Abstract
The chapter offers an account of the prehistory of Vygotsky’s theory. More concretely, the chapter provokes an engagement with the conceptual and methodological issues that arose in Vygotsky’s creative development before the emergence of cultural-historical theory. Here is analyzed the shift in Vygotsky’s world-view orientation from subjectivism to natural-scientific, objective analysis of consciousness . Having passed through reflexology and behaviorism , Vygotsky never identified himself fully with these approaches due to his humanitarian education. It is proposed that Vygotsky’s effort to transcend the divide between objectivism and subjectivism as an essential dimension of the crisis in psychology can be examined as an attempt to overcome contradictions in his own research.
Not everything that flowered once must wilt,
Not everything that was must pass.
(Tyutchev)
Oh, how we must despise and respect life at the same time in order to live. The main thing is to be above life, to deal with it slightly condescendingly (Chekhov) and to be free of it. I am independent. My passions have again burnt out.
(Vygotsky, In Van der Veer and Zavershneva 2011, 470–471)
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- 1.
Lev Semyonovich replaced the “d” in his name for “t” in the early 1920s.
- 2.
It has been reported by Dobkin that “Lev Semenovich was very fond of puzzles with a dual solution. Sometimes they would be witty jokes, sometimes words that had two meanings” (Feigenberg 1996, 80).
- 3.
Lukacs (1980) provided a systematic critique of the refusal of the Hegelian dialectics by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the turn to irrationalism in its various forms as a result of the deep philosophical crisis and the decadence as a basic characteristic of contemporary bourgeoisie’s philosophy.
- 4.
In the 1920s in the USSR, a strong movement emerged of experimentation with the ideas of western liberal educators such as John Dewey (1859–1952) and Maria Montessori (1870–1952). It seems that even before the elaboration of cultural-historical theory, Vygotsky aroused fundamental objections to ideas of “child centered” pedagogy. Vygotsky was aware of the inadequacy of a “child centered” conception of “…an individual and autonomous self-development that is somehow automatic, predetermined, and guaranteed, in abstraction from community practices…” (Stetsenko 2017, p. 340).
- 5.
The editor of the Russian edition of “Pedagogical Psychology” did not mention the origin of this quote (Vygotsky 1991, p. 372). Moreover, several Vygotskian quotations to Trotsky, the Left Opposition leader, were removed from republished Vygotsky’s works. The existence of suppressed passages in “Pedagogical Psychology” and other Vygotsky’s writings has been reported by Van der Veer and Yasnitsky (2011).
- 6.
Vygotsky’s dissertation “Psychology of Art” first was published in 1965. A typed copy of “Psychology of Art” has been preserved in the archive of the famous Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). The marginal notes of Eisenstein on Vygotsky’s work demonstrate the utmost attention when he was reading it. Vygotsky’s idea of Αrt as a social technique of feelings was especially important to Eisenstein for the elaboration of his concept of modes of aesthetic reaction (Vassilieva 2013).
- 7.
Vygotsky’s understanding of the aesthetic reaction to a work of Art as a dynamic unity of opposites inspired Eisenstein to elaborate his concept of “montage attraction.” Eisenstein attempted to develop a dialectical approach to film form in terms of the law of unity and struggle of opposites for the explanations of the ecstatic state provoked by Art (Bulgakowa 2014).
- 8.
The term “defectology” (“study of defect”) carries negative connotation toward the disabled in the English language. In Russia, this term was used for the study of the handicapped and the methods of their education and upbringing (Gindis 1995).
- 9.
Vygotsky’s work has been translated into English with the title “The historical meaning of psychological crisis” (Vygotsky 1997). The Russian title of Vygotsky’s work is “Istorischeskii smisl psychologischeskova krizisa.” Vygotsky used the word “sense” (smysl) not “meaning” (znashenie) (Veresov 1999).
- 10.
“Subconsc. is biological, consc. is soc.[,] the living interaction of these two principles is personality” (Zavershneva and Osipov 2012, p. 35).
- 11.
Later, in his work “The teaching about emotions” Vygotsky criticised psychophysical parallelism and epistemological dualism that “…became the architectural plan for the development of psychology…” (Vygotsky 1999b, p. 182).
- 12.
In this chapter, some issues are examined that were crucial for the development of Vygotsky’s research program such as the interconnection between methodology and practice. The conceptualization of dialectics by Vygotsky and the distinction between essence and phenomenon are examined in the ninth chapter of the book. See also Dafermos (2014).
- 13.
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Dafermos, M. (2018). The Prehistory of Cultural-Historical Theory. In: Rethinking Cultural-Historical Theory. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 4. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0191-9_5
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