[xmca] personal meaning

Mike,
  Thanks for being so consistent .
  Now it's after midnight and I don't have time to push forward ! with checking L's two supposedly late works of 1979/1981. But I can provide you with the following ; this time I went direct to the terminology if this makes you happy :
  [Meaning (German: Bedeutung; Russian: znachenie)
  "Meaning is the generalization of reality that is crystallised and fixed in its sensuous vehicle, i.e. normally in a word or a word combination. This is the ideal, mental form of the crystallisation of mankind's social experience and social practice. The range of a given society's ideas, science, and language exists as a system of corresponding meanings. Meaning thus belongs primarily to the world of objective, historical phenomena. And that must be our starting point.
  Meaning, however, also exists as a fact of the individual consciousness. Man perceives the world and thinks about it as a social, historical entity; he is armed and at the same time limited by the ideas and knowledge of his time and his society. The wealth of his consciousness is in no way reducible to the wealth of his personal experience. Man does not know the world like a Robinson Crusoe making independent discoveries on an uninhabited island. He assimilates the experience of preceding generations of people in the course of his life; that happens precisely in the form of his mastering of meanings and to the extent that he assimilates them. Meaning is thus the form in which the individual man [[appropriates]] generlised and reflected human experience" (Leontyev, 1981: 226).]
  ...
   
  [Sense (German: Sinn; Russian: smysl)
  "Arising in the course of the development of activity, [sense, a relation between the subject and the world that is created by the subject's activity,] is originally biological, and animals' psychic reflection of the external medium is inseparable from this relation. Subsequently, for the first time only in man, this relation is differentiated for the subject as his relation and comprehended. This conscious sense is created concretely psychologically by an objective relation reflected in man's head of what stimulates him to act to what his action is directed as its direct result. In other words conscious sense expresses the relation of motive to goal. It is necessary simply to stress specially that we use 'motive' not to signify the experiencing of a need but as signifying the objective thing in which this need is concretised in the conditions and to which the activity is directed.
  Suppose a student reads the literature recommended to him. That is a conscious, purposive process. Its conscious aim is to assimilate the content of this literature. But what personal sense does this aim, and so the corresponding action, have for the student? That depends on what the motive is that stimulates the activity realised by his action. If it consists in preparing him for his future profession, the reading will have one sense for him, but if it is simply, for example, to pass an examination, then the sense of the reading will understandably be quite another one, and he will read the literature with other eyes, and assimilate [[appropriate]] it in a different way. The question of personal sense can thus be answered by bringing out the corresponding motive.
  Sense is always the sense of something. There are no 'pure' senses. Subjectively sense therefore belongs, as it were, to the comprehended content itself, and seems to be part of its objective content. [p. 20] That circumstance has also created very great misunderstanding in psychology and psycholinguistics, which is expressed either in [[not distinguishing between]] these concepts, or in sense being considered a concretised meaning, depending on the context or situation. In fact, although sense ('personal sense') and meaning introspectively seem merged in consciousness, the two concepts need to be differentiated from one another. They are linked internally with one another but only by a relation that is the reverse of the above-mentioned one; or rather sense is expressed in meanings (like motive in aims), but not meaning in sense.
  In some cases the disparity between sense and meaning in consciousness comes out especially clearly. One may know some historical event or another very well and excellently understand the significance of some historical date, but that date may at the same time have a different sense…one sense, for example, for a youth who has not yet left school, another for the same youth when he is defending his country, and giving his life for it, on the battlefield. Has his knowledge of the event, of this historical date, been altered or increased? No, it has perhaps even become less distinct, something perhaps even forgotten; for some reason, however, it is now recalled and brought to mind, and then it proves to be illuminated in his consciousness, as it were, in a fuller content. It has become different, but not as meaning, and not from the angle of knowledge of it, but from the aspect of its sense for the individual; it has acquired a new, deeper sense for him" (Leontyev, 1981:
 229-230).]
  I should add that this has always been perplexing to me ; what the genuine division might have been : 2,3,4 terms ? But the way L argues about the mutual , dialectical coverings and colourings of the terms , and as Paul recommended : expanding the personal meaning into the objective meaning , seems to be quite clear .
  --on another occasion , too , you stressed on this point and I did not want to take your time . What you asked me on that occasion was if "the working class" think like children . And now still I don't know if by the working class's thinking , you mean "primitive" .
  --Maybe I'd better have posed the question like this : "Did he/they pursue their area of specialization and scientific research as some goal in itself ? Psychology for psychology's sake ? Then why the judgement to the effect that Vygotsky was a victim of the purges ?
  Regards
  Heidi
  heidizulfai@yahoo.com
   

       
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Received on Sun Mar 2 12:26 PST 2008