In standard approaches to psychology – whether researchers adhere to the biologi- cal model generally associated with the experimental research method or the inter- pretive model generally taken up in many of the fields concerned with learning, development, and teaching – the individual is the unit of analysis. Near the end of his life, Vygotsky began to challenge the idea that the individual could be under- stood independently from its relation to the environment. In a lecture about one month prior to entering the hospital where he died, he proposed a new category, perezhivanie [(emotional) experience]. The Russian term he used is equivalent to the German Erleben and Erlebnis, which is the noun form of a verb that translates
“to go through and experiencing something” while being (absorbed) in an event.
The Russian category was proposed to stand for “the unity/identity [edinstvo] of personal and environmental moments” (Vygotskij 2001, 77). The term “moment”
designates parts of a whole, which means that perezhivanie refers to an irreducible unit that has person and environment as its parts. In a part-whole relation, the rela- tion always is more than the collection of elements arising from disjunctive abstrac- tions (Whitehead 1929/1978). Identity then is not ascribed to the person but to the unit that forms the unity, which means that any characteristic also is that of the person–environment relation, which itself has (temporal, spatial) extension rather than thing-like character. Much later, the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson would emphasize precisely this latter aspect. Thus, for example, he noted that dependency, aggressiveness, and pride are not characteristics of individual per- sons but that “all such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person” (Bateson 1979, 133, emphasis added).
A similar move leads to the ascription of feelings to occasions, and an angry person would then be described as a continuity of feeling of the same subjective form (experience) across successive occasions (Whitehead 1933).
The term perezhivanie sometimes is translated as “(emotional) experience.” But this translation does not do justice to the term, because an experience, like the German Erfahrung, tends to stand for something that one can grasp after some event has come to a close. In pragmatic philosophy, the latter term has been captured in
the notion of “an experience” as distinct from the continuity of experience (Dewey 1934/2008). An experience is completed and therefore forms a whole with a begin- ning and ending. It is thus used as a counterpoint to what we actually are and can be aware off when we are in the midst of something currently happening the very nature of which we can firmly grasp only after this happening has ended. The con- tinuity of experience inherently is confronted with an open and uncertain future.
Thus, although Erleben (Erlebnis) and perezhivanie are often rendered by means of the English experience, such a translation does not do full justice to the original words.1 Replacing the term by “lived experience” also allows suggests a view of experience in the past tense, something that has been lived rather than something that we are currently living.
There are two key aspects that we need to retain and make salient about the cat- egory of perezhivanie (Erleben). First, it denotes what we are aware of and feel while going through and undergoing some occasion. As such, both thinking and feeling are events that accompany the concurrent doing and perceiving that are also cogredient in the overall event. Perezhivanie thus is used to capture an entire slab of presence in the sense of an event described in Chap. 2 – and not in the sense of a thing that one could have or have had, like “an experience.” Second, perezhivanie captures a unity/identity that includes personal and environmental moments.
Vygotsky’s term moment [moment] in the definition of perezhivanie is not the same as the “feature” that appears in the English translation of Vygotsky’s lecture. The term feature marks something that stands out; it refers to the manifestation of a unit in some characteristic of a part and thus constitutes an abstraction. The term moment, as pointed out above, is used to denote an irreducible part of a process, that is, as an event cogredient in a more encompassing event. Thus, for example, in the concrete event of an economic exchange, “relative value form and equivalent form are mutually constitutive, inseparable moments that belong to each other but simul- taneously are mutually exclusive or contradictory extremes, that is, poles of the same value expression” (Marx and Engels 1962, 63). Perezhivanie thus orients edu- cational psychologists to understanding and theorizing human conduct as some- thing that is spread across a situation in its entirety, the person and the environment as it is perceived and acted upon.
There is another difficult issue concerning the Russian word edinstvo that Vygotsky used in the preceding definition of perezhivanie. The Russian term trans- lates both unity and identity. The problem arises when the unity of individual and environment is thought as the rapprochement of separate things. But person and environment do not add up much in the same way as apples and oranges do not add up. This is also why, for all its positive contributions to an understanding of how people and organisms more generally relate to the environment, many ecological approaches have to fail. This is so because these conceive of the environment in terms of stable features – called affordances – that provide opportunities to the organism for doing things: “making shelters, nests, mounds, huts, … swimming,
1 There are many other Vygotskian terms that have been taken up inappropriately in the relevant Western literature (Yasnitsky 2019).
crawling, walking, climbing, flying” (Gibson 2015, 121). The organism is said to take advantage of an offering that the environment makes. That is, the environmen- tal feature is thought of as enabling (making possible) the doing. The theory does begin with an abstraction to explain a form of event, which is an attempt at reverse engineering, for the very identification of the abstraction requires knowledge of how the doing has ended. If we were to think the individual (organism) and environment as things, we can get something like a unity, such as when apples and oranges are thought of as fruit. As things are abstractions, the subsumption of things occurs under an even more encompassing abstraction where concrete details are and have to be dropped. But how can there by an identity of these different things? Apples and oranges do not add up! How can they be identical if they are different? Chap. 2 gives us the essential hint: the organismic life is not separate from environmental life, but, as shown for the percipient event, there is but one event that extends over multiple cogredient events. The percipient event is not separate from those events perceived but contributes to constituting the identity of the organism and the environment (Fig. 2.3, middle part).
A key problem with current scholarship concerning Vygotsky’s notion perezhivanie appears to have its origin in the same thing-oriented ontology that attempts to recon- struct events from the abstracted characteristics entities involved. Because of the exclu- sionary nature of the ingredients, mediators are required that make the connection between the opposing terms. In contrast, Vygotsky proposed investigating human con- duct in terms of the category of perezhivanie understood as the unity/identity of per- sonal and environmental moments. But that step can be realized only if we use an ontology in which the fundamental units are events – which then leads to an evental approach in the way this is outlined in Chap. 2. However, currently available discus- sions are based on ontologies of things (see Chap. 1). Operating within such ontologies, investigators attempt to reconstitute the unity from its manifestations that are external to each other, personal and environmental features. Such features, as seen in Chap. 2, always are abstractions because they stand for characteristics of events in the limit where it does not have temporal or spatial extension. Any co-variation between external features will be coincidental, a deceiving appearance, rather than a reflection of the inner unity/identity of the eventmental phenomenon (Marx and Engels 1962). That is, the relation between external manifestations (expressions) of a phenomenon cannot teach us anything about the inner relation of the different cogredients of an event, and, thus, cannot explain the latter. This is why even the most radical departure from con- ventional educational psychology – which approaches phenomena such as aptitude through the notion of transaction based in the above referenced theory of James J. Gibson (e.g. Corno et al. 2002) – ultimately has to fail if it attempts to begin with personal and environmental characteristic to explain performance. The evental approach presented here begins with the event as a whole within which other events are identified together with their relations. Any characteristics analytically worked out will be abstractions of and from the irrecoverable, only ever once-occurring happening as it was unfolding originally and without any timeout. To work out a process-based (even- tal) approach to the phenomenon of the unity/identity of individual and environment, I return to the same fragment from classroom life that is used in Chap. 1.