EMOTIONS

Concern about the education of the emotions in this century begins against an unpromising philosophical background. The central modern tradition on the analysis of emotions originates with the work on morality of David Hume. Hume, famously, distinguished reason and emotion (passion), believed that reason in itself was unable to motivate us and therefore held that morality, with its motivational essence, must be based upon emotion. The emotions, according to Hume, are ‘original existences’, that is, states that a person comes to be in which have no reference to anything outside themselves. For example, Hume compares being angry with being ‘more than five foot high’ in that neither of these things has any reference to any other object; whereas reason, because it deals with either the relationship of ideas (for example, in mathematics) or the relationship of things (as in science), does have reference to things outside itself. And it is this reference that enables us to talk about truth and falsity with regard to reason (you refer to these things either correctly or incorrectly), but makes it totally inappropriate to believe that emotions can be true or false: but, if they cannot be such, then they cannot be reasonable or unreasonable because truth and falsity just are the province of reason; it makes sense to think that a proposition in mathematics is true or false and therefore reasonable or unreasonable; it makes no sense at all to think that a pain or a pleasure is true or false. Hume’s analysis overturned nearly 2,000 years of philosophical

speculation concerning morality. It was a direct attack on the Platonic and Christian idea of morality as a battle between (angelic) reason and (animal) passion where being good is a question of reason resisting the promptings of desire: whilst Hume’s analysis, if accepted, shows the fundamental importance of the emotions to morality. But it also seems to show that any talk of the education of the emotions is beside the point. If emotions just happen to us or not, if they by their very nature cannot be reasonable or unreasonable, then how could we possibly go about educating the emotions (Hume 1958, 1962)? The assault on the Humean position was seriously begun by Bed-

ford (1956-57) – although Bedford’s paper was not directly aimed at Hume but rather at the faculty psychology theories that derived from a Humean picture – where it was pointed out that an account of emotions which focuses upon what we feel when we experience a particular emotion (i.e. upon the ‘original existences’) must be seriously inadequate given our rich vocabulary for emotional description and our lack of criteria for distinguishing feelings in terms of this

vocabulary. So, for instance, shame and embarrassment are both emotions, but to try to distinguish them in terms of either the feelings experienced when someone is ashamed or embarrassed or the behaviour exhibited seems impossible. Rather than looking at psychology – or behaviour – for the distinction, we need, instead, to look at the logical differences in the terms themselves. So, in this instance, shame has a necessary connection with being at fault for something that embarrassment does not. We can make the same point concerning terms such as envy and jealousy, anger and indignation, expectation and hope; that the latter of the pair in each case must include a judgement about the situation in hand which the former does not. For example, you may envy someone their girlfriend but you can only be jealous of them if, in some way, you believe the girl belongs to you. Emotion words ‘form part of the vocabulary of appraisal and criticism, and a number of them belong to the more specific language of moral criticism’ (Bedford 1956-57). That is, they involve beliefs, and as such beliefs can be well-or ill-founded, perceptive or unperceptive, rational or irrational, true or false; we can, contra Hume, properly talk of the emotions associated with such appraisals as reasonable or unreasonable. More recently Bennett and Hacker (2003) have drawn attention to the connection between the emotions and caring and the significance of the former via their engendering of the latter. As yet, the educational implications of their account have not been drawn out. Bedford’s paper seemed to open the door again to talking about

educating the emotions. His points were taken up and further elucidated in Peters (1970a, 1971). Peters, like Bedford, insisted that emotions have cognitive content in that they involve appraisals of the world, and holds that such appraisals can be the focus of educational endeavour; that is, we can try to ensure that we teach children to see the world clearly. But further, Peters also believed that there are other educational tasks associated with the emotions. He noted that we can suffer emotions passively or such emotions can become the motives for appropriate – or sometimes inappropriate – action, and believed that it was attention to this area of our emotional life which merited work by educationalists. But he also believed that a psychology which was confined within the behaviouristic or physiological traditions, and thus simple-minded concerning the range of emotions, was singularly ill-equipped to contribute to this educational task. The Bedford-Peters position is both interesting and important with

regard to the education of the emotions. However, serious doubts still remain. It is not at all clear, for instance, that all emotions have

the cognitive content which gives a grip to education. It may be the case that we cannot be jealous or indignant or proud without reason, but the same does not seem to be true of cheerfulness or misery. The clarification of appraisals which Peters recommends also may have significant limits. It may be the case that, faced with the task of giving reasonable appraisals concerning our emotions we would have to stop talking – except in very particular cases – of being afraid of spiders (because fear of X involves the belief that X is dangerous and spiders are not usually dangerous). But the realisation that we have used the wrong word – or, perhaps, made the wrong appraisal – is hardly likely to prevent our unease when spiders are about. Indeed, it may be the case that our talk of being afraid of spiders is an attempt to rationalise completely irrational feelings, that is, we talk this way because we are afraid, for no good reason, of spiders. This may be important in terms of moral education because it may give pause to an unreasonable optimism that, when we tackle the false beliefs in a statement like ‘I hate black people because they take our jobs’, the hostility expressed will vanish. Last, the talk of properly canalising the emotions into appropriate action both begs certain questions as to what is deemed appropriate and seems an unlikely target for direct attack. Whilst it does connect with certain approaches to moral education (see Ryle 1972 and D. Carr 1991), it is noteworthy that such approaches see the growth of morality as something to be learned rather than taught through training, exemplification and the use of vicarious examples (see virtue theory). In the last twelve years there has been a growing interest among

educators, especially in the United States, in the ideas concerning emotional education put forward by Goleman (1995), and these have been used to underpin schemes for social and emotional learning. Whilst Goleman’s work takes off from recent work concerning cognition and the emotions within Psychology, e.g. Gardner (1993), it also traces its roots to the works of Aristotle. However, there has been sustained criticism both of the Aristotelian basis of this work and its suitability as a framework for moral and social education (see D. Carr 2002 and Kristjansson 2006). Whilst sharing the Bedford-Peters line concerning the role of

cognition in emotion, Scheffler (1991) concentrates upon those emotions which grow out of the educational enterprise itself. So, for instance, he follows Peters (1966) in seeing a crucial role in education for developing the intellectual/academic emotions such as a care for truth and justification. But he also insists that along with those ‘calm emotions’ – as David Hume might have described them – we also

nurture emotions such as cognitive surprise and the joy of verification which may accompany academic endeavours. A rather different approach to emotional education is found in

Hepburn (1972). Whilst Hepburn is aware of the cognitivist drive in modern analyses of emotion, his concern is not with this aspect of their elucidation but, rather, with the way in which the arts, and especially literature, may be used to sharpen our perceptions of the emotions we feel and replace emotional cliche´s with a concern for the proper details of emotions in all their complexity. He is also concerned with the way in which the arts, in offering us different emotional reactions to situations, may increase our sense of emotional choice and therefore of emotional freedom. It is clear from the examples used in his analysis that Hepburn’s argument depends upon an education drawing from ‘high’ culture. However, although this may be out of favour today this does nothing to undermine his position.