Abstract
Vygotsky was a brilliant literary scholar whose role in psychology borrows substantially from his interests in and fascination with literature and theatre. The central question for Vygotsky’s theory was aesthetic synthesis – the emergence of generalized feelings in human life-experiences. The critical empirical example for the emergence of affective synthesis for Vygotsky was the short story by Ivan Bunin, ‘Legkoe dykhanie’. My task in this article is to analyse Vygotsky’s way of conceptualizing dialectical synthesis as a general psychological process. I demonstrate that Vygotsky succeeded in locating the empirical phenomena where such syntheses can be observed, and proceeded halfway towards creating a general model of affective synthesis. Yet he failed to complete the task due to the limitations of the analogical transfer of the notion of short circuit into the psychological realm. The problem of synthesis remains unsolved up to the present day. Possible ways of solving it require formalization of the notion of double negation that has been used in dialectical philosophies, but has not been encoded into psychology’s research methodologies.
Why do people attend theatre? Or watch movies? The images played out in these extraordinary human arenas of creativity are separate from the dramas of the everyday world, and as such should be places for alienating escapism. The reality is just the opposite – theatre, film, literature are created and appreciated precisely as providing relevant material for the affective lives of everyday people. They need to experience the suspense and confusion of complex stories, and many of these fictional constructs acquire importance in living ordinary lives. The questions that fictional characters like Hamlet, Anna Karenina (Eco, 2009), Colonel Aureliano Buendía (Márquez, 1967), or Macunaíma (de Andrade, 1988) are set up to ask in a literary domain overwhelm the spectator or reader in ways that can change their lives. Literary creativity has practical consequences, and is sought after even in the Facebook age.
Such fictional characters are synthetic – they are invented by the authors, yet they carry with them their believability as if they were real. Likewise, in real human development we create fictions – images of our future as rich or poor, married or divorced, honored or despised. We live our lives forward – imagining the pleasures of becoming adult and the wisdom or misery of becoming old. We even invent elaborate images of what happens once we stop living – hell, heaven and purgatory can be imagined but not visited. In sum – the human psyche is a perpetual constructor of the imagined world that leads our real living. The focus is on synthesis of new forms of feeling, thinking and acting.
The question of psychological synthesis has been a major theoretical problem for psychology since its beginnings at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (Valsiner, 2012) and remains unsolved to the present day. Efforts were made to make sense of it from a bottom-up approach (Wilhelm Wundt’s schöpferishe Synthese [Volkelt, 1924]) or from a top-down one (Felix Krueger in Ganzheitspsychologie [Diriwächter, 2012]). Both approaches failed. Endeavours to make sense of synthesis through the process of recombining elements (as Wundt tried) or differentiating an unstructured field (Krueger’s way) could not account for novelty. A similar fate was encountered by Charles Sanders Peirce – his effort at explaining rapid transitions in thought by abduction (Pizarroso and Valsiner, 2009) was made in the framework of classical logic. There is a lesson for the future to be learned from each of these failures – the process of emergence of something new cannot be explained through what has already been established.
There were, of course, glimpses into the processes of synthesis. The empirical discovery of the insight phenomena in the Würzburg School experiments in 1906–8 (Bühler, 1951) kept the importance of the issue in sight. The very first empirical description of the ‘aha-feeling’ is worth careful rethinking about how the synthesis processes happen in the human psyche.
As was typical in the ‘Würzburg School’ experimental introspection studies, the observer (nowadays we call that person ‘research participant’ [Bibace, Clegg and Valsiner, 2009]) was given a complex meaningful stimulus with the task of answering ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the question ‘Do you understand [stimulus]?’ Immediately after the answer was given, the observer had to report what had been going on in his mind during the search for which answer to give. So, the following stimulus sentence was given: The most glowing colors in which the virtues shine are the inventions of those who lack them. First, again helplessness; I was unable to bring the possession and lack of virtues into the required contrast. There was a search connected with this [perceptually represented only by eye movements as though shifting back and forth on a surface], interrupted by occasional reverberations of the words, now of the first, now of the second part of the sentence. Then comprehension came suddenly with an affect like ‘Aha!’ [not spoken]; the basis of comprehension was the far-fetched analogy, or as I would prefer to put it, a superordinate relationship: one prizes most highly what one lacks. Comprehension was tied in with this, and I said yes. (Bühler, 1951: 49)
The problem of analysis of the insight as a (rapid) process is conceptually complex – to explain on the basis of what already exists something that does not exist yet. Furthermore – once its emerging is happening, it develops qualities that were not present in its predecessors (new Gestalt quality). This is a theoretical task that physical chemistry and immunology have in their own terms succeeded in solving. Synthesis of new chemical structures in a context that is far from equilibrium (Prigogine, 1977) or recognition of a new incoming viral agent as ‘not mine’ (Jerne, 1984) are examples of scientific problems where the issue has found respectable solutions. Psychology – side-tracked by its social imperative of ‘measurement’ (Michell, 2005) – has not found a solution to the problem of synthesis; primarily due to failing in the first place to recognize the issue as central. Thus, a century after the pioneering work by the ‘Würzburg School’, psychology still needs a theory of synthesis.
Vygotsky’s quest
Lev Vygotsky understood the centrality of the synthesis problem. His effort to make sense of psychological synthesis in the first half of the 1920s took place in the context of his move from literary scholarship into psychology (van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991). His later work (after 1925) added little to this first effort, as it became increasingly embedded in the social context of the educational and psychological discourses (subsumed under the notion of paedology) of the (then) new Soviet Union.
The central empirical object for Vygotsky’s effort was Ivan Bunin’s short story ‘Legkoe dykhanie’ [Gentle Breath] (published in 1916). The short story, in Vygotsky’s own words, is not about the main character (Olya Meshcherskaya), but about … the feeling of becoming free, lightness, distancing and full transparency of life, which cannot be derived from the very events that lie at its foundation. (Vygotsky, 1987: 149)
How do people feel lightness? They create meaning of it through their breathing – the distinction of the light and easy breathing of a child asleep can be contrasted with the heavy breathing of a sprinter who has just given his utmost to finish a 100-meter dash. Yoga practices emphasize regimes of breathing. The topic of breathing in the process of acting – in theatre and in reading poetry, as well as listening to it – fascinated Vygotsky to the extreme. His only empirical study – which resulted in no conclusions due to equipment failures (van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991) – was conducted in 1921–2 on breathing rhythms. It turns out that Bunin’s ‘Legkoe dykhanie’ was one of the texts with which Vygotsky experimented. 1 What was important in this effort was to look for affective processes that mediate the person’s relating with aesthetic objects – in this case, poetry and prose.
The author’s curse: Living one’s own theory
Affective generalization was not only an issue for Vygotsky’s first and frail research efforts. His whole personality was filled with deeply affective ways of relating with his life-world. Being intermittently ill with tuberculosis, in and out of hospitals and sanatoria, made him feel the tension between the hard- and light-hearted sides of living and loving to their utmost. The social turmoils that surrounded his life added to the personal life-dramas (van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991).
Vygotsky’s melancholic experiences of his only foreign trip – to London in 1925 – are now documented well enough to give us a testimony of a sensitive soul who desires beauty and is longing to be back with his young wife and infant daughter, while facing the fogs of London. His Einfühlung into his wife’s depression back in Moscow is interspersed with deep life (and death) philosophical generalization: Friday, July 31, we find Vygotsky sitting in a café on Piccadilly Circus. 9.35 p.m. Lion’s Tea Piccadilly [writing into his notebook]. ‘Tea. Inexpressibly sad. Why is G. not happy? <For> you believed in your happiness. Oh, how I would love to see you happy! More than anything I want that. I am already almost free of personal longings. I saw the planks and the Egyptian putty, my brothers. Oh, how we must despise and respect life at the same time in order to live. The main thing is to be above life, to deal with it slightly condescendingly (Chekhov) and to be free of it. I am independent. My passions have again burnt out’. (van der Veer and Zavershneva, 2011: 470–1; emphases added)
The notion of affective explosion – korotkoe zamykanie [short circuit] is central in Vygotsky’s theoretical efforts to explain dialectical synthesis within the psyche, the empirical basis for which he took from Bunin’s short stories, as well as from fables (Vygotsky, 1987) – and not samples of ordinary persons from the given society (Russia in the 1920s). One single short story can give us more direct evidence about the universal features of the generic human psyche than a survey of a very large sample from the population.
The complex rhythm of a short story
What fascinated Vygotsky first of all was Bunin’s compositional construction of the structure of the short story. Bunin had a tendency towards abbreviating his messages, breaking up any linear order in the story and thus generating a basis for generalization that goes beyond the concatenation of its parts. It is not merely a question of sequence – the non-linear order in a short story creates the basis for generalization. If we take a narrative A→B→C→D where the author describes an event as it proceeds in its course of time, no generalization is triggered. If, however, the author first narrates a later event (C) and then proceeds to its antecedents – like in the case C→A→B→D, the narrative return (to →A→B→) carries a function in the message as a whole. Non-linearity of a story sets the stage for tensions that carry on beyond the real time-line. It also creates the context for generalizing interpretation of the story.
Thus, ‘Legkoe dykhanie’ is not a mundane story about the fate of a young schoolgirl and her death through being shot by her frustrated fiancé, about her teacher who revisits her grave and about climatic conditions. All these elements are undoubtedly there in the story, but the story is not about any of these. Vygotsky grasped the importance of connecting different episodes described in the story, finding in that structure of the short story the basis for its ease of breathing: We guess: the events are united and chained together in ways that they lose their quotidian heaviness and impenetrable haze [neprozrachnaja mut’]; they are melodically tied with one another, and in their escalations, resolutions, and transitions they as if untie the threads that pull them together [razvjazyvayushchie ih niti], they become free from the ordinary links by which these are given to us in life and in reflections upon it; they become alienated from reality, they become tied with one another like words become linked in a poem. (Vygotsky, 1987: 149) The end is the beginning.
Vygotsky understood the importance of the very last sentence – the pointe – for literary works. In ‘Legkoe dykhanie’, that sentence was: These days this gentle breath again has spread in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind. … we experience almost painful ease. This marks … that affective contradiction, that clash of opposing feelings that creates the wonderful psychological law of the artistic short story. (Vygotsky, 1987: 155)
As to Vygotsky, these schemes are primarily affective and only secondarily cognitive – so we can think of affective abstraction and generalization in the form of feeling. The information about the characters in Bunin’s short story is abbreviated and mixed as to the details and feelings in the complex. Through such construction of the meaning complex the author triggers a lingering generalized feeling in the reader. The complex is set to create affective synthesis.
Dialectics of synthesis
Vygotsky’s systematic use of the dialectical scheme (thesis–antithesis–synthesis) together with the focus on affect (based on his fascination with Spinoza, and reflected profoundly in his notebook [van der Veer and Zavershneva, 2011]) leads him to the analysis of the feelings that can be triggered to emerge through literary texts. Vygotsky’s highlighting of the abstractive generalization through the last sentence in the short story is an empirical demonstration of a locus where dialectical synthesis of a new feeling takes place.
Having located the critical breakthrough place then leads to the need to explain how that process works. Here Vygotsky fails – by choosing the simile of ‘short circuit’ [korotkoe zamykanie] to characterize this process (Vygotsky, 1987). The idea was first expressed in the analysis of the fable – where the opposites are clearly expressed. Thus: The catastrophe (or pointe) of a fable is its concluding locus, in which the two planes become united in one act, action, or phrase, revealing their opposite natures, driving the opposition to the extreme, and thus discharge the duality of feelings that had been building up in the course of the fable. There occurs as-if a short-circuiting of the two opposing currents, in which the contradiction explodes, burns, and resolves. (Vygotsky, 1987: 138)
However, the electrical event of ‘short circuit’ does not generate a new way of transfer of energy, but rather results in the breakdown of the present electricity flow. After a short circuit, the lamps stop giving light and we are left in darkness – rather than switch to a new form of light that has not been seen before. In the discourse about electricity, ‘short circuit’ is an outcome to be avoided (and prevented from happening) rather than utilized for new lighting conditions. It is an abnormal condition. 3
In dialectical philosophy the notion of negation is presented in the form of two mutually linked processes of negation. The primary negation (‘A is not B’) is crucial in classical logic where it is the root 4 for all further logical derivations. Yet it is only the basis of its own negation – the negation of the first negation (‘the claim “A is not B” is irrelevant’). This second negation reunites the previously separated opposites. It creates the possibility to look at the systemic functioning of parts within a whole. No medical student could get away with a claim ‘The mouth is an intestine’ or its corollary (‘The mouth is not an intestine’) – clearly the human mouth is not the same as the intestine, but a claim that it is not is absurd, while still true. To claim such absurdity would be an anatomical gross error. Yet through the second negation we reunite the two important part of the alimentary system into one whole – both are necessary parts of the given physiological system. They perform linked functions within the whole – hence statements of their being different (or similar) are irrelevant for understanding of the whole gastro-intestinal system.
Interestingly, Vygotsky’s use of the ‘short circuit’ simile captures only the first of the two negations (negation of the previous contradiction) but does not specify how the second negation (negation of the previous negation [Valsiner, 2012: ch. 10]) leads to the synthesis of new feeling. The new feeling the ‘short circuit’ simile covers is that of clash and destruction of the previous tension of opposite feelings, yet the whole ethos of Vygotsky’s developmental thinking is that of construction of new psychological functions – moving from lower to higher ones in ontogeny – through the processes of synthesis. It is in this respect that the ‘short circuit’ simile was an unfortunate analogical device Vygotsky used, blocking his own efforts to understand the dialectical overcoming of the previous tension by a ‘leap’ to a new level of organization.
However, the phenomena under study – a writer’s skill in creating the final pointe for a short story, or a person’s insight into understanding something that previously made no sense – provide clear evidence of affective abstractive synthesis. We can experience this in our daily life when feeling into any life-situation. Psychological science can learn from its past and develop precise methodology for the study of ever-reconstructed forms of human feeling that turn into hierarchies of signs that regulate human conduct (Valsiner, 2014). Psychology is not a science of behavior, or of cognition, but of affective processes that lead to functional abstraction.
General conclusions
Vygotsky’s work on ‘Legkoe dykhanie’ in the context of his main contribution to psychology – Psychology of Art – is a fitting example of how classic literature can serve as the database for contemporary psychology (Brinkmann, 2009; Moghaddam, 2004). Characters created by writers in novels, short stories and theatre plays are results of the work of in-depth intuitive psychologists who affectively grasp quintessential psychological processes and encode these into communicative messages to the audiences that are slightly beyond the ordinary lives of the latter. Thus, literature and art create the ‘zone of proximal development’ (to use Vygotsky’s term, introduced for other purposes a decade later [Valsiner and van der Veer, 2014]) for all of the human beings who keep being fascinated by this arena of meaning-making. However, a theory of psychological synthesis is still to be constructed in that discipline that has prided itself in focusing on behavior, its prediction and control. In contrast, a theory of synthesis needs to address the ways of transcending behavior into the infinite subjectivity of the human psyche – as a result of synthetic breakthroughs, leading to ever new efforts of the kind. It is here that a return to art and literature as empirical databases can allow us a new chance. Vygotsky failed – yet in a place from where we can go further.