情本的认知：脑科学对教育的启示——兼与董奇教授商榷

Knowledge as Forms of Feelings:Revelations of the Brain Science to Education——Discussion with Professor Dong Qi

脑科学在揭示脑的工作机制、原理以及脑损伤与认知、情感障碍的相关关系上显示了强大的优越性、操作性与可验证性。理论与技术的耦合又为打开黑箱的大脑提供了精要又深远的户牖。然而,当认知的身体体现性原理启开学界探微大脑的规式作用时,学者们过度揄扬脑与认知的关系而未深解“实证科学揭示的不是脑的认知,而是情本的肉身”的真实义,即身体对知识的体现性是情本的知性形式。“情”或说“情感”并不是心理的状态、大脑的附属,而是历史的、文化的、个性化的人的存在、生存方式。人是情本的在者,知识是情本析出的晶体。正因为人是情本体的,所以教育是情本的教化与养正,动情发智、智运情中的教化式教学才是脑科学等实证科学对教育的开示。

Brain science has demonstrated its signifi cant advantages in revealing close relationships between brain and cognition.As a result,reductionists speak loudly that the primary goal of education is the brain education and every teacher should be a brain educator.Reductionists bring us into refl ections on those questions such as whether learning is our brains that are learning exclusively? Whether observable activities of the brain in working,with the help of advanced technology,can be understood as learning? What the brain science tells us is whether there has been a transition in a cognitive agent from the mind to the brain or a new form of dualism coming into being? Being different from a reductionist,we think that a lesson that education should learn from cognitive neuroscience is that man lives in a world by having the body that can sense and be sensed so that a structured somatic awareness is built up,based on which feelings,emotion and cognition are shaped.If so,we would say that the goal and aims of education are not primitively cognitive but cultivating students by immersing them into human material culture designed by educators in order to enable students to learn by material engagement.Elliot,a middle-aged man,suffered from a malignant tumor,had to go through a surgical operation on the frontal lobe region.After operation,his doctor Antonio Damasio found that Elliot had cognitive disorders--“to know but not to feel.” Based on observations and refl ections,Damasio wrote that “reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior.The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.” Emotion that Damasio defined the biological machinery is what we called feeling-orientedness exhibited by the body as sensed and sensible.Therefore,feelingorientedness is embodied,defi ned not in terms of the brain but of the person constituted by the brain,body and mind,who can have interests,intention and plan to develop his world.Feeling-orientedness theory was fi rstly proposed by philosopher Li Zehou who talked about them in terms of psychology.On the contrary,we think feeling-orientedness theory in terms of embodiment.Cognitive neuroscience provides us with a good example to illustrate it.S.M got her amygdalae damaged,correspondingly,and lost her ability to experience fear.This example triggered cognitive neuroscientists strong interests in working on it and realized that emotion is embodied.Actually,Darwin made the same argument as neuroscientists.He wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that “fear was expressed from an extremely remote period,in almost the same manner as it now is by man.” Not only is fear embodied,pleasure,sadness,and anger,etc.are the same case.Emotion mentioned above involves a network of brain regions made up of median ventral prefrontal lobe,anterior cingulated gyrus,hypothalamus,basal ganglia,the central gray matter,and the brain stem,etc.The network in activation is an expression that the body as the fl esh reveals how it feels.Knowing as an intellectual concept or an observed action is crystallized from emotion and feeling that the body is experienced and feeling.John Dewey got the point when he argued that “experience is primarily an active-passive affair;it is not primarily cognitive.”A lesson that education should learn from cognitive neuroscience is that we are not our brains but the structured fl esh loaded with historical and cultural meaningfulness.We immerse ourselves into human material and intellectual culture to shape the way that we look at the world and attitudes that we would take when we are dealing with the world.Thus,the fi rst lesson is that educators create friendly environment and cultivate students with love and passion that nurture students mind and soul to grow healthily.Secondly,knowledge as abstracted,symbolized,conceptualized system cannot be isolated from professional backgrounds,traditional culture,historical context,moral and ethical ideas that educators have had to present.Therefore,the outlook and overall qualities that educators have will exert signifi cant infl uences in shaping students’ development of personality.Finally,because knowledge is shaped by our bodies,being embodied,so symbolized,conceptualized knowledge should be taken back to a designed environment in which students will learn by material engagement.We are not our brains but are a structural unity of brain,body and mind----neuroethics with a human face.