Re: [xmca] The "Inner Form" of the Word

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Martin: 
 
Well, you have a real treat in store for you when you get back to Pittsburgh. I hope your eyes recover in time. I just have three quick comments.
 
a) Yes, I get the distinction between psychologism and logicism. Shpet is anti-psychological in precisely that sense. That is why Shpet doesn't consider the novel to be literature (it has no inner form; it's nothing but social rhetoric of a maudlin, tendentious, and philosophically vapid sort). The eidetic purity of the word's inner form is logicalist and Platonist, and it probably DOES have Russian Orthodox roots (it's something he shares with blithering anti-Semites like Losev).  
 
b) It seems to me that Vygotsky (in Chapter Two of T&S) is arguing that logic has TWO genetically separate roots (like everything else in thinking and speech and then like everything else in thinking and everything else in speech). Sure, one root is social experience: the name and the price and the location of apples in the local grocery store. But the other is the child's own experience of the weight and size and shape and taste of the apple. Vygotsky's beef with Piaget is that Piaget ignores the latter, and his beef with Stern is that Stern ignores the former. And as you pointed out, had he lived a little longer he would have had the grim satisfaction of seeing Piaget veer from one point of view to the other.
 
c) I agree: Lenin's remark quoted in Chapter Two of T&S is not a full or complete statement of the origins of human logic (to even begin to approach that, you would probably need at least two roots, as Vygotsky says). I agree: Vygotsky should NOT have made such a big deal out of a couple of scribbled margin notes in  the copy of Hegel's Logic that poor old Lenin kept on his night table. (For one thing, I often scribble things in my night-table readings that I would be perfectly horrified to see widely perused. For another, it was the very DEVIL to translate into Korean.) 
 
But I still think that Lenin's comment makes sense as a CRITIQUE of Hegel. Hegel wants us to see "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal" as a kind of model for "Spirit (Logic), Man's Actions, therefore Man's Purposive Activity". 
 
Lenin says that this isn't JUST a game (although it's also a game, and Hegel is really huffing and puffing when he plays this game!). Lenin says if we turn it upside down then there is a teeny tiny bit of cultural historical truth to it, a little "kernel". We get: "Man's Purposive Activity (over millions of years), Man's Actions (viz. his culture), ergo Man's Logic". 
 
Of course, that's only one root of man's logic; in the work of Galileo and Newton, in contrast, we see a little more of the other root, the adult equivalent of the child's own desire for, and experience of the apple. But that million-year old root certainly IS a root with a whole lot of little rootlets, and we can argue that Galileo and Newton's own work really started as just one of these!
 
"O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?"

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 

--- On Sat, 5/28/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:


From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] The "Inner Form" of the Word
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Saturday, May 28, 2011, 8:09 AM


David,

Those books are waiting for me in Pittsburgh, so I am behind you in the readings, but I think you are probably correct that LSV was rather radical in claiming that word meaning, inner form, changes. He does claim at several points in T&S that this is the book's main discovery, but that claim tends to pass by a modern reader unnoticed because we are not familiar with the context that he was working in.

The charge of "psychologism" - which Frege made against Husserl, Shpet's teacher, for example - was that someone was reducing logic to psychology; turning the timeless and universal laws of reason into merely the way people happen to think, with all the imperfections that this involves. The counter charge would have been "logicism," that someone is treating as necessary and analytic matters that are in fact contingent and synthetic.

So LSV was willing to risk the accusation of psychologism; he rejected the notion that the inner form of the word is a timeless, universal essence, and instead located it in history. He was not separating word meaning entirely from sense, though he did, however, argue that word meaning is the most stable aspect of sense.

And the issue that would then have confronted him is whether he could build a convincing account of the genesis of reason using changing and contingent building blocks. Could he build logic from psychology? Or was he willing to propose a psychological account of logic? He does, seemingly approvingly, quote Lenin on the notion that logical truths are simply the result of millions of years of repetition of habits. I must say that I find that rather unsatisfying.

Martin

On May 27, 2011, at 10:08 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Martin and I have been puzzling over Vygotsky's occasional references to the "inner form" of a word: where did Vygotsky GET the idea? What did he DO with it? And above all why does it MATTER?
>  
> Well, I recently read two books that I think solve these questions, but introduce a whole slew of new ones. The two books are:
>  
> Tihanov, G. (2009) Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.
>  
> Seifrid, T. (2005) The Word Made Self. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
>  
>> From the Tihanov volume (an edited text) we learn two important things about inner form. First of all, the idea of inner form of LANGUAGE does indeed go back to Humboldt and even further (the Port Royal Grammarians apparently used it!). But it's Potebnia who says that a WORD has inner form. 
>  
> This Potebnian formulation obviously begs to be qualified: a word like "of" or "the" or even "to be" wears its inner form on its sleeve, and may have less of it than a word like "hedgehog" or "God" or  even "to run". 
>  
> Well, Seifrid argues that this Potebnian interpretation of Humboldt came with a LOT of religious baggage. Potebnia believed that the "inner form" of a word was its "nearest psychological meaning", i.e. its sense. But he ALSO believed that this essence (or maybe "es-sense") was innate and stable, as opposed to the historically changing outer form. 
>  
> That idea, of a God-made word whose inner "self" is unchanging but which can manifest itself in "you" (Christ) and even in "he" (the Holy Spirit), was very attractive to Russian Orthodox philologists, including the Symbolists, later the Acmeists, Florensky, Bulgakov, and possibly Bakhtin.
>  
> Bakhtin, who Seifrid does not discuss much, is a VERY curious case. I used to think, along with Emerson and Morson, that there is no serious evidence that he was a deeply religious man, not even his early writings. But Seifrid points out that one of the conceits that Florensky and Bulgakov had was that the human body was basically SYMMETRICAL: not only along the head to crotch axis but even along a left hip right hip axis: the kidneys correspond to lungs, the asshole to the mouth and so on. Florensky and Bulgakov (and I think Bakhtin too) played with the idea that semen and language were equivalent effluvia, one from the upper and one from the lower bodily stratum. 
>  
> There are three reasons why I think Bakhtin might have been in on the joke: First, and worst, although Bakhtin claims to be interested in novels, he never expresses any sustained interest in the work of any woman novelist of any nationality whatsoever, and the novel is, at least in English and French, an overwhelming feminine mode of expression.  Secondly, in his Rabelais book he writes almost obsessively about the "lower bodily stratum" and its effusions and is particularly amused by the correspondance of flatulence to laughter, and other forms of inverting high and low. Thirdly, the Rabelais book was, as we know, rejected, when Bakhtin submitted it as a Ph.D. although to all appearances it is a very sound, even miraculous, work of medieval scholarship. If it was recognized as a work associated with Florensky and Bulgakov, that would explain it.
>  
> Shpet also signs up to this idea of an unchanging "inner form", and rejects "psychologism" on precisely these grounds. But it's EXACTLY the opposite of Vygotsky's view. Yesterday I pointed out that the Donizetti aria presents two DIFFERENT views of causation, both of which may be said to be "mechanical": Adina says her infidelity is caused by her inner essence, and Nemorino says her unchanging love is caused by an outer force. 
>  
> This is, I think, Vygotsky's view! Inner form is actually what CHANGES from moment to moment, flitting and fluttering, pattering and puttering. Outer form changes too, but more slowly, the way that the river, grieving and grooving the mountains, drags them down grain by grain to the sea.
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>  
>  
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