p In the previous chapters we examined certain aspects of the qualitative, special features of psychic reflection of reality stemming from the qualitative difference between living organisms’ two types of relation with their environment, designated respectively by the schemes S +* N (’ organism—nature’) and S -> M -*• N (’subject—subjectified object—object’). We limited the description of their features then to very common elements, and adopted them in an abstract form precisely as generic relations of animal or man with the environment, leaving aside many of their other aspects. We abstracted, for instance, the very important circumstance that, in addition to relations with the environment, there are also relations between the individuals that make up a community designated by the symbol S. We shall go into the point of the methodological legitimacy of this abstracting later; here we would draw attention to another aspect of the approach we have adopted to analyse direct and indirect (mediated) relations.
p We have also treated each of these types of relation abstractly, so far, in ‘pure’ form, in the sense that the_description of animals’ sensory reflection of reality was associated exclusively with the direct link between the organism and its environment, while man’s rational reflection of it was associated with the link mediated by tools. That approach allowed us to oppose the one type of relation to the other with greater clarity, and to bring out most clearly the objective bases of the qualitative difference between the pre conscious and conscious levels of reflection, and to 84 concentrate attention on the most common pattern of the transition from the first to the second. In real life, however, such ’ purity’ of relations is far from always obvious.
p Not all species of animal interact only directly with their environment; many have elements of an indirect, mediated relation to it through external objects of adaptation, or through living individuals similar to itself (or belonging to other species). When, for example, a squirrel in a dense forest hurriedly hides in its tree hollow, having heard the alarm calls of a magpie (though it itself has not seen the approaching hunter), this means that, whatever the preliminary conditions of the forming of this behaviour, the chattering magpie functions as a kind of mediator for the squirrel between it and an object of potential danger to its life.
p On the other hand, men are not simply related indirectly to their environment. True, with the development of civilisation the middle link (subjectivised object) displays a tendency to all-embracing growth, but men continue to experience a need for direct communion with nature. They do not watch the setting sun or look at the starry heavens solely through telescopes. They prefer to breathe air without resorting to a gas-mask or an oxygen mask (though, incidentally, the air pollution in some big cities has reached such an alarming scale that it is no longer safe to breathe without the mediation of a respirator).
p The mediated character of men’s relations with the natural environment, and their everyday communion with the ‘humanised’ part of it rather than virgin nature, can and do create the illusion that they possess freedom in treatment of the natural medium and can dominate it without any need to act in accordance with the objective character of natural laws. Forgetting of the real connection between freedom and necessity expressed in the famous dialectical statement that ’freedom is understanding of necessity’ can lead to catastrophic consequences in the realm of ‘man—nature’ relations. For men are a part of nature and not just her children. Children generally live longer than parents; people die, but nature is eternal. Nature can get along without people, but people never without nature.
p Nevertheless, when we make the difference between living organisms’ direct and indirect connections with their environment, and not their identity, the subject of our investigation, and take them in ‘pure’ form, it remains correct 85 that the first of these connections expresses essential features characteristic of the world of animals, and the second of the world of men, and that it is precisely the transition from direct connections to indirect ones that opens up the opportunity to pass to conscious reflection of reality.
p Exceptions to the rules associated with abstract examination of the organism’s direct and indirect relations with the environment, taken in their ‘pure’ form, cannot be interpreted in the sense that ’there are no rules without exceptions’ or that ’exceptions simply prove the rule’. When it is a matter of knowledge of objective laws, the discovery of seemingly insignificant exceptions to a scientific law often not only does not confirm the law’s truth but even leads to a crisis and disproof of a law developed earlier, and to its replacement by a new one that penetrates more deeply into the essence of the object studied. The observed deviations from the ‘pure’ schemes of living organisms’ direct and indirect relations with their environment are obviously side effects of the general pattern of development of animate matter.
p We assume that the operation of the objective laws that led to the creation of rational beings was not predestined, teleologically implying the only true line toward solution of this problem, i.e. the line that led to the origin of man. If we confine ourselves simply to the scale of our planel (and Earth is a ’speck of dust’ in the infinite world of cosmic objects), then in earthly conditions there must, seemingly, have been many directions leading to the genesis of rational beings. It is another matter that they all, except one (which led to the emergence of Homo sapiens}, proved to be ’blind alleys’ in earlier or later stages of the branching of the tree of life. Some of the dead-end directions led to the origin of such complex forms of reflection""of reality that it would have been impossible, without the singling out of an objective determinant for the rise of consciousness, to draw a distinct boundary between man’s consciousness and the psyche of animals.
p “^We shall not touch here on the early branchings of the tree of life that led to the formation of those stems that provided the basis for the evolution of plants and arthropods. We must, however note in thisc connection that reports of the discovery, ‘sensational’for their day, of a capacity in certain plants"to perceive melodies created and performed by people are no longer taken as unauthoritative fantasies in 86 scientific circles. And there are no longer any doubts that individual species of insects, especially those leading a ’ social’ way of life (for example, ants and bees), possess an extremely complicated pattern of behaviour that includes a hierarchical division of functions in the activity of a given community as a whole between the individuals constituting it, and exchange of information between separate individuals of the community, in a special language.^^1^^
p As before, we shall limit ourselves to examination simply of that stem of the tree of life that led to the formation and evolution of Chordata, and to the top of this branching where birds and mammals (including the primates and man himself) have their place, because this part comprises the species of animals most ‘akin’ morphologically to man.
p It has been discovered, moreover, that some of the side branches in the determined process of transition from the organism’s direct relation with the environment to an indirect one appear to be exceptions throwing doubt on conclusions about the decisive role of this transition as the main cause of the origin of conceptual thought, or that call for extension of the status of rational beings not only to man but also to those species that clearly demonstrate a marked capacity for an indirect, mediated relation with the environment. In order to introduce clarity into this question (without rejecting the very general, abstract thesis about the origin of consciousness formulated earlier), we must obviously take the line of concretising it further. Above all, we must examine the ‘operant’ or ‘instrumental’ behaviour of certain animals.
p In a Skinner box, in contrast to Pavlov’s classic experiments, in which conditioned signals, precedingunconditionedreflex reinforcement in time, occurred in the environment through the actions of the experimenter, quite independently of the actions of the experimental animal, the animal itself by its own actions evokes a result that leads to ‘closing’ of all the indirect links in the chain of actions that were terminated by an unconditioned-reflex reinforcement (e.g. by pressing a pedal, pulling a lever, etc.). That is all the more important because
p certain researchers consider ... conditioned motor reflexes to be a special form of behaviour, and give them a special name (operative behaviour, according to Skinner; conditioned reflexes of a second type, according to Konorsky and Miller; instrumental conditioned reflexes, according to Hilgard and 87 Marquis), suggesting that they differ in principle in their physioTogicarmechanism from classical Pavlovian conditioned reflex-
p es.^^2^^
Let us take as an example the chain of operative behaviour in laboratory conditions of an animal experiencing hunger^^3^^:
p This chain is one of intermediate results and actions leading from a feeling of an unsatisfied need for food to its satisfaction.^^4^^ In it the lever plays a role similar to that of the mediator-instrument, since it is only possible to attain the end result (food) by bringing an object (the lever) into play that is external in relation to the organism. The similarity, however, ends at that, and there is a fundamental difference between a tool and an external object (in this case a lever).
p The lever was not invented by the animal; it is not even natural object that might be found ready-made in nature as an external object of adaptation; it has been deliberately ’rigged up’ by man. The external object functions here as an obstacle to attainment of the end result, which is eliminated by the actions of the animal itself (pulling of a lever, stepping on a pedal, etc.). Many species exhibit a faculty for overcoming obstacles of this kind. A fox, for example, hunting for mice in winter, hearing a rustling under the snow, digs it away with quick movements of its paws in search of its prey. Here an obstacle is also eliminated by its actions, viz., the obstacle between it and the mouse (the layer of snow).
p The radical difference between such.. a ‘mediator’ and the most primitive instrument of pre-labour is, other things apart, that the instrument is not an obstacle to attainment of the end result but on the contrary a means of overcoming an obstacle and, moreover, a means that becomes an artificial prolongation of the living organism’s bodily organs. There are therefore hardly grounds for classing such operant conditioning as a principally different type of behaviour going beyond the context of classical conditioned reflexes, 88 although there is undoubtedly a much more complex mechanism here, in this case of the forming of the conditioned reflexes than in classical ones. It is also quite clear that there is a direct interaction of the animal and the environment here, because the mediator-objects that prevent attainment of the final result, and therefore call for elimination, are an integral part of the environment. The scheme S -*• M -*- N (in our notation) does not exist here.
p The transition from the organism’s direct interaction with the environment to an indirect, mediated one, which led to the origin of the rational being, could seemingly have only happened when there were several conditions present in which the law of the struggle for existence operated. That law is the cause of the formation through natural selection of a host of animal species possessing various potentialities for further development of their bodily organisation, and at the same time for complication of the forms of reflecting the environment necessary for survival in a changing situation.
p When the transition to use of instruments of pre-labour was completed, a most important condition for transference of man’s ancestors’ own actions to their ‘self-motion’ as to ’their other’ representations of movement and changes in space and time as objective entities existing independently of them must have been formed in their psyches.
p The rise of a guess in the brain of man’s ancestors about the ‘self-movement’ of the external mediator-object bringing an addition to their physical efforts obviously could not have happened if a space-time determination of their own activity had not been transferred to the ‘activity’ of the mediator actuated in the course of their actions, and so perceivable as something which, while caused by these actions, was already separate from them.
p Are animals capable of fixing events in a space-time sequence? If so, how is sensory reflection of movement in space and time differentiated from its logical, abstract reflection?
p An affirmative answer to the first question follows from the existence of anticipatory reflection in highly organised animals. They not only quite accurately fix the distance separating them from an object interesting them, but also correlate the path of their own movement with the changing tra jectories’^^1^^ off the "object V movement. A cat pursuing "a mouse, for example, does not’just run after its victim, 89 repeating all the zigzags of its path, but cuts across it, i.e. extrapolates the mouse’s future position. Numerous observations confirm that highly organised animals not only perceive events taking place in present time, but also somehow experience future events. A hunting dog begins, by all its behaviour and appearance, to hasten its master to a fascinating future walk in the forest as soon as the first preparations for a prospective hunt are begun.
p But, however complicated animals’ predictive behaviour may be, the general principle still stands that, with a direct relation between the living organism and the environment, the space-time sequence of the results of its activity is united into a whole of some kind through the living organism’s inner active unity itself. Space-time changes in the environment are fixed in the animal psyche as inwardly experienced factors not separate from its own actions. For space and time to get a subjective reflection in the animal’s psyche as objective facts, it is seemingly necessary that the space-time factors become objectified and transformed into facts external to it, but this transformation, which is achieved on the one hand by the animal’s own actions, is no longer, on the other hand, reducible to them.
p Allowing for that, we can presume that representations of movement in space as an objective reality independent of the living organism’s actions could not have been formed earlier than the stage of evolution when spatial displacement of the mediator-instrument was obviously separate from the organism’s bodily functions.
p An ape’s dislodging of an object at a distance from it by means of a stick (even prepared by the ape itself by biting off surplus twigs from the branch of a tree), for example, only creates the prerequisites for forming a representation of space as an objective fact, but still does not lead to it. The stick extends the natural length of the ape’s arm, as it were, and serves as an external material standard of length or stretch. The stretch of the ape’s own body is thus translated into the length of the stick extending it. But the ‘independent’ spatial displacement of the stick, separate from the ape’s organism, becomes obvious when the ape throws the stick at a remote object in order to dislodge it, and the throw leads to the desired result. The example of the ’aimed throw’ is good illustrative material, in our view, for explaining one of the conditions for the transition from sensory reflection of space to its conceptual reflection.
90p The act of an aimed throw contains moments of the interruption of continuity that are reflected on the level of direct observation, on the one hand, as the result of the organism’s own actions (the throwing of an object) and, on the other hand, as the result of the action of an external mediator-object separate from the organism (dislodging of the target object by the thrown object). Such a throw leads to the organism’s reflection of the distance between its own body and the target object in the form of a distance that is overcome not by spatial dislodgment of the organism itself but by dislodging object M external to it, and put into action through the organism’s own actions.
p Recognition of the capacity to make an aimed throw of an external object as one (but not the sole) condition of the transition to logical thought, and precisely as a condition for the forming of representations of space as a distance existing independently of the subject, i.e. space as an objective entity, enables us to pass the frontier between animals’ perception of space and man’s perception of it. The subjective reflection of spatial intervals through an aimed throw differs qualitatively from the direct perception of space characteristic of the organism’s direct connection with the environment. If, for example, a predator controls the direction of its actions by extrapolating the trajectory of its future victim’s movement, the primitive hunter must already have foreseen not simply the path of the object of his hunt but also the path of the weapon thrown by him. In works on cybernetics this difference is sometimes designated as the difference between predictive behaviour of the first and second order.
p The passage to aimed throwing of objects of external adaptation as a condition for the forming of representation of the objectivity of space brings out an essential difference between men’s use of tools and the use of external objects by certain species of animal in a manner similar to men’s implement activity.
p We can now consider refuted the old view of primates’ (e.g. chimpanzee’s) incapacity to make and use external objects of adaptation in natural conditions, outside situations intentionally ‘provoked’ by man in experiments with apes. Bernhard Grzimek, an eminent authority on animals provides evidence that chimpanzees are capable of making weapons for themselves; having broken off a branch, they bite off the leaves and thrash an enemy with this club. 91 But they do not know how to aim, so they seldom throw anything.^^5^^
p The results of the observations of the life of chimpanzees in natural conditions made by Jane van Lawick-Goodall are well known. She was able to gain the confidence of these anthropoid creatures and lived alongside them for many years.^^6^^ Studies of the behaviour of chimpanzees have shown that they resort to use of external objects, for example to get honey from bees’ nests or to extract termites from their nests. In the latter case the weapons of the ‘hunt’ are simple stems of plants or branches stripped of their leaves. The chimpanzees push the switch into the termitary, and then draw it out, licking off the insects covering the twig. They may spend whole hours doing this. If the end of the ‘fishing-rod’ bends and will not go into the hole, they break it off and again push it into the termites’ nest (licking it as well, so that the insects stick to it better!) Sometimes such previously prepared twigs are laid on top the nearest termitary. When the ‘fishing-rods’ become quite useless, the chimpanzees change them for newly prepared ones. Cases have also been described when they got water out from narrow crevices by thrusting a bunch of plants into them and sucking the moisture saturating them.^^7^^
p Not only do higher mammals display a faculty for ’ inventing’ and using external objects as a tool or weapon, but so also do individual species of birds. On the Galapagos Islands there are small birds, woodpecker finches, whose actions in using external ‘tools’ have become a subject of close study in recent years. Here is what Igor Akimushkin writes about their unusual capacities:
p We saw them first in a film shot in the Islands by a group of cameramen led by the famous German zoologist Irenaus EibleEibesfeldt. We saw how, having pecked the trunk of a tree with its bill and attentively listened, the woodpecker knew whether there were beetle larvae under the bark and in the wood worth its attention. And how, later, when the larvae gave themselves away by panicky fuss, it stripped off the bark, often using a small stick as a lever, found the track of the woodborer, and then—something unbelievable happened! The woodpecker broke off a spine from a cactus with its bill, and taking it in its bill thrust it into the opening left in the tree by the larva. It twirled the spine vigorously in it, trying to pin the ‘worm’ or to force it out of the labyrinth of passages in the inner bark and wood. Its inventiveness is often rewarded immediately, but sometimes it has to mess about for some time before the fat stupid grub quits its woody chambers, seeking 92 safety from the outrageous spine in reckless flight. Then the woodpecker, either sticking the spine into the tree or holding it in its claw, seizes the grub. If no spine is available the bird breaks off a small branch with its beak and snaps twigs off it, which it breaks down so that it will be convenient to work with.^^8^^
p The same ‘cunning’ means of gaining its subsistence are also employed by the related species of mangrove finches.
p Such complicated behaviour when the animal itself sets in train by its own actions external objects of adaptation into order to attain vitally important results, performing for that preliminary operations to make said objects, differs markedly from simpler conditioned-reflex activity. The external object partially worked up by the animal and used by it as a tool or instrument, already serves as an artificial prolongation of its bodily organs. But it is not yet separated from its bodily functions, such as occurs in throwing at a target. Therefore a representation of the objectivity of space cannot be formed in the brain of the animal performing such actions.
p That does not mean, however, that the developing tree of life could not have arrived in some of its branching (not counting that of Homo sapiens) at the formation of species that had come to acts of aimed throwing and even mastered them. The following example from the behaviour of forest chimpanzees presents interest. When encountering a stuffed leopard they break branches off from trees and brandish them threateningly. Some of the apes throw branches, sticks, and stems at the leopard, but without taking careful aim so that only some of the objects hit the supposed enemy. Jane van Lawick-Goodall and her colleagues often observed how chimpanzees threw hefty stones at an enemy. And although these throws were awkward and the stones did not hit the target, there was no doubt that they were thrown at a definite target. Such throws are only a step away from successful aimed throwing, but a step that is of fundamental importance for forming representations of the objectivity of spatial extension. The puzzling capacity of dolphins for taking precise aim, which they demonstrate after training when playing ‘basketball’, throwing a ball into a basket banging above the water, seems even more surprising.
p The capacity to throw formed in certain species of birds is no less puzzling. It was noted back in antiquity (as has been confirmed by present-day investigators) that there are 93 birds thai, crack the shells of nuts, tortoises, and molluscs thai do not yield to blows of their beaks by a very ’ cunning’ method: they soar upward with their prey, and then drop it from a height onto rocks or other hard ground.9 Such complicated behaviour still cannot be classed as aimed throwing in the full sense. It may be due to a conditionedreflex chain of the closing of a temporal link arising as the result of accidental falling of a caught victim and its subsequent reinforcement by food in the bird, descending to its dropped prey. But how are we to explain the descriptions in the literature of the actions of the Australian crested hawk, which bombards emu eggs from the air? We must also cite the following picture of the behaviour of the African vulture (one variant of which has been shot on film):
p When a bush fire drove ostriches from their nests, their eggs were not damaged. White-headed and lappeted vultures tried to break them with strong blows of their beaks, but without success. Then two carrion vultures flew up. At first they tried breaking the shells of the eggs with their beaks, but when that failed they sought out stones weighing 100 to 300 grammes. They picked these up in their bills, then standing erect and raising their heads high with the stones in the beaks, they threw them down straight onto the eggs lying at their feet. After from four to twelve blows the shell was cracked and the feast began.^^10^^
p This clearly expressed African carrion vulture’s capacity for a mediated action, which almost completely coincides in its main objective consequences with the mechanism considered earlier of man’s ancestors’ use of primitive instruments of pre-labour, still awaits scientific explanation. The stones that play the role of mediator between the organism and the environment add something ‘extra’ to the bird’s direct physical efforts, because it could not break the hard shell of the ostrich egg by its beak alone. There is also here an act of an aimed blow that creates the possibility of perception of spatial extension ‘isolated’ from the direct spatial displacement of the body of the bird itself. It may be supposed that birds’ mode of life (like that of dolphins), freely moving in any of the three dimensions of space in spite of the effect of gravity, led to the rise in some species (with a sufficiently developed neurophysiological organisation) of conditions for the formation of quicker reactions of ‘objectifying’ space through sporadic use of external mediators in such a specific way.
p But even if it has been established that certain species have the faculty of forming representations of the 94 objectivity of spatial extension, it is still impossible to conclude from that that they could ‘guess’ the self-movement of the external mediator a? the source of the ‘increment’ that increased their own strength.
p A necessary condition for making such a guess was also the forming of representations of changes in time as an objective entity existing independently of the reflecting subject. Although notions of space and time are often closely linked with one another, there is nevertheless an essential difference between them. Transference of the subjective perception of time to an external object as to ’its other’ is associated with more substantial difficulties and is a much more complicated process than transference of the perception of space.
p When Kant linked the representation of space with an external intuition and that of time with an inner sense, he was noting an important difference in the subjective perception of space and time (in spite of the error of his subjective idealist approach to their interpretation). Spatial extension is, in fact, perceived by exteroreceptors (organs of vision, hearing, smell, etc.) as something externally opposed to the perceiving organism, as for example the definite size of the external object, or its remoteness at some distance, or the direction in which it lies in relation to the subject of the perception, etc. But can one see, hear, or smell time as an external object? The answer to that is not so obvious. When we cast a glance at the clock in order to know what time it is, we do not see time, but rather the location of the hands on the clock-face. We can see the movement of the second hand and hear the ticking of the clockwork, assuring ourselves that our clock has not stopped. The clock was invented at a comparatively late stage in the development of society; and for its invention to be possible there had to be an understanding that time passed independently of whether we slept or were awake, or whether we waited impatiently for a desired meeting, when every minute seemed to drag on interminably, or whether we discovered (on the contrary), carried away by an enthralling play or interesting talk, that it was already past midnight.
p Animals cannot objectify the passage of time by an object made by them, similar to clockwork, but they can orientate themselves in time. With a direct link between the organism and the environment, a sequence of the results of actions following one another in time is associated in the animal’s 95 psyche in a certain whole through its projection onto the background of the instinctive sense of self-preservation. The objective length of time is perceived by animals as an inner, emotionally experienced expectation of the happening of a vitally important event (e.g. the receiving of food) after an indifferent stimulus preceding it in time (a conditioned signal), if this signal has already led in the past, after a certain period of waiting, to the emergence of just that event.
p The exceptional importance of animals’ capacity inwardly, ‘subjectively’, to experience the sequence of phenomena recurring in time has been confirmed experimentally by the fact that the closing of a temporal link underlies the physiological mechanism of the forming of a conditioned reflex in an animal, i.e. of ’this central physiological phenomenon of higher nervous activity’.^^11^^ With the discovery of biological clocks, as we have already noted, it was also established that animals have an inner sense of time and a capacity to measure its daily intervals, and to maintain the periodic rhythm of processes taking place in their organism.^^12^^
p One can admit the truth of the Kantian thesis of a link between representations of time and an inner sense rather than an external intuition if we limit the organism’ sinteraction with its environment simply to the dyad ’subject— object’. The ordered duration of time would really be experienced in that case as the product of subjective activity, and we would be forced to agree with Kant’s categorical conclusion that time ’in itself, independently of the mind or subject, is nothing’,^^13^^ with the reservation, however, that it would be such only from the standpoint of the subject, and an animal-subject rather than a human one. At the same time, however, we would have to reduce human consciousness to the animals’ sensory reflection of the external world, and to regard consciousness as exclusively ’animal consciousness’, which clearly contradicts reality.
p Kant did not avoid dualism, either, in his analysis of the perception of time. Although he understood time as ’nothing else than the form of the internal sense’,^^14^^ he linked, its representation with intuition of the mutability of external things as well, and compared the sense image of time with an image of drawing a line, i.e. with an image of the process of drawing a line and not of the actually ‘drawn’ line, because in the latter case the line represents 96 an image of spatial extension rather than a period of time.^^1^^" If we take any point on the surface of the globe as the starting point for reckoning the spatial displacement of a body, then its trajectory will be the line of its change of position in relation to the initial point of reference outside it. This change takes place in time, but the representation of time cannot be reduced simply to one of the duration of a body’s mechanical displacement in space. If the body in our example remained in a state of rest at a given point in relation to that point, time would not cease.
p Therefore, if we tried to treat time as a special form of the existence of matter, differing from space (although inseparable from it), its duration would have to be represented not by the image of drawing a line but rather by the image of a continuing process, of a point moving in a line as a point of the relation, at least, of two objects, or of the inner change of a single object, taken separately, containing a unity of opposing aspects. In that case the image of the dialectical self-movement of matter in time, including both spatial displacement of bodies and the process of change and development of material systems taking place due to inner causes, would correspond more adequately to the image of the duration of time.
p Time (in any case at the level of a macrosystem) has its own order or sequence as well as duration. It is onedimensional and irreversible, flowing from the past through the present to the future. The duration of processes in time may be characterised, moreover, by the different speeds or rates. That makes the problem of transferring the internal sense of time into its perception as an objective fact even more complicated. If the outward, material standard of the extension of space can already be a stick in an ape’s paws, what process or object can take on the role of external standard of the ordered duration of the passage^of time? Abstracting from the subject of perception, we might say that the periodicity of processes occurring in nature (e.g. the Earth’s daily rotation around its axis, or its annual revolution around the Sun) could be taken as the objective (though not absolute) standard of time. The period of relative rotation of the process in regard to its previous result can be taken here as the interval of the measurement of time.
p Many animals possess an amazingly developed sense of orientation relative to the daily displacement of the Sun. But, given the organism’s direct connection with its 97 environment, the succession of day and night, position of the Sun in the sky, etc., can only be perceived as signal-results in a general chain of recurring intermediate results and actions leading to satisfaction of biological needs. Here precise ‘closing’ of the cycle of recurring results is an unconditioned-reflex reinforcement (e.g. satisfaction of the need for warmth, the finding of food with the onset of darkness by animals leading a nocturnal mode of life, etc.), and not because of the Sun’s return to its previous position a day later. An animal’s biological clock, allowing for repetition of an earlier sequence of events, enables it to determine more or less accurately the length of the time interval between intermediate signals and the satisfaction of biological needs.
p But, since it is the objective recurrence of phenomena in the outer world that underlies the forming of animals’ anticipatory reflection of that world, the sensually perceived standard of time must, apparently, be taken as the period of the living organism’s ‘return’, as it were, to its previous state, associated with the objective recurrence of objective phenomena, that is to say, the period in which the feeling of a situation satisfactory for the maintenance of life is succeeded by an unsatisfactory one, there is a new return to the feeling of a satisfactory situation, etc.
p For such an inner sense of time to be transferable to external objects as ’its other’, the animal itself has, through its own actions, to carry on an interaction of external objects occurring outside it and possessing a property of duration in time and of the periodicity of a cycle that would lead to recurring external results of vital importance to it. In other words, the point of the ‘closing’ of the cycle of phenomena must be transferred from the inner plane (sense of satisfaction of a direct biological need) to an external one, to external objects.
p It is quite clear that neither the Sun nor Earth could become such objects, because not even man, let alone animals, is capable of imparting action to them or even of altering Earth’s revolution around the Sun or its rotation around its own axis. The transition from a direct to an indirect interaction with the environment creates the premises for the possibility of sensory transference of the point of ‘closure’ of a periodically recurring chain of results to an external object. This object can only be an external mediator. To convert this possibility into realityj howeve^ called 98 for further development of the tool activity of man’s ancestors, dictated of necessity by the objective conditions of the struggle for existence. We shall examine the separate stages of the objective logic of this development later; here we would just note that it (this development) quite naturally led to the production of tools by means of tools.
p The protracted act of the ‘generation’ of a tool by another tool similar to it also meant the development of a new cycle of results ‘closed’ on an external object, i.e. one put into motion by man’s actions but at the same time reproducing itself as an external object that is a means of satisfying vital needs, albeit, of necessity, indirectly and not directly. The length of the process of the tool’s affecting the object of labour, which led to the appearance of a new tool, became accessible for subjective perception as something ‘own’, because the process was the result of the subject’s action; at the same time, however, it was ’its other’, because it took place relatively independently of the subjectas a process of an interaction of tool and object of labour external to him, and led to a result that, while important for the subject, was separated in time from satisfaction of the organism’s biological need (because the new tool still had to perform its role of tool in the subject’s subsequent activity). The objective precondition was thus created for perception of the ordered duration of time as the length of processes taking place outside the subject, and as the separation of the datum point of time from rigorous connection with the internal sense of emotionally experienced expectation of a satisfied, directly biological need. But that was only the first step on the long social, historical road to understanding time as an objective form of the existence of matter.
p There is hardly any need for such a detailed substantiation of the thesis that the forming of representations of space and time as objective facts did not (and could not) mean the development of some conceptual (let alone philosophical or scientific) determination by man’s ancestors of space and time as a preliminary condition for the passage to logical thought. It was a matter only of the development of their instrumental (tool) activity leading to the rise of a reflection of reality, in which the extension and duration of phenomena of the external world began to be perceived as something that existed and ‘acted’ relatively independently of the subjective acts and experiences of the ancestors 99 themselves, leading to certain results (desirable or undesirable).^^16^^
p We concluded earlier that the initial ‘cellule’ of rational reflection of reality was the fixing in the psyche of man’s ancestors of the relationship: ’if Ra, then Rb (through mediator M)\ We can now concretise that by pointing out that the guess about a tool’s ‘self-action’ as the source of the ‘increment’ contained in Rh (the result of the tool’s action on the object of labour) compared with Ra (the result of man’s effect on the tool), could seemingly not have arisen before the stage of the development of the use of tools, when the transition was made in practice to the production of tools by means of tools. The sensually observed fact of the birth of a new tool from a tool in the act of the latter’s interaction with an external object of labour led to the mediator-tool’s coming to be regarded as an inspired body, while the ‘addition’ to man’s own forces obtained through using tools began to be perceived as the consequence of an inner cause latent in them, i.e. of their ’vital activity’.
p In the transition from direct to indirect (mediated) influence on the environment there was thus already the premise for the possibility of the logical scheme ’if Ra, then Rb (through mediator M)’ to arise, but the possibility was only converted into reality at a definite, later stage in the development of mediated activity. That is a manifestation of the law of the dependence of consciousness on the level of development of practical, material activity, the lag of consciousness behind being, in spite of the possibility of anticipatory reflection of reality. Such reflection became possible in consciousness just because consciousness had an objective content, and only insofar as this reflection of objective patterns was an adequate of these patterns themselves existing outside consciousness. The dialectical materialist thesis about the secondary nature of consciousness also extends to the initial period of the rise and establishment of consciousness as a special, ideal form of reflection of reality.
p Consciousness could not have arisen if the natural process of the transformation of apes into men had not led to changes in the material neurophysiological substratum of the psychic activity of man’s ancestors, to a transformation of the ape brain into the human brain. In that connection we may suppose that direct sense perception must have 100 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1985/EMT239/20090802/199.tx" required the existence of some circular, closed/open cerebral process as a condition of its existence, the beginning and end of which process were merged in a unity of opposites experienced in the form of satisfied and unsatisfied biological needs passing into one another. The transition to logical thought must therefore have been accompanied, along with preservation of the former circuit, with the rise of a new neurophysiological circuit connected with it, the starting and final points of whose pulsations had become the material, cerebral substratum in man’s ancestors’ reflection of the fact of their reproduction of external mediators by means of external mediators.
p On the other hand, to the extent that we recognise the fact of the rise of new, open/closed loops in the organism’s neurophysiological structure, we would have to conclude that this new link was some new, inner entity by virtue of its relative closure, or a system possessing the property of self-development during interaction with the environment. In other words, the genesis of such a connection (at the bioelectric level, for example) must have been, in turn, an inner stimulus for further development of the brain matter and of the whole living organism as an integral system.
p Notes to Chapter 4
p ^^1^^ No few works have been published in recent decades on problems of animal behaviour (ethology), including the behaviour of ‘social’ insects and their ‘language’. We would single out, in particular, the book of the French biologist Prof. Remy Chauvin Les societies animates (Plon, Paris, 1963). Without going into a discussion of the methodological principles that guided him, we must note that his book contains many facts about animals’ very complicated forms of behaviour, including Karl von Frisch’s discovery of the phenomenon of the dances of bees as a means of exchanging information between the individuals of a hive. See also Karl von Frisch. Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language (OUP, London, 1950).
p ^^2^^ A. S. Dmitriev. Fiziologiya vysshei nervnoi deyatel’nosti (The Physiology of Higher Nervous Activity), Vysshaya Shkola, Moscow, 1974, p. 190.
101p ^^3^^ See A. V. Napalkov and N. V. Tselkova. Informatsionnye protsessy v zhivykh organismakh (Information Processes in Living Organisms), Vysshaya Shkola, Moscow, 1974, p. 201.
p ^^4^^ The full ‘closed’ cycle of this chain can be written more fully, employing the symbols we have adopted (see pp. 56-57) as follows
p 1 ( 2 r,\ 3 \ 4
p —>\ri-^ }—>— V
p rz J rj
p With this notation the intermediate character of the results within the brackets is obvious.
p ^^5^^ See Bernhard Grzimek. Sredl zhivotnykh Afriki ( translated by E. Geevsky from Grzimek unter Afrikas Tieren [Berlin, 1969]), Mysl, Moscow, 1973, p. 32.
p ^^6^^ See Jane van Lawick-Goodall. In the Shadow of Man (Houghton Mufflin Co., Boston, Mass., 1971).
p ^^7^^ Ibid., pp. 35-37,; 98-99, 184.
p ^^8^^ See I. Akimushkin. Mir zhivotnykh (rasskazy o ptitsakh) (The World of Animals. Stories about Birds), Molodaya Gvardiya, Moscow, 1973, p. 370. We cannot, of course, attach the significance of scientific terminology to the metaphores used by Akimushkin, or attribute human capabilities and characters to animals, as he does in this passage, but the facts observed of the birds’ use of external ‘tools’ cannot help evoking a need for a scientific explanation of them.
p ^^9^^ In the journal Nauka i zhizn’ (1968, 1:60), for example, G. Simakov reported the following: ’Workers at Tashkent airport long ago noted that in the autumn the landing strip was littered every day, for some reason, with walnut shells. Who could be causing this disgraceful state of affairs? Passengers did not walk on the landing strip. It turned out that crows were guilty. Gathering nuts from trees and picking up windfalls from the ground, they flew to the airport with them and dropped them onto the concrete runway from a height of 30 to 50 metres. The nuts broke and the crows feasted. If a nut did not break the bird picked it up and dropped it again. It is interesting that it was not just one bird that was so quickwitted; dozens of crows circled above the airport.’
p ^^10^^ See Akimushkin. Op. cit. (1973), p. 148.
p ^^11^^ See A. S. Dmitriev. Op. cit., p. 93.
102p ^^12^^ See V. B. Chernyshov. The Accuracy of Biological Clocks Priroda, 1974, 12:87.
p ^^13^^ Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn (J.M.Dent & Sons, London, 1934), p. 50.
p ^^14^^ Ibid., p. 49.
p ^^15^^ When characterising internal sense, Kant pointed out the importance of the act of attention as an example of the subject’s effect on his internal sense, and remarked that ’we are necessitated to take our determinations of periods of time, or of points of time, for all our internal perceptions from the changes which we perceive in outward things’ (ibid. pp. 106-107). ’We cannot represent, time, which is not an object of external intuition, in any other way than under the image of a line, which we draw in thought’ (p. 106).
^^16^^ The formation of notions of time as a fact existing outside man took the form among the ancients of its personification in the image of an exalted being (which was a characteristic in general of primitive thought). In Greek mythology, for instance, time was represented in the image of Kronos, who was one of the sources of the world. Kronos generated fire, air, and water, which in turn provided the beginning of several generations of gods. The Roman god of time, Saturn, was also the god of crops, i.e. his activity was already regarded through the prism of changes of the annual periodicity of men’s labours. At the same time the name ‘Saturn’ was associated with the past ’golden age’, in memory of which annual festivals ( Saturnalia) were observed.
Notes
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