Emotion and feelings in the thought of Antonio Damasio. Pedagogical reflections

Abstract

Rationality and emotions seems to be irreconcilable fields of the human experience and reality. In the pedagogical reflections and practices this two fields of experience have been considered for a long time like different targets to achieve or two different variables acting inside the educational contexts. This article, moving from Antonio Damasio’s works, wants to explore the role played by a new consideration of the relations between rationality and emotion in the field of education, looking also at the suggestion coming from the reflection of John Dewey on learning habits, from the consideration of the importance of concept of homeostasis for the human life and educational processes and from the attention to the structuration of educational contexts.

For a long time, emotion and rationality were considered like two different domains of human reality. Antonio Damasio’s works, instead, has allowed us to reconsider the interactions between emotions and rationality as part of a single process aimed at building the human well-being. Consider from a pedagogical point of view his works means to be careful to design educational contexts useful for the growth of the subject and to be careful to renew the pedagogical way of looking at the human.