Lev Vygotsky; a Celebration of His Life and Work

Lev Vygotsky; a Celebration of His Life and Work by the Australian Armchair Sceptic

Introduction and Biography

Introduction

In my blog here I want to pay tribute to the memory of Lev Semionovich Vygotsky. I discovered Vygotsky in the late 1970’s when I was undertaking a master’s degree in philosophy. I have since also completed a PhD on Vygotsky and his notion of consciousness and the acquisition of what is referred to as ‘the higher mental processes’. I remain quite fascinated and impressed, and somewhat overwhelmed by the material he produced in a short lifetime. I continue to read his work and to this day and find material that is as fresh and creative as if it were written today.
Vygotsky was born in Orsha, Belarus (at that time, part of the Russian empire) on November 17th, 1896. Vygotsky was raised and undertook his basic education in the city of Gomel, at that time part of the Russian empire, now Belarus. He was from a non-religious Jewish family.

Though Vygotsky was an atheist, he did maintain respect for his Jewish culture, its traditions and history. Though being of Jewish descent was quite a disadvantage in the Russian empire and Jews were quite limited in what they could access. However, Vygotsky was brilliant enough to by admitted to Moscow University in1913 b means of a ‘Jewish Lottery’. Which limited the Jewish student quota to three per cent. Vygotsky’s academic interests included art, humanities and social sciences.

In 1924 Vygotsky attended the Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd where he met several individuals who were to be his close collaborators and colleagues and were to join with Vygotsky in founding a historical-cultural psychological school. Notable among them were Alexander Luria who was to become famous for his study and research into the implications of brain damage. The other important collaborator was Aleksei Nikolayevich Leontiev, a Soviet Russian developmental psychologist and philosopher and a founder of activity theory after Vygotsky’s death. The Activity School moved from Mocow to Kharkov (Kharkiv) now Ukraine to avoid the strictures and censures of Stalin in Moscow.

Alexander Luria

Aleksei Leontiev

Vygotsky moved to Moscow with his new wife Roza Smekhova and two daughters Asya Vigodskaya and Gita Vygodskaya. He then worked as a staff scientist at the Psychological Institute and was also hired to teach in Schools. His eldest daughter Gita became a famous psychologist herself. Gita lived to 85 years until 2010. She was instrumental in keeping safe, (in a time of a perilous Stalinist ban of his work), hundreds of Vygotsky’s manuscripts and, after the death of Stalin, was involved in the publications of many of her father’s unknown works. As a note, when working in in Moscow, Vygotsky changed the spelling of his last name to the more Slavic sounding Vygotsky, rather than the original Jewish spelling Vygotskii which his wife and daughters kept.

I will discuss this below, but briefly, after his death Vygotsky’s works were banned in Stalinist Russia. The reasons are not too clear, though my view is that the Stalinist regime considered his study of language and thought as Bourgeoisie and “idealistic’. Th reason was, I think, that the study of unobservable phenomena such as consciousness and its relation to awareness, problem solving and language etc. did not fit the then reigning empiricist model of science. This is why after his death his school moved to Kharkiv naming it the Activity School to give it a more concrete objective sound and escape the so-called bourgeoise label. Many of Vygotsky’s works became available after Stalin’s death and his most famous work, ‘language and Thought’ was published in several Languages. Unfortunately, the English version was heavily censured in a time of anti-communist sentiment. All references to Marx were deleted making it somewhat limited. Full, uncensured versions, became available in the eighties, and this is where I came in; trying to get access to some of his uncensured works for my master’s Thesis. There were more works available at the time in German than English and I was very fortunate to get some translations from the German. It was frustrating as it was not until 1999 that full access to Vygotsky’s work became available in, “The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky (1999), By: Robert W. Rieber (Editor), L.S. Vygotsky, Marie J. Hall (Translator)

A brilliant intellectual, a philosopher (particularly in the Philosophy of Science) but known mainly for his work in developmental psychology. He was social activist, and very effective teacher and researcher whose work revolved around the social and cultural development of the interrelation of cognitive skills, language and education. Vygotsky died of tuberculosis on June 11th, 1934, aged only 37. This is a celebration of his work, the 90th year after his death.

This presentation is not intended as an academic treatise which, of course, would have a limited readership. I am writing it for you, my readers and followers as my goal is to make Vygotsky accessible to you to introduce you to a great mind, way ahead of its time. The presentation is very long for which I am sorry as I wanted it to be available to non-academic readers. I hope I am successful in this. What is to follow is my own interpretation of Vygotsky’s work, though I accept that there are many different takes on Vygotsky, though this presentation is mine after more than 45 years of reading his work. I am trying to write as clearly and as simply as I can so what I write can be understood by a wide readership and Utube watchers. This much more difficult than writing an academic treatise or article, so I hope you can find what I write and say understandable. Please ask questions and make your own points in the comments section and I will be happy to respond to all of them.

I will not try to cover all of Vygotsky’s work as it is too vast just for one presentation, so I will instead focus on two areas of

Vygotsky’s unique ideas. These are:

1. Vygotsky as philosopher.

Vygotsky was very versed in the philosophy of science being influenced by many philosophers. These include the Dutch philosopher Benedict De Spinoza, who was one of Vygotsky’s great heroes. Also, he was influenced by German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel one of the most influential figures of German idealism. These in addition to the philosophical stances of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Vygotsky’s elaboration of the philosophical base of psychological science and the problems with the state of the science in his time is a central feature of his philosophical stance. I also argue that those problems still exist to this day and I will seek to elaborate on that.

2.Vygotsky as a psychologist

I will discuss the uniqueness of his developmental psychology and its relevance to human cognitive awareness. In addition, I will compare Vygotsky’s position to the other most influential developmental psychologist, the Swiss Psychologist, Jean Piaget. Piaget is arguably the most influential of all developmental psychologists and his ideas, and those scholars influenced by him, have had a very significant role in educational practice, especially in the West, for many years. And they still have. Vygotsky communicated with Piaget and Piaget was impressed with his work. However, the differences between Piaget and Vygotsky are significant and extremely important to understand.
Vygotsky’s Philosophy

It was important in Vygotsky’s time for psychologists, especially in the Soviet Union, to outline the philosophical basis of their approach. They sought to ground their psychology philosophically. This means an analysis of their subject matter (what they were studying or researching) and what method is appropriate for the research into that subject matter. As an example, the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov’s work was the discovery of what was called the ‘conditioned reflex’. Pavlov was also a brilliant physician who performed many quite revolutionary operations. Though it was the conditioned reflex that made him internationally famous.

Pavlov’s psychological experiments were on dogs. He showed that it was possible to illicit a Salivary response (a secretion) in dogs. Dog’s normally, at the presentation of food will salivate in anticipation of the food. Pavlov was able to show by pairing the food with the sound of a bell and it would create as association between the sound of the bell and food. After this association the dog would salivate at the sound of the bell when the food was not there yet. Thus, what was referred to as a conditioned response was acquired, and the dog would hear the bell and salivate. As I said the bell sound was referred to as a conditioned response (or CR). Palov used this to understand human behaviour. He was not interested in the study of dog psychology but as a general means of understanding conditioning. Pavlov’s version of conditioning was known as classical conditioning. It has been the basis of treatment of phobias, addictions, certain mental illness that can be dealt with by conditioning. In fact, Pavlov and others sought to show ( a position I do not accept) that most human learning was through conditioning.

The philosophical aspect of this claim was outlined by Pavlov himself. He argued it was scientific, in the empiricist way, it was objective and the experiment with dogs was simply a universal example of learning that could be applied to all human (and maybe animal) behaviour. Pavlov and others that followed him, rejected what they saw as subjective phenomena in science. Mental phenomena such as consciousness, memory, thinking, reasoning, or problem-solving, was rejected as scientific phenomena as they were not objectively observable. or measurable.

Vygotsky’s philosophical position was expressed in a long manuscript, ‘The Crisis in Psychology’, that he did not complete, and that unfinished version was only published in full and in language other than Russian in the 1990’s. I have read it a few times and it is very difficult in any language much more difficult than his other works that were quite accessible. The problem is it has many Russian tropes that are unclear to non- Russians. Maye readers should try to get hold of it and comment on what they think? However, in the meantime, I will seek to provide what I see as its basic underlying principles.

Vygotsky saw the crisis in psychology as a clash between two mainly incompatible positions or philosophical approaches. One was represented by the behavioural school (comprising both classical (Pavlov) and operant conditioning (operant condition involving conditioning by means or reward was represented at the time by the US psychologist J. B. Watson) These two approaches were seen by their advocates as objective science. They rejected any non- objective phenomena such as language, mind, mentality, and consciousness that was regarded as subjective phenomena and considered not to fit the natural science (empiricist) model. I should mention that a number of critics of these behavioural approaches consider them to be physiology rather than psychology, as psychology is the study of the human spirit rather than human physiology. This rejection of psychology as a study of the mental was not acceptable to Vygotsky who saw such phenomena as consciousness as an essential feature of any psychology. They ignored the development of conscious control and the emergence of higher mental processes such as reasoning, language, problem solving was an essential feature of human behaviour. Also rejected by Vygotsky were some of the psychological approaches of the day such as phenomenology and gestalt psychology as descriptive and lacking an objectivity base.

Without going into more detail on this more philosophical aspect of Vygotsky’s approach as it can be the object of another presentation. Vygotsky proposed that any psychology cannot ignore either the impact of language on behaviour or that of the social environment. In my view consideration of these two phenomena which are basically social is revolutionary. It moved psychology out of the realm of a study of individuality and physiology into an area of the social. Vygotsky never completed his work on the crisis as I consider he thought it could not be solved in his lifetime. How he studied the impact of the social and language on development is the next topic.

Vygotsky’s Psychology

Vygotsky’s psychology can be said to be driven by two needs. These are

1. Outline the philosophical base of his approach

2. To meet the practical psychological and educaonal needs of the newly estabished Soviet Union

1. The philosophical base

These are mentioned above in his philosophical position. This is the view that psychology is in crisis because it has not included a crucial aspect of human behaviour, namely consciousness. This entails, having experiences, making decisions about future activities, problem solving, planning, learning and the appreciation of all forms of art. The behavioural (or reflexological) approach covers only the physiological aspects of behaviour, such as the classical and operant conditioning. Advocates of these approaches who want to see psychology as a natural science, reject all forms of phenomena that are not empirical, meaning that which cannot fit into the observational account of the natural sciences. Vygotsky implies that these approaches provide us with a universal picture of how conditioning works in all animals, though they are limited in understanding human behaviour, they are really physiology not psychology. Psychology, Vygotsky insists, is about human behaviour, behaviour that is unique to humans. In fact, he points out that the meaning of the term psychology is the study of the human spirit. My interpretation is that Vygotsky does not see psychology as a natural science in the sense that it deals only with observable objective data (called empiricism). Empiricism has limited itself as you can detect from brain activity that the brain is thinking but not what it is thinking about. Vygotsky inserts this quote from Marx in his paper written in 1925, “Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behaviour”.

The spider makes operations resembling the operations of the weaver, and the bee creating its waxen cells disgraces some architects. But from the very beginning, the worst architect differs from the best bee in that before building the cell of wax, he already has built it in his head. The result, which is received at the end of the process of work, already exists in the beginning of this process in an ideal form in a representation of a person. The person does not only change the form given by nature, but in what is given by nature he, at the same time, realises his conscious purpose, which as a law determines the way and character of his actions and to which he must subordinate his will.” K. Marx

Many organisms from insects to mammals follow instincts, that have evolved over many millions of years, to construct external structures. These include bees, termites, ants, birds (i.e. nests) and other structures to sleep and to protect young in all animals. Humans also have instinctual behaviours in their repertoire, though much of human behaviour is unique in that it is conscious and enables problem solving and planning in one’s head, as it were, before it is realised in the material environment. This is Marx’s and Vygotsky’s point about human behaviour, which as indicated above, and this is not included in many of the physiologically based psychologies. This is not to say that some animals with highly evolved brains such as, primates, whales, dolphins etc. do not display conscious behaviour. Despite this point, human consciousness has a much more complex and qualitatively different structure to other animals. Vygotsky argues that consciousness and what it entails is essential to the study of human social behaviour such as learning, language acquisition, problem solving, planning and so on.

The problem of consciousness has remained a central and difficult and complex problem, that has really, to this day, not been explained satisfactorily. Progress on certain areas has been made since Vygotsky. This would include some aspects of Vygotsky’s work on metal processes such as, the ability to discriminate and categorize phenomena, the ability to control and plan and undertake what one plans and other actions that can be traced and seen in brain processing. However, some recent philosophers argue that there is more to consciousness than these abilities. The philosopher David Chalmers refers to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness which he claims is the hard problem of ‘experience’. He says:

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing hat is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried explaining it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given
David Chalmers Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, No.3, 1995, pp. 200-19.

Vygotsky did not speak about experience specifically, though his work did focus, as we will see, on what he referred to as, the acquisition of the ‘higher mental processes’. In my view his understanding of this acquisition is close to what Chalmers refers to as, ‘experience’. The point that needs to be made about Vygotsky’s approach is that humans live in a cultural setting that has important implications for the development of behaviours such as speaking, learning and thinking without which they could not be acquired. His point is that culture can’t be ignored in processes such as these learning, speaking, planning and thinking behaviours. Vygotsky’s position is that culture provides the means for conscious development in children. This is unique to Vygotsky. I will discuss this further below, as Vygotsky sees instinct as providing a motive to survive, to learn to acquire practical abilities. This differs substantially from both Freud and Piaget for whom instincts militate against reality learning, as they are based on what is referred to as the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle does not provide instincts to survive and learn to deal with the culture and environment but only to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

2. The Practical Base

Vygotsky was born in the last days of the Czarist Russian empire. Serfdom was the way the society was organised under the Czars and though some Czars did make concessions to Improve the lives of the serfs The Czarist Emperor Alexander 1 was said to have abolished the tradition of serfs though progress was slow on that, and the system itself remained intact for more than 20 million individuals in a population of about 60 million.

The Bolshevik revolution under Vladimir Lenin was to create the Soviet Union in 1917 and serfs were immediately emancipated. The nobility was deprived of much of its land and serfs were enabled to live on the land without any obligations to the noble landowners. The 1920’s in the Soviet Union saw the emergence and acceptance of new and fresh approaches to psychology as there was a basic reorganisation of the entire social structure. As indicated above, Vygotsky entered of the field pf psychology with the presentation of a paper “Methods of Reflexology and Psychological Investigations” at the Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1924. It was very well received and the Director of the Psychological institute in Moscow K N Kornilov invited him to join the institute. This was really the beginning of Vygotsky’s interest and knowledge of philosophy, literature and art and the social sciences they were to have a very profound impact on his work as an academic psychologist.

The task for the Soviet Union in the 1920’s under Lenin was to modernise the entire country and its population. Education was a major need in a country that had millions of individuals without any educational access at all, including those who were previously under serfdom and others without education such as factory workers. There were also cultural differences between the groups that were to become Soviet citizens and not Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Mongolians and many more. Also, there were virtually no services for those with such disabilities as intellectual disability, mental illness and many physical handicaps. Thus, the challenge for educationalists and psychologists – to educate the masses, to assist those individuals with disability to participate in the new social order. Equality of opportunity for all citizens was a Marxist major policy ideal. This meant the study of child’s development (including those with disabilities) in the acquisition of physical skills, of knowledge and of the appreciation of art and literature. The problem was what was the process and what was needed for children to acquire such abilities.

Vygotsky was familiar with the work of both Freud and Piaget both held genetic or developmental views of child and adult development of abilities. They held to a view that to understand a phenomenon such as human adult higher mental processes required a study of its development in children and what was required to assist this process. Piaget who was influenced by Freud in this saw the overcoming of instinctual behaviour as a key to social and individual development.

For Freud the instinctual driving force of all animals was what he referred to as the pleasure principle. It was the view that animals naturally sought pleasure and avoided pain, and it was the dominant force of the human psyche. Freud referred to this as the ‘id’ and it was the persistent driving force of the psyche. The individual human had to somehow overcome (or suppress is the correct term) this as it would not allow any dealing with reality. Freud’s notion of the ego was that which emerged as the reality principle – a force that sought to bring the ego under some control of reality. However, the id remained the driving force of the psyche. Thus, the ego’s power over the psyche was tentative and it continued to assert itself in many ways. In one of his major works ‘Civilization and is Discontents’, Freud argued that civilisation requires some overcoming or suppression of instinctual drives, though it remained in the background as a driving force. The reality principle does bring about change but at a cost.

Piaget was influenced by Freud and saw the achievement of both cognitive and physical abilities as the overcoming of instinctual drives. For Piaget the socialisation of children requires the overriding and suppression of the individuals real nature. This position is significantly opposed by Vygotsky who argues that fundamentally the acquisition of abilities such as self- consciousness, or conscious of oneself as a personal being and becoming an agent capable of self-determination (as opposed to the view of Sam Harris that self-determination is a myth a position with which I radially disagree). For Vygotsky these abilities are not a given by physiological or biological inheritance. They can only be acquired by a process of socialisation by an internalisation of cultural/social phenomena such as language and of social skills. Ther can be no conscious awareness of oneself, no ability to plan, solve problems, no internal thinking without their acquisition from the external non-biological culture into which they were born.

The last sentence in the previous paragraph is extremely controversial. It suggests that our uniquely human abilities both physical and cognitive require cultural input. This is the way that humans have evolved and without that culture we would not be the unique animal we are. There a few examples of young children being raised by animals from young babies (Vygotsky does mention some) that even when brought back from animal care into human culture, seem unable to fully acquire essential skills such as language (speaking), thinking conceptually, even physical actions such as walking, facial expressions and gesticulating.

There is much more I can say about this though I will have to leave that to future posts. This post is now really getting much longer than I thought it would, so we must finish up. I wish to finish with some thoughts on Vygotsky’s view on culture and the development of higher mental processes which is not, as I said above, a physiological or biological process only but depends on cultural input.
For Vygotsky the development of mental processing and complex thinking requires in ‘internalisation’ of language, that is a non- biological social phenomenon. The process of this from acquisition from childhood is central to Vygotsky’s developmental approach. In future blog post I my look at this in detail though readers can find this in the ‘Collected Works’ and in the famous work by Vygotsky, ‘Thought and Language”.

The major point I make about Vygotsky’s position is on the interaction between the biological (the brain) and the social and cultural base. Vygotsky (and, later his colleague Alexander Luria) take issue with the common view of development, that espoused by both Freud and Piaget, was that the brain determined behaviour and cognition. This is referred to as biological determinism the same philosophical base that was espoused by Sam Harris in his rejection of the possibility of self-determination. The Vygotskian position was that the brain itself was changed in its architecture by the social, linguistic and cultural environment. The brain does not determine behaviour and cognition but is itself impacted on and changed by its immersion in a particular social order. It becomes, as it were, socialised. Vygotsky, following philosophers such as Spinoza, argues for what is referred to as the plasticity of the brain its ability to change its structure.

Vygotsky understands evolution that is sometimes referred to as ‘Baldwinian Evolution’ that argues that certain social behaviours or adaptations precede biological change. If such adaptation is useful for subsistence in a population, then it generates selection pressures on genes that support its spread in the population. Thus, those in individuals in a social order that are more successful do better and impact on evolutionary processes. Thus, certain behaviours and cognition are learned socially and not inherited or, it seems, dependent on the brain for such actions. What do you think of that Sam Haris?
This is my last point though I have much more to say, maybe in future posts, though here I want to briefly mention Vygotsky’s understanding of how thought is acquired in childhood. For Vygotsky thinking is not determined by brain processes but by the internalisation of language (or speech). Vygotsky does not deny the existence in all organisms of certain thought type processes such as awareness of danger initiating flight. Also, many of the evolved mammals use their brains to outsmart and catch prey. Carnivores such as lions learn to work in coordinated groups. However, human thought is unique in that it is conceptual and gained from language internalisation. The process of the internalisation of language (and that means speech really) in Vygotsky’s work is very complex though basically it is a sort of internalisation of activity. Vygotsky proposed the now famous notion, ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ (The ZPD) in which children learn behaviours by association with more competent peers and older adults. For example, a mother and her child can comprise a ZPD. The child begins an action but is unable to complete that action because she/he lacks certain skills that enable a completion of that action. The mother intuitively determines what action her child wants to perform so she completes that action for the child. The child learns to complete the action supplied by her/his mother and in time can perform that action without the mother’s assistance.

I tend to explain the ZPD by reference to intelligence tests. The usual manner of their presentation is to just provide the child (it could be an adult) with the test to complete. The result supposedly represents the child’s level of ability and intelligence. My View is that the child who does not do well on an IQ test because she/he has not learned the basic presuppositions of answering IQ questions. If you teach a child how to answer or the tricks embedded in answering the question, he or she will perform much better on the test than if that pre-test learning had not occurred. Thus, many studies have shown that if you provide individuals with (what I call) the tricks embedded in answers you improve their performance substantially.
Many educators have picked up on the ZPD and it is used quite commonly now in educational settings. The point to make is that the internalisation changes the child’s brain’s architecture. There is so much more that can be said relating to changing of brain architecture, but it must be covered in other future posts. My view is that it puts to rest the notion of brain determination of behaviour that has, in my view, resulted in very limited understanding of human behaviour and of the possibilities of enhanced cognitive functioning.