Lev Vygotsky’s Theory of Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

In his chapter on the contributions of Lev Vygotsky to twentieth century aesthetics Joao Pedro Frois provides insights into Russian and Eastern European psychology and philosophy from around the time of the Russian Revolution, into the 1950s, when Vygotsky’s work was first introduced to Western readers. Frois introduces us to the historical context of Vygotsky’s education and brief but highly influential academic career. (Vgotsky died at age thirty-eight, of tuberculosis.) While educators outside the field of art education are familiar with Vygotsky’s theories on language development, less familiar is his work on aesthetics. Thus, in The Psychology of Art, (1926/1971) the result of his work over the years 1915–1922, Vygotsky addressed the following questions: “What is the relation between aesthetic response and all other forms of human behavior? How do we explain the role and importance of art in the general behavioral system of man?” (p. 240). His text is an investigation into those questions. Frois’s chapter draws our attention to what Vygotsky considered to be key elements of human behavior. These include imagination, creativity, and Vygotsky’s particular interpretation of catharsis as it emerges from aesthetic response.As Frois points out, Vygotsky’s work was not only influential in his day, even anticipating the work of some of his contemporaries, but continues to have an impact on writers in the fields of education, psychology and aesthetics today. What is unusual about Vygotsky’s work is the breadth of his influences and interests. Thus Frois introduces us to Vygotsky’s early studies of literature, particularly of Hamlet, and shows how Vygotsky branched out from literature to incorporate the other arts into his spectrum of interests. Indeed, the arts seemed to provide Vygotsky with the grounding for his theory development from three perspectives— instrumental, cultural, and historical. Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia was a fertile ground for cultural and societal self-examination, after all, and the arts lent themselves to such examination. But Vygotsky’s interests spanned the human sciences as well as the arts. In particular, Vygotsky began to examine the psychology of the day and to bring it to bear on his study of the arts. Thus, his Psychology of Art (1926) draws heavily on his earlier critiques of Hamlet. It is in this text that Vygotsky draws analogies between perception and artistic creation, from the perspective of psychology. That is, he sees creativity as emerging from “those sensations that arise in the nervous system”, in other words perception, but that these only hint at possibilities there for development. Vygotsky’s assertion that “our capacities exceed our activity” foreshadows his theory of the zone of proximal development, a theory that educators today still find compelling. Perhaps the most surprising component of Vygotsky’s work, however, was his insistence upon a focus on the artwork as opposed to the viewer, in order to arrive at an understanding of aesthetic response as a general principle, as opposed to an isolated instance of idiosyncratic behavior. This gives Vygotsky’s work a distinctly empirical flavour, one with which Frois obviously sympathizes. Frois does an admirable job of guiding us through Vygotsky’s thinking in this regard. The point of being able to arrive at some kind of general principle of aesthetic experience is, as Frois points out in his conclusion, that then aesthetic responses are capable of not only individualized meanings but of shared realities as well. The capacity for shared meanings puts aesthetic experience firmly within the educational realm.