Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Dilthey?: Why V was critical towards D?

[Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>]

Thanks for all these Dilthey-Vygotsky leads.

It makes much sense that Vygotsky would not have been fond of the Dilthey's
Dualism. But, turning back to what prompted the association in the first
place, if perezhivanie is a translation of the German erlebnis, then whose
erlebnis is Vygotsky translating?

Perhaps whomever was using it before Dilthey?

Who might that be?

Below I've pasted a paragraph from an essay on erlebnis that describes
Gadamer's tracing of the origins of the term. (Larry?). The author argues
that Gadamer says that Dilthey "coined" it, but that it was a coalescing of
ideas from others, Kant and Rousseau in particular.

If, as Anton posits, perezhivanie is a direct translation of erlebnis, then
did Vygotsky just "poach" this from Dilthey's oeuvre while rejecting
Dilthey's main tenets?

Personally, I don't have anything against intellectual poaching (which I
would define as taking an element of someone's theory without "buying into"
the whole), but it does make for an interesting story...
And more importantly, it may be helpful for understanding perezhivanie.

-greg

"Gadamer's history of Erlebnis is at the same time a recognition of its
vitality as an idea, and I can only briefly outline this rich philological
exercise. The various dispersed elements that were to make up Erlebnis
coalesced for a period of time and only eventually came together as a kind
of cultural leitmotif. Kant gave an early impetus to the idea by developing
the idea of *Lebensgefuhl,* the "heightening of the feeling of life."
Rousseau, who portrayed the uniqueness of his inmost self as the best
evidence of Nature, was also a seminal influence. It was Rousseau's
opposition of the world of inner experience to Enlightenment rationalism
that inspired Dilthey to coin the term. Its roots in biographical
literature explain a great deal about its character, particularly in the
way that an experience carries with it and is attached to the whole of a
life: "Every act, as an element of life, remains connected with the
infinity of life that manifests itself in it" (Gadamer, TM, 64). Dilthey
speaks of this in the relation between biography and history: "Everything
that I experience or could experience constitutes (a nexus or system). Life
is a process which is connected into a whole through a structural system
which begins and ends in time." Gadamer will lay claim to this crucial
appropriation of the doctrine of part and whole. His treatment of Erlebnis
begins as a linguistic history, catching at the double meaning at the root
of the concept to explain its extraordinary power. The verb "erleben" in
the first instance means "to be alive when something happens," and thus
speaks to the immediacy of the moment of experience. The form "das Erlebte"
refers to the permanent result of what is experienced, relating the
transience of undistinguished life to the achievement of permanence in
certain experiences. The fruitfulness of this dual derivation is that the
word is able to refer simultaneously to the two aspects of experience as a
conceptual matrix: "Something becomes an 'experience' not only insofar as
it is experienced, but insofar as its being experienced makes a special
impression that gives it lasting importance" (TM, 61). The entanglement of
these two aspects of the same experience has an ontological consequence,
because it lays claim to the relationship of every act to the whole of
experience that surrounds it."

The full article is at: http://www.janushead.org/3-1/jarthos.cfm



On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> Vygotsky writes in some detail about Dilthey in "The Meaning of the Crisis
> in Psychology." His criticism is that Dilthey's conception of psychology
> amounted to one of the two sides of the dualism that LSV was keen to
> overcome. Indeed, Dilthey himself divided science into two types, the
> natural sciences and the sciences of mind, and located psychology in the
> latter.
>
> Martin
>
> On Apr 24, 2013, at 2:43 AM, Rauno Huttunen <rakahu@utu.fi> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > Radzikhovskii and Khomskaya make interesting point in their article A.R.
> Luria and L. S. Vygotsky: Early Years of their Collaboration (Journal of
> Russian and East European Psychology, Volume 20, number 1 / Fall 1981, DOI:
> 10.2753/RPO1061-040520013):
> >
> > "To understand how, in such a situation, Vygotsky nevertheless could
> become Luria's teacher,
> > we must turn to Luria's scientific career before he met Vygotsky. ...
> whole generations of Russian
> > students had been nurtured: the works of Hoffding, Wundt, Dilthey,
> Binet, and James"
> >
> > That would be one reason why Vygotsky was critical towards Dilthey.
> Dilthey represented earlier paradigm.
> >
> > Rauno Huttunen
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of Martin Packer
> > Sent: 24. huhtikuuta 2013 6:07
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Dilthey? Perzhivanie and Erlebnis?
> >
> > Vygotsky certain;y knew about Dilthey. But he wasn't a huge fan:
> >
> > "It was specifically the fear of materialistic conceptions of natural
> scientific psychology penetrating into the social sciences that pushed
> Dilthey and other authors toward the idea of dividing psychology into two
> "separate sciences." Dilthey wrote that "integration into the natural
> sciences" gives psychology the "character of a refined materialism. This
> psychology is not a sure foundation, but a danger for the jurist or the
> historian of literature. Every subsequent development has shown what a
> disintegrating role this hidden materialism of Spencerian explanatory
> psychology has played in the economic and political sciences and in
> criminal law" (Dilthey, 1924, p. 30)."
> >
> > Vygotsky, L. S. (2012). The science of psychology. Journal of Russian
> and East European Psychology, 50(4), 85-106.
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > On Apr 23, 2013, at 9:08 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Just making connections a propos of Anton's mention that perezhivanie
> is a
> >> direct translation of the German erlebnis.
> >>
> >> I was recently reading The Anthropology of Experience in which Edward
> >> Bruner looks to link anthropology, through Victor Turner, to Dilthey and
> >> his important concept "erlebnis".
> >>
> >> Vygotsky certainly would have known about Dilthey, no?
> >>
> >> -greg
> >>
> >> p.s. I also wonder if Dilthey would have been a significant influence on
> >> Dewey and his notion of "experience"?
> >>
> >> --
> >> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> >> Visiting Assistant Professor
> >> Department of Anthropology
> >> 883 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> >> Brigham Young University
> >> Provo, UT 84602
> >> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
> >> __________________________________________
> >> _____
> >> xmca mailing list
> >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >>
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
>
>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
883 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca