I believe the argument that I am trying to make is that you cannot
separate social historical development from the rest of evolution
(human and otherwise) or you run into trouble. If we want to say
that the individual develops out of society, then where are we
saying society comes from? My fear is that it is thought of
as a monolithic _material thing_ that has come down like a
curtain to separate us from all other species. To me all that society
is is a bunch of individuals cooperating to achieve some product,
and at the same time indviduals are defined by the way society
divides the labor process with the help of advanced communication.
If you lose the even, continuous quality between the two I think
that you lose a great deal, and it slides into either social determinism
or maturationism. An example is the Vygotsky and Piaget debate.
I have claimed that the difference between Vygotsky and Piaget
is not social-individual, individual-social...there is no heirarchy
in terms of development for either of them. The difference, much simpler,
and at the same time more complex, is that Vygotsky posited that
thinking originates in material activity, while Piaget will
not make a commitment, claiming that you can find no "original sin"
in the development of thinking. I think that the reason Vygotsky
demands an "original sin" is to completely defy the notion of
cerebral primacy. The only way to avoid the social creating the
individual or the individual creating the social, which I believe
is not productive, is to maintain this evolutionary continuum
in human social historical development.
In terms of the apes, my use of Kohler's apes was more or less
narrowly defined to include two phase activities. Apes have the
planning ability but they do not have language. I know that there
is some argument on this, so let me digress just a bit. The essential
aspect of human language is that we can communicate with each other
in activity, therefore making it true joint activity. For a number of
years people thought that is was the ability to walk upright that
allowed for the development of these communication systems. A student
of mine said this theory was disproved about a decade ago because
archeologists discovered a society where the individuals didn't
walk upright but had an advanced communication system (this really
pissed me off). But still, humans can communicate with each other
but apes _can't_, although they can develop advanced communication
systems with humans (because humans walk upright?). I know Sue
Savage Rumbaugh is convinced that apes can communicate with each
other and is doind some interesting work with computers, but that
brings up a whole bunch of other issues. Anyway, my point is that
with two phase activities (i.e., planning abilities) apes are able
to do things together (using each other as instruments), but are
not able to do things cooperatively (using insturments to divide
the labor in the activity). My original point was the advanced
communication systems allow this type of planned activity to come
together as social activity, but you cannot lose sight of the fact
that social acitivity was preceded by this type of individual
activity.
Michael Glassman
University of Houston