Berstein's anti-reductionistic materialism: On the road towards a biology of activity (1965).
Bernstein's paper, "On the Road Towards a Biology of Activity," appeared the year before his death.2 With this paper, Bernstein closed several lines of argument that he had been developing from the onset of his career in the early 1920s. The paper converges on the notion of activity. In accordance with his own shifting focus heuristic (cf. Bongaardt, 1996), Bernstein challenged future researchers of movement to integrate models of the movement functions that constitute activity. He suggested that these functions are: the coordination of movement, the planning of movement, and the exploration of better, optimal ways to move. In the 1920s, Bernstein had collaborated with his friend and colleague L.S. Vygotsky at the Moscow Institute of Experimental Psychology. Vygotsky (cf. 1926/1994) was the first to place activity at the core of Soviet psychology. According to Vygotsky, reflexology and behaviorism, then dominant approaches in psychology, were fundamentally wrong; they focus on building-blocks of behavior without addressing phenomena that stand out as typically human, most importantly, consciousness. Rather than starting with building blocks, psychology should start with the daily activity of human beings in their environment and show how this activity relates to consciousness. Forty years later, in his 1965 paper, Bernstein stressed a point that mirrors Vygotsky's: Reflexes are not building blocks of movement. The general characteristics of any movement precede the specificity of such units, whether reflexes or synergies, and this primacy pertains to the actual organization of movements as well as to the study of movement. The development and relevance of the activity concept in Bernstein's work in the period from 1925 to 1965 deserves a study of its own; here, a brief historical sketch of Bernstein's activity concept is offered, along with a few theoretical considerations concerning activity's constituent functions.