It's gotta be somewhere in here Steve:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/five2.htm
Andy
Steve Gabosch wrote:
Can anyone with a Russian edition of a book by Lenin help? I am
having difficulty locating a passage Vygotsky refers to. It is an
interesting quote from the LSV CW, Vol 3, pg 114, in the 1930 article
Mind, Consciousness and the Unconscious.
Vygotsky's publishers give a reference to a 1984 Russian edition of
Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (p 143), for which I am
looking for the corresponding text in English.
Vygotsky:
"Dialectical psychology's whole uniqueness precisely resides in the
attempt to define the subject matter of its study in a completely
novel way. This subject matter is the integral process of behavior
which is characterized by the fact that it has its mental and its
physiological side. [Dialectical] psychology studies it as a unitary
and integral process and only in this way tries to find a way out of
the blind alley that was created [by the old psychology]. We remind
you here of the warning that Lenin [1909/1984, p 143] gave in his book
"Materialism and empiriocriticism" against the incorrect understanding
of this formula. He said that contrasting the mental with the
physical is absolutely necessary within the strict confines of the
statement of our epistemological goals, but that beyond these confines
such a contrast would be a gross mistake.
Vygotsky's main points in this article include, by the way, that human
psychology is a dialectical unity (and not identity) of the mental and
physiological, and that psychology studies "psycho-physiological
unitary integral" processes. That last one is new for me - I hadn't
seen that particular formulation before. As we all know, he liked to
experiment with words. Vygotsky continues:
"It is indeed a methodological difficulty of psychology that its
viewpoint is a genuinely scientific, ontological one and that here
this contrast would be a mistake. Whereas in epistemological analysis
we must strictly oppose sensation and object, we must not oppose the
mental and physiological processes in psychological analysis."
biblio reference:
Lenin, V.I. (1909/1984). Materialismus i empiriokriticism. Moscow:
Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoj Literatury
Lenin's book in Russian online (no page numbers, but this is the 1984
edition)
http://www.psylib.ukrweb.net/books/lenin01/index.htm
Lenin's book in English
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/volume14.htm
Thanks,
- Steve
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