Excerpt from Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist < Books < East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy

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EXCERPT
Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist

by Fred Newman and Lois Holzman

Chapter 3 Practice - Vygotsky's tool-and-result methodology and psychology

The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study. [Vygotsky, Mind and Society, 1978, p. 65]

In their most scientifically and philosophically lucid moments, Marx and Vygotsky, his follower, reject much more than an ill-formed psychological paradigm. Their intellectual challenge is to the entirety of Western thought, including thought about thought. Marx's writings both assume and imply the invalidity of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophies that came before him, and world views that developed in his time, e.g. rationalism, empiricism, positivism and vulgar materialism (the latter being the simplification and distortion of Marxism that takes the material world as basic and therefore causative). Marx subjected the broad and varied families of concepts associated with these historically interconnected world views to intense scrutiny, using the method he developed - dialectical historical materialism - to challenge the fundamental epistemic (how we know) and ontic (what there is) categories of Western cognition....

But isn't Marx's method of dialectical historical materialism simply another world view, another paradigm, another philosophy?' every critic of Marx since 1848 has asked. 'Isn't a challenge to philosophy, no matter how radical, still a philosophy?' The Marxian-Vygotskian answer to this apparent contradiction is radically methodological; it challenges how we challenge and introduces a qualitatively different (practice of) method.

For Marx and Vygotsky the object of study and the method of study are practical. By this they did not mean 'useful'; they were speaking of practical-critical activity, i.e. revolutionary activity. The world historical environment ('scene') is both spatially and temporally seamless and qualitative, not quantitative; it can only be comprehended by a scientific practice free of interpretive assumptions, or premises. But this by no means implies that it is without premises. Such a scientific practice is, Marx explained, filled with the real premises that are 'men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions'. This Marxian method, the method of practice (if not yet the practice of method), not only redefines what science (or any other world view) is to be; it redefines what method is to be.

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