enactivist camps make use of such transcriptions, thereby retaining the very Cartesianism that they intend to overcome (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 2009).
All of these terms refer to things; even actions are things that are external causes for something else that happens afterward and for the effect. But these things do not connect other than by means of other things that mediate between them, including forces external to the things. In our everyday experience, however, there are not disconnected things and forces that make for causal connections but all the events – seeing, hearing, feeling – are “obscurely drawn together and mutually implied in a unique drama. Therefore, the body is not an object. For the same reason, the con- sciousness I have thereof is not a thought” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 231, emphasis added). The living, animate body therefore cannot be reconstituted after having dis- sected it into pieces to get a better idea of how it works. It is because of the gathering capacity of the drama that I propose in Chap. 12 a psychology in terms of drama. It will not attempt to reconstitute human conduct and psychology from decontextual- ized bits and pieces: like I cannot reconstitute life by replaying the photographs on a reel fast enough so that they give the semblance of movement.
conception is one where an otherwise empty space is filled with entity-body-things that occupy regions. In this view, matter-things are the support of enduring or chang- ing qualities in terms of which each entity-body-thing can be characterized. The outcome of this approach is that “we rivet our attention on the eternal realm of forms. In this imagined realm there is no passage, no loss, no gain. It is complete in itself. It is self-sustaining. It is therefore the realm of the ‘completely real’”
(Whitehead 1938, 68).
In the work of René Descartes, the distinction between matter and space, on the one hand, and non-spatial (non-, meta-physical) mind comes the expressed in its fullest. Mind is very different from matter, for it does not have its spatial qualities.
This corresponds to the ways of theorizing common in ancient Greece, where there is contingent matter with its imperfections that is opposed to the eternal nature of (mental) forms and idealizations. To the present day, psychology has not overcome this dichotomy, exclusively focusing on one (physiology) or the other aspect (mind, mental constructions). Those mental things are external to the material things – thus the question how mental things come to be connected (grounded) in the real world of material things that we are made of and experience. But if experienced affect (emotions) is a bodily phenomenon, the question arises as to its relation to thought.
Because thought and body are different substances, the relationship can only be external. Moreover, because they do not share anything in common, some form of mediator is required, which, for Descartes, was the pineal gland. That organ allowed the mind (soul) to perceive the movements of the body, including those related to emotions; and through this organ, the mind could also affect and change the emotions.
One way of overcoming the dichotomy was by postulating a single substance that has both material and mental qualities or characteristics, something like a thinking- body (Il’enkov 1977). In his writings concerning the teaching of emotions, Vygotsky drew on the works of Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary critic of Descartes.
For Spinoza, there are not two substances but precisely one substance, the thinking body, which manifests itself in the contradictory and mutually exclusive body and thought (mind). In the final pages that Vygotsky edited before his death, there are hints that he was moving from his earlier focus on things (e.g. words, thoughts) to the concrete life of the individual. After making a statement about thinking that becomes the thinker of thoughts – a statement almost identical to one made by Nietzsche, the perhaps most vicious critic of all thing-centered philosophies – Vygotsky relates thinking and life:
Thinking was divorced from the full vitality of life, from the motives, interests, and inclina- tions of the thinking individual. Thinking was transformed either into a useless epiphenom- enon, a process that can change nothing in the individual’s life and behavior, or into an independent and autonomous primeval force that influences the life of consciousness and the life of the personality through its intervention. (Vygotsky 1987, 50)
In his elaborations, however, he does not go all the way to a process approach where events are thought of by means of evental categories. He never went as far as his contemporary countryman Mikhail Bakhtin did, who, in Toward a Philosophy of
the Act (Bakhtin 1993), suggests that we understand the act and its ethical dimen- sions only when we start thinking in terms of evental categories, including Being- as- event, world-as-event, and life-as-event, such as in the event of once-occurrent Italy, the event of my experiencing (thinking), the event of death, and the event of interpenetration. Vygotsky, on the other hand, in postulating the unity of affective and intellectual processes, isolates these from everything else and he maintains the separation between idea and reality, such as when he notes how “every idea contains some remnant of the individual’s affective relationship to that aspect of reality which it represents” (Vygotsky 1987, 50). Throughout his final, posthumously pub- lished Thinking and Speech, the intellectualism remains, including his focus on the
“the word’s relationship to the object, its relationship to reality” (285).
In his own words, Vygotsky never got to step into the promised lands that he was seeing on the horizon, the world in flux (of the “flüssig” type, as he wrote in a note shortly before his death). However, Evald V. Il’enkov, a Russian philosopher some- times considered to have provided a philosophical basis for the later Vygotskian thought, showed how the Spinozist take could be developed into a modern theory that no longer dichotomizes body and mind and instead viewed in the thinking body the most fundamental phenomenon to be investigated. Notably, in a discussion of the relevance of Spinoza, Il’enkov focuses on events rather than on a substance- thing. He notes that “thinking is not a product of an action but the action itself”
(Il’enkov 1977, 35) and “one and the same event” (36) manifests itself in two ways.
Importantly in the context of the remainder of the book, the philosopher notes:
For to explain the event we call “thinking,” to disclose its effective cause, it is necessary to include it in the chain of events within which it arises of necessity and not fortuitously. The
“beginnings” and the “ends” of this chain are clearly not located within the thinking body at all, but far outside it. (Il’enkov 1977, 37)
Despite those beginnings, Il’enkov does not perhaps fully achieve the kind of per- spective that is laid out and developed in the remainder of this book, a perspective based on the radical move from things to events required by a transactional approach). Il’enkov still has things side by side with events and does not provide a complete eventual perspective that describes even object-things in terms of events.
Whitehead does have object-things, but these are abstractions with permanent char- acters of events within events and across events. This characterization is apparent in the following quotation from the theory of objects:
An event, considered as gaining its unity from the continuity of extension and its unique novelty from its inherent character of “passage,” contributes one fact to life; and the pattern exhibited within the event, which as self-identical should be a rigid recurrence, contributes the other factor to life. (Whitehead 1919, 198)
The event and recurrent stability need to be theorized together, which leads liveli- ness to be the characteristic of the relation between event and the object-thing as recurrence. Otherwise we end up with abstractions, for “to say that the object is alive suppresses the necessary reference to the event” whereas “to say that an event is alive suppresses the necessary reference to the object” (Whitehead 1919, 196). An important reason for educational psychology to move to a different ontology exists
in the opposition between theory, which tends to be formulated in the form of things, and practice, which inherently is an event. Teachers never deal with things but with events; and what they name the theory–praxis gap has its origin in the difference between the teachings of educational psychology – concerned with lifeless things and processes – and the real life of the classroom. Once we fashion our theories such that they describe events in terms of events, our hopes will be fulfilled to have overcome the gap. At the same time, we will have overcome the gap between body and mind, for one and the same event has both qualities, body and of mind.
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The world is a world of events. (Mead 1932, 1)
To think the event before anything: Is this not an impossible challenge? As soon as we attempt to grasp an event as it happens in itself, we are almost immediately absorbed by another thing, by “things” precisely, frozen before our eyes by a Medusa’s gaze. (Romano 1998, 7)
In Chap. 1, I outline and exemplify the focus of classical (educational) psychol- ogy on things and that this very orientation is the source for the body–mind dualism that continues to plague the field. I also refer to the experience of and philosophical discussions about the fact that life means flux, change, and novelty. This means that we are never confronted in a strong sense with things but with events; and when there appear to be self-identical things then these always are abstractions, for when we seem to perceive the same thing over and over again, the situation has changed, we have changed, and thus the relationship to whatever appears to be recurrent (i.e.
things) has changed. If it appears counter-intuitive that things change even though it sometimes does not appear as such, then consider yourself. You are not the same person that you were at the age of two months, two years, or 20 years; and yet you may like most people have the sense that there is something self-same to the present day. As the second introductory quotation suggests, it is hard to think the event – e.g. our lives – as events because as soon as we try grasping the event, we fall back to things. Whereas thinking the world in terms of stable objects may be legitimate and even useful in everyday life, it leads to insurmountable theoretical problems (Bergson 1911). A transactional approach (to situated cognition), however, requires us to take into account time within the fundamental categories of our theory; but virtually all approaches to situated cognition take the self-action and interaction approach (Roth and Jornet 2013). Without time integral to the unit of analysis, the relations between two phases in the development of an individual are external, that is, arbitrary. This is so because external relations do not represent the inner transfor- mations that unfold in the course of an event.
In the course of our lives, we have come so used to be surrounded by (self- identical, permanent) things that it is hard to imagine that we are subject to a belief