The Origins of
Cultural Historical Activity Theory
Talk by Andy Blunden, April 2010
Descartes and Consciousness
Rene Descartes
(1596-1650)
?
“I think, therefore I am!”
Mind/matter:
Ontological distinction
Subject/Object:
Epistemological relation
Descartes
Herder and Culture
The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment
Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744-1803)
God/Nature is Active
Everyone has their Schwerpunkt !
Herder
Goethe
and Romantic Science
(1749-1832)
Gestalt
Urphänomen
Goethe
Hegel
(1770-1831)
Subject-Object
Thought-object / Artefact
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
Formation of Consciousness
• Way of thinking
• Way of Life
• Constellation of artefacts
Concept
Hegel’s Idealism
Hegel’s Psychology
“I/Me dialectic”
Readings
The full text of this talk can be found at
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/origins-chat.htm
Recommended readings are at:
• Ilyenkov, E., (2009) “Dialectical Logic,” The Ideal in
Human Activity, Erythrós Press and
• Hegel (2009), “Hegel’s Logic” with a Foreword by Andy
Blunden, Erythrós Press.
Selections from Classical German Philosophy are at
http://www.marxists.org/subject/philosophy/german.htm
Questions and discussion with the author are welcome with
Andy Blunden: ablunden@mira.net
Marx and Activity
Part Two of talk by Andy Blunden on the Origins of
Cultural Historical Activity Theory, April 2010
Marx’s Critique of Hegel
(1818-1883)
Feuerbach and Hegel
Theses on Feuerbach
Herder – Fichte - Hess
“Practical-critical Activity”
Theses on Feuerbach
The German Ideology
• The Real Individuals
• Their Activity, and
• the Material Conditions
The Method of Political Economy
“The concrete is the concentration of many determinations
...
It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process
of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure,
even though it is the point of departure in reality.”
Preface to Capital
“In bourgeois society, the commodity-form of
the product of labour — or value-form of the
commodity — is the economic cell-form.”
The Commodity
th
18
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
*
Men make their own history, but under
circumstances given and transmitted from
the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brains of the living. ... they anxiously conjure
up spirits of the past, borrowing from them
names, battle slogans, and costumes.
*
In Conclusion
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Genealogy-CHAT.htm
Readings
• The full text of this talk can be found at
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/origins-chat.htm#marx
• The recommended readings from Marx are at
http://marx.org/archive/marx/works/sw/course/xmca.pdf
• Questions and discussion with the author are welcome
with Andy Blunden: ablunden@mira.net
• Further reading on these ideas are found in “An
Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity,” by Andy Blunden