James V. Wertsch
E. Jayne White
V. P. Zinchenko
State University—Higher School of Economics [email protected]
English translation from the Russian text:
©2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
The interplay and life of consciousness are like a sequence of words, a dialogue.
G.G. Shpet
The ontological aspect of the problem of consciousness
After emerging from the realm of philosophy, the problem of consciousness became a subject of reflection and research for a large number of sciences. Hardly any of them, including psychology, is capable of setting apart its own subject matter of the study of consciousness in any pure form. This is the basis of the title of the article. I am not sure that I will be able to clearly define the subject matter of the psychological study of consciousness, but I will try to present it as a task and lay out at least several ways of accomplishing it. The difficulties of presenting consciousness as the subject matter of psychology are compounded by the fact that psychology itself as a science cannot boast a rigorous definition of its own subject matter. There are several possibilities here. The simplest one is the usual tautologies: psychology is the science of the psyche… And then comes a not overly long enumeration of psychic processes and functions that sometimes includes consciousness. One sometimes encounters an expansive outline of the scope of psychology, which incorporates parts of more or less remote sciences, which are called related sciences. With regard to this concept of psychology, Gogol’s Nozdrev even comes to mind: everything up to the forest is mine, the forest is mine, and everything beyond the forest is mine, too. (One justification, weak as it may be, for this kind of expansion is that other sciences, above all physiology, treat psychology exactly the same way.) Finally, one sometimes also encounters an unjustified narrowing of the subject matter of psychology, e.g. when it is defined as the orienting function of various forms of activity, which is equated with the psyche. It is hard to find a place for consciousness in this definition. The historical (if you can call it that) roots of this narrowing of the subject matter of psychology lie in the forcible injection of I.P. Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes into psychology in the 1950s. To the credit of psychologists, it should be pointed out that they did not adopt just any reflexes as the subject matter of psychology, but rather the reflex,
“What is that?” As a result, it turned out that the research done by P.Ia. Gal’perin, A.V.
Zoporozhets, E.N. Sokolov, et al. in orienting and exploratory activity did in fact make up one of the glorious pages of Soviet psychology—but only one. Incidentally, P.Ia.
Gal’perin, who insisted more than the others on this narrow definition of the subject matter of psychology, dreamed of a time when psychology would become an objective science of the subjective world of human beings (and animals). This definition naturally encompasses consciousness, self-awareness and even the soul.
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The task of defining the subject matter of a science must be treated cum grano salis, following the counsel of G.G. Shpet: “”For a science, its subject matter is like a mask at a ball, an anonym, a biography without the hero’s given name, patronymic and grand- father’s name. Science can describe a little, a great deal or everything about its subject matter, but one thing it never knows and cannot know in essence—what its subject matter, its name, patronymic and family name are. They are in a sealed envelope that is kept under the shreds of Philosophy… Will we learn much when we obtain and unseal the envelope?... Will we catch the meaning? Will we understand the intellect of the arts? (we would add “of the sciences” as well—V.Z.). Is it not more correct that only now do we ponder them, their fate, and we go off into seclusion to think about the meaning?” (Shpet, 1996, pp. 346–347).
The experience of the history of Soviet science teaches that it is better not to have a rigorous definition of the subject matter of a science and to have freedom of scientific work than to have such a definition and not to have freedom. Freedom is needed to under- stand the intellect and meaning of a science and to design the subject matter of one’s own inquiry. In practice that is exactly what happens, and scientists willy-nilly, based on the logic of their work, attempt to present various sectors of psychology, e.g. activity, per- sonality, thought and consciousness, as the subjects of monodisciplinary or interdisci- plinary inquiry (cf. Velikhov, Zinchenko, Lektorskii). This kind of freedom is not devoid of artifice, but in my view it is of a fairly innocuous nature. This article is not devoid of it, either. Still, I will try not to go too far, at any rate, beyond the bounds of psychology.
The principal difficulties of both a mono- and an interdisciplinary inquiry into con- sciousness involve the need to overcome or even repudiate the opposition between con- sciousness and existence, as well as, for that matter, the opposition between matter and consciousness. Binary oppositions have lost their credibility, they have ceased to give rise to meanings. M.K. Mamardashvili spoke of the “quasisubject” and “phenomenological”
nature of consciousness, calling the phenomena of consciousness “spiritual-corporeal formations” and “third items.” Before him, G.G. Shpet called consciousness a “social item.”
The category of consciousness, like the categories of activity, the subject, and per- sonality, is a fundamental and at the same time an extreme abstraction. The task of any science that lays claim to studying consciousness is to fill it with concrete ontological substance and meaning. After all, consciousness is not only born in existence and not only reflects and therefore embodies it—to be sure, in a reflected or distorted light—but also creates it. Only after this process of embodiment, rather than in its dubious purity, does living consciousness act as a subject of experimental study and then, when the onto- logy of consciousness is defined and agreed on, as a subject of interdisciplinary inquiry as well.
The task of ontologizing consciousness is not a new one for psychology. To this day consciousness is being reduced and, accordingly, identified with such phenomena as a distinctly apperceived image, a field of clear attention, the content of short-term memory, the obvious result of an act of thought, apperception of one’s own self, etc. In all of these cases true acts of consciousness are replaced by its external and often scanty results, i.e.
by various well-known empirical phenomena that are accessible to self-observation. The inclusion of such phenomena in the ontology of consciousness may raise doubts because of their obvious subjectivity. There is, however, a great deal of truth in the old assertion by A.A. Ukhtomskii that the subjective is no less objective than the so-called objective.
Stereotypes (clichés) involving efforts to find and localize consciousness in the structural formations of material nature are reproduced in more and more new forms. For example, the localization of consciousness in the brain, in its neurophysiological mechanisms (in- cluding the ludicrous search for the neurons of consciousness) attracts many researchers with the opportunity to use experimental techniques that have traditionally developed for the study of natural (rather than social) objects. Scientists are not affected by the warnings
Consciousness as the Subject Matter and Task of Psychology
from outstanding physiologists and neurophysiologists (from C. Sherrington to A. R.
Luriia) that it is hopeless to search for consciousness in the brain.G. G. Shpet persua- sively argued a hundred years ago that the claims of physiological psychology to the whole realm of psychology were untenable (Shpet, 2006). But physiological reductionism is indestructible. It is fed by the no less absurd computer reductionism, which has taken aim not only at consciousness but also at the self. Both types of reductionism are pre- mised on an extreme simplification of the functions and processes of consciousness. Or as D. Dennett, a talented popularizer of his own ideas, puts it, their replacement with their own phantasms such as a “pandemonium of homunculi” or a kind of fame—in the sense of momentary renown or fleeting glory (Iulina, 2003, p. 109). N.S. Iulina cites K.
Popper’s reasonable conclusion: if physics cannot explain consciousness, so much the worse for physics. We should add that the same applies to physiology.
The ongoing search for the matter of consciousness in language is more successful and promising. Even though both the traditional and the recent attempts to identify con- sciousness with various psychic acts or physiological functions are controversial, the very fact that they are taking place demonstrates that there is a persistent effort in psychology to ontologize the phenomena of consciousness, to define its functions and to construct consciousness as a subject of psychological inquiry. At the same time, none of the nume- rous forms of reduction of consciousness, as useful as they are in terms of describing its phenomenology and possible material foundations, cannot be considered satisfactory.
This is due to the fact that the items to which it is reduced cannot even partially perform the actual functions of consciousness. They include the reflectional [otrazhatel’naya], generative (creative), regulatory-evaluative, dialogic, and reflexive [refleksivnaya] func- tions.<<to distinguish between otrazhatel’nyi and refleksivnyi, I have adopted
“reflectional” and “reflexive.” The latter has been used in the literature specifically by Vladimir Lefebvre, so I decided not to use “contemplative” or some other synonym. If you prefer another solution, I’d be eager to hear it.>> Consciousness is polyfunctional—according to M.M. Bakhtin—polyphonic and its functions are not confined to this list.
The reflexive function, of course, is the principal one: it is the one that appears to characterize the essence of consciousness. Thanks to reflexion, consciousness bustles about in quest of the meaning of existence, of life, of activity: it finds, it loses, it goes astray, it searches again, it creates new meanings, etc. It works intensively on the causes of its own mistakes, delusions and failures. The wise consciousness knows that the main reason for failures is its freedom with respect to existence, but giving up freedom is tantamount to giving up oneself. Therefore consciousness, in choosing freedom, is always risking, including risking itself. This is normal. The tragedy begins when consciousness imagines itself as being absolutely free of natural and cultural history, when it ceases to feel that it is a part of nature and society, rids itself of responsibility and conscience and lays claim to the role of a demiurge. The latter may result from a sharp decrease in an individual’s ability to sustain criticism and from a distorted self-assessment, to the point where he no longer perceives himself as a human being or thinks of himself as super- human, which is essentially the same thing.
Objects of reflexion may be both images of the world and thoughts about it; the underpinnings and modes of a person’s regulation of his own behavior, actions and deeds;
the processes of reflexion themselves; and finally, his own, or personal, consciousness.
The basic premise for designing consciousness as a subject of inquiry must be the concept of it not only as an extreme abstraction but also as a very well-defined cultural-historical formation and vital organ. A given type of culture engenders a concept of consciousness as an epiphenomenon or a concept of consciousness that is almost entirely reduced to the unconscious. Such concepts are not merely a fact of culture but a factor in its develop- ment. The influence of psychoanalysis on twentieth-century culture is unparalleled. Cul- ture now needs, more than ever, the development of concepts of consciousness per se in
V.P Zinchenko
all the richness of its existential, reflexive and spiritual properties and qualities and of consciousness as a creative, effective and active entity. Culture appeals to the conscious- ness of society and cries out about itself (Zinchenko, 1989).
The question arises: is such an all-powerful and omnipotent consciousness accessible to scientific cognition? It is well known that in order to analyze a concrete situation, it is helpful to rise above it, even to detach oneself from it, and turn the “visual world” into a
“visual field” (terminology of J. Gibson). The latter is more pliant for managing and manipulating its elements (images). But consciousness is not the visual world, and certainly not the material world. And there are two possible ways here of handling it. One can either detach oneself from it or attempt to concretize it. In the first instance there is a danger of losing consciousness as an object of observation and study; in the second, a danger of inappropriate concretization. The early 1960s saw the appearance of the first models of cognitive and executive processes and the birth of cognitive psychology, which, in order to vivify (animate) them, populated block models of the processes it studied with demons and homunculi making choices and decisions. The skepticism over incorporating demons and homunculi into the block models of cognitive processes is fully justified. But we must not forget that the inclusion of each block in the system of infor- mation-processing in short-term memory or of broader cognitive structures was preceded by a detailed experimental study of the reality of the subjective that lay behind it, a kind of physics of the reception, storage, conversion and choice of a given type of information.
The demons performed a coordinating, semantic, and reflexive function in the broad sense of the word. V. A. Lefebvre, without resorting to otherworldly forces, first drew a soul on a blackboard, then postulated the presence of an “inner computer” in the human consciousness. More interesting is his hypothesis that living creatures possess a funda- mental characteristic that he called the intention to make a choice (Lefebvre, 1990). But as important as it is to analyze the procedures of reflexive choice, one can hardly reduce the entire life of consciousness to it. The aim must be to find the place of reflexion in the life of the individual, his activity and his consciousness. In the process, we must not disregard the experience that has been amassed in studying perceptual, mnemic, intellec- tual, and executive processes, i.e. the actual physics that exists in psychology, even if it is still not animated enough. Whatever the case, the current attempts to concretize and objectify consciousness and to treat it as a model should not surprise anyone.
From the History of Research on Consciousness
It is useful to recall the achievements and setbacks of the science of consciousness in Russia over the past century. The history of the problem of consciousness in Russian psychology is still waiting for its researcher. In schematic form, it looks like this. After a fruitful postrevolutionary period associated with the names of S.N. Bulgakov, N.A.
Berdiaev, V.S. Solov’ev, P.A. Florenskii, G.I. Chelpanov, and G.G. Shpet, all of whom made a substantial contribution not only to the philosophy but also to the psychology of consciousness, the problem of consciousness began to be pushed aside already in the early 1920s. Priority was given to reactology, with its disdain for problems of con- sciousness, and to psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the study of the unconscious.
Nevertheless, both schools claimed a monopolistic right to the development of a genu- inely Marxist psychology. The beginning of the 1920s may be marked as the period when the activity-based approach to psychology was born. S.L. Rubinshtein also linked this approach to Marxism, which, incidentally, was more organic than psychoanalysis and reactology. P.A. Florenskii and G.G. Shpet continued, in part, to work on problems of consciousness; unfortunately, their works at that time (and later) did not have any noticeable effect on the development of psychology. In the mid-1920s two more figures appeared. They were M.M. Bakhtin and L.S. Vygotskii, whose objective was to under- stand consciousness, its nature, functions, connection to language and words, etc. For
Consciousness as the Subject Matter and Task of Psychology
both of them, especially for Bakhtin, Marxism was what it was in reality, i.e. merely one method, one means of understanding and explanation.
In the 1930s, to all intents and purposes, the country lost consciousness and the uncon- scious both literally and figuratively (L.S. Vygotskii died; M.M. Bakhtin was exiled, then began to engage in literary criticism; P.A. Florenskii and G.G. Shpet were executed; S.
Freud was banned; and psychoanalytical offices were shut down). Consciousness was declared to be something secondary, second-class, and was then replaced by an ideology that was shaping not a “new man” according to M. Gor’kii, but a “dull man” according to M. Zoshchenko. The character of the people was also changing: general human values were being distorted. To be more precise, they were becoming polarized. On the one hand, “There are no obstacles in our way…”; on the other, a paralyzing fear that coexisted with a demand for self-sacrifice: “And we will die as one…” The abundant palette of the highest human emotions was being lost, while the basest ones were being cultivated: unlimited human cruelty, betrayal, spy mania, etc.
Culture and intellectuality were carefully covered up or disguised with a veneer of quotations, and disappeared into the subtext. Under these conditions it became dangerous to do work on consciousness, and its study was confined to such relatively neutral niches as the historical roots of the emergence of the consciousness and its ontogenesis in childhood. Followers of L.S. Vygotskii (A.N. Leont’ev [Leontiev], A.R. Luriia, P.Ia.
Gal’perin, A.V. Zaporozhets, P.I. Zinchenko, et al.) reoriented themselves toward pro- blems of the psychological analysis of activity and the psychology of action. Like S.L.
Rubinshtein, while they did not always do so organically, they did tie in these problems with Marxism in an interesting and productive way. Then they had to tie in the same problems with I.P. Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes and even with Lysenko’s agrobiology. There were too many voluntary-compulsory links to list here, although fortunately they were temporary.
A return to the problems of consciousness took place, for the most part, in the second half of the 1950s, thanks primarily to the works of S.L. Rubinshtein, and then those of A.N. Leont’ev. We must point out that in order to set apart consciousness as a subject of psychological inquiry, it is equally necessary to develop the cultural-historical and activity-based approaches to consciousness and the psyche.
The fact that naturalistic interpretations of consciousness and its encapsulation in the individual were fallacious was understood by M.M. Bakhtin and L.S. Vygotskii. The former insisted on the polyphony of consciousness and its dialogic nature. The latter said that all psychic functions, including consciousness, appear (manifest themselves?) in joint activities among individuals. Vygotskii especially emphasized the importance of the emotional sphere in the development of consciousness, and highlighted the inner experi- ence as a unit of its analysis. It is hard to overestimate the role of various forms of inter- course in the emergence and formation of consciousness. It is located not in the individual but between individuals, although it may be my consciousness, or someone else’s, or no one’s. Of course, consciousness is an attribute of the individual, but to no less of an extent, if not to a greater extent, it is an attribute and characteristic of the collective, of “a convocation with everyone,” of inter- and suprapersonal or transpersonal relations. The internalization of consciousness and its emergence in the individual are always accom- panied by the appearance and development of oppositions: the self and the other; the self and the second self. This means that a specific individual’s consciousness retains its dialogic nature and, accordingly and fortunately, its less-than-total social determination.
Its spontaneity can be hardly be denied, a point that V.V. Nalimov especially insisted on.
It is no less important to overcome the so-called brain metaphor when analyzing the mechanisms of consciousness. Consciousness, of course, is the product and result of the activity of organic systems, which include not only the nervous system but also the individual and society. One of the most important attributes of these systems, according