Author — A.N. Leontiev. The book «Activity, Consciousness, Personality». Chapter Formation of personality.
The situation of the development of the human individual reveals its features already at the very first stages. The main one is the mediated nature of the child’s connections with the outside world. Initially, direct biological connections between the child and the mother are very soon mediated by objects: the mother feeds the child from a cup, puts clothes on him and, while occupying him, manipulates the toy. At the same time, the child’s connections with things are mediated by the surrounding people: the mother brings the child closer to the thing that attracts him, brings it to him, or, perhaps, takes it away from him. In a word, the child’s activity more and more appears as realizing his connections with a person through things, and his connections with things through a person.
This situation of development leads to the fact that things are revealed to the child not only in their physical properties, but also in the special quality that they acquire in human activity — in their functional meaning (a cup — what they drink from, a chair — what they sit on, watches — what is worn on the hand, etc.), and people — as the «masters» of these things, on which his connections with them depend. The subject activity of the child acquires a tool structure, and communication becomes a speech, mediated language.
This initial situation of the development of the child contains the seed of those relations, the further development of which constitutes a chain of events leading to the formation of him as a personality. Initially, the relationship to the world of things and to the surrounding people are merged for the child with each other, but then they split into two, and they form different, albeit interconnected, lines of development that pass into each other.
In ontogenesis, these transitions are expressed in alternating phase changes: phases of predominantly the development of objective (practical and cognitive) activity — phases of the development of relationships with people, with society. But the same transitions characterize the movement of motives within each phase. As a result, those hierarchical connections of motives arise that form the «knots» of the personality.
The tying of these knots is a hidden process and is expressed in different ways at different stages of development. Above, I described one of the phenomena that characterizes the mechanism of this process at the stage when the inclusion of the child’s objective action in his relation to the adult who is absent at the moment, although it changes the meaning of the result achieved, the action itself still remains completely “field”. How are further changes taking place? The facts obtained in the study of preschool children of different ages show that these changes are subject to certain rules.
One of them is that in a situation of multidirectional motivation, the subordination of the action to the demand of a person occurs earlier, and later — to objective interdisciplinary connections. Another rule that was discovered in experiments also looks somewhat paradoxical: it turns out that under conditions of doubly motivated activity, an object-material motive is able to perform the function of subordinating another earlier, when it is given to the child in the form of only a representation, mentally, and only later — remaining in the actual field of perception. .
Although these rules express a genetic sequence, they also have a general meaning. The fact is that when situations of the type described are exacerbated, the phenomenon of displacement (decalage) arises, as a result of which these simpler control relations are exposed; it is known, for example, that it is easier to go on the attack on the direct order of the commander than on self-command. As for the form in which motives appear, in the complex circumstances of volitional activity it is very clearly revealed that only an ideal motive, i.e. a motive lying outside the vectors of the external field is capable of subordinating actions with oppositely directed external motives. Speaking figuratively, the psychological mechanism of life-feat can be sought in the human imagination.
The process of personality formation in terms of the changes in question can be represented as the development of the will, and this is not accidental. A weak-willed, impulsive action is an impersonal action, although one can speak of the loss of will only in relation to a person (after all, one cannot lose what one does not have). Therefore, authors who consider the will to be the most important personality trait are right from an empirical point of view. Will, however, is neither the beginning nor even the «core» of personality, it is only one of its expressions. The real basis of the personality is that particular structure of the subject’s integral activities, which arises at a certain stage in the development of his human ties with the world.
A person lives, as it were, in an ever-expanding reality for him. Initially, this is a narrow circle of people and objects directly surrounding him, interaction with them, their sensory perception and assimilation of what is known about them, assimilation of their meanings. But then a reality begins to open before him, which lies far beyond the limits of his practical activity and direct communication: the boundaries of the world he knows, the world he represents, are moving apart. The true «field», which now determines his actions, is not just present, but existing — existing objectively or sometimes only illusory.
The subject’s knowledge of this existing always precedes its transformation into a determinant of its activity. Such knowledge plays a very important role in the formation of motives. At a certain level of development, motives first appear as only «known», as possible, as yet not really inducing any action. To understand the process of personality formation, one must certainly take this into account, although the expansion of knowledge in itself is not decisive for it; that is why, by the way, the education of the individual cannot be reduced to teaching, to imparting knowledge.
The formation of personality involves the development of the process of goal formation and, accordingly, the development of the actions of the subject. Actions, becoming more and more enriched, seem to outgrow the range of activities that they implement, and come into conflict with the motives that gave rise to them. The phenomena of such outgrowth are well known and are constantly described in the literature on developmental psychology, albeit in different terms; they form the so-called developmental crises — the crisis of three years, seven years, adolescence, as well as much less studied crises of maturity. As a result, there is a shift of motives to goals, a change in their hierarchy and the birth of new motives — new types of activity; former goals are psychologically discredited, and the actions that respond to them either cease to exist altogether or turn into impersonal operations.
The internal driving forces of this process lie in the initial duality of the subject’s connections with the world, in their dual mediation — objective activity and communication. Its deployment gives rise not only to the duality of the motivation of actions, but due to this, also to their subordination, depending on the objective relations that open up before the subject, into which he enters. The development and multiplication of these subordinations, special in their nature, arising only in the conditions of a person’s life in society, takes a long period, which can be called the stage of the spontaneous, not guided by self-consciousness of the emerging personality. At this stage, which continues until adolescence, the process of personality formation, however, does not end, it only prepares the birth of a self-conscious personality.
In the pedagogical and psychological literature, either the younger preschool or adolescence is constantly indicated as a turning point in this respect. Personality is indeed born twice: the first time — when the child manifests in obvious forms the polymotivation and subordination of his actions (recall the phenomenon of «bitter candy» and others like it), the second time — when his conscious personality arises. In the latter case, some special restructuring of consciousness is meant. The task arises — to understand the need for this restructuring and what exactly it consists of.
This necessity is created by the fact that the more the subject’s connections with the world expand, the more they intersect with each other. His actions, realizing one of his activities, one relation, objectively turn out to be realizing some other of his relations. Their possible discrepancy or contradiction, however, does not create alternatives, which are solved simply by the «arithmetic of motives.» The real psychological situation, generated by the intersecting connections of the subject with the world, in which, independently of him, each of his actions and each act of his communication with other people are involved, requires him to orient himself in the system of these connections. In other words, mental reflection, consciousness can no longer remain orienting only certain actions of the subject, it must also actively reflect the hierarchy of their connections, the process of ongoing subordination and resubordination of their motives. And this requires a special inner movement of consciousness.
In the movement of individual consciousness, previously described as a process of mutual transitions of directly sensory contents and meanings, acquiring one or another meaning depending on the motives of activity, movement is now opened in yet another dimension. If the movement described earlier is figuratively imagined as movement in a horizontal plane, then this new movement occurs, as it were, along the vertical. It consists in correlating motives with each other: some take the place of subjugating others and, as it were, rise above them, some, on the contrary, descend to the position of subordinates or even completely lose their meaning-forming function. The formation of this movement expresses the formation of a coherent system of personal meanings — the formation of personality.
Of course, the formation of personality is a continuous process, consisting of a number of successively changing stages, the qualitative features of which depend on specific conditions and circumstances. Therefore, tracing its successive course, we notice only individual shifts. But if you look at it as if from a distance, then the transition, which marks the true birth of the personality, acts as an event that changes the course of all subsequent mental development.
There are many phenomena that mark this transition. First of all, it is a restructuring of the sphere of relations with other people, with society. If in the previous stages society opens up in expanding communications with those around it, and therefore primarily in its personified forms, now this situation is reversed: the surrounding people are increasingly beginning to act through objective social relations. The transition in question begins the changes that determine the main thing in the development of the individual, in her destiny.
The need for the subject to orient himself in the expanding system of his connections with the world is now revealed in its new meaning: as generating the process of deployment of the social essence of the subject. In its entirety, this unfolding constitutes the perspective of the historical process. As applied to the formation of personality at one stage or another of the development of society, and depending on the place occupied by the individual in the system of existing social relations, this perspective appears only as eventually containing an ideal “end point”.
One of the changes, behind which a new restructuring of the hierarchy of motives is hidden, is manifested in the loss of self-worth for the adolescent of relations in the intimate circle of his communication. Thus, the demands coming from even the closest adults now retain their meaning-forming function only on condition that they are included in a wider social motivational sphere, otherwise they cause the phenomenon of “psychological rebellion”. This entry of a teenager into a wider circle of communication does not mean, however, that the intimate, personal, as it were, is now receding into the background. On the contrary, it is precisely during this period and precisely for this reason that an intensive development of inner life takes place: along with friendship, friendship arises, nourished by mutual confidentiality; changes in the content of the letters, which lose their stereotypical and descriptive character, and descriptions of experiences appear in them; attempts are made to keep intimate diaries and the first loves begin.
Even deeper changes mark subsequent levels of development, inclusively up to the level at which the system of objective social relations, its expression, acquires personal meaning. Of course, the phenomena that arise at this level are even more complex and can be truly tragic, but the same thing happens here: the more society opens up for the individual, the more filled his inner world becomes.
The process of personal development always remains deeply individual, unique. It gives strong shifts along the abscissa of age, and sometimes causes social degradation of the individual. The main thing is that it proceeds in completely different ways, depending on specific historical conditions, on the individual’s belonging to a particular social environment. It is especially dramatic in a class society with its inevitable alienation and partialization of the individual, with its alternatives between submission and domination. It goes without saying that concrete life circumstances leave their mark on the course of individual development in socialist society as well. The destruction of the objective conditions that form an obstacle to the return to a person of his real essence — for his comprehensive and harmonious personality, makes this perspective real for the first time, but does not at all automatically rebuild the personality. The fundamental change lies elsewhere, in the fact that a new movement is emerging: the struggle of society for the human person. When we say: “In the name of a person, for a person,” this means not just for his consumption, it means for his personality, although this, of course, implies that a person must be provided with both material goods and spiritual food.
If we return again to the phenomena that distinguish the transition from the period of preparation of the personality to the period of its development, then one more ongoing transformation should be indicated. This is the transformation of the expression of the class characteristics of the individual, and more broadly, the characteristics that depend on the social differentiation of society. The class affiliation of the subject from the very beginning determines the development of his connections with the outside world, the greater or lesser breadth of his practical activities, his communications, his knowledge and assimilated norms of behavior. All this constitutes the acquisitions that make up the personality at the stage of its initial formation. Is it possible and necessary to speak in relation to this about the class character of the individual? Yes, if we mean what the child takes from the environment; no, because at this stage he is only an object, so to speak, of his class, social group. The further revolution consists in the fact that he becomes their subject. Now, and only now, his personality begins to take shape as a class personality in a different, proper meaning of the word: at first, perhaps unconsciously, then realizing it, but sooner or later he inevitably takes his position — more active or less active, resolute or vacillating. Therefore, in the conditions of class confrontations, he does not just “turn out”, but he himself stands on one side or the other of the barricades.
It turns out something else, namely, that at every turn of the life path he needs to free himself from something, to affirm something in himself, and all this needs to be done, and not just “subjected to the influences of the environment.”
Finally, at the same cu, another change occurs, which also changes the very «mechanism» of personality formation. Above, I spoke about the ever-expanding reality that exists for the subject actually. But it also exists in time, in the form of his past and in the form of his foreseen future. Of course, first of all, we have in mind the first — the individual experience of the subject, the function of which is allegedly his personality. And this again resurrects the formula about personality as a product of innate properties and acquired experience. In the early stages of development, this formula may still seem plausible, especially if it is not simplified and the full complexity of the mechanisms of experience formation is taken into account. However, under the conditions of the ongoing hierarchization of motives, it is increasingly losing its significance, and at the level of the individual, it seems to be overturning.
The point is that at this level the subject’s past impressions, events, and own actions by no means appear to him as resting layers of his experience. They become the subject of his attitude, his actions, and therefore change their contribution to the personality. One thing in this past dies, loses its meaning and turns into a simple condition and methods of its activity — the existing abilities, skills, stereotypes of behavior; the other opens up to him in a completely new light and acquires a meaning he had not seen before; finally, something from the past is actively rejected by the subject, psychologically ceases to exist for him, although it remains in the warehouses of his memory. These changes happen all the time, but they can also be concentrated, creating moral breaks. The emerging reassessment of the former, established in life, leads to the fact that a person throws off the burden of his biography. Doesn’t this indicate that the contributions of past experience to the personality have become dependent on the personality itself, have become its function?
This becomes possible due to the emerging new internal movement in the system of individual consciousness, which I figuratively called the movement “along the vertical”. One should not only think that upheavals in the personality’s past are produced by consciousness, consciousness does not produce, but mediates them; they are produced by the actions of the subject, sometimes even external ones — breaks in previous contacts, change of profession, practical entry into new circumstances. Perfectly described by Makarenko: the old clothes of homeless children accepted into the colony are publicly burned at the stake.
Contrary to its prevalence, the view of a person as a product of a person’s biography is unsatisfactory, justifying a fatalistic understanding of his fate (the layman thinks so: a child has stolen, which means he will become a thief!). This view, of course, admits the possibility of changing something in a person, but only at the cost of external intervention, the power of which outweighs what has been formed in his experience. It is the concept of the primacy of punishment over remorse, the reward over the action it crowns. The main psychological fact is missed, namely, that a person enters into a relationship with his past, which in different ways enters into the cash for him — in the memory of his personality. Tolstoy advised: notice that you remember, that you do not remember; By these signs you recognize yourself.
This view is also wrong because the expansion of reality for a person occurs not only in the direction of the past, but also in the direction of the future. Like the past, the future is present in the individual. The life perspective that has opened up to a person is not just a product of “anticipatory reflection”, but his property. This is the strength and truth of what Makarenko wrote about the educational significance of near and far perspectives. The same for adults. Here is a parable I once heard in the Urals from an old groom: when a horse begins to stumble on a difficult road, you should not whip it, but raise its head higher so that it can see further in front of you.
Personality is created by objective circumstances, but only through the totality of his activity, which realizes his relationship to the world. Its features form what determines the type of personality. Although questions of differential psychology do not enter into my task, the analysis of the formation of personality nevertheless leads to the problem of a general approach to the study of these questions.
The first foundation of personality, which no differential psychological conception can ignore, is the richness of the individual’s connections with the world. It is this richness that distinguishes a man whose life encompasses a vast range of varied activities, from that Berlin teacher, “whose world stretches from Maobit to Köpenick and is tightly boarded up behind the Hamburg Gate, whose relationship to this world is reduced to a minimum by his miserable position in life.” It goes without saying that we are talking about real, and not about relations alienated from man, which oppose him and subordinate him to themselves. Psychologically, we express these actual relations through the concept of activity, its sense-forming motives, and not in the language of stimuli and performed operations. To this it must be added that the activities constituting the foundations of the personality also include theoretical activities, and that in the course of development their circle is capable of not only expanding, but also impoverishing; in empirical psychology this is called «restriction of interest.» Some people do not notice this impoverishment, while others, like Darwin, complain about it as a disaster.
The differences that exist here are not only quantitative, expressing the measure of the breadth of the world that has opened up to man in space and time — in his past and future. Behind them lie differences in the content of those objective and social relations that are given by the objective conditions of the epoch, nation, class. Therefore, the approach to the typology of personalities, even if it takes into account only this one parameter, as they say now, cannot but be concrete-historical. But psychological analysis does not stop there, for the connections of the individual with the world can be either poorer than those given by objective conditions, or far exceed them.
Another, and, moreover, the most important, parameter of personality is the degree of hierarchization of activities, their motives. This degree is very different, regardless of whether the foundation of the personality, formed by its connections with the environment, is narrow or wide. Hierarchies of motives always exist, at all levels of development. It is they who form relatively independent units of a person’s life, which may be smaller or larger, or larger, separated from each other or included in a single motivational sphere. The disunity of these units of life, hierarchized within themselves, creates the psychological image of a person living in fragments — now in one «field», then in another. On the contrary, a higher degree of hierarchization of motives is expressed in the fact that a person, as it were, tries on his actions to the main motive for him-goals, and then it may turn out that some are in conflict with this motive, others directly respond to it, and some take it aside. From him.
When they mean the main motive that motivates a person, they usually talk about a life goal. But is this motive always adequately revealed to consciousness? It is impossible to answer this question from the threshold, because its awareness in the form of a concept, an idea does not occur by itself, but in that movement of individual consciousness, as a result of which the subject is only able to refract his inner through the system of values, concepts he assimilates. This has already been discussed, as well as the struggle that is being waged in society for human consciousness.
The semantic units of life can gather, as it were, into one point, but this is a formal characteristic. The main question remains about what place this point occupies in the multidimensional space that constitutes the real, although not always visible to the individual, true reality. The whole life of the Miserly Knight is aimed at one goal: the construction of a “state of gold”. This goal is achieved (“Who knows how many bitter abstinences, curbed passions, heavy thoughts, daytime worries, sleepless nights all this cost?”), But life ends with nothing, the goal turned out to be meaningless. With the words «Terrible age, terrible hearts!» Pushkin ends the tragedy of the Miser.
A different personality, with a different fate, is formed when the leading motive-goal rises to a truly human and does not isolate a person, but merges his life with the life of people, their good. Depending on the circumstances that fall to the lot of a person, such life motives can acquire very different content and different objective significance, but only they are capable of creating an internal psychological justification for his existence, which constitutes the meaning and happiness of life. The top of this path is a man who, according to Gorky, has become a man of mankind.
Here we come to the most complex parameter of personality: to the general type of its structure. The motivational sphere of a person, even in its highest development, never resembles a frozen pyramid. It can be shifted, eccentric in relation to the actual space of historical reality, and then we are talking about the one-sidedness of the individual. It can develop, on the contrary, as a multilateral one, including a wide range of relations. But in both cases, it necessarily reflects the objective non-coincidence of these relations, the contradictions between them, the change in the place they occupy in it.
The personality structure is a relatively stable configuration of the main motivational lines, hierarchized within itself. We are talking about what is incompletely described as «orientation of the personality», incomplete because even if a person has a distinct leading line of life, it cannot remain the only one. Serving the chosen goal, the ideal does not at all exclude or absorb other life relationships of a person, which, in turn, form meaning-forming motives. Figuratively speaking, the motivational sphere of a personality is always multi-peak, as is the objective system of axiological concepts that characterizes the ideology of a given society, a given class, social stratum, which is communicated and assimilated (or rejected) by a person.
The internal correlations of the main motivational lines in the totality of human activities form, as it were, a general «psychological profile» of the individual. Sometimes it develops as flattened, devoid of real peaks, then a person takes a small thing in life for a great one, but does not see the great at all. Such poverty of the individual can, under certain social conditions, be combined with the satisfaction of an arbitrarily wide range of daily needs. Incidentally, this is the psychological threat posed to the individual by the modern consumer society.
A different structure of the psychological profile of a person is created by the juxtaposition of life motives, often combined with the appearance of imaginary peaks formed only by “known motives” — stereotypes of ideals devoid of personal meaning. However, such a structure is transient: at first, the lines of different life relations, which are lined up next to each other, then enter into internal connections. This happens inevitably, but not by itself, but as a result of that inner work that I spoke about above and which appears in the form of a special movement of consciousness.
The manifold relations in which man enters into reality are objectively contradictory. Their contradictions give rise to conflicts, which, under certain conditions, are fixed and enter the structure of the personality. Thus, the historically arisen separation of internal theoretical activity from practical activity gives rise not only to one-sided development of the personality, but can lead to psychological discord, to the splitting of the personality into two spheres that are extraneous to each other — the sphere of its manifestations in real life and the sphere of its manifestations in life, which exists only illusory, only in autistic thinking. It is impossible to describe such a discord more psychologically than Dostoevsky did: from a miserable existence filled with meaningless deeds, his hero goes into a life of imagination, into dreams; we have before us, as it were, two personalities, one is the personality of a humiliated and timid person, an eccentric, hiding in his hole, the other is a romantic and even heroic personality, open to all life’s joys. And yet, this is the life of one and the same person, so the moment inevitably comes when dreams dissipate, years of gloomy loneliness, longing and despondency come.
The personality of the hero of «White Nights» is a special, even exceptional phenomenon. But through this exclusivity, a general psychological truth emerges. This truth lies in the fact that the structure of the personality is not reduced either to the richness of a person’s connections with the world, or to the degree of their hierarchization, that its characteristic lies in the correlation of different systems of existing life relations that give rise to a struggle between them. Sometimes this struggle takes place in outwardly inconspicuous, ordinary dramatic, so to speak, forms and does not violate the harmony of the personality, its development; after all, a harmonious personality is not at all a personality that does not know any internal struggle. However, sometimes this internal struggle becomes the main thing that determines the whole appearance of a person — such is the structure of a tragic personality.
So, the theoretical analysis makes it possible to single out at least three main personality parameters: the breadth of a person’s connections with the world, the degree of their hierarchization, and their general structure. Of course, these parameters do not yet give a differential psychological typology; they can serve as nothing more than a skeletal scheme, which still has to be filled with a living concrete historical content. But this is the task of special studies. Will not, however, the substitution of psychology by sociology take place in this case, will not the «psychological» in personality be lost?
This question arises due to the fact that the approach in question differs from the anthropologism (or cultures — anthropologism) customary in personality psychology, which considers a person as an individual with psychophysiological and psychological characteristics that have changed in the process of his adaptation to the social environment. He, on the contrary, requires considering the personality as a new quality, generated by the movement of the system of objective social relations, in which his activity is involved. Personality thus ceases to appear as the result of a direct layering of external influences; it appears as what a person makes of himself, asserting his human life. He affirms it both in everyday affairs and communication, and in people to whom he passes a particle of himself, and on the barricades of class battles, and on the battlefields for the Motherland, sometimes consciously affirming it even at the cost of his physical life.
As for such psychological “personality substructures” as temperament, needs and drives, emotional experiences and interests, attitudes, skills and habits, moral traits, etc., they, of course, do not disappear at all. They only reveal themselves differently: some — in the form of conditions, others — in their creations and transformations, in changes in their place in the personality, occurring in the process of its development.
Thus, the features of the nervous system, undoubtedly, are individual and, moreover, very stable features, these features, however, are by no means constitutive of the human personality. In his actions, a person consciously or unconsciously takes into account the features of his constitution, just as he takes into account the external conditions of his actions and the means available to him for their implementation. Characterizing a person as a natural being, however, they cannot play the role of those forces that determine the motivation of activity and goal setting that develops in him. Perhaps the only real, albeit secondary, problem of personality psychology is the problem of the formation of the subject’s actions aimed at his own innate or acquired characteristics, which are not directly included in the psychological characteristics of his personal sphere.
However, needs and attitudes can be considered as substructures, factors or «modes» of personality. Thus, they appear only in abstraction from the activity of the subject in which their metamorphoses take place; but it is not these metamorphoses that create the personality; on the contrary, they are themselves generated by the movement of personality development. This movement follows the same formula that describes the transformation of human needs. It begins with the fact that the subject acts to maintain his existence; it leads to the fact that the subject maintains his existence in order to act — to do his life’s work, to fulfill his human purpose. This revolution, completing the stage of personality formation, at the same time opens up unlimited prospects for its development.
Object-material “needs for oneself” are saturable, and their satisfaction leads to their being reduced to the level of living conditions, which are less noticed by a person, the more familiar they become. Therefore, a person cannot develop within the framework of consumption; its development necessarily involves a shift in needs to creation, which alone knows no boundaries.
Should it be emphasized? Probably, it is necessary, because a naive, and in fact, relic thought sometimes presents the transition to the principle «according to needs» almost as a transition to a super-prosperous consumer society. It is overlooked that this requires a transformation of material consumption, that the opportunity for everyone to satisfy these needs destroys the inherent value of things that meet them, destroys the unnatural function that they perform in a privately owned society — the function of affirming a person through them himself, his own » prestige.»
The last theoretical question that I will dwell on is the question of self-awareness as a person. In psychology, it is usually posed as a question about self-consciousness, about the process of its development. There is a huge number of works devoted to the study of this process. They contain detailed data characterizing the stages of the formation of ideas about oneself in ontogenesis. We are talking about the formation of the so-called body scheme, the ability to localize one’s interoceptive sensations, the development of knowledge of one’s external appearance — recognizing oneself in a mirror, in a photograph. The process of development in children of assessments of others and of oneself has been carefully traced, in which first physical features are singled out, then psychological and moral features are added to them. A parallel ongoing change lies in the fact that the partial characteristics of others and oneself give way to more general characteristics, embracing a person in his entirety and highlighting his essential features. Such is the empirical picture of the development of self-knowledge, one’s individual properties, features and abilities. Does this picture, however, give an answer to the question of the development of self-consciousness, of the awareness of the “I”?
Yes, if you understand self-awareness only as knowledge about yourself. Like all knowledge. Self-knowledge begins with the selection of external, superficial properties and is the result of comparison, analysis and generalization, the allocation of the essential. But individual consciousness is not only knowledge, but a system of acquired meanings, concepts. It is characterized by an internal movement that reflects the movement of the very real life of the subject, which it mediates: we have already seen that it is only in this movement that knowledge acquires its relation to the objective world and its effectiveness. The situation is no different in the case when the object of consciousness is the properties, features, actions or states of the subject itself; in this case, too, one should distinguish between self-knowledge and self-awareness.
Knowledge, ideas about oneself are accumulated already in early childhood; in unconscious sensible forms they apparently exist in the higher animals as well. Another thing is self-consciousness, awareness of one’s «I». It is the result, the product of the formation of man as a person. Representing a phenomenological transformation of the forms of the actual relations of the individual, in its immediacy it acts as their cause and subject.
The psychological problem of the «I» arises as soon as we ask ourselves the question of what reality all that we know about ourselves belongs to, and whether all that we know about ourselves belongs to this reality. How does it happen that in one I discover my “I”, and in the other I lose it (that’s what we say: to be “beside myself…”)? The discrepancy between the «I» and what the subject represents as the object of his own knowledge of himself is psychologically obvious. At the same time, psychology, proceeding from organic positions, is not able to give a scientific explanation for this discrepancy. If the problem of «I» is posed in it, then only in the form of a statement of the existence of a special instance within the personality — a little man in the heart, who at the right moment «pulls the strings.» Refusing, of course, from attributing substantiality to this special instance, psychology ends up bypassing the problem altogether, dissolving the “I” in the structure of the personality, in its interactions with the outside world. And yet it remains, revealing itself now in the form of the desire inherent in the individual to penetrate the world, in the need to «actualize oneself.»
Thus, the problem of self-consciousness of the individual, awareness of the «I» remains unresolved in psychology. But this is by no means an imaginary problem; on the contrary, it is a problem of high vital importance, crowning the psychology of the individual.
V.I. Lenin wrote about what distinguishes “just a slave” from a slave who has come to terms with his position, and from a slave who has rebelled. This is the difference not in the knowledge of one’s individual traits, but in the difference in the awareness of oneself in the system of social relations. The awareness of one’s «I» is nothing else.
We are used to thinking that a person is a center in which external influences are focused and from which the lines of his connections diverge, his interactions with the outside world, that this center, endowed with consciousness, is his “I”. This, however, is not the case at all. We have seen that the diverse activities of the subject intersect with each other and are linked into knots by objective, social relations in their nature, into which he necessarily enters. These knots, their hierarchies form that mysterious «center of the personality» which we call «I»; in other words, this center lies not in the individual, not beyond the surface of his skin, but in his being.
Thus, the analysis of activity and consciousness inevitably leads to the rejection of the egocentric, “Ptolemaic” understanding of man, traditional for empirical psychology, in favor of the “Copernican” understanding, which considers the human “I” as included in the general system of interconnections of people in society. At the same time, it is only necessary to emphasize that what is included in the system does not mean at all that it dissolves in it, but, on the contrary, that acquires and manifests the forces of its action in it.
In our psychological literature, Marx’s words are often cited that a person is not born a Fichtean philosopher, that a person looks, as if in a mirror, into another person, and only treating him as his own kind, he begins to treat himself as a person. . These words are sometimes understood only in the sense that a person forms his image in the image of another person. But there is a much deeper content expressed in these words. To see this, it is enough to restore their context.
«In some respects,» Marx begins the quoted footnote, «man resembles a commodity.» What are these relationships? Obviously, those relations are meant, which are mentioned in the text, accompanied by this note. These are the value relations of goods. They lie in the fact that the natural body of one commodity becomes a form, a mirror of the value of another commodity, i.e. such a supersensible property that it never shines through its fabric. Marx ends this footnote as follows: “At the same time, Paul as such, in all his Pavlovian corporeality, becomes for him a form of manifestation of the kind of “man” (italics mine. — A.L.).” But man as a genus, as a generic being means for Marx not the biological species Homo sapiens, but human society. In it, in its personified forms, a person sees himself as a person.
The problem of the human «I» is one of those that elude scientific and psychological analysis. Access to it is closed by many false ideas that have developed in psychology at the empirical level of personality research. At this level, a person inevitably appears as an individual complicated, and not transformed by society. those. acquiring new systemic properties in it. But it is precisely in these «supersensible» properties that he constitutes the subject matter of psychological science.