Aristotle, Emotions, and Education

Kristján Kristjánsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317178590
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What can Aristotle teach us that is relevant to contemporary moral and educational concerns? What can we learn from him about the nature of moral development, the justifiability and educability of emotions, the possibility of friendship between parents and their children, or the fundamental aims of teaching? The message of this book is that Aristotle has much to teach us about those issues and many others. In a formidable display of boundary-breaking scholarship, drawing upon the domains of philosophy, education and psychology, Kristján Kristjánsson analyses and dispels myriad misconceptions about Aristotle's views on morality, emotions and education that abound in the current literature - including the claims of the emotional intelligence theorists that they have revitalised Aristotle's message for the present day. The book proceeds by enlightening and astute forays into areas covered by Aristotle's canonical works, while simultaneously gauging their pertinence for recent trends in moral education. This is an arresting book on how to balance the demands of head and heart: a book that deepens the contemporary discourse on emotion cultivation and virtuous living and one that will excite any student of moral education, whether academic or practitioner.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Fusing Heart and Head

1.1 Aristotelianism and Moral Education

For philosophers of Aristotelian persuasion, the last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first has been an uplifting time in the area of moral education, with its extensive burgeoning of interest in Aristotelian, or at least quasi-Aristotelian, ideals of character building. As understood here, moral education is a multi-dimensional endeavour which draws on the domains of moral philosophy, psychology and education. Moral philosophy provides the ultimate goals at hand; psychology explains the conditions for those goals to be achieved; education presents the means to achieve them. And in all three domains we have recently witnessed developments and trends with lines of descent that can be traced back to Aristotle.

In moral philosophy, critical attention has shifted to forms of virtue-based naturalism, which are now seen as the main rivals of traditional utilitarianism and Kantianism. Like utilitarianism but unlike Kantianism, virtue-based naturalism rests on the assumption that moral properties and relations are natural properties and relations, and that moral philosophy must answer to empirical facts about what makes people thrive. Moral naturalism is a type of foundationalism that considers the ultimate grounds of morality to be rooted in biological and psychological facts about human nature, and the justification of moral claims to be substantive rather than formal. Actions of goodwill are thus good because they actualize substantive value-conferring properties, not – as for Kantians and other formalists – because of the way they are willed: by virtue of some formal qualities of choice. For utilitarian naturalists, those value-conferring properties solely concern happiness (qua pleasure and the absence of pain) and its potential maximization. But Aristotelian naturalists designate the generically human virtues of action and reaction – those characteristics human beings need to flourish. In recent years Aristotelian virtue theory has spawned a cottage industry of so-called virtue ethics that shares the same basic teleological orientation as Aristotle’s virtue theory, although it tends to deviate considerably from the nuts and bolts of Aristotle’s canonical account (see further in Kristjánsson 2002: Section 2.2).

In psychology, interest in the emotions as potential ingredients in the good life was launched in the late twentieth century, propelled by the powerful resurgence of an Aristotle-inspired cognitive view of the emotions as potentially infused with reason and amenable to cultivation and coaching. To speak of the deep and pervasive involvement of the emotions in the moral character of our lives – let alone thinking of them as potential moral virtues – would have sounded outlandish prior to this Aristotelian renaissance. It was the essential passivity of emotions that tended to be highlighted. In sharp contrast to the old ideal that reason should rule and passions be suppressed, most contemporary emotion theories convey the message that emotional disengagement is tantamount to moral impoverishment, and that the human character is essentially ‘a disposition to be affected in one set of ways or another’ (Roberts 2003: 2). Thus moral education becomes largely a process of sensitization to proper feelings. Indeed, most philosophers who have written about the emotions during the recent proliferation of emotion research have been interested chiefly in their applicability to morality and moral education. Some of the recent academic interest in the educability and salience of the emotions has percolated through to the public, with buzzwords like ‘emotional intelligence’ suddenly becoming topics of spirited discussion in the workplace and at the dinner table. Although, as I argue in Chapter 6, the assumptions underlying ‘emotional intelligence’ may differ more from Aristotle’s view than some of its exponents seem to realize, there is no doubt that both approaches share the general aim of managing our emotional life with intelligence.

The dissemination of Aristotelian ideas within education has also created new waves and ripples. In fact, two of the most prominent recent trends in values education are anchored firmly in Aristotelian assumptions. The first, character education, is an influential if as yet philosophically undiscerning and underdeveloped movement, representing back-to-basics morality and pedagogy. It has swept across the educational field, particularly in the USA, but has reverberations in Europe. The proponents of character education emphasize a need for the inculcation of a set of cosmopolitan basic virtues of action and reaction. They believe that those virtues must be transmitted through a plurality of methods, including, especially at the early stages, systematic modelling of worthy mentors and moral exemplars. They also believe that this transmission must occur partly via direct habituation, by which the relevant virtues seep into students’ personalities like dye into wool. Values education must necessarily proceed through extrinsically activated osmosis, therefore, but not only through the development of the students’ own skills of critical reasoning, as had long been the dominant orthodoxy. That orthodoxy harks back, on the one hand, to the Kohlbergian stress on cognitive skills in moral education and, on the other, to the ultra-liberal conception of such education as a mere exercise in values clarification. According to the character-education camp, this dominant orthodoxy has failed to live up to its promise – has failed to deliver the ultimate prize of moral education, which is to make students good. The phoenixian rise of character education has generally been congenial to Aristotelians. The unfortunate lack of direct rapport between character education and contemporary Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics notwithstanding, devout Aristotelians have reason to take heart in the character-education programme of essentially transcultural values, and in its focus on habituation as a necessary method of socio-moral schooling prior to and coterminous with the honing of children’s critical reasoning and reflection.

Another movement in values education which has recently gained considerable prominence, especially in the USA, is that of social and emotional learning. Despite some reservations that I air in Chapter 6, it also seems bound to gain favour among Aristotelians. While incorporating some of the basic values of character education, social and emotional learning complements them with insights from the currently lively discursive field of emotional intelligence. In this way it reinforces, at least obliquely, the Aristotelian point that virtue is about emotion as well as action: that in order to be fully virtuous, a person must not only act, but also react, properly.

Apart from its influence on recent trends in values education, Aristotelianism has been undergoing a revival in more general areas of educational discourse. What has come to the fore there, however, is not a single, all-embracing perspective of ‘neo-Aristotelianism’, but various distinguishable sub-perspectives. The most commanding of these, and the one I find occasion to scrutinize, considers teaching itself to be a ‘practice’ in the Aristotelian sense, and schooling to be a specific praxiological enterprise into which students must be initiated.

So much for a quick overview of the ‘Aristotelian turn’ in moral education. What has primarily fuelled this turn is debatable; I do not aspire here to a sociological or historical analysis of the conditions that have paved the way for a second coming of Aristotle. Earmarking this book as philosophical rather than social-scientific is its focus on the theoretical underpinnings, connections and justifications of the various types of Aristotelianisms germane to moral education. What needs to be engaged is both Aristotle himself and the recycled Aristotle of late. ‘Does the latter adequately represent the former?’ I ask. And, more importantly, ‘Is Aristotelianism in contemporary moral education really up to scratch?’ In the following pages of this chapter, I develop the import of those questions in greater detail.

One might reasonably pause at this juncture to ask if the succession of insights provided by the recent Aristotle-fuelled trends in moral philosophy, psychology and education amount to anything more than an amalgam of vaguely connected points. This introductory section is not the place to answer that question conclusively. Here I merely observe that what is distinctive in all these trends is an image of deeply embodied and embedded moral personhood: an image of the human self as an enmattered essence, which, if it is to realize its full potential, must think its feelings and feel its thoughts; and of a self, richly embedded in a social context, which is necessary for its existence as a unitary being. The title of this introductory chapter is meant to capture this basic underlying image and to highlight the Aristotelian insistence that we must balance and synthesize the demands of heart and head if ours is to be a well-rounded life, a life truly worth living. More needs to be said about this overarching notion of moral personhood, and I hope that the account of Aristotelian moral development in Chapter 2 goes some distance towards illuminating it. However, the most productive way to engage the ramifications for moral education in the Aristotelian notion is arguably through forays into the various areas in which Aristotelianism has, rightly or wrongly, been understood to provide guidance. That will be the aim of subsequent chapters.

There is no dearth of studies on (1) Aristotle on the emotions, (2) Aristotle on education and (3) the educational salience of the emotions. Yet to the best of my knowledge, no study has focused simultaneously on those three themes and their interconnections. To do so, as I have done in this work, one must span various fields of inquiry. Although my orientation is unabashedly philosophical, I have argued elsewhere at some length for the need to cross the barbed wire between moral philosophy and the social sciences (Kristjánsson 2006: Section 1.2). From a coherently naturalistic standpoint, it is futile to pursue moral philosophy at the level of uppercase abstractions, without input from social-science research about what makes people tick. I do not hesitate to adopt insights from the psychology and education literatures, therefore, and to reap from them whatever advantages or disadvantages I deem salutary for my line of argument. Although it breaks some traditional – and in my view debilitating – disciplinary boundaries, I categorize this book as a study in educational philosophy. In order to sustain that categorization, one must be willing to accept a somewhat broad notion of ‘educational philosophy’. Admittedly, the philosophy of education is still in the thrall of an identity crisis. Looked upon (or rather looked down upon) by many mainstream philosophers as being too peripheral and ‘soft’, its own practitioners do not even agree if the preposition ‘of’ in ‘philosophy of education’ is closer to that of ‘leg of lamb’ or to that of ‘servant of Lord Snooty’ (Carr 2003: 253). In my understanding, the former sense is closer to the mark. Moral education is, for example, a necessary extension of moral philosophy, which is, again, an indelible part of philosophy. There is no master here, no servant. In any event, the categorization of this book or its precise placement on library shelves is a side issue; what matters is the soundness of its conclusions.

1.2 Is Aristotle but a Ventriloquist’s Dummy?

The current education literature – especially the moral education literature – is replete with direct and indirect references to Aristotle, made by Aristotelian aficionados and Aristotelian refuseniks alike. Let me identify, from among the common refrains, a number of assumptions about what Aristotle did or did not hold and how these assumptions relate to contemporary moral/educational concerns. Unfortunately, many of the assumptions abroad in the literature are unfounded, placing Aristotle in the role of a ventriloquist’s dummy to mouth the author’s own point of view. Following are a number of assumptions of that ilk – assumptions that serve as expository foils to my discussion in subsequent chapters.

Assumption A: Aristotle does not really provide a coherent conception of childhood. He offers no systematic theory of moral development, and his idea of moral virtue is based solely on self-control: teaching children to flex their will-power muscles.

Assumption B: Aristotle’s view of moral upbringing neglects the role of critical reasoning. Moral education is reduced to mindless habituation, leaving us with two glaring paradoxes: ‘extrinsically habituated reason’ and ‘heteronomously formed autonomy’.

Assumption C: Aristotle, the forefather of the cognitive theories of emotions, advises us, as his modern counterparts do, to rid ourselves of negative emotions. He shares with the cognitive theorists of late the insurmountable problem of the individuation of emotions.

Assumption D: Aristotle claims, mistakenly, that anger can be justified, and even that it should be taught by moral educators as an appropriate emotion. His elaboration of this claim reveals his impoverished notion of emotion regulation.

Assumption E: The contemporary theory of emotional intelligence constitutes the practical application of Aristotle’s advice to bring intelligence to our emotions. Just as Aristotle does, emotional intelligence teaches us how to control our emotions, to enable us to lead healthy and successful lives; but it does so in a more enlightening and serviceable way than Aristotle did.

Assumption F: Teaching children how to imitate positive moral exemplars can counteract the effect of increasingly negative role models. This strategy harks back to Aristotle’s emotional virtue of emulation, which basically suggests that children should latch onto positive role models.

Assumption G: True character friendship, as described by Aristotle, cannot be formed between parents and their children, for both structural and moral reasons. And Aristotle himself was the first to draw attention to the moral reasons.

Assumption H: Aristotelian virtue is primarily about self-improvement. There is little room for other-regarding virtues (benevolence does not even count as a virtue) and therefore little to be learned from Aristotle about why we should help people in dire straits.

Assumption I: Agreeableness is not a moral virtue in itself, as Aristotle would hold that it is. Its value – the value of teachers being friendly towards their students, for instance – can be reduced to established moral virtues or explained independently, using non-moral reasons.

Assumption J: Teaching is best understood as praxis in the Aristotelian sense, guided by uncodifiable, context-dependent phronesis, as explained by the moral particularist par excellence, Aristotle.

The aim of the following chapters is to undermine those common assumptions, one by one, and to offer accounts that are more textually faithful to Aristotle and more substantively plausible. But first, an important caveat is in order. I do not pretend to be a classics expert, let alone an Aristotelian scholar, and my goals are not exegetical: I have unearthed no new readings of Greek texts or hit upon novel interpretations that are destined to shake the classics world. I rely upon existing translations and my own natural and unsullied – or so I hope to persuade readers – understanding of them. Whenever interpretative controversies are invoked, I try to locate their practical relevance, as my eventual aim is to say something germane about moral education rather than about Aristotle. Aristotle’s position in this book, in other words, is not to be viewed as a relic of ancient philosophy, but as food for current educational thought.

In light of this substantive approach to Aristotle’s texts, I try to overlook interpretative issues that I deem to be primarily of academic rather than practical importance. Take the ongoing debate between ‘judgementalists’ and ‘phenomenalists’ within the cognitive camp of emotion theories. The judgementalists understand the relevant cognition in emotion to be a belief or a judgement; the phenomenalists understand it to involve a perception-driven recognition. Both factions support their position with textual references to Aristotle (cf. Fortenbaugh 2002: 94–103). For questions concerning the moral coaching of our emotions, this issue is of scant, if any, relevance, and I omit it from consideration here, although it happens to interest me in a different context (see Kristjánsson 2002: 30–36).

For me, the search for the real Aristotle and the sloughing off of the unreal Aristotles is a substantive quest rather than a textual odyssey. I count myself as an Aristotelian, albeit self-styled rather than fundamentalist, and I hope that my arguments will appeal to readers of broad Aristotelian sympathies. Given the status of contemporary cognitive theories of emotion, the current popularity of virtue theories, and the recent prominence, in educational circles, of character education and social and emotional learning – all with a distinctly Aristotelian flavour – I suspect that the category of people with ‘broad Aristotelian sympathies’ should reach beyond devout Aristotelians. I even venture to hope that many of my conclusions will appeal to readers with no ready Aristotelian philosophy in their pockets, and even to followers of distinctly different moral outlooks.

Approaching Aristotle as a self-styled Aristotelian moral philosopher, rather than as an Aristotelian exegete, has several self-evident disadvantages. But it may have its advantages, too. Just, as someone once said, it is an exile’s prerogative to love an adopted home with an absence of irony that is impossible for a native, so the affection for Aristotle’s works among those who are not classics scholars can have a holistic, childlike quality that is far removed from the spirit of textual hair-splitting. For me, Aristotelianism is a condition more than a scholarly position; one acquires the ability to smell out what Aristotle would say on a given issue and then follows one’s scent into the thicket of his writings. If it turns out that one’s scent is mistaken and Aristotle did not really say anything important on the issue, or, worse yet, was mistaken in his view, then the consolation lies in ascertaining what Aristotle should have said.

But this approach invites an immediate challenge: have I not put myself in an unassailable win-win position with regard to Assumptions A–J? If they are not properly grounded in Aristotle’s works, I can fault them for that; and if they are so grounded, I can fault them for being wrong in any case! Perhaps that is not really a win-win position, for the converse of this approach is that even if the assumptions happen to be grounded in Aristotle’s works, they can still be wrong. An argumentum ad verecundiam is never sufficient; it will always be incumbent upon me to provide Aristotle-independent reasons for the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the assumptions under discussion. But then, a possible interlocutor might continue, why raise the spectre of Aristotle in the first place as some sort of an argumentative deus ex machina? If, in the end, nothing much turns on what he did or did not say about the substantive issues at hand, and the aim is not simply to do Aristotle’s bidding, why not simply explore the pros and cons of the issues as they arise and disburden ourselves of the Aristotelian baggage?

There are at least three reasons not to follow the interlocutor’s suggestion. One is that Aristotle has important things to say about most issues relevant to moral education. His views on education are usually of modern appositeness and they invariably repay attention. More specifically, there is great philosophical illumination to be gained by studying his views. Naturally they can never provide the last word on any contemporary educational issue, but they can offer a useful first word and sometimes grant us a certain philo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Fusing Heart and Head
• 2 Aristotelian Moral Development
• 3 Aristotle and the ‘Paradox of Moral Education’
• 4 Aristotle on the Non-Expendability of Emotions
• 5 Teaching Justified Anger the Aristotelian Way
• 6 Emotional Intelligence versus Aristotle
• 7 Emulation: An Aristotelian Virtue for the Young
• 8 Aristotelian Friendship between Parents and Children
• 9 What Can Aristotle Teach Us about Generosity?
• 10 Aristotelian Agreeableness and Teaching
• 11 Is Teaching an Aristotelian Praxis?
• 12 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index