[Xmca-l] Re: Vygotsky and Deborin
Andy Blunden
ablunden@mira.net
Sun Mar 22 19:51:39 PDT 2015
Glad you appreciate the forensic aspect of this Larry. It has long
troubled me, where did Vygotsky get his Hegelianism from? I was given a
photocopy of Thinking and Speech in 1997, and it has always been T&S
which has been the book for me. I was delighted by his dialectical
reasoning. But when I looked through his CW it was obvious that he had
never read Hegel because all his Hegel references andHegel quotes were
taken from well-known passages in Engels, Lenin, and later, Marx. It was
a little while ago when, following up on the xmca discussion on word and
action, I re-read "Ape, Primitive Man and Child" as well as "History of
the Development ..." that I realised that whatever he knew about Hegel
he had learnt it in 1930. That really set me going. Fortunately, Anton
Yasnitsky had for me what was the decisive piece of evidence, though
Anton himself doesn't see it that way. What we see in what Vygotsky
wrote in that collaboration is about Kohler's Gestalt ideas of how
chimps solve problems and eidetic memory. Nothing about concepts or
Hegel there at all.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
Larry Purss wrote:
> Andy,
> Thanks for this answer.
> It is very helpful in observing transitions and your locating in
> history that only after 1930 could Vygotsky approach thinking and
> language moving away from the logical positivists to have written with
> these new concepts. Also, thanks for the Rogoff Chapter 5 which I
> will read.
> A fascinating detective story we are uncovering on how ideas and
> concepts are transformed through encounters.
> Larry
>
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 6:29 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
> (1) Deborin and his associates were Hegelians. Deborin had just
> translated Hegel's Logic into Russian. It seems to me that during
> his collaboration with B A Fingert and M L Shirvindt in 1930, they
> straightened him out on what a concept was. This is something he
> could only have learnt from a Hegelian. In writing "Ape Primitive
> Man and Child" in 1929 he thought a concept was a collection of
> items sharing some attribute in common, and conversely that a set
> was a collection of objects united by some theory-dependent
> relation such as origins. This is the wrong way around, but by the
> time he wrote some passages of "History of the Development of the
> Higher Mental Functions" in 1931, he had corrected this mistake.
> By the time he wrote "Thinking and Speech," concept formation is
> the central topic, while word meaning is the unit of analysis.
> This is the same relation as that between capital and
> commodity-exchange in Marx's /Capital/. So, I think that those
> things which made Vygotsky stand out from all the others, which we
> find in "Thinking and Speech," would have been impossible if
> Vygotsky had stuck with the Logical Positivist view of concepts.
>
> (2) Deborin was challenged purely and simply because he was too
> clever. Too clever for his own good. None of Stalin's Red
> Professors could fault him. But it was untenable, in the aftermath
> of the Russian Revolution, that someone other than the Great
> Helmsman, General Secretary and Hero of the Revolution, Comrade
> Josef Stalin, should have the last word on Philosophy. He was
> denounced ostensibly for being concerned with questions of
> philosophy which were not of interest to Soviet workers. Deborin
> survived by shutting his mouth forever after (we have nothing by
> him in English). But any association with him would have been a
> problem for anyone's career.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
> Larry Purss wrote:
>
> Anton tells me that this collaboration had a very negative
> effect on Vygotsky's career, as Deborin was denounced in
> January 1931, but in my humble opinion, seems to have been
> invaluable in preparing Vygotsky to write "Thinking and Speech."
>
> Andy, why do you think encountering Deborin's work was
> "invaluable".
> Was Deborin proposing that "thought" and "language" [thinking
> and speech] are two distinct realms of development that become
> intertwined in the emergence of"verbal thought" as a distinct
> development?
> Why was Deborin denounced in January 1931. It seems that 1931
> is the time when theoretical approaches which focused on
> "subjectivity" and "meaning" became dangerous ideas for one's
> academic career. Was it also a time when exploring "gestalt
> psychology" was challenged?
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 1:58 AM, Andy Blunden
> <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>> wrote:
>
> I've ordered David Bakhurst's book, which I hope will tell
> me even
> more, but thanks to Natalia Gajdamschko and via Natalia, Gena
> Kravtsova, and Anton Yasnitsky, I am now certain that Vygotsky
> never met Deborin, but he did collaborate with two of
> Deborin's
> supporters in writing a book on currents of Psychology in
> 1930,
> exactly the time I'm interested in, Osnovnye techeniia
> sovremennoi
> psikhologii, which is to be found at
> http://www.koob.ru/vigodsky_v_l/main_currents. Anton tells
> me that
> this collaboration had a very negative effect on Vygotsky's
> career, as Deborin was denounced in January 1931, but in
> my humble
> opinion, seems to have been invaluable in preparing
> Vygotsky to
> write "Thinking and Speech."
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
> mike cole wrote:
>
> I would consult David Bakhurst's early book.
> mike
>
> On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Andy Blunden
> <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>>> wrote:
>
> Is there anyone who can tell me a bit more about the
> relationship
> between Vygotsky and Abram Deborin, who was an
> editor of
> "Under
> the Banner of Marxism," a fan of Spinoza and I
> believe the
> translator of the Russian version of Hegel's
> Shorter Logic. I
> would be particularly interested in the dates of
> interactions
> between them.
> Andy
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
>
>
> -- It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as
> a natural science
> with an object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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