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Chasing Vygotsky’s Dogs: Retrieving Lev Vygotsky’s Philosophy for a Workers’ Paradise

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Abstract

In an article published in 1930, Lev Vygotsky refers explicitly to the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza. From a close reading of Vygotsky’s remarkable piece, ‘The socialist transformation of man,’ the extraordinary parallels in the lives and philosophies of Vygotsky and Spinoza are revealed. Then the strengths and weaknesses are assessed of the analytical approach Vygotsky may have inherited from Spinoza. It is suggested that there are analytical ramifications arising from Vygotsky’s possible reliance on Spinoza’s nuanced but essentially dualistic philosophy. The conclusion is that the key limitation of this methodology is the elision of radical doubting with radical unknowability.

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Notes

  1. The usual quote given from Vygotsky (1978, p. 86) that describes the Zone of Proximal Development is the following one: ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.’ The incredibly loaded terms such as distance, actual development, level, determined, independent, problem solving, potential development, guidance, collaboration, more capable, peers, not to mention the relationships between them, are never really explained adequately anywhere by Vygotsky.

  2. One more line of descent is revealed for the broad ideas that may have influenced Vygotsky when Fitzpatrick (1979, p. 11) states that Lunacharsky and Krupskaya were of the generation strongly influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s view of the influence of the cultural environment upon character formation (see also Wertsch 1985, p. 7).

  3. This substitution of social solutions for political ones was not new for Vygotsky. For example, in his 1926 work Educational Psychology, Chapter 12, he states: ‘Every attempt at constructing educational ideals in a society with social contradictions is a utopian dream, since, as we have seen, the social environment is the only educational factor that can establish new reactions in the child, and so long as it harbours unresolved contradictions, these contradictions will create cracks in the most well thought-out and most inspired educational system.’ What Vygotsky could not admit, except by his refusal to construct clear ‘educational ideals’, was that ‘unresolved’ social contradictions continued to exist in the Soviet Union. How they were to be resolved was, of course, the issue about which Vygotsky was most obscure. Ewing (2001, p. 479) finds that this sort of aversion owing to political caution pervaded the work of Soviet pedologists.

  4. Vygotsky had used this phrase before, in the concluding sentence of a manuscript written in 1926–1927 entitled The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology. The paraphrase appears there after the following: ‘In the future society, psychology will indeed be the science of the new man.’ Vygotsky then qualifies this: ‘There is no necessity for this psychology to correspond [any closer to] the present one as—in the words of Spinoza—the constellation Dog corresponds to a dog, a barking animal’ (quoted in Rieber and Robinson 2004, p. 224). Here is yet another causal candidate for aiding the socialist transformation of humans—a new psychological method.

  5. Canis Major (the greater dog) along with Canis Minor (the lesser dog) are two constellations accompanying the hunter Orion. In the northern polar sky, Canis Major stands on its hind legs and holds in its jaws Sirius, the ‘dog star’ and the brightest star in the sky, whose name in Greek means ‘scorching’ and at 8.6 light-years’ distance from Earth is the ninth closest star. Sirius is a binary star composed of Sirius A, a white giant, and Sirius B, a white dwarf.

  6. Spinoza (1677/1955, p. 7): ‘an entity must be defined as absolutely infinite which consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence’.

  7. Stuart Hampshire (1951, p. 194) states that Spinoza’s ‘radical lack of the idea of history…is the essential reflection of his general philosophy’. Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991, p. 359) find a similar methodological problem in Spinoza: ‘a developmental perspective seems to be entirely lacking in his work’.

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Correspondence to Kelvin McQueen.

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McQueen, K. Chasing Vygotsky’s Dogs: Retrieving Lev Vygotsky’s Philosophy for a Workers’ Paradise. Stud Philos Educ 29, 53–66 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9160-4

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