1. The first mythological (religious) doctrine of the soul is animism(from lat. anima, animus soul, spirit). This term was introduced into ethnographic science by the English scientist E. B. Tylor, who considered faith in spirits that exist independently of the body as the basis of religions. Animism denotes religious ideas about spirits and the soul. Spirits personified thunder, lightning, wind, trees, etc. and could harm people, die, be born - in general, they had everything like people. Animists considered the soul to be external to the body. It was believed that the soul enters a person at birth and leaves him after death, by the will of the gods. During sleep, the soul also leaves the body, wanders around the world.
2. Hylozoism(from Greek. hyle- matter and zoe- life) - a term introduced by Cadworth in 1678 to refer to early, mainly ancient Greek concepts that denied the boundary between living and non-living. Hylozoists believed that everything that exists in nature has a soul. For the hylozoist Heraclitus of Ephesus, the soul is a spark of the cosmos, which he considered to be an ever-living fire. “Everything flows, everything changes”, “Our bodies and souls flow like streams” - these words are attributed to him, as well as “You cannot enter the same river twice”. This is how the principle of development was born - that is, everything is constantly changing. Heraclitus believed that everything on earth obeys the world law (logos), and not the will of the gods.
According to the ancient Greek sage Thales from Miletus, also a hylozoist, a magnet attracts metal, a woman attracts a man, because a magnet, like a woman, has a soul. Thales is also known as the author of the famous call "Man! Know thyself!".
3. Democritus(born c. 460 - 5th century BC) an ancient Greek philosopher and encyclopedic scientist, materialist, taught that a person consists of atoms of the body and atoms of the soul. The soul consists of the most mobile atoms - the atoms of fire. He rejected the immortality of the soul and believed that when the body dies, the atoms of the soul disperse into space.
He said that there are no causeless phenomena, causality is a universal law that everything on Earth obeys, events seem to be random, the causes of which we simply do not yet know. “I would prefer at least one causal explanation to royal power over Persia,” said Democritus.
Subsequently called the principle of causation principle of determinism.
purpose of life considered a serene and happy state when a person is not subject to the action of passions and fear.
4. Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras(500-428 BC), the founder of the Athenian philosophical school, was looking for that beginning, those particles that make up whole things, an organized, ordered world is formed from chaos. He decided that such a beginning is "noos" - the mind. The more it is in the body, the more perfect it is. Man has the most of it, therefore he is the most perfect.
He also said that "Everything has a part of everything." “Nothing is created anew or destroyed, but is united from existing things and divided.” Everything is contained in everything, in everything there is a part of everything, only the proportions are different. He considered all phenomena as a system, not reducible to the sum of its parts. System(Greek - a whole made up of parts) - a whole consisting of interconnected parts, and having properties that none of these parts separately have. That is, it acts in nature systemic principle.
Thus, the predecessors of Aristotle, the "father of psychology", discovered the principles that for all time became the basis for explaining mental phenomena.
Heraclitus discovered the principle regular development;
Democritus discovered the principle determinism;
Anaxagoras discovered the principle system (organization).
5. Hippocrates(460-370 BC) - the father of medicine, philosopher, poet, friend of Democritus - believed that mental qualities depend on bodily, and bodily - on the proportions in which the body's juices are mixed (blood, bile, mucus ). This proportion has been called temperament.
He identified 4 types of temperament:
· sanguine (the blood that is produced in the heart predominates);
choleric (yellow bile predominates);
phlegmatic (mucus predominates);
melancholic (black bile predominates).
These names have survived to the present, but the reasons for the existence of different temperaments are different, namely: different nervous systems. At that time, they did not know about the role of the nervous system in the body.
Hippocrates laid the foundation for typology, without which modern teachings about individual differences between people would not have arisen. This typology has been humoral(Latin "humor" - liquid).
6. Not to mention Plato(427–347 BC), student of Socrates and later teacher Aristotle. Plato was an idealist, that is, he believed that the soul is primary and immortal. Aristotle first studied at Plato's academy, then taught there, and after Plato's death, his views began to change, and he became a materialist, that is, he began to believe that matter, including the body, is primary. Plato said: “The soul is immortal, it only changes the body in which it lives. Instilling in a born person, she forgets her past. In the process of learning, she "remembers" what she knew.
He introduced for the first time into the understanding of mental life the concept conflict of motives(one of the types of intrapersonal conflicts) and showed the role of the mind in overcoming this conflict.
In a figurative form, he reflected the struggle of the soul and mind in the myth of a charioteer who rules a chariot drawn by two horses. 1st horse - wild, these are instincts that give lower, immoral, immoral inclinations and motives (malice, greed, envy, selfishness, aggressiveness, cruelty, adultery, laziness, etc.); 2nd horse - thoroughbred And noble, these are the highest drives and motives (duty, conscience, altruism, kindness, etc.). The charioteer is the mind trying to cope with the horses, to combine base and noble motives, and experiencing great difficulties in doing so.
A few centuries later, the idea of a person torn apart by conflicts will come to life in the psychoanalysis of S. Freud.
"Instincts are good servants, but bad masters." And who will win? Reason with its logic or soul with its feelings, often instinctive (for brevity, let's say - the heart)? Probably friendship, that is, behavior, is the resultant between them. Guided by the voice of the heart, feelings is often dangerous. Marina Tsvetaeva said: “There is a head on the heart, but there is an ax on the head.” And if the head is not able to cope with the heart, with feelings, sooner or later it will “fly off”.
Even Plato said: "It is impossible to want what you have." Now there is a saying: "What we have, we do not store, having lost, we cry."
Plato discovered inner speech as an internalized dialogue.
considered the highest virtue Justice, said that it was more precious than gold and that "injustice is the greatest evil that the soul can contain, and justice is the greatest good."
In addition to the discoveries mentioned above, there were others in the ancient era:
7. In the VI century. BC e. Ancient Greek physician Alcmaeon discovered that the organ of the soul is the brain. (Although Aristotle, who worked 200 years later, still believed that the brain is a refrigerator for blood, and the place of the soul is the heart.)
8. In the III century. BC e. Ancient Greek doctors discovered the reflexes of the brain. Reflex - involuntary reaction of the body to external or internal stimuli. Then, in the 17th century, they were rediscovered by René Descartes, a French scientist.
9. Socrates (c. 470–399 BC), an ancient Greek philosopher, made dialogue the primary method of finding truth. And early thinkers simply postulated the principles of their teachings. He argued that the main virtue is knowledge and that a man who knows what good is will not do evil. He was convinced that power in the state should belong to the "best", i.e., moral, fair and skillful citizens in government.
Already in our era, in the 2nd century, Roman physician Galen divided movements into voluntary and involuntary, revealed the role of the retina in the mechanism of vision [Enikeev, p. 22].
In the III century. AD Flesh "n (204 / 205–270), a Greek philosopher, discovered such a mechanism of brain activity as reflection(lat. - reflection) - this is reflection, analysis of feelings and thoughts; as well as reflection, full of doubts and hesitations. For him, for the first time in history, psychology becomes the science of consciousness understood as self-awareness.
A special place among scientists who are considered the forerunners of modern psychologists is occupied by Aristotle. Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher and encyclopedist who lived in the 4th century BC. BC (384-322 BC), belongs to the first work on psychology. This work (treatise) is called “On the Soul” and is considered the first course in general psychology. Aristotle himself is considered the father of psychology as a science.
Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great, created his own school in Athens, called the Lyceum. Then privileged educational institutions began to be called lyceums.
Aristotle said that the soul cannot be separated from the body, the soul is a function of the body, the result of its activity, and not an independent entity; the soul cannot exist without the body.
Aristotle singled out target cause actions (that is, the cause of the action is the goal that a person sets for himself). It is the goal that influences the course of life in advance, i.e. human behavior depends not only on his past, but also on the desired future. This was a new word in understanding the causes of mental life (determination). Target It is "what the action is for." "Nature does nothing in vain." Aristotle believed that knowledge of a person is possible only through knowledge of the Universe and the order existing in it [L. D. Stolyarenko, Fundamentals of Psychology, p. 48].
Aristotle discovered and studied many psychological phenomena:
Representations (fantasies according to Aristotle) as a trace of sensations;
The mechanism of associations, i.e., the connection of ideas, images in memory and imagination (looking at the lyre, the girl remembers the lover who played on it, Plato said); This is still used today, giving gifts as a keepsake. He singled out associations for similarity, adjacency And contrast.
Differences between theoretical and practical intelligence;
the concept of ability as a function of the soul;
The relationship of the body and feelings: the activity of the body is associated with feelings pleasure And displeasure; actions associated with pleasure, a person tends to repeat, and the learning mechanism is based on this;
proportionality of reactions and conditions that caused them: behavioral reactions should be adequate to external conditions and influences, they should not be either excessive or insufficient, etc.
Aristotle paid much attention justice. Justice, he said, is the most perfect virtue (he considered other virtues to be wisdom, courage, restraint, and moral qualities).
At first he thought that the principle of justice is the principle of equality- when dividing something, you need to divide everything equally. But people are different, they work differently, so the principle of equality is not always fair. On reflection, Aristotle introduced an additional principle - the principle of proportional equality . It consists in the fact that the one who works hard gets more, the one who works little gets less, that is, people are endowed with benefits in proportion to their work.
The one who has a large property contributes more than the one who has less property. For example, income tax - to take from all the same, or depending on income?
There is justice by nature and justice by law. Justice by nature is proportional: left hand in justice does less than the right, the child less than the adult.
What about a woman and a man? Are they supposed to work the same way, or are there jobs for men and women?
Figure 4 - Types of observation
TOPIC 2. HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE [Petrovsky AV, Yaroshevsky MG History and theory of psychology. 1996 and others]
General outline of the development of ancient psychological thought
Since ancient times, there has been an interaction of cultures: the ideas and spiritual values that have developed in the depths of one culture have had an impact on others. Therefore, the features of ancient Greek civilization should not be considered in isolation from the achievements of the East.
This also applies to ancient philosophy, which embraced the totality of scientific views. Its origin was due to fundamental changes in the material life of people, a kind of "industrial revolution" associated with the transition from bronze to iron in the field of production.
Slave labor is widely used in production. There is an intensive growth of trade and craft elements, there are policies (city-states), the craft is separated from Agriculture. The widespread class struggle between the old aristocracy and the new social groups led to the establishment of a new type of slave-owning society - slave-owning democracy.
Radical social changes, the development of commodity-money relations, the rapid expansion of economic ties, the establishment of maritime hegemony - all this produced profound transformations in the life and consciousness of the ancient Greeks, from whom new circumstances required enterprise, energy, and initiative. Old beliefs and legends are being shaken, and positive knowledge is rapidly accumulating - mathematical, astronomical, geographical, medical. The critical mindset, the desire for an independent logical justification of opinions are strengthened. The thought of an individual aspires to high generalizations, embracing the universe in a single image. The first philosophical systems appear, the authors of which take as the fundamental principle of the world, giving rise to all the inexhaustible wealth of phenomena, one or another type of matter: water (Thales), an indefinite infinite substance "aleuron" (Anaximander), air (Anaximenes), fire (Heraclitus).
There is not only a new picture of the world, but also a new picture of man. The individual was brought out from under the power of mythological creatures living on Olympus. Before him opened the prospect of comprehending the laws of being through observation and the logical work of the mind. When making a decision, the individual could no longer rely on supernatural forces. He had to be guided by his own plan, the value of which was determined by the degree of proximity to the world order.
Heraclitean ideas about the inseparable connection of the individual soul with the cosmos, about the procedural nature (flow, change) of mental states in unity with pre-psychic ones, about different levels of mental life passing one into another (the beginnings of the genetic approach), about the subordination of all mental phenomena to the immutable laws of the material world forever woven into the fabric of scientific and psychological knowledge.
New teachings arise not in continental Greece with its agricultural way of life, but in the Greek colonies on the coast of Asia Minor: in Miletus and Ephesus - the largest commercial, industrial and cultural centers of that time. With the loss of political independence by these centers, the east of the ancient Greek world ceases to be the focus of philosophical creativity. They become the west. The teachings of Parmenides (end of the 6th century BC) in Elea and Empedocles (490-430 BC) in Agrigentum on the island of Sicily arise, the philosophy of the semi-mythical Pythagoras spreads from the island of Samos.
After the Greco-Persian wars (5th century BC), the economic upsurge and the development of democratic institutions contributed to new advances in philosophy and science. The largest of them are associated with the activities of Democritus from Abdera, who created the atomistic theory, Hippocrates from the island of Kos, whose views on the body were important not only for medicine, but also for philosophy, Anaxagoras, a native of Klazomen, who, having come to Athens, taught that nature is built from the smallest material particles - "homeomeria", ordered by the mind inherent in it.
Athens in the 5th century BC – intensive work center philosophical thought. In the same period, the activities of the "teachers of wisdom" - the sophists - once again returned. Their appearance was due to the flourishing of slave-owning democracy. Institutions arose, participation in which required eloquence, education, the art of proving, refuting, convincing, i.e. effectively influence fellow citizens not by external coercion, but by influencing their intellect and feelings. Sophists taught these skills for a fee.
Sophists, who proved the relativity and conventionality of human concepts and institutions, were opposed by Socrates, who taught that concepts and values should have a common, unshakable content.
Two great thinkers of the IV century BC. e. - Plato and Aristotle - created systems that for many centuries had a profound impact on the philosophical and psychological thought of mankind.
With the rise of Macedonia (4th century BC), a grandiose empire was created, after the collapse of which a new period began - the Hellenistic one. It is characterized by the strengthening of close ties between Greek culture and the culture of the peoples of the East, as well as the flowering in some Hellenistic centers (especially in Alexandria) of experienced and accurate knowledge. The main philosophical schools of this period were represented by the Peripatetics - followers of Aristotle, the Epicureans - followers of Epicurus (341-270 BC) and the Stoics.
The philosophical teachings of the Hellenistic period were characterized by a focus on ethical problems. The position of the individual in society has changed radically. The free Greek lost contact with his city-polis and found himself in a whirlpool of turbulent events. His position in the changing world became unstable, which gave rise to individualism, the idealization of the sage's way of life, not subject to the alleged play of external elements.
There was a growing distrust of human cognitive abilities. Skepticism arose, the ancestor of which, Pyrrho, preached complete indifference to everything that exists ("ataraxia"), the rejection of activity, the abstention from judgments about anything. In ideological terms, the teachings of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics affirmed the humility of the individual in relation to the military slave-owning monarchies that arose after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great. Wisdom was seen not in knowing the nature of things, but in developing rules of conduct that would allow one to maintain equanimity in the cycle of socio-political and military upheavals.
At the same time, new centers of culture are emerging, where various currents of Western and Eastern thought interact. Among these centers, Alexandria (in Egypt) stood out, where they were created in the 3rd century BC. under the Ptolemies, the library and the Museum.
The Musei was essentially a research institute with laboratories, rooms for classes with students, a botanical and zoological gardens, and an observatory. Here a number of important research in mathematics (Euclid), geography (Eratosthenes), mechanics (Archimedes came here from Syracuse), anatomy and physiology (Herophilus and Erasistratus), grammar, history and other disciplines. The specialization of scientific work is growing, associations of people engaged in scientific activity(scientific schools). Improvement in the technique of anatomical research leads to a number of discoveries that are important not only for medicine, but also for psychology.
Ancient Rome, whose development of culture is directly related to the achievements of the Hellenistic period, put forward such major thinkers as Lucretius (I century BC) and Galen (II century AD).
Later, when slave uprisings and civil wars began to shake the Roman Empire, views hostile to materialism and the experimental study of nature (Plotinus, Neoplatonism) became widespread.
Views on the nature of the mental
Animism. In tribal society, the mythological idea of the soul dominated. Each specific sensually perceived thing was endowed with a supernatural double - a soul (or many souls). This view is called animism (from the Latin "anima" - soul). The surrounding world was perceived as depending on the arbitrariness of these souls. Therefore, the original views on the soul are not so much about the history of psychological knowledge as such (in the sense of knowledge about mental activity), how much to the history of general views on nature.
The shifts in the understanding of nature and man, which took place in the 6th century BC, became a turning point in the history of ideas about mental activity.
The works of the ancient Greek sages led to revolutionary changes in ideas about the world around us, the beginning of which was associated with overcoming ancient animism.
Animism is the belief in the hidden beyond visible things a host of spirits (souls) as special "agents" or "ghosts" that leave the human body with their last breath (for example, according to the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras) and, being immortal, forever wander through the bodies of animals and plants. The ancient Greeks called the soul the word "psyche", which gave the name to our science. It preserved traces of the initial understanding of the relationship of life with its physical and organic basis (cf. Russian words: "soul, spirit" and "breathe", "air").
It is interesting that already in that ancient era, people, speaking of the soul ("psyche"), linked phenomena inherent in external nature (air), the body (breath) and the psyche (in its subsequent understanding), although, of course, in everyday life In practice, they perfectly distinguished these concepts. Getting acquainted with the ideas of human psychology according to ancient myths, one cannot help but admire the subtlety of people's understanding of gods endowed with cunning or wisdom, vindictiveness or generosity, envy or nobility - all those qualities that the creators of myths learned in the earthly practice of their communication with their neighbors. This mythological picture of the world, where bodies are inhabited by souls (their "doubles" or ghosts), and life depends on the mood of the gods, reigned in the public consciousness for centuries.
As already mentioned, the first psychological theories appeared at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC. They were developed by scientists who belonged to the well-known philosophical schools of that time - Milesian and Elean. Thales, one of the leading scientists of the Milesian school, believed that the fundamental principle of the world, and therefore of man, that is, his soul, is water, without which there is no life. His followers - Anaximander and Anaximenes, sharing the view of Thales that what is, the fundamental principle is a material substance, attached more importance to air, considering it to be its eternally living and changing basis.
In these first psychological concepts, the soul was considered mainly as a source of activity, energy, while other functions of the soul, including the most important questions of cognition and regulation of behavior for subsequent scientists, have not yet been studied.
One of the first to speak about the purpose of the soul and its various properties Pythagoras(VI century BC) - not only a famous mathematician, but also a philosopher and psychologist. Pythagoras became the founder of one of the most significant scientific schools of that time, which was built more on the principle of a secret lodge than a scientific school. Its goal was to form a group of people ("scientific aristocracy", as Pythagoras himself called it), which could take responsibility for society, directing its development and eliminating its shortcomings. Pythagoras denied the equality of souls, believing that there is no equality in nature at all. In the same way, it is not among people, of whom some are more capable and active, while others are less capable and inclined to obedience. These differences, Pythagoras emphasized, are not hereditary, therefore, in the most aristocratic and wealthy family, a person incapable of governing can be born. Based on this, he considered it necessary to search for such capable people and their special training. Opposition to these ideas, both on the part of Greek democracy and on the part of aristocrats, led to the fact that the school of Pythagoras and his followers was persecuted and took the form of a closed party, with initiations and oaths of allegiance. The ideas of Pythagoras about the need to form a class of rulers from the most wise and enlightened people also left their mark on Plato's theory of an ideal society.
Pythagoras was also the first to come to the conclusion that the soul cannot die with the body of a particular person, that it must develop according to its own laws, according to its purpose. He considered purification as this goal, that is, the soul in the process of its life (its own, not the body) should become more and more perfect and pure. His concept was influenced by the ideas of Buddhism about karma and the reincarnations of the soul, as well as the Orphic religion, which believed that after the death of the body, the soul moves to another body, depending on the moral assessment of its existence.
Pythagoras, as an evaluation criterion, chose the correspondence of an object (including a person) to strict mathematical laws - harmony, parity, etc. Thus, for the first time in psychology, the idea appeared that the world of mathematics, the world of perfect geometric and logical formulas, is more important and objective than the world of real objects. The essence of objects here is evaluated not by purpose, but by their numerical expression, and the more perfect it is, the more perfect the object itself. Such an understanding of the essence of a number is beautifully expressed in a poem by N. Gumilyov: “... a smart number conveys all shades of meaning ...” So the goal is set for reality - to become as perfect as an ideal logical world. So far, we are not talking about the fact that it is the ideal world that is primary, that it gave rise to the world of real objects, but the prerequisites for these views are already laid down in the theory of Pythagoras.
However, while exploring the functions of the soul and its purpose, Pythagoras and his school did not yet ask themselves the question of how a person cognizes the world, a question that will become one of the main ones for psychological science. Among the first to study the process of cognition by analyzing the stages of knowledge processing began the Greek scientist Heraclitus(VI-V centuries BC).
Heraclitus believed that the formation and development of the world, nature and man is carried out according to immutable laws that no one, neither people nor gods, can change. This law is the Logos, expressed primarily in the word, and is the force that man calls fate. The fundamental principle of all things is fire, which, through condensation, turns into air, water and earth. Logos determines the direction and time of these transformations, which form the basis of the world year (by analogy with the seasons). Therefore, as winter gives way to spring, and summer to autumn, so the flourishing of society is replaced by its decline and the emergence of a new society. This theory of the world year of Heraclitus gained particular popularity in moments of social crises, which, for example, Roman historians explained on the basis of this theory.
In the same way, a person and his soul change. Therefore, according to Heraclitus, it is possible to investigate the patterns of the life of the soul, its development and extinction. Along with Anaxagoras' theory of determinism, the idea of the Logos expressed by Heraclitus opened up new possibilities for the scientific study of the psyche.
Of great importance is the fact that Heraclitus introduced the idea of constant development and change into psychology. His famous saying “everything flows” later became one of the most important provisions not only for philosophical dialectics, but also for theories of consciousness, for example, for theories stream of consciousness James. Heraclitus also believed that everything moves and changes and there is no unambiguous assessment for the surrounding things, for the world as a whole. Thus, gold, which is very important for a man, is of no value to a donkey who prefers hay to it. This idea of the subjectivity of evaluation subsequently became one of the reasons for the denial of the possibility of knowing the world by subsequent psychologists, such as Democritus. Heraclitus, however, considered such subjectivism and variability to be completely natural and arising from the Logos, from the laws of nature, and did not oppose their ability to understand the world.
He was also the first to suggest that there are two stages in the processing of knowledge - sensations and reason. At the same time, the mind is able to comprehend more general and invisible things, for example, the Logos, the essence of things. Therefore, the mind is higher than the sensations.
He transferred his understanding of the development of the world to the development of the soul. He believed that the human soul is born, grows and improves, then gradually grows old and, finally, dies. Making a comparison between the soul and fire (the fundamental principle of the world), Heraclitus measured the degree of perfection and maturity of the soul according to the degree of its fieryness. So, the soul of a child is still damp, damp, gradually it dries up, becomes more and more fiery, mature, capable of clear and clear thinking. In old age, the soul is again gradually saturated with moisture, becomes damp, and the person begins to think badly and slowly. Thus, Heraclitus not only spoke for the first time about the development of the soul, but also connected this development with thinking, identifying mental development with the development of the intellect. Such an approach was later characteristic of many psychological theories, in which the intellect, knowledge of the world, was considered as the main function of the mental. This made it possible already in the 19th century. W. Wundt to accuse psychology of intellectualism.
By the 4th century BC e. in Greek society, there was an urgent need for teachers who could teach people who held high political positions in the elected Greek republics, but did not have a good primary education. At the same time, it was important to teach them not so much the rudiments of knowledge (literacy, arithmetic), but the art of expressing one's thoughts, thinking logically and convincing others. Teachers - mostly philosophers - taught not only philosophy, but also psychology, rhetoric, i.e. common culture, wisdom, therefore they were called "teachers of wisdom" - sophists.
The most famous representatives of this school were Protagoras(c. 481-410 BC) and his student Gorgias(c. 483-375 BC). From their point of view, the ability to reason develops the ability to prove any truth, as well as to refute any judgment. For their speeches, in which they publicly demonstrated this ability, and for the lessons, the sophists began to receive significant amounts of money, which distinguished them from most other scientists. We can say that their activities marked the beginning of paid education in science.
The ability to avoid a direct answer and give several ways to solve the same problem is called sophistry. Proving the importance of the personal opinion of a particular person and its priority over other beliefs, Protagoras expressed the famous saying: "Man is the measure of all things." Proceeding from this, he spoke about the relativity and subjectivity of human knowledge, the impossibility of developing common concepts for all, including the concepts of good and evil, since what is good from the point of view of one person, another can evaluate as evil.
At the same time, Protagoras said that from the point of view of society, there are concepts of good and evil, good and bad behavior. It was he who first raised the question of whether it is possible, by systematically influencing a person in personal communication, to make him better in the moral sense, to help him overcome the difficulties of life. At the same time, the purpose of such an impact was not only the improvement of a person in terms of objective criteria of morality, but also the search for optimal ways to adapt to the social conditions in which a person lives. From the point of view of Protagoras, the natural development of the child's soul, without a purposeful social impact on him, cannot help him in such socialization. Yes, already in Ancient Greece For the first time, the question was raised about what conditions are optimal for the formation of a socially active and adapted personality. Protagoras came to the conclusion that from the point of view of social adaptation, the most important thing is precisely the external influence, which consists in teaching people how to influence others. In the conditions of Greek democracy, one of the significant conditions for such an impact was just oratory, the ability to captivate people with a word and convince them that they were right. own point vision. Therefore, it was precisely the teaching of the techniques of oratory that Protagoras considered the main thing in the lessons that the sophists gave. This point of view was shared by many scientists of ancient Greece and Rome, and therefore the possession of oratory was considered one of the main criteria for giftedness. The ability for eloquence made it possible to participate more actively in public life, helped to achieve a higher status place. Therefore, Protagoras believed that through learning and exercise, a person can become more moral and more civic.
The views of the first Greek psychologists on certain psychological issues were analyzed and systematized in the theory of the famous Greek philosopher and psychologist Democritus(470-370 BC). He was born in the city of Abdera, in northern Greece, into a noble and wealthy family. His parents tried to give him the best education, but Democritus himself found it necessary to undertake several long journeys in order to gain knowledge not only in Greece, but also in other countries, primarily in Egypt, Persia and India. On these trips, he spent almost all the money left to him by his parents, and therefore, when he returned to his homeland, his fellow citizens considered him guilty of embezzlement and appointed a court session at which Democritus had to justify his behavior or leave his home forever. Proving the usefulness of his knowledge, Democritus read to the people's assembly the main provisions of his book "The Great World Construction", which, according to many contemporaries, was his best work. The strength of Democritus's conviction and understanding of the importance of science were so great that fellow citizens recognized his innocence and considered that the money was well spent by him. Not only was he acquitted, but he was awarded 500 Talans (a very large sum of money at the time) and copper statues were erected in his honour. The stories about him testify to his deep worldly wisdom, observation and extensive knowledge, it was not for nothing that fellow citizens turned to him for advice in difficult situations. Traveling not only gave Democritus the opportunity to obtain a variety of knowledge, but also showed their relativity and subjectivity. Perhaps due to this, he became the first author of the theory of the primary and secondary qualities of things, which, as will be shown below, proves the subjectivity and incompleteness of our knowledge about the world. Purposefulness and immersion in scientific research helped Democritus create one of the first complex psychological theories, in which all the important questions for psychology were analyzed for the first time - about the soul, cognition, free will and regulation of behavior. At the same time, it is possible that it was precisely these qualities that did not allow him to create his own school (Democritus is one of the few outstanding scientists of that time who did not have direct students).
The erudition of Democritus was also manifested in his writings, which, unfortunately, have come down to us only in fragments. The wanderings, which were initially blamed on him, allowed Democritus to become the first systematizer of knowledge accumulated in various psychological and philosophical systems of that time. The foundation of his theory is the atomistic concept, the foundations of which were developed by the teacher Democritus Leucippus. According to this view, the whole world consists of the smallest, invisible particles - atoms. Democritus explains the whole variety of properties and objects of nature, the surrounding world and people by the fact that atoms differ from each other in shape, they can be differently oriented in space and are connected to each other in different combinations.
According to Democritus, man, like all the surrounding nature, consists of atoms that form his body and soul. At the same time, the soul, which, as in the previous teachings, is the cause of the activity of the body, is built from small round atoms, the most mobile, since they must give movement to an inert body. Thus, from the point of view of Democritus, such a structure of the soul can ensure the fulfillment of its most important function - the source of energy for the body.
Small round atoms form the basis not only of the soul, but also of air. They are scattered throughout space, falling into the body of a living being when inhaled. When exhaling, part of the soul's atoms flies out of the body, dissolving in the air. Therefore, breathing is one of the most important processes for life, the atoms of the soul are constantly renewed in it, which ensures mental and somatic health. Thus, echoes of Indian philosophy, gleaned by Democritus in his travels, appear again in Greek psychology. After the death of a person, the body can no longer serve as a shell for these atoms, and the soul is scattered in the air, and therefore the soul is also mortal.
The soul is not only in humans, but in all living beings. Moreover, the difference between man, animals and lower forms of life is not qualitative (after all, the structure of the soul is the same for everyone - these are small round atoms), but quantitative - a person has more atoms of the soul than animals.
This quantitative rather than qualitative approach to explaining the differences is characteristic both of the theory of knowledge of Democritus and of the entire first period in the development of ancient psychology, in which, as noted above, the fact that the laws that determine human life are not questioned was not questioned. the same as for the rest of nature. This is the same Logos about which Heraclitus wrote that “even the sun cannot violate the Logos”, even the gods are subject to its laws, and even more so man and his environment, both social and natural.
Democritus believed that the soul is located in several parts of the body - in the head (reasonable part), chest (masculine part), liver (lustful part) and in the senses. At the same time, in the sense organs, the atoms of the soul are very close to the surface and can come into contact with microscopic copies of surrounding objects that are not visible to the eye. (idols ), which are carried in the air, getting into the senses.
These copies are separated (expire) from all objects of the external world, and therefore this theory of knowledge is called theory of outflows . The contact of the eidola with the atoms of the soul is the basis of sensation, it is in this way that a person learns the properties of surrounding objects. At the same time, all our sensations (including visual and auditory) are contact, since sensation cannot occur without direct contact of the eidola with the atoms of the soul. Eidols can get not only into the sense organs, but also into other parts of the body - then our sensations are wrong, they deceive us. So, according to Democritus, illusions and errors of perception arise. The fact that eidols can be blown away from the object of which they are copies explains, he suggested, the cause of mirages when we see objects that are not in reality. Dreams are also associated with eidols that fall to a person during his sleep. Thus, the theory of outflows of Democritus explained at the level of science of that time almost all the phenomena of perception, which modern psychology also speaks of.
Summarizing the data of several sense organs, a person builds a picture of the world, moving to the next level - the conceptual one, which is the result of the activity of thinking. Thus, in the theory of Democritus, there are two stages in the cognitive process - sensations and thinking, which arise simultaneously and develop in parallel. At the same time, he emphasized that thinking gives us more knowledge than sensations. Thus, sensations do not allow us to see atoms, but through reflection we come to the conclusion about their existence, i.e., larger objects can be known through sensation, and smaller ones through thinking. In other words, as in the understanding of the soul, the difference between different types of knowledge is quantitative, but not qualitative. The theory of outflows (albeit with some modifications) was recognized as the basis for the formation of our sensory knowledge about the objective world by all the materialists of Ancient Greece.
Democritus also introduced the concept of primary and secondary qualities of objects. Primary - these are the qualities that really exist in objects: mass, surface texture (smooth or rough), shape. Secondary qualities are color, smell, taste. The listed properties are not in objects, they were invented by people for their own convenience, since “only in opinion there is sour and sweet, red and green, but in reality there is only emptiness and atoms,” wrote Democritus. Thus, for the first time he said that a person cannot quite correctly, adequately know the world around him, and in order to compensate for his ignorance, he comes up with some properties for different objects. At the same time, Democritus emphasized that this is not an empty fantasy, although secondary qualities are subjective (what seems too sweet to one, for example, may seem sour to another, etc.), but are based on a combination of several primary qualities.
Subsequently, the idea that based on the generalization of the data of our senses, we cannot fully and adequately know the world around us, began to dominate the theory of knowledge of almost all sensationalists. The concept of two types of qualities, expressed by Democritus, acquired a more complete form in D. Locke, who added a third to the two types of qualities, which made it even more difficult to correctly understand the world.
Democritus' views on the role of emotions in this process had a strong influence on the development of the theory of behavior regulation. He believed that it is emotions that guide behavior, since a person (and any other living being) strives for what brings pleasure, avoiding what brings displeasure, suffering. Subsequently, these views of Democritus were developed by Epicurus in theories hedonism (pleasure), in which it was proved that human behavior is stimulated and directed by the objects of the surrounding world, causing him certain emotional experiences. Democritus himself wrote that emotions only regulate activity, but it is directed by a universal law, the Logos.
The inability to fully understand the surrounding reality also applies to the understanding of the laws that govern the world and the fate of man. Democritus argued that there are no accidents in the world and everything happens for a predetermined reason. He wrote that people came up with a case to cover up ignorance of the matter and inability to manage. In fact, there are no accidents and everything is causally conditioned. This approach is called universal determinism , and the recognition of the necessity of all events taking place in the world gives rise to a fatalistic tendency in the understanding of human life, denies the free will of man. Critics of Democritus, analyzing these views, emphasized that with such an understanding it is impossible not only to control one's own behavior, but also to evaluate the actions of people, since they depend not on their moral principles, but on fate. These views of Democritus were especially negatively evaluated from the point of view of the development of human morality, since in the event that everything is conditioned, it is impossible to influence a person’s behavior, just as it is impossible to judge or praise him. Socrates and Plato, considering such a deterministic approach from the point of view of ethics, said that one cannot judge a person who stole, if we assume that he acted on the basis of his natural and natural emotions in a certain situation (for example, he wanted to eat, but money for there was no food), and the situation in which he could steal the money he needed was set from the very beginning, laid down in his fate.
At the same time, Democritus himself sought to combine a fatalistic approach to fate with human activity in choosing moral criteria for behavior. He wrote that moral principles are not given to a person from birth, but are the result of upbringing, so people become good through exercise, and not nature. Education, according to Democritus, should teach a person to think well, speak well and do well. He also wrote that people who have grown up in ignorance are like a person who dances between swords placed upside down. They die if they don't hit the only place where they should put their feet when jumping. So ignorant people, evading following the right example, usually perish. Democritus himself considered education such a difficult matter that he deliberately refused marriage and did not want to have children, because he believed that many troubles come from them; while in case of success, the latter is acquired at the cost of great labor and care, in case of failure, grief is incomparable with any other.
However, the desire to combine the idea of human activity with the principle of universal determinism, universal conditioning, including conditioning and all human actions, both good and bad, remained the bottleneck in the theory of Democritus (especially in the era of Hellenism, when ethical issues were one of the central for psychology and philosophy). Numerous attempts followed to revise this part of the theory of Democritus, which, in particular, was done by Epicurus. However, the theory itself remained the leading materialist concept for six centuries.
Of great importance for the development of psychology were the concepts of the psyche developed by doctors, primarily in medical school. Hippocrates(c. 460 - c. 370 BC). He collected and systematized, like Democritus in psychology and philosophy, almost all scientific views on medicine of his and previous time. The main thing that Hippocrates defended was the empirical nature of medical knowledge. He argued that it cannot be built without experimental research, on the basis of reasoning alone, that the abstract concepts of cold or warm, good or bad are not applicable to medicine. There is no concept of warmth in general, there are more or less warm or cold substances that bring benefit or harm to a sick person in different situations. So the dialectical approach to concepts, laid down by Heraclitus, was reflected in the medical and psychological works of Hippocrates.
Another idea of Heraclitus, used by Hippocrates in his works, was the idea of four principles that make up the environment. Although the leading life force, providing a connection between a person and the environment, he considered air, which makes it possible to breathe, the basis of the person himself, his bodily organization, is humoral, liquid. Proceeding from this, Hippocrates developed his well-known doctrine of temperaments, based on a combination of four types of fluid in the body - blood, mucus, black bile and yellow bile. As Hippocrates believed, "the nature of the body consists of them, and through them it both gets sick and is healthy."
An important point in his theory was the concept of measure, which he considered leading in empirical medicine, proving that, although there is no abstract concept of measure, an experienced doctor who can observe can derive this measure in each case and for each patient. The concept of measure (crasis) became the main one in the concept of temperament, while it was believed that deviation from the norm, violation (acrasia) of the combination of four types of liquid leads to vivid manifestations of one or another temperament.
Studying the manifestations of temperament, Hippocrates raised the question of its connection with the way of life of a person, understood in the broadest sense - from food and drink to natural conditions and communication features. Thus, in the teachings of Hippocrates, for the first time, thoughts appeared about differentiation, the diversity of individual variations of the general concept human. Therefore, to a certain extent, we can say that Hippocrates was the first psychologist who spoke about individual differences, about differential psychology.
The mythological understanding of the world, where bodies are inhabited by souls, and life depends on the gods, has reigned in the public consciousness for centuries. At the same time, the pagans often gave the style of behavior of the celestials deceit and wisdom, vindictiveness and envy, other qualities learned in the earthly practice of their communication with their neighbors.
Animism (from lat. anima - soul) is the first mythological doctrine of the soul. Animism included the idea of a host of souls hidden behind concrete visible things as special ghosts that leave the human body with their last breath. Elements of animism are present in any religion. Its rudiments make themselves felt in some modern psychological teachings and are hidden under the "I" (or "consciousness" or "soul"), which receives impressions, thinks, decides and moves the muscles.
In some other teachings of that time (for example, the famous mathematician and philosopher, Pythagoras, the champion of the Olympic Games in fisticuffs), souls were represented as immortal, forever wandering through the bodies of animals and plants.
Later, the ancient Greeks understood the "psycho" as the driving principle of all things. They own the doctrine of the universal animation of matter - hylozoism (from the Greek hyle - substance and zoe - life): the whole world is the universe, the cosmos is originally alive, endowed with the ability to feel, remember and act. The boundaries between living, non-living and mental were not drawn. Everything was considered as a product of a single primary matter (pra-matter). So, according to the ancient Greek sage Thales, a magnet attracts metal, a woman attracts a man, because a magnet, like a woman, has a soul. Hylozoism for the first time "placed" the soul (psyche) under the general laws of nature. This doctrine affirmed an immutable postulate for modern science about the initial involvement of mental phenomena in the cycle of nature. Hylozoism was based on the principle of monism.
Further development hylozoism is associated with the name of Heraclitus, who considered the universe (cosmos) as an ever-changing (living) fire, and the soul as its spark. ("Our bodies and souls flow like streams"). He was the first to express the idea of a possible change, and consequently, the natural development of all things, including the soul. The development of the soul, according to Heraclitus, occurs through oneself: "Know thyself"). The philosopher taught: "No matter what roads you go, you will not find the boundaries of the soul, so deep is its Logos."
The term "Logos", introduced by Heraclitus, which is still used today, meant for him the Law according to which "everything flows", gives harmony to the universal course of things woven from contradictions and cataclysms. Heraclitus believed that the course of things depends on the Law, and not on the arbitrariness of the gods. Because of the difficulties in understanding the aphorisms of the philosopher, contemporaries called Heraclitus "dark".
The idea of development in the teachings of Heraclitus "passed" into the idea of causality of Democritus. According to Democritus, the soul, body and macrocosm are composed of atoms of fire; only those events, the cause of which we do not know, seem random to us; according to the Logos, there are no causeless phenomena, all of them are the inevitable result of the collision of atoms. Subsequently, the principle of causality was called determinism.
The principle of causality allowed Hippocrates, who was friends with Democritus, to build a doctrine of temperaments. Hippocrates correlated health disorders with an imbalance of various "juices" present in the body. Hippocrates called the ratio of these proportions temperament. The names of the four temperaments have survived to this day: sanguine (blood predominates), choleric (yellow bile predominates), melancholic (black bile predominates), phlegmatic (mucus predominates). So the hypothesis was framed, according to which the countless differences between people fit into a few general patterns of behavior. Thus, Hippocrates laid the foundation for scientific typology, without which modern teachings about individual differences between people would not have arisen. Hippocrates looked for the source and cause of differences within the organism. Mental qualities were made dependent on bodily ones.
However, not all philosophers accepted the ideas of Heraclitus and his view of the world as a fiery stream, the ideas of Democritus - the world of atomic whirlwinds. They built their concepts. So, the Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras was looking for a beginning, thanks to which integral things arise from a disorderly accumulation and movement of the smallest particles, and an organized world out of chaos. He recognized reason as such a beginning; on the degree of its representation in various bodies, their perfection depends.
The idea of organization (systemic) of Anaxagoras, the idea of causality of Democritus and the idea of regularity of Heraclitus, discovered two and a half thousand years ago, became at all times the basis for the knowledge of mental phenomena.
The turn from nature to man was made by a group of philosophers called sophists ("teachers of wisdom"). They were not interested in nature with its laws independent of man, but in man himself, whom they called "the measure of all things." In the history of psychological knowledge, a new object was discovered - relations between people using means that prove any position, regardless of its reliability. In this regard, the methods of logical reasoning, the structure of speech, the nature of the relationship between the word, thought and perceived objects were subjected to a detailed discussion. Speech and thinking came to the fore as a means of manipulating people. Signs of its subordination to strict laws and inevitable causes operating in physical nature disappeared from the ideas about the soul, since language and thought are devoid of such inevitability. They are full of conventions depending on human interests and passions.
Subsequently, the word "sophist" began to be applied to people who, with the help of various tricks, give out imaginary evidence as true.
Socrates strove to restore strength and reliability to the idea of the soul, of thinking. The formula of Heraclitus "know thyself" meant in Socrates an appeal not to the universal law (Logos), but to inner world subject, his beliefs and values, his ability to act as a rational being.
Socrates was a master of oral communication, a pioneer of analysis, the purpose of which is to reveal with the help of the word what is hidden behind the veil of consciousness. Selecting certain questions, Socrates helped the interlocutor to slightly open these covers. The creation of a dialogue technique was later called the Socratic method. In his methodology lurked ideas that, many centuries later, played a key role in the psychological study of thinking.
First, the work of thought initially had the character of a dialogue. Secondly, it was made dependent on the tasks that create an obstacle in its usual course. It was with such tasks that questions were posed, forcing the interlocutor to turn to the work of his own mind. Both features - dialogism, which assumes that cognition is originally social, and the determining tendency created by the task - became the basis of the experimental psychology of thinking in the 20th century.
The brilliant student of Socrates, Plato, became the founder of the philosophy of idealism. He affirmed the principle of the primacy of eternal ideas in relation to everything transient in the perishable corporeal world. According to Plato, all knowledge is memory; the soul remembers (this requires special efforts) what it happened to contemplate before its earthly birth. Plato bought up the writings of Democritus in order to destroy them. Therefore, only fragments remained from the teachings of Democritus, while almost complete collection writings of Plato.
Based on the experience of Socrates, who proved the inseparability of thinking and communication, Plato took the next step. He assessed the thought process, which was not expressed in the Socratic external dialogue, as an internal dialogue. ("The soul, thinking, does nothing else than talks, asking itself, answering, affirming and denying"). The phenomenon described by Plato is known to modern psychology as internal speech, and the process of its generation from external (social) speech was called "internalization" (from Latin internus - internal). Further, Plato tried to single out and delimit the various parts and functions in the soul. They were explained by the Platonic myth of a charioteer driving a chariot to which two horses are harnessed: a wild one, torn from a harness, and a thoroughbred, amenable to control. The driver symbolizes the rational part of the soul, the horses - two types of motives: lower and higher. Reason, called upon to reconcile these two motives, experiences, according to Plato, great difficulties due to the incompatibility of base and noble desires. Thus, the aspect of the conflict of motives that have moral value was introduced into the sphere of the study of the soul, and the role of reason in overcoming it and integrating behavior. A few centuries later, the idea of a person torn apart by conflicts will come to life in the psychoanalysis of S. Freud.
Knowledge about the soul grew depending on the level of knowledge about external nature, on the one hand, and from communication with cultural values, on the other. Neither nature nor culture by themselves form the realm of the psychic. However, it does not exist without interacting with them. The Sophists and Socrates, in their explanations of the soul, came to understand its activity as a phenomenon of culture. For the abstract concepts and moral ideals that make up the soul cannot be derived from the substance of nature. They are products of spiritual culture. It was assumed that the soul is brought into the body from outside.
The work on the construction of the subject of psychology belonged to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist, who lived in the 4th century BC, who opened a new era in understanding the soul as a subject of psychological knowledge. Not physical bodies and not incorporeal ideas became for him a source of knowledge, but an organism where the corporeal and the spiritual form an inseparable integrity. The soul, according to Aristotle, is not an independent entity, but a form, a way of organizing a living body. "Those who think correctly," said Aristotle, "those think that the soul cannot exist without a body and is not a body." The psychological doctrine of Aristotle was based on a generalization of biomedical facts. But this generalization led to the transformation of the main principles of psychology: organization (consistency), development and causality.
According to Aristotle, the very word "organism" should be considered in connection with the related word "organization", which means "a well-thought-out device", which subordinates its parts to itself to solve a problem; the device of this whole and its work (function) are inseparable; the soul of an organism is its function, activity. Interpreting the body as a system, Aristotle singled out different levels of abilities for activity in it. This made it possible to subdivide the capabilities of the organism (the psychological resources inherent in it) and their implementation in practice. At the same time, a hierarchy of abilities was outlined - the functions of the soul: a) vegetative (available in animals, plants and humans); b) sensory-motor (available in animals and humans); c) reasonable (inherent only in man). The functions of the soul are the levels of its development, where from the lower and on its basis a function arises more high level: following the vegetative, the ability to feel is formed, from which the ability to think develops. In an individual person, during his transformation from an infant into a mature being, those steps are repeated that the entire organic world has passed through in its history. Subsequently, this was called the biogenetic law.
Explaining the patterns of character development, Aristotle argued that a person becomes what he is by performing certain actions. The idea of the formation of character in real actions, which in people always presuppose a moral attitude towards them, put the mental development of a person in a causal, natural dependence on his activity.
Revealing the principle of causality, Aristotle showed that "nature does nothing in vain"; "You need to see what the action is for." He argued that the end result of the process (goal) affects its course in advance; mental life in this moment depends not only on the past, but also on the desired future.
Aristotle should rightfully be considered the father of psychology as a science. His work "On the Soul" is the first course in general psychology, where he outlined the history of the issue, the opinions of his predecessors, explained his attitude towards them, and then, using their achievements and miscalculations, proposed his solutions.
The psychological thought of the Hellenistic era is historically associated with the emergence and subsequent rapid collapse of the largest world monarchy (4th century BC) of the Macedonian king Alexander. There is a synthesis of elements of the cultures of Greece and the countries of the Middle East, characteristic of the colonial power. The position of the individual in society is changing. The free personality of the Greek was losing ties with his native city, its stable social environment. He found himself in the face of unpredictable change, bestowed by the freedom of choice. With increasing acuteness, he felt the fragility of his existence in the changed "free" world. These shifts in the self-perception of the individual left their mark on ideas about mental life. Faith in the intellectual achievements of the previous era, in the power of the mind, began to be questioned. Skepticism arises, refraining from judgments concerning the surrounding world, because of their unprovability, relativity, dependence on customs, etc. The rejection of the search for truth made it possible to find peace of mind, to reach the state of ataraxia (from Greek word, meaning no disturbance). Wisdom was understood as a renunciation of the shocks of the outside world, an attempt to preserve one's individuality. People felt the need to resist the vicissitudes of life with its dramatic turns, depriving peace of mind.
The Stoics ("standing" - a portico in the Athenian temples) declared any affects harmful, seeing in them damage to the mind. According to them, pleasure and pain are false judgments about the present, desire and fear are false judgments about the future. Only the mind, free from any emotional upheavals, is able to properly guide behavior. This is what allows a person to fulfill his destiny, his duty.
From ethical orientations to the search for happiness and the art of living, but on other cosmological principles, the school of serenity of the spirit of Epicurus developed, which departed from the version of Democritus about the "hard" causality that reigns in everything that happens in the world (and, therefore, in the soul). Epicurus allowed spontaneity, spontaneity of changes, their random nature. Capturing a sense of the unpredictability of what can happen to a person in a stream of events that make existence fragile, the Epicureans laid in the nature of things the possibility of spontaneous deviations and thus the unpredictability of actions, freedom of choice. They emphasized the individualization of the individual as a quantity capable of acting independently, having got rid of the fear of what was prepared from above. "Death has nothing to do with us; when we exist, then there is no death yet; when death comes, then we are no more." The art of living in a whirlpool of events is associated with getting rid of fears of the afterlife punishment and otherworldly forces, because there is nothing in the world but atoms and emptiness.
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Introduction
1 Animism and hylozoism in ancient psychology
2 The main provisions of the materialistic doctrine of the soul in ancient psychology
3 Idealistic ideas of ancient psychology
4 The concept of the soul in Aristotle
5 Psychological thought in the Hellenistic era
6 The teachings of ancient doctors
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
Ideas about the soul existed already in ancient times and preceded the first scientific views on its nature. They arose in the system of primitive beliefs of people, in mythology. artistic folk art- poetry, fairy tales, as well as religion show great interest in the soul. These pre-scientific and extra-scientific ideas are very peculiar and differ from the knowledge about the soul that is developed in science and philosophy, in the way they are obtained, in the form of their embodiment, in their purpose. The soul is considered here as something supernatural, as “the animal in the animal, the man inside the man. The activity of an animal or a person is explained by the presence of this soul, and his calm in a dream or in death is explained by its absence ... ".
In contrast, the very first scientific ideas about the soul are aimed at explaining the soul and its functions. They originated in ancient philosophy and constituted the doctrine of the soul. The doctrine of the soul is the first form of knowledge in the system of which psychological ideas began to develop: "... psychology as a science should have begun with the idea of the soul ... It was the first scientific hypothesis of ancient man, a huge conquest of thought, to which we now owe the existence of our science" .
Philosophy arose in the era of the replacement of the primitive communal system by a class slave-owning society, both in the East - in ancient india, Ancient China, and in the West - in ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Psychological problems became part of philosophy, since the subject of philosophical reflections aimed at a rational explanation was the world as a whole, including questions about a person, his soul, etc.
Ancient psychology was nourished by the humanism of Greek culture with its idea of the fullness of life as the harmony of the bodily and spiritual sides, the cult of a living, healthy, beautiful body, love for earthly life. She is distinguished by a subtle intellectualism, a high attitude towards reason.
Interest in psychological phenomena in antiquity existed already from the middle of the first millennium BC, as evidenced by scientific treatises ancient Greek philosophers Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and others. Common to the views of most ancient scientists was the use of the concept of “soul” instead of the word “psychology” and its consideration as a special entity, the root cause of various movements occurring in the world, not only among animals, but also among inanimate bodies.
1 Animismand hylozoismin ancient psychology
The emergence of ancient ideas about the world around us is associated with animism (from Latin anima - soul, spirit) - the belief in a host of souls hidden behind specific visible things as special ghosts that leave the human body with their last breath, and according to some teachings (for example, the famous philosopher and the mathematics of Pythagoras), being immortal, forever wandering through the bodies of animals and plants.
The ancient Greeks understood the “psycho” as the driving principle of all things, the soul itself. It is interesting that already in that era, speaking of the soul, people, as it were, combined into a single complex inherent in external nature (air), the body (breath) and the psyche (in its subsequent understanding). Of course, in their everyday practice, they all distinguished this perfectly.
The revolution in the minds was the transition from animism to hylozoism (from the Greek hyle - substance and zoe - life): the whole world is the universe, the cosmos is originally alive, endowed with the ability to feel, remember and act. The boundaries between living, non-living and mental were not drawn. Everything was considered as a product of a single primary matter (pra-matter). So, according to the ancient Greek sage Thales, a magnet attracts metal, a woman attracts a man, because a magnet, like a woman, has a soul. Hyloism for the first time placed the soul (psyche) under the general laws of nature. This doctrine affirmed an immutable postulate for modern science about the initial involvement of mental phenomena in the circulation of nature. Hylozoism was based on the principle of monism.
To the hylozoist Heraclitus, the cosmos appeared in the form of "eternally living fire", and the soul ("Psyche") - in the form of its spark. Everything that exists is subject to eternal change: "Our bodies and souls flow like streams." Another aphorism of Heraclitus was: "Know thyself."
The term "Logos", introduced by Heraclitus, but still used today, has acquired a great variety of meanings. For himself, it meant the law according to which "everything flows", phenomena pass from one to another. The small world (microcosm) of an individual soul is similar to the macrocosm of the entire world order. Therefore, to comprehend oneself (one's psyche) means to delve into the law (Logos), which gives the universal course of things dynamic harmony woven from contradictions and cataclysms.
Heraclitus introduced the idea of the natural development of all things.
2 ABOUTthe main provisions of the materialistic doctrine of the soulin ancient psychology
In the understanding of the soul itself, the ancients distinguished two lines: materialistic and idealistic. The first was mainly represented by the works of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and the second - by the works of Plato and, in part, Aristotle. The latter occupied an ambivalent position, in some cases acting as a materialist, and in others taking an idealistic position.
The materialistic doctrine of the soul took shape and developed as part of the materialistic philosophy that arose in the 6th century. BC e. and was historically the first form of ancient Greek philosophy. The pinnacle of ancient materialism was atomistic materialism, the founders of which are Democritus and his teacher Leucippus (5th century BC).
The teaching of Heraclitus that the course of things depends on the law (and not on the arbitrariness of the gods - the rulers of heaven and earth), passed into the idea of causality of Democritus.
Democritus, adhering to the atomistic picture of the world, considered the soul as special kind matter, which is the smallest and most mobile atoms, similar to those that make up fire (at that time the whole world was considered as consisting of four principles: earth, water, air and fire). The gods themselves in his image are nothing more than spherical clusters of fiery atoms.
He recognized the law as one for both the soul and the cosmos, according to which there are no causeless phenomena, but all of them are the inevitable result of the collision of continuously moving atoms. Random events seem to be the causes of which we do not know. Subsequently, the principle of causality was called determinism.
Various sensations and feelings that arise in a person were interpreted by Democritus as subjective products obtained from the combination of various atoms with each other. They are the atoms of the soul, penetrating into the body, making it mobile.
Democritus attributed movement to the soul in the material sense as spatial movement. When complex bodies disintegrate, then small ones enter from them, disperse in space and disappear. So the soul is mortal. Through the pores of the body and breathing, atoms can go out and again penetrate inside. The soul, thus, can leave the body and return to it again, is continuously updated with each breath.
Different parts of the body contain a different number of soul atoms, and most of them are in the brain (the rational part), in the heart (the masculine part), the liver (the lusty part of the soul) and the sense organ.
Thus, Democritus gives a natural understanding of the soul. It does not exist outside the body. At the same time, the argument in favor of the materiality of the soul is the following reasoning: if the soul moves the body, then it is corporeal itself, since the mechanism of the action of the soul on the body was conceived as a material process like a push. The arguments in favor of the corporality of the soul are developed in detail by Lucretius.
The movements of the soul can be natural and unnatural, reasonable and unreasonable. When, for example, a person is under the influence of drugs, the soul, losing the properties of fire and being filled with moisture, begins to behave unnaturally and unreasonably: “An intoxicated husband wanders no one knows where, for his psyche is wet” (saying of the ancients).
The more the fiery principle in the soul, the drier, lighter and more sublime it is; on the contrary, the more moisture in the soul, the heavier and lower it is. In this system of ideas, very naive from the position of our days, affects were presented as too unreasonable and unnatural movements of the soul.
In ancient atomistic materialism, two types of knowledge are distinguished - sensation (or perception) and thinking. Feelings are the beginning and source of knowledge. They give knowledge about things: sensation cannot arise from something that does not exist. The most reliable thing, says Epicurus, a follower of the ideas of Democritus, is to turn to external and internal feelings. Errors arise from the intervention of the mind.
Democritus calls sensory knowledge a dark kind of knowledge. It is limited in its capabilities, tk. cannot penetrate to the smallest, to the atom, to the hidden, according to Epicurus. According to Democritus, perception was seen as a natural physical process. The thinnest films, images, copies (eidols) are separated from things - expire - similar in appearance to the object itself. They are forms or kinds of things.
When eidols come into contact with the atoms of the soul, a sensation occurs and in this way a person learns the properties of surrounding objects. At the same time, all our sensations (including visual and auditory) are contact, because. sensation does not occur without direct contact of the eidola with the atoms of the soul.
Thinking is a continuation of sensation. Democritus calls it a bright kind of knowledge, true, lawful knowledge. It is a more subtle cognitive organ and grasps an atom that is inaccessible to sensation, hidden from it. Thinking is similar to sensation in terms of its mechanisms: both are based on the outflow of images from objects.
A new feature of mental phenomena was discovered by the activity sophist philosophers(from the Greek words "Sophia" - "wisdom"). They were not interested in nature, with its laws independent of man, but in man himself, who, as the aphorism of the first sophist Protagoras said, "is the measure of all things." Subsequently, the nickname "sophist" began to be applied to false sages who, with the help of various tricks, give out imaginary evidence as true. But in the history of psychological knowledge, the activity of the sophists discovered a new object: relations between people, studied using means designed to prove and inspire any position, regardless of its reliability.
In this regard, the methods of logical reasoning, the structure of speech, the nature of the relationship between the word, thought and perceived objects were subjected to a detailed discussion. How can one convey anything through language, asked the sophist Gorgias, if its sounds have nothing in common with the things they denote? And this was not just a logical contrivance, but raised a real problem. She, like other issues discussed by the sophists, prepared the development of a new direction in the understanding of the soul.
The search for the natural "matter" of the soul was abandoned. The study of speech and mental activity came to the fore from the point of view of its use to manipulate people. Their behavior was made dependent not on material causes, as it seemed to the former philosophers, who involved the soul and the cosmic cycle. Signs of its subordination to strict laws and inevitable causes that operate in physical nature disappeared from the ideas about the soul. Language and thought are devoid of such inevitability; they are full of conventions and depend on human interests and passions. Thus, the actions of the soul acquired unsteadiness and uncertainty. Socrates (469 - 399 BC) strove to restore their strength and reliability, but rooted not in the eternal laws of the macrocosm, but in the internal structure of the soul itself.
3 idealistsscientific ideas of ancient psychology
Socrates, a philosopher who has become for all ages the ideal of disinterestedness, honesty and independence, understood the soul in a slightly different way than representatives of the materialistic direction.
The already familiar formula of Heraclitus “know thyself” meant quite a different thing for Socrates: it directed the thought not to the universal law (Logos) in the form of cosmic fire, but to the inner world of the subject, his beliefs and values, his ability to act reasonably according to the understanding of the best.
Socrates was a master of oral communication. With every
with the person he met, he started a conversation, forcing him to think about carelessly applied concepts. Subsequently, they began to say that Socrates was a pioneer of psychotherapy, trying with the help of the word to expose what is hidden behind the cover of consciousness.
In any case, his method contained ideas that, many centuries later, played a key role in the psychological studies of thinking. Firstly, the work of thought was made dependent on the task that created an obstacle to its usual course. It was precisely such a task that the system of questions that Socrates brought down on the interlocutor became, thereby awakening his mental activity. Secondly, this activity initially had the character of a dialogue.
Both signs: 1) the direction of thought (determining the trend) created by the task, and 2) dialogism, suggesting that cognition is initially social, since it is rooted in the communication of subjects, became the main guidelines for the experimental psychology of thinking in the 20th century.
After Socrates, whose focus was primarily on the mental activity (its products and values) of an individual subject, the concept of the soul was filled with new substantive content. It was made up of very special realities that physical nature does not know. The world of these realities became the core of the philosophy of the student of Socrates Plato (end of the 5th - first half of the 4th century BC).
Plato, in constructing his theory, relied both on the ideas of Socrates and on some provisions of the Pythagoreans, in particular, on their deification of number. Plato created his own scientific and educational center in Athens, called the Academy, at the entrance to which was written: “Let no one who does not know geometry enter here.”
Geometric figures, general concepts, mathematical formulas, logical constructions - all these are special intelligible objects, endowed, in contrast to the kaleidoscope of sensory impressions (changeable, unreliable, different for each), inviolability and obligation for each individual. Raising these objects into a special reality, Plato saw in them the sphere of eternal ideal forms, hidden in the image of the realm of ideas.
Everything perceptible to the senses, from the fixed stars to directly perceptible objects, are only obscured ideas, their imperfect, weak copies. . Affirming the principle of the primacy of super-strong general ideas in relation to everything that happens in the perishable bodily, material world, Plato became the founder of the philosophy of objective idealism.
According to Plato, the soul is between ideas and material bodies, connecting them with each other, but it itself is a product and product not of the world of things, but of the world of ideas. It represents that part of the world spirit that lives and exists in living matter.
Plato comes to the conclusion that there is an ideal world in which the souls or ideas of things are located, that is, those perfect samples that become prototypes of real objects. The perfection of these samples is unattainable for these objects, but it makes them strive to be similar, to correspond to them. Thus, the soul is not only an idea, but also the goal of a real thing.
Basically, Plato's idea is general concept, which, indeed, does not exist in real life, the reflection of which is all the things included in this concept. Since the concept is immutable, then the idea or soul, from the point of view of Plato, is constant, unchanging and immortal.
How, then, settled in the mortal flesh of the soul joins the eternal ideas? All knowledge, according to Plato, is memory. The soul remembers (this requires special efforts) what it happened to contemplate before its earthly birth.
Based on the experience of Socrates, who proved the inseparability of thinking and communication (dialogue), Plato took the next step. He assessed the process of thinking from a new angle, which does not receive expression in the Socratic external dialogue. In this case, according to Plato, it is replaced by an internal dialogue. “The soul, thinking, does nothing else than talk, asking itself, answering, affirming and denying.”
The phenomenon described by Plato is known to modern psychology as inner speech, and the process of its origin from external (social) speech is called interiorization (from the Latin "interior" - internal). Plato himself does not have these terms; nevertheless, we have a theory that has firmly entered into modern scientific knowledge about the human mental structure.
Further development of the concept of the soul went in the direction of its differentiation, the allocation of various "parts" and functions of the soul.
The human soul can be in three states: animal, rational and sublime. The first state of the soul is characteristic of the lower living beings and the low state of man. It is connected with the satisfaction of his organic needs. The reasonable state of the soul is inherent in the thinking and consciousness of man, it opposes the animal nature. Finally, the sublime state appears at the moments of the highest creative tension, as well as when a person acts on the basis of his noble motives. All parts of the soul, according to Plato, must be in optimal ratio with each other, and when their correspondence is violated, various deviations in the psyche and behavior arise.
Thus, in Plato, their distinction has an ethical meaning. This is evidenced by the Platonic myth of a charioteer driving a chariot to which two horses are harnessed: one is wild, capable of going its own way at any cost, the other is thoroughbred, noble, manageable. Here the driver symbolizes the rational part of the soul, the horses - two types of motives: lower and higher motives. The mind, according to Plato, finds it difficult to reconcile these motives because of the incompatibility of base and noble desires.
Thus, such important aspects as the conflict of motives with different moral values and the role of the mind in overcoming conflict and integrating behavior were introduced into the sphere of the study of the soul. Centuries later, the version of the interaction of the three components that form the personality as a dynamic, conflict-torn and full of contradictions structure will come to life in Freud's psychoanalysis.
Knowledge about the soul - from its beginnings on ancient soil to modern ideas - developed, on the one hand, in accordance with the level of knowledge about external nature, on the other hand, as a result of the development of cultural values. Neither nature nor culture in themselves form an area of the psyche, however, the latter cannot exist without interaction with them.
Philosophers before Socrates, thinking about mental phenomena, were guided by nature, looking for one of the natural elements that form a single world, which is ruled by natural laws, as an equivalent of these phenomena. Only by comparing this idea with the ancient belief in souls as special twins of bodies, one can feel the explosive power of the philosophy professed by Heraclitus, Democritus, Anaxagoras and other ancient Greek thinkers. They destroyed the old worldview, where everything earthly, including the psychic, was made dependent on the whims of the gods, crushed the mythology that had reigned in the minds of people for thousands of years, elevated the mind and the ability of a person to think logically, tried to find the real causes of phenomena.
It was a great intellectual revolution from which to count scientific knowledge about the psyche. After the Sophists and Socrates, in explaining the essence of the soul, there has been a turn towards understanding it as a phenomenon of culture, because the abstract concepts and moral ideals that make up the soul cannot be derived from the substance of nature; they are products of spiritual culture.
For representatives of both orientations - "natural" and "cultural" - the soul acted as an external reality in relation to the body, either material (fire, air, etc.) or incorporeal (the focus of concepts, generally valid norms, etc.). Whether it was about atoms (Democritus), or about ideal forms (Plato), it was assumed that both one and the other enters the body from the outside, from the outside.
4 Aristotle's concept of the soul
The views of Aristotle became the pinnacle of the ancient doctrine of the soul. Aristotle (384 - 322 BC), the author of the first scientific psychological work - the treatise "On the Soul", opened a new era in understanding the soul as a subject of psychological knowledge. Its source was not physical bodies and incorporeal ideas, but an organism where the corporeal and the spiritual form an inseparable whole.
The soul, according to Aristotle, is not an independent entity, but a form, a way of organizing a living body. If there were no soul, Aristotle argued, then the living would cease to be such. The soul of a person is immortal and, with his departure from life, is not destroyed, but returns to the world and disperses there, existing no longer in the form of compact, concentrated compounds of atoms (a form characteristic of living beings), but in the form of disconnected and scattered throughout the space of the atoms of the soul . Thus, the ideas of Aristotle contradict the sophisticated dualism of Plato.
Aristotle was the son of a physician under the Macedonian king and was himself preparing for the medical profession. Appearing as a youth of seventeen in Athens to the sixty-year-old Plato, he studied for several years at his Academy, with which he later broke. The famous painting by Raphael "The School of Athens" depicts Plato pointing his hand to the sky, Aristotle - to the earth. These images capture the difference in the orientations of the two great thinkers. According to Aristotle, the ideological wealth of the world is hidden in sensually perceived earthly things and is revealed in direct communication with them based on experience.
On the outskirts of Athens, Aristotle created his own school, called the Lyceum (following this name, later privileged educational institutions began to be called the word "lyceum"). It was an indoor gallery where Aristotle, usually walking, taught classes.
Aristotle was not only a philosopher, but also an explorer of nature. At one time he taught the sciences to the young Alexander of Macedon, who subsequently ordered samples of plants and animals from the conquered countries to be sent to his old teacher. A huge amount of facts was accumulated - comparative anatomical, zoological, embryological and others, which became the experimental basis for observing and analyzing the behavior of living beings. The generalization of these facts, primarily biological ones, became the basis of the psychological teachings of Aristotle and the transformation of the main explanatory principles of psychology: organization, regularity and causality.
The very term "organism" requires considering it from the point of view of organization, that is, the ordering of the whole in order to achieve some goal or to solve some problem. The device of this whole and its work (function) are inseparable. The soul of an organism is its function, work.
Treating the body as a system, Aristotle singled out different levels of activity abilities in it. The concept of ability, introduced by Aristotle, was an important innovation, forever included in the main fund of psychological knowledge. It shared the capabilities of the organism, the psychological resource inherent in it, and its practical implementation. At the same time, a scheme was outlined for the hierarchy of abilities as functions of the soul: 1) vegetative (it is also found in plants), 2) sensory-motor (in animals and humans), 3) rational (inherent only in humans). The functions of the soul became the levels of its development.
Thus, the idea of development was introduced into psychology as the most important explanatory principle. The functions of the soul were located in the form of a "ladder of forms", where a function of a higher level arises from the lower (and on its basis). Following the vegetative (vegetative) function, the ability to feel is formed, on its basis the ability to think develops. At the same time, in the development of each person, those steps are repeated that the entire organic world has gone through in its history (later this was called the biogenetic law).
Aristotle identifies five main sense organs in humans: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, he offered them the first scientific explanation. He also has the merit of an ethical-psychological explanation human actions and characterizations of people.
The distinction between sense perception and thought was one of the first psychological truths discovered by the ancients. Aristotle, following the principle of development, sought to find the links leading from one stage to another. In his search, he discovered a special area of mental images that arise without the direct impact of objects on the senses. Now these images are usually called representations of memory and imagination (in the terminology of Aristotle - "fantasies"). These images are subject to the mechanism of association discovered by Aristotle - the connection of representations. Explaining the development of character, he argued that a person becomes what he is by doing certain actions.
Action is associated with affect. Each situation has an optimal affective response to it. When it is excessive or insufficient, people act badly. Thus, correlating motivation with the moral assessment of an act, Aristotle brought the biological doctrine of the soul closer to ethics. The doctrine of the formation of character in real actions, which in people as “political” beings always presuppose a moral attitude towards others, put the mental development of a person in a causal, natural dependence on his activity.
The study of the organic world prompted Aristotle to give new meaning to the basic principle of scientific explanation - the principle of causality (determinism). Among various types causality, Aristotle singled out a special target reason, because, according to Aristotle, "nature does nothing in vain." The end result of the process (goal) affects its course in advance. mental life at the moment depends not only on the past, but also on the inevitable future (what must happen is determined by what is happening now).
So, Aristotle transformed the key explanatory principles of psychology: system (organization), development, determinism. The soul for Aristotle is not a special entity, but a way of organizing a living body, which is a system; the soul goes through different stages in development and is able not only to imprint what is acting on the body at the moment, but to conform to the future goal.
Aristotle discovered and studied many specific mental phenomena. Having enriched the explanatory principles, Aristotle presented a completely different picture of the structure, functions and development of the soul compared to his predecessors.
5 Psychologistical thought in the Hellenistic era
As a result of the campaigns of the Macedonian king Alexander (4th century BC), the largest world monarchy of antiquity arose. Its subsequent collapse opened a new period in history. ancient world- Hellenistic with its characteristic synthesis of elements, the cult of Greece and the countries of the East.
The position of the individual in society has changed radically. The free Greek lost touch with his hometown, a stable social environment, and found himself in the face of unpredictable change. With increasing acuteness, he felt the fragility of his existence in a changed, alien world. These shifts in the real situation and in the self-awareness of the individual left their mark on ideas about her spiritual life.
Belief in the power of the mind, in the great intellectual achievements of the previous era, is being questioned. A philosophy of skepticism arises, recommending generally to refrain from judgments concerning the surrounding world, because of their unprovability, relativity, dependence on customs, etc. (Pyrrho, end of the 4th century, BC). Such an intellectual stop came from ethical motivations. It was believed that the rejection of the search for truth would allow one to find peace of mind, to reach the state of ataraxia (from the Greek word meaning absence of unrest).
The idealization of the way of life of a sage, estranged from the play of external elements and, due to this, able to preserve his individuality in an unstable world, to withstand shocks that threaten his very existence, directed the intellectual searches of the other two philosophical schools that dominated the Hellenistic period - Stoics and Epicureans. Rooted in the schools of classical Greece, they rethought their ideological heritage in accordance with the spirit of the new era.
School stoics originated in the 4th century. BC e. and got its name from the name of the place in Athens (“standing” - the portico of the temple), where its founder Zenon preached his doctrine. Representing the cosmos as a whole, consisting of endless modifications of the fiery air - pneuma, the Stoics considered human soul one of these modifications.
Under pneum (in the original meaning of the word - inhaled air), the first natural philosophers understood a single natural, material principle that permeates both the external physical cosmos and the living organism and the psyche that resides in it (i.e., the area of sensations, feelings, thoughts).
For Anaximenes and other natural philosophers, like Heraclitus, the view of the psyche as a particle of air or fire meant that it was generated by an external, material cosmos. For the Stoics, the fusion of psyche and nature took on a different meaning. Nature itself was spiritualized, endowed with signs characteristic of the mind - but not individual, but supra-individual.
According to this doctrine, the world pneuma is identical to the world soul, the “divine fire”, which is the Logos or, as the later Stoics believed, fate. The happiness of man was seen in living according to the Logos.
Like their predecessors in classical Greece, the Stoics believed in the primacy of reason, that a person does not achieve happiness because of ignorance of what it consists of. But if before there was an image harmonious personality, in the full life of which rational and sensual (emotional) merge, then among the thinkers of the Hellenistic era, in an atmosphere of social adversity, fear, dissatisfaction, anxiety, the attitude towards affects changed.
The Stoics declared war on the affects, seeing them as "corruption of the mind", since they arise as a result of the wrong activity of the mind. Pleasure and pain are false judgments about the present; desire and fear are just as false judgments about the future.
Affects should be treated like diseases. They need to be uprooted from the soul. Only the mind, free from any emotional upheavals (whether positive or negative), is able to properly guide behavior. This is what allows a person to fulfill his destiny, his duty and maintain inner freedom.
This ethical-psychological doctrine was usually associated with the attitude, which, speaking modern language might be called psychotherapeutic. People felt the need to resist the vicissitudes and dramatic turns of life, depriving of peace of mind. The study of thinking and its relation to emotions was not of an abstract-theoretical nature, but correlated with real life, with learning the art of living. Increasingly, philosophers were turned to discuss and solve personal, moral problems. From seekers of truth, they turned into healers of souls, which later became priests, confessors.
On other cosmological principles, but with the same ethical orientation towards the search for happiness and the art of living, was based school of Epicurus(end of IV BC). In their ideas about nature, the Epicureans relied on the atomism of Democritus. However, in contrast to the Democritus doctrine of the inevitability of the movement of atoms according to laws that exclude chance, Epicurus assumed that these particles could deviate from their regular trajectories. This conclusion had an ethical and psychological background.
Unlike the version of "hard" causality that prevails in everything that happens in the world (and, therefore, in the soul as a kind of atoms), the Epicureans allowed spontaneity, spontaneity of changes, their random nature. On the one hand, this approach reflected a sense of the unpredictability of human existence, on the other hand, it recognized the possibility of spontaneous deviations, excluded the strict predestination of actions, and offered freedom of choice.
In other words, the Epicureans believed that a person is able to act at his own peril and risk. However, the word "fear" here can only be used metaphorically: the whole point of the Epicurean teaching was that, imbued with it, people would be saved precisely from fear.
This goal was also served by the doctrine of atoms: the living body, like the soul, consists of atoms moving in the void, which at the moment of death disperse according to the general laws of the same eternal cosmos; and if so, then “death has nothing to do with us; when we are, then death is not yet; when death comes, then we are no more” (Epicurus).
The picture of nature presented in the teachings of Epicurus and the place of man in it contributed to the achievement of serenity of the spirit, freedom from fears, first of all, before death and the gods (who, living between the worlds, do not interfere in the affairs of people, because this would violate their serene existence).
Like many Stoics, the Epicureans thought about ways to achieve independence of the individual from everything external. They saw the best way in self-withdrawal from all public affairs. It is this behavior that will allow you to avoid grief, anxiety, negative emotions and, thereby, experience pleasure, because it is nothing more than the absence of suffering.
A follower of Epicurus in Ancient Rome was Lucretius (I century BC). He criticized the teaching of the Stoics about the mind poured into nature in the form of pneuma. In reality, according to Lucretius, there are only atoms moving according to the laws of mechanics; as a result, the mind itself arises. In cognition, sensations are primary, which are transformed (like “like a spider weaves a web”) into other images leading to the mind.
The teachings of Lucretius (set out, by the way, in poetic form), as well as the concepts of the thinkers of the previous, Hellenistic period, were a kind of instruction in the art of surviving in a whirlpool of disasters, forever getting rid of fears of the afterlife punishment and otherworldly forces.
6 The teachings of ancient doctors
In conclusion, it is impossible not to mention the ideas of the doctors of antiquity, who made a huge contribution to the development of the science of psychology. The positions of materialism in ancient psychology were strengthened by the successes of ancient doctors in anatomy and medicine.
The physician and philosopher Alkmeon of Croton (6th century BC) for the first time in the history of knowledge put forward a position on the localization of thoughts in the brain.
Hippocrates (c. 460 - c. 377 BC) - the "father of medicine", adhered to the line of Democritus in philosophy and acted as a representative of materialism in medicine. Hippocrates believed that the organ of thinking and feeling is the brain. The most famous was the doctrine of temperaments.
According to Hippocrates, the basis human body four juices: mucus (produced in the brain), blood (produced in the heart), yellow bile (from the liver), black bile (from the spleen). Differences in the juices of people explain differences in mores, and the predominance of one of them determines the temperament of a person. The predominance of blood is the basis of sanguine temperament (from Latin sanquis - blood), mucus - phlegmatic (from Greek phlegma - mucus), yellow bile - choleric (from Greek chole - bile), black bile - melancholic (from Greek melaina chole - black bile).
Hippocrates classifies human types on a somatic basis. I.P. Pavlov noted that Hippocrates "caught the capital features in the mass of countless variants of human behavior" and referred to him in his doctrine of the types of higher nervous activity.
In the Hellenistic period, new centers of culture arose, where various currents of Eastern thought interacted with Western. Among these centers, those created in Egypt in the 3rd century BC stood out. BC. (at royal dynasty Ptolemy, founded by one of the commanders of Alexander the Great) library and museum in Alexandria. The museum was essentially a research institute with laboratories, rooms for classes with students. It conducted research in various fields of knowledge, including anatomy and physiology.
Thus, the doctors Herophilus and Erazistrat, whose works have not been preserved, significantly improved the technique of studying the body, in particular the brain. Among the most important discoveries made by them is the establishment of differences between sensory and motor nerves; more than two thousand years later, this discovery formed the basis of the doctrine of reflexes, which is most important for physiology and psychology.
All these anatomical and physiological information of the Hellenistic period was combined and supplemented by the ancient Roman physician Galen (II century AD). In the work “On the Parts of the Human Body” (which was a reference book for doctors until the 17th century), he, relying on many observations and experiments and summarizing the knowledge of doctors of the East and West, including Alexandrian, described the dependence of the vital activity of the whole organism on the nervous system, elucidated the structure of the brain and spinal cord, experimentally established the functions of the spinal cord.
In those days, the anatomy of human bodies was forbidden, all experiments were performed on animals. But Galen, operating on gladiators (slaves, whom the Romans considered people very conditionally), was able to expand medical ideas about a person, primarily about his brain, where, as he believed, is produced and stored " top grade»pneuma as bearers of the mind.
Widely known for many centuries was the doctrine developed by Galen (following Hippocrates) about temperaments as proportions in which several basic "juices" are mixed. He calls a temperament with a predominance of "warm" courageous and energetic, with a predominance of "cold" - slow, etc. In total, he singled out 13 temperaments, of which only one is normal, and 12 are some deviation from the norm.
Galen paid great attention to affects. Even Aristotle wrote that, for example, anger can be explained either by interpersonal relationships (the desire to avenge an insult), or by “blood boiling” in the body. Galen argued that changes in the body (“increased warmth of the heart”) are primary in affects. The desire to take revenge is secondary. Many centuries later, there will again be discussions between psychologists around the question of what is primary - a subjective experience or a bodily shock.
Conclusion
The world of culture has created three "organs" for understanding a person and his soul: religion. Art and science. Religion is built on myth, art on the artistic image, science on experience organized and controlled by logical life.
The people of the ancient era, enriched by the centuries-old experience of human knowledge, in which they drew both ideas about the character and behavior of the gods, and the images of the heroes of their epic and tragedies, mastered this experience through the “magic crystal” of a rational explanation of the nature of things, earthly and heavenly. From these seeds grew the branched tree of psychology as a science.
Ancient doctors, treating people and involuntarily changing their mental states, passed on from generation to generation information about the results of their actions, about individual differences (the medical schools of Hippocrates and Galen).
No less important than the experience of ancient medicine were other forms of practice - political, legal, pedagogical. The study of methods of suggestion, persuasion, victory in a verbal duel, which became the main concern of the sophists, turned the logical and grammatical structure of speech into an object of experimentation. In the practice of communication, Socrates discovered its original dialogism (ignored by the experimental psychology of thinking that arose in the 20th century), and Plato discovered inner speech as an internalized dialogue. He also owns the model of personality, so close to the heart of the modern psychotherapist, as a dynamic system of motives that tear it apart in an inescapable conflict.
The discovery of many psychological phenomena is associated with the name of Aristotle: the mechanism of associations by contiguity, similarity and contrast, the discovery of images of memory and imagination, the differences between theoretical and practical intelligence, etc.
Therefore, in the field of psychology, antiquity is glorified by great theoretical successes and some empirical data, without which it could not exist. modern science. These include not only the discovery of facts, the construction of innovative models and explanatory schemes. Problems have been identified that have guided the development of the human sciences for centuries.
Bibliography
1. Vygotsky L.S. Sobr. op. T. 1. - M., 1982. - 624 p.
2. Zhdan A.N. History of Psychology: Textbook. - M.: Publishing House of Moscow State University, 1990. - 367 p.
3. Martsinkovskaya G.D., Yaroshevsky M.G. 100 outstanding psychologists of the world. - M .: Publishing house "Institute of Practical Psychology", Voronezh: NPO "MODEK", 1996. - 320 p.
4. Nemov R.S. Psychology: a manual for students: 10 - 11 cells. - M.: Enlightenment, 1995. - 239 p.: ill.
5. Petrovsky A.V., Yaroshevsky M.G. Psychology: Textbook for students. higher ped. textbook establishments. - M.: "Academy"; Higher School, 2001. - 512 p.
6. Fraser J. The Golden Bough. - M., 1980. - 265 p.
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