Morte e rinascita della cultura del sentire: una lettura pedagogica

The spectacularization of communication and overexposure to superfluous images would appear to suppress emotions. Indeed, media mimesis does not lead to catharsis, but to countercatharsis which not only erodes reality but a sense of reality, an awareness of what exists and the metabolization of reality through its dramatic rendition. Media mimesis seems to blur the line between reality and fiction to the extent that reality is increasingly susceptible to being represented by the media: this represents a new order for spectators who, through the erasure of every difference between reality and the way it is represented, can no longer move from one level of experience to another since “fiction permeates everything” (Piromallo Gambardella, 2004) or, to quote Baudrillard (1996), television has murdered reality. The process of anesthetization and desensitization to real violence, activated by an increasingly more ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ violence, and an emerging emotional and relational inaffectivity among younger generations constitute a risk that a media society may become synonymous with a violent society and that homo videns may be transformed into homo violens. Here, homo violens is not necessarily linked to perceptibly violent behaviour, acts and gestures. Today, a violent person is also someone who no longer engages with others on an emotional level and has no filter based on subjectivity, a ‘feeling’ specifically associated with man as a person. In view of all this, pedagogical theorization and educational practice have already focused several times on what Goleman calls “emotional literacy”. From Bruner and Gardner up until recent research in neuroscience (from Damasio to Rizzolatti), there has been a need to shift the line of reflection from cognition to affectivity, to jointly consider the relationship between logos and pathos in the learning process, and to bring together mind and heart in order to promote emotional literacy in a context that devitalizes or removes much of the psycho-imaginative richness of the existential experience. These perspectives, whether specifically psychological or neuroscientific, conceal two risks in the author’s view: on the one hand, a sort of affective mysticism, the result of a drifting of the emotion paradigm would seem to predominate today which becomes, in a more extreme form, an ideological module of emotionalism and sentimentalism; on the other, the impression that, paradoxically, there is a tendency to rationalize the irrational (Mottana, 2004) and assign, in other words, emotions to models, protocols and procedures associated with instrumental reason, productivity and socio-professional performance. This attempt to handle emotions rationally does not encourage a “widening of feeling” or, more specifically, a rebirth. In pedagogical terms, reflection is needed that focuses on a new anthropology of feeling, inspired by the axiological value of emotions (Nussbaum) and rediscovery of the sense of shame. This idea of shame has all too frequently been pushed to one side because it is solely linked to the theme of sexuality: in actual fact, shame as a sentiment is closely linked to a private, intimate, authentic side of existence. Essentially, shame is what preserves the unique, original nature of a person’s mystery. Seen in this light, it is clear that it does not mean individualistic enclosure and solipsistic withdrawal and that it can be considered a form of regard and protection for one’s personal inner world and, at the same time, respect for the sensitivity of others. A pedagogy of shame, one that is capable of attracting terms like respect, freedom, responsibility and testimony. Shame, an essential part of personality, on an educational level, can be considered the last “hunting ground” where we can unearth a watchful conscience that defends human dignity and genuine love rather than a culture of narcissism, voyeurism and exhibitionism which constantly drains us physically and emotionally regardless of the consequences. It is the ontological root, something that guarantees the freedom and maturity of being human and being a person