• DOI:10.1080/10749039.2018.1538379
• Corpus ID: 145032408

Introduction to symposium on Vygotsky and Spinoza

@article{Jornet2018IntroductionTS,
  title={Introduction to symposium on Vygotsky and Spinoza},
  author={Alfredo Jornet and Mike Cole},
  journal={Mind, Culture, and Activity},
  year={2018},
  volume={25},
  pages={340 - 345}
}

• Alfredo Jornet, M. Cole
• Published 2 October 2018
• Psychology
• Mind, Culture, and Activity

It has been known since the publication of Thought and Language in English that at the end of his life, Vygotsky turned to the ideas of Spinoza to overcome what he considered the shortcomings of his earlier theoretical ideas, bringing emotion to center stage in the process of development. Recent scholarship has made it clear that Spinoza was important from the beginning Vygotsky’s carreer. His doctoral thesis, The Psychology of Art, opens with a quotation from Spinoza, and years later Leont’ev (1997) made it clear in his introduction to Vygotsky’s collected works that Vygotsky’s interest in the philosophy of Spinoza began as early as his student years, and “would remain his favorite thinker for the rest of his life” (p. 12). Spinoza’s lifelong influence on Vygotsky, however, has remained a relatively unexplored issue. Only in the past decade or so has there been growing interest in the connections between the ideas of these two thinkers separated in time and cultural-historical circumstances. One reason for this trend may be that, after 40 years and a growing number of previously unpublished manuscripts coming to light, Western scholarship has now had the time to wrestle with Vygotsky’s ideas long enough to come up with some of the same needs and questions that brought him to Spinoza. Or perhaps the current historical zeitgeist has brought academicians back to the relation between the psychological categories “cognition” and “emotion,” the contemporary psychology’s versions of the philosophical categories of “intelligence” and “will” that were at the heart of Spinoza’s monism. For those within the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) tradition, the coincidence of an interest in Spinoza and a growing interest on the concept of perezhivanie (Cole & Gajdamschko, 2016) is salient because different interpretations of the importance of this concept in the project of building a culturalhistorical psychology became part of a growing divergence between Vygotsky and Leontiev. One of the challenges of considering Vygotsky and Spinoza together is that most contemporary developmental psychologists and educators have neither encountered Spinoza’s ideas (they are working from secondary sources) nor agree on how, precisely, one should interpret Vygotsky. Hence a comparison of the two is the comparison of two, variously interpreted, systems of thought. Some scholars have defended the idea that Spinoza’s influence is crucial for understanding Vygotsky’s system of thought (Gredler & Shields, 2004; Roth & Jornet, 2016, 2017; Van der Veer, 1984), whereas others have doubted the extent to which Spinoza’s philosophy penetrated into Vygotsky’s pen beyond his admiration and recognition for the Dutch philosopher (Glassman & Wang, 2004). All interpretations of the Spinoza–Vygotsky relationship, however, agree on the importance of the question of the unity of intellect and will (Derry, 2004), or the problem of freedom, which Vygotksy came to understand as “the central problem of all psychology” (Zavershneva & van der Veer, 2018, p. 210). For Vygotsky, the solution to this problem lay in the solution of the “psychophysical relationship,” or what we today refer to as the mind–body problem. This issue, which had plagued all previous theories in psychology, was particularly salient in the psychology of emotions, where diverse answers to the problem of how physiological states (body) relate to psychological sates (mind) were given. Concerned as he was with developing a materialist psychology, solving this issue became a growing concern.