LECTURE No. 4. Psychology of modern times in the XNUMXth century

1. The main trends in the development of philosophy and psychology in the XNUMXth century

Discoveries of N. Copernicus, D. Bruno, G. Galileo, W. Harvey, R. Descartes

Intensive development of capitalist relations in the XVI-XVII centuries. led to the rapid flourishing of many sciences, especially natural science, especially those areas that were of practical importance for the production of the manufacturing period. These included "mechanical arts" associated with the creation of various ground mechanisms, equipment, machines, river and sea vessels, the manufacture of astronomical, physical and navigational instruments. The successes and achievements of mechanics had not only practical, but also great scientific and ideological significance. The discoveries of N. Copernicus, D. Bruno, G. Galileo, I. Kepler, I. Newton dealt the first irresistible blows to the religious myths of the Middle Ages. The traditions of medieval alchemists were undermined by Boyle's brilliant experiments. Invincible blows to theological dogmas were dealt by geographical discoveries related to navigation, which made it possible to obtain numerous information in the field of astronomy, geology, biology, etc. With the invention and use of the microscope, ideas in the field of anatomy and physiology of plants and animals have changed significantly. The discovery of the cellular structure of living organisms and sexual differentiation in plants, the discovery by Harvey of a new scheme of blood circulation, and the description by Descartes of the reflex mechanism of animal behavior should be recognized as major achievements.

Successes in the development of natural science contributed to the formation of a new view of nature in general and the place of man in it. In place of scholasticism, the idea of ​​the natural origin of man, of his power and unlimited possibilities in the knowledge and conquest of nature, made its way more and more persistently.

The general opposition to church hegemony, the struggle for the liberation of man, his mind from religious oppression, the struggle for the secular nature of science are one of the distinguishing trends in the development of philosophy and psychology of modern times.

A new era in the development of world psychological thought was opened by concepts inspired by the great triumph of mechanics, which became the "queen of the sciences." Its concepts and explanatory principles created, first, a geometric-mechanical (Galileo), and then a dynamic (Newton) picture of nature. It also included such a physical body as an organism with its mental properties.

The first outline of a psychological theory oriented towards geometry and new mechanics was by the French mathematician, naturalist and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). He chose the theoretical model of the organism as an automaton - a system that works mechanically. Thus, the living body, which in the entire previous history of knowledge was considered as animate, was freed from its influence and interference. From now on, the difference between inorganic and organic bodies was explained according to the criterion of the latter being related to objects that act like simple technical devices. In the age when these devices were established in social production, the principle of their operation was captured by scientific thought, far from this production, explaining the functions of the body in their image and likeness. The first great achievement in this regard was the discovery of the circles of blood circulation by Harvey. The heart was presented as a kind of pump that pumps fluid.

The discovery of the reflex, the second achievement of Descartes. He introduced the concept of the reflex, which became fundamental to physiology and psychology. If Harvey eliminated the soul from the category of regulators of internal organs, then Descartes dared to do away with it at the level of the external, environmentally oriented work of the whole organism. Descartes saw the nervous system in the form of "tubes" through which light airlike particles pass (he called them "animal spirits"). He believed that an external impulse sets these "spirits" in motion, bringing them to the brain, from where they are automatically reflected to the muscles. The term “reflex”, which appeared after Descartes, meant “reflection”.

Muscle response is an integral component of behavior. Therefore, the Cartesian scheme belongs to the category of great discoveries. She discovered the reflex nature of behavior, not the effort of the spirit, but the restructuring of the body on the basis of the strictly causal laws of its mechanics will provide a person with power over his own nature, just as these laws can make him the master of external nature.

2. Materialism and idealism

The herald of empiricism was Francis Bacon (XVI century), who made the main emphasis on the creation of an effective method of science, so that it actually contributed to the acquisition of power over nature by man.

In his New Organon, Bacon gave the palm to induction, that is, to such an interpretation of a multitude of empirical data that allows them to be generalized in order to predict future events and thereby master their course.

The idea of ​​methodology, which proceeded from the knowledge of the causes of things with the help of experience and induction, influenced the creation of an anti-scholastic atmosphere in which new scientific thought, including psychological, developed.

The emerging fundamental change in the development of natural science and the numerous grandiose discoveries that accompanied it brought to the fore questions of general principles and methods of cognition, the resolution of which was impossible without referring to the basic mental abilities and functions of a person. When developing problems related to methodology and methods of cognition, scientists were divided into two currents - empirical and rationalistic. Differences between them arose on three cardinal issues. These included questions about the sources and origin of knowledge, about the nature of universal concepts, about the relationship and boundaries of human cognitive capabilities, namely, his sensory experience and logical thinking. The founders of the empirical direction Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and their followers believed that sensory experience is the source of all knowledge.

Representatives of the rationalist current, pioneered by Descartes and Leibniz, believed that the source of knowledge lies in the mind itself, and universal concepts have an a priori origin, that is, they come from the mind itself and innate intellectual abilities. In accordance with these differences, representatives of empiricism considered induction as the leading scientific method, involving the ascent from private and individual facts established in sensory experience to general principles and laws, while representatives of rationalism saw the basis for acquiring reliable knowledge in deduction as a way to derive the desired truths. from principles either previously established or innate (Descartes, Leibniz).

The contradictions that arose between scientists of the XNUMXth century in the field of the general methodology of cognition were aggravated and complicated by disagreements in solving another, no less fundamental question about the nature of the human cognitive abilities themselves, their relationship to the external physical world, on the one hand, to the bodily organism, on the other.

These disputes gave rise to a psychophysical problem, the various ways of solving which divided thinkers into two other irreconcilable camps - materialism and idealism.

This line of struggle became the leading one in strengthening and differentiating ideological positions not only between the aforementioned rationalistic and empirical currents, but also within them. So, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, being the founders of rationalism, were opponents in solving the psychophysical problem and spoke from different positions: Descartes - from the positions of dualism; Leibniz - idealism; Spinoza - materialism. Similarly, empiricism was developed both by representatives of the materialist trend (Bacon, Hobbes, French and Russian materialists of the XNUMXth century) and by supporters of idealist currents (Berkeley, Hume, and others).

But they were also united by some common points that were associated with the state and level of science in general.

The most developed section of knowledge was the mechanics of solids, the dominance of which gave rise to a tendency to interpret and explain all other phenomena of inanimate and living nature in terms of mechanics. As a universal methodological approach and a way of explaining and cognizing the surrounding world, mechanism is also fixed in philosophy. From it, mechanistic principles are transferred to psychology, and all mental phenomena, behavior and consciousness of a person begin to be interpreted and described according to the model of mechanical processes.

3. Philosophical and psychological system of R. Descartes

An associate of Bacon in the fight against theology and medieval scholasticism, in an effort to develop a new methodology that would help overcome prejudices, was the greatest thinker of the New Age, R. Descartes (1596-1650).

For Descartes, experience is not a source of reliable knowledge, such is the power of reason. Downplaying the importance of empirical knowledge in comprehending the truth, Descartes, however, did not completely deny its role. The methodological principles of cognition, set forth by Descartes initially in the "Rules for the Guidance of the Mind" (1628-1629), then in the metaphysical "Discourses on Method" (1637), "Principles of Philosophy" (1644), "Reflections on the First Philosophy" (1641), acted as an introduction to the entire system of philosophical and psychological views, presented in a systematic and complete form in the treatise Passions of the Soul (1649).

An integral part of Descartes' doctrine of extended bodily substance are questions of physics and physiology, the structure and activity of animals and humans. In the field of natural sciences, Descartes was interested not only in problems of mechanics, physics, optics, geometry, but also in questions of embryology, anatomy and physiology of animals, and psychophysiology. He expressed the idea of ​​repeating in the individual life of an individual the stages of development of the animal world, which in the 19th century. was reflected in the biogenetic law - “ontogenesis is a brief repetition of phylogeny.” Descartes supported the new blood circulation scheme proposed by Harvey, by analogy with which he tried to consider the work of the nervous system of animals and humans. This allowed him to lay down the idea, give the first description of the unconditioned reflex scheme and formulate the principle of determinism, which was extended not only to the field of organic processes, but also to a wide range of mental phenomena. The leading and initial thesis in explaining the life activity of animals was the position about the machine-like nature of their behavior. This served as the basis for the transfer of physical and mechanical principles to all vital functions of the animal organism.

The principle of automatism was extended by Descartes to the actions of the human body. Such bodily functions as digestion, heartbeat, nutrition, growth, respiration, as well as a number of psychophysiological functions - sensations, perceptions, passions and affects, memory and ideas, external movements of the body's organs - all of them occur exactly as a clock or other mechanisms work. .

Descartes is rightly regarded as the discoverer of experimental psychophysiology and as the first physiological psychologist.

Such mental acts as sensations, perception, memory, representations, imagination, affects, were treated by Descartes as purely bodily manifestations and were excluded from the sphere of the mental. Imagination, ideas, memory, feelings and affects are nothing more than simple bodily movements, "unenlightened" by thinking, which alone constitutes the essence of spiritual substance. Descartes considered mental only that which is permeated by the mind or is realized by the thinking substance. For the first time in the history of psychological thought, the psychic began to be limited to the sphere of only conscious phenomena. The psychic began to be reduced to self-consciousness. This concept was destined to become the leading point of view, which became widespread in Europe and determined the formation of many philosophical and psychological systems of the next two centuries.

Starting with Descartes, psychology ceased to exist as a science of the soul, and began to act as a science of consciousness. And from the point of view of the method of cognition, the definition of the mental as directly experienced and realized meant that the phenomena of consciousness are available only to the subject himself and there can be only one way to detect them - self-observation, introspection. The recognition by Descartes of the existence of two different independent substances also determined the difference in the methods of their knowledge: the experimental method for analyzing the mechanics of the body, introspection for the knowledge of the soul. Consciousness did not find in Descartes its expression and manifestation in activity through which it could be studied experimentally.

Descartes' doctrine of two substances, the reduction of the mental to self-consciousness led to significant contradictions and difficulties in resolving a number of other fundamental issues. One of them concerned the presence of the psyche in animals. Animals are devoid of spiritual thinking substance, and this is precisely what God distinguished them from man. As a result of the dilution of the mental and the bodily, Descartes was forced to cut off the connection between the psyche of animals and humans.

Recognizing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts (ideas) and desires are two entities independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in a holistic person. The solution he proposed was called psychophysical interaction. The body affects the soul, awakening "passive states" (passions) in it in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, having thinking and will, affects the body, forcing this "machine" to work and change its course. Descartes was looking for an organ in the body where these two incompatible substances could still communicate. He suggested that such an organ be one of the endocrine glands - the "pineal" (pineal gland). Nobody took this empirical discovery seriously. However, the theoretical question of the interaction of the soul and the body in its formulation absorbed the intellectual energy of many minds for centuries.

Understanding the subject of psychology depends on such explanatory principles as causality (determinism), systemicity and development that guide the research mind. All of them have undergone fundamental changes in modern times. In this, the decisive role was played by the introduction into psychological thinking of the image of a structure created by human hands - a machine.

It is, firstly, a system device, secondly, it works inevitably according to the rigid scheme laid down in it, and thirdly, the effect of its work is the final link in the chain, the components of which replace each other with an iron sequence.

The creation of artificial objects introduced a special form of determinism into theoretical thinking - a mechanical (automaton-like) scheme of causality, or mechano-determinism.

The liberation of the living body from the soul was a turning point in the scientific search for the real causes of everything that happens in living systems, including the mental affects that arise in them (sensations, perceptions, emotions). But with this, Descartes had a different turn: not only the body was liberated from the soul, but the soul (psyche) in its highest manifestations was liberated from the body. The body can only move, the soul can only think.

The principle of the body is a reflex. The principle of the soul is reflection. In the first case, the brain reflects external shocks. In the second - consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas, sensations. Descartes created a new form of dualism. Both members of the relationship - both the body and the soul - acquired a content unknown to previous eras.

4. Materialistic theory of T. Hobbes

A worthy place among the creators of the new methodology and fighters against the prevailing scholasticism and biblical mythology belongs to the largest English thinker of the 1588th century, the closest student and follower of Bacon, Thomas Hobbes (1679-XNUMX).

There is nothing in the world, Hobbes believed, except for material bodies that move according to the laws of mechanics. Accordingly, all mental phenomena were brought under these global laws. Material things, acting on the body, cause sensations. According to the law of inertia, representations appear from sensations in the form of their weakened trace. They form chains of thoughts following each other in the same order in which the sensations were replaced.

For Hobbes, a determinist of the Galilean temper, only one law operates in the structure of a person - the mechanical coupling of mental elements by contiguity. Associations were taken as one of the main mental phenomena by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. But Hobbes was the first to give association the force of the universal law of psychology, where both abstract rational cognition and arbitrary action are subordinated.

Arbitrariness is an illusion that is generated by ignorance of the causes of an act. The strictest causality reigns in everything. In Hobbes, mechano-determinism received an extremely complete expression in relation to the explanation of the psyche.

Important for future psychology was Hobbes's ruthless criticism of Descartes' version of the "innate ideas" with which the human soul is endowed before any experience and independently of it.

Hobbes outlined his views in the field of philosophy and psychology in a number of works, the most significant of which are On the Citizen (1642), Leviathan (1651), On the Body (1655) and On Man (1658).

One of the merits of Hobbes was to establish the unity of empirical and rational knowledge. Hobbes argued that there can be only one truth, and that is the one that is achieved and acquired on the basis of experience and reason. According to Hobbes, knowledge should begin with sensibility as the initial stage on the way to generalizations. The universal properties of things are established with the help of induction, which is the path from the knowledge of actions to the knowledge of causes. After determining the universal causes, a return path, or deduction, is necessary, which ensures the transition from the known causes to the knowledge of new diverse actions and phenomena. In Hobbes' methodology, induction and deduction, sensory and rational cognition are mutually offered and mutually dependent stages of a single cognitive process.

Mental is a special internal state of moving matter. It consists in a specific form of movement that occurs in a living body as a result of external influences. The psychic begins with external pressures on the sense organs. External influences, spreading through the nervous system to the brain and heart, cause countermovements in the latter. Everything - from sensations to thoughts - is nothing but an internal countermovement.

Hobbes called the sensual effects of internal countermovements "ghosts" or "images." Ghosts are of two types. The first type includes those internal movements that occur in the brain and are associated with the emergence of images of things and ideas.

The second kind of phantoms consists of those internal movements which, being transmitted to the activity of the heart, intensify or inhibit it, thus causing states of pleasure or displeasure.

The primary and most universal form of the transition of external movements into internal ones are sensations. There is nothing in the soul or in the thoughts that has not passed in whole or in part through sensations. Sensations differ in quality, and these differences are due to the different physical nature of the external bodies. The indications of our sensations and perceptions are quite reliable, although there can be no complete identity, a mirror resemblance between an object and its image. The degree of adequacy or distortion of the image depends on the conditions of perception.

After direct exposure to external objects, traces remain in the brain, weakened internal movements. These residual movements, according to Hobbes, are representations. They are divided into two large classes: simple and complex. Simple are those in which images of one object are stored. Complex representations include either collective images or generalized representations.

Revealing the nature of representations, Hobbes puts forward a conjecture about the associative mechanism, although the very term "association" has not yet been introduced by Hobbes. Clutches of images of consciousness can be random and active. The passive flow of associations is characteristic of dreams.

The highest level of associations is characterized by the fact that here the flow of images and ideas is controlled by the person himself. Purposeful operation of images and ideas is the essence of thinking.

The mechanism of mental activity was interpreted by Hobbes on the model of arithmetic operations. The two main mental operations were "addition" and "subtraction". The operation of addition corresponded to the connection of representations, and the operation of subtraction corresponded to the dismemberment and separation of representations and images. It is in the operations of addition and subtraction that the activity of the subject is manifested.

Thus, thoughts are not innate, they are the result of addition and subtraction.

According to Hobbes, speech plays an important role in the cognitive process, acting in two functions - as an instrument of thought and as a means of communication. Hobbes was the first to single out the denoting and expressive function of speech most clearly. Taken in relation to the subject, speech acts as a mental process in which words act as a label, label of some thing or phenomenon. They become tools of thought, a means of preserving and reproducing experience.

Speech addressed to another person is not only a mark for oneself, but is a sign for others. Without operating with signs and marks, knowledge is impossible, and from this point of view, Hobbes assessed the emergence of language as the greatest conquest.

In their origin, all words are the product of an agreement between people to use them to denote things and communication.

Hobbes points out that misunderstanding between people and the conflicts that arise between them are caused by two main reasons: either people intentionally or out of ignorance use words that actually denote other thoughts, feelings, actions; or in the hearer the words used do not evoke the ideas that stand behind them.

With the will, incentive and cognitive processes, Hobbes linked the genesis of voluntary movements and the regulation by a person of his behavior in general. Arbitrary, he considered only those actions that are preceded by images or ghosts of movement. Arbitrary movements can contain both one and several representations that precede the action. In his practical life, a person builds his behavior based on different levels of reflection. Common sense behavior is usually limited by the limits of personal judgment and experience. But for the highest achievements, a person needs wisdom, which involves the regulation of his actions and behavior not only on the basis of personal experience, but also on the basis of scientific data. Scientific knowledge is always a force that increases the potential of a person in his practical life.

It is impossible not to recognize the enormous influence that Hobbes's views had on the further development of philosophy and psychology. The empirical line begun by Bacon received its new materialistic substantiation in the teachings of Hobbes. His ideas accelerated the transformation of psychology from the science of the soul into the science of mental phenomena.

Considering the psyche in terms of Galilean mechanics, Hobbes, even more than Descartes, contributed to the establishment of a natural-scientific and experimental approach to the study of mental phenomena. Hobbes made the first sketch of the associative mechanism, which in the writings of Hartley and Hume will be given universal significance. In this regard, Hobbes can be considered a harbinger of the future associative psychology, which had a direct impact on the formation of the theoretical foundations of experimental psychology in the period of its emergence.

5. The teaching of B. Spinoza on the psyche

Criticism of Cartesian dualism of Hobbes was supported by the great Dutch thinker Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza. However, unlike Hobbes, Spinoza took the path of a materialistic interpretation of rationalism. Spinoza took the deductive-geometric scheme of Euclid as an ideal and model for constructing and presenting his teaching. Spinoza is united with Hobbes by his recognition of nature as the only substance. Hobbes saw the world as a system of interacting finite individual bodies. Spinoza opposed this point of view with his idea of ​​matter as a substance that cannot be reduced to its specific states and properties.

Spinoza's new point of view was not inspired by the Cartesian doctrine of two substances. With the intention of overcoming the dualism of Descartes, Spinoza puts forward the doctrine of a single substance, its attributes and modes, which is the core of his entire philosophical and psychological system. It is based on the desire to explain nature from itself. He argues that the root cause of everything that exists and of itself is a substance that exists objectively, regardless of any external stimulus and creator. It is uncreated and indestructible, infinite in its temporal and spatial existence. Substance is one in the sense that the same laws always and everywhere operate in nature. Two substances of the same nature cannot exist.

The essence of a single substance is expressed and revealed in its root and fundamental properties, which were called attributes by Spinoza. Attributes are such essential and universal aspects of a substance that are not identical to it and in relation to which they are derivative and secondary. Substance has many attributes, of which only two are available to man - the attribute of thinking and the attribute of extension. Since extension and thinking are only attributive properties of a substance, which, according to the philosopher, is earlier than all its states, then as such they can no longer act as independent entities.

All the surrounding diversity of the world, various phenomena and events are particular states and modifications of a substance or its attributes. In relation to the attribute of extension, each individual mode expresses certain specific extensions, durations of existence and movement of bodies.

Each thing or phenomenon must be considered in two attributes - in the attribute of thinking and in the attribute of extension.

On the one hand, Spinoza understood the untenability of the assumption that each thing can experience its own ideas, i.e., think; on the other hand, not accepting dualism and seeing in thinking a universal property of nature, he was inclined to believe that, to varying degrees, all individual bodies are animated.

A person is a special complex modification of the unity of the attributes of thinking and extension, the modes of the soul and body. The essence of a person can be revealed in two dimensions, or modes. In one case, a person acts as a mode of body, in the other - as a mode of thinking.

Each of the attributes cannot determine each other, not because they are of a different substantial nature, but because both of them have at their basis a single source and beginning, common laws and causes. The new point of view put forward by Spinoza, according to which the corporeal and the spiritual are considered as two sides of the same thing (substance), is usually called psychophysical monism. The principle of psychophysical monism received a materialistic interpretation in the teachings of Spinoza, since the mental was derived from substance and interpreted as a natural property.

The process of cognition consists in a progressive movement from the modal level of knowledge about everything finite, temporal and random to the general logical foundations of natural laws and necessity, from the multiplicity of modes to substance. Spinoza distinguishes three levels of knowledge: sensual, demonstrative and intuitive.

Spinoza's doctrine of knowledge had one of its goals to resolve a number of ethical problems associated with the search for ways that indicate to man his possibilities in acquiring freedom and happiness. Spinoza sees these paths in man's understanding and awareness of external necessity and accepting it as the basis for voluntary decisions and actions.

The path of transforming external necessity into internal necessity or freedom is presented by Spinoza in the doctrine of passions and affects, the analysis of which occupies almost two-thirds of his main work, Ethics. The starting point in the theory of affects is the position of self-preservation, according to which all living beings strive to preserve and affirm their existence. For its preservation, the human body needs many substances, through which it could be continuously reborn. In order to possess these substances, the human body must be endowed with the ability to act. These states that impel the body to activity were called affects by Spinoza. The root motive force that ensures the self-preservation of the human body is attraction or aspiration. Along with attraction and desire as the main motives, Spinoza also distinguishes two more types of affects: pleasure or joy and displeasure or sadness. Man is full of passions, different in sign and intensity. Affects cannot be destroyed, since they are the manifestation of the laws of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be eliminated. But it is also dangerous to go on about emotions. People subject to strong affects cease to control themselves. According to Spinoza, there is not a single affect about which it would not be possible to form a clear idea, which means that affects will be in the power of a person, and his soul will suffer the less, the more they are known by a person.

Knowledge itself is the highest affect, from which all other lower passions differ in a lesser degree of inclusion of rational components in them. Since affects differ from each other in that rational elements are represented in them to varying degrees, this made it possible to consider the struggle of impulses as a clash of ideas. For Spinoza, "will and reason are one and the same." Will is the highest affect, leading to the rejection of some ideas and the affirmation of others. The will is determined by the degree of a person's awareness of his passions and states, the measure of the completeness of knowledge of the laws of nature.

6. D. Locke's sensationalism

Traditions opposite to rationalism in the study of human cognitive abilities were laid down by the greatest English thinker of the 1632th century. D. Locke (1704-XNUMX). The starting point in Locke's philosophical and psychological concept was his criticism of the theory of innate ideas, put forward in ancient times by Socrates and Plato and supported in modern times by Descartes and Leibniz. Locke's main idea was that knowledge cannot arise by itself. There are no innate ideas and principles. All ideas and concepts come from experience. Based on the data of medicine, child psychology, ethnography, the philosopher points out that if ideas were innate, then they would be available to children, idiots and savages. The available facts and observations of children, mentally ill people indicate that in reality such ideas as the concept of God and the soul, the ideas of good, evil and justice, are not realized by them, and therefore, they are not given to a person from birth. Locke illustrates the inconsistency of the theory of innate ideas in a particularly revealing way with the example of dreams. Dreams, according to Locke, are composed of the ideas of a waking person, interconnected in a bizarre way. Ideas themselves cannot arise until the senses supply them with them.

By experience, Locke understood everything that fills the soul of a person throughout his entire individual life. The content of experience and its structure are made up of elementary components, designated by the philosopher as the general term "ideas". Locke called ideas and sensations, and images of perception and memory, general concepts and affective-volitional states. Initially, a person is born with a soul, similar to a blank sheet of paper on which, only during life, the outside world inflicts patterns with its influences. It is the external world that is the first source of ideas. From external experience, a person can only have what nature imposes on him.

Sensible ideas acquired in external experience act as the starting material for a special inner activity of the soul, thanks to which ideas of a different kind are born, essentially different from sensual ideas. This special activity of the soul, called reflection by Locke, is the ability of the soul to turn its gaze on its own states, while generating new mental products in the form of ideas about ideas. Although reflection is not related to the external world, it is similar in its function to external senses and therefore can be called "inner sense" or inner experience.

According to Locke, reflection and external experience are interconnected. Reflection is a derivative formation that arises on the basis of external experience. Reflection is, as it were, experience about experience. But since reflexive activity generates its own ideas, it was considered by Locke as another relatively independent source of knowledge.

Locke's doctrine of external and internal experience resulted in two important points. By affirming the connection between external and internal experience, he tried to restore the unity of various forms of cognition. The products of reflection are general concepts and complex ideas, and the latter can only be the result of mental activity. From this point of view, reflection acts as a form of rational knowledge, which in turn is based on sensory experience. By dividing experience into external and internal, Locke sought to emphasize the obvious differences in the patterns of rational and sensory cognition.

An important section of Locke's empirical concept is connected with the doctrine of simple and complex ideas. He called simple ideas the indecomposable elements of consciousness. They can be obtained both from external experience and from reflection, and simultaneously from both sources.

Once the soul has acquired simple ideas, it moves from passive contemplation to active transformation and processing of simple ideas into complex ones. Locke saw the formation of complex ideas as a simple mechanical combination of the initial elements of experience. The combination of simple ideas is carried out in various ways. They are associations, connection, relation and separation.

In Locke, associations are not the main mechanism of the internal activity of consciousness. He considered them as incorrect, unreliable combinations of ideas, as random and passive connections, characteristic mainly of the mental life of the mentally ill and only partly healthy people, for example, during dreams. Locke is credited with introducing the term "association of ideas".

Unlike associations, more reliable ways of forming complex ideas, for which reflection is responsible, are summation or connection; collation or comparison and generalization or isolation. Addition, or summation, is based on the direct connection of ideas on the basis of similarity or contiguity. The second way of forming complex ideas is connected with the establishment of similarities and differences through the comparison and comparison of ideas, as a result of which ideas of relations arise. An example of such ideas can be the concepts of "father", "friend", "motherhood", etc. The last and highest way of forming complex ideas is abstraction (distraction, isolation), through which the most general concepts are formed, similar to such as the concepts of "soul" , "God", etc. With his detailed description of the technology of thinking, Locke advanced the long-standing problem of the origin of general concepts far ahead. However, when analyzing the laws of mental activity, he encountered a number of fundamental difficulties, many of which were caused by a general mechanistic approach to the structure of consciousness. The principle of reducing consciousness to a mechanical sum and combination of initial mental elements will dominate English associative psychology for two centuries.

A special role in the formation of ideas of external and internal experience, and in the transformation of simple ideas into complex ones, Locke assigned speech. The philosopher ascribes two functions to speech: the function of expression and the function of designation. But words and speech are not only tools of thinking, but also a means of exchanging ideas and thoughts. The main purpose of any communication is to be understood. Words denote both specific and general ideas, and since people do not always give the same label to different ideas, they often fail to reach an understanding. Locke points out that the main abuses committed by people are expressed in the use of words without any ideas, in the use of the same word to express different ideas, in the use of old words in a new meaning, in the designation by words of what people themselves do not understand. Getting rid of possible shortcomings and abuses in speech, awakening ideas that are adequate to their speech forms - these are the main ways by which you can master the art of communication.

Locke defined cognition as establishing the correspondence or inconsistency of two ideas, and the adequacy of cognition depends on the way the soul perceives its ideas. There are three of them: intuitive, demonstrative and sensual. The lowest and least reliable is sensory knowledge, in which things are known through images of perception. The highest and most reliable source is intuitive knowledge, when the correspondence or inconsistency of two ideas is established through these ideas themselves. When it is not possible to reveal the similarity or difference in ideas with the help of them themselves, a person has to attract other ideas, resort to additional evidence and reasoning. This kind of knowledge, deduced by means of a series of intermediate inferences, is called demonstrative knowledge by Locke. In its character, role and reliability, it occupies a place between sensory and intuitive knowledge.

Cognitive forces do not exhaust all the richness of a person's spiritual life. Along with them, there is another series of psychic phenomena in the soul, closely connected with the cognitive forces and called by Locke the forces of desire or striving. Within the framework of motive forces, he singled out the will and the emotional state - pleasure and suffering. Thus, motivating forces are the active side of all cognitive and practical human activity.

7. G. Leibniz: the idealistic tradition in German philosophy and psychology

G. Leibniz (1646-1716) - a contemporary of all the main geniuses of the XNUMXth century - begins the idealistic tradition. and their ideological opponent. The ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke were critically revised and synthesized by Leibniz into his own original system of principles and concepts. Leibniz could not fail to notice that Spinoza failed to completely overcome the dualism of Descartes, since in the teachings of the Dutch philosopher the Cartesian division of the world into two substances left its traces in the form of a bifurcation and isolation of the attributes of extension and thinking. Leibniz was not satisfied with the preserved opposition of spirit and matter, mental and physical, and in order to restore their unity, he puts forward a doctrine that makes it possible to explain the infinite diversity of the world on the basis of a substantive basis that is uniform in nature and origin, but of different quality in its states. Fatalism was also unacceptable to Leibniz in Spinoza's teaching. At the same time, Leibniz takes the side of Spinoza in his polemic with Locke regarding the role of experience and reason in cognition. Leibniz tries to establish a connection between the sensual and the rational. But since rational knowledge does not grow out of experience, the unity of experience and reason appears in Leibniz's teaching not as an ascent from sensory forms to ideas, but as an imposition of the rational on sensory experience. Therefore, in a significant part, cognitive errors arise not so much due to the fault of the senses, but due to the weakness of the mind and attention itself, as the desire for clarity and memory.

The core that forms the philosophical and psychological system of Leibniz and connects all its sections and parts is a number of initial methodological principles, or laws. The main ones in terms of their significance include the principle of universal differences, the principle of the identity of indistinguishable things, the laws of continuity and discreteness. Using the principle of universal differences, Leibniz tried to affirm universal variability in the world of physical phenomena and consciousness, to deny both the absolute similarity of existing things with each other and the repetition of states of the same thing in time, and thereby point to the qualitative diversity of the world. The principle of universal difference is supplemented and provided by another principle - the principle of the identity of indistinguishable things. Its meaning lies in the fact that one should not distinguish between things if in fact they are one and the same thing, and vice versa, to identify things that are different in their qualities. The differences between things are derived by Leibniz on the basis of the third principle - the law of continuity. This law indicates that everywhere in the world there are imperceptible transitions in the ascent of things in degrees of perfection.

Leibniz believed that in the continuum of things and their qualities there is no lower or upper limit. Other consequences followed from the principle of continuity. One of them pointed to the succession of different states in one and the same thing. The same principle of continuity also assumed the interconnection of various properties of one and the same thing.

Opposite in its meaning to the principle of continuity is the law of discreteness, according to which gradualness and continuity itself is composed of small jumps and breaks that give rise to individual objects, their autonomy and qualitative originality. It is with the help of the principle of discreteness that Leibniz manages to explain the qualitative diversity and uniqueness of various things and states of consciousness.

Leibniz deploys a system of views built on the model and through analogy with the psychological characteristics of a person and representing a kind of idealistic reincarnation of the atomistic picture of the world.

The "true atoms of nature" are soul-like units - monads, of which the universe consists of countless multitude. Monads are simple, indivisible and eternal. They are autonomous, and the influence of one monad on another is excluded. The leading and root properties of each monad are activity and representations.

Leibniz believed that in the historical perspective, the development of monads goes through several stages, each of which corresponds to a certain form of the monad. The most primary form is pure monads. They are characterized by the presence of activity, but the absence of any ideas. This state of the monad is like a dreamless sleep. Pure monads appear as inanimate, but active and ever-moving matter. The pure monads are followed by the soul monads, which have vague ideas as a result of a low degree of striving for clarity. This form of monads appears at the level of plants and animals. More perfect monads, called spirit monads, are peculiar to man. Their perfection is expressed in the greatest clarity and distinctness of representations. The monads of the angel and God complete the hierarchy, completely free from the material shell and possessing the absolute completeness of knowledge and extremely clear self-consciousness.

A similar system of levels also takes place in human ontogeny. In a certain sense, with his hierarchical system of monads, Leibniz gives a new interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of the three levels of the soul, according to which its higher forms arise and are realized on the basis of the lower ones.

Leibniz's teaching introduced many ideas and trends that would have a significant impact on the subsequent development of psychology. Leibniz was the first to show the active nature of consciousness, its dynamism and its constant variability. Leibniz's doctrine of perceptions and apperceptions will become the initial foundation on which subsequent concepts of the soul in German psychology will be built. It has also been influential in a number of other ways. First of all, the inclusion in the sphere of the mental, in addition to the conscious phenomena of preconscious perceptions, expanded the boundaries of the mental. The logical consequence of this new approach was the rehabilitation of the psyche of animals. Leibniz becomes a harbinger of the doctrine of the thresholds of consciousness, with which he will speak in the XNUMXth century. Herbart and which will become the starting point in Fechner's psychophysical measurements and experiments. From Leibniz, German psychology learned the principle of psychophysical parallelism, on the basis of which experimental psychology in Germany would be built.

Author: Luchinin A.S.

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