Chapter 3: The Duality of Activity

Let us return to the questions we have posed. How should the contradiction be resolved between scientific and everyday concepts of activity? The relationship, the true connection between everyday and scientific concepts, can be interpreted in different ways. One way is to simply drop the common-sense point of view in favor of theoretical conceptions. But such scientism, while it may be somewhat appropriate for nonhumanitarian knowledge, is, in our view, completely unjustified in the humanities (philosophy, pedagogy, psychology). For all the apparent respectability of the slogan “Science is always right!,” violence against common sense in the humanities is in reality no better and no worse than the obscurantism of champions of “common sense” with regard to scientific concepts. Just as colliding matter and antimatter destroy each other, so the collision of militant scientism and no less militant obscurantism leaves no room for either science or common sense. Theoretical conceptions undoubtedly subjugate conceptions of everyday consciousness, but the act of subjugating them is not at all an act of merciless negation, “bare, purposeless.” The theoretical subjugation of common sense retains, or should retain, elements of the latter’s original object-relatedness, elements anchored and mystically assimilated in mankind’s original prescientific conceptions. Breaking with common sense, as with something deliberately unsound, fallacious, fundamentally false, means breaking with the very subject-matter of research, declaring it fallacious or unworthy of the theorist’s attention, striking it at the root. Subjugating common sense theoretically must obviously be understood only as sublation. Our solution to this problem is conditioned on overcoming the postulate of congruity and on differentiation between the processes of realization and the actual motion of activity (see Chapter 1). Therefore, let us return to the questions originally posed. Is activity subjective? Let us reformulate this question as follows: If the subject is logically the bearer and conveyor of a goal, then is it legitimate in