Antecedent Willingness to Master the Word and to Engage in Enculturation

This article discusses the conditions or prerequisites of language and culture acquisition. The author following G.G. Shpet, A.A. Ukhtomsky, M. Heidegger, N.A. Bernstein and V.V. Bibikhin calls these conditions as antecedent principle, which is regarded as a direct intelligible intuition, spiritual integral, undifferentiated unity: I understand, I think, I can. The immediacy of the principle does not mean that it is primitive. The path of unmediated development of the antecedent principle is by its differentiation that is performed in the collective action and merged communication and by the means of which many forms of behavior mediated by culture are being built. The development of the latter hinders the immediacy of perceiving and understanding of the world as well as the communication with like-minded but also enriches those acts. Alternation and interaction of immediacy and indirectness is seen as the precondition of the human development and productive activity. The author questions the traditional cultural-historical psychology division of mental functions into the natural, lower and cultural, higher.