Re: [xmca] All for humanitarian cause !

Dear Heidi:
   
  I didn't mean to be silent, and I certainly did not intend any insult of any kind to anybody on the list. I'm producing materials for the new semester, which started on Monday. I've got two grad seminars, and they need love too!
   
  I guess I agree with Bakhurst (see his article on Vygotsky's rationalist "Demons" in the Cambridge Companion). I really don't think that LSV was "post-logical". It would be too hard to understand if it were.
   
  As Paul points out, I'm a humble idiographer (though I do the nomothetic thing too). I am not a philosopher or a revolutionary (though nothing he says about the Panthers is really news to me--I did live in Chicago and Algiers when there were Panthers there). I work with children's words, and if my students understand me and I can understand them, we feel pretty good about it.
   
  But the subject line (the name of the thread) was "If all hope for a more reasonable social system is gone...". I guess my answer would be that if all hope for a more reasonable social system is gone, history continues regardless, and, strange to say, social systems do appear to get more reasonable without hope. At least when we compare them with, say, five hundred or a thousand years ago.
   
  The question is how and why. Perhaps it's more a statement about the nature of "reason" than about the nature of "progress". But perhaps not, and that's where navel gazing and hope kicks in.
   
  Like you, Heidi, I don't agree that there can be no homologies between social crises and psychological ones. It seems to me that there can be resemblances between cultural and historical neoformations and crises of personal meaning. If that were not true, it would be very hard to see in what sense our psychology is "cultural historical". It would also be very hard to see how (as Martin shows so well) it all goes back to Marx.
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education
   

       
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Received on Tue Mar 4 16:16 PST 2008