This article considers A.N. Leontiev’s activity theory through the prism of the scientific problem that gave rise to it. This problem is often described as the need to go beyond L.S. Vygotsky’s “word-centrism,” but it seems more reasonable to argue that the problem addressed by activity theory had already been posed by Vygotsky himself as the need to overcome the two-factor approach to determination of the psyche, which for cultural-historical theory meant a transition from social to psychological determination and from there to human freedom. This problem caused Vygotsky to change his theory many times and, in particular, led to a transition from the theory of higher mental functions (“instrumental theory”) to the theory of the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness (“cultural-historical theory”). This problem was taken up by [Leontiev’s] “Kharkov School” directly from Vygotsky, and the difference between their activity theory and Vygotsky’s theory was only in the proposed solutions. Whereas Vygotsky proposed a solution that viewed “the personalized emotional experience of events” [perezhivanie]1 as a unit of the psyche, the Kharkovites proposed what seemed to them a more materialistic version, the concept of activity as a mediator refracting the influence of two factors, the social and the physiological, on the psyche. Understanding the genuine problem that Leontiev created his activity theory to solve, affects our understanding of the main theses of activity theory as well as the research carried out from its perspective. From analysis of some of these studies, we derive and emphasize such characteristics of activity as holism/integrality and supra-individuality.
The 125th anniversary of L.S. Vygotsky’s birth, which was marked in 2021, was commemorated by various events in the scientific and cultural life of Russia and other countries. A major example is this issue of the journal, which is devoted to Vygotsky’s creation of a new school in the field of children with handicaps (corrective pedagogy) — a cultural-historical theory of children’s handicaps. As A.N. Leontiev aptly put it, Vygotsky was a psychologist, a pedologist, an expert on children’s handicaps, an expert on children’s handicaps, an educator, and a psychopathologist, while remaining a psychologist and merely contributing to these disciplines his own invigorating flow of psychological theory. The cultural-historical approach that Vygotsky devised in psychology, on the one hand, was based on research in the field of abnormal childhood, and on the other hand, helped to generalize it and make it into a well-organized theoretical system. This volume includes works by Vygotsky in the field of children’s handicaps as well as the results of research aimed at analyzing his contribution to the theory and practice of teaching and educating children with developmental deviations. The issue opens with Vygotsky’s article “On the Psychology and Pedagogy of Handicapped Children [K psikhologii i pedagogike detskoi defektivnosti],” published in 1924 in the anthology Questions in the Education of Blind, Deaf-Mute, and Mentally Retarded Children [Voprosy vospitaniia slepykh, glukhonemykh i umstvenno otstalykh detei]. This was Vygotsky’s first work on problems related to handicapped children. As Vygotsky writes in the foreword, the purpose of the anthology was to frame the problem of special schools for handicapped children as a problem of social education.
Any physical handicap — be it blindness, deafness, or congenital feeblemindedness — not only alters a person’s relation to the world but above all affects relationships with people. An organic handicap or deficiency is actualized as socially abnormal behavior. Even in their own family, blind or deaf children are above all special children, and an exceptional, unusual relationship with them is formed, unlike their other children. Their misfortune alters their social position in the family before anywhere else. And this is true not only in regard to families where such children are viewed as an onerous burden and punishment but also where blind children are surrounded by twice as much love and ten times as much solicitude and tenderness — in these latter families, these increased doses of attention and pity add up to a heavy burden for the child and a barrier around him that separates him from other children. In his famous story, Korolenko accurately showed about the blind musician how the blind child became “the center of the family, an unconscious despot, where everything in the home conformed to his slightest whim.” As a child’s life goes on, the physical handicap produces a completely different social attitude in their environment than is the case with normal people. The abnormality in the “relational activity” between the individual and the world, as V.M. Bekhterev put it, turns out in practice to be a severe dysfunction of the whole system of social relations. All connections with people, every factor that determines the person’s geometric place in the social milieu, their role and fate as a participant in real life, all of the functions of social existence are restructured from a new perspective. The physical handicap causes a kind of social dislocation, very much like a physical dislocation, when an injured limb — an arm or leg — comes out
Any handicap, that is, any physical deficiency, confronts the organism with the task of overcoming this handicap, making up for the deficiency, and compensating for the harm it causes. Therefore, the impact of the handicap is always twofold and contradictory: on the one hand, it weakens the organism, undermines its activity, and is a drawback; on the other, precisely because it hampers and disrupts the organism’s activity, it serves as a stimulus for greater development of other functions of the organism, prodding and impelling the organism to more intensive activity, which can compensate for the deficiency and overcome the difficulties. This is a general rule that is equally applicable to the organism’s biology and psychology: the minus of the handicap turns into the plus of the compensation, that is, the deficiency proves to be a stimulus for intensified development and activity. Two principal types of compensation are defined: direct, or organic, and indirect, or psychological. The former occurs mostly when one of the paired organs is damaged or removed. For example, when a kidney, a lung or the like is removed, the other, remaining paired organ compensatorily develops and assumes the functions of the diseased organ. Where direct compensation is impossible, the task is taken on by the central nervous system and the person’s psychic apparatus, creating over the diseased or deficient organ a protective superstructure of the higher functions that support the apparatus’s operation. In the view of A. Adler, sensing the deficiency of organs serves as a constant stimulus for the individual to develop his psychology. The education of a child with a physical handicap usually relies on indirect, psychological compensation, since direct, organic compensation of blindness, deafness, and similar deficiencies is not feasible.
In psychological systems that give primacy to the concept of an integrated personality, the idea of overcompensation plays a dominant role. “Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger” is the way W. Stern formulates this idea, pointing out that strength is born from weakness, and abilities from deficiencies (W. Stern 1923, p. 145). The school of the Austrian psychiatrist Adler, which is widely popular and very influential in Europe and America and calls itself individual psychology, that is, personality psychology, developed this idea into an entire system, into a complete theory of the psyche. Overcompensation is not some rare or exceptional phenomenon in the life of an organism. An infinite multitude of examples of it can be cited. This is more an extremely common and very widespread feature of organic processes related to the basic laws of living matter. Granted, to this day we do not have any kind of exhaustive and all-inclusive biological theory of overcompensation, but in a number of specific fields of organic life these phenomena have been studied so thoroughly, and their practical use is so substantial, that we can quite rightly talk about overcompensation as a scientifically established, fundamental fact of an organism’s life. We vaccinate healthy children with smallpox toxin. The children experience a mild illness and upon recovering become protected against smallpox for many years. Their organism has acquired immunity, that is, it has not only overcome the mild illness that we caused with the inoculation but has come out of the illness healthier than before. The organism has succeeded in developing an antitoxin in much larger quantities than was required by the dose of the toxin that was injected in it. If we now compare our children with others who have not been vaccinated, we will see that they are exceedingly healthy with respect to this horrible disease: they are not merely not ill now, similar to other healthy children, but they also cannot get sick, they will remain healthy even when the toxin gets into their bloodstream.
The article considers the problem of the relationship between Lev Vygotskii’s cultural historical theory and Aleksei Leont’ev’s activity theory. Starting from the idea that one scholar is considered the successor of the other, the author analyzes the crux of the fundamental differences in the approaches of the two outstanding psychologists. The author draws on materials from scientific publications by Lev Vygotskii and Aleksei Leont’ev, including those that are not as widely known to the psychological community, as well as the facts from their academic biographies.Of central concern is the problem of how to interpret the tool and the sign, since Vygotskii and Leont’ev have offered competing explanations. This problem can be resolved if they are considered in light of the paradigm of joint activity. This is where the subject (child) learns modes of activity within a certain system of relations with other participants in the activity (adults). The main mechanism that the subject relies upon to develop is the method they learn to resolve these contradictions that arise in the course of such a joint activity and result from the changing modes of activity and the transforming system of relations. Thus, objective activity and communication, which condition each other, can be best understood in light of the solution to the problems of joint activity, which allows us to talk about opportunities for reconciling Vygotskii’s cultural-historical theory with Leont’ev’s activity theory.
The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the academic relationship between two leading Russian psychologists, Aleksei Leont’ev and Lev Vygotskii. The initial relationship between the teacher (Vygotskii) and the attentive student and follower (Leont’ev) changed, such that the two scholars eventually sought to differentiate themselves from each other and to seek out and defend their own approaches. The author describes how the psychological ideas of these two scholars changed over time. The two scholars pursued different approaches to the problem of activity and personality over their careers. The article devotes particular attention to the academic work of Leont’ev, which was produced under socialism and thus was subjected to certain ideological pressures. Leont’ev, the founder of activity theory, came to realize that personality needed to be studied across its moral and value dimensions despite working in an environment that frowned upon this approach. Other Soviet scholars gave no place for moral principles, since a person was equated to being a “product.” By citing specific works by Leont’ev, the author shows how the ideas of the “leader of Marxist psychology” evolved and sheds light on the internal context of his scientific investigations. We see that he eventually resolved a question of fundamental disagreement with Vygotskii concerning the problem of experiences and activity. During the last years of his life, Aleksei Leont’ev approached the late Vygotskii in his views, taking the side of his teacher, old friend and, at the same time, main internal opponent, which is not all that uncommon a phenomenon in academic circles. This can be seen by the fact that two years before his death (in 1977), Leont’ev actually resolved a fundamental disagreement he had with Vygotskii concerning the problem of experiences and activity.
… Biology long ago discovered empirically that two phenotypically identical structures or processes may be wholly dissimilar from a causal-dynamic perspective, i.e., in terms of their causes and their effects. Physics and, recently, biology have demonstrated that phenotypical similarity may go hand in hand with an extreme difference in causal-dynamic properties and that, conversely, there may be considerable phenotypical difference between two phenomena or processes that are causally and dynamically very much alike.
In this paper, we discuss the past, present, and future of the cultural activity approach as a methodology that aims to integrate the humanities and the natural sciences, psychotechnical and theoretical knowledge. An attempt has been made to conceptualize another crisis in cultural activity psychology. The meaning of the historical crisis of cultural activity psychology is reflected in the future prospects of its development, bridging the gap between classical and contemporary approaches. Reflection on the crisis of cultural activity psychology allows us to underline the following axioms: the need for dialogue with different variants of the cultural activity movement in modern psychology; the need for reflection on the myths and dangers of canonizing certain thinkers; the presumption of decency among professionals who are attracted to the school of Leo Vygotsky, and understanding of their motivation in developing his ideas. In addition to the axioms required for an appropriate dialogue with researchers who are interested in L.S. Vygotsky, there are risks that restrict the understanding and development of his legacy: the risk of science-policy isolationism, the risk of sectarianism, the risk of “jubilee” historicism, the risk of reducing monism to monotheism. These axioms and risks are aspects of the cognitive situation that are important for further development of the research program of cultural activity psychology. Discussing cultural activity psychology as a methodology and a special intellectual movement allows us to emphasize a number of meta-features of cultural activity psychology as a world-view. On the level of specific scientific methodology, we can consider the relationship of cultural activity psychology to other sciences in which the category of “activity” is the key one. Summing up, we refer to the cultural activity approach to social and cultural practices, which expresses the methodological approach of social constructivism.
Let us return to the questions we have posed. How should the contradiction be resolved between scientific and everyday concepts of activity? The relationship, the true connection between everyday and scientific concepts, can be interpreted in different ways. One way is to simply drop the common-sense point of view in favor of theoretical conceptions. But such scientism, while it may be somewhat appropriate for nonhumanitarian knowledge, is, in our view, completely unjustified in the humanities (philosophy, pedagogy, psychology). For all the apparent respectability of the slogan “Science is always right!,” violence against common sense in the humanities is in reality no better and no worse than the obscurantism of champions of “common sense” with regard to scientific concepts. Just as colliding matter and antimatter destroy each other, so the collision of militant scientism and no less militant obscurantism leaves no room for either science or common sense. Theoretical conceptions undoubtedly subjugate conceptions of everyday consciousness, but the act of subjugating them is not at all an act of merciless negation, “bare, purposeless.” The theoretical subjugation of common sense retains, or should retain, elements of the latter’s original object-relatedness, elements anchored and mystically assimilated in mankind’s original prescientific conceptions. Breaking with common sense, as with something deliberately unsound, fallacious, fundamentally false, means breaking with the very subject-matter of research, declaring it fallacious or unworthy of the theorist’s attention, striking it at the root. Subjugating common sense theoretically must obviously be understood only as sublation. Our solution to this problem is conditioned on overcoming the postulate of congruity and on differentiation between the processes of realization and the actual motion of activity (see Chapter 1). Therefore, let us return to the questions originally posed. Is activity subjective? Let us reformulate this question as follows: If the subject is logically the bearer and conveyor of a goal, then is it legitimate in
The question “HOW,” in which modern science specializes, is secondary to the question “WHY.” We have already formulated our opinion: everything at school, including the organization of learning collaboration, should be aimed at educating a person who, once an adult, can independently determine their place in the world of human relations, their own way of thinking and acting, their own POSITION. We differentiate “position” as a relationship that a person constructs to the human world, from “status” and “role.” Status is a characteristic of extremely regimented relationships, in which a person is unambiguously prescribed, in finished form, his or her place, methods of interaction, and system of views and evaluations. Unlike the relationships of position and status that permeate all domains of human existence, “roles” (social and playful) are always partial, do not fully encompass the human “self.” For example, the position (always personal!) of the “believer” is embodied in Luther’s god-building: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” The status of a believer is embodied in the scrupulous Talmudic prescription of every step of a righteous life. And the role of a believer is played by those who, though they attend church on holidays, do not remember God on weekdays. While realizing that we are using “loaded” psychological terms, and not performing here a conceptual analysis and differentiating our understanding of “position,” “status,” and “role” from those accepted in various
Vedvyas, Y. et al. (2019) Manufacturing and preclinical validation of CAR T cells targeting ICAM-1 for advanced thyroid cancer therapy. Sci. Rep. 9: 10634. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-46938-7 Here the authors report the use of the CliniMACS Prodigy T Cell Transduction (TCT) process to automatically manufacture CAR T cells targeted to ICAM-1. Thawed and rested leukopaks were rested overnight before starting the TCT process involving lentiviral transduction on days one and two. This data supports further study to evaluate the safety and efficacy.
When we speak of someone who knows how to teach himself, we think of a scholar obsessed with a cognitive passion. Having stumbled upon some gap in his education, he begins to experience a spiritual yearning, a thirst for knowledge. And to quench that thirst, he goes to the library, compiles a detailed bibliography on the issue of interest to him, digs into specialist literature, and studies it until he feels sufficiently well informed. But learning to learn should not be understood so narrowly. It reveals itself not only in the cognitive domain and does not coincide with the ability to use reference literature and extract the necessary information from books. Some people grow wiser by drawing life experience from communication with other people, from reflections, music, novels, contemplation of nature. People who know how to teach themselves are basically able to do the following: They know their own abilities very accurately and specifically, and, consequently, their limitations: a lack of knowledge, inability to cope with a particular situation (or task), lack of skill, incompetence. And, faced with a task for which they lack certain knowledge, skills, and abilities to solve (note that they determine for themselves what exactly they lack, and know what to look for), they do not avoid it, declaring the new task stupid or uninteresting, but look for ways to expand their capabilities, studying someone else’s experience (including from books), and, if all else fails,
This book is devoted to issues of learning collaboration, which is aimed at the reflective development of primary schoolchildren, the skill that underlies learning to learn. Diagnostics of our experimental instruction’s developmental effects are therefore centered around development of the child’s reflective ability and do not touch upon the many other questions that intrigue psy-chologists and teachers: reasons for studying in cooperation with peers, the altruistic intent of such studying, resistance to neuroticism of children who work in a constant mode of searching and uncertainty, and so forth. The purpose of this chapter is to show that the methods of organizing learning collaboration previously described are effective for solving the task before us: learning primary schoolchildren.
The question asked here is not a rhetorical reference to what we have said up to now. The choice of goals and, accordingly, methods of elementary instruction depends on how it is answered. We have only formulated one possible answer: not knowing what one does not know, it is impossible to set targets for self-education, to teach oneself, to be the subject of one’s own learning activity. But there is another possible answer: not knowing what one does not know can be an excellent topic for study, prompting one to avidly absorb any knowledge, abilities, and skills. Children can be taught to read, write, and count perfectly; they can even be made into experts, highly qualified specialists who can solve any problem within the bounds of their competence. But is it possible, without knowing the limits of one’s competence, to go beyond these limits and set fundamentally new tasks, without waiting for “life itself” (in the person of a teacher, boss, or leader) to prod one? We have no wish to engage in unproductive, purely confessional debate about which school is better: one that nurtures the subjects of instruction, or one that looks at the child as the object of its tender pedagogical concerns. Both approaches to the instruction of primary schoolchildren are acceptable, but they are incompatible, and the main thing is not to confuse them: not to impute to a school oriented toward the training of specialists and technicians, the cultivation of learning to learn, which it cannot attain; and not to judge a school that cultivates learning to learn, only by the skillful achievements of its students. And each school should proceed according to its internal laws, not applying alien and even harmful approaches from a different educational system. For example, for knowledgeable adults who invest their knowledge in children’s minds (“the reasonable, the good, the eternal”), academic discussion about learning is not useful: there should be one truth, clear and not corroded by doubt. But teachers who encourage students to learn on their own simply cannot do
Few people today would be surprised by yet another example of the conflict between an object’s appearance according to “common sense” and how the same object looks according to a scientific theory. Rather, when theoretical and everyday ideas expressing the characteristics of a given object Lperceived as a kind of norm, expressing the “scientific nature” of those theoretical views. Otherwise, it is said that the theory is poor, that its methodological premises are not constructive, or that it does not have effective means of analyzing the phenomena under study. It would seem from this that it would be possible to look at the problem of activity, which has recently been actively discussed in philosophy and psychology, in this way. Yet if we address the relationship between theoretical and everyday ideas regarding the essence of activity, we find a truly grotesque situation: The everyday view of activity contrasts, not with some stable and integrated system for revising its scientific views but with fundamentally different, sometimes actively antagonistic and quite opposing views. This applies to the definition of the essence of activity, to the description of its structure and functions, to the identification of its specific determinants, and so forth. As a result, a very curious paradox arises that deserves special discussion. Let us turn first to a rather familiar everyday understanding of activity, in order to then establish what metamorphoses it undergoes when it becomes the object of methodological and theoretical analysis. In the intuitive understanding of activity that corresponds to ordinary everyday word usage, a number of attributes are traditionally distinguished. The subjectness of activity. People usually say: “the activity of the subject,” “is realized by the subject,” or “is determined by the subject.” Let us illustrate the “subject” in question as follows (see Figure 1.1):
A loving and capable adult is the center of a child’s existence. Deprivation of or defective communication and joint actions with adults can certainly have detrimental consequences for children’s health (mental and physical) and psychological development [1]. It is well known that anomalies and developmental delays in children who have no organic impairment of the nervous system are based on certain difficulties and problems in their relationships with adults who are significant to them [2]. This position has received so much confirmation in life and experimental work, has so taken possession of scientific and everyday pedagogical consciousness, that the “child–adult” relationship has come to be seen as a kind of psychological panacea. The universally recognized idea of the leading role of an adult in the mental development of a child began to be vaguely replaced by the idea of self-sufficiency of the adult, in the discourse of many teachers and in the practice of many parents and teachers; there was a logical substitution of the thesis that “collaboration with an adult is a necessary condition for child development” with the thesis (never formulated openly) that “an adult is the sufficient condition for the child’s psychological well-being” (at least in the classroom). We emphasize once again: this logical (and practical) substitution is not completely conscious. No teacher (at least from the several hundred we surveyed) and the rare parent will maintain that the most loving, delicate, sensitive adult, the most skillful, pedagogically gifted educator, can provide a child with the fullest conditions for development and improvement. The objections refer to friends, peers, younger people . . . But this is at the level of verbal consciousness. And in practice? The practice of modern preschool upbringing is based on the idea of play as the leading activity of preschoolers. The development of the form of play
Nonadaptivity as inevitability. Analyzing the manifestations of a person’s vital relationship to the world, we first of all turn to the famous maxim of F. Engels: “To live means to die.” “The negation of life is essentially contained in life itself, so that life can always be understood in relation to its inevitable result, which is continually present in the embryo: death.” The “embryo” of death can, of course, be interpreted as a “goal” (“to die”). But naturally, the author of The Dialectics of Nature was far from a teleological interpretation of death, which he viewed as a result of life, in accordance with Hegel’s distinction between them. If that is so, then from this simple premise there follows an important conclusion for us: The life of the individuum as a totality cannot be represented in the form of progress toward any single original goal; the fundamental support for the postulate of congruity collapses, because the negation of life contained in life itself goes beyond what this postulate can explain.
