Тексты

The new definition of psyche based on ideas of Spinoza, Vygotsky and Ilyenkov

The modern psychology strongly requires a general psychological theory suitable not only for the decision of a narrow class of practical problems, but responding to the multiple challenges of the present. A titanic step to it was made by L.S.Vygotsky. Unfortunately his life was hardly sufficed to begin this huge work. His disciples and, first of all, A.N.Leont'ev, have continued it, but despite of essential theoretical progress an integrated theory was not built.
The theory pretending to continuity in development of cultural - historical approach, can be based only on the philosophical basis on which its founders were standing. L.S.Vygotsky’s basis was the ideas of Spinoza and Marx. Today one can succeed L.S.Vygotsky only using the modern reading of these ideas developed by E.V.Il'enkov.
The latter begins with criticism of Cartesian psychophysical problem and offers a Spinoza’s idea of a thinking body as its unique theoretical solution. According to this logic, the thinking is understood not as a modus of the incorporeal substance, interacting by some mysterious way with the “extended” substance, but as a way of active action of a thinking body congruous to the form of his object. Ability to such “thinking”, an action plastically assimilating to the form of an object is not emergent property of nervous system, but the integral, attributive property of the material Nature, Spinoza’s Substance. The most abstractly it can be understood as the definition of life as such.
Life is a unity of spontaneity, productivity and objectness - process started not by external stimulus, but finding the causality inside itself, cooperating not with the external abstract environment, but posing his object by his own activity, and, at last, acting not according to abstractly internal program, but according to the objective form of the object itself.
With transition of organisms to specific form of activity, characteristic for multicellular animals, the object activity can be realised only with new, reflective plan of the relation. Life now is mediated by the self-directed, reflective relation so that any extrasomatic objective act is possible only in identity with the act intrasomatic, self-directed or affective. This internal dialectics of reflective action also meant physiologist N.A.Bernshtejn, discussing a birth of free action through disinhibition of a joint originally squeezed by reciprocal muscles. According to this definition psychic activity is an ensemble, a jazz band of sub activeness in which solo party of object activity of entire organism is possible only through improvising support of other, sub active orchestral players.
A human being against an animal is born with the ready full score of sub activeness, but actively builds it in interaction with other people. Therefore human life, the process of an active object relation of a person to the world is possible only as the moment of the reflective whole sides of which are he and other person, he and all ever living people, he and culture, as a system of objectified activity of these people.