Leontyev Alexey Nikolaevich activity consciousness personality summary. And Leontiev - activity, consciousness, personality. Basic concepts of the topic

This small theoretical book took a very long time to prepare, but even now I cannot consider it finished - too much remains in it not explicit, only outlined. Why did I still decide to publish it? Let me note right away: not for the love of theorizing.

Attempts to understand methodological problems psychological science have always been generated by an urgent need for theoretical guidelines, without which concrete research inevitably remains myopic.

For almost a century now, world psychology has been developing in conditions of crisis in its methodology. Having at one time split into the humanities and natural sciences, descriptive and explanatory, the system of psychological knowledge is showing more and more cracks in which the very subject of psychology seems to be disappearing. Its reduction is taking place, often covered up by the need to develop interdisciplinary research. Sometimes there are even voices openly calling for the “Varyags” into the psychology: “come and reign over us.” The paradox is that, despite all theoretical difficulties, there is now an extraordinary acceleration in the development of psychological research all over the world - under the direct pressure of the demands of life. As a result, the contradiction between the enormity of factual material, scrupulously accumulated by psychology in excellently equipped laboratories, and the pitiful state of its theoretical, methodological foundation has become even more acute. Negligence and skepticism regarding general theory psychics, the spread of factualism and scientism, characteristic of modern American psychology (and not only for it!), have become a barrier to the study of major psychological problems.

It is not difficult to see the connection between this phenomenon and the disappointment caused by the unfulfilled claims of the main Western European and American trends to produce a long-awaited theoretical revolution in psychology. When behaviorism was born, people started talking about a match being held to a keg of gunpowder; then it began to seem that it was not behaviorism, but Gestalt psychology that had discovered a general principle capable of leading psychological science out of the dead end into which elementalist, “atomistic” analysis had led it; finally, many people have become dizzy from Freudianism, which supposedly found in the unconscious the fulcrum that allows psychology to be turned on its head and made truly vital. Other bourgeois psychological trends were, perhaps, less pretentious, but the same fate awaited them; they all ended up in the common eclectic stew that is being cooked now - each in his own way by psychologists seeking a reputation for “broad minds.”

We are not seriously talking about the personality of even a two-year-old child, although he exhibits not only his genotypic characteristics, but also a great many characteristics acquired under the influence of the social environment; By the way, this circumstance once again testifies against the understanding of personality as a product of the intersection of biological and social factors. It is curious, finally, that in psychopathology cases of split personality are described, and this is by no means just a figurative expression; but no pathological process can lead to a split in the individual: a split, “divided” individual is nonsense, a contradiction in terms.

The concept of personality, just like the concept of the individual, expresses the integrity of the subject of life; personality does not consist of pieces, it is not a “polypnyak”. But personality is a holistic formation of a special kind. Personality is not an integrity determined genotypically: one is not born with a personality, a personality become...

Personality is a relatively late product of the socio-historical and ontogenetic development of man.

Personality formation is a sui generis process that does not directly coincide with the process of lifetime change natural properties the individual in the course of his adaptation to the external environment. Man as a natural being is an individual possessing one or another physical constitution, type nervous system, temperament, dynamic forces of biological needs, efficiency and many other traits that, in the course of ontogenetic development, are partly developed and partly suppressed, in a word, they change in a variety of ways. However, it is not changes in these innate properties of a person that give rise to his personality.

Personality is a special human formation, which can no more be deduced from his adaptive activity, just as his consciousness or his human needs cannot be deduced from it, as well as the consciousness of a person and his needs (Marx says: production consciousness, production needs), a person’s personality is also “produced” - created by social relations into which the individual enters in his activities. The fact that at the same time some of his characteristics as an individual are transformed and change is not the cause, but the consequence of the formation of his personality.

Let us express this differently: the features that characterize one unity (individual) do not simply pass into the features of another unity, another formation (personality), so that the first are destroyed; they are preserved, but precisely as characteristics of the individual. Thus, the features of higher nervous activity of an individual do not become features of his personality and do not determine it. Although the functioning of the nervous system is, of course, a necessary prerequisite for the development of personality, its type is not at all the “skeleton” on which it is “built on.” The strength or weakness of nervous processes, their balance, etc. manifest themselves only at the level of mechanisms through which the individual’s system of relations with the world is realized. This determines the ambiguity of their role in the formation of personality.

To emphasize what has been said, I will allow myself a slight digression. When it comes to personality, we habitually associate it psychological characteristics with the closest, so to speak, substrate of the psyche - central nervous processes. Let us imagine, however, the following case: a child has a congenital dislocation hip joint, dooming him to lameness. Such gross anatomical exclusivity is very far from the class of features that are included in the lists of personality characteristics (in their so-called “structure”), nevertheless, its significance for the formation of personality is incomparably greater than, say, a weak type of nervous system. Just think, peers are kicking a ball in the yard, and a limping boy is on the sidelines; then, when he gets older and the time comes to dance, he has no choice but to “lean up the wall.” How will his personality develop under these conditions? This is impossible to predict, impossible precisely because even such gross exclusivity of an individual does not unambiguously determine his formation as a person. By her own it is not capable of giving rise to, say, an inferiority complex, isolation or, on the contrary, benevolent attentiveness to people and generally no actual psychological characteristics person as an individual. The paradox is that the prerequisites for personality development are, by their very essence, impersonal.

Personality as an individual is a product of the integration of processes that carry out the life relations of the subject. There is, however, a fundamental difference in that special entity that we call personality. It is determined by the nature of the very relationships that give rise to it, which are specific to. person public relations into which he enters in his objective activity. As we have already seen, with all the diversity of its types and forms, they are all characterized by the commonality of their internal structure and presuppose their conscious regulation, that is, the presence of consciousness, and at certain stages of development also the self-awareness of the subject.

Just like these activities themselves, the process of their unification - the emergence, development and disintegration of connections between them - is a process of a special kind, subject to special laws.

The study of the process of unification, linking the activities of the subject, as a result of which his personality is formed, is a major task of psychological research... This task requires an analysis of the subject’s objective activity, always, of course, mediated by the processes of consciousness, which “sew together” individual activities with each other.

The subject, entering society in new system relationships, also acquires new - systemic - qualities, which alone form the actual characteristics of the individual: psychological, when the subject is considered in the system of activities that carry out his life in society, social, when we consider him in the system of objective relations of society as their “personification” 2 .

Here we come to the main methodological problem, which lies behind the difference between the concepts of “individual” and “personality”. We are talking about the problem of duality of qualities social facilities, generated by the duality of objective relations in which they exist. As is known, the discovery of this duality belongs to Marx, who showed the dual nature of labor, the product produced and, finally, the duality of man himself as a “subject of nature” and a “subject of society” 3.

For scientific psychology personality, this fundamental methodological discovery is of decisive importance. It radically changes the understanding of its subject and destroys the ingrained patterns in it, which include such heterogeneous traits or “substructures” as, for example, moral qualities, knowledge, skills and habits, forms of mental reflection and temperament. The source of such “personality schemes” is the idea of personality development as a result of layering lifetime acquisitions on a certain pre-existing metapsychological basis. But it is precisely from this point of view that personality as a specifically human formation cannot be understood at all.

The real way to study personality is to study those transformations of the subject (or, in the language of L. Sav, “fundamental revolutions”) that are created by the self-movement of his activity in the system of social relations 4. On this path, however, from the very beginning we are faced with the need to rethink some general theoretical principles.

One of them, on which the initial formulation of the problem of personality depends, returns us to the already mentioned position that external conditions act through internal ones. “The position according to which external influences are connected with their mental effects indirectly through the personality is the center, based on which defines the theoretical approach to all problems of personality psychology...” 5 . The fact that the external acts through the internal is true, and, moreover, unconditionally true in cases where we consider the effect of one or another influence. It’s another matter if we see in this position the key to understanding the internal as personality. The author explains that this internal itself depends on previous external influences.

A.N. Leontiev
"ACTIVITY.CONSCIOUSNESS.PERSONALITY"

FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR
This small theoretical book took a very long time to prepare, but even now
I can’t consider it finished - there’s too much left in it
explicit, only intended. Why did I still decide to publish it? Let me note right away: not for the love of theorizing.
Attempts to understand the methodological problems of psychological science have always been generated by an urgent need for theoretical guidelines, without which specific research inevitably remains short-sighted.
For almost a century now, world psychology has been developing in conditions
crisis of its methodology. Having at one time split into the humanities and natural sciences, descriptive and explanatory, the system of psychological
knowledge gives more and more cracks, in which it seems to disappear
subject of psychology. Its reduction is taking place, often covered up by the need to develop interdisciplinary research. Sometimes there are even voices openly calling for the “Varyags” into the psychology: “come and reign over us.” The paradox is that, despite all theoretical difficulties, there is now an extraordinary acceleration of development throughout the world.
psychological research - under the direct pressure of life's demands. IN
As a result, there is a contradiction between the vastness of factual material, scrupulously accumulated by psychology in excellently equipped laboratories, and the pitiful state of its theoretical, methodological foundation
worsened even more. Negligence and skepticism regarding the general theory
psyche, the spread of factualism and scientism, characteristic of modern American psychology (and not only for it!), have become a barrier
on the way to studying major psychological problems.
It is not difficult to see the connection between this phenomenon and the disappointment caused by the unfulfilled claims of the main Western European and American trends to produce long-awaited theoretical research in psychology.
revolution. When behaviorism was born, people started talking about a match being brought to
barrel of gunpowder; then it began to seem that it was not behaviorism, but Gestalt psychology that had discovered a general principle capable of leading psychological science out of the dead end into which elementalist, “atomistic” analysis had led it; Finally, many people have become dizzy from Freudianism, which supposedly found in the unconscious that point of support that allows
to put psychology on its head and make it truly vital. Other bourgeois psychological trends were, perhaps, less
pretentious, but the same fate awaited them; they all ended up in a common eclectic stew, which is now being cooked - each in their own way - by psychologists seeking a reputation for "broad minds."
The development of Soviet psychological science followed a completely different path.
Soviet psychologists opposed methodological pluralism
a unified Marxist-Leninist methodology that allows one to penetrate
the actual nature of the psyche, human consciousness. The persistent
searches for solutions to the main theoretical problems of psychology based on Marxism. At the same time, work was underway to critically comprehend, on this basis, the positive achievements of foreign psychology, and specific research was launched on a wide range of issues. New approaches and a new conceptual apparatus took shape, which made it possible to quickly bring Soviet psychology to a scientific level incomparably higher than the level of the psychology that enjoyed official recognition in pre-revolutionary Russia. New names have appeared in psychology:
Blonsky and Kornilov, then Vygotsky, Uznadze, Rubinstein and others.
The main thing is that this was the path of tireless, purposeful struggle, the struggle for the creative mastery of Marxism-Leninism, the struggle against the idealistic and mechanistic, biologizing concepts that advocated
now in one, now in another guise. Developing a line opposing these
concepts, it was necessary at the same time to avoid scientific isolationism,
as well as the provisions of one of the psychological schools that exists alongside
with others. We all understood that Marxist psychology is not a separate direction, not a school, but a new historical stage, personifying
represents the beginning of a truly scientific, consistently materialistic psychology. We also understood something else, namely, that in modern world psychology
performs an ideological function, serves class interests and what about
this cannot be ignored.
Methodological and ideological issues remained the focus of Soviet psychology, especially in the first period of its development, which
was marked by the publication of such fundamental books in their ideas,
like “Thinking and Speech” by L.S. Vygotsky and “Fundamentals general psychology" L.S. Rubinshtein. It must be admitted, however, that in subsequent years attention to
methodological problems of psychological science have weakened somewhat. This,
Of course, that doesn't mean at all that theoretical issues became less discussed or less written about. I mean something else: famous
methodological carelessness of many specifically psychological ones, including
including applied research.
This phenomenon can be explained by a number of circumstances. One of them is
that gradually there was a breakdown in the internal connections between the development
philosophical problems psychology and the actual methodology of ongoing research. Many voluminous books are devoted to philosophical issues of psychology (as well as philosophical criticism of foreign non-Marxist movements),
but questions concerning specific ways to study broad psychological problems are almost not addressed in them. It seems like
ramifications: on the one hand - the sphere of philosophical psychological
problematics, and on the other hand, the sphere of specifically psychological methodological issues that arise in the experience of specific studies.
Of course, the development of the actual philosophical questions of a particular area
scientific knowledge necessary. However, we are talking about something else: about development on
Marxist philosophical basis of special problems of the methodology of psychology as a specific science. And this requires the penetration of theoretical thought into it, so to speak, " domestic economy".
Let me explain my idea using the example of one of the most difficult problems that has long been
facing psychological research, - we are talking about a communication problem mental processes and brain and physiological processes. Hardly
we now need to convince psychologists that the psyche is a function of the brain and
that mental phenomena and processes need to be studied in unity with physiological ones. But what does it mean to study them in unity? For concrete psychological research, this question turned out to be extremely difficult. The fact is that
no direct correlation between mental and brain physiological processes solves the problem. The theoretical alternatives that arise from such a direct approach are well known: either
the hypothesis of parallelism, fatally leading to an understanding of the psyche
as an epiphenomenon; or this is the position of naive physiological determinism
with the resulting reduction of psychology to physiology; or finally
this is a dualistic hypothesis of psychophysiological interaction, which allows the action of the immaterial psyche on material processes,
occurring in the brain. For metaphysical thinking there is no other solution
simply does not exist, only the terms that cover the same things change
alternatives.
At the same time, the psychophysiological problem has a completely specific and highest degree business sense, because the psychologist must constantly keep in mind the work of morphophysiological mechanisms. It is impossible to talk, for example, about the processes of perception without referring to data from morphology and physiology. However, the image of perception as a psychological reality is not at all the same as brain processes and their
constellations of which he is a function. It's obvious what we have here
deal with different forms of movement, but this necessarily poses further
the problem of those meaningful transitions that connect
these forms of movement. Although this problem is primarily methodological, its solution requires an analysis that penetrates, as I said, into the results accumulated by specific studies on psychological and
physiological levels.
On the other side, in the sphere specifically psychological issues,
attention has become increasingly focused on the thoroughness of development
individual issues, on increasing the technical equipment of the laboratory
experiment, improvement of the statistical apparatus and the use of formal languages. Of course, without this progress in psychology is now
is simply impossible. But something else is also obvious: that this alone is not enough. It is necessary that particular tasks do not overshadow more general ones, so that the research methodology does not overshadow its methodology.
The fact is that a research psychologist, having taken up the study of specific issues, inevitably continues to encounter fundamental methodological problems of psychological science. Only they appear before him in their hidden expression, so that the solution to specific issues
seems independent of them, requiring only multiplication and clarification of empirical data. There is an illusion of “demethodologization” of the sphere of specific
research, which further enhances the impression of the opening of internal
connections between the general theoretical Marxist foundations of psychological science and its facts. As a result, the system psychological concepts a kind of vacuum is formed into which concepts generated by views that are essentially alien to Marxism are spontaneously drawn.
Theoretical and methodological carelessness sometimes affects
approach to solving some purely applied psychological tasks. She
manifests itself primarily in attempts to uncritically apply scientifically unsubstantiated methodological means for practical purposes. Undertaking
attempts of this kind often speculate on the need to more closely connect psychology with the actual tasks that are put forward by modern
stage of development of society and the scientific and technological revolution. The crudest expression of such attempts is the practice of thoughtless use
psychological tests, most often imported from the USA. I'm talking here
about this only because the development of testing practice reveals one
of the “mechanisms” that give rise to anti-methodological attitudes in psychology.
Tests, as you know, are short tests, the purpose of which is to detect (and sometimes measure) one or another previously scientifically understood property or process. When, for example, did it become
the reaction of litmus to acid is known, then the “litmus paper” test appeared - a change in its color began to serve as a simple indicator of the acidity or alkalinity of the liquid wetting the paper; study of individual
features of color perception led to the creation of the well-known Stilling tables, which, based on the distinguishability of the numbers depicted on them, make it possible to fairly reliably judge the absence or presence of a color anomaly and its
character. These kinds of tests, widely used in various fields of knowledge, can be called “understanding” in the sense that they are based on a meaningful understanding of the dependencies that connect
test results with the properties and conditions being studied
or processes. They are not emancipated from science and do not replace in-depth research.
Those tests that serve as a method have a fundamentally different character.
bypass the difficulties of obtaining truly scientific psychological knowledge. A typical example of such tests are tests of mental development. In their
is based on the following procedure: first of all, the existence of a certain “psychological phlogiston” called intellectual
giftedness; Next, a number of questions-tasks are invented, among which those that have the greatest differentiating power are selected, and from them
a “test battery” is compiled; finally, based on statistical
processing the results large number tests, the number of correctly solved problems included in such a battery is correlated with the age, race or social background of the subjects. Empirically determined
the established percentage of decisions is taken as unity, and the deviation from
it is written in the form of a fraction, which supposedly expresses the “intellectual quotient” inherent in a given individual or group.
The inconsistency of the methodology of this kind of tests is obvious. After all
the only criterion on the basis of which certain test tasks are introduced is their validity, i.e. the degree to which the results of their solution correspond to certain indirect expressions of the test takers
psychological characteristics. This gave rise to a special psychological discipline - the so-called testology. It's not hard to see that
behind such a transformation of methodological technique into an independent discipline lies nothing more than a substitution of theoretical research
brutal pragmatism.
Do I mean by this that psychological tests should be abandoned? Of course not. I used the example of long-discredited
yourself of giftedness tests in order to once again emphasize the need for serious theoretical analysis even when solving such issues that
At first glance they seem narrowly methodological.
I dwelled on the difficulties that scientific psychology is experiencing, and said nothing about its indisputable and very serious achievements.
But it was precisely the awareness of these difficulties that constituted, so to speak, the critical content of this book. It, however, is not the only foundation on which the positions developed in it are based. They were largely led by the positive experience of concrete psychological research, both my own and those conducted by other scientists. The results of these
research I always had in mind, although they are directly mentioned only
occasionally, as quick illustrations; in most cases they
remained completely outside the scope of presentation. The latter is explained by the need to abandon long digressions in order to make a general author’s
the concept is more clear and visible.
For the same reason, the book does not pretend to provide an overview scientific literature on the issues raised. Many important and famous
works are not cited to the reader, although they are implied. Since this
may give the wrong impression, I must emphasize that if
these psychological works remained unnamed, then this one is by no means
because, in my opinion, they do not deserve attention. The situation is no different with philosophical and historical sources: the reader will easily discover theoretical reasoning behind which lies an analysis of some categories of pre-Marxist classical philosophy that are not directly named.
All these are losses that can only be restored in a new, completely
written differently big book. Unfortunately, such an opportunity
I'm just not here right now.
Almost any theoretical work can be read in different ways, sometimes
completely different from how it appears to the author. Therefore, I want to take the opportunity to say in the preface that on the pages
This book is, in my opinion, the main thing.
I think the main thing in this book is to try psychologically
understand the categories that are most important for building a holistic system
psychology as a specific science about the generation, functioning and structure of the mental reflection of reality, which mediates the life of individuals. This is the category of objective activity, the category of human consciousness and the category of personality.
The first of them is not only the initial one, but also the most important. In Soviet psychology this position is constantly expressed, but it is revealed
it is significantly different. The central point, which forms, as it were, a watershed between different understandings of the place of the category of activity, consists
whether objective activity is considered only as a condition of mental reflection and its expression, or whether it is considered as a process that carries within itself those internal driving contradictions, bifurcations and
transformations that give rise to the psyche, which is a necessary moment of its own movement of activity, its development. If the first of these
positions is derived from the study of activity in its basic form - in the form
practice - beyond the boundaries of psychology, then the second position, on the contrary, assumes that activity, regardless of its form, is included in the subject of psychological science, although, of course, in a completely different way than it is included in
subject of other sciences.
In other words, psychological analysis activity consists, from the point of
view of this second position, not in isolating from it its internal mental elements for further separate study, but in
to introduce into psychology such units of analysis that carry
mental reflection in its inseparability from the moments of human activity that generate it and are mediated by it. This position that I defend requires, however, a restructuring of the entire conceptual apparatus of psychology, which in this book is only outlined and, to a large extent, seems to be a matter of the future.
Even more difficult in psychology is the category of consciousness. General
the doctrine of consciousness as the highest, specifically human form of the psyche,
arising in the process of social labor and presupposing the functioning of language, constitutes the most important prerequisite for human psychology. The task of psychological research is to, not limiting ourselves to the study of phenomena and processes on the surface of consciousness, to penetrate into its internal structure. But for this, consciousness must be considered not as a field contemplated by the subject, on which his images and concepts are projected, but as a special internal movement generated by the movement
human activity.
The difficulty here is to single out the category of consciousness
as psychological, and this means understanding those real transitions that
connect the psyche of specific individuals and social consciousness, its forms. This, however, cannot be done without a preliminary analysis of those “formatives” of individual consciousness, the movement of which characterizes its internal structure. A special chapter of the book is devoted to a presentation of the experience of such an analysis, which is based on an analysis of the movement of activity. It is not for me, of course, to judge whether this
the experience was successful. I only want to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the psychological “secret of consciousness” remains closed to any method, with the exception of the method discovered by Marx, which allows one to demystify the nature of the supersensible properties of social objects, to which man also belongs as a subject of consciousness.
The greatest objections can probably be caused by the ones I am developing.
views on personality as a subject of psychological study proper. I
I think so because they are decisively incompatible with those metaphysical cultural-anthropological concepts of personality (as well as with theories
its double determination - biological heredity and social
environment) that are now flooding world psychology. Incompatibility
this is especially visible when considering the question of the nature of the so-called
internal engines of personality and the question of the connection between a person’s personality and his
somatic features.
A widely accepted view of the nature of human needs and drives is that they are the determinants of activity
personality, its orientation; that, accordingly, the main task of psychology is to study what needs are characteristic of man and
what mental experiences (drives, desires, feelings) they cause.
Another view, in contrast to the first, is to understand how
development of human activity itself, its motives and means
transforms his needs and gives rise to new needs, as a result of which their hierarchy changes, so that the satisfaction of some of
they are reduced to the status of only necessary conditions human activity, his existence as a person.
It must be said that the defenders of the first, anthropological or, better,
say, from a naturalistic point of view, many arguments are put forward, including those that can metaphorically be called arguments
"from the stomach." Of course, filling the stomach with food is an indispensable condition
any objective activity, but the psychological problem lies in
friend: what this activity will be like, how it will develop, and together
with it comes the transformation of the needs themselves.
If I have highlighted this issue here, it is because it confronts opposing views on the prospects for studying personality. One
of them leads to the construction of personality psychology, emanating from primacy, in
in the broad sense of the word, consumption (in the language of behaviorists - “reinforcement”); the other is to build a psychology based on the primacy of activity in which a person asserts his human personality.
The second question - the question of a person’s personality and his bodily characteristics - is sharpened in connection with the situation that psychological theory
personality cannot be built based mainly on differences in human constitutions. How can personality theory do without the usual
references to Sheldon's constitutions, Eysenck's factors, and finally to Pavlov's
types of higher nervous activity? This consideration also arises from a methodological misunderstanding, which largely depends on the ambiguity of the very concept of “personality”. This ambiguity, however, disappears
if we accept the well-known Marxist position that personality is a special quality that a natural individual acquires in the system of social relations. The problem then inevitably turns: anthropological
the properties of an individual do not act as defining personality or included in
its structure, but as genetically specified conditions for the formation of personality
and, at the same time, as something that determines not her psychological traits, but
only forms and ways of their manifestation. For example, aggressiveness as a trait
personality, of course, will manifest itself differently in a choleric person than in a phlegmatic person,
but explaining aggressiveness by a feature of temperament is as scientifically pointless as looking for explanations of wars in the instinct characteristic of people
pugnacity. Thus, the problem of temperament, properties of the nervous system, etc. is not “expelled” from the theory of personality, but appears in a different, non-traditional plane - as a question about the use, so to speak, by a person of innate individual properties and abilities. AND
this is a very important problem for specific characterology, which, as
and a number of other problems remained not discussed in this book.
The reservations made in this preface (and they could be even more
numerous), due to the fact that the author saw his task not so much in
approval of certain specific psychological provisions, how many in
searching for a method of obtaining them, arising from the historical-materialistic
doctrines about human nature, his activities, consciousness and personality.
In conclusion, it remains for me to say a few words about the composition of the book.
The thoughts contained in it have already been expressed in the author’s previous publications, a list of which is given in the notes to the chapters. However, for the first time they
presented here systematically.
The book is divided into three parts. The first of them is formed by chapters I and II, devoted to the analysis of the concept of reflection and that general
the contribution that Marxism makes to scientific psychology. These chapters serve
an introduction to its central part, which examines the problems of activity, consciousness and personality. The last part of the book occupies a very special place: it is not a continuation of the previous chapters, but
represents one of the author's early works on the psychology of consciousness.
More than twenty years have passed since its first, now rare, edition, and much of it is outdated. However, it contains some psychological and pedagogical aspects of the problem of consciousness, which in other parts
the books are not touched upon at all, although these aspects remain close to the author’s heart. This prompted me to include it in the book.
Moscow, June 1974

CHAPTER I
MARXISM AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
1. ABOUT THE GENERAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXIST PSYCHOLOGY
The teachings of K. Marx created a revolution in the social sciences: in philosophy,
in political economy, in the theory of socialism. Psychology, as is known,
remained for many years isolated from the influence of Marxism. Marxism is not
admitted to official scientific psychological centers, and the name of K. Marx
for more than half a century after the publication of his main works, there was almost no mention in the writings of psychologists.
Only in the early twenties were scientists in our country for the first time
a demand has been put forward to consciously build psychology on the basis of Marxism1. Thus, it was Soviet scientists who opened Marx to the world
psychological science.
Initially, the task of creating Marxist psychology was understood as
the task of criticizing idealistic philosophical views, dominated in
psychology, and introducing into it some provisions of Marxist dialectics. Characteristic in this regard was the title of a new psychology textbook published in 1926, written by K.N. Kornilov. It was called like this:
"A textbook of psychology presented from the point of view of dialectical materialism." In it, as in other works of this period, many ideas and concepts of Marxism-Leninism that are fundamental to psychology, including
the concept of reflection remained undiscovered. Although Kornilov and others
the authors of that time emphasized the position about the social nature of the human psyche, but it was usually interpreted in the spirit of naive
ideas about the biosocial conditioning of human behavior.
Only after the works of L.S. Vygotsky2 and, somewhat later, S.L. Rubinstein3, the significance of Marxism for psychology began to be more fully understood. The historical approach to the human psyche, the concrete psychological doctrine of consciousness as the highest form of reflection of reality, and the doctrine of activity and its structure have been developed. There was a process of gradual rethinking of the significance of the works of the classics of Marxism for psychological science. It became increasingly clear that Marxism had created a broad
a theory that reveals the nature and general laws of the psyche, consciousness, that the contribution
Marxism into psychological science is incomparable in its significance with the largest theoretical discoveries made in psychology both in
the pre-Marxist period of its development, and after Marx.
This awareness was the result of a great deal of theoretical work by many Marxist psychologists, including foreign ones4. But even now
It cannot be said that psychology has exhausted the treasury of ideas of Marxism-Leninism. That is why we again and again turn to the works of K. Marx, which provide solutions to the most profound and complex theoretical problems of psychological science.
In the theory of Marxism, the decisive important for psychology is the doctrine of human activity, its development and its forms.
Marx, as is known, begins his famous theses on Feuerbach with
indicating “the main shortcoming of all previous materialism.” He
consists in the fact that the object, reality is taken by him only in the form
object, in the form of contemplation, and not as human activity, not
subjective5.
Speaking about the contemplativeness of the old materialism, Marx means
the fact that knowledge was considered by him only as a result
the influence of objects on the knowing subject, on his senses, and not
as a product of the development of his activities in the subject world. Thus,
old materialism separated knowledge from sensory activity, from the practical life connections of a person with the world around him.
Introducing the concept of activity into the theory of knowledge, Marx gave it
strictly materialistic meaning: for Marx, activity in its original and
basic form is a sensual practical activity in which
people come into practical contact with objects of the surrounding world, experience their resistance and influence them, obeying them
objective properties. This is the fundamental difference between the Marxist
doctrine of activity from the idealistic one, which knows activity
only in its abstract, speculative form.
The profound revolution accomplished by Marx in the theory of knowledge consists in
that human practice was understood as the basis of human cognition, as the process during the development of which cognitive tasks arise, human perception and thinking are generated and developed
and which at the same time carries within itself the criterion of adequacy, truth
knowledge: in practice, says Marx, a person must prove the truth,
reality and power, this-worldliness of one’s thinking.
Recalling these well-known theses of Marx, it must be especially emphasized that not one of them can be taken in isolation, in isolation from
Marxist teaching as a whole. In particular, this applies to the provision on
the role of practice, a position which some modern perverts
they try to interpret Marxism as supposedly expressing and substantiating
pragmatic point of view.
In fact, Marx's philosophical discovery does not consist at all in
identification of practice with cognition, but in the fact that cognition does not exist
outside the life process, which by its very nature is a material, practical process. Reflection of reality arises and develops in the process of developing real connections between cognizing people and their surroundings.
their human world, these connections are determined and, in turn,
has the opposite effect on their development.
“The premises with which we begin,” we read in the “German Ideology,” “are not arbitrary, they are not dogmas; these are real premises, from which one can abstract only in the imagination. These are real individuals, their activities and the material conditions of their life..."6
These prerequisites at the same time constitute three necessary basic points, three links, the dialectical connections of which form a single self-developing system.
Already in the very physical organization of individuals lies the need
that they enter into an active relationship with the outside world; in order to exist, they must act, produce the means they need
to life. By influencing the outside world, they change it; that's what they also
change themselves too. Therefore, what they are is determined by their activities, conditioned by the already achieved level of development of its
means and forms of its organization.
Only in the course of the development of these relationships does the mental
people's reflection of reality. "...People who develop their material
production and their material communication change along with this
reality also one’s thinking and the products of one’s thinking.”7
In other words, thinking, consciousness are determined by real being,
life of people and exist only as their consciousness, as a product of development
the specified system of objective relations. In its self-development the system
this constitutes various infrastructures, relationships and processes that can
should become the subject of study of individual sciences. However, Marxist
the requirement is that they be considered within this general
system, and not in isolation from it. This requirement, of course, applies
also to the psychological study of people, to psychological science.
The old metaphysical psychology knew only abstract individuals,
exposed to the external environment opposing them and, with their
parties that manifest their inherent mental abilities: perception,
thinking, will, feelings. It makes no difference whether the individual is thought of as
some kind of jet machine (even if very complexly programmed),
or he is endowed with autochthonously manifested spiritual powers. Like
Saint Sancho, ridiculed by Marx, who naively believed that the blow
we strike the fire stored in the stone, the metaphysical psychologist thinks that
the psyche is extracted from the subject himself, from his head. Like Sancho, he
does not suspect that the fiery particles are separated not from the stone, but from the steel
and, most importantly, the whole point is in the interaction that heats up these particles
stone and steel. The metaphysical psychologist also misses the main link - the processes that mediate the subject’s connections with the real world, the processes in which
only the mental reflection of reality occurs, the transition of the material into the ideal. And these are the essence of the processes of the subject’s activity, initially always external and practical, and then also acquiring the form
internal activity, activity of consciousness.
Analysis of activity constitutes the decisive point and main method of scientific knowledge of mental reflection, consciousness. In the study of forms of social consciousness, this is an analysis of the existence of society, its inherent ways
production and systems of social relations; in the study of individual
psyche is an analysis of the activities of individuals in given social conditions and specific circumstances that befall each of them
them.
2. THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
K. Marx laid the foundations specifically psychological theory consciousness, which opened up completely new perspectives for psychological science.
Although the former subjective-empirical psychology willingly called itself
a science of consciousness, it never really was. Phenomena
consciousnesses were either studied in purely descriptive terms, from epiphenomenological and parallelistic positions, or were completely excluded from the subject
scientific and psychological knowledge, as demanded by the most radical
representatives of the so-called “objective psychology”9. However, related
a system of psychological science cannot be built outside of a concrete scientific theory of consciousness. This is precisely evidenced by the theoretical crises that constantly arose in psychology as concrete psychological knowledge accumulated, the volume of which, starting from the second half
last century has increased rapidly.
The central mystery of the human psyche, before which one stopped
scientific and psychological research constituted the very existence
internal mental phenomena, the very fact of being presented to the subject
pictures of the world. This psychological secret could not be revealed in pre-Marxist psychology; it remains undiscovered in modern psychology, which develops outside of Marxism.
Consciousness has invariably appeared in psychology as something external,
only as a condition for the occurrence of mental processes. This was, in particular, Wundt’s position. Consciousness, he wrote, is that what
whatever mental states we find in ourselves, and therefore we do not
we can know the essence of consciousness. "All attempts to define consciousness...
lead either to a tautology or to definitions of activities occurring in consciousness, which are not consciousness because they presuppose
him"10. We find the same idea in even sharper expression in Natorp:
consciousness is devoid of its own structure, it is only a condition of psychology, but
not her subject. Although its existence represents the main and
a completely reliable psychological fact, but it defies definition
and can only be derived from oneself11.
Consciousness is qualityless, because it itself is quality - quality
mental phenomena and processes; this quality is expressed in their “presentation” (presentation) to the subject (Stout). This quality cannot be revealed: it can only exist or not exist12.
The idea of the externality of consciousness was also contained in the well-known comparison of consciousness with the stage on which the events of mental life are played out. To
these events could happen, a scene is needed, but the scene itself is not involved in
them.
So, consciousness is something extra-psychological, psychologically without quality. Although this idea is not always expressed directly, it is constantly
implied. Not a single previous attempt to psychologically characterize consciousness conflicts with it. I mean first of all
that quantitative concept of consciousness which was most directly
was also expressed by Ledd: consciousness is something that decreases or increases, which is partly lost in sleep and completely lost during fainting13.
This is a kind of “glow”, a moving bunny of light or,
better to say, a spotlight, the beam of which illuminates the external or internal
field. His movement across this field is expressed in phenomena of attention, in
of which consciousness alone receives its psychological characteristics, but again only quantitative and spatial. The “field of consciousness” (or, what is the same thing, the “field of attention”) can be narrower, more concentrated, or wider, more diffuse; it can be more stable or less stable, fluctuating. But despite all this, the description of the “field of consciousness” itself remains qualityless, structureless.
Accordingly, the “laws of consciousness” put forward had a purely formal
character; These are the laws of relative clarity of consciousness, continuity
consciousness, stream of consciousness.
The laws of consciousness are sometimes also referred to as the law of association
or the laws of integrity, pregnancy and
etc., but these laws relate to phenomena in consciousness, and not to consciousness as
special form of the psyche, and therefore are equally valid both in relation
to his “field”, and in relation to phenomena that arise outside this “field” - both at the level of man and at the level of animals.
The theory of consciousness occupies a somewhat special position, dating back to
French sociological school (Durkheim, De Roberti, Halbwachs and
others)14. As is known, main idea of this school, relating to the psychological problem of consciousness, is that individual consciousness
arises as a result of the influence on a person of the consciousness of society, under
by the influence of which his psyche is socialized and intellectualized;
this is the socialized and intellectualized human psyche
his consciousness. But even in this concept the psychological lack of quality of consciousness is completely preserved; only now consciousness appears
a certain plane on which the concepts that make up the content of social consciousness are projected. By this consciousness is identified with
knowledge: consciousness is “co-knowledge”, a product of communication of consciousnesses.
Another direction of attempts to psychologically characterize consciousness
was to present it as a condition for unifying the internal
mental life.
An association mental functions, abilities and properties - this is
consciousness; therefore, Lipps wrote, it is at the same time self-consciousness15.
This idea was expressed most simply by James in a letter to K. Stumpf: consciousness is
"common master of mental functions." But it is precisely in the example of James that it is especially clear that such an understanding of consciousness remains completely within the framework of the doctrine of its qualitylessness and indefinability. After all, it was James
said about himself: “It’s been twenty years since I doubted the existence
existence called consciousness... It seems to me that the time has come for everyone to openly renounce it."16.
Neither the experimental introspection of the Würzburgers, nor the phenomenology of Husserl and the existentialists were able to penetrate the structure
consciousness. On the contrary, understanding by consciousness its phenomenal composition with its
internal, ideal relationships, they insist on “depsychologizing,” so to speak, these internal relationships. Psychology
consciousness is completely dissolved in phenomenology. It is interesting to note that
authors who set as their goal to penetrate “beyond” consciousness and developed
doctrine of the unconscious sphere of the psyche, retained the same understanding of consciousness - as " related organization mental processes" (Freud). As well as
other representatives of depth psychology, Freud takes the problem of consciousness beyond the sphere of psychology proper. After all, the main authority representing consciousness, the “super-ego,” is essentially metapsychic.
Metaphysical positions in the approach to consciousness, in fact, could not
lead psychology to no other understanding of it. Although the idea of development
and penetrated into pre-Marxist psychological thought, especially in the post-Spenserian period, it was not extended to solve the problem of the nature of the human psyche, so the latter continued to be considered
as something pre-existing and only “filled” with new contents.
It was these metaphysical positions that were destroyed by the dialectical-materialist view, which opened up completely new ones for the psychology of consciousness.
prospects.
The starting point of Marxism about consciousness is that it represents a qualitatively special form of the psyche. Although consciousness has
its long prehistory in the evolution of the animal world, it first appears in humans in the process of the formation of labor and social relations.
Consciousness from the very beginning is a social product17.
Marxist position on necessity and the real function of consciousness
completely excludes the possibility of considering in psychology the phenomena of consciousness only as epiphenomena that accompany brain processes and the activity that they implement. At the same time, psychology, of course, does not
may simply postulate the activity of consciousness. The task of psychological
science is to scientifically explain the effective role of consciousness, and this is possible only subject to a radical change in the approach itself
to the problem and, above all, on the condition of abandoning that limited anthropological view of knowledge, which makes us look for it
explanation in the processes playing out in the head of an individual under the influence
stimuli affecting him - a glance that inevitably returns
psychology into parallelistic positions.
The real explanation of consciousness lies not in these processes, but in the social conditions and methods of the activity that creates its necessity - in labor activity. This activity is characterized
by the fact that its reification occurs, its “extinction”, in Marx’s words, in a product.
“That,” writes Marx in Capital, “that on the side of the worker manifested itself in the form of activity, now appears on the side of the product
in the form of a property at rest, in the form of being"18.
“During the labor process,” we read below, “labor constantly passes
from the form of activity to the form of being, from the form of movement to the form of objectivity"19.
In this process, the objectification also occurs of those ideas
which encourage, direct and regulate the activities of the subject. In her
product they gain new uniform existence in the form of external,
sensory objects. Now in their external, exteriorized or exoteric form they themselves become objects of reflection. Correlation with initial ideas is the process of their awareness
subject - the process as a result of which they receive in his head
its doubling, its ideal being.
This description of the process of awareness is, however, incomplete. In order for this process to take place, the object must appear before
by a person precisely as imprinting the mental content of activity,
those. your ideal side. The emphasis on this latter, however, cannot be understood in abstraction from the social connections into which labor participants must necessarily enter, from their communication. Entering into communication with each other, people also produce a language that serves to designate an object,
means and the labor process itself. Acts of signification are nothing more than
acts of highlighting the ideal side of objects, and the appropriation of language by individuals
- appropriation of what it signifies in the form of its awareness. “...Language,” notes
Marx and Engels - there is a practical thing that exists for other people and
only thereby existing also for myself, real consciousness..."20
This provision, however, cannot at all be interpreted in the sense
that consciousness is generated by language. Language is not its demiurge, but the form of its existence. At the same time, words, linguistic signs are not just
substitutes for things, their conditional substitutes. Behind verbal meanings
hidden social practice, transformed and crystallized into
them the activity in the process of which only the person is revealed
objective reality.
Of course, the development of consciousness in each individual person does not repeat
socio-historical process of production of consciousness. But a conscious reflection of the world does not arise in him and as a result of a direct projection onto his brain of ideas and concepts developed by previous
generations. His consciousness is also a product of his activity in
objective world. In this activity mediated by communication with others
people, and the process of appropriating (Aneignung) to them the spiritual wealth accumulated by the human race (Menschengattung) and embodied in
objective sensory form21. At the same time, the very objective existence of human activity (Marx says - industry, explaining that all
Human activity has hitherto been labor, i.e. industry)
acts as a “sensually presented human
psychology"22.
So, Marx’s radical discovery for psychological theory consists
is that consciousness is not a manifestation of some mystical ability
human brain to emit "light of consciousness" under the influence of influencing
things are irritants to him, and the product of those special ones, i.e. public,
relationships that people enter into and which are only realized through their brain, their senses and organs of action. In generated
these relations processes and the positing of objects in the form of their
subjective images in a person’s head, in the form of consciousness.
Together with the theory of consciousness, Marx also developed the foundations of scientific
history of human consciousness. The importance of this for psychological science is hardly
can be overestimated.
Despite the fact that psychology has a lot of material on historical development thinking, memory and other mental processes,
collected mainly by cultural historians and ethnographers, the central
the problem - the problem of the historical stages of the formation of consciousness - remained unresolved in it.
Marx and Engels not only created general method historical study of consciousness; they also revealed the fundamental changes that human consciousness undergoes during the development of society. It's about
first of all, about the stage of the initial formation of consciousness and language and about
the stage of transformation of consciousness into a universal form of specifically human
psyche, when the reflection in the form of consciousness extends to the entire circle
phenomena of the world around a person, on his own activities and on
himself23. Especially great importance has Marx's teaching about those
changes in consciousness that it undergoes in the conditions of the development of the social division of labor, the separation of the bulk of producers from
means of production and separation of theoretical activities from practical ones. The economic alienation generated by the development of private property leads to alienation and disintegration of the consciousness of people.
The latter is expressed in the fact that there is an inadequacy of the meaning
which acquires for a person his activity and its product, their
objective meaning. This disintegration of consciousness is destroyed
only together with the destruction of the private property relations that gave rise to it, with the transition from a class society to a communist one. “...Communism,” wrote Marx, “already thinks of itself as reintegration or return
man to himself, as the destruction of human self-alienation..."24.
These theoretical positions of Marx become especially relevant
meaning in our time. They provide guidance for scientific psychology in its approach to
the most complex problems of changing human consciousness in a socialist,
communist society, in solving those specific psychological problems that now appear not only in the sphere of educating a growing child
generation, but also in the field of labor organization, communication between people and in other
spheres of manifestation of human personality.
3. PSYCHOLOGY OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES
The Marxist doctrine of the nature of consciousness created a general theory of the human psyche. At the same time, it found its embodiment in theoretical
solving such major problems as the problem of perception and m

K. Marx laid the foundations for a concrete psychological theory of consciousness, which opened up completely new perspectives for psychological science.

Although the old subjective-empirical psychology readily called itself a science of consciousness, in reality it never was one. The phenomena of consciousness were either studied in a purely descriptive manner, from epiphenomenological and parallelistic positions, or were completely excluded from the subject of scientific psychological knowledge, as demanded by the most radical representatives of the so-called “objective psychology.” Wherein connected system psychological science cannot be built outside of a concrete scientific theory of consciousness. This is precisely what is evidenced by the theoretical crises that constantly arose in psychology as concrete psychological knowledge accumulated, the volume of which has rapidly increased since the second half of the last century.

The central mystery of the human psyche, before which scientific and psychological research stopped, was the very existence of internal mental phenomena, the very fact of the picture of the world being presented to the subject. By the way, this psychological secret could not be revealed in pre-Marxist psychology; it remains undiscovered in modern psychology, which develops outside of Marxism.

Consciousness has invariably appeared in psychology as something external, exclusively as a condition for the flow of mental processes. This was, in particular, Wundt’s position. Consciousness, he said, essentially consists in the fact that we find any mental states in ourselves, and therefore we cannot know the essence of consciousness. “All attempts to define consciousness... lead either to a tautology or to definitions of activities occurring in consciousness, which are not the essence of consciousness because they presuppose it.” We find the same idea in even sharper expression in Natorp: consciousness is devoid of its own structure, it is exclusively a condition of psychology, but not its subject. Although its existence is a basic and completely reliable psychological fact, it cannot be defined and can only be deduced from itself.

Consciousness is qualityless, because it itself is quality - the quality of mental phenomena and processes; ϶ᴛᴏ quality is expressed in their “presentation” (representation) to the subject (Stout) Quality ϶ᴛᴏ is not revealed: it can only be or not be.

The idea of the externality of consciousness was also contained in the well-known comparison of consciousness with the stage on which the events of mental life are played out. In order for these events to occur, a scene is needed, but the scene itself does not participate in them.

Thus, consciousness is something extra-psychological, psychologically without quality. Although this idea is not always stated directly, it is constantly implied. Not a single previous attempt to psychologically characterize consciousness conflicts with it. I mean first of all that quantitative concept of consciousness, which was expressed with the greatest directness by Ledd: consciousness is that which decreases or increases, which is partly lost in sleep and completely lost in fainting.

This is a ϲʙᴏshaped “glow”, a moving light bunny or, better to say, a spotlight, the beam of which illuminates the external or internal field. Its movement across this field is expressed in phenomena of attention, in which consciousness alone receives its psychological characteristics, but again exclusively quantitative and spatial. “It is worth saying - the field of consciousness” (or, which is the same thing, “the field of attention”) can be narrower, more concentrated, or wider, more diffuse; it can be more stable or less stable, fluctuating. But despite all this, the description of the “field of consciousness” itself remains qualityless, structureless. Accordingly, the “laws of consciousness” that were put forward were of a purely formal nature; These are the laws of relative clarity of consciousness, continuity of consciousness, stream of consciousness.

The laws of consciousness sometimes also include such as the law of association or the laws of integrity, pregnancy, etc. put forward by Gestalt psychology, but these laws apply to phenomena in consciousness, and not to consciousness as a special form of the psyche, and therefore are equally valid both in relation to its “field” and in relation to phenomena that arise outside of this “field” - both at the human level and at the animal level.

A somewhat special position is occupied by the theory of consciousness, which dates back to the French sociological school (Durkheim, De Roberti, Halbwachs and others). As is known, the main idea of this school, which relates to the psychological problem of consciousness, is essentially that individual consciousness arises as a result of influence on a person of the consciousness of society, under whose influence his psyche is socialized and intellectualized; The socialized and intellectualized psyche of a person is his consciousness. But even in this concept the psychological lack of quality of consciousness is completely preserved; only now consciousness appears to be a certain plane onto which concepts, concepts that make up the content of social consciousness are projected. By this, consciousness is identified with knowledge: consciousness is ϶ᴛᴏ “co-knowledge”, a product of communication of consciousnesses.

Another direction of attempts to psychologically characterize consciousness was to present it as a condition for the unification of internal mental life.

The unification of mental functions, abilities and properties is consciousness; Therefore, Lipps said, it is also self-consciousness. This idea was most simply expressed by James in a letter to K. Stumpf: consciousness is “the general master of mental functions.” But it is precisely in the example of James that it is especially clear that such an understanding of consciousness remains completely within the framework of the doctrine of its qualitylessness and indefinability. After all, it was James who said about himself: “For twenty years now, I have doubted the existence of a thing called consciousness... It seems to me that the time has come for everyone to openly renounce it.”

Neither the experimental introspection of the Würzburgers, nor the phenomenology of Husserl and the existentialists were able to penetrate into the structure of consciousness. On the contrary, understanding by consciousness its phenomenal composition with its internal, ideal relationships, they insist on “depsychologizing,” so to speak, these internal relationships. The psychology of consciousness is completely dissolved in phenomenology. It is interesting to note that the authors who set as their goal to penetrate “beyond” consciousness and developed the doctrine of the unconscious sphere of the psyche, retained the same understanding of consciousness - as “a connected organization of mental processes” (Freud). Like other representatives of depth psychology, Freud derives the problem of consciousness for the sphere of psychology itself. After all, the main authority representing consciousness, the “super-ego,” will essentially be metapsychic.

Metaphysical positions in the approach to consciousness, in fact, could not lead psychology to any other understanding of it. Although the idea of development penetrated into pre-Marxist psychological thought, especially in the post-Spenserian period, it was not extended to solve the problem of the nature of the human psyche, so that the latter continued to be viewed as something pre-existing and exclusively “filled” with new contents. It was these metaphysical positions that were destroyed by the dialectical-materialist view, which opened up completely new perspectives for the psychology of consciousness.

The starting point of Marxism about consciousness is essentially that it represents a qualitatively special form of the psyche. Although consciousness has a long prehistory in the evolution of the animal world, it first appears in humans in the process of the formation of work and social relations. Consciousness from the very beginning is a social product.

The Marxist position on the necessity and real function of consciousness completely excludes the possibility of considering in psychology the phenomena of consciousness exclusively as epiphenomena that accompany brain processes and the activity that they implement. At the same time, psychology, of course, cannot simply postulate the activity of consciousness. The task of psychological science is to scientifically explain the effective role of consciousness, and this is possible only under the condition of a radical change in the very approach to the problem and, above all, under the condition of abandoning that limited anthropological view of cognition, which forces us to look for its explanation in the processes that are playing out. in the head of an individual under the influence of stimuli affecting him - a view that inevitably returns psychology to a parallelistic position.

The real explanation of consciousness lies not in these processes, but in social conditions and methods of the activity that creates its necessity - in labor activity. By the way, this activity is characterized by the fact that it is reified, its “extinction”, in Marx’s words, in a product.

“That,” writes Marx in Capital, “that on the side of the worker appeared in the form of activity, now on the side of the product appears in the form of a thing at rest, in the form of being.” “During the labor process,” we read below, “labor constantly moves from the form of activity to the form of being, from the form of movement to the form of objectivity.”

In this process, the objectification also occurs of those ideas that motivate, direct and regulate the activity of the subject. In its product they acquire a new form of existence in the form of external, sensory objects. Let us note that now in this external, exteriorized or exoteric form they themselves become objects of reflection. Correlation with the original ideas is the process of their awareness by the subject - a process as a result of which they receive in his head something like doubling, something like ideal existence.

Such a description of the process of awareness will, however, be incomplete. It is worth saying that in order for this process to take place, the object must appear to the person precisely as capturing the mental content of the activity, i.e. its ideal side. The emphasis on the latter, however, cannot be understood in abstraction from the social connections into which labor participants necessarily enter, from their communication. By entering into communication with each other, people also produce a language that serves to designate the object, means and the labor process itself. Acts of signification are nothing more than acts of highlighting the ideal side of objects, and the adoption of language by individuals is the acceptance of what it signifies in the form of its awareness. “...Language,” notes Marx and Engels, “is practical consciousness, existing for other people and exclusively thereby existing for myself, real consciousness...”

This position, however, cannot at all be interpreted in the sense that consciousness is generated by language. Language will not be his demiurge, but the form of his existence. At the same time, words and linguistic signs are not just substitutes for things, their conditional substitutes. Behind verbal meanings lies social practice, activity transformed and crystallized in them, in the process of which only objective reality is revealed to man.

Of course, the development of consciousness in each individual person does not repeat the socio-historical process of consciousness production. But his conscious reflection of the world does not arise as a result of the direct projection onto his brain of ideas and concepts developed by previous generations. His consciousness will also be a product of his activity in the objective world. In this activity, mediated by communication with other people, the process of accepting (Aneignung) to them the spiritual wealth accumulated by the human race (Menschengattung) and embodied in an objective sensory form is carried out. In this case, the very objective existence of human activity (Marx says industry, explaining that all human activity has hitherto been labor, i.e. industry) acts as “human psychology sensually presented to us.”

Thus, Marx’s discovery, radical for psychological theory, is essentially that consciousness is not a manifestation of some mystical ability of the human brain to emit the “light of consciousness” under the influence of things affecting it - stimuli, but a product of those special ones, i.e. social relations into which people enter and which are exclusively realized through their brain, their senses and organs of action. It is in the processes generated by these relationships that objects are posited in the form of their subjective images in the human head, in the form of consciousness.

Together with Marx’s theory of consciousness, the foundations of the scientific history of human consciousness were developed. We should not forget that the importance of this for psychological science can hardly be overestimated.

Despite the fact that psychology has a large amount of material on the historical development of thinking, memory and other mental processes, collected mainly by cultural historians and ethnographers, the central problem - the problem of the historical stages of the formation of consciousness - remained unresolved in it.

Marx and Engels not only created a general method for the historical study of consciousness; they also revealed the fundamental changes that human consciousness undergoes during the development of society. We are talking primarily about the stage of the initial formation of consciousness and language and the stage of transformation of consciousness into a universal form of the specifically human psyche, when reflection in the form of consciousness extends to the entire range of phenomena of the world around a person, to his own activities and to himself. Of particular importance is Marx’s teaching about the changes in consciousness that it undergoes in the context of the development of the social division of labor, the separation of the bulk of producers from the means of production and the separation of theoretical activity from practical activity. The economic alienation generated by the development of private property leads to alienation and disintegration of the consciousness of people. The latter is expressed in the fact that there is an inadequacy of the meaning that his activity and its product acquire for a person with their objective meaning. By the way, this disintegration of consciousness is destroyed exclusively with the destruction of the private property relations that gave rise to it, with the transition from a class society to a communist one. “...Communism,” Marx narrated, “already thinks of itself as reintegration or the return of man to himself, as the destruction of human self-alienation...”

These theoretical positions of Marx acquire a particularly relevant meaning in our time. It is worth noting that they provide guidance for scientific psychology in its approach to the most complex problems of changing human consciousness in a socialist, communist society, in solving those specific psychological problems that now arise not only in the sphere of educating the younger generation, but also in the field of organizing work and communication between people and in other areas of manifestation of human personality.

Leontyev A N

Leontyev A N

Activity, Consciousness, Personality

A.N. Leontiev

Activity.Consciousness.Personality

Attempts to understand the methodological problems of psychological science have always been generated by an urgent need for theoretical guidelines, without which specific research inevitably remains short-sighted.

For almost a century now, world psychology has been developing in conditions of crisis in its methodology. Having at one time split into the humanities and natural sciences, descriptive and explanatory, the system of psychological knowledge is showing more and more cracks in which the very subject of psychology seems to be disappearing. Its reduction is taking place, often covered up by the need to develop interdisciplinary research. Sometimes there are even voices openly calling for the “Varyags” into the psychology: “come and reign over us.” The paradox is that, despite all theoretical difficulties, there is now an extraordinary acceleration in the development of psychological research all over the world - under the direct pressure of the demands of life. As a result, the contradiction between the enormity of factual material, scrupulously accumulated by psychology in excellently equipped laboratories, and the pitiful state of its theoretical, methodological foundation has become even more acute. Neglect and skepticism regarding the general theory of the psyche, the spread of factualism and scientism, characteristic of modern American psychology (and not only for it!), have become a barrier to the study of major psychological problems.

The development of Soviet psychological science followed a completely different path.

Soviet psychologists contrasted methodological pluralism with a unified Marxist-Leninist methodology, which allows one to penetrate into the actual nature of the human psyche and consciousness. A persistent search began for solutions to the main theoretical problems of psychology on the basis of Marxism. At the same time, work was underway to critically comprehend, on this basis, the positive achievements of foreign psychology, and specific research was launched on a wide range of issues. New approaches and a new conceptual apparatus took shape, which made it possible to quickly bring Soviet psychology to a scientific level incomparably higher than the level of the psychology that enjoyed official recognition in pre-revolutionary Russia. New names appeared in psychology: Blonsky and Kornilov, then Vygotsky, Uznadze, Rubinstein and others.

The main thing is that this was the path of a tireless, purposeful struggle for the creative mastery of Marxism-Leninism, a struggle against idealistic and mechanistic, biologizing concepts that appeared in one guise or another. While developing a line opposed to these concepts, it was necessary at the same time to avoid scientific isolationism, as well as the position of one of the psychological schools existing along with others. We all understood that Marxist psychology is not a separate direction, not a school, but a new historical stage, personifying the beginning of a truly scientific, consistently materialist psychology. We also understood something else, namely, that in the modern world psychology performs an ideological function, serves class interests, and that this cannot be ignored.

Methodological and ideological issues remained the focus of attention of Soviet psychology, especially in the first period of its development, which was marked by the publication of such fundamental books in their ideas as “Thinking and Speech” by L.S. Vygotsky and “Fundamentals of General Psychology” by L.S. .Rubinstein. It must be admitted, however, that in subsequent years attention to the methodological problems of psychological science has weakened somewhat. This, of course, does not mean that theoretical issues have become less discussed or written about less. I mean something else: the well-known methodological carelessness of many specific psychological, including applied, studies.

This phenomenon can be explained by a number of circumstances. One of them is that there has gradually been a breakdown in the internal connections between the development of philosophical problems of psychology and the actual methodology of ongoing research. Many voluminous books are devoted to philosophical issues of psychology (as well as to philosophical criticism of foreign non-Marxist movements), but questions concerning specific ways to study broad psychological problems are almost not addressed in them. One gets the impression of a kind of branching: on the one hand, the sphere of philosophical psychological problems, and on the other hand, the sphere of specifically psychological methodological issues that arise in the experience of specific research. Of course, the development of the actual philosophical questions of a particular area of scientific knowledge is necessary. However, we are talking about something else: about the development on a Marxist philosophical basis of special problems of the methodology of psychology as a specific science. And this requires the penetration of theoretical thought into its, so to speak, “inner economy.”

I will explain my idea using the example of one of the most difficult problems that has long faced psychological research - we are talking about the problem of the connection between mental processes and cerebral, physiological processes. It is hardly necessary to convince psychologists now that the psyche is a function of the brain and that mental phenomena and processes need to be studied in unity with physiological ones. But what does it mean to study them in unity? For concrete psychological research, this question turned out to be extremely difficult. The fact is that no direct correlation between mental and brain physiological processes solves the problem. The theoretical alternatives that arise from such a direct approach are well known: either it is the hypothesis of parallelism, fatally leading to an understanding of the psyche as an epiphenomenon; or this is the position of naive physiological determinism with the resulting reduction of psychology to physiology; or, finally, it is a dualistic hypothesis of psychophysiological interaction, which allows for the action of the immaterial psyche on the material processes occurring in the brain. For metaphysical thinking, no other solution simply exists; only the terms that cover the same alternatives change.

At the same time, the psychophysiological problem has a very specific and highly business meaning for psychology, because the psychologist must constantly keep in mind the work of morphophysiological mechanisms. It is impossible to talk, for example, about the processes of perception without referring to data from morphology and physiology. However, the image of perception as a psychological reality is not at all the same as the brain processes and their constellations, the function of which it is. It is obvious that we are dealing here with different forms of movement, but this necessarily poses a further problem about those meaningful transitions that connect these forms of movement. Although this problem is primarily methodological, its solution requires an analysis that penetrates, as I said, into the results accumulated by specific studies at the psychological and physiological levels.

On the other side, in the sphere of specifically psychological problems, attention began to be increasingly focused on the thoroughness of the development of individual questions, on increasing the technical equipment of laboratory experiments, improving the statistical apparatus and on the use of formal languages. Of course, without this, progress in psychology is now simply impossible. But something else is also obvious: that this alone is not enough. It is necessary that particular tasks do not overshadow more general ones, so that the research methodology does not overshadow its methodology.

The fact is that a research psychologist, having taken up the study of specific issues, inevitably continues to encounter fundamental methodological problems of psychological science. Only they appear before him in their hidden expression, so that the solution to specific issues seems independent of them, requiring only the multiplication and clarification of empirical data. An illusion arises of “demethodologization” of the sphere of specific research, which further strengthens the impression of the disconnection of internal connections between the general theoretical Marxist foundations of psychological science and its factology. As a result, a kind of vacuum is formed in the system of psychological concepts, into which concepts generated by views that are essentially alien to Marxism are spontaneously drawn.

Theoretical and methodological carelessness sometimes affects the approach to solving some purely applied psychological problems. She...