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

[Andy Blunden]

I am familiar with Dewey's work on this, Alfredo, and I too have found it
very useful. That was not my problem. But thinking about it, I suspect it
was just an English expression problem.
You said "experience is a unit of doing and undergoing". But I think you
meant to say "experience is a unity of doing and undergoing," which is
certainly true. Just as activity is a unity of consciousness and
behaviour, or identity is a unity of recognition and self-consciousness,
etc.
But a *unit* is something different from *unity*. "Experience" in this
sense is not a unit at all; "an experience" can be a unit, but not a unit
of doing and undergoing.

Is that right, Alfredo?
Andy

> 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
>
>
>