Vygotsky’s Anomalous Spinozism

Abstract

This article exposes sources and influences of Spinoza in some of Vygotsky’s works, keeping in mind its meaning for the creation of a “new man” in Soviet Socialism. We try to understand the features of Vygotsky´s reading of Spinoza in an active dialogue with contemporary studies of 17th-century philosophy and its consequences for a materialist psychology. In this direction, we discuss references to Spinoza done by Vygotsky in the context of the latter’s argumentative style as well as studies of Engels, Plekhanov and Deborin as possible sources in Vygotsky´s approach to Spinoza. Paraphrasing Negri´s take on Spinoza as the “wild anomaly” of the 17th-century, we argue that Vygotsky performed an anomalous reading of Spinoza. In spite of the similarities with Deborin´s view of the modern philosopher, Vygotsky had plans that were more ambitious for Spinozist materialism and determinism. We trace the anomalous way in that the latter´s materialism reveals itself as one of randomness and contingency, against a rigidly structured projection of state, society, or model of human beings. We cannot figure out exactly which “model of man“ Vygotsky had in mind in his take on Spinoza, but we are able to recognize some core aspects in his reasoning. Roughly, these include the unity between mind and body, which can take the most diverse forms in the common body of multitude; the bases of consciousness in the affection; the integration, in the psychological systems, of affect, will, and desire; and the Spinozan ethics as a reference to life.

Acknowledgments

We thank Andy Blunden for editing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Stalin’s Great Break (1929–1932) was a period of deep change that followed Stalin’s victory over his enemies. It was marked by a huge loss of intellectual freedom, as well as enforcement of the peasantry into collectivization farms to “break” with Russian backwardness (see Netto, 1982).

2. Abbagnano (1971/1998) claimed that the term materialism was used for the first time by Robert Boyle in his work of 1674, The Excellence and Grounds of the Mechanical Philosophy. Generally speaking, it is fair to say that the term was adopted by modern thought only in the 17th century.

3. Vygotsky starts his sketch for the second part of The Teaching About Emotions by saying that “a book such as this cannot be other than personal” (as cited by Zavershneva & van der Veer, 2017, p. 214).

4. The term multitude (Latin: multitudo) has a long trajectory in political philosophy. In its modern outlines it appeared, before Spinoza, in Machiavelli and Hobbes. Spinoza, however, attributed to the concept a differentiated sense. For him, multitude is not a set of individuals acting in a barbaric and irrational way, but the instituting power that establishes an empire. The meaning of multitude can be perceived in the same sense in physics when we treat, for example, number of heterogeneous bodies in which there are a very different elements as a single a body (Aurélio, 2009).

5. It would be hard to overestimate Plekhanov’s importance to Soviet Marxism. Even after the political split of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903, which split Lenin´s partisans, the Bolsheviks, from Plekhanov´s Mensheviks, Lenin acknowledged how important Plekhanov had been in the dawning of Russian Communism. Ten years later, he still held out hope that it would be possible to unify the movement and maintained that he had a true respect for Plekhanov as a theoretician rather than as a politician.

6. The portrayal of Spinoza as an atheist of system can be tracked back to the French Radical Enlightenment. Ever since then, Spinozism has been used to fight mainstream religion, supporting the struggle for a secular state (see Chaui, 1999). This trend influenced Engels, as well as Plekhanov, Deborin, and Vygotsky.

7. See also Chaui (1999), who ascribed to Spinoza the assumption that reality is completely intelligible. Morfino (2008) stated, “Engels, therefore, like Spinoza, holds that nature is a universal interconnected totality, the parts of which cannot be separated from the whole other than by abstraction” (p. 14). Concurring with Spinoza, Engels claimed the intention to go beyond the notion that nature is invariable (Engels, 1883/1979), as well as to overcome the old metaphysics, which separated cause and effect, placing the ultimate causes of the universe outside its own laws, creating a metaphysics to which God rules over physical Nature.

8. Politzer also criticized this abstractionist view and stood for a psychology of drama, an idea that influenced Vygotsky (1929/2000).