I’ve made use of the phrase ’emotional intelligence’ recently, and it would do to spell out a little more what I mean by the phrase. I use it because it has been popularised by Daniel Goleman, so that gives the concept a contemporary ‘purchase’. However, what I really have in mind is something Ancient, and is really captured by terms like ‘virtue’ and ‘wisdom’ and (perhaps most of all) “eudaimonia”; and the thinkers I am leaning on are first, Alasdair MacIntyre, and second, Martha Nussbaum (and behind them both lies Aristotle). Nussbaum writes this about “eudaimonia” (in ‘The Fragility of Goodness’):

“Some texts we shall discuss are rendered obscure on this point by the common translation of Greek ‘eudaimonia’ by English ‘happiness’. Especially given our Kantian and Utilitarian heritage in moral philosophy, in both parts of which ‘happiness’ is taken to be the name of a feeling of contentment or pleasure, and a view that makes happiness the supreme good is asumed to be, by definition, a view that gives supreme value to psychological states rather than to activities, this translation is badly misleading. To the Greeks, eudaimonia means something like ‘living a good life for a human being’; or as a recent writer, John Cooper, has suggested, ‘human flourishing’. Aristotle tells us that it is equivalent, in ordinary discourse, to ‘living well and doing well’. Most Greeks would understand eudaimonia to be something essentially active, of which praiseworthy activities are not just productive means, but actual constituent parts. It is possible for a Greek thinker to argue that eudaimonia is equivalent to a state of pleasure; to this extent activity is not a conceptual part of the notion. But even here we should be aware that many Greek thinkers conceive of pleasure as something active rather than stative; an equation of eudaimonia with pleasure might, then, not mean what we would expect it to mean in a Utilitarian writer. The view that eudaimonia is equivalent to a state of pleasure is an unconventional and prima facie counterintuitive position in the Greek tradition. A very common position would be Aristotle’s, that eudaimonia consists in activity according to excellence(s).”

Aristotle developed a system which had at its heart the notion of the virtues – those excellences which the human being could develop which would enable them to live a full human life. In particular, there was an emphasis on the necessity of risk – that some elements of the good life can only be achieved if you are prepared to take the risk of failure and loss. In the Aristotelean synthesis, the virtues have the central role, and the key virtue is phronesis, or judgement: ‘judgement has an indispensable role in the life of the virtuous man which it does not and could not have in, for example, the life of the merely law-abiding or rule-abiding man’ (MacIntyre). This emphasis upon judgement is where I see emotion playing the necessary role, and the contemporary language of ’emotional intelligence’ as making sense, and I link it in with Damasio’s ‘somatic marker hypothesis’, ie the necessity for emotions to be engaged in our reasoning capacities.

My argument is this: our reasoning capacity is dependent upon our emotions, and, clearly, emotional development is dependent upon the development of the virtues (eg forebearance, capacity for hard work, delayed gratification etc). So, logically, a functioning intellect is dependent on emotional maturity, not the other way around, and it is through the growth of our emotional maturity that we develop our understandings not principally through (Modern) intellectual development. Put simply, if our emotions are tangled, then our reason will be tangled; if our emotions are in order (well developed) then our rational investigations will thereby be improved. For Aristotle was clear that the ability to develop the virtues – and therefore to achieve eudaimonia, the good and flourishing life – depended upon education and effort. It required emotional maturity – wisdom. Instead of the Socratic contemplation of abstract universals, ‘Being mortal, let us think mortal thoughts’.

Another quotation from Nussbaum, this time from “Upheavals of Thought”, where she is discussing ‘the enormous educational importance of tragic drama’:

“Tragedy is not for the very young; and it is not just for the young. Mature people always need to expand their experience and to reinforce their grasp of central ethical truths. But to the young future citizen, tragedy has a special significance. For such a spectator is learning compassion in the process. Tragedies acquaint her with the bad things that may happen in a human life, long before life itself does so: it thus enables concern for others who are suffering what she has not suffered. And it does so in a way that makes the depth and significance of suffering, and the losses that inspire it, unmistakably plain – the poetic, visual, and musical resources of the drama thus have moral weight. By inviting the spectator to become intensely concerned for the fate of the tragic hero, and at the same time portraying the hero as a worthy person, whose distress does not stem from his own deliberate wickedness, the drama sets up compassion; an attentive spectator will, in apprehending it, have that emotion. The Greeks cultivated compassion primarily through drama…”

So I see ’emotional intelligence’ as being precisely that cultivation of compassion and insight which comes from a full and rounded education, what might be called ‘largeness of soul’. It is the ability to exercise discernment, to perceive the good and to act according to the good, and in doing so to foster a full human flourishing.

There is nothing original to me here – it is really just a contemporary rephrasing of Aristotle – but of course I would wish to link it to the insights of the Christian faith, as did Augustine and Aquinas and the great mainstream of Christian theology. For it would be possible to argue – given the time and resources(!) I would argue – that the determinative tragedy, which both reveals our human nature and at the same time gives the answer to tragedy, is the story of Christ. When Christ says that he has come that we might have life and have it in all its fullness, I think he is talking about eudaimonia.