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Among the remarkable and bright figures in the history of philosophical and psychological thought in England in the 18th century are David Hartley(1705–1757) and Joseph Priestley. Hartley, with his views, begins an associative trend in English empirical psychology. He expresses his credo with sufficient clarity: “Everything is explained by primary sensations and laws of association.” Hartley elevated association to a universal mechanical law of all forms of mental activity, to something similar to Newton’s great law of universal gravitation. This means that he extended it to all spheres and floors of mental life. Associations are established between sensations, between ideas, between movements, and also between all of the above mental manifestations. All of these associations correspond to associated tremors of nerve fibers or associated vibrations of the brain matter. The main conditions for the formation of associations are contiguity in time or space and repetition. In his work “Reflections on Man, His Structure, His Duty and Hopes,” Hartley argued that the human mental world develops gradually as a result of the complication of primary sensory elements through their associations due to the contiguity of these elements in time and the frequency of repetition of their combinations. As for general concepts, they arise when everything random and unimportant disappears from a strong association, which remains unchanged under different conditions. The totality of these constant connections is held together as a whole thanks to the word, which acts as a generalization factor. The focus on a strictly causal explanation of how the mental mechanism arises and works, as well as the subordination of this teaching to the solution of social and moral problems - all this gave Hartley’s scheme wide popularity. Her influence both in England itself and on the continent was extremely great, and it extended to various branches of humanities: ethics, aesthetics, logic, pedagogy. A follower of Hartley's ideas was Joseph Priestley. Priestley opposed the view that matter is something dead, inert and passive. In addition to extension, matter has such an integral property as attraction and repulsion. Consideration of the properties of attraction and repulsion as a form of activity of matter gave Priestley grounds to believe that there is no need to resort to God as the source of the movement of matter. As for mental or spiritual phenomena, they, just like repulsion and attraction, are properties of matter, but not all matter, as it was with Spinoza, but organized in a special way. Priestley considers such an organized system of matter, the property of which is mental abilities, to be “the nervous system, or rather the brain.” Priestley makes spiritual phenomena not only dependent on the body, but also on the external world. The instruments of human communication with the outside world are the senses, nerves and brain. Without them, neither sensations nor ideas can take place. All phenomena of the human spirit are derived by Priestley from sensations. He believed that external feelings alone were enough to explain the whole variety of mental phenomena. Manifestations of the spirit are reduced by Priestley to the abilities of memory, judgment, emotions and will. They all perform various types associations of sensations and ideas. The same applies to the most general concepts. The anatomical and physiological basis of sensations, ideas and their associations are vibrations of the nervous and brain matter. Strong vibrations are characteristic of sensory images, weakened vibrations are characteristic of ideas. Priestley was alien to the vulgar idea of the psyche that Toland had. He pointed out that in no case should one assume that brain vibrations are the sensation or idea itself. The vibration of brain particles is only the cause of sensations and ideas, for vibrations can occur without being accompanied by perceptions. Priestley made the complex nature of the phenomena of the spirit dependent on the volume of the vibrating system of the brain. Priestley took an objective position on the issue of will. According to Priestley, will cannot be understood as a voluntary decision of the spirit to act in one way or another, without any actual external reason. The will has the same necessity as other manifestations of the spirit. The origins of “free will” must be sought outside of will itself. The most difficult question for all philosophers of the period described was whether animals have a soul, and if so, how does it differ from the human soul. Priestley believed that “animals possess the rudiments of all our faculties, without exception, and in such a way that they differ from us only in degree, and not in kind.” He attributed to them memory, emotions, will, reason and even the ability to abstract. By endowing animals with traits of the human psyche, Priestley took a mistaken step towards anthropomorphism. A qualitative identification of the psyche of animals and humans was allowed by many advanced natural scientists and materialist philosophers of the 18th–19th centuries. (Priestley, La Mettrie, Darwin, Chernyshevsky, Romanee, etc.). Anthropomorphism played a progressive role at that time, for it was a form of affirmation of a materialistic view of the nature and origin of the psyche of animals and humans. Despite all his misconceptions, Priestley played a significant role in strengthening the natural science and objective approach to spiritual phenomena. By implementing Hartley's ideas, he contributed to the spread of the basic principle of the English association school. As a materialist philosopher, natural scientist and brilliant experimenter in the field of chemistry, Priestley considered it possible to apply experiment to the field of mental phenomena. Two other English thinkers of this era interpreted the principle of association differently - D. Berkeley(1685–1753) and D. Hume(1711–1776). Both took as primary not physical reality, not the vital activity of the organism, but the phenomena of consciousness. Their main argument was empiricism - the doctrine that the source of knowledge is sensory experience (formed by associations). According to Berkeley, experience is the sensations directly experienced by the subject: visual, muscular, tactile, etc. In his work “An Experience in a New Theory of Vision,” Berkeley analyzed in detail the sensory elements that make up the image of geometric space as the container of all natural bodies. Physics assumes that this Newtonian space is given objectively. According to Berkeley, it is a product of the interaction of sensations. Some sensations (for example, visual) are associated with others (for example, tactile), and people consider this entire complex of sensations to be a thing given to them independently of consciousness, whereas “to be means to be in perception.” This conclusion inevitably inclined to solipsism - to the denial of any existence other than one’s own consciousness. To get out of this trap and explain why different subjects have perceptions of the same external objects, Berkeley appealed to a special divine consciousness that all people are endowed with. In his psychological analysis visual perception Berkeley expressed several valuable ideas, pointing out the participation of tactile sensations in constructing an image of three-dimensional space (with a two-dimensional image on the retina). As for Hume, he took a different position. He believed that the question of whether physical objects exist or not exist independently of us is theoretically insoluble (this view is called agnosticism). Meanwhile, the doctrine of causality is nothing more than a product of the belief that behind one impression (recognized as the cause) another will appear (accepted as the effect). In fact, there is nothing more than a strong association of ideas that arose in the experience of the subject. And the subject himself and his soul are just successive bundles or bundles of impressions. Hume's skepticism awakened many thinkers from their “dogmatic sleep” and made them think about their beliefs regarding the soul, causality, etc. After all, they accepted these beliefs on faith, without critical analysis. Hume's opinion that the concept of a subject can be reduced to a bundle of associations was directed with its critical edge against the idea of the soul as a special entity bestowed by the Almighty, which generates and connects individual mental phenomena. The assumption of such a spiritual, incorporeal substance was defended, in particular, by Berkeley, who rejected material substance. According to Hume, what is called the soul is something like a stage stage, where a series of interconnected sensations and ideas pass through. Hume divides the variety of impressions, or perceptions, into two categories: perceptions (sensations) and ideas. The basis of their differences lies in the strength and vividness of the impression. Hume includes passions, effects, and emotions as reflective impressions. Sensations arise from unknown causes, and reflective impressions are associated with bodily pain or pleasure. In addition to dividing impressions into perceptions and ideas, Hume divides both into simple and complex. Simple perceptions and simple ideas necessarily correspond to each other, whereas complex ideas may not always resemble complex perceptions. Ideas are divided into ideas of memory and ideas of imagination. Hume saw associations as the only mechanism for connecting ideas. He was far from believing that perceptions and their connections had anything to do with the external world and the body. He openly admits that he has no idea either about the place where one association is replaced by another, or about the material from which the mental world consists. Not only is there no object of perception, there is no subject itself, their bearer. Personality for Hume is nothing more than “a bundle or bundle of various perceptions, following each other with inconceivable speed and being in constant flux, in constant movement.” The presentation of Hume's philosophical and psychological system shows that it is permeated with the spirit of extreme subjectivism. Having transformed Locke's external experience entirely into internal, he found no place in it for either the object or the subject. Beyond the kaleidoscopically changing states of consciousness, it is impossible to reach either God or matter. The question of a way out of the impasse created by Hume inevitably arose. The first attempts were made by E. Condillac; in England itself, the subjective Berkeley-Hume line receives further development in the works James Mill(1773–1836) and his son John Stuart Mill(1806–1873). Their views were a classic example of mechanistic introspective association psychology. Mill believed that the first states of consciousness are sensations; ideas are derived from them. The nature of consciousness is such that it already contains sensory data and an associative mechanism for their connection. Association is not a force or a cause, as Hume understood it, but simply a way of coincidence or contact of ideas. They apply only to ideas and do not affect sensory data. From simple ideas complex ones are formed through associations. If Hume put forward three laws of associations, then J. Mill put forward one: contiguity or proximity in time or space. Simultaneous and sequential associations differ in strength, which depends on two conditions: clarity and repetition of ideas. The result of diverse contacts (associations) of ideas constitutes the essence of human mental life. There is no access to it except for internal surveillance. J. Mill's mechanical view of the structure of consciousness was criticized by his son D. St. Millem. He opposed the position about the atomic composition of the soul and the mechanical connection of the original elements. Instead of the mechanical model, as not reflecting the true structure of consciousness, D. Art. Mill proposed a chemical one, i.e. now consciousness began to be built on the model of chemical processes. Properties of the soul, believed D. St. Mill, it is impossible to deduce from the properties of elements, just as water is characterized by properties that are not inherent in either oxygen or hydrogen individually. The new chemical approach did not interfere with D. St. Mill left in force the basic associative principle of connection between the elements of consciousness. For him, the laws of association have the same force in psychology that the law of gravity has in astronomy. The initial phenomena of consciousness, when associated, give a new mental state, the qualities of which have no similarity among the primary elements. D. St. Mill identified the following laws of associations: similarity, contiguity, frequency and intensity. Subsequently, the law of intensity was replaced by the law of non-separation. All these laws were involved by D. Art. Mill to substantiate the subjective-idealistic theory, according to which matter was understood as “the constant possibility of sensation.” It seemed to him that, along with a limited part of actual sensations (transient and changeable), there is always a vast area of possible (permanent) sensations, which constitute the external world for us. Associative laws underlie the mutual transitions of actual sensations into possible ones, and vice versa. The dynamics of states of consciousness in the phenomenological concepts of both Mills occurs out of connection with the objective world and those physiological processes that constitute the material basis for all mental phenomena. English associationism of the 18th century, both in its materialistic and idealistic versions, guided the searches of many Western psychologists in the next two centuries. No matter how speculative Hartley’s views on the activity of the nervous system were, he essentially thought of it as an organ that transmits external impulses from the sense organs through the brain to the muscles, as a reflex mechanism. In this regard, Hartley became the heir to Descartes' discovery of the reflex nature of behavior. But Descartes, along with reflex, introduced a second explanatory principle - reflection as a special activity of consciousness. Hartley outlined the prospect of an uncompromising explanation based on a single principle and those highest manifestations of mental life that the dualist Descartes explained by the activity of an immaterial substance. This Hartlian line was subsequently included in the resource of scientific explanation of the psyche in new era, when the reflex principle was perceived and transformed by Sechenov and his followers. Found its followers at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. and the line outlined by Berkeley and Hume. Its successors were not only positivist philosophers, but also psychologists (Wundt, Titchener), who focused on the analysis of the elements of the subject’s experience as special mental realities that cannot be deduced from anything. 2. French materialism Philosophically, the decisive step in the orientation of psychology towards objective and experimental study was made by the French materialists of the 18th century. French materialism combined two lines of theoretical thought: the objective direction of Descartes in the field of physics and physiology and the sensualistic ideas of Locke. As for Lockean empiricism and sensationalism, their transfer to French soil was facilitated by the works E. Condillac(1715–1780). These include: “An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge” (1746), which was a summary of Locke’s book “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” and Condillac’s independent work “Treatise on Sensations” (1754). Condillac proceeded from the experimental origin of knowledge; he eliminated the reflexive source of knowledge. Condillac used the image of a statue, which he gradually endowed with various sensations. With the introduction of each new type of sensation, the mental life of the statue becomes more complicated. The most important of all senses is touch. It acts as the teacher of all other senses. The dominant position of touch is determined by the fact that only it teaches other senses to relate sensations to external objects. The human soul is a collection of modifications of sensations. Memory, imagination, judgment are varieties various combinations sensations. Feelings are the only source inner world person. The general concept of Condillac was characterized by duality. He did not deny, like Berkeley, for example, the existence of an objective world. At the same time, Condillac criticized Spinoza for his doctrine of substance and tried to prove that no substance could be seen behind sensations. Adhering to this point of view, Condillac practically remained in the introspective positions of Berkeley and Hume. Condillac's phenomenological tendencies drew deserved criticism from Diderot. The ideas of Descartes and Condillac were further developed by the materialists of the 18th century. J. Lametrie(1709–1751), D. Diderot(1713–1784), P. Holbach(1723–1789), K. Helvetia(1715–1771) and P. Cabanis(1757–1808). They are characterized by overcoming the dualism of Descartes, Locke and Condillac both in understanding the entire universe and in understanding the inner world of man. A significant step towards an objective analysis of the human and animal psyche from the standpoint of mechanics was made by the founder of French materialism, a doctor and naturalist. J. Lametrie. His views were formed under the influence of Descartes' physics and Locke's sensualism. Accepting the completely Cartesian thesis about the machine-like nature of the work of the bodily organism, La Mettrie extends the mechanical principle to the field of mental phenomena. He firmly states that man is a complex machine, vertically crawling towards enlightenment, “a living personification of continuous movement.” The driving principle of the animal and human machine is the soul, understood as the ability to feel. La Mettrie was a passionate advocate of the objective method. He begins his work “The Man-Machine” by pointing out that his guides were always only experience and observation. An objective indicator of the course of mental processes are those bodily changes and the consequences that they cause. He believed that the only cause of all our ideas are impressions from external bodies. From them grow perceptions, judgments, and all intellectual abilities, which are “modifications of a kind of brain screen on which, as if from a magic lantern, objects imprinted in the eye are reflected.” In the doctrine of sensations, La Mettrie draws attention to the relationship between the objective and subjective aspects of the image. To emphasize the crucial role of mental components in the formation of an image, La Mettrie called perception “intellectual.” Despite the mechanistic approach to explaining the psyche of animals and humans, anthropomorphic errors, La Mettrie played a prominent role in establishing a materialistic, natural-scientific view of the nature of mental phenomena, and, therefore, in defining the scientific method of future experimental psychology. One of the most original French thinkers was D. Diderot. His main ideas in the field of psychology are set out in three works: “Letter on the Blind for the Edification of the Sighted” (1749), “Thoughts for the Explanation of Nature” (1754) and “Conversation of d'Alembert and Diderot” (1769) . In these works, Diderot argues that matter is the only substance in the universe, in man and in animals. Dividing matter into living and nonliving, he believed that the organic form of matter comes from the inorganic. All matter has the ability to reflect. At the level of organic life, this ability appears in the form of active sensitivity. At the level of dead matter, the property of reflection is represented in the form of potential sensitivity. The entire set of mental phenomena, ranging from various kinds of sensations to will and self-awareness, depends on the activity of the senses, nerves and brain. The problem of sensations is the most developed part of Diderot's psychological views. In his work “Letter on the Blind for the Edification of the Sighted,” he gives a consistently materialist solution to the question of the nature of sensations and their interaction, rejecting Berkeley’s entire phenomenological “extravagant system.” No less consistently pursues the idea of the natural origin of the psyche, another representative of French materialism - Paul Holbach. There is no place for spiritual substance in his System of Nature. Man is declared to be the most perfect part of nature. As for the spiritual principle in man, Holbach considers it as the same physical principle, but “viewed only from a certain angle of view.” Thanks to a high bodily organization, a person is endowed with the ability to feel, think and act. The first ability of a person is sensations. All others follow from them. To sense means to experience the effects of external objects on the senses. Any impact of an external agent is accompanied by changes occurring in the sense organs. These changes, in the form of concussions, are transmitted through the nerves to the brain. Holbach emphasizes the certain role of needs in human life. Needs are the driving factor of our passions, will, bodily and mental needs. Holbach's position on needs as the main source of human activity is of great importance. Holbach, in his doctrine of needs, argued that external causes alone are sufficient to explain human activity and his consciousness (cognitive, emotional and volitional activity). He completely rejected the traditional idea of idealism about the spontaneous activity of consciousness. To understand psychic phenomena, Holbach called for turning to nature and seeking truth in it, using experience as a guide. The idea of the possibility of an objective study of mental phenomena opened up a real path to scientific experimentation in the field of mental processes. In addition to affirming natural determinism, when considering the inner world of man, his consciousness and behavior, French materialists took the first step towards the idea of social determinism. Special credit goes here K. Helvetia, which showed that man is not only a product of nature, but also a product of social environment and upbringing. Circumstances create a person - this is the general conclusion of the philosophy and psychology of Helvetius. Both books of Helvetius “On the Mind” and “On Man” are devoted to the development and substantiation of the original thesis, which proclaimed: man is a product of education. Helvetius saw the main task in proving that the difference in mental abilities and spiritual appearance of people is due not so much to the natural properties of a person as to upbringing. It includes the objective environment, life circumstances, and social phenomena. Helvetius came to underestimate the role of a person’s physical potential in the development of his mental abilities. The first form of mental activity, according to Helvetius, is sensations. The ability to sense is considered by the philosopher to be the same natural property as density, extension and others, but it only applies to “organized animal bodies.” For Helvetius, everything comes down to sensation: memory, judgment, mind, imagination, passions, desires. At the same time, Helvetius's extreme sensualism played a positive role in the struggle against Descartes' reduction of the psychic to consciousness and thinking. Helvetius pointed out that the human soul is not only the mind, it is something more than the mind, for, in addition to the mind, there is the ability to sense. The mind is formed mainly during life; You can lose it during your lifetime. But the soul as the ability to sense remains. It is born and dies along with the birth and death of the organism. Therefore, thinking alone cannot express the essence of the soul. The sphere of the psyche is not limited to the area of thinking and consciousness, since beyond it there is a large number of weak sensations that “without attracting attention to themselves, cannot evoke in us either consciousness or memories,” but behind which there are physical causes. According to Helvetius, man is not a passive being, but, on the contrary, an active one. The source of his activity is passions. They revive the spiritual world of man and set it in motion. Passions are divided into two types, some of which are given by nature, others acquired during life. They are recognized by external expressions and bodily changes. As a true materialist, Helvetius, in relation to the method of understanding the human psyche, could not help but take the position of an objective and experimental approach. The science of the spiritual world of man, in his opinion, should be interpreted and created in the same way as experimental physics is interpreted and created. 3. Germany. Development of German psychology in the 18th–19th centuries After Leibniz, empirical tendencies began to penetrate German psychology. They became especially noticeable in the works X. Wolf(1679–1754). In psychology, Wolf is known for dividing psychology into empirical and rational parts, which is reflected in the titles of his books: “Empirical Psychology” (1732) and “Rational Psychology” (1734). In addition, Wolf assigned the name “psychology” to science. According to Wolf, real science is ideally designed to solve three main problems: 1) deducing facts and phenomena from essential principles; 2) description of these facts and phenomena; 3) establishment of quantitative relationships. Since psychology cannot realize the third task, it remains to solve the first two, one of which should become the subject of rational psychology, the other - the subject of empirical psychology. According to Wolf, the basis of all mental manifestations is the soul. Its essence lies in the ability to represent. This leading force manifests itself in the form of cognitive and anetative abilities. Anetic abilities, or desire abilities, are dependent on cognitive ones. For Wolf, everything comes down to the root cognitive essence, which is the cause of various manifestations, which empirical psychology should deal with. Wolf's advocacy for empiricism in psychology, for the creation of psychometry as a science similar to experimental physics, is the positive side of Wolf's teachings in psychology. But, solving the psychophysical problem in the form of psychophysiological parallelism, Wolf still divided, instead of connecting, mental and physiological processes into two independent series of phenomena. A strong tilt of German psychology towards empiricism was realized I. Kantom(1724–1804). Kant's psychological views stemmed from his general theory of knowledge. He assumed that real objects exist outside of us - “things in themselves.” However, nothing can be said about them, since “things in themselves” are unknowable. We are given only phenomena of consciousness that are produced by “things in themselves”, but do not express their essence. What is presented to us in consciousness is a world of phenomena, completely different from the world of things. In itself, sensory experience does not carry any knowledge about objects. Rational categories are not deducible from sensory data; they are given initially. Since the essence of things is incomprehensible, and the world can be given to man only in phenomena (“things for us”), then all sciences deal only with phenomena, and therefore can only be empirical sciences. The exception is mathematics and mechanics. According to this position, for psychology, the object of study of which is the inner world of man, the essence of the soul is inaccessible. The subject of psychology can only be the phenomena of consciousness that are detected through inner feeling. Thus, psychology is the science of the phenomena of consciousness, to which he included cognitive, emotional and volitional acts. Kant replaced the dichotomous principle of the division of the soul with a three-member classification of mental phenomena. The main method by which these types of phenomena are detected is internal observation. According to Kant, phenomena obtained from the inner sense occur in one dimension - time sequence. The spatial dimension is not characteristic of the phenomena of consciousness. Therefore, psychology is deprived of the opportunity to apply mathematics, the use of which requires at least two dimensions. Experimental methods are completely inapplicable to a thinking subject. Hence the conclusion is drawn that psychology is never destined to become an “experimental teaching.” Meanwhile, it is believed that with his critical attitude towards psychology, I. Kant stimulated the search for new approaches and means in the field of psychology at subsequent stages of its development (Yaroshevsky, Boring, Murphy, etc.). Among other provisions of Kant that influenced psychology, one should indicate his doctrine of transcendental apperception as a special ability of the mind to generalize, synthesize and integrate sensory intuitions. Kant's general doctrine of a priori conditions, or forms of sensory experience, will form the basis of Müller's theory of specific sensory energy, which has had a significant influence in foreign psychophysiology. Along with the ideas of Kant at the beginning of the 19th century. in Germany the views are becoming widely known and widespread I. Herbart(1776–1841). The influence of his philosophical and psychological-pedagogical ideas was felt in different directions. One of them concerns the definition of psychology as a special explanatory science, in which he saw the basis for the construction of scientific pedagogy. Another position of Herbart is associated with the establishment of psychology as a field of empirical experimental knowledge. Herbart’s call for the transformation of psychology into an experimental science had no real prerequisites because it deprived mental processes of a physiological basis. He did not admit that the physiological approach could in any way contribute to obtaining scientific knowledge about the mental. An experiment, according to Herbart, cannot take place in psychology due to its analytical nature. All the wealth of mental life consists of the statics and dynamics of ideas endowed with spontaneous activity. All performances have time and power characteristics. Changes in ideas in intensity constitute the statics of the soul. The change of ideas over time constitutes the dynamics of the soul. Any idea that does not change in quality can change in strength (or intensity), which is experienced by the subject as the clarity of ideas. Each idea has a desire for self-preservation. When there is a difference in intensity, weak ideas are suppressed while strong ones remain. The sum of all delayed, or inhibited, ideas was the subject of Herbart's careful calculations. Suppressed ideas take on the character of motivating forces. From this struggle of various ideas for a place in consciousness follows Herbart’s position on the thresholds of consciousness. Conscious were considered those ideas that, in their strength and tendency to self-preservation, are above the threshold. Weak ideas that lie below the threshold do not provide the subjective experience of clarity. Ideas that have entered the sphere of consciousness have the opportunity to be assimilated into the general mass of clear ideas, which Herbart called “apperprising.” Among the most valuable propositions put forward by Herbart for the fate of experimental psychology are: 1) the idea of using mathematics in psychology; 2) the idea of thresholds of consciousness. Herbart's laws of representations (fusion, complication, apperception, etc.) will become the working concepts with which psychologists operated in the first stages of the development of experimental psychology. As for philosophical methodology, here they discarded the most valuable and living things and adopted the original principles of Leibniz and Wolff. This is precisely what prevented him from fulfilling the task that he set for himself - to build an “experimental physics of the soul.” 4. Philosophical stage of development of psychology The philosophical stage of the development of psychology in the 17th–19th centuries is the most important period in the formation of theoretical prerequisites for the transformation of psychology into an independent science. There are two main factors contributing to the emergence and formation of psychology as a science. One of them is the penetration into psychology of the empirical approach. The essence of the empirical principle proclaimed by Bacon was a single requirement for all specific sciences to know the laws of nature, the study of individual facts and phenomena obtained through observation and experiment. The transition of psychology from reasoning about the essence of the soul to the analysis of specific mental phenomena obtained on the basis of experience was the positive result of the implementation of Bacon’s ideas in the field of psychology. However, empiricism itself, which replaced the idea of the soul as a special indivisible entity with the idea of it as a set of mental phenomena, did not unambiguously solve the question of the method and ways of their knowledge. The concept of experience in empirical psychology was interpreted in close connection with the question of the relationship of mental phenomena with the physical world and the material substrate. Hence, in determining the method of psychology, one or another solution to a psychophysical and psychophysiological problem acquired cardinal importance. The psychophysical and psychophysiological problem was solved in the history of psychology either in the spirit of dualism (Descartes' theory of external interaction, Leibniz's theory of parallelism), or in the spirit of monism in its materialist (Spinoza, French and Russian materialists) or in a subjective-idealistic form (Berkeley, Hume). All varieties of idealism in solving psychophysical and psychophysiological problems are characterized by the separation of the mental from the physical and physiological, the reduction of the world of mental phenomena to a closed system of facts of consciousness that are not accessible to objective observation. The only method of penetration into consciousness was proclaimed to be only internal experience, introspection, and introspection. In the 19th century in Western European philosophy and psychology, the most common form of solving the question of the relationship between soul and body was the theory of parallelism, according to which the mental and physiological were considered as two independent series of phenomena, but having a functional correspondence with each other. This way of considering a psychophysiological problem allowed for the possibility of judging mental states by the accompanying bodily changes and acted as a theoretical prerequisite for the introduction of natural scientific methods into psychology within the framework of idealism. It was the concept of psychophysiological parallelism that became the philosophical basis for the construction of experimental psychology in the West, the creation of which was initiated by W. Wundt. Remaining in the position of subjective psychology, Wundt and his followers could not recognize the decisive importance of the objective method in the knowledge of the psyche. The leading role was still assigned to introspection, and the use of physiological methods was considered by them only as a means of controlling it. For many centuries, introspective theories of consciousness were opposed by the materialist line in psychology, which in the 18th–19th centuries. represented in England by Toland, Priestley, in France by La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, in Russia by Lomonosov, Radishchev, Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky. Considering the mental as natural properties, materialist philosophers argued that mental phenomena can and should be studied by the same means and methods used by the natural sciences, that is, observation and experiment. These ideas of philosophical materialism found their expression in the materialist program of transferring psychology to natural scientific foundations and methods, which was developed from the standpoint of reflex teaching by the prominent Russian scientist I.M. Sechenov.
A.N. Leontiev
HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF VIEWS ON MENTAL PHENOMENA
(Leontyev A.N. Lectures on general psychology. - M.: Smysl, 2000. – P.16-21).
The first lecture of our course was devoted to identifying specific features mental phenomena. The answer to this complex question, of course, could only be given in the most general form. I emphasized that the most characteristic function of mental processes is reflection, that reflection is understood as a special, subjective form of reflection of reality that arises at a certain stage biological evolution. Thus, we attributed mental phenomena to the widest range life phenomena. Mental phenomena and processes are generated during the development of life and are necessary for life. And precisely because their generation and development is inseparable from the evolution of living organisms, they represent a function of the body or, more specifically, a function of the brain.
From these provisions follows a preliminary definition of the subject of psychological science:
Psychology is the science of the laws of generation and functioning of mental reflection in life and in the activities of living individuals.
As a preliminary definition, this definition is essential in all its elements, although, like any definition, it is by no means exhaustive and requires a much more detailed development of what is hidden behind it. Nevertheless, it seems to me to summarize the results of the development of scientific thought concerning the nature of psychic phenomena so close to us and at the same time so mysterious.
There are different paths that their research can take. First of all, this is a way to study the history of the development of ideas about the psyche. The history of the development of ideas about the nature of mental phenomena is very instructive precisely for understanding their essence. Another avenue of research is opening up. Those who follow this path also study the development, but not the history of views on the nature of the psychic, but the psychic reflection itself, that is, they study the history of the psi themselves. chemical phenomena. The third way is the way of systematic research of facts, actorizing mental phenomena and processes.<...>
Today we will talk about the history of the development of views on mental phenomena. But I will immediately note that I do not intend to give a detailed account of the development tiya of psychology as a science. This is the task of a special course in the history of psychology. I I will limit myself to just mentioning how ideas about mental phenomena first arose and how the main problems faced by human knowledge aimed at solving the question of the nature of these phenomena were posed. Psychology as a science has a very long prehistory and a very short history of its development as an independent field of scientific knowledge. If the problem of the psyche has attracted the attention of philosophers for more than two thousand years, then the history of psychology as a positive science does not even last one hundred and fifty years.<...>
Quite early, philosophical thought formulated several important problems related to the nature of mental phenomena. These problems are not a thing of the past. They live and influence the development of psychology as a field of specific knowledge. So, in ancient philosophy Two opposing approaches to understanding the nature of the psyche arose, the struggle between which continues to this day. Philosophers adhering to one line proceeded from the assumption of the existence of an objective world. From their point of view, mental phenomena tions depend on material phenomena. In other words, matter is primary, - psyche is secondary. This line is known in the history of philosophy as the line of matter lism. In ancient philosophy it was most clearly represented by Democritus, and we usually talk about it as the line of Democritus, the line of a materialistic approach to mental phenomena.
Representatives of the other line proclaimed primacy spiritual world considering material phenomena as products of this special world, that is, they argued that the psyche (or, more broadly, a special spiritual principle) is primary, and matter is secondary. This line of idealistic approach to mental phenomena is often called Plato's line.
The struggle of these two lines constituted the most important content of the development of philosophical thought in the next two millennia. However, it would be a grave mistake to understand this struggle in a simplified way, that is, by dividing philosophers into two camps and trying to fit all the richest directions of philosophical thought into this rigid external scheme. It is undeniable that philosophers were divided into two camps: the camp of materialism and the camp of idealism. But from this indisputable position it does not at all follow that the struggle of these two lines, these two main tendencies simply divided philosophical systems into two parts. Everything was much more complicated. And if we retrospectively trace the views of great philosophers, we often find contradictory elements in the same theoretical ideas. Thus, the struggle between two trends appears in history not as an external clash of two different systems, but as an internal contradiction of philosophical views.
This phenomenon found its classical expression in the system of one of the visible the greatest representatives of ancient philosophy - Aristotle. Aristotle, famously In a sense, he developed the line of Democritus. It was he who came up with the thesis: “If there were no perceived things, then there would be no sensations.” Consequently, Aristotle’s system of views recognized the existence of the objective world as a source of sensations. The thesis that sensation cannot arise without the presence of the sensed is, of course, a materialist thesis. But in Aristotle’s system there is also Plato’s line. Solving the question of in what forms matter exists, in what forms it appears before the perceiving subject, Aristotle came to the conclusion that these forms are of extraterrestrial, that is, spiritual, origin. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Aristotle's theoretical views on the development of mental problems. Some concepts introduced by Aristotle have remained relevant to our time. Such concepts include the concept of association. We are still talking about associations and reproducing the observations summarized in the Aristotelian system. We know those phenomena that served as the basis for highlighting the concept of “association” (connection). Associations of impressions or sensations arise if the events causing these sensations were either close in time, or similar to each other, or, conversely, one event sharply contradicted another (association by contrast). All these ideas are alive in one form or another, alive to this day. And the term “association”, having changed its original meaning, refers to the number of capital psychological concepts.
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I will allow myself to make a leap in time, since we are not engaged in a consistent presentation of history, but only placing milestones along the path of development of philosophical thought. Our understanding of the prehistory of psychology as a specific science, and of modern psychology, is inextricably linked with the name of the greatest philosopher of modern times, Rene Descartes. When Descartes is remembered, the Latin word “ cogito "-, since it was Descartes who came up with the famous thesis: " Cogito ergo sum "("I think, therefore I exist"). Behind this thesis lies a whole worldview. Descartes drew a clear line between the two worlds: the world of mental phenomena and the world of material phenomena. One world - uh that is the peace that we find within ourselves. Descartes calls this world the world of thinking, understanding by thinking the entire totality of mental phenomena. He repeatedly explained his thesis, emphasizing that thinking also means Essences of perception, remembering, feeling - in a word, the whole mental life. D Ekart placed the world of mental phenomena inside the subject.<...>
In addition to the world of psychic phenomena, there is a world outside of us, world of extension. Can a thought or feeling be measured? Do they have those signs of extension that are inherent in objective bodily phenomena? Descartes answers this question in the negative and uses the criterion of extension as the basis for separating the two worlds.
We have an ambivalent attitude towards this division. It is valuable because it initially led to an emphasis on the uniqueness of mental phenomena and was reflected in the subsequent development of psychology, contributing to the separation or, more precisely, the isolation of the internal subjective world from the external objective one. Descartes' distinction between two worlds deserves close attention. And the external world, and a person’s own body, and human actions, of course, belong to the world of extension. But what then remains for the share of the inner world, which really has no metric, no extension? Where then should we place this thinnest plane, this stage on which the spectacle of constantly changing psychic phenomena is played out? Within the framework of Descartes' concept, consciousness turns out to be isolated, turns into a closed, isolated peace from life. Isolated from life, because life is the life of the body, because life is life in the environment, because life is action! Life is active This is a process that acts as an affirmation of existence on the part of every subject of behavior, and especially a person. Life as an affirmation is a practical and therefore material process. If we separate consciousness from this practical process, then it inevitably turns out to be closed in its own circle. Thus, the position about the isolation of the mental world comes into conflict with our basic position, according to which mental processes are life processes generated in the course of evolution and reflective in nature. Descartes' idea of the world of consciousness, as separate from the world of extension, was developed directly in relation to psychology and in the interests of psychology. Next to Descartes, I would like to put another name, significant not only for the history of philosophy, but also for the entire history of the development of human positive knowledge. I mean... I. Newton. Newton mainly entered the history of human thought as one of the representatives of exact knowledge, the founder of the Newtonian worldview in physics. Apparently, one side of his activity has fallen out of the sight of historians. The fact is that Newton was also not indifferent to the problem of the psyche. He thought about the nature of strange psychic phenomena. These strange phenomena, at the same time the closest to us and the most difficult to understand, are hardly achievable for scientific analysis. Newton dreamed of an exact psychological science, possessing the same powerful power of prediction as physics, and asked the question: “How to penetrate the world of strange psychic phenomena that flicker bizarrely in our minds?” They flash brightly and then disappear, as if covered with clouds. Newton was well aware that the task of analyzing mental phenomena is equal in difficulty, if not more difficult, than the task of penetrating the world of the universe. In the Universe, we also observe flickering luminaries that from time to time hide behind clouds. Despite all the complexity and remoteness of the world of the Universe, we manage not only to penetrate into it through direct observation, but also to process the obtained empirical facts with our minds, giving them a mathematical form. But can’t we apply the same method to the analysis of the world of mental phenomena, that is, use the observation method to study the laws of the inner world? This was Newton's dream.<...>
The struggle of materialistic and idealistic tendencies, reflecting in very complex forms the struggle of opposing ideologies, gave rise to some ideas that had a significant impact on the fate of our science. I will have to pick out a few more problems from history, without which it would be difficult to imagine some areas of modern psychology.
At the end of the XVIII century, a group of philosophers appeared who tried to deduce mental phenomena directly from the work of the brain. The philosophers of this group undoubtedly represented a materialist line of development, since they adhered to the thesis about the primacy of matter and the knowability of the objective world. This direction is known in the history of philosophy as the direction of metaphysical and mechanistic materialism. It depicted a person with all his sorrows and joys by analogy with a machine. One of the first representatives of this trend, the French doctor and philosopher La Mettrie, catchily called his main work “Man-Machine,” reflecting with this name the very essence of French materialism. Philosophers of this school, comparing a person with a complex mechanism, tried to explain human behavior based on the structure of his body, about which at that time they knew quite little. To remove the psyche from the structure of the brain, in essence, means to reduce it to this device. We have two sides of the same coin. And nowadays we often come across theories that derive the psyche from the structure and functioning of the human brain. If we accept such a point of view, then psychology is, as it were, destroyed; it loses its subject, turning into physiology, biology, etc. And what the natural sciences cannot yet explain remains the responsibility of psychology as a temporary science, which, having described some phenomena and processes, must transfer them for truly scientific study into the hands of a physiologist... Thus, the ideas of mechanistic materialism, having adopted more sophisticated and hidden forms have migrated into our century. The psyche, of course, is a function of the brain. But what is its relationship to “brain” processes? Is it possible to derive the laws of mental activity from the laws of brain function? That is the question!
In conclusion, I must dwell on one more representative of a large fi losophical school - Bishop George Berkeley. Berkeley is considered one of the founding defenders of subjective idealism. This direction is of particular interest, since it starts from a very important and purely psychological position: the first reality that we encounter is sensations. Those philosophers for whom this position is the starting point of philosophical constructions are called sensualists. The father of sensationalism, John Locke, succinctly expressed the credo of this movement when he said: “There is nothing in the intellect that has not first passed through the senses.” Locke's thesis, which argued that the formation of images, ideas and concepts is possible only on the basis of our sensations, can be given a double meaning. Mater ialistically understood, it means that sensations are an indispensable source of our knowledge. But the same thesis takes on a fundamentally different color in the context of ideas of subjective idealism (or agnosticism). Representatives of subjective idealism ask the following question: “The primary source of our knowledge is sensations, but what lies behind the sensations? What causes them? We see the reason that generated the image of this or that phenomenon through sensations. But the fact is that I can get information about this reason through all the same sensations.” So, a vicious circle is formed. If Descartes' circle is closed isolates and isolates consciousness from the outside world, then the Berkeley circle is a circle that isolates y sensations. In the concept of subjective idealism, sensation acquires an independent existence, isolated from reality, that is, it exists without the sensed. With this interpretation of Locke’s thesis, our senses no longer act as unique windows into the world, no longer connecting us with the surrounding reality, but, rather, separating us and fencing us off from the outside world. Then mental phenomena become purely subjective phenomena, “purely” in the sense that there is nothing behind them except subjectivity.<...>
I can look at an object from a different angle, and then it will change, but I also learn about my movement from the same sensations. If we firmly adhere to the logic of subjective idealism, then we will come to the paradoxical conclusion about the unique existence of me as a subject. Just as subjective idealism takes on other forms, so mechanistic materialism has not yet left the arena of history.
And finally, a few words about that stage of history when psychology began to emerge from the depths of philosophy and develop as an independent science. I note that psychology left the womb much later than other natural sciences. It began to develop as a field of specific knowledge sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. The following appeal addressed to researchers of the nature of mental phenomena was of decisive importance for the emergence and development of psychology as an independent science. The scientists who raised this cry argued that psychology should break with speculative, purely philosophical constructions and move on to experimental analysis, designed in the image and likeness of the natural positive sciences. This idea became a turning point in the development of psychology as a field of specific scientific knowledge. |
Animism. In tribal society, the mythological idea of the soul dominated. Let us note that each specific sensually perceived thing was endowed with a supernatural double - a soul (or many souls). This view is called animism (from the Latin "anima" - soul). The surrounding world was perceived as dependent on the arbitrariness of these souls. Therefore, the initial views on the soul relate not so much to the history of psychological knowledge as such (in the sense of knowledge about mental activity), but to the history of general views on nature.
Shifts in the understanding of nature and man that took place in the 6th century BC became a turning point in the history of ideas about mental activity. The material was published on http://site
The works of the ancient Greek sages led to revolutionary changes in ideas about the world around us, the beginning of which was associated with the overcoming of ancient animism.
Animism is the belief in a host of spirits (souls) hidden behind visible things as special “agents” or “ghosts” that leave the human body with their last breath (for example, according to the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras) and, being immortal, eternally wander through the bodies of animals and plants. The ancient Greeks called the soul the word "psyche", which gave the name to our science. It preserves traces of the initial understanding of the connection between life and its physical and organic basis (cf. Russian words: “soul, spirit” and “breathe”, “air”)
It is interesting that already in that ancient era, people, speaking about the soul (“psyche”), connected with each other phenomena inherent in external nature (air), the body (breath) and the psyche (in its subsequent understanding), although, of course, in everyday life In practice, they distinguished these concepts perfectly. Getting acquainted with ideas about human psychology from ancient myths, one cannot help but admire the subtlety of people’s understanding of gods endowed with cunning or wisdom, vindictiveness or generosity, envy or nobility - all those qualities that the creators of myths learned in the earthly practice of their communication with their neighbors. By the way, this mythological picture of the world, where bodies are inhabited by souls (their “doubles” or ghosts), and life depends on the mood of the gods, has reigned in the public consciousness for centuries.
Hylozoism. A fundamentally new approach was expressed by the doctrine that replaced animism about the universal animation of the world - hylozoism, in which nature was conceptualized as a single material whole endowed with life. Decisive changes initially occurred not so much in the actual composition of knowledge as in its general explanatory principles. Let us note that the information about man, his bodily structure and mental properties, which the creators of ancient Greek philosophy and science gleaned from the teachings of thinkers of the ancient East, was now perceived in the context of a new worldview, liberated from mythology.
Heraclitus: the soul as a “spark of Logos”. Hylozoist Heraclitus (late 6th - early 5th century BC) saw the cosmos as an “eternal living fire”, and the soul (“psyche”) as its spark. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the soul is included in the general laws of natural existence, developing according to the same law (Logos) as the cosmos, which is the same for all things, and was not created by any of the gods and none of people, but which has always been, is and will be “an ever-living fire, ignited in measures and extinguished in measures.”
The name of Heraclitus is also associated with the identification of several stages in the process of cognition of the surrounding world. Having separated the activity of the sense organs (sensations) from the mind, he gave a description of the results of human cognitive activity, proving that sensations provide “dark”, little differentiated knowledge, while the result of mental activity will be “light”, clear knowledge. At the same time, sensory and rational knowledge are not opposed, but harmoniously complement each other, like “multiple knowledge” and “mind”. Heraclitus emphasized that “much knowledge does not teach intelligence,” but at the same time, a scientist and philosopher must know a lot in order to form a correct idea of the world around him. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the different aspects of knowledge in Heraclitus are mutually related harmonious opposites that help penetrate into the depths of the Logos.
He also pointed out for the first time the difference between the soul of an adult and a child, since, from his point of view, as the soul grows older, it becomes more and more “dry and hot.” The degree of moisture of the soul affects its cognitive abilities: “dry radiance is the wisest and best soul,” said Heraclitus, and therefore a child, who has a more wet soul, thinks worse than an adult. In the same way, “a drunk man staggers and does not notice where he is going, since his soul is wet.” Thus, the Logos, which rules the cycle of things in nature, also controls the development of the soul and its cognitive abilities.
Let us note that the term “Logos”, introduced by Heraclitus, acquired a great variety of meanings over time, but for him himself it meant the law according to which “everything flows”, phenomena pass into each other. The small world (microcosm) of an individual soul is identical to the macrocosm of the entire world order. Consequently, to comprehend oneself (the “psyche”) means to delve into the law (Logos), which gives the continuously flowing course of things a dynamic harmony, woven from contradictions and cataclysms. After Heraclitus (he was called “dark” because of the difficulty of understanding and “crying”, since he considered the future of humanity even more terrible than the present), the idea of a law that rules all things entered into the stock of means allowing one to read the “book of nature” with meaning. including the non-stop flow of bodies and souls, when “you cannot enter the same river twice.”
Democritus: the soul is a stream of fiery atoms. Heraclitus’s idea that the course of things depends on the law of Logos was developed by Democritus (c. 460-370 BC)
Democritus was born in the city of Abdera, into a noble and wealthy family. His parents tried to give him the best education, but Democritus found it necessary to undertake several long journeys in order to obtain the necessary knowledge not only in Greece, but also in other countries, primarily in Egypt, Persia and India. Democritus spent almost all the money left to him by his parents on these trips, and therefore, when he returned to his homeland, his fellow citizens considered him guilty of embezzling his wealth and scheduled a trial. Democritus had to justify this behavior or leave his home forever. In this justification, Democritus, proving to his fellow citizens the benefit of the knowledge he had acquired, read to the people’s assembly his book “It is important to know that the great world-building” (which, according to contemporaries, was his best work). Fellow citizens felt that the money had been well spent. Democritus was not only acquitted, but also given a large monetary award, and copper statues were erected in his honor.
Unfortunately, the works of Democritus have reached us only in fragments.
It is worth noting that the basis of his theory is the concept according to which the entire world consists of tiny particles invisible to the eye - atoms. Atoms differ from each other in shape, order, and rotation. Man, like all surrounding nature, consists of atoms that form his body and soul. The soul is also material and consists of small round atoms, the most mobile, since they must impart activity to the inert body. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that from the point of view of Democritus, the soul will be a source of activity, energy for the body. After the death of a person, the soul dissipates in the air, and therefore not only the body, but also the soul is mortal.
Democritus believed that the soul is located in the head (the rational part), in the chest (the masculine part), in the liver (the lustful part) and in the senses. When in the sense organs, the atoms of the soul are very close to the surface and can come into contact with microscopic, invisible to the eye copies of surrounding objects (eidoles), which float in the air, reaching the sense organs. These copies are separated (outflow) from all objects of the external world (that is why this theory of knowledge is called the “theory of outflows”) When eidols come into contact with the atoms of the soul, a sensation occurs, and this is how a person learns the properties of surrounding objects. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that all our sensations (including visual, auditory) will be contact. By summarizing the data from several senses, a person discovers the world, moving to the next level - conceptual, which will be the result of the activity of thinking. In other words, Democritus has two stages in the cognitive process - sensations and thinking. At the same time, he emphasized that thinking gives us more knowledge than sensations. Thus, sensations do not allow us to see atoms, but through reflection we come to the conclusion about their existence. “We note that the theory of outflows” was recognized as the basis for the formation of our sensory knowledge of the objective world by all materialists of Ancient Greece.
Democritus also introduced the concept of primary and secondary qualities of objects. Primary - those qualities that actually exist in objects (weight, surface, smooth or rough, shape) Secondary qualities - color, smell, taste, these qualities are not in objects, they were invented by people themselves for their convenience, since “only in opinion there is sour and sweet, red and green, but in reality there is only emptiness and atoms.” Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that Democritus was the first to say that a person cannot completely correctly, adequately understand the world around him. By the way, this inability to fully understand the surrounding reality also applies to understanding the laws that govern the world and human destiny. Democritus argued that there are no accidents in the world, and everything happens for a predetermined reason. People came up with the idea of chance to cover up ignorance of the matter and inability to manage. In fact, there are no accidents, and everything is causal.
This approach is called determinism, and the recognition of the unambiguous necessity of all events occurring in the world gives rise to a fatalistic tendency and denies the human will. Critics of Democritus emphasized that with such an understanding it is impossible not only to control one’s own behavior, but also to evaluate the actions of people, since they depend not on a person’s moral principles, but on fate.
At the same time, Democritus himself sought to combine a fatalistic approach with the idea of human activity when choosing moral criteria behavior. It is worth noting that he said that moral principles are not given by birth, but will be the result of education, so people become good through exercise, not nature. Education, according to Democritus, should give a person three gifts: to think well, speak well and do well. Children who grew up in ignorance are like dancing between swords with the blades facing up. It is worth noting that they die if, when jumping, they do not hit the only place where they should place their feet. Likewise, ignorant people, avoiding following the right example, usually perish.
Democritus himself considered education to be such a difficult matter that he deliberately refused marriage and did not want to have children, believing that they cause a lot of troubles and in case of success the latter was acquired at the cost of great labor, and in case of failure the grief of the parents is incomparable with any other.
The categories in which natural-philosophical* knowledge of the world and human relationships with it were expressed initially had only one area of practical application - medicine. Subsequently (in the IV-IH centuries BC) another area of application of this knowledge appeared - pedagogy. The concepts of doctors were formed under the direct influence of philosophical theories, but these concepts themselves, in turn, left their mark on the “picture of man” as it was drawn in philosophical systems. It is important to note that some of the most significant writings of physicians were the works of Hippocrates.
* Natural philosophers are thinkers focused on the study of the nature of things.
Hippocrates: doctrine of temperaments. The school of Hippocrates (c. 460-377 BC), known to us from the so-called “Hippocratic Collection,” viewed life as a changing process. Among its explanatory principles, we find air in the role of a force that maintains the inextricable connection of the body with the world, brings intelligence from the outside, and implements mental functions in the brain. The single material principle was rejected as the basis of organic life. If a person were one, then he would never get sick, and if he were sick, then the healing remedy would have to be one. But there is no such thing.
Hippocrates replaced the doctrine of a single element underlying the diversity of things with the doctrine of four fluids (blood, mucus, yellow bile and black bile). Hence, depending on which fluid predominates, there is a version of four temperaments, later called: sanguine (when blood predominates), phlegmatic (mucus), choleric (yellow bile) and melancholic (black bile)
For future scientific psychology, this explanatory principle, with all its naivety, was very important (it is not for nothing that Hippocrates’ terminology has been preserved to this day). First of all, the hypothesis was brought to the fore, according to which countless differences between people can be grouped according to several common characteristics of behavior; thus laying the foundations of the scientific typology that underlies modern teachings about individual differences between people. Secondly, Hippocrates looked for the source and cause of differences within the body; mental qualities were made dependent on physical ones. The role of the nervous system in that era was not yet known, therefore the typology was, in today's language, humoral (from the Latin “humor” - liquid)
Alcmaeon: the brain is the organ of the soul. The humoral orientation of the thinking of ancient Greek physicians did not at all imply that they ignored the structure of organs specifically designed to perform mental functions. For a long time, both in the East and in Greece, two theories “heart-centric” and “brain-centric” competed with each other.
The idea that the brain is an organ of the soul belongs to the ancient Greek physician Alcmaeon of Cretona (VI century BC), who came to this conclusion as a result of observations and surgical operations. In particular, he found out the fact that from the cerebral hemispheres “two narrow paths go to the eye sockets.” It is worth saying that, believing that sensation arises due to the special structure of the peripheral sensory apparatus, Alcmaeon at the same time argued that there is a direct connection between the sense organs and the brain.
Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the doctrine of the psyche as a product of the brain arose due to the discovery of the direct dependence of sensations on the structure of the brain, and this, in turn, became possible thanks to the accumulation of empirical facts. Sensations, according to Alcmaeon, are the starting point of all cognitive work. “The brain provides (us) with the sensations of hearing, sight and smell, from the latter arise memory and idea (opinion), and from memory and idea, which have reached unshakable strength, knowledge is born, which is such by virtue of its strength.”
Let us note that in this way other mental processes arising from sensations were associated with the brain, although knowledge about these processes (unlike knowledge about sensations) could not be based on anatomical and physiological experience.
Following Alcmaeon, Hippocrates also interpreted the brain as an organ of the psyche, believing that it would be a large gland.
It should be noted that in the 20th century, scientists turned to research on both nervous processes and body fluids, its hormones (a Greek word meaning something that excites). Note that now both doctors and psychologists talk about a unified neurohumoral regulation of behavior.
If you look at the Hippocratic temperaments from a general theoretical perspective, you will notice their weak side (however, it is also inherent in modern typologies of characters): the body was considered as a mixture - in certain proportions - of various elements, but how did this mixture turn into a harmonious whole? remained a mystery.
Anaxagoras: "mind" as the beginning of things. The philosopher Anaxagoras (5th century BC) tried to solve this riddle. It is worth noting that he did not accept Heraclitean view of the world as a fiery stream, nor the Democritus picture of atomic vortices. Considering nature to consist of many tiny particles, he looked for the beginning in it, thanks to which an organized cosmos arises from chaos, from the disordered accumulation and movement of these particles. Anaxagoras recognized this beginning as the “subtlest thing,” to which he gave the name “nus” (mind). It is worth noting that he believed that their perfection depended on how fully the mind was represented in various bodies. “Man,” said Anaxagoras, “will be the most intelligent of animals due to the fact that he has hands.” It turned out that it is not the mind that determines a person’s advantages, but his bodily organization that determines the highest mental quality - rationality.
The principles formulated by Heraclitus, Democritus and Anaxagoras created the main vital nerve of the future system of scientific understanding of the world, incl. and knowledge of mental phenomena. No matter what tortuous paths knowledge took in subsequent centuries, it was subject to the ideas of law, causality and organization. The explanatory principles discovered two and a half thousand years ago in Ancient Greece have become the basis for the knowledge of mental phenomena for all times.
Sophists: teachers of wisdom. A completely new side of the knowledge of mental phenomena was discovered by the activity of the sophist philosophers (from the Greek “sophia” wisdom). They were not interested in nature, with its laws independent of man, but in man, who, as the aphorism of the first sophist Protagoras said, “is the measure of all things ". Subsequently, the nickname “sophist” began to be applied to false sages who, using various tricks, present imaginary evidence as true. But in the history of psychological knowledge, the activity of the sophists opened a new object: relationships between people, studied using means that are designed to prove and inspire any position, regardless of its reliability.
In connection with this detailed discussion, methods of logical reasoning, the structure of speech, and the nature of the relationship between words, thoughts and perceived objects were subjected to detailed discussion. How can anything be conveyed through language, asked the sophist Gorgias, if its sounds have nothing in common with the things they denote. And this was not purely a logical trick, but raised a real problem. It is worth noting that it, like other issues discussed by the Sophists, prepared the development of a new direction in the understanding of the soul.
The search for the natural “matter” of the soul was abandoned. The study of speech and mental activity from the perspective of its use to manipulate people has come to the fore. Their behavior was not dependent on material causes, as was imagined by previous philosophers who drew the soul into the cosmic cycle. Let us note that now she fell into a network of arbitrary logical-linguistic intricacies. From ideas about the soul, signs of its subordination to strict laws and inevitable causes operating in physical nature disappeared. Language and thought lack such inevitability; they are full of conventions and depend on human interests and preferences. Let us note that thereby the actions of the soul acquired instability and uncertainty.
One of the most remarkable thinkers of the ancient world, Socrates (469-399 BC), sought to return strength and reliability to the actions of the soul, but rooted not in the eternal laws of the macrocosm, but in the internal structure of the soul itself.
Socrates: Know thyself. The son of a sculptor and a midwife, he, having received a common education for the Athenians of that time, became a philosopher who discussed the problems of the theory of knowledge, data, politics, pedagogy with any person who agreed to answer his questions anywhere - on the street, on the market square, in any time. Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did not take money for philosophizing, and among his listeners there were people of the most varied financial status, education, political beliefs, ideological and moral disposition. The meaning of Socrates' activity (it was called "dialectics" - finding the truth through conversation) was to help the interlocutor, with the help of certain questions selected in a certain way, find the true answer (the so-called Socratic method) and thereby lead him from vague ideas to logically clear knowledge of the subjects discussed. A wide range of “everyday concepts” about justice, injustice, goodness, beauty, courage, etc. were discussed.
Socrates considered it their duty to accept Active participation V public life Athens. At the same time, he did not always agree with the opinion of the majority in the national assembly and in the jury trial, which required considerable courage, especially during the reign of the “thirty tyrants.” Socrates considered his disagreements with the majority to be the result of the fact that he always strived to observe laws and justice, which most people do not always care about. It is worth noting that he was accused of “not honoring the gods and corrupting youth,” and was sentenced to death by 361 votes out of 500 judges. Socrates courageously accepted the sentence, drinking poison and rejecting the plans of their students to escape as salvation.
Socrates did not write down his reasoning, believing that only a live conversation leads to the desired result - the education of the individual. Therefore, it is difficult to completely reconstruct his views, which we know from the three main sources of the comedies of Aristophanes, the memoirs of Xenophon and the works of Plato. All these authors emphasize that it was Socrates who first considered the soul primarily as a source of human morality, and not as a source of body activity (as was customary in the theories of Heraclitus and Democritus). Socrates said that the soul is a mental quality of an individual, inherent to him as a rational being acting in accordance with moral ideals. Such an approach to the soul could not proceed from the thought of its materiality, and therefore, simultaneously with the emergence of a view on the connection of the soul with morality, a new view of it also emerged, which was later developed by Socrates’ student Plato.
Speaking about morality, Socrates associated it with human behavior. Morality is a good realized in the actions of people. Moreover, in order to evaluate this or that act as moral, one must first know what good is. Therefore, Socrates connected morality with reason, believing that virtue consists in knowledge of the good and in acting according to this knowledge. For example, a brave person is one who knows how to behave in danger and acts according to their knowledge. Therefore, first of all, it is necessary to train people, show them the difference between good and bad, and then evaluate their behavior. By learning the difference between good and evil, a person begins to know himself. Thus, Socrates comes to the most important point of their views, associated with the transfer of the center of research interests from the surrounding reality to man.
Socrates' motto was: "Know thyself." By self-knowledge, Socrates did not mean turning “inward” - to one’s own experiences and states of consciousness (the very concept of consciousness had not yet been isolated at that time), but an analysis of actions and attitudes towards them, moral assessments and norms of human behavior in various life situations. This led to a new understanding of the essence of the soul.
If the sophists took as their starting point man’s attitude not to nature, but to other people, then for Socrates the most important thing is man’s attitude to himself as the bearer of intellectual and moral qualities. Subsequently, they even said that Socrates was the pioneer of psychotherapy, trying to use words to reveal what is hidden behind the external manifestations of the work of the mind.
In any case, his method contained ideas that played a key role in psychological studies of thinking many centuries later. First of all, the work of thought was made dependent on the task, which created an obstacle to its usual flow. It was precisely this task that became the system of questions that Socrates brought down on his interlocutor, thereby awakening his mental activity. Secondly, this activity was initially in the nature of a dialogue. Both features: a) the direction of thought created by the task, and b) dialogism, which assumes that cognition is initially social, since it is rooted in the communication of subjects, became the main guidelines in the experimental psychology of thinking in the 20th century.
We know about this philosopher, who has become for all centuries the ideal of selflessness, honesty, and independence of thought, from the words of his students. He himself never narrated anything and considered himself not a teacher of wisdom, but a person who awakened in others the desire for truth.
After Socrates, whose center of interest was primarily the mental activity (its products and values) of the individual subject, the concept of the soul was filled with new substantive content. It consisted of completely special entities, which physical nature does not know.
The ideas put forward by Socrates were developed into the theories of his outstanding student Plato.
Plato: the soul and the kingdom of ideas. Plato (428-348 BC) was born into a noble Athenian family. His versatile abilities began to manifest themselves very early and served as the basis for many legends, the most common of which attributes to him divine origin (making him the son of Apollo). Plato’s real name is Aristocles, but in his youth he receives a new name - Plato, which means broad-shouldered (in In his early years he was fond of gymnastics) Plato had a gift for giving, his philosophical works were written in a highly literary language, they contained many artistic descriptions and metaphors. At the same time, his passion for philosophy and the ideas of Socrates, whose student he became in Athens, distracted Plato from his original intention to devote his life to poetry. Plato carried his loyalty to philosophy and his great mentor throughout his life. After the tragic death of Socrates, Plato leaves Athens, vowing never to return to that city again.
His travels lasted about ten years and ended tragically - he was sold into slavery by the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius, who initially called on Plato to help him build an ideal state. Plato's friends, having learned about this, collected the amount necessary for the ransom, but by that time Plato was already freed. Then the collected money was handed over to Plato, and he bought a plot of land on the northwestern outskirts of Athens and founded a school there, which he called the Academy. Already in his old age, Plato makes a second attempt to participate in state affairs, trying to create an ideal state together with the son of Dionysius, Dionysius the Younger, however, this attempt also ended in failure. Disappointment in the surroundings has darkened last years Plato's life, although until the end of his days he was surrounded by many students and followers, among whom was Aristotle.
Plato relied not only on the ideas of Socrates, but also on certain provisions of the Pythagoreans,* in particular on the deification of number. Above the gate of Plato's Academy it was written: "Let him who does not know geometry enter here." In an effort to create a universal concept that unites man and the cosmos, Plato believed that surrounding objects would be the result of the union of the soul, the idea, with inanimate matter.
* According to the views of the Pythagorean school (about whose founder there is no reliable information), the universe has not a material, but an arithmetic-geometric structure. Harmony reigns in everything that exists, having a numerical expression.
Plato believed that there is perfect world, in which there are souls, or ideas, of things, those perfect samples that become prototypes of real objects. The perfection of these samples is beyond the reach of objects, but makes us strive to be like them. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the soul will be not only an idea, but also the goal of a real thing. In principle, Plato's idea will be a general concept, which does not exist in real life, but a reflection of which will be all the things included in this concept. So, there is no generalized person, but each of the people will be, as it were, a variation of the concept “person”.
Since the concept is immutable, then the idea, or soul, from Plato’s position, is constant, unchanging and immortal. It is worth noting that she will be the guardian of human morality. Being a rationalist, Plato believed that behavior should be prompted and directed by reason, and not by feelings, and opposed Democritus and his theory of determinism, asserting the possibility of human freedom, the freedom of his rational behavior. The soul, according to Plato, consists of three parts: lustful, passionate and rational. The lustful and passionate soul must submit to the rational soul, which alone can make behavior moral. In their dialogues, Plato likens the soul to a chariot drawn by two horses. The black horse - a lustful soul - does not listen to orders and needs a constant rein, as he strives to overturn the chariot and throw it into the abyss. The white horse is a passionate soul, although it tries to follow its path, it does not always obey the driver and needs constant supervision. And finally, Plato identifies the rational part of the soul with the driver, who seeks the right path and directs the chariot along it, driving the horse. In describing the soul, Plato adheres to clear black-and-white criteria, proving that there are bad and good parts of the soul: the rational part for him will be clearly good, while the lustful and passionate part will be bad, lower.
Since the soul is constant and a person cannot change it, then the content of the knowledge that is stored in the soul is also unchanged, and the discoveries made by a person will not, in fact, be discoveries of something new, but exclusively the awareness of what has already been stored in the shower. Thus, Plato understood the process of thinking as remembering what the soul knew in its cosmic life, but forgot when entering the body. And thinking itself, which he considered the main cognitive process, will essentially be reproductive thinking, not creative thinking (although Plato operates with the concept of “intuition”, leading to creative thinking)
Exploring cognitive processes, Plato spoke about sensation, memory and thinking, and he was the first to talk about memory as an independent mental process. It is worth noting that he gives memory a definition - “the imprint of a ring on wax” - and considers it one of the most important stages in the process of cognition of the environment. The process of cognition itself in Plato, as already mentioned, was presented in the form of recollection; thus, memory was the repository of all knowledge, both conscious and unconscious at the moment.
At the same time, Plato considered memory, like sensations, to be a passive process and contrasted them with thinking, emphasizing its active nature. The activity of thinking is ensured by its connection with speech, as Socrates spoke about. Plato develops the ideas of Socrates, proving that thinking is a dialogue of the soul with itself (in modern language, internal speech). At the same time, the process of logical thinking unfolded in time and consciously cannot convey the fullness of knowledge, since it relies on the study of surrounding objects, that is, copies real knowledge about subjects. Let us note that, nevertheless, a person has the opportunity to penetrate into the essence of things, and it is associated with intuitive thinking, with penetration into the depths of the soul, which stores true knowledge. It is worth noting that they are revealed to a person immediately, in their entirety. (This instantaneous process is similar to “insight,” which will later be described by Gestalt psychology. Moreover, despite the procedural similarity of intuitive thinking with “insight,” they are different in content, since Plato’s insight is not associated with the discovery of something new, but exclusively with awareness what was already stored in the soul.)
Plato's research laid new trends not only in philosophy, but also in psychology. It is worth noting that he was the first to identify stages in the process of cognition, discovering the role of inner speech and the activity of thinking. He also for the first time presented the soul not as an integral organization, but as a certain structure, which is under the pressure of opposing tendencies, conflicting motives, which are not always possible to reconcile with the help of reason. (By the way, this idea of Plato about internal conflict the soul will become especially relevant in psychoanalysis, while its approach to the problem of knowledge will be reflected in the position of rationalists.)
Knowledge about the soul - from its beginnings on ancient soil to modern ideas - developed, on the one hand, in conjunction with the level of knowledge about external nature, on the other - as a result of the assessment of cultural values. Neither nature nor culture in themselves form the realm of the psyche, but the latter cannot exist without interaction with them. Philosophers before Socrates, thinking about mental phenomena, focused on nature, looking for one of the natural elements as an equivalent of these phenomena, forming a single world governed by natural laws. Only by comparing ϶ᴛᴏ performance with ancient faith into souls as special counterparts of bodies, one can feel the explosive power of that philosophy professed by Heraclitus, Democritus, Anaxagoras and other ancient Greek thinkers. It is worth noting that they destroyed the old worldview, where everything earthly, incl. the mental, became dependent on the whim of the gods, crushed the mythology that had reigned in the minds of people for thousands of years, raised the mind and ability of man to think logically, and tried to find the real causes of phenomena.
This was a great intellectual revolution, from which scientific knowledge about the psyche should be counted. After the Sophists and Socrates, in the explanations of the essence of the soul, there was a revolution towards understanding it as a cultural phenomenon, since the abstract concepts and moral ideals that make up the soul cannot be derived from the substance of nature. It is worth noting that they are products of spiritual culture.
For representatives of both orientations – “natural” and “cultural” – the soul acted as a reality external to the body, either material (fire, air) or incorporeal (the focus of concepts, generally valid norms). Whether we were talking about atoms (Democritus) or about ideal forms (Plato) - it was assumed that both enter the body from the outside, from the outside.
Aristotle: the soul is a way of organizing the body. Aristotle (384-322 BC) overcame these views, opening a new era in the understanding of the soul as a subject of psychological knowledge. Its source for Aristotle was not physical bodies and incorporeal ideas, but the organism, where the physical and the spiritual form an inseparable integrity. The soul, according to Aristotle, is not an independent entity, but a form, a way of organizing a living body. Let us note that this put an end to both the naive animistic dualism and the sophisticated dualism of Plato.
Aristotle was the son of a physician under the Macedonian king and was himself preparing for the medical profession. Having appeared as a seventeen-year-old youth in Athens to the sixty-year-old Plato, he studied for several years at his Academy, with which he later broke up. Famous picture Raphael's "School of Athens" depicts Plato pointing his hand to the sky. Aristotle - to earth. These images capture the difference in orientation of the two great thinkers. According to Aristotle, the ideological wealth of the world is hidden in sensually perceived earthly things and is revealed in direct communication with them.
On the outskirts of Athens, Aristotle created his own school, called the Lyceum (later the word “lyceum” began to be used to refer to privileged educational institutions). It was an indoor gallery where Aristotle, usually walking, taught classes. “Those think correctly,” Aristotle told his disciples, “who imagine that the soul cannot exist without a body and will not be a body.”
Who was meant by those who “think correctly”? It is quite clear that they are not natural philosophers, for whom the soul is the most subtle body. But not Plato, who considered the soul a pilgrim, wandering through bodies and other worlds. The decisive result of Aristotle’s thoughts: “The soul cannot be separated from the body” - contradicted Plato’s views on the past and future of the soul. It turns out that Aristotle considered his own understanding to be “correct,” according to which it is not the soul that experiences, thinks, and learns, but the whole organism. “To say that the soul is angry,” he narrated, “is equivalent to saying that the soul is engaged in weaving or building a house.”
Aristotle was both a philosopher and a naturalist explorer of nature. It is important to note that at one time he taught science to the young Alexander the Great, who subsequently ordered samples of plants and animals from the conquered countries to be sent to his old teacher.
A huge amount of comparative anatomical, zoological, embryological and other facts accumulated, which became the experimental basis for observations and analysis of the behavior of living beings. The generalization of these facts, primarily biological ones, became the basis of Aristotle’s psychological teachings and the transformation of the main explanatory principles of psychology: organization, patterns, causality.
The very term “organism” requires us to consider it from the point of view of organization, that is, the ordering of the whole to achieve a goal or to solve a problem. The structure of this whole and its work (function) are inseparable. “If the eye were a living being, its soul would be vision,” said Aristotle.
The soul was thought of by Aristotle as a way of organizing a living body, the actions of which are expedient. It is worth noting that he believed the soul to be inherent in all living organisms (including plants) and subject to objective, experimental study. It is worth noting that it cannot exist without a body and at the same time will not be a body. The soul cannot be separated from the body. Let us note that thereby the versions about the past and future of the soul, the ways of its connection with the material body external to it were rejected. Not the soul itself, but the body thanks to it learns, thinks and acts. The primary level of these relationships is represented in the processes of nutrition (“plant soul”) as the assimilation by a living body of the material substances necessary for its existence. This relationship presupposes the specific activity of the organism, thanks to which the external is absorbed by the living body differently than by the inorganic one, namely, through expedient distribution “within the boundaries and the law.” Such a way of apprehending the external, specific to a living organism, should, according to Aristotle, be considered the soul in its most fundamental biological form. The starting point for life will be nutrition as a strengthening of the external. Aristotle extended this general explanatory principle to other levels of activity of the soul, primarily to sensory impressions, to the ability to sense, which he interprets as a special likeness of the sense organ to an external object. Moreover, here, unlike nutrition, it is not the material substance that is assimilated, but the form of the object.
The soul has various abilities as stages of its development: plant, sensory and mental (inherent only to man). In relation to the explanation of the soul, Aristotle, contrary to his postulate about the inseparability of the soul and the body capable of life, believed that the mind in its highest, essential expression is something different from the body. Hierarchy of levels cognitive activity ended with the “supreme mind”, which was not mixed with anything corporeal or external.
The beginning of knowledge is the sensory ability. It is worth noting that it imprints the form of things just as “wax receives the impression of a seal without iron or gold.” In this process of assimilating the living body to external objects, Aristotle attached great importance to a special central organ called the “general sensory organ.” This center cognizes the qualities common to all sensations - movement, size, figure, etc. Thanks to it, it becomes possible for the subject to distinguish between modalities of sensations (color, taste, smell)
Aristotle considered the central organ of the soul not the brain, but the heart, connected with the organs of sense and movement through blood circulation. The body imprints external impressions in the form of “fantasy” images (data meant ideas of memory and imagination). It is worth noting that they are connected according to the laws of association of three types - contiguity (if two impressions followed each other, then subsequently one of them causes the other), similarities and contrasts. (These laws discovered by Aristotle became the basis of the direction, which later received the name of associative psychology.)
Aristotle adhered, in modern terms, to a systematic approach, since he considered living body and its abilities as an expediently operating system. His important contribution would also be the affirmation of the idea of development, since he taught that a higher-level ability arises on the basis of a previous, more elementary one. Aristotle correlated the development of an individual organism with the development of the entire animal world. In an individual person, during his transformation from a baby into a mature being, those steps that the organic world has passed through during its history are repeated. This generalization contained in its rudimentary form an idea that was later called the biological law.
Aristotle distinguished between theoretical and practical reason. The principle of this distinction was the difference between the functions of thinking. Knowledge as such does not in itself make a person moral. His virtues depend neither on knowledge nor on nature, which only potentially endows the individual with inclinations from which his qualities can further develop. It is worth noting that they are formed in real actions that give a person a certain stamp. This is also due to how he relates to his feelings (affects)
The action is associated with affect. It is worth saying that every situation has an optimal affective reaction to it. When it is excessive or insufficient, people act badly. Combining motivation with a moral assessment of an act, Aristotle brought the biological doctrine of the soul closer to data. “Everyone is able to be angry and easily, as well as give out money and spend it, but not everyone knows how and it is not easy to do it in relation to the one to whom it should be and for what and how it should be.” If the affect (emotional state) and action are adequate to the situation, then spending money is usually called generosity: if it is inadequate, it is either wastefulness or stinginess. It is extremely important to develop the correct way of responding through experience, studying others and yourself, and hard work. A person is what he cultivates and develops within himself.
Aristotle was the first to speak about the nature-conformity of education and the need to correlate pedagogical methods with the level of mental development of the child. It is worth noting that he proposed periodization, the basis of which was the structure of the soul he identified. He divided childhood into three periods: up to 7 years, from 7 to 14 and from 14 to 21 years. It is worth saying that for each of these periods a specific education system should be developed. For example, speaking about preschool age. Aristotle emphasized that in this period the most important place is occupied by the formation of the plant soul; Therefore, for young children, daily routine, proper nutrition, and hygiene are so important. It is extremely important for schoolchildren to develop other skills, in particular movements (with the help of gymnastic exercises), sensations, memory, and aspirations. Moral education must be based on the exercise of moral action.
If Plato considered feelings to be evil, then Aristotle, on the contrary, talked about the importance of educating children’s feelings, emphasizing the need for moderation and a reasonable correlation of feelings with the environment. It is important to know that he attached great importance to affects that arise independently of the will of a person and the fight against which with the power of reason alone is impossible. That's why he emphasized the role of art.
It is worth noting that especially dramatic art, which, by evoking strong emotions in viewers and listeners, promotes catharsis, i.e. cleansing from affect, while simultaneously teaching both children and adults the culture of feelings.
Speaking about morality, Plato emphasized that only absolutely correct and perfect behavior is moral, and any deviations from the rule, even with the best goals, will already be an offense.
In contrast, Aristotle emphasized the importance of the very desire for moral behavior. Thus, he encouraged the child's attempts, albeit unsuccessful, to “be good,” thereby creating additional motivation.
Thus, Aristotle transformed the key explanatory principles of psychology: systematicity (organization), development, determinism. The soul for Aristotle is not a special entity, but a way of organizing a living body, which is a system; the soul goes through different stages in development and is capable of not only capturing what is acting on the body at the moment, but also being consistent with a future goal.
Aristotle discovered and studied many specific mental phenomena. But there are no “pure facts” in science. Any fact is seen differently depending on the theoretical angle of view, on the categories and explanatory schemes with which the researcher is armed. Having enriched the explanatory principles, Aristotle presented a completely different, compared to his predecessors, picture of the structure, functions and development of the soul.
Psychological views in the Hellenistic era. As already mentioned, after the campaigns of the Macedonian king Alexander (IV century BC), the largest monarchy of antiquity arose.
Its subsequent collapse opened a new period in the history of the ancient world - the Hellenistic - with its characteristic synthesis of elements of the cultures of Greece and the countries of the East.
It is worth saying that the position of the individual in society has changed radically. The free Greek lost contact with his hometown, a stable social environment and found himself faced with unpredictable changes. With increasing acuteness he felt the fragility of his existence in a changed world. These shifts in the real situation and self-perception of the individual left an imprint on ideas about her mental life.
Belief in the power of reason, in the great intellectual achievements of the previous era, is called into question. A philosophy of skepticism arises, which recommends generally abstaining from judgments concerning the surrounding world, due to their unprovability, relativity, dependence on customs, etc. (Pyrrho, late 4th century BC) It was precisely this intellectual attitude that came from data motivation. It was assumed that giving up the search for truth would allow one to find peace of mind, to achieve a state of ataraxia (from the Greek word meaning absence of worries)
The idealization of the lifestyle of a sage, detached from the play of external elements and thanks to him able to preserve his individuality in an unstable world, to withstand shocks that threaten his very existence, directed the intellectual searches of the other two philosophical schools that dominated the Hellenistic period - the Stoics and the Epicureans. Connected by their roots with the schools of classical Greece, they rethought their ideological heritage in accordance with the spirit of the new era.
Stoics. The Stoic school arose in the 4th century BC. It is worth noting that it received its name from the name of the place in Athens (“standing” - the portico of the temple), where its founder Zeno (not to be confused with the sophist Zeno) preached this teaching. Representing the cosmos as a single whole, consisting of endless modifications of fiery air - pneuma, the Stoics considered the human soul to be one of such modifications.
By pneuma (the original meaning of the word is inhaled air), the first natural philosophers understood a single natural, material principle that permeates both the external physical space and the living organism and the psyche residing in it (i.e. the area of sensations, feelings, thoughts)
In Anaximenes, as in Heraclitus and other natural philosophers, the view of the psyche as a particle of air or fire meant that it was generated by the external, material cosmos. Among the Stoics, the fusion of psyche and nature acquired a different meaning. Nature itself was spiritualized, endowed with signs characteristic of reason - but not individual, but super-individual.
According to this teaching, the world pneuma is identical to the world soul, “divine fire,” which will be the Logos or, as the later Stoics believed, fate. Man's happiness was seen in living according to the Logos.
Like their predecessors in classical Greece, the Stoics believed in the primacy of reason, in the fact that a person does not achieve happiness because he does not know what it consists of. But if previously there was an image of a harmonious personality, in a full life in which the rational and the sensual (emotional) merge, then among the thinkers of the Hellenistic era, in an environment of social adversity, fear, dissatisfaction, anxiety, the attitude towards emotional upheavals - affects - changed.
The Stoics declared war on affects, seeing in them “corruption of the mind,” since they arise as a result of “wrong” activity of the mind. Pleasure and pain are false judgments about the present; desire and fear are equally false judgments about the future. Affects should be treated like diseases. They need to be “rooted out of the soul.” Only the mind, free from any emotional shocks (both positive and negative), is capable of correctly guiding behavior. It is this that allows a person to fulfill his purpose, his duty and maintain his inner integrity.
By the way, this data-psychological doctrine was usually associated with an attitude that, in modern language, could be called psychotherapeutic. People felt the need to resist the vicissitudes and dramatic turns of life that deprive them of mental balance. The study of thinking and its relationship to emotions was not of an abstract theoretical nature, but was correlated with real life, with learning the art of living. Increasingly, philosophers were turned to to discuss and resolve personal, moral problems. From seekers of truths, they turned into healers of souls, as priests and confessors later became.
Epicureans. The school of Epicurus (late 4th century BC) was based on different cosmological principles, but with the same orientation towards the search for happiness and the art of living. In their ideas about nature, the Epicureans relied on the atomism of Democritus. At the same time, in contrast to the Democritus’ doctrine of the inevitability of the movement of atoms according to laws that exclude chance, Epicurus assumed that these particles could deviate from their natural trajectories. This conclusion had a data-psychological basis.
In contrast to the version of “hard” causality in everything that happens in the world (and, therefore, in the soul), the Epicureans allowed spontaneity, the spontaneity of changes, their random nature.
From one point of view, this approach reflected a sense of the unpredictability of human existence, on the other, it recognized the possibility of spontaneous deviations inherent in the nature of things, excluded the strict predetermination of actions, and offered a certain freedom of choice. In other words, the Epicureans believed that a person is capable of acting at his own fear and risk. However, the word “fear” here can only be used metaphorically: the whole point of the Epicurean teaching was that, imbued with it, people would be saved precisely from fear.
The doctrine of atoms also served this purpose: the living body, like the soul, consists of atoms moving in emptiness, which at the moment of death are scattered according to the general laws of the same eternal cosmos. And if so, then “death has nothing to do with us; when we exist, then death is not yet there, but when death comes, then we are no longer there.”
The picture of nature and man’s place in it presented in the teachings of Epicurus contributed to the achievement of serenity of spirit, free from fears, first of all, of death and the gods (who, living between worlds, do not interfere in the affairs of people, since this would disrupt their serene existence)
Like many Stoics, the Epicureans thought about ways to achieve independence of the individual from the external. The best way they saw it as self-removal from all public affairs. It is this behavior that will allow you to avoid grief, anxiety, negative emotions and thereby experience pleasure, since it is nothing other than the absence of suffering.
A follower of Epicurus in Ancient Rome was Lucretius (1st century BC). It is worth noting that he criticized the Stoic teaching about reason, poured in the form of pneuma. In reality, according to Lucretius, there are only atoms that move according to the laws of mechanics; as a result, the mind itself arises. In cognition, sensations will be primary, transformed (like “how a spider weaves a web”) into other images leading to the mind.
The teachings of Lucretius (stated, by the way, in simple form), like the concepts of the thinkers of the previous Hellenistic period, were his kind of instructions in the art of surviving in a whirlpool of disasters, forever getting rid of the fear of afterlife punishment and otherworldly forces.
Problems of moral behavior and education. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that in the Hellenistic period, the problem of data, moral behavior fell into the center of interests of psychologists of different directions. For both the Stoics and the Epicureans, the study of the criteria of moral and immoral, by which human behavior can be assessed, was of great importance. The main reason The divergence of the positions of the Stoics and Epicureans was the question of the relationship between the individual and society. Should a person obey external rules or should he follow only his own ideas about good and evil? own desires and standards?
Even in the culture of Ancient Greece, the idea arose that a strong, significant person has the right to laws, his own position and his actions must be assessed by data standards other than life common man. In our time, this idea of a superman was developed by F. Nietzsche.
The Cynic school believed that a true personality should defiantly ignore public opinion. From this point of view, each person will be self-sufficient, i.e. has everything necessary for spiritual, data life within itself. At the same time, as one of the leading scientists of the school, Diogenes of Sinope, emphasized, not every person is able to understand himself, come to himself and be content only with what he has in himself. People are accustomed to the help of society, other people, and comfort.
Therefore, the only way for moral self-improvement is the path to oneself, a path that limits contacts and dependence on the outside world. It is best to carry out such self-improvement with early childhood; that's why they should be special schools cynics for children (although such training is possible in adulthood)
Path moral development and training in Cynic schools consisted of three stages - asceticism, apadekia and autarky. The first step consisted of giving up the comfort and benefits that society provides. The Cynics walked in shabby clothes, in rags, even in the rain and cold they did not accept warm clothes, ate very little, did not have permanent housing, they could sleep in the open air, without washing. It is worth noting that they denied all the achievements of everyday culture, striving for simplification. In this way, from their point of view, dependence on society was overcome, which, in exchange for comfort, required a person to betray himself. At the next stage, a person was instilled with the idea of ignoring the knowledge accumulated by society; illiteracy was even considered a virtue. At the third stage of independence, a person was taught not to pay attention to public opinion, to praise and blame. For this purpose, a special exercise was invented, which consisted in the fact that the student had to beg from a marble statue. Such behavior was considered successful when he continued his prayers despite the stony, cold silence of the statue. In the same way, students were taught not to pay attention to the ridicule, insults and threats that accompanied their appearance in the cities in torn and dirty clothes. In fact, the Cynics, striving for independence, taught not so much self-sufficiency as negativity towards society, shocking public opinion.
More widespread were the views of Epicurus, who argued that it is not negativism, but alienation, withdrawal from society that is most Right way spiritual self-development and self-improvement. It is worth noting that he believed that the only source of both good and evil would be man himself, who is also the main judge of his own actions. Thus, the source of activity, like the source of morality, lies in man himself. Epicurus opposed the assertion that only behavior based on reason will be moral. It is worth noting that he believed that it is not the mind, but the feelings that control human behavior, causing in him the desire to do what causes pleasure and avoid those objects that cause displeasure.
Epicurus emphasized that from early childhood a person must learn to distinguish between desires and build behavior based on knowledge. It is worth noting that he argued that anything that causes pleasant feelings will be moral. You cannot live pleasantly without living morally, and you cannot live morally without receiving pleasure from it, Epicurus believed. In this case, true pleasure is provided only by spiritual pleasures, which are eternal and enduring, while bodily pleasures are temporary and can turn into their opposite. So, after a good dinner with excesses, your head or stomach may hurt, after contact with an unfamiliar woman you can catch a bad disease, and exclusively communication with books and friends is eternal and always brings only joy.
Expanding the position of Epicurus, Lucretius Carus narrated that “all those who strive to reach the heights of pleasure have made the path that ascends to him disastrous...” True happiness is for the one “who has the wealth of a moderate life, a serene spirit and he lives, being content with little."
There were vulnerabilities in Epicurus’s position, since if a person finds strength in himself and only in himself, punishes and encourages himself, he lacks the support necessary for many, helping to overcome difficulties and temptations, giving hope that someone will appreciate his behavior and reward him. If a child, as Epicurus said, is taught to rely only on his own strengths, without fear of failure and condemnation, then such upbringing certainly helps strong people quickly find their way, but it can be painful and even dangerous for the weak who need help. and support.At the same time, one cannot but agree with his position that fear - both of teachers and of gods - hinders human development.
It is important to note that one of the main postulates of the Stoic school said that a person cannot be absolutely free, since he lives according to the laws of the world into which he finds himself. In this case, we cannot choose either the play we ended up in or the role we played. This is given by fate, by fate, which no one can change. What can a person himself do? He can only play with dignity the role that is destined for him. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the main moral law is the need to preserve one’s essence, one’s dignity in any, even the most difficult circumstances. A person from an early age must understand that he is not able to change his fate, to evade it, the Stoics believed. Therefore, whether you like it or not, you will still fulfill the will of fate. But you can be a pitiful spectacle of a person crying and not understanding his goal, or you can walk through life with your head held high, aware of where you are going.
The Stoics argued that “whoever willingly obeys orders avoids the most unpleasant side of slavery - doing what you don’t want.” Unhappy is not the one who carries out other people's orders, but the one who carries them out against his will; Therefore, you need to accustom yourself to desire what circumstances require.
Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the main danger in the process of education for the Stoics was the element of feelings, which must be curbed in children for their own benefit.
Achieving complete self-control, tranquility, which is not disturbed by any everyday worries, is a sign of the highest mental health, and from the position of Marcus Aurelius, who said: “Consider it a sign of complete development if you are not disturbed by any noise, no voices will disturb you.” whether they contain flattering words, or threats, or just empty sounds.”
Stoic ethics in no way called for passivity. On the contrary, she was filled with faith in man, in the power of his mind. From an early age, children were taught that they could understand and overcome absolutely everything. Marcus Aurelius, in this instruction to young men, told: “If something is inaccessible to you, do not think that it is inaccessible to everyone, but if it is available to someone, then it is also available to you, since you are a person.” Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that every child had to understand that despite external limitations (poverty, illness), morally and intellectually he is no different from his more successful peers and therefore the laws and requirements for him are the same , as for them.
The Stoics emphasized that a strong person in any conditions, even in slavery and prison, will be internally healthy.
Alexandrian science. During the Hellenistic period, new cultural centers arose where various currents of Eastern thought interacted with Western ones. Among these centers, the ones created in Egypt in the 3rd century BC stood out. (under the royal Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by one of the generals of Alexander the Great) library and Musaeus in Alexandria. The Musey was essentially a research institute where research was carried out in various fields of knowledge, incl. in anatomy and physiology.
Thus, the doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus, whose works have not been preserved, significantly improved the technique of studying the body, in particular the brain. Among the most important discoveries they made was the establishment of differences between sensory and motor nerves; After more than two thousand years, this discovery formed the basis of the most important doctrine of reflexes for physiology and psychology.
Galen. Another great researcher of mental life in its connection with the physical was the ancient Roman physician Galen (2nd century AD). He wrote over 400 treatises on philosophy and medicine, of which about 100 have survived (mainly on medicine). Galen synthesized the achievements of ancient psychophysiology into a detailed a system that served as the basis for ideas about the human body over subsequent centuries. In the work “On Parts of the Human Body,” he, relying on many observations and experiments and summarizing the knowledge of doctors of the East and West, incl. Alexandrian, proclaimed the dependence of the vital activity of the entire organism on the nervous system.
In those days, dissecting human bodies was prohibited; all experiments were carried out on animals. But Golets, operating on gladiators (slaves whom the Romans essentially did not consider human), was able to expand medical ideas about man, primarily about his brain, where, as he believed, the “highest grade” of pneuma as the bearer of the mind is produced and stored.
The doctrine of temperaments as proportions in which several basic “juices” are mixed, developed by Galen (following Hippocrates), was widely known for many centuries. Let us note that he called a temperament with a predominance of “warm” courageous and energetic, a predominance of “cold” - slow, etc.
It's important to know that great attention Galen paid attention to affects. Aristotle also said that, for example, anger can be explained either by interpersonal relationships (the desire to take revenge for an insult) or by “boiling blood” in the body. Galen argued that changes in the body will be primary in affects ("increased cardiac warmth"); the desire for revenge is secondary. Many centuries later, discussions between psychologists will again arise around the question of what comes first - subjective experience or bodily shock.
Philo: pneuma as breathing. The disasters that the peoples of the East experienced in cruel wars with Rome and under its rule contributed to the development of teachings about the soul, which prepared the views that the Christian religion assimilated.
It is important to know that the teachings of the mystical philosopher from Alexandria Philo (1st century AD), who taught that the body is dust, receiving life from the breath of the deity, gained great popularity. This breath is pneuma. The idea of pneuma, which occupied an important place in ancient teachings about the soul, was, as already mentioned, of a purely hypothetical nature. This created the ground for irrational, inaccessible to empirical control, judgments about the dependence of what happens to a person on supersensible forces, intermediaries between the earthly world and God.
After Philo, pneuma was credited with the function of communication between the mortal part of the soul and the incorporeal entities that connect it with the Almighty. A special section of religious dogma arose that described these “pneumatic” entities and was called pneumatology.
Plotinus: the concept of reflection. The principle of the absolute immateriality of the soul was approved by the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus (c. 203 - c. 269 AD), the founder of the Roman school of Neoplatonism. At the basis of the existence of everything corporeal, he saw the emanation (outflow) of the divine, spiritual principle.
If we ignore religious metaphysics, imbued with mysticism, then in relation to the progress of psychological thought, Plotinus’ ideas about the soul contained a new important point. With Plotinus, psychology for the first time in its history becomes the science of consciousness, understood as “consciousness itself.” The turn to the study of the inner mental life of man began in ancient culture long before Plotinus. At the same time, with the tendency towards individualization noticeably growing in the Hellenistic period, the prerequisites for the subject to recognize himself as the final independent center of mental acts had not yet taken shape. These acts were considered to be derived from pneuma by the Stoics, and from atomic flows by the Epicureans.
Plotinus - following Plato - taught that the individual soul comes from the world soul, towards which it is directed; another vector of activity of the individual soul is directed towards the sensory world. Plotinus himself identified one more direction, namely, the soul’s turning toward itself, toward its own invisible actions: it, as it were, follows its work, becomes its “mirror.”
After many centuries, the subject’s ability not only to sense, feel, remember, think, but also to have an internal idea of these functions was called reflection. It is precisely this ability that serves as an integral “mechanism” of a person’s conscious activity, connecting his orientation in the external world with orientation in the inner world, in himself.
Plotinus distinguished this “mechanism” from other mental processes, the explanation of which was the focus of many generations of mental researchers. No matter how wide the range of these explanations was, they ultimately led to the search for the dependence of mental phenomena on physical reasons, from processes in the body, from communication with other people.
The reflection revealed to Plotinus could not be explained by any of these factors. It is worth noting that she looked like a self-sufficient entity that could not be derived from anything. It remained so for centuries, becoming the original concept of introspective psychology of consciousness (see below)
In modern times, when real social foundations for the self-affirmation of the subject as an independent free person claiming the uniqueness of his mental being were formed, reflection acted as the basis and main source of knowledge about this being. It was precisely this interpretation that was contained in the first programs for the creation of psychological science, which had its own subject, which distinguishes it from other sciences. Indeed, no science is engaged in the study of the ability to reflect. Of course, while highlighting reflection as one of the areas of activity of the soul, Plotinus could not consider the individual soul to be a self-sufficient source of its own internal images and actions. The soul for him is an emanation of the super-beautiful sphere of the highest origin of all things.
Augustine: the concept of inner experience. The teachings of Plotinus influenced Augustine (354-430 AD), whose work marked the transition from the ancient tradition to the medieval Christian worldview. Augustine gave the interpretation of the soul a special character: considering the soul to be an instrument that rules the body, he argued that its basis is formed by the will, and not the mind. Let us note that by doing so he became the founder of the doctrine later called voluntarism (from the Latin “voluntas” - will)
According to Augustine, the will of the individual depends on the divine and acts in two directions: it controls the actions of the soul and turns it to itself. All changes occurring in the body become mental thanks to the volitional activity of the subject. Thus, from the “imprints” that are preserved by the senses, the will creates memories.
All knowledge lies in the soul, which lives and moves in God. It is worth noting that it is not acquired, but is extracted from the soul, again thanks to the direction of the will.
It is worth noting that the basis for the truth of this knowledge is internal experience: the soul turns to itself in order to comprehend with utmost certainty its own activity and its invisible products.
The idea of an internal experience, different from the external, but possessing a higher truth, had a theological meaning for Augustine, since it was assumed that this truth was bestowed by God. Subsequently, the interpretation of internal experience, freed from religious overtones, merged with the idea of introspection as a special method of studying consciousness, inherent only in psychology.
Several millennia BC, great civilizations emerged in the East: Egyptian, Indian, Chinese and others, in the depths of which ideas were born that led to modern scientific knowledge.
There was a process of rationalization of myths; subject-like forces gradually became impersonal. Old concepts acquired new characteristics. And although the deity still remained the supreme ruler, his influence on human life turned out to be more and more indirect. This, in particular, can be seen in the description of the mechanism of mental activity in the Egyptian so-called “Monument of Memphis Theology” (late fourth millennium BC). According to this work, the organizer of everything that exists, the universal architect, is the god Ptah. Whatever people think or say, he knows their hearts and tongues. The meaning of the sense organs, for example, is this: the gods “created the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the breathing of the nose, so that they would give messages to the heart.” As for the heart, it “allows all consciousness to rise.” In other words, already in this ancient papyrus there was a conclusion that the condition of “all consciousness” is the activity of a bodily organ.
No less important from the point of view of a natural-scientific understanding of the psyche was the view on the word expressed in the essay under consideration. As is known, the word was perceived by the consciousness of ancient people as a double of a thing, its possession was equated to mastery of an object, it was considered a means of magical influence, etc.
But in the “Monument of Memphis Theology” we find something different. It states: “The language repeats what is intended by the heart.” Consequently, the products of language only repeat what is produced by the same bodily organ, where messages from the senses flow and where consciousness “rises.” According to one ancient author, this is how all works, all arts, the making of hands, the walking of feet, etc., were created. They were created by the notorious Ptah, but he realized his plans with the help of a body acting by virtue of its own structure. In this device, the peripheral organs are connected to the central organ, from which consciousness and speech originate.
This is how views were born that, while remaining generally within the theological worldview, led to a causal understanding of individual phenomena. Such an understanding could then have no other support than the achievements of ancient Eastern medicine. However, a big obstacle to its development was religious prejudices that prohibited dissecting the body. The body diagram inevitably looked fantastic and was passed on in this form from generation to generation.
In all countries of the East (and then in ancient Greece), decisive importance was given to blood circulation, and two principles were considered the basis of vitality: the fluid of the blood and its air.
In Chinese medical sources (“The Book of the Inner,” the main text of which is usually attributed to the U111 century BC), the heart is also considered the main organ, the “prince of the body,” and the air-like principle, qi, is taken as the basis for vital functions. Mixing in the body with other components, qi, along with physiological functions, also performs psychological functions. It gives a person the gift of speech and “moves thoughts.” If thoughts were localized in the heart, then feelings were localized in the liver.
According to doctors of Ancient India, the main organ of mental activity was also located in the heart. Only later, along with the “heart-centric” one, does the “brain-centric scheme” appear.
The teaching about temperaments also comes from doctors. It expressed a spontaneously materialistic understanding of the causes of individual differences between people. The justification of these differences by humoral characteristics followed from the doctrine of the elements of the body. Indian and Chinese doctors took three elements as the basis of temperament: an air-like principle (for the Chinese, qi), bile (sometimes blood) and mucus. Accordingly, people, depending on the predominance of one of the elements, were divided into several types.
Chinese doctors identified the following types of people:
1. With a predominance of bile (or blood): strong, brave, similar to a tiger.
2. With a predominance of qi: unbalanced, mobile, like a monkey.
3. With a predominance of mucus: slow, inactive.
Although the development of natural scientific knowledge about the human body was constrained by various religious and moral prohibitions, a rational explanation of psychophysiological phenomena made its way. It was expressed in ideas about air as a carrier of mental processes that directly connect living things with the environment; in the idea of the dependence of the soul on the life of the body; in explaining the properties of this body (including mental ones) by a mixture of natural elements in it.
Philosophical schools that appeared in India and China in the middle of the first millennium BC, proceeded primarily from previously established categories and ideas. For India, the source texts were the Vedas (second millennium BC), the completion of which was considered the Upanishads (c. 1000 BC). Mysterious language Ved opened up wide scope for widely divergent interpretations. the problem of the soul was discussed primarily as an ethical one from the point of view of correct behavior, personal improvement, and the achievement of bliss. The generally accepted dogmas about the transmigration of souls, retribution and deliverance.
In this regard, the main content of those that arose in the 6th century was formed. BC. religious teachings Jainism And Buddhism. In solving ethical problems, both directions expressed certain views on mental phenomena in their relation to physical ones. Jainism considered the body to be the source of unfreedom of the soul. Buddhism denied the soul as a special entity: the psyche is a stream of unique moments, successive states.
The philosophical schools that emerged later (Sankhya, Vedanta, Yoga, Mimamsa, Nyaya, Vaisheshika) also subordinated the study of the soul to metaphysical and ethical tasks.
Vedanta developed the subjective idealistic tendencies of the Upanishads. The real Self is not a mortal body, not a subject as a bearer of impressions in the waking state or in a dream, but a special intuitive consciousness. In it, subject and object, external and internal are not distinguished. This is Atman, which is identical to Brahman - the infinite cosmic consciousness, the basis of the world. The individual soul is different from the Atman. Her divine nature is hidden behind the flow of sensory perceptions and bodily aspirations. Through knowledge and strict moral discipline she gets rid of them, becoming identical with Brahman.
Another school - Yoga - taught that in order to achieve true knowledge it is necessary to suppress all types of mental activity that obscures it. Yoga has developed a system of techniques (the so-called eightfold path), which first includes the regulation of bodily functions (posture, breathing, etc.), and then internal mental acts - attention and thinking. The desire to resolve ethical and psychological issues determined a keen interest in the psychology of the individual. Special dismemberment techniques were developed mental states and even managing them.
The schools that emerged around the middle of the first millennium BC are also distinguished by their ethical orientation. in China. The heads of these schools were revered Lao Tzu and Mo Tzu.
Lao Tzu (late 4th - early 5th century BC) is credited with creating the book “Tao Te Ching” - an outstanding monument to world philosophy. It contains a natural philosophical view of existence, going back to ancient concept o Tao (path, road), is connected with postulates that prescribe a person a certain way of behavior in relation to Tao, namely non-action (wu-wei).
If Taoism demanded to comprehend the path of the world process in order to follow it, then another current of Chinese philosophical and religious thought - Confucianism - had a different focus: reflections on traditions, customs, and morals. For him, Tao is a force that operates in the moral communication of people, in the behavior of rulers and the history of the state. Confucianism posed the problem of the relationship between innate and acquired in psychology. Founder of the school Confucius(551 - 479 BC) taught that knowledge and mental qualities are innate. Man is good by nature, but external circumstances spoil him. This means we need to overcome their harmful influence by cultivating the ability for self-deepening and internal improvement. This point of view was defended by the largest follower of Confucius - Mencius(c. 372-289 BC). But another movement arose in Confucianism, represented by Xunzi(c. 298-238 BC). Denying the innateness of such positive moral qualities as compassion, modesty and others, he believed that man is evil by nature, while kindness is a product of upbringing. If it were otherwise, then people would not need to be educated. A person's character is like a vessel into which a potter turns clay.
The ethical and religious ideal of the Mo Tzu school (c. 480-400 BC) differed from the mystical tendencies of Taoism and Confucian self-deepening, which was opposed to an active influence on life.
A number of Indian theories of mental activity are based on the idea of an inextricable connection between the organ of cognition and the object of cognition. These theories considered several forms of connection between the sensory organ and the object. Thus, the Nyaikas emphasized: a) communication with all individual objects of a given class; b) communication with the object through its image, revived in memory; c) communication with the subtlest past and future objects, caused by in-depth reflection. The first method meant contemplation of the general, the second - association (visual perception of sandalwood causes “communication” with its smell), the last - yogic perception.
Indian literature has long distinguished between two forms of perception: indefinite (nirvikalpa) and definite (savikalpa). The first is purely sensory, giving a direct impression of an object upon its contact with an organ, the second is dissected, embodied in speech structures. Representatives of the Vedanta school understood by vague perception a chaotic mass of sensory impressions, which contains neither individual nor general. Perception becomes defined thanks to the concept. Concepts, according to one of the main commentators of Vedanta, Shankara (end of the Second World War - beginning of the 1st century), are archetypes, after which the sensory world is copied.
Buddhists argued that a certain perception is no longer a perception, since it is corrupted by the influence of the intellect, which for practical purposes subsumes it under the category of substance, genus, etc. The word, as an arbitrary sign of a multitude of objects, distorts the image and prevents the contemplation of a thing in its uniqueness.
A number of representatives of the Mimamsa school criticized both Vedantists and Buddhists, arguing that indefinite perception has two aspects - generic and specific, which, however, are not yet presented in it separately. A generic attribute is inherent in many individual objects, a specific one - only in this one.
In Indian psychology, the main attention was paid to perception as such, various transformations within the sensory image.
A large place in the psychological teachings of the Hindus was occupied by the question of illusions of perception, hallucinations, dreams, as well as the possibilities of special, supersensible perception studied by Yoga. A number of Buddhist philosophers assumed that nothing exists other than a series of directly experienced images. Thus, the distinction between real and illusory perceptions essentially lost its meaning.
Mystical views were opposed by natural science. The reality or illusoryness of the image, as Bhatta, one of the greatest philosophers of the Mimamsa school, taught, should be determined based on the nature of the relationship between the organ and the external object. If this relationship is distorted for any reason, perception becomes illusory. The causes of the disorder can be either peripheral (sense organs) or central (manas). When manas does not function properly, memory images are projected into the outside world. Then hallucinations occur. Dreams are also nothing more than a kind of hallucination, representing the revival of subconscious impressions caused by previous perceptions.
The question of transitional moments in the dynamics of mental life was of incomparably greater interest to Indian philosophers than to Western Europeans. No one, perhaps, had the concept of the Self in its various forms until modern times been the subject of such close attention as the Hindus. This was directly related to their religious and metaphysical quests. But at the same time, attempts were made to understand very real questions: how is it possible for a subject to understand the activity of his own mind, whether during perception only an object or also the mental act itself is realized, is consciousness identical to self-consciousness, is the Self perceived directly or through its manifestations in thinking, feeling and etc.
Religion imposed a taboo on any thinking about a person on a plane other than the one it prescribed. Nevertheless, materialistic elements are contained in many systems of the East.
In India the teaching Lokayats (chakrvaks)) in the fight against mysticism and religious metaphysics generally rejected the concept of the Self as an independent entity. The Charvakas' argumentation boiled down to the fact that the senses do not tell us anything about the Self, and the indirect meaning obtained through inferences cannot be reliable. Consciousness is a by-product of the four basic elements of nature.
Very little information has reached us about the teachings of the Charvakas. It is known that it was developed by four schools. Some identified consciousness with the organism as a whole, others - with vitality(probably, the general biological principle was meant), the third - with the activity of the senses, the fourth - with manas, i.e. with the psychic in the broad sense of the word. The Charvaks were among the first in the history of psychology to fight against the principle of the substantiality of consciousness. In the West, the concept of consciousness, as opposed to the concept of soul, developed later.
In China, the representative of materialism was Wang Chong(27-104) - author of the polemical work “Critical Reasonings”. Wang Chong contrasted religious and teleological ideas with a teaching that was associated with the achievements of natural science and medicine and reflected the views of advanced social groups. He spoke out against those who, “trying to understand heaven, start from man,” that is, transfer signs of purposeful human behavior to nature. The Chinese philosopher argued that the only correct way is the opposite way. The laws of nature are a means of understanding the human psyche. He also opposed the postulate of the innateness of knowledge, which had not only theoretical but also practical meaning.
To another great thinker Fan Zhenyu(450-515) belongs to a remarkable work about the annihilation of the spirit. Citing comparisons from the material world, he pointed out that spirit is not inherent in every matter, but only in a certain way of structured matter.
The general patterns of development of psychological ideas in the East and West are the same. There has long been an exchange of material and spiritual values between different cultures, but at present, in relation to many things, the opportunity to find out on the basis of which culture they arose has been lost.
Self-test questions
1. What three elements did Indian and Chinese doctors take as the basis of temperament?
2. How did representatives of the first philosophical schools of Ancient India and China consider the problem of the relationship between soul and body?
3. What was the main problem posed by Confucianism?
4. How did the philosophers of the Ancient East consider the problem of knowledge?
5. How did various religious teachings influence the development of psychological thought in Ancient India and Ancient China?
Questions and tasks for self-test for section 2:
1. Fill out the table.
2. Compare the processes of formation and development of psychological knowledge in the countries of Europe and the Ancient East.
3. Highlight the similarities and differences in ideas about the soul in Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the Ancient East. Present the result in the form of a table.
4. Highlight the similarities and differences in the ideas about knowledge of the philosophers of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the Ancient East. Present the result in the form of a table.
3. PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE THINKERS
The “soul” has been of interest to cognitive humanity throughout its entire history in many respects, which is naturally expressed in the variety of directions and forms of its research. In various eras, the main sources of the latter were both religious attitudes, empirical data reflecting the connection between soul and body, and the results of speculative observations by a person of the mental processes occurring in himself. One of the significant features medieval period The evolution of psychological knowledge is precisely the affirmation of the unity of the designated sources.
An equally significant feature of the Middle Ages is the restoration of continuity in the development of psychological ideas, disrupted by the fall of ancient Greek civilization. But it should be noted that the “feudal restoration” had a characteristic feature, expressed in the clerical orientation of the comments on ancient teachings about the soul. There were significant reasons for this. It was the church and especially the monastic movement in Europe and its opponent in the East that preserved, commented on and developed the achievements of the thinkers of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
The theological orientation of the overwhelming number of “spiritual doctrines” caused the formation in the mass consciousness of a stereotype in the perception of the Middle Ages as a period of scientific depression and degradation, which fundamentally contradicts the results and the overall significance of the contribution of scientists of this period to the progressive development of human culture. In this regard, the task and need arises for an objective understanding of feudal society as a stage not so much of decline and regression, but of the accumulation and growth of prerequisites for deepening knowledge about the human mental world.
To confirm this, it is enough to turn to the names of the great figures of science and culture put forward by the Middle Ages. Thomas More, Tomaso Campanella, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Omar Khayyam, Ganjavi Nizami, Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, Saavedra Cervantes, Santi Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and many others - not a single one was bypassed in his creative and scientific search problems of the human soul.
Finally, it was in the Middle Ages that Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism with their inherent forms of spiritual introspection finally took shape and established themselves as world-scale religions. As an alternative to the religious worldview and its scholastic apologetics, scientific activity begins to develop in all fields of knowledge, and an experimental science of the soul is born.
In various historical and scientific studies, there are many views on the chronological framework of more than a thousand years of the Middle Ages. In this manual, this period will be limited to the V - XVI centuries. As for its periodization and structure, then characteristic psychological views of the Middle Ages - represented by two world centers: the Arab East and Western Europe, as well as a surge of intellectual and spiritual activity of the Renaissance, predetermined the content of the chapter.
3.1 Development of psychological ideas of the Eastern world in the Middle Ages.
The significant role of psychological views in Arab medieval science is due to a whole set of objective and subjective prerequisites. The development of psychological ideas, like all scientific thought, took place in the Eastern world under the influence of many sociocultural factors. In their analysis, among the reasons for the Arab “breakthrough” of psychological knowledge, we will distinguish two groups.
Firstly, these are geopolitical prerequisites. The formation of a new formation - feudalism - in the East occurred historically earlier than in the West. Its state embodiment was the Arab Caliphate - a Muslim-feudal theocracy, in its power comparable only to the Great Empire of Alexander the Great. As in ancient times, a huge state education stimulated migration, the development of the economy, culture, and the spread of scientific views. The unity of the state Arabic language facilitated the translation of ancient works and the popularization of the ideas contained in them. Geographical position(from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean) allowed the Arabs to use the scientific achievements of not only Asia, but also Europe, India, and China: caravans with books flocked to the libraries of caliphs from all over the world. Of particular note is the beneficial impact on the development of Arab culture of the humanistic ideas of freedom and equality, originally embedded in Islam as the official state religion.
Secondly, the development of medieval psychological thought in the Arab world had scientific prerequisites. This is based on fairly rich soil. ancient culture Hellenes (the teachings of Democritus, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plato, etc.). The Edessa school in Syria enjoyed no less authority in the early Middle Ages than the recognized academies in Athens and Alexandria. After their closure, scientific centers move to the Near and Middle East. In 832, the House of Wisdom (the prototype of the Academy of Sciences) opened in Baghdad. Their own achievements: the flourishing of the system of applied sciences, including medicine, physics, geometry, astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, stimulated the emergence of outstanding thinkers and experimenters. Through their efforts, gunpowder, a magnetic needle, water and mechanical clocks, the degree measurement of the Earth were invented, time displacement was discovered time zones (only five centuries later, in 1522, members of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition made a similar discovery for Europe).
Previous eras of the evolution of psychological knowledge were unaware of such scientific potential, on the basis of which Arab scientists sought the secrets of the human soul. But even in psychological research, these thinkers relied on their prehistory, rich in ideas.
Already in a dualistic worldview Iranian Zoroastrianism The central questions raised are about the relationship between soul and body, life and death, good and evil. In the 8th century, early representatives of rational theology - Kalama (Mutazalites- isolated) in their works claim that a person acts in accordance with reason. Nature, according to their teaching, has a materialistic structure, and the body after death disintegrates into particles. Everything in the world, including the souls of people, is causally determined, and there is a real possibility of knowing this world by the human mind, and not by divine revelation. The Koran is interpreted in this regard as usual literary work. The Mutazalites opposed the anthropomorphic concept of the creator, seeing in him only an abstract deity.
This is how the system of psychological ideas of the medieval Arab world began to take shape. A galaxy of thinkers played an outstanding role in its design, the results scientific activity which forever entered the treasury of world psychological thought.
Al-Kindi(800-860\879) The founder of the peripatetic traditions of the Muslim East, the “philosopher of the Arabs”, continued the Aristotelian teaching. He wrote 238 works, including the psychological treatises “On the Mind”, “Discourse on the Soul”, “On First Philosophy”, “The Book of the Five Essences”.
In the problem of the relationship between nature and soul, Al-Kindi adhered to deterministic views, arguing that God is only a distant cause. The soul, in his opinion, “is divided into two parts, namely: reason and feeling.” Al-Kindi has priority in creating the “concept of four types of intelligence,” according to which the mind appears in four forms: actual (as a set of universals); potential (as the ability to perceive universals); acquired (as finding universals in the soul); manifested (realization outside).
In the theory of knowledge, the scientist argued: “Truth is necessarily knowable; therefore, things that have existence are knowable.” And further: “Human knowledge is of two types. The first type of knowledge is closer to us, but further from the essence. This is knowledge through the senses... The other type of knowledge is closer to the essence and further from us. This is rational knowledge...”
Al-Kindi was one of the first in the East to call for the unification of the efforts of scientists in order to use the “fruits of the research of our predecessors” and achieve true knowledge.
Ar-Razi -
lat. Rhazes
(864-925), Iranian scientist - encyclopedist, rationalist and freethinker, ran a clinic in Ray, then in Baghdad. His scientific research is characterized by freedom from dogmatism, the use of experiment, and the practical orientation of his physiological research. His worldview concept is based on the doctrine of five eternal principles: creator, soul, matter, space, time. Matter with its attributes, in his opinion, is a principle equivalent to God.
In the psychological views of the famous Iranian thinker and natural scientist - the author of the "Comprehensive Book", we find advice not to blindly follow Hippocrates and Galen, but to build medical science based on the results of observations and experiments. Ar-Razi assigned a special role in his scientific work to the solution of psychophysiological problems. In this regard, he experimentally substantiated the close connection between soul and body. In the theory of knowledge, the scientist adhered to the approaches of materialistic sensationalism.
The scientific heritage of the “second teacher” (after Aristotle) Al-Farabi(870-950) is large and varied. Of the more than one hundred works he wrote, works on the classification of sciences, philosophy, and politics stand out. A number of treatises are devoted to problems of psychology: “On the Soul,” “On the Power of the Soul,” “Reason and Concept,” “On the Many and the Single,” “On the Mind,” "The essence of the issues."
The scientist explains all phenomena of the world based on recognized natural patterns. Therefore, solving a psychophysical problem, he writes that “the substance of the soul exists detached from its mother,” but “the giver of forms creates it when something appears” - the body. The first container of the soul is located in the depths of the heart.
The thinker identifies the essential characteristics of people: man differs from animals in special properties, since he has a soul, from which arise forces that act through bodily organs, and, in addition, he has a force that acts without the mediation of a bodily organ; this force is the mind. None of these forces exists apart from matter. These forces also include practical reason - the one that deduces what actions characteristic of people should be carried out. This position led Al-Farabi to the concept of the active human mind, according to which people have common sense and use their minds to solve moral problems.
Ibi Sina-lat. Avicenna(980-1037), physician, naturalist, philosopher, encyclopedist .
His popularity and authority were expressed in the respectful nickname “Headman and Head”. Ibn Sina wrote numerous works on various branches of knowledge: philosophy, medicine, linguistics ,
logic, mathematics, physics, cosmology, chemistry, ethics, etc. - a total of 456 works in Arabic and 23 works in Farsi.
The thinker's philosophical and natural science treatises enjoyed great popularity in the East and West for a number of centuries. His “Canon of Medical Science” - a medical encyclopedia in five parts (volume about 200 pp), the result of the experience of Greek, Roman, Indian and Asian doctors, went through about thirty Latin editions in Europe only in the 16th-18th centuries. The "Canon" provided Ibn Sina's scientific views with more than five centuries of leadership in all medical schools of the Middle Ages.
Despite the fact that psychological issues were dealt with in treatises on medicine and philosophy, Avicenna devoted separate works to psychology, including “Poem about the Soul”, “Brochure on the Explanation of an Expensive Substance”, “Essay on human power and knowledge", "Gift of the rais (chief of philosophers) to the ruler", "Pamphlet about the soul". His "Book of Healing" (in 18 volumes) in the section "Physics" contains a kind of psychological encyclopedia of the Arab Middle Ages - "The Book of the Soul".
In his ideological views, Avicenna was a consistent supporter of Aristotle, especially in the use of medical and other natural science approaches to the study of the human psyche. At the same time, the Arab scientist continued the line of Socrates in interpreting the inner world of a person as the content of his psyche, and not a duplicate or idea. This is where Avicenna’s two psychologies came from: natural science and metaphysical, which, in turn, was reflected in his concept of dual truth. The latter, according to historians, preserved for posterity and protected Avicenna’s natural scientific thought from the attacks of Islamic reaction. Avicenna's doctrine of the soul in this regard occupied the place of a “layer” between his religious and natural science views.
Avicenna's worldview was reflected in the inconsistency of his psychological views, the problems of which are very broad: from the analysis of human mental strength to the solution of dyads: “life and psyche,” “soul and body,” “animal and human.” mental life"The scientist was interested mainly in the following questions: what place does the soul occupy?, what is its essence? Is it eternal? The answers to these questions were given by Avicenna vaguely and contradictory. Nevertheless, he expressed and experimentally substantiated ideas that played a significant role in the evolution of psychological thought of the Middle Ages. In addition, he built a fairly harmonious system of categories and concepts of psychological knowledge corresponding to the time, which later passed into modern European science. Following Aristotle, Avicenna defines the human soul as “the first completion of the natural organic body to the extent that it acts through intelligent choice and reasoning and because it perceives the universal.”
The mind, according to the scientist, is an active creative force, an instrument for understanding the universe. “Healing” clearly expresses the idea that “cognition consists in the reflection of a cognizable object by a cognizing subject.” In Avicenna’s dying “Directions and Instructions,” the knowledge of a thing is a reflection of its essence in the feelings and mind of the knower. Cognition is impossible without prior sensory experience: reality is given only in sensations. (“Felt in the soul,” according to Avicenna, means “reflected.” Having examined the Essence of the process of abstraction, he identified the following stages: 1) sensation (appearance of an image); 2) representation (distinction between image and matter); 3) imagination (the emergence of ideas and concepts); 4) universal concepts and categories (the highest form of abstraction).
In solving the psychophysiological problem, Avicenna comes to the conclusion that the source of the human psyche is the brain. The localization of mental forces in the brain and sense organs is recognized by scientists as an indisputable fact: each mental function corresponds to a section of sensory nerves or cerebral hemispheres.
Observations of disorders caused by brain injuries allowed the thinker to give a more precise definition of its connection with the processes of sensation and thinking. On this basis, it was concluded that spiritual forces do not exist on their own, but require a specific bodily organ. But nevertheless, it is emphasized that the human psyche in linguistic form is connected with an idea that is immortal, hence the soul as the bearer of the idea is immortal.
Avicenna describes the first case of psychodiagnostics in history - the search for an emotional complex based on changes in the vegetative sphere (increased heart rate in response to various external factors). He also conducted the first experiments on the psychology of emotions - the beginnings of the experimental psychophysiology of effective states (feeding rams with the same food, but one next to a wolf). His schemes speak of the discovery of the role of “conflicts” - opposing emotional attitudes - in the emergence of deep somatic shifts.
Age-related psychophysiology begins with Avicenna’s research. In the process of human development from birth to adulthood, not only physiological growth is sought, but also changes in the mental characteristics of a person. In this regard, important importance was assigned to education, through which, as he believed, the influence of the psyche on the structure of the developing organism is carried out. Feelings that change the course of physiological processes arise in a child as a result of the influence of the people around him. By causing certain affects in a child, adults shape his physiological qualities.
Avicenna's physiological psychology thus included assumptions about the possibility of controlling processes in the body, giving it a certain stable state by influencing sensory, affective life, depending on the behavior of other people. The idea of the relationship between the mental and the physiological was developed by him based on his extensive medical experience.
The position of consistent naturalism in explaining mental phenomena has ensured the high scientific authority of Avicenna’s natural science concepts down to the present day.
Ibn Al-Haytham - lat. Algazen (965-1039)
The outstanding naturalist of the Middle Ages is known not only as a commentator on the teachings of Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, but also for the specific development of one of the mechanisms of mental life - plant sensation. Main work Algazena - “Treasure of Optics”. The main theoretical generalization of Ibn Al-Haytham, which influenced the development of the entire psychological concept of sensations, should include the representation of the eye by an optical system - a device. Based on the results of experiments and experiments, the scientist concludes that the process of transforming the facts of the external world into an act of consciousness is carried out with the help of a physical organism, and not through “outflows” from an object or from the eye, as was believed in antiquity.
The scientist for the first time draws attention to the duration of mental acts, explained by the time required for the transmission of excitation along nerve conductors from the “sensing apparatus”. According to the criterion of the duration of visual perception, time is declared one of the main factors of sensation. Therefore, during short-term presentation, only familiar objects can be correctly perceived. This is due to the fact that the condition for the emergence of a visual image is not only direct impacts light stimuli, but also traces of previous impressions remaining in the nervous system.
In each visual act, Ibn Al-Haytham distinguished, on the one hand, the direct effect of capturing an external influence, and on the other, the work of the mind that is added to this effect, thanks to which the similarities and differences of visible objects are established. On this basis, a number of important conclusions are drawn: the ability to visually differentiate is generated by judgment, and the processing of what is perceived occurs unconsciously; the phenomenon of binocular vision, color and contrast shifts can be explained by experimental optical methods; For visual perception, eye movement is necessary - movement of the visual axes.
Ibn Al-Haytham's schemes not only destroyed the imperfect theories of vision that the Arabs inherited from ancient authors, but also introduced a new explanatory principle. The initial sensory structure of visual perception was considered as a derivative of the experimentally and mathematically substantiated laws of optics and the properties of the nervous system. This direction opposed one of the main dogmas of scholasticism, both Muslim and Christian - the doctrine that the soul in all its manifestations is a special kind of essence belonging to the supernatural world. Thus, Ibn Al-Haytham experimentally built the scientific foundations of the emerging theory of sensory perceptions and raised psychological views to the level of natural scientific laws.
With name Abu - Hamida Ghazali(1059-111) scientists, as a rule, connect the beginning of the decline of free thought and the revival of religious sciences - the subordination of Arab medieval thought to religious dogmas. The reason for this is considered to be his essay “Refutation” (literally: inconsistency, decay, dispersion), directed against the Peripatetics of the East. But, paying tribute to such an assessment, it is worth noting a number of positive moments for psychological knowledge in the work of Abu Hamid Ghazali. His treatise “Delivering from Delusions” is interesting not only because it is autobiographical, but also because it reflects the struggle between different directions of psychological ideas. This work seems to be a rare literary monument of the East, revealing the contradictory process of the formation and evolution of the science of the soul in the era of feudalism.
In the psychological teachings of Ghazali, the most valuable thoughts are about the nature of words. “It is impossible to argue about names, because we ourselves gave them to things only with the permission of the divine law,” Abu Hamid writes in his “Refutation.” “But what is important for us here is not the word itself, but its meaning.” It should also be noted that Abu Hamid Ghazali substantiated a rather harmonious system of psychological concepts using the inductive genetic method. “The first thing that is created in a person is the sense of touch... Then the sense of sight is created in a person... Then he is endowed with hearing... Then the sense of taste is created for him... And so on until the person crosses boundary of sensory objects." By the age of seven, a person “develops a discriminating ability.” “Then he rises to a new level, and intelligence is created for him.” The last phase of “divine creativity” is the endowment of a person with a “prophetic gift”.
A detailed description of the stages of man’s “divine evolution” and the disclosure of their content was one of the few attempts to construct a model reflecting the human mental world. This method was continued in modern times in the “man-machine” and “man-statue” systems created by La Mettrie and Condillac, but this will happen only after more than six centuries.
Ibn Tuyfel - lat. Abubatser(c.1110 - 1185)
The famous doctor, philosopher, poet was on friendly terms with Ibn Rushd. For his heretical views he received the nickname “teacher of wickedness.” In the novel “Hai, son of Yakzan” that has come down to us, translated into almost all European languages, historians have seen a “psychological Robinsonade”. It depicts the self-development of a “natural man”, isolated from society on a desert island. By creating a system of psychological concepts, Ibn Tuyfel gradually endows the hero of the novel with the means of understanding the world around him. But this process is no longer determined by divine causality, as with Ghazali. but by realizing a person’s potential for development through the method of self-deepening, regardless of social traditions and divine revelation. From the first knowledge, limited to sensory things, a person gradually comes to an awareness of his intellect - the discovery that “he himself possesses an independent essence.”
Thus, Ibn Tuyfel defends the progressive thought of the unity of the natural world and its evolution. The scientist also includes the developing mental world of man, the world of his consciousness, in this unity.
Ibn Rushd - lat. Averroes(1126 - 1198), an outstanding representative of Eastern Aristotelianism, whose teaching more than any other influenced Western European philosophical and psychological thought. Ibn Rushd wrote more than fifty works, among which “large”, “medium” and “small” commentaries on the works of Aristotle stand out. The Arab thinker received the honorary nickname “Great Commentator” thanks to his analysis of the legacy of the outstanding ancient Greek scientist in his works. Contemporaries said that Aristotle explained nature, and Averroes explained Aristotle. As A.I. Herzen rightly noted, “Aristotle was buried under the ruins of the ancient world until the Arabian (Ibn Rushd) resurrected him and brought him to Europe, which was mired in the darkness of ignorance.” However, Ibn Rushd not only explained the thinking of the ancient teacher, but also reworked it. He was the author of an encyclopedic medical work in seven books, the treatises “Refutation of the Refutation” and “Discourse on Reason”.
In his psychological teaching, Averroes gave a materialistic explanation of the problem of the relationship between soul and body: “The emergence of the soul... is the union of the soul with bodily capabilities predisposed to union with it.” The psyche, the individual soul (“my psyche”) as a product of sensuality is formed in the process of life on the basis of connection with the outside world. The source of the psyche is sensuality, contact. Understanding the soul as a product of sensuality speaks of its destructibility after the cessation of communication with the outside world. Hence the denial of the immortality of the individual soul.
Ibn Rushd commented in his own way on Aristotle’s teaching about the soul and mind, namely, he emphasized their separation. The soul was understood as functions that are inseparable from the body (primarily sensuality). They are necessary (this was Aristotle’s opinion) for the activity of the mind, are inextricably linked with the body and disappear with it. As for the mind itself, it is divine and enters the individual soul from the outside, just as the sun sends rays to the organ of vision. With the disappearance of the body, the “traces” of the individual soul left by the divine mind during the period of influence on it are separated from the disappeared mortal individual and continue to exist as a moment of the universal mind inherent in the entire human race.
Developing Aristotle's teaching about passive and active minds, the Arab scientist argues that sensuality allows one to perceive the divine mind, and then the potential and actual spirit manifests itself. The divine mind only initiates movement in man. “The soul is active in two ways,” writes Ibn Rushd, “firstly, in relation to the body - it dominates and controls it; secondly, in relation to its principles and essence, it perceives the intelligible. Its actions in relation to the body are sensory perception, imagination, passions, anger, fear, sadness and pain. When she begins to think about objects of rational perception, she abandons everything extraneous.”
Averroes expressed the idea that the human psyche is perfect in its capabilities, thereby establishing the idea of man’s godlikeness in the process of cognition. He contrasted the parts of the soul with the divine mind, universal for all, which only initiates movement in a person. This, in turn, assumed the equality of people in intellectual abilities.
At the same time, in one of the “Discourses” the idea is expressed about real differences in the abilities of people, according to which he distinguishes them into three varieties: rhetoric (with the ability of all to judge); dialectics (with the ability for dialectical interpretation “by nature and by skill”); apodeictic (with the ability to interpret “by nature and by philosophical science"). As a natural scientist and psychophysiologist, Averroes denied that the sensory part of vision belongs to the lens, justifying the performance of this function by the retina of the eye.
Thus, Ibn Rushd did not stop before declaring the closest connection between states of consciousness and physiological phenomena; he directly called some forces of the soul the products of bodily organs. His theoretical concepts about the annihilability of the individual soul and the godlikeness of man in knowledge dealt a blow to scholastic-dogmatic views, affirmed the idea of natural equality of people, and defended their earthly dignity.
The views of the outstanding thinker about dual truth were incompatible with the “official” worldview of his era. Therefore, the fate of Averroism is full of collisions: from scientific recognition to anathematization (Ibn Rushd was called “ mad dog who never ceases to bark at Christ”). In 1256, on behalf of the Pope, Albert the Great gave a lecture at the University of Paris “On the unity of reason against Averroes,” and in 1270 a treatise by Thomas Aquinas appeared with the same title. But for many figures of the Middle Ages and the European Renaissance, Averroism was a banner in the establishment of a truly scientific worldview.
Self-test questions
1. What are the specific features of the medieval period in the evolution of psychological knowledge?
2. What main directions can be identified in Avicenna’s psychological views?
3. What features of visual perception did Algazen note?
4. Who is the outstanding follower of Aristotle’s teachings in the East in the Middle Ages and what significance did his teaching have for the development of psychology?
1.2. Development of psychological knowledge within the framework of the doctrine of the soul
Ancient philosophy, which embraced the entire set of scientific views, laid the foundation for psychology. It is here that the first philosophical systems appear, the authors of which take this or that type of matter as the fundamental principle of the world, which gives rise to all the inexhaustible wealth of phenomena: water (Thales), an indefinite infinite substance “aleuron” (Anaximander), air (Anaximenes), fire (Heraclitus) .
1.2.1. Views on the nature of the psyche
Animism. In tribal society, the mythological idea of the soul dominated. Each specific sensory thing was endowed with a supernatural double - a soul (or many souls). This view is called animism (from the Latin “anima” - soul). The surrounding world was perceived as depending on the arbitrariness of these souls.
Animism is the belief in a host of spirits (souls) hidden behind visible things as special “agents” or “ghosts” that leave the human body with their last breath (for example, according to the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras) and, being immortal, eternally wander through the bodies of animals and plants.
Getting acquainted with ideas about human psychology from ancient myths, one cannot help but admire the subtlety of people’s understanding of gods endowed with cunning or wisdom, vindictiveness or generosity, envy or nobility - all those qualities that the creators of myths learned in the earthly practice of their communication with their neighbors. This mythological picture of the world, where bodies are inhabited by souls (their “doubles” or ghosts), and life depends on the mood of the gods, has reigned in the public consciousness for centuries.
Hylozoism. A fundamentally new approach was expressed by the doctrine that replaced animism about the universal animation of the world - hylozoism, in which nature was conceptualized as a single material whole endowed with life. Decisive changes initially occurred not so much in the actual composition of knowledge as in its general explanatory principles. The information about man, his bodily structure and mental properties, which the creators of ancient Greek philosophy and science gleaned from the teachings of thinkers of the ancient East, was now perceived in the context of a new worldview, freed from mythology.
Heraclitus: the soul as a “spark of Logos”. Hylozoist Heraclitus (late 6th - early 5th century BC) saw the cosmos as an “eternal living fire”, and the soul (“psyche”) as its spark. Thus, the soul is included in the general laws of natural existence, developing according to the same law (Logos) as the cosmos, which is the same for all things, not created by any of the gods and none of the people, but which has always been, is and will be “an ever-living fire, ignited in proportions and extinguished in proportions.”
The name of Heraclitus is also associated with the identification of several stages in the process of cognition of the surrounding world. Having separated the activity of the senses (sensations) from the mind, he gave a description of the results of human cognitive activity, proving that sensations provide “dark”, poorly differentiated knowledge, while the result of mental activity is “light”, clear knowledge. However, sensory and rational knowledge are not opposed, but harmoniously complement each other, like “many knowledge” and “mind”. Heraclitus emphasized that “much knowledge does not teach intelligence,” but at the same time, a scientist and philosopher must know a lot in order to form a correct idea of the world around him. Thus, the different aspects of knowledge in Heraclitus are mutually related harmonious opposites that help penetrate into the depths of the Logos.
He also pointed out for the first time the difference between the soul of an adult and a child, since, from his point of view, as the soul grows older, it becomes more and more “dry and hot.” The degree of moisture of the soul affects its cognitive abilities: “dry radiance is the wisest and best soul,” said Heraclitus, and therefore a child who has a more wet soul thinks worse than an adult. In the same way, “a drunk man staggers and does not notice where he is going, for his soul is wet.” Thus, the Logos, which rules the cycle of things in nature, also controls the development of the soul and its cognitive abilities.
Democritus Heraclitus's idea that the course of things depends on the law of Logos was developed by Democritus (c. 460-370 BC).
Unfortunately, the works of Democritus have reached us only in fragments. The basis of his theory is the concept according to which the whole world consists of tiny particles invisible to the eye - atoms. Atoms differ from each other in shape, order, and rotation. Man, like all surrounding nature, consists of atoms that form his body and soul. The soul is also material and consists of small round atoms, the most mobile, for they must impart activity to the inert body. Thus, from the point of view of Democritus, the soul is a source of activity, energy for the body. After the death of a person, the soul dissipates in the air, and therefore not only the body, but also the soul is mortal.
Democritus believed that the soul is located in the head (the rational part), in the chest (the masculine part), in the liver (the lustful part) and in the senses.
Democritus has two stages in the cognitive process - sensations and thinking. At the same time, he emphasized that thinking gives us more knowledge than sensations. Thus, sensations do not allow us to see atoms, but through reflection we come to the conclusion about their existence. Democritus also introduced the concept of primary and secondary qualities of objects. Primary are those qualities that actually exist in objects (weight, surface, smooth or rough, shape). Secondary qualities - color, smell, taste, these properties do not exist in objects, people themselves invented them for their convenience, since “only in opinion there is sour and sweet, red and green, but in reality there is only emptiness and atoms.”
Thus, Democritus was the first to say that a person cannot completely correctly and adequately understand the world around him. This inability to fully understand the surrounding reality also applies to understanding the laws that govern the world and human destiny. Democritus argued that there are no accidents in the world, and everything happens for a predetermined reason. People came up with the idea of chance to cover up ignorance of the matter and inability to manage. In fact, there are no accidents, and everything is causal.
Hippocrates: doctrine of temperaments. The school of Hippocrates (c. 460-377 BC), known to us from the so-called “Hippocratic Collection,” viewed life as a changing process. Among its explanatory principles, we find air in the role of a force that maintains the inextricable connection of the body with the world, brings intelligence from the outside, and performs mental functions in the brain. The single material principle was rejected as the basis of organic life. If a person were one, then he would never get sick, and if he were sick, then the healing remedy would have to be one. But there is no such thing.
Hippocrates replaced the doctrine of a single element underlying the diversity of things with the doctrine of four liquids (blood, mucus, yellow bile and black bile). Hence, depending on which liquid predominates, there is a version of four temperaments, later named: sanguine (when blood predominates), phlegmatic (mucus), choleric (yellow bile) and melancholic (black bile).
For future scientific psychology, this explanatory principle, with all its naivety, was very important (it is not for nothing that Hippocrates’ terminology has been preserved to this day). First, the hypothesis was brought to the fore that the innumerable differences between people could be grouped into a few common behavioral traits; thus laying the foundations of the scientific typology that underlies modern teachings about individual differences between people. Secondly, Hippocrates looked for the source and cause of differences within the body; mental qualities were made dependent on physical ones. The role of the nervous system in that era was not yet known, so the typology was, in today’s language, humoral (from the Latin “humor” - liquid).
If you look at the Hippocratic temperaments from a general theoretical point of view, you can notice their weak side (however, it is also inherent in modern character typologies): the body was considered as a mixture - in certain proportions - of various elements, but how this mixture was transformed into a harmonious whole was left up to us. nasty.
Anaxagoras: "mind" as the beginning of things. The philosopher Anaxagoras (5th century BC) tried to solve this riddle. He did not accept Heraclitean view of the world as a fiery stream, nor the Democritus picture of atomic vortices. Considering nature to consist of many tiny particles, he looked for the beginning in it, thanks to which an organized cosmos arises from chaos, from the disorderly accumulation and movement of these particles. Anaxagoras recognized this beginning as the “subtle thing,” to which he gave the name “nus” (mind). He believed that their perfection depended on how fully the mind was represented in various bodies. “Man,” said Anaxagoras, “is the most intelligent of animals due to the fact that he has hands.” It turned out that it is not the mind that determines a person’s advantages, but his bodily organization that determines the highest mental quality - rationality.
The principles formulated by Heraclitus, Democritus and Anaxagoras created the main vital nerve of the future system of scientific understanding of the world, including the knowledge of mental phenomena. Whatever tortuous paths this knowledge took in subsequent centuries, it was subject to the ideas of law, causality and organization. The explanatory principles discovered two and a half thousand years ago in Ancient Greece have become the basis for the knowledge of mental phenomena for all times.
Sophists: teachers of wisdom. A completely new side of the knowledge of mental phenomena was discovered by the activity of the sophist philosophers (from the Greek "sophia" wisdom). They were not interested in nature, with its laws independent of man, but in man himself, who, as the aphorism of the first sophist Protagoras said, “is the measure of all things.” Subsequently, the nickname “sophist” began to be applied to false sages who, using various tricks, pass off imaginary evidence as true. But in the history of psychological knowledge, the activity of the sophists opened a new object: relationships between people, studied using means that are designed to prove and suggest any position, regardless of its reliability.
In this regard, methods of logical reasoning, the structure of speech, and the nature of the relationship between words, thoughts and perceived objects were subjected to detailed discussion. How can anything be conveyed through language, asked the sophist Gorgias, if its sounds have nothing in common with the things they denote. And this was not just a logical trick, but raised a real problem. She, like other issues discussed by the sophists, prepared the development of a new direction in the understanding of the soul.
The search for the natural “matter” of the soul was abandoned. The study of speech and mental activity from the point of view of its use to manipulate people has come to the fore.
Socrates. One of the most remarkable thinkers of the ancient world, Socrates (469-399 BC), sought to return strength and reliability to the actions of the soul, but rooted not in the eternal laws of the macrocosm, but in the internal structure of the soul itself. The meaning of Socrates’ activity (it was called “dialectics” - finding the truth through conversation) was to help the interlocutor find the true answer (the so-called Socratic method) with the help of certain questions selected in a certain way and thereby lead him from vague ideas to a logically clear one. knowledge of the subjects discussed. A wide range of “everyday concepts” about justice, injustice, goodness, beauty, courage, etc. were discussed.
Socrates' motto was: "Know thyself." By self-knowledge, Socrates did not mean turning “inward” - to one’s own experiences and states of consciousness (the very concept of consciousness had not yet been isolated at that time), but an analysis of actions and attitudes towards them, moral assessments and norms of human behavior in various life situations. This led to a new understanding of the essence of the soul.
The ideas put forward by Socrates were developed into the theories of his outstanding student Plato.
Plato. Plato (428-348 BC) was born into a noble Athenian family. His versatile abilities began to manifest themselves very early and served as the basis for many legends, the most common of which ascribes to him divine origin (making him the son of Apollo). Plato's real name is Aristocles, but in his youth he received a new name - Plato, which means broad-shouldered (in his early years he was fond of gymnastics). Plato relied not only on the ideas of Socrates, but also on some provisions of the Pythagoreans, in particular on the deification of number. Above the gate of Plato's Academy it was written: "Let him who does not know geometry enter here." In an effort to create a universal concept that unites man and the cosmos, Plato believed that surrounding objects are the result of the union of the soul, the idea, with inanimate matter.
Plato believed that there is an ideal world in which there are souls, or ideas, of things, those perfect samples that become prototypes of real objects. The perfection of these samples is beyond the reach of objects, but makes us strive to be like them. Thus the soul is not only an idea, but also the purpose of a real thing. The idea, or soul, from Plato's point of view, is constant, unchanging and immortal. She is the guardian of human morality. Being a rationalist, Plato believed that behavior should be prompted and directed by reason, and not by feelings, and opposed Democritus and his theory of determinism, asserting the possibility of human freedom, the freedom of his rational behavior. The soul, according to Plato, consists of three parts: lustful, passionate and rational. The lustful and passionate soul must submit to the rational one. In his dialogues, Plato likens the soul to a chariot drawn by two horses. The black horse - a lustful soul - does not listen to orders and needs a constant rein, as he strives to overturn the chariot and throw it into the abyss. The white horse is a passionate soul, although it tries to go its own way, it does not always obey the driver and needs constant supervision. And finally, Plato identifies the rational part of the soul with the driver, who seeks the right path and guides the chariot along it, driving the horse. Since the soul is constant and a person cannot change it, the content of the knowledge that is stored in the soul is also unchanged, and the discoveries made by a person are essentially not discoveries of something new, but only an awareness of what has already been stored in the shower. Thus, Plato understood the process of thinking as remembering what the soul knew in its cosmic life, but forgot when entering the body. And thinking itself, which he considered the main cognitive process, is essentially reproductive thinking, not creative thinking (although Plato operates with the concept of “intuition”, leading to creative thinking).
Exploring cognitive processes, Plato spoke about sensation, memory and thinking, and he was the first to talk about memory as an independent mental process. He gives memory a definition - “the imprint of a ring on wax” - and considers it one of the most important stages in the process of cognition of the environment. The process of cognition itself in Plato, as already mentioned, was presented in the form of recollection; thus, memory was the repository of all knowledge, both conscious and unconscious at the moment.
However, Plato considered memory, like sensations, to be a passive process and contrasted them with thinking, emphasizing its active nature.
Aristotle. Aristotle (384-322 BC) opened a new era in the understanding of the soul as a subject of psychological knowledge. For Aristotle, its source was not physical bodies and incorporeal ideas, but the organism, where the physical and spiritual form an inseparable integrity. The soul, according to Aristotle, is not an independent entity, but a form, a way of organizing a living body. Aristotle was the son of a physician under the Macedonian king and was himself preparing for the medical profession. Having appeared as a seventeen-year-old youth in Athens to the sixty-year-old Plato, he studied for several years at his Academy, with which he later broke up. Raphael's famous painting "The School of Athens" depicts Plato pointing his hand to the sky. Aristotle - to earth. These images capture the difference in orientation between the two great thinkers. According to Aristotle, the ideological wealth of the world is hidden in sensually perceived earthly things and is revealed in direct communication with them.
A huge amount of comparative anatomical, zoological, embryological and other facts accumulated, which became the experimental basis for observations and analysis of the behavior of living beings. The generalization of these facts, primarily biological, became the basis of Aristotle’s psychological teachings and the transformation of the main explanatory principles of psychology: organization, regularity, causality.
The soul was thought of by Aristotle as a way of organizing a living body, the actions of which are expedient. He considered the soul inherent in all living organisms (including plants) and subject to objective, experimental study. It cannot exist without a body and at the same time is not a body. The soul cannot be separated from the body.
The soul has various abilities as stages of its development: vegetative, sensory and mental (inherent only to humans). In relation to the explanation of the soul, Aristotle, contrary to his postulate about the inseparability of the soul and the body capable of life, believed that the mind in its highest, essential expression is something different from the body. The hierarchy of levels of cognitive activity culminated in the “supreme mind,” which was not mixed with anything corporeal or external.
The beginning of knowledge is the sensory ability. It imprints the form of things just as “wax receives the impression of a seal without iron or gold.” In this process of assimilating the living body to external objects, Aristotle attached great importance to a special central organ called the “general sensory organ.” This center cognizes the qualities common to all sensations - movement, size, figure, etc. Thanks to it, it becomes possible for the subject to distinguish between modalities of sensations (color, taste, smell).
Aristotle considered the central organ of the soul not the brain, but the heart, connected with the organs of sense and movement through blood circulation. The body captures external impressions in the form of “fantasy” images (this meant ideas of memory and imagination). They are connected according to the laws of association of three types - contiguity (if two impressions followed each other, then subsequently one of them causes the other), similarity and contrast. (These laws discovered by Aristotle became the basis of a movement that later received the name of associative psychology.)
Aristotle adhered, in modern terms, to a systems approach, since he considered the living body and its abilities as a purposefully operating system. His important contribution is also the affirmation of the idea of development, for he taught that a higher-level ability arises on the basis of a previous, more elementary one. Aristotle correlated the development of an individual organism with the development of the entire animal world. In an individual person, during his transformation from an infant into a mature being, those steps that the organic world has passed through during its history are repeated. This generalization contained in its rudimentary form an idea that was later called the biological law.
Aristotle was the first to speak about the nature-conformity of education and the need to correlate pedagogical methods with the level of mental development of the child. He proposed periodization, the basis of which was the structure of the soul he identified. He divided childhood into three periods: up to 7 years, from 7 to 14 and from 14 to 21 years. For each of these periods, a specific education system must be developed. For example, speaking about preschool age. Aristotle emphasized that during this period the formation of the plant soul occupied the most important place; Therefore, for young children, daily routine, proper nutrition, and hygiene are so important. Schoolchildren need to develop other properties, in particular movements (with the help of gymnastic exercises), sensations, memory, and aspirations. Moral education should be based on the exercise of moral actions.
If Plato considered feelings to be evil, then Aristotle, on the contrary, wrote about the importance of educating children’s feelings, emphasizing the need for moderation and a reasonable correlation of feelings with the environment. He attached great importance to affects that arise independently of the will of a person and the fight against which with the power of reason alone is impossible. Therefore, he emphasized the role of art. Especially dramatic art, which, by evoking appropriate emotions in viewers and listeners, promotes catharsis, i.e. cleansing from affect, while simultaneously teaching both children and adults the culture of feelings.
So, Aristotle transformed the key explanatory principles of psychology: systematicity (organization), development, determinism. The soul for Aristotle is not a special entity, but a way of organizing a living body, which is a system; the soul goes through different stages in development and is capable of not only capturing what is acting on the body at the moment, but also being consistent with a future goal.
Aristotle discovered and studied many specific mental phenomena. But there are no “pure facts” in science. Any fact is seen differently depending on the theoretical angle of view, on the categories and explanatory schemes with which the researcher is armed. Having enriched the explanatory principles, Aristotle presented a completely different, compared to his predecessors, picture of the structure, functions and development of the soul.
Psychological views in the Hellenistic era. After the campaigns of the Macedonian king Alexander (IV century BC), the largest monarchy of antiquity arose. Its subsequent collapse revealed new period in the history of the ancient world - Hellenistic - with its characteristic synthesis of elements of the cultures of Greece and the countries of the East.
The position of the individual in society has changed radically. The free Greek lost contact with his hometown, a stable social environment and found himself faced with unpredictable changes. With increasing acuteness he felt the precariousness of his existence in a changed world. These shifts in the real situation and self-perception of the individual left an imprint on ideas about her mental life.
Stoics. The Stoic school arose in the 4th century BC. It received its name from the name of the place in Athens ("standing" - the portico of the temple), where its founder Zeno (not to be confused with the sophist Zeno) preached his teachings. Representing the cosmos as a single whole, consisting of endless modifications of fiery air - pneuma, the Stoics considered the human soul to be one of such modifications.
By pneum (the original meaning of the word is inhaled air), the first natural philosophers understood a single natural, material principle that permeates both the external physical space and the living organism and the psyche residing in it (i.e., the area of sensations, feelings, thoughts).
According to this teaching, the world pneuma is identical to the world soul, the “divine fire,” which is the Logos or, as the later Stoics believed, fate. Man's happiness was seen in living according to the Logos.
Like their predecessors in classical Greece, the Stoics believed in the primacy of reason, in the fact that a person does not achieve happiness because he does not know what it consists of. But if previously there was an image of a harmonious personality, in whose full life the rational and the sensual (emotional) merge, then among the thinkers of the Hellenistic era, in an environment of social adversity, fear, dissatisfaction, anxiety, the attitude towards emotional upheavals - affects - changed.
The Stoics declared war on affects, seeing in them “corruption of the mind,” since they arise as a result of “wrong” activity of the mind. Pleasure and pain are false judgments about the present; desire and fear are equally false judgments about the future. Affects should be treated like diseases. They need to be “rooted out of the soul.” Only a mind free from any emotional shocks (both positive and negative) is able to correctly guide behavior. This is what allows a person to fulfill his destiny, his duty and maintain inner freedom.
Epicureans. The school of Epicurus (late 4th century BC) was based on different cosmological principles, but with the same orientation towards the search for happiness and the art of living. In their ideas about nature, the Epicureans relied on the atomism of Democritus. However, in contrast to the version of “hard” causality in everything that happens in the world (and, therefore, in the soul), the Epicureans allowed spontaneity, the spontaneity of changes, their random nature. In other words, the Epicureans believed that an individual is capable of acting at his own peril and risk. However, the word “fear” here can only be used metaphorically: the whole point of the Epicurean teaching was that, having imbued with it, people would be saved precisely from fear.
The doctrine of atoms also served this purpose: a living body, like the soul, consists of atoms moving in emptiness, which at the moment of death are scattered according to the general laws of the same eternal cosmos. And if so, then “death has nothing to do with us: when we exist, then death is not yet there, but when death comes, then we are no longer there.”
Like many Stoics, the Epicureans thought about ways to achieve independence of the individual from the external. They saw the best way in self-removal from all public affairs. It is this behavior that will allow you to avoid grief, anxiety, negative emotions and, thereby, experience pleasure, for it is nothing more than the absence of suffering.
1.2.2. Results of the development of ancient psychological thought
The works of ancient Greek thinkers revealed many great problems that still guide the development of psychological ideas today. In their explanations of the genesis and structure of the soul, three directions are revealed in which the search for those large spheres independent of the individual took place, in the image and likeness of which the microcosm of the individual human soul was interpreted.
The first direction was the explanation of the psyche based on the laws of motion and development of the material world. The main idea here was the decisive dependence of mental manifestations on the general structure of things, their physical nature. (The question of the place of the psyche in the material world, first raised by ancient thinkers, still remains core in psychological theory.)
The second direction of ancient psychology, created by Aristotle, focused primarily on wildlife; the starting point for him was the difference between the properties of organic bodies and inorganic ones. Since the psyche is a form of life, bringing this issue to the forefront was a major step forward. It made it possible to see in the psyche not a soul living in the body, having spatial parameters and capable (according to both materialists and idealists) of leaving the organism with which it is externally connected, but a way of organizing the behavior of living systems.
The third direction made the mental activity of the individual dependent on forms that are created not by physical or organic nature, but by human culture, namely, on concepts, ideas, and ethical values. These forms, which indeed play a large role in the structure and dynamics of mental processes, were, however, starting with the Pythagoreans and Plato, alienated from the material world, from the real history of culture and society and presented in the form of special spiritual entities, alien to sensory bodies.
This direction has given particular urgency to the problem, which should be designated as psychognostic (from the Greek “gnosis” - knowledge). By it we must understand a wide range of issues that confront the study of psychological factors that initially connect the subject with reality external to him - natural and cultural. This reality is transformed according to the structure of the subject’s mental apparatus into something perceived by him in the form of sensory or mental images - be they images environment, the behavior of the person in it or this person himself.
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