Influence Of Psychophysiological Specifics Of A Leader On The Style Of Political Decision-Making

Andrey Davydov

Translated by Kate Bazilevsky

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Culture Of A Symbol

“Personal Unconscious”

Pythagorean Approach In The Theory Of Personality

Conclusions

Bibliography

Introduction

Humanity is accustomed to feeling mature; despite the fact that compared to geomorphological age it is far from it, to put it mildly. Based on this comparison, we can conclude that we are still in childhood state. Maybe to some extent it is due to this that the current level of sensible activity of a human is not free from many natural laws, which often get ignored by theories of knowledge.

Culture undoubtedly includes rules for executions of cogitative operations, interpretations of events, and linking between them. To a great extent these rules determine the worldview inherent in a human. However, this picture has stable central cores, which usually do not change, even despite their apparent inconsistency with requirements of the environment, and these main cores form during very early stages of childhood. One of these cores is a symbol.

Plato, Pythagoras used the term “symbol” and even Homer mentions this word. In his perspective on a symbol, Aristotle ascended to views of his predecessors.

In our own time, we encounter a phenomenon of symbolization, symbolic view and description of the world, as something that is genetically inherent in unconscious structures of the brain. Consequently, a symbol is regarded as a product of symbolic representation of structures of the unconscious.

C. Lévi-Strauss stated that myth structure corresponds to structure of the unconscious (meaning that it reflects the mentality of people who are consciously aware of this myth), and also that cultural phenomena are external expressions of “I,” which manifest in the form of symbols and signs.

Philosophy, culturology denotes a series of questions, one of which can be formulated as follows: who is the author of a myth? C. G. Jung has shown that myth creation, as a non-reflexive activity of consciousness relates to the sphere of “collective unconscious.” His ideas about heritability of “collective unconscious,” the concept of “an archetype” as a great-symbol, as well as the idea that “cultural symbols are important components of our mental apparatus.” Another posing of the question was done by E. Cassirer: “If any culture consists of creation of spiritual images of the world, then the goal of philosophy is not to go beyond all these creations, but rather to understand and become consciously aware of the principle of their formation.” According to Cassirer, culture is generation of all possible new symbols, and therefore the task of cultural studies, as a philosophical discipline, is to construe these symbols, their essential meaning in order to identify their origin. This origin lies in the general transcendental symbolic function of consciousness itself. Symbolic function of consciousness is manifested as symbolic forms, or (and, it is the same thing) in the form of language, myth, religion, art, and science.

Some answers can be found in C. G. Jung’s “depth psychology,” namely, in his theory of “collective unconscious” that gave science the concept of “an archetype.” Jung states that collective unconscious is identical in all people. This leads to the thought of suprapersonal nature of collective unconscious. However, this does not exclude the thought of individual unconscious and individual archetype, as well as the archetypal complex in the system of collective and individual unconscious. And, that they are that pivot point for an individual, which allows it to have him to have his own individual behavioral style. …

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