Re: Collected Works of LSV

nate (schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu)
Mon, 4 May 1998 17:27:05 -0500

I was curious what books are included in the colleded works. I
was under the interpretation they included Thought and Language
and Mind and Society.
nATE
-----Original Message-----
From: Stanton Wortham <swortham who-is-at abacus.bates.edu>
To: xmca list <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, May 04, 1998 3:15 PM
Subject: Collected Works of LSV

I have pasted in below a review of Volumes 3 & 4 of Vygotsy's
COLLECTED
WORKS, published by Plenum, which came out last year. The
review was just
published in the AMERICAN SCIENTIST, May-June, 1998, Volume 86,
pp.
296-7, and is posted here with their permission.

For those of us who do not read Russian, and who want to get
into the
details of how Vygotsky conceptualized issues like the
relationship
between individual and social, I would highly recommend taking a
look at
these volumes.

Stanton Wortham

The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 3. Ren van der
Veer,
trans., Robert Rieber and Jeffrey Wollock, eds. xiii + 426 pp.
Plenum
Press, 1997. $65.

The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 4. Marie Hall,
trans.,
Robert Rieber, ed. xvii + 294 pp. Plenum Press, 1997. $59.50.

Since it branched off from philosophy in the 19th century,
psychology has had a troubled, dual nature. Some have
envisioned another
natural science, one that offers causal explanations for
behavior. Others
have envisioned a humanistic science, one that offers more
contextualized
descriptions of the meaningfulness of human experience. The
first group
reduces human phenomena to natural mechanisms. The second
insists that
human phenomena must be described in intentional or spiritual
terms.
Writing in the 1920's and 1930's, Lev Vygotsky claimed that this
split
within psychology had created a crisisDDbecause the split had
prevented
psychology from developing any widely accepted findings or
methods of
the sort one finds in the natural sciences. Although some
progress has
been made in the intervening seventy years, Vygotsky's
description rings
uncomfortably true today.
We will not solve psychology's problem, Vygotsky argued,
by
adopting either a naturalistic or a humanistic approach alone.
He decried
naturalistic explanations that reduce complex human
accomplishments like
self-consciousness, volition, and reasoning to simple
associative
mechanisms. He was even more critical of humanistic accounts
that
describe higher human functions as immaterial forces that evade
scientific
explanation. Vygotsky proposed, instead, to construct a
thoroughly
materialistic science that would nonetheless explain the most
complex,
apparently spiritual aspects of human life. This was an
enormously
ambitious project. Volumes 3 and 4 of the English translation
of
Vygotsky's Collected Works help reveal to the English-speaking
world how
close he came to accomplishing his goal of a materialist,
non-reductionist
psychology.
Vygotsky has been considered an important theorist by
mainstream
American developmental psychologists for a couple of decades,
and in
recent years his sociocentric approach to cognition has begun to
influence
other areas of the discipline. But up until ten years ago only
two short
books were available in English, and these had been very heavily
edited.
With the publication of the third and fourth volumes of
Vygotsky's
Collected Works in English, we now have available most of
Vygotsky's
key writings in their original form. The English Volume 3 was
Volume 1
in the Russian edition, and includes Vygotsky's more theoretical
and
philosophical writings. This volume reveals Vygotsky's powerful
philosophical vision far more richly than previously translated
materials.
Vygotsky's prefaces to Russian translations of important books
in
psychology, and his long article "The Historical Meaning of the
Crisis in
Psychology," show his extraordinary ability to uncover the
limitations of
others' implicit theoretical assumptions. The English Volume 4
(Russian
Volume 3) contains essential papers on the development of higher
mental
functions, which was the area in which Vygotsky came closest to
giving a
successful materialist account of what makes us human.
Vygotsky's background had prepared him to capture the best
from
both naturalistic and humanistic sides of psychology. He was a
materialist,
and he saw Marxist economics as the model for a scientific
psychology.
But he also had extensive literary experience, had written a
dissertation on
the psychology of art, and believed that psychology must take on
the
challenge of explaining uniquely human capacitiesDDlike our
cognitive and
emotional responses to art, and our deliberate, self-conscious
reasoning and
action. Against the behaviorists of his day, then, he
maintained that higher
human capacities represent qualitative developmental leaps. All
other
materialist accounts to that point had explained thinking,
feeling, and
intention in terms of basic physiological or associative
processes.
Vygotsky was the first to offer an objective, materialist
account that did
not reduce higher human functions to physiological or
associative
mechanisms.
His approach relied on two key concepts, that we might
call holism
and history. I will take these in turn. Vygotsky claimed that
developmental leapsDDlike the ability to think using true
conceptsDDhappen
when more primitive abilities combine to form a new functional
system.
Abstract thought, for instance, emerges when thinking and speech
combine.
Initially the child speaks to communicate and thinks to solve
concrete
problems. When the child begins to use more complex language,
the
generalizing power of language (all words categorize, despite
continuous
variation in experience) becomes a tool for thought. Children
start to use
the categorical power of language to organize their thinking,
and thus
develop the ability for abstract thought. Instead of reducing
the higher
capacity to more primitive ones, then, Vygotsky claimed that the
higher
capacity develops through the synthesis of more primitive
functions into a
complex whole. This example of the "interfunctional" system
that
combines thinking and speech is well known, of course, and
presented in
Vygotsky's famous monograph Thinking and speech (published in
Volume
1 of the Plenum edition of the Collected Works). Volume 4
illustrates how
Vygotsky used the same holistic, interfunctional approach to
explain many
other higher psychological capacities. Volume 3 shows that
Vygotsky
intended this approach not only to answer questions about
cognitive
development, but also as a method for turning psychology into a
true
science.
Vygotsky argued that the interfunctional systems which
explain
distinctively human capacities represent complex adaptations
made by the
species. He emphasized that these adaptations depend on
cultural and
historical advances, as well as biological ones. Humans have
been
evolutionarily successful partly because of our ability to
develop and pass
down cultural knowledge and tools. This means that the higher
mental
processes depend on systems that combine both biological and
cultural-
historical aspects. This has important consequences for our
view of
humanity: according to Vygotsky, the historical epoch and social
position
of a person integrally influence that person's higher
psychological
functions. All humans do not think, feel, and act in the same
basic ways,
because higher human capacities depend on systems that include
historically particular cultural components. Vygotsky found
this a socially
progressive conclusion, because it meant that less developed
humans could
be improved by giving them better cultural tools.
The key to Vygotsky's non-reductionist materialism, then,
is the
interconnection of natural and cultural components in
interfunctional
systems. He argued that psychologists should explore these
complex bio-
psycho-cultural systems, instead of reducing or ignoring either
their natural
or their cultural components. Even though Vygotsky himself did
not
provide adequate empirical support for this argument (his
psychological
career lasted only a decade because of his early death), his
work is still
important today. The Collected Works in English are
particularly valuable
because a broad and honest reading of Vygotsky challenges common
assumptions about psychology. In contemporary American
psychology, for
instance, materialists rarely find themselves on the same side
as those
interested in cultural studies. By struggling to understand
Vygotsky's
project, and by building on his more promising insights, we
might have a
better chance of overcoming the divisions that psychology still
faces.

Stanton Wortham, Bates College