Reading :: Vygotsky: Philosophy and Education

Vygotsky: Philosophy and Education

By Jan Derry

This book was recommended to me by another scholar, who suggested that I needed to better understand Hegel's influence on Vygotsky. True. I have been avoiding reading Hegel. Fortunately Jan Derry has done some of the hard work on this question already.

Derry's first sentence is: "This book is a response to the claim that Vygotsky holds abstract rationality as the pinnacle of thought" (p.1). Throughout the book, Derry explores how Vygotsky understands rationality, contrasting that understanding with how Vygotsky has been taken up by others, comparing Vygotsky's thought to situated cognition (Ch.2), and constructivism (Ch.3), Piaget (Ch.4). She then explores roots of Vygotsky's thought in Spinoza (Ch.5) and Hegel (Ch.6-7).

A few quick notes from the early part of this book:

In Chapter 2,

• Derry sketches the evolution of the Vygotsky school, drawing on Kozulin to discuss the split between Vygotsky's more "complex" view vs. the Kharkovites (p.12)
• She mentions, drawing again on Kozulin, that Vygotsky's "followers ... were inevitably compromised by the difficult conditions of Stalinism," leading to the activity approach, which was "a more 'materialist' approach [that] occurred in a climate of terror that had become life-threatening" (p.13, quoting Zinchenko here).
• Specifically, the Kharkov school moved from the study of consciousness to that of object-orientedness (p.13)
• Derry quotes Zinchenko, who said that in the context of Stalinism, symbols were deemed idealistic, whereas "the thing" was materialist (p.13); one was unsafe to study, the other was safe.
• Critically, Zinchenko says, activity was reduced to the understanding that a human being was a functional organ for carrying out the Soviet state's directives (p.14).

In Chapter 3, Derry criticizes Wertsch for not understanding Vygotsky because he didn't appreciate Vygotsky's grounding in Hegel (a lack that I share, which is why I read Derry's book!). Specifically, "Although Hegel offers a radically different appreciation of 'abstract rationality,' that is lost to much contemporary work, owing in part to the alignment of Hegel with Marxism and Marxism with the failures of Soviet practice" (p.35). She also criticizes the North American approach more broadly as representationalist, understanding meaning as representing something that exists out there (p.39-42), rather than being created through human agency; if we subscribe to a representationalist paradigm, she says, "agency can be and is ascribed to anything that appears to exert effect" (p.42, in a passage that calls out Wertsch's discussion of tools but can be applied to posthumanism as well). 

In Chapter 4, Derry explores the underlying philosophical differences between Vygotsky and Piaget, arguing that Piaget worked within a dualist Kantian framework (p.71) while Vygotsky worked within a monist Hegelian framework (p.75). 

In Chapter 5, Derry argues that "Vygotsky's understanding of free will derives from Spinoza" (p.85). "Freedom and necessity are at the heart of Vygotsky's account of how mindedness is formed and sustained by mediation with artefacts in a social domain" (p.86). And "Vygotsky follows Spinoza in taking the basis of freedom to be the human ability to separate ourselves from our passions, from the contingencies of nature, and to make for ourselves a space within which we can determine our actions" (p.90). 

Later in the chapter, Derry returns to the Vygotsky/Kharkov split, arguing that 

The idea of economic determinism is fostered by a crude reading of Marx, where a determinate relation is taken to exist in what became known as the base and superstructure model. The temptation is then to see human beings simply as a product of their circumstances. This determinism plagued Vygotskians: It was precisely this that provoked the rift with Leontiev and the Kharkov group because they could not accept Vygotsky's insistence on the existence of a plane that was not explicable in terms of tool use in an environment. (p.97)

I'm not all-in on the first part of this interpretation: Lamdan and Yasnitky make a pretty good case that Vygotsky and Luria had themselves subscribed to economic determinism in the Uzbek expedition. But I agree that the Kharkov group collapsed the Vygotskian distinction between physical tools and psychological tools (signs). 

In any case, Derry notes that a rapprochement could occur only when orthodox Stalinist concepts developed that would make it possible: "only when Vygotskian theory was reinstated in the language of the second signal system of Pavlov. The second signal system incorporates the notion that language and concepts mediate human existence as a second signal system rather than as a first signal where stimuli act on the nervous system directly" (p.98; for examples, see my reviews of Simon, Cole & Maltzman, and especially Luria). 

In Chapter 6, Derry finally turns her attention to "the most significant philosopher for Vygotsky—Hegel" (p.105). "Hegel's philosophy is not readily accessible," she adds with some understatement (p.105). To lead us through it, she contrasts Kant and Hegel:

1. Kant believed in an unknowable realm; Hegel believed that everything was knowable.
2. Kant believed that the mind in itself could construct the world in a particular way; Hegel believed that the mind emerges in social activity.
3. Kant emphasized representations corresponding to a world of which we have knowledge; Hegel emphasized "meaning arising inferentially within a system" (p.106).

Based on Hegel, Vygotsky understood forms of knowing as "developed from activity rather than linking the categories of understanding" (p.108). He also argued that words and concepts "do not merely reflect but actually structure thought. Concepts do not follow, but actually precede, thought" (p.112). Indeed, "Under the influence of Hegel, Vygotsky is bound to reject the representationalist view of knowledge, which presupposes a terminus where knowledge is complete" (p.116). 

In Chapter 7, Derry considers Vygotsky, Hegel, and education. Here, she emphasizes that Vygotsky's views were not "the caricature of evolutionism mistakenly attributed to both Hegel and Marx" (p.135). I won't go further into this chapter, but it is illuminating.

Overall, this book really helped me to understand Hegel (and Spinoza, and Kant) in relation to Vygotsky's thinking. If that's something you want to do also, definitely pick this book up.