Peculiarities of philosophical and pedagogical views of H. Chelpanov in context of experimental pedagogy discourse

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Peculiarities of philosophical and pedagogical views of H. Chelpanov in context of experimental pedagogy discourse

Herasymenko A.S.,

graduate student of Foreign Languages Department at National University of Water Management and Natural Resources

The article reveals the peculiarities of the pedagogical views of the Ukrainian professional academic philosophy representative at the end of the 19^th - the beginning of the 20^th century H. Chelpanov. Based on the researches of H. Chelpanov's works, the reconsideration of the role of experimental pedagogy through the prism of the explication of the phenomenon of the soul as an organic integrity of the human spiritual life and the impossibility of its experimental confirmation was carried out.

It is shown that the national scientist opposes the excessive enthusiasm of experimental psychology and the direct application of the methods of experimental psychology in pedagogical practice.

It is substantiated that the ideas of H. Chelpanov had a significant influence on the spiritual and moral orientations of the academic philosophical thought formation in Ukraine and proved to be concordant with the methodological reorientation of the world humanitarianism in the twentieth century, especially in the context of the thematic analysis of psychological and anthropological issues that contributed to the formation of professional pedagogy, philosophy and psychology.

Key words: person, personality, anthropology, experimental pedagogy, soul, spirituality, psychics, philosophy, psychology

Problem statement and relevance of research

chelpanov pedagogy academic philosophy

Anthropological reorientation of humanitarian knowledge with increased emphasis on the human phenomenon sets the task of rethinking many sciences that deal with the problems of human existence, particularly pedagogy. Such transformational shifts in the anthropological reorientation of humanitarian knowledge are carried out in order to banish the views on a man as the object of various manipulations, resulting in bestowing personality-focused characteristics on the teaching and educational activities through the prism of returning to the pedagogical tradition of philosophical and anthropological orientation.

It must be noted that one of the major ways for developing an educational system lies in the problem of comprehension and analysis of theoretical and practical achievements of the past, where historical, scientific, pedagogical and philosophical knowledge acts as part of the self-knowledge of humankind and personality in particular. In connection with this, considerable research interest nowadays is caused by pedagogical searches of Ukrainian professional academic philosophy representatives in the second half of the nineteenth - early twentieth centuries. In this sphere, the figure of an extremely talented scholar, teacher, philosopher, and psychologist H. Chelpanov deserves special attention. H. Chelpanov's appeal to the problems of the soul and the spirituality, along with his critical rethinking of the direct application of the experimental psychology methods in pedagogical practice are becoming of utmost relevance today. And therefore, the foundation are made for the formation of "universal living philosophy", which, according to A. Zaluzhna “realizes an attempt to formulate the goals of spiritual creativity of man, tries to counteract threatening trends in the depreciation of meaning of human existence, producing the intellectual prerequisites for the search for new ideological landmarks” [2, p.46]. For the main problem of the time is, first of all, the problem of spiritual and moral order and the role of higher value intentions in the formation of positive ideological orientations. This is exactly what makes it possible to deepen the degree of humanity, mutual understanding and ethical responsibility in the problematic field of pluralistic segmentation of modern society, and to largely reinforce the role of educational activities in the transformational processes of socio-cultural reality.

Analysis of recent research and publications

Significant contribution to the study of H. Chelpanov's heritage is being made by such philosophers, psychologists, and educators as G.Aliaiev, B. Bratus, V. Davydov, V. Zinchenko, N. Mozgova, T. Sukhodub, etc., focusing on the scholar's appeal to the problems of soul and spirituality.

Out of modern dissertational researches devoted to the explication of the scientific activity of H. Chelpanov, one should emphasize the historical-psychological studies of S. Bogdanchykov (psychology in the problematic field of Marxist theories) and historical-philosophical studies of I. Gladkov(epistemological views in the context of the relationship between philosophy and psychology).

Pedagogical aspects of the H. Chelpanov's scientific heritage are considered from the point of view of "pedagogy of the future", oriented on the formation of the perfect personality, which we encounter in the speeches of the participants of the International Chelpanov Psychological and Pedagogical Readings (Kyiv, 2017) I. Bekh, T. Galtseva, V. Sergeeva , T. Zel- inska and others.

Purpose and tasks

In the proposed article we set out the task to reveal the peculiarities of the philosophical and anthropological discourse of the national pedagogy of the end of the XIXth - beginning of the XXth century through the prism of H. Chelpanov's experimental pedagogy. Hence, on the basis of the works of the Ukrainian scholar, we will try to explain the soul as an organic integrity of the human spiritual life in the unity of thought, sensory and volitional acts, which makes it impossible to fully apply the methods of experimental psychology in the pedagogical practice. At the same time, we will analyse the formation peculiarity of the essential understanding of the soul phenomenon and the particularities of the child's psychological formation in the problematic field of critical rethinking of materialist tendencies in philosophy, psychology and pedagogy.

Presenting main material

It is worth mentioning that in the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries, the main directions of the pedagogical science development were focused on the discovering human nature and the question of identifying the laws of influencing a person for the sake of solving educational and upbringing problems. For instance, in order to test the effectiveness of the school learning process and to study the nature of a child, teachers and psychologists began to actively use the experimental method, which led to the emergence of “experimental pedagogy”. Accordingly, at the beginning of the XX century, especially after the organization of the experimental pedagogical psychology laboratory by A. Nechaiev in St. Petersburg, extremely high expectations began to be put on experimental psychology. Concurrently, attempts are made to transfer pedagogy to the status of a science by using statistical data obtained as a result of conducted experiments and special observations on the children's development. There emerges a tendency to recognize experimental psychology as being scientific, spreading similar ideas on the pedagogical sphere of knowledge as well.

It was H. Chelpanov and his supporters who opposed the excessive enthusiasm of experimental psychology, especially in regard with the direct application of the experimental psychology methods in pedagogical practice. The scientist points out the scientific failure of such an approach as well as its practical danger. Accordingly, it is fairly stated in the work “Psychology and School”: “The apparent ease of such an important practical point of view as the question of diagnosing a person will attract a lot of inexperienced experimenters who will carry out their testing on children. These experimenters can fanatically believe in the immutable truthfulness of received numbers and will also fanatically try to implement the findings based on erroneously interpreted data. The question of upbringing will be introduced with an element that is highly questionable. I will not doubt for one moment in the question of what will be worse for children: the complete ignorance of teachers in the realm of psychology or the inadequate use of scientific methods” [8, p.125].

It should be emphasized that the creative search of the thinker is formed in the atmosphere of confrontation between the two opposing worldviews and scientific positions of that time: the revolutionary ideas that, in the context of the views of K. Marx and F. Engels, state the principles of historical and philosophical materialism and the religious-philosophical movement in the context of the Kyiv and Moscow Religious-Philosophical Societies.

Being a follower of the transcendental foundations of I. Kant's critical philosophy, H. Chelpanov negatively perceived materialist tendencies in philosophical discourse, considering them as being directed on people who are philosophically unprepared and mediocre. The scientist especially criticised the ideas about the matter giving rise to human consciousness and reducing the natural diversity of psychic phenomena to the stratum of conditioned reflexes, as experimental pedagogy stated it. In particular, H. Chelpanov notes: “Out of the two distinct classes of phenomena: material and psychic, psychic presents more obvious reality. What we call material, ... is our interpretation. Our beliefs, thoughts, feelings and desires are given directly to us, we perceive them as they are, while the so-called material things can only be apprehended by the means of interpretations” [9, p. 126]. According to the scholar, consciousness can be described as neither the motion of matter, nor its property, nor even the function of the brain. He justifies the fundamental difference between physical and mental, divergent both in nature and in the methods of cognition. H. Chelpanov defends the idea that there is the lack of scientific argumentation of thinking being the property of the brain, and therefore the presentation of the material and the spiritual as being identical is incorrect, since physical phenomena cannot generate mental ones. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that his name was referred to negatively within the framework of the Diamat's thinking of the Soviet state and that he was considered the opponent of materialism and Marxism.

However, H. Chelpanov was by no means an opponent of experimental psychology. On the contrary, being well acquainted with the methods of foreign scientists' research, he, as a teacher, himself introduced the national scholars with the experimental results obtained in the institutes of Germany. By this we mean the study of the mental processes conducted by the Wьrzburg School, which began the experimental research in the field of higher mental functions - thought and will. According to H. Chelpanov, it is precisely this direction where experimental psychology can find itself quite a strong reinforcement. “It is necessary to distinguish between individual psychological research,” asserts the scientist, “... and psychology that brings the bits of this fragmentary knowledge to the system... This is exactly theoretical, general or philosophical psychology. It explores the basic laws of the spirit” [8 p.81].

The scientist convincingly argues that the study of psychology cannot be reduced only to a simple description and classification of psychic phenomena, but requires epistemological analysis of the basic concepts of mental processes and operation of the philosophical categories of "substance", "causes", "interaction", "differences", because “even pure experience requires a philosophical reflection, this is the reason it is called pure” [7, p.78]. That is, in order to go beyond the direct experience, it is necessary to use gnoseologically- treated concepts that are the competence of philosophy. Referring to philosophy as the study of the spirit and reducing its main concern to determining the role of the spirit in world development, H. Chelpanov rightly observes that if “physics, chemistry, and mechanics are necessary for studying the basic properties of matter, psychology likewise contributes to clarification of the basic properties of the spirit” [7, p.79].

In fact, H. Chelpanov takes extreme interest in the problem of personality, which he considers in the context of the ratio between mental and physical in his work "Soul and Brain". The scholar believes that the efforts of the will allow the person to realize the essence of their inner world and to subjugate the body to their inner “Self'. And it is this representation of the integral "Self" as a combination of one's inner world and body that, according to H. Chelpanov, constitutes the notion of personality [6]. The philosopher shows that personality cannot be regarded as a simple combination of individual phenomena and states of the psyche, because they are brought about by the existence of the mental life integrity, which is the basis of the individual.

In the plane of interaction between metaphysics and epistemology with psychology, H. Chelpanov substantiated the scientific failure of “psychology without soul” and “psychology without the hypothesis of the soul” [7, p.73], postulating the need for an active principle. After all, a person who reflects on thoughts, feelings, and desires imagines something that “thinks”, “feels”, “has wishes”, which in the philosophical tradition is called the subject, “Self', “the soul”. In this context, the soul is conceived as an environment in which psychic phenomena take place and is interpreted by H. Chelpanov as “a certain unity in which there are ideas, that contains ideas, a unity that combines and binds” [7, p.76]. The scholar believes that the soul itself is the bearer of mental phenomena, which, in their turn, appear to be the manifestation of the soul, and therefore psychology should engage in research on the soul's nature and properties.

It is on the basis of the correlation between material and spiritual in a person that the integral principle of the unity of the soul and personal identity is substantiated. The scientist states that “personality cannot be regarded as a simple combination of individual phenomena and states of the psyche” (A. Zaluzhna), because they “are brought about by the existence of the mental life integrity, which is the basis of the individual” [3, p.67]. Along with it, H. Chelpanov explains the principle of the identity of the individual, which should not be regarded in its absolute sense. At different points in life, there are different mental processes, and emotional states are as well fluid and variable. The identity of the personal “Self' lies in in the plane of continuity of various representations, spiritual states that “change each other and are different for different moments of life”; however, “thanks to this continuity we can establish the identity of our Self'. There must be something to hold on this continuity, keep it within itself [6, p.307]. It is our "Self¹ that is constant in the transience of mental phenomena and with all the diversity and variability of mental life remains identical to itself. The fundamental manifestation of the outlined principle lies in a sense of responsibility for person's actions committed during their lifetime.

Conclusions

Overall, everything aforementioned proves the existence of a demand for philosophic-pedagogical searches by H. Chelpanov in today's society. The scientific and organizational activities of this scholar firmly determined the peculiarities of the pedagogical science formation in the context of its close relationship with the philosophical doctrine; it also made a significant contribution to the genesis of experimental pedagogy, outlining problem of its absolutization, and largely predetermined the development of contemporary humanitarianism. H. Chelpanov's scientific position regarding experimental pedagogy's contradictory nature, its inaccuracies and ineffectiveness in the situation of ignoring the phenomenon of the soul that goes beyond the experimental confirmation remains extremely important even today. However, the ideas of H. Chelpanov had a significant impact on the spiritual and moral guidance for the formation of Ukrainian academic philosophical thought and proved to be concordant with the methodological reorientation of the world humanitarianism in the twentieth century, especially in the context of the thematic analysis of ontological, psychological and anthropological issues that contributed to the formation of professional pedagogy, philosophy and psychology. Nevertheless, H. Chelpanov's major concern for the anthropological foundations of pedagogical knowledge and the peculiarities of its relationship with philosophical and psychological approaches requires further scientific research.

References

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