Éducation sentimentale? Rethinking emotional intelligence with Michel Henry: from incarnation to education

ABSTRACT

In this paper we explore the possibility of rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence within the context of education. By developing a pedagogical dialogue with Michel Henry’s phenomenology of incarnation, we try to move beyond existing models of emotional intelligence by shifting the emphasis from the intellectual significance of emotion to a more original incarnate affectivity within intelligence, understood as lived sense-making. We claim that this ontological and ontogenetic perspective on emotion puts it at the heart of education. Yet only because it evokes an understanding of education which is expressly non-functionalist: a disruptive, even dreadful event that marks the threshold and tension between what Henry terms Life (interiority) and World (exteriority). More than simply learning us to manage our emotions or recognize the value of experiences, emotional intelligence is about the very making of World out of Life, a Life that is at once radically subjective and communal.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional education
• emotional intelligence
• affectivity
• phenomenology
• Michel Henry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We will consistently capitalize ‘Life’ and ‘World’, in compliance with Michel Henry’s habit, and to highlight their specific ontological significance within his thought.

2. Not unimportantly, this developmental psychology is itself already often ‘cognitively biased’, mainly through the influence of Piaget (Meyer-Drawe 1984, 162–174).

3. The question could be asked whether the term emotional intelligence itself should be retained. For now we prefer to focus on how the present term, abstracted from its history, might be reconceptualized.

4. In most of the examples we have kept the educational context unspecified, in order to allow our analysis a maximal scope. It would be interesting to see whether significant phenomenal differences exist between various contexts (family, formal/informal education).

5. This is, we think, one of the weaker points of Nussbaum’s analyses: while positing that emotions embody a certain value judgement, the implied notion of ethos lacks a solid ontological foundation. Consequently, emotions risk again to be moralized, for instance when certain ‘negative’ emotions are disqualified as embodying false judgements.

6. For the sake of brevity we will have to limit ourselves to those aspects of Henry’s thought that have the strongest bearing on our topic. In doing so, we will try to both make sense of and be loyal to the idiosyncratic complexity of Henry’s phenomenology, which perhaps merits a lengthier introduction than we are able to provide here.

7. It is interesting to see how Henry explicitly distances himself from Merleau-Ponty, even though their phenomenologies bear strong resemblances. Especially the late Merleau-Ponty, whose ‘affective turn’ was already picked up by educational theory much earlier (cf. Meyer-Drawe 1984), is decidedly dismissed because of its ontological vagueness and its mystification of human subjectivity (Henry 2000, 21, 31). An interesting study of R. Gély (2012) thoroughly compares Henry, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, departing from the notion of incarnation.

8. The ‘archi-’ refers to the transcendental character of this pathos (or other terms with which it is combined): rather than a specific affect, which in Henry’s mind is always already a transcendent object of the World, the archi-pathos concerns the general self-affectivity that typifies immanent Life as such. (By the way: given the unparalleled prominence of pathos in Henry’s thought, we find it quite remarkable that someone like Bernhard Waldenfels does not express a more profound interest in Henry when he discusses the phenomenological significance of pathos (cf. Waldenfels 2008)).

9. Although in his writings Henry uses both terms in similar ways, it is remarkable that he has gradually shifted to a preference for soi, as if to depart from an overly egological subjectivism (cf. Henry 1965).

10. To avoid misunderstanding: this does not mean that the ‘outwardly’ perceptible signals of the anger are irrelevant, or inexistent. What is at stake is precisely their outwardness, the notion of exteriority. Henry considers this worldly exteriority to hide the ‘transcendental’ immanent continuum of Life, which does not acknowledge any substantial entities (that transcend it), but merely intensifies itself in contingent, finite subjectivities (that remain interior).

11. The exact nature of the asymmetrical relation between (interior) Life and (exterior) World in Henry’s thought remains unclear. Henry explicitly dismisses a dualist or Schopenhaurian stance, yet at times this seems hardly credible (cf. Welten 2009).

12. Roth applies Henry’s interpretation of habit as incarnate movement to the pedagogy of geometry, and convincingly shows how even the most abstract scientific operations always presuppose an embodied habitual knowledge of the World.

13. For an evaluation of Henry’s Cartesianism by Jean-Luc Marion, see Marion (1988). Édouard Mehl (2012) has furthermore elaborated an interesting critique of both Henry’s own reading of Descartes and Marion’s evaluation thereof.

14. Henry especially stresses the ‘I’ and the active-passive verb construction in Descartes’ quote ‘at certe videre videor’, ‘I certainly appear to see’ (cf. Mehl 2018).

15. An incarnate subjectivity which is, so to speak, never fully individualized (such as in Sartre’s existentialist reading of Kierkegaard), since, as flesh, it cannot aspire to transcend the immanent Life generating its flesh.

16. This is also a puzzling aspect of Henry’s phenomenology: to which extent does he presuppose subjectivity – and hence even Life – to be personal, and what does this then mean? If there is good reason to suspect him of an existentialist anthropocentrism, one should still not fail to discern the strong notes of decentralization and relationality in his concept of Life, which in any case disavows the notion of the subject as an individual.

17. The notion of innocence should be understood in an amoral sense here, such as it can also be found in Walter Benjamin’s early essay Fate and Character (Benjamin 1996, 201–209). It concerns an agency whose (potential) meaning is radically immanent, without depending on an extrinsic finality.

18. This certainly bears a strong resemblance to the phenomenological notion of empathy as it was elaborated by Edith Stein many years before (Manganaro 2017).