During the past decade, scientific interest in the emotions has been experiencing a renaissance. After a century of neglect, emotion is once again a hot topic in the sciences of mind, as psychologists increasingly abandon their exclusive focus on reasoning, perception and memory, and rediscover the importance of affective processes. A new view of emotion is emerging one which sees emotions not as obstacles to intelligent action but as vital components of adaptive behaviour.
LOOKING FOR SPINOZA
Antonio Damasio
Heinemann
355 pp
£20.00
One of the leading thinkers in this scientific revolution is the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Damasio's studies of patients with frontal-lobe damage have presented some of the most compelling evidence for the importance of emotions in rational decision-making. Damasio's most important achievement, however, lies not so much in the new data he has provided as in his ability to weave the facts and figures into a coherent intellectual framework. Hundreds of scientists have contributed pieces to the emerging mosaic, but few have managed to fit them together with such consummate skill as Damasio.
Damasio's first book, Descartes Error (1994) addressed the role of emotion in decision-making and introduced the somatic marker hypothesis, which underlines the importance of bodily feedback in generating feelings. In The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Damasio discussed the role of emotion and feeling in the construction of the self. Now, in his third book, Damasio turns his attention to the nature of feelings themselves what they are, and the functions they evolved to perform.
Central to Damasio's argument is a distinction between feelings and emotions. Emotions, in Damasio's parlance, are the public or at least potentially public face of feelings, which are essentially private, subjective phenomena. This distinction allows Damasio first to highlight, and then to challenge, one widespread view of emotional expressions. Most people probably regard smiling, frowning and other such external signals of emotion as gestures that give expression to internal feelings, which come first. Damasio, however, thinks that things are really the other way round it is the smile that comes first, and causes the happy feeling, not vice versa.
In making this radical move, as in other aspects of his work, Damasio follows in the footsteps of the great psychologist and philosopher William James. It was James who first identified and criticised the commonsense theory of emotion that Damasio objects to. It might have been more appropriate, then, to have called the book 'Looking for William James'. Why, then, the reference to Spinoza?
The answer, in brief, is that Damasio finds in Spinoza another intellectual ally who, like James, emphasised how much our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame. Spinoza argued that the human mind is the idea of the human body, a phrase which Damasio interprets as foreshadowing his own theory of emotions as processes grounded in neural mappings of the body. Portrayed in this light, Spinoza becomes the perfect counterpoint to Descartes, a rhetorical move that capitalises on a subliminal reference to the title of Damasio's first book.
Professional philosophers might quibble at this approach to the history of ideas, in which seventeenth century philosophers are judged purely by their success or failure in anticipating the ideas of contemporary neuroscience, but this would be to miss the point entirely. Damasio's book is not a work of historical scholarship, but a work of science and, even more, of philosophy. And this is the real justification for the reference to Spinoza. For the fact is that the real heirs to Spinoza's legacy today are more likely to be found in departments of artificial intelligence and neuroscience than in departments of philosophy. Virtually all the interesting philosophy today is done, not by professional philosophers, but by scientists like Damasio.
Damasio writes with verve and style. He succeeds in guiding his readers on a tour of some of the latest discoveries in neuroscience without blinding them with science. But Damasio does not exaggerate the extent of our current knowledge. Despite the recent advances in our understanding of emotions and feelings, much uncharted territory remains to be discovered. The map may be incomplete, but thanks to Damasio we do at least know the principal landmarks.
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