...Suppose someone were to say, "Education always presupposes certain goals toward which progress can be made. Is it possible to specify what it would be like to be fully developed in the way of feeling and emotion? What is the ideal toward which one should strive?" What could we answer?

Surely it would be the better part of wisdom to back away from "ideal" beyond specifying, as Aristotle did with respect to human virtues, some middle place between cowardice and foolhardiness, so, "well developed in the affective way" would specify a mean between the extremes of passive apathy and hair-trigger emotionality. Of course, this is only a beginning and may even be dismissed as too obvious to merit mention. But the main point is that there is considerable ground between extremes, and one cannot reasonably specify more precisely, for that will depend upon a number of additional factors than just being human. There is age, stage of development, station in life, cultural norms, and individual personality. By the latter is meant, roughly, that we all have different living styles. The ideal of integration requires a certain coherence among the different traits and propensities.

If one set out to "operationalize a set of behavioral objectives," one could expect nothing but a travesty as outcome, yet everyone who believes in the importance of the traits and functions described in this work has a least implicit criteria available for recognizing "a feeling person." And this is not a bad short-hand designation of the kind of person we are trying to visualize, though it does not coincide with the "feeling type" of C. G. Jung, discussed above, for that personality type by definition is one in which the feeling function is most fully developed, as against the functions of intuition, thinking, and sensation. By contrast, what we are trying to get into better focus is a person who might have any of the other three even more highly developed, and who yet has differentiated feeling to a relatively high, well-discriminated level.

What, then, can be said about one who seems to us to have earned the descriptor, "a feeling person"? Working on the assumption that development along these lines tends to be somewhat harder for males than females, we'll use the masculine pronoun in what follows:

1. He is one who often pays attention to the feeling components in a situation, in himself, and in another person. He will notice the feeling tone, or lack of it, in a response, and have some sense of its appropriateness. Of course this will require a certain degree of comfortableness in his situation, something different from a manic involvement.
2. Beyond attending, he values the feeling function, finding that its presence in another is commendable--and of course he regrets its being only weakly differentiated in himself and a friend alike, or as being distorted in some way, as when somebody is more than a little cynical or is exceptionally given to disparagement of his fellows.
3. He is a person with marked appreciative capacities and tendencies. That is, he finds much in his environment to praise, and does not stint in expressing this appreciation. At the same time, his praise is discriminating, for otherwise it must be dilute. The point is illustrated in something that Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote in an essay on literature: "I feel more inclined to love things than to judge them. I see in criticism a fervent effort to bring out the full power of the chosen work." (Meditations on Quixote, p. 560) Furthermore, the feeling person appreciates variety, diversity in his associates.
4. He is a person aptly described as "sensitive" or "empathic", which is to say that he is frequently tuned into the nuances of feeling present in a live situation (or in a letter or other object), picking up on the subtleties of feeling that are being expressed, or at least revealed, even if obliquely and inconspicuously. Again, this is not merely a matter of noting, but in turn of responding feelingly himself.
5. This person has a degree of confidence in his ability to perceive feelingly, rather than being stalled by nervousness or a lack of confidence in his own judgment. This requires a certain amount of a kind of self-esteem we hear much less about than the sort associated with intellectual confidence--which yet again tells us something about the narrowness of most educational goals and aims. Naturally, overwrought self-confidence spells arrogance and dogmatism, as much in feeling as in any other kind of way.
6. The feeling person considers that he has some choice about how to respond, not being unduly restricted by common opinion, political correctness, cultural norms, or current fashions. He can freely roam among the possibilities open and relevant to him, and make a judgment in keeping with the authentic aspects of his own being.
7. "Response" in this context includes action, in so far as that is distinguished from a show of feeling or emotion.
8. However, feeling development also includes coming to be able to detach feeling from overt action. Feeling, as we have seen, is not confined in its role to motivating behavior, even though there is an at least incipient inclination toward action in all but the faintest feelings. Yet whatever their intensity, feelings can be consummatory (as Dewey like to say), valued end-states, there to be appreciated in and for themselves. The Chinese "Wu-Wei" names an attitude of keenly alert non-action that has its own wholly distinctive feel.
9. This in turn leads to the feeling person's willingness to take responsibility for the judgment that is typically contained in feeling. Although there is a sense in which feelings must be accepted for what they are: they exist--not immutably, to be sure, but at least temporarily. If one has a flash of annoyance at something someone has said, it is simply a fact that one is reacting negatively and critically and one needs to accept this, whether or not he decides to make the feeling public. This would not need saying if it were not fairly common for people to cover over, even in their own consciousness, certain feelings which they disapprove of in themselves. This latter point is closely related to defensiveness.
10. Although "becoming a transparent person" is sometimes held to be an ideal to aspire to, it is an ideal that underestimates the importance of keeping some things to ourselves. (Self-transparency, though, merits our praise.) The feeling person is one with a fairly highly developed spontaneity. In one sense spontaneity as associated with a certain effervescence, is the very opposite of flatness of affect. Spontaneity bespeaks genuineness--whatever the kind of feeling it is that gets shown--and is also contrastive with a sort of plodding, highly deliberative judgment, necessary as that too can be in making an important decision. Spontaneity bespeaks the presence of values that are already internalized in one's being.
11. Reflectiveness is a quality that has been implicit in much of what has already been said, but it requires its separate billing. It may seem the opposite of spontaneity, and in a sense so it is. Always to hold back on expressing a feeling until it has been considered is frequently the mark of a person overly developed on the intellective side, to the detriment of the affective. Yet, to let it all hang out is equally one-sided. Even early in our development, we learn that our first feeling appraisal was mistaken: it is reflection that reveals the mistake. We often need to fit our appraisal into a larger value complex, consider long-range consequences, and much else, all in the service of human attitudes and conduct.
12. The feeling person we have here in mind is not only able to control his stronger emotions, more particularly the ones fraught with possibly very damaging consequences, but, what is less obvious, is able to combine emotions for richer and sometimes more benign results. (Emotions do not often occur singly.) For instance, in a combative sport like boxing or football, such a one is able to combine a certain ferocity with control, even calmness. Or, again, to find anger compatible with continuing affection, or admiration with suspicion. Sometimes the complexity has to do with the attitude one brings to the having and the expressing of an emotion, which is notably the case when one takes an aesthetically distanced attitude toward an even fairly strong feeling of apprehension.
13. Since it is never enough simply to have feelings, the feeling person will have developed a wide-ranging capacity to express and communicate his feelings, both spontaneously and more deliberately, after reflection and forming. This is accomplished on the personal level in the kind of human relating that Martin Buber famously called "I-Thou" which he described as an intense mutuality of awareness of the other's uniqueness. We look to the great artists for models of how expression can be fully embodied in objects that then serve humankind permanent access to feelings that would perhaps otherwise be beyond our reach.

This evidently incomplete list of characteristics may serve at least to sketch the Feeling Man, who in the characteristics mentioned will differ little or not at all from the Feeling Woman. Indeed some recent psychological investigations seem to show that gender differences in this realm have often been grossly exaggerated. And yet people's respective ways of manifesting their feeling characteristics will often bear the mark of their gender, of their ethnicity, and of their personality-as-idiosyncratic, for finally none of us is identical with a type, but each of us is our own indefensible self.

--James L. Jarrett, Ph.D.
Professor of Education at the University of California at Berkeley