Re: [xmca] Hegel's CONCEPT, hermeneutical TRADITIONS, and GESTALTS

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Larry-- Like Andy, i find there is too much there to respond to all of it,
even if I were capable of doing so (!). So I, too, will pick out a piece.

My focus is on this quotation:
*"According to Vygotsky, the child starts by learning in the so-called zone
of proximal development, an essentially situated way of acting and learning.
Gradually, however, the child is supposed to internalize the social frames
and appropriate them, so that what initially was an interpersonal process
becomes an individual psychological competence.  The SITUATIONIST
alternative would be to regard development not as the individualization and
increased isolation of the subject, but as the increasing ability to partake
of what the social world can afford an individual capable of COLLABORATION
with others" (p. 104).*
-----------------------
Ever since our discussion of Seth Chaiklin's article on the zoped I have
been sensitive to my own and others' failures to read LSV with enough care.
I find Costall's work very interesting and I think I understand his concerns
dating back a couple of decades. But I do not think that this
characterization of LSV's views is helpful.

It is not entirely clear to me what the limits on the conditions that would
constitute a zoped for Vygotsky. We have two different kinds of examples,
almost all of which come from situations where deliberate instruction is
involved, moreover, instruction structured by "true concepts." But we also
have the example of pretend play. But we have no examples that begin from
infancy. The quoted passage appears to equate zopeds with any participation
in an activity with "more capable peers."

Then, as Andy points out in his response, there is this notion of Vygotsky
proposing an increasingly isolated subject seems really odd. The language
being used in this explication now uses the terminology of situationalism,
at an earlier time it was Gibsonian, with legitimate peripheral
participation in the mixture of ideas along the way. OK. But why does one
end of a spectrum have to efface the other end?

mike


On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> Well, there's so much there Larry, my response will be patchy.
>
> Every current of thought offers different kinds of insight, and every
> current worthy of existence gives us something unique. I like to introduce a
> Hegelian perspective into these discussions all the time, because in my view
> Vygotsky is part of the same "genealogy" with Hegel, and so understanding
> Hegel often sheds light on aspects of Vygotsky's own thinking which may not
> be explicit.
>
> Re tradition: in my limited reading, I associate "tradition" with Gadamer,
> and I assimilate it to ideas like genre or activity: - the larger, on-going
> system of activity of which an event or text or concept is a part, and a
> concrete concept in the Hegelian sense is commensurate with tradition in
> this sense.
>
> I think some of the observations about Vygotsky you cite, though, are
> absolutely upside down. Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky does not really originate from
> the Englightenment, except in the trivial sense. In my reading Herder and
> Goethe were explicitly critics of the Enlightenment, viz., the Romantic
> Movement. It is the ideas of the Romantic movement, through Hegel and Marx,
> which continue to mark our current off from Kantian, Positivist, cognitivist
> current, neurobabblers and so on. Luria for example, explicitly identified
> with Romantic Science.
>
> So the contrast between Vygotsky and what is characterised as
> "situationist" is about as wrong as it is possible to imagine. If one word
> could account for Vygotsky's approach to human reality it would be
> "collaboration." Have a read of something by Vera John-Steiner about this.
>
> Andy
>
>
> Larry Purss wrote:
>
>> Hi Andy
>>
>> I wanted to think out loud about various discourses that are explored
>> within
>> the CHAT community and how they are translated or transformed.
>>
>> Andy I've been reflecting on how you are always reminding us of the power
>> of
>> Hegel's idea of the CONCEPT as a triangular relationship  of the 1)
>> individual  2) particular and 3) the universal as aspects of every
>> CONCEPT.
>> You also elaborate on how a CONCEPT is a historically situated artifactual
>> FORM OF LIFE that must be understood as a GESTALT which includes all
>> 3 aspects of the triangle.  If we loose sight of any aspect of the
>> triangle
>> their is no CONCEPT.
>>
>> Now I seem to be biased to hermeneutical accounts that uses terms such as
>> "traditions" "horizon of understanding" "all accounts are biased" and
>> privilege a particular account within a tradition. This tradition embraces
>> "fallibility and uncertainty" in communities of inquiry as an ideal.
>>
>> I am wondering how parallel these  accounts of CONCEPTS and TRADITIONS
>> are?
>> and how these accounts differ?  From these perspectives CHAT could be seen
>> as a form of life that is a CONCEPT for Hegel and a tradition for
>> hermeneutical accounts.  My attraction to hermeneutical accounts is their
>> elaboration of the "imaginary" the "fictional" "pretense" "magic"
>> "religion"
>> as legitimate forms of life to be taken into account.  The divide often
>> imposed on the paradigmatic accounts between the "real" and the
>> "imaginary"
>> is a divide I question.
>>
>> CONCEPTS & TRADITIONS are both notions that embrace "a way of life" as
>> central to their explanatory power. My question to you is do you see
>> parallels in these 2 CONCEPTS or traditions?
>>
>> Another way of asking about " the place of fiction, & the imaginal in our
>> accounts of the social situation of development is how we understand the
>> notion of "truth" and  abstract universals in our accounts of situated
>> activity [interactivity]  Alan Costall and Ivan Leuder in an article make
>> a
>> comment about Vygotsky as committed to the Enlightment ideal of ABSTRACT
>> RATIONALITY. {see"Situating Action I: Truth in the Situation" in the
>> journal
>> Ecological Psychology 8(2), 101-110}
>>
>> Costall and Leuder state,
>> "According to Vygotsky, the child starts by learning in the so-called zone
>> of proximal development, an essentially situated way of acting and
>> learning.
>> Gradually, however, the child is supposed to internalize the social frames
>> and appropriate them, so that what initially was an interpersonal process
>> becomes an individual psychological competence.  The SITUATIONIST
>> alternative would be to regard development not as the individualization
>> and
>> increased isolation of the subject, but as the increasing ability to
>> partake
>> of what the social world can afford an individual capable of COLLABORATION
>> with others" (p. 104)
>>
>> Andy, the above quote seems to privilege "collaboration and sociality"
>> over
>> internalization and representations.  It also privileges EMERGENCE over
>> discovery of underlying truths.  These concepts or traditions privilege
>> RADICAL notions of self development as fundamentally MUTUALLY CONSTITUTED
>> and seem to fit into Hegel's notion of CONCEPTS.  This account
>> privileges two aspects of Hegel's CONCEPT [the individual and the
>> particular].  It is the universal side of the triangle that is
>> being critiqued by Costall & Leuder as needing to be de-emphasized.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> Larry
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>>
>>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
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