Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) volume 108 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm The Practical Essence of Man The ‘Activity Approach’ in Late Soviet Philosophy Edited by Andrey Maidansky Vesa Oittinen leiden | boston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The practical essence of man : the 'activity approach' in late Soviet philosophy / edited by Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen. pages cm. – (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; VOLUME 108) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-27313-9 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-27314-6 (e-book) 1. Philosophy, Russian–20th century. 2. Act (Philosophy) I. Maidansky, Andrey, editor. B4231.P68 2015 197–dc23 2015029550 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-27313-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27314-6 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Introduction 1 Andrey Maidansky and Vesa Oittinen 1 Activity and the Search for True Materialism 17 David Bakhurst 2 ‘Praxis’ as the Criterion of Truth? The Aporias of Soviet Marxism and the Activity Approach 29 Vesa Oittinen 3 Reality as Activity: The Concept of Praxis in Soviet Philosophy 42 Andrey Maidansky 4 The Category of Activity in Soviet Philosophy 58 Inna Titarenko 5 The Activity Approach and Metaphysics 75 Edward M. Swiderski 6 Abstract and Concrete Understanding of Activity: ‘Activity’ and ‘Labour’ in Soviet Philosophy 96 Sergey Mareyev 7 The Kiev Philosophical School in the Light of the Marxist Theory of Activity 103 Elena Mareyeva 8 The Evolution of Batishchev’s Views on the Nature of Objective Activity, and the Limits of the Activity Approach 120 Alexander Khamidov 9 The Activity Approach in Soviet Philosophy and Contemporary Cognitive Studies 137 Vladislav Lektorsky vi contents 10 The Concept of the Scheme in the Activity-Theories of Ilyenkov and Piaget 154 Pentti Määttänen 11 The Ideal and the Dream-World: Evald Ilyenkov and Walter Benjamin on the Significance of Material Objects 167 Alex Levant Bibliography 189 Index 202 Introduction Andrey Maidansky and Vesa Oittinen The ‘activity theory’ in Soviet psychology, represented by Lev S. Vygotsky and Aleksei Leontiev, is now known around the world. However, its sibling, the philosophical activity theory, which arose among Soviet philosophers in the 1960s, remains virtually unknown outside Russia. Among the many reasons for this could be the feeling that Soviet philosophical culture has nothing to offer to the present. This bias is shared by many contemporary Russian thinkers, who regard the 70 years of Soviet rule as nothing more than a black hole in the intellectual history of Russia. However, closer examination reveals that there is more to this picture. Such names as Bakhtin, Lotman, Mamardashvili and Ilyenkov have already established themselves, even in Western consciousness, and offer glimpses of a different kind of reality behind the allegedly mono- lithic façade of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The ‘activity approach’ presented in this volume was a further innovative undercurrent of the ‘late Soviet’ period that is worthy of reception and critical assessment even today. Its represen- tatives posed important methodological questions concerning one of the main paradigms of Marxism and also of modern philosophy in general. In this book, several Russian and Western scholars analyse the activity ap- proach and its connections to similar approaches in other traditions, especially in Marxist philosophy and pragmatism. These contributions show that the scope of the activity approach is wider than that of Marxist philosophy, as it repeatedly contested the received ideas of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. This sys- tem of ideas represented a lacklustre interpretation of Marx’s thought, which was – to cite Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez’s now-classic exposition of the ‘praxis- viewpoint’ in Marxism – ‘reduced to the old materialism fertilised by dialectics on the one hand, or a materialist metaphysics which is little more than an inver- ted idealism, on the other’. According to Sánchez Vázquez, this reduction was ‘a result of the deliberate omission or rejection by some commentators of the centrality of the category of praxis’.1 While this statement is correct, it requires further comment. Of course, the official Soviet ideology could not silence the idea of ‘praxis’, since it held such a prominent place in the corpus of classical Marxist texts, not only in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, but also in those of Plekhanov and Lenin. However, the ‘Diamat’ view on praxis was as 1 Sánchez Vázquez 1977, p. 3. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004273146_002 2 maidansky and oittinen lacklustre as its view on Marx’s heritage in general: the concept of praxis was interpreted in a manner that did not differ greatly from the way the Pragmatists treated it, which meant that praxis as a criterion of truth was de facto identified with ‘success’ in action. Actually, it is surprising to find how few perceptive ana- lyses there were in Soviet philosophy of the concept of praxis. The emergence of the activity approach among Soviet philosophers from the early 1960s onwards, initially in the rather narrow circles of some Moscow intellectuals, represented a decisive break with the vulgarised Diamat ideas. In a sense, this current was a Soviet analogy to the Western ‘Praxis’ Marxism as it was expounded at around the same time by such Yugoslav philosophers as Mihajlo Marković, Milan Kangrga and Svetozar Stojanović. But there are also some important differences. First of all, the Soviet ‘activity approach’ was a much more heterogeneous (one could even say amorphous) current. Another important characteristic of the Soviet activity approach-philosophy was that it developed quite independently from the Western theories of action. While both the philosophical theories of action in the Western world (such as Anscombe, Audi and von Wright) and the sociological theories (Max Weber, for example) were primarily interested in actions of individual agents from the viewpoint of teleological causality, the Soviet philosophers had a broader view of the subject-matter. They understood activity as the fundamental trait of man’s relations with the surrounding world; in this sense, the concept of activity could be seen as forming the methodological basis of all human and social sciences (not only that of psychology, where it had proved especially fruitful thanks to the works of Vygotsky, Rubinshtein and the Leontievs). Of course, this situation reflects the different philosophical backgrounds of Western and Soviet action-theories. The Western theories of action emerged mostly in the tradition of analytic philosophy, while the Soviet theories had their background in Marxism and its concept of praxis. However, the differ- ences between the Western and Soviet approaches can be traced back even further into the history of philosophy, back to Aristotle. In fact, it is possible to extract at least two different action-theories from Aristotle. One is ‘logical’, based on the problematics of practical syllogism (action as a result of premises), and the other is ‘anthropological’ (action as realisation of human essence). The Western theories of action often start with Aristotle’s idea of a practical syllogism, formulated in the seventh book of Nicomachean Ethics,2 and thus focus on logical reasoning around different kinds and modes of activity. The Soviet Marxist tradition of praxis and activity-theories, in turn, relies on the 2 Compare Ethica Nicomachea vii.iii.9 et seq. introduction 3 Aristotelian theory of prâxis and poíêsis, which not only concerns syllogistic judgement, but also refers to the actualisation of human essence itself.3 Although the Soviet philosophers tried to maintain a more or less convin- cing Marxist-Leninist façade in their publications, their divergent evolutionary paths soon brought them to face the abysses of fundamental philosophical questions in a manner that was quite different from that of the Yugoslav ‘prax- ists’, who had sketched a rather superficial and optimistic version of Marxism. Therefore, it is no surprise that some representatives of the Soviet ‘activity approach’,most notably Genrikh Batishchev, left the ground of Marxist thought as early as the 1970s. These experiences of the late Soviet philosophy made it clear that a web of unresolved questions lay around the Marxist concept