(Studies in Critical Socialsciences 22) Andy Blunden-An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity-Brill(2010)

8/15/2019 (Studies in Critical Socialsciences 22) Andy Blunden-An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity-Brill(2010)

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An InterdisciplinaryTeory o Activity


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Studies in CriticalSocial Sciences

Series Editor

David Fasen estWayne State University

Editorial Board

Chris Chase-Dunn, University o Cali ornia-RiversideG. William Domhoff, University o Cali ornia-Santa Cruz

Colette Fagan, Manchester University Matha Gimenez, University o Colorado, Boulder

Heidi Gott ried, Wayne State University Karin Gottschall, University o Bremen

Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Rhonda Levine, Colgate University

Jacqueline O’Reilly, University o BrightonMary Romero, Arizona State University

Chizuko Ueno, University o okyo

VOLUME 22


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Tis book is printed on acid- ree paper.

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blunden, Andy.

An interdisciplinary theory o activity / by Andy Blunden.p. cm. — (Studies in critical social sciences ; 22)Includes bibliographical re erences and index.ISBN 978-90-04-18406-0 (alk. paper)1. Mind and body. 2. Psychology—History. 3. Vygotskii, L. S. (Lev Semenovich),

1896–1934. I. itle. II. Series.

BF151.B58 2010150.19’8–dc22

2010005214

ISSN 1573-4234ISBN 978 90 04 18406 0

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Te Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrightedmaterial used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been success ulthe publisher welcomes communications rom copyright holders, so that theappropriate acknowledgements can be made in uture editions, and to settle otherpermission matters.

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CON EN S

PAR I

IN RODUC ION AND HIS ORICAL EXCURSUS

Chapter One Introduction ....................................................... 3

Chapter wo Soviet Cultural Psychology (1924–) ............... 13

Chapter Tree Goethe’s Romantic Science ............................. 23

Chapter Four Te Young Hegel and What Drove Him ...... 33

Chapter Five Te Phenomenology and ‘Formations oConsciousness’ ................................................... 41

Te Phenomenology ..................................... 45

Chapter Six Te Subject Matter o the Logic ..................... 51

Chapter Seven Being, Essence & the Notion .......................... 59

Chapter Eight Subjectivity and Culture .................................. 69

Chapter Nine Hegel’s Psychology and Spirit ......................... 75 Hegel’s Psychology ....................................... 79

Chapter en Marx’s Critique o Hegel ................................. 85

Chapter Eleven Marx and the Foundations o ActivityTeory ................................................................. 93

Activity ........................................................... 94 Social Formations ......................................... 100

Chapter welve Marx’s Critique o Political Economy ........... 103

Abstraction ..................................................... 105 Te Commodity Relation ............................ 108


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Chapter Tirteen Conclusions rom this HistoricalExcursus ......................................................... 113

PAR II

LEV VYGO SKY

Chapter Fourteen Vygotsky’s Critique o Behaviorism ......... 119 Vygotsky’s Hegelianism .......................... 122 Behaviorism .............................................. 126 Vygotsky’s Sources and In uences ....... 130

Chapter Fifeen Vygotsky and Luria on RomanticScience ........................................................... 133

Luria ........................................................... 138

Chapter Sixteen Vygotsky on Units and Microcosms ........ 141 Unit o Analysis ....................................... 145

Chapter Seventeen Vygotsky on Gestalt and Bildung .............. 149 Te Higher Psychological Functions .... 152 Te Social Situation o Development ... 154 Vygotsky on Concepts ............................ 158

Chapter Eighteen Te Signi cance o Vygotsky’s Legacy ..... 163

PAR III

AC IVI Y HEORY

Chapter Nineteen Activity ........................................................... 169 Interdisciplinary Concept ...................... 169 Te General Conception o

“Activity” ................................................... 174

Chapter wenty Activity as the Substance o a Science ..... 179 Gadamer on the Hermeneutic Circle ... 185


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PAR IV

AN IN ERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

Chapter wenty-Eight Collaborative Projects ........................... 255

Chapter wenty-Nine Ethics and Collaboration ...................... 267 Social Science and Ethics ................. 267 Collaboration with Strangers .......... 268 Te Ethics o Collaboration ............ 271

Chapter Tirty Marx’s Critique o Political Economyand Activity Teory .............................. 275

Collaboration and Exchange ........... 276 Projects and Firms ............................ 277

Chapter Tirty-One owards a axonomy o Activity ....... 281 Genre, Frame and Field ................... 286

Chapter Tirty- wo Collaborative Projects and Identity .... 289

Chapter Tirty-Tree Collaborative Projects and Agency ..... 295

Chapter Tirty-Four Emancipatory Science ........................... 301

Chapter Tirty-Five Conclusion .............................................. 317 Cultural Psychology and Critical

Teory ................................................. 318 Science and Survival ......................... 324

Acknowledgements ............................................................................ 327Re erences ........................................................................................... 329Index .................................................................................................... 339


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CHAP ER ONE

IN RODUC ION

Tis work is a riendly critique o Cultural Historical Activity Teory(CHA ), a current o psychology which grew up in the early SovietUnion, until it was suppressed in the mid-1930s, and only graduallybecame more widely known rom the 1960s. 1

It was the difficult conditions in the Stalinist USSR which restrictedthe scope o CHA to psychology, and it is the aim o this work toresolve those eatures o CHA which have prevented it rom ul llingits potential as an interdisciplinary approach to the human sciences ingeneral. Tis is not a project or a science o everything. But it doespoint to a potential or a progressive, critical new approach across arange o disciplines, and an improved possibility or interdisciplinarywork. But i this book achieves nothing else, then it will be to clari y arange o methodological problems or CHA researchers themselves.

Hope ully it will also create interest in CHA among those not yetamiliar with it. CHA is today one o the most in uential and pro-gressive schools o thought in the domain o child development andelementary education, and is active in a wide range o other disci-plines. With its emphasis on culture, 2 it is also one o the very ewcurrents o psychology which can effectively respond to reductionistneuroscience: one o the ounders o CHA , Alexander Luria , is alsorecognized as one o the ounders o neuroscience .

Te roots o CHA lie in 19th century German philosophy, in par-ticular Goethe ’s ‘romantic science’3 and some o the ideas he introduced

1 ‘CHA ’ is a name invented only in the 1990s by Cole (1996: 104–5; 2007: 206–7)and Yrjö Engeström to promote the unity o what was by that time a diversity o cur-rents all originating rom the work o Lev Vygotsky . ‘Cultural Psychology’ came intocurrency in the early 1930s and ‘Activity Teory ’ in the 1960s.

2 In CHA , ‘culture ’ re ers to the universe o arti acts created by and used in a soci-ety (Cole 1996: 144). Culture is meaning ul in social li e only in relation to the livingpeople using it and to the place o arti acts in the various orms o activity in which it

is used. Some researchers use the term in a wider sense as re erring to arti acts, ormso activity and thought- orms characteristic o a way o li e (Ratner 2008).3 ‘Romantic Science’ is an approach to natural science which grew up in opposi-

tion to dogmatic Newtonian science in the early 19th century, associated with Goethe ,Sir Humphry Davy and Alexander von Humboldt . Te term is tied to this historical


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in opposition to the dominant abstract empirical, or positivist approachto science at the time. Goethe ’s key scienti c ideas were picked up by

Hegel and more consistently developed, albeit on the oundation oabsolute idealism. Marx ’s critique4 o Hegel reed these ideas o theiridealist shell, making individuals, their activity and the material con-ditions under which they live the sole premises (Marx 1975i: 31). Inthe cauldron which was the afermath o the Russian Revolution , LevVygotsky was able to appropriate the key insights rom this traditionin a completely original approach to psychology. Political conditions,which made it impossible to rationally discuss political or sociologi-cal issues, determined that his work would ocus on education, childdevelopment and disability education.

‘Activity’ simply means what people do, but with his “Teses onFeuerbach” (1975g), Marx connected the concept with critique o arange o metaphysical conceptions, and made it the oundation o hisown view o the world, at the philosophical level. In the work o CHAwriters, the concept o activity has accrued urther connotations andnuances in the course o efforts to develop a rational oundation orpsychology.

Central to the approach used here is the notion o immanent cri-tique.5 Tis means that the subject matter is criticized solely throughits own voice, in the words o its own representatives. In an immanentcritique, the writer ollows disputes internal to the subject, observeshow they are resolved and how each new step orward uncovers newproblems, and so on, tracing the development o the subject matter asit develops according to its own logic. Tis allows the critic to build upa concrete understanding o the material and identi y its main prob-lems and possible ways orward. Immanent critique is contrasted with

simply putting orward a counterproposal or nding ault with the

juncture, and we will use the term ‘emancipatory science’ to indicate a contemporarydevelopment o the principles rst proposed by Romantic Science.

4 ‘Critique’ may indicate a variety o orms o engagement, but what is most impor-tant is that the word is not used here in any sense as a kind o ‘attack’, in act, thebest critique is one which speaks to the writer under critique and bene ts them. Also,‘critique’ is not necessarily a textual activity; ‘practical critique’ is an important parto critique, as per “Do as I do, not as I say,” and so on.

5 Although the idea dates back to Aristotle , immanent critique is generally associ-

ated with Hegel (1969: 31). In criticizing the ideas o some group o people, immanentcritique uses the group’s own basic principles against the group’s claims, where pos-sible in their own words, and by holding them true to their own principles demon-strates where these principles nally lead.


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subject matter, and arguing against it. Tis latter approach will rarelysucceed in the developing the subject matter itsel , and can dogmati-

cally harden differences.What is meant by an ‘interdisciplinary concept ’ o activity (Cole1985) is this: when specialists in different disciplines or currents oscience communicate with one another they must have recourse to ashared language and conceptual ramework. Tis is usually the linguaranca and everyday common sense, as scienti c concepts are gener-ally limited to the theoretical ramework to which they belong, in oneor another discipline. Tis limits the depth o possible collaborationand mutual criticism and appropriation. Te aim is to develop ‘activ-ity’ as a scienti c concept which is meaning ul not only in the domaino psychology, but also in sciences such as sociology, political science,linguistics and so on. Irrespective o whether specialists in other disci-plines take up the idea, CHA needs access to ways o describing andgrasping societal phenomena, because it is a basic tenet o CHA thateverything that may be ound in the individual psyche was previouslyto be ound in relations between people, and that arti acts and orms osocial interaction originating in the social world constitute the contento the psyche. So an interdisciplinary concept o activity is necessaryor its own purposes.

Troughout this book, the need to remain true to the original aimso Goethe ’s Romantic Science is affirmed. Te term ‘Romantic Science ’is dated, and the expression ‘emancipatory science’ is pre erred. Teaim o this study in promoting a current o emancipatory science, 6 comes more to the ore as the study is developed. Emancipatory sci-ence means an approach to science whose effect is to emancipate itssubjects, rather than predict their behavior or control them. It is not a

simple matter to see exactly what it is about a science which quali es itto be recognized as emancipatory. It is hoped that this work will sheda little light on this matter.

Te book begins with a short historical narrative or the bene t othose who are not amiliar with the story o CHA . We begin our

6 ‘Emancipatory science’ is a new term introduced here as a continuation in con-temporary conditions o the project o ‘Romantic Science’, recognizing that accumu-

lation o knowledge does not per se contribute to human reedom, and examiningconcepts indigenous to CHA or their implications or human reedom. JürgenHabermas’s (1987) idea o ‘emancipatory interest’ was an approach to the same idearom within a different tradition.


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account in Petrograd in January 1924 at Vygotsky ’s rst interventionin Soviet psychology, and ollow the current up recent times. Tis

chapter aims to simply introduce the characters, and does not touchon the content o their ideas.Te remainder o the book is made up o three parts.Te rst part , chapters 3 to 12, is an historical excursus, exploring

the 19th century origins o the key ideas which were deployed in theounding o CHA . We begin with Goethe and trace the transmis-sion and genesis o the key concepts o Goethe ’s approach to sciencethrough Hegel and Marx .

Te second part , chapters 13 to 24 is an immanent critique oCHA , working through Vygotsky ’s original work, Leontyev’s ActivityTeory , Yrjö Engeström’s version o Activity Teory and the CulturalPsychology o Michael Cole. Te immanent critique leads up to animpasse: a collection o serious problems have been drawn out whichremain unsolved. At the center o the impasse is the problem o repre-senting the relation between the psychological unctioning o an indi-vidual and their social situation.

Te third part , chapters 25 to 31, begins with a proposal to over-come the impasse and open up a route or the urther development oCHA . Tis proposal is then de ended, and it is shown that the side-bene ts o resolving the impasse include an interdisciplinary concepto activity, along with an opportunity to revive the project o an eman-cipatory science. It is also shown that the approach provides insightsinto problems o ethics as well as science. Te key concepts in thisproposal are ‘project’ and ‘collaboration ’, or ‘project collaboration’.

Te key concepts which the historical excursus must gain romGoethe are Gestalt, Urphänomen and Bildung . Gestalt includes the

idea that the representation o a phenomenon must begin rom aconception o the whole, rather than being assembled rom the parts.Urphänomen , also known as the ‘cell’ or ‘unit o analysis’ (these twoterms are interchangeable), o a complex phenomenon is the mostprimitive orm o the phenomenon which, through its visceral simplic-ity, can unction as an explanatory principle; that is, the part containsthe whole. Bildung is a concept o personal development which under-stands the process o growth as li e-long maintenance and appropria-tion o the existing culture.

Hegel took up Goethe ’s ideas in philosophical terms, understand-ing the Gestalt as a ‘ ormation o consciousness’ and using immanent


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critique to write a Bildungsroman or European culture. For Hegel, aormation o consciousness is made up o concepts, and the concept

represents Hegel’s ormulation o the Urphänomen . Tis led Hegelto a brilliant conception o the nature o science, which must beginwith a concept o its subject matter, and un old the content out o itsconcept.

Marx’s critique o Hegel sought to appropriate 7 Hegel’s insightswhile liberating them rom their idealistic ormulation, typi ed by therendering a social formation as a ‘ ormation o consciousness’. Marxused the notion o activity which he learnt rom Moses Hess , to makea materialistic interpretation o Hegel’s ‘spirit’. But in large measure,Marx adopted Hegel’s idea o how a science must begin, subject tothe understanding that the subject matter is ultimately the developingactivity o real people, not “thought concentrating itsel ” (1986: 37–39).Marx demonstrated his approach with the writing o “Capital,” whichbegins rom the ‘economic cell orm’, the commodity (1996a: 8).

We begin our immanent critique o CHA with an account oVygotsky’s speech (1997) in which he delivered an immanent critiqueo behaviorism to a hall ull o behaviorists. He went on to make a cri-tique o all the currents o Russian, European and American psychol-ogy, with the declared aim o writing the Das Kapital o psychology(1997b: 320–330). Vygotsky’s take on Marx was quite different romthat o his contemporaries, mainly based on a very deep understand-ing o Marx ’s “Capital.” A central theme o his work was there oreconcerned with orming a concept o the subject matter o psychologyand determining the cell or ‘unit o analysis ’ or the science o con-sciousness. Vygotsky’s most amous work is his study o the relationo thinking and speaking, or which he determined that the unit o

analysis was the ‘meaning ul word’. Te unit o analysis or conscious-ness in general was the ‘joint arti act-mediated action’. 8

7 ‘Appropriate’ means to take a concept rom one conceptual rame into another,one’s own, making such trans ormations as necessary to make it meaning ul withinthe host rame, so as to retain the essential insights and efficacy which the concepthad in its original rame.

8 Tis odd expression will be dealt with at great length in due time, but brie y, anarti act is any product o human labor—a word, a tool, a domestic animal, a walk-ing stick, and mediation means to ‘go between’. So an ‘arti act-mediated action ’ isan action in which the person(s) uses an arti act to achieve their aim. Mediation canalso re er to arti acts which orm the substrate or interaction between people, such as


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Alexei Leontyev, one o Vygotsky ’s associates, took this work in anew direction afer Vygotsky’s death in 1934. Leontyev’s approach

bears the name o ‘Activity Teory ’. Leontyev claimed that Vygotsky’s‘unit o analysis’ did not take account o the societal activity o whicha person’s actions are a part, and which give meaning and motivationto a person’s actions. Without understanding the activity o which anaction is a part, the psychological signi cance o actions cannot bedeciphered. According to Leontyev, there are three levels o activity:operations, which are normally executed without thought, like step-ping over a curb, actions, which are executed to achieve personal goals,but which via the social division o labor, add up to the socially deter-mined, usually institutionalized, activity, which is the third level.

It will be shown that a close examination o Activity Teory demon-strates that it is raught with difficulties. Activity depends on the notiono every activity having an ‘objective motive’ which corresponds to ade nite need o the society, the meaning o all actions ultimately beingthe meeting o the needs o the whole community. Tis will be shownnot to be a coherent concept. Further, despite efforts by Leontyev ,it cannot be squared with Marx ’s critique o political economy. Inact, Leontyev had abandoned the methodological oundations laidby Vygotsky. Activity Teory also ails to give a coherent descriptiono identity ormation, taking as given the very thing which has to bederived. Nonetheless, Leontyev had identi ed genuine problems inVygotsky’s approach which still need to be addressed.

Te version o Activity Teory developed by Yrjö Engeström (1987)resolves a number o the problems with Leontyev’s theory, but only atthe expense o a move urther towards an abstract-empirical 9 approachand abandonment o Vygotsky’s Marxist ramework.

words; ‘joint action’ means something that people are doing together, either immedi-ately or as implied by social context. Saying something to someone is an example oa ‘joint arti act-mediated action’.

9 ‘Abstract empirical ’ and ‘positivist’ are terms used to describe the opposite, com-plementary approach to science, which regards its human subjects as objects to bepredicted and controlled, which ails to see that the researcher is also part o the subject matter o research, which begins with the parts and assembles the whole out oparts without any concept o the whole, which regards the methods o natural scienceas the model or human science, which uncritically accepts the data o observationas act and rejects any need or critical re ection on the theory implicit in the act oobservation, etc., etc.


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Michael Cole is closer to Vygotsky and Luria than Leontyev , andlike Vygotsky, Cole has eschewed the use o abstractions and structural

conceptions like activities meeting social needs, and aims to developthe methodology o Vygotsky critically. Cole (1997) studied the prob-lems o cross-cultural education, including the cross-cultural psycho-logical research that has accompanied efforts to introduce schooling tosocieties in which schooling was ormerly unknown. Tis brought tolight the need to incorporate the social context o actions in the unito analysis. How to incorporate context in the unit o analysis or thestudy o consciousness though? ‘Context’ is an open-ended totality,and to explicitly include an open-ended totality in the ‘cell’ under-mines the very idea o the Gestaltist approach.

Tis problem brings us to the end o the immanent critique.Te proposed solution to the problems con ronting CHA begins

with an exposition o two concepts: ‘project’ and ‘collaboration ’.A project is a unit o activity, but it differs undamentally rom the

concept o an activity ound in Leontyev . A project is something pro- jected [L. thrown orward] by the subject, rather than an object towhich the subject is drawn; the subject may be an individual or manypeople who are united precisely in that they are pursuing the sameproject. A project is an on-going collection o actions and is both theaim o the actions and the process o attaining that object. A projectis a concept, but every individual has a different concept o the proj-ect, these constituting the various shades o meaning and connota-tions to be ound in representations o the project. People may be ullycommitted to the project, or they may pursue the project or externalrewards provided or their participation; people may ‘own’ a project,or be only barely aware o its existence.

So the notion o project is meant to replace the notion o an object-oriented activity in Leontyev ’s theory, or more exactly, Leontyev’sconcept constitutes a limiting case o project. Te ambiguity in theword ‘activity’ as used in CHA can cause con usion here. Project isa unit o activity, but it is not to replace the concept o activity as it isto be ound in Marx and Vygotsky , as the general substance o humansocial li e. It only replaces the concept o an activity, as a unit o soci-etal activity, in Leontyev’s theory.

Te other concept is collaboration. Te notion o collaboration is to

give de nite conceptual orm to the notion o ‘joint’ when CHA the-orists talk about ‘joint activity’. Collaboration is always and essentially


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working together in a common project. Equally, projects are alwaysessentially collaborative.

Collaboration must be distinguished rom two limiting cases ocollaboration : management and cooperation. 10 Collaboration, man-agement and cooperation constitute three alternative modes o inter-action in the process o a project, but collaboration should be seen asthe general case, with management and cooperation unctioning aslimiting cases.

Collaboration is a very rich concept, including an almost in niterange o human interaction in its scope. Collaboration is able to char-acterize social relations because the project in which collaboration isenacted constitutes the de nition o ‘we’ relevant to the given relation-ship; i people have nothing to do with each other, then there is norelationship; the numerous ways in which different parties to a projectinteract with each other towards the project end give us a conceptualapproach to the wealth o possible human relationships.

Collaboration includes both cooperation and con ict , which are alsotwo limiting cases o collaboration . rue collaboration always entailsan element o dispute o the concept o what is to be attained, as wellas con ict over how to get there. Sometimes the con ict completelyovercomes the cooperation. But working together in a project whichdoes not entail some element o reciprocal criticism is not collabora-tion: it is either division o labor, or example along traditional lineso gender and age, or according to a hierarchy in the line managementarrangements, or it is simple cooperation, where the participants pur-sue their aims independently.

Joining together these two concepts—project and collaboration —which are in any case mutually constitutive, we have project collabo-

ration as a new unit o analysis or activity. Projects are aggregates oarti act-mediated actions, which are always directed or mediated byrelations to other people. Actions are always made up o operations,with operations and actions trans orming mutually one into another.Nothing is changed here; only the conception o the whole, that is, thecontext of action.

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‘Cooperation ’ is used in a specialized sense here, as a limiting case o collabora-tion in which people work independently, each in control o their own action, andthe joint result is the sum o their separate labors. Cooperation may be effected by atraditional division o labor or via external coordination.


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So what this means, is that we conceive o the context as a clothin which innumerable projects are woven together. Tis includes the

project o the nation, o which there are multitude o different concep-tions, the project o a particular amily, science, art, sport, etc., etc., allo which are to be conceived o as projects, all o which are contestedin one degree or another through differing concepts o the project.Tis is the context o psychological development.

A project is concrete in that it includes just those individuals, arti-acts and material conditions o which it is composed in actuality, notany which it ought to include; only those people and arti acts which areempirically given. I we take collaborative project as the unit o activ-ity, then activity is an interdisciplinary concept, because it is equallyavailable or psychology as an orienting, motivating and contextualconcept in psychology, and or sociology as a concept which re ectsthe motivational, cognitive and social aspects o collaboration in soci-etal institutions, processes and movements.

Project collaboration also provides a sound oundation or ethics .A project is afer all what gives meaning in an individual’s li e andwhat unites them with or opposes them to others. Te idea o exter-nal rewards, that is, pursuit o a project solely or ame or monetaryrewards or example, typi es a core problem in modernity.

Te idea o collaboration in a project allows us to concretize the ideao “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” While thisBiblical maxim does express the need or empathy, amiliarity withcultural difference has taught us that others may wish to be treateddifferently than we wish to be treated. Consequently, the Golden Rule ,as it is called, is actually dogmatic; other people need to have a sayin what is done to them as well! Project collaboration gives a precise

de nition o ‘we’ relevant to a speci c interaction, so that with themaxim: “we decide what we should do,” we can capture the ethicalprecepts o modern li e.

Project collaboration also gives a new insight into political economy.Exchange o commodities is a limiting case o collaboration in whichthere is no common aim, and people simply instrumentalize each otherto urther their own projects. Division o labor mediated by commod-ity exchange is what constitutes the economy. But the economy restson other spheres o li e activity, such as amily where people do col-

laborate rather than exchange products with one another according tocontractual obligations, and within rms, where the norm is manage-ment and direction, not collaboration.


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CHAP ER WO

SOVIE CUL URAL PSYCHOLOGY 1924

Te greatest discoveries are madenot by individuals but by their age.(Goethe 1823)

It is Petrograd, 6 January 1924 at the Second All-Russian Congress

o Psychoneurology. At the First Congress a year earlier, KonstantinKornilov had deposed Georgy Chelpanov, the ather o Russian psy-chology and Director o the Institute o Psychology, and dedicated theInstitute to the creation o a Marxist psychology. Everyone looked toone or another variety o behaviorism in which the concept o ‘con-sciousness’ was understood variously as unscienti c, illusory or anepiphenomena o behavior and/or brain physiology. All the scienceswere in the midst o such cultural revolutions. Tere would have to bea revolution in art, in geology, in agriculture, in every domain o socialli e, including psychology. Russia already boasted world-renownedgures like Bekhterev and Pavlov, so the dominance o behaviorism1 seemed assured.

o the rostrum steps an unknown young teacher rom Gomel, LevVygotsky. Vygotsky speaks with uency and con dence, at lengthand without the bene t o notes (Cole , Luria & Levitin 2006; Kozulin1990; Levitin 1982). He uses the language o Pavlov’s and Bekhterev’sRe exology, but calls or consciousness to be given its place as thekey concept o psychology (Vygotsky 1997). I everything was a re ex,then consciousness was not a re ex but the organization o re exes, aprocess with a social origin, and which the subject themsel can con-trol. He advocated such a broadening o the subject matter o psychol-ogy which would make untenable the current practices o the scienceo psychology.

o many listening, this must have sounded very much like the res-toration o Chelpanov’s dualistic and idealistic psychology, but thiswas a young man “who would have to be listened to” (Luria 2006: 38).

1 I use “behaviorism” in a generic sense which will be urther elaborated later.


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Vygotsky was invited to Moscow to take up a position at the Instituteand soon ormed a research group (the ‘troika’) with two o Kornilov’s

young assistants, Alexander Luria, at the time an advocate o psycho-analysis, and Alexei Leontyev.Te Russian Revolution was more than a regime change; every area

o social and intellectual li e in Russia was subject to protracted, trau-matic and repeated trans ormation. It certainly trans ormed Vygotsky’sli e.

Lev Vygotskywas raised in Gomel, within the Jewish Pale in saristRussia. He was a brilliant student, reading avidly in history and phi-losophy, running a reading group amongst his school riends aroundissues o Jewish history (Levitin 1982). His reading evidently includedthe writings o the ounder o Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov.Being a Jew, even as a ‘gold medal’ student, he was lucky to be admit-ted to university in Moscow to study law in 1913.

During his time in Moscow, Vygotsky was involved in ideologi-cal struggles within the domain o aesthetics and literary criticism,in which Symbolists and Formalists did battle with Futurists andConstructivists. Deeply engaged with problems o hermeneutics andsemiotics as they were being ought out on the European stage, thiswas a ormative period in his intellectual li e, and culminated in thewriting o “Te Psychology o Art.”

Graduating in 1917, and afer taking a course in psychology andphilosophy at the “People’s University” o Shanyavsky, he returned toGomel to teach literature and psychology at the school there. He alsoconducted classes at a drama studio and delivered lectures on literatureand science. Moved by the plight o orphans and disabled children inthe wake o the Revolution, he organized a psychology laboratory at

the Gomel eacher’s College where he participated in the preparationo a new generation o teachers, and wrote a manual or teachers called“Educational Psychology,” a somewhat eclectic overview o the mainissues and approaches to the subject at the time.

Alexander Luria was born in Kazan in 1902. His ather, RomanAlbertovich, wanted him to become a doctor, but AlexanderRomanovich pre erred the law. Luria’s amily had compensated or therestrictions placed on Jews in Russia by requent travel to Germanywhere they were able to obtain an education and imbibe Europeanculture. German was the second language in the Luria household, andLuria retained a li elong interest in the ‘Romantic Science’ o Goethe, von Humboldt and others. o appease his ather, Luria also continuedmedical training.


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With the victory o the October Revolution, the pro essors wereat an absolute loss as to how to teach their subjects as lectures were

overtaken by chaotic student debates. University li e came to a rapidend when Kazan ound itsel the site o the beginning o the Wars oIntervention, but in the meantime Luria’s relentless enquiry into thehuman condition had led him to Freud. Luria started a psychoana-lytic society, attempted some experimental work to test psychoanalyticideas and in the midst o utter turmoil managed to publish a smallbook on his ideas using recycled paper. Te experimental approachreported in this work caught the attention o Kornilov and Luria wasinvited to join the staff at the Institute in Moscow.

Alexei Leontyev, the youngest o the group, had only just gradu-ated rom Moscow University in 1924 and, attracted by the project obuilding a Marxist psychology, and displaying a gif or experimentalwork, had taken up a graduate position under Kornilov.

Among the three o them, only Vygotsky had prior knowledgeo Marxism (Cole, Luria & Levitin 2006). But Vygotsky’s Marxismwas radically different rom that o the people around him. Ratherthan inserting scraps taken rom Marxist texts into existing theorieso behavior, taken or granted as the materialist line in psychology,Vygotsky drew rom Marxism a critical humanist ethos and a meth-odology, principally centered on his reading o “Capital.” So Vygotskybegan by asking: what was the subject matter o psychology.

Coming rom the highly politicized pre-Revolutionary strugglesover aesthetics, and the real problems o education in a country shat-tered by war and revolution, Vygotsky wanted a psychology whichwas up to its subject matter: the actual li e o human beings, not justlaboratory reactions. With early training in hermeneutics and liter-

ary criticism, rather than rat-racing and dog training, he approachedthe various currents o psychology he ound around him in Russiacritically , somewhat as he would have approached a literary genre, thesame way Marx approached political economy. And while everythingconnected with the old regime and the surrounding capitalist worldwas anathema, Vygotsky wasappropriating European culture. Peopledidn’t know where to put him, he belonged to no-one’s camp andde ed categorization.

For all the problems, the old society had been shattered. Te SovietUnion in the early 1920s was a cauldron o creativity. But physicaland intellectual conditions were desperately inadequate. Te entireresources o the country which had not been destroyed were mobi-lized in an ideological atmosphere which was highly charged. Nothing


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was impossible or out o bounds. History was being made everywhere.Tanks to the Revolution , these three young men ound themselves

charged with the task o revolutionizing the science o psychology.Early in 1925, the troika expanded their group with the addition o5 graduate students, 4 o them women, and began a critical review othe dominant trends in psychology around them in Moscow. Vygotskytook steps to set up an Institute or De ectology, i.e., or the treatmentand education o disabled children o all kinds, in his home town oGomel, and along with Luria became a student o medicine, side-by-side with teaching and research. Tis was interrupted however by aserious bout o tuberculosis, the illness which dogged Vygotsky’s li eand would ultimate take it rom him.

On his return to activity, the group began to work their way throughall the theories o psychology which were contesting the eld on theworld stage: Freud, Piaget, James, . . . critiquing them and appropriat-ing the insights each had to offer. Te group worked collaboratively,discussing the problems in a group while one o them took notes. othis day it is not possible to be certain about the authorship o much owhat the group produced in this period. Even graduate students wereinvited to experiment on their own initiative and sometimes made keybreakthroughs.

Tey were making a name or themselves and earning respect, butthey were never at any point a contender to be the leading currentin Soviet psychology. And political conditions were changing. WhenLeontyev published a book in 1929, the publisher inserted a pre acedenouncing Leontyev’s ‘errors’, and in 1930 he was orced to leave hispost at the Krupskaya Academy o Communist Education. In 1931, theregime restored the pre-revolutionary curriculum in schools and new

ideas were not welcome. With Lydia Bozhovich and others, Leontyevset up the Neurosurgical Institute in Kharkov where they might beable to work more reely.

In the meantime, Vygotsky worked prodigiously, as i in a hurry(Davydov & Radzikovskii 1985: 39), and in the early 1930s gave lec-tures (transcribed by his students) and wrote the manuscripts2 in which

2 Te main works are “Tinking and Speech,” “Te Historical Meaning o the

Crisis in Psychology,” “Lectures on Psychology,” “History o the Development o theHigher Mental Functions,” “Problems o Child Psychology,” “ ool and Sign in theDevelopment o the Child,” and “Te eaching about Emotions.”


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his scienti c legacy, the oundations o cultural psychology, were setdown, ocusing mainly on child development, learning, ‘de ectology’

and questions o methodology. Te Institute or De ectology in Gomelprovided a re uge or Vygotsky’s students to continue their work asthe political pressure continued to mount.

In 1931, with Vygotsky’s help, Luria carried out an expedition toUzbekistan to investigate the changes taking place in the thinking opeople who were being drawn directly rom a eudal li estyle into amodern planned economy, a unique opportunity to observe culturalpsychology in motion. Tey ound that even limited schooling orexperience with collective arming brought about dramatic changes inpeople’s thinking. Tere were some serious aws in Luria’s methodol-ogy and his interpretation o the results which we will return to later,but he came under a public attack which missed the point entirely.Te data was interpreted as in itsel insulting to Soviet nationalitiesand Luria came under severe political re as a result. Te affair madecross cultural research in the Soviet Union politically impossible andcultural differences in how people learn and understand things couldnot be even discussed thereafer.

Vygotsky was overtaken by another bout o tuberculosis and died in1934. During the ollowing 12 months, some o Vygotsky’s works werepublished, but political conditions rapidly deteriorated as the Moscowrials got under way. Stalin had almost the entire leadership o theSoviet state, the Army and the Party denounced as saboteurs and shot(Sedov 1980; Khrushchev 1956). error penetrated every workplace,every amily.

First was the Pedology3 affair, in which Vygotsky’s ideas on theeducation o disabled children were denounced, and the works o the

whole School were banned. Tereafer, there would be no psychologicaltesting o children in Soviet schools and with a misconceivedegalitarianism, all students were to be treated ‘equally’ in the Sovieteducation system, regardless o intellectual or sensory disability or cul-tural difference.

In 1936, S. G. Levit, Director o the Institute in Kharkov, wasdenounced and shot (Luria 2006: 215). Luria was lucky to slip away

3 Pedology was the study o physical and mental development o children, but itentailed a lot o testing, comparison and categorization.


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and departed the eld o psychology, adopting medicine or his ownhealth. Li e was hardly risk ree as a Jewish doctor in Stalin’s USSR,

but Luria concentrated his attention on the treatment o brain dam-age, and very soon, the Nazi invasion brought plenty o opportunityto contribute to the war effort while doing important research orwhich he would become world amous, even whilst remaining wiselyunknown in his own country.

By end o the war, Vygotsky’s legacy had been virtually eradicated.Ironically, in a ‘socialist’ country, scienti c knowledge has been passeddown along amily lines and the children and grandchildren o theounding troika have been key vehicles or the preservation o theiroriginal ideas ( or example, Lena Kravtsova, Vygotsky’s grand-daugh-ter and Dmitry Leontyev, AN Leontyev’s grandson). Te Institute oDe ectology which Vygotsky ounded in Gomel, provided a sanctuarywhere his students were able to continue his work. But in the socialand political conditions created by the purges, these researchers nolonger believed in Vygotsky’s ideas, but as Alex Kozulin (1990) cor-rectly points out, because they took his works as their ounding docu-ments, even though they criticized them, they nevertheless constituteda current o Vygotsky’s ideas.

A brie thaw afer World War wo which saw Luria made a ull pro-essor at Moscow University did not last long. Pavlovian ‘psychology’was en orced as the compulsory norm along with Lysenkoite ‘genetics’and there were widespread purges o scientists. Luria was dismissed romhis position in an anti-Semitic campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’.

Afer Stalin’s death in 1953, things did loosen up somewhat. Afer20 years o non-existence, Psychology got its own learned journal.In 1957, Luria was allowed to travel and Leontyev’s work began to

receive public appreciation. While Leontyev made a name or himselwith ‘Activity Teory’,4 which will be dealt with at length later on,and Luria made a name or himsel in Neuropsychology, both mencredited Vygotsky as their teacher. But Vygotsky’s name remainedunknown outside a small circle, and Cultural Psychology existed onlyin the memory o a ew.

4

Differences between Activity Teory and Cultural Psychology should not be exag-gerated; both orm part o the same broad current o research and share commontheoretical and historical oundations. ogether they are re erred to as CHA (SeeCole & Gajdmaschenko 2007: 207).


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But in the meantime, a new generation had appeared. AlexanderMeshcheryakov (1923–1974), a student o Luria’s, took over the work

o Pro essor Ivan Sokolyansky (1889–1960), a pioneer in the educationo dea and blind children. Meshcheryakov developed methods o edu-cation o dea -blind children and opened a school or the dea -blindin Zagorsk in 1962. He did ground-breaking work, evidently superiorto anything to be ound in the West in this eld. Te education ochildren born without sight or hearing involves the practical construc-tion o human consciousness where it did not previously exist. Tispractice created a basis or a renewal o Vygotsky’s legacy. Crucial tomaking this connection was a group o philosophers who recognizedthe signi cance o Meshcheryakov’s work. First among them EvaldIlyenkov (1924–1979), taking up Vygotsky’s ideas at an new level,based on a comprehensive critique o European philosophy and anoriginal analysis o the writings o Karl Marx.

During the late 1970s, Leontyev’s work began to come under somecriticism, criticism generally basing itsel on the work o Vygotsky, owhich Leontyev himsel had been seen as the oremost authority. Butmore o this later. In the late 1970s, the leadership o an entire genera-tion o Soviet psychologists died: Meshcheryakov died in 1974, Luriain 1977, Leontyev and Ilyenkov in 1979, Ilyenkov by his own hand.

Creating a Marxist cultural psychology in the post-Stalin USSR acedan almost insurmountable difficulty: Marx had plenty say about thesocial and psychological problems arising rom bourgeois society,5 butthe Soviet Union was supposed to be ree o all such ‘contradictions’.Even those who were wise enough to know that this was nonsense hadno opportunity to theorize the pathology o Soviet li e, being quiteunable to talk or write about such things with other people. Science

cannot be built without discussion. Tis meant that there was a rmline beyond which Soviet psychology could not go without descend-ing into hypocrisy. Even a brilliant Soviet psychologist like VasilyDavydov (1930–1998) presaged his analysis o child development on‘really existing socialism’ being a norm, against which the pathologieso other societies were measured (Kozulin 1990). Perhaps Ilyenkov’ssolution was the only way out?

5

Te term ‘bourgeois society’ is intended in the technical sense o its meaning inMarx, that is, all those relations in which individuals con ront one another as reeand independent agents, that is, in the market, and aside rom amilial, political ortraditional obligations in general.


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Te impossibility o critically examining the really existing modeso domination did not apply in the West. Te civil rights movement ,

the women’s liberation movement, and other social movements dedi-cated to exposing various orms o oppression and social pathologyhad long since broken through the walls o the academy, and activistswere already searching or a psychological approach that honored therole o culture in psychology. In the West it was possible to con rontthe real social basis o psychology, including problems o social sub-ordination, cultural difference, inequality, ragmentation and socialchange.

Tere is a great irony here.A Marxist theory o the mind was born in the cauldron o the

1917 Russian Revolution, but was suppressed precisely because o itsrevolutionary Marxist character, despite the act that Marxism wasthe official state doctrine. Afer 30 years in hiding, it escaped only totake root in the bastion o capitalism and anti-communism, wherein order to survive it had to keep its Marxism under wraps. But ina double irony, the crisis which be ell Marxism in the wake o thecollapse o the Soviet Union lef CHA largely unscathed, because othe non-political shape it had adopted or the purposes o survival inthe past.

So CHA is now a worldwide current in the human sciences, largelyoverlooked by anyone going in search o Marxism, because it is locatedonly in the pro essional lives o teachers and social workers, linguistsand psychologists. Although most o Vygotsky’s present-day ollowersare politically on the Lef, they are diverse both in academic interestsand intellectual training, and do not constitute a current o Marxismas such.

Tis is the story o Cultural Psychology, initiated by Lev Vygotsky.Te aim o the present work is to appropriate rom the work othe Cultural Psychologists and Activity Teorists, some very importantinsights they have or the purpose o developing a new approach in thebroader political and sociological domain. A critical appropriation isnecessary because some o those insights which inspired the work atthe beginning have been lost. So be ore we can begin a critical reviewo the theoretical legacy o Vygotsky, a digression is necessary, backinto the roots o his approach in the nineteenth century.

Te roots o Cultural Psychology lie in the Romantic Science oJohann Wol gang von Goethe, taken up in the philosophy o Hegel,


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appropriated and trans ormed by Karl Marx. Te thread linking thesegures with Vygotsky has lain largely unexamined or a long time, but

the time is now very ripe or a revival o Goethe’s struggle against theanalytical, abstract-empirical science which has wreaked such havocover the past century.

And it is to Goethe’s science that we must rst turn.


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CHAP ER HREE

GOE HE’S ROMAN IC SCIENCE

What is the universal?Te single case.What is the particular?Millions o cases.

In July 1794, both Goethe (1996) and Schiller had been attending alecture at the Jena scienti c society and as the audience led out, thetwo poets ound themselves embarrassed to be lef acing one another.Embarrassed, because Goethe elt that since Schiller had “rapturouslyembraced” the Kantian philosophy, he had been betraying his art,approaching Nature subjectively, “ rom the standpoint o so manyhuman traits,” rather than “actively observing Nature’s own manner ocreating,” and much to the rustration o their mutual riends, Goethehad been re using to speak to Schiller.

Conversation could not be avoided however, and when Schillerremarked that the current “mangled methods o regarding Naturewould only repel the lay person who might otherwise take an inter-est,” Goethe readily agreed, adding that “there might be another wayo considering Nature , not piecemeal and isolated but actively at work,as she proceeds rom the whole to the parts”. . . And so the pair con- versed as they made their way home together. By the time they reachedSchiller’s house, Goethe ound himsel expounding his observations othe metamorphoses o plants, and to illustrate a point made a quicksketch on a piece o paper. “But,” Schiller retorted, “this is not anempirical experience, it is an idea,” drawing upon Kant ’s distinctionbetween the aculties o sensation and reason . Goethe ought hard tosuppress his rising anger, and politely remarked: “How splendid that Ihave ideas without knowing it, and can see them be ore my very eyes.”Tus Goethe drew Schiller’s attention to the unsolved problem in theKantian philosophy o the objective sources o conceptual knowledge.Ten ensued a decade o close riendship and collaboration until

Schiller’s death in 1805.Tough 25 years his junior, Johann Wol gang von Goethe wasalready an acclaimed poet be ore Immanuel Kant rst gained his


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reputation as a philosopher with his “Critique o Pure Reason” in1787. And Goethe would continue to nourish the education o German

speaking people rom Marx and Wundt to Freud and Jung . WhenNapoleon occupied Jena in 1807, the only German he wanted to meetwas Goethe (Pinkard 2000). It is unquestionable that the importanceo Goethe in European culture has been greatly underestimated in theAnglophone world. 1

More than that, Goethe’s views on science and nature are only nowbeginning to come into their own afer two centuries o eclipse, a ateto which Goethe himsel was ully resigned. Goethe was not just apoet who dabbled in science. Te study o Nature was or him a prac-tice, ‘practice’ in the sense with which a Buddhist might utter thatword, to be pursued diligently throughout his li e. Goethe died aboutthe time Lyell published his “Principles o Geology” and a quarter ocentury be ore Darwin published “Origin o Species” and Mendeleyevthe periodic table o elements. Tese were the discoveries which reallydemonstrated the interconnectedness o Nature as a process o devel-opment and change. Science in Goethe’s day was engaged mainly inthe collection and organization o data in botany, chemistry, zoology,etc., alongside the continuation o the Newtonian project, o render-ing all the phenomena o Nature as the mathematical expression ometaphysical ‘ orces’ and ‘vibrations’.

It was this latter tendency to which Goethe was most hostile. Itwas not that he was opposed to the use o mathematics in science; headmired the precision o mathematics, studied it and used it. But his vision or science he compared to the multiplicity o religious sects tobe ound in New York, where the many churches tolerated each other,each allowing that there was more than one way to the truth. But he

saw that the kind o science which was organizing behind the bannero Newtonianism would establish itsel as the one true model o natu-ral science and would ultimately eradicate other modes o understand-ing and relating to Nature. Much o what Goethe had to say 200 yearsago, has become commonplace criticism o the practice o natural sci-ence in recent decades.

Tere were a number o reasons or Goethe’s hostility to what I willcall ‘positivism’, so as to avoid misuse o the name o Isaac Newton.

1 Not in Russia though; Vygotsky , or example, directly cites Goethe 35 times in hisCollected Works, compared with 26 citations o Hegel, all indirect .


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Firstly, and above all, the description and supposed explanation oa phenomenon in terms o some imperceptible orce or ‘vibration’ is

a orm o metaphysics in that it makes something beyond perceptioninto the cause and explanation or what is given in experience. 2 Tesame criticism could be made o Kant ’s split between thing-in-itseland appearance. Goethe wanted to obliterate this gul between ideaand image because, as he saw it, understanding o Nature came romthe study o Nature itsel , not by looking or supernatural or meta-physical orces.

Secondly, mathematical representations o natural processes makethe study o Nature the domain o a specialist elite. Goethe saw naturalscience as a public and collaborative enterprise, rom which those whoparticipated enjoyed a spiritual bene t. It was there ore important touse means o representation o nature which were accessible to the layperson and made sense to those without specialized training.

Tirdly, experience o Nature was, in Goethe’s view, primarily aboutqualities, and quantities were obtained only by abstracting rom thesequalities. While there was a place or quantitative science, rst placeshould be given to qualitative science. Goethe was concerned with theintensity and quality o our experience o Nature, there ore sciencerequired, not only training o the intellect and in the use o instru-ments, but training o the senses and the imagination.

Over and above his literary and administrative work, Goetheinvented the science o morphology , and studied all the leading sci-ences o the time: mineralogy, geology, botany, comparative anatomy,osteology, psychophysiology, zoology, meteorology, and was at thecutting edge o the science o his day.

Goethe’s critique o positivistic science was extremely rich, but there

are a ew aspects which are germane to our theme, and should bementioned here.According to Goethe, natural science was a practice rather than a

collection o truths. He saw science as ormulating the metaphysicalrationalization o a culture’s idea o reality and truth. So science devel-ops historically and he went so ar as to say that the history o scienceis the science itsel , demonstrating this in his “History o the Teory

2

For example, to say it is the orce o gravity which causes a body to all with anacceleration g actually explains nothing, moving the explanation rom the plane oobservation to an invisible and hypothetical orce. Tis criticism was ultimately vin-dicated by Einstein ’s General Teory o Relativity.


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o Colors.” “Te greatest discoveries are made not by individuals butby the age,” because the claims and methods o science are an integral

part o the whole culture. Consequently, he regarded all claims aboutNature as partial, relative and historical.Goethe advocated above all the study o development as the path to

knowledge o a thing. He was the inventor o the Bildungsroman3—anovel which thematizes the development o the central character, andhe lived his own Bildungsroman, continuously and publicly trans-orming himsel , a living demonstration o the struggle to lead a trulyhuman li e. Tis included, not just having an active interest in naturalscience, but seeking to maintain natural science as a practice in whicheveryone could participate.

Goethe argued against the conception o gaining control overNature, promoting instead humility and a cooperative relationshipwith Nature . At the same time as ghting a battle against positivistscience, he was also an opponent o religious superstition. Not a mili-tant God-denier like Holbach or Maréchal, he claimed: “As students onature we are pantheists, as poets polytheists, as moral beings mono-theists” (Goethe 1964: 49).

But there are two o Goethe’s ideas in particular on which wemust ocus, both o which bear on his struggle to overcome the dis- junction between phenomenon and idea: these are his notion o theUrphänomen 4 or archetypal phenomenon, and his insistence on pro-ceeding rom the whole to the part, captured in the word Gestalt.5

How was an understanding o Nature possible? How could Naturebe intelligible? Goethe held that even though human beings were apart o Nature, the senses needed to be trained, and we had to learn tobe as observant and unprejudiced as possible.

3 Bildung is a uniquely German word meaning the process o acquiring and main-taining the culture o one’s times. Originally, Bildung re erred only to the shaping,orming, cultivating o objects, but took on the meaning o ‘education’ in the 18thcentury, and it became a central concept or Herder , Hegel, Schiller and &c. SoBildungsroman = personal development story.

4 Urphänomen is unique to Goethe; the pre x ‘ ur ’ means primitive or original andis usually translated as ‘archetypal’. Phänomen means phenomenon, that is appearanceor apparent thing.

5 Gestalt is a very common word in German, usually translated as ‘ orm’ or ‘shape’

or ‘ ormation’, but in this context roughly means ‘ gure’ as in the expression ‘Whata ne gure o a man!’ Te word is used in other languages in the sense o GestaltPsychology, meaning ‘an integral whole’.


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I the eye were not sun-like,How could we ever see light?And i God’s own power did not dwell within us,How could we doubt in things divine?Goethe (Heller 1975)

Although hypotheses could be used provisionally as a means osharpening observation, scienti c perception o an object obliged theobserver to hold off so ar as possible rom making hypotheses, whilstexpanding so ar as possible the eld o observation. He was morethan aware that ‘every observation is already a theory’ (Goethe 1996),and that in more than one sense: people saw what interested them and

what they expected to see, but as he had remarked to Schiller , theoriescould also be objects o perception. Te close connection between sen-suous perception and understanding was crucial to Goethe.

He vigorously opposed the method o abstract induction, the crudeempiricism which substitutes or understanding, the simple registra-tion o patterns in the data. But he was also vigorously opposed tothe hypothetico-deductive method in which a hypothesis would bemade and then ‘proved’ by means o selective experiments, which, heclaimed, simply reproduced in contrived circumstances whatever isrequired: “Nature does not tell the truth under torture,” he said.

Nature had to be understood in its own terms, as experienced byhuman beings. Ideas—principles, laws, and so on—are not somethingbehind appearances, but are contained within appearances.

Goethe held that the whole was present in every part, and every partwas connected to the whole. 6 Te whole must there ore be perceptiblein every part. Nature was not assembled rom parts, but began as awhole, and rom the whole came parts, and the same principle applied

to perception: “In an organic being, rst the orm as a whole strikesus, then its parts and their shape and combination.”Tus Goethe came to the idea o the Urphänomen or Archetypal

Phenomenon (Goethe 1994).

6 Scheff (1997) offers an application o what he calls "Goethe's whole/part method-

ology" in which psychological insights, particularly in relation to emotions, are usedin the analysis o historical events. Scheff uses Goethe in a valuable approach to inter-disciplinary work. See also Bertolt et al. 1998.


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Rather than the explanatory principle being some imperceptibleorce or energy, causing phenomena rom behind, so to speak, the

Urphänomen was itsel a phenomenon, but it had to be the mosteasily understood, simplest, or archetypal orm o the thing, a ormwhich allowed the nature o the whole phenomenon to be under-stood. Despite a misunderstanding encouraged by Darwin himsel , theUrphänomen is not to be con used with the rst in time, the begin-ning o a Darwinian line; the Urphänomen is conceptually rather thangenetically primitive. Every particular phenomenon is a mani estationo this one universal phenomenon, so the Urphänomen is a concreteunity, not a common ancestor.

And nor is the Urphänomen to be understood as a common empiri-cal attribute shared by all mani estations, that is, as an abstract generalcategory.7 Tere may in act be no shared attributes at all, or under-standing goes to the essence o the thing, not its contingent attributes(Bortof 1998).

Goethe had observed that the progress o science made its great stepsorward thanks to that rare perceptive insight, or aperçu, which some-how gets to the essence o a complex phenomenon. Such an insightwas possible only on the basis o prolonged observation, but wasneither a deductive or inductive process, but reliant on Anschauung 8 or active contemplation. Te key to understanding natural processesthrough such insights was the discovery o the Urphänomen , whichallows Nature to be understood in its own terms, and in terms o com-mon experience, something which is easily communicated and sharedwith others.

It is this radically different conception o how to understand somecomplex process, through discovery o what is called the ‘cell ’ o the

organism, its simplest unit, is the great contribution Goethe made toscience. But it was not until the 1830s, a ew years afer Goethe’s death,that advances in microscopy allowed Schleiden and Schwann to seeand identi y the cell as the basic unit o a living organism, already

7 An abstract general category is a grouping o things according to a common attri-bute, or example, “red heads,” even though the common attribute may be incidentalto the things being grouped.

8 Anschauung is usually translated as ‘intuition’. Te verb schauen means to see

or view, and entered philosophy when Meister Eckhart translated the Latin contem- platio, the activity o contemplating something, especially the divine. Kant howevertook Anschauung to be exclusively sensory, rejecting the possibility o intellectualintuition, so the senses were the only source o orm or shape.


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carrying within it all the characteristics of the whole living being.Goethe brilliantly anticipated this discovery and the word ‘cell’ is com-

monly used for the unit Goethe called Urphänomen .As will be already clear, Goethe was adamant that understandinghad to proceed from the whole to the parts, that in doing so scienti cmethod emulated the processes of Nature itself, as well as ordinaryhuman perception . In this context, we should further outline howGoethe saw this notion of the whole, usually referred to in English asthe Gestalt:

In 1817, Goethe explained Gestalt as follows:

Te Germans have a word for the complex of existence presented by aphysical organism: Gestalt. With this expression they exclude what ischangeable and assume that an interrelated whole is identi ed, de ned,and xed in character.

But if we look at all these Gestalten, especially the organic ones, wewill discover that nothing in them is permanent , nothing is at rest orde ned—everything is in a ux of continual motion. Tis is why Germanfrequently and ttingly makes use of the word Bildung to describe theend product and what is in process of production as well.

Tus in setting forth a morphology we should not speak of Gestalt, orif we use the term we should at least do so only in reference to the idea,the concept [NB], or to an empirical element held fast for a mere momentof time(Goethe 1996).

So, Gestalt is a transitory, developing form, whilst the real whole is thewhole process of development ; to know something means to compre-hend its whole process of development.

But it was the idea that human beings perceived a whole Gestalt,independently of and prior to the parts, which was taken up. At rst

Kant observed in his Tird Critique, that we perceive natural thingsas having a purpose, and it was fundamentally this conception of thenatural purpose of organisms which allowed us to perceive forms asa whole (Kant 1914: §77). If we perceive things as related merely bymechanical cause and effect, then no concept of the whole can emerge.Much later, Christian von Ehrenfels took up the idea in a series ofinvestigations which later gave rise to Gestalt Psychology .

Since antiquity philosophers had been troubled by the source of con-ceptual knowledge. We acquire a certain kind of knowledge through

the senses, but from colors and textures and noises, how could knowl-edge of causes, of categories, of reason, religion and law be acquired?Kant was proposing that human beings possessed a separate, innate


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CHAP ER FOUR

HE YOUNG HEGEL AND WHA DROVE HIM

I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out o the city on recon-naissance. It is indeed a wonder ul sensation to see such an individual,who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches outover the world and masters it.(Hegel 13 Oct. 1806)

At the time o the storming o the Bastille on 14th July 1789, the18-year-old Hegel was a philosophy student at übingen, 500 km to theeast o Paris. Soon afer, he entered the seminary, sharing a room withthe poet Hölderlin (Pinkard 2000). His earliest known writing was anessay (Hegel 1984) on the prospects or urthering the Enlightenment bylaunching a ‘ olk religion’, penned in 1793, shortly be ore Robespierrelaunched his own manu actured ‘religion o the Supreme Being’. Tisproject ell at and shortly aferwards Robespierre was himsel sent to

the guillotine. Mainly under the in uence o Hölderin , Hegel aban-doned his youth ul disdain or the Christian religion and came to seethat, or all its aults, it was Christianity which had ultimately openedthe way or the Enlightenment and modernity (Pinkard 2000).

On 13th October 1806, Hegel mailed off the manuscript o his rstbook, “Te Phenomenology o Spirit,” rom Jena, the day be ore thetown was occupied by his hero Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon wasborn the same year as Hegel, but died in 1821 shortly afer the pub-lication o Hegel’s “Philosophy o Right,” which culminates in thesection on World History in which Hegel describes the role o world-historic heroes as “living instruments o the Weltgeist (world spirit)”(Hegel 1952: 218). Napoleon smashed up Germany’s eudal structuresand introduced the code civile. But the rst movement from below,the uprisings o the French proletariat began only in June 1832, aferHegel’s death.

Te industrial revolution in Britain roughly coincides with Hegel’sli etime, 1770–1830, but the Chartist Uprisings took place in the 1830sshortly afer Hegel’s death. So Hegel saw the revolutionary impact ocapitalism, both the enlightenment and the misery it brought with it, butnever saw a movement o the oppressed, a modern social movement.


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Also, some o the most brilliant women o the rst wave o emi-nism were amongst his circle o riends (such as Caroline and

Dorothea Schlegel), including his mother, Maria Magdalena, andsister, Christiane Luise, but Hegel himsel remained an inveteratemisogynist.

Germany did not have a state. Until 1815, Germany was part owhat was still called the Holy Roman Empire , and made up o a patch-work o over 300 small principalities, some Catholic some Protestant,each with their own class structure and traditions and with no solidar-ity between them. England to the North, Revolutionary France to theWest, Imperial Russia to the East and Austria-Hungary to the South.Te armies o these great powers marched back and orth acrossGermany , pushing the German princes around like pawns. And noneo the princes could count on their citizens to take up arms in theirde ence. Whilst Revolutionary France made history with its armiesand its agitators, and the English built an empire with their moneyand their inventions, Germany remained a spectator in history. Butthis was the Germany o Goethe , and Schiller and Beethoven . Hegeldrew the conclusion that the German Revolution would have to bemade with philosophy rather than with guns and mobs.

Te Holy Roman Empire was brought to a close in 1815, just asthe last volume o the “Science o Logic” went to press, and at theCongress o Vienna, in the afermath o Napoleon ’s eventual militaryde eat, the German Federation was created with just 38 components.Tis situation suited Hegel, and generally speaking, the most creativeperiod o Hegel’s li e was during the Napoleonic Wars, 1804–1815.

As was remarked in connection with Goethe , Hegel never knewDarwin , but he was amiliar with the theory o Lamarck , and he posi-

tively rejected the idea that human beings had evolved out o animals.Although he learnt o Lyell ’s theory o geological ormation and cameto accept that the continents were products o a process o ormation,he insisted that there was change but no development in Nature . Hecould know nothing o the pre-history o humanity or the natural his-tory o the Earth, and as surprising as it may seem or the historicalthinker par excellence, he claimed that:

even if the earth was once in a state where it had no living things butonly the chemical process, and so on, yet the moment the lightning o li estrikes into matter, at once there is present a determinate, complete crea-ture, as Minerva ully armed springs orth rom the head o Jupiter. . . .


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Man has not developed himsel out o the animal, nor the animal out othe plant; each is at a single stroke what it is.(Hegel quoted in Houlgate 2005)

At the time, natural science offered no rational explanation or theappearance o organic li e out o inorganic li e or o the origins o thehuman orm and language. It is to Hegel’s credit that he did not tryto resolve the problem o what he knew little about by appealing towhat he knew absolutely anything about. He relied almost entirely onthe intelligibility of human life and culture as it could be observed: nooundation myths or appeals to a natural order beyond human expe-rience or appeals to Eternal Reason or Laws o Nature. In that sense,Hegel’s is a supremely rational philosophy.

His misogyny and racism, which led him to exclude women and thepeoples o uncivilized nations rom being creators o culture, derivedrom his blindness to the act o the cultural origins o the humanorm itsel .

Hegel presents a contradictory gure. As a youngster, he saw him-sel as a oot soldier or the Enlightenment. Witnessing what Kant ,Fichte and Schelling achieved as proponents o philosophical systems,

together with awareness o the unsatis actory nature o the thesesystems, he was impelled to construct a philosophical system o hisown.

But although the Enlightenment essentially entailed the expansiono individual reedom, unlike other proponents o the EnlightenmentHegel was not a liberal:1 he did not identi y reedom with the ‘negative’reedom o individuals rom constraint, rooted in an individualist con-ception o the subject. It was his experience o li e in Germany whichled him to a deeper conception o reedom. At best, an individual only

has the power o the whole community o which they are a part. A citi-zen o a nation like Germany , which had no state , had no reedom.So in order to understand Hegel we have to let go o the conception

o the state as a power over society or as a limitation on individualreedom, and see the sense in which the state is also the instrument oits citizens and an expression o their reedom. Hegel never knew othe idea o the state as an instrument o class rule, and he conducted

1

‘Liberal’ is used throughout in the philosophical sense as the advocacy o the ree-dom o individuals rom all kinds o restraint, economic or social, not the peculiarlyAmerican sense o the word.


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a li e-long struggle against all those theories which promoted a liberal,or ‘negative’ idea o reedom. For him, the state occupied the space

that it occupied or the people o Vietnam and other nations whichemerged rom the national liberation struggles o the post-World Warwo period: that o a social movement. But what he describes in his“Philosophy o Right,” or example, is not a social movement, but astate, complete with hereditary monarchy and a public service. At thedeepest level, though, his philosophy is that o a social movement, opeople who have organized themselves around a common cause or‘project’.

Hegel wasn’t simply a communitarian; he was deeply concerned withindividuality and how the sel -determination o an individual personcould be realized in and through the appropriation o the culture othe community as a whole. His central concern was what later came tobe called ‘social solidarity’, but only that kind o social solidarity whichpromotes the ourishing o individuality.

Te real limitation on Hegel’s conception o a social movement isthat, as remarked above, he never saw nor ever conceived o a socialmovement o the oppressed. He saw no reason to believe that the ‘rab-ble’ could liberate themselves. Modern theories o sel -emancipationare all presaged on the ormation o collective sel -consciousness andthe state is the expression o collective sel -consciousness par excel-lence. Hegel well understood that the agency o individual humanbeings can only be constituted in and through social movements andthe institutions such movements create. He was deeply concerned withthe role o individuals in bringing about social change, but the concep-tion o the individual which he developed was a radical break romthose o his immediate predecessors.

It was the concern to nd a route to modernity or Germany whichled Hegel to an investigation o the source o the differing spirit o peo-ples and the ate o each nation (1948, 1979). Hegel did not invent thisstudy. Be ore him Immanuel Kant (Eze 1997) and Johann Gott riedHerder (2004), who coined the terms Volksgeist and Zeitgeist, hadmade investigations into the problem. By studying the history o apeople, Hegel hoped to discover why one people would make revolu-tion or build an empire, while another people would wallow in dis-unity or slavery.

Tese ideas became important in the development o cultural anthro-pology and helped shape the ideas o people like Franz Boas (Stocking1966), but modern nations are not homogeneous entities in that sense,


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and Hegel, whose interest was in the ostering o both social solidarityand modern individuality, understood this. At best the concept could

be use ul in characterization o an ancient city state or o an isolatedcommunity perhaps, or to explain particular aspects o the charactero different nations. Nonetheless, the problem o Volksgeist asks alegitimate question, and it was a rst step towards understanding thenature o modern social li e and its relation to the psychology o theindividuals who constitute a society, and a radical break rom trying tounderstand the problem o reedom through oundation myths, socialcontracts or the aculty o Reason.

Hegel’s early work, such as the 1802–03 draf, “System o EthicalLi e” (1979), is particularly important because in it we see Hegelworking out his conception o spirit in terms o practical daily li e(1979: 102ff ). aking the lead o his predecessors Kant and Fichte , andDescartes or that matter, he aimed or a philosophy without presup-positions, but instead o turning inwards to the contemplation o ‘clearideas’, or appealing to some kind o mathematical reasoning, he tookas his given datum, ordinary, living people—reproducing themselves,their literature and their society and thinking about philosophy—albeit in mysti ed orm.

Now it is true that this kind o consideration is absent rom hislater works, such as the Logic, which moves entirely in the domain oabstract thought orms, but there is no reason to suppose that he aban-doned this view o the construction o consciousness through labor .Philosophy in general and logic in particular has to stand on its ownground and cannot appeal to other domains or its proo . But whatHegel’s early investigations led him to was not a social psychology, todo with how people acquire an idea, but a radically new conception

o what an idea is.Somewhere between the writing o “System o Ethical Li e” in 1803and the next version o his system sometimes called the “Philosophyo Spirit” (1979), dated 1805–06, an important change took place inhis idea o Spirit . Up till this time he had been interested in the spirito this or that times or the spirit o this or that people, and looked orits origins in the day-to-day activity o people. But, ollowing the pres-sure which comes to bear on every builder o a philosophical system,he began to talk about ‘spirit’ as such. So instead o having the spirit o

this or that people rooted in an historical orm o li e, orged throughthe experience o victory or de eat at war, through the raising o cropsor trading o goods, we had Spirit . Spirit manifested itself in the activity


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o a people, grew as that people ul lled their destiny, and then movedon to another people. Spirit came and went, entered into the affairs o

a nation, and would leave it again. So with little change in the concep-tion o spirit itsel , spirit became something that pre-existed the ormo li e in which it was instantiated. And it was one and the same spiritwhich ound a different orm at a different time in a different people.

Tis move acilitated the construction o a systematic philosophy,but it moved his philosophy in a theistic direction. At the same time,it is a move which is rather easily reversible, or our secular times. Youdon’t need to rei y the concept o Spirit , as i it were something whichcould pre-exist human li e, and only manifest itsel in human activity.We can use Hegel’s concept o spirit as something which is constitutedby rather than mani ested in human activity; we can re use to makethat move which Hegel made around 1803–4, and still appropriatewhat Hegel has to offer in his mature works.

Te other implication o this conception o Spirit was that it reallyemphasized the unitary character o spirit; everyone shares in the cul-ture o a people, its language, its orms o production and distribution,its institutions and its religion. It is this shared character o spirit asHegel conceived it, which comes to the ore, rather than a concernwith distinctions and difference. But the point is this: should we pro-ceed like Fichte, beginning rom the individual, and rom the individual deduce the nature o the society, or should we on the contrary,begin with a conception o the society, a conception which rests onpeople’s collaborative activity, and rom there deduce the nature othe individual

Documents

(Studies in Critical Socialsciences 22) Andy Blunden-An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity-Brill(2010)