Abstract
Sociality and technology are not simply general underpinnings which yield an amorphous consciousness. Quite the contrary, sociality and technology exist as specific social-technological systems which endow consciousness with particular form and content. Consciousness only emerges in the struggle to comprehend, create, and transform a particular social, technological, and physical reality. Accordingly, consciousness’s activity and organization are thoroughly imbued with that reality. The features of psychology that were described in Chapter 1 are only abstractions that have been intellectually lifted from sensuous life activity. The statement that “thought is stimulated by language” is a summary description of the fact that different kinds of language exist which stimulate quite different kinds of thinking. The summary description is abstract in the sense that it extracts a common quality from the different instances. The instances are concrete in that they are integrated configurations of numerous real properties. While abstractions are real in the sense that different particulars do have common qualities, abstractions must always be recognized as emanating from concrete particulars; they do not exist in and of themselves.1 Beneath the serene, imperturbable homogeneity of abstractions lies a vibrant, discordant concreteness. The comfortable, secure feel of invariant abstractions is only the external shell of a most unstable, variable lived struggle to produce concrete phenomena. Accordingly, psychological abstractions such as thinking, feeling, perceiving, learning, and communicating must be grounded in sensuous life activity. Psychology is the psychology of real, living individuals engaged in a definite mode of social life and intercourse with nature. Psychological functions are not independent of practical life. As Vygotsky (1989, p. 65) said, “It is not thought that thinks; a person thinks.”
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Notes
Criticizing abstraction which loses sight of its constituent particulars, Hegel emphasized the importance of a dialectical integration among the two. Only this integration, which he called the true Concept of a thing, is concrete. In his inimitable words, Now, as regards the nature of the Concept as such, it is not in itself an abstract unity at all over against [i.e., separate from] the differences of reality; as Concept it is already the unity of specific differences and therefore a concrete totality. So, for example, ideas like man, etc. are prima facie not to be called ‘concepts,’ but abstractly universal ideas, which only become the Concept when it is clear in them that they comprise different aspects in a unity, since this inherently determinate unity constitutes the concept. (Hegel, 1975, vol. 1, p. 108) Hegel contended that avoiding reified, abstract universals is central to doing good philosophy. Insisting that identity dialectically encompasses, rather than excludes, differences he warned, “we must especially guard against taking identity as abstract Identity, to the exclusion of all Difference. That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone deserves the name of philosophy” (Hegel, 1965, p. 214). The specifications that concretize and limit the general are its determinateness (Bestimmtheit). Hegel emphasizes that being is always determinate being (Marcuse, 1987, chap. 3).
While feelings depend upon attitudes, they are not identical to them. I can have a generalized attitude of loving my mother which I do not feel most of the time because I am not thinking about her. When I talk to her, however, I feel the love. Similarly, if someone asks me, I can certainly say I fear snakes even though I do not normally, or at that moment, feel the dread. I do not walk around vividly feeling fear. I only feel afraid when I am in the presence of snakes.
The social-conceptual basis of adult human emotions does not mean that natural vestiges have been entirely expunged from the human organism. These vestiges definitely exist in babies, and the fact that certain adult facial expressions accompany certain emotional experiences might be rooted in primordial connections that have persisted to this day. However, any such natural components of human emotion will function as Whorf’s “lower processes” (described in the previous chapter) which means they will be overridden by higher social-conceptual processes. Facial expressions are a case in point: As Plutchik stated, “At best there is a prototype facial pattern that may appear briefly under extreme stresses or conditions but it is quickly changed, modified, or inhibited on the basis of rules and experiences that are unique both to the culture and to the individual” (cited in Ratner, 1980a).
Romantic love did also exist in earlier periods in other countries. According to Lantz (1982), besides eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century America, romantic love has been identified in ancient Rome, early Christianity, and feudalism. Common social factors in these periods account for the romanticizing of love. In addition, however, social differences in these periods generated important distinctions in the particular characteristics of romantic love. For example, medieval courtly love was typically an unfulfilled relationship between a married upper-class woman and a suitor of lesser rank. There was little of the personal involvement and soulful sharing that became so prominent in the nineteenth century. Romantic love has even changed considerably from the nineteenth century to today. Changes in society, the relation of the family to public life, and in notions of the self and personal relationships inevitably alter the nature of love. The former ideal of commitment has been undermined by ideals of personal freedom and change. Lovers are wary of entanglements, and they are more concerned with what they can get out of a relationship (i.e., how it will enrich their own experience) than with what they put into it for the other person. In addition, modern love has become invaded by commercial notions of terms, rights, and responsibilities which are equilibrated in order to ensure equality of exchange. Love has also become permeated by economic notions of work, so that lovers work on their relationships as on a job (Swindler, 1980).
Of course, the incorporating of situational variations in emotions must not be overstated. Within a given culture, the same kind of anger may be expressed in a range of circumstances without significantly altering its quality. Its behavioral manifestations can also vary considerably without altering its quality. However, there are limits to this equilibrium. Just as water remains liquid within a range of temperatures but freezes or vaporizes outside this range, so an emotion retains its essential quality within a range of situations but changes significantly in cultures with different concepts and understandings.
The real difference in emotional constructs that is reflected in emotional terminology makes translation of emotional terms quite precarious. This poses great difficulties for cross-cultural research and understanding of emotions. Leff (1977) points out the problem of trying to convey differentiated emotions of one culture into another culture that has an undifferentiated emotional vocabulary. For example, worry, tension, and anxiety, which refer to separate sections of the mental state examination schedule must all be collapsed into a single Chinese word. Another difficulty involves translating between languages which express emotion in bodily terms and those, such as Indo-European, which express the cognitive experience of emotions. For example, “When translating into Yoruba, a Nigerian language, it was hard to find equivalents for depression and anxiety. The words eventually chosen, when translated back into English, came out as ‘the heart is weak’ and ‘the heart is not at rest’” (Leff, p. 322). The doubtful cross-cultural equivalence of emotional constructs and terms is troubling for most cross-cultural psychological research on emotions which requires subjects to label facial photographs with a single affect word. Assuming equivalence of terms when none, in fact, exists conjures up a false impression of universal emotions and emotional recognition processes. This problem of false generalization will be discussed in the next chapter.
Discussing the cultural constitution of the need for privacy, Moore (1984) writes, “By and large, privacy appears to be much less of a social necessity... in nonliterate societies than in those with a written language and some form of state.” “Hence the need for privacy or protection from intrusion is not explicable as an instinctive or reflex reaction. Instead it derives from the perceived difference between benefits derived from the social order, such as protection and an assured supply of food, and the costs of maintaining the social order in the form of social obligations like sharing food and performing labor” (pp. 73, 74). Social historians have amply demonstrated that the European feudal nobility had little, if any, need for privacy. Their homes were always open to outsiders who habitually dropped in without notice. Rooms were large, unspecialized areas where diverse activities were conducted simultaneously. Beds did not permanently lie in bedrooms, but were unfolded and set up in the living room at night. Guests often slept in the same beds with their hosts, and all the beds were close together rather than in being in separate rooms. There was no sexual privacy except for a light curtain that was sometimes drawn around a bed. Bodily functions were also quite public, as it was common to urinate, spit, and blow one’s nose on the street. Even eating was a communal activity with a common dish and utensils. It was only with the rise of the individualized bourgeoisie that modern privacy came into existence. The bourgeoisie rigidly separated the household from the outside, required appointments before visiting, specialized rooms to serve separate activities, introduced sexual privacy, and privatized bodily functions including eating (Aries, 1962, pp. 393-404; Stone,1977, pp. 253-257; Elias, 1978; Clark, 1976). The antipathy to privacy in ancient Greece is revealed in the fact that the Greek term for idiot—“iodotes”—meant a private and separate person.
The economic basis of mathematical thinking repudiates Piaget’s explanation of number as “an endogenous construction” which “is not learned but only exercised” (Piaget, 1971, pp. 310, 312). Piaget claimed that arithmetic derives from spontaneous, endogenous tendencies to order things in relation to each other. The tendency toward equilibrium, which involves compensating activity in one direction with activity in the opposite direction leads to reversible mathematical operations such as addition and subtraction (Piaget, 1971, p. 12). Similarly, counting springs from the tendency to pair things together. Emphasizing the endogenous nature of these tendencies, Piaget explicitly states that “the operations of putting together, including, putting in order, and so on are in no way the products of learning... The sources or roots of these connections are to be found within the organism and not in the objects, so that it is impossible to speak of learning or structures or acquired habits in their normal sense” (Piaget, 1971, p. 310). Obviously, such a nativistic formulation overlooks the sociohistorical relationships that inspire mathematical thinking and which preclude its emergence in children living in noncommercial societies. Piaget’s nativistic explanation of mathematics also overlooks the systematic encouragement that parents give to children on an interpersonal level (Saxe et al., 1987). The fact that entire populations learn math when exposed to commercial life-styles demonstrates that the capacity for mathematical thinking is universal—rather than being confined to extraordinary individuals—and simply requires a social motive to incite people to construct mathematical concepts (cf. Chapter 4 discussion of genius).
This analysis is borne out by the fact that standardizing of time is historically quite recent. De Grazia (1962) says that although the Egyptians and Babylonians divided the day into 12 parts, they did not pay attention to the exact “hour” and only recognized the “early” and “late” parts of the day, the “hot part of the day,” and “nighttime.” Before the fourteenth century A.D., an “hour” was not a uniform unit. Europeans divided the day into 12 daylight and 12 nighttime hours so that, except for the two equinoxes, the 12 dark hours did not equal the 12 daytime hours nor, obviously, was each nighttime hour equal in length to each daylight hour. (Whitrow, 1973, p. 401). Indeed, clocks only came into existence as reliable measures of time in 1500 when the hour hand alone was invented. The minute hand only became common after 1660. Even then, the round shape of clocks over which the hands repeatedly swept reflected the cyclical pattern of agricultural life. Modern digital clocks are the true reflection of our quantified, discrete, linear sense of time.
Generality of cognitive functions is not restricted to modern society. Wagner and Spratt (1987, pp. 1211, 1216) found that premodern Moroccan children who are taught in Quran preschools to rote-memorize Islamic names but do not spend time memorizing digits, perform as well on memory tests using digits as they do on rote-memory tests with Muslim names as the items to be remembered. In other words, practice in memorizing names generalized to digits (cf. Jahoda, 1981, for an additional example of generalization from school to everyday cognition among Ghanian tribal people).
Actually, evidence challenges any such homogeneity across all cognitive operations. Specifically challenging Piaget’s conception of generic, coherent cognitive stages, Shweder (1982a, p. 357) said, The idea that children or adults are characteristically preoperational (or concrete operational, or formal operational) has taken a beating in recent years. If we examine the actual cognitive functioning of individuals across a series of tasks or problems, we discover that no single operational level is a general property of an individual’s thought. Children and adults often do not apply the same mode of reasoning (e.g., reversibility) to formally equivalent problems (e.g., a conservation task) which differ in content or surface characteristics (e.g., conservation of number versus conservation of liquid quantity). By varying the content of a task it is possible to elicit either preoperational thinking from a college-educated adult or formal operational thinking from a four year old. The person who functions at a formal operational level on one task is not typically the same person who functions at a formal operational level on a second task. Indeed, to cite but one example, Roberge and Flexer discovered that performance on formal operational tests for propositional logic and combinatorial thinking intercorrelate a mere-0.07 for eighth graders and 0.17 for adults (cf. also Cole 8c Bruner, 1971; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1983, pp. 340-342; Feldman & Toulmin, 1976). Kagan (1981, p. 118) similarly rejects “a concept like ‘developmental rate’ or ‘developmental level’ which applies to all major cognitive functions during an era of growth. Such general constructs—g being one example—are not theoretically useful and are not in accord with the relative independence we found among many of the indices of cognitive development.” Gelman and Baillargeon concur with this conclusion. In their extensive review of the developmental literature they pointedly state: “In our opinion there is little evidence to support the idea of major stages in cognitive development of the type described by Piaget” (Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983, p. 214). Cultural variations in the sequence in which cognitive abilities are exhibited further challenges the notion of intrinsic, maturationally mandated stages. Research on decentration, or the ability to adopt different perspectives, has found that it appears on different tasks at different ages in different societies. On 3 tasks of decentration—(1) sibling perspective comprehension, (2) sibling category definition, and (3) left-right orientation—Vietnamese children are successful at 7, 11, and 10 years of age, respectively. Geneva children are successful at 10, 9, and 8 years, respectively. And Hawaiian children are successful at 9, 8, and 10, respectively. The sequence is thus (1), (3), (2) in the Vietnamese population, (3), (2), (1) in the Geneva sample, and (2), (1), (3) in the Hawaiian children. An additional complicating piece of data is that Hausa children achieve decentration on the left-right orientation task as early as 6, compared to 10 in the Vietnamese population (Luong, 1986). Luong concludes that the variation in what Piagetians would consider a horizontal decalage sequence closely relates to the diversity of sociocultural rules and is a function of the sociocultural environment: It is no coincidence that the extremely early decentration in left-right orientation by Hausa children takes place in a system which, as a part of the Islamic tradition, attaches considerable importance to the differentiation of left and right hands and to the full comprehension of their symbolic significance. Similarly, the emphasis on the assumption of junior interactants’ perspectives in Vietnamese kin term usages underlies the earlier decentration among Vietnamese children on the sibling perspective task. (pp. 26-27) The fact that 3-year olds recognize the difference in perspective between themselves and others well before they achieve reversibility and decentration in other tasks (such as right-left orientation), challenges Piaget’s hypothesis that this operation constitutes a part of the domain-free concrete operational structure that emerges at age 7-12 (Luong, p. 34; Leontiev, 1981, p. 397). While maturation dictates a general direction of cognitive ability toward abstract and decentered thinking, there is no evidence for a fixed sequence of decentered competencies (Luong, 1986, p. 8). Experientially derived variations in cognitive competencies do not rule out the possibility that certain competencies are intrinsically more complex and difficult to acquire than others. In these areas, a universal developmental sequence would be manifest. Decontextualized thought succeeds contextualized thought for this reason. And cross-cultural evidence suggests a universal developmental sequence for other competencies as well. Mwamwenda and Mwamwenda (1989) report several studies which find an invariant sequence: transitive inference, conservation of volume, class inclusion. This data contradicts Piaget’s contention that transivity is the most difficult and latest to appear of the three, however the data suggests that a universal sequence among the three may occur. The notion that invariant sequences of activity can result from differential complexity of tasks rather than from an endogenous set of cognitive processes (which naturally unfold at predetermined times) is readily illustrated with examples from history. In history, literacy invariably precedes science, and hunting and gathering society invariably precedes agriculture which always precedes industrialization. It is inconceivable that mankind could have reversed this order or skipped directly from hunting and gathering to industrialization without the intermediate “stage” of agriculture. However, the sequences are invariant because each “stage” requires knowledge (and material support) that has been acquired in earlier periods. The sequences are certainly not determined by endogenous dispositions which unfold in an intrinsically predetermined order. No ineluctible destiny compels every society to develop from one stage to another (some remain at one stage) or to complete the entire possible progression and achieve the most developed state (Gellner, 1988, p. 16). Exactly the same can be said for the ontogenetic sequence of cognitive operations.
The way in which atomizing knowledge instantiates bourgeois social values within educational institutions is illuminated by McNeil (1986). She shows how the atomistic form in which knowledge is dispensed (and cognition is structured) co-opt disparate content within a uniform bourgeois form.
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Ratner, C. (1991). Psychology’s Concrete Social Character. In: Vygotsky’s Sociohistorical Psychology and its Contemporary Applications. Cognition and Language. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2614-2_3
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