[Xmca-l] Re: Alex Kozulin's notion of three planes of understanding

[Huw Lloyd]

This is all seems to boil down to the acknowledging the contingencies in
any classificatory divisions.

Note that this is not done in the "two types of scientists" description
[1], which suggests that its used as a heuristic device.

Huw

[1] http://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch10.htm


On 19 March 2014 16:12, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:

> Andy,
>
> I find your comments very helpful. The Social Studies of Science people
> have, in my view, been very successful in showing that science, all
> science, seeks ways to make new phenomena visible - in other words, to
> expand 'what is given in experience' - in order to expand the range of
> explanation. Ironically, the positivists were also opposed to building
> scientific knowledge on anything other than experience, but they had a
> narrow view of what experience consists of, limiting it basically to atomic
> sensations. In the social sciences is not positivism but what has been
> called "Formal science" that has insisted on trying to explain what is
> visible in terms of structures or functions that are abstractions, putting
> the cart before the horse. It seems to me that LSV was wise in finding
> something of value in the phenomenology of his time (Husserl and Shpet),
> because since then phenomenologists - such as Merleau-Ponty and Garfinkel -
> have continued to insist the inquiry must be based on experience, and have
> demonstrated the power of this approach.
>
> Martin
>
>
> On Mar 18, 2014, at 8:12 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > My reading is this.
> > "Romantic Science" I associate with Goethe, and the fragile thread of
> scientists which followed him.
> > Goethe himself insisted that his ideas about science were no to be seen
> as exclusive or antagonistic to positivist approaches. He used the
> diversity of Christian sects active in the New York of his day as a
> metaphor for how he saw science as developing, as against the homeogeneity
> of a state religion.
> > So far as I know, it was only Luria who self-identified with "romantic
> science", but I think it is fair to say that Vygotsky was also, but
> Vygotsky identified himself as a Marxist, not a Romantic.
> > I do not see the Romantic/Positivist difference as
> descriptive/explanatory, though I can see the basis for that. Romantic
> science prefers to use what is given in experience as the foundation for
> explanation, rather than postulating metaphysical "forces" which are beyond
> sensation as explanations for what is given in experience, which is what
> positivism does. For Goethe, Newton was the archetype of this.
> > I think the nomothetic/ideographic distinction is also another valid
> rendering of the Romantic/Positivist difference, but I think it is only
> partial. It is one possible way of implementing the conviction that we must
> resist, so far as possible, abstracting from experience. But for Goethe, it
> was always a question of resisting that for as long as possible, never a
> rejection of the necessity of abstracting altogether. That's why he called
> Romantic Science a "delicate empiricism."
> > It is true that it is very fashionable nowadays (and for at least a
> generation) to claim holism and various similar ideas. The point with
> Romanticism is not so much the aim of holistic synthesis rather than
> positivist analysis, but Romanticism shows *how* it is possible to "begin
> from the whole." Positivist efforts at "holistic analysis" are usually, in
> my view, forms of words alone, beginning by gathering a whole bunch of
> abstractions together and calling them the whole, and then re-discovering
> the abstractions again.
> > But as Hegel said, "there is nothing on Earth, in Heaven or anywhere
> else, that is not both mediated and immediate."
> >
> > Andy
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> >
> >
> > mike cole wrote:
> >> David, Martin. My apologies if I was reading idiocyncratically and too
> >> literally.
> >>
> >> I stumbled when I read I have always resisted the Lurian
> characterization
> >> of Vygotsky as a romantic scientist, because I never heard ARL speak of
> LSV
> >> in those terms, nor did I put his idea of romantic science together with
> >> explanatory/descriptive.
> >>
> >>
> >> Perhaps the problem is that I had not properly appreciated the line that
> >> David points to:
> >>
> >> "On p. 175 he says "One of the major factors that drew me to Vygotsky
> was
> >> his emphasis on the necessity to resolve (sic) this crisis", meaning the
> >> crisis brought about by the split between classical and romantic
> >> tendencies."
> >>
> >> My failure was that I have long thought of the split being confronted as
> >> between explanatory and descriptive psychology. It had not occurred to
> me
> >> to equate descriptive with romantic. I also have, and continue, to
> think of
> >> Luria's particular approach to romantic science as a means of overcoming
> >> the nomoethetic/idiographic dichotomy that is also at play here.
> >>
> >> Your way of putting this together with German romanticism helps make
> sense
> >> of the way that more contemporary cultural historical scholars have used
> >> the term "non-classical" to refer to the Vygotskian tradition.
> >>
> >> mike
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 7:30 AM, Martin John Packer <
> mpacker@uniandes.edu.co
> >>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>> Mike,
> >>>
> >>> Like David, I too have read Luria as arguing for romantic science
> contra
> >>> the classical alternative, and attributing this to LSV. Is your reading
> >>> that Luria wants to combine the two, and this is what he saw LSV doing?
> >>>
> >>> Martin
> >>>
> >>> On Mar 18, 2014, at 7:59 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> I thought you had an actual example, David.
> >>>>
> >>>> So far as I know, LSV never used the term, and the terms " holism,
> >>>> with anti-reductionism and Gestalt" were characteristic of many who
> did
> >>>>
> >>> not
> >>>
> >>>> claim romantic science as an organizing framework. The way you wrote
> it
> >>>> made it sound like a direct attribution to a specific individual.
> >>>>
> >>>> Hence my question.
> >>>> mike
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 10:18 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com
> >>>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> Oh, I got it from a wonderful book by Luria edited by Michael and
> >>>>> Sheila Cole, "The Making of Mind". The phrase "romantic scientist" is
> >>>>> not really Luria's to begin with; he took it from Max Verwoern. But
> on
> >>>>> p. 174 of "The Making of Mind", he associates "romantic" with holism,
> >>>>> with anti-reductionism and Gestalt, using Vygotsky's favorite quotes.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "Classical scholars are those who look upon events in terms of their
> >>>>> constituent parts. Step by step they single out important units and
> >>>>> elements until they can formulate abstract general laws. These laws
> >>>>> are then seen as the governing agents of the phenomena of the field
> >>>>> under study. One outcoem of this approach is the reduction of living
> >>>>> reality with all its richenss of detail to abstract schemas. The
> >>>>> roperties ofhte iving whole are lost, which provoked Goethe to pen,
> >>>>> 'Gray is eery theory, but ever green is the tree of life."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "Romantic scholars traits, attitudes and strategies are just the
> >>>>> opposite. They do not follow the path of reductionism, which is the
> >>>>> leading philosophy of the classical group. Romantics in science want
> >>>>> neither to split living reality into its elementary components nor to
> >>>>> represent the wealth of life's concrete events in abstract models
> that
> >>>>> lose the properties of the phenomena themselves. It is of the utmost
> >>>>> importance to romantics to preserve the wealth of living reality, and
> >>>>> they aspire to a science that retains this richness."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Don't you think that sounds like a thumbnail of Vygotsky?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On p. 175 he says "One of the major factors that drew me to Vygotsky
> >>>>> was his emphasis on the necessity to resolve (sic) this crisis",
> >>>>> meaning the crisis brought about by the split between classical and
> >>>>> romantic tendencies. He then describes the rise of wave after wave of
> >>>>> reductionism in psychology in the twentieth century.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> David Kellogg
> >>>>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On 18 March 2014 12:14, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> David-- Where did luria say that Vygotsky was engaged in Romantic
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> Science.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> I missed it!
> >>>>>> mike
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 2:34 PM, David Kellogg <
> dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>> Larry:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> I'm not sure if this is on topic, but I'd like to pick up a strand
> of
> >>>>>>> our thread that nobody else has touched. It's the idea that part of
> >>>>>>> the trans-disciplinary, supra-psychological element of Vygotskyan
> >>>>>>> theory lies in his early work on esthetics, and specifically on
> >>>>>>> Hamlet.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> I have always resisted the Lurian characterization of Vygotsky as a
> >>>>>>> romantic scientist, because I think he was, as Nadezhda Mandelstam
> >>>>>>> said and as Bakhurst confirmed (in his piece on "Vygotsky's
> Demons" in
> >>>>>>> the Cambridge Companion), a defender of Enlightenment ideas AGAINST
> >>>>>>> the Romantic counter-revolution of the nineteenth century. When I
> read
> >>>>>>> Vygotsky on Hamlet, I can see that he has completely rejected the
> >>>>>>> nineteenth century idea of Hamlet as romantic hero--that is, an
> >>>>>>> inspired individual hero among lesser breeds without the law.
> Hamlet's
> >>>>>>> depressed, not inspired. He's divided, not individual. And the
> others
> >>>>>>> in the play actually perceive Hamlet more accurately than he
> perceives
> >>>>>>> himself; Hamlet simply cannot feel the weight of his own body, nor
> is
> >>>>>>> he sufficiently aware of his own awareness to be able to
> distinguish
> >>>>>>> it from the way things are.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> But I recently read a lot about Gordon Craig and Konstantin
> >>>>>>> Stanislavski's 1912 Moscow production of Hamlet. Whether he saw it
> or
> >>>>>>> not (and there is some debate on this point), it had a huge
> influence
> >>>>>>> on the way that Vygotsky read Hamlet (we know that Vygotsky saw the
> >>>>>>> revival of the 1912 production and that he disapproved of it).
> >>>>>>> Perversely true to the play text, Craig's and Stanislavski's
> version
> >>>>>>> was a completely divided production that almost fell apart before
> >>>>>>> opening night: Craig saw the play as monodrama (that is, everybody
> in
> >>>>>>> the play except Hamlet himself is a "ghost" in the mind of Hamlet).
> >>>>>>> Stanislavski, of course, insisted on a historical drama of real
> people
> >>>>>>> whose motivations were all too human; Hamlet was simply a man
> amongst
> >>>>>>> men.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> You can see that all of Kozulin's planes are present and accounted
> >>>>>>> for. Stanislavski, the social realist, accounts for the way in
> which
> >>>>>>> Vygotsky made sense to his contemporaries. Craig is much closer to
> the
> >>>>>>> way we interpret Vygotsky today: a way of making sense of
> individual
> >>>>>>> psychology, alongside the work of Freud, Piaget, and others. And
> the
> >>>>>>> third, trans-disciplinary, supra-psychological plane? Well, I think
> >>>>>>> that is yet another plane that has gone missing. But when we find,
> I
> >>>>>>> am sure that we will see that Vygotsky himself is safe and sound on
> >>>>>>> board.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> David Kellogg
> >>>>>>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> On 17 March 2014 06:17, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Mike,
> >>>>>>>> thanks for sending the article on the risks of being a public
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> intellectual.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Anna Sfard also recently posted on who university scholars
> *address*
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> in
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> their publications.
> >>>>>>>> I have been re-reading Alex Kozulin's book written 25 years ago
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> [Vygotsky's
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Psychology: A Biography of Ideas.]
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Alex, in the epilogue to that book summed up by positing three
> trends
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> in
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Vygotsky scholarship which he called three *planes*.
> >>>>>>>> The 1st plane corresponds to the understanding of Vygotsky's
> theory
> >>>>>>>>
> >>> by
> >>>
> >>>>>>> his
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> contemporaries in the 1920's and 1930's.
> >>>>>>>> The 2nd plane emerges with the discovery of Vygotsky's theory in
> the
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> West
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> in the 1960's .
> >>>>>>>> In 1990 Kozulin perceived the emergence of a 3rd plane of Vygotsky
> >>>>>>>> scholarship which is re-evaluating the presuppositions of the
> 1920's.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> What
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> in the 1920's appeared to be a straight forward thesis of social
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> mediation,
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> and in the 1960's as a necessary corrective to the individualistic
> >>>>>>>> approaches of Western Psychology, in 1990 emerges as a radically
> new
> >>>>>>>> question. The realization that within Vygotsky's theory social AND
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> cultural
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> mediatory mechanisms do NOT coincide.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Alex writes:
> >>>>>>>> "The origins and context of Vygotsky's theories are now being
> seen in
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> a
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>> new
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> light; in place of comparisons to Pavlov, the Gestaltists and
> Piaget
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> comes
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> the context of philosophical hermeneutics and the theory of
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> communicative
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> action. In an even broader sense, what looked like Vygotsky's
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> contribution
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> TO psychology appears now as leading BEYOND psychology or at least
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> BEYOND
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> traditional psychology and into the sphere of human studies BASED
> on
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> the
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> humanistic, rather than the scientific model." [p. 278-279].
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> I am not sure how relevant Kozulin's epilogue  seems to others 25
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> years
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> later, but I found the themes in this book very current and
> relevant.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> In
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> particular his analysis of Vygotsky's early humanistic writings
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> explored
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> in chapter one on *The Psychology of Art* and chapter two on the
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> theme of
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Vygotsky's book on the tragedy of Hamlet.  These works were
> written
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> by a
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> young public scholar developing his identity through engaging in
>  the
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> deep
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> questions of life and existence.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> How does this relate to Anna and Mike's postings?
> >>>>>>>> The discussion of corporate *money* controlling who gets to be the
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> audience
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> for researcher's articles [Anna Sfard's question] and the
> question of
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> the
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> role of *public* intellectuals who are addressing humanistic
> >>>>>>>>
> >>> questions
> >>>
> >>>>>>> and
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Vygotsky's writings as a humanistic writer seem related to the
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> concept of
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Kozulin's 3rd plane of engagement BEYOND narrow academic
> disciplinary
> >>>>>>>> discourse.
> >>>>>>>> Will the university as an institution remain a place for these
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> humanistic
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>>> studies and the type of scholarship which Alex captures in his
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>> biography
> >>>>>
> >>>>>>> of
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Vygotsky's ideas, based on the humanistic model?. How central to
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Vygotsky's
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> later psychological theories were his earlier reflections on art
> and
> >>>>>>>> tragedy?
> >>>>>>>> Larry
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>