[Xmca-l] The Ideal and Nicaraguan Sign Language

[Andy Blunden]

Mike has drawn our attention to the Nicaraguan Sign Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
as a counter-example to Vygostsky's claim:

    "that if no appropriate ideal form can be found in the environment,
    and the development of the child, for whatever reasons, has to take
    place outside these specific conditions (described earlier), i.e.
    without any interaction with the final form, then this proper form
    will fail to develop properly in the child."

In my opinion, this once-in-human-history event does not invalidate the 
principle Vygotsky was elaborating. Just like every attempt to say what 
distinguishes the human being from the animal seems to be faulted by the 
latest clip from YouTube, all such absolute claims are almost bound to 
fail at some point. But the principle, illustrated by the fact that 
children growing up in Russia speak Russian and understand the meaning 
of perezhivanie whereas we don't, etc., is hardly faulted by NSL.

The other thing that Mike suggests is that the principle of the ideal 
being present in the environment carries with it the negation of the 
idea of the social formation itself being subject to continuous change. 
Again, I think Vygotsky just takes this as outside the concerns of 
Psychology. His essay on Socialist Man 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1930/socialism.htm shows 
that in fact he saw the psychology of people as primarily determined by 
the social formation of which they were a part and he saw that social 
formation as evolving. He was of course a modern, albeit I suspect a 
modern with a considerable capacity for irony.

Now, this raises the difficult question of what Vygotsky may have meant 
by "ideal." Or, what he thought is a mystery, but what should *we* 
understand by ideality? It is well known that Vygotsky was surrounded by 
a number of fellows who were aficionados of Hegelianism, even if 
Vygotsky himself had never studied Hegel, so it is fair to suggest that 
the Hegelian concept of the Ideal is relevant in this context, of 
reconciling "ideal" as the norm in a given social formation and "ideal" 
as the notion of infinite, historical perfectability. For Hegel, 
"ideality" expresses both these principles; that is, that any relation 
contains within it a "gap" which makes it open to perfectability, and 
that "gap" is ever present, and its existence expresses what Hegel calls 
The Idea, that is to say, the ever-unfolding spirit of human freedom. 
Etc. It only requires that the Idea is present for any relation to be 
mutable. This is deep and challenging philosophical stuff which we don't 
really need, if we can just accept that "the ideal" does not mean 
something fixed and final, just an evolving norm: ever-shifting goal posts.

Andy





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*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/