The more I read in this chapter 3, the more I think Leontiev has a
quite simple central purpose, and certainly an important one, but he
is at pains of how to express it. Opening up my earlier perspective I
have now started reading Leontievs text under the heuristic that:
Leontiev wants to reintroduce meaning into psychology, but is not
allowed on two accounts: both by (a) the habits and the polit-science
establishment in his country who cannot operate other than
materialistically, and by (b) the world-wide psychology
self-understanding as a natural science where meaning has no place.
"Activity" thus would be his in many respects well- in others a bit
ill-chosen term to replace "behavior" in the behaviorist's sense
(i.e. the plain movements of a body) as the central concept, together
with its complement of reflection, in an environment or object
related psychology. For, in fact there is no behavior that is not
related to some thing or event in the environment. And also any
psychic process or content in a narrower sense, "consciousness" and
memory, is of course environment-related, more or less directly. It's
necessarily implied; otherwise movements of a body are senseless.
This begins very early, phylogenetically. Of course, all kinds of
tropism and of taxis in one- and multiple-celled organisms are
environment-related devices, positive or negative in the sense of
approaching, searching, etc. or avoiding, fleeing etc. In more
complex organisms instincts on all levels are bindings of an organism
into pertinent environmental conditions, receptive and active. Why,
for heavens sake, should or could it be possible to understand humans
at all if you throw the relatum in the environment out of psychology?
In actual psychology L.'s term meets two additional obstacles: In
English "'activity" has several definitions, the most important one
is also object-unrelated, namely the simple amount of movements per
time unit. In German the translation "Taetigkeit" does a good job,
but then another problem comes in: the East German followers, by
national duty so to say, overdid the thing emphasizing to exclusive
heights what L. had prepared namely to center to whole approach in
Action and in relation to goals, but those follower set up a
definition of action very pointedly in terms of conscious purpose and
industrial and personal and collective planning. So they did in fact
a kind of old Bewusstseinspsychologie in materialist clothes which
would soon have been forgotten again if it were not for the apparent
confirmations of the cognitive turn in psychology in the early 1970s.
There are various attempts in the history of psychology to
re-introduce that idea of environment relatedness of everything
psychical, especially after behaviorism and other mechanistic
theories (Pavlov among them?) had thrown it out.
Interestingly, this starts long before behaviorism by thinkers and
researcher dissatisfied with the self-imposed closure of normal
psychology into the psyche within individual human organism and
"consciousness" in particular. Herder is among them, naturally; also
Karl Philip Moritz, the founder of the first Magazine for experience
based psychology (fuer Erfahrungsseelenkunde) in the late 18th. In
the later 19th Brentano introduced his notion of "intentionality"
which has often been misunderstood in the sense of conscious
purposiveness but essentially meant environment- or
object-relatedness. Also an ill-chosen term, because it sounds so
specific for an idea embracing so much, a very special thing but in
fact to cover everything.
But in the mechanistic psychological world of the middle 20th century
it was nearly impossible to introduce meaning again. I remember well
enough my younger when I had understood that psychology neede to
include culturality but could not use any such term for immediatedly
being made an outlaw in psychology. The irony later in the century is
that psychology returned to its seclusive notion of the psyche within
the organism and replaced the in principle environment-sensitive
stimuli, responses and incentives, reinforcers etc. of behaviorism by
fiction that bases everything only on as-if-environments represented
by linguistic conventions.
But the activity conception at least in part does the job. For any
operation or action with an object must necessarily pertain to its
meaning, understood individually and collectively in culture. And it
has the advantage that meaning is brought into the field without use
of the so un-materialistic word.
This message was half written when Peter's message came in and I
think his points and his remarks re Rubinstein and Vygotsky sort of
confirm my interpretation and make it the better understandable that
there are reasons for hesitation with Leontiev to deal with the
meaning of meaning.
Of course, the question remains of how meaning can work, both in the
objects out there and in their reflections within and how the two
embodiments of meaning relate. But this is not the time to bring
semiotic ecology in.
Alfred
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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