Alexander Surmava 2005
Modern psychology strongly requires a general psychological theory suitable not only for the decision of a narrow class of practical problems, but responding to the multiple challenges of the present. A titanic step towards such a general psychological theory was made by Lev Vygotsky. Unfortunately his life was hardly sufficed to begin this huge task. His disciples and, above all, Alexei Leont'ev, continued that his work, but despite having made essential theoretical progress, an integrated theory was not built.
A theory pretending to continuity in development of the cultural-historical approach, can be based only on the philosophical basis on which its founders were standing. L.S. Vygotsky's basis was the ideas of Spinoza and Marx. Today one can succeed Lev Vygotsky only using the modern reading of these ideas developed by Evald Il'enkov.
The latter begins with criticism of Cartesian psychophysical problem and offers a Spinoza-ist idea of a thinking body as its unique theoretical solution. According to this logic, thinking is understood not as a modus of incorporeal substance, interacting by some mysterious means with “extended” substance, but as a way of active action of a sensual thinking body, congruous to the form of his object. The ability for such “thinking,” an action plastically assimilating to the form of an object, is not emergent property of the nervous system, but the integral, attributive property of the material Nature, Spinoza's Substance. Most abstractly it can be understood as the definition of life as such.
Life is a unity of spontaneity, productivity and object directness - a process started not by an external stimulus, but by finding the causality inside itself, cooperating not with the external abstract environment, but positioning its object by its own activity, and, at last, acting not according to an abstractly internal program, but according to the objective form of the object itself. In these two paragraphs in the most aphoristic form we put forward a program for a radically new approach to the development of both biology and psychology (free of “S-R” paradigm, stimulus-response). Basing ourselves on this new approach we put forward a substantially new definition of psyche.
With the transition of organisms to a specific form of activity, characteristic for multicellular animals, the object directed activity can be realised only with new, reflexive (nothing to do with any physiological reflexes) plan of the relation. Life now is mediated by the self-directed, reflexive relation so that any extrasomatic object-directed act is possible only in identity with the act intrasomatic, self-directed or affective one. This internal dialectic of reflexive action was also what the greatest Russian physiologist Nikolai Bernshtein meant when he discussed the birth of free action through disinhibition of a joint originally squeezed by reciprocal muscles. According to this definition, psychic activity is an ensemble, a “jazz band” of sub-activeness in which “solo part” of object-activity of entire organism is possible only through the improvisational support of other, sub active orchestral players. Thus the enigma of connection between an abstract opposition of intellect and affect may be solved, making possible a turn to a practical investigatory plan.
A human being, in contrast to an animal, is born without the ready object-directed full score of sub-activeness, but actively builds it in interaction with other people. Therefore human life, the process of an active object-directed relation of a person to the world is possible only as the moment of the reflexive whole, sides of which are he/she and another person, she/he and all people who have ever lived, she/he and culture, as a system of objectified activity of these people. The approach this suggests may overcome the special “Cartesian gap” between soul and body, animal and human beings and comprehend all of them on the basis of unified monistic theory.
At the beginning of XX century William James said that psychology “...is no science, it is a hope of science.”
Today at the beginning of XXI century we can state that basing on ideas of Spinoza, Vygotsky and Ilyenkov we can go ahead the hope and are making the first steps of psychological science.