ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the nature of thinking as a human capacity sketch with the help of Levi-Strauss, of Marx and Engels, and of the Soviet thinkers about thinking, namely, Vygotsky and Luria. The chapter shows the beginning of a historical-materialist account of thinking identify in the German Ideology (GI), in which the topic of thinking was addressed, albeit sketchily, in terms of language and the division of labour. It also elaborates the contribution to a science of thinking made by Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria. The analysis in the GI directs them towards an occupational account of the flourishing of analytical thinking, so the work of the Soviet thinkers alerts them to the importance of modes of language to the nurturing of thinking capabilities. Vygotsky was the 'metapsychologist' who sought a historico-cultural method of understanding 'consciousness', one which would be neither 'mentalistic' nor 'naturalistic', that is, which would be reduced to neither mysterious introspective states of mindedness nor brain functioning.