Tie aesthetic qualities, the formation of labor activity and a creative approach to solving problems). As a basis for training and education elementary school student, which are a single and inseparable process, is the provision on the comprehensive and harmonious development of the individual.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of the teacher in this process of upbringing education. The chapter on the teacher completes the course in developmental and educational psychology. In it you will find a lot of important and interesting things from the field of personality psychology and the activities of a teacher. But that will be later, at the end of the course. And now we consider it important to remind you of your teachers, of those who left an indelible mark on your soul. Maybe this will help you better understand yourself and the profession that you have decided to dedicate your life to as a teacher. Perhaps then the entire material of this manual will appear before you in a different light and meaning.
The personality of the teacher and its role in our life. “Care for the harmonious development of morality, mind, feelings, for the upbringing of the nobility of the heart, the purity of all spiritual impulses and aspirations is the essence of the upbringing of a new person,” wrote V. A. Sukhomlinsky in the book “The Birth of a Citizen.” In the conditions of school education and upbringing the primary school teacher is the first to carry out this care and the first to form the attitude of children to school, educational work, to each other. Special studies show that this role cannot be overestimated.
People's Artist of the USSR B.P. Chirkov says: “I am forever grateful to the elementary school teacher in Kolshin, the former Vyatka province, Natalya Danilovna, with whom I began my studies. It was she who planted in my soul an interest in reading, and it became a passion for life. In connection with his role as the teacher Stepan Lautin in the film "Teacher", he reproduces one episode: "The teacher tells his students about Vanka Zhukov, the hero of the Chekhov story, who sent a letter" to the village of grandfather ". “Where is Vanka Zhukov now,” the students ask, “has his letter gone?” The teacher replies that Vanka grew up, learned, became a good person, because his letter did not get to his grandfather, but to Lenin, who conquered happy life for kids. I think that this episode reflects an important feature that a teacher needs: the ability to connect the program educational material with life, with its great truth ... He must always connect his subject with modernity.
" Sukhomlinsky V. A. The birth of a citizen. M., 1971, p. 44. " See: Mlynek A; Anin B. Vasiliev M. Teacher in my life. M., 1966.
Rubinshtein S. L. Problems of general psychology. M.. 1976, p. 184.
Tie aesthetic qualities, the formation of labor activity and a creative approach to solving problems). As a basis for the education and upbringing of a younger student, which is a single and inseparable process, the provision on the comprehensive and harmonious development of the individual is used.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of the teacher in this process of upbringing education. The chapter on the teacher concludes the course in developmental and educational psychology. In it you will find a lot of important and interesting things from the field of personality psychology and the activities of a teacher. But that will be later, at the end of the course. And now we consider it important to remind you of your teachers, of those who left an indelible mark on your soul. Maybe this will help you better understand yourself and the profession that you have decided to dedicate your life to as a teacher. Perhaps then the entire material of this manual will appear before you in a different light and meaning.
The personality of the teacher and its role in our life. ʼʼCare for the harmonious development of morality, mind, feelings, the upbringing of the nobility of the heart, the purity of all spiritual impulses and aspirations is the essence of the upbringing of a new personʼʼ, wrote V. A. Sukhomlinsky in the book ʼʼThe Birth of a Citizenʼʼ". classes are the first to carry out this care and are the first to form the attitude of children to school, educational work, to each other.Special studies show that this role cannot be overestimated.
People's Artist of the USSR B.P. Chirkov says: ʼʼI am forever grateful to the elementary school teacher in ᴦ. Kolshine of the former Vyatka province Natalya Danilovna, with whom I began my studies. It was she who planted in my soul an interest in reading, and it became a passion for lifeʼʼ. In connection with his role as teacher Stepan Lautin in the film ʼʼUchitelʼʼ, he reproduces one episode: ʼʼThe teacher tells his students about Vanka Zhukov, the hero of a Chekhov story, who sent a letter ʼʼto the village of grandfatherʼʼ. ʼʼAnd where is Vanka Zhukov now, the students ask, has his letter disappeared?ʼʼ The teacher replies that Vanka grew up, learned, became a good person, because his letter did not get to his grandfather, but to Lenin, who won a happy life for children . I think that this episode reflects an important feature that a teacher needs: the ability to connect the program educational material with life, with its great truth ... He must always connect his subject with modernity.
" Sukhomlinsky V. A. The birth of a citizen. M., 1971, p. 44. " See: Mlynek A; Anin B. Vasiliev M. Teacher in my life. M., 1966.
Rubinshtein S. L. Problems of general psychology. M.. 1976, p. 184. - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Rubinshtein S. L. Problems of General Psychology. M.. 1976, p. 184." 2017, 2018.
Consciousness and language
The content of consciousness produced in the process joint activities people and expressing their socio-cultural experience, must be manifested, embodied in an objectified object-material form that exists independently of individual individuals. The two-layer, two-level nature of the existence of consciousness, which was mentioned above, also implies the duality of the form of its expression. Along with coding, the embodiment of the content of consciousness in the corresponding neurodynamic structures of the individual psyche, information about the sociocultural
experience, transmitted, broadcast from generation to generation, should be given to people in the form of reality, "roughly, visibly" presented to their personal perception.
The emergence and development of consciousness as a socio-cultural phenomenon, a specifically human form of mastering the world, is inextricably linked primarily with the emergence and development of the spoken language as a material carrier, the embodiment of the norms of consciousness. Only when expressed in language does the collectively developed consciousness act as a kind of social reality.
Along with verbal colloquial language, the content of collective representations of consciousness can be expressed, objectified in material phenomena of a different kind, which in this case, as well as colloquial, acquire a sign function. A material phenomenon, a material object performs a symbolic function, or the function of a sign, becomes a sign if it expresses some content of consciousness, becomes a carrier of certain sociocultural information. In this situation, this phenomenon or object acquires meaning or significance. Separate signs are included in some sign (or semiotic) systems, subject to certain rules of construction and development. Such are the sign systems of natural (spoken or written) language, artificial languages of science, sign systems in art, mythology, religion. Speaking about a sign, it is necessary, therefore, to clearly distinguish between its informational and semantic aspect, the sociocultural information embodied in the sign, its meaning and meaning and the material form, the "shell", "flesh" of the sign, which is the bearer of certain sociocultural information, meaning, meaning. . So, expressions of colloquial speech, which, like material objects, are a combination of sounds or lines on paper, have certain meanings or meanings. A piece of cloth has a certain meaning when it is a flag or banner. deep meaning for religious consciousness, they embody objects of worship, which for the uninitiated can act simply as everyday objects. All these meanings exist insofar as they express a certain idea of the national, state, religious, etc. consciousness.
It is important to understand that a sign is a sign precisely in the unity of these two sides. There is no sign without its matter, flesh, material shell. But it would be a serious mistake to reduce the sign to the latter. The sign is a functional formation, it becomes a sign, since its material reality acquires a sign function. It is clear that this or that material object can perform a symbolic function only in the context of a certain culture. The fact that for people of a certain society, a certain culture contains a meaning known to them, a symbolic meaning known to them, is perceived by people who do not belong to a given society or culture, as an ordinary material object with the usual spatial, energy, color, etc. properties. It is necessary, for example, to understand the language of religious temple symbolism in order to discern a certain semantic meaning in the architectonics of a temple.
The degree of connection between the material nature of a sign and the semantic content expressed by it can be very different and vary over a fairly wide range. Characterizing the sign and trying to emphasize its difference from the image, often as a specific sign of the sign they note the lack of similarity, similarity of the matter of the sign and the reality to which this sign indicates. This is true, however, only for so-called artificial signs, for example, when the letters of the alphabet denote physical quantities in mathematical formulas. However, the similarity or similarity of the matter of the sign and the content expressed by it is not at all contraindicated for the sign. In the extreme case, a single item of this class can become a sign for designating other items of this class - for example, a copy of a product displayed in a store window is a sign of the presence of this product on the counter. There is further an extensive class of so-called iconic signs (from the Greek "icon" - an image), when there is no such material homogeneity, as in the above example with a product in a shop window and on a counter, but there is a moment of physical similarity, a visually perceived correspondence of the sign and the designated - say, various schemes that allow you to navigate the terrain or indoors. Well-known combinations of conventionality and iconicity of a sign are quite common - for example, road signs. By the way, signs of writing, letters of the alphabet, which are usually given as examples of conventional signs, genetically go back to iconic signs - drawings. For example, the initial letter of our and other related alphabets "A" goes back to the iconic sign, denoting in the language of the Phoenicians, who were the ancestors of all these alphabets, the head of a bull - the sound "A" was included in the word denoting a bull in the Phoenician language. A peculiar symbolic function in the history of culture is carried out by collective actions imitating, "losing" life situations, cult religious and mythological plots. Here, the very real action of people becomes the matter in which the content of consciousness, its meaning is embodied (say, a fighting or hunting dance of men of a primitive tribe). In general, the fundamentally important question is not about the physical similarity of the sign and the signified or the absence of such, but about the presence of the function of signifying one reality by another, as a result of which, in a given culture system, the transfer of known sociocultural information, the known content of consciousness about a certain reality based on perception is carried out. another reality.
A peculiar form of such movements in the semantic content of consciousness is the work of consciousness with symbols. Symbols are always associated with some way, which distinguishes them from abstract ideas, theoretical concepts. At the same time, if the meaning of the image is aimed at the reproduction by consciousness of this particular reality in its certainty and specificity, then the symbol, through the image of this particular reality, points to some content associated with it, embodied in a certain specificity, but not reducible to it. For example, the image of a lion is aimed at fixing the originality of this beast, distinguishing it from other predatory animals related to it. But the idea of a lion, which does not lose its figurativeness, can acquire a symbolic meaning, a symbolic meaning, pointing to strength, courage, aggressiveness as some kind of deep realities embodied in this living creature. In other words, through immediate concreteness in the symbol "shines through", some wider or deeper reality is manifested, a representative, a manifestation, the embodiment of which is this concreteness.
Symbol, symbolization, symbolic consciousness have been and are of exceptional importance both in the history of culture and at its present stage. An exceptionally important role was played by symbols in the emergence of culture and in the early phases of its existence. All archaic consciousnesses, all mythology is permeated with symbols. Without symbolism, one cannot imagine art, theoretical consciousness, including science, is somehow connected with symbolism. In particular, it is always possible to trace the genetic connections of the original theoretical concepts with symbols, the significance of symbolic consciousness for the mobility, "openness" of scientific thinking. The role of symbolism in practical consciousness is also very great. For example, the mobilizing role of symbols in social movements, in state building is quite clear (in particular, the symbolism of banners, flags, coats of arms, emblems, etc., in which, despite a significant touch of conditional symbolism, deep semantic content nevertheless peeps through) .
In all situations of implementation of the sign-symbolic function, the meaning or meaning associated with it, expressing a certain content of consciousness, are of an ideal nature. Like the ideality of a mental image, the ideality of the meaning and meaning of signs, sign-symbolic systems is primarily due to the fact that these meanings and meanings express a certain program of action for people who perceive this meaning and meaning in a given system of culture. A drawing of a building that an architect intends to build, or a drawing of a machine that a designer is about to create, are real, material sheets of paper. However, in addition, the image of the future building (or machine) is embodied in the drawing, a certain meaning as a plan, project, program, a certain result of the creative work of consciousness is embodied.
The concept of ideality just characterizes the specific mode of existence of the meaning and meaning embodied in a material object, which serves as a program for the real actions of people. Since something is perceived as a sign or symbol that has a known meaning and meaning only in the system of a certain culture, the content of consciousness, fixed in meaning and meaning, is subjective, or subjective reality, only for representatives of this culture. Say, a drawing of a machine includes an ideal content only for technically educated people who are able to read this drawing and translate its meaning into objective reality. This ability acts as a certain subjective reality, the presence of which is a feature of these subjects. Similarly, let's say the ideality of a painting or a statue as artwork, embodied in a very real material, is a kind of subjective reality for people who are able to perceive, "distribute" the semantic content that is embodied in a statue or a picture. The specificity of the ideality of images and norms of social consciousness, its meanings and meanings in comparison with the ideality of mental individual images lies in the fact that the former are created in the process of joint activities of people and are embodied in sociocultural semiotic systems, in cultural artifacts. The reality of the meanings and meanings expressed in sociocultural semiotic systems, therefore, appears primarily as the reality of the collective subjectivity of the bearers of certain cultural skills. And the corresponding contents of consciousness, meanings and meanings become a subjective reality for individual people to the extent that these people are attached to the corresponding culture.
Consciousness arises in the practical activity of people as a necessary condition for its organization and reproduction. The most important milestone in the development of human culture is the division of spiritual and physical labor, the isolation of the production of the phenomena of consciousness as a special, spiritual, production. In turn, in spiritual production, the production of norms and ideas of consciousness, theoretical consciousness, moral, religious, political and other types of consciousness stand out.
self-awareness
Structure and forms of self-consciousness
Objectivity and reflexivity of self-consciousness
Consciousness involves the selection by the subject of himself as the bearer of a certain active position in relation to the world. This isolation of oneself, attitude towards oneself, assessment of one's capabilities, which are a necessary component of any consciousness, form different forms of that specific characteristic of a person, which is called self-consciousness.
The interest of researchers in the scientific heritage of S.L. Rubinstein has not weakened over the years. This is evidenced by many things: this is a theoretical and methodological analysis of the main works, and the reprinting of his works, as well as a scientific analysis of his creative biography. Scientists reveal the connection between the heritage of S.L. Rubinstein with topical problems of modern psychological science and practice, opening up new facets of his work.
Between 1930 and 1942 S.L. Rubinstein headed the Department of Psychology of the Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute. A.I. Herzen. S.L. Rubinshtein is one of those domestic psychologists who purposefully dealt with the problem of the individual's life path.
Rubinshtein notes the fallacy of interpreting age as a metaphysical entity independent of specific content: “Psychology does not study age as such, but the patterns of human mental development in terms of age.” At the same time, “the establishment of age-related patterns of mental development does not relieve ... the psychologist from the need to study the individual characteristics of a particular individual child. The very problem of age characteristics should be posed in the course of psychology in the closest, inseparable connection with the study and consideration of individual characteristics. The program “Problems of age-related periodization of the child’s mental development” presents topics covering the mental development of the child in the first three stages of ontogenesis: before entering school, in junior school age , middle school age. In the "Fundamentals of Psychology" in 1935, S.L. Rubinshtein addresses the problem of the life path of the individual, giving both a positive and critical assessment of the work of 1928. S. Buhler, devoted to the problem of the life path of a person as an individual history. Contrary to the evolutionary theory of S. Buhler, S.L. Rubinstein argued that the life path is not a simple unfolding of a life plan laid down in childhood. This is a socially determined process, at each stage of which neoplasms arise. At the same time, the individual is an active participant in this process, and at any moment can intervene in it. Objecting to Buhler's thesis that the personality in the subsequent life path is only a project of what was laid down in childhood (although Buhler herself suggested studying the life path as the evolution of the inner world of the personality), S.L. Rubinstein puts forward the idea of a life path, on the one hand, as a kind of whole, on the other hand, as some qualitatively defined stages, each of which can become a turning point due to the activity of the individual, i.e. radically change her life path. It is essential that the concept of the life path of the individual, developed by S.L. Rubinstein in this work and the work of 1935, made it possible to give a broader definition of personality than those that reduced the theory of personality to its structures and the ratio of components in them. To the problems of not the path of life in the strictly psychological sense of the word, but life as a way of being a person in the philosophical sense of S.L. Rubinstein addresses in his latest work "Man and the World". However, here, too, he reveals the specifics of human life precisely at the individual level, i.e. in relation to personality. Thus, the definition of personality is realized through the characteristics of the entire system of relations with the outside world, through the characteristics of the mode of existence chosen by it, implemented and affirmed. In his work "Philosophical Roots of Experimental Psychology" S.L. Rubinstein wrote that the penetration of the principle of evolution into psychology played a significant role in its development. Firstly, evolutionary theory "introduced a new, very fruitful point of view into the study of mental phenomena, linking the study of the psyche and its development not only with physiological mechanisms, but also with the development of organisms in the process of adaptation to the environment" and, secondly, led to the development genetic psychology, stimulating work in the field of phylo - and ontogenesis. It is in this vein, i.e. in terms of posing the problem of the life path of the individual as a process determined by social and subjective variables, in the 30s. 20th century and the task of studying the individual history of a person was formulated. The development of the concept of the life path of the individual contributed to the solution of the old problem of how to combine the individual-biographical and socio-typical approaches to life, i.e. to make the transition from the ideographic to the nomothetic method of studying human life. Rubinstein outlined his initial views in Fundamentals of General Psychology, where the concept of the subject itself does not yet appear, but the reality that it denotes has already been presented. "The line leading from what a man was at one stage of his history to what he became at the next, runs through what he has done." This statement contains an indication not only that a person depends on the conditions and circumstances of his life, but also that he himself determines them. Consciousness, activity, maturity of the individual are considered by Rubinstein as "higher personal formations" that perform the functions of organization, regulation, and ensuring the integrity of a person's life path as a subject of activity. In contrast to the domestic psychology of that time, which investigated the personality either through a system of social relations, specifically implemented in the interaction between a child and an adult, or with the help of the category of activity, S.L. Rubinstein went beyond the limits of specific types of material and ideal activity, placing the personality in a wider context - in the space of its life activity. It is the personality that correlates his subjective desires and the objective requirements of the social situation, regulating the relationship between the subject and the object. "Thus, a person does not dissolve in activity, but through it solves complex life tasks and contradictions. Here, activity acts as behavior and actions. This is the quality of a person as a subject of life, which determines its values and ways of implementing them in life, builds his relationships (and ways of communicating in them), finds ways of self-realization in activity that are adequate to his personality. The concept of the subject and the provision on the subjective approach in the study of the psyche were introduced by S.L. Rubinstein in the 40s of the XX century. They received further development in the works of the 1950s - "Being and Consciousness" (1957) and "Principles and Ways of the Development of Psychology" (1959). This concept made it possible to overcome the impersonal connection between consciousness and activity. In the general problem of determining human behavior, this reflection, or, in other words, worldview feelings, act as internal conditions included in the overall effect, determined by the natural correlation of external and internal conditions. The behavior of the subject in any situation in which he is, and the degree of his dependence on this situation or freedom in it, depend on such a generalized, final attitude of a person to life. The subjective approach overcomes a separate study of the personality - its individual qualities, sides, properties, hypostases outside of life, as well as an impersonal approach to the study of life structures, values, events, periods of human development.Man as a subject of life is considered from the point of view of:
- - mental warehouse - individual characteristics of mental processes and states;
- - personal warehouse - motivation, character and abilities, in which the driving forces of the personality, its life potential and resources are found;
- - life style - the ability to use your mind and moral qualities in order to set and solve life tasks, activity, worldview and life experience.
From this point of view, it is necessary to determine the basic life formations of the individual. This is activity, consciousness and the ability to organize the time of life.
(theory and methodology)
S. L. Rubinshtein is one of the outstanding theorists of Soviet psychological science. S. L. Rubinshtein is characterized by a breadth of scientific interests; At the same time, his development of many problems of psychology is united by general ideas in which a single idea of constructing a theory of Marxist psychology is realized.
This publication consists of two parts. The first of them includes articles published at different times and in different editions (collections, works of institutes, journals, etc.). These articles formulated ideas that were then developed in subsequent monographic studies by S. L. Rubinshtein or have independent significance. The second part of the book is represented by a previously unpublished manuscript by S. L. Rubinstein “Man and the World”
All published materials are of great importance for understanding the patterns of formation and development of Soviet psychological science. But this is not only the history of psychology. The views of S. L. Rubinshtein constitute an organic part of the current state of Soviet psychological science.
In an introductory article, it is impossible to characterize all or most of the issues raised in this book. We will focus only on a few theoretical problems of psychology considered by S. L. Rubinshtein in published materials, paying special attention to the main ideas of S. L. Rubinshtein's work "Man and the World".
The central question of S. L. Rubinshtein's research is the question of the nature of the mental. Rubinshtein makes it his task to study various objective connections of the mental, in each of which it appears in a different capacity (for example, as a reflective activity, as a higher nervous activity). The main task for him was to determine the place of the mental in the universal connection and interdependence of the phenomena of objective reality. Psychic phenomena are organically included in the causal dependencies of objective reality: on the one hand, they act as conditioned by the influences of the external world, by the objective circumstances of a person's life, on the other hand, they determine a person's behavior. The specificity of the mental lies, therefore, in the specificity of connections with objective reality.
- 1 This manuscript has only been partially published. See Questions of Philosophy, 1966, No. 7; 1969, no. 8; , Sat. "Methodological and theoretical problems" - the problems of psychology ". M., Nauka publishing house, 1969.
Psychology studies mental processes in the specific laws of their course in unity with their specific content. In addition to mental processes, the composition of the mental also includes mental formations. Mental processes and mental formations are interconnected and can only be studied in this relationship. The main mode of existence of the mental is its existence as an activity, as a process. The bearer of mental processes and mental formations is a person. Therefore, the main task of psychology, according to S. L. Rubinshtein, is to study the psyche as a qualitatively specific property of the personality. By studying the patterns of the emergence and development of consciousness, psychology studies it in the process of becoming a personality. Cognition of the psychic is mediated by all essential concrete connections in which a person is included.
To understand the nature of the mental, it is important to analyze the problem of the relationship between consciousness and activity, to which S. L. Rubinshtein devotes a number of works. His article "Problems of Psychology in the Works of Karl Marx" plays an exceptional role in this respect.
The main content of the work of K. Marx analyzed by S. L. Rubinshtein “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” is reduced to the analysis of human activity, labor and consciousness. As a starting point in the Marxist understanding of activity, S.L. Rubinshtein singles out its disclosure as a form of dialectical connection between the subject and objective reality. In this constant interaction, the relationship between subject and object, the connection between activity and object, activity and consciousness is realized: in the interaction of man and nature, both nature and man change. S. L. Rubinshtein draws attention to the Marxist position that in the process of activity, a person, transforming an object, reveals his essential forces. Ultimately, a person is the result of his own labor. S. L. Rubinshtein specifically emphasizes the importance for psychology of the proposition about the connection between activity and consciousness and the social nature of human labor. Labor is an activity regulated by human consciousness. But consciousness is not something that exists outside labor, arises before it, and is alien to it. Consciousness itself is formed in activity. A specific feature of labor as a form of human activity is its social character. The social nature of human activity (both practical and theoretical) determines the social nature of human consciousness. “... Human psychology and his activity derive their objective content from the relation of a person to another person, to society ... The social relation to other people mediates in a person and his very relation to nature, in general to an object. A person exists as a person only due to his relationship to another person” (p. 51) 2 .
Being a reflection of being, a conscious being, consciousness in an ideal form mediates the real relationship of a person to the environment. And these relationships are established and manifested in human activity, through it. Consciousness and activity are “so interconnected that a genuine opportunity opens up, as it were, to shine through the consciousness of a person through an analysis of his activity, in which consciousness is formed and revealed” (p. 30). The activity is included in the field of psychological research. Consciousness and activity form an organic whole, they are not identical, but are constantly interconnected.
S. L. Rubinshtein formulated the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, which became one of the methodological principles that largely determined the development of Soviet psychological science. Consistent implementation of this principle in psychological research meant understanding consciousness, the psyche as a process, as an activity of a subject, a real individual.
One of the general theoretical problems developed by S. L. Rubinshtein and quite fully presented in this book is the problem of the development of the psyche. SL Rubinshtein shows that the development of mental processes is not only their growth, but also a change that goes through a series of stages, stages. These stages are characterized by specific features, the patterns and conditionality of which must be revealed by psychological research.
- 2 Hereinafter references are made to the pages of this edition.
Based on the analysis of the ideas of K. Marx, Rubinstein gives a deep characterization of the principle of historicism and the principle of development in the consideration of the psyche. Psychic phenomena develop in the process of evolution of the organic world, in the course of the historical development of mankind, and in the process of the individual life of man. SL Rubinshtein pays attention to the characteristics of each of these stages of development and singles out something defining them. Thus, for the phylogenetic development of the psyche, the position on the determining role of lifestyle in the development of the psyche is important. The basic Law historical development human psyche, his consciousness lies in the fact that a person develops in labor. By changing nature, creating culture, a person changes himself, forms, develops his own consciousness. “The objective world generated by human activity determines the entire development of human feelings, human psychology, human consciousness” (p. 49). The historical development of human activity mediates the historical development of consciousness. The human psyche is a product of a historically developing practice. The principle of development is organically connected with the principle of historicism. The conditionality of historically developing products of labor, forms of human activity is a specific feature of the human psyche. The historicity of consciousness lies in the fact that it arose with the appearance of man as a social being, and in particular, that it develops in the process of historically developing humanity, being determined by socio-historical conditions.
The starting point for understanding the individual development of the Psyche, human consciousness is the fundamental position on the development of consciousness in activity. This provision determines the formulation and solution of the main issues of the development of the human psyche.
In the problem of the individual development of the psyche, the main question is the relationship between development and training, development and education. S. L. Rubinshtein formulated a number of fundamentally important provisions that are of topical theoretical and practical importance for building the foundations of scientific pedagogy. The article "Psychological Science and the Matter of Education" contains a number of important theoretical provisions. The child develops by being brought up and learning, points out S. L. Rubinshtein. Education and training are included in the very process of child development. The task of upbringing and education is to shape the development of the child by conditioning maturation. Of great practical importance is S. L. Rubinshtein’s position that “the personality mental properties of the child, his abilities, character traits, etc., as well as the characteristics of mental processes (perception, memory) that are different at different stages of development and in different individuals etc.) are not only manifested, but also formed in the course of the child’s own activity, through which, under the guidance of a teacher, he is actively involved in the life of the team, mastering the rules and mastering the knowledge gained in the course of historical development cognitive activity of mankind” (p. 192).
Solving the problem of the relationship between learning and development, growth and maturation (in the process of development) presupposes a definite solution to the question of the sources and driving forces of development. This question in another form appears as a question about the biological and social in man, about the role of external and internal in development. A number of articles published in this book, and especially in the article "The problem of abilities and questions of psychological theory" contain fundamental provisions on these issues. In determining the development of mental phenomena, in particular abilities, natural and social, external and internal are inextricably linked. It is not one or the other that determines development, but both.
SL Rubinshtein criticizes the views according to which the development of the human psyche is determined only by external determination. In particular, speaking about human abilities, S. L. Rubinshtein pointed out that they are not only a product of learning, assimilation, the effect of exclusively external conditioning, but to a certain extent they are part of the initial conditions of learning. In the formation of abilities, we should not talk about a one-sided impact on a person, but about the mutual dependence of a person and the objective world.
“The abilities of people,” writes S. L. Rubinshtein, “are formed not only in the process of assimilation of products created by man in the process of historical development, but also in the process of their creation; the process of man's creation of the objective world is at the same time the development of his own nature” (p. 223).
The composition of the internal conditions that mediate the effect of external influences and to a certain extent determine the formation of a person's abilities also includes his natural features. In this regard, SL Rubinshtein pointed out that if natural, organic conditions cannot explain changes in human mental activity, then they cannot be excluded as “conditions from the explanation of this activity” (p. 223).
The operation of the principle of development in psychology is revealed by S. L. Rubinshtein in the analysis of a number of specific psychological problems (the development of perception, speech, psychology of speech”, “A few remarks on the psychology of the deaf-blind-mute”).
The central place in the articles published in this book is occupied by the problem of personality. In particular, already in the article "Problems of Psychology in the Works of Karl Marx" it occupies an essential place. Here, S. L. Rubinshtein formulated a number of fundamental provisions, which were then developed in other works and served as the theoretical basis of Soviet personality psychology. S. L. Rubinshtein quite rightly pointed out the unsatisfactory state of the study of personality in psychology. Meanwhile - and SL Rubinshtein repeatedly wrote about this - outside the study of personality there can be no truly scientific interpretation of any mental phenomenon. The problem of personality acquires central importance in the construction of psychological science.
Psychology cannot be reduced to an analysis of processes and functions cut off from the individual, impersonal, as was done by representatives of functionalism. SL Rubinshtein resolutely opposed the functionalism of introspective psychology. In his opinion, in order to overcome functionalism, the position on the social conditionality of human consciousness, the implementation in psychology of the Marxist position that the essence of the individual is a set of social relations, is important. “Social.relationships are relations in which not individual sense organs or mental processes enter, but a person, a personality. The determining influence of social relations, labor on the formation of the psyche is carried out only indirectly through the personality” (p. 38). S. L. Rubinshtein points out that when explaining mental phenomena, a person acts as a united set of internal conditions through which all external influences are refracted. This puts the individual at the center of psychological research and determines the approach to all problems of psychology. But at the same time, personality as a whole is not an object of only psychological science. S. L. Rubinshtein repeatedly pointed out this when he objected to the psychologization of personality. Essential for the psychological characteristics of personality is the understanding of human consciousness. Without consciousness there is no personality, but personality cannot be reduced to consciousness. Taking as a starting point the Marxist definition of the essence of personality as a set of social relations, in psychological research it is necessary to investigate a real, concrete person entering into these social relations. But man is part of nature. In this regard, the problem of the correlation between the natural and the social in man is also essential for psychology. SL Rubinshtein emphasizes the idea of Marx, which determines the fundamental correlation of the biological, psychological and social in the individual, a problem that is no less acute and relevant now, as it was thirty or forty years ago. “... For Marx, the personality,” he wrote, “and at the same time its consciousness is mediated by its social relations, and its development is determined primarily by the dynamics of these relations. However, just as the denial of the psychologization of the personality does not mean turning off consciousness and self-consciousness, in the same way the denial of biologization does not mean the turning off of biology, the organism, nature from the personality. Psycho-physiological nature is not ousted or neutralized, but is mediated by social relations and restructured—nature becomes man!” (p. 40).
Starting from the Marxist analysis of the relationship between nature and man, S. L. Rubinshtein rightly points out that the general formula about the relationship between natural and social is not enough to reveal their real and complex interweaving, that a specific analysis is needed. A specific analysis of some aspects of this problem was given by S. L. Rubinshtein when developing the question of the essence of abilities, the laws of their formation.
In articles about K. Marx, SL Rubinshtein pointed out that the central problem of Marx's conception is man, and this is the unsurpassed significance of Marx's works for psychology. In contrast to the anthropologism of Feuerbach, which deals with the abstraction of a person, Marx analyzes a real person living in certain socio-historical conditions, changing with these conditions, being in certain social relations with other people. In contrast to the Hegelian concept, in which the main question is the question of the relationship between spirit and nature, Marx raised the question of the relationship between man and nature, the subject and the objective world. “From the general concept of Marx, it seems to us, first of all, that what is similar in the theory of knowledge is not the relationship between thinking, consciousness or ideas and an object, but the relationship between a person as a subject of practical and theoretical activity and the objective world” (p. 61).
These two lines of Marxist analysis led S. L. Rubinshtein to study the fundamental theoretical question of man's place in the world.
A person enters into a real relationship with objective reality, transforming the external world with his activity. In these relationships, a certain place is occupied by human consciousness. It acts as a regulator of human behavior and activities. Such a formulation of the question led S. L. Rubinshtein to the conclusion that the main epistemological relationship is not the relationship between the idea, image and object, being, but the relationship between being and man. S. L. Rubinshtein pointed out that the problem of the correlation of the image, idea and thing, consciousness and being, and, accordingly, the problem of the place of consciousness in the world, developed by him in the book “Being and Consciousness”, is not the original one, it must be transformed into another original and fundamental problem, namely, the problem of the relationship between being and man, the place of man in the world.
The formulation and development of this problem is the subject of S. L. Rubinshtein's manuscript "Man and the World". Many of SL Rubinshtein's ideas expounded in this last work of his should still be assimilated and used in future research in psychology and philosophy. The manuscript was not completed by S. L. Rubinshtein himself. Not all the problems posed in it have been developed with sufficient completeness, many issues are only indicated, the wording of a number of provisions is not final. But this manuscript is a logical continuation of the philosophical and psychological studies of S. L. Rubinshtein, reflected in the articles published in this book, as well as in his fundamental monographs. The work “Man and Mip” is the completion of the theoretical research of S. L. Rubinshtein. One can truly understand the work of S. L. Rubinshtein only by studying this last work of his. "Man and the World" is basically a philosophical work. It poses many fundamental philosophical problems, the main of which are the problem of being, the problem of man, the problem of their relationship. But this work is of exceptional importance for many other human sciences - psychology, anthropology, ethics, aesthetics, etc.
The main idea that permeates the entire work as a whole is the idea of including a person in the composition of being. S. L. Rubinshtein analyzes the development of being and philosophical concepts that characterize its essence. Before the emergence of man, at the level of inorganic and organic nature, there was no split into objective and subjective in being. When man arose, the duality of object and subject appeared in being. Comprehending this process of the bifurcation of being, philosophers solved the question of the relationship between the object and the subject in different ways. Idealistic philosophy has mystified this relationship. Mystification lies in the fact that being is considered only as a correlate of consciousness. In a number of idealistic concepts, the characterization of being as a correlate of consciousness is removed: in fact, only consciousness remains for analysis, and being turns into an appearance. Thus, the original idealistic position makes the very existence of being problematic.
S. L. Rubinshtein points out that in a number of cases, even with a materialistic analysis of being, when it is identified with nature, matter, turns into “thingness”, a person is actually excluded from it. Rubinshtein considers the idea of the need to introduce a person / into the composition of being the initial, key idea.
Being develops. In the process of its formation, different levels of existence arise - the level of inorganic matter, the level of life, the level of man. The singling out of the levels of beings is determined by the specific mode of their existence. The main mode of human existence is his existence as a conscious and active being, as a subject of consciousness and activity. The emergence of each new level of existence leads to the identification of new properties, qualities of all lower levels.
The definition of the specifics of human existence and the position on the influence of the overlying levels of being “and the underlying ones are of great theoretical importance. Man in being is not something extraneous, along with other existing ones: with the formation of man as the highest level of being, all lower levels are revealed in a new way. Being is no longer considered only as a world of processes and phenomena of physical nature, it also includes a person as a social being. The gap of being into three unrelated spheres - nature, society and thinking - is being overcome.
The introduction of man into the composition of being, and at the same time raising the question of different ways of existence of being, led S. L. Rubinshtein to the conclusion that the most general properties, qualities act specifically at different levels of being. Thus, Eremya and space are forms of the existence of matter. They express the structure of being, determine the forms of its connections. But space and time characterize different spheres of being in different ways. The space acts as the space of physical and chemical processes, the space of organisms and the space of man. Time is also specifically manifested: this is the time of the existence of nature, human life and the time of human history. The time of existence of physical processes differs from the time of human life, from the time of human history. Widely using the theory of relativity, analyzing the psychological facts of different durations of time in different periods of a person’s life, S. L. Rubinshtein notes that “subjectively experienced time is not so much apparent, in experiencing the supposedly inadequately matter, and the relative time of life (behavior) of this system - a person, quite objectively reflecting the life plan this person» (p. 305).
SL Rubinshtein pays much attention to the characteristics of ontological, epistemological, ethical and other categories, to the identification of their most complex internal relationships. So, defining the initial concepts, S. L. Rubinshtein characterizes beings in different qualities, in different systems of connections and relationships. The characteristics of the features of different levels of being, their formation and development are carried out in the study of the categories of being, essence, substance, matter, nature, world, reality, existence, formation, time, space, causality. The ontological characteristic of being serves as the basis for the formulation and solution of epistemological problems. S. L. Rubinshtein subjects the correlation of being and cognition to a special analysis; at the same time, he singles out and characterizes the categories of essence, phenomenon, appearance, reveals the logical structure of cognition, correlates the implicit and explicit in cognition.
S. L. Rubinshtein's position seems important that cognition and being are not related externally, ontological and epistemological categories are closely related to each other and can be understood in their unity.
The disclosure of being, its epistemological characteristics is the result of the interaction of being with man. “Primarily,” writes S. L. Rubinshtein, “there are not objects of contemplation, but objects of human needs and actions, the interaction of forces, the opposition of nature, tension” (p. 258). The very epistemological relation of man to being, which is based on the practical, effective relation of man to the objective world, acts not only as an act of consciousness, but as a way, as a mode of human existence.
The relation of a person to being is connected with the relation of a person to another person. These relationships are interdependent. The social relations of man are part of his being. Man is included in being in his specific capacity as a social person. The social being of a person is part of the ontological characteristics of being. But even in the cognition of being, a person does not appear as an isolated individual, but only in relation to other people, only in a social way. Man is a social entity. “Consciousness, cognition presupposes thinking - speech and, therefore, communication. There is, therefore, a social conditionality of being - human being and the objective world. The cognition of being (conceptual) is all socially conditioned, everything is a product of the socially conditioned life of people. So, there really is a collective subject of scientific knowledge: “I am “we” (p. 338).
To characterize the relationship of man with nature, with other people, S. L. Rubinshtein uses the principle of determinism in its dialectical materialistic understanding. The application of this principle was expressed by Rubinstein in the position that external causes act, being refracted through internal conditions. This position in relation to psychology was deeply developed by S.L. Rubinshtein in his earlier published works, especially in the book Being and Consciousness. In the manuscript "Man and the World" this principle is revealed on the basis of new material. Its action clearly appears in the analysis of a person's place in being, in which a person is included as a being, and his existence is determined by the relationship with other beings. S. L. Rubinshtein subjected to deep analysis the interaction of external causes and internal conditions, the problem of the correlation between the determination of human activity and human activity, the problem of human freedom and responsibility.
From the standpoint of the principle of determinism, the existence of an essence (substance) and the laws of its disclosure by a person in the process of cognition are determined. Subtly and deeply analyzes "S. L. Rubinshtein in this regard, one of the most difficult theoretical and epistemological problems - the problem of the relationship between essence and phenomenon, the problem of appearance. The phenomenon exists, claims" S. L. Rubinshtein, as a result of various interactions, as being not in pure, but in a form complicated by incidental circumstances. In the process of cognition, the phenomenon is more and more revealed to the person, it becomes more and more meaningful. But as an immediate given, appearance never exhausts what appears. More full disclosure which is realized indirectly in the process of thinking. The process of cognition consists in the discovery of being. But with penetration into the depths of being, what really exists is revealed; the true is separated from the apparent.
For subjective idealism, the phenomenon is reduced to appearance, and appearance is the representation of a person. And from here it is concluded that being is my idea. The dialectical-materialistic, deterministic explanation of seeming makes it possible to overcome the sophism of subjective-idealistic philosophy. SL Rubinshtein advances a number of important propositions in this connection. The characterization of something as seeming already presupposes that being exists. “... something discovered, as not truly existing, but as it seems to me, is only revealed insofar as it actually exists” (p. 308). Thus, semblance always presupposes essence; semblance can exist only in relation to it.
In the process of cognition, semblance acts as a moment of disclosure of being. This process can be understood from the real interaction of a person as a real material being with the real world acting on him. In this real interaction of the world and a person, objects, phenomena, things seem to a person one way or another, depending on certain conditions and circumstances of their perception. Appearance as a moment of cognition acts as a disclosure of the nature of phenomena depending on the objective conditions in which they are perceived by a person. As an example, S. L. Rubinshtein gives an explanation of the illusions of perception. Illusory perception, notes S. L. Rubinshtein, is not a subjective distortion of reality. “The illusory dimensions of an object are not non-existent dimensions, but those dimensions that naturally arise when it is perceived under certain conditions” (p. 310). Thus, the appearance itself is due to the objective "and the laws of interaction of this phenomenon with other phenomena. Using a particular example of solving the problem of appearance, S. L. Rubinshtein emphasizes the idea that objects and phenomena of objective reality exist in the most complex connections and relationships and only through the discovery of these connections and relationships can they be adequately known by a person.In the process of cognition, the interaction of external influences, refracted through the internal state of the subject, his internal properties, is revealed.
S. L. Rubinshtein extended the action of the principle of determinism to the understanding of other psychological problems, to the formulation and solution of the problem of a person as a whole. Thus, the position formulated in the book “Being and Consciousness” that mental phenomena in the interconnection of objects and phenomena of the material world act, on the one hand, as caused by external influences, and on the other hand, as causing human behavior, in the work "Man and the World" finds further development.
S. L. Rubinshtein notes that the specificity of the human way of existence is determined by the measure of the ratio of the self-determination of a person and his dependence on what is outside of a person that is different in relation to him. Man enters into relationship with this other as an active being, transforming the surrounding reality by his actions. These actions themselves are determined by the situation, but the situation itself includes a person with his needs, interests, inclinations. The active involvement of a person in a situation presupposes that a person analyzes it, singles out the conditions in it that must be correlated with the requirements facing him and the tasks that go beyond this situation. Human actions that transform the situation are determined by conditions, but at the same time, by their actions, a person changes circumstances. By changing the situation, transforming the existing, a person changes himself. Constantly solving the tasks facing him, a person transforms the situation, goes beyond its limits and is included in an endless system of new relationships and interdependencies. It acts as a link in the universal system of connections and dependencies. In a certain sense, the existence of a person at every given moment of life is mediated by his attitude to everything that is generated by the previous development of mankind, embodied in the products of the activities of peoples, the material and spiritual culture of society.
SL Rubinshtein applies the principle of determinism to the analysis of the problem of necessity and freedom. He believes that the problem of necessity and freedom is dialectically resolved by revealing the complex dependencies of the determinism of human actions and his relationship to the world around him. The main thing for understanding the problem of human freedom and the determining influence of being is the position that the relationship between man and the world includes the conscious regulation of behavior by the man himself. This implies a person's awareness of this world and those actions that are aimed at changing it.
S. L. Rubinshtein singles out and analyzes different aspects freedom problems. Freedom is considered as self-determination, in which the role of internal conditions in the determination of behavior is especially emphasized.
S. L. Rubinshtein's thoughts about freedom as domination, man's control over his own inclinations and needs are of significant importance. The external conditions are the necessary conditions of a person's life in society, but these conditions act on a person, only refracting through the internal moral attitudes of the individual. External determination, acting as a system of moral norms, is dialectically connected with internal conditions, tendencies, inclinations and needs of the individual.
Man is not only objectively in a certain relation to the world, but in one way or another he is subjectively related to it. A change in a person's attitude to objective connections is an expression of an objective change in these connections, it acts as an assessment of a change in a situation, circumstances. In this regard, S. L. Rubinshtein subtly and deeply analyzes humor and irony, tragic and comic. These forms of a person's relationship to the world act as an expression of a person's relationship to a situation, as a form of assessing the position of the subject himself in this situation. Humor and irony express a certain attitude of a person to weaknesses, shortcomings, imperfections, ugliness, evil in their relationship with strength, goodness, etc. Humor and irony not only express the objective relationship of circumstances, the corresponding situation, but also human qualities entering the situation and changing it. Objective relations of circumstances are revealed, refracted through the internal laws of the subject, through his way of seeing, perceiving these circumstances, through the system of subjective relations of a person. And in the way of seeing, in relation to the situation, the features of the person himself are also revealed.
A deterministic explanation of a person's relationship to another person leads S. L. Rubinshtein to important ethical propositions that are of great theoretical importance for solving the problems of human upbringing. S. L. Rubinshtein pointed out that the ethical meaning of “the principle of determinism lies in emphasizing the role of the internal moment of self-determination, loyalty to oneself, non-unilateral subordination to the external, and, on the contrary, only external determination entails internal emptiness, lack of resistance, selectivity according to bearing to external influences” (p. 382). Practical conclusions follow from these provisions. The tasks of education, according to S. L. Rubinshtein, are not limited to organizing a system of external influences on a person. When solving them, it is necessary to reveal the system of external influences and those internal conditions that mediate the perception of these influences. Moral education should not be reduced to bare moralization, to the presentation of only demands from outside. It should act as a process of changing the conditions of a person's life, as a real organization of the behavior of one person in relation to the behavior of other people. S. L. Rubinshtein formulates some requirements for the educator. Firstly, the educator himself must live a real life and include in it those whom he educates. Introducing the educated to this life, the educator must perform such actions that would themselves be the conditions for the life of another person. Secondly, the educator must, by his actions, evoke response actions of the educatees, in which the internal conditions of real moral behavior would be formed. Morality, therefore, appears not as something external in relation to the existence of a person, but as a characteristic of his being, his relationship with other people included in this being.
In addition to these issues, for psychological science of great importance is the special analysis by S. L. Rubinshtein of the problems of consciousness and self-consciousness of a person, the problems of human existence, the love of a person for a person, the question of the aesthetic attitude of a person to reality. The book "Man and the World" implements a single concept, raises one cardinal question - about the nature of man and his place in the world. And this issue is solved as a two-pronged task - to expand all the problems of the world in relation to a person, in one case (the first part of the manuscript “Man and the World” is devoted to this), and to characterize a person in relation to the world, in another ( This is the subject of the second part of the work).
The published work requires thoughtful, detailed, in-depth study, and the ideas formulated in it require creative use and further development.
We hope that the publication of SL Rubinshtein's manuscript "Man and the World" will contribute to the development of the problem of man, one of the most important and exciting problems of our time.
E. V. Shorokhova
Problems of psychology in the writings of Karl Marx
Psychology is not one of those disciplines that were developed systematically, like political economy, by Marx. We will not find, as is known, in the collected works of Marx specially psychological treatises. But in his various works, as if in passing, this brilliant mind scattered a number of remarks on various questions of psychology. It is worth thinking about these outwardly disparate remarks, and it becomes obvious that, although outwardly not systematized, they represent an internally unified system of ideas. As their content is revealed, these remarks merge with each other and turn out to be one monolithic whole, imbued with the unity of Marx's worldview, proceeding from his foundations.
Therefore, in the field of psychology, Marx can and should now be interpreted not as a great representative of the past, subject to historical study and philological commentary. We must approach him as the most modern of our contemporaries, put before him the most urgent problems over which modern psychological thought is struggling, in order to understand, first of all, what answers to the most key questions of psychology lie in statements Marx, taken in the light of the general foundations of Marxist-Leninist methodology, and what paths he outlines for the construction of psychology.
Modern foreign psychology, as is known, is going through a crisis. This crisis, coinciding with a period of significant development of experimental research, is, like the crisis of modern physics, about which Lenin wrote in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a methodological crisis. It reflects the general ideological struggle waged in modern science and revealed in the crisis of the methodological foundations of various disciplines, starting with modern mathematics.In psychology, this crisis led to the fact that psychology broke up into psychology, and psychologists were divided into schools, each with The crisis in psychology thus assumed such a sharp and open form that it could not but be recognized by the leading representatives of psychological science. once raised this question at psychological congresses. of the German psychologists in Hamburg (1931), the presiding K-Buhler, in the speech with which he opened the congress, pointed out that an in-depth reflection on the foundations of psychological science has now become an urgent need, and before that, in a special psychology dedicated to the "crisis ” book, he emphasized that the decisive hour had struck for psychology, that it had entered a crisis, on the resolution of which its entire future fate depended. At the Tenth International Congress of Psychology in Copenhagen (August 1932), W. Köhler (Rubber) cautioned that "if we do not find the connecting threads of psychology in the near future, we will finally become atomized" 3 .
Without accepting the solution to the basic problems of the modern crisis of psychology, which Buhler tried to give in his work "The Crisis of Psychology" ("01e Knse neer Psuschoboge"), one can, perhaps, agree with him that the key is that a problem that has become particularly acute in the conflict between introspective psychology, behavioral psychology and the so-called psychology of the spirit. The task of the present article devoted to Marx, of course, cannot include an analysis of these currents, which, in their concreteness, are historical formations subject to historical study and analysis. Here the task is essentially different: to reveal with maximum theoretical sharpness the main problems of modern psychology in order to clarify with all possible clarity, based on the study of Marx's psychological statements, what solution to these key problems should be taken as the basis for constructing Marxist-Leninist psychology.
- 1 Ben "cm d'er (Me XII Coppess d'er Goei\.sbjen OesePszkaln 1yg Psusgyuolioge, Legausgeges en von KaGka, Tepa, 1932, 5. 3-6.
- 2 K. Veil 1e. Ble Knse ore p5uspo1o §1e, Tepa, 1929. (2nd ed. See esp. pp. 1-2 and 27-28.)
- 3 See Valentiner's report on the Tenth International Psychological Congress in the journal Soviet Psychotechnics, 1933, no.
The dominant concept of the psyche, established by traditional introspective psychology, identifies the psyche with the phenomena of consciousness; the task of psychology, according to this conception, is to study the phenomena of consciousness within the limits of that individual consciousness to which they are directly given; the existence of the psyche is exhausted by its givenness, experienced in consciousness. Unlike all other sciences, which reveal their essence in the phenomena they study, psychology, from this point of view, turns out, by virtue of the very essence of its subject, is doomed to always remain in principle on the Machist position of pure phenomenalism. ma. The phenomena in it allegedly coincide with the essence (E. Husserl). Marx pointed out that if the internal essence of things and the external form of their manifestation directly coincided, then any science would be superfluous. Psychology in this concept turns out to be such a superfluous science, setting itself the task of revealing what is already directly given.
If we analyze this concept, then at the basis of it, as the position that determines it, we will find the principle of the immediate givenness of the mental. The task of introspection as a method lies precisely in isolating the mental from all objective mediations. This is, in essence, a radically idealistic thesis: everything material, external, physical is mediated through consciousness, through the psyche; the psyche is the primary, immediate given. In its immediacy, it closes in the inner world and turns into a purely personal property. Each subject is given only the phenomena of his consciousness, and the phenomena of his consciousness are given only to him. They are fundamentally inaccessible to another observer. The possibility of objective knowledge of someone else's psyche, which could be only indirect, inevitably disappears. But at the same time - and this is the root of the question - the objective knowledge of the psyche also becomes impossible from the side of the subject experiencing it. Extreme and, in essence, the only consistent introopectionists asserted that the data of introspection are absolutely reliable 4 .
This means that there is no authority capable of refuting them, which is just as true as the fact that there is no authority capable of confirming them. If the psychic is pure immediacy, not determined in its own content by objective mediations, then there is no objective instance at all for verifying the data of introspection. The possibility of verification, which distinguishes knowledge from belief, in psychology, therefore, disappears; it is just as impossible for the subject himself as it is for an outside observer. Thus, psychology becomes impossible as objective knowledge, as a science.
- * Very clearly and consistently this point of view in Russian literature was formulated by N. Ya. Grot. See his "Foundations of Experimental Psychology", published as an introduction to the translation of the book "Essay on Psychology" by W. Wundt (Moscow, 1897) published under his editorship.
And yet this concept of the psychic determined all, including those sharply hostile to introspective psychology, psychological systems. In their struggle against consciousness, representatives of behavior - American and Russian - have always proceeded from the understanding of it that was established by the introspectionists.
Their entire argumentation, substantiating the need to turn off consciousness from psychology and turn behavior into a subject of psychological science, boiled down mainly to the fact that mental phenomena or phenomena of consciousness are in principle accessible only to one observer; they "are not subject to objective verification and therefore can never be the subject of scientific research" 5 . Ultimately, this argument against consciousness rested on an introspectionist conception of consciousness. Instead of reconstructing the introspectionist conception of consciousness in order to implement an objective approach to mental phenomena, behaviorism rejected consciousness, because it accepted the concept of consciousness that it found ready-made from its opponents as something immutable, as something that can be either taken or rejected, but not changed.
Proceeding precisely from this concept of the psyche, created by introspective psychology, and thus exponentially realizing the unity of idealism and mechanism, behavioral psychology came to its understanding of human activity as behavior, as a set of external reactions to environmental stimuli.
The first operation that behavioral psychology, in order to free it from its connection with the consciousness expelled from psychology, performed on concrete human activity, dissecting from it the subject of psychology, was that human activity, understood as a set of external reactions to external stimuli of the environment, was separated from the acting subject as a concrete, conscious historical personality. Consciousness, divorced from human activity, behavioral psychology opposed activity - behavior, divorced from consciousness.
And after this, inevitably, a second operation was performed on the same activity. Taken depending only on the physiological mechanisms by which it is carried out, human activity was also derived from the connection with the products of this activity and the environment in which it is carried out. As a result, it has lost both its social character and its psychological content; from the sphere of the social and psychological, it fell out exclusively into the physiological plane.
- 5 ohm. J. W o ts he. Psychology as a science of behavior. Odessa, 1926, pp. 1-2.
With this second operation - the separation of activity from the products or results of this activity, in which it is realized and thanks to which it becomes meaningful - behavior has performed an operation on human activity similar to that which introspective psychology has subjected to human consciousness. Locking the consciousness of a person in the inner world, introspective psychology tore it not only from objective activity, but also isolated consciousness from the links mediating it with ideology.
The anti-psychologism of the leading directions of the idealistic philosophy of the 20th century, both of the Hueyerleve and Rickertian persuasion, outwardly opposing the logical, ideological - in the form of an idea or value - to the psychological, thereby consolidated the emasculation of the objective, its mediating links with ideology. The “psychology of the spirit” attempted to turn the semantic connections of this consciousness with the ideology that had fallen out of consciousness into a self-sufficient object and make them the subject of genuine psychology (degeneral psyche), as the science of the subjective spirit. But these semantic connections isolated from a real psycho-physical subject (E. Spranger's Smn-Lapser) could just as little or even less become a full-fledged subject of a unified psychology, as the consciousness of introspective psychology or the behavior of behaviorists and reflexologists. Psychology, as a result, found itself in front of three abstract constructions, peculiar decay products, resulting from the dismemberment of the real consciousness and the real activity of a living person, as a concrete historical personality. Psychology then faced the task of rising above these limited conceptions into which psychology had disintegrated.
The first path that K. Buhler tried to pave in the West in a very subtle form (and which K. N. Kornilov followed in our country in a different way in his attempt to create a Marxist psychology) was simply to come to a single psychology as a result of the synthesis of various psychologies, as various complementary aspects. Buhler tried to combine the approach to the subject of introspective psychology, psychology of behaviorism and psychology of the spirit, considering them as three aspects of a single subject of psychology. This path was doomed to failure in advance. It only leads to the unification of the subjective idealistic conception of consciousness with the mechanistic conception of human activity. As a result of such a merger, nothing can turn out, except for summing up the mistakes made by the synthesized directions - the combination of an untenable concept of consciousness with a false concept of human activity and a misunderstanding of the relationship between psychology and ideology.
The real task must obviously lie not in such a "synthesis", but in a "struggle on two fronts", not in accepting everything that is recognized in each of these conceptions* but in overcoming those general premises from which all these warring theories and their very hostility proceed: It is necessary not to combine the concept of consciousness of introspective psychology with the behavioral concept of human activity, etc., but to overcome these concepts, transforming the understanding as consciousness, and human activity, established in the psychological concepts that determined the crisis of modern psychology. The mistake of introspective psychology was not in the fact that it wanted to make consciousness the subject of psychological study, but in the way it understood consciousness, the human psyche. Behavior's mistake was not that it wanted to study man in his activity in psychology, but above all in how it understood this activity. And the error of the psychology of the spirit lies not in the recognition of the mediated ™ consciousness by its relation to culture, to ideology, but in how it interprets this relation. Therefore, the way to overcome the crisis cannot be to, based on a false introspectionist understanding of consciousness, completely reject consciousness and - as behavior - try to build a psychology without the psyche, or, based on a false - behavioral - understanding of human activity, to try - as a subjective psychology of consciousness - to build a psychology without taking into account human activity, or, finally, to try to correct the error of a false understanding of consciousness by adding another error to it - a false understanding of human activity, etc. The path There can be only one solution to the crisis expressed in the struggle of these directions: only a radical restructuring of the very understanding of both consciousness and human activity, inextricably linked with a new understanding of their relationship, can lead to a correct disclosure of the subject of psychology. Such is namely, this is our basic position - the path that is indicated with complete certainty in the psychologist ical statements of Marx. They clearly outline a different interpretation of both consciousness and human activity, which fundamentally overcomes their gap and creates a basis for building Marxist-Leninist psychology as a "really meaningful and real" 6 science.
- 6 K. Marx and F. Engels. From early works. M., Gospolit-izdat, 1956, p. 595.
The starting point for this restructuring is the Marxian conception of human activity. In the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx, using Hegelian terminology, defines human activity as
the objectification of the subject, which at the same time is the deobjectification of the object. “The greatness of the Hegelian “Phenomenology” and its final result - the dialectic of negativity as a driving and generative principle,” writes Marx, “consists, therefore, in the fact that Hegel considers the self-generation of man as a process, considers objectification as deobjectification, as self-alienation and the removal of this self-alienation, in that he, therefore, grasps the essence of labor and understands objective man, true, because real, man as the result of his own labor” 7 . All human activity for Marx is the objectification of himself or, in other words, the process of objective disclosure of his “essential forces”. In Capital, analyzing labor, Marx simply says that in labor "the subject passes into the object." So, human activity is not a reaction to external stimulus, it is not even doing, as an external operation of the subject on the object, - it is “the transition of the subject into the object”. But in this way the connection is closed not only between the subject and its activity, but also the connection between the activity and its products. The very understanding of activity as objectification already contains this thought; Marx sharpens and emphasizes it when, analyzing labor in Capital, he says that "activity and object mutually penetrate each other." Since human activity is objectification, its objectification or the transition of the subject into an object, the disclosure in the objects of his activity, his essential forces, including his feelings, his consciousness, insofar as the objective existence of industry is open book human essential forces, human psychology sensibly presented to us 8 . Therefore, "psychology, for which this book, i.e., just the sensually most tangible, most accessible part of history, is closed, cannot become a really meaningful and real science" 9 .
- 7 K. Marx and F. Engels. From early writings, p. 627.
- 8 See K. Marx and F. Engels. From early works, p. 594. d Ibid., p. 595
But behind the connection thus closed, going from the subject to the object, another fundamental dependence is immediately revealed in human activity, going from the object to the subject. Objectification or objectification is not a “transition into an object” of what is already ready, regardless of the activity of this subject, whose consciousness is only projected outside. In objectification, in the process of transition into the object, the subject itself is formed. “It is only thanks to the material richness of the human being that the richness of subjective human sensibility develops, and partly for the first time is generated: the musical ear, which feels the beauty of the shape of the eyes, - in short,
speaking, such senses as are capable of human enjoyment and which assert themselves as human essential forces. For not only the five external senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, practical senses "(will, love, etc.) - in a word, human feeling, the humanity of feelings - arise only due to the presence of a corresponding object, thanks to humanized nature" 10. And further: "Thus, it is necessary to objectify human essence - both in theoretical and practical terms - in order, on the one hand, to humanize human feelings, and on the other hand, to create a human feeling corresponding to all the richness of human and natural essence" p.
Thus, objectifying in the products of his activity, forming them, a person forms - “partly generates, partly develops” - his own feelings, his consciousness, according to the well-known formula of “Capital”: “... changing the external nature man at the same time changes his own nature. Not by immersion in the inexpressible depths of immediacy, not in inactivity, but in labor, in the very activity of a person - transforming the world, his consciousness is formed.
In order to definitively outline Marx's thought and dissociate it from Hegel's idealistic concept of a self-generating subject, it is necessary to include one more essential link in this chain of Marx's reasoning.
When I become objectified in my activity, then I am thereby included in the objective context from me and my will of an independent situation. I enter, in the process of interpenetration of action and object, into an objective situation determined by social laws, and the objective results of my activity are determined by the objective social relations in which I am involved: the products of my activity are the products of social activity. “The activity and the use of its fruits, both in their content and in the mode of existence, are of a public nature: public activity and public use” 12 .
- 10 K. Marx and F. Engel p. From early writings, pp. "593-594.
- Ibid., p. 594.
- 12 Ibid., p. 589.
And this applies not only to my practical activity in the narrow sense, but also to my theoretical activity. Each thought that I have formulated acquires an objective meaning, an objective significance in the social use that it receives depending on the objective situation in which it, formulated by me, has entered, and not depending only on those subjective intentions and motives from which I came to it; the products of my theoretical, as well as the products of my practical activity in their objective content, are the products of social activity: "... social activity and public use exist by no means only in the form of directly collective activity and directly collective use" , i.e., not only in activity and spirit, which are found “in actual communication with other people ... But even when I am engaged in scientific, etc. activities, activities that I only rarely I can carry out in direct communication with others - even then I am engaged in social activities, because I act as a person. Not only is I given, as a social product, the material for my activity—even the very language in which the thinker works—but my own being is also social activity; and therefore what I make of my person, I make of myself for society, conscious of myself as a social being.
So, man is not a Hegelian self-generating subject: if my consciousness is formed in my activity through the products of this activity, it is objectively formed through the products of social activity. My consciousness in its inner essence is mediated objective connections which are established in social practice and in which I am included, I enter every act of my activity, practical and theoretical. Each act of my activity and I myself in it are woven through it with thousands of threads, are included in the objective formations of a historically formed culture by various connections, and my consciousness is mediated through them through and through.
This central concept of Marx about the formation of the human psyche in the process of activity, indirectly through the products of this activity, solves the key problem of modern psychology and opens the way to a fundamentally different solution to the question of its subject matter than the competing currents of modern psychology do.
- K. Marx and F. Engels. From early writings, p. 590
In contrast to the main idea of introspective psychology about the immediacy of the psyche (direct experience as the subject of psychology), Marx formulated with all possible clarity the proposition about the objective mediation of consciousness. After all, “it is only thanks to the (subjectively) objectively unfolded richness of the human being” that the richness of subjective human sensibility is obtained. This idea of the objective mediation of the psyche is carried out with great consistency by Marx through all his psychological statements: for Marx, language is “practically existing for other people, and therefore for myself real consciousness ...”, “only through the relation to the man Peter, as to his own kind, the man Paul begins to treat himself as a man, etc. This opens up the fundamental possibility of an objective study of the psyche. The psyche is not subjective, not only appears to be mediated for cognition; it can be known indirectly through human activity and the products of this activity, because in its being it is objectively mediated by them. On the basis of this concept, introspection itself should not be completely excluded, but should and can be restructured. The psyche, consciousness can become the subject of psychology - meaningful and real. Objectivity in psychology is achieved not by turning off the psyche, but by a fundamental transformation of the concept of human consciousness and the concept of human activity.
Marx's analysis of human consciousness and labor in a form "constituting the exclusive property of man" reveals with all possible clarity what this restructuring is expressed in, how radically it changes the whole situation, opening the way for objective knowledge of the mental.
- 14 K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 3, p. 25. 16. See. ibid., p. 29. (Note 2.)
Marx's basic formulas about consciousness are well known. “Consciousness [eaz Veshirchzesh] can never be anything other than a conscious being [eaz yeshi^e sem], and the existence of people is the real process of their life” 14 , i.e. consciousness as a reflection of being - according to Lenin's formula. Along with this first, there is a second formula: “My relation to my environment is my consciousness” 15 , and, unlike the animal, which does not relate to anything, a person’s relation to others is given as an attitude and, finally, in direct connection with this: language is a practical, existing for other people, and therefore also existing for myself, real consciousness. Taken in their internal relationship and in connection with Marx's concept of human activity as labor in a form constituting the exclusive property of man, these formulas fully define Marx's concept of consciousness. The essence of consciousness lies in the fact that my relation to my environment in the mind of a person is itself given as a relation, i.e., the real relation of a person to the environment becomes mediated through its ideal reflection, which is practically realized in language. Language serves as the plane on which I fix the being that I reflect and project my operations. Thus, the ideal plan is included between the immediately present situation, which I know. and the operation or action by which I change the world. In this connection, the very structure of the action inevitably turns out to be different. The emergence of a mediating ideal plan frees action from its exclusive dependence on the immediately present situation. “Conscious man” thanks to this distinguishes himself from nature, as Lenin writes 16 , and opposes himself to the objective world. Man ceases to be a slave to the immediately present situation; his actions, becoming mediated, can be determined not only by stimulation emanating from the immediately present situation, but also by goals and objectives lying outside it: they become selective, targeted and volitional; It is these features that characterize human activity in its specific differences from the behavior of animals. “Labor in a form constituting the exclusive property of man” is characterized primarily by two features. “At the end of the labor process, a result is obtained that already at the beginning of this process was in the mind of a person, i.e. ideally”: an ideal plan is included in real activity, mediating it, and in connection with this it “not only changes the form of that what is given by nature; in what is given by nature, he realizes at the same time his conscious goal, which, like a law, determines the method and nature of his actions and to which he must subordinate his will” 17 . The presence of an ideal plan of consciousness is associated with a change in the nature of the activity itself.
- V. I. Lenin. complete collection works, vol. 29, p. 85. K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 23, p. 189.
This characterization of specifically human forms of consciousness and activity in their internal interconnection has found brilliant confirmation in experimental studies on animals, as well as on pathological material. In the studies of W. Köhler (Kohler) on the intellect of anthropoid apes, two features are clearly revealed that distinguish the animal closest to man from man: 1) the absence of semantic speech, that function of it, which K. Buhler calls "OarsrePurschs-! ipkgup", the function of representation or display, in the presence of affective "speech", expressive movements and sounds - characterizes the plane of "consciousness"; 2) the dependence of the monkey, even in the most intellectual of the operations it performs, on the immediately present situation, by virtue of which the animal turns out to be a “slave of the visual field,” characterizes the nature of its activity. It is impossible not to see the internal connection between these two moments. On negative instances, they confirm the interconnections that are revealed in Marx's analysis of human consciousness and labor.
No less revealing in this regard are new studies of speech and action disorders - aphasia and apraxia. Especially the studies of G. Head (Head), who follows Jackson (maksop), and the works of A. Gelb (Ce1b) and K. Goldstein (Cuiszyn) have shown the closest internal connection between the possibility of mediating action by an ideal plan, "a symbolic formula ”and the strong-willed, targeted nature of the activity. Violation of the possibility to formulate a plan of action and ideally mediate one's activity turns out to be connected with the transformation of the action into a simple reaction, which is only a mechanical discharge, under the influence of a directly present stimulus; a person again becomes a slave to the immediately present situation, his every action is, as it were, chained to it; he is unable to regulate it in accordance with tasks or goals that lie outside of it. An ideal plan falls out, and the character and “method of action” of a person cease to be determined “as by law” by a conscious goal to which a person subordinates his will, i.e., the form of activity that is the exclusive property of a person is destroyed. This connection between the uniqueness of human consciousness and the specificity of human activity is revealed positively and fundamentally by Marx in the analysis of consciousness and labor.
It is worthwhile now to compare the relation of consciousness in its introspective conception and behavior as a set of reactions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the relation between labor and consciousness in Marx. The relation between the first two is purely external; the latter are so interconnected that a genuine opportunity opens up, as it were, to shine through the consciousness of a person through an analysis of his activity, in which consciousness is formed and revealed. When Marx defines the specificity of human consciousness as my relation to my environment, which is given to me as a relation, i.e., has an indirect character, he defines consciousness itself, proceeding from those changes in the real relations of a person to his environment, which associated with the genesis and development of human consciousness. This is a methodologically decisive point.
Human consciousness, being a prerequisite for a specific human form of activity - labor, is also primarily its result. In the activity aimed at changing the external world, at the formation of objects of activity, consciousness is formed in its inner being. This inwardly penetrating and from within human consciousness, the formative influence of social practice, is the decisive moment of Marx's conception. To verify this, a few comparisons are sufficient. A. Bergson also emphasizes the role of practice in the formation of intelligence; the intellect is formed for the needs of practice in order to influence the external material world. But from this position, Bergson, as is known, will draw the conclusion that the intellect does not express consciousness in its inner essence, but only outlines the contours of matter in its division, established for the purpose of practical influence on it 18 . The psychologist and philosopher must therefore break through this outer shell, turned to face the material world, and return again to the "immediate data of consciousness", because practice only reforms, and does not form the inner world of consciousness. The French sociological school of E. Durkheim will also put forward a proposition about the social nature of consciousness, but from this understanding of consciousness as a social formation, some, like Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl, will come to reduce psychology to ideology, others will draw the unexpected conclusion that consciousness, by virtue of precisely this social nature, is completely inadequate to psychic reality (Ch. Blondel), that consciousness and the psyche, consciousness and the field of psychology are completely external and alien to each other (A. Vallon) 19 .
Finally, Freud recognizes the "I", consciousness, in a certain sense as a social product, but again, internal driving forces psychological development personalities will then find themselves in the realm of the unconscious; external relations will be established between the conscious and the unconscious, under the influence of the antagonistic forces of repression.
Thus, the decisive factor for the Marxist-Leninist concept is to overcome the opposition of social and individual, external and internal, carried out in the original concept of the formation of the inner essence of human consciousness in the process of human impact on the outside world, in the process of social practice, in which interpenetration of action and object and the formation of the subject and consciousness through the products of social practice.
In this thesis, as a central point, lies the proposition about the historicity of consciousness. Being formed in the process of social practice, it develops along with it. “Consciousness, therefore, from the very beginning is a social product and remains so,” adds Marx, “as long as people exist in general” 20 .
- 18 See especially H. Beg § s o n. Rapz, 191 1. _
- 19 See H. XV a 11 on p. Rapz, 1929. (Subsequently, A. Vallon overcame this erroneous point of view. - Approx. ed.)
- 20 K. Marks and F. Engel's. Works, vol. 3, p. 29.
We sometimes come across the view that the recognition of the historicity of the psyche, even the recognition of the genetic point of view in general, is specific to Marxist-Leninist psychology. This, of course, is not true. Not to mention the genetic point of view, the recognition of the principle of development, which since the time of H. Spencer has been in his evolutionary interpretation almost the dominant idea of modern bourgeois psychology - and the idea of the historicity of consciousness, as is known, is not a specific feature and the exclusive property of Marxist psychology. The essence of the matter, therefore, is not only in recognizing the historicity of consciousness in general, but in how to understand it.
The decisive moments stand out clearly when comparing the Marxian concept with the concept of L. Levy-Bruhl. Levy-Brühl also, as is known, recognizes not only quantitative, but qualitative restructuring of the psyche in the process of socio-historical development, a change not only in content, but also in form or structure. He considers this historical development of consciousness to be fundamentally impossible to reduce to factors of only an individual order, but connects it with changes in social formations. Thus, he seems to interpret this problem dialectically and recognizes the social nature of the process of mental development. However, Lévy-Bruhl reduces sociality itself to pure ideology, to which, on the other hand, he reduces psychology as well. Social relations lie for him mainly on the plane of social consciousness. Social being is essentially a socially organized experience. Thus, any real relationship to nature, to the objective world and any real influence on it falls out of sociality, human practice falls out.
In accordance with this, when studying the historical development of the psyche, those forms of consciousness that are associated with the sphere of practice fall out of the researcher’s field of vision, and as the only sources that determine human psychology in the early stages of socio-historical development, only ideology remains, in first of all, the religious mythology of the corresponding period. On the basis of ideology alone, without connection with practice, Levy-Bruhl defines the psychology of “primitive man”. The result is that all his thinking is prelogical and mystical, impenetrable to experience and insensitive to contradiction. In the early stages of socio-historical development, man also loses those elements of intellectuality that W. Köhler (Rubber) recognized in his monkeys when they use tools; he lacks any elements of intellectual operations, thinking that objectively reflects reality; it thus essentially falls out, even as an initial stage, from the plan of the mental development of mankind; not a qualitative difference is established, but a complete opposite of the two structures: one must leave one in order to enter the other external to it. Any continuity, and not just continuity in the development of thinking is broken: development, in essence, turns out to be impossible. - And in connection with this fundamentally wrong and politically reactionary universalization of the differences established on the basis of a comparison of primitive forms of ideology with the forms of modern scientific knowledge, the main thing in relation to which ideological mysticism is derivative is pushed into the background: not mysticism, but the narrow practicality of the primary forms of thinking, its chaining to directly present concrete situations, the weak isolation of the ideal plan.
As a result of this idealistic interpretation of social relations in terms of social consciousness, the understanding of the driving forces of development is lost. Social formations, to which various psychological structures must correspond, turn out to be static formations themselves.
Marx's concepts differ from this concept in their very essence. And the main difference lies, of course, in the fact that sociality, the social relations of people are not opposed to their relationship to nature. They do not exclude but include the relationship to nature. “Labor is first of all a process taking place between man and nature...” 21 . And he is the main social category. Social relations are, first of all, real production relations between people, which develop in the process of their impact on nature. Only a correct understanding of the relationship established by Marx between nature and the social essence of man can lead to a sufficiently deep and fundamentally correct understanding of the historical development of the psyche.
Marx formulates his point of view on the relationship of man to nature with complete clarity. "Man," writes Marx, "is directly a natural being" 22 . “Man is the direct subject of natural science”, “Nature is the direct subject of the science of man. The first object of man - man - is nature. And therefore - "history itself is a real part of the history of nature, the formation of nature by man" 24 .
- 21 K-Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 23, p. 188.
- 22 K. Marks and F. Engels. From early writings, p. 631.
- 23 Ibid., p. 596.
- 24 T a m e.
- 25 Ibid., p. 634.
- 3 Dec. 1193 33
An essential prerequisite for a correct understanding of this “becoming of nature by man” is Marx's understanding of “removal”, which is fundamentally different from Hegel's interpretation of it. Marx says about the Hegelian understanding of “removal” that it contains “the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or his only imaginary criticism ...” 25 - that positivism that found its theoretical expression in the thesis “everything real is reasonable” and practically brought to justify the reality of the Prussian monarchist state. Hegel's "removal" is a purely ideal operation: the transition from a lower form to a higher one is connected with a dialectical understanding of this lower form as "untrue", imperfect, as lower. But after this “removal”, the lower form, over which the higher one has now been built, remains completely intact, what it was. “A person who has understood that in law, politics, etc., he leads an alienated life, leads his true human life in this alienated life as such” 26 . “And thus, after the abolition of, for example, religion, after the recognition in religion of the product of self-alienation, it still finds itself confirmed in religion as religion” 27 .
For Marx, filming is not only an ideal operation, but a process of real alteration; what is needed is not "criticism" (the favorite term of the Young Hegelians), but a revolution. In the process of development, including psychological development, the emergence of new higher forms is associated not with the realization of the untruth, imperfection of lower forms, but with their real restructuring. The development of man, therefore, is not a process of superstructing the nature of human social existence, it is a process of “becoming nature by man”. This development is manifested in the extent to which human essence has become nature for man, or how nature has become the human essence of man” 28, “to what extent the natural behavior of a person has become human, or to what extent human essence has become a natural essence for him, to what extent his human nature has become nature for him. With regard to the psychological development of man, the historical development of the psyche is not reduced to the superstructure of the “realm of the spirit” over the sensuality and instincts of a natural being; it is not limited to the fact that “higher spiritual feelings” are built over primitive animal instincts, and human thinking is built over “gross feelings”. The process of development goes deeper; it captures all its most primitive manifestations. Instincts become human needs, which in the process of historical development become human needs.
- 26 K. Marks and F. E ygel s. From early writings, p. 634.
- 27 T a m e.
- 28 Ibid., p. 587. 23 Ibid.
- *° Ibid., p. 594.
Man's feelings develop; at the same time, they are involved in the process of the entire historical development: “... the formation of the five external senses is the work of the entire world history that has passed so far” 30 . And Marx points out in one stroke what is the main essence of this development: “... the senses directly in their practice became theoreticians. They have a relation to a thing for the sake of a thing, but this thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man...” 31 . This remark by Marx in a brief formula expresses the main and most significant fact revealed by the most profound modern research on the historical development of perception: the release of perception from the preoccupation with action, the transformation of situational objects of actions into constant objects and higher forms of human perception - especially visual , tactile - into the forms of objective, "categorical", theoretical consciousness, which is both the result and the premise of more perfect forms of human activity. Comparison of the structure of feelings that are at the lower stages of development - such as smell, for example - according to Genning's research, with the highest forms of "categorical" perception in the field of visual, in the understanding of Gelb and Goldstein, or a comparison of the visual perceptions of animals, even Köhler's monkeys (for whom objects do not retain the independence from the actual situation necessary for the free choice of action), with the perception of man, they reveal the full significance of Marx's remark: the highest and not in all areas achieved result of the development of the very feelings of man is really that - are new directly in their practice by theoreticians”; for them the "objective relation" to the "thing for the sake of the thing" opens up. This is a profound restructuring that the senses themselves undergo in the process of historical development. At the same time, Marx emphasizes the historicity of this process, showing how, depending on the changing socio-historical conditions, this attitude “to the thing for the sake of the thing” is lost. When a mineral becomes a commodity, an exchange value, the human eye ceases to see the beauty of its form, ceases to relate to a thing for the sake of a thing 32 .
- "K. Marks and F. Engel's. From early works, p. 592.
- Same, p. 594
So, both elementary feelings and instincts - the whole human psyche as a whole - are involved in the process of historical development; all areas of consciousness are subjected to alteration; Restructuring does not proceed evenly in all areas: there are areas that are advanced, there are functions that are historically rebuilding faster, and there are areas that are lagging behind. Consciousness is not a flat formation: its various parts are at different levels of development; but, in any case, it participates in the process of historical development with all its array. Just as the process of "becoming nature by man" must be
The psychological development of man is understood; it is only in this respect that the problem of psychological development can and must receive a truly deep and radical interpretation.
Revealing the process of development as development and "change in the very nature of man, primarily his psychological nature, Marx at the same time reveals the socio-historical conditionality of this process. He shows quite concretely how various forms of the division of labor restructure the psychological abilities of a person, as a particular property distorts and devastates the human psyche.In this conception of development, revolutionary theory naturally leads to revolutionary practice.Understanding the dependence of the psychological nature of man on their distorting social forms that hinder their full development, the demands for changing these social The references, so often practiced in bourgeois science, to the supposedly unchanging nature of man to substantiate the immutability of the existing system, and this "nature" in reality caused it, are falling apart. and consciousness as a simple change of opinions and ideas, which takes place autogenously and is the engine of the historical process. Only in a real restructuring of social practice - but in this restructuring for sure - in a difficult process of formation and struggle full of internal contradictions, is the consciousness of man rebuilt in its inner essence.
All the politically pointed demands that the practice of socialist construction places before us are the reshaping of people's consciousness, the overcoming of the survivals of capitalism. not only in the economy, but also in the minds of people - all of them have as their theoretical basis this concept of the historical development of consciousness laid down by Marx under the influence of restructuring social practice. And on the other hand, being, firstly, the result of historical development, consciousness is at the same time a prerequisite for historical development, being a dependent, but still an essential component of it.
“Human consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but also creates it,” 33 wrote Lenin. The change in consciousness - and its content and form in their inseparable connection - is far from indistinguishable. component historical process: it is just as little an epiphenomenon of a socio-historical process as it is of a physiological process.
- 33 V. I. Lenin. Complete Works, vol. 29, p. 194
Being determines consciousness. But changes in consciousness, determined by changes in being, themselves, in turn, mean changes in the conditions in which the definition of people's activities is carried out by determining them - largely mediated through their consciousness - by objective factors. The Leninist problem of spontaneity and consciousness (see V. I. Lenin, “What is to be done?” 34) goes beyond the scope of psychology, of course, but the transition from spontaneity to consciousness includes, at the same time, a profound alteration of the human psyche .
Inextricably linked with this entire system of psychological ideas of Marx, as one of its central links, is the Marxian interpretation of the problem of personality. In the crisis of bourgeois psychology, the idea of personality was one of the most critical. Psychology, in essence, has completely lost its personality. Introspective psychology, which limited the psychological problematics to the analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, could not, in principle, properly pose this problem. Behavior, which reduces human activity to a set of superficially superimposed or mechanically interlocking habits, ultimately carried out in terms of behavior the same analytical, mechanically summative methodology that introspective psychology applied to consciousness. Each of these psychological concepts split the personality, tearing, firstly, its consciousness and its activity from each other, in order to then: one - to decompose consciousness into impersonal functions and processes, the other - to divide behavior into separate skills or reactions.
At present, the idea of personality occupies one of the central places in psychology, but its interpretation is determined by the “deep psychology” of the Freudian persuasion or, recently, by V. Stern’s personalism, which has attracted more and more attention, which gives it a statement that is fundamentally alien “ irreconcilable with that which we find in Marx. And deeply symptomatic of the state of psychology in the USSR is the fact that even our psychology - a psychology that wants to be Marxist - has not realized the significance and place of the problem of personality; and in its episodic interpretation of those few authors who did not pass it by, only Freudisteco-Adlerian and Sternian ideas were reflected.
- V. I. Lenin. Complete Works, vol. 6, pp. 28-53, etc.
Meanwhile, in the system of Marxist-Leninist psychology, the problem of personality should occupy one of the central places and, of course, receive a completely different interpretation. Without connection with the personality, it is impossible to understand psychological development, because “people who develop their material production and their material communication, along with this reality of theirs, also change their thinking and the products of their thinking” 35 .
Forms of consciousness do not develop by themselves - in the order of autogenesis, but as attributes or functions of the real whole to which they belong. Outside of personality, the interpretation of consciousness could only be idealistic. Marx therefore opposes to the mode of consideration which proceeds from consciousness another, corresponding real life, in which "they start from the actual living individuals themselves and consider consciousness only as their consciousness" 36 .
Marxist psychology cannot, therefore, be reduced to an analysis of processes and functions alienated from the individual, impersonal. These processes or functions themselves are for Marx "organs of individuality." “Man,” writes Marx, “appropriates to himself his all-round essence in an all-round way, that is, as a whole man.” Each of his "human relations to the world - sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, thinking, contemplation, sensation, desire, activity, love - in a word, all the organs of his individuality" is involved in this.
Outside of this interpretation, the main thesis for the Marxist concept would be unrealizable, according to which the consciousness of a person is a social product and his entire psyche is socially conditioned. Social relations are relations in which not individual sense organs or psychological processes enter, but a person, a person. The determining influence of social labor relations on the formation of the psyche is carried out only indirectly through the personality.
But the inclusion of the problem of personality in psychological problems, of course, in no case should mean its psychologization. Personality is not identical with either consciousness or self-consciousness. This identification, carried out in the psychology of consciousness, insofar as it posed the problem of personality in general, is, of course, unacceptable for Marx.
Analyzing the errors of Hegel's "phenomenology" 38, Marx among them notes that for Hegel the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness, or rather, the object always appears only as an abstract consciousness. However, not being identical with the personality, consciousness and self-consciousness are essential for the personality.
- 35 K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 3, p. 25. 56 T a m e.
- 87 K. Marx and F. Engels. From early works, p. 591. m See ibid., p. 625. . - ; /"
A personality exists only if it has consciousness: its relations to other people must be given to it as relations. Consciousness, being a property of matter, which may or may not have consciousness (Marxism is not panpsychism!), is a quality of the human personality, without which it would not be what it is.
But the essence of the individual is the totality of social relations 39 .
A. Trendelenburg, in a special study on the history of the word parsopa, noted that the Latin word parsopa, from which comes the designation of a person in most Western European languages, borrowed from the Etrusecs, was used by the Romans in the context $, assizatoris, and thus meant not a specific individuality, but a social function performed by a person. K. Bühler, referring to this study of Trendelenburg, notes that now the meaning of this word has shifted: it denotes not the social function of a person, but his inner essence (and gensepzar!) how a person performs his social function, to conclude about his inner essence. Here, for Buhler, the inner essence of the personality and its social relations turn out to be external to each other, and the term "personality" means either one or the other; a person enters and exits certain social relations, putting them on and taking them off like masks (the original meaning of the Etruscan word from which the term persopa comes) 40 ; they do not determine the person's face, its inner essence. A number of social functions that a person has to perform in a bourgeois society remain external to his personality, but basically, in the end, personality means not either a social function or the inner essence of a person, but the inner essence of a person, determined by social relations. niami!
The human personality as a whole is formed only through its relations with other people. Only as I establish human relations with other people, I myself form as a person: “Only by treating the man Paul as his own kind, the man Peter begins to treat himself as a man. At the same time, Paul as such, in all his Pavlovian corporeality, becomes for him a form of manifestation of the kind of “man” 41 .
- 89 See K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 3, p. 3.<0 А. Тгепс1е1епЬиг§. 2иг ОезсЫсЫе йез ^оНез «Регзоп». КапЫисПеп, 1908, № 13, 8. 4-5.
- ¦ "K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 23, p. 62. (Note 18th.)
In contrast to the teachings prevailing in modern psychology and psychopathology, in which the personality in its biological isolation acts as a primary immediate given, as an absolute self-existing self, determined by deep, biologically determined drives or constitutional features, regardless of social ties and mediation - for Marx, the individual, and at the same time his consciousness, is mediated by his social relations, and his development is determined primarily by the dynamics of these relations. However, just as the denial of the psychologization of the personality does not mean turning off consciousness and self-consciousness, in the same way the denial of biologization does not mean the turning off of biology, the organism, nature from the personality. Psychophysical nature is not forced out or neutralized, but is mediated by social relations and restructured—nature becomes man!
In psychological terms, Marx's understanding of human needs is of fundamental importance for the realization of the revolutionary historical concept in the very understanding of the nature of the individual.
The concept of need, in contrast to the concept of instinct, will have to take a prominent place in Marxist-Leninist psychology, entering into the inventory of its basic concepts. Failure to take into account the need to understand the motivation of human behavior inevitably leads to an idealistic concept. “People are accustomed,” writes Engels, “to explain their actions from their thinking, instead of explaining them from their needs (which, of course, are reflected in the head, realized), and in this way that idealistic worldview arose over time. 42. On the basis of the concept of need, the whole doctrine of the motivation of human behavior receives a fundamentally different formulation than that which is usually given to it on the basis of the doctrine of instincts and drives "Contrary to any rationalistic conceptions, needs take into account the demands of human "nature", the human organism. But needs, approaching instincts and drives in this respect, differ fundamentally from them. Mediated by social relations through which they are refracted, they are a product of history, in contrast to instincts as only physiological formations; they further have and ontogeny, in contrast to instincts, products of phylogenesis.
- 42 K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 20, p. 493.
The concept of need is beginning to gain a significant place in modern psychology. As noted in his report at the X International Psychological Congress D. Katz, who specially develops the problem of starvation of appetite in as-
pect "psychology of needs": "The concept of need will decisively have to replace the concept of instinct, which turned out to be of little use for starting work on new problems"; the concept of need "covers both natural and artificial, both innate and acquired needs" 43 . At the same congress, E. Claparède emphasized the importance of need and its place in psychology. Establishing that human behavior is driven by needs, modern psychology in the works of K-Levin 45, along with innate instinctive needs, discovers temporary, emerging needs in ontogenesis, which, however, are represented by quasi-needs, in contrast to the first ones, as genuine, real ones, over which the latter build on. And these theories of needs, emphasizing the variability, dynamism of needs, still remain in the biological plane; This biological attitude is especially emphasized by Kdapared. In contrast to all these basically biological theories, Marx reveals the socio-historical conditionality of human needs, which, again, does not abolish, but mediates the “nature” of man. At the same time, in historical development, new needs are not only built on top of the primary instinctive needs, but these latter are also transformed, repeatedly refracting through the changing system of social relations: according to Marx's formula, human needs become human needs. So, in contrast to abstract idealistic concepts, needs drive human behavior, but also in contrast to biologization theories, these needs are not fixed in non-historical nature, unchanging instinctive drives, but historical, in history all mediated and restructured in a new way. needs.
- 4 3 See his report "Hunter uni apren" (Bencsm uber den XII Kopgess s!er Geusspep Oesespann (dir Pseuspodre, Hsg. wop Kayasa, 1932, 5. 285) and monographs on the same subject.
- 44 See E. C. paraggio e. La pruspoleo ^le (opsitupnelle" (report at the Tenth International Congress of Psychology), Keuier rpNosorption, 1933, No. I-2.
- 45 See especially in the work: K. b e \ y 1 n. Vorza12. \uple silt" "Veorgyshz. VegNp, 1926.
The needs put forward in place of instinctive drives thus realize historicity in the doctrine of motives, of the driving forces of behavior. They also reveal the richness of the human personality and the motives of its behavior, overcoming the narrowing of the main engines of human activity, to which the doctrine of instinctive drives inevitably leads, which in its limit comes - in the Freudian doctrine of sexual attraction - to the idea about the one and only engine to which everything comes down. The richness and diversity of historically emerging needs creates ever-expanding sources of motivation for human activity, the significance of which depends, moreover, on specific historical conditions. “We have seen,” writes Marx, “what significance under socialism is the wealth of human needs, and consequently, some new type of production and some new object of production: a new manifestation of human essential power and a new enrichment of the human being. » 46 . “Under the dominance of private property,” emphasizes Marx, the social conditionality of this situation, “we observe the opposite relationship”: each new need creates a new dependence. But "assuming the existence of socialism", this wealth of historically developing needs - more and more diverse and created on a higher and higher level - opens up prospects for a rich, meaningful, dynamically developing and rising to an ever higher level of human stimulation. - sky activity.
Above the doctrine of needs, in the doctrine of motivation, the doctrine of interests is further raised, and here, in Marx's conception, the socio-historical, class conditioning of the driving forces of human activity again appears with particular force.
- 46 K. Marx and F. Engels. From ramieh works, sir. 599.
- "Ibid., p. 611.
With the doctrine of the historicity of needs, Marx also associated the doctrine of the historical conditioning of differences in abilities. “The difference in natural gifts among individuals,” writes Marx, “is not so much a cause as a consequence of the division of labor” 47 . This means that such dissimilar abilities, apparently characteristic of people employed in various professions and who have reached adulthood, are not so much a cause as a consequence of the division of labor; not so much the cause as the effect, but not only the effect, but also the cause. In Capital, Marx writes: “Different operations performed alternately by the producer of a commodity and merging into one whole in the course of his labor place different demands on him. In one case he must develop more strength, in another case more dexterity, in a third case more mindfulness, and so on, but the same individual does not have all these qualities in equal measure. After dividing, isolating and isolating the various operations, the workers are divided, classified and grouped according to their predominant abilities. If, therefore, the natural characteristics of the 48 workers form the soil on which the division of labor grows, then, on the other hand, manufacture, as soon as it is introduced, develops labor forces, by their very nature suitable only for one-sided specific functions. » 49 .
Thus, "the natural features of the workers form the soil in which the division of labor takes root," the already introduced division of labor forms and transforms human abilities. Arising on the basis of “natural features”, they are not immutable, absolute entities, but in their development they are subject to the laws of social life that transform them. Marx reveals the dependence of the structure of human abilities on historically changing forms of the division of labor, concretely demonstrating in a brilliant and subtle analysis the change in the human psyche during the transition from handicraft to manufacture, from manufacture to large-scale industry, from its / initial to later mature capitalist forms 50 . Here, of central importance is the discovery of how the development of manufacture and the division of labor leads to extreme specialization of abilities, to the formation of “a partial worker, a simple bearer of a certain partial social function...” 51 - sti, leads to its replacement by “an individual, for whom various social functions are successive ways of life”.
- 48 In the Economic-Eco-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx strongly emphasizes this natural basis of abilities: ^Man is a directly natural being. As a natural being, moreover, a living natural being, he, on the one hand, is endowed with natural forces, vital forces, being an active natural being; ethnic forces exist in him in the form of inclinations and abilities...” (K. Marx and F. Engels. From Early Works, p. 631).
- 43 K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 23, p. 361.
- 80 See ibid. (A number of notes in ch. 12 and 13.)
- "Ibid., p. 499.
In their needs and abilities, the psychological nature of the personality is concretized. At the same time, in its very essence, it turns out to be conditioned, mediated by those specific socio-historical conditions in which it is formed. This dependence of the personality, its structure and fate on the socio-historical formation, Marx further reveals with demonstrative sharpness and brightness, revealing the fate of the personality under the domination of private property and under communism. He begins with a pointed critique of "crude communism," as Marx refers to Proudhon's anarchist communism.
“This communism denies everywhere the personality of man”, it is imbued with a thirst for leveling. But it is such only because it is not the overcoming, but the completion of the principle of private property. His ideal is that everything should be the private property of all; therefore “he seeks to destroy everything that, on the basis of private property, cannot be possessed by everyone”; “he wants to forcibly disengage from talent” 52 . The denial of a person's personality is, in essence, “only a form of manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to assert itself as a “positive community” 53 .
The products of human activity, which are the “objectified”, objectified essence of a person (his essential forces), thanks to the objective object being of which the internal subjective wealth of a person is formed, turn out to be alienated, alien things under the dominance of private property. As a result, each new human need, which could be a new manifestation and a new source of the wealth of human nature, becomes the source of a new dependence; each ability, generating new needs as a result of its realization, multiplies these dependencies, and as a result, a person, as it were, constantly alienates his own inner content and, as it were, is devastated, becoming more and more external dependencies. bridges. Only the overcoming of this alienation, which is not ideally metaphysically, but roughly realistically carried out by the regime of private property, that is, only the realization of communism, can ensure the true development of the individual. “Therefore, the abolition of private property means the complete emancipation of all human feelings and properties; but it is this emancipation precisely because these feelings and properties have become human both in the subjective and in the objective sense.
- 52 K. Marx and F. Engels; From early.works, p. 5861s
- 53 Ibid., p. 587. ¦",
- 54 Ibid., p. 592.
1 Only the implementation of truly human relations in a team will ensure the development of the human personality. The wealth of real relationships with people becomes here the real, spiritual wealth of a person, and in a strong team the personality will be strong. The desire for leveling, for depersonalization is alien to true communism. Marx then deepens his formulation of the question of the leveling of abilities in the polemic against Lassalle in his Critique of the Goth Programme. The pages devoted to the question of equality in Lenin's State and Revolution further develop these ideas. The modern struggle against “equalization” and all of our current practice, with its careful consideration of the individual characteristics of each worker and student and the system of personal advancement, are the practical realization of this theoretical proposition of Marx in the construction of socialism.
“Only in collectivity,” Marx further develops his propositions on the role of the true collective in the development of the individual, “does the individual receive the means that enable him to develop his inclinations in all respects; therefore, only in collectivity is personal freedom possible. In a real collectivity, individuals will achieve in their association and through this association at the same time their freedom. Here Marx uses the term "personal freedom" in a sense that is fundamentally different from that which was established in bourgeois society and which Marx criticized in Capital, speaking of the proletarians, like free birds - to die of hunger. The concept of personal freedom can be formal and negative or meaningful and positive. The first asks: free from what. The second is free for what. For the first, all sorts of bonds and connections are only fetters, the second knows that they can also be supports, and the decisive question is: what real development opportunities and actions are provided by this. Marx shows that in this positive and real sense, only real collectivity provides personal freedom, since it opens up the possibility of an all-round and complete development of the individual. In the Economic-Philoeophic Manuscripts of 1844, he sums up the meaning of real collectivity: “Communism as the positive abolition of private property - this self-alienation of man - and by virtue of this as a genuine appropriation of human essence by man and for man; and therefore as a complete, occurring in a conscious way and with the preservation of all the wealth of the achieved development, the return of a person to himself as a social person, i.e. human. Such communism as complete naturalism is to humanism, but as completed humanism, = to naturalism; it is the true resolution of the contradiction between man and nature, man and man, the true resolution of the dispute between Existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the race. He is the solution to the riddle of history, and he knows that he is the solution” 55 .
- ; . K. Marx and F, Engels. From early writings, p. 588.
This article, of course, is far from exhausting all the wealth of ideas that psychology can draw from the works of Marx. Here, only a cursory outline of the solution of several key questions contained in Marx's statements - such as the question of the subject of psychology (the problem of consciousness in its relation to human activity), the problem of development and the problem of personality. But from this cursory sketch, it seems obvious that in Marx's outwardly disparate statements on questions of psychology we have an integral system of ideas; in connection with the general foundations of Marxist-Leninist methodology, they outline the main lines of the psychological system and outline the path along which psychology can become "a really meaningful and real science." Soviet psychology is now faced with a great task: in concrete research work to realize this opportunity that opens up for psychology and, realizing the inseparable unity of both methodology and the factual material permeated by it, as well as theory and practice, to create a psychological science, strong clarity of its own methodological positions and a conscious striving to serve the cause of building a classless socialist society, which is being forged in our USSR by the disciples of Marx and Lenin, who continue the work that was the main business of Marx's life.
