The Origins ofCultural 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 CultureThe Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment

Johann Gottfried Herder

(1744-1803)

God/Nature is Active

Everyone has their Schwerpunkt !

Herder

Goetheand Romantic Science

Gestalt

(1749-1832)

UrphänomenGoethe

Hegel(1770-1831)

Thought-object / Artefact

Subject-Object

• Way of thinking

• Way of Life

• Constellation of artefacts

The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Formation of Consciousness

Concept

““I/Me dialecticI/Me dialectic”

Hegel’s Psychology

Hegel’s Idealism

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.htmQuestions 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

18th 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