Caring, Emotion, Optimization

In some contexts of the current society, the optimization of the processes, that is considered at the basis of both greater productivity and a more efficient time schedule, seems to be connected to the capacity to regulate and manage emotions. Nevertheless, a phenomenological analysis of emotional life, suggests that emotions cannot be controlled in a managerial way; instead, it is possible to act in a transformative way on them by engaging in a continuous and, sometimes, difficult exercise of self-reflection, aimed at bringing to light the cognitive contents that underlie them. The philosophical (Nussbaum, 2001) and psychological (Oatley, 1992) assumption from which we start in order to develop our reasoning, is that emotions are epiphenomena of the cognitive activity, therefore they are an affective experience with an intimate conceptual core. This assumption is the ground for the development of a theory of education as caring for the self that engages the person in a practice of emotional self-understanding. This practice requires the subject to adopt a phenomenological method (Husserl, 1913; Stein, 1917-1933/1991; Arendt, 1978; Mortari, 2008) for describing the flow of the mind’s life and then to carry out an analytical reflection on the collected mental data.