Abstract
The chapter proposes an alternative, dialectical reading of Vygotsky’s theory that may help us better understand its philosophical underpinnings. The chapter starts with a brief sketch of the history of dialectics. Αn attempt will be made to define dialectics and its main historical forms. Then, three key methodological issues of dialectics will be examined and its relations to Vygotsky’s theory: the relation between essence and phenomenon , the ascent from the abstract to the concrete and its relation to the movement of thinking from the sensory concrete to the abstract and the relation between the logical and historical method . The chapter includes also a reflection on the dialectical method and its application to psychology in the USSR.
We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not .
(Heraclitus)
Dialectics consists in formulating a “ contradiction ,” bringing it to the fullest sharpness and clarity of expression, and then finding a real, concrete, object-related, and therefore obvious, resolution of it…dialectics is by no means a mysterious Art only for mature and select minds . It is the real logic of real thinking—a synonym for concrete thinking. People must be trained in it from childhood .
(Ilyenkov 2007a, p. 24, 20)
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that the law of the negation of negation as well as any reference to the Hegelian concept “aufhebung” was omitted by Stalin in “Dialectical and historical materialism” (1938). Until Stalin’s death, a serious discussion on materialistic dialectic and its relation to Hegelian dialectic was impossible.
- 2.
Lenin stated in his “Philosophical notebook”: “In Capital, Marx applied to a single science logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge of materialism [three words are not needed: it is one and the same thing] which has taken everything valuable in Hegel and developed it further” (Lenin 1976, p. 317).
- 3.
Ilyenkov’s account of dialectical contradictions has been labeled by Bakhurst as “flawed” (Bakhurst 1991, p. 170). The rejection of dialectical contradictions by Bakhurst (1991) has been justifiably criticized by Engeström for ignoring “the possibility that dialectical contradictions are foundationally different from the contradictions described in the formal-logical principle of noncontradiction” (Engeström 2015, p. xxix).
- 4.
For Ilyenkov, philosophy is the theory of thought, rather the objective world itself. During that period, Soviet philosophers were preoccupied with trying to find the relations between the external world of objects, on the one hand, and the internal world of thoughts, on the other. Rejecting ontologization of the subject matter of philosophy, Ilyenkov argued that the logic can be examined as its primary subject matter. Ilyenkov and his friend Korovikov presented their views on their famous “Theses” that caused controversy at the Faculty of philosophy of Moscow Moscow University (MGU). In the discussion that was sparked they were accused of “Hegelianism” and were sacked from MGU (Bakhurst 1991, 2013; Ilyenkov and Korovikov 2016).
- 5.
It is important to take into account the essential difference between the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet philosophy. The 1960s was “the golden age” in Soviet philosophy when new, creative insights emerged and high-level discussion on dialectics was achieved. In the 1970s the tendencies of the stagnation became dominant in the USSR and in Soviet philosophy. As Korovikov remarks “… Il’enkov left this world at a time when the momentum of history had gone from the Soviet project and Russian society was utterly stagnant, to use the metaphor that came to characterize the period. What killed Il’enkov, according to his friend, was the unspiritual (‘‘antidukhovnaja’’) atmosphere, from which all the oxygen had been sucked by careerists, cynics, and petty bureaucrats. In such a world, it was no longer possible to define one’s intellectual identity as a moment in the unfolding of a grand historical project” (Bakhurst 2013, p. 284)
- 6.
For illustrating the mismatch between the methodology in K. Marx’s “Das Kapital” and the application of the concept of activity in Soviet psychology, the following example can be used. Jones (2009) demonstrates that Marx used the concept of activity not in a general sense, but in the sense of the labor process involved in capitalist production, in a concrete, historically specific productive activity.
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Dafermos, M. (2018). Developing a Dialectical Perspective on Vygotsky’s 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_9
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