The problem of methodological foundations of psychology in Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit

The article deals with the problem of Hegel's place in the history of psychology based on the analysis of Chapter V of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The author tries to demonstrate that the identification of Hegel's psychological conception with the doctrine of the Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is wrong, because it is in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the philosopher reveals the prerequisites for the formation of the concept of soul in the "experience of consciousness" and carries out a thorough criticism of contemporary psychology. According to Hegel, the emergence of the concept of soul is associated with the attempt of "observing reason" to reveal the "inner" of the organic and to attribute to it a stable existence by analogy with objects of inanimate nature. However, actual experience disproves these attempts. The concept of soul arises in it, but immediately opens the inaccessibility of "soul" for "observing reason". Thus, Hegel reveals the lack of reality in the central concept of philosophical psychology. The author claims that this way Hegel makes a decisive step from the former metaphysical theory about soul to the creation of the new model of psychology. The result of the "experience of consciousness" is the awareness of the inevitability of abandoning the dead-end approaches of the former psychology and the transition to the analysis of an individual's activity in the social context as a productive method of cognition of mental phenomena. In the following sections of Chapter V, Hegel demonstrates that the nature of individuality is revealed in activity, and not in some supposedly inherent invariable attributes, and this activity can be carried out only in a social context. Hegel's demonstration of the impossibility of knowing individuality outside of its activities prompts to recognise his approach to those searches that were conducted in the Russian psychology of the 20th century (Lev Vygotsky and his followers). The author argues the idea that Hegel' s views can be considered as the first attempt to develop a method of scientific psychology.

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