Pia Valenzuela

Developing virtues requires attending to the affective and cognitive components of virtue. The former component implies cultivating apt emotional responses to specific situations. The cognitive part requires the (meta) virtue of phronesis. In dealing with “Phronesis in educating emotions,” this article attends to the nature of emotions and phronesis as its role in cultivating good action habits and virtuous emotional habits. It understands emotion regulation as one of the functions of phronesis. In the broader sense, phronesis includes elements other than deliberation, such as dialectics and rhetoric, which can be helpful to induce a certain suspicion or to persuade somewhat since our affectivity is susceptible to persuasion (i.e. Aristotle’s political dominion of emotions). As a topic in the intersection of moral psychology and moral philosophy, we get valuable insights into a psychologist’s work, Magda Arnold’s (1903–2002) emotion theory. Her understanding of emotion elicitation elucidates the relation between phronesis and emotions. The article focuses on one of the central elements of emotion elicitation, the appraisal. This piece can make the education of emotions for virtue development more understandable. At first glance, our initial appraisal may be hasty and inaccurate, leading to emotional reactions. However, with careful reflection, we can correct and improve upon our initial appraisal and subsequent emotions. If our initial assessment was flawed, this second, more thoughtful evaluation can be enhanced through phronesis. Due to the appraisal’s spontaneity, cultivating educated emotions requires values’ teaching, learning, and thus, appraising good things. With the development of virtues, intuitive estimates become adequate, so emotional responses are more attuned to diverse situations.

Is it possible to be happy without virtues? At least for the kind of enduring human happiness Aristotle bears, virtues are required (NE, I). In addition to virtues, some prosperity is necessary for flourishing, like having friends and minimal external goods. Nowadays, we witness different approaches to happiness – well-being – focusing on mental states – i. e. affective – usually without reference to moral issues, concretely moral dispositions, or virtues. At the crossroads of Philosophy and Psychology, the present article discusses the connection of happiness – well-being – and affective states by presenting Fredrickson’s theory of positive emotions, which has been criticised as approaching only hedonic well-being and therefore overlooking its eudaimonic aspects. In her approach, there is no reference to the good life connected to the human good, as in Aristotle’s ethics. However, there is instead an understanding of becoming a benevolent, a better person as a necessary human aspiration.