[Xmca-l] Re: Did Vygotsky Ever Finish Anything?

[mike cole]

​Hi David--- I do not think the priority makes much of a difference with
respect to what we have to learn about the complexities of the issues. The
problems are the same whenever the criticism arose.

I can find only two references to Luria in the index of my copy of Vol 4 of
Hist Psych Functions. Neither is on this topic. I have not been following
all the letter writing you refer to and that plays such an important role
in Anton's historical revolutionizing. Could you point to where he calls
out Luria for writing incorrect ideas in their joint book and doing, or
planning to do, objectionable research in Central Asia? ​

I sort of like the idea of this "book" as a kind of Notebooks of the Mind.
Seems to characterize a lot of the way LSV worked.

mike

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 2:13 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike:
>
> Anton Yasnitsky argues that Chapter Two of HDHMF must have been
> written "not later than 1930", contrary to the usual chronology, which
> is 1931-1932.
>
>  http://www.psyanima.ru/journal/2011/4/2011n4a1/2011n4a1.1.pdf
>
> If Anton is right then the manuscript was written before Luria left
> for Uzbekistan; if the traditional dating is correct then it was
> written more or less during the expedition itself and represents the
> kind of private misgivings about the work of his collaborators that he
> often expresses.
>
> If we accept Anton's chronology then there are a few problems.
>
> a)  Vygotsky's enthusiasm for the expedition (expressed in the
> letters) is hard to explain; Vygotsky wasn't an opportunist and he had
> absolutely no compunction about expressing his strong disapproval of
> Luria's contribution to "Ape, Primitive, and Child". Why would he turn
> around and suddenly decide that the method of using laboratory
> experiments in the field was okay?
>
> b) Anton says that the two parts of HDHMF are unrelated--they were
> pasted together by the Soviet editor. But the beginning of the book
> clearly prefigures the ending (see Ch. 1, p. 7 in the English Volume
> Four, second para) and the end of the book also refers to the
> beginning (see Ch. 15, p. 241, first three paras).
>
> c) Vygotsky says that the second half of the book was done first (see
> above paragraphs, and also p. 3, para 5). Anton has it the other way
> aroud.
>
> It seems to me that the biggest problem with Anton's analysis is not
> the chronology, though. It's that Anton does not recognize that HDHMF
> is a major work; he doesn't even recognize it as authorial, because
> Vygotsky doesn't include it in any of the lists of his published and
> unpublished work.
>
> Anton's certainly right that Vygotsky did not include the work in his
> CV. But I think that the explanation is this: it was a private
> manuscript, like the notebooks that Da Vinci and Wittgenstein kept.
> Vygotsky used it to try to work out his own ideas for his own benefit.
> That's why Chapter Four contains all this mind-changing, where
> Vygotsky says that maybe Titchener is right and there are two stages
> of behavior, but maybe Buhler is right, and there are three, but there
> are really four, but the fourth one is sui generis, so maybe Buhler is
> right after all. And that's why the manuscript contains his misgivings
> about what Luria was up to.
>
> Although I think it is a private manuscript (and that's why it has no
> title--the title is one that the Soviet editors made up out of the
> first five words of Chapter One) I also think it was, quite unlike
> Thinking and Speech, an almost finished book. Of course, Vygotsky
> never really finished anything: his mind is a discourse and not a
> text. But that's true of minds quite generally, in  a sense finishing
> his books and leaving new books unfinished is what we are all here
> for.
>
> For example--a thought occurs to me. The lifespan of early man appears
> to have been somewhere in the low thirties, rather like other
> primates. At age fifteen, early man would be middle aged. Did they
> even have children back then?
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>



-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.