Vygotsky’s Emotions: Desire/Passion in Spinoza, Proposal/Proposition in Halliday, and Teaching Sexual Consent to Children in Korea

Abstract

Some problems, unraveled, seem to resolve each other. The Soviet integrative psychologist Vygotsky bequeathed to us an unfinished paper on the emotions. But was it about the teachings of Spinoza, was it concerned with contemporaneous theories, or did Vygotsky have a teaching/theory of his own? Vygotsky called his approach “Spinozian but not Spinozist” in his notes, but in his actual writings this appears as a distinction without a difference. What did he mean by it? In many places, Vygotsky appears to be retracing his steps rather than proceeding to a conclusion, yet he was already considering a title and a dedicatee. Was it really finishable? This paper argues that Vygotsky intended to use the teachings of Spinoza to critique his colleagues and associates; that he turned the critique back on “Spinozism” itself, and that the theory he intended to construct would be properly called “Spinozian”. In the end, however, only practice can resolve the Spinozist teaching on emotions into the kind of working Spinozian theory Vygotsky had in mind; only real data will help us tie up the last loose threads. To this end, a linguistic approach to the problem of how the concept of sexual consent develops in Korean children is proposed.