We were dining in the basement room of the 'Leningrad,' reportedly the most fashionable evening restaurant in Kyiv. Professor Porshnev presided. Seated around the table, in order, were young psychologists — Andrei Brushlinsky (Institute of Philosophy, USSR Academy of Sciences), Rita Bobneva (Institute of Sociology, USSR Academy of Sciences), and Aron Brudny (Institute of Philosophy, Kyrgyz SSR Academy of Sciences). Given the combination of personalities, we were sitting not so much at a table as on a powder keg ready to explode at one careless word. Everyone in this small circle of candidates and doctors of science was militantly denying something — the work of this or that scholar, this or that psychological school, these or those experimental methods.
These notes are based on conversations with students about the collection 'Psychology, Linguistics, and Interdisciplinary Connections' (eds. T.V. Akhutina and D.A. Leontiev), published in Moscow (Smysl Publishing) in 2008 and devoted to the many-faceted scholarly work of A.A. Leontiev. There were several such conversations, and material published by R. Frager and J. Fadiman in the encyclopedic volume 'Personality' (Moscow, Olma-Press, 2002) is also used here. In essence, the issues discussed here are of known interest to students and teachers, participants in a seminar on the problems of communication. I would like to note that the free form in which the material is presented should not trouble a reader interested in the mutual influence of understanding and communication.
The existence of the world is continuous, and this is quite obvious. But as for its essence, matters are not so simple. It is no coincidence that systems which ascribe a single substrate to everything that exists — be it matter, idea, or energy — lack sufficient explanatory power and have not become universally accepted. There is nothing impossible in the idea that the essence of the world is discrete, and it would be more correct to speak of essences that form the basis of the world's existence. This would fully correspond to the philosophical premises required by Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
From the standpoint of dialectical-materialist philosophy, motion is universal. But it is not only infinite — it is directional; motion has its own specificity. This specificity can be uncovered and studied. Moreover, constructive conclusions can and must be drawn from the study of the laws of development — conclusions essential for setting the direction of society's movement in today's complex, dynamic world. The task is to show, contrary to fashionable pessimistic concepts, that the development of humanity, and accordingly the development of society, is by no means necessarily destructive toward nature as a whole.
As is well known, the word 'culture' derives from the Latin 'cultura,' which meant both 'to cultivate' (the land) and 'to perfect' and 'to venerate.' In later usage of the word 'culture,' these nuances were preserved, but it is curious that originally 'culture' meant the transformation of nature in the interests of humans — more precisely, the tilling of the land. And in parallel arises the metaphor 'cultura animi,' used by Cicero — 'the culture (perfection) of the soul,' 'spiritual culture.'
European culture, to which we all owe so much, is, in essence, the fruit of the self-awareness of the former provinces of the Roman Empire. It is not out of the question that a new Eurasian culture will take shape as a result of the development of the self-awareness of the former components of the secular empire. Perhaps a different understanding of the meaning of culture will emerge here, and hence a different culture — especially in the East. Eastern understandings of culture and Eastern cultural traditions unquestionably stand in opposition to what, in the 1920s, was called the 'mechanization of the human soul.'
In 21st-century psychological science, the idea is becoming increasingly widespread that the meaningful perception of the world is a process fundamentally similar to its construction (for example, a 2009 scientific conference of Moscow State University psychologists, held in honor of Academician A. Asmolov's 60th birthday, was devoted to the construction of worlds). In essence, this is one form of the idea of the psychological plurality of worlds, which is encapsulated in the classical formula 'tat tvam asi.'
Here only one way out remains: since one cannot assume that people, taken as a whole in their actions, have any rational purpose of their own, one must try to discover, in the senseless course of human affairs, a purpose of nature.
— I. Kant
School T is a school of thematic learning. Its necessity is recognized by students, but it is suppressed by the teaching structure that has become entrenched worldwide. The structure of instruction! Indeed, who is capable of studying, one after another over the course of several hours (in exactly this order), tangents and cotangents, the cardiovascular system of mammals, the realism of Leo Tolstoy, the structural formula of benzene, and the June Third coup d'état — without losing their mind? The answer is well known: you are. You graduated from a school built on the principle of subject-based instruction. It is curious that the terms 'to study' and 'to understand' have, in essence, been removed from school parlance and, with good reason, replaced by the special word 'to internalize.'
Consciousness is the existence of our "I," and it is expressed through relation. In other words, consciousness finds expression in the relation of the individual self to that which is, may be, or could have been. It is often claimed that consciousness is a "reflection" of the surrounding world, but consciousness cannot be reduced to reflection at all; rather, consciousness is an illumination of the external world, while thinking is an immersion into the internal and external world.
Magic is studied from a wide variety of perspectives — ethnographic, psychological, and historical-cultural. The author examines magic as a phenomenon of human existence, finding expression in both individual and mass consciousness.
When people speak of the struggle for nature conservation, this is, of course, primarily from a psychological point of view, about — or should be about, if we grasp the essence of the matter — not so much the relationship of humans to nature as the relationship of people to one another. This is something we ourselves do not always realize.
What is the struggle for nature conservation? Some kind of state action? Or is it the activity of some organized group of people? Or something else entirely? We will speak about this third possibility — what it could be, if we were to set ourselves the hypothetical task of achieving this goal. Organizationally: people would gather, they would organize a certain society (such a society does, generally speaking, exist, but we know very well that the mere existence of this society by no means guarantees the conservation of nature, and moreover, this society, at least in part, does not deal with this issue at all). If the struggle for nature conservation is strictly a state action, perhaps not a one-time event but an ongoing one, then it is organized by a body of civil servants — and you, too, are not one of them (in this capacity).
