Abstract
In this article I analyse the correlation between the direct and the mediated in activity, consciousness and personality. Cultural-historical psychology, attitude theory and activity theory were solving the tasks of overcoming the ‘postulate of directness’, which led to the ‘postulate of mediation’. None of these postulates shows in its entirety the path of human psychological development and the work of human consciousness. The direct and the mediated are examined in this article as equally necessary conditions for the development of the human psyche. A lot of attention is paid to the nature of the initial, primary spontaneity of a child as an indispensable condition for mastering culture. The direct is the necessary condition for the development of culture, and the mediated is the mechanism of this development.
Psychology did not reach the idea of the mediated structure of the psyche straightaway, although this idea was articulated by philosophy hundreds of years ago. The opposition (though is it an opposition?) of the direct and the mediated became most evident in relation to characteristics of thought and memory. According to Plato, the intellect [nus] is what distinguishes the human soul from the animal. Nus is a creative principle that is super-individual by nature, and joins the human soul to the divine world. The being itself is an idea, a shape, an image, an aspect, which a person can directly perceive, imagine and comprehend. Though, for this intellectual perception, different from the sensual one, to happen, there has to occur a mysterious turn of the soul’s eyes. Along with this intellect, Aristotle conceded the existence of a passive, transient, mortal intellect. Later the rank of intellect was constantly reduced, its functions were operationalized, became more worldly, not to say utilitarian. It came down to a general and specific adaptation ability, to solving practical tasks, which is reflected by numerous existing definitions of intellect. Finally it led to an isolation of two realities: the divine, inherent, direct intellect became the realm of intuition, and the worldly, acquired, mediated intellect preserved its status as intellect. It cannot be said that both realms coexist peacefully. Some (for example, A. Bergson) started a struggle with intellect in favor of intuition, others, on the contrary, struggled with intuition in favor of intellect. The latter appeared most clearly in the appeal of D. N. Uznadze to overcome the postulate of directness (meaning the acceptance of a direct and immediate effect of external conditions – stimuli – on an individual and his or her consciousness).
In the investigations of Uznadze the attitude serves as the mediating link of behaviour, and more than just a link, an explanatory principle of the psyche in general (Uznadze, 1997). He conceded, though, not only the fixed attitudes (created in experience), but also the non-fixed ones, as a certain pure readiness to perceive the different and indefinite. Apart from searching for the links, which mediated behaviour and thought, it began to arise as another way of fighting the directness – belittling it. This was vividly expressed in the studies of memory, where there appeared a stable tradition of identification of the direct in general and direct memory in particular with the primitive, elemental, mechanical (Vygotsky, 1982–4, see 1983: 251–4); with the inferior, biological, situational, though sometimes outstanding imprinting (Leontiev, 1959: 328–9); with the natural that is defined by physiological laws (P. I. Zinchenko, 1961: 437); with the lower, elementary, that needs repetition (Smirnov, 1987: II, 8); and with the involuntary imprinting (Rubinstein, 1989: II, 342).
P. I. Zinchenko and A. A. Smirnov retrieved the involuntary memory from this circle of assimilation, armed it with means, and brought it into the circle of culture and activity. And the direct memory stayed as primitive, inferior, natural, physiological, biological, etc., with which, according to L. S. Vygotsky, the artificial modes of memorizing are somehow combined (?!). The fate of the direct in the study of attention is similar. Involuntary attention was also substituted for it. The latter first became voluntary, and then came back to being the ‘secondary post-voluntary attention’ (T. Ribot, N. F. Dobrynin). The same goes for the involuntary memory, which finally becomes the post-voluntary, meaning the one that found and gathered the intellect and does not need a volitional effort any longer. A thought is held (if held?) by its own, and not foreign, tension and effort. A. N. Leontiev, who proposed as the explanatory principle of all the psyche the notion of ‘activity’, agreed with Uznadze and gave his own arguments towards the necessity of overcoming the postulate of directness (Leontiev, 1983: II, 137). Both authors, as though implicitly, formulated a new postulate: the postulate of mediation. An argument in favor of the idea (principle, postulate) of mediation is that it forms the basis of the cultural-historical psychology of Vygotsky. Probably only A. V. Zaporozhets was trying to break out of the circle of mediation towards directness and spontaneity as the conditions for a child’s development.
The struggle against the ‘postulate of directness’ received unexpected help from information theory, cybernetics and computer science. The latter keeps trying to formalize natural language and construct artificial intelligence (projects on creating a new human are being proposed with the same tiresome persistence). In addition to that, the naturalness (normality) of language, intellect and human being are perceived not as a source of possible heuristics, but as an unfortunate nuisance and an obstacle for such projects.
The goal of this article is to call into question the truth of both postulates and to look at directness and mediation as equally indispensable levels of development and functioning of the psyche and consciousness.
Let us try to imagine that directness is not a rudiment, but the most important quality of the human psyche, which coincides only partly with involuntariness. The direct is opposed to the mediated and not to the voluntary. Another matter is that the direct and the involuntary may have similar trajectories of development and similar fates. In what follows I will compare directness not with intellect and memory, but with experience in the most general sense. To reach a positive evaluation of directness I will start by characterizing the mediated, its indubitable benefits and flaws.
When we deal with our own experience it is hard to say where and whom we got it from, and even harder to distinguish whether we acquired it involuntarily or learnt it by heart. Albert Einstein once made a curious statement (at least it is attributed to him): ‘Education is what is left when we forget what we learnt at school.’ Every person has vivid experience, vivid knowledge and vivid memory. Of course we can talk about the measure or degree of depth, volume and quality of knowledge and experience, possessed by one person or another. But it is much harder to talk about their sources.
I will say in advance that not knowing the sources of experience, as well as not knowing your own self-concept, is a good thing. Let us believe the poet, who left school in his 7th year and neglected higher education: You are ruined by your own conceptual and analytical ways, for example, when by the means of language you dissect your experience and thus deprive the consciousness of all the benefits of intuition. For with all its beauty, a fine concept signifies narrowing of meaning, cutting off any fringe. While the fringe is the most important phenomenon, because it can interweave. (Brodsky, 2001: 96)
Ignorance of the sources of the experience we possess is not an impediment. It, as well as our memory, does not have clear limits, they are boundless due to their dimension. We owe that to cultural mediation. The main spirit of the cultural-historical psychology resides in the notion of ‘mediation’. While for culture (and philosophy) itself the idea and practice of mediation is not news (consider the historical reconstruction of this phenomenon: Cole, 1996; Hoziev, 2000). One of the most ancient psycho-technical practices is mnemonics, well known at least since antiquity. Its goals and means can be easily formulated within cultural-historical psychology. Mnemonics is an elaboration of various modes that include the external means and internal ways of memorization. Mastering these modes and their use, according to Vygotsky and A. N. Leontiev, transforms memory from a natural psychic function into a culturally mediated one. The internal ways do not in the least emerge due to the work of mutually mediating images, actions and words. The internal forms of the latter are as an interweaving fringe, similar to the one described by I. Brodsky. Learning by heart is also a cultural means (although its usefulness is often called into question). That is why the remarkable investigations carried out by H. Ebbinghaus should not mislead us. What was actually investigated was not the pure mneme, not the natural, but a quite mediated memory; in Ebbinghaus’s experiments it is mediated by repetition and other spontaneously employed cultural ways of memorizing, which were meticulously registered by the investigator (Ebbinghaus).
The highest appraisal of mediation was given by G. W. F. Hegel, who called it the soul of dialectics. ‘Pure’ mental functions which are isolated and not mutually mediated (and only encountered in psychological projects and laboratories) are mechanical and have no perspective for development. They, in Hegel’s words, stay a combination, a mixture, a heap. This also fully relates to a mutually unmediated knowledge: ‘Mechanical way of conception, mechanical memory, mechanical course of action signify, that in what the spirit is perceiving or doing his inherent penetration and presence are missing’ (Hegel, 1970–1: III, 159). The ‘dead’ mechanism is a process of interaction between objects, ‘which directly presented themselves as independent, but in fact are dependent and their center is outside of them’ (ibid.: 157). These words of the philosopher can be translated into psychological language as the difference between the stimulus-reactive and active behavior. In the first case we observe reaction, and in the second – action (free action). The first is mediated by the external circumstances, the second – by the internal. (Let us put aside for now the question of whether everything internal is mediated, or there is a possibility of directness and spontaneity.) The interest of psychology in the mechanisms of internal mediation is constantly growing, but clearly more slowly than they deserve: recall E. C. Tolman’s intervening variables of targeted behavior, or the determinist principle of S. Rubinstein towards the psyche (external reasons act only through internal conditions).
Mediation in its most generalized sense means that all psychological acts (processes, functions, functional organs – new formations, personal constructs, etc.) are included in the cultural context of life and activity of an individual. The means are represented by artifacts: work tools, utensils, signs (including iconic signs), words (language), symbols, materialized meanings and values, myths, and culture as a whole. There are also personalized mediators. St Augustine called Jesus Christ the Main Mediator between God and humans. In the case of children, the mediators between them and the world (including the world of culture) are their parents and teachers. Mediation comes into its own right very early. The pre-activity of a small child, which is carried out in a context of combined activity with an adult, is already mediated in three ways: ‘By an adult (mediator, intermediary), by a sign (semiotic artifact), and by a tool (technical artifact). This “holy trinity” provides the basis for a certain “genetically initial unit of mental development”’ (V. P. Zinchenko and Mesheryakov, 2000: 80).
In a more restricted sense, mediation means that all mental acts mediate each other. Each one of them is under the influence of the others; therefore it is a nearly unsolvable problem for experimental psychology to separate one of them to some extent in its pure form. With regard to memory this means that it experiences the influence not only from the external means, such as a knot tied up ‘to memorize’, or even a computer or written notes, but also from other mental processes; for example, thought, attention, emotion, etc. Memory in its turn also acts as a means of behavior, activity and other mental processes. So, perceptual, mnemonic and intellectual acts can be both the goal and the means; this is convincingly shown in P. I. Zinchenko’s studies of memory (P. I. Zinchenko, 1961). In the first case, they appear as mediated, and in the second, as mediators. The biggest difficulty in investigation is the fact that these two forms of mediation, let us call them passive and active, are quite compatible in time. The perspective of a separate investigation is barely visible.
Let us point out another remarkable feature of mediation. According to James Wertsch, Vygotsky validated an important developmental principle, which we could call the principle of decontextualization of mediators. Decontextualization of mediators is a process during which the significance of sign means becomes more independent from the unique time-space and social context where they were initially used. Here we can also talk about the salvational role of forgetting. Not only do we not remember the majority of our experiences and knowledge, but we also can only vaguely imagine where we got them from. Moreover, we do not remember the means and sources of our knowledge. Maybe our abundant experience was accumulated and preserved not only due to memory, but thanks to a certain kind of amnesia? An individual person, as well as humanity in general, does not care too much about the archeology and genealogy of his or her existing knowledge. The deciding argument for the existence of such amnesia, and at the same time for the determinative role of involuntary memory in acquiring experience, is linked to our childhood. Although we all come from childhood, and, according to L. Tolstoy, by 5 years old we acquire 90 per cent of our knowledge (I wonder, how did he calculate it?), these are the years that are particularly inaccessible for our voluntary memory. J. Renan must have been right in stating that a human being ‘grows with the roots upwards’. Our memory is directed more towards the future than towards the past. This is the subject of investigations by J. Nutten and G. Sereda. Brodsky even said quite gloomily: the more you remember, the closer you are to death. (If it is really true, then we should have a more optimistic attitude towards sclerosis.)
Let us return to children. It is curious how with the obvious childish directness, which adults lose too often, this time in life could be called the feast of mediation, and, paradoxically, the triumph of direct memory. Here we should not be misled by language. The directness and spontaneity of behavior are obvious. Whereas I am interested in, so to say, pre-experiential directness, directness a priori, that is hard to grasp in its purity, because of the ‘feast of mediation’. The reason is that a child gets lessons in mediation from her or his very first day, and so entry into the culture begins. At the same time, as Brodsky put it: The speed of internal progress is greater than the speed of the world. Development eludes constant observation.
An infant is sensitive to culture; therefore culture starts to dominate nature imperceptibly fast, nearly straightaway. But the ‘natural directness’, if it actually exists, cannot be inferior or primitive. These qualities are more likely to be observed in an adult. As A. Belyi put it: modern savages are not the remains of primitive humans, but the degenerates of previously existing cultures. (Unfortunately, nowadays you could hear something similar from the savages towards the aristocrats and intellectuals, who are not too numerous.)
Difficulty in discovering the direct grows also because the word as a quintessence of culture from the very beginning becomes not only the most important event and fact in a baby’s life, but also a spiritual and cultural act. I analysed the penetration of the word (‘seeding logos’) into an infant’s soul and its growth on a fertile soil of movements, actions, sensations and images, the soil that is irrigated by affects, in two of my papers (V. P. Zinchenko, 2008a and 2008b). Due to the light of the Word a child’s development starts with the ‘highest C’, with formation of the spiritual, symbolic layer of consciousness, from the ‘vertex psychology’, the congeniality of an infant to the highest manifestations of the human spirit, expressed though a mother’s love for her child. Mother from the very first day (and maybe even before) gives the child soul, love, care and word. From the moment of birth not only does the process of introduction to culture start but also the child’s cultural and spiritual development. 1 An infant is not passive; he or she generates signs that are intelligible to an adult!
P. Florensky used to say that a person is not a fact, but an act. I used to feel that this is not enough, and I added, that a human is an artifact, because it is not nature that creates humans, but they themselves, and moreover they use a very poorly known material. Thereby we come to the highest evaluation of the role mediation plays in human life. Here it is likely that I should say ‘But’. Does it not seem that as a result I have raised mediation to an unreachable level, and thus denied human being not only the primitive, but also the direct mental functions? Of course, nothing is for free. It is hard to argue with the fact, that while growing up we lose a significant part of our childish directness. Those who did not have enough play in their childhood, for example, bureaucrats, lose it altogether. We also acquire cultural prohibitions and taboos; we repress our soul’s impulses, often regretting it later. There are very few who can preserve childish spontaneity for long. Florensky also used to say, that to be a genius is to preserve childhood for your whole life, and to have talent is to preserve youth. A. Akhmatova also noted about Pasternak, that he was blessed with some kind of eternal childhood. The consolation is that there is not only initial childhood directness, but also a different directness, that is, a new formation; and we owe it to a great extent to our ability to forget the sources of experience, and to our creativity.
Karl Marx, and following him some psychologists, including A. N. Leontiev, used the term ‘appropriation’ of experience, which had a somewhat questionable moral tone. The word ‘appropriation’ sounds as though there is something about it reminding us of plagiarism, but still it implies authorship, even though fictitious, which disappears in the word ‘imitation’. Authorship is more tangible in the word ‘reproduction’, especially if we weaken the ‘re-’ and put an emphasis on the ‘production’: ‘reproduction’. The phrase ‘in one’s image and likeness’ contains the same ambiguity: likeness is imitation, and image is always original and unique, it depends on the likeness less than a prototype. Osip Mandelstam was more decisive in saying: ‘I am creator of my worlds’, which implies not only the authorship, but also responsibility for the created and not created. He expressed this responsibility in a different poem: ‘All in this world is interwoven by my own hand’. This goes for the created. And for the uncreated: ‘Artist, be the avenger of the worlds uncreated, – / Give existence to the non-existent …’ And finally the consciousness of the poet, who is still a beginner: ‘And in cherishing the uncreated world, I forgot the useless “I”.’ 2 For creation it is not a self-concept that is needed, but a free I, free even from the ‘second I’:
Here the poet’s self obeys and dissolves in his creative urge, which in itself is freedom, and maybe also destiny. The best self-concept was created by A. S. Pushkin, who ‘formulated’ it after the completion of Boris Godunov: ‘What a Pushkin! What a son of a bitch!’
Obviously, creating one’s own world (or worlds) is not only a prerogative of poets and artists. A person does not care much about the origins of his or her inner world, which does not stop him or her from remembering parents or teachers with gratitude. It is important that a person perceives this world directly. Her or his world, as well as the external one, is presented and not represented to her or him. A person can share his or her experience, let somebody into his or her world, and shut others out. It is the person’s property. A good example would be a native language. I understand in my mind that it was not I who created it, but I feel it as my own intimate belonging, and I belong to it. V. Nabokov spoke about language even more definitely: ‘All I have is my style.’ Such sensations or certainty provide a basis (or could serve as an explanation) for the direct perception of language, symbols and other artifacts. And here is where a tricky question arises: were the anthropologists and psychologists too thoughtless in declaring all the mediators, including the word, artifacts? A word is not a conditional representant, said G. G. Shpet. We have not agreed with anyone that a table is a table. We just know it. Language is a house of being, a shelter, an event of being – that is how M. Heidegger characterized it.
A true work of art, in spite of the trap created by the language, is also not an artifact, but an event, co-being, an event of being. A. A. Potebnja noted, maybe somewhat naively, concerning the role of the direct in creating works of art: ‘If art is the process of objectifying the initial data of a soul’s life, then science is the process of objectifying art’ (Potebnja, 1989: 181). Much later, M. Merleau-Ponty wrote that a great artist proceeds from the primary, meaning the direct relationship to the world, which is the only possible base for an integral worldview. Art is always a ‘speaking word’. Language ceases to be a simple means for transmitting a message about the tangibly given, and becomes the body of a writer, the author himself or herself (Wertsch, 1991[1985]: 584). Accordingly, a work of art is perceived directly not only by the naïve, but also by the sophisticated connoisseurs of art. The world is presented to us even when we look at it in the light of culture, or, to be more precise, not in the light, but with ‘new eyes’ (functional organs) that we acquired by means of culture. Such eyes do not interfere with the world being presented, although they see it differently, and can even distort the perception. A. Belyi wrote that notions are glasses. They grow misted because of the living breath of reality, and in clear notions we can see nothing. We know it by our own experience that we should correct such glasses, and maybe even get rid of them. However, we can conclude, that regardless of whether cultural mediation helps or hinders the perception of the world and our activity in it, this does not annihilate its presentedness. As Mandelstam said: To take the whole world in your hands as a simple apple.
Here comes the question: could we put it this way, that mediation played its part, fulfilled its mission by arming us with culture, and now it can leave? If not leave altogether, then retreat into the shadows in order to leave us alone with the outer world and our own inner worlds and experiences? Cultural mediation creates as well a cultural directness, which is pleasant, and sometimes creates aesthetic pleasure. Of course this is true. But it is not only about hedonism. The reason is that only the direct presentedness of the world, whether it is external or internal, is open to intuition. Just as using certain tools can help interpret and explain them. Only mediation can bring the world, specifications of a task, problematic situations, etc., into a form suitable for problem-solving and decision-making. So mediation is a representation of a presented world. Its further decomposition with luck leads to creation of a new image, its new composition and new direct presentedness. I will point out once again, that only the presented, integral image of the world (internal or external) can serve as a subject and condition for an act of intelligible intuition, which represents an ‘ability’ to comprehend, which is independent from the comprehension that we ‘learn’ (Shpet, 2005: 173). Shpet reached this thought through the phenomenological analysis of consciousness. This primary comprehension belongs to the essence of consciousness itself; it is not only a generally representative function, but also a presentative one. It is exactly the presentative function that due to intuition ‘inspires objects, gives them soul, and we can really speak of a special group of objects that hold comprehension in their essence’ (ibid.: 172–3). The same motive is present in much later reflections of Heidegger upon consciousness: ‘Consciousness is a co-presentedness of the objective sphere together with the presenting person in the circle of presentation which he provides himself. All the present gets the meaning and image of its presence, namely presentedness inside the representation, from the consciousness’ (Heidegger, 1993: 60–1). Intuition in a way helps consciousness to pull the direct from piles of the mediated, which appears to be quite a complicated task.
Let us turn to the pre-experiential ability to comprehend, meaning comprehension without learning, which Shpet also wrote about. The main question is about the pre-experiential comprehension of language. How well is this question interpreted in the light of Heidegger’s words, that ‘the essence of a person rests in language’, that ‘we are doomed to speak’? Heidegger begins his article ‘On the Way to Language’, from which I took these expressions, saying that we exist primarily in language and by language: Besides, the way to language is impossible if we indeed are already at that point to which the way is to take us. But are we at that point? Are we so fully within language that we experience its nature, that we think speech as speech by grasping its idiom in listening to it? Do we in fact already live close to language even without our doing? Or is the way to language as language the longest road our thinking can follow? (Heidegger, 1993: 259)
Above we spoke about a mother’s gifts to her child. It is not enough to be worthy of the gifts, it is also necessary to have the pre-experiential ability to accept them. We should not be confused by the fact that both are unaware of its being an act of giving. Bestowal of a soul, care and word, and its acceptance, are direct acts that are basic for future development. In the context of his thoughts on the origins of the work of art, Heidegger wrote: Bestowal and grounding have in themselves the abruptness of what we call a beginning. But this suddenness of the beginning, the uniqueness of what is unique to the leap from out of this suddenness, does not exclude – rather it includes – the fact that the beginning has inconspicuously prepared itself over the longest time. As a leap, the genuine beginning is always a leaping-ahead, a leaping-ahead in which everything to come is already leapt over, even if as something veiled. Concealed within itself, the beginning contains already the end. A genuine beginning, of course, is not a beginning in the sense of being primitive. The primitive, because it lacks the bestowing, grounding leap and the leap-ahead, has no future. It cannot release anything more from itself since it contains nothing save that in which it is caught. A beginning, by contrast, always contains the undisclosed fullness of the extraordinary, and that means the strife with the ordinary. (Heidegger, 2008: 213)
In a ‘mother–child’ situation giving acts are mutual; they happen in the space Between Me and You of M. Buber and M. Bakhtin, in the inter-individual space of Vygotsky, or the space of combined action of D. B. Elkonin. The gifts of a mother are clear. But a child itself is a gift (of God), which a mother receives with gratitude. So what is this mysterious beginning that requires extremely long and imperceptible preparation, but at the same time is direct? ‘Primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘biological’ functions, for example, the ‘stagnant instincts and shortsighted reflexes’ (A. A. Ukhtomsky), are hardly suitable for this role. The easiest and therefore the most widespread train of thought (it pains me to say it) is not suitable either: placing the origins of experience, thought, word and consciousness in the brain. Without knowing about N. Chomsky, who in 1957 stated that there existed inherent syntactic structures in the brain, Vygotsky in 1932 contradicted this with the following: … the brain and its function in a naturalistic sense do not and cannot have such structures, they appear from above – from the psychological structures (2 brains, interacting through the historic-cultural environment). Within the word lies the source of new brain structures; and all possibilities of operations with words do not lie within the morphological structure of the brain. (Vygotsky, 1932, from family archive, [Series of documents: Library cards])
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… Vygotsky … changes the aspect of examination of the psycho-physical problem: instead of the old dilemma ‘body or soul’, he draws our attention to another: ‘It is extremely important: speech/thought as a psycho-physical problem’. (Symposium 4 December 1932). (Zavershneva, 2007: 75–6) Not only the fact of understanding speech, but even more so the fact of understanding within your kin, up to its most indefinite forms, as mechanical imitation, sympathy, feeling into something and other types, are in their essence only manifestations of this united ‘comprehension’, as a mind’s function that conditions any community. (Shpet, 2005: 173)
V.V. Bibikhin’s thoughts also took him in the same direction. He talks about beginnings in the plural, but does not separate them, or exchange them for independent mental functions; on the contrary, he connects them into an early, anticipating unity: I-can – I-think – I-understand, stating that such a unity is not so much a quality of humans, but their essence. A person is an open I-can to the world, and I-can is inherent in a person. The first I-can is a general source for meaning and willed decision. I-can is a material opportunity for choice, which comes before meaning and will. That is why a person is a possible being, who has an alternative: ‘Any figure of meaning is “perceived” or “understood”, and does not just capture it, in the light of its alternative, previously present as a possibility for a different behavior … Understanding is always a perception, that is an act of assumption, trust, acceptance of this possibility and exclusion of another’ (Bibikhin, 2007: 222–6). Commenting on his text the author writes: ‘Buridan’s ass. This is the natural state of a human. Because he can do anything, is open to anything. Natural’ (ibid.: 230). Bibikhin, as well as Shpet, thinks that this state of I-can, this possibility for understanding and for an alternative is inherent in a human as an ancestral being. In his ponderings, the open I-can is not separated from the accepting understanding, or understanding acceptance, understanding love. Rubinstein reached similar ideas in his last, posthumously published book. He changed the classical formula: external conditions act refracted by internal conditions. In his book Chelovek I mir [A Person and the World] we read: ‘Strictly speaking, the inner conditions act as causes (problem of self-development, self-movement, motive forces of development, origins of development being in the process itself as its inner causes), and the external causes act as conditions, circumstances’ (Rubinstein, 1973: 290). The same position is expressed by the description of love as the primary, most urgent human need (ibid.: 374). Of course even the open I-can and such love are not omnipotent: ‘Reality is the insufficiency of human desire, human guilt that in itself contains the punishment’ (Krasavin, 2007: 505).
Above I spoke of the triumph of mediation. Bibikhin has a hymn to the direct first gaze: ‘Nietzsche is mistaken: after all the right one is the first gaze, “understanding” without understanding, seeing the meaning without an evident meaning, sketching the world without its arrangement. The world forestalls, it is the first that is visible, and all that is visible is visible in it’ (Bibikhin, 2007: 192). This understanding and vision are seen not in the gnoseological light, but as a possibility and ability to contain an event of the world. The author, following Heidegger, admits that the beginnings cannot be understood in the usual way, grasped. They themselves seize us; a person merges with the beginnings (ibid.: 110–12). Here the accepting understanding merges with the fulfilling understanding, the one that is connected to activity, ability to be. Heidegger called it the understanding of being.
What Bibikhin calls the accepting understanding is Shpet’s intelligible intuition, intuition of the direct. With all its importance it is only a condition, a beginning, but not a method of cognition. Defending Hegel from reproaches for intuitionalism, Shpet writes that he is not an intuitionalist, but an intuitionalist plus a discourse. Hegel’s logic does not seek ‘prerequisites’, it is a ‘circle’. Shpet argues this point saying that ‘the identity of mediation and directness is (a) Hegel’s basis and specificum’, and ‘(b) it is the basis of his dialectics, as a method’ (Shchredina, 2004: 299–300). Shpet cites the explanation of Hegel’s understanding of the terms directness and mediation by N. Debolsky: The direct serves as the beginning of a thought, and the mediated as its result. Due to the fact that the truth is contained not in the beginning, but in the result, then the truth appears to be mediated, but on the other hand, the result serves again as a beginning of a further thought, and thus the result itself becomes direct. (Shedrina, 2004: 299) Hegel’s service to philosophy consists mainly in correctly resolving the opposition of the direct and mediated knowledge. He refutes all intuitionalism, that is both empiricism, and mysticism, philosophy of faith, revelation, inner vision, etc.; but at the same time he also disproves the praise of mind, and the desire to prove any theory discursively. In refuting them he also conciliates them by showing that one is the beginning and the other is the result. (Shedrina, 2004: 299)
We can only feel sorry for the investigators of thought: they scarcely manage to extract from the flow or run of thought an intuitive act that is pure to any extent. The only thing left is to be satisfied with anecdotal descriptions such as Archimedes’ bath, Newton’s apple, Mendeleev’s dream and others. Additional complications arise from Heidegger’s leap forward that characterizes a beginning. Such a beginning already contains the end (result), or at least its search image. This means that the understanding acceptance, or intelligible intuition, is capable (obviously, within certain limits) of mapping and controlling the following steps of discourse and mediation.
So, we found the initial direct among the ideas of Shpet and Bibikhin. And what can we say about the mechanisms of the ‘secondary’, ‘tertiary’, etc., directness? Above I spoke about the amnesia of the sources of experience. I will try to imagine it more specifically as a kind of phenomenological reduction. I am not sure if researchers of consciousness really can perform a ‘phenomenological reduction’ of their experience to any full enough extent, or reach the state of ‘pure’ consciousness, fall into a state of ‘epoché’, rid themselves of any premises regarding the investigated object; meaning to reach its presentedness purified from representations. The object is too insidious. It is necessary to reduce the examining mind in order to investigate consciousness. It is easier to reduce both minds, which is exactly what happens when the brain is taken as an object of investigation of consciousness, and some special mind neurons are looked for.
If we leave aside this extremely ridiculous option, then phenomenological reduction presupposes quite a doubtful voluntariness of controlling one’s own mind. Let us assume that it is possible. But then we encounter another difficulty. Before the reduction procedure it is necessary to already possess (know) a ‘pure’ consciousness, in order to stop at the right moment, and not also to reduce the mind; it seems the neuropsychologists and philosophers, who locate consciousness in the brain, have unintentionally done it with their own minds. Does the phenomenological reduction not remind you of ‘wild psychoanalysis’? Sigmund Freud actually compared psychoanalysis with the surgeon’s knife, which can be used not only to get rid of the unnecessary, but also to cut off the vitally useful.
What I understand here as phenomenological reduction (or amnesia), Carl Gustav Jung called ‘pure experience’, which leaves authorities behind and gives space for intuition. In his well-known lecture in 1929 ‘On the Goals of Psychoanalysis’ Jung wrote: ‘In psychotherapy it is really necessary for the doctor not to follow too strictly the goal he outlined’ (Jung, 1993: 76). W. Bion (Bion, 1970) considered as indispensable professional qualities for a psychoanalyst to be able to forget, to abstain from the desire to cure the patient or even from an understanding attitude. According to him, memory, desire and understanding interfere with the direct perception and observation of a patient, and impede psychoanalytical insight. Bion considered it necessary to train future psychoanalysts to forget, and to develop severe abstention from desire and understanding. The reason for this is that each case in psychoanalysis is unique, and cases are discussed in excessively generalized terms. Realizing the need for future psychoanalysts to study psychoanalysis, master its methods of work and thought, Bion saw it more as a misfortune than as a benefit. Almost as expressed in the words of V. Khlebnikov (1986):
I think that Bion’s ideas clearly also make sense for a psychology that is carried away by statistics. Psychologists have to remind themselves more often of the good old ‘qualitative investigations’ (consider, for example, those of K. Duncker, 1965[1926]), which they have forgotten, claiming to have created the new methodology for such research. Of course, phenomenological reduction is useful and necessary in order to examine and analyse another consciousness. It is useful both for scientific and practical goals. The topic here is not the incognizability of one’s own consciousness, or the inaccessibility of a mind for a mind. There is no doubt that consciousness had already revealed some things about itself before the ideas of Edmund Husserl on phenomenological reduction, and it seems that it also did so with their help. I see a possibility for the application of the idea of phenomenological reduction not so much as a method of investigating the mind (one’s own or another’s) itself, but as its own mechanism. Phenomenological reduction is quite a natural (and not artificial as in Husserl’s work) amnesia of the mechanics and procedures of mediation, which helped to acquire perceptive, motor, mnemonic, or intellectual experience; but only of the procedures, and not of the results. Of course reduction, or amnesia, is not a complete forgetfulness. It is partial, and most importantly, temporal, being restored through the acts of objectivation and discursion. This reduction provides a transformation of the mediated into the direct, a representation of an experience into presentation of the world, which allows us to see it in a different light, as though for the first time, and grasp its meaning. Such an outburst or appeal for meaning should be objectivated, transformed into a text, which requires the next turn of mediation and discourse.
Such dynamics between the direct and mediated, if not eliminating the opposition between nativism and empiricism, then at least eases it considerably. In the light of this dynamics, intuition and discourse are not opposed, but complementary. In particular, it means that no matter how long is the path from the beginning to the result, the latter becomes for an individual a direct, in a way a natural, beginning, a springboard of sorts for a new round in solving a problem. Shpet was right in saying that thinking is a ceaseless ‘mediation’, but it is as discrete as any living movement that has a quantum wave quality. Between the adjacent acts of mediation there is what he already called a sensory or intellectual, and not intelligible, intuition, which opens and evaluates the meaning of what has been achieved at the previous step and determines a direction for the next one. An intuitive act is possible only towards what is directly given, and the meaning that is revealed is then transformed into acts of mediation. In other words, in an intuitive act the meaning is open, and in a discursive act it is a chain of significances, where the meaning finds a new realization, which is ready to be objectivated as a new image, word, thought, act. Substantially a process of cognition (thought, understanding) could be described as an alteration of oppositely directed acts of attributing meaning to significances (verbal, objective, conceptual, etc.) and attributing significance to meanings. Not only are these acts oppositely directed, but they are also asymmetric. A dramatic argument between the already signified and the inexpressible, but sensed, meanings often happens in a gap or clearance between these acts. The inexpressible ones, in spite of their ineffability, nourish the discourse. Maybe it is in these clearances where a space appears for what Heidegger called an insight into what is: ‘an event of illumination, where the truth of being acts before the homeless being … When an insight happens, a person gets touched in his essence by a lightening of being. An insight illuminates a person’ (Heidegger, 1993: 257). An insight seems to be the highest form of creative intuition; its results are not just signified, they serve as a basis for creation.
Let us descend from the heights of philosophical revelations to the ground. A mediated (discursive) act either leads to a directly presented result or gets entangled in mediators. We can only set our hopes upon insight, or revelation. The latter was perfectly expressed by Mandelstam:
Einstein, when he left the space of his relativity theory (the sources of which were, according to him, visual images and even muscular sensations) into the abandoned garden of mathematics, admitted that when mathematicians laid hands on his theory he ceased to understand it.
A common way to look at intuition as a method, and therefore as an independent type of thought, has to do with the fact that the steps of discourse are not always given in introspection. I think through missed links, Mandelstam said. That is the source of the poverty of the introspection of thought, where ruptures of meaning are inevitable. The intermediate state of intuitive acts in retrieving meaning is emphasized by widely spread metaphors: bodies, knots, crystals, drops, quantums of meaning. Such subdivision does not contradict its integrity at any given moment. Neither does it contradict seeing the terms listed above as steps on the way to concentrations, lightenings, rainbows of meaning (V. P. Zinchenko, 2007: 11). The intermediate position of meaning between its embodiment in significance, word, image, or action makes it more felt than observed, and hardly expressible in its primary purity. The meaning that is not embodied in some perceptual or verbal form vanishes as smoke, or the morning mist, like an unrecorded dream. And the embodied meaning differs from the initial. It is well known to anyone through her or his own experience, and explains the ceaseless pursuit for meaning, as for a Firebird. It was magnificently expressed by Goethe: ‘Formation, transformation / Eternal mind’s eternal recreation’. T. S. Eliot wrote about the same: ‘For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.’ 5
In the end we end up with a paradoxical situation. Intuition is sudden (illumination, insight, satori, etc.) and is presented in introspection and consciousness only as a result, and the discourse that leads to it often relies on ‘unconscious inference’ (Helmholz), ‘non-verbal inner word’ (Mamardashvili), and reminds us of ‘the tears unseen by the world’. Therefore in analysing thought we encounter an equation of sorts, where both terms are unknown. It provokes researchers to negate either intuition or discourse. In this sense the full definition of thought given by Duncker is interesting: ‘Thought is a process, whereby the means of an insight (understanding) of a problematic situation leads to an adequate action of response (“good errors” are also adequate)’ (Duncker, 1965: 79). Duncker as well as Wolfgang Köhler emphasized the directness of insight. It seems that, due to the mysterious nature of insight, researchers prefer to see thought as a process of trial and error.
Psychology has done a lot to understand the act of mediation, that is, to understand the transformation of the direct into the mediated or, as is commonly said, the natural into the cultural. The transformation of the mediated into the ‘secondary’ direct is less studied. Being derivative from the first, the direct is equally natural (by its functioning) as it is cultural (by its content). From this point of view, for example, a new meaning can be attributed to an infamous psychological notion of ‘association’: being a natural function (in Vygotsky’s sense), it, as well as a metaphor, is quite suitable to link the beginning and the end of this long chain of mediations in a dynamics of formation of the higher mental functions (Nazarov, 2007).
Because in my description of mediation I drew on Hegel for support, particularly his statement that it is the soul of dialectics, it is important to warn the reader against a possibly erroneous interpretation. The thing is that for Hegel cognition is not reduced to dialectics. It has three sides: ‘a) abstract or rational; b) dialectical or negatively reasonable; c) speculative or positively reasonable’ (Asmus, 1984: 190). Only the dialectic unity of all three ‘things’ gives a full description of the logical. I decided to introduce this explanation in order to prevent mediation from being viewed only as the negatively reasonable, critical, destructive side of cognition, which is seen by dialectic materialism as the whole cognition (here psychoanalysis would be appropriate). Mediation is an instrument of both the negatively and the positively reasonable parts of cognition. If torn out of the whole context of cognition the dialectic or negatively reasonable side of cognition loses its rationalness and reasonableness, as happened in dialectic materialism in its Soviet version. Heidegger wrote that Marxist dialectics cast away the fundamental position of Hegel – his Christian metaphysics. So the grinders of its mill run idle: ‘The method of dialectical mediation secretly sneaks past the phenomena … Dialectics is a dictatorship of certainty, which is not to be questioned. In its nets any question dies away’ (Heidegger, 2008: 456). But not totally ‘idle’: V. Mayakovski, who experienced the power of Marxist dialectics personally, called it a firearms method. To be fair it has to be said that he studied dialectics not by Hegel and also practised it equalling a pen to a bayonet. It would have been hasty to relate Heidegger’s characteristic to all Soviet philosophy, and, using the example of Marxist dialectics, ‘sneak past’ this amazing and in a way remarkable phenomenon (Porus, 2008). There were quite a few Soviet psychologists who initiated a productive dialogue with Marxism, and other currents in western philosophy, including Heidegger.
The reader might have a legitimate question: Why did the author feel the need to discuss the problem of the relationship between the direct and the mediated? The latter is clear, it is not only the soul of dialectics, but of cultural-historical psychology, which together with the activity theory (of Leontiev) successfully overcame the ‘postulate of directness’. But could it be a Pyrrhic victory that closed off one of the fruitful ways towards the investigation of human development, activity and creativity? And culture itself is direct, sincere and modest. According to Karl Marx, it becomes second nature for a person. Probably we should be talking about it as the first, truly human nature. Why do we speak so diffidently about the natural in a person? Probably it is because we identify (intentionally or not) the natural with the biological, and the latter is understood as animal, which is actually not the meaning of this term. When Michel Foucault (with some sadness) talks about the ‘biopower’, which unfortunately thrives in human society, it does not at all mean that he brings it from the animal kingdom. It does not surprise us that using tools to mediate their behavior does not make animals into humans. Discussing two versions of human origins: ‘a human from an ape’ or ‘an ape from a human’ – we rarely consider that both of them are offensive primarily for the ape. We should not offend humans either: We should beware (as of plague and stupidity) of the theories that brag about ‘explaining’ one from another, the ‘origins’ of a rational word from a senseless yell, ‘origins’ of understanding and mind from the frightened trembling and grinning convulsion of a protoantropos. Such an ‘explanation’ is a simple closing of a curtain upon an indecent ignorance. (Shpet, 1989: 387)
I will limit myself to some examples, which serve as evidence of how it should not be a surprise for psychology to think about the generation of the direct by the mediated. First of all, I am going to mention the law of prägnanz: the urge towards a good shape, which was formulated by Köhler. Many investigations were dedicated to analysing and explaining how the acts that are successive, and unfolding in time (perceptive acts), are transformed into a single-act simultaneous recognition. Investigations of motion skills and abilities also belong here: during their development a reduction of excessive movements happens, and the final movement presents itself as a ‘kinesthetic melody’, or ‘a flight performed by the soul’. Similar things are encountered in memory investigation, which with its development needs fewer and fewer auxiliary tools, artifacts. An example here could be Leontiev’s ‘parallelogram of development’ of memory (the graphically expressed relationship between the direct and mediated memorizing) and many investigations of P. I. Zinchenko. Similar results were obtained during research by P. Y. Galperin and his collaborators on how mental actions and notions are formed. In 2012 we carried out research on the perception of meanings in text by children and elderly people. Childish directness is an instant emotional intuition; it is a predominance of emotional experiences that create meaning. And mediation and discourse do not create meanings, rather significances and notions (often dead ones). It was precisely the emotional experiences that produced the same meanings for children and elderly people. Of course this does not mean that elderly people were falling back into childhood, therefore we characterized their perception of a story as post-mediated directness. While speaking of directness and mediation we cannot pass by the parallelogram of development of memorization, created by Leontiev. He showed that the higher forms of memory are developed through using external sign-stimuli for memorization. Then the latter ‘grow inwards’. This result without doubt is for memorization. Our results could be shown not as a parallelogram, but as an hourglass. In its base and top are the emotional spheres of children and elderly people, and in the bridge the emotional sphere of students (who were the control group). Using any kind of means (internal or external) suppresses directness and liveliness of perception. Of course the number of such examples can be increased. But enough has been said.
All these examples show the same thing: achieving directness is possible only through a path of overcoming mediation. The latter is necessary to build an individual’s inner world, which is presented to him or her not as a visible world, but as a visible field (J. Gibson), which he or she can handle much more freely than the external world before him or her . Obviously the first one is virtual, but, with all its subjectivity and partiality, it is no less objective than the second. By the way, it is as dear to a person as the external world. Dealing with one’s inner world supposes certain tuning out: artists and art critics talk about separating, non-attachment from the external. Our inner world, as well as our outer, is not given as a whole, but set to us. So in order to work with it we have to generate necessary functional organs, which provide us with the integral perception of the world. An individual should learn to hearken to it, to look at it closely, submerge into it, overcome its superfluity, to be able to perceive it selectively, to concentrate attention on it, to operate it. Emotions play an important role in our work with the inner world. Zapoorozhets called them the organs of individuality, and the core of personality.
So the direct and the mediated are realities that are hard to distinguish in life, culture, activity, thought and psyche in general. In all these spheres both postulates of directness or mediation are equally inappropriate, as are the definite, if not to say odious, methodological principles of determinism, reflection, etc., of psyche, that remind us of the terrifying Soviet style of finality, expressed, for example, in the slogan: ‘Communism is inevitable’, or very recent fairy tales of stable economic development. It has been known for a long time within developmental psychology that the only thing that can be stable is degradation. Another thing is the domination of one or the other, which can actually constitute a scientific problem, as well as a life problem. But such a problem should still be seen.
I will illustrate this with an unexpected example. Unfortunately, psychologists long ago stopped noticing the awkwardness of the syncretic phrases ‘subjectivity of personality’, ‘personal subject’, ‘multi-subjectivity of personality’ and other variations on the same topic. And the obvious is evaded. The subject is a function that is generated as a result of an obligatory socialization, which it represents. Personality is a freedom that is created through individualization and overcoming of subjectivity, and that is what it personifies. The reverse side of personality’s freedom are the feelings of responsibility and guilt (Bakhtin). The subject, unlike a free personality, is underlying 7 (Heidegger). It is subject to a normative fixation. In psychology it is the subject in a laboratory, who is used for uncovering, investigating, or generating some function. Personality, according to Florensky, is a limit of self-construction; according to A. F. Losev, a miracle, myth, mystery; according to Bakhtin, personality is an object of admiration, envy, hate, of disinterested artistic representation, and not an object of investigation. It does not require extensive disclosure: it is seen through gesture, gaze, word … Mamardashvili said that personality is unified, and maybe even single, and then it is God. A religious philosopher L. P. Krasavin stated that the difference between the acts of the higher and lower personality is relative: ‘An act of the highest exists only in its individualization by the lower; an act of the lower is nothing but its individualization by an act of the highest … Even its relationship with the absolute personality, God, does not violate its freedom to any extent’ (Krasavin, 2007: 476–7).
Personality is not subject to formation, because a personality formed from the outside becomes a belonging of the one who ‘formed’ it or made it into a zombie. A personality can be destroyed; such a practice is well perfected through the history of humanity and keeps being improved (not without the help of psychologists and psychiatrists). A personality can also singlehandedly lose its face, go to pieces, or become a function.
A subject represses its directness, and personality opens it in itself and opens to it through revelations and deeds. Therefore the phrases listed above, such as a ‘subjective personality’, comprise at least a terminological contradiction, and more often a reduction of personality to a subject, function, which works as a justification for the practice of ‘forming’ and manipulating it. So, a subject is mediated, it is entangled in guidelines and standards. Personality is direct, it is intrinsic for it to ‘participate in existence’, ‘think actively’, act freely – do. I will conclude this theme by saying that the true object of investigation of a notorious or not so much ‘holy trinity’ of ‘subject – individual – personality’ is actually individuality. It is this particular area of psychology that owns the most prominent achievements, which does not require proof. Individuality has an alternative: movement towards the subject or personality. The first way is one of impoverishment, of robbing oneself until losing individuality; the other is one of enrichment of one’s individuality, such an enrichment, when individual features fade, becomes insignificant. What is left is their mysterious excess, which manifests in the harmony of inner and outer freedom and dignity. From meeting a true personality there remains a feeling: Esse homo.
Of course I am far from excluding the notion and word ‘personality’ or the word ‘subject’ from psychology’s thesaurus. We cannot argue with language. I act on the premise of the ‘presumption of guilt’: all the people I meet are personalities until they are proven to the contrary. And education should be oriented towards personality. The matter is that psychology should moderate its claims for forming and testing, and especially manipulating personality.
In the area of cognition and action the relationship between the direct and mediated is not as dramatic, although, as it is shown above, it is quite complicated. The direct vision is, of course, wonderful, but it will not take us far, it has to be objectified, substantiated (at least for oneself), and sometimes one should restrain oneself, stepping on the throat of one’s own song. Mediated knowledge is no less remarkable, but the impulses of its own development are quite limited. They grow, when the mediated knowledge becomes alive, and a learnt action – free.
I think it is still too early to sum up these thoughts regarding the relationship between the direct and the mediated. It is better to leave an open ending …