New Ideas in Psychology 30 (2012) 144–153

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Personhood: An activist project of historical becomingthrough collaborative pursuits of social transformation

Anna StetsenkoThe Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States

Keywords:VygotskyPersonhoodMoral philosophyEthicsAgencyTransformative

E-mail address: astetsenko@gc.cuny.edu1 The interrelated concepts of Being and Becom

tence (in the sense of ‘‘Being in the world’’) whtransformations in the states of Being (in contradiswith periods of relative stability), wherein (b) transstates of Being a certain type of a person vis-a-vis onrefer to states at subpersonal levels of existence), awhat the person does or accomplishes through onethat an individual undergoes or that happens to anexistence as a path of a continuous, ceaseless, and dvis-a-vis the social world carried through one’s opositing any ontological breaks with the previous

0732-118X/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltdoi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2009.11.008

a b s t r a c t

The goal of this paper is to contribute to recent scholarship thatpursues radical revision of prevalent models of personhood miredin outdated notions of human development and its foundationalprinciples. To achieve this goal, I revisit and expand Vygotsky’sproject of cultural historical psychology to offer a dialecticalframework that encompasses but is not limited to relationalontology. Premised on the notion of collaborative transformativepractice as the grounding for human Being and Becoming,1 myproposal is that at the core of human nature and development liesan ineluctably activist stance vis-a-vis the world; it is the realiza-tion of this stance through answerable deeds composing oneunified life project that forms the path to personhood. The ethicaldimension appears as foundational to Being and Becomingbecause it is integral to actions through which we become who weare while changing the world in collaborative pursuits of socialtransformation. From an activist transformative stance persons areagents not only for whom ‘‘things matter’’ but who themselvesmatter in history, culture, and society and, moreover, who come

ing are employed in the following sense. Being stands for ontological exis-ereas Becoming is a type of Being that implies (a) pathways of constanttinction with the concept of development that combines periods of changeformations pertain to changes in the states of ‘‘Being someone,’’ that is, in thee’s social world (in contradistinction with concepts such as change that cannd conveying (c) active nature of this process in the sense that it stands for’s own pursuits (in contradistinction with the concept of growth as a processindividual). Thus, the concept of Becoming conveys the sense of ontologicalynamic moment-to-moment transformation in one’s standing and relationswn active pursuits whereby a person is constantly changed yet without

states of Being.

d. All rights reserved.

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into Being as unique individuals through and to the extent thatthey matter in these processes and make a contribution to them.

� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

What kind of persons are people living in today’s society? There is little explicit interest in thisquestion in psychology with notable exceptions to be found mostly in classical works that date backmany decades (e.g. by Baldwin, James, Mead, Merlau-Ponty, Vygotsky; cf. Sugarman, 2005). There iseven less attention to the question as to what kind of a society we are living in and to what extent itaccommodates our needs, suits our purposes, and promotes our personhood and agency. The para-mount relevance of these interrelated questions is that without finding answers to them we areunlikely to develop deep insights not only into ourselves but also into how society can be transformedand possibly improved.

It is not that the question of personhood has been ignored – after all, humans are self-interpretingcreatures who cannot and in fact never avoid such questions. Rather, assumptions about personhoodoften lie hidden in theories of human development beneath less wide-ranging conceptualizations,whereas generalities about personhood are avoided. However, matters of such magnitude – about whowe are, how we define ourselves, and what social changes are necessary – are indelibly and powerfullypresent in any and all conceptualizations related to human development, shaping them in a mannersimilar to how a deep oceanic current, though invisible, inevitably affects surface waters and ultimatelydefines their course. Left unaddressed, these matters haunt psychological accounts leaving themvulnerable to hidden whirlwinds and pitfalls of outdated and erroneous assumptions that are notinfrequently harmful.

The models of personhood that are in circulation today, though not always explicitly stated, portraypersons as either governed by genetically predetermined programs inherited from the distant past (asin evolutionary psychology); or as onlooking hosts of internal information processing (as in cogniti-vism); or as automatons mechanically reacting to external stimuli that direct, prod, and coercebehavior (as in behaviorism that, under various guises, is still alive and well in psychology); or asorganisms full of unconscious drives and desires who seek to discharge energy impulses (as inpsychodynamic perspectives); or as blindly following commands from the intracranial play of neuronswith individuals neither aware nor in control over the biochemistry of their own brains (as in a recentlypopular strand of brain reductionism).

What is common to these views is that they celebrate a certain sort of person who, firstly, is at thewhim of powerful forces outside of one’s control and even awareness, and thus can hardly expect or beexpected to act purposefully and responsibly. Secondly, this is a solitary, autonomous individual notonly unrelated and unattached to others but in constant antagonism with them, impelled to avoid andresist social forces that are intrinsically alien to human ‘‘primordial nature.’’ The popularity of thesemodels is not surprising because theories are known to reflect societies and prevalent ideologiesserving them that capture life through the lens of dominant interests – even when these ideologieshave long outlived their utility and accuracy and continue to exist to society’s detriment.

Importantly, many recent strands of research that claim to challenge traditional portrayals none-theless either adhere to one of these models (e.g., positive psychology that tacitly operates withtraditional notions especially in placing emphasis on solitary individual), or openly denounce therelevance of personhood. The latter is the case in alternative post-modernist perspectives such as socialconstructionism and some versions of sociocultural and critical theory. Although these theoriessuccessfully combat outdated modes of thinking mired in individualism and naturalism, they avoidexplicitly addressing general (meta-theoretical) questions about issues such as the essence ofhumanness and the roots of agency. Their success in overcoming traditional portrayals of humanbeings as solipsistic creatures pre-programmed by their evolutionary ancestry, biology, or other naturalforces outside of society comes at a price of retreating from the issues of subjective experience, ethics,and personhood.

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In the end, these diverse approaches reveal remarkable affinity (alongside some contrasts) in thatthey all cut personhood – along with mind, agency, and meaning – seriously down to size, leaving usbereft of a sense of personhood and of a hope of grasping foundations for our society that might assistthe advancing of social agendas needed to reform it. The shocking views (aired daily in media outlets,even including the National Public Radio in the USA) that ‘‘we’re all puppets’’ or machines (see Wright,1994) under the control of brain chemistry or genes that in order to propagate themselves act to instillin us a desire to procreate and compete are not merely inadequate; rather, they are reprehensiblydetrimental to individuals and society.

The reasons why contemporary theories stay away from issues of personhood are not unrelated tothe political climate of the last decades when ideals of individual profit and narrowly understood self-interest were relentlessly promoted. In this climate, apart from notable exceptions offered by frame-works on the margins of social disciplines (e.g., critical race theory, feminist and literary studies,pedagogy), few scholars cared to address broad issues of common humanity and social change. Artistsand novelists, as is often the case, have been especially perceptive of the consequences following ‘‘thedeath of the character’’ and ‘‘the end of the apogee of the individual.’’ The novelist who coined theseexpressions, Saul Bellow, has also drawn attention to, in his words, the terrible predictions we live with,the visions of ruin where the decline and fall of everything is our daily dread and people are agitatedand tormented by social crises (Bellow, 1976). As his novels exemplify, however, it is not in the interestof human beings to give up this core human enterprise, with the problem lying not in itself but in itsinadequate accounts.

It is against this background that this paper is written – with an acute sense of urgency thatcurrently prevalent models of personhood are in need of a radical revision. To achieve this goal, I revisitand expand Vygotsky’s project of cultural-historical psychology – a uniquely activist (in multiplemeanings of this term) framework underpinned by ideals of social justice and created during the timeof an unprecedented social experiment fueled by the revolutionary impulse to create a better society,all the tragic failings of this experiment notwithstanding (cf. Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004a). In doing so,I join in recent attempts (e.g., Martin & Sugarman, 1999; Sugarman, 2005; Williams & Beyers, 2001) todevelop an alternative to both the dominant reductionist and individualist accounts on the one hand,and those post-modernist approaches that refrain from theorizing personhood and agency, on theother. Similar to these recent attempts, I suggest that persons are agentive beings who develop throughembeddedness in sociocultural contexts and within relations to others. However, in expanding thisconstrual, my proposal is that at the core of human nature and development lies an ineluctably activiststance vis-a-vis the world that all human beings exercise (whether they know it or not) and that it isthe realization of this stance that forms the path to personhood.

2. From relational ontology to transformative activist stance

Traditional approaches, limited as they are in theorizing human personhood, do not do justice to ourintuitions and experiences of either being a ‘‘person’’ or knowing about fellow human beings andeveryday life. These intuitions and experiences, however, cannot be wiped out or ignored. What theyreveal is that human life is a realm where the most salient attribute of everyday situations is thepersistent constraint to act; where challenges abound and human beings have to navigate complex,multilayered social webs infused with tacit and not so tacit social contracts, rules, responsibilities,expectations, and obligations; where decisions as to what is right or wrong and what to do next aremade daily under the pressures of uncertainty and unpredictability; where these decisions are fraughtwith difficult choices and often have long lasting, sometimes life changing, consequences; whereothers are profoundly enmeshed with everything persons do, prominently figuring in even the utmostintimate ‘‘depths’’ of one’s thoughts, feelings, intentions, and aspirations – providing necessaryresources and supports, standards and valuations critical for acting, while also constantly deliveringverdicts and judgments and imposing expectations, encouragements, and sanctions; where the weightof tradition and the need to follow on with what has been done in the past and to fit in with the statusquo are combined with the urgent demand to innovate, to plan ahead, and to find our own solutions todilemmas that had never existed before and can only be glimpsed as likely to emerge in the future; andwhere the only permanent ‘‘given’’ is that the world is in constant change that can spin off in

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unexpected directions at any moment. Most importantly, this is the world where everything a persondoes affects other human beings, while what others are doing or have done in the past affects eachperson’s life now and in the future. Even the most ‘‘ordinary’’ and mundane life appears, from this briefdescription, to be directly constituted by actions and deeds carried out by persons who always act intandem with others, simultaneously seeking authenticity and relations to others (and de facto alwaysbeing immersed in such relations) – persons required to be conscious and conscientious, responsiveand responsible agents in society rather than simply ‘‘undergoers’’ of solitary experiences.

What theory can account for and explain as well as ultimately help improve ordinary human lifethat only appears to be ordinary and is instead more like a challenging accomplishment? It has to bea theory that conceptualizes personhood in ways that capture and do justice to the complexities ofhuman life and our experiences of ourselves with respect to matters at the very foundation of humanBeing – about what kind of persons we are and what it means to be human. Moreover, such a theoryhas to be underpinned by an ontological vision sufficient to support a critical model of history andsociety while leaving ample space for human agency and personhood.

A number of recent frameworks have made important steps forward in theorizing persons as agentsof their own and social life while navigating between the extremes of naturalism and socialconstructivism to develop understandings of individuals as simultaneously determining and deter-mined by the world. These frameworks offer alternative analytics including relational notions ofdiscourse, interaction, difference, and embodiment drawing on theories, among others, by Merlau-Ponty and Levinas (Burkitt, 2003; Williams & Beyers, 2001). One prominent theme has been toreinstate a construal of humans as beings who partially create themselves on the basis of their ownself-interpretations centered around ethics and morality (Taylor, 1989), turning to narrativity in orderto account for the ambiguities and complexities of human life. Understanding humans as profoundlyrelational – dialogical, embedded in sociocultural context, embodied, interrelated with others, andtherefore ethical – is, in my view, the major achievement of this recent theorizing. However, more workis needed to have the ethical dimension fully integrated into accounts of persons as agentive andresponsible especially at the level of issues of a very basic sortdabout the way humans are, that is,about the foundational character of their Being.

The next step in theorizing personhood and human development after establishing their relationalcharacter is, in my view, to dialectically expand relationality through the notion that human devel-opment is an activist project that is not only imbued with dialogism, ethics, and interrelatedness butalso, and more originary, is grounded in collaborative, purposeful, and answerable deeds ineluctablycolored by visions of and commitments to a particular project of social transfromation. Dialecticalexpansion of this sort can be achieved, in my view, with the foundation of the Vygotskian project thatpioneered but did not complete this task, within a dialectical framework encompassing but not limitedto relational ontology.

Explicitly grounded in Marxist philosophy and profoundly saturated with goals of a radical socialtransformation, Vygotsky’s theory stands out even today in its philosophical depth, conceptualbreadth, and clear ideological commitment to social justice. Particularly remarkable (but overlooked incontemporary interpretations) is its orientation toward an account of human development built onfully relational premises that nonetheless does not eschew individual phenomena including person-hood and agency. As such, Vygotsky’s project potentially provides an overarching framework that couldbe used to facilitate unification of otherwise disconnected approaches concerned with phenomena ofhuman development and personhood. Yet, much effort is needed to advance and expand Vygotsky’sproject, especially in restoring its original (radical and revolutionary) thrust, in order for this project toserve the role of a unifying framework. For, all the radical novelty and progressive spirit of Vygotsky’soriginal ideas notwithstanding, his approach remained inconsistently articulated and not withoutcertain gaps. Moreover, although many important advances have been achieved in elaborating thisproject since its author’s untimely death, its key revolutionary import has been somewhat diminishedalong the way, especially due to ideological pressures of an increasingly stifling regime in the SovietUnion. Its interpretations in the last couple of decades in Western scholarship, given the peculiarsociopolitical climate during these decades, have also circumvented the revolutionary import of thisproject. In particular, the end of the cold war and the dismantling of the Soviet Union – which in theiraftermath were myopically perceived as the ‘‘end of history’’ and the ‘‘final triumph of capitalism’’ –

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were marked (as recently widely admitted) by an exuberant optimism and unfounded faith inunregulated markets that in reality degenerated into a self-destructing economy and attendantconservative modes of thinking imbued with an ideology of rampant individualism. These years havenot been particularly conducive to the flourishing of radical progressive ideas, especially, as is the casewith Vygotsky, associated with communitarian ideology.

The critical expansion of Vygotsky’s project entails restoring the original worldview underpinningthis project. This worldview was worked out by members of this project as a result of absorbing keyinfluential strands of thinking at the start of the 20th century. These strands included, first, the phil-osophical system of Marx (itself assimilating earlier achievements of Kant and Hegel) with itsdialectical premise about reality as a unitary (total, indivisible) process that is constantly anddynamically in motion, transition, change, and development – replacing commonsense notions of‘‘things’’ and ‘‘entities’’ with notions of ‘‘process’’ and ‘‘relation.’’ Second, Vygotsky’s project integratedDarwinian understanding of evolution according to which all living forms evolve and develop withinprocesses of continuous relations with their surrounds and with other living forms, rather than withinpreordained processes wherein fixed, independent entities develop internally from some primordialinner essences. Third, Vygotsky’s project assimilated and added to the study of human development inline with then cutting-edge discoveries in physiology, anthropology, phylogenesis, ontogenesis, andcomparative psychology. Forth, added to the mix was Vygotsky’s deep knowledge of literary theory,pedagogy, linguistics, and semiotics providing insights into sign mediation and symbolization.

The resulting core premise of Vygotsky’s worldview was that all organisms, from the first momentof life, find themselves in unbreakable, intricate relations with the world formed by constantly ongoing,open-ended and ever changing (dynamic) interactions and back-and-forth exchanges with theworlddexchanges of energy, resources, forms, products, and so on. It is through these exchanges andinteractions that all characteristics of organisms and aspects of their life are constituted as relativelyenduring yet always retaining a fluidity associated with their process-like nature. Behavioral andcognitive characteristics, therefore, cannot be specified in advance of individual development andinteraction with the world. Instead, they are constructed in the course of a life span of a given organism(cf. recent epigenetic accounts, e.g. Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2003).

Viewing the distinctiveness of human development as having to do with its unique mode of rela-tionship to the world was one of the great achievements of Vygotsky’s psychology (likening it tosystems of thought developed by Dewey and Piaget). But it is the next, and related, step – providing anoriginal ontological specification for relations that ground human development while introducing thenotions of collectivity, culture, and historicity – wherein the novelty and revolutionary import ofVygotsky’s project lies (Stetsenko, 2008). As Vygotsky (1997, p. 18) stated, ‘‘[i]n the process of historicaldevelopment, the social human changes modes and ways of own behavior, transforms natural pre-givens and functions, works out and creates new forms of behavior – the specifically cultural ones.’’ Hedid not have time however to fully articulate this worldview and to develop its implications forpersonhood.

The change that Vygotsky had in mind (and that had been captured in Marxist theory before himthough not in its application to psychology) resides in what constitutes the very foundation of humanlife – a shift toward what Vygotsky termed ‘active adaptation’ and what could be more preciselytermed active collaborative transformation of nature. In this logic, the beginning of a uniquely human life(at the advent of the human species) is associated with and marked by a shift from adaptation toa given environment (that governs in the animal world) to an active and even pro-active (that is, goal-directed and purposeful), collaborative transformation of the environment with the help of collectivelyinvented and gradually elaborated, from generation to generation, cultural tools. This new relation tothe world, precisely as a new form of life (Lebensweise) – the sociocultural collaborative transformativepractice that unfolds and gradually expands in time – in essence brings about the emergence of humanbeings and constitutes the foundation for their development in all its expressions and facets.

This change signifies the end of strictly biological evolution and marks the ‘‘leap to freedom,’’entailing a new reality of human Becoming where new forces – those of history, culture, and society –reign. According to this view, humans come to be and come to know – each other, themselves and theworld – while transforming their world and, in the process, while collectively creating their own lifeand their own nature, along with their society and history. This idea was advanced against the

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naturalistic understanding ‘‘that only nature affects human beings and that only natural conditionsdetermine their historical development .,’’ forgetting that ‘‘man in turn acts upon nature, changes it,creates new conditions of existence for himself’’ (Marx & Engels, 1978, p. 156).

Importantly, the transformative collaborative practice supersedes adaptation and natural selection,that is, dialectically negates, without eliminating, them. The notion of superseding conveys the sense ofsomething being taken over by a new process and integrated into it so that the former processcontinues its life, yet now in a subordinate role. The hallmark of human practices is that they do notnarrowly conform to existing reality and do not aim to fit in with it. Instead, the goal is to change theworld and the persons in it – with the two being instantaneously created in and through humanpractices. These practices, on the one hand, produce and engender social interactions (intersubjec-tivity), as well as psychological processes and agency (individual subjectivity, which nonethelessremains profoundly social), and on the other handdat mature stages of development in history and inontogenydare themselves reciprocally produced by these very interactions and subjectivities.

These practices continuously and cumulatively evolve through time, constituting the realm of socialhistory and culture while being enacted and carried out by human collectivities through uniquecontributions by individual participants who always act as social subjects (the point often neglected inVygotsky’s project especially in its later stages). In this dialectical process, there is always an enduringnexus of relations with past and future generations because activities in the present inevitably build onprevious conditions and accomplishments; they also contribute to unfolding collective practices thusincurring changes for the future and, moreover, are contingent on the future because they are goal-directed and purposeful. In expansion of the relational worldview, this conceptualization positscollaborative human practice directed at transforming the world as a radically new ontology ofhistorical Becoming as a unified, and uniquely human, realm. Processes through which humans collec-tively change their world are primary and foundational in the sense that all other phenomena ofhuman life are seen as grounded in these transformative collaborative practices, as growing from thesepractices, constituting their dimensions, serving their goals, and never completely breaking away fromthem. Importantly, no ontological gaps are posited to separate phenomena within this realm, withhuman mind and personhood, self-regulation and cognition all seen as representing instantiations(or moments) of human practice. The centrality of collaborative transformative practices for human lifeand development can be viewed, I suggest, on a par with the centrality of evolution in biology andtherefore as a condition sine qua non for understanding these processes. It is also within and for thesepractices that human personhood becomes necessary and possible.

3. Personhood: an activist project of a historical becoming-trough-doing

The interrelated implications from this transformative ontology of historical Becoming for thenotion of personhood are the following. First, it overcomes the contemplative stance in that humansare understood as not passively dwelling in the world or observing it from afar, without direct andimmediate engagement. Instead, humans are understood as being connected with the world preciselythrough their own acts – through what has been termed ‘‘engaged agency’’ in moral philosophy (Taylor,1995). Similarly to this philosophy, here too the disinterested observers and the self-contained indi-viduals understood as separate units existing prior to and independently of the world are replaced withthe notion that persons are constituted by enduring engaged agency and as a nexus of relations.

What is added however is that the transformative stance provides a deep, worldview-level rationalefor this construal of personhood derived from and supported by explorations into phylogeny, ontogeny,and history of sign mediation. In addition, it dispenses not only with the passive human being butsimultaneously also with the construal of the world as self-contained and existing prior to and inde-pendently from human beings. Therefore, the second implication is that the world itself is understoodin its human relevance – as a dynamic uninterrupted flow of actionable human deeds stretchingthrough time, as a flow of practice brought into existence and enacted by people. Thus understood, theworld does not exist separately from human beings and cannot be described apart from them, inisolation from what people actually do and perform in their lives, with human actions constituting noless than the lived world itself (cf. Bakhtin, 1993). This reality can be termed life-world because it is theworld where people live but not in a manner of passively inhabiting it. It also represents ‘‘everyday

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reality’’ because it is immediately given to people in even the most mundane situations and episodes,rather than removed from them; yet it should not be equated with the ‘‘everyday’’ in the sense ofmerely and only mundane, putatively inferior to some putatively higher order levels above humanconcerns and aspirations. Perhaps the term for this reality should be actuality (in its etymologyderiving from act in many languages – Wirklichkeit [German], deijstvitelnost [Russian]) – a realm wherehuman activities, human praxis, and deeds form the ultimate grounding for the world that is notdiscovered but made by humans and, therefore, is ‘‘in need’’ of them for its very coming into Being.

Third, because the world is taken in its human relevance – as inhabited and even enacted, orperformed, in human practice – it appears as indelibly imbued with meanings and other phenomena ofhuman subjectivity (what was termed ‘‘ideality’’ by Ilyenkov, 1982); the latter only exist through theirrole in creating the world, making changes and leaving tangible traces in it.

Fourth, although human transformative practice is carried out by individuals in and through theirunique and irreducibly personal (but not a-social) contributions, from their unique positioning inhistory and society, the collective dimension is taken to be primary – because each contribution isinextricably relational, representing a nexus of interrelations with other people, and thus with societyand history. Therefore, individuals never start from scratch and never completely vanish; instead, theyenter and join in with social practices as participants who build upon previous accomplishments andalso inevitably and forever change the social matrix of these practices (if only in modest ways), leavingtheir own indelible traces in history. Therefore the relational self is starkly different from the solipsisticself that is merely self-defining, existing in isolation from other people. Instead, the relational self isborn into a world that has been developed by others and that is waiting for human beings to adopt andchange it.

Fifth, this perspective also implies that people perceive the world and things only through the prismof their relevance in the overall fabric of their life – what these things stand for in their activity and vis-a-vis their goals and purposes. That is, the meaning of things is grounded in how they matter to people(cf. the notion of ‘‘import’’ in Taylor, 1989). This is not the same as the egotistic instrumentalism ofnarrow individualism where the end goal is limited to reaching self-serving and self-gratifying goodsand payoffs. What is at stake is a broader point about the all-encompassing centrality of humanreciprocal engagement in and with the world to the extent that there is no way that we can extractourselves out of this engagement. We can never take a neutral stance of a disinterested observeruninvolved in what is going on. This brings the dimensions of the ethical to the very center of the wholehuman enterprise of Being and Becoming.

The last two implications are well understood in relational ontology and moral philosophy (anddownplayed by some neo-Marxists such as Ilyenkov, 1982; cf. Stetsenko, 2005). However, compared tothese perspectives, the stance of transformative collaborative practice permits bridging the dividebetween the subjective and the objective realms more resolutely and directly. This is because humanpraxis – taken as the grounding realm of human Being – immediately and inevitably cuts across thisdivide, existing neither in the world per se, nor in the self-contained individual, but precisely at theintersection of the two, that is, in-between them. This intersectional realm absorbs both putativepolarities so that the organism and the environment are understood to be reciprocally brought intoexistence through and in the transactions between them. This is a strong ontological move that de factoabolishes the duality of human existence and the bifurcation of nature into objective and subjectiveplanes, or into natural and cultural dimensions, thus resolving the great problem of naturalism(cf. Taylor, 1989) in which phenomenology and ontology are not reconciled. The advantage of theperspective developed herein is that of simultaneously overcoming both outdated biases – that ofseeing the world as composed of static things separate from individuals and that of seeing individualsas separate from the material world of human practice. That is, the stance of transformative practicepermits us to grasp that apparently outward (and seemingly ‘‘fixed’’) social phenomena and institu-tions such as, say, the Federal Reserve on the one hand, and the apparently ‘‘inward’’ phenomenology ofhuman subjectivity such as thoughts and feelings, on the other, are not separately existing, staticphenomena. Rather, these seemingly ‘‘sturdy’’ social institutions and these purportedly ephemeralmental contents (appearing to be the exact opposites in the old mode of thinking) are in fact closelyconnected – representing interrelated moments (more or less fleeting or durable) of one and the samerealm of human practice enacted by people in their collective pursuits. In other words, the materiality of

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the world is revealed as endowed with meaning and relevance though always only for someone, for anagent who is engaged in the world and, vice versa, human subjectivity at the same time stands infusedwith the materiality of always tangible human practice (and its artefacts and products) out of which itemerges and through which it exists. That is, the world is revealed ‘‘as a forum of human actions’’which takes the natural world into its orbit, absorbs, and transforms it on its own unique grounds – thespecifically human realm of collaborative meaningful practice. Therefore, the most critical point is thatunlike in moral philosophy and in some neo-Marxist interpretations, the world of facts and of humanexperience is bridged through ascertaining the human relevance of material practice alongside andsimultaneously with ascertaining the material, practical relevance of human subjectivity and inter-subjectivity (cf. Stetsenko, 2005; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004b).

From the perspective outlined herein, the ethical can be situated at the core of human Becoming instrikingly obvious and direct ways. This is because human collaborative transformative practice isprecisely the type of realm that lends itself naturally (not naturalistically) to formulations in ethicalterms. Namely, such a realm immediately implies that the world is constituted by none other thanincarnate answerable deeds united as one ceaseless process of ‘‘ideological Becoming’’ (Bakhtin, 1993;cf. his idiosyncratic term postuplenie, see Stetsenko, 2007) in pursuit of meaningful changes in theworld.

Given their core and defining quality, these deeds cannot unfold without being anchored in thenotions of what is good or bad, right or wrong, and what to do next. A being who needs to act in orderto exist cannot be neutral or uncertain regarding its surrounds because acting (unlike reacting orpassively dwelling) presupposes knowing which way is up and what direction to go. Acting requireshaving a compass that helps one to know one’s location – where one is coming from, where one is now,and where one is going – while taking a position from which, and uniquely from which, a person canevaluate what is going on and what is to be done next in light of a destination of one’s Becoming.

Ethical and purposeful dimensions therefore appear as foundational to Being and Becoming (andknowing, since knowing is a form of acting too) because they are integral to actions through which webecome who we are while changing something in and about the world – always acting together withother people, for other people, and affecting other people while being reciprocally affected by them.That is, the ethical can be most fully integrated into the very foundations of human Becoming ifa contemplative stance vis-a-vis the world is replaced with a more active stance anchored in trans-formative practices and the answerable deeds composing them.

Within the unity of my ‘once-occurring answerable life’ composed of an uninterrupted flow ofresponsive and responsible deeds that cannot be undone and that leave traces in the world, the ethical(‘the ought’) is turned into a central, ubiquitous dimension that underpins and penetrates all otheraspects of Being and Becoming, and thus represents a form-creating quality and an anchoringconstituent of the whole edifice of human life. This approach is akin in some aspects yet also differentfrom the relational ontology grounded either in immediate experiences (in hermeneutics andphenomenology), or narrativity (in self-interpretative and discursive accounts), or embodiment anddifference (in recent interpretations based in Merlau-Ponty and Levinas). The core difference is thatpositing transformative collaborative practice at the core of human development suggests that thisdevelopment is an active and even activist project of a historical Becoming aimed at contributing tocommon human history. In relational ontology, a person is embedded in the social world and is a specialkind of agent for whom things have characteristically human significance – for whom things matter(cf. Sugarman, 2005). From the activist transformative stance outlined herein, however, persons areagents not only for whom ‘‘things matter’’ but who themselves matter in history, culture, and societyand, moreover, who come into Being as unique individuals through and to the extent that they matter inthese processes and make a contribution to them.

The resulting picture of personhood is that the self can only realize itself by taking an activist stancevis-a-vis the world; this, in turn, presupposes the need to commit oneself to certain goals and a visionof how the world should be and to developing a life project to achieve this vision– with matters as towhat is right or wrong and which societal arrangements should be sought to accomplish one’s idealsplaced at the center. Developing one’s project and mission in the world entails taking a stance on one orthe other (not infrequently warring) side within the social ‘‘drama’’ of life, and is thus not a mundaneoccurrence but a true struggle that requires courage and will – as well as, ultimately, serving as a source

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of these very qualities. In this view, each person simultaneously defines oneself and the world andthrough this, ultimately comes to be oneself – a unique individual who has an irreplaceable role to playand a unique mission to fulfill within humanity’s collaborative pursuits and, thus, within our commonhuman history. This process therefore is the exact opposite of the loss of individuality. Instead, indi-vidual uniqueness as the core attribute of personhood is forged precisely and singularly in the socialarena, vis-a-vis social matters, and within the social events that constitute human history.

This stance cannot be claimed from nowhere. There is a certainty of historical place and timedefined by realities of life in a given community including its prevalent conflicts and contradictions. It isup to each individual to discern these conflicts and to figure out the defining predicament of one’stimes in order to form a commitment to making a unique contribution to the ongoing communal lifeand history. Vygotsky (2004, p. 343) expressed a remarkably prescient insight (derived from Marx) onhow personhood and society are interrelated when he stated that people need to master the truthabout society before they can master truth about themselves (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 343). In furtherdeveloping this view from the position developed herein, it can be argued that mastering the truthabout society and becoming a person are actually deeply intertwined, even simultaneous endeavors thatcannot precede each other but rather, have to be carried out in conjunction– as differing aspects of oneand the same process of a historical activist Becoming that is simultaneously a co-authoring of commonhistory.

4. Conclusions

The stance of collaborative transformative practice as carried out by contributions embodied inanswerable deeds by individually unique persons who always act as society members is robust enoughto encapsulate ontological, epistemological, and ethical/moral dimensions, while also moving beyondnaıve objectivism and uncommitted relativism. This stance builds upon and integrates insights fromrelational ontology that overcomes the hubris of individualism and instead emphasizes the process-like, relational social fabric as constitutive of human Being. The transformative activist stance, however,goes farther in that it reinstates the relevance of the individual and re-introduces personhood on thenew grounds of a different worldview in which the primacy of the collective is ascertained along withthe role individuals play in it. By capitalizing on the constitutive role of answerable deeds that form oneuninterrupted flow of an activist Becoming, this stance allows for a seamless and unequivocal integrationof the ethical (the ‘ought’) into the most basic description of human development and human natureitself.

The transformative ontology of social practicedaugmented by the notion of individual contribu-tions to this practice through activist Becoming as a pathway to personhoodddispenses with the strictdichotomy between collective and individual levels in human development. What it offers instead isone process (in need of a new term, perhaps ‘‘collectividual,’’ to convey the amalgamation of social andindividual in one unified realm, see Stetsenko, 2010) of people always acting together in pursuit of theircommon goals, bound by communal bonds and filaments, yet individually unique. In this dialecticalapproach, there is no need to get rid of the individual and of personhood because there is no such thingas a solitary person performing anything in disconnection from other people, outside of history and thesocial fabric of life. Instead, an individual human being is an ensemble of social relations (as Marxfamously stated), being first formed within and out of these relations and then coming to embody,carry out, and expand them through one’s own life and deeds. What this deceptively simple pointimplies is that each individual human being is truly and deeply social and, moreover, who alwaysmatters in some way or some sense d that is, a person who represents the totality of human history (inall its vicissitudes though under a particular perspective), carries it on, contributes to it, and ultimatelybears responsibility for its future. To be able to see history and society embodied and expressed in, andeven created through, the deeds of one single persondregardless of how powerless, insignificant, andfragile this one person may appear to others or even to oneselfdis a truly formidable task incontemporary world in crisis and in need of a profound change. Understanding the nature of this crisis,its roots, and how and what contribution can and needs to be made to resolving it is therefore the keyquestion simultaneously for each person and for psychology wanting to make a difference and thusultimately to matter in the world.

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