PROLEGOMENA TO EVERGETICS

Abstract

The article expounds prefatory remarks and explanatory essay (Prolegomena) to the Evergetics – a valueand subject-oriented science on management processes in the society. The Evergetics seeks reserves to improve management efficiency not in the modernization of an “impersonal” bureaucratic machine, but in the people, in every man, in the use of his intellectual and volitional resources. The man is considered there not as a “cog” of a value-invariant management mechanism, but as a person (actor), endowed with consciousness, who acts rationally and performs cognitive-activity-related functions together with other people to resolve any problem situations that arise in everyday life. These heterogeneous actors having their own subjective views of the world and value priorities, based on the Poincaré's conventional concept of truth, which treats the truth as a result of an agreement, produce intersubjective knowledge, on the basis of which they make a collective decision on how to settle the situation. Perception of meaning of the situation by each heterogeneous actor happens at the level of individual consciousness. However, one person cannot constitute the whole variety of meanings of the situation, so this person receives from others what lacks in his own experience. Meaning-generating activity of people has an impact on all intersubjective community and, as a result, a common meaning-bearing space appears. A holonic approach is used in the Evergetics (on a “part–whole” principle) to build systems in contrast to the traditional causal approach (on a “cause-effect” principle). The article emphasizes strategic significance of the problem to transform the “Economic Man” to the “Man of Culture”.