SUBJECT X INDIVIDUAL /Re: Horizontal and Individual activity?

From: Ricardo Ottoni Vaz Japiassu (rjapias@uol.com.br)
Date: Tue Apr 10 2001 - 16:52:55 PDT


Nate,

You said that, to you:

"the very fact that I am an individual speaks to the social (...) It seems
outright impossible to speak of the individual and the social as being
categories opposed to each other."

and, also, that :

"the seperate categories of individual - social are real strong
in American political thought."

This made me think on how people from different cultures or with different
understanding of a word meaning - and sense -, despite of being talking to
each other using the same words are, in fact, saying different things. Like
that kind of comunication between children and adults Vygotsky pointed -
when he explains and exposes his understanding of "scientific" or social
concepts formation process along a person's verbal thinking development.

Personally, when I use the word individual I'm reffering to the biological
dimension of any live being. But when I use the word subject I reffer to a
specific live being: a human being.

Someone can reffer to a human being as an individual but this word -
individual -, in my view, should be used much apropriate to a particular
mouse or dog or bee.

We are human beings, cultural-historical beings: subjects that are
social-cultural-historically constituted.

PHD Angel Pino, from Unicamp/Brazil, had written a very interesting paper on
the notion of social in Vygotsky's writtings. He makes a distinction between
social and cultural. To him, the cathegory social is broader than the
cathegory cultural. Because someone can talk about bees' social life and
monkeys' social life and even about humans' social life from the biological
perspective. But, once an individual of human specie becomes a subject, a
person, cultural-historically constituted, the cathegory of culture may be
understood like a smaller circle inside the social great one.



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