Conflicting views on the importance of emotion to human development and growth: Piaget and Whitehead

Abstract

In this paper I analyse the concept of emotion on Jean Piaget's theory of development and Alfred North Whitehead's theory of growth. For Piaget, emotion is the motivating force of action emanating from outside the individual in the form of sensations emitted by objects. His view is rooted in the Newtonian conception of a universe comprised of isolated objects requiring an emotive force to initiate a series of mechanistic interactions between objects. Piaget reduces all conscious human experience to a cognitive formulation of these causal relations. His abstract concept of emotion as force fails to explain the relationship between bodily feelings, emotions, and higher forms of consciousness in human beings. Conversely, Whitehead explains that emotions are the crucial mediating factors between the welter of awareness of these feelings in higher organisms. His view is consistent with the new physics and its emphasis on indeterminacy, energy, and the organic relationship among events. Whitehead's concrete concept of emotion gives insight into the experience of bodily feelings and their relationship to the growth and learning of human beings. The implications of these conflicting views of emotion for psychology and education are clear. Psychologists must avoid the reductionist tendencies illustrated in Piaget's theory if they hope to understand the subtleties of human experience. Failing to do this will lead them to a concept of human growth and learning in which ideas have no internal relationship with the experience of the knower. Such a conception distorts our understanding of human beings and ignores the joy of knowing.