Vygotsky and Spinoza: On Monism, Interaction, Freedom, and Affects

A comprehensive treatment is given on monism, freedom, and emotions in Vygotsky and Spinoza, showing that Vygotsky drew on Spinoza throughout his work. Like his contemporaries, he did not fully grasp Spinoza's substance monism in its entirety. However, unlike them, he did not revert to pre-Kantian metaphysics, instead using Spinoza's parallelism positively to qualitatively link different explanatory levels, rather than mechanically connecting them. He adopts a rationalist conception of freedom, like Spinoza, but it varies depending on the stage of his work, shifting between an instrumental or semantic conception. Vygotsky used Spinoza to critique the emotion theories of his time that were based on one or the other pole of Cartesian dualism. He proposed a theory of emotion that linked its different dimensions (motive, perezhivanie, and the bodily), integrating it with his theory of freedom.