[Xmca-l] Re: LSV on language as a model of development

[Alfredo Gil Jornet]

Dewey, most extensively in chapter 3 of "Art as experience", makes a distinction between the general stream of experience, and an experience, which, according to him, is the experience that "is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency". After the fact, an experience "has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship", Dewey writes. He further says that, within that unity, there is both an aspect of doing, of initiation, and another of undergoing, "of suffering in its large sense". He further articulates the relation between the doing and the undergoing in terms of "anticipation" and "consummation" "Anticipation" he writes "is the connecting link between the next doing and its outcome for sense. What is done and what is undergone are thus reciprocally, cumulatively, and continuously instrumental to each other"

Although in most passages these notes have a rather individualistic taste, he goes on to clarify that there is a prominent public character in experience: "without external embodiment, an experience remains incomplete" he says. In the same chapter, he also argues that "it is not possible to divide in a vital experience the practical, emotional, and intellectual from one another." Both these conditions may make it possible to draw connections between Dewey's notion of experience and Vygotsky's perezivanie.

In any case, I find interesting the dialectic Dewey proposes between doing and undergoing as aspects of a minimal unit of sense-full experience because it allows for thinking of being immersed in a developmental situation in which the final form already exists before the intellect grasps it, so that we do not need to put individual knowledge constructions as who puts the cart before the horse.

But this is my reading, which may have obviated other aspects that would preclude this reading?
Hope this was of help.
Best,

Alfredo
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Sent: 03 July 2014 17:17
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: LSV on language as a model of development

Alfredo, what did you mean by:
> ... as he argued, experience is a unit of doing and undergoing,

Andy