Principles of dialectical psychology

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Principles of dialectical psychology

• Alexander Surmava

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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
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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
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• 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.

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• 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
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• 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.

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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?
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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.
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• 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.
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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.