[Xmca-l] Help With Russian?

[David Kellogg]

Dear Russophones:

I've been puzzling all afternoon over this, from Vygotsky's lecture on the
Crisis at Three and Seven. Vygotsky has just introduced the importance of
having a unit in which the development f the personality can be described
and explained, and proposes "lived experience", that is, "perezhvanie". He
now wants to define it.

Всякое переживание есть всегда переживание чего-нибудь. Нет переживания,
которое не было бы переживанием чего-нибудь, как нет акта сознания, который
бы не был актом сознания чего-нибудь. Но всякое переживание есть мое
переживание. В современной конкретной теории переживание вводится как
единица сознания, где все основные свойства сознания даны как таковые, в то
время как во внимании, в мышлении не дано связи сознания. Внимание не
является единицей сознания, а является каким-то элементом сознания, в
котором нет ряда других элементов, причем единство сознания как такового
пропадает, а вот действительной динамической единицей сознания, из которой
складывается сознание, является переживание.


So I gather this means:

a) "All lived experience is an experience of some thing."

(i.e. all perezhivanie is intensional, it is about or of or
towards something, it includes the environment)

b) "There is no lived experience that is not a lived experience of
something, just as there is no act of consciousness which is not an act of
cognizing something."

(i.e. consciousness is always consciousness of some event, some happening,
some entity)

c) "But in all lived experience there is the live-experiencing of myself."

(But there is also a live-experiencing of the self, as well as a live
experiencing of the environment.)

d) "In contemporary concrete (?) theory, lived experience is introduced as
a unit of consciousness in which all of the basic properties of
consciousness are given as such, whereas attention and thinking are not
given this link to consciousness."

(It appears that by "concrete theory" he means something like "concrete
psychology": in this theory, thinking is not a unit of consciousness and
neither is attention.)

e) "Attention is not a unit of consciousness but is some element of
consciousness in which there is no series of other elements, with it the
unity of consciousness as such vanishes"

(Attention isn't a unit, but only an element, because attention does not
contain within itself the set of elements. Is Vygotsky saying that if we
take attention as a unit then the unity of consciousness vanishes?)

f) "Here the actual dynamic unit of consciousness, from which consciousness
is made up, is lived experience."

(Lived experience is the real unit of consciousness, from which
consciousness is constituted.)

I find d) and e) very puzzling. Do I have it right, or am I way off the
mark?

Help, Russophones!

David Kellogg

Macquarie University