Andy Blunden. March 2008
Mephistopheles: “I am the spirit which negates.”
(Goethe, Faust)
Vygotsky developed his psychology using the same approach to the science that Marx had used in his critique of political economy. He worked through the various competing theories which had arisen in the history of psychology, critically appropriating them. This entailed grasping the problems to which each theory addressed itself, reformulating its key insights and tracing the contradictions into which they led. The aim was to arrive at a new concept of psychology, which responded to the contradictions and problems manifested in the history of the science. Such a concept was not a “synthesis,” but would be a complete break from the historically preceding theories of psychology, making a new starting point to be concretized in a reconstructed, truly scientific psychology. This is the method of research which Marx developed in his critique of political economy, on the foundation of the approach laid out formally by Hegel in his Logic. So Vygotsky’s psychology drew on the entire range of contemporary and preceding scientific investigations into psychology, within a methodological framework appropriated from Marx and Hegel.
One of the key theories which drew Vygotsky’s attention in the 1920s was Gestalt psychology, which presented itself as the left-wing of psychology, with a critique of the dominant associationist psychology. However, the concept of Gestalt[1] had already made its way into Vygotsky’s thinking, from its origins with Goethe more than a century earlier, by an entirely different route.
Goethe was an acclaimed poet before Kant had made his name with The Critique of Pure Reason; he towered over the world of Hegel and Schopenhauer and even after his death oversaw the education of German-speakers from Marx and Wundt to Freud and Jung and had a huge impact in Russia as well. In his natural scientific work, Goethe challenged the Newtonian orthodoxy of 19th century science, exerting his influence not only through his writings, but through personal example. As a critic of analytical, mechanistic science he anticipated many ideas associated with the late 20th century.
Throughout his life, Goethe fought against the kind of mindless positivism which led, for example, to attempts to understand language by analysing the physiological effects of a succession of sound vibrations on the ear.
Whilst the impact of sensations as a source of knowledge of the objective world seemed clear enough, the source of conceptual knowledge had troubled philosophers since antiquity. Kant, for example, had proposed a separate faculty of reason with access to categories, working side by side with a faculty of intuition accessing the data of sensation. Late 19th century scientists wanted to resolve these problems by finding the source of concepts, or at least form, in sensation itself. In his influential Analysis of Sensations, Ernst Mach went so far as to hypothesise additional sense organs which could acquire visual or auditory forms, alongside elements like colour, pitch and so on. Faced with this absurdity, Christian von Ehrenfels proposed that the whole form of a thing could be represented to consciousness, not just separately and alongside its elements, but prior to its elements. Ehrenfels credited Goethe for the idea that the senses could acquire the whole shape or figure – Gestalt, but for Gestalt Psychology the problem remained within the framework of an object stimulating the senses of an individual organism, and the problem of the source of conceptual knowledge had been quietly reduced to that of form, or associations between sensuous stimuli. As Vygotsky put it, “having smashed atomism, [they] replaced the atom by the independent and isolated molecule.” [Preface to Koffka, 1934, LSV CW v. 3, p230]
Goethe was the foremost advocate of the primacy of the whole over the parts, and of environment over individual organism, but beginning from perception of a Gestalt, the direction taken by Gestalt psychology was the opposite of that taken by Goethe. Goethe defined Gestalt as follows:
“The Germans have a word for the complex of existence presented by a physical organism: Gestalt. With this expression they exclude what is changeable and assume that an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character.
“But if we look at all these Gestalten, especially the organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is at rest or defined – everything is in a flux of continual motion. This is why German frequently and fittingly makes use of the word Bildung[2] to describe the end product and what is in process of production as well.
“Thus in setting forth a morphology we should not speak of Gestalt, or if we use the term we should at least do so only in reference to the idea, the concept, or to an empirical element held fast for a mere moment of time.” [The purpose is set forth, 1817]
So, Gestalt is an ephemeral form; the real whole is the idea, the whole process of development. But Goethe vigorously denied that the truth of a phenomena could be some non-phenomenal formula or hypothetical mechanism. Goethe understood that all perceptions were ‘theory laden’, in his words:
“The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. ... Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena – they themselves are the theory.” [Maxims and Reflections]
So what was necessary was to hold off so far as possible from making hypotheses, while expanding so far as possible the field of phenomena, and then by intuitive perception [Anschauung[3]], see the simple, archetypal form, the Urphänomenon[4], which united all of the phenomena, not by means of an abstract general pseudo-concept, a common attribute shared by all, but a genuine generative principle, simultaneously conceptual and phenomenal:
“The Urphänomenon is not to be regarded as a basic theorem leading to a variety of consequences, but rather as a basic manifestation enveloping the specifications of form for the beholder.” [Letter to von Buttel, 3 May 1827]
It must be granted that Goethe did not fully work out this idea, but his claim that phenomena could be understood only by means of a simple prototypical phenomena was to be taken up by Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky, each in turn giving it a more definite worked-out formulation. Meanwhile, Goethe’s insistence that forms could be perceived by human beings, because their thinking was part of the same whole which generated those forms, and that things, human beings included, must be known by their deeds, was taken up by Hegel.
In the late 18th century, a number of philosophers, including Kant and Herder as well as Hegel, were trying to work out the conditions which went into the formation of the national character or ‘spirit of a nation’. These investigations provided the basis for a psychology which approached the individual as a product of society, rather than seeing society as a collection of individuals.
In his 1804 manuscript, System of Ethical Life, Hegel proposed a solution to the problem of the source of conceptual knowledge, posed by Kant in terms of a faculty of Reason, separate from Intuition (i.e., sensation). Hegel proposed that knowledge was constructed by individuals working with artefacts fashioned as objectifications of the inherited knowledge of a community. This would explain how sensuous perception already included forms of conceptual knowledge and how thinking and perception developed along with social and cultural change. The activities which Hegel had in mind extended from the labour process, using tools and means of production, to communication with words and other symbols, to the raising of children. The consciousness entailed in these activities, the artefacts being used and the collaborative forms of activity formed a single whole, i.e., a Gestalt. Each aspect of this trichotomy constituted the others: consciousness was the individual’s orientation to use of the artefact, the artefact was what it was only in and through its use in the particular activity for which it was intended, and an activity was constituted by people’s motives and the artefacts they used to construct it.
Subsequently, this relation was taken for granted by Hegel; this is what constituted consciousness, but for Hegel it was all the work of thought, and the arcane mode of exposition of his later works obscured what it was he was talking about. His attention in later works was on the development of these forms of consciousness and he never took the trouble to make distinctions between the material objectifications of thought, the internalisations of the use of such thought objects and the forms of collaborative activity in which subjectivity and objectivity mutually constitute one another; it was all the work of thought, and the individual psyches, the particular activities and the artefacts being uses were simply different logical aspects of a single substance – thought, not something originating in people’s heads, but a spirit which finds expression in consciousness, institutions and material culture.
Furthermore, although consciousness is produced in the same labour process in which the community’s material needs are produced, Hegel held that it was, not the subject-object relation, but the subject-subject relation which was the basis for self-consciousness, and the real motor for the development of culture, so the whole labour process disappeared into the background of a narrative about thought-forms.
What Hegel was dealing with was a Gestalt, sometimes translated as ‘configuration’ or ‘shape of consciousness’. A Gestalt for Hegel was simultaneously a social formation or ‘way of life’ (including both labour processes and superstructure), a ‘way of thinking’ or spiritual culture or ideology of a community, and a material culture, including spoken words and human body forms as well as artefacts in the usual sense of the word.
Children had to be raised into the culture of a community, but the kind of conundrums which scientists later posed for themselves in terms of how sensuous perception of forms was possible, simply did not arise for Hegel. It is worthwhile reproducing the following excerpt from the Preface to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit to show how Hegel saw the individual appropriates the culture of his or her community:
“The particular individual, so far as content is concerned, has also to go through the stages through which the general mind has passed, but as shapes once assumed by mind and now laid aside, as stages of a road which has been worked over and levelled out. Hence it is that, in the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes, for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world’s culture delineated in faint outline. This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. In this respect culture or development of mind (Bildung), regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself. Looked at, however, from the side of universal mind qua general spiritual substance, culture means nothing else than that this substance gives itself its own self-consciousness, brings about its own inherent process and its own reflection into self.”
Hegel did not and could not, at the beginning of the 19th century, solve the problem of exactly how individuals learn, but he set the terms in which this problem could be solved. Learning entailed the individual moving through a series of Gestalten leading up to that of the general spiritual culture of the wider community.
In his Logic, where Hegel developed the general rules exhibited in the movement, change and interaction of Gestalten, we see that a Gestalt is built up of notions (Begriffen), understood as finite systems of practical activity, nodes in the infinite web of social interconnections, very similar to Goethe’s notion of Urphänomenon. Thus, effectively, the idea of a Gestalt can be utilised as a component of consciousness related to finite systems of social interaction, not just whole social formations.
Hegel had produced a foundation for a socio-cultural theory of the mind in an idealist form. The Gestalt was simultaneously way of life, way of thinking and inherited culture, but it was contradictions in the way of thinking which was in the last instance what generated the dynamism and eventual crisis in a social formation, not whether the social formation managed to ‘earn its keep’, so to speak, by producing the means of satisfying its material needs. So Hegel gave priority to thought over nature and labour. But we can adopt his idea of Gestalt whilst rejecting the characterization of the Gestalt as a thought form.
In his appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy, Karl Marx made a number of important modifications relevant to the question of how the idea of Gestalt was received in the twentieth century. In his own words:
“The premises from which we begin are ... the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity.” [The German Ideology §I.1a, 1845]
So Marx makes it quite explicit: what constitutes a Gestalt is “real individuals, their activity and the material conditions” – not ‘thought-forms’.
“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” [Theses on Feuerbach VIII]
So Marx makes practical human activity the key category; Gestalt is not a thought-form, but a system of social practices.
“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” [The German Ideology §I.1b, 1845]
So Marx explicitly makes material production the primary activity, determinant in relation to the spiritual life of the community in general. What is more, whereas Hegel never knew a social movement or emancipatory class struggle, the principle at the heart of a Gestalt is not, as it was for Hegel, a ‘criterion of truth’ buried in ideology, but an antagonistic social relation arising in the labour process, encapsulated in the most elementary relation of bourgeois society, the commodity relation.
Like Hegel, Marx saw individual psychology as a product of social conditions, and he was not troubled by the kind of problems which tortured the minds of later positivist natural scientists looking for the source of mind inside the head.
Generally speaking, it is Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s concept of Gestalt as a system of practical activity, which was inherited by Vygotsky and his colleagues in the early USSR. There are numerous innovations which Marx made which are beyond the scope of this article, but a couple of aspects to Marx’s conception need qualification.
Marx’s privileging of material production reflected the fact that his ‘philosophical’ work had a practical intent, namely socialist revolution led by the organised working class. If interpreted as a theory of psychology, then Marx’s conception would be one-sided in this respect. The formulation quoted above from Theses on Feuerbach is quite sufficient, however: ‘practical activity’ is the substance of a Gestalt, and such activity should by no means be limited to ‘material production’.
Secondly, there is in Marx a certain utopian element, which should not be exaggerated, but is real nonetheless, namely that although his concept of Gestalt was conflict-ridden, he shared with Hegel a conviction that the historical process could bring about some kind of reconciliation in the form of a classless society. Consequently, the conflicts which are responsible for social crises and transformation of a Gestalt, are in danger of being situated in some kind of historical progression which blinds us to sources of social conflict, which do not fit into a schema of historical progression. On the contrary, any society is riven with a multiplicity of contradictions which are embedded in the consciousness of individuals.
When Vygotsky began his systematic critique of the psychology of his day, he could already draw on this concept of Gestalt as consciousness inseparable from social practice, but the construction of a science of psychology meant going beyond generalised notions of social consciousness to the instantiation of consciousness in individual organisms. For this task, Hegel description of how a child may ‘take possession’ of the ‘general mind’, in the excerpt from the Preface to the Phenomenology, is crucial. Every individual in fact participates in only a fraction of the universe of social practice and what is more, does so from the standpoint of some particular social position. And yet, a human being, as a living, self-conscious being in their own right, must constitute along with their social situation, a whole, a Gestalt. The child and the more limited sphere of practical activity which forms the child’s immediate social situation, must progress through a series of Gestalten, each of them, at every stage, a functional living system of human life. This is a problem which could be posed by the concepts worked out by Hegel and Marx, but one which was never tackled by them.
Almost everything about how Vygotsky appropriated these ideas flows from his situation in the young Soviet Union, in the wake of the greatest social revolution of our time, saturated with Marxism and with a mandate to work towards fostering a new, higher type of human being, ‘socialist man’.
This situation made it possible for Vygotsky to draw on the insights of Marx and Hegel which had been lost as a result of the analytical kind of science preferred by dominant positivist ideology of the late 19th/early 20th century. So Vygotsky conceived of the Gestalt, not just as a brain structure, but as a whole system of social activity, a social situation of development, which included the individual personality and what lay within their social horizon.
By the early 1920s, Gestalt psychology ‘owned’ the word Gestalt, and Marx had coined no equivalent word, usually referring to a ‘social formation’ or ‘historical personage’. Vygotsky used a Russian word, novo-obrazovaniye[5], literally something like ‘new configuration’, usually translated as ‘neoformation’, to refer to a psychological function and the corresponding modes of social functioning, which plays a central or leading role in development at a certain stage, similar to the German word ‘Bildung’. So for Vygotsky, following Hegel and Marx, the basic unit of development is not the structure of the individual organism (‘Gestalt’), but the novo-obrazovaniye, the psychological function which is simultaneously a social function, encapsulated in the idea of word meaning, embedded in the relation between a child and its social situation of development.
Vygotsky was formulating a completely new vision of the structure of the human personality, a structure for which there were few satisfactory existing concepts, but there can be no doubt that he drew on Marx’s conception of the forms of movement of social formations.
In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx remarked:
“There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features.”
The ‘main activity’ in a given complex whole usually gives its name to the whole corresponding stage of development. On the other hand, each new social formation opens up the possibility for new functions but which are blocked by the very structure itself. This contradiction builds up until the social formation is thrown into crisis. In a famous passage from the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx remarks:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
It was this same conception of the development of a complex whole or Gestalt which characterised Vygotsky’s conception of personality and a person’s relation to their social situation. Just as Marx and Hegel had conceived of history in terms of periods of gradual change punctuated by periods of crisis and transformation, Vygotsky conceived of child development in the same way. Talking of these developmental crises, Vygotsky noted:
“The age levels represent the integral, dynamic formation, the structure, which defines the role and relative significance of each partial line of development. At each given age period, development occurs in such a way that separate aspects of the child’s personality change and as a result of this, there is a reconstruction of the personality as a whole - in development there is just exactly a reverse dependence: the child’s personality changes as a whole in its internal structure and the movement of each of its parts is determined by the laws of change of this whole.” [The Problem of age, §2, 1934]
In psychology, the crisis can be conceived in terms of the demands made on a child and the child’s expectation, in her social situation which has brought her to the point of making a passage to a new configuration of her relation with those around her, but at the same time, holds her back. The whole structure of her personality and the configuration of her social situation has to be overthrown and transformed. It is this transformation and associated changes which we call ‘development’.
This sketch of the notion of Gestalt from Goethe to Vygotsky suggests the general outlines of how Vygotsky approached the problem of the relation between learning and development. A couple of qualifications should be made however in relation to the conditions under which Vygotsky and his colleagues worked and the impact of these conditions on the reception of Marx and Hegel.
Despite the fact that the USSR was founded on Marxism, by the 1920s it was an administered society in which all social conflicts were suppressed. Connected to the suppression of social and political conflict, the utopian belief that the USSR was en route to an historically higher form of society was shared even by oppositionists. This condition was reinforced by the fact that the social movements which brought into consciousness the entire range of cultural differences in the West, were also suppressed in the Soviet Union. Children generally enjoyed a uniform process of upbringing with uniform expectations towards becoming a citizen of the USSR. These conditions could not be more different from those in which Karl Marx had worked out his conflict-ridden notion of Gestalt. In the opinion of this author, these conditions led to shortcomings in the conception of development and conflict in the work of the Vygotsky School, shortcomings which can be overcome by appropriating the gains of the social movements in the west, especially the civil rights and women’s movements.
1. Gestalt is an untranslatable German word that has been imported into other languages. However, the normal meaning of Gestalt in German is ‘figure’ as in “what a fine figure of a man,” referring to the overall dynamic configuration of a living thing. In other languages it is used only in the sense given to the word by Gestalt Psychology, as an integral structure or indivisible whole.
2. Bildung is another uniquely German word meaning the process of acquiring the culture of one’s times, becoming a cultured person. Originally, Bildung referred only to the shaping, forming, cultivating of objects, but took on the meaning of ‘education’ in the 18th century; Goethe is renowned for his Bildungsroman, novels narrating the personal development of the central character, and it became a central concept for Herder, Hegel, Schiller and & c.
3. Anschauung is usually translated as ‘intuition’. The verb schauen means to see or view as in Weltanschauung = worldview, and entered philosophy when Meister Eckhart translated the Latin contemplatio, the activity of contemplating something, especially the divine. Kant however took Anschauung to be exclusively sensory, rejecting the possibility of intellectual intuition, so the senses were the only source of form or shape.
4. Urphänomenon is unique to Goethe; the prefix ‘ur’ means primitive, original or earliest, and is usually translated as “archetypal.” I take it that it is represented as ‘abstract notion’ in Hegel’s Logic, ‘commodity relation’ in Marx’s critique of political economy, and ‘word meaning’ in Vygotsky.
5. Novo-obrazovaniye is usually rendered as ‘neoformation’. novo- means new; obraz means ‘picture’ (as does the German Bild) and obrazovaniye or ‘picturing’, is usually translated as ‘education’, but seems to have a similar meaning to the German Bildung. So according to its etymology, novo-obrazovaniye means a new ‘accomplishment’ or unique mode of social functioning.