Abstract
This introductory chapter examines Vygotsky’s uptake in past and current educational psychology, where problematic translations from the original works and a frequent disregard of Vygotsky’s Marxist epistemological premises have characterized the Russian scholar’s tremendous impact in the field. Instead of a finalized theory ready to be applied, Vygotsky’s work was in vibrant and constant development, a development that his untimely death broke at a point when the psychologist, building on Spinoza, was on the verge of a major shift in his theory. We revisit Vygotsky’s living legacy in the light of recent historical and archival analyses that provide a sense of the direction that Vygotsky was taking to overcome the problems that plagued the (educational) psychology of his time, problems that continue to this day. They revolve around the Cartesian dualisms that divide mind and body, collective and individual, or culture and biology. Instead there is not a body, and a thinking mind, but a thinking body that manifests itself as thinking and as body. This is a dialectical materialist reading of Spinoza, the foundations and implications of which we develop throughout the rest of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
The editor of two fragments from the personal archive of the Vygotsky family notes that the psychophysical problem was for Vygotsky what the body–mind problem is for us today (Vygotsky 2010).
- 2.
The king’s road.
- 3.
- 4.
Two English translations (Vygotsky 1986, 1987) do not reproduce the original quotation marks that separate the phrases directly taken from Marx and Engels (1978) and the remaining text. The German translation (Vygotskij 2002) and a recent Russian version (Vygotskij 2005) do contain the original quotation marks.
- 5.
Very important.
- 6.
- 7.
In all of their writing, Marx and Engels never use the German equivalents to societal [gesellschaftlich] and social [sozial] synonymously. They are not synonymous! Instead, only the former term allows a critique of a class society, whereas the latter refers to anything that we do in common. When taking on an idea from Marx and Engels, Vygotsky, too, makes the distinction (i.e. obščestvenij vs. social’no).
- 8.
This quotation is indeed a paraphrase from the preface to The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1978), which first was published Institute for Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union: 1932 in the German and 1933 in the Russian version.
- 9.
Marx does so in Das Kapital (Marx and Engels 1962).
- 10.
See Leont’ev (1978).
- 11.
Vygotsky’s notebooks contain many statements about the differences between Leont’ev and himself that were emerging, including the different ways in which they were articulating consciousness.
- 12.
“Consciousness [Bewußtsein], being conscious, never can be something other than conscious being” (Marx and Engels 1978: 26).
- 13.
Spinoza sought philosophical rigor by means of a synthetic geometric method , in which all aspects of the whole system of thought are derived from a primary set of propositions and axioms.
- 14.
In conversations with colleagues, we sometimes hear the suggestion that Vygotsky, in referencing Marx and Engels, was simply doing lip service to the regime of his days. This may or may not have been the case. More important to us is the fact that his method of inquiry fundamentally is materialist dialectical, as is his reading of Spinoza independent of whether or not he names it a Marxist re-reading.
- 15.
The two psychologists are contemporaries, having lived during approximately the same time: 1896–1934 (Vygotsky) and 1903–1942 (Politzer).
- 16.
In American pragmatist philosophy, experience is used in that way (e.g. Dewey 1934/2008).
- 17.
That idea also is central to a materialist phenomenology (Henry 2000).
- 18.
“Substance is its own cause.”
- 19.
Animation is the “fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept” of life (Sheets-Johnstone 2011: 453).
- 20.
This fundamental insight also arises within phenomenological philosophy, where there is a primacy accorded to movement over schemas (e.g. Sheets-Johnstone 2011).
- 21.
That precise insight also was the result of an inquiry from a very different perspective, an inquiry that established the foundations of the person in its habitudes (Maine de Biran 1841).
- 22.
Vygotsky makes reference to Spinoza’s definition suggesting that it can be justifiably applied to child development, where the “initial consciousness of the infant still completely lacks active [psychological (psixičeskie)] states, that is, [psychological (psixičeskix)] states internally determined by the personality ” (Vygotsky 1998: 233).
- 23.
Marx and Engels (1978) rightly point out that Feuerbach’s position, in identifying mind with body, fails to recognize the inner contradiction in the worldly foundation of life, which detaches itself from itself to form an apparently self-sufficient kingdom (i.e. consciousness). In other words, Feuerbach’s materialism is of the kind that can be found to the present day in the natural sciences and positivist psychology, and which cannot account for the emergence and concrete existence of consciousness.
- 24.
- 25.
Historically, our own sensitivity and attention to the social relation s as educational research ers have a different intellectual origin, namely in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
- 26.
Throghout the book, we use the term {teaching | learning} as a means to emphasize the social irreducibility of instructional situations, in which not the individuals alone, but the soci(et)al relation is the unit that learns and develops.
- 27.
The vulgar interpretation merely identifies consciousness with matter.
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Roth, WM., Jornet, A. (2017). Vygotsky, Spinoza, and Cultural Psychology of Education. In: Understanding Educational Psychology. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39868-6_1
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