Distanciation
The role that neurophysiology now gives to emotions changes the way we look at the rationality of human reflection as Damasio clearly shows in the title of one of his books: Descartes’ Error (1994). Researchers in neurophysiology, for instance Damasio himself (1999), LeDoux (2003) or Buser (1999), and in post-Bourdieu French sociology as well (Kaufmann, 2001, or Lahire, 2001), tell us that a given social situation will cause an individual to respond according to an emotion which is personally specific to this type of situation and to what he or she is meant to do in the situation, combined with his or her other more immediate emotions, and this interplay of emotions is likely to trigger his or her cognitive response to the situation. Lahire (2001) and Channouf (2004) among others, remind us that individuals access their attitudes, emotions and other inner states only partly by inferences drawn from observing their behaviors or circumstances. Inner clues are weak, ambiguous or cannot be deciphered. Everybody observes who they are and what they feel and must rely on external clues to be able to infer their inner states. Some form of mediation will prove beneficial as the only way to compensate for the impossibility of fully effective introspection. This combines with the notion of cognitive unconscious (Channouf, 2004, Buser, 1999) which monitors the way humans perform sometimes very complex actions without their being conscious of what determines that performance. It can be postulated that humans go through their life and education without necessarily being fully aware of their need for distanciation and for mediation.
Research now relies on physically observable neurophysiological data thanks to new instruments. Maintaining personal behaviors and teaching practices that do not take these facts into account is less defendable. Human conditioning is not necessarily immovable and humans would gain from an authentic reflection (distanciation) which would help them become “less assertive” (Laborit, 1996).