Re: [xmca] Are Fleer and Hedegaard Bernsteinians?

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

I wonder if mayve one of our Russian friends can help us 
here? On the basis of the same stories, looking into the 
roots of Vygotsky's ideas, it seemed to me that Shpet is 
*not* one of the sources of Vygotsky's ideas on linguistics. 
I might be 100% wrong, and Martin EG knows more about this 
than I do, but I gave up reading Shpet after a little while 
because I found it so uninteresting. It was squarely located 
in appropriation of Husserl's metaphysics, the same Husserl 
which Vygotsky so sweepingly dismisses in "Historical 
Crisis" ("two psychologies, etc"). Though he does refer 
occasionally to phenomenology, I don't rate these references 
very highly. Martin I think sees more in them than I do. But 
the point is, I can see nothing of von Humboldt or German 
Classicism in Shpet, but much in Vygotsky.

On the other hand, the translator of Shpet says "... from 
looking over the list of lecture courses of the 
Historical-Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University 
between 1905 and 1918 (covering Vygotsky's student days), 
which contain throughout German language bibliographic data 
on philosophy."

So I wonder if Shpet really was the mediator in Vygotsky's 
receipt of the Classical German (v Humboldt and Herder) 
views on language and thought. Or perhaps he is getting it 
directly, or from Marx and Plekhanov? Unfortunately, I can 
find nothing by Potebnya in English.

BTW, if you liked the v Humboldt quote, here is the context: 
http://marx.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/vhumboldt-wilhelm.htm

Andy

mike cole wrote:
> *Andy is a big Goethe fan, and in my limited way, so am I. I always liked
> his statement "**Everything has been thought of* before, but the problem is
> to think of it again." So Vygotsky learned it all from Shpet but too chicken
> to make that public, and Shpet probably learned a lot from Potebnya, and von
> Humboldt said it all before any of them, and so on. And if you were to ask
> the people they "got it from" those geniuses would all say that the new kid
> on the block got it wrong. We are all naives standing on the shoulders of
> other naives. It can be annoying. It only gets really irritating when people
> act like they are levitating and wondering about why those around them are
> standing on the ground, watching the sheep grazing.



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