Chapter 1 Self-Consciousness We are all here and now. Anything beyond this knowledge is fantasy. H. L. Mencken, American journalist and satirist (1880-1956) Awareness vs. Knowledge Are you a conscious person? If you think so, ask how well you

Appendix 1: Rumsfeld's Life Path 1932 Born in Chicago, Illinois 1946-1950 New Trier High School Student 1950-1954 Princeton University Student (B.A.) 1954 Marries Marion Joyce Pearson 1954-1957 Service in the US Navy as

Life path and crises Throughout the life path, many turning points await us all, changing the course of events and future life. They are called "life lessons" (the term was introduced by B. M. Teplov). A similar lesson can be a change that is obvious to others -

The process of becoming a human personality includes as an integral component the formation of his consciousness and self-awareness. A person as a conscious subject is aware not only of the environment, but also of himself in his relations with the environment. If it is impossible to reduce the personality to its self-consciousness, to the I, then it is also impossible to separate one from the other. Therefore, the question that confronts us in terms of psychological study personality, this is a question about its self-consciousness, about the personality as I, which, as a subject, consciously appropriates everything that a person does, refers to himself all the deeds and actions emanating from him and consciously takes responsibility for them as their author and creator .

First of all, this unity of the personality as a conscious subject with self-consciousness is not a primordial given. It is known that the child is not immediately aware of himself as I; during the first years, he himself quite often calls himself by name, as those around him call him; he exists at first, even for himself, rather as an object for other people than as an independent subject in relation to them. Awareness of oneself as I is, therefore, the result of development.

The unity of the organism as a single whole and the real independence of its organic life are the first material prerequisite for the unity of the personality, but this is only a prerequisite. And accordingly, elementary mental states of general organic sensitivity ("synesthesia"), associated with organic functions, are obviously a prerequisite for the unity of self-consciousness, since the clinic has shown that elementary, gross violations unity of consciousness in pathological cases of the so-called split, or disintegration of the personality (depersonalization), are associated with violations of organic sensitivity. But this reflection of the unity of organic life in a common organic sensitivity is only a prerequisite for the development of self-consciousness, and by no means its source. original source and driving forces the development of self-consciousness must be sought in the growing real independence of the individual, expressed in a change in his relationship with others.

It is not consciousness that is born from self-consciousness, from the Self, but self-consciousness arises in the course of the development of the consciousness of the individual, as it really becomes an independent subject. Before becoming the subject of practical and theoretical activity, the self is formed in it. The real, not mystified history of the development of self-consciousness is inextricably linked with the real development of the individual and the main events of her life path.

The first stage in the real formation of the personality as an independent subject, standing out from the environment, is associated with the mastery own body, with the appearance of voluntary movements. These latter are developed in the process of formation of the first objective actions.

The next step on the same path is the beginning of walking, independent movement. And in this second case, as in the first case, not only the technique of this matter is essential, but rather the change in the relationship of the individual with the people around him, to which the possibility of independent movement is provided, as well as independent mastery of the object through grasping movements. . One, like the other, one together with the other gives rise to a certain independence of the child in relation to other people. The child really begins to become a relatively independent subject of various actions, really standing out from the environment. With the realization of this objective fact, the emergence of the self-consciousness of the personality, its first idea of ​​\u200b\u200bitI. own I through the knowledge of other people. There is no I outside the relationship to YOU, and there is no self-consciousness outside the awareness of another person as an independent subject. Self-consciousness is a relatively late product of the development of consciousness, which assumes as its basis the real development of the child as a practical subject, consciously standing out from the environment.

An essential link in a number of major events in the history of the formation of self-consciousness is the development of speech. The development of speech, which is a form of existence of thinking and consciousness in general, while playing a significant role in the development of the child's consciousness, at the same time significantly increases the child's capabilities, thus changing the child's relationship with others. Instead of being just an object of the actions of the adults around him directed at him, the child, mastering speech, acquires the ability to direct the actions of the people around him at will and through other people to influence the world. All these changes in the child's behavior and in his relationships with others give rise, being realized, to changes in his consciousness, and changes in his consciousness, in turn, lead to a change in his behavior and his internal attitude towards other people.

There are a number of stages in the development of personality and its self-consciousness. In a number of external events in the life of a person, this includes everything that really makes a person an independent subject of social and personal life, somehow: first, a child develops the ability to self-service and, finally, in a young man, in an adult, the beginning of his own labor activity making him financially independent; each of these external events has its own internal side; an objective, external change in the relationship of a person with others, reflected in his consciousness, changes the internal, mental state of a person, rebuilds his consciousness, his internal relation both to other people and to yourself.

However, these external events and themes internal changes, which they cause, does not exhaust the process of formation and development of personality. They lay only the foundation, create only the basis of the personality, carry out only its first, rough molding; further completion and finishing are connected with other, more complex internal work, in which the personality is formed in its highest manifestations.

The independence of the subject is by no means limited to the ability to independently perform certain tasks. It includes an even more essential ability to independently, consciously set certain tasks, goals, and determine the direction of one's activity. This requires a lot of inner work, involves the ability to think independently and is associated with the development of an integral worldview. Only in a teenager, in a young man, this work is done; critical thinking is developed, a worldview is formed; moreover, the approach of the time of entry into independent life involuntarily, with particular acuteness, he puts before the young man the question of what he is suitable for, what he has special inclinations and abilities for; this makes one seriously think about oneself and leads to a significant development in the adolescent and youth of self-consciousness. In this case, the development of self-consciousness passes through a series of stages - from naive ignorance of oneself to more and more in-depth self-knowledge, which is then combined with more and more definite and sometimes sharply fluctuating self-esteem. In the course of this development of self-consciousness, the center of gravity for the adolescent shifts more and more from the outer side of the personality to its inner side, from the reflection of more or less random traits to the character as a whole. Associated with this is the awareness - sometimes exaggerated - of one's originality and the transition to the spiritual, ideological scales of self-esteem. As a result, a person defines himself as a personality on a higher plane.

In a very broad sense, everything experienced by a person, all the mental content of his life, is part of the personality. But in a more specific sense, as belonging to him, a person does not recognize everything that is reflected in his psyche, but has just been experienced by him in the specific sense of the word, entering the history of his inner life. Not every thought that has visited his mind, a person equally recognizes as his own, but only one that he did not accept in finished form, but mastered, thought through, that is, one that was the result of some of his own activity. In the same way, not every feeling that has fleetingly touched his heart, a person equally recognizes as his own, but only one that determined his life and work. But all this - and thoughts, and feelings, and in the same way desires - a person for the most part, at best, recognizes as his own, but in his own I he will include only the properties of his personality - his character and temperament, his abilities - and he will add to them perhaps the thought to which he gave all his strength, and the feelings with which his whole life has grown together.

A real person who, reflected in his self-consciousness, is aware of himself as I, as the subject of his activity, is a social being included in social relations and performing certain social functions. The real existence of a person is essentially determined by his social role: therefore, reflected in his self-consciousness, this social role is also included by a person in his Self.

The self-consciousness of a person, reflecting the real being of a person, does this - like consciousness in general - not passively, not in a mirror way. A person's idea of ​​himself, even of his own mental properties and qualities, does not always adequately reflect them; the motives that a person puts forward when justifying his behavior to other people and to himself, even when he strives to correctly understand his motives and is subjectively quite sincere, by no means always objectively reflect his motives, which really determine his actions. Human self-consciousness is not given directly in experiences, it is the result of cognition, which requires awareness of the real conditionality of one's experiences. It may be more or less adequate. Self-awareness, including one or another attitude towards oneself, is closely related to self-esteem. A person's self-esteem is essentially conditioned by the worldview that determines the norms of evaluation.

Self-consciousness is not an initial given inherent in man, but a product of development. During this development, as a person acquires life experience, before him not only new aspects of being open up, but also a more or less deep rethinking of life takes place. This process of its rethinking, passing through the whole human life, forms the most intimate and basic content of his inner being, which determines the motives of his actions and the inner meaning of the tasks that he solves in life. The ability, developed in the course of life in some people, to comprehend life on a grand scale and recognize what is truly significant in it, the ability not only to find means for solving problems that have accidentally popped up, but also to determine the very tasks and purpose of life in such a way that truly to know where in life to go and why is something infinitely superior to any scholarship, even if it has a large stock of special knowledge, this precious and rare property is wisdom.

Rubinshtein S.L.

A psychology that is more than a field for the leisurely exercise of learned bookworms, a psychology that is worth man's giving his life and strength to it, cannot confine itself to the abstract study of individual functions; it must, passing through the study of functions, processes, etc., ultimately lead to actual knowledge real life, live people.

The true meaning of the path we have traversed lies in the fact that it was nothing more than a step-by-step paved path for our cognitive penetration into the mental life of the individual. Psychophysiological functions were included in various mental processes. The mental processes that were first subjected to analytical study, being in reality aspects, moments of concrete activity in which they are actually formed and manifested, were included in this latter; in accordance with this, the study of mental processes passed into the study of activity - in that specific ratio, which is determined by the conditions of its actual implementation. The study of the psychology of activity, which always really proceeds from the individual as the subject of this activity, was, in essence, the study of the psychology of the individual in his activity - his motives (motives), goals, tasks. Therefore, the study of the psychology of activity naturally and naturally turns into the study of personality traits - its attitudes, abilities, character traits that are manifested and formed in activity. Thus, the whole variety of mental phenomena - functions, processes, mental properties of activity - enters into the personality and closes in its unity.

Precisely because any activity proceeds from the personality as its subject and, thus, at each given stage, the personality is the initial, initial one, the psychology of the personality as a whole can only be the result, the completion of the entire path traversed by psychological knowledge, covering the whole variety of mental manifestations, consistently revealed in it by psychological knowledge in their integrity and unity. Therefore, in any attempt to begin the construction of psychology with the doctrine of personality, any concrete psychological content inevitably falls out of it; personality appears psychologically as an empty abstraction. Due to the impossibility of revealing its mental content at first, it is replaced by the biological characteristics of the organism, metaphysical reasoning about the subject, spirit, etc. or social analysis of the individual, whose social nature is psychologized in this case.

However great the importance of the problem of personality in psychology, the personality as a whole cannot in any way be included in this science. Such a psychologization of personality is unjustified. Personality is not identical with either consciousness or self-consciousness. Analyzing the mistakes of Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Spirit", K. Marx notes among the main ones that for Hegel the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness. Of course, it is not the metaphysics of German idealism - I. Kant, J. Fichte and G. Hegel - that should form the basis of our psychology. Personality, the subject is not "pure consciousness" (Kant and the Kantians), not always equal to itself "I" ("I + I" - Fichte) and not a self-developing "spirit" (Hegel); it is a concrete, historical, living individual, included in real relations to the real world. Essential, determining, leading for a person as a whole are not biological, but social patterns of his development. The task of psychology is to study the psyche, consciousness and self-consciousness of the individual, but the essence of the matter is that it should study them precisely as the psyche and consciousness of "real living individuals" in their real conditioning.

But if a personality is irreducible to its consciousness and self-consciousness, then it is impossible without them. A person is a personality only insofar as he distinguishes himself from nature, and his relation to nature and to other people is given to him as a relation, i.e. because he has consciousness. The process of becoming a human personality therefore includes, as an integral component, the formation of his consciousness and self-awareness: this is the process of development of a conscious personality. If any interpretation of consciousness outside the personality can only be idealistic, then any interpretation of personality that does not include its consciousness and self-consciousness can only be mechanistic. Without consciousness and self-consciousness there is no personality. A person as a conscious subject is aware not only of the environment, but also of himself in his relations with the environment. If it is impossible to reduce the personality to its self-consciousness, to the "I", then it is also impossible to separate one from the other. Therefore, the last final question that confronts us in terms of the psychological study of the personality is the question of its self-consciousness, of the personality as "I", which, as a subject, consciously appropriates everything that a person does, refers to itself all the deeds emanating from him. and actions and consciously takes responsibility for them as their author and creator. The problem of the psychological study of the personality does not end with the study of the mental properties of the personality - its abilities, temperament and character; it ends with the disclosure of the self-consciousness of the individual.

First of all, this unity of the personality as a conscious subject with self-consciousness is not a primordial given. It is known that the child does not immediately recognize himself as "I": during the first years he himself very often calls himself by name, as those around him call him; he exists at first, even for himself, rather as an object for other people than as an independent subject in relation to them. Awareness of oneself as "I" is thus the result of development. At the same time, the development of self-consciousness in a person takes place in the very process of the formation and development of the independence of the individual as a real subject of activity. Self-consciousness is not externally built over the personality, but is included in it; self-consciousness therefore does not have an independent path of development, separate from the development of the personality, it is included in this process of development of the personality as a real subject as its moment, side, component.

The unity of the organism and the independence of its organic life are the first material prerequisite for the unity of the personality, but this is only a prerequisite. And accordingly, the elementary mental states of general organic sensitivity ("senesthesia"), associated with organic functions, are obviously a prerequisite for the unity of self-consciousness, since the clinic has shown that elementary, gross violations of the unity of consciousness in pathological cases of the so-called split or disintegration of the personality (depersonalization ) are associated with violations of organic sensitivity. But this reflection of the unity of organic life in a common organic sensitivity is only a prerequisite for the development of self-consciousness, and by no means its source. The source of self-consciousness does not have to be looked for in the "relationships of the organism with itself", expressed in reflex acts that serve to regulate its functions (in which, for example, P. Janet looks for them). The true source and driving forces of the development of self-consciousness must be sought in the growing real independence of the individual, expressed in a change in his relationship with others.

It is not consciousness that is born from self-consciousness, from the "I", but self-consciousness arises in the course of the development of the consciousness of the individual, as it becomes an independent subject. Before becoming the subject of practical and theoretical activity, the "I" itself is formed in it. The real, not mystified history of the development of self-consciousness is inextricably linked with the real development of the individual and the main events of her life path.

The first stage in the formation of a personality as an independent subject, standing out from the environment, is associated with the mastery of one's own body, with the emergence of voluntary movements. These latter are developed in the process of formation of the first objective actions.

The next step on the same path is the beginning of walking, independent movement. And in this second case, as in the first case, it is not so much the technique of this case that is significant, but rather the change in the relationship of the individual with the people around him, which leads to the possibility of independent movement, as well as independent mastery of the object through grasping movements. One, like the other, one together with the other gives rise to a certain independence of the child in relation to other people. The child really begins to become a relatively independent subject of various actions, really standing out from the environment. With the realization of this objective fact, the emergence of the self-consciousness of the individual, the first idea of ​​her about her "I" is connected. At the same time, a person realizes his independence, his isolation from the environment only through his relations with the people around him, and he comes to self-consciousness, to the knowledge of his own "I" through the knowledge of other people. There is no "I" outside the relationship to "you", and there is no self-consciousness outside the awareness of another person as an independent subject. Self-consciousness is a relatively late product of the development of consciousness, assuming as its basis the child's becoming a practical subject, consciously separating himself from his environment.

An essential link in a number of major events in the history of the formation of self-consciousness is the mastery of speech, which is a form of existence of thinking and consciousness as a whole. Playing a significant role in the development of the child's consciousness, speech at the same time significantly increases the effective possibilities of the child, changing his relationship with others. Instead of being the object of the actions directed at him by the surrounding adults, the child, mastering speech, acquires the ability to direct the actions of the people around him at will and through other people to influence the world. All these changes in the child's behavior and in his relationships with others give rise, being realized, to changes in his consciousness, and changes in his consciousness, in turn, lead to a change in his behavior and his internal attitude towards other people.

The question of whether an individual is a subject with a developed self-consciousness and distinguishes himself from the environment, is aware of his attitude towards him as an attitude, cannot be solved metaphysically. There are a number of stages in the development of personality and its self-awareness. In a number of external events in the life of a person, this includes everything that makes a person an independent subject of public and personal life: from the ability to self-service to the start of labor activity, which makes him financially independent. Each of these external events has its own internal side; an objective, external, change in the relationship of a person with others, reflected in his consciousness, changes the internal, mental state of a person, rebuilds his consciousness, his internal attitude both to other people and to himself.

However, these external events and the internal changes that they cause do not exhaust the process of formation and development of the personality.

The independence of the subject is by no means limited to the ability to perform certain tasks. It includes a more significant ability to independently, consciously set certain tasks, goals, and determine the direction of one's activity. This requires a lot of inner work, involves the ability to think independently and is associated with the development of an integral worldview. Only in a teenager, in a young man, this work is done: critical thinking is developed, a worldview is formed, since the approach of the time of entry into an independent life with particular acuteness raises the question of what he is suitable for, for which he has special inclinations and abilities; this makes one think more seriously about oneself and leads to a noticeable development in the adolescent and youth of self-consciousness. At the same time, the development of self-consciousness goes through a series of steps - from naive ignorance of oneself to more and more in-depth self-knowledge, which is then combined with more and more definite and sometimes sharply fluctuating self-esteem. In the process of development of self-consciousness, the center of gravity for the adolescent is increasingly transferred from the external side of the personality to its internal side, from more or less random traits to the character as a whole. Associated with this is the awareness - sometimes exaggerated - of one's originality and the transition to the spiritual, ideological scales of self-esteem. As a result, a person defines himself as a person at a higher level.

At these higher stages of the development of the personality and its self-consciousness, individual differences are especially significant. Every person is a person, a conscious subject, possessing and known self-consciousness; but not in every person those qualities of him, by virtue of which he is recognized by us as a personality, are presented in equal measure, with the same brightness and strength. With some people, it is this impression that in this person we are dealing with a person in some special sense of the word that dominates everything else. We will not confuse this impression even with that very close, it would seem, feeling to him, which we usually express when we say of a person that he is an individuality. "Individuality" - we are talking about a bright person, i.e. distinguished by a well-known peculiarity. But when we specifically emphasize that a given person is a person, this means something more and different. A person in the specific sense of the word is a person who has his own positions, his own pronounced conscious attitude to life, a worldview, to which he came as a result of great conscious work. The personality has its own face. Such a person does not just stand out in the impression he makes on another; he consciously separates himself from the environment. In its highest manifestations, this presupposes a certain independence of thought, non-banality of feeling, willpower, some kind of composure and inner passion. At the same time, in any significant personality there is always some departure from reality, but one that leads to a deeper penetration into it. The depth and richness of a person presupposes the depth and richness of her connections with the world, with other people; the rupture of these ties, self-isolation devastates her. But a person is not a being who has simply grown into the environment; a person is only a person who is able to distinguish himself from his environment in order to contact him in a new, purely selective way. A person is only a person who relates in a certain way to the environment, consciously establishes this attitude in such a way that it is revealed in his entire being.

A true personality, by the certainty of his attitude to the main phenomena of life, makes others self-determine. A person who has a personality is seldom treated with indifference, just as he himself is not treated with indifference to others; he is loved or hated; he always has enemies and there are real friends. No matter how peacefully outwardly the life of such a person flows, internally there is always something active, offensively affirming in him.

Be that as it may, each person, being a conscious social being, the subject of practice, history, is thus a person. By defining his attitude towards other people, he defines himself. This conscious self-determination is expressed in his self-consciousness. Personality in its real existence, in its self-consciousness is what a person, realizing himself as a subject, calls his "I". "I" is a person as a whole, in the unity of all aspects of being, reflected in self-consciousness. The radical-idealistic currents of psychology usually reduce the personality to self-consciousness. W. James built on the subject's self-consciousness as a spiritual personality over a physical and social personality. In reality, the personality is not reduced to self-consciousness, and the spiritual personality is not built on top of the physical and social. There is only one person - a man of flesh and blood, who is a conscious social being. As "I" he acts, because with the development of self-consciousness he realizes himself as a subject of practical and theoretical activity.

A person relates his body to his personality, since he takes possession of it and the organs become the first instruments of influence on the world. Being formed on the basis of the unity of the organism, the personality of this body appropriates it to itself, relates it to its "I", insofar as it masters it, masters it. A person more or less firmly and closely connects his personality with a certain external appearance, since it contains expressive moments and reflects the way of his life and style of activity. Therefore, although both the body of a person and his consciousness are included in the personality, it is by no means necessary to speak (as James did) about the physical personality and the spiritual personality, since the inclusion of the body in the personality or attributing it to it is based precisely on the relationship between the physical and spiritual side of personality. To a lesser, if not more, degree, this applies to the spiritual side of the personality; there is no special spiritual personality in the form of some pure incorporeal spirit; it is an independent subject only because, being a material being, it is capable of exerting a material influence on the environment. Thus, the physical and the spiritual are aspects that enter the personality only in their unity and internal interconnection.

To his "I" a person, to an even greater extent than his body, refers the internal mental content. But not all of it he equally includes in his own personality. From the mental sphere, a person refers to his "I" mainly his abilities and especially his character and temperament - those personality traits that determine his behavior, giving it originality. In a very broad sense, everything experienced by a person, all the mental content of his life, is part of the personality. But in his more specific sense, relating to his "I", a person does not recognize everything that is reflected in his psyche, but only what he experienced in the specific sense of the word, entering the history of his inner life. Not every thought that has visited his mind, a person equally recognizes as his own, but only one that he did not accept in finished form, but mastered, thought through, i.e. one that was the result of his own activities.

In the same way, not every feeling that has fleetingly touched his heart, a person equally recognizes as his own, but only one that determined his life and work. But all this - thoughts, feelings, and in the same way desires - a person for the most part, at best, recognizes as his own, but in his own "I" he will include only the properties of his personality - his character and temperament, his abilities, and will add to them he is perhaps a thought to which he gave all his strength, and feelings with which his whole life has grown together.

A real person who, reflected in his self-consciousness, is aware of himself as "I", as the subject of his activity, is a social being included in social relations and performing certain social functions. The real existence of a person is essentially determined by his social role: therefore, reflected in self-consciousness, this social role is also included by a person in his "I".<...>

This attitude of the individual is also reflected in the psychological literature. Having asked the question of what includes the personality of a person, W. James noted that the personality of a person is the total sum of everything that he can call his own. In other words: a man is what he has; his property is his essence, his property absorbs his personality.<...>

In a certain sense, we can, of course, say that it is difficult to draw a line between what a person calls himself and some of what he considers his own. What a person considers his own, to a large extent determines what he himself is. But only this proposition acquires for us a different and in some respects opposite meaning. A person considers his own not so much the things that he appropriated to himself, but rather the cause to which he gave himself, the social whole in which he included himself. A person considers his area of ​​work to be his, he considers his homeland to be his, he considers her interests, the interests of mankind to be his: they are his, because he is theirs.

For us, a person is defined primarily not by his relationship to his property, but by his relationship to his work.<...>Therefore, his self-esteem is determined by what he, as a social individual, does for society. This conscious, social attitude to work is the pivot on which the entire psychology of the individual is rebuilt; it also becomes the basis and core of its self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness of a person, reflecting the real being of a person, does this - like consciousness in general - not passively, not a mirror image. A person's idea of ​​himself, even of his own mental properties and qualities, does not always adequately reflect them; the motives that a person puts forward, justifying his behavior to other people and to himself, even when he strives to correctly understand his motives and is subjectively quite sincere, by no means always objectively reflect his motives, which really determine his actions. Human self-consciousness is not given directly in experiences, it is the result of cognition, which requires awareness of the real conditionality of one's experiences. It may be more or less adequate. Self-awareness, including one or another attitude towards oneself, is closely related to self-esteem. A person's self-esteem is essentially conditioned by the worldview that determines the norms of evaluation.

Human consciousness is generally not only theoretical, cognitive, but also moral consciousness. It has its roots in the social being of the individual. It receives its psychologically real expression in the inner meaning that everything that happens around him and by himself acquires for man.

Self-consciousness is not an initial given inherent in a person, but a product of development; at the same time, self-consciousness does not have its own line of development separate from the personality, but is included as a side in the process of its real development. In the course of this development, as a person acquires life experience, not only new aspects of being open up before him, but also a more or less profound rethinking of life takes place. This process of its rethinking, passing through the whole life of a person, forms the most intimate and basic content of his being, determines the motives of his actions and the inner meaning of the tasks that he solves in life. The ability, developed in the course of life in some people, to comprehend life on a grand scale and recognize what is truly significant in it, the ability not only to find means for solving problems that accidentally pop up, but also to determine the tasks themselves and the purpose of life in such a way that they truly to know where to go in life and why is something infinitely superior to any scholarship, even if it has a large stock of special knowledge, this precious and rare property is wisdom.

Personal life path

As we have seen, a person is not born as a personality; he becomes a person. This development of the personality is essentially different from the development of the organism, which takes place in the process of simple organic maturation. The essence of the human personality finds its final expression in the fact that it not only develops like any organism, but also has its own history.

Unlike other living beings, humanity has a history, and not just repeating cycles of development, because the activity of people, changing reality, is objectified in the products of material and spiritual culture, which are transmitted from generation to generation. Through them, a succession is created between generations, thanks to which subsequent generations do not repeat, but continue the work of the previous ones and rely on what their predecessors have done, even when they come into conflict with them.

What applies to humanity as a whole cannot but apply in a certain sense to each individual. Not only humanity, but every person is to some extent a participant and subject of the history of mankind, and in a certain sense he himself has a history. Every person has his own history, since the development of the individual is mediated by the result of his activity, just as the development of mankind is mediated by the products of social practice, through which the historical continuity of generations is established. Therefore, in order to understand the path of one's development in its true human essence, a person must consider it in a certain aspect: what was I? - What I've done? – what have I become? It would be wrong to think that in one's deeds, in the products of one's activity, one's labor, a person only reveals himself, being already ready before and apart from them and remaining the same after them as he was. A person who has done something significant becomes, in a certain sense, a different person. Of course, it is also correct that in order to do something significant, you need to have some kind of internal capabilities for this. However, these possibilities and potentialities of a person stall and die if they are not realized; only to the extent that a person is objectively realized in the products of his labor does he grow and form through them. Between the personality and the products of its labor, between what it is and what it has done, there is a peculiar dialectic. It is not at all necessary that a person exhaust himself in the work that he has done; on the contrary, people about whom we feel that they have exhausted themselves by what they have done usually lose purely personal interest for us. At the same time, when we see that no matter how much a person has invested himself in what he has done, he has not exhausted himself with what he has done, we feel that a living person is behind the deed, whose personality is of particular interest. Such people have an internally freer attitude towards their work, towards the products of their activity; without exhausting themselves in them, they retain inner strength and opportunities for new achievements.

The point, then, is not to reduce the history of human life to a series of external affairs. Least of all, such a reduction is acceptable for psychology, for which the inner mental content and mental development of the personality are essential; but the essence of the matter is that the very mental development of the personality is mediated by its practical and theoretical activity, its deeds. The line from what a man was at one stage of his history to what he became at the next runs through what he has done. In the activity of a person, in his deeds, practical and theoretical, the mental, spiritual development of a person is not only manifested, but also accomplished.

This is the key to understanding the development of personality - how it is formed, making its life path. Her psychic abilities are not only a prerequisite, but also the result of her actions and deeds. In them, it is not only revealed, but also formed. The thought of a scientist is formed as he formulates it in his works, the thought of a public, political figure - in his deeds. If his deeds are born from his thoughts, plans, plans, then his thoughts themselves are generated by his deeds. The consciousness of a historical figure is formed and develops as an awareness of what happens through him and with his participation, like when a sculptor's chisel carves a human image from a block of stone, it determines not only the features of the depicted, but also the artistic face of the sculptor himself. The artist's style is an expression of his individuality, but his very individuality as an artist is formed in his work on the style of his works. The character of a person is manifested in his actions, but in his actions he is formed; the character of a person is both a prerequisite and the result of his real behavior in specific life situations; conditioning his behavior, he is in the same behavior and develops. A bold man acts boldly and a noble man behaves noblely; but, in order to become brave, you need to do bold deeds in your life, and in order to become truly noble, you need to commit deeds that would put this stamp of nobility on a person. A disciplined person usually behaves in a disciplined manner, but how does one become disciplined? Only by subordinating your behavior from day to day, from hour to hour, to unswerving discipline.

In the same way, in order to master the heights of science and art, certain abilities are needed, of course. But, being realized in some activity, abilities are not only revealed in it; they are formed and developed in it. Between the abilities of a person and the products of his activity, his labor, there is a profound relationship and the closest interaction. A person's abilities develop and work out on what he does. The practice of life provides at every step the richest factual material, testifying to how people's abilities are developed and developed at work, in study and work.<...>

For a person, his biography, a kind of history of his "life path" is not an accidental, external and psychologically indifferent circumstance. It is not for nothing that a person’s biography includes, first of all, where and what he studied, where and how he worked, what he did, his works. This means that in the history of a person, which should characterize him, they include, first of all, what he has mastered in the course of training from the results of the previous historical development humanity and what he himself did for its further advancement - how he joined in the succession of historical development.

In those cases when, being included in the history of mankind, an individual performs historical deeds, i.e. deeds that are included not only in his personal history, but also in the history of society - in the history of science itself, and not just scientific education and mental development this person, in the history of art, and not only the aesthetic education and development of a given personality, etc., - it becomes historical figure in the proper sense of the word. But every person, every human personality has its own history. Every person has a history insofar as he is included in the history of mankind. It can even be said that a person is only a person insofar as he has his own history. During this individual history there are also their own "events" - key moments and turning points in the life path of an individual, when, with the adoption of a decision for a more or less long period, a person's life path is determined.

At the same time, everything that a person does is mediated by his attitude towards other people and therefore is saturated with social human content. In this regard, the things that a person does usually outgrow him, since they are public affairs. But at the same time, a person outgrows his business, since his consciousness is a social consciousness. It is determined not only by a person's attitude to the products of his own activity, it is formed by his attitude to all areas of historically developing human practice, human culture. Through the objective products of his labor and creativity, a person becomes a person, because through the products of his labor, through everything that he does, a person always correlates with a person.

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Behind every theory there is always some ideology in the end; Behind every psychological theory is some general concept a person who receives a more or less specialized refraction in it. Thus, a certain concept of the human personality stood behind traditional, purely contemplative, intellectualized psychology, in particular, associative psychology, which depicted mental life as a smooth flow of ideas, as a process flowing entirely in one plane, regulated by the clutch of associations, like an uninterruptedly working machine in which all parts attached to each other; and in exactly the same way, its own conception of man as a machine, or rather, an appendage to a machine, lies at the basis of behavioral psychology.

Its own concept of the human personality is behind all the constructions of our psychology. This is a real living person of flesh and blood; internal contradictions are not alien to him, he has not only sensations, ideas, thoughts, but also needs and drives; there are conflicts in his life. But scope and real significance higher levels his consciousness is expanding and strengthening. These higher levels of conscious life are not externally built on top of the lower ones; they penetrate deeper and deeper into them and rebuild them; human needs are increasingly becoming truly human needs; without losing anything in their natural naturalness, they themselves, and not just the ideal manifestations of man built on top of them, are increasingly turning into manifestations of the historical, social, truly human essence of man.

This development of man's consciousness, its growth and its rooting in him, take place in the process of man's real activity. Consciousness of a person is inextricably linked with reality, and efficiency - with consciousness. Only due to the fact that a person, driven by his needs and interests, objectively objectively generates ever new and more and more perfect products of his labor, in which he objectifies himself, all new areas, all higher levels of consciousness are formed and developed in him. Through the products of his labor and his creativity, which are always the products of social labor and social creativity, since man himself is a social being, a conscious personality develops, its conscious life expands and strengthens. It is also a whole psychological concept in a folded form. Behind it, as its real prototype, looms the image of a human creator who, by changing nature and rebuilding society, changes his own nature, who in his social practice, generating new social relations and in collective labor creating a new culture, forges a new, truly human the shape of a person.

The specificity of a person’s conscious way of life lies in his ability to separate his “I” from his life environment in the representation of himself, to make his inner world an object of reflection and understanding. This process is called the formation human self-awareness.

There are several points of view regarding the formation of human self-consciousness.

1. Self-consciousness is the original, genetically primary form of human consciousness. Supporters of this concept argue that on the basis of primary self-sensitivity (self-perception) there is a synthesis of two different systems of ideas about oneself as "I" and about everything else as "not-I". Thus, the feeling of "I" exists as something completely autonomous from the processes of perception by the psyche of external (for it) facts.

2. Self-consciousness is the highest kind of consciousness that arises as a result of the previous development of consciousness (the point of view of S. L. Rubinshtein). This concept is built on the assumption of an exclusively external orientation of our psyche at the very first stage of its development, and only at some point a person is able to perceive himself. Reflection of the outside world is a universal channel of socialization, a defining aspect of consciousness.

3. Consciousness of the external world and self-consciousness arose and developed simultaneously, uniformly and interdependently (IM Sechenov). The prerequisites for self-consciousness are laid down in the so-called "systemic feelings", which are of a psychosomatic nature. Moreover, the first half of the "feelings" correspond to the objects of the external world, the second - to the body's own states - self-perceptions. As “objective sensations” are combined, a person’s idea of ​​the external world is formed, and as a result of the synthesis of self-perceptions, an idea of ​​himself, i.e. the emerging consciousness reflects its carrier and mental reactions as one of the sides of this interaction. The accumulating pole of the psyche becomes the basis for the formation of individual self-consciousness.

self-awareness - a conscious attitude of a person to his needs and abilities, inclinations and motives of behavior, experiences and thoughts.

Self-consciousness is expressed in a person's emotional and semantic assessment of his subjective capabilities, which serves as the basis for the expediency of actions and deeds. Being involved in the activity, the individual becomes the object of social assessment - as satisfying or not satisfying its technological requirements. A person turns into a condition for the realization (actualization) of himself. The “I”, considered by the actor as a condition for self-realization, acquires a personal meaning. The meaning of "I", thus, is the unit of self-consciousness. As a unit of self-consciousness, the meaning of "I" contains cognitive, emotional and relational components, it is associated with the activity of the subject that occurs outside of consciousness, i.e. his social activities. Self-consciousness allows a person to reveal his social value and the meaning of his being, forms and changes ideas about his future, past and present (V. V. Stolin). At the individual level, the meaning of "I" is partially identical to self-esteem.

Self-esteem (sometimes: self-attitude, subjective attitude towards oneself, self-concept) - a stable structural formation endowed with a personality to indicate its own value and significance and influencing its development, activity and behavior.

A person's self-esteem is formed on the basis of assessments by those around him of his activities, the ratio of the real and ideal self-image. From the point of view of T. Shibutani, each person places himself as an object inside his symbolic environment. A person's idea of ​​himself is not a direct reflection of what he is or what he does. A person comprehends himself with the help of linguistic categories and the general premises of his culture. SL Rubinshtein emphasized that "my attitude towards myself is mediated by the attitude of another towards me." Empirically in a person's life, the attitude of other people towards him determines his attitude towards them.

The incentive-constructive role of positive self-esteem is associated with the formation of important socio-psychological qualities in a person that have a strong motivational potential: a person begins to experience himself as an active subject of actions, a creator of alternatives responsible for their choice and implementation, strive for self-improvement and the possibility of self-affirmation (R. M . Granovskaya).

It is shown that all situations of coercion and pressure that threaten the self-respect of the individual, deprive him of the right to choose, negatively affect the actualization of human capabilities (L. I. Antsyferova). A negative attitude towards oneself acts as an obstacle to developing social influences in the field of professional and educational activities, communication and family life. In search of ways of self-affirmation, a person often resorts to non-constructive forms of behavior.

Self-assessment creates the basis for the perception of one's own success and failure, the achievement of goals of a certain level, i.e. the level of claims of the individual (the term was introduced into psychology by K. Levin and his students).

The level of claims of the individual - the desire of a person to achieve the goals of the complexity for which he considers himself capable.

The level of a person's claims is formed as a result of the person's experience of his achievements as successful or unsuccessful. The level of claims can be adequate to the capabilities of the individual and inadequate (overestimated or underestimated).

Thus, the essence of the psychological mechanism of individual self-consciousness should be considered as a system of self-givenness of the basic mental processes of the personality integrated into a holistic personifying center, as a quality of human nature, thanks to which each of us turns from a “subject in itself” into a “subject for itself”.

Investigating the impact of society on a person, we can say that the influence of the norms and prescriptions of society, customs and institutions depends on the volume and method of organizing knowledge, on the beliefs and worldview of the individual, on his ability to correctly comprehend social situations, adequately perceive interlocutors, see significant contradictions in problematic situations. circumstances. Psychology has accumulated many concepts related to different sections of the worldview: "cognitive map of the world", "subjective picture of the world", "system of personal constructs" and others.

Within the framework of humanistic psychology, self-consciousness is designated by the term "inner self". To designate this concept as a transpersonal (ie, non-personal) psychic reality, G. I. Gurdjieff and his followers (P. D. Uspensky) use the term "essence" (essense). This term, which goes back to the Latin word essere - being, in a similar sense (essence in itself - In-se) is also used in the conceptual apparatus of A. Meneghetti's ontopsychology. In analytical psychology, the central psychic instance is denoted by the term "I" or "self" (seif). In psychosynthesis, to designate this center of the psyche, hidden behind the "shell of the personality" and constituting the "heart of the human psyche" (R. Assagioli), the term "higher self" is used. A. A. Radugin, when analyzing the structure of self-consciousness, uses the concepts: the current "I" and the personal "I".

The most simple in science model of the structure of self-consciousness proposed K. Jung and is based on the opposition of conscious and unconscious elements of the human psyche. He singled out two levels of its self-image:

1) the subject of the human psyche is the so-called "self", which contains mostly unconscious processes, i.e. the person that we are;

2) the form of manifestation of "selfhood" on the surface of consciousness, the so-called conscious "I", a secondary product of the conscious and unconscious existence of a person.

Domestic psychology (S. L. Rubinshtein), considering self-consciousness as the formation of qualitatively new capabilities of the individual, presents the following structure of self-consciousness:

1. Directly sensory level, through which psychosomatic reactions and processes are reflected in the self-consciousness of the individual (self-perception).

2. Whole-personal level (personifying), associated with the perceptual mechanisms of personality centers (perception, experience and awareness of oneself as an active principle).

3. Intellectual-analytical level, which serves as the basis and means of the theoretical stage of self-cognitive activity (self-observation, self-analysis, self-understanding).

4. Purposeful-activity level, acting as a kind of synthesis of the three considered, through which the reflection and correction of the feedback of the psyche with the objective and own subjective reality is carried out.

The leading functions of self-consciousness are connected with the purposeful-activity level of the structure of self-consciousness: regulative-behavioral and motivational.

The subjective picture of the life path in the self-consciousness of a person is built in accordance with individual and social development, commensurate with biographical and historical facts. To correlate oneself with the forms of social life in which one has to live and act, revealing one's capabilities, features, and on this basis to determine one's place in these forms, structures - this is one of the main tasks of individual life. S. Buhler was the first to try to understand the life of a person not as a chain of accidents, but through its regular stages. Individual, or personal, life she called way of life personality.

Personal life path - the life of a particular person, having certain patterns, amenable to description and explanation; personality evolution, the sequence of age stages of personality development, stages of her biography; the movement of the personality to higher, more perfect forms, to the best manifestations of the human psyche.

S. L. Rubinshtein represented the life path of a person as a whole, in which each age stage prepares and influences the next. As structures of life and units of analysis of the life path, S. Bueller singles out events, S. L. Rubinshtein - turning stages in a person's life, which are determined by personality. A person organizes his life, regulates its course, chooses and carries out its direction. S. L. Rubinshtein singled out the special role of self-consciousness in the organization of a person's life.

The life path is subject to periodization, not only age-related (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), but also personal, which may not coincide with age. Personal qualities act as the driving force of life dynamics, the content of life. Motivations for action, claims, abilities, intentions, orientation, interests are expressed in the life manifestations of the individual. The ability of a person to organize life, to resolve its contradictions, to build value relations is called a life position, which is a special life and personal formation.

Life position- a way of self-determination of a personality in life, generalized on the basis of its life values ​​and meeting the basic needs of the personality, which is the result of the interaction of the personality with its own life, her own achievement.

Life position is characterized by personality contradictions and ways to resolve them. An illustration of the inability to resolve life's contradictions are two phenomena - leaving and laying responsibility on another. The inflexibility of one's life position is manifested in the desire to maintain one's views on life, "principles", habits, social circle, etc. unchanged.

The life position of a person can be determined through his activity as a way of social life, a place in the profession, a way of self-expression, a set of attitudes of the individual to life. The realization of a life position in time and circumstances of life, corresponding to the dynamic characteristics of the life path, is called a life line.

life line- this is a certain sequence (or inconsistency) of a person in carrying out, implementing his life position, loyalty to his principles and relationships in changing circumstances.

The main characteristic of a progressive life line is the continuous feedback of the results of the previous stage (decisions, actions, etc.) on the next one.

Satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with life is an indicator of the real problematic (presence of contradictions) of the individual. The strategy of a person's life consists in revealing and resolving the true causes of emerging contradictions, and not in avoiding them through life changes. The ability of a person to resolve contradictions is a measure of his socio-psychological maturity, courage, steadfastness and adherence to principles.

life strategy- these are ways of changing, transforming the conditions, situations of life in accordance with the values ​​of the individual; building life based on their individual capabilities and capabilities developed in life.

The fundamental content of the life strategy consists not only in a kind of structuring, in the organization of life, but also in the creation of its spiritual value, spiritual and ethical level and method, which brings genuine satisfaction to a person.

A psychology that is more than a field for the leisurely exercise of learned bookworms, a psychology that is worth man's giving his life and strength to it, cannot confine itself to the abstract study of individual functions; it must, passing through the study of functions, processes, etc., ultimately lead to a real knowledge of real life, living people.

The true meaning of the path we have traversed lies in the fact that it was nothing more than a step-by-step paved path for our cognitive penetration into the mental life of the individual. Psychophysiological functions were included in various mental processes. The mental processes that were first subjected to analytical study, being in reality aspects, moments of concrete activity in which they are actually formed and manifested, were included in this latter; in accordance with this, the study of mental processes passed into the study of activity - in that specific ratio, which is determined by the conditions of its actual implementation. The study of the psychology of activity, which always really proceeds from the individual as the subject of this activity, was, in essence, the study of psychology. personalities in her activities- its motives (motives), goals, objectives. Therefore, the study of the psychology of activity naturally and naturally turns into the study of personality traits - its attitudes, abilities, character traits that are manifested and formed in activity. Thus, the whole variety of mental phenomena - functions, processes, mental properties of activity - enters into the personality and closes in its unity.

Precisely because any activity proceeds from the personality as its subject and, thus, at each given stage, the personality is the initial, initial one, the psychology of the personality as a whole can only be the result, the completion of the entire path traversed by psychological knowledge, covering the whole variety of mental manifestations, consistently revealed in it by psychological knowledge in their integrity and unity. Therefore, in any attempt to begin the construction of psychology with the doctrine of personality, any concrete psychological content inevitably falls out of it; personality appears psychologically as an empty abstraction. Due to the impossibility of revealing its mental content at first, it is replaced by the biological characteristics of the organism, metaphysical reasoning about the subject, spirit, etc. or social analysis of the individual, whose social nature is psychologized in this case.

However great the importance of the problem of personality in psychology, the personality as a whole cannot in any way be included in this science. Such a psychologization of personality is unjustified. Personality is not identical with either consciousness or self-consciousness. Analyzing the mistakes of Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Spirit", K. Marx notes among the main ones that for Hegel the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness. Of course, it is not the metaphysics of German idealism - I. Kant, J. Fichte and G. Hegel - that should form the basis of our psychology. Personality, the subject is not "pure consciousness" (Kant and the Kantians), not always equal to itself "I" ("I + I" - Fichte) and not a self-developing "spirit" (Hegel); it is a concrete, historical, living individual, included in real relations to the real world. Essential, determining, leading for a person as a whole are not biological, but social patterns of his development. The task of psychology is to study the psyche, consciousness and self-consciousness of the individual, but the essence of the matter is that it should study them precisely as the psyche and consciousness of "real living individuals" in their real conditioning.

But if a personality is irreducible to its consciousness and self-consciousness, then it is impossible without them. A person is a personality only insofar as he distinguishes himself from nature, and his relation to nature and to other people is given to him as a relation, i.e. because he has consciousness. The process of becoming a human personality therefore includes, as an integral component, the formation of his consciousness and self-awareness: this is the process of development of a conscious personality. If any interpretation of consciousness outside the personality can only be idealistic, then any interpretation of personality that does not include its consciousness and self-consciousness can only be mechanistic. Without consciousness and self-consciousness there is no personality. A person as a conscious subject is aware not only of the environment, but also of himself in his relations with the environment. If it is impossible to reduce the personality to its self-consciousness, to the "I", then it is also impossible to separate one from the other. Therefore, the last final question that confronts us in terms of the psychological study of personality is the question of its consciousness, about the personality as "I", which, as a subject, consciously appropriates everything that a person does, refers to itself all the deeds and actions emanating from him, and consciously assumes responsibility for them as their author and creator. The problem of the psychological study of the personality does not end with the study of the mental properties of the personality - its abilities, temperament and character; it ends with the disclosure of the self-consciousness of the individual.

First of all, this unity of the personality as a conscious subject with self-consciousness is not a primordial given. It is known that the child does not immediately recognize himself as "I": during the first years he himself very often calls himself by name, as those around him call him; he exists at first, even for himself, rather as an object for other people than as an independent subject in relation to them. Awareness of oneself as "I" is thus the result of development. At the same time, the development of self-consciousness in a person takes place in the very process of the formation and development of the independence of the individual as a real subject of activity. Self-consciousness is not externally built over the personality, but is included in it; self-consciousness therefore does not have an independent path of development, separate from the development of the personality, it is included in this process of development of the personality as a real subject as its moment, side, component.

The unity of the organism and the independence of its organic life are the first material prerequisite for the unity of the personality, but this is only a prerequisite. And accordingly, the elementary mental states of general organic sensitivity ("senesthesia"), associated with organic functions, are obviously a prerequisite for the unity of self-consciousness, since the clinic has shown that elementary, gross violations of the unity of consciousness in pathological cases of the so-called split or disintegration of the personality (depersonalization ) are associated with violations of organic sensitivity. But this reflection of the unity of organic life in a common organic sensitivity is only a prerequisite for the development of self-consciousness, and by no means its source. The source of self-consciousness does not have to be looked for in the "relationships of the organism with itself", expressed in reflex acts that serve to regulate its functions (in which, for example, P. Janet looks for them). The true source and driving forces of the development of self-consciousness must be sought in the growing real independence of the individual, expressed in a change in his relationship with others.

It is not consciousness that is born from self-consciousness, from the "I", but self-consciousness arises in the course of the development of the consciousness of the individual, as it becomes an independent subject. Before becoming the subject of practical and theoretical activity, the "I" itself is formed in it. The real, not mystified history of the development of self-consciousness is inextricably linked with the real development of the individual and the main events of her life path.

The first stage in the formation of a personality as an independent subject, standing out from the environment, is associated with the mastery of one's own body, with the emergence of voluntary movements. These latter are developed in the process of formation of the first objective actions.

The next step on the same path is the beginning of walking, independent movement. And in this second case, as in the first case, it is not so much the technique of this case that is significant, but rather the change in the relationship of the individual with the people around him, which leads to the possibility of independent movement, as well as independent mastery of the object through grasping movements. One, like the other, one together with the other gives rise to a certain independence of the child in relation to other people. The child really begins to become a relatively independent subject of various actions, really standing out from the environment. With the realization of this objective fact, the emergence of the self-consciousness of the individual, the first idea of ​​her about her "I" is connected. At the same time, a person realizes his independence, his isolation from the environment only through his relations with the people around him, and he comes to self-consciousness, to the knowledge of his own "I" through the knowledge of other people. There is no "I" outside the relationship to "you", and there is no self-consciousness outside the awareness of another person as an independent subject. Self-consciousness is a relatively late product of the development of consciousness, assuming as its basis the child's becoming a practical subject, consciously separating himself from his environment.

An essential link in a number of major events in the history of the formation of self-consciousness is the mastery of speech, which is a form of existence of thinking and consciousness as a whole. Playing a significant role in the development of the child's consciousness, speech at the same time significantly increases the effective possibilities of the child, changing his relationship with others. Instead of being the object of the actions directed at him by the surrounding adults, the child, mastering speech, acquires the ability to direct the actions of the people around him at will and through other people to influence the world. All these changes in the child's behavior and in his relationships with others give rise, being realized, to changes in his consciousness, and changes in his consciousness, in turn, lead to a change in his behavior and his internal attitude towards other people.

The question of whether an individual is a subject with a developed self-consciousness and distinguishes himself from the environment, is aware of his attitude towards him as an attitude, cannot be solved metaphysically. There are a number of stages in the development of personality and its self-awareness. In a number of external events in the life of a person, this includes everything that makes a person an independent subject of public and personal life: from the ability to self-service to the start of labor activity, which makes him financially independent. Each of these external events has its own internal side; an objective, external, change in the relationship of a person with others, reflected in his consciousness, changes the internal, mental state of a person, rebuilds his consciousness, his internal attitude both to other people and to himself.

However, these external events and the internal changes that they cause do not exhaust the process of formation and development of the personality.

The independence of the subject is by no means limited to the ability to perform certain tasks. It includes a more significant ability to independently, consciously set certain tasks, goals, and determine the direction of one's activity. This requires a lot of inner work, involves the ability to think independently and is associated with the development of an integral worldview. Only in a teenager, in a young man, this work is done: critical thinking is developed, a worldview is formed, since the approach of the time of entry into an independent life with particular acuteness raises the question of what he is suitable for, for which he has special inclinations and abilities; this makes one think more seriously about oneself and leads to a noticeable development in the adolescent and youth of self-consciousness. At the same time, the development of self-consciousness goes through a series of steps - from naive ignorance of oneself to more and more in-depth self-knowledge, which is then combined with more and more definite and sometimes sharply fluctuating self-esteem. In the process of development of self-consciousness, the center of gravity for the adolescent is increasingly transferred from the external side of the personality to its internal side, from more or less random traits to the character as a whole. Associated with this is the awareness - sometimes exaggerated - of one's originality and the transition to the spiritual, ideological scales of self-esteem. As a result, a person defines himself as a person at a higher level.

At these higher stages of the development of the personality and its self-consciousness, individual differences are especially significant. Every person is a person, a conscious subject, possessing and known self-consciousness; but not in every person those qualities of him, by virtue of which he is recognized by us as a personality, are presented in equal measure, with the same brightness and strength. With regard to some people, it is precisely this impression that in this person we are dealing with personality in some special sense of the word, dominates everything else. We do not confuse this impression even with that very close feeling, it would seem, to him, which we usually express when speaking of a person that he individuality."Individuality" - we are talking about a bright person, i.e. distinguished by a well-known peculiarity. But when we specifically emphasize that a given person is a person, this means something more and different. A person in the specific sense of the word is a person who has his own positions, his own pronounced conscious attitude to life, a worldview, to which he came as a result of great conscious work. The personality has its own face. Such a person does not just stand out in the impression he makes on another; he consciously separates himself from the environment. In its highest manifestations, this presupposes a certain independence of thought, non-banality of feeling, willpower, some kind of composure and inner passion. At the same time, in any significant personality there is always some departure from reality, but one that leads to a deeper penetration into it. The depth and richness of a person presupposes the depth and richness of her connections with the world, with other people; the rupture of these ties, self-isolation devastates her. But a person is not a being who has simply grown into the environment; a person is only a person who is able to distinguish himself from his environment in order to in a new, purely selectively contact him. A person is only a person who applies in a certain way to the environment, consciously establishes this relationship in such a way that it is revealed in his entire being.

A true personality, by the certainty of his attitude to the main phenomena of life, makes others self-determine. A person who has a personality is seldom treated with indifference, just as he himself is not treated with indifference to others; he is loved or hated; he always has enemies and there are real friends. No matter how peacefully outwardly the life of such a person flows, internally there is always something active, offensively affirming in him.

Be that as it may, each person, being a conscious social being, the subject of practice, history, is thus a person. By defining his attitude towards other people, he defines himself. This conscious self-determination is expressed in his self-consciousness. Personality in its real existence, in its self-consciousness is what a person, realizing himself as a subject, calls his "I". "I" is a person as a whole, in the unity of all aspects of being, reflected in self-consciousness. The radical-idealistic currents of psychology usually reduce the personality to self-consciousness. W. James built on the subject's self-consciousness as a spiritual personality over a physical and social personality. In reality, the personality is not reduced to self-consciousness, and the spiritual personality is not built on top of the physical and social. There is only one person - a man of flesh and blood, who is a conscious social being. As "I" he acts, because with the development of self-consciousness he realizes himself as a subject of practical and theoretical activity.

A person relates his body to his personality, since he takes possession of it and the organs become the first instruments of influence on the world. Being formed on the basis of the unity of the organism, the personality of this body appropriates it to itself, relates it to its "I", insofar as it masters it, masters it. A person more or less firmly and closely connects his personality with a certain external appearance, since it contains expressive moments and reflects the way of his life and style of activity. Therefore, although both the body of a person and his consciousness are included in the personality, it is by no means necessary to speak (as James did) about the physical personality and the spiritual personality, since the inclusion of the body in the personality or attributing it to it is based precisely on the relationship between the physical and spiritual side of personality. To a lesser, if not more, degree, this applies to the spiritual side of the personality; there is no special spiritual personality in the form of some pure incorporeal spirit; it is an independent subject only because, being a material being, it is capable of exerting a material influence on the environment. Thus, the physical and the spiritual are aspects that enter the personality only in their unity and internal interconnection.

To his "I" a person, to an even greater extent than his body, refers the internal mental content. But not all of it he equally includes in his own personality. From the mental sphere, a person refers to his "I" mainly his abilities and especially his character and temperament - those personality traits that determine his behavior, giving it originality. In a very broad sense, everything experienced by a person, all the mental content of his life, is part of the personality. But in his more specific sense, relating to his "I", a person does not recognize everything that is reflected in his psyche, but only what he experienced in the specific sense of the word, entering the history of his inner life. Not every thought that has visited his mind, a person equally recognizes as his own, but only one that he did not accept in finished form, but mastered, thought through, i.e. one that was the result of his own activities.

In the same way, not every feeling that has fleetingly touched his heart, a person equally recognizes as his own, but only one that determined his life and work. But all this - thoughts, feelings, and in the same way desires - a person for the most part, at best, recognizes as his own, but in his own "I" he will include only the properties of his personality - his character and temperament, his abilities, and will add to them he is perhaps a thought to which he gave all his strength, and feelings with which his whole life has grown together.

A real person who, reflected in his self-consciousness, is aware of himself as "I", as the subject of his activity, is a social being included in social relations and performing certain social functions. The real existence of a person is essentially determined by his social role: therefore, reflected in self-consciousness, this social role is also included by a person in his "I".<…>

This attitude of the individual is also reflected in the psychological literature. Having asked the question of what includes the personality of a person, W. James noted that the personality of a person is the total sum of everything that he can call his own. In other words: man There is what he It has; his property makes it entity, his own absorbs his personality.<…>

In a certain sense, we can, of course, say that it is difficult to draw a line between what a person calls himself and some of what he considers his own. What a person considers his own, to a large extent determines what he himself is. But only this proposition acquires for us a different and in some respects opposite meaning. A person considers his own not so much the things that he appropriated to himself, but rather the cause to which he gave himself, the social whole in which he included himself. A person considers his area of ​​work to be his, he considers his homeland to be his, he considers her interests, the interests of mankind to be his: they are his, because he is theirs.

For us, a person is determined primarily not by his relationship to his property, and his attitude to his labor. <…>Therefore, his self-esteem is determined by what he, as a social individual, does for society. This conscious, social attitude to work is the pivot on which the entire psychology of the individual is rebuilt; it also becomes the basis and core of its self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness of a person, reflecting the real being of a person, does this - like consciousness in general - not passively, not a mirror image. A person's idea of ​​himself, even of his own mental properties and qualities, does not always adequately reflect them; the motives that a person puts forward, justifying his behavior to other people and to himself, even when he strives to correctly understand his motives and is subjectively quite sincere, by no means always objectively reflect his motives, which really determine his actions. Human self-consciousness is not given directly in experiences, it is the result of cognition, which requires awareness of the real conditionality of one's experiences. It may be more or less adequate. Self-consciousness, including one or another attitude towards oneself, is closely connected with self-esteem. A person's self-esteem is essentially conditioned by the worldview that determines the norms of evaluation.

Human consciousness is generally not only theoretical, cognitive, but also moral consciousness. It has its roots in the social being of the individual. It receives its psychologically real expression in the inner meaning acquires for a person everything that happens around him and by himself.

Self-consciousness is not an initial given inherent in a person, but a product of development; at the same time, self-consciousness does not have its own line of development separate from the personality, but is included as a side in the process of its real development. In the course of this development, as a person acquires life experience, not only new aspects of being open up before him, but also a more or less deep rethinking life. This process of its rethinking, passing through the whole life of a person, forms the most intimate and basic content of his being, determines the motives of his actions and the inner meaning of the tasks that he solves in life. The ability, developed in the course of life in some people, to comprehend life on a grand scale and recognize what is truly significant in it, the ability not only to find means for solving problems that accidentally pop up, but also to determine the tasks themselves and the purpose of life in such a way that they truly know, Where go in life and For what,- this is something infinitely superior to any scholarship, even if it has a large stock of special knowledge, this is a precious and rare property - wisdom.

Personal life path

As we have seen, a person is not born as a personality; he becomes a person. This development of the personality is essentially different from the development of the organism, which takes place in the process of simple organic maturation. The essence of human personalities finds its final expression in the fact that it not only develops like any other organism, but also It has my history.

Unlike other living beings, humanity has a history, and not just repeating cycles of development, because the activity of people, changing reality, is objectified in the products of material and spiritual culture, which are transmitted from generation to generation. Through them, a succession is created between generations, thanks to which subsequent generations do not repeat, but continue the work of the previous ones and rely on what their predecessors have done, even when they come into conflict with them.

What applies to humanity as a whole cannot but apply in a certain sense to each individual. Not only humanity, but every person is to some extent a participant and subject of the history of mankind, and in a certain sense he himself has a history. Every person has his own history, since the development of the individual is mediated by the result of his activity, just as the development of mankind is mediated by the products of social practice, through which the historical continuity of generations is established. Therefore, in order to understand the path of one's development in its true human essence, a person must consider it in a certain aspect: what was I? - What I've done? – what have I become? It would be wrong to think that in one's deeds, in the products of one's activity, one's labor, a person only reveals himself, being already ready before and apart from them and remaining the same after them as he was. A person who has done something significant becomes, in a certain sense, a different person. Of course, it is also correct that in order to do something significant, you need to have some kind of internal capabilities for this. However, these possibilities and potentialities of a person stall and die if they are not realized; only to the extent that a person is objectively realized in the products of his labor does he grow and form through them. Between the personality and the products of its labor, between what it is and what it has done, there is a peculiar dialectic. It is not at all necessary that a person exhaust himself in the work that he has done; on the contrary, people about whom we feel that they have exhausted themselves by what they have done usually lose purely personal interest for us. At the same time, when we see that no matter how much a person has invested himself in what he has done, he has not exhausted himself with what he has done, we feel that a living person is behind the deed, whose personality is of particular interest. Such people have an internally freer attitude towards their work, towards the products of their activity; without exhausting themselves in them, they retain inner strength and opportunities for new achievements.

The point, then, is not to reduce the history of human life to a series of external affairs. Least of all, such a reduction is acceptable for psychology, for which the inner mental content and mental development of the personality are essential; but the essence of the matter is that the very mental development of the personality is mediated by its practical and theoretical activity, its deeds. The line from what a man was at one stage of his history to what he became at the next runs through what he has done. In the activity of a person, in his deeds, practical and theoretical, the mental, spiritual development of a person is not only manifested, but also accomplished.

This is the key to understanding the development of personality - how it is formed, making its life path. Her psychic abilities are not only premise, but also result her actions and deeds. In them, it is not only revealed, but also formed. The thought of a scientist is formed as he formulates it in his works, the thought of a public, political figure - in his deeds. If his deeds are born from his thoughts, plans, plans, then his thoughts themselves are generated by his deeds. The consciousness of a historical figure is formed and develops as an awareness of what happens through him and with his participation, like when a sculptor's chisel carves a human image from a block of stone, it determines not only the features of the depicted, but also the artistic face of the sculptor himself. The artist's style is an expression of his individuality, but his very individuality as an artist is formed in his work on the style of his works. The character of a person is manifested in his actions, but in his actions he is formed; a person's character is both a prerequisite and a result of his actual behavior in specific situations. life situations; conditioning his behavior, he is in the same behavior and develops. A bold man acts boldly and a noble man behaves noblely; but, in order to become bold, you need to do bold things in your life, and in order to become really noble - to commit acts that would impose on a person this stamp of nobility. A disciplined person usually behaves in a disciplined manner, but how becomes is he disciplined? Only by subordinating your behavior from day to day, from hour to hour, to unswerving discipline.

In the same way, in order to master the heights of science and art, certain abilities are needed, of course. But, being realized in some activity, abilities are not only revealed in it; they are formed and developed in it. Between the abilities of a person and the products of his activity, his labor, there is a profound relationship and the closest interaction. A person's abilities develop and work out on what he does. The practice of life provides at every step the richest factual material, testifying to how people's abilities are developed and developed at work, in study and work.<…>

For a person, his biography, a kind of history of his "life path" is not an accidental, external and psychologically indifferent circumstance. It is not for nothing that a person’s biography includes, first of all, where and what he studied, where and how he worked, what he did, his works. This means that the history of a person, which should characterize him, includes, first of all, what he mastered in the course of education from the results of the previous historical development of mankind and what he himself did for its further advancement - how he was included in the succession of historical development.

In those cases when, being included in the history of mankind, an individual performs historical deeds, i.e. deeds that are included not only in his personal history, but also in the history of society - in the history of science itself, and not only science education and the mental development of a given person, into the history of art, and not just the aesthetic education and development of a given personality, etc. - it becomes a historical personality in the proper sense of the word. But every person, every human personality has its own history. Every person has a history insofar as he is included in the history of mankind. It can even be said that a person is only a person insofar as he has his own history. In the course of this individual history, there are also "events" - key moments and turning points in the life path of an individual, when a person's life path is determined by the adoption of a decision for a more or less long period.

At the same time, everything that a person does is mediated by his attitude towards other people and therefore is saturated with social human content. In this regard, the things that a person does usually outgrow him, since they are public affairs. But at the same time, a person outgrows his business, since his consciousness is a social consciousness. It is determined not only by a person's attitude to the products of his own activity, it is formed by his attitude to all areas of historically developing human practice, human culture. Through the objective products of his labor and creativity, a person becomes a person, because through the products of his labor, through everything that he does, a person always correlates with a person.

* * *

Behind every theory there is always some ideology in the end; Behind every psychological theory there is some general conception of man, which receives in it a more or less specialized refraction. Thus, a certain concept of the human personality stood behind traditional, purely contemplative, intellectualized psychology, in particular, associative psychology, which depicted mental life as a smooth flow of ideas, as a process flowing entirely in one plane, regulated by the clutch of associations, like an uninterruptedly working machine in which all parts attached to each other; and in exactly the same way, its own conception of man as a machine, or rather, an appendage to a machine, lies at the basis of behavioral psychology.

Its own concept of the human personality is behind all the constructions of our psychology. This is a real living person of flesh and blood; internal contradictions are not alien to him, he has not only sensations, ideas, thoughts, but also needs and drives; there are conflicts in his life. But the sphere and the real significance of the higher levels of consciousness are expanding and strengthening in him. These higher levels of conscious life are not externally built on top of the lower ones; they penetrate deeper and deeper into them and rebuild them; human needs are increasingly becoming truly human needs; without losing anything in their natural naturalness, they themselves, and not just the ideal manifestations of man built on top of them, are increasingly turning into manifestations of the historical, social, truly human essence of man.

This development of man's consciousness, its growth and its rooting in him, take place in the process of man's real activity. Consciousness of a person is inextricably linked with reality, and efficiency - with consciousness. Only due to the fact that a person, driven by his needs and interests, objectively objectively generates ever new and more and more perfect products of his labor, in which he objectifies himself, all new areas, all higher levels of consciousness are formed and developed in him. Through the products of his labor and his creativity, which are always the products of social labor and social creativity, since man himself is a social being, a conscious personality develops, its conscious life expands and strengthens. It is also a whole psychological concept in a folded form. Behind it, as its real prototype, looms the image of a human creator who, by changing nature and rebuilding society, changes his own nature, who in his social practice, generating new social relations and in collective labor creating a new culture, forges a new, truly human the shape of a person.

Afterword

Historical context and modern sounding of the fundamental work of S.L. Rubinshtein

The author of this book, Sergei Leonidovich Rubinshtein, one of the greatest psychologists and philosophers, was born on June 6 (18), 1889 in Odessa, and died on January 11, 1960 in Moscow. Higher education received in 1909-1913. in Germany - at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Freiburg, where he studied philosophy, logic, psychology, sociology, mathematics, natural science. In Marburg, he brilliantly defended his doctoral dissertation in philosophy "On the problem of method", devoted mainly to a critical analysis of Hegel's philosophical system and, above all, its rationalism. Returning to Odessa, Rubinstein became an associate professor at Odessa University, and after the death of the famous Russian psychologist N.N. Lange, since 1922, he headed the Department of Psychology and Philosophy.

Immediately after the revolution, S.L. Rubinshtein takes Active participation in system restructuring high school in Ukraine. Difficulties in the transformation of higher education in Odessa, the rejection by Odessa psychologists of philosophical ideas, which in the 20s. he began to develop in his courses, forced S.L. Rubinshtein to move away from teaching and accept the post of director of the Odessa Scientific Library. In general, the 20s. in Rubinstein's biography, this is a period of intensive scientific research, his formation as a philosopher and methodologist of science, and the creation of the foundations of a philosophical and psychological concept. Mastering the works written during these years by S.L. Rubinshtein is just beginning. In 1979, and then in 1986, his first articles were republished, which were published in the early 20s, but most of his philosophical and psychological heritage has not been published, although it represents a unique example of a creative synthesis of epistemology, ontology and methodology of science. In his manuscripts of 1916-1923. Rubinshtein outlines and more and more clearly develops, as it were, a "third" path in philosophy - the third in relation to both materialism and idealism. But in the 30-50s. he could only call it dialectical materialism or materialistic dialectics.

In the article "The principle of creative amateur activity (to the philosophical foundations of modern pedagogy)" Rubinshtein reveals the essence of the activity approach and begins to develop its philosophical, pedagogical and psychological aspects. The author himself sees the essence of this approach, first of all, in the fact that "the subject in his deeds, in the acts of his creative amateur activity, is not only revealed and manifested; he is created and determined in them. Therefore, what he does, you can determine what he is It is possible to determine and shape him by the direction of his activity. On this alone lies the possibility of pedagogy, at least pedagogy in a grand style.

In this article, Rubinshtein analyzed the most significant features of activity, such as: 1) its subjectivity, i.e. the fact that it is always carried out by a person as a subject or subjects (for example, teaching as " a joint research" by the teacher and students of a cognizable object); 2) its content, reality, objectivity; 3) its creative and personality-developing character. These characteristics of activity, which have become key in this work, were developed by Rubinstein in his unique philosophical concept of the 20s. completed in the 1950s and published after his death.

In the 20s. not only in Odessa mechanistic, reflexological, behavioral ideas, incompatible with the activity principle, dominated in psychology. In Ukraine at that time the departments of psychology were transformed into departments of reflexology. This partly explains why Rubinstein did not receive support from his colleagues in Odessa University and was not even able to publish his large philosophical and psychological manuscript, of which the mentioned article was a very brief fragment. Nevertheless, he continues his philosophical and psychological research. In this article and in his few other publications of the 1920s, when Rubinstein begins to develop the original concept of the subject and his activity, he does not refer to the philosophy of K. Marx, since he does not see a significant ideological similarity between his own and Marx's philosophical views(He felt such closeness only after the publication in 1927-1932 of Marx's early philosophical manuscripts).

The encyclopedic education received at the universities of Germany, in some way brought this person closer to the people of the Renaissance. The methodological tasks solved by the Marburg philosophical school, primarily the search for a synthesis of the sciences about the spirit (humanities) and about nature, brought S.L. Rubinshtein to the forefront of the then scientific knowledge, especially on the problems of methodology, the solution of which he associated with philosophical anthropology and ontology. Rubinstein's father, a prominent lawyer, knew G.V. Plekhanov and often visited him during his trips abroad, which, apparently, was one of the reasons that prompted the young Rubinstein to start studying the philosophy of K. Marx. However, Rubinstein is interested not only in the problem of the synthesis of social and economic characteristics of being, posed by Marx, but in the way of connecting all the qualities of a person and his place in being. In the 20s. not only are the foundations of the worldview laid, but also the scientific style of S.L. Rubinshtein is formed, combining the courage of methodological search with German pedantic rigor and systematicity in building concepts.

In an unpublished manuscript of the 20s. S.L. Rubinshtein gives a critical analysis of the methodological principles of the philosophy of the beginning of the century - Husserlianism, neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, linking the main methodological problems with the task of constructing an ontological doctrine about the structure of being and the place of man in it. To reveal the type of causality that is key to humanities, he puts forward the fundamental idea of ​​his philosophical and psychological concept - the idea of ​​the subject. This idea was in the early 1930s. is formalized in the form of a methodological principle of psychology - the unity of consciousness and activity. Rubinstein comes to this principle by applying Marx's understanding of activity, labor and social relations to psychology.

Thus, formal periodization scientific creativity S.L. Rubinstein, when the 10-20s. consider the actual philosophical stage, and the 30-40s. - psychological, while the 50s. considered as a period of return to philosophy, rather superficial. During development in the 20s. of the fundamental problems of the methodology of sciences (in Soviet philosophy they began to be systematically developed, perhaps, only starting from the 60s, i.e. after the death of Rubinstein), he, while maintaining the philosophical orientation of these problems, solves them in relation to the tasks of a specific science - psychology.

These considerations are the starting point for answering the question why Rubinstein was able to solve these problems that arose at the turn of the 20th century in such a profound and original way in his Fundamentals of General Psychology. The state of a deep methodological crisis in science, including psychology, brought the tasks of methodology to the fore. Soviet psychologists, who aspired in the 20s. to rebuild psychology on the basis of Marxism, were not professional philosophers of the level required by the solution of these problems. Rubinstein almost did not participate in the discussions of psychologists in the 20s, but the education he received, which made him an expert not only in Russian, but also in world psychology and philosophy, teaching, starting from 1916, a course in psychology, which he carried out in the 20s . philosophical analysis of this science testify to the fundamental nature of his research in this area. Therefore, his "rapid" appearance in psychology in the early 30s. with the program article "Problems of Psychology in the Works of Karl Marx", perceived by many as decisive for the Marxist formation of this science, in fact, was prepared by almost two decades of previous work.

Rubinstein began to solve the problem of building psychology on a dialectical-materialistic basis, already being an original philosopher. This allowed him to proceed from a holistic Marxist teaching, and not to turn to its separate, closer to psychology positions.

Approximately at the same time or somewhat later in the West, T. Kuhn turned to the creation of a methodology, but precisely as abstracted from specific sciences and therefore a universally general area of ​​philosophical knowledge. Rubinshtein proceeds to develop methodology precisely as a method of cognition in a particular science, inseparable from this science. On the basis of a generalization and a critically reflexive rethinking of the method of psychological cognition, Rubinshtein manages, without going into the field of particular problems of psychology, to identify such features associated with the dialectical understanding of its subject, which later, in the early 50s, required a revision of the philosophical foundation of psychology, the level of dialectic of this justification. This partly explains the predominant philosophical orientation of Rubinstein's works of the last period of his life. If Kuhn's methodology breaks away from philosophy, turning into abstract and formal scientism, then Rubinstein's establishes a meaningful connection between philosophy and concrete science. Solving the problem of constructing a methodology for a particular science becomes for Rubinstein an approbation of the possibilities of the philosophical method, an operationalization of philosophical thinking. That is why, while studying psychology, he continues his philosophical studies.

Linking the crisis of world psychology with the crisis of the methodology of science, Rubinstein did not confine himself to projecting onto psychology what he found in the 1920s. the philosophical and ontological principle of the subject and his activity, because as a scientist he avoided any apriorism and treated with reverence the internal logic of the development of any phenomenon, including scientific knowledge. Turning to the identification of the internal contradictions of psychology, he categorized this crisis as a mutually exclusive polarization, primarily of two directions in the psychology of the 20th century. - psychology of consciousness and behaviorism. This polarization was associated with an idealistic understanding of consciousness, and although behaviorism acted as a direction opposite to the psychology of consciousness, as its alternative, it proceeded from the same understanding of consciousness as introspectionism, but it simply denied it.

The contradictions of the global crisis psychological science did not bypass the Soviet psychology of the 20s. “The paradox of the situation,” the historian of Soviet psychology E.A. Budilova assesses the basic concepts of psychology of that time, “that arose in reflexology, as well as in reactology, was that both of these areas, declaring the subject of study of a person as an actor, in reality assigned him a passive role in switching external stimuli to a motor response. Human activity lost its essence - consciousness and was reduced to motor responses or reactions. " The impossibility of overcoming the crisis of world psychology was associated with the mechanistic nature of attempts to overcome it.

Rubinstein, having identified the key problem, without the solution of which the crisis could not be overcome - the problem of consciousness and activity, managed to reveal the internal connection of these categories due to the disclosure of their unity through the category of the subject. Having introduced the subject into the composition of the ontological structure of being, he simultaneously sought to deepen and concretize the understanding of objectivity in the approach to the subject as a problem of the method of all humanitarian knowledge and, more specifically, of psychology. Understanding activity not as an entity closed in itself, but as a manifestation of the subject (in its historicity, in its system of social relations, etc., according to K. Marx), allows Rubinstein to formulate the thesis about the objective mediation of consciousness, i.e. to extend the objective approach to the understanding of the subjective. The dialectics of objectification and subjectification is not Hegelian self-unfolding of the essence of the subject, but the objective-active and subjective-conscious correlation of this subject with others, with the products of his activity and the relations that determine this activity.

Thus, the connection between consciousness and activity is not simply postulated, but revealed. Rubinstein later qualified this principle as follows: “The affirmation of the unity of consciousness and activity meant that it was necessary to understand consciousness, the psyche, not as something only passive, contemplative, receptive, but as a process, the activity of a subject, a real individual, and in itself human activity, in human behavior to reveal its psychological composition and thus make the very activity of a person the subject of psychological research. "However, it should be emphasized that Rubinstein's implementation of the activity (as he was later called) approach to consciousness, which actually coincided in this sense with the principle of the subject of activity, did not meant reducing the specifics of consciousness and the psyche as a whole to activity.On the contrary, the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity was based on their understanding as different modalities, and the activity approach served the purpose of objectively identifying the specifics of the activity of consciousness.

At the same time, Rubinstein carries out a methodological concretization of the philosophical concept of the subject: he reveals precisely the subject that implements and in which the connection between consciousness and activity, which is studied primarily by psychology, is realized. Such a subject is a person. The psyche and consciousness are not self-sufficient, do not exist in themselves, but belong to a person, more specifically, to a person. Personality in Rubinstein's understanding, proceeding from the category of the subject, at the same time turns out to be the richest specific concept, thanks to which the impersonal, subjectless, and therefore abstract nature of the connection between consciousness and activity is overcome. Through personality, Rubinstein reveals a system of various connections between consciousness and activity: in personality and personality, this connection is closed and realized. The personality itself is defined through a trinity - what a person wants, what is attractive for him (this is the so-called orientation as a motivational-need system of a person, values, attitudes, ideals), what a person can (these are his abilities and talents), finally, what he is himself, i.e. what of his tendencies, attitudes and behavior was fixed in his character. In this trinity, the dynamic characteristics of the personality (orientation, motives) and its stable qualities - character and abilities are consistently connected. To paraphrase this definition today, we can say that a person as a subject develops a way to connect his desires, motives with abilities in accordance with his character in the process of their implementation in life, in accordance with its goals and circumstances.

For Rubinstein, personality is both the main psychological category, the subject of psychological research, and the methodological principle. Like all the methodological principles of psychology that were developed by Rubinstein, personal principle on different stages development of his concept and of Soviet psychology as a whole, he solved various methodological problems and therefore modified his methodological content. At the first stage of its development in the early 30s. and above all, in the program article of 1934, the personality principle solved a number of critical tasks: overcoming the idealistic understanding of personality in psychology, overcoming the methodology of functionalism, which did not recognize personality as the basis of various mental processes, etc. At the same time and a little later, Rubinshtein defines the positive tasks that were solved by this principle: revealing through the personality not only the connection between consciousness and activity (with the preservation of the specifics of the components), but also the connection of all mental components (processes, qualities, properties); determination of the quality and method of organization of the psyche, which is achieved at the level of the individual; finally, the identification of a special dimension and quality of the personality itself, which is found only in a special dimension and the process of its development - the life path. This also includes the tasks of studying the specifics of self-development and personality formation (the ratio of development and training, development and education), identifying the dialectics of external and internal, individual and typical, special and universal, which are also methodological and as such arose in psychology.

However, among all this multitude of specific tasks that were consistently solved by Rubinshtein, one should not miss the main one, which, perhaps, can be reflected only by comprehending the entire history of Soviet psychology and the social determinants of its development. Only by revealing this deep trend, we can say the following: at the turn of the 20-30s. the study of the personality and especially the personality of the child begins, but the crisis situations of Soviet psychology associated with the defeat of social psychology, psychotechnics, pedology, i.e. organizational intervention in internal matters science, lead to a gradual depersonalization of the subject of general and pedagogical psychology. The specific development of the theory of personality (V.N. Myasishchev and others) cannot compensate for the pushing into the background of personal problems, which begins in the mid-30s. and reaches in the 40s. its apogee. That is why, especially in the context of an era that strove for depersonalization, it is very significant and fundamental that Rubinstein, starting from the 1930s, consistently implements a personal approach to the subject of psychology and develops his own theory of personality.

On the whole, these considerations outline the range of methodological problems for which Rubinshtein was prepared in the first stages of his career and from which he began his theoretical and empirical research in the 1930s. 1930-1942 make up the Leningrad period of his life and work, associated with the move from Odessa to Leningrad and the beginning of his own psychological scientific activity as head of the department of psychology at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. A.I. Herzen, where he was invited by M.Ya. Basov.

Within an unusually short time, Rubinstein creates a new scientific team, develops a series of experimental studies and proceeds to develop the dialectical-materialistic foundations of psychological science. A big step in solving this problem was the publication of his first monograph "Fundamentals of Psychology" in 1935. For this book he was awarded (without defending a dissertation) academic degree the doctors pedagogical sciences(in psychology).

The formation of psychology on the basis of dialectical methodology means the formation of a new type of knowledge and cognition, the essence of which is the philosophical and methodological substantiation of the adequacy of the very method of revealing, seeing the subject of science, ahead of concrete research. Such an advance is not an arbitrary construction or an apriorism of philosophy (in its former understanding as a science of sciences) in relation to a specific science, but an ontological philosophical justification of the place of the mental in the general system of phenomena of the material world, and therefore an objective identification of promising areas of its research. Such a prioriism is excluded, since the choice of philosophical categories that act as methodological principles of science and then serve as guidelines in determining the directions of its research is carried out on the basis of a generalization of the entire state of psychological science, and not by external random "application" to psychology of all the positions and categories of Marxist psychology in a row. philosophy (as, for example, in the 1920s they tried to directly apply the position of Marxism on the class struggle to the definition of the essence of the psyche).

Thus, the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, singled out as the central one for determining its subject, was formulated, as already noted, on the basis of a critical understanding of the state of world psychological science, and not simply in the order of psychological disclosure and concretization of the Marxist philosophical category of activity. On the basis of the most essential regularities of reality revealed by philosophical thought throughout history, psychology, establishing its own methodological principles that are essential for determining its subject, receives genuine, adequate to its essence, guidelines for its study of reality, excluding the purely empirical, random, dead-end nature of such research.

The creation of the foundations of science based on a new philosophical paradigm, and even more so their justification as a new type of scientific knowledge, was a unique task for psychology. Its uniqueness is revealed, first of all, in the most general comparison with the features of the design and structuring of psychological knowledge that took place in the same years in Western European and American psychology. This psychology continued to exist without overcoming the methodological crisis of the beginning of the century and only compensating for its consequences by a wide range of psychology entering practice (clinical, engineering, etc.). In the 1930s and subsequent years, major original concepts were developed in Western European and especially American psychology. However, no one will object to the fact that none of them claims to be the integration of all psychological knowledge. The latter is presented more in informational than interpretive quality, in the form of numerous manuals containing insufficiently connected summaries of knowledge and information from different sections of psychology.

Meanwhile, the development of psychological science in the USSR on the basis of the methodological problem solved by Rubinstein begins as a development, saying modern language, systemic knowledge, which is its truly unique feature. However, the identification of numerous internal connections of the subject of psychology, which Rubinstein set about in the first edition of his "Fundamentals ..." (1935), is possible in principle only on the basis of a methodologically adequate definition of this subject. The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, which reveals the personality as the subject of this unity, turned out to be such an ultimate and capacious foundation on which - at that stage - it was possible to integrate almost all existing psychological knowledge into a single system. This system, we repeat, was not of a classificatory nature, it acted as a categorical logic of integrating the old and obtaining new knowledge.

Such a categorical systematization of knowledge, which Rubinstein undertook in his first psychological monograph, becomes a heuristic means of producing new psychological problems, i.e. serves as a means of generating new knowledge, performing the function of their development as a whole. Disclosing the role of social determination in understanding the connection between activity, consciousness and the psyche subsequently became, in many respects, a single fundamental position of Soviet psychology, in the presence of various directions and schools in it, considering this dependence in different aspects and differently understanding the role of activity in determining the specifics of the mental (D. N. Uznadze, S. L. Rubinshtein, B. M. Teplov, A. N. Leontiev, B. G. Ananiev and others).

So, in the book "Fundamentals of Psychology" in 1935, S.L. Rubinshtein, on the basis of the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, for the first time presented the various data, directions and problems obtained in psychology as internally interconnected and generalized. At the same time, on the basis of this principle, he began to study a number of new psychological problems of thinking, memory, perception, speech, etc., which was carried out at the Department of Psychology of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute for a number of years.

great theoretical and experimental work B. G. Ananiev, A. N. Leontiev, A. A. Smirnov, B. M. Teplov and many other Soviet psychologists also conducted on the basis of the activity principle. For example, in the course of the study of memory by P.I. Zinchenko, A.A. Smirnov, A.G. Komm, D.I. Krasilshchikova, through its manifestation and formation in activity, the specificity and active nature of memorization and recollection are revealed. Through changing the tasks and conditions of activity, the essence of other mental processes was revealed. “From the standpoint put forward by this principle,” Rubinstein later wrote, “the problems of sensory, memory, and abilities were fruitfully developed in Soviet psychology.”

In the context of the activity approach, the categorization of activities began according to the principle of the leading role for development (the child), which was based on the general psychological classification of activities (play, learning, work). These problems were discussed by S. L. Rubinshtein with B. G. Ananiev, A. N. Leontiev, B. M. Teplov, D. N. Uznadze and others in discussions about the relationship between maturation and development, learning and development of the child. In the 30s. begins a psychological study of the features of the game as the leading type of activity for the formation of the psyche and consciousness of the child (A.N. Leontiev, D.B. Elkonin, etc.).

The intensive development of these theories and specific empirical research encourages Rubinstein to write a new, even deeper and empirically grounded in a new direction version of "Osnovy…". Soon after the publication of Fundamentals of Psychology in 1935, he began to create his fundamental work, Fundamentals of General Psychology, in which he presented and summarized almost all the theoretical and empirical achievements of Soviet psychology in the 1930s.

One of the methodological cores of this work is the consideration of the psyche, consciousness and personality in development. Here Rubinshtein continues in an essentially new way the development that emerged in Soviet psychology in the 1920s. the tendency to consider the problem of the development of the psyche constitutive in determining the subject of psychology, and the study of the developing psyche of the child as one of the leading ones in terms of its significance and specific weight (P.P. Blonsky, M.Ya. Basov, L.S. Vygotsky, etc.). In the new work, S.L. Rubinshtein reveals in unity the historical, anthropogenetic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic, functional aspects of the development of the psyche and the existential-biographical aspects of the development of the personality. The system of psychology is developed and presented to them through a hierarchy of increasingly complex mental processes and formations in the activity.

The activity of the subject itself is also considered in the process of its formation and improvement: at different stages of the complication of the life path, the activity takes on new forms and is restructured. That is why Rubinstein, firstly, objects to reducing the role of activity in mental development only to training, which does not create any new structures, and shows that on different levels development, mental processes are built in different ways, acquire new motives, a new quality and are included in a new mode of activity, using old mental formations only in a transformed, removed form. Secondly, he opposes his concept to all attempts to understand mental development as pure maturation, in which the inclinations laid down by nature function independently of the conditions of a particular activity. This is exactly what was noted in the concept of Rubinstein, emphasizing its activity-genetic aspect, B. G. Ananiev, A. R. Luria and other psychologists in the review given on the submission of "Fundamentals of General Psychology" (1940) for the State Prize.

This work received a similar assessment in the staff of the Institute of Psychology at Moscow State University: “S.L. Rubinshtein for the first time comprehensively and reasonably presented psychology as a relatively complete scientific system in the light of materialist dialectics. In this work, he essentially summed up the development of Soviet psychology over 25 years on general background of the achievements of world scientific psychological thought and outlined new ways of its fruitful development on the basis of Marxist-Leninist methodology.He set and gave at a high theoretical level the solution of a number of psychological problems (psyche and activity, the relationship of mental and physiological, the structure of consciousness, etc. .). Many of the problems he raised for the first time received an original solution, which was of fundamental importance for the further development of philosophical and psychological thought. For example, the problem of the structure of consciousness was revealed by him for the first time in Soviet psychology in the light of the dialectical unity of experience and knowledge. The problem of the structure of consciousness became really possible thanks to a new solution to the psychophysical problem given by Rubinstein on a broad genetic basis. This solution to the problem, based on the relationship and interdependence of structure and function, provides a new explanation of the genetic roots of the development of the psyche. SL Rubinshtein gave a solution to the main questions of the theory of psychological knowledge in the light of the Marxist-Leninist theory of reflection. Professor Rubinstein also developed his own methodology of psychological research - an original version of a natural experiment that implements the unity of influence and cognition in the methodology of psychological research.

The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, formulated by Rubinstein in the article "Problems of Psychology in the Works of Karl Marx" (1934), appears in "Fundamentals of General Psychology" (1940) in a concretized and dissected form. This principle involves the disclosure of this unity in the aspect of the functioning and development of consciousness through activity. Here it is necessary to emphasize its very special content in relation to the usual genetic understanding of development accepted in psychology. In the traditional sense, development was seen as the passage of certain successive, i.e. following in time one after another, stages that are irreversible. The determination of these stages was sometimes associated with the action of immanent - only internal - conditions; then development was understood as maturation. In other cases, on the contrary, the role of external conditions was absolutized, and then development was reduced to a mechanistically understood assignment from the outside - training, etc. Rubinshtein, in his classical formula of the connection between consciousness and activity, interprets the essence of development through the dialectic of subject and object, and thus development approaches functioning: the manifestation of consciousness in activity is simultaneously (and not sequentially) the development of consciousness through activity, its formation.

In the Fundamentals of General Psychology, both aspects (or meanings) of the principle of development complement each other: genetically sequential stages of development receive their qualitative certainty, act as new formations depending on the optimally - non-optimally occurring functioning of the structures that have developed at each stage, depending on the method of interaction with reality. In other words, a qualitative change in the structure of the psyche, consciousness, personality, etc. at each successive stage of their development, i.e. the appearance of new formations and, moreover, the emergence of a new mode of functioning, in turn, depend not on the immanently developing correlation of stages, but on the nature of functioning. This is, in relation to a person, the manifestation and formation of consciousness in activity, depending on the activity of the subject of the latter. That which is only the functioning of structures at the level biological world, acts as a special quality of activity, activity at the human level. However, the unity of structure and function, functioning is presented purely categorically in the "Fundamentals of General Psychology", which allows us to trace this aspect of development in its specificity at the level of animals and humans. Summarizing, we can say that Rubinstein's concept of development is not structural-genetic, like most of the concepts of development in psychology, including the concept of J. Piaget, the concept of personality development by S. Buhler and many others, but structural-functional-genetic, where the genetic sequence of certain stages and structures is not immanent, but depends, in turn, on the type of interaction or functioning, and in a person, on the nature of the activity.

Developing, following A.N. Severtsov and I.I. Shmalgauzen, the principle of the unity of structure and functioning, Rubinshtein reveals an important proposition that at different genetic levels, there is a correspondingly different relationship between the sides of this unity, just as the ratio between the sides of this unity is essentially to change genetically sequential stages or structures. When considering phylogenetic and ontogenetic evolution, Rubinstein expresses and develops two significant and interrelated ideas. The first indicates the interdependent nature of the structure and function: "not only the function depends on the structure, but also the structure depends on the function." The second one concerns the importance of the way of life for the integral process of development: "Directly or indirectly, the way of life plays a decisive role in the development of both the structure and the function in their unity, and the influence of the way of life on the structure is mediated by function." From these ideas, in turn, follows a methodological critique of the strategy of comparative research, based on the primacy of structure, morphology, etc. and therefore sees his task in comparison of different stages, stages, sections of this structure. Rubinstein's criticism was directed against the replacement of the genetic principle by the comparative one, but it is also significant for substantiating the same principles in psychology, rejecting the structural-comparative principle and asserting the functional-(structural)-genetic principle. This criticism is associated primarily with a qualitatively new understanding of the ontogenetic development of the individual, and therefore only on its basis can one understand the essence of longitudinal research, the importance of its strategy. Slice study, comparison different ages in their established fixed structures do not allow revealing their genesis, the dialectics of external and internal, the functional capabilities of a structure of one type or another and stage. Rubinshtein points to the static nature of such cross-sectional studies that do not reveal the patterns of development.

What gives the application of the functional-genetic principle to solving the problems of building a system of psychology? First, it integrates both stages of the development of the psyche - in animals and humans. At the same time, the functional aspect of the human psyche is specified through activity. Not behavior (in the behaviorist sense), but precisely functioning, is for Rubinstein a category that makes it possible to reveal the continuity of two qualitatively different stages in the development of the psyche (animals and humans). And this is extremely important for the criticism of the behavioral tradition in psychology, which even managed to conditioned reflexes how to bring an undoubtedly functional concept under a behavioral one, reducing conditioned reflexes to external manifestations (in behavior). Secondly, the functional-genetic principle makes it possible, through the understanding of development as the development of a function and structure, to describe in unified categories the psychophysiological characteristics of the psyche, on the one hand, and the reflective-activity characteristic, on the other. It must be said that the second task of applying the functional-genetic principle confronted Rubinstein later, in the 1950s, when the so-called Pavlovian session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the medical sciences The USSR (1950) demanded that psychology renounce the specifics of its subject when the danger arose of a complete physiologicalization of psychology.

The psychophysiological problem is analyzed in the Fundamentals of General Psychology in terms of brain structures and their functions, which allows us to give a psychophysiological specification of the principle of development (as a single one for the level of reflective-activity functioning of the psyche). At the same time, criticizing the concept of functional localization (as one of the theories of the relationship between structure and function), Rubinstein develops the most important idea that in the evolutionary series, the relationship between structure and function changes in favor of the latter. "The phylogenetically older any 'mechanism', the stricter its localization", and the further along the phylogenetic ladder, the more static localization is replaced by dynamic and systemic, i.e. almost all large cortical zones participate in the implementation of the same function. "The question of functional localization must be resolved differently for different genetic stages - one for birds, differently for cats and dogs, and again differently for humans."

The enduring methodological significance of these provisions can be revealed in the context of subsequent events in the history of psychology and physiology, associated with the already mentioned Pavlovian session, which led to the physiology of psychology. This physiization manifested itself in the direct transfer to humans of I.P. Pavlov’s provisions on conditioned reflexes of animals, which in turn led to the blurring of the qualitative boundaries between human and animal biology, and then, as its consequence, to the elimination of the specifics of human biology. This example confirms the importance of Rubinshtein's provisions on the methodological consideration of the specificity of structure and function relationships at different stages of development, on the qualitative specifics of this relationship in animals and humans.

The genetic principle in the above sense of it permeates all the theoretical constructions of S. L. Rubinshtein's book. As already noted, consciousness is considered here in a variety of genetic (in the broad sense of the word) aspects, the prehistory of its occurrence is carefully analyzed - the range of problems of classical zoopsychology associated with the stadial nature of the animal psyche, the principles and criteria for differentiating stages, which were at the center of discussions between Western European and domestic psychologists (V.Kehler, V.A.Vagner, etc.). In each of the chapters devoted to the disclosure of the essence of mental processes (cognitive, emotional, speech, and finally, actually personal - volitional, etc.), there is a section devoted to the genesis of this process or function in a child. (These sections were shortened in the third edition of the Fundamentals, but that is why it is necessary to note their strategic and methodological role in the first and second editions of the book, as well as in this edition of the book as an implementation of the principle of development in all aspects, in all the specifics of the psychological stages of development.) The most general content of the methodological principles of development and its most deep meaning reveals the thesis of potentiality as an unconditional possibility of human development "regardless of any predetermined scale", as K. Marx formulates it. It is this thesis that overcomes any idea of ​​the finiteness of development, characteristic of theories of localization and rigidity of structures in which development is realized. Development is a line towards differentiation as a complication of structures, on the one hand, and towards generalization - on the other hand, generalization also gives the possibility of unlimited flexible generalized connections between them.

Each new level of development, according to Rubinstein, opens up more and more opportunities, and the realization of these opportunities, in turn, forms new structures - this is the philosophical and methodological meaning of the relationship between structure and functioning. Rubinstein's concept of development reveals not only its stages, but also its hierarchy. structures top level modify the modes of functioning of the lower, are combined with them, which creates the most complex phenomenological picture, which could not be explained, for example, by K. Buhler, "pulling out", in the words of Rubinstein, the stages of development actually building on top of each other into "one straight line, divided into three strictly limited segment.

Developing the idea of ​​a hierarchy of development, Rubinstein was able to reveal not only the role of the higher, more complex stages of development in relation to the lower ones, but also their qualitative difference. For Rubinstein, human development is becoming, including the principle of self-development and self-improvement.

The unity of the functional and genetic aspects, as Rubinstein understood it, is very relevant, since in modern psychology the methodological principles of psychology, which strictly distinguish between functioning and development, are still widespread. In this case, human activity begins to be considered as a normative (corresponding to specified technical conditions) functioning. With all the legitimacy of such consideration in determining specific professional tasks, it cannot be transferred to understanding psychological aspect activity, which always implies the possibility and necessity of the development of a person as a subject.

The idea of ​​development as becoming coincides with the category of the subject, his self-development as a result of active change in the world. Realizing the principle of development in the psychology of cognition and human activity, Rubinshtein considers the stages of development through the concepts of cognition and behavior, which fully correspond to the general genetic approach.

Forms of behavior and cognition, which develop sequentially at different stages as fixed and typical for them, have a different internal structure and determine the totality of possibilities in the relationship of the subject with the world. It is the discrepancy between the internal structure of these forms and the process of real interaction with the world that leads to the activation of the functional capabilities of the subject, to the search for new ways of their correlation (but not in such a way that the internal structure determines the functional capabilities of each of the forms separately). Rubinstein reveals the internal structure of both the psyche, and consciousness, and personality, and its activity, which are characterized by certainty, qualitative difference, stability and at the same time the ability to expand the mode of functioning and, on this basis, to restructure them. The unity of forms or structures is based precisely on their difference, and not on identity, in which lies a constant source, an infinite possibility of their development.

Rubinstein explores such stable forms as character and abilities at the level of personality. And character, and abilities, and will are considered not only in their static forms, but also in dynamics, which is a concrete expression of the processuality of development. And for these forms, the unity of the stable and the dynamic is revealed in the genesis. Stability, definiteness of forms is not their fixity. Stability and stability are manifested in functioning, which contains endless possibilities for variability. Character is manifested in activity, in behavior, but it is also formed in it. The dynamics of formation is associated with the possibility of the emergence in each new situation of a new way of behavior, which from a separate act can then turn into a character trait.

Thus, the principle of development in all the versatility of its understanding permeates the entire work of Rubinstein.

The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity also appears in many aspects, performing both positive (methodological, theoretical, empirical) and critical functions. This principle sets the system for the division and integration of psychological problems. Through it, a new understanding of the subject of psychology and a methodological definition of the nature of the mental is given: the psyche as a unity of reflection and relationship, cognition and experience, epistemological and ontological. Through the same principle, the belonging of consciousness to the acting subject is revealed, which relates to the world due to the presence of consciousness in it. The definition of the reflective nature of the mental has become universally recognized. However, the qualification of the psyche as an experience, as a certain ontological state, was not given either before or after Rubinstein. The significance of this aspect becomes especially evident in the context of the subsequent development of psychology: for some authors, activity has gradually been reduced to its ideal forms. This tendency manifests itself especially clearly in philosophy and psychology, when one speaks of the identity of consciousness and activity, or, what is the same, of the commonality of their structure.

Rubinstein's definition of the psyche as a unity of reflection and attitude, knowledge and experience, reveals the correlation in it of the ideal and the real, the objective and the subjective, i.e. represents the psyche in the system of various philosophical and methodological qualifications. The definition of consciousness as objective and as subjective, i.e. as expressing the relationship of the individual to the world, the interpretation of consciousness as the highest level of organization of the psyche, which, unlike other levels, is characterized by ideality, "objective meaning, semantic, semantic content", understanding of consciousness as an individual determined by the social being and social consciousness at the same time reveal the productive contradictions of its movement . The genesis and dialectics of the subject's three relationships - to the world, to others, and to himself (these relationships were singled out by Rubinstein as constitutive back in 1935 in "Fundamentals of Psychology") - reveal the basis of self-consciousness and reflection of the individual's consciousness. Finally, the correlation of consciousness with the lower levels of the psyche allows us to understand its role as their regulator, as well as the regulator of the subject's integral activity in its relationship with the world.

This statement about the regulatory function of consciousness is also hallmark Rubinstein's concepts. Consciousness can act as a regulator of activity only because of its non-identity of the latter, because of its special modality: the whole objective reality is represented in consciousness (in any case, the ideality inherent in consciousness allows the individual to be guided by everything that is distant in time and space, which constitutes a non-surface essence of being). Precisely because consciousness is given everything that exists in the world, everything remote in time and space, everything with which a person has never come into direct contact and cannot come into direct contact, a person is not closed in the narrow world of his "I" and turns out to be able to go out endlessly. far beyond this "I". She can set her coordinate system relative to what is significant for her in this world and thereby regulate her actions and realize her experiences. The idea of ​​the regulatory role of consciousness goes back to the Marxist philosophical understanding of its activity, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to natural scientific ideas about the regulatory role of the psyche. However, Rubinstein began to substantiate the last dependence as a fundamental continuous line of domestic psychology after the publication of the second edition of Fundamentals of General Psychology, i.e. since the mid 40s.

First, through the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, Rubinstein is looking for an approach to an objective study of personality, to through what And How it manifests itself in action. This approach was implemented in a cycle of research into the problems of raising a child by S.L. Rubinshtein and his collaborators back in the 1930s. in Leningrad. Almost simultaneously, he outlines another direction of research - the path of active formation of the personality and its consciousness through activity. Tracing the connection between consciousness and activity, Rubinshtein shows that consciousness is such a higher mental process that is associated with the regulation by the personality of the relationships that develop in activity. Consciousness is not just supreme personal education, it performs three interrelated functions: the regulation of mental processes, the regulation of relations and the regulation of the activity of the subject. Consciousness is thus the highest faculty of the acting subject. Consciousness brings him out into the world, and does not close in himself, since his goals are determined not only by himself, but also by society. Determination by the subject of his activity is also formed in a special process - the life path of the individual.

Fundamental for Rubinstein is the question of the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness: it is not consciousness that develops from self-consciousness, the personal "I", but self-consciousness arises in the course of the development of the consciousness of the individual, as it becomes an independently acting subject. Rubinstein considers the stages of self-consciousness as stages of isolation, selection of the subject from direct connections and relations with the outside world and mastering these connections. According to Rubinstein, consciousness and self-consciousness is the building by a person through his actions of relations with the world and at the same time the expression of his attitude to the world through the same actions. From such an understanding of the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness, S.L. Rubinshtein develops his concept of an act: “At the same time, a person realizes his independence, his separation as an independent subject from the environment only through his relations with other people, and he comes to self-consciousness, to knowledge of his own "I" through the knowledge of other people. Self-consciousness in this sense is not so much a reflection of one's "I" as an awareness of one's way of life, one's relations with the world and people.

At the intersection of all the above definitions of consciousness - epistemological, socio-historical, anthropogenetic, actually psychological, socio-psychological (the ratio of individual and collective consciousness), and finally, value-moral - and there is its voluminous integral characteristic. It is formed precisely by genetic consideration. Only consideration of consciousness in development makes it possible to correlate, distinguishing between the historical (anthropogenetic) and ontogenetic processes of the development of consciousness, to show the unity and specificity of individual and social consciousness, to define consciousness as a stage in the development of the child's personality, then as a stage in the life path and a new quality in the formation of personality, as a way and a new quality of life and correlation with reality. The stage of a conscious attitude to life is a new quality of consciousness itself, arising in connection with the new way of life of the individual. A person becomes a subject of life not because she has consciousness, character, abilities, but because and to the extent that she uses her intellect, her abilities to solve life problems, subordinates her lower needs to higher ones, builds her life strategy.

SL Rubinshtein deeply disclosed the genesis of the communicative functions of consciousness, manifested in speech and carried out in it: "Thanks to speech, the consciousness of one person becomes a given for another." Speech is a form of existence of thought and an expression of attitude, i.e. the unity of knowledge and attitude is also traced in the functions of speech. Extremely important, according to Rubinstein, is the genesis of those speech functions that are associated with the child's need to understand and with the desire to be understood by others. His analysis of this need, accompanied by a convincing criticism of J. Piaget, is partly close to Bakhtin's idea of ​​dialogue. However, the fundamental feature of Rubinstein's position is that, unlike M.M. Bakhtin, who, following the founder of hermeneutics F. Schleiermacher, insisted on the importance of intersubjectivity, "Socratic conversation", Rubinstein explores the intrasubjective aspect of this need.

The genetic-dynamic aspect of consciousness is most concretely embodied when S.L. Rubinshtein considers emotions and will. It is in them that consciousness appears as an experience and an attitude. When a need from a blind attraction becomes a conscious and objective desire directed at a specific object, a person knows what he wants and can organize his action on this basis. In the genesis of the reversal of needs, the switching of their determination from internal to external factors, Rubinstein's concept comes close to D.N. Uznadze's concept of objectification.

Thus, the disclosure of the genesis and structure of consciousness as a unity of cognition and experience, as a regulator of human activity, made it possible to present different qualities of the mental - cognitive processes in their unity with the experience (emotions) and the implementation of relations to the world (will), and to understand the relations to the world as regulators of activity in its psychological and objective social structure, and to consider all these multi-qualitative features of the mental as processes and properties of the personality in its conscious and active relation to the world.

Rubinstein's understanding of consciousness thus gave both a new understanding of the subject of psychology and a new structure of psychological knowledge. The principles of the unity of consciousness, activity and personality formed the basis for the construction of psychology as a system.

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The pioneering role of S. L. Rubinshtein in the systematic and profound development (starting from 1922) of the activity principle in psychological science should be specially emphasized, since over the past 20-25 years this contribution to psychology has either been diminished or hushed up; in a number encyclopedic reference books not a word is said about it. Meanwhile, in our country and abroad, many achievements in the development of the activity approach are becoming more and more widespread, although often without mentioning the authorship or co-authorship of S.L. Rubinshtein. Oddly enough, but this is exactly what happened, for example, with the well-known philosophical and psychological scheme for analyzing activity in terms of its main components (goals, motives, actions, operations, etc.). Basically, this scheme was developed by S.L. Rubinshtein and A.N. Leontiev in the 30-40s. Now it is very widely used and improved (sometimes criticized) by domestic and foreign psychologists, philosophers, and sociologists.

Rubinstein began to develop the above scheme for analyzing activity in his program article "Problems of Psychology in the Works of K. Marx" (1934) and in subsequent monographs. Thus, in the monograph Fundamentals of Psychology (1935), Rubinstein systematized the first achievements in the implementation of the activity principle. First of all, in the very activity of the subject, he identified its psychologically significant components and specific relationships between them. Such, in particular, are action (in contrast to reaction and movement), operation and deed in their correlation with the purpose, motive and conditions of the subject's activity. (In 1935 action and operation were often identified by Rubinstein.)

Unlike a reaction, an action is an act of activity that is directed not at a stimulus, but at an object. The relation to the object appears for the subject precisely as a relation, at least partly conscious and therefore regulating all activity in a specific way. "Conscious action differs from unconscious in its very objective manifestation: its structure is different and its relation to the situation in which it is performed is different; it proceeds differently."

An action is different not only from a reaction, but also from an act, which is determined primarily by a different expression of the subject's relations. An action becomes an act to the extent that it is regulated by more or less conscious life relations, which, in particular, is determined by the degree of self-consciousness formation.

Thus, the unity of consciousness and activity is concretely manifested in the fact that various levels and types of consciousness, in general, the psyche are revealed through, respectively, different kinds activity and behavior: movement - action - deed. The very fact that a person is at least partially aware of his activity - its conditions and goals - changes its nature and course.

Rubinstein elaborated his system of ideas in more detail in the first (1940) edition of Fundamentals of General Psychology. Here, the dialectic of activity, actions and operations is more concretely revealed in their relationship primarily to goals and motives. Goals and motives characterize both the activity as a whole and the system of actions included in it, but they characterize it in different ways.

The unity of activity appears primarily as the unity of the goals of its subject and those of his motives that induce it. The motives and goals of activity, in contrast to those for individual actions, are usually integrated in nature, expressing the general orientation of the individual. These are the initial motives and the final goals. At different stages, they give rise to different private motives and goals that characterize certain actions.

The motive of human actions can be associated with their goal, since the motive is the impulse or desire to achieve it. But the motive can separate from the goal and move 1) to the activity itself (as happens in the game) and 2) to one of the results of the activity. In the second case, the by-product of actions becomes their goal.

So, in 1935-1940. Rubinstein already singles out diverse components within activity: movement - action - operation - act in their relationship with the goals, motives and conditions of activity. Action is at the center of these multilevel components. That it is, according to Rubinstein, the original "cell, unit" of psychology.

Continuing the psychological analysis of activity and its components in the second (1946) edition of Fundamentals of General Psychology, S.L. Rubinshtein, in particular, writes: various conditions the goal must and can be achieved in various ways (operations) or ways (methods), the action turns into a solution to the problem "and here he makes a footnote:" Questions of the structure of the action are specially studied by A.N. Leontiev.

In the 40s. and later A.N.Leontiev published a number of articles and books, which presented his point of view on the relationship between activity - action - operation in connection with the motive - goal - conditions. This is primarily his "Essay on the development of the psyche" (1947), "Problems of the development of the psyche" (1959), "Activity, consciousness, personality" (1975). In his opinion, "in the general flow of activity, which forms human life in its higher manifestations mediated by psychic reflection, analysis singles out, firstly, separate (special) activities - according to the criterion of the motives that motivate them. Further, actions are distinguished - processes that obey conscious goals. Finally, these are operations that directly depend on the conditions for achieving a specific goal.

In this scheme, the concept of activity is strictly correlated with the concept of motive, and the concept of action - with the concept of goal. In our opinion, a less rigid scheme looks more promising, according to which both motives and goals are associated with activities and actions, but in the first case they are more general, and in the second - more particular. However, sometimes Leontiev himself divides the goals into general and particular, and only the latter directly correlates with actions. Thus, at this point, a certain convergence of the positions of Rubinstein and Leontiev is outlined. At the same time, significant differences remain between them, primarily in the interpretation of the subject and his motives. In addition, as we have already seen, Rubinstein constantly emphasizes the fundamentally important role of an act, when, from his point of view, activity "becomes behavior" in the moral (but, of course, not the behaviorist) sense of the word.

On the whole, the described general scheme of correlating activities, actions, and operations in their connection with motives, goals, and conditions is an important stage in the development of Soviet psychology. It is no coincidence that it is still widely used today. At the same time, the scheme developed by S.L. Rubinshtein and A.N. Leontiev is often regarded as almost the most important achievement of Soviet psychology in solving the problems of activity. In our opinion, this is certainly not the case. In this problematic, the most essential for psychology is not this general scheme (which should not be canonized at all), but the disclosure through Marx's category of activity of an inseparable connection man with peace and the understanding of the psyche as originally included in this fundamental relationship.

Unlike activity and out of connection with it, actions, operations, motives, goals, etc. have long been the subject of research by psychologists in many countries. For example, K. Levin and his school did a lot to study actions and motives, and J. Piaget and his students did a lot to study operations and actions. But only in Soviet psychology, which developed on the basis of dialectical materialist philosophy, was the connection of man and his psyche with the world especially deeply analyzed. The most important criteria for such an analysis were the categories of object, activity, communication, etc. taken from K. Marx. And it is precisely in this respect (primarily in the development of the problem of activity) that Soviet psychology has certain methodological advantages, for example, over the same J. Piaget, who could not avoid a certain tilt towards operationalism.

In all developments of the problem of activity and other problems, S.L. Rubinshtein acts not only as an author, co-author and leader, but also as one of the organizers of psychological science in the USSR. Above all, he strove and knew how to establish creative business contacts and close cooperation with the psychologists of the country, even in cases where they held significantly different points of view. For example, as M.G. Yaroshevsky wrote about this in relation to the Leningrad period of Rubinstein’s scientific work: “There were ample opportunities for informal communication. Vygotsky and Leontiev, Ananiev and Roginsky came to Rubinstein in his two-room apartment on Sadovaya to share their ideas. to his chair Luria, Zankov, Kravkov and others. Excellently informed about the situation in psychology - domestic and world, Rubinstein maintained close contacts with those who worked at the forefront of science. "

In many ways, not sharing the positions of L.S. Vygotsky (see more about this later), Rubinstein nevertheless invited him to lecture on psychology to students of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. M.I. Herzen. He also agreed, in response to Vygotsky's request, to appear in 1933 as an official opponent in the defense of the dissertation of Zh.I. Shif, a student of Vygotsky who studied development scientific concepts at schoolchildren. (According to Zh.I. Shif, it is known that after the defense she corresponded with Rubinstein for quite a long time, wanting to find out in more detail what was the essence of his critical attitude towards Vygotsky’s theory. She assumed that Rubinstein’s letters to her could be preserved in that part of her archive, which is located at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR.)

Especially fruitful were Rubinstein's creative ties and contacts with his allies and partly like-minded people on the further development of the activity approach - with B.G. Ananiev, A.N. Leontiev, A.A. Smirnov, B.M. differences between them in the interpretation of activity, these psychologists largely jointly developed and promoted the activity approach, which was opposed by many others at that time, including leading Soviet psychologists (for example, K.N. Kornilov, N.F. Dobrynin, P. A. Shevarev and others former students G.I. Chelpanov - the founder of the first institute of psychology in Russia).

Rubinstein invited him to the Department of Psychology of the Pedagogical Institute. A.I. Herzen A.N. Leontiev for lecturing students. At the same department, he organized the defense of doctoral dissertations by B.M. Teplov and A.N. Leontiev and acted as one of the official opponents. Rubinstein continued this line of cooperation between different scientific schools and trends even after his move from Leningrad to Moscow in the autumn of 1942.

When did the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, Rubinstein remained in the besieged Leningrad, because he considered it his civic duty as vice-rector to organize the work of the pedagogical institute in the harsh conditions of the blockade. During the first, most difficult winter of the siege (1941/42), he worked on the second edition of his Fundamentals of General Psychology, significantly supplementing, developing and improving their first version of 1940.

In the spring of 1942, the first edition of his Fundamentals of General Psychology was awarded the State Prize on the presentation of a number of psychologists, as well as outstanding scientists V.I. Vernadsky and A.A. an original contribution to the development of these sciences and who highly appreciated the philosophical and psychological work of S.L. Rubinshtein.

In the autumn of 1942, Rubinstein was transferred to Moscow, where he headed the Institute of Psychology and created a department and department of psychology in the Moscow state university. (In 1966, on the basis of this department, A.N. Leontiev organized the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University.) Here in 1943-1944. Rubinstein invited to work not only his Leningrad students - M.G. Yaroshevsky, A.G. Komm and others, but also the employees of A.N. Leontiev - P.Ya. Galperin and A.V. Zaporozhets, still successfully coordinating the collective creative work many psychologists from different institutions and scientific schools.

In 1943, Rubinshtein was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and became the first representative of psychological science in it. On his initiative and under his leadership, in 1945, a psychology sector was created at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences - the first psychological laboratory in the USSR Academy of Sciences. In the same 1945, he was elected an academician of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR. All this is the result of the great and well-deserved recognition of his Fundamentals of General Psychology (1940).

Particularly broad prospects for his new creative achievements opened up in the spring of 1945, after the victory over Nazi Germany. In 1946, when the second, significantly revised and expanded edition of Fundamentals of General Psychology came out, S.L. Rubinshtein was already correcting the layout of his new book, Philosophical Roots of Psychology. This book, in its philosophical depth, far surpassed "Fundamentals ..." and marked a fundamentally new stage in the further development of the activity approach. It was supposed to be published by the publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and it seemed that nothing could prevent this. Nevertheless, the set was scattered, and this was only the beginning of the thunderstorm that broke out in 1947, when S.L. Rubinshtein was accused of cosmopolitanism, i.e. "admiration for foreignness", in underestimation domestic science etc. During 1948-1949. he was removed from all posts; Truly "big trees attract lightning."

A series of "studies", discussions, more precisely, condemnations of the "Fundamentals of General Psychology" began (at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, at the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR, etc., on the pages of newspapers and magazines "Questions of Philosophy", "Soviet Pedagogy" etc.). During the first discussion, which took place at the Institute of Philosophy from March 26 to April 4, 1947, Rubinstein and the few who supported him somehow managed to "fight back". The final word of B.M. Teplov helped in part. However, all subsequent "studies" marked the complete defeat by psychologists and philosophers of the "Fundamentals of General Psychology" and the activity approach presented in them. One of the results of such "discussions" was a devastating review of both editions of "Fundamentals of General Psychology", written by P.I. Plotnikov and published in the journal "Soviet Pedagogy" in 1949 (almost on the eve of Rubinstein's 60th birthday). The review ended with the following, downright ominous words: "S. L. Rubinstein's book offends Russian and Soviet science in general, psychology in particular, and reflects a "specialized refraction" of his lackey essence. The sooner we clear Soviet psychology of rootless cosmopolitans, the sooner we will open the way for its fruitful development."

Another laureate of the State Prize, the psychophysiologist N.A. Bernshtein, was subjected to equally undeserved persecution. After the Pavlovian session (1950), physiologists L.A. Orbeli, P.K. Anokhin and many other scientists became victims of persecution. (All of them, like Rubinstein, were gradually restored in their rights only after the death of I.V. Stalin.)

In these most difficult and fraught with terrible consequences years (1948-1953), Rubinstein continues to develop an activity approach. From the monograph "Philosophical Roots of Psychology," unpublished but preserved in layout, a new philosophical and psychological work "Being and Consciousness" grew up, which was published only in 1957.

The philosophical and psychological concept of S.L. Rubinshtein underwent especially strong changes in the interpretation of man and the theory of activity (primarily in understanding thinking as activity). The evolution of his views is based on the systematically developed by Rubinstein philosophical principle of determinism: external causes act only through internal conditions. He began the development of this principle in 1948-1949, but for the reasons described above, he was able to start publishing his results only in 1955. Rubinstein applied this interpretation of determination to the interaction of a subject with an object, significantly clarifying the understanding of the latter.

Rubinshtein analyzes the transformation by a person (in the course of activity) of the surrounding world and himself on the basis of the difference between the categories "being" and "object" proposed by him: being independently of the subject, but as object it is always related to him. Things that exist independently of the subject become objects as the subject begins to relate to them, i.e. in the course of cognition and action they become things for the subject.

According to Rubinstein, activity is determined by its object, but not directly, but only indirectly, through its internal specific patterns (through its goals, motives, etc.), i.e. according to the principle "external through internal" (this is an alternative, in particular, to the behaviorist scheme "stimulus-response"). For example, in experiments conducted by Rubinstein's students, it was shown that an external cause (experimenter's hint) helps the subject solve a mental problem only to the extent that the internal conditions of his thinking are formed, i.e. depending on how much he independently advanced in the analysis of the problem being solved. If this progress is insignificant, the subject will not be able to adequately use outside help. Thus, the active role of internal conditions is clearly manifested, mediating all external influences and thereby determining which of the external causes participate in the single process of determining the life of the subject. In other words, the effect of external causes, acting only through internal conditions, significantly depends from the latter (which is usually insufficiently taken into account by those who analyze Rubinstein's principle of determinism). In the process of development - especially phylogenetic and ontogenetic - the proportion of internal conditions that refract all external influences increases. From these positions, Rubinstein gives a deep and original solution to the problem of freedom (and necessity).

When explaining any mental phenomena, a personality, according to Rubinstein, acts as an integral system of internal conditions through which all external influences (pedagogical, etc.) are refracted. Internal conditions are formed depending on previous external influences. Consequently, the refraction of the external through the internal means the mediation of external influences by the entire history of the development of the individual. Thereby determinism includes historicism, but it is by no means limited to it. This history contains both the process of evolution of living beings, and the history of mankind itself, and the personal history of the development of a given person. And therefore, in the psychology of the individual there are components of varying degrees of generality and stability, for example, common to all people and historically unchanged properties of vision, due to the spread of sunlight on earth, and, on the contrary, mental properties that change significantly at different stages of socio-economic development (motivation and etc.). Therefore, personality traits contain both the general, and the special, and the individual. Personality is the more significant, the more in the individual refraction it represents the universal.

From such positions, Rubinstein developed his understanding of the subject of social and historical psychology. If general psychology studies universal mental properties of people social Psychology explores typological mental traits inherent in a person as a representative of a certain social system, class, nation, etc., and historical psychology- the development of the psyche of people of that generation, during whose life there are qualitative transformations of society. However, in any case, psychology studies the psyche of people only in the course of their individual ontogenetic development and insofar as it is possible to reveal, first of all, the mental as process, initially included in the continuous interaction of a person with the world, i.e. into activities, communication, etc.

According to Rubinstein, there is a process basic mode of existence of the psyche. Other ways of its existence are mental properties (motives, abilities, etc.), states (emotional, etc.) and products, results of the mental as a process (images, concepts, etc.). For example, thinking acts not only as activity subject in terms of his goals, motives, actions, operations, etc., but also how process in the unity of cognitive and affective components (the mental process of analysis, synthesis and generalization, with the help of which a person sets and solves problems). The process of thinking (as opposed to thinking as an activity) ensures the most efficient contact of the subject with the object being cognised. By studying people in their activities and communication, psychology singles out their own psychological aspect, i.e. First of all, the main level of regulation of all life is mental as a process. The main characteristic of the mental as a process is not just its temporal development, dynamics, but the method of determination: not the initial a priori predeterminedness, the direction of the process, but the emerging one, determined by the subject in the course of the process itself. Rubinstein's ontological approach is manifested in this understanding of the mental; he revealed the existentiality of the mental.

In the course of their activities, people create material and ideal products (industrial products, knowledge, concepts, works of art, customs, mores, etc.). These clearly defined products show a level mental development the people who created them - their abilities, skills, abilities, etc. This is the psychological aspect of these products, which characterizes the results of the mental process, which is involved in the regulation of all the activity of the subject. Psychology studies “within” the activity of people, first of all, the mental as a process in relation to its results (for example, the thought process of analysis, synthesis and generalization in relation to the emerging concept), but not these results in themselves (out of connection with the mental process). When the latter appear outside such a connection, they drop out of the subject matter of psychology and are studied by other sciences. For example, concepts - without taking into account their relationship to the mental as a process - are included in the subject of logic, but not psychology. “Through its products, thinking passes from the psychological sphere proper to the sphere of other sciences - logic, mathematics, physics, etc. Therefore, to make formations, in particular concepts, the starting point in the study of thinking means exposing oneself to the danger of losing the subject of psychological research proper.”

Thus, already after the completion of the "Fundamentals of General Psychology", starting from the mid-40s. (with unpublished books"Philosophical Roots of Psychology"), Rubinstein systematically and more and more deeply differentiates in the psyche its two essential components - the mental as a process and as a result. At the same time, he uses and develops everything rational that was introduced into the development of this problem, on the one hand, by I.M. Sechenov, and on the other hand, by the Gestaltists, while simultaneously criticizing the main shortcomings of their theories.

If in your book he considers both components of the psyche as more or less equivalent for psychological science, then in all subsequent monographs he emphasizes the special and predominant significance for it of precisely the mental - as a process that is formed in the course of continuous interaction between a person and the world and an animal with environment. In humans, this interaction appears in very different forms: activity, behavior, contemplation, and so on. Mental as a process participates in their regulation, i.e. exists as part of activity, behavior, etc.

From these positions, in the last 15 years of his life, S.L. Rubinshtein theoretically and experimentally develops, together with his students, the concept of the mental as a process, which is a new stage in the development and application to psychology of the methodological principle of the subject of activity (more precisely, one could say, subject-activity approach). In philosophy, at that time he created the original concept of man, presented in his manuscript "Man and the World", posthumously, but with cuts, published in the one-volume of his works "Problems of General Psychology" (1973, 1976).

The theory of the mental as a process was developed mainly on the basis of the psychology of thinking. Therefore, the specifics of this theory can be revealed especially clearly by comparing the chapter on thinking in "Fundamentals of General Psychology" with Rubinstein's monograph "On Thinking and Ways of Its Research", which reveals mainly the procedural aspect of human thinking. In "Foundations ..." of 1946, thinking appears mainly as an activity of the subject. In other words, Rubinstein reveals here the motivational and some other personal characteristics of thinking as an activity in its main components (goals, motives, intellectual operations and actions, etc.). And in the book of 1958, thinking is no longer considered only as an activity of the subject (i.e., from the side of goals, motives, operations, etc.), but also as its regulator, as a mental cognitive-affective process (of analysis, synthesis, and generalizations of a cognizable object).

The term "process" in a very broad sense is constantly used in psychology (for example, in "Fundamentals ..." in 1946) and in many other sciences. But in the works of Rubinstein in the last years of his life, this term is used in a strictly defined sense. In "Foundations ..." 1946, in the chapter on thinking, there is a section " Psychological nature thinking process", in which a lot is understood by process: action, act of activity, dynamics, operation, etc. The following provisions seem to be especially important: "The whole process of thinking as a whole appears to be a consciously regulated operation"; "This conscious purposefulness essentially characterizes the mental process... It is performed as a system of consciously regulated intellectual operations, etc. It is easy to see that the thought process is essentially identified here with an intellectual operation or a system of operations regulated at the level of reflection. This is one of the components of the personal (primarily active) In other words, thinking is studied in the 1946 Fundamentals mainly only as an activity, but not a process (in the narrow sense of the word).

Transition to the study of thinking as process was necessary for a deeper disclosure of precisely the psychological aspect of activity and its subject. The subject, his activity and its components (goal, motives, actions, operations, etc.) are studied not only by psychology, but primarily by philosophy, sociology, ethics, etc. And therefore, developed by S.L. Rubinshtein and A.N. .Leontiev, the scheme of analysis of activity according to these components is necessary, but not sufficient for psychological science.

For example, from the point of view of the theory of the mental as a process, actions and operations are always already relatively formed in relation to certain, i.e. limited operating conditions. In this sense, they are not sufficiently plastic and labile, which is revealed in a new, changed situation, when they become not quite adequate. Unlike actions and operations, the mental as a process is extremely labile and plastic. In the course of the thought process, a person more and more accurately reveals specific, constantly changing, all the time in some way new conditions of his activity, communication, etc., to the extent of this, forming new and changing the old ways of action. Consequently, thinking as a process is primary and most flexible in relation to actions and operations that, as secondary and less flexible components, arise and develop in the course of this process as its necessary forms.

It is especially important to note also that the process of thinking, perception, etc. proceeds mostly unconsciously (this circumstance was not sufficiently taken into account in the "Foundations ..." of 1946, since they emphasized the conscious regulation of the operation). But thinking as an activity personal level- is regulated by the subject to a large extent consciously with the help of reflection. Rubinstein in 1958 specifically emphasizes the difference and interrelationship between these two aspects of thinking: “It is clear that process and activity cannot be opposed to each other in any way. The process, when its goal is realized, continuously passes into the activity of thinking.”

Thus, the study of the procedural aspect of the psyche means a deeper psychological study of the subject and his activity. Without revealing the mental as a process, it is impossible to understand the emergence and formation of such components of activity as goals, operations, etc., and in general the psychological specifics of the relationship between them. In other words, the interaction of a person with the world is studied not only at the level of activity, but also "inside" it, at the level of the mental as a process. This is one of the lines of correlating "Osnovy…" 1946 with Rubinstein's subsequent works.

* * *

In all their psychological research Rubinstein acts primarily as a methodologist and theorist, consistently and organically uniting the theory of psychology, its history and experiment in an integral system. This is how he built his concept and, subjecting other concepts to a critical analysis, singled out in them, first of all, the theoretical core. This is how he considered the theories of the Gestaltists, V.M. Bekhterev, P.P. Blonsky, L.S. Vygotsky and many others. Analyzing very critically, for example, the reflexological theory of late Bekhterev, at the same time he highly appreciated some of his experimental work.

It seems to us that the question of S.L. Rubinshtein's attitude to Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory needs special analysis. According to Rubinstein and Vygotsky's student Zh.I. Shif, we know that in the early 1930s. in his conversations with L.S. Vygotsky, S.L. Rubinshtein did not generally agree with the main provisions of his theory, although he supported a number of his ideas and findings on many particular problems. He later expressed his opinion about this theory in his Fundamentals of 1935, 1940 and 1946. and very briefly in the book "Principles and Ways of Development of Psychology" (1959). His position is presented in most detail in "Fundamentals..." in 1940, where Vygotsky ranks first among Soviet psychologists in terms of the number of references.

Rubinstein rightly sees the main shortcoming of the cultural-historical theory in the dualistic opposition of the cultural development of the child to his natural development. However, he immediately specifically emphasizes: "Criticizing these theoretical principles of Vygotsky, it should be noted at the same time that Vygotsky and his colleagues have certain merits in terms of the development of the child." This recognition of Vygotsky’s merits was made despite the fact that after the well-known resolution (1936) of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On Pedological Perversions in the System of People’s Commissariat of Education,” all psychologists associated with pedology (for example, P.P. Blonsky and L.S. Vygotsky), were subjected to devastating criticism and their books were withdrawn from libraries (nevertheless, Rubinshtein includes some works of both authors in the summary bibliography of his Fundamentals).

However, on the whole, since the emergence of cultural-historical theory, Rubinstein did not share its main ideas. In his opinion, its main drawback is as follows: "The word-sign turns into a demiurge of thinking. Thinking turns out to be not so much a reflection of being, arising in unity with speech on the basis of social practice, but a derivative function of a verbal sign." Here Rubinstein correctly points out the main difference between Vygotsky's theories and his own. In the first case, the word-sign is the leading driving force mental development of the child. In the second, a person and his psyche are formed and manifested in activity (initially practical), on the basis of which the child masters speech, which then has a reverse effect on all mental development. In other words, this is the difference between Vygotsky's non-activity (sign-centric) approach and Rubinstein's activity approach (in "Fundamentals ..." of 1946, Rubinstein did not reproduce his main objections to the cultural-historical theory).

Many other psychologists at that time (and later) evaluated Vygotsky's theory in much the same way. For example, in the generalizing article "Psychology" A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev wrote that in the early 30s. "The most significant are the experimental studies of the development of memory, thinking, speech and other mental processes, belonging to L.S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and his collaborators ... However, in these works, the process of mental development was considered out of its connection with the development of practical activity and thus directly derived from the fact that a person masters ideal products (speech, concepts) ... ". In the list of references for this article, Luria and Leontiev indicate "Fundamentals of Psychology" by S.L. Rubinshtein (2nd ed. M., 1939).

P.I.Zinchenko, P.Ya.Galperin, E.A.Budilova, D.B.Elkonin and others also noted more than once that L.S.Vygotsky’s theory was built on the basis of a non-activity approach. However, in last years of his life and contrary to his previous assessments, A.N. Leontiev made the following conclusion: “He (Vygotsky) managed to see that the objective activity of a person should become the central category for Marxist psychology. And although the term “objective activity” itself does not occur in his works, but such is the objective meaning of his work, such were his subjective intentions. Some psychologists agreed with this conclusion.

A paradoxical situation has arisen. On the one hand, over the past 60-65 years, a well-reasoned point of view has been formed on Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory as essentially non-activity based. This position was shared and developed, in particular, by Rubinstein. On the other hand, about 20-25 years ago, an opposite and almost completely unreasoned point of view arose, according to which it was Vygotsky who was almost the founder of the activity approach; moreover, the supporters of this position, in essence, ignore the opposing views.

In this regard, obviously, one can and should hope that the new edition of Rubinstein's Fundamentals of General Psychology - the most extensive psychological work on the problems of the nature of the mental, consciousness, personality and activity - will create favorable conditions for successfully resolving the above situation and raising the level of both scientific discussions. and the entire research culture.

The release of the new edition of "Foundations ..." - an important event in the life of the psychological community.

This monograph is an innovative fundamental work in which the author consistently and systematically developed and specifically implemented all the initial methodological principles: the principle of personality, development, reflection and attitude and the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity (later called the subject-activity approach).

The talent of a real scientist, combined with encyclopedic education, courage, honesty and integrity in the struggle for truth, for the high culture of our science, even under the conditions of Stalin's personality cult, the ability to organize the collective work of his students and colleagues - all this ensured his well-deserved success in preparing and writing his first major monograph. In the course of creative critical revision of almost the entire Soviet and foreign psychology as of the 30s and 40s. and as a result of his theoretical and experimental studies, Rubinstein developed in this monograph an original complete system psychological science, based on its latest achievements and a new philosophical paradigm. In terms of the depth of theoretical generalization, the subtlety of analysis and the multilateral coverage of empirical material, this encyclopedic original work of his still has no analogues in domestic and foreign philosophical and psychological literature.

This fundamental research largely retains its relevance to our days, primarily in its methodological guidelines and theoretical generalizations, revealing the initial foundations of the psychological study of man, his consciousness, activity, behavior, etc. This monograph is still alive, used and cited in a number of recent psychological works as an authoritative and reliable primary source of many studies begun or continued on its basis. Its translations are still being published in different countries. For example, in 1986 this book was published in Japan, in 1984 its 10th edition was published in Berlin (the first edition was in 1958). The new, fourth edition of Fundamentals of General Psychology returns us to the past - to one of the origins of psychological science in the USSR and at the same time leads to the future, because in this, as in any other fundamental work, there is still a lot of potential, undeveloped, unexpected .

K.A. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya,

A.V. Brushlinsky