Realising the personal vocation by reconsidering feeling in its social root

Abstract

In the context of recent events of a health as well as socio-political nature, a renewed reflection on feelings and their social significance becomes not only topical, but urgent. The movement of reflection on emotions and feelings, within the history of thought, traces, in fact, a path that moves from a negative and derogatory attitude towards them to a completely opposite one. We have moved from the human being defined by reason alone to one defined by the heart alone, with the consequences that each extreme brings. Today, if the re-evaluation of feelings is taken for granted and essential to a full understanding of the human being, the meaning of this category must be rethought, especially in relation to the other components that also exist, namely the rational and operational dimensions.

In this essay we focus precisely on a reinterpretation - starting from the contributions of certain phenomenologists - of the category of "feeling", declining its expressions in sentiments, emotions, emotional states, all the way to love, passing through entropathy, as a way of accessing these worlds. This analysis sheds light on the richness as well as the ambiguity of the human, precisely because of this dimension and the intrinsic polarity between pathic individuality and relationality, thereby highlighting the need for the formation of the affective sphere, especially in the relationship with 'examples' that open the way to the recognition of the diversity that passes through us as a richness.