Metapsychology Online Book Reviews

Looking for Spinoza

Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
by Antonio Damasio
Harcourt, 2003
Review by Neil Levy, Ph.D. on Feb 24th 2003

This, the third of Damasio’s influential books, continues his war against a persistent enemy: dualism. Dualists hold that mind and matter, and therefore mind and body, are composed of fundamentally different substances. Mind is immaterial, immune to ordinary causes, and potentially immortal. It is higher, purer, more spiritual. Body is lower, cruder, and destined to die, the very embodiment of man’s fall. Of course, this kind of dualism has been battered many times, at the hands of philosophers and of scientists, yet it clings on, in the popular imagination and even in the less reflective moments of many of its foes. Damasio’s arguments as to how mind arises out of body is a powerful antidote against its constant temptation.

The first half of this book is devoted to emotions and feelings. Emotions, in Damasio’s terminology, are bodily events: the chemical, neural and muscular changes that the body characteristically undergoes in the appropriate circumstances. Our heart rate, our posture, the chemical signals and electrical signals sent from and to the brain, all have characteristic patterns, which are the visible and measurable correlates of fear and anger, pride and shame, joy and sadness. So defined, emotions are things we share with ‘lower’ animals; indeed, primitive emotions are to be found in very simple animals.

Feelings, on the other hand, are the phenomenological experiences which emotions give rise to. Damasio argues that feelings essentially are perceptions of a certain states of the body. That is, a feeling is the perception of an emotion. It is worth remarking, in passing, that is unclear how literally we are meant to take this claim. Does Damasio really mean that feelings are nothing but perceptions of a state of the body? Or does he really mean that feelings are caused by perceptions of body states, and importantly made up of such perceptions? Is my anxiety just this yawning feeling in my stomach, my elevated heart rate and the tenseness of my muscles? Or is there an affect over and above all these, caused by them but irreducible to them? It is not clear that any mere perception would account for the phenomenological character of the feeling, the way it feels. It seems possible, in principle, for us to perceive that our body is undergoing certain alterations, without feeling anything at all. But perhaps our imaginations mislead us here, and the intuition that this is possible is a vestige of dualism. In any case, Damasio’s thesis would have gained in clarity if he had addressed this issue directly.

The perception of the body which is, or which causes, the feeling is not always accurate. All the sensors we have throughout our body produces a ‘map’ in our brain, and this map is the proximate site of the feeling. But that map can be misleading. Sometimes, it is misleading for a reason, as when the bodily signals which give rise to the experience of pain are filtered out, to allow a person to flee from danger; sometimes, it is misleading as a result of malfunction, or drug ingestion. Moreover, the simulation of the body states of others might give rise to characteristic emotions, such as the feeling of empathy.

It is plain why Damasio is so taken with the notion that feelings are perceptions, usually relatively accurate, of states of the body. At a stroke, it undercuts one of the strongest sources of our intuition that our minds are independent of our bodies. When we see that feelings can be induced rapidly and reliably, by manipulating the body in certain ways, our confidence is shaken. This buttresses the case Damasion began to construct with Descartes’ Error, in which he argued that feelings are necessary for rational behavior. But Damasio is after still bigger game. The grand claim he hopes to defend is that mind, and not just feelings, is essentially a map of the body. Emotions come first, evolutionarily speaking: our ancestors reacted in certain characteristic ways in the appropriate circumstances for many millenia. But at some point they came to have minds, to be aware of their emotions. Mind is dependent upon body, ontologically and genetically.

What has all this to do with Spinoza, the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher? It is not merely Spinoza’s monism that attracts Damasio to him, nor the fact that (at least as he interprets him), Spinoza too held that mind was dependent upon body. For Damasio, linking his reflections upon the mind to Spinoza’s work allows him to tie it in to grander questions; indeed, to the very grandest questions of all. Unfortunately, here the book is at its weakest. Damasio claims that understanding his claims, in the light of Spinoza’s work, helps to see how it can be relevant to the great questions of philosophy and ethics. It shows how neurobiological knowledge can contribute to the search for meaning in life, to the pursuit of happiness, to ethics. But when we strip away the rhetoric what he has to say is frequently trivial or obvious. We are told, for instance, that neurobiology vindicates Spinoza’s insight that joy is preferable to sorrow, and that our feelings can be controlled to some extent. Too often, he asks a great question, and answers it by changing the subject: how can neurobiology help us pursue the good life? It can lead to the production of more effective medication.

Damasio is, it seems, not content with being one of the most influential neurobiologists alive. He wants to be a philosopher as well. He would do better to stick to his craft. So long as he switches between them, as he does here, he risks failing at both. Not only are his philosophical reflections all too often banal, the communication of his neurological findings suffers as well, as we lose the ability to distinguish his data, his considered interpretation of that data, and his looser speculations. Antonio Damasio has a lot to tell us, and his message is important enough unadorned. It would be a pity to have it drowned out by his strained attempts to make it more relevant.

Dr Neil Levy is a fellow of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University, Australia. He is the author of two mongraphs and over a dozen articles and book chapters on Continental philosophy, ethics and political philosophy. He is currently writing a book on moral relativism.