For those of us who do not read Russian, and who want to get into the
details of how Vygotsky conceptualized issues like the relationship
between individual and social, I would highly recommend taking a look at
these volumes.
Stanton Wortham
The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 3. Ren=82 van der Veer,
trans., Robert Rieber and Jeffrey Wollock, eds. xiii + 426 pp. Plenum
Press, 1997. $65.
The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 4. Marie Hall, trans.,
Robert Rieber, ed. xvii + 294 pp. Plenum Press, 1997. $59.50.
Since it branched off from philosophy in the 19th century,
psychology has had a troubled, dual nature. Some have envisioned another
natural science, one that offers causal explanations for behavior. Other=
s
have envisioned a humanistic science, one that offers more contextualized
descriptions of the meaningfulness of human experience. The first group
reduces human phenomena to natural mechanisms. The second insists that
human phenomena must be described in intentional or spiritual terms.=20
Writing in the 1920's and 1930's, Lev Vygotsky claimed that this split
within psychology had created a crisis=C4=C4because the split had prevent=
ed
psychology from developing any widely accepted findings or methods of
the sort one finds in the natural sciences. Although some progress has
been made in the intervening seventy years, Vygotsky's description rings
uncomfortably true today.
We will not solve psychology's problem, Vygotsky argued, by
adopting either a naturalistic or a humanistic approach alone. He decrie=
d
naturalistic explanations that reduce complex human accomplishments like
self-consciousness, volition, and reasoning to simple associative
mechanisms. He was even more critical of humanistic accounts that
describe higher human functions as immaterial forces that evade scientifi=
c
explanation. Vygotsky proposed, instead, to construct a thoroughly
materialistic science that would nonetheless explain the most complex,
apparently spiritual aspects of human life. This was an enormously
ambitious project. Volumes 3 and 4 of the English translation of
Vygotsky's Collected Works help reveal to the English-speaking world how
close he came to accomplishing his goal of a materialist, non-reductionis=
t
psychology.
Vygotsky has been considered an important theorist by mainstream
American developmental psychologists for a couple of decades, and in
recent years his sociocentric approach to cognition has begun to influenc=
e
other areas of the discipline. But up until ten years ago only two short
books were available in English, and these had been very heavily edited.=20
With the publication of the third and fourth volumes of Vygotsky's
Collected Works in English, we now have available most of Vygotsky's
key writings in their original form. The English Volume 3 was Volume 1
in the Russian edition, and includes Vygotsky's more theoretical and
philosophical writings. This volume reveals Vygotsky's powerful
philosophical vision far more richly than previously translated materials=
.=20
Vygotsky's prefaces to Russian translations of important books in
psychology, and his long article "The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in
Psychology," show his extraordinary ability to uncover the limitations of
others' implicit theoretical assumptions. The English Volume 4 (Russian
Volume 3) contains essential papers on the development of higher mental
functions, which was the area in which Vygotsky came closest to giving a
successful materialist account of what makes us human.
Vygotsky's background had prepared him to capture the best from
both naturalistic and humanistic sides of psychology. He was a materiali=
st,
and he saw Marxist economics as the model for a scientific psychology.=20
But he also had extensive literary experience, had written a dissertation=
on
the psychology of art, and believed that psychology must take on the
challenge of explaining uniquely human capacities=C4=C4like our cognitive=
and
emotional responses to art, and our deliberate, self-conscious reasoning =
and
action. Against the behaviorists of his day, then, he maintained that hi=
gher
human capacities represent qualitative developmental leaps. All other
materialist accounts to that point had explained thinking, feeling, and
intention in terms of basic physiological or associative processes.=20
Vygotsky was the first to offer an objective, materialist account that di=
d
not reduce higher human functions to physiological or associative
mechanisms.
His approach relied on two key concepts, that we might call holism
and history. I will take these in turn. Vygotsky claimed that
developmental leaps=C4=C4like the ability to think using true concepts=C4=
=C4happen
when more primitive abilities combine to form a new functional system.=20
Abstract thought, for instance, emerges when thinking and speech combine.=
=20
Initially the child speaks to communicate and thinks to solve concrete
problems. When the child begins to use more complex language, the
generalizing power of language (all words categorize, despite continuous
variation in experience) becomes a tool for thought. Children start to u=
se
the categorical power of language to organize their thinking, and thus
develop the ability for abstract thought. Instead of reducing the higher
capacity to more primitive ones, then, Vygotsky claimed that the higher
capacity develops through the synthesis of more primitive functions into =
a
complex whole. This example of the "interfunctional" system that
combines thinking and speech is well known, of course, and presented in
Vygotsky's famous monograph Thinking and speech (published in Volume
1 of the Plenum edition of the Collected Works). Volume 4 illustrates ho=
w
Vygotsky used the same holistic, interfunctional approach to explain many
other higher psychological capacities. Volume 3 shows that Vygotsky
intended this approach not only to answer questions about cognitive
development, but also as a method for turning psychology into a true
science.
Vygotsky argued that the interfunctional systems which explain
distinctively human capacities represent complex adaptations made by the
species. He emphasized that these adaptations depend on cultural and
historical advances, as well as biological ones. Humans have been
evolutionarily successful partly because of our ability to develop and pa=
ss
down cultural knowledge and tools. This means that the higher mental
processes depend on systems that combine both biological and cultural-
historical aspects. This has important consequences for our view of
humanity: according to Vygotsky, the historical epoch and social position
of a person integrally influence that person's higher psychological
functions. All humans do not think, feel, and act in the same basic ways=
,
because higher human capacities depend on systems that include
historically particular cultural components. Vygotsky found this a socia=
lly
progressive conclusion, because it meant that less developed humans could
be improved by giving them better cultural tools.
The key to Vygotsky's non-reductionist materialism, then, is the
interconnection of natural and cultural components in interfunctional
systems. He argued that psychologists should explore these complex bio-
psycho-cultural systems, instead of reducing or ignoring either their nat=
ural
or their cultural components. Even though Vygotsky himself did not
provide adequate empirical support for this argument (his psychological
career lasted only a decade because of his early death), his work is stil=
l
important today. The Collected Works in English are particularly valuabl=
e
because a broad and honest reading of Vygotsky challenges common
assumptions about psychology. In contemporary American psychology, for
instance, materialists rarely find themselves on the same side as those
interested in cultural studies. By struggling to understand Vygotsky's
project, and by building on his more promising insights, we might have a
better chance of overcoming the divisions that psychology still faces.
Stanton Wortham, Bates College