This book offers a path to a better understanding of feeling and emotion for ourselves and for an education of the heart. With a systematic phenomenology of emotionality, Daniele Bruzzone opens up an approach to a pedagogical ethics of humane life and coexistence. In European culture, feelings, emotions and moods are mostly viewed with suspicion and reservation. They are seen as a threat to universal, technical reason and are placed under its tutelage. Their strength, their power, their significance and their productivity are for the most part not recognised. In education and upbringing, they are to be controlled and disciplined so that children and young people become reasonable and rational adults. The meaning of feelings, however, can only be understood if we listen to the voice of the heart. Bruzzone makes this accessible through a phenomenological analysis. At the same time, he opens up the “axiological” dimension of values for our actions and our lives. This is achieved by presenting many convincing arguments for a “raison du coeur” (Pascal) and thus for the rehabilitation of feelings. Bruzzone treads this path with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and Edith Stein. He shows the importance, depth and productivity of feelings in our life and coexistence. He reveals their relevance for value formation and value orientation. On this basis, the task of an affective education can be determined, which consists of learning to feel and to empathise, to understand one's own and the feelings of others, to express them, to reflect on them and to communicate them in a sensitive way. In a word, this means cultivating feelings, empathy and sensitivity. Feelings are then not only to be understood as something subjective or something accidental, but they are intimately connected with our actions and decisions. The ethics of feelings is founded in an ordo amoris (Scheler).
Bruzzone's phenomenological analysis distinguishes different dimensions and nuances of affective phenomena as emotions, feelings and moods. He argues that the experience of being “invaded” by an emotion is different from that of being “immersed” in a mood, just as being “guided” by a feeling does not mean being “swept away” by a passionate impulse. In pedagogical practice especially, feelings are of crucial importance. Bruzzone shows this clearly and convincingly: for those who educate and care as well as for those who learn and are to be cared for. Weakness, mistakes, inadequacies thus appear in a new, positive light, namely as the basis of learning and life under the sign of care.
Daniele Bruzzone is an outstanding representative of the Italian phenomenological pedagogical movement, which was decisively established by Piero Bertolini in Bologna. With the founding of the renowned Encyclopaideia: Journal of Phenomenology and Education at the end of the 1990s, a group of phenomenologists came together who were active in various academic and practical fields. They developed original themes and areas (social pedagogy and the early Husserl theory) in many different ways. The basis for many of them, as well as for Bruzzone, remains Bertolini's claim to pursue a scientific pedagogy that, on the basis of an epistemology of education, does not lose the connection to the lifeworld and the ambition of a substantial empirical research of educational phenomena.
In this book, Daniele Bruzzone, currently the editor-in-chief of Encyclopaideia, opens up the field of a phenomenology of feelings, emotions and moods in their significance for care and for the education of the heart in the best possible way. I am very pleased that a translation in English can now be made available to an international audience in the series “Phänomenologische Erziehungswissenschaft” by Springer VS.