The development of psychological thought in the 17th century and in the era of enlightenment (18th century). A Brief History of the Development of Psychology Psychology in the 17th century

Psychology has come a long way of development, the understanding of the object, subject and goals of psychology has changed. Let us note the main stages in the development of psychology as a science.

Stage I - psychology as the science of the soul. This definition of psychology was given more than two thousand years ago. The presence of the soul tried to explain all the incomprehensible phenomena in human life. Stage II - psychology as a science of consciousness. Arises in the 17th century in connection with the development natural sciences. The ability to think, feel, desire is called consciousness. The main method of study was the observation of a person for himself and the description of the facts. Stage III- psychology as a science of behavior. Arises in the 20th century. The task of psychology is to set up experiments and observe what can be directly seen, namely, behavior, actions, reactions of a person (the motives that cause actions were not taken into account).

Psychology is a science that studies the objective patterns, manifestations and mechanisms of the psyche.

In order to more clearly represent the path of development of psychology as a science, we briefly consider its main stages and directions.

1. The first ideas about the psyche were associated with animism(from Latin anima - spirit, soul) - the most ancient views, according to which everything that exists in the world has a soul. The soul was understood as an entity independent of the body, controlling all living and inanimate objects.

2. Later, in the philosophical teachings of antiquity, psychological aspects were touched upon, which were solved in terms of idealism or in terms of materialism. Thus, the materialist philosophers of antiquity Democritus, Lucretius, Epicurus understood the human soul as a kind of matter, as a bodily formation, consisting of spherical, small and most mobile atoms.

3. According to the ancient Greek idealist philosopher Plato(427-347 BC), who was a student and follower of Socrates, the soul is something divine, different from the body, and the human soul exists before it enters into union with the body. It is the image and outflow of the world soul. The soul is an invisible, sublime, divine, eternal principle. Soul and body are in complex relationship with each other. According to its divine origin, the soul is called upon to control the body, to direct the life of a person. However, sometimes the body takes the soul into its fetters. The body is torn apart by various desires and passions, it takes care of food, is subject to illnesses, fears, temptations. Mental phenomena are divided by Plato into reason, courage (in the modern sense - will) and desires (motivation).

Reason is located in the head, courage - in the chest, lust - in the abdominal cavity. The harmonious unity of the rational principle, noble aspirations and desires gives integrity to the spiritual life of a person. The soul lives in the human body and guides him throughout his life, and after death leaves him and enters the divine "world of ideas." Since the soul is the highest thing in a person, he should take care of its health more than the health of the body. Depending on what kind of lifestyle a person led, after his death, a different fate awaits his soul: it will either wander near the earth, burdened with bodily elements, or fly off the earth into an ideal world, into a world of ideas that exists outside of matter and outside of the individual. consciousness. "Aren't people ashamed to take care of money, fame and honors, but not to take care of their mind, truth and their soul and not think that it should be better?" - ask Socrates and Plato.

4. Great Philosopher Aristotle In the treatise "On the Soul" he singled out psychology as a kind of field of knowledge and for the first time put forward the idea of the inseparability of the soul and the living body. Aristotle rejected the view of the soul as a substance. At the same time, he did not consider it possible to consider the soul in isolation from matter (living bodies). The soul, according to Aristotle, is incorporeal, it is the form of a living body, the cause and purpose of all its vital functions. Aristotle put forward the concept of the soul as a function of the body, and not some external phenomenon in relation to it. The soul, or "psyche", is the engine that allows a living being to realize itself. If the eye were a living being, then its soul would be sight. So the human soul is the essence of a living body, it is the realization of its being, - Aristotle believed. The main function of the soul, according to Aristotle, is the realization of the biological existence of the organism. The center, "psyche", is in the heart, where the impressions from the sense organs come. These impressions form a source of ideas, which, combined with each other as a result of rational thinking, subordinate behavior to themselves. The driving force of human behavior is the desire (internal activity of the body), associated with a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Sense perceptions constitute the beginning of knowledge. The preservation and reproduction of sensations gives memory. Thinking is characterized by the compilation of general concepts, judgments and conclusions. A special form of intellectual activity is the mind (reason), brought in from outside in the form of divine mind. Thus, the soul manifests itself in various abilities for activity: nourishing, feeling, rational. Supreme Abilities arise from the lower ones and on their basis. The primary cognitive faculty of man is sensation; it takes the form of sensuously perceived objects without their matter, just as "wax takes the impression of a seal without iron." Sensations leave a trace in the form of representations - images of those objects that previously acted on the senses. Aristotle showed that these images are connected in three directions: by similarity, by contiguity and contrast, thereby indicating the main types of connections - associations of mental phenomena. Aristotle believed that knowledge of man is possible only through knowledge of the universe and the order existing in it. Thus, at the first stage, psychology acted as the science of the soul.

5. In an era middle ages the idea was established that the soul is a divine, supernatural principle, and therefore the study of spiritual life should be subordinated to the tasks of theology.

Only the outer side of the soul, which faces the material world, can yield to human judgment. The greatest mysteries of the soul are accessible only in religious (mystical) experience.

6. C 17th century a new era begins in the development of psychological knowledge. In connection with the development of the natural sciences, with the help of experimental methods, they began to study the laws of human consciousness. The ability to think and feel is called consciousness. Psychology began to develop as a science of consciousness. It is characterized by attempts to comprehend the spiritual world of a person mainly from general philosophical, speculative positions, without the necessary experimental base. R. Descartes (1596-1650) comes to the conclusion about the difference between the soul of a person and his body: "The body by its nature is always divisible, while the spirit is indivisible." However, the soul is capable of producing movements in the body. This contradictory dualistic doctrine gave rise to a problem called psychophysical: how are bodily (physiological) and mental (mental) processes in a person related? Descartes created a theory to explain behavior based on a mechanistic model. According to this model, the information delivered by the senses is sent along the sensory nerves to the holes in the brain, which these nerves expand, which allows the "animal souls" located in the brain to flow through the thinnest tubes - the motor nerves - into the muscles, which inflate, which leads to withdrawal of the irritated limb, or causes one or another action to be performed. Thus, there was no need to resort to the soul to explain how simple behavioral acts arise. Descartes laid the foundations for the deterministic (causal) concept of behavior with its central idea of a reflex as a natural motor response of the organism to external physical stimulation. This is Cartesian dualism - a body that acts mechanically, and a "reasonable soul" that controls it, localized in the brain. Thus, the concept of "Soul" began to turn into the concept of "Mind", and later - into the concept of "Consciousness". The famous Cartesian phrase "I think, therefore I am" became the basis of the postulate that the first thing a person discovers in himself is his own consciousness. The existence of consciousness is the main and unconditional fact, and the main task of psychology is to analyze the state and content of consciousness. On the basis of this postulate, psychology began to develop - it made consciousness its subject.

7. An attempt to reunite the body and soul of man, separated by the teachings of Descartes, was undertaken by the Dutch philosopher Spinoza(1632-1677). There is no special spiritual principle, it is always one of the manifestations of an extended substance (matter).

Soul and body are determined by the same material causes. Spinoza believed that such an approach makes it possible to consider the phenomena of the psyche with the same accuracy and objectivity as lines and surfaces are considered in geometry.

Thinking is an eternal property of substance (matter, nature), therefore, to a certain extent, thinking is inherent in both stone and animals, and to a large extent inherent in man, manifesting itself in the form of intellect and will at the human level.

8. German philosopher G. Leibniz(1646-1716), rejecting the equality of the psyche and consciousness established by Descartes, introduced the concept of the unconscious psyche. The hidden work of psychic forces - countless "small perceptions" (perceptions) - is continuously going on in the human soul. Conscious desires and passions arise from them.

9. The term " empirical psychology"introduced by the German philosopher of the 18th century X. Wolf to designate a direction in psychological science, the basic principle of which is to observe specific mental phenomena, classify them and establish a regular connection between them that can be verified by experience. The English philosopher J. Locke (1632-1704) considers the soul of a person as a passive, but capable of perceiving environment, comparing it with a blank slate on which nothing is written.Under the influence of sensory impressions, the human soul, awakening, is filled with simple ideas, begins to think, that is, to form complex ideas.In the language of psychology Locke introduced the concept of "association" - a connection between mental phenomena, in which the actualization of one of them entails the appearance of another. So psychology began to study how, by association of ideas, a person realizes the world. The study of the relationship between the soul and the body is finally inferior to the study of mental activity and consciousness.

Locke believed that there are two sources of all human knowledge: the first source is the objects of the external world, the second is the activity of a person’s own mind. The activity of the mind, thinking is known with the help of a special inner feeling - reflection. Reflection - according to Locke - is "the observation to which the mind exposes its activity", this is the focus of a person's attention on the activity of his own soul. Mental activity can proceed, as it were, at two levels: processes of the first level - perception, thoughts, desires (every person and child has them); processes of the second level - observation or "contemplation" of these perceptions, thoughts, desires (this is only for mature people who reflect on themselves, know their soul feelings and states). This method of introspection becomes an important means of studying the mental activity and consciousness of people.

10. Highlight psychology into an independent science occurred in the 60s. 19th century. It was associated with the creation of special research institutions - psychological laboratories and institutes, departments in higher educational institutions, as well as with the introduction of an experiment to study mental phenomena. First option experimental psychology as an independent scientific discipline was the physiological psychology of the German scientist W. Wundt (1832-1920). In 1879 he opened the world's first experimental psychological laboratory in Leipzig.

22. Significant contribution to the development of psychology of the XX century. contributed our domestic scientists L.S. (1896-1934), A.N. (1903-1979), A.R. Luria (1902-1977) and P.Ya. (1902-1988). L.S. Vygotsky introduced the concept of higher mental functions (thinking in concepts, rational speech, logical memory, voluntary attention) as a specifically human, socially conditioned form of the psyche, and also laid the foundations of a cultural and historical concept mental development person. Named functions originally exist as forms external activities, and only later - as a completely internal (intrapsychic) process. They come from forms of verbal communication between people and are mediated by the signs of the language. The system of signs determines behavior to a greater extent than the surrounding nature, since a sign, a symbol contains a program of behavior in a collapsed form. Higher mental functions develop in the process of learning, i.e. joint activities of a child and an adult.

A.N. Leontiev conducted a cycle experimental studies, revealing the mechanism of formation of higher mental functions as a process of "growing" (internalization) of higher forms of tool-sign actions into the subjective structures of the human psyche.

A.R. Luria Special attention devoted to the problems of cerebral localization of higher mental functions and their disorders. He was one of the founders of a new field of psychological science - neuropsychology.

P.Ya. Galperin considered mental processes(from perception to thinking inclusive) as an orienting activity of the subject in problem situations. The psyche itself historically arises only in a situation of mobile life for orientation on the basis of an image and is carried out with the help of actions in terms of this image. P.Ya. Galperin is the author of the concept of the phased formation of mental actions (images, concepts). The practical implementation of this concept can significantly increase the effectiveness of training.

3. DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT IN THE XVII CENTURY AND IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (XVIII CENTURY)

With the approval of simple technical devices in social production, the principle of their operation increasingly attracted scientific thought to explain the functions of the body in their image and likeness. The first great achievement in this aspect was the discovery by Harvey of the circulatory system, in which the heart was presented as a kind of pump that pumps fluid, which does not require the participation of the soul.

A new outline of a psychological theory focused on explaining Galileo's principles and Newton's new mechanics belonged to the French naturalist René Descartes (1596-1650). He presented a theoretical model of the organism as a mechanically working automaton. With this understanding, the living body, which was previously considered as controlled by the soul, was freed from its influence and interference; the functions of the "machine of the body", which include "perception, imprinting of ideas, retention of ideas in memory, internal aspirations ... are performed in this machine like the movements of a clock."

Later, Descartes introduced the concept of reflex, which became fundamental to psychology. If Harvey "removed" the soul from the category of regulators internal organs, then Descartes "did away" with it at the level of the whole organism. The scheme of the reflex was reduced to the following. An external impulse sets in motion light airlike particles, "animal spirits", brought into the brain through the "tubes" that make up the peripheral nervous system, from there the "animal spirits" are reflected to the muscles. Descartes' scheme, having explained the force moving the body, revealed the reflex nature of behavior.

One of Descartes' most important works for psychology is called The Passions of the Soul. In it, the scientist not only "deprived" the soul of the royal role in the Universe, but also "raised" it to the level of a substance equal in rights to other substances of nature. There has been a shift in the concept of the soul. Consciousness became the subject of psychology. Believing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts, ideas and desires are two entities (substances) independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in man. The explanation he offered was called the psychophysical interaction. It consisted in the following: the body influences the soul, awakening passions in it in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, possessing thinking and will, acts on the body, forcing it to work and change its course. The organ where these two incompatible substances communicate is one of the endocrine glands - the "pineal" (pineal gland).

The question of the interaction of soul and body absorbed the intellectual energy of many minds for centuries. Having freed the body from the soul, Descartes "liberated" the soul (psyche) from the body; the body can only move, the soul can only think; the principle of the body's work is a reflex (i.e. the brain reflects external influences); the principle of the soul's work is reflection (from Latin - "turning back", i.e. consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas, sensations).

Descartes created new form dualism in the form of the relationship of soul and body, divided feelings into two categories: rooted in the life of the organism and purely intellectual. In his last essay - a letter to the Swedish Queen Christina - he explained the essence of love as a feeling that has two forms - bodily passion without love and intellectual love without passion. In his opinion, only the former lends itself to a causal explanation, since it depends on the organism and biological mechanics; the second can only be understood and described. Descartes believed that science, as the knowledge of the causes of phenomena, is powerless in the face of the highest and most significant manifestations of the mental life of an individual. The result of his similar reasoning was the concept of "two psychologies" - explanatory, appealing to the causes associated with the functions of the body, and descriptive, consisting in the fact that we explain only the body, while we understand the soul.

Attempts to refute the dualism of Descartes, to affirm the unity of the universe, to put an end to the gap between the corporeal and spiritual, nature and consciousness, were undertaken by a number of great thinkers of the 17th century. One of them was the Dutch philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677). He taught that there is a single eternal substance - God, or Nature - with an infinite number of attributes (inherent properties). Of these, the philosopher believed, only two are open to our limited understanding - extension and thinking; from this it is clear that it is senseless to represent a person as a meeting place of two substances: a person is an integral bodily-spiritual being.

An attempt to build a psychological doctrine of man as an integral being is captured in his main work - "Ethics". It sets the task of explaining the whole variety of feelings (affects) as the motivating forces of human behavior with the accuracy and rigor of geometric proofs. It has been argued that there are three motivating forces: attraction, joy, and sadness. It has been argued that from these fundamental affects the whole variety of emotional states; while joy increases the capacity of the body for action, while sadness reduces it.

Spinoza took from the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz (1646-1716), who discovered the differential and integral calculus, the following idea of the unity of the physical and mental. The basis of this unity is the spiritual principle. The world consists of countless spiritual entities - monads (from gr. monos - one). Each of them is "psychic", i.e. not material (like an atom), but endowed with the ability to perceive everything that happens in the universe. The imperceptible activity of "small perceptions" - unconscious perceptions - is continuously going on in the soul. In those cases when they are realized, this becomes possible due to the fact that a special act, apperception, is added to simple perception (perception). It includes attention and memory. So, Leibniz brought into circulation the concept of the unconscious psyche.

To the question of how spiritual and bodily phenomena relate to each other, Leibniz answered with a formula known as psychophysical parallelism. In his opinion, they cannot influence one another. The dependence of the psyche on bodily influences is an illusion. Soul and body perform their operations independently and automatically. However, divine wisdom is reflected in the fact that between them there is a pre-established harmony. they are like a pair of clocks that always show the same time, because they are started with the greatest accuracy.

At the end of this section of psychology, it is necessary to mention the name

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Before him, rationalism reigned in psychological teachings (from Latin racio - mind). Hobbes proposed to take experience as the basis of knowledge. They opposed rationalism to empiricism (from Latin empirio - experience). This is how empirical psychology arose.

In the XVIII century in Europe, when the process of strengthening capitalist relations continued, a new movement, the Enlightenment, expanded and strengthened. Its representatives considered ignorance to be the main cause of all human ills. It was assumed that in the fight against it, society would get rid of social disasters and vices, and goodness and justice would reign everywhere in it. These ideas were acquired in various countries different tonality in connection with the originality of their socio-historical development. So, in England, I. Newton (1643-1727) created a new mechanics, perceived as a model and ideal of exact knowledge, as a triumph of reason.

In accordance with the Newtonian understanding of nature, the English physician Gartley (1705-1757) explained the mental world of man. He presented it as a product of the body's work - a "vibrator machine". The following was assumed. Vibration of the external ether through the vibrations of the nerves causes vibrations of the medulla, which pass into the vibrations of the muscles. In parallel with this, psychic "companions" of vibrations arise in the brain, combine and replace each other - from feeling to abstract thinking and arbitrary actions. All this happens on the basis of the law of associations. Gartley considered. that the mental world of a person develops gradually as a result of the complication of primary sensory elements through associations of adjacency of elements in time. For example, the behavior of a child is regulated by two motivational forces - pleasure and pain.

The task of education, in his opinion, is to consolidate in people such ties that would turn away from immoral deeds and give pleasure from moral ones. and the stronger these ties, the more chances for a person to become a morally virtuous person, and for the whole society - more perfect.

Other prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment were K. Helvetius

(1715-1771), P. Holbach (1723-1789) and D. Diderot (1713-1784). Defending the idea of the emergence of the spiritual world from the physical world, they represented a "man-machine" endowed with a psyche as a product of external influences and natural history. In the final period of the Enlightenment era, the physician-philosopher P. Kabanis (1757-1808) put forward a position according to which thinking is a function of the brain.

At the same time, he proceeded from observations of the bloody experience of the revolution, the leaders of which instructed him to find out the awareness of the convict, whose head is cut off on the guillotine, of their suffering, evidence of which may be convulsions. Cabanis answered this question in the negative. Only a person with a brain is able to think. The movements of the decapitated body are of a reflex nature and are not conscious. Consciousness is a function of the brain. P. Kabanis attributed the expression of thought in words and gestures to the external products of brain activity. To the external products of brain activity - the expression of thought in words and gestures. Behind thought itself, in his opinion, is hidden an unknown nervous process, the inseparability of mental phenomena and the nervous substratum. By arguing the need to move from the speculative to the empirical study of this inseparability, he paved the way for the movement of scientific thought in the next century.

The Italian thinker D. Vico (1668-1744) in his treatise "Foundations of a new science about the general nature of things" (1725) put forward the idea that every society passes successively through three epochs: gods, heroes and people. As for the mental properties of a person, they, according to D. Vico, arise in the course of the history of society. In particular, he associated the emergence of abstract thinking with the development of trade and political life. The name of D. Viko is associated with the idea of a supra-individual spiritual power, inherent in the people as a whole and constituting the fundamental principle of culture and history.

In Russia, the spiritual atmosphere of the Enlightenment conditioned the philosophical and psychological views of A.N. Radishchev (1749-1802). A.N. Radishchev was looking for the key to the psychology of people in the conditions of their public life ("Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow"), for which he was sentenced to death penalty, replaced by a link to Siberia.

So, in the Enlightenment, two directions arose in the development of problems of psychological knowledge: the interpretation of the psyche as a function of highly organized matter - the brain, which contributed to the experimental study of those phenomena that were considered the product of an incorporeal soul; the doctrine according to which the individual psyche is determined by social conditions, mores, customs, the spiritual world of people who are driven by their own energy of cultural creativity.

Ancient psychology: the development of knowledge about the soul as an entity and a critical analysis of views

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History and main trends in the development of psychology in Russia

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History of psychology

The first ideas about the psyche were associated with animism (from the Latin "anima" - spirit, soul) - the most ancient views, according to which everything that exists in the world has a soul. The soul was understood as an entity independent of the body...

History of psychology

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History of psychology

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The history of the development of psychological views

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Features of the development of psychological knowledge in Russia at the turn of the 19th century

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The subject and task of modern psychology, its significance in the life of a person

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Problems, subject and methods social psychology

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Like, originates in the depths of millennia. The term "psychology" (from the Greek. psyche- soul, logos- doctrine, science) means "the doctrine of the soul." Psychological knowledge has historically developed - some ideas were replaced by others.

The study of the history of psychology, of course, cannot be reduced to a simple enumeration of the problems, ideas and ideas of various psychological schools. In order to understand them, it is necessary to understand their internal connection, the single logic of the formation of psychology as a science.

Psychology as the doctrine of the human soul is always conditioned by anthropology, the doctrine of man in its entirety. Studies, hypotheses, conclusions of psychology, no matter how abstract and private they may seem, imply a certain understanding of the essence of a person, they are guided by one or another of his image. In turn, the doctrine of man fits into the general picture of the world, formed on the basis of the synthesis of knowledge, worldview attitudes of the historical era. Therefore, the history of the formation and development of psychological knowledge is seen as a completely logical process associated with a change in the understanding of the essence of man and with the formation on this basis of new approaches to explaining his psyche.

The history of the formation and development of psychology

Mythological ideas about the soul

Humanity started with mythological picture of the world. Psychology owes its name and first definition to Greek mythology, according to which Eros, the immortal god of love, fell in love with the beautiful mortal woman Psyche. The love of Eros and Psyche was so strong that Eros managed to convince Zeus to turn Psyche into a goddess, making her immortal. Thus, the lovers are united forever. For the Greeks, this myth was a classic image of true love as the highest realization of the human soul. Therefore, Psycho - a mortal who has gained immortality - has become a symbol of the soul, looking for its ideal. At the same time, in this beautiful legend about the difficult path of Eros and Psyche towards each other, a deep thought is guessed about the difficulty of a person mastering his spiritual beginning, his mind and feelings.

The ancient Greeks initially understood the close connection of the soul with its physical basis. The same understanding of this connection can be traced in Russian words: “soul”, “spirit” and “breathe”, “air”. Already in ancient times, the concept of the soul combined into a single complex inherent in external nature (air), the body (breath) and an entity independent of the body that controls life processes (the spirit of life).

In early ideas, the soul was endowed with the ability to go free from the body while a person is sleeping, and live its own life in his dreams. It was believed that at the moment of death of a person, the soul leaves the body forever, flying out through the mouth. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls is one of the most ancient. It was presented not only in ancient India, but also in Ancient Greece, especially in the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato.

The mythological picture of the world, where bodies are inhabited by souls (their "doubles" or ghosts), and life depends on the arbitrariness of the gods, has reigned in the public consciousness for centuries.

Psychological knowledge in the ancient period

Psychology as rational knowledge of the human soul originated in antiquity in the depths on the basis of the geocentric picture of the world, placing man at the center of the universe.

Ancient philosophy adopted the concept of the soul from previous mythology. Almost all ancient philosophers tried to express the most important essential principle of living nature using the concept of the soul, considering it as the cause of life and knowledge.

For the first time a man, his inner spiritual world becomes the center of philosophical reflection in Socrates (469-399 BC). Unlike his predecessors, who dealt mainly with the problems of nature, Socrates focused on the inner world of man, his beliefs and values, the ability to act as a rational being. Socrates assigned the main role in the human psyche to mental activity, which was studied in the process of dialogical communication. After his research, the understanding of the soul was filled with such ideas as "good", "justice", "beautiful", etc., which physical nature does not know.

The world of these ideas became the core of the doctrine of the soul of the brilliant student of Socrates - Plato (427-347 BC).

Plato developed the doctrine of immortal soul inhabiting a mortal body, leaving it after death and returning to the eternal supersensible world of ideas. The main thing with Plato is not in the doctrine of immortality and the transmigration of the soul, but in the study of the content of its activities(in modern terminology in the study of mental activity). He showed that the inner activity of souls gives knowledge about realities of supersensible being, the eternal world of ideas. How, then, does the soul, which is in mortal flesh, join the eternal world of ideas? All knowledge, according to Plato, is memory. With appropriate efforts and preparation, the soul can remember what she had a chance to contemplate before her earthly birth. He taught that man is "not an earthly planting, but a heavenly planting."

Plato first identified such a form of mental activity as inner speech: the soul reflects, asks itself, answers, affirms and denies. He was the first to try to reveal the inner structure of the soul, isolating its triple composition: the higher part is the rational principle, the middle part is the volitional principle, and the lower part of the soul is the sensual principle. The rational part of the soul is called upon to coordinate the lower and higher motives and impulses coming from different parts souls. Such problems as the conflict of motives were introduced into the sphere of the study of the soul, and the role of the mind in its resolution was considered.

Disciple - (384-322 BC), arguing with his teacher, returned the soul from the supersensible to the sensible world. He introduced the concept of the soul as functions of a living organism rather than some independent entity. The soul, according to Aristotle, is a form, a way of organizing a living body: “The soul is the essence of being and the form is not of such a body as an ax, but of such a natural body, which in itself has the beginning of movement and rest.”

Aristotle singled out different levels of activity abilities in the body. These levels of ability constitute a hierarchy of levels of soul development.

Aristotle distinguishes three types of soul: vegetable, animal and reasonable. Two of them belong to physical psychology, since they cannot exist without matter, the third is metaphysical, i.e. the mind exists separately and independently from the physical body as the divine mind.

Aristotle was the first to introduce into psychology the idea of development from the lower levels of the soul to the highest forms. At the same time, each person, in the process of turning from an infant into an adult being, passes through the steps from the plant to the animal, and from it to the rational soul. According to Aristotle, the soul or "psyche" is engine allowing the organism to realize itself. The center of the "psyche" is in the heart, where the impressions transmitted from the senses come.

When characterizing a person, Aristotle put forward in the first place knowledge, thinking and wisdom. This setting in the views of man, inherent not only to Aristotle, but also to antiquity as a whole, was largely revised within the framework of medieval psychology.

Psychology in the Middle Ages

When studying the development of psychological knowledge in the Middle Ages, a number of circumstances must be taken into account.

Psychology as an independent field of research did not exist during the Middle Ages. Psychological knowledge was included in religious anthropology (the doctrine of man).

The psychological knowledge of the Middle Ages was based on religious anthropology, which was especially deeply developed by Christianity, especially by such "fathers of the church" as John Chrysostom (347-407), Augustine Aurelius (354-430), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and others.

Christian anthropology comes from theocentric picture world and the main principle of Christian dogma - the principle of creationism, i.e. creation of the world by the divine mind.

It is very difficult for modern scientifically oriented thinking to understand the teachings of the holy fathers, which are predominantly symbolic character.

Man in the teachings of the Holy Fathers appears as central creature in the universe the highest step in the hierarchical ladder of the theater, those. created by God peace.

Man is the center of the universe. This idea was also known to ancient philosophy, which considered man as a "microcosm", a small world, embracing the entire universe.

Christian anthropology has not abandoned the idea of a "microcosm", but the holy fathers have significantly changed its meaning and content.

The "Church Fathers" believed that human nature is connected with all the main spheres of being. Man is connected with the earth with his body: “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul,” the Bible says. Through feelings, a person is connected with the material world, the soul - with the spiritual world, the rational part of which is capable of ascending to the Creator Himself.

Man, the holy fathers teach, is dual in nature: one of his components is external, bodily, and the other is internal, spiritual. The human soul, nourishing the body with which it was created together, is everywhere in the body, and is not concentrated in one place. The Holy Fathers introduce a distinction between "inner" and "outer" man: "God created inner man and blinded external; the flesh is molded, but the soul is created. In modern terms, outer man is a natural phenomenon, inner man- a supernatural phenomenon, there is something mysterious, unknowable, divine.

Unlike the intuitive-symbolic, spiritual-experimental way of knowing a person in Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity followed the path rational comprehension of God, the world and man, having developed such a specific type of thinking as scholasticism(of course, along with scholasticism in Western Christianity, there were also irrational mystical teachings, but they did not determine the spiritual climate of the era). The appeal to rationality ultimately led to the transition of Western civilization in modern times from a theocentric to an anthropocentric picture of the world.

Psychological thought of the Renaissance and Modern times

Humanist movement that originated in Italy in the 15th century. and spread in Europe in the 16th century, was called "Renaissance". Reviving the ancient humanistic culture, this era contributed to the liberation of all sciences and arts from the dogmas and restrictions imposed on them by medieval religious ideas. As a result, the natural, biological and medical sciences began to develop quite actively and made a significant step forward. A movement began in the direction of forming psychological knowledge into an independent science.

A huge influence on the psychological thought of the XVII-XVIII centuries. provided by mechanics, which became the leader of the natural sciences. Mechanical picture of nature led to a new era in the development of European psychology.

The beginning of a mechanical approach to explaining mental phenomena and reducing them to physiology was laid by the French philosopher, mathematician and naturalist R. Descartes (1596-1650), who was the first to develop a model of an organism as an automaton or a system that works like artificial mechanisms in accordance with the laws of mechanics. Thus, a living organism, which was previously considered as animated, i.e. gifted and controlled by the soul, freed from its defining influence and interference.

R. Descartes introduced the concept reflex which later became fundamental for physiology and psychology. In accordance with the Cartesian scheme of the reflex, an external impulse was transmitted to the brain, from where a response occurred, setting the muscles in motion. They gave an explanation of behavior as a purely reflex phenomenon without referring to the soul as the force that moves the body. Descartes hoped that over time, not only simple movements - such as the defensive reaction of the pupil to light or hands to fire - but also the most complex behavioral acts could be explained by the physiological mechanics he had discovered.

Before Descartes, it was believed for centuries that all activity in the perception and processing of mental material is carried out by the soul. He also argued that the bodily device and without it is able to successfully cope with this task. What are the functions of the soul?

R. Descartes considered the soul as a substance, i.e. an entity independent of anything else. The soul was defined by him according to a single sign - the direct awareness of its phenomena. Its purpose was to knowledge of the subject about his own acts and states, invisible to anyone else. Thus, there was a turn in the concept of "soul", which became the reference for the next stage in the history of the construction of the subject of psychology. From now on, this subject becomes consciousness.

Descartes, on the basis of a mechanistic approach, raised a theoretical question about the interaction of "soul and body", which later became the subject of discussion for many scientists.

Another attempt to build a psychological doctrine of man as an integral being was made by one of the first opponents of R. Descartes - the Dutch thinker B. Spinoza (1632-1677), who considered the whole variety of human feelings (affects) as motivating forces of human behavior. He substantiated the general scientific principle of determinism, which is important for the understanding of psychic phenomena—universal causality and the natural scientific explainability of any phenomena. He entered science in the form of the following statement: "The order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things."

Nevertheless, a contemporary of Spinoza, the German philosopher and mathematician G.V. Leibniz (1646-1716) considered the correlation of spiritual and bodily phenomena on the basis of psychophysiological parallelism, i.e. their independent and parallel coexistence. He considered the dependence of mental phenomena on bodily phenomena an illusion. The soul and body act independently, but between them there is a pre-established harmony based on the Divine mind. The doctrine of psychophysiological parallelism found many supporters during the formative years of psychology as a science, but at the present time belongs to history.

Another idea of G.V. Leibniz that each of the countless monads (from the Greek. monos- one) of which the world consists, is "mental" and endowed with the ability to perceive everything that happens in the Universe, has found unexpected empirical confirmation in some modern concepts consciousness.

It should also be noted that G. W. Leibniz introduced the concept "unconscious" into the psychological thought of the New Age, designating unconscious perceptions as “small perceptions”. Awareness of perceptions becomes possible due to the fact that a special mental act is added to a simple perception (perception) - apperception, which includes memory and attention. Leibniz's ideas significantly changed and expanded the concept of the mental. His concepts of the unconscious psyche, small perceptions and apperceptions have become firmly established in scientific psychological knowledge.

Another direction in the formation of new European psychology is associated with the English thinker T. Hobbes (1588-1679), who completely rejected the soul as a special entity and believed that there is nothing in the world but material bodies moving according to the laws of mechanics. Psychic phenomena were brought under their influence mechanical laws. T. Hobbes believed that sensations are a direct result of the impact of material objects on the body. According to the law of inertia, discovered by G. Galileo, representations appear from sensations in the form of their weakened trace. They form a sequence of thoughts in the same order in which the sensations were replaced. This connection was later called associations. T. Hobbes proclaimed reason to be the product of association, which has as its source the direct influence of the material world on the sense organs.

Before Hobbes, rationalism reigned in psychological teachings (from lat. pacationalis- reasonable). Starting with it, experience was taken as the basis of knowledge. Rationalism T. Hobbes opposed empiricism (from the Greek. empeiria- experience), from which arose empirical psychology.

In the development of this direction, a prominent role belonged to the compatriot of T. Hobbes - J. Locke (1632-1704), who in the experiment itself identified two sources: feeling and reflection, by which he understood the internal perception of the activity of our mind. concept reflections firmly established in psychology. The name of Locke is associated with such a method of psychological knowledge as introspection, i.e. internal self-observation of ideas, images, representations, feelings, as they are to the “internal gaze” of the subject observing him.

Starting with J. Locke, phenomena become the subject of psychology consciousness, which generate two experiences - external emanating from the sense organs, and interior accumulated by the individual's own mind. Under the sign of this picture of consciousness, the psychological concepts of subsequent decades were formed.

The birth of psychology as a science

At the beginning of the XIX century. new approaches to the psyche began to be developed, based not on mechanics, but on physiology, which turned the organism into an object experimental study. Physiology translated the speculative views of the previous era into the language of experience and investigated the dependence of mental functions on the structure of the sense organs and the brain.

The discovery of differences between sensory (sensory) and motor (motor) nerve pathways leading to the spinal cord made it possible to explain the mechanism of nerve communication as "reflex arc" the excitation of one shoulder of which naturally and irreversibly activates the other shoulder, generating a muscular reaction. This discovery proved the dependence of the functions of the organism, concerning its behavior in the external environment, on the bodily substrate, which was perceived as refutation of the doctrine of the soul as a special incorporeal entity.

Studying the effect of stimuli on the nerve endings of the sense organs, the German physiologist G.E. Müller (1850-1934) formulated the position that no other energy than famous physics, nervous tissue does not possess. This position was elevated to the rank of law, as a result of which mental processes moved in the same row as the nervous tissue visible under a microscope and dissected with a scalpel, which generates them. True, the main thing remained unclear - how the miracle of the generation of psychic phenomena is accomplished.

German physiologist E.G. Weber (1795-1878) identified the relationship between a continuum of sensations and a continuum of physical stimuli that elicited them. In the course of experiments, it was found that there is a quite definite (different for different sense organs) relationship between the initial stimulus and the subsequent one, in which the subject begins to notice that the sensation has become different.

The foundations of psychophysics as a scientific discipline were laid by the German scientist G. Fechner (1801-1887). Psychophysics, without touching upon the question of the causes of mental phenomena and their material substratum, revealed empirical dependencies on the basis of the introduction of experiment and quantitative methods research.

The work of physiologists on the study of the sense organs and movements prepared a new psychology, different from traditional psychology, which is closely connected with philosophy. The ground was created for the separation of psychology from both physiology and philosophy as a separate scientific discipline.

At the end of the XIX century. Almost simultaneously, several programs for the construction of psychology as an independent discipline took shape.

The greatest success fell to the share of W. Wundt (1832-1920), a German scientist who came to psychology from physiology and was the first to begin to collect and combine into new discipline created by various researchers. Calling this discipline physiological psychology, Wundt took up the study of problems borrowed from physiologists - the study of sensations, reaction times, associations, psychophysics.

Having organized in 1875 in Leipzig the first psychological institute, W. Wundt decided to study the content and structure of consciousness on a scientific basis by highlighting the simplest structures in the internal experience, initiating structuralist approach to consciousness. Consciousness was divided into mental elements(sensations, images), which became the subject of study.

A unique subject of psychology, not studied by any other discipline, was recognized as "direct experience". The main method is introspection, the essence of which was to observe the subject of the processes in his mind.

The method of experimental introspection has significant shortcomings, which very quickly led to the abandonment of the consciousness research program proposed by W. Wundt. The disadvantage of the method of introspection for building scientific psychology is its subjectivity: each subject describes his experiences and sensations, which do not coincide with the feelings of another subject. The main thing is that consciousness is not made up of some frozen elements, but is in the process of development and constant change.

By the end of the XIX century. The enthusiasm that Wundt's program once awakened has dried up, and the understanding of the subject of psychology inherent in it has lost credibility forever. Many of Wundt's students broke with him and took a different path. At present, the contribution of W. Wundt is seen in the fact that he showed which way psychology should not go, since scientific knowledge develops not only by confirming hypotheses and facts, but also by refuting them.

Realizing the failure of the first attempts to build a scientific psychology, the German philosopher W. Dilypey (1833-1911) put forward the idea of "two hesychologies": an experimental one, related in its method to the natural sciences, and another psychology, which, instead of an experimental study of the psyche, deals with the interpretation of the manifestation of the human spirit. He separated the study of the connections of mental phenomena with the bodily life of an organism from their connections with the history of cultural values. He called the first psychology explanatory, second - understanding.

Western psychology in the 20th century

Western psychology of the 20th century. It is customary to distinguish three main schools, or, using the terminology of the American psychologist L. Maslow (1908-1970), three forces: behaviorism, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology. In recent decades, the fourth direction of Western psychology has been developed very intensively - transpersonal psychology.

Historically the first was behaviorism, which got its name from the understanding of the subject of psychology proclaimed by him - behavior (from the English. behavior - behavior).

The American zoopsychologist J. Watson (1878-1958) is considered the founder of behaviorism in Western psychology, since it was he who, in the article “Psychology as the behaviorist sees it”, published in 1913, called for the creation of a new psychology, stating the fact that for half a century of its existence as an experimental discipline of psychology has failed to take its rightful place among the natural sciences. Watson saw the reason for this in a false understanding of the subject and methods of psychological research. The subject of psychology, according to J. Watson, should be not consciousness, but behavior.

The subjective method of internal self-observation should be replaced accordingly objective methods external observation of behavior.

Ten years after Watson's keynote article, behaviorism came to dominate almost all of American psychology. The fact is that the pragmatic orientation of research into mental activity in the United States was due to requests from the economy, and later from the mass media.

Behaviorism included the teachings of I.P. Pavlov (1849-1936) about the conditioned reflex and began to consider human behavior from the point of view of conditioned reflexes formed under the influence of the social environment.

The original scheme of J. Watson, explaining behavioral acts as a reaction to presented stimuli, was further improved by E. Tolman (1886-1959) by introducing an intermediate link between the stimulus from the environment and the individual's response in the form of the individual's goals, his expectations, hypotheses, cognitive map peace, etc. The introduction of an intermediate link somewhat complicated the scheme, but did not change its essence. The general approach of behaviorism to man as animal,verbal behavior, remained unchanged.

In the work of the American behaviorist B. Skinner (1904-1990) “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”, the concepts of freedom, dignity, responsibility, morality are considered from the standpoint of behaviorism as derivatives of the “system of incentives”, “reinforcement programs” and are evaluated as “a useless shadow in human life."

The most powerful influence on Western culture was psychoanalysis, developed by Z. Freud (1856-1939). Psychoanalysis contributed to Western European and American culture general concepts"psychology of the unconscious", ideas about the irrational moments of human activity, conflict and splitting of the inner world of the individual, "repressiveness" of culture and society, etc. etc. Unlike behaviorists, psychoanalysts began to study consciousness, build hypotheses about the inner world of the individual, introduce new terms that claim to be scientific, but not amenable to empirical verification.

In psychological literature, including educational literature, Z. Freud's merit is seen in his appeal to the deep structures of the psyche, to the unconscious. Pre-Freudian psychology took a normal, physically and mentally healthy person as an object of study and paid the main attention to the phenomenon of consciousness. Freud, having begun to explore, as a psychiatrist, the inner mental world of neurotic personalities, developed a very simplified a model of the psyche, consisting of three parts - conscious, unconscious and superconscious. In this model, 3. Freud did not discover the unconscious, since the phenomenon of the unconscious has been known since antiquity, but swapped consciousness and the unconscious: the unconscious is a central component of the psyche, on which the consciousness is built up. The unconscious itself was interpreted by him as a sphere of instincts and drives, the main of which is the sexual instinct.

The theoretical model of the psyche, developed in relation to the psyche of sick individuals with neurotic reactions, was given the status of a general theoretical model explaining the functioning of the psyche in general.

Despite the obvious difference and, it would seem, even the opposite of approaches, behaviorism and psychoanalysis are similar to each other - both of these areas built psychological ideas without resorting to spiritual realities. Not without reason, representatives of humanistic psychology came to the conclusion that both main schools - behaviorism and psychoanalysis - did not see a person as specifically human, ignored the real problems of human life - the problems of goodness, love, justice, as well as the role of morality, philosophy, religion, and were nothing else, as "slandering a person." All these real problems are seen as derived from basic instincts or social relations and communications.

“Western psychology of the 20th century,” as S. Grof writes, “created a very negative image of a person - some kind of biological machine with instinctive impulses of an animal nature.”

Humanistic psychology represented by L. Maslow (1908-1970), K. Rogers (1902-1987). V. Frankl (b. 1905) and others made it their task to introduce real problems in the field of psychological research. The subject of psychological research representatives of humanistic psychology considered a healthy creative personality. The humanistic orientation was expressed in the fact that love, creative growth, higher values, meaning were considered as basic human needs.

The humanistic approach departs furthest from scientific psychology, assigning the main role personal experience person. According to humanists, the individual is capable of self-esteem and can independently find a way to the flowering of his personality.

Along with the humanistic trend in psychology, dissatisfaction with attempts to build psychology on the worldview basis of natural-scientific materialism is also expressed by transpersonal psychology, which proclaims the need for a transition to a new paradigm of thinking.

The first representative of the transpersonal orientation in psychology is the Swiss psychologist K.G. Jung (1875-1961), although Jung himself called his psychology not transpersonal, but analytical. Attribution to K.G. Jung to the forerunners of transpersonal psychology is held on the basis that he considered it possible for a person to overcome the narrow boundaries of his "I" and personal unconscious, and connect with the higher "I", the higher mind, commensurate with all of humanity and the cosmos.

Jung shared the views of 3. Freud until 1913, when he published a policy article in which he showed that Freud had completely wrongly reduced all human activity to a biologically inherited sexual instinct, while human instincts are not biological, but entirely symbolic in nature. K.G. Jung did not ignore the unconscious, but paying great attention to its dynamics, he gave a new interpretation, the essence of which is that the unconscious is not a psychobiological dump of rejected instinctive tendencies, repressed memories and subconscious prohibitions, but a creative, rational principle that connects a person with all of humanity, with nature and space. Along with the individual unconscious, there is also the collective unconscious, which, being supra-personal, transpersonal in nature, forms the universal basis of the spiritual life of every person. It was this idea of Jung that was developed in transpersonal psychology.

American psychologist, founder of transpersonal psychology S. Grof states that the worldview based on natural-scientific materialism, which has long been outdated and has become an anachronism for theoretical physics of the 20th century, still continues to be considered scientific in psychology, to the detriment of its future development. "Scientific" psychology cannot explain the spiritual practice of healing, clairvoyance, the presence of paranormal abilities in individuals and whole social groups, conscious control internal states etc.

The atheistic, mechanistic and materialistic approach to the world and existence, S. Grof believes, reflects a deep alienation from the core of being, the lack of a true understanding of oneself and the psychological suppression of the transpersonal spheres of one's own psyche. This means, according to the views of supporters of transpersonal psychology, that a person identifies himself with only one partial aspect of his nature - with the bodily "I" and chilotropic (ie, associated with the material structure of the brain) consciousness.

Such a truncated attitude towards oneself and one's own existence is ultimately fraught with a sense of the futility of life, alienation from the cosmic process, as well as insatiable needs, competitiveness, vanity, which no achievement can satisfy. On a collective scale, such a human condition leads to alienation from nature, to an orientation towards "limitless growth" and obsession with the objective and quantitative parameters of existence. As experience shows, this way of being in the world is extremely destructive both on a personal and collective level.

Transpersonal psychology considers a person as a cosmic and spiritual being, inextricably linked with all of humanity and the Universe, with the ability to access the global information field.

In the last decade, many works on transpersonal psychology have been published, and in textbooks and teaching aids this direction is presented as latest achievement in the development of psychological thought without any analysis of the consequences of the methods used in the study of the psyche. The methods of transpersonal psychology, which claims to cognize the cosmic dimension of man, meanwhile are not connected with the concepts of morality. These methods are aimed at the formation and transformation of special, altered states of a person with the help of dosed use of drugs, various types of hypnosis, hyperventilation of the lungs, etc.

There is no doubt that the research and practice of transpersonal psychology discovered the connection of a person with the cosmos, the exit of human consciousness beyond the usual barriers, overcoming the limitations of space and time during transpersonal experiences, proved the very existence of a spiritual sphere, and much more.

But in general, this way of studying the human psyche seems to be very pernicious and dangerous. The methods of transpersonal psychology are designed to break down the natural defenses and penetrate into the spiritual space of the individual. Transpersonal experiences occur in a state of drug intoxication, hypnosis or increased breathing and do not lead to spiritual purification and spiritual growth.

Formation and development of domestic psychology

I.M. Sechenov (1829-1905), and not the American J. Watson, since the first in 1863 in the treatise "Reflexes of the Brain" came to the conclusion that self-regulation of behavior organism through signals is the subject of psychological research. Later I.M. Sechenov began to define psychology as the science of the origin of mental activity, which included perception, memory, and thinking. He believed that mental activity It is built according to the type of reflex and includes, after the perception of the environment and its processing in the brain, the response work of the motor apparatus. In the works of Sechenov, for the first time in the history of psychology, the subject of this science began to cover not only the phenomena and processes of consciousness and the unconscious psyche, but also the entire cycle of interaction of the organism with the world, including its external bodily actions. Therefore, for psychology, according to I.M. Sechenov, the only reliable method is the objective, not the subjective (introspective) method.

Sechenov's ideas influenced world science, but basically they were developed in Russia in the exercises I.P. Pavlova(1849-1936) and V.M. ankylosing spondylitis(1857-1927), whose works approved the priority of the reflexological approach.

In the Soviet period of Russian history, in the first 15-20 years of Soviet power, an inexplicable, at first glance, phenomenon was revealed - an unprecedented rise in a number of scientific fields - physics, mathematics, biology, linguistics, including psychology. For example, in 1929 alone, about 600 titles of books on psychology were published in the country. New directions are emerging: in the field of the psychology of learning - pedology, in the field of psychology labor activity- psychotechnics, brilliant work was carried out on defectology, forensic psychology, zoopsychology.

In the 30s. Devastating blows were dealt to psychology by the decisions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and almost all basic psychological concepts and psychological research outside the framework of Marxist guidelines were banned. Historically, psychology itself has contributed to this attitude towards research in the field of the psyche. Psychologists - at first in theoretical studies and within the walls of laboratories - as if relegated to the background, and then completely denied a person's right to an immortal soul and spiritual life. Then theoreticians were replaced by practitioners and began to treat people as soulless objects. This arrival was not accidental, but prepared by a previous development in which psychology also played its part.

By the end of the 50s - the beginning of the 60s. there was a situation when psychology was assigned the role of a section in the physiology of higher nervous activity and a complex of psychological knowledge in Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Psychology was understood as a science that studies the psyche, the patterns of its emergence and development. The understanding of the psyche was based on the Leninist theory of reflection. The psyche was defined as the property of highly organized matter - the brain - to reflect reality in the form of mental images. Mental reflection was considered as an ideal form of material existence. Dialectical materialism was the only possible ideological basis for psychology. The reality of the spiritual as an independent entity was not recognized.

Even under these conditions, Soviet psychologists such as S.L. Rubinstein (1889-1960), L.S. Vygotsky (1896-1934), L.N. Leontiev (1903-1979), D.N. Uznadze (1886-1950), A.R. Luria (1902-1977), made a significant contribution to world psychology.

In the post-Soviet era, new opportunities opened up for Russian psychology and new problems arose. The development of domestic psychology in modern conditions no longer corresponded to the rigid dogmas of dialectical materialist philosophy, which, of course, provides freedom for creative search.

Currently, there are several orientations in Russian psychology.

Marxist-oriented psychology. Although this orientation has ceased to be dominant, the only and mandatory, however long years formed the paradigms of thought that shape psychological research.

Westernized psychology represents an assimilation, adaptation, imitation of Western trends in psychology, which were rejected by the previous regime. Usually, productive ideas do not arise on the paths of imitation. In addition, the main currents of Western psychology reflect the psyche of a Western European person, and not a Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc. Since there is no universal psyche, the theoretical schemes and models of Western psychology do not possess universality.

Spiritually Oriented Psychology, aimed at restoring the “vertical of the human soul”, is represented by the names of psychologists B.S. Bratusya, B. Nichiporova, F.E. Vasilyuk, V.I. Slobodchikova, V.P. Zinchenko and V.D. Shadrikov. Spiritually oriented psychology relies on traditional spiritual values and the recognition of the reality of spiritual being.

AND IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (XVIII CENTURY)

Later, Descartes introduced the concept of reflex, which became fundamental to psychology. If Harvey "removed" the soul from the category of regulators of internal organs, then Descartes "did away" with it at the level of the whole organism. The scheme of the reflex was reduced to the following. An external impulse sets in motion light airlike particles, "animal spirits", brought into the brain through the "tubes" that make up the peripheral nervous system, from there the "animal spirits" are reflected to the muscles. Descartes' scheme, having explained the force moving the body, revealed the reflex nature of behavior.

One of Descartes' most important works for psychology is called The Passions of the Soul. In it, the scientist not only "deprived" the soul of its royal role in the Universe, but also "raised" it to the level of a substance equal in rights to other substances of nature. There has been a shift in the concept of the soul. Consciousness became the subject of psychology. Believing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts, ideas and desires are two entities (substances) independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in man. The explanation he offered was called the psychophysical interaction. It consisted in the following: the body influences the soul, awakening passions in it in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, possessing thinking and will, acts on the body, forcing it to work and change its course. The organ where these two incompatible substances communicate is one of the endocrine glands - the "pineal" (pineal gland).

The question of the interaction of soul and body absorbed the intellectual energy of many minds for centuries. Having freed the body from the soul, Descartes "liberated" the soul (psyche) from the body; the body can only move, the soul can only think; the principle of the body - a reflex (i.e. the brain reflects external influences); the principle of the soul's work is reflection (from Latin - "turning back", i.e. consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas, sensations).

Descartes created a new form of dualism in the form of a relationship between soul and body, divided feelings into two categories: those rooted in the life of the organism and purely intellectual. In his last essay - a letter to the Swedish Queen Christina - he explained the essence of love as a feeling that has two forms - bodily passion without love and intellectual love without passion. In his opinion, only the former lends itself to a causal explanation, since it depends on the organism and biological mechanics; the second can only be understood and described. Descartes believed that science, as the knowledge of the causes of phenomena, is powerless in the face of the highest and most significant manifestations of the mental life of an individual. The result of his similar reasoning was the concept of "two psychologies" - explanatory, appealing to the reasons associated with the functions of the body, and descriptive, consisting in the fact that we explain only the body, while we understand the soul.

An attempt to build a psychological doctrine of man as an integral being is captured in his main work - "Ethics". It sets the task of explaining the whole variety of feelings (affects) as the motivating forces of human behavior with the accuracy and rigor of geometric proofs. It has been argued that there are three motivating forces: attraction, joy, and sadness. It has been argued that the whole variety of emotional states is derived from these fundamental affects; while joy increases the capacity of the body for action, while sadness reduces it.

Spinoza took from the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz (1646-1716), who discovered the differential and integral calculus, the following idea of the unity of the bodily and mental. The basis of this unity is the spiritual principle. The world consists of countless spiritual entities - monads (from gr. monos - one). Each of them is "psychic", i.e. not material (like an atom), but endowed with the ability to perceive everything that happens in the universe. The imperceptible activity of "small perceptions" - not conscious perceptions - is continuously going on in the soul. In those cases when they are realized, this becomes possible due to the fact that a special act, apperception, is added to simple perception (perception). It includes attention and memory. So, Leibniz introduced the concept of the unconscious psyche into circulation.

At the end of this section of psychology, it is necessary to mention the name of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Before him, rationalism reigned in psychological teachings (from Latin racio - mind). Hobbes proposed to take experience as the basis of knowledge. They opposed rationalism to empiricism (from Latin empirio - experience). This is how empirical psychology arose.

In the XVIII century in Europe, when the process of strengthening capitalist relations continued, a new movement, the Enlightenment, expanded and strengthened. Its representatives considered ignorance to be the main cause of all human ills. It was assumed that in the fight against it, society would get rid of social disasters and vices, and goodness and justice would reign everywhere in it. These ideas acquired different tonality in different countries due to the peculiarity of their socio-historical development. So, in England, I. Newton (1643-1727) created a new mechanics, perceived as a model and ideal of exact knowledge, as a triumph of reason.

Other prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment were K. Helvetius (1715-1771), P. Holbach (1723-1789) and D. Diderot (1713-1784). Defending the idea of the emergence of the spiritual world from the physical world, they represented the "man-machine" endowed with the psyche as a product of external influences and natural history. In the final period of the Enlightenment era, the physician-philosopher P. Kabanis (1757-1808) put forward a position according to which thinking is a function of the brain.

At the same time, he proceeded from observations of the bloody experience of the revolution, the leaders of which instructed him to find out the awareness of the convicts, who are beheaded on the guillotine, of their suffering, evidence of which may be convulsions. Cabanis answered this question in the negative. Only a person with a brain is able to think. The movements of the decapitated body are of a reflex nature and are not conscious. Consciousness is a function of the brain. P. Kabanis attributed the expression of thought in words and gestures to the external products of brain activity. To the external products of brain activity - the expression of thought in words and gestures. Behind thought itself, in his opinion, is hidden an unknown nervous process, the inseparability of mental phenomena and the nervous substratum. By arguing the need to move from the speculative to the empirical study of this inseparability, he paved the way for the movement of scientific thought in the next century.

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HISTORY OF FORMATION OF THE SUBJECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The development of psychological knowledge within the framework of the doctrine of the soul (from antiquity to the 17th century)

The appearance of ancient ideas about the world around us is associated with animism (from the Latin ashta - soul). The animistic worldview endows every object with a soul, which acts as a source of movement and development. Dreams, hallucinations, death - all these facts prompted primitive people to the idea of the existence of the soul as a real object in the body. A complex cult ritual of relations with the souls of the dead, influencing the souls of people and animals, communicating with the spirit - the patron of the tribe - developed.

As a doctrine of the soul, psychology arose more than two thousand years ago as the main part of philosophical teachings. The most famous contribution to the psychology of ancient Greek philosophers. They believed that the soul is present in nature wherever there is movement and warmth. A revolution in the minds was the transition from animism to hylozoism (from the Greek. yu1e - substance, matter). The hylozoists began to consider the soul (psyche) from the point of view of natural science laws.

The hylozoist Heraclitus (530-470 BC) introduced the idea of development as a law. He believed that everything that exists is subject to eternal change: "Our bodies and souls flow like streams." The cosmos appeared to Heraclitus in the form of "eternally living fire", and the soul - in the form of its spark. Heraclitus considered the knowledge of his own soul to be one of the worthy occupations of a person. His favorite saying is: "Know thyself." The works of Heraclitus were difficult to understand, so even his contemporaries called him the "dark philosopher."

The Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) put forward the idea of organization (systemicity). He considered the world to be composed of countless qualitatively different particles and pointed out that the mind (nous) is the beginning that gives the processes of nature and human behavior a regular character.

Hippocrates (460-377 BC) laid the foundation for the scientific typology that has been used by modern teachings about individual differences between people. Hippocrates searched for the source and cause of differences inside the body, spiritual qualities were made dependent on bodily ones. For a physician, it was important to know the structure of a living organism, the causes on which health and disease depend. Hippocrates considered such a reason to be the proportion in which various “juices” (blood, bile, mucus) are mixed in the body. "Proportion in the mixture" was later called temperament. The names of four temperaments that have survived to this day are associated with the name of Hippocrates: sanguine (blood predominates), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile), phlegmatic (mucus).

Democritus (460-370 BC) believed that the psyche, like all nature, is material. The soul is made up of atoms, only finer than those that make up the physical bodies. The world is known through the senses. The thinnest, invisible casts are separated from things and penetrate into the soul, leaving their imprint on it. Democritus also put forward the idea of causality, later called determinism. He was a materialist and an atheist. He was constantly engaged in the anatomy of animal corpses. At one time he even lived in a cemetery. “Once, when some young men,” says a satirist of the 2nd century A.D. e. Lucian, - they wanted to scare him for the sake of a joke and, dressed up as the dead, wearing black dresses and masks depicting skulls, surrounded him with a dense crowd, he not only was not afraid of their performance, but did not even look at them, but said, continuing to write: “ Stop fooling around." I was so firmly convinced that the souls that were outside the body were nothing.

Three principles discovered by the ancient Greek scientists Heraclitus, Democritus and Anaxagoras (2.5 thousand years ago) became the basis of the scientific way of understanding the world, including scientific knowledge mental phenomena.

A new feature of mental phenomena was discovered by the activities of philosophers called sophists - "teachers of wisdom." They were not interested in nature with its laws independent of man, but in man himself, whom the sophist Protagoras called "the measure of all things." Subsequently, sophists began to be called false wise men who, with the help of various tricks, give out imaginary evidence as true. But in the history of psychological knowledge, the activities of the sophists discovered a new object: relationships between people. The study of methods of persuasion, victory in a verbal duel turned the logical and grammatical structure of speech into an object of experimentation.

Socrates (470-399 BC) for the first time considered the soul as the source of human morality. He can be called the ancestor of dialectics - the method of finding truth by asking leading questions. In contrast to the sophists, whose starting point was the relation of man to people, he took as a basis the relation of man to himself as the bearer of intellectual and moral qualities. Socrates was accused of "worshiping new deities", "corrupting the youth" and sentenced to death. However, for subsequent eras, he became the embodiment of the ideal of the sage. He said that the soul is the mental quality of the individual, characteristic of him as a rational being. Such an approach could not proceed from the idea of the materiality of the soul, and therefore a new view of it arises, which was developed by a student of Socrates - Plato, who became the founder of objective idealism.

According to Plato (427-347 BC), the soul has nothing to do with matter. Unlike the material world, it is ideal. Cognition is not the interaction of the psyche with the outside world, but the memory of the soul about what it saw in the ideal world before it entered the human body. The objective world is only a pretext, not an object of knowledge.

Thus, in the philosophy of Ancient Greece, two diametrically opposed points of view on the psyche developed: materialistic (the line of Democritus) and idealistic (the line of Plato).

The development of psychological knowledge followed the path of clarifying the subject of psychological research. Aristotle (384-322 BC), the greatest ancient Greek scientist, singled out vegetable, animal and reasonable souls. This division emphasized the specificity of the human psyche, and the mental began to correlate with inner world: knowledge, experiences, actions. The pinnacle of ancient psychology is Aristotle's work "On the Soul", which became the first systematic study of the soul in world literature. Aristotle presented a picture of the structure, function and development of the soul as a form of the body: the rational soul is ideal, separable from the body, its essence is divine.

Aristotle

After the death of the body, it is not destroyed, but returns to the incorporeal ether of air space.

Lucretius (99-55 BC), a student of Epicurus (follower of Democritus), believed that the spirit is not the same as the soul. The soul, a kind of matter, is active, active, able to subdue the body, which consists of coarser matter. He categorically rejected the idea that all nature is permeated with reason. There are only atoms, he taught, moving according to natural laws, from which the mind itself must be deduced.

Thus, in ancient science one can find a variety of views on the essence of the soul:

the soul is like a spark, a part of the ever-living fire that flows and changes like a stream (Heraclitus);
the soul as a combination of atoms (Democritus);
soul as a result of mixing three fluids: blood, bile, mucus (Hippocrates);
the soul as a holistic formation that arose thanks to the "nus" - the mind (Anaxagoras);
the soul as part of the universal, immortal world soul, which is connected with the body (Socrates, Plato);
soul as a form of a living body and the purpose of its existence (Aristotle);
the soul is a combination of atoms moving both spontaneously and naturally (Epicurus, Lucretius), etc.

Ideas about the soul during the Middle Ages (VI-XVI centuries) are influenced by religious teachings - Christianity and Islam.

At the dawn of the Middle Ages, the Christian thinker Augustine (IV-V centuries) became famous. From his point of view, the soul is an instrument that rules the body, but its basis is the will, in which the divine will is embodied. The brightest representatives of the Arabic-speaking science of the IX-XII centuries. (Avicenna - 980-1037, Algazen - 965-1039, Averroes - 1126-1198) defended the point of view about the conditionality of mental phenomena by a bodily substrate. According to Averroes, called the great commentator of Aristotle, the soul is mortal, like the body, only the mind is immortal, for it has a divine origin.

The ideas of Averroes and Aristotle were reflected in the teachings of the Catholic philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), which in turn formed the basis of Thomism (from the Latin name of Thomas - Thomas). However, Thomas defended the existence of one truth - divine, and not two, like Averroes, - divine and earthly. The soul is immortal and is a pure form, which in man is united with the body. The soul is the principle and source of the existence of the body.

So, the development of psychological knowledge within the framework of the doctrine of the soul is marked by the following phenomena:

idealistic and materialistic approaches to understanding the essence of the soul;
holistic and anatomical approaches to the structure of the psyche;
static and dynamic approaches to the form of existence of the soul.