Metaperspectives of intellectual movements reveal an intimate interaction between abstract theories and social conditions, an intimacy perhaps most strongly emphasized by social theories such as those found in hermeneutics (Mueller-Vollmer, 1992), postmodern/post-structural/critical theory (Poster, 1989; Sarup, 1993), and the rhetorical tradition (Bizzell & Herzberg, 1990). And perhaps this intamcy is no more obvious than in totalitarian regimes, wuch as that of the Soviet era. In science, including psychology, this intimacy has come under increasing scrutiny (Bakhtin, 1928; Barnes & Shapin, 1979; Foulcault, 1972, 1973; Horgan, 1996).
Ours will be a more modest and exploratory effort to examine some of these issues in Russian psychology within the context of dialectical materialism in compraison to similar interactions between chaos theory in psychology and social conditions in the west. It is difficult to contrain the such a topic from more ambitious efforts, but the modest state of our own knowledge of these affairs perhaps may assist in such constraint.
Before we begin our exploration of Russian psychology, it may be worthwhile to review a few features of dialectical materialism and chaos theory in order to evaluate their relevance for psychology. Central to all these ideas are the concepts of language, meaning, interpretation, and history. And of course, the most central theme might be coisidered that of "context" (Nietzsche, 1887; Richards & Ogden, 1923, Riger, 1992).
The earliest (6th century, bce) Greek (Ionian) philophers were Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Milesia, and their interest centered on physics and cosmology. Anaxamander, for example, claimed that the ultimate stuff of the universe, Aperion, was infinite, in order to account for multiplicity of form and change in nature.
From metaphsical monism came the need to explain change, as we just noticed with Anaximander
Xenophanes, the theological Eleatic, "introduced two fundamental problems: the problem of being and becoming, and that of rest and motion." (Sahakian, 1968). The first dealt with the issue of whether the universe was static or changing, and the second with how natural forces operate. He did postulate a universal "Being who contains within himself the Arche [origin] of all things" (Sahakian, 1968).
Heraclitus of Ephesus , "perhaps the greatest and boldest thinker among the pre-Socratics" (Popper, 1968) proposed the concepts of flux, strife, and Logos. Flux is the concept that everything is undergoing constant change (the becoming of Xenophanes). The everchanging river became an example maintained by history and again made prominant by William James (1890). Strife is a process of change whereby everything gives rise to its opposite. There is then a union of opposites, a new whole created by opposing forces, as in the archer's bow. Arche is motion as originator of everything. The seeds of dialectics can be seen here: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. "There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic" (Hegel, (1812/1929). Logos is the orderly principles that govern change, of action and reaction, and Logos is reason, our ability to understand and behave reasonably. Understanding Logos required transcending appearances. (See Sahakian, 1968; Sabelli, 1989; or your favorite shopping place for the pre-Socratics.)
Parmenides, also of the Eleatic school, the opposite to Heraclitus, was the prime proponent of the view of the universe as a static and permanent. Zeno, a dialectician in style though not necessarily in philosophy, went even further in denying motion. He was ingenious in showing motion as an appearance rather than a reality. His use of paradox and infinity raised issues of space, time, and motion which are fundamental to concepts of change.
Thales, and Pythagoras of Samos were in good geographic position to benefit from Egyptian geometry and Babylonian celestial mathematics (and possibly Indian mathematics), which they accelerated greatly. Mathematical concepts were important to Egyptian and Babylonian religion and predictions of seasonal events (e.g., the flooding of the Nile tied to the appearance of Sirius at dawn). Babylonian mystical concepts employed a mathematical-linguistic cabala. Thales predicted an eclipse, measured the distances of ships at sea and the heights of pyramids, and laid the foundations of deductive geometry, but his interest in mathematics was principally practical (he was a trader and businessman), and seemed not to greatly participate in his cosmology, although one might conjecture an influence. (Boyer, 1968; Kline, 1953).
Perhaps Pythagoras and his followers did the most to ascribe mathematical properties to a rational universe, including their use in pursuing a moral basis of behavior, a hallmark of the Greek Enlightment. "All is number", proclaimed Pythagoras. Pythagoreans noticed that diverse pheonoma enjoy the same mathematical properties and believed that the universe obeyed perfect mathermatical laws, embodied in "the harmony of the spheres". As Philolaus put it, "Were it not for number and its nature, nothing that exists would be clear to anybody anybody either in itself or in its relation to other things. . . You can observe the power of number exercising itself not only in the affairs of demons and gods but in all the acts and the thoughts of men in all handicrafts and music." Pythagoras carried the Babylonian mathematical cabalastic numerologies to an extreme in his mysitcal cult.
Ralph Abraham (1994) places Pythagoras in a Dionysian/Orphic-Chaos-Erodynamic lineage, in his historical study of the struggle between concepts of chaos and order. Sahakian (1968), observes that Philolaus tried to reconcile Heralitan becoming with Parmenides' permanance. The last of the pre-Scratics gave way to Plato's Ideals which carried mathemtical cosmological foundations to a Parmenedean conclusion that there were permanent, perfect, and eternal ideals founded on mathematical properties. The Pythagoreans had a list of ten (a sacred number for them) oppositions of thesis and antithesis.
Dynamical systems theory, its subdomains of chaos theory and bifurcation theory (catastrophe theory), its precursors of general systems theory, cybernetics, systems dynamics, and neural net theory, and its close relatives of fractal and complexity are founded on a few basic ideas (Abraham, 1992; Abraham, 1995a,b,c; Abraham, Abraham, & Shaw, 1990). All these dynamical theories depend on systems of variables interacting over time, the patterns of which are called vectorfields, portraits, and attractors depending on whether the information is an instantaneous vectorfield or its integration over time.
The incorporation of nonlinearity in any model's equations of change (differential and difference equations) empower the description of both bifurcation (abrubt rather than gradual changes in the pattern of an attractor) and chaos, a pattern of complexity in which competing forces of convergence and divergence keep trajectories in the region of the attractor but keep the pattern sufficiently complex that it does not repeatedly visit the same state as long as conditions of stationarity hold. The most important features of a chaotic attractor are its invariant properties, its insensitivity to initial conditions. Presumably the nonlinearities of the models capture the nature of nonlinearities in nature.
One of the greatest powers of dynamics is to parsimoniously explain non-stationarity, especially bifurcations. Another is its ability to describe great complexity.It thus liberates psychology from the confines of restrictive design and analysis procedures, although this liberation is not yet fully appreciated.
A derivative idea is one that considers the attractor as an emergent phenomena. For example states of consciousness and quantum states may be identifiable and nameable and their nature reasonably clearly understood as attractors. The nature of these attractors may be understood even when the component hypothetical variables specified in the equations that describe the attractor remain elusive. We might even speculate in many instances that seems to be no such variables, no particulate components which exist for that attractor. We might identify a probable dimensionality of its state space, but its axes, in essence forces, do not exist as things with a material representation. The analogy to quantum concepts is not trivial. These notions become especially relevant when considering phylogenetic and ontogenetic psychology, as say, for Vygotsky's constructive principles, which brings in also the importance of bifurcation sequences under self-organizational developmental control.
One type of more complex dynamical modelling is to couple a number of subsystems into a network. Such networks are a heuristic aid to modelling the complexity of higher dimensional systems such as psychological and social systems. The modelling of coupling between subsystems is usually configured as the control parameters of some subsystems being a function of the states of other subsytems. Feedback in these systems, that is the indirect influence of a subsystem indirectly back on its own control parameters is a critical feature. Such self- organizational systems can thus effect not only small adjustments in their own behavior, but major ones via bifurcation. The significance of self-organization cannot be overstated:
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of the dynamical systems' metamodelling strategy in psychology. (Abraham, Abraham, & Shaw, 1990, p. III-118) |
Following the October Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war (1918-1920), Soviet psychologists sought to define a scientific psychology independent of physiology and reflecting Marxist-Leninist principles. At first they tried to construct such a psychology out of bits and pieces of behavioral, functional, psychoanalytic and Gestalt approaches; by the end of the 1920s, however, most agreed that Soviet psychology should be derived directly from Marxist- Leninist propositions rather than selected aspects of bourgeois psychology. Eclecticism was eschewed. (See: Koltsova, Oleinik, Gilgen & Gilgen, 1996.)
Neither Marx nor Lenin had much to say about psychology as a field of study; however, both recognized the complexity of human psychological functioning and actions and the reality of consciousness. Therefore, if psychology was to be a credible field of study in the Soviet Union, psychologists had to reject approaches which tried to simplify human nature either by reducing the psychological to the physiological, or by expunging consciousness from study, or by ignoring or experimentally and statistically neutralizing the role of work, socio-economic class, the dynamics of society and the social-cultural-historical contexts in general relative to the development of consciousness and personality. The challenge to create a truly Marxist-Leninist psychology based on dialectical materialism at a time when there were so many competing schools was referred to by prominent Soviet psychologists including, Lev Vygotsky and Sergie Rubinstein, as "the crisis in psychology." (Vygotsky, 1926).
The submission of Russian psychology to dialectical materialism has intellectual roots both in a Hegelian processlike orientation and in the hegemonical insistance of the Marxist-Leninist totalitarian social ideology. It is intriguing, but not surprising, to find in the writings of Soviet psychologists, even early during the Soviet period, a recognition of the non-linearfeatures including abrupt transformations and self-organizing processes intrinsic to complex systems modelled by dynamical systems theory. Vygotsky himself suggested a program for the unification of a general psychology, and his approach was largely Hegelian in nature. For additional examples, one can consult K. N. Kornilov.
To place things in context let us say a few words about Kornilov. He was the founder of reactology which examined the spatial and temporal characteristics of actions and mental operations which he considered prototypical of those involved invarious types of work. His approach combined behavioral and chronometric analyses.
Reactology along with Vladimir Bekhterev's reflexology were soon viewed as not adequately representing Marxist-Leninist psychology and thus rejected. The former was considered too behavioral and the latter too reductionistic. Pavlov's model of brain functioning was elevated to the position of truth in 1950, being viewed as compatible with dialectical materialism by those in charge of ideology during the Stalinist period (late 1920s to 1953). While Kornilov's reactology was rejected by the 1930s, his discussion of the general implications for Soviet psychology of Marxist-Leninist principles is reasonable in retrospect.
The most comprehensive analysis of the relevance of Marxist-Leninist principles for Soviet psychology, emphasizing the unity of consciousness and activity, was presented by Sergie Rubinstein during the 1940s. During the intensely chauvinistic and nationalistic period following World War II, Rubinstein who was Jewish, was highly criticized and Alexander Leontiev (much influenced by Vygotsky) became the major theoretical spokesman for psychology in the USSR during the 1950s and 1960s.