This issue of our journal, which is appearing in the year the “Mozart of psychology,” Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896 – 1934), would be celebrating his 125th birthday, contains articles that are mainly devoted to an issue that remains much debated, namely the correlation between the systems of ideas associated with the Vygotsky school and with the school of Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontiev (1903 – 1979).
The fact that our authors belong to different generations of the school associated with the Moscow University Faculty of Psychology, while others belong to different “branches” of that school, leads to certain differences in the way their works address the issue of the connection between the activity theory of the faculty’s founder Leontiev and the approach of his teacher Vygotsky.
A.G. Asmolov and B.S. Bratus’ are direct students of A.N. Leontiev (which the article by Bratus’ discusses autobiographically and in considerable detail). At first glance, it may seem these authors approach the topic of correlating Vygotsky’s and Leont’ev’s approaches from opposite directions. While Asmolov’s article is devoted to discussing the possible prospects for activity theory, the article by Bratus’ is retrospective, that is, its author focuses on considering various aspects — from the biographical to the theoretical — of the divergence between Leontiev and Vygotsky in the 1930s. This opposition is only on the surface, however, since in order to prepare a “bright future” for activity theory, Asmolov analyzes the lessons of its past and present, especially the traps and dead ends that arose during the theory’s process of development. Conversely, Bratus’ discusses the reasons for Leont’ev and Vygotsky’s divergence not only for reasons of historical interest, but also to highlight those key points of activity theory that were excessively emphasized when they were demarcated from Vygotsky’s approach and that turned out in fact to be its growth points.
The very title of A.G. Asmolov’s article, “The Historical Meaning of the Crisis of Cultural Activity Psychology,” sounds like a diagnosis of the present state of “cultural activity psychology,” by which the author means both Vygotsky’s approach and Leontiev’s activity theory. The article supports this diagnosis — “crisis” — by references to numerous statements that cultural activity psychology “is turning more and more every year into a history of science, the past of psychology, but not its present and future.” After listing a number of manifestations of this crisis (isolationism, privatization of ideas, and so forth), the author locates its main symptom in the termination of dialogue between the classics and the contemporaries. The author’s reflections on the crisis of cultural activity psychology allow him to identify possible risks that limit the development of dialogue between scholars researching Vygotsky’s legacy. These include, for example, “the risk of sectarianism” and “the risk of reducing monism to monotheism.” As a result of his analysis, Asmolov concludes that broadening the horizons of cultural activity psychology requires recognizing it as a unique sociocultural movement whose development both offers new opportunities and is fraught with risks, and that management of those risks must be based on non-classical and post-non-classical ideals of rationality. Systems analysis occupies a special place among those meta-characteristics Asmolov identifies in the unique intellectual movement of cultural activity psychology. The author emphasizes that, at the level of concrete-science methodology, absolutely all representatives of the classical version of cultural activity psychology are united by three blueprints for analyzing mental phenomena: the structural, the functional, and the genetic. The article ends with a consideration of the four methodological blueprints for analysis presented in Leontiev’s activity theory: the motivational-axiological, the intensional, the operational-technical, and the psychophysiological, each of which establishes the direction of dialogue with representatives of other approaches, from the existential to the cognitive, and with neuroscience. This allows Asmolov to draw his main conclusion that the historical meaning of the crisis of cultural activity psychology “is that this a crisis of development, not a crisis of collapse.”
In his article “‘Word’ and ‘Deed’: The History of Scientific Relations of A.N. Leontiev and L.S. Vygotsky,” another of Leontiev’s direct disciples, B.S. Bratus’, also addresses the problem of correlating Vygotsky’s and Leontiev’s ideas by turning to their “past,” arguing that the “early” Vygotsky and Leontiev generally adhered to a position the latter briefly expressed in notes to himself (“‘In the beginning was the deed [delo].’ In the beginning was the deed (and then came the word and that’s the whole point [vse delo]!”) However, the “late” Vygotsky believed that “in the beginning was the word.” Meanwhile, Bratus’ is convinced that “word-centrism” is what made it possible to overcome the activity paradigm, opening up in particular the possibility of “understanding personality as a special level of ‘mediatedness’” and the possibility of “freedom and autonomy from activity-based conditionality of being,” and that by the end of his life, Leontiev himself “went beyond” his own activity-based approach, since he turned to a special study of the moral-axiological sphere of personality, to the study of “supra-activity semantic spaces” that Bratus’ believes contradicted “the original postulates of the theory” that meanings are generated in activity. Thus, the article’s author arrives at the paradoxical conclusion that “late A.N. Leontiev was converging with late L.S. Vygotsky,” and that the connection between the two authors’ approaches has only grown over time and will continue to grow.
An indirect debate with Bratus’ emerges in the articles of N.N. Nechaev. He believes the perspective that Vygotsky and Leontiev developed different approaches to understanding the sources of development of human consciousness, as evidenced, the author believes, even by the differing terminology they used when discussing the developmental mechanisms of higher mental functions. In speaking of mediation, Vygotsky nearly always speaks of “oposredovanie” (a term derived from “intermediary”), while Leontiev systematically uses “oposredstvovanie,” derived from the word for “means.” For Nechaev, this terminological difference betrays a substantially different understanding of the relationship between the “instrument” and “means” in these authors’ texts. In turn, Nechaev believes, their different understanding of “instrumentality” and “signedness” is due to the fact that Vygotsky’s approach is based on a “communication paradigm,” while Leontiev’s system of ideas is based on an “instrumental activity paradigm.” This has an equivalent in the debates of contemporary psychologists who distinguish and even contrast activity as the process of a subject’s influence on an object (S→O) and communication as the interconnection of subjects among themselves (S↔S). Nechaev sees a “reintegration” of these approaches in an appeal to what, both in phylogeny and ontogenesis, precedes both the instrument and the sign in the course of development of activity: namely, people’s “real interaction,” which is “twofold,” that is, the interaction is both instrumental and communicative. To defend this idea, Nechaev refers both to works by Leontiev and Gal’perin as his own direct teacher.
A.N. Romashchuk, the author of our last article, “Overcoming Two-Factor Approaches to Determination of the Psyche as a Key Problem in A.N. Leontiev’s Activity Theory: Distinguishing Psychological Determination and Human Freedom,” is a member not even of the second generation of students of the founder of the Moscow University school of psychology, but the third. This is probably what determines his more detached, and partially even external way of analyzing the problem of the connection between activity theory and Vygotsky’s approach. More specifically, this article attempts to highlight what is similar and different in the approaches of Vygotsky and Leontiev, and on essentially different grounds: by analyzing the scientific problems the creators of these approaches were addressing. Romashchuk comes to the conclusion that, from the perspective of the problems they posed (the problem of freedom or, to formulate it another way, the problem of overcoming two-factor approaches in psychology), Vygotsky’s and Leontiev’s positions are nearly identical. However, from the perspective of the methods used for addressing this problem (Vygotsky’s proposals and activity theory), their approaches are nearly opposite. Romashchuk concludes that only by understanding the problem around which Vygotsky developed this or that theory do we realize why he had at least four such theories, and that his transition from one theory to another was apparently determined precisely by the difficulties posed by the problem of freedom. This approach to analysis gives a unique interpretation to the correlation between “Word” and “Deed” and also helps reveal what Vygotsky’s approach shared in common with Leontiev’s activity theory, as well as the ways they differed.
Thus, for all the unity of the Moscow University’s school of psychology, the authors of the articles published in this issue are nonetheless involved in internal debates with one another. This in turn is surely proof that they are a living and developing school and not just some historical exhibit in the museum of psychology.