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Principles of dialectical psychology

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Title: Principles of dialectical psychology


1
Principles of dialectical psychology
  • Alexander Surmava

2
  • 80 years ago Vygotsky put forward a reasonable
    idea that a psychological theory to be scientific
    has to correspond to two basic requirements
  • it has to be based on positive resolution of
    psychophysical problem and
  • to be built according to the logic of ascending
    from abstract to concrete, from the cell to the
    developed whole.

3
  • The very possibility of a breakthrough into this
    front was opened by Ilenkovs Dialectical
    logic with his basically new interpretation of
    Spinoza.

4
  • The main problem which was and still remains an
    obstacle on the way of development of theoretic
    psychology is a lack of theoretic understanding
    of life as it is. Thats why the majority of
    psychological theories are corresponding with a
    preposterous idea that humans are dead mechanical
    and naturally dispassionate stimulus-reactive
    automatons equipped with thinking bodiless soul.

5
  • Life as a principle of self-organization of
    material world commanding mechanism and chemism
    can be understood only as an active, object
    oriented process. There is no life neither
    animal (mental), not plant (vegetative) - in
    abstraction from object oriented activity.
  • Meanwhile this constatation gives us almost
    nothing because only lazy desist now from
    praising the word activity to the skies.
  • What we mean under the term activity
    that is the question.

6
  • Dialectical psychology comprehends activity as a
    spontaneous, selfdetermining, basically
    nonreactive process positing its object and its
    subjectness. These are not two even supplementary
    processes but basically one and the same act.

7
Communication
  • If an eclecticism doesnt suit us, if we dont
    like to pile new and new essences each time when
    our mind apprehensively stops before real
    dialectical troubles, it has to be opposed by
    monism as the only possible theoretic logic.
    There is nothing simpler and in the same time
    more primitive and fruitless than introducing
    concepts of subject, life, psyche,
    consciousness, socialness, activity, object, sign
    etc., etc. as special substances or essences
    taken from nowhere.

Sign
Subjectness
Socialness
Object
8
The diversity of developed formsof psyche and
consciousness
  • Much harder, but only theoretically productive
    method is to show how the more concrete category,
    more concrete relation is born by more abstract
    one. Hence appears the necessity not only to
    ascertain the presence of psyche empirically but
    to demonstrate how it emerges from life as its
    closest background, demonstrate it as a special
    though necessary form of life.

A life as a single abstract basis
9
  • From our point of view the transition from
    abstract life to the life psychic is not an
    addition of some new extrinsic principle, say the
    principle of subjectivity, but the natural
    emergence of that subjectivity in the same
    process of active relation but to a specific type
    of object. Thus lets consider what type of
    object counterposes, or better to say can be
    posited by an active subject.

10
  • An object posited by active alive unit can be
    either some external thing, or another alive
    unit. When such positing is not a consumption or
    gorging the latter, but mutual, collaborative
    activity regarding something third, we meet the
    greatest aromorphosis in evolution of the
    material Nature. In the case when active
    interaction with the other alive unit is a
    necessary presupposition, condicio sine qua non
    of active relation of both units to their common
    object, such a mutual positing of two alive units
    plays the role of reflexive relation.

Reflexive relation in scheme of Nikolai Bernshtein
11
  • The transition from an abstract object oriented
    activity directed only outside of a living
    organism to the activity self directed or
    reflexive is the transition from an abstract life
    to the psychic one.
  • A subject of simple, or abstract life is also
    something simple, nonsegmented, if you wish,
    something punctiform. It basically hasnt
    anything inner, it is similar to the movement of
    a beam of laser pointer according to the contour
    of figures drawn on the blackboard.
  • On the contrary the subject of psyche is
    unthinkable in abstraction from a system of
    oppositely directed and oppositely acting or
    mutually counteracting organs as well as in
    abstraction from the inner strain, posited by
    this counteraction.
  • An activity of such complex organism is a
    sublated system of subactivities of its organic
    parts, its sublated reflexivity.

12
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio a
fellowof infinite jest, of most excellent fancy
he hathborne me on his back a thousand times
and now, howabhorred in my imagination it is! my
gorge rims atit. Here hung those lips that I
have kissed I knownot how oft. Where be your
gibes now? yourgambols? your songs? your flashes
of merriment,that were wont to set the table on
a roar? Not onenow, to mock your own grinning?
quite chap-fallen?
13
A sensation can be comprehended only reflexively.
An alive creature can perceive some extrasomatic
object of his activity only sensually as inner
suffering of its body, as selfsensation or affect.
14
  • Being on 99.99 Cartesian the modern psychology
    first of all separates consciousness from affect
    insisting that cognitive and affective sides of
    psyche have supposedly the distinct nature, can
    exist separately from each other and thus
    interact. In the second place it separates so
    called high or mental affects from low or bodily
    or in fact mechanical affects.
  • On the contrary the Dialectical psychology
    proceeds from the understanding of affect and
    intellect, or affective and cognitive spheres of
    psyche as identity of oppositions. This identity
    as well as this opposition are not results of our
    as dialectical investigators arbitrariness, but
    are deeply rooted in the very tissue of psychic
    activity comprehended as identity of object
    oriented and reflexive activity.

An abstract INTELLECTwithout a tiny hint at
affect can be imagined only as adead
mechanicaldevice.
An abstract AFFECT without a tiny hint at
intellect cannotbe imagined at all.
15
  • Reflexive relation can tie together only
    (sub)active, alive units. Consequently, later
    indivisible unit or atom of psychic life can be
    regarded only as an organism which consists of
    minimum two subactive elements, in extreme case
    two cells. One of the simplest organisms that
    meet the conditions is Volvox. Evolutionarily
    more developed organisms realize their reflexive
    relations by annular smooth muscles and
    reciprocal pairs of transversal striated muscles.

16
The definition of psyche
  • Life of an organism, whose object oriented
    activity is its sublated reflexive relation while
    his reflexivity is a sublation of his object
    activity, is a mental or psychic life. The mere
    dialectic relation in which an organism actively
    relates to its object only relating by the same
    act to itself as to a living organism, and vice
    versa finds itself in self reflexive relation
    only relating to its object and only acting
    according its objective form, this dialectic
    relation is psychic relation or psyche as it is.

17
The definition of psyche
  • Life of such an organism, taken in its relation
    to objective world, is an external, objective
    sensation, Spinozian act according to the form of
    an object, cognitive relation, or intellect. The
    same life, taken in its relation to itself, is an
    inner introceptive selfsensation, making so
    called sensual tissue of an image, self
    directed reflexive activity, or affect.

18
  • The relation between intellect and affect
    displays the same dialectic identity of opposites
    like relation between soul and body. It is as
    nonsensical to search causal relation between
    body and psychic processes as to search causal
    relation between thinking and affect or emotion,
    though traditional psychology is still trying to
    find these magical connections.

19
alternative
  • Dialectic psychology is entirely based on
    Spinozas thesis that an affect can be overcome
    only by another more powerful affect and never by
    pure thought and vice versa the thought can
    influence only another thought and basically
    cant interact with affect. It sounds as
    contradicting to banal experience, but we insist,
    that realisation of this idea is the first step
    from magic to real research, from psychology of
    miserable or disrupted consciousness to the
    revolutionary humanism.
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