Birth of Ideals and Universals

Abstract

A major weakness of all theories in educational psychology – including those of sociocultural and cultural-historical inclinations – is their intellectualist bent. Even Lev S. Vygotsky never explained how the scientific concepts that the children in his studies were learning came about in the first place, and how any abstract universal concept could have emerged in the course of human history – though he did intimate that all higher psychological functions were relations with others first before they were functions of the individual (Vygotsky 1989). Piaget’s main problem was the reduction of development to biological maturation underlying the different stages; and he used biological concepts for describing the development of qualities that are recognized to be purely societal or cultural in the approaches developed by social psychologists such as L. S. Vygotsky, A. N. Leont’ev, A. R. Luria, and their students and followers. Mainstream psychological theories also have an intellectualist bent in that they conceive of what we know in terms of ideal things, such as concepts, which are abstracted from the physical world. In the cognitive sciences and psychology, these ideal things exist somehow exist independent of the world, which, as suggested in Chap. 1, leads to the symbol grounding problem, that is, of the connection between the material world and ideal concepts. The problem of the missing connection has been made thematic in different names: the psychophysical or body–mind problem. The problem, however, is one of method and presupposition. As soon as we shift to a transactional approach, where everything is conceived in terms of events that together make the world-as-event, and where phenomena are the result of recurrences in percipient events and experiences, the existence of ideal things as an ensemble effect of material processes no longer is a mystery. This is so because in this approach, “all awareness, even awareness of concepts, requires at least the synthesis of physical feelings with conceptual feeling” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 243). Just as stereovision arises as a new quality in the cooperation of two eyes, mind is a new quality arising from the cooperation of people. This chapter is concerned with how ideals and universals come to exist in human history and in the life of young people (students in early elementary school). Even the birth of ideals is an event, and any ideal exists in and as a twofold relation – as intimated in the introductory quotation and, as seen below, in statements that Marx and Engels made in the mid-19th century: relation among people and relation between people and things.