The “Whole Person” Challenge: Addressing Conundrums of Systemic-Holistic Approaches to Human Development

Abstract: In this paper, I explore two interrelated topics that are critically important to studying human development: first, the principle of a systemic-holistic approach and, second, the challenge of understanding the whole person. In his paper on pedology, Vygotsky sets to articulate these topics, facing many challenges along the way. Both aspects are also central to a set of recently popular Relational Developmental Systems Theories (RDST). I discuss how these recent theories, despite important advances, still face the same challenges as did Vygotsky almost a hundred years ago, with a tendency to offer aggregative/composite solutions focused on multiple individual attributes and levels of human ecologies. This tendency appears to be in sync with the goal to achieve some “full” understandings of human development, as motivated by a positivist and de facto colonial (eurocentric) scientistic ethos, which essentializes phenomena such as the “whole person” as fixed, objective things “out there,” thus neglecting researchers’ engagement with them. Consequently, the concept of the whole person remains ever elusive. What is missing is an account of a person as an actor/agent of ashared communal life, or productive self- and community-making, and a protagonist in an integral, non-additive unique lifeproject/agenda that is inextricably a part of the shared communal existence. The proposed alternative, from an activist-trans/formative methodology (with roots in Marxist-Vygotskian ideas), is to consider the whole person as an artifact contingent on, and consubstantial with, particular living functionalities/goals/tasks within ongoing self-and-world/other co-realizing productive practices, including understanding and research.