Re: leont'ev: externalization/internalization etc

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@lesley.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 31 2000 - 05:17:18 PST


We are made of the fabric we are tearing at here. Woven into our everyday life are distinctions: individual and social, humans and environment, inside and outside. Internalization and externalization suffer also as shorthand notation for the complex uptake and complex production in the activity of humans. The terms are separated with ease in the ideal, with difficulty in the real. They are unified with difficulty in the ideal and with ease in the real. (Yes, I see contradictions here) These are our cultural heritages. So it is tempting to reject, scientifically, any of these terms based upon their failings, yet they serve practical functions everyday and scientifically, even if only for a "bootstrapping" process, as stepping stones. So it goes, also with 'ideal' and 'real', and 'scientific' and 'everyday'. It has been highly illuminating to see how these struggles have been taken on across languages and cultures. So perhaps we can think of these things as components of a whole, that we may index in order to comprehend in our limited ways what is otherwise incomprehensible -- the totality of human existence.

bb



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