안토니오 다마지오 스피노자의 뇌 Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow And The Felling Brain (2003

알라딘: 스피노자의 뇌

스피노자의 뇌 - 기쁨, 슬픔, 느낌의 뇌과학  | 사이언스 클래식 9  

안토니오 다마지오 (지은이),임지원 (옮긴이),김종성 (감수)사이언스북스2007-05-07원제 : Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow And The Felling Brain (2003년)

정가

22,000원

양장본424쪽

책소개

<데카르트의 오류>, <사건에 대한 느낌>으로 알려져 있는 안토니오 다마지오의 '정서-느낌'에 관한 삼부작 중 마지막 책. 의식과 마음에 대한 과학적 연구가 활발해지면서 마음과 몸은 데카르트의 이원적 견해는 더 이상 설 자리를 잃게 되었는데, 지은이는 이것을 극복한 스피노자의 사상을 추적해 느낌과 정서, 감정의 본질을 파헤친다.

총 7장으로 구성되어 있으며, 초반부에서는 시제 임상에서 다양한 뇌 질환 환자들의 사례를 통해 느낌과 정서를 촉발하고 수행하는 뇌와 신체의 메커니즘을 설명하고 우리 내면에서 작동하는 정서의 기구를 규명하고, 후반부에서는 자신의 이러한 이론들이 스피노자의 사상과 어떠한 식으로 연결되는지를 설명하고 있다.

오랜기간 우리의 통념을 지배해온 데카르트의 세계관과는 확연히 다른 세계관의 모습과 느낌과 본질, 중요성을 일깨워주는 흥미로운 책이다.

목차

1장 느낌 속으로

2장 욕구와 정서

3장 느낌

4장 느낌, 그 이후

5장 몸과 뇌, 마음

6장 스피노자를 방문하다

7장 거기 누구인가

감사의 말

부록1

부록2

주

용어 사전

추천의 글

옮긴이의 글

=======

책속에서

첫문장

고통과 쾌락, 그리고 그 사이에 존재하는 온갖 느낌(feeling) 들은 우리 마음의 토대를 이루고 있다.

흥미롭게도 정서적으로 유효한 대상은 느낌의 기원이 되는 대상을 형성하는 역할을 한다. 따라서 우리가 정서나 느낌의 대상이라고 말할 때 어떤 대상을 말하는 것인지 분명히 할 필요가 있다. 이를테면 멋진 바다 경치는 정서적으로 유효한 대상이다. 그리고 그 경치를 바라본 결과로 비롯된 신체 상태가 느낌의 기원에 존재하는 실제 대상이며, 그것이 느낌 상태에서 지각된다.-p111 중에서

나의 목적은 영적 현상의 숭고함이 생물학의 숭고함에 구현되어 있으며, 우리는 그 절차를 생물학적으로 이해하기 시작했다는 사실을 주장하는 것이다. 그 절차의 결과에 대해서는 굳이 설명할 필요도 없고 그럴 가치도 없다. 영적 경험 그 자체로 충분하다.-p337 중에서  접기

추천글

다마지오는 뇌과학의 최전선에서 '감정 혁명'을 불러일으켜, 뇌과학뿐만 아니라, 다른 분야들에까지 과학의 지혜를 전파하고 있다! - 「뉴욕 타임스」 - 뉴욕 타임스 

‘노무현 혐오’와 ‘박정희 공포’, 닮았다 - 강양구 (프레시안 부국장) 

빼어나게 매력적이며, 심오한 깊이를 지닌 책이다. 저자가 가진 학식과 지혜는, 인간 뇌에 관한 과학적 지식이 인간 그 자체에 대한 중요한 통찰을 제공할 수 있다는 힘 있는 설명을 선사한다. - 「네이처」 - 네이처 

정서와 느낌, 판단, 윤리 같은 형이상학의 영역을 뇌과학을 사용해 줄기차게 탐구해 나가는 다마지오의 글은 매혹적이다. 철학과 뇌과학을 넘나들면서 거침없는 의견을 쏟아 내는 다마지오의 달변에 한껏 지적 쾌감을 만끽할 수 있을 것이다. - 김종성(서울 아산 병원 신경과 과장, <뇌에 관해 풀리지 않는 의문들>의 지은이) - 김종성 

저자 및 역자소개

오늘날 가장 탁월한 심리학자 중 한 명으로 꼽히는 학자다. 현재 서던캘리포니아 대학 돈사이프 인문·예술·사회과학대 신경과학·심리학·철학 교수 겸 뇌과학연구소 소장이다. 신경과 전문의이자 신경과학자인 다마지오는 느낌·감정·의식의 기저를 이루는 뇌 과정을 이해하는 데에 지대한 공헌을 해 왔다. 특히 감정이 의사 결정 과정에서 차지하는 역할에 대한 그의 연구는 신경과학·심리학·철학에 중대한 영향을 미쳤다. 수많은 과학 논문을 발표했으며 미국과학정보연구소에 의해 ‘가장 많이 인용된 연구자’로 선정되기도 했다.

미국 의학한림원, 미국 예술과학아카데미, 바바리안 인문과학아카데미, 유럽 과학기술아카데미 회원이며, 그라베마이어 상(2014년), 혼다 상(2010년), 아스투리아 과학기술상(2005년), 노니노 상(2003년), 시뇨레 상(2004년), 페소아 상(1992년) 등 수많은 상을 받았다. 로잔 연방 공과대학, 소르본 파리 데카르트 대학 등 유수의 대학들로부터 명예박사 학위를 받았으며, 일부 학위는 아내인 해나 다마지오와 공동으로 받았다. 대표작 중 번역된 것으로는 《데카르트의 오류》, 《스피노자의 뇌》(2007 아·태이론물리센터APCTP 올해의 과학도서 선정) 《느낌의 진화》 등이 있다. 접기

최근작 : <느끼고 아는 존재>,<느낌의 진화>,<데카르트의 오류> … 총 29종 (모두보기)

임지원 (옮긴이) 

서울대학교에서 식품영양학을 전공하고 같은 대학원을 졸업했다. 전문 번역가로 활동하며 다양한 인문·과학서를 옮겼다. 옮긴 책으로는 『공기』, 『에덴의 용』, 『진화란 무엇인가』, 『섹스의 진화』, 『스피노자의 뇌』, 『넌제로』, 『슬로우데스』, 『루시퍼 이펙트』, 『급진적 진화』, 『사랑의 발견』, 『세계를 바꾼 지도』, 『꿈』, 『육천 년 빵의 역사』(공역), 『교양으로 읽는 희토류 이야기』 등이 있다.

최근작 : … 총 43종 (모두보기)

김종성 (감수) 

號(호): 向岩(향암), 牧川(목천), 요셉, 瓦井(와정), 拙彬(졸빈).

청계(靑溪) 할아버님(1500-1580)과 퇴계(退溪) 할아버님(1501-1570)의 16대 손(孫). 1959년 서울에서 태어나 다섯 살에 대전으로 이사했다. 대전에서 목동초등학교, 한밭중학교, 서대전고등학 교를 졸업하고, 충남의대에서 학사·석사·박사 학위를 취득하 였다. 연세의대 가정의학교실에서 가정의학 전문의를 취득했다.

육군군의관을 제대한 후 대전한일병원 알코올중독치료센터 소장, 울산의대 강릉아산병원 가정의학과 교수를 역임하고, 충남대 병원 가정의학과 개설(2000년) 및 충남의대 가정의학교실을 창립 (2004년)하였으며, 2018년 현재 충남대학교 의과대학 가정의학교실의 주임교수로 근무하고 있다.

퇴계사상과 관련한 철학논문 「행동조절에 대한 성리학과 뇌 과학 이론의 현상학적 상통성과 의학적 함의: 퇴계 심학(心學)을 중심으로」(유학연구, 2017)으로 대한가정의학회 ‘학술상’을 수상하였다. 성리학의 선행후지 철학이론을 환자치료 프로그램으로 검증한 「Adapting a cognitive behavioral program in treating alcohol dependence in south Korea」 논문을 SSCI 학술지(Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 2007)에 발표한 바 있다. 저서로 『의사가 만난 퇴계, 5판』(궁미디어, 2017), 『알코올중독의 우리 전통 행동인지치료』(하나의학사, 2005) 등 26권이 있으며, 학술논문으로는 알코올 분야에 100여 편과 가정의학 분야에 50여 편이 있다. 대한가정의 학회로부터 ‘공로상’(2005·2014), ‘저술공로상’(2013), ‘출판지원 상’(2014), ‘학술상’(2011·2014·2015·2017), ‘존경받는 의사상’ (2015) 등을 수상했다. 접기

최근작 : <마음이 편하지 않을 때는 한 걸음 걸어라>,<의사가 만난 퇴계>,<김종성 박사의 뇌졸중 119> … 총 18종 (모두보기)

임지원(옮긴이)의 말

느낌과 의식은 그 출현에서부터 서로 겹쳐지고 서로를 지탱해 주면서 함께 발달해 왔기 때문에 그것을 제각기 분리해서 따로따로 분석하기 어렵지만, 아무튼 복잡한 환경 속에서 복잡한 행동 반응이 요구되는 인간과 같은 생물의 경우 과거를 염두에 두고 미래를 예측하는 자전적 자아와 추론 능력, 복잡한 의사 결정 능력을 가진 의식의 발달이 요구되었고 그 의식 절차의 일부로서 느낌 역시 출현했을 것이라고 저자는 주장한다. - 임지원(옮긴이)

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평점 분포

    7.6

     

스피노자와 뇌과학에 대해 가볍게 읽을 수 있어요  구매

아라디 2019-09-17 공감 (1) 댓글 (0)

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공감

     

인간의 감정에 대한 스피노자의 직관적 통찰을 현대 뇌과학으로 풍부하게 입증하는 책. ‘느낌’이 생명현상에 대한 고차원적 정보를 담고 있음을 재미있게 들여다볼 수 있습니다.  구매

잿빛매 2021-02-10 공감 (1) 댓글 (0)

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공감

     

이전책인 데카르트의 오류는 깊이가 있었는데 이건 좀 대중서인듯...아쉬움  구매

windfl99 2008-11-08 공감 (1) 댓글 (0)

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공감

     

아주 재미있게 읽을 수 있었다. 스피노자에 대해서도 많이 알수 있고...  구매

거북이 2012-07-09 공감 (0) 댓글 (0)

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공감

     

서가 한쪽에 꽂혀 있던 책을 최근에야 다 읽었다. 기쁨과 슬픔 등의 정서와 느낌의 역할을 스피노자를 화두로 풀어낸다. 때로는 신경과학의 용어가 어렵게 다가오지만 읽기에 방해가 될 정도는 아니다. 우리가 행복해야 할 이유가 다 있다.  구매

wonderkid 2021-03-11 공감 (0) 댓글 (0)

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마이리뷰

정서와 느낌에 관한 신경과학

요즘은 아주 게을러져서 책도 몇 권 안 읽는데 그나마 읽은 책 기록 남기는 것도 귀찮다.-.-; 아무 것도 안 남기면 나중에 뭘 읽었는지 전혀 기억 못하니 귀차니즘에서 잠시 탈출해보자.

 

뇌과학에 관한 책을 몇 권 읽다보니 분과학문 분야가 다루는 세부 사항보다는 대체적인 지도를 그리게 되는데 그간 읽은 건, 음악, 언어, 기억, 계획과 실행에 관한 뇌 신경학적 관점 다룬 책들이다. 이번 책은 정서emotion와 느낌feeling을 다룬다. 사람이 오감과 육감으로 구현하는 물리적 것들에 대한 공통점이 있다.

 

느낌은 유기체의 가장 윗단계에 있는 작용이다. 저자는 느낌과 정서를 조금 구별한다. 정서가 얼굴표정, 목소리, 특정 행동에서 드러난다고 설명한다. 즉 정서는 행위나 움직임는 가시적 요소를 통해 발생한다. 느낌은 정서가 선행되어야하고 일종의 심상으로 유기체의 뇌 속에서 일어나는 사적 현상으로 정의한다. 실제 신체 상태에서 일어나는 게 아니고 어떤 주어진 순간 뇌의 체성 감각 영역에서 구성되는 실제 지도에서 비롯된다고 함. 음악이든, 언어든, 기억이든, 실행이든, 느낌이든, 그러니까 모두 선행하는 외부 입력이 존재해야한다. 그리고 개체는 그 외부 입력을 자신만의 회로에서 패턴화해서 저장했다가 제3의 외부의 물리적 자극이 있을 때 생긴다.

 

스피노자는 뇌과학과 대체 무슨 관계인가 하면 저자는 마음과 신체의 일원론을 주장하기 위해 스피노자의 <에티카>를 종종 인용한다. 이 책에서 저자가 주장하는 바는, 마음의 작용은 신체의 작용이라는 것. 마음은 뇌에서 발생하기 때문에 뇌가 없다면 마음도 작동하지 않는다는 것. 뇌사상태에 빠진 사람을 생각하면 일리있기도 한데 완전히 동의하게 되진 않는다. 신체 상태 변화는 분명히 심적 변화로 이어진다. 몸이 피곤하면 짜증이 난다든가 무기력해진다든가, 반대로 몸 상태가 좋으면 기분도 상승 곡선을 그리는 건 분명하다. 저자는 마음의 임무를 몸의 생존을 위해 기능한다고 보는 점이 함정인듯. 스피노자까지 가져온 노력이 좀 물거품처럼 보인다. (사실 스피노자 이야기가 저자의 주장과 잘 섞이지 않고 두 권의 책으로 이루어진 거 같다. 스피노자 일대기와 뇌과학으로. 덕분에 스피노자의 간략한 일대기를 알게 되었지만) 마음이 신체를 위해서만 존재한다고 결론내리는 건 과학자의 시선이다. 자살 충동을 느끼는 사람들한테 일반적으로 마음을 굳게 먹으라고 말한다. 마음을 고쳐 먹으면 신체 세포나 유익한 화학물질들이 증가한다. 이게 신체 보존을 위해서라니...마음과 신체는 상호작용을 해서 분리하는 건 불가능하지만 저자의 결론은, 글쎄.

 

아무튼 6월도 나태하게 보내고 있는데 내 마음을 좀 들여다보고 고등생물로서 머리 좀 쓰고 살자. 제발.

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넙치 2013-06-18 공감(2) 댓글(3)

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마음과 뇌와 몸은 하나 새창으로 보기 구매

마음과 몸 서로 다른 실체로 구성되어 있다는 데카르트를 반박한 데카르트의 오류라는 책을 쓴 저자의 또 다른 책이다. 데카르트의 오류는 현재 절판 상태다. 저자는 행동신경학을 전공했다. 마치 소설을 읽듯 책은 스피노자의 생가를 방문하며 그를 회상하는 장면으로 시작된다. 당대에는 유대교에서 파문을 당하고 유럽에서 가장 학문적 자유가 보장되었던 네덜란드에서조차 금서가 된 스피노자의 책에서 저자는 심신을 이해하는 오늘날의 현대생물학의 관점을 발견했다. 책의 내용은 요약하면 다음과 같다. 여러 실험을 통해 피험자가 느낌을 갖기 전에 신체적인 반응이 먼저 일어나는데 이 신체적인 반응은 피험자가 의식하지 못하는 순간 경험한 특정한 사건에 대한 뇌의 반응으로서 이를 통해 정서가 생겨나고 이후 느낌이 일어난다. 신체적인 반응에 따른 전반적인 신체 상태가 뇌의 감각 지도에 표상되고 이에 따라 우리가 받는 느낌이 달라진다는 것이다. 이처럼 우리 몸의 모든 세포의 항상성 반응이 뇌의 감각 지도에 표상되는 것이 느낌 및 인식 형성의 기본 원리라면 어쩌면 몸과 정신은 분리된 것으로 볼 수 없다는 것이다. 책의 후반부에 상당한 양을 저자는 스피노자의 철학을 설명하는데 할애하고 있다. 신경과학자로서 자신의 평생의 연구를 한 철학자의 사상과 접목시켜 설명할 수 있다는 게 너무나 부럽고 존경스럽다. 

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dr4mind 2014-02-25 공감(2) 댓글(0)

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기다리던 책이 다시 나와 기쁘다! 새창으로 보기 구매

의식에 대한 호기심이 있다면 이 책의 절판을 누구나 아쉬워 하지 않았을 까 싶다. 그리고 안토니오 디바지오하면 이 책말고도 데카르트의 오류, 사건에 대한 느낌이라는 제목만으로도 이 저자가 누구인지 궁금증이 있지 않을 까 싶다. 그만큼 그가 천착하는 의식에 대한 연구가 네게는 사막의 오아시스처럼 갈증을 채워주는 그 무엇이다. 게다가 감수하신 김종성교수나 번역자 모두 신뢰할수 있는 3박자가 모두 갖춰진 책이다..   

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==

===

FIRST CHAPTER

'Looking for Spinoza'

By Antonio Damasio

Feb. 23, 2003

Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because the mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming of the most universal of melodies that only dies down when we go to sleep, a humming that turns into all-out singing when we are occupied by joy, or a mournful requiem when sorrow takes over.*

Given the ubiquity of feelings, one would have thought that their science would have been elucidated long ago-what feelings are, how they work, what they mean-but that is hardly the case. Of all the mental phenomena we can describe, feelings and their essential ingredients-pain and pleasure-are the least understood in biological and specifically neurobiological terms. This is all the more puzzling considering that advanced societies cultivate feelings shamelessly and dedicate so many resources and efforts to manipulating those feelings with alcohol, drugs of abuse, medical drugs, food, real sex, virtual sex, all manner of feel-good consumption, and all manner of feel-good social and religious practices. We doctor our feelings with pills, drinks, health spas, workouts, and spiritual exercises, but neither the public nor science have yet come to grips with what feelings are, biologically speaking.

I am not really surprised at this state of affairs, considering what I grew up believing about feelings. Most of it simply was not true. For example, I thought that feelings were impossible to define with specificity, unlike objects you could see, hear, or touch. Unlike those concrete entities, feelings were intangible. When I started musing about how the brain managed to create the mind, I accepted the established advice that feelings were out of the scientific picture. One could study how the brain makes us move. One could study sensory processes, visual and otherwise, and understand how thoughts are put together. One could study how the brain learns and memorizes thoughts. One could even study the emotional reactions with which we respond to varied objects and events.

But feelings-which can be distinguished from emotions, as we shall see in the next chapter-remained elusive. Feelings were to stay forever mysterious. They were private and inaccessible. It was not possible to explain how feelings happened or where they happened. One simply could not get "behind" feelings.

As was the case with consciousness, feelings were beyond the bounds of science, thrown outside the door not just by the naysayers who worry that anything mental might actually be explained by neuroscience, but by card-carrying neuroscientists themselves, proclaiming allegedly insurmountable limitations. My own willingness to accept this belief as fact is evidenced by the many years I spent studying anything but feelings. It took me awhile to see the degree to which the injunction was unjustified and to realize that the neurobiology of feelings was no less viable than the neurobiology of vision or memory. But eventually I did, mostly, as it turns out, because I was confronted by the reality of neurological patients whose symptoms literally forced me to investigate their conditions.

Imagine, for example, meeting someone who, as a result of damage to a certain location of his brain, became unable to feel compassion or embarrassment-when compassion or embarrassment were due-yet could feel happy, or sad, or fearful just as normally as before brain disease had set in. Would that not give you pause? Or picture a person who, as a result of damage located elsewhere in the brain, became unable to experience fear when fear was the appropriate reaction to the situation and yet still could feel compassion. The cruelty of neurological disease may be a bottomless pit for its victims-the patients and those of us who are called to watch. But the scalpel of disease also is responsible for its single redeeming feature: By teasing apart the normal operations of the human brain, often with uncanny precision, neurological disease provides a unique entry into the fortified citadel of the human brain and mind.

Reflection on the situation of these patients and of others with comparable conditions raised intriguing hypotheses. First, individual feelings could be prevented through damage to a discrete part of the brain; the loss of a specific sector of brain circuitry brought with it the loss of a specific kind of mental event. Second, it seemed clear that different brain systems controlled different feelings; damage to one area of the brain anatomy did not cause all types of feelings to disappear at once. Third, and most surprising, when patients lost the ability to express a certain emotion, they also lost the ability to experience the corresponding feeling. But the opposite was not true: Some patients who lost their ability to experience certain feelings still could express the corresponding emotions. Could it be that while emotion and feeling were twins, emotion was born first and feeling second, with feeling forever following emotion like a shadow? In spite of their close kinship and seeming simultaneity, it seemed that emotion preceded feeling. Knowledge of this specific relationship, as we shall see, provided a window into the investigation of feelings.

Such hypotheses could be tested with the help of scanning techniques that allow us to create images of the anatomy and activity of the human brain. Step by step, initially in patients and then in both patients and people without neurological disease, my colleagues and I began to map the geography of the feeling brain. We aimed at elucidating the web of mechanisms that allow our thoughts to trigger emotional states and engender feelings.

Emotion and feeling played an important but very different part in two of my previous books. Descartes' Error addressed the role of emotion and feeling in decision-making. The Feeling of What Happens outlined the role of emotion and feeling in the construction of the self. In the present book, however, the focus is on feelings themselves, what they are and what they provide. Most of the evidence I discuss was not available when I wrote the previous books, and a more solid platform for the understanding of feelings has now emerged. The main purpose of this book, then, is to present a progress report on the nature and human significance of feelings and related phenomena, as I see them now, as neurologist, neuroscientist, and regular user.

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The gist of my current view is that feelings are the expression of human flourishing or human distress, as they occur in mind and body. Feelings are not a mere decoration added on to the emotions, something one might keep or discard. Feelings can be and often are revelations of the state of life within the entire organism-a lifting of the veil in the literal sense of the term. Life being a high-wire act, most feelings are expressions of the struggle for balance, ideas of the exquisite adjustments and corrections without which, one mistake too many, the whole act collapses. If anything in our existence can be revelatory of our simultaneous smallness and greatness, feelings are.

How that revelation comes to mind is itself beginning to be revealed. The brain uses a number of dedicated regions working in concert to portray myriad aspects of the body's activities in the form of neural maps. This portrait is a composite, an ever-changing picture of life on the fly. The chemical and neural channels that bring into the brain the signals with which this life portrait can be painted are just as dedicated as the canvas that receives them. The mystery of how we feel is a little less mysterious now.

It is reasonable to wonder if the attempt to understand feelings is of any value beyond the satisfaction of one's curiosity. For a number of reasons, I believe it is. Elucidating the neurobiology of feelings and their antecedent emotions contributes to our views on the mind-body problem, a problem central to the understanding of who we are. Emotion and related reactions are aligned with the body, feelings with the mind. The investigation of how thoughts trigger emotions and of how bodily emotions become the kind of thoughts we call feelings provides a privileged view into mind and body, the overtly disparate manifestations of a single and seamlessly interwoven human organism.

The effort has more practical payoffs, however. Explaining the biology of feelings and their closely related emotions is likely to contribute to the effective treatment of some major causes of human suffering, among them depression, pain, and drug addiction. Moreover, understanding what feelings are, how they work, and what they mean is indispensable to the future construction of a view of human beings more accurate than the one currently available, a view that would take into account advances in the social sciences, cognitive science, and biology. Why is such a construction of any practical use? Because the success or failure of humanity depends in large measure on how the public and the institutions charged with the governance of public life incorporate that revised view of human beings in principles and policies. An understanding of the neurobiology of emotion and feelings is a key to the formulation of principles and policies capable of reducing human distress and enhancing human flourishing. In effect, the new knowledge even speaks to the manner in which humans deal with unresolved tensions between sacred and secular interpretations of their own existence.

Now that I have sketched my main purpose, it is time to explain why a book dedicated to new ideas on the nature and significance of human feeling should invoke Spinoza in the title. Since I am not a philosopher and this book is not about Spinoza's philosophy, it is sensible to ask: why Spinoza? The short explanation is that Spinoza is thoroughly relevant to any discussion of human emotion and feeling. Spinoza saw drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings-an ensemble Spinoza called affects-as a central aspect of humanity. Joy and sorrow were two prominent concepts in his attempt to comprehend human beings and suggest ways in which their lives could be lived better.

The long explanation is more personal.

The Hague

December 1, 1999. The friendly doorman of the Hotel des Indes insists: "You should not walk in this weather, sir, let me get a car for you. The wind is bad. It is almost a hurricane, sir. Look at the flags." True, the flags have taken wing, and the fast-moving clouds are racing toward the east. Although The Hague's Embassy Row seems about to lift off, I decline the offer. I prefer to walk, I say. I will be all right. Besides, see how beautiful the sky looks in between the clouds? My doorman has no idea where I am going, and I am not going to tell him. What would he have thought?

The rain has almost stopped and with some determination it is easy to overcome the wind. I actually can walk fast and follow my mental map of the place. At the end of the promenade in front of the Hotel des Indes, to my right, I can see the old palace and the Mauritshuis, festooned with Rembrandt's face-they are showing a retrospective of his self-portraits. Past the museum square the streets are almost deserted, although this is the center of town and it is a regular working day. There must be warnings telling people to stay indoors. So much the better. I arrive at the Spui without having to brave a crowd. After I get to the New Church, the route is entirely unfamiliar and I hesitate for a second, but the choice becomes clear: I turn right on Jacobstraat, then left on Wagenstraat, then right again on Stilleverkade. Five minutes later I am on the Paviljoensgracht. I stop in front of number 72-74.

The front of the house is much as I imagined it, a small building with three floors, three windows wide, a version of the average canal townhouse, more modest than rich. It is well kept and not very different from what it must have looked like in the seventeenth century. All the windows are closed, and there is no sign of activity. The door is well kept and well painted, and next to it there is a shiny brass bell, set in the frame. The word SPINOZAHUIS is etched in the rim. I press the button resolutely but without much hope. There is no sound from inside and no movement in any curtain. No one had answered the phone when I tried to call earlier. Spinoza is closed for business.

This is where Spinoza lived the last seven years of his brief life and where he died in 1677. The Theologico-Political Treatise, which he carried when he arrived, was published from here, anonymously. The Ethics was completed here and published after his death, almost as anonymously.

I have no hope of seeing the house today but all is not lost. In the landscaped middle section that separates the two lanes of the street, an unexpected urban garden, I discover Spinoza himself, semiobscured by the windswept foliage, sitting quietly and pensively, in sturdy bronze perpetuity. He looks pleased and entirely undisturbed by the meteorological commotion, as well he should, having survived stronger forces in his day.

For the past few years I have been looking for Spinoza, sometimes in books, sometimes in places, and that is why I am here today. A curious pastime, as you can see, and one that I had never planned to adopt. The reason why I did has a lot to do with coincidence. I first read Spinoza as an adolescent-there is no better age to read Spinoza on religion and politics-but it is fair to say that while some ideas made lasting impressions, the reverence I developed for Spinoza was rather abstract. He was both fascinating and forbidding. Later, I never thought of Spinoza as especially relevant to my work, and my acquaintance with his ideas was sparse. And yet there was a quote of his that I had long treasured-it came from the Ethics and pertained to the notion of self-and it was when I thought of citing it and needed to check its accuracy and context that Spinoza returned to my life. I found the quote, all right, and it did match the contents of the yellowed paper I had once pinned to a wall. But then I started reading backward and forward from the particular passage where I had landed, and I simply could not stop. Spinoza was still the same, but I was not. Much of what once seemed impenetrable now seemed familiar, strangely familiar, in fact, and quite relevant to several aspects of my recent work. I was not about to endorse all of Spinoza. For one thing, some passages were still opaque, and there were conflicts and inconsistencies of ideas unresolved after multiple readings. I still was puzzled and even exasperated.

Continues...

Excerpted from Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio Copyright © 2003 by Antonio Damasio

Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 23, 2003 of

===

LOOKING FOR SPINOZA: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

Antonio R. Damasio, Damasio, . . Harcourt, $28 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-15-100557-4

The third in a series that began with Descartes' Error, this book deftly combines recent advances in neuroscience with charged meditations on foundational 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the result is Damasio's fullest report so far on the nature of feelings. A Salk Institute professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, 

Damasio makes a useful distinction between emotions, which are publicly observable body states, and feelings, which are mental events observable only to the person having them. 

Based on neuroscience research he and others have done, Damasio argues that an episode of emoting begins with an emotionally "competent" stimulus (such as an attractive person or a scary house) that the organism automatically appraises as conducive to survival or well-being (a good thing) or not conducive (bad). This appraisal takes the form of a complex array of physiological reactions (e.g., quickening heartbeat, tensing facial muscles), which is mapped in the brain. From that map, a feeling arises as "an idea of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process." Because they "bear witness to the state of life deep within," feelings are a vital guide to decision-making. Damasio goes on to connect his own views to Spinoza's and sympathize with that thinker's "secular religiosity," which identified God with nature. He ends by discussing spiritual feelings, which he relates to "the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection." Given his professional background, it is not surprising that Damasio is more persuasive when talking neuroscience than philosophy. But overall, he succeeds in making the latest brain research accessible to the general reader, while his passionate Spinozist reflections make that data relevant to everyday life. (Feb. 3)

==

I feel therefore I am

Jonathan Bate enjoys Antonio Damasio's lesson in 300-year-old philosophy, Looking for Spinoza

Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio

Buy Looking for Spinoza at Amazon.co.uk

Jonathan Bate

Sat 24 May 2003 10.05 AEST

Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain

by Antonio Damasio

320pp, Heinemann, £20

A new treatment for Parkinson's disease involves implanting tiny electrodes in the patient's brain-stem. A low-intensity electrical current then charges the motor nuclei, enabling the patient to move their hands without a tremor and to walk normally. A team at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris were treating a 65-year-old woman by this method, but a slight error occurred: the electrical charge was passed two millimetres below the correct contact point.

The woman's expression immediately changed to one of sadness. Then she began to cry and to speak of her hopelessness, her sense of worthlessness, of disappearing down a dark hole. The doctors realised something was wrong and switched off the current. In less than two minutes her behaviour returned to normal. She was a habitually cheerful woman who had no history of psychiatric disorder personally or in her family. She had not even experienced the mood changes that sometimes come with Parkinson's. It was as if the symptoms of depression had simply been switched on with the charge to a particular point in her brain and switched off again just as quickly.

Another story: one of the more radical treatments for epilepsy is the surgical removal of the brain region that causes the seizures. Before getting out his knife, the surgeon has to identify the brain areas that must not be removed because they do essential work (controlling speech and vision, for instance). This is done by stimulating the brain with electricity and watching the results. In the case of one patient, stimulation to a number of closely located sites had the effect, in Antonio Damasio's words, of "consistently and exclusively locating laughter". The patient would be shown a picture of a horse. Under normal conditions, she would see it as a regular kind of horse. But when the relevant segment of the supplementary motor area of the left frontal lobe was stimulated, she would consider it the most hilarious equine on God's earth.

Sorrow and joy: the ground bass of our feeling lives. Tragedy and comedy: the two fundamental outlooks upon the human condition. Is it possible that such profound and all-embracing essentials might have a physical location in some particular small corner of the brain? That feelings are in the most literal sense nothing more or less than a form of neural electricity?

For some, there will be shades of Huxley's Brave New World in these images of white-coated lab technicians probing electrodes into the brain in order to artificially stimulate depression and laughter. But who is to say which stimuli are artificial and which are natural? All sorts of things stimulate us into sadness or joy: reading books, snorting cocaine, watching films and plays and football matches, going on religious pilgrimages or to revivalist meetings, making love, getting drunk. Whatever the cause, an investigation into the mechanics of strong feeling has much to promise.

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There is an ancient philosophical tradition that associates feeling with the body and reasoning with the mind. At least since René Descartes, there has been a tendency to separate mind from body, to regard human and animal bodies merely as superior machines, the mind as the thing that is uniquely apart, uniquely human. Cartesian philosophy begins by imagining a disembodied mind (the cogito - "I think therefore I am"); the body and the material world become the thing thought about (res cogitans).

Damasio is a distinguished neuro-scientist who came to prominence outside his specialist field just under a decade ago when he published a book called Descartes' Error, which argued that new knowledge about the workings of the brain called into question the old distinctions between reasoning and feeling, mind and body. Damasio's particular expertise is in the area of brain injury: what do we learn about ourselves when we encounter someone who, as a result of damage to a particular bit of the brain, has suddenly lost the ability to feel embarrassment - or compassion, or fear, or sociability? What do we learn about the nature of consciousness from, say, amnesiacs who retain all their core biological functions but have lost their sense of individual identity?

Case after case analysed by Damasio in both Descartes' Error and his next book, The Feeling of What Happens, has confirmed him in the view that things traditionally kept apart by philosophers (such as rational decision-making and emotional mood) actually happen together in the brain and, further, that the brain functions by mapping the body. The Cartesian thought-experiment of a disembodied mind is a contradiction in terms, since the mind only exists in conjunction with the body. Damasio has always trusted an instinct of William James's: that every time we have a thought about our emotions we bring with that thought an accompanying body state.

In his new book, Damasio finds another, more surprising precedent for his vision: the 17th-century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, for whom "the human mind is the idea of the human body". Damasio considers, for instance, Spinoza's proposition that "love is nothing but a pleasurable state, joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause". Whereas Descartes always seemed to begin from an idea, Spinoza begins here from a body-state: when we are in love the feeling suffuses our entire body. The mental process of assigning a cause comes second.

By beginning from the body Spinoza proved himself a proto-biological thinker. Two centuries before Darwinian evolution and the work of Ernst Haeckel, father of scientific ecology, Spinoza proposed that the starting-point for our thinking about the nature of humankind should be physiology and the process of life-regulation.

As Darwin and Dawkins have discovered, when you start thinking about humankind in biological terms you will swiftly run into trouble with religion. The great advantage of the Cartesian elevation of mind over world was that it could be reconciled with St Paul's distinction between the eternal soul and the mortal body.

For Spinoza, everything was body, nature, materiality. His system left no room for transcendence; his God was wholly immanent, in some sense synonymous with nature. He was excommunicated for his pains and for a century his influence went largely underground (it has recently been unearthed in Jonathan Israel's magisterial book, Radical Enlightenment). It resurfaced with the romantic worship of nature - Coleridge was a passionate Spinozist - and remained a force to be reckoned with in the world-pictures of both Freud and Einstein.

Damasio's new book offers a curious mixture of cutting-edge neuroscience and reverential footstepping of Spinoza. Fellow-scientists may not see the point of dredging up a 300-year-old intellectual system: why not just stick with the hard evidence of MRI and PET scans? Philosophers and historians of ideas will complain about the crudity of Damasio's broad-brush account of such complex texts as Spinoza's Ethics and Tractatus Politicus Religiosus. Religious fundamentalists will bristle at the idea of reducing such sensations as spiritual wellbeing to neural electricity. But anybody prepared to cross disciplinary boundaries in their inquiry into what it means to be human should take serious notice: some pretty important maps are in the process of being redrawn.

Spinoza's ideas were considered dangerous for political as well as religious reasons. To begin from the body and the principle of physical wellbeing was to reject the idea of a natural hierarchy in which some men inherited comfort by divine right while other men (and all women) had a more lowly status. At the same time, biologism - the survival of the fittest - is also a threat to liberal ideas (witness the sorry history that led from "social Darwinism" to the Nazi party). Spinoza's quest was to develop an ethical system that was both cognisant of the force of biology and true to what we would now call the "enlightenment" principles of liberty and justice. He has a lot to teach us about ethics in the age of genetic engineering.

And what of the political consequences of Damasio's neurological Spinozism? Again and again in this book's account of how emotions, "played out in the theatre of the body", precede the work of the mind, I was reminded of the first work of one of my heroes: William Hazlitt's little-known philosophical pamphlet, "An Essay on the Principles of Human Action". Like Spinoza and Damasio, Hazlitt begins with the body. Imagine a child putting a hand in a flame. The bodily sensation of pain teaches the brain about danger. "I will not touch fire again or it will hurt," thinks the child. But wait a minute, says Hazlitt: when the child learns the lesson, it is imagining a being that does not yet exist: its own future self.

To adopt Damasio's terms, the brain is mapping a body that is still only imaginary. From feeling comes the capacity for imagination and hence for empathy. If we can imagine our future self, we can also imagine other selves. The human mind thus has a natural capacity not only for self-interest, as Hobbes had proposed, but also for disinterest (in the proper sense of the word). For Hazlitt, this insight was the starting-point for a lifetime's commitment to both liberal politics and the empathetic power of the arts. I have a hunch that he would have considered Damasio's findings a cause for joy, not despair.

· Jonathan Bate is Leverhulme research professor of English literature at Warwick University

· Antonio Damasio appears at the Guardian Hay Festival next week

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Top reviews from other countries

sarah

3.0 out of 5 stars Looking for Spinoza

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on 19 March 2006

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In this book the author discusses a historic theory of emotion in the context of his own research and ideas. According to the theory, known as the James-Lang theory of emotion, our emotions derive from the perception of our body's response to an emotionally charged stimulus. The classical argument ran as follows. We see a bear and our heart starts to beat fast, our breathing becomes shallow and fast and we run away, we then feel fear. The other theory of emotion; dismissed by the author of this book, agues the opposite. We see the bear, feel fear, and then have then our body reacts.

In the book Damasio presents some convincing evidence for the James-Lang theory of emotion. He makes a distinction between emotions on the one hand and feelings on the other. He defines emotions as the person's response to some emotional situation that can be observed by an outsider, and feelings as the person's subjective reaction that cannot be seen by an outsider. He then goes on to argue that feelings are the perception of our body's responses to internal and external stimuli. We feel happy when we are balanced physiologically. We feel frightened when our body shows a physiological response to, say the bear. The evidence that he presents comes mostly from his own research, and it is convincing. He expands on the theory, arguing that feelings play an important role in our lives, that they enable us to interact with others smoothly and that they are crucial for decision making. Here he draws his evidence from his work with his patients who have suffered brain damage to specific brain regions.

I bought this book because I enjoyed his book 'Dascartes Error' so much. However, I found 'Looking for Spinoza' long-winded in parts and sometimes boring. The sections devoted to Damasio's own research were very interesting, though I suspect one would have to have a background knowledge of brain and behaviour to fully appreciate them. He mentions brain regions as if he is discussing the pub next door with a neighbour. I also had difficulties in seeing the relevance of Spinoza to his arguments, and the penultimate chapter body brain and mind was frankly dull.

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Jennifer Margolian

4.0 out of 5 stars 🤓👍

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 6 November 2018

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It did not come with a cover... but aside from that it 👍

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William E. Baumzweiger, M.D.

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking For Spinoza-an important book that relates to brain-science, human nature and humanity's needs

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 11 May 2016

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Antonio Damasio has written a book that is not only the definitive biography of Baruch / Benedict Spinoza but is also an important discussion of how Spinoza, utilizing mostly his own mind, elucidated the beginnings of biology, neurology, democratic forms of government and ideal forms of society. I understand why the Jewish-Orthodox community was forced to expel him-what he was writing was heresy to Christian Europe-but believe that Judaism would have been enriched by enthusiastically embracing his ideas.

How did Antonio Damasio, who came from a Portuguese Catholic background know so much about Bento/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza? Well, the Portuguese Inquisition brutally forced all of its Jews to convert to Catholicism, and perhaps his ancestors were among those Jews. Perhaps in writing this book Dr. Damasio, who is now at USC, is letting us in on a bit of his own underlying thought processes.

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kikeo58

1.0 out of 5 stars not scientific and mostly personal opinion

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 22 March 2022

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The premise is good but I was quickly disappointed in the book. First, of all the author launches off into non standard nomenclature without bothering to define his terms. You spend a lot of time trying to figure out how a feeling is different from an emotion. The author talks about the two for a quarter of the book without telling you how one is not the other. There are no medical or scientific references to establish or backup the field. There is no record of laboratory experiments to verify the assertions. This book is not the professional quality that one would expect from someone in a medical school. Thus I do not recommend it.

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Amy B

4.0 out of 5 stars Amy's Review

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 8 November 2010

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As I began reading Damasio's Looking for Spinoza, I found myself entranced by his eloquent narrative. He presents complex biological and philosophical material in a manner that is accessible and applicable to everyday life and to clinical practice. Damasio had two purposes in writing this book; 1) to present progress on the nature and human significance of feelings and related phenomena and 2) to connect Spinoza to corresponding neurobiology of today. Damasio provides a wealth of empirical evidence in the form of biological and psychological research for Spinoza's early contributions regarding the mind-body problem. Due to the nature of both emotions (publicly observable body states) and feelings (mental events observable only to the person having them) as Damasio defines them it is surprising that we have not done more to study their neurobiological basis.

As a therapist, I have found that negative feelings are 99% of what brings a client into therapy and Damasio's manuscript is highly relevant in demonstrating a need to identify where certain feelings are located so that they can be treated effectively. He articulates this need as he describes how feelings are manipulated to great efforts with substances, sexual activity, and other hedonistic practices. We want to increase pleasure and decrease pain and Damasio advocates for Spinoza's view that the best way to combat a negative feeling is to overpower it with a positive feeling based in reason. I see the relationship of this philosophy in clinical practice with cognitive behavioral techniques and the power of changing your thoughts.

Since we go to such great lengths to escape our emotions, I find this material highly relevant to clinical practice because if we can alter our emotions through neuromapping breakthroughs, then maybe those with long-term depression or anxiety or psychosis for that matter, do not have to endure the pain and stigma of psychopharmacological treatments where the side-effects can be life altering. Most people spend most of their life ignoring their feelings when we need to realize that in accordance with Damasio's view that they can be seen as "revelations of the state of life within the person" which is direct line with Rogerian and client-centered therapy.

Damasio did an excellent job exploring the biological basis of feelings and conveyed the material in a thought provoking and comprehensive manner. He uses case studies, experimental results, and his own experiences in bring Spinoza's work to life. Well done.

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a.zandi

4.0 out of 5 stars Baruch, where are you?

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2010

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Damasio, a neuroscientist, attempts to demonstrate how brain and body work in concert to produce the concept of the mind. He cites the 17th century philosopher and early proponent of the role feelings (affect) plays in human behavior, Baruch Spinoza as the key figure in the repudiation of Descarte's mind-body dualism. Demasio's text is largely scientific but philosophical as well. Often times, he prefaces his theories with a warning stating that his ideas are not based on rigorous scientific scrutiny. Ultimately, Demasio attempts to biologically distinguish between emotions and feelings (pleasure and pain) as well as describe their innate evolutionary functionality to man. This is no small task considering the seemingly intangible nature of feelings and the general belief in science that feelings are impossible to examine empirically. Demasio's concepts, while rooted in neuroscience and philosophy, are quite helpful to mental health professionals trying to make sense of their patient's feelings and how they contribute to maladaptive behaviors. I am writing this review from this perspective.

Demasio, with a great illustration from Shakespeare, contends that emotions are observable actions or movements rooted in our physiology while feelings are the private meaning we ascribe to this phenomenon. Emotions automatically occur in our brains and bodies in response to environmental stimuli. Emotions prelude the feelings that arise privately in our mind. Often emotions serve the evolutionary purpose of promoting our survival and maintaining homeostasis (balance). Homeostasis is based on a system of autonomic functions, pain and pleasure behaviors, drives and motivations, emotions and ultimately feelings. Demasio does a nice job of discussing the neurology behind emotions citing the amygdala, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the cingulate as emotional triggering sites.

Emotions are our physiological responses to the environment. Our feelings are our responses to emotions in order to create mental images. Our feelings provide us information in order to best manage our lives. Again, this serves a self-perserving purpose. What we do with the information our feelings provide is up to us. I took this section to mean that some people are better than others at recognizing and utilizing their feelings, in the short-term these people endure less suffering and mental illness. In the long term, these people are better adapted in the evolutionary sense. I think these insights are very relevant to mental health.

For example, the constant tension and hypervigilence a patient with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder experiences is their body's natural use of emotions gone awry. The patient with PTSD is in a constant state of unbalance due to a pervasive fear of harm stemming from an unprocessed trauma. The subsequent feeling is some variant of sorrow. As Demasio points out, a change or problem in the environment prompts self-perserving behavior in the organism.

In the case of depression, or the "common cold" of clinical psychology, one may lack the ability to adapt to intense feelings of sorrow stemming from the physiological changes (emotions) their body produces in response to environmental stimuli. The depressed individual fails to adapt to the environment in order to regain homeostatic balance. More and more negative feelings emerge as adaptation is continuously avoided. I think this is why so many depressed patients lack energy and feel overwhelmed by life. One or two triggering events that are not adapted to can lead to landslide of negative life circumstances that seem unbearable.

I also believe that some people pay far too much attention to their feelings. In the case of certain personality disorders (histrionic and borderline), the feelings themselves are given far greater value than the cognitive appraisals they elicit. Ultimately, an inability to cope with and utilize feelings in functional manner is implicated in suffering. Spinoza, seemingly the world's first Cognitive Behaviorist, encouraged people to overcome intense negative feelings by eliciting stronger positive feelings through their cognitions. Although, this is a crude way of conceptualizing cognitive-behavioral therapy, I do think mentally overcoming negative feelings serves as the basis of CBT. While I don't necessarily think this is revolutionary, I do think it is interesting considering how far back Spinoza lived. The clinical utility of this book resides primarily in what Damasio does with his knowledge of Spinoza's philosophy.

I really enjoyed learning the science behind feelings and how Damasio assigns them an evolutionary function. I think that many people who are suffering with depression, substance abuse and anxiety have difficulty making sense of and learning how to utilize their emotions. Feelings are transient states indicating that something is going right or wrong in our environment. They elicit action on our part to either maintain or change the environment. The failure to act on feelings is at the heart of many psychological issues. Our role as mental health professionals is to help clients learn how to recognize, label and adaptively act on their feelings.

I feel compelled to also mention Damasio's final chapter where he seemingly attempts to offer a solution for those struggling to find meaning in the tragic human condition. What do those who do not turn to religion or earthly possessions turn to find meaning? Damasio contends that finding the "spirit" is the key to finding meaning. Spirit does not refer to any type of religious entity but rather a drive towards knowledge and immersion in some sort of discipline be it art, science, or badminton (it can be anything really). This drive ideally goes on to somehow positively impact the lives of others. I tend to mostly agree with Damasio. I think religion offers an easy explanation to a complex question that many fear to even ask. For those who seek more than a mere pacifier, they must turn to some activity or cause that is engrossing and subjectively meaningful. I think this is the source of so many people's internal struggles, the meaning they find in life is based not on what they believe in their heart of hearts but what others tell them is meaningful or worse yet what they think they should find meaningful. These are essentially false selves living false lives. While meaning can be influenced by the environment, a person's chief task in life if to engage in the struggle to determine their own meaning. The outcome is not as important as the process. I know, there may be no salvation in this prescription, but then again what if there were no such thing as salvation?

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Carlos Camara

4.0 out of 5 stars A great third book.

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2003

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Damasio took on the interaction between emotions and reason, consicousness, and now, with this book, feelings. These are not unimportant, trivial or simple problems for a neurologist to tackle. They are among the greatest mysteries left in science. Now, do not take this to mean I think I agree wholly with Damasio, or that he has solved these puzzles completely. No. But he has made progress, and he has advanced some really intersting hypothesis. Damasio therefore is rightly considered one of the foremost theorethical neuroscienctists, and although seems sometimes to dismiss much of the literature and consider only evidence coming out of his lab, his ability to so easily transform his theories into highly readable popular accounts is scary.

Damasios main concern in this book is to present an neurobiological account of feelings. Now the first move he makes is to distinguish them from the related phenomenon of emotions. These are not to be confused, even when they are highly related. Felling, to Damasio, comes only after the emotion, and is very different from it. Emotions are complexes of chemical and neural patterns that drive the organism by automatical alterations of the state of the body, towards evolutionarily set places of well-being. Fellings are the perceptions of changes in, or the states of the body, and the modes of thinking that these ensue. To Damasio then, the feeling of fear would consist of the infromation provided by the body proper as well as of the way the cognitive mechanism functions because of the changes that are taking place. Since Damasio considers body regulating, homeostatic, and body sensing so important for feelings, he mantains the neurobiological underpinnings of feelings must be structures related to these functions. And he has evidence to support this claim. Imaging experiments show activity in the brain stem, hypothalamus,cingulate cortices and insula correlated with feelings. These structures have in common precicely their activity in regulating or obtaining information of the body. For theoretical reasons, Damasio holds the insula to be the main player here.

With these thoughts in mind, Damasio lists what he thinks are the necessary and sufficient conditions to have a feeling. THese are a nervous system with a body, a way for that nervous system to map and transform body states in neural maps, and then create out of these mental patterns or images, consicousness, a way for the nervous system to change the state of the body. Dmasio then also discusees the probable functions of feelings, its evolutionary origins, and possible reasons why feelings feel the way they do. The first of these questions he anwers in his first book, Descartes error. The second, because emotions were there as were the neural patterns that mapped body state changes, as well because feelings promoted survival by their function. The third, why feelings feel the way they do, Damasio answers speculatively but very interestingly. The life process, its design in multicellular organisms, the way the life process is altered by changes in the body and thr innate reactions of the body,thenature of the nural medium where these structures are mapped, explain together why feeling feel the way thet do. Damasio also discusses how mental images might arise, speculates about the origins of a mental level of neurobiological phenomena, and discusses mind-body philosophical issues. Also, in between these issues, Damasio devotes roughly a third of the book to his interest on the life and philosophy of Spinoza, who Damasio reads as to have anticipated some of Damasios ideas on the body and the mind.

There remain some problems with Damasios account of course. For example, he seems to say a system that has the necessary and sufficient conditions for feelings but is not alive would not feel. His inclusion of consciousness as a necessary condition makes sense, but also obscures his explanation. Is consciousness itself explained? probably not in Damasios terms, but certainly not in the terms probably most relevant for feelings: qualia. What would life add to a system to make it feel,but qualia, that is, the essence (content?) of a feeling? But why would life bring qualia?if life is a physical process too, so qualia should be a physical process too, and therefore a physical system could have it too. But not necesarily an alive physical system. Damasio also never specifies what takes place between a neural pattern and a mental image for the latter to arise out of the former. This is the qualia problem again. So Damasio does not explain qualia? so what? nobody else has. But it is a reality that feelings will not be explained without a proper account of qualia. There is also the issue of predictions and testability. Will damage to the inusla cause loss of feeling? will a brain in a vat feel? Damasio also gives little space to neurochemistry, and it is obvious that it is a very important part of the making of feelings. How do serotonin, dopamine, acetycholine, and other neuromodulators affect feelings? directly, by changing neurons? Chemicals can alter feelings in predictable ways, so does the insula have special receptors, and if so what are their functions? If feelings require consicousness, and as some mantain, consicousness requires language, does feeling require language? how about the memories of feelings. Do memories of feelings activate the insula too, and if not, can feelings arise then out of association cortex (for memories of feelings bring a little of those feelings into the mind)? These questions are some philosophical and some empirical, but they all have somthing to say about feelings, and Damasio gives us no answers.

The book is a great acomplishment, and anybody interested with the hard problems of neuroscience, consciousness, emotions, the self, will want to read this book. Damasios views are predictable given his other two books, but they are original and very interesting. Few other neuroscientists are as thought provoking, or write as clearly as Damasio does.

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Nov 29, 2008Jon Stout rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: idealists and reductive materialists

Shelves: philosophy

Inspired by Descartes' Error, and interested in a neurologist's interest in philosophers, I sought out Looking for Spinoza. It rewarded me in several ways, first by extending my understanding of how emotions as a biological concept are continuous with feelings as a conscious, mental phenomenon, and second by providing a guided, personal investigation into the life of Bento-Baruch-Benedict Spinoza.

Damasio has a lot to say about emotions and the structure of the brain, some of it exhaustingly detailed. But the key area for me was in matching what I might introspectively think and feel, with Damasio's experimentally substantiated knowledge of the routes through the neural pathways that electrical and chemical signals follow.

One example would lie in Damasio's distinction between emotions and feelings, which I had previously taken to be roughly synonomous. Damasio says that emotions are instinctual reactions that all animals have as a way of coping with environmental stimuli. They are not necessarily conscious. But feelings, according to Damasio, are our conscious perceptions of our bodily states as we are having emotions. Thus a worm can react with alarm, but we conscious beings feel our bodies change when we are alarmed, and we can be alerted to consider why we are alarmed and what we want to do about it.

The less theoretical and more personally appealing part of the book is Damasio's personal quest to trace out the life of Spinoza, whose philosophy, Damasio believes, anticipates many of his own findings and conclusions. I love Damasio's drive to fit his scientific work into a philosophical overview, which is both theoretical and personal.

Damasio is originally Portuguese, and I can't help feeling that he is driven in part by a sense of kinship with a man who might have shared some of his cultural experiences, albeit separated by centuries. Much of the research on Spinoza is in Portuguese, showing some intensive effort. Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew whose family fled the inquisition for a relatively tolerant Holland.

There Spinoza participated in the Jewish community, but eventually was alienated from it, because he had attained views of his own, characteristic of the Enlightenment. Thus he moved from the Portuguese "Bento" to the Hebrew "Baruch" to the Latin "Benedictus" (all meaning "blessed", like "Barack" from Swahili and Arabic, I can't help adding).

Spinoza's odyssey is inspiring, as is Damasio's obvious admiration of it, and his own efforts to model his own life as a scientist on a comparable philosophical framework. As I get older (smile), I love it when science and philosophy get personal. (less)

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Nov 12, 2009Stephen rated it it was ok

This book is, by turns, interesting and frustrating. Damasio knows his stuff when it comes to the details of neuroscience (which is to be expected because this is his field) and the details he supplies are fascinating. However, he overreaches himself when he tries to fit all these separate details into his one-size-fits-all model of how emotions and feelings interact together in a living brain; everything becomes ‘evidence’ for his overarching theory. Just because we have the one word ‘feelings’ does not necessarily mean that joy, sorrow, envy, hate, happiness and the like all work the same way or have the same origins. Also he is often unclear as to whether the processes he describes are operating at a conscious or unconscious level. Then at one point in the book he almost implies that cells themselves are conscious. When it comes to evolution he again takes things too far with the equivalent of ‘just so’ stories to describe how emotions and feelings arose.

The parallel thread in the book concerns the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza. Many interesting and fascinating details of his life and work are presented, but Damasio again tries to shoehorn these ideas into his own overblown model of brain function. Spinoza’s thoughts are fascinating but of course he knew nothing of neurobiology, his ideas need to be understood in relation to his own time, in context with the philosophers that came before him and those writing alongside him.

Overall, the book’s language is also rather dense and too flowery. On the whole, if you have time to spare, you will find some interesting facts here, both about how the brain works and about Spinoza. However, be prepared to wade through pages of overblown pet theories that the evidence just doesn’t support. You may well find the same information more clearly presented elsewhere.
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Nov 08, 2010Melinda Olivas rated it liked it  ·  review of another edition

I found the book “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain” by Antonio Damasio an interesting look at the relationship between emotions, feelings, and the brain. I enjoyed reading about Damasio’s almost obsession-like fascination with the philosopher Spinoza. Damasio found Spinoza’s beliefs about feelings, passions, and emotions influential and relevant to his work as a neurologist. I also enjoyed that Damasio included a bit of philosophical flavor throughout the whole of this book.
As a current doctoral student in clinical psychology, I found Damasio’s unique perspective on emotions and feelings interesting, though debatable. I read the book with an open mind yet could not help but think of my clients as their difficulties with feelings, affect, and emotion regulation are relevant to the topic. Damasio believes that emotions are a person’s external or observable expressions of feelings, and that feelings are the hidden, in-the-mind, non-observable experiences. He believes that emotions come before feelings which implies ideas such as one making a facial expression that typically implies “happiness”, then their internal state will also be happy. I find this idea hard to grasp because of the simplicity it suggests regarding emotion regulation. If being “happy” was this easy there would be little need for therapists or clinicians in general. On the other hand, some psychotherapy orientations, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, lend themselves to the idea that one’s internal experience of feelings are inter-dependent on one’s behaviors and thoughts. If one agrees with Damasio’s perspective, it would be interesting to see how a depressed client is affected by “pretending” to be happy.
A section that I also enjoyed reading and find applicable to my work as a clinician is that of joy and sorrow. Although Damasio breaks down these two feelings into neurological processes, he does talk about how a person’s choices are influenced by their past experience of the joy or sorrow feeling that they associate it with. Damasio wrote, “A gut feeling can suggest that you refrain from a choice that, in the past, has led to negative consequences, and it can do so ahead of your own regular reasoning telling you precisely the same ‘do not’ ” (147). Many clients seek therapy for problems they have related to attachment or interpersonal skills. These problems can be explained and understood in light of Damasio’s belief because they have dealt with similar situations and had negative consequences in their past. For example, if a person has been hurt as a result of an unfaithful partner and finds they can no longer trust people, it is their “gut feeling” that reminds them not to make the same bad choice and they find themselves alone and uhappy. Damasio suggests that this “gut feeling” or “hunches…steer our behavior in the proper direction” (150). Psychotherapy is a very beneficial and helpful resource for exploring, processing, and challenging the negative “gut feelings”.
I found this book to be interesting, applicable to clinical psychology, and, for the most part, easy to read. I liked his style of writing, was entertained with his fascination with Spinoza, and inspired by his passion for neuroscience.
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Oct 28, 2012Randal Samstag rated it did not like it

Shelves: philosophy

For a devastating critique of this book see: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/boo....

Quoted from the review, by philosopher of mind, Colin McGinn:

"I have two things to say about this theory: it is unoriginal, and it is false. As anyone even remotely familiar with this topic is aware, what Damasio presents here is known as the ''James-Lange'' theory of emotion, after the two psychologists, William James and Carl G. Lange, who thought of it independently in the 1880's. Not once does Damasio refer to it by this name, and he makes only very cursory reference to James's version of the theory. He generally writes as if he were advancing a startling discovery, mere hints of which, with the benefit of hindsight, can be extracted from Spinoza and James. In fact, the theory is a standard chestnut of psychology textbooks, a staple of old-style behaviorist psychology, with its emphasis on outer behavior at the expense of inner feeling.

The errors of the theory are chiefly those of exaggeration. While it is a truism that whistling a happy tune can improve your mood so that external actions can initiate a change of emotional state, it by no means follows that feelings play no causal role in the production of behavior. And it is quite clear that an emotion can shape the course of a person's actions over time, as when someone stays in bed all day because he feels depressed. We do often cry because we are sad -- even though the crying can work to augment the feeling. There is causal interplay between feelings and their bodily expression, rather than a one-way dependence. The fact, cited by Damasio, that a bodily fear response can precede a conscious feeling of fear does not show that once the feeling is present it has no causal control over behavior -- and it clearly does, as with fleeing and hiding.

What about the idea that an emotion is a bodily perception? Suppose I am delighted that my son has become a doctor. I may have various sensations in my body that express this emotion -- say, lightness in my limbs and a warm feeling in my viscera. But the object of my delight is not my body; it is my son's success. My bodily sensations are directed to my body and my emotion is directed to my son. Therefore my emotion cannot be identical to my bodily sensations -- for the two have different objects. This refutes the James-Lange theory.

As Wittgenstein remarks in his classic discussion of this theory, the horribleness of my grief when someone I love dies cannot be explained as the horribleness of the sensations I feel in my body. It results, rather, from the horribleness of what my grief is about; my bodily sensations may not be particularly horrible in themselves. Nor do we try to assuage someone's grief by attending to her bodily sensations; instead we talk about what she is grieving over. The James-Lange theory fails because it ignores what philosophers call the intentionality of emotion -- that is, what emotions are about, their representational content, which are generally things outside the body. The theory tries to reduce an emotion to its sensory bodily symptoms, but these symptoms have the wrong kind of intentionality: the state of the body, not the state of the external world."

I would never take this guy (Damasio) seriously. (less)

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Nov 10, 2010Elizabeth rated it really liked it

In Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain Antonio Damasio uses neurological and physiological markers to delineate the process of emotions and feelings. Then, he further integrates these scientific findings with social studies. This in and of itself was quite impressive and perhaps demonstrates the fields (e.g., what individuals call the soft sciences and hard sciences) coming together and taking a different integrative perspective of how mental health can be conceptualized.

Of particular interest to me was when Damasio indicated that problems in the environment prompt self-preserving behavior. This perspective is very much in line with behaviorist thinking. However, on a more psychodynamic note, it makes me think about how personality becomes engrained, especially in the case of individuals with personality disorders. It makes me think about how crucial early relationships with significant others are. For example, an individual with antisocial personality disorder lacks empathy for others, because the individual more than likely experienced abuse, neglect, modeling of antisocial behavior in early relationships with significant others, and/or had a parent with an inability to set healthy boundaries (e.g., overindulgent parent). Conceptualizing psychopathology from the perspective that most behavior is aimed at self-preservation helps me conceptualize clients that may be difficult to work with from a different, perhaps more empathic, perspective. Additionally, conceptualizing all behavior as self-preserving behavior also makes one aware of the behaviors that our client’s pull from us and how therapy can serve as a problem or change in the environment that may prompt our clients to change their behaviors.

Also of clinical relevance was Damasio’s conceptualization that feelings serve as information about internal states of what is happening within the individual. This reminds me of client’s that wish that uncomfortable feelings would dissipate and go through quite a number of measures to ignore, avoid, and not feel unwanted feelings. The amount of energy that they expend in that process at times is significant. In the avoidance of unwanted feelings sometimes more emotional damage emanates rather than in accepting feelings as indicators that something in going on within. Perhaps, offering a metaphor of an unpleasant feeling being akin to a physical marker of pain (e.g., a person cutting their finger and blood the pain resulting from the experience) would help our clients come to accept some of their unpleasant feelings. The conceptualizing of the emotional healing process within the framework of a physical injury may also help our clients more holistically integrate and accept their feelings.

Overall, the book was full of food for thought. It was filled with clinical relevance and is worthy of keeping on a shelf as a book that could be re-visited for varying purposes (e.g., a clearer understanding of how neurology and psychopathology emanate in different cases, in helping conceptualizing certain clients, and so forth).
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Jan 13, 2010cole rated it did not like it

If you buy the Enlightenment belief that scientific truth can be obtained and man made better for it, then take my review with a grain of salt. If you are convinced of the fact that using the terms "bad" and "human nature" in the same sentence is pretty acceptable, you won't like this too much.

Damasio's science seems interesting enough and does pose some engaging questions. However, there are far too many condescending logical leaps for me to stomach. The low point came with the rather absurd statement that placing self-preservation and it's biological mechanisms at the center of human ethical systems was in no way problematic, as if that hadn't been the ostensible justification for a horde of repugnant choices, national efforts and reform programs throughout history. This was far too much Nietzsche in sheeps clothing and far too little virtue.

As a classmate noted, the parts about Spinoza are interesting. (less)

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Dec 04, 2017Michael rated it it was ok

Looking for Spinoza is essentially two books wishing it could be one. The first half covers the neurobiology of emotional life. Damasio lays out an interesting overview for a lay reader of how the brain operates as a self regulatory system, connecting this self-regulation to emotions and feelings. The second half is essentially a slim biography of Spinoza. Unfortunately, for a man whose major life events consisted of excommunication, writing philosophy and grinding lenses until he died, there isn't much that Damasio could add to our knowledge of Spinoza. Damasio clearly wants to do more with Spinoza's philosophy and Neurobiology, he just does not have the command of the philosophy to pull it off. (less)

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Jan 26, 2016Divya Palevski rated it liked it

I liked this book but found some parts weary to read. When Damasio writes about the neurology of the feeling brain , it is easy to assemble the author's love for his subject. However, found his sentence structuring elaborately wounded ( I had to read some sentences twice) and repetitive.
But that being said, his monolistic view of mind/ brain and body and his reverence towards Baruch Spinoza is admirable. I believe in Monolism and the idea of feelings variably related to the homeostasis of the body makes great sense. (less)

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Feb 15, 2018Charles Daney rated it liked it

Shelves: biography, reviewed, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes pleasant, elegant prose. Unfortunately, aside from that, this book, first published in 2003, is somewhat of a disappointment. The main concern of his scientific career has been to understand the mechanisms underlying "emotions" and "feelings". He has given good accounts of this subject in two previous books: Descartes' Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999). What is good about Damasio's writing, especially in the earlier books, is that he doesn't do much dumbing down of the material, by avoiding technical terms, to appeal to the "general reader", as too many "science writers" do.

The book reviewed here, however, doesn't cover the subject in as much depth as the previous books, and in particular it doesn't very well illuminate the distinction - which the author insists upon - between "emotion" and "feeling". It appears that Damasio wanted to write on what interested him about Spinoza, but didn't have enough to fill a whole book. So the first five chapters (about 3/4 of the total text) are devoted mostly to the neuropsychological issues, while the final two chapters are on Spinoza, and are connected only tenuously with the rest of the book.

Damasio has championed the idea that human consciousness and other psychological phenomena - emotions and feelings especially - aren't rooted primarily in the brain, but instead are shaped by physiological processes going on throughout the whole body. This may be surprising to some, but it's not an especially radical idea. It makes good evolutionary sense. An animal's main evolutionary objective is to be good at survival and reproduction. Emotions (at least in animals with more than a rudimentary nervous system) exist to motivate an individual to seek things that favor survival and reproduction (shelter, food, sex), and to avoid threatening things (excessive heat or cold, predators, reproductive rivals). They seem to form a bridge between the sensory and motor systems. In animals with a developed cerebral cortex, like humans, emotions work partly through cognition.

Note that the words "emotion" and "motivation" share the same linguistic root: the Indo-European MEUh-. Emotions, whether conscious or not, are what motivates animal behavior. Emotions in general and feelings in particular allow humans to make critical decisions quickly, when the situation requires that. It seems unlikely that inhabitants of the planet Vulcan, like Mr. Spock of Star Trek, could have successfully evolved without the help of emotions. (Though perhaps they became able to suppress them at a later stage.)

I wish Damasio had been clearer in this book about his distinction between emotions and feelings. Are things like "fear", "pleasure", "shame", etc. emotions or feelings? Most people, I think, might use either term for them. But for Damasio, it seems, an emotion is represented in the brain only in certain specific regions, and may or may not appear in consciousness. For instance, a person (who is capable of consciousness) may have a "je ne sais quoi" sensation of fear on encountering an animal or object or situation with which the individual has had a negative experience in the past, even if that has been forgotten. The person will still avoid the particular stimulus without giving much thought as to why. A feeling, on the other hand, enters consciousness and additionally involves parts of the brain related to deliberate behavior. ("I like (or don't like) this whatever and want to remain (or not remain) exposed to it.") Naturally, if an animal doesn't have "consciousness" in the human sense - a worm, say - the animal can still be said to have "emotions" if it is motivated to approach or avoid certain things, for its own benefit. At any rate, that's how I interpret Damasio's thesis, and if I've misinterpreted it, a lack of clarity may be the reason.

As far as the two chapters on Spinoza are concerned, they may be the most interesting part of the book in spite of their brevity. He lived from 1632 to 1677, entirely in Holland. This was mostly before what historians consider the "Age of Enlightenment", which flowered in the 18th century. Spinoza, however, is generally considered one of its earliest avatars. He was born into a moderately prosperous Jewish family, but eventually renounced both his material and religious heritage. Temperamentally he was reclusive, yet congenial with others in his limited social sphere. He came to reject both Judaism and Christianity, evidently for both philosophical reasons (of which see below) as well as revulsion at the irrationality and cruelty of both religious traditions. Fortunately for Spinoza, he lived in Holland, which at the time featured the least intolerant variety of Christianity. Nevertheless, his main philosophical work, the Ethics, was published only posthumously - and was almost immediately banned by both secular and religious (Jewish, Catholic, and Calvinist) authorities because of its "heretical" philosophy. Later leading philosophers of the Enlightenment (e. g. Locke, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant) apparently studied the Ethics - but were fearful of acknowledging its influence on them. At least Spinoza managed to escape the fates of other "heretics" like Giordano Bruno and Galileo.

If you're interested in much discussion of Spinoza's philosophy, the present book is disappointing on this too, for at least three reasons. First, Damasio alludes in passing only to a few places in Spinoza's writing that deal with the psychology of emotions and feelings. Although he suggests that Spinoza foreshadowed current research findings, Spinoza's musings on these issues, however prescient, can't be much more than lucky guesses about what neuroscience now knows. Second, Damasio is wise not to deal at length with Spinoza's take on philosophical questions like "free will" and the "mind-body" problem. That's because the occupation of philosophers is to argue endlessly about issues that can only be satisfactorily resolved by scientific investigation. Third, Spinoza's opinions on religion aren't crystal clear. It's true that Spinoza was perhaps the most noteworthy Western philosopher of the preceding 1500 or so years to flatly reject dogma of the polluted swamp of traditional religion. However, arguments (among philosophers who care about such things) are still going on as to whether Spinoza's opinions actually represented atheism, agnosticism, "panentheism", or "pantheism" (which has generally been attributed to Spinoza). (less)

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Aug 06, 2020Jorge Hurtado rated it it was amazing

I didn't know the author before, but now I admire him.
Antonio Damasio is not just a scientist, he is also a humanist; he is a philosopher. He understands the deep of what he talks about and never claims to have the truth (as others claim) of difficult issues
such as feelings, consciousness, moral values,...

As the tittle suggests, the author talks about how emotions work, from a neurobiological perspective, and admires the evolutionary process that had to take place in order to reach a point of complexity able to host those feelings. He let you see how emotions are the key component of humanity, the main thing which makes us do something, instead of nothing.
A scientist of today would stop there, and limit himself, but he goes further. He speculates about a moral system based on those feelings, a moral system which should optimize survival and well-being of humanity. That's when he talks about Spinoza, interpreting his philosophy and ethic with the scientific knowledge of today, realising the level of truth that Spinoza reached thanks to his life, culture, family, friends, introspection, intelligence,...

Full of biography and references, this is a masterpiece, not just because the truth it holds, but because the humility and bravery with which the author tackle difficult problems with the knowledge of today, in order to motivate the search of tomorrow. (less)

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Jul 19, 2019Dennis Littrell rated it it was amazing

Humanism from a neurobiologist

Part of this is a celebration of the 17th century Rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinosa whose world view is very much in concert with that of Antonio Damasio. Spinosa's demolition of Descartes' mind/body duality is the thread that Damasio takes up and weaves into this graceful and agreeable narrative. Furthermore, it is Spinosa's recognition that we are part of, and contained within, nature and not materially different from nature (another of Descartes' errors) that attracts Damasio's admiration for Spinosa.

Leaving aside this framing device I want to concentrate on Damasio's argument about the nature of humans based on his experience as a neurobiologist, which is really the core of this book.

Damasio recognizes that feelings, like consciousness itself, are perceptions, not states of mind. What is being perceived is the state of the body itself, and what is doing the perceiving is the brain. In this understanding--and I think it is a felicitous one--the brain operates as a sixth sense, something like the so-called third eye of the Hindus. It is not, of course, a supernatural sixth sense, but a sense organ in addition to the other five whose job it is to perceive the homeostasis of the organism, a sense organ that looks within instead of without. Instead of the sensation of color or sound, the sixth sense perceives emotions.

Of course the Van Allen Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center does not use such a term as "sixth sense" nor would he allude to the third eye of the Hindus. He is a neurologist, a scientist and (despite his demurral) a philosopher. I mention these other ways of "knowing" in an attempt to provide a larger context for Damasio's argument.

This argument is not original with Damasio (and I don't think he would claim it is). In one sense it is derivative from the growing understanding that consciousness itself, a kind of meta-awareness, is actually a perception. Damasio's "feelings" are part of this consciousness.

A further part of Damasio's argument is that emotions are prior to feelings. First there is an emotionally competent stimulus (ECS). Then there is an "appraisal" of that stimulus which results in appropriate and automatic emotion, followed by feelings based on a perception of the emotion and the external situation. This is on-going, and we usually don't notice it. In extreme cases, such as danger, our feelings are more pronounced. In Damasio's scheme, an ECS might be a grizzly bear come upon suddenly while hiking. The "appraisal" would be the recognition that this is a bear, that it is big and it is potentially dangerous. The "emotion" would be all the systemic glandular, chemical and muscular responses in preparation for the flight or fight response. The "feeling" itself would be what we call fear.

Damasio attempts to explain the experience of feelings in anticipation of "naysayers" who contend that such things are eternal mysteries. He makes a distinction between what, say, a Boeing 777 with all its sensing devices might "feel" and how humans feel. The crux of Damasio's distinction is the enormously greater complexity of the biological organism. But this argument, beginning on page 126, is not satisfactory because it does not explain the subjective experience of pain, which is what the "naysayers" are really talking about.

What I think Damasio should say is that we can never know what the Boeing 777 is feeling (or if it is "feeling") since feelings are subjective experiences. They can only be recognized in ourselves (if we have them) and identified with in the report of others. It is the same as trying to explain what the color red looks like to a blind person or how strawberries taste to someone who has never tasted one. Analogies and comparisons may be drawn, but there is no way that I can ever be sure that I feel what you feel or that the subjective nature of any sensuous experience between one entity and another is the same.

In the fourth chapter, "Ever Since Feelings," Damasio attempts to account for how feelings arose in an evolutionary sense. He believes they help complex organisms solve complex problems. (p. 177) "Body-state maps" work automatically for most organisms, but, Damasio argues, with emotions made conscious through the experience of feeling, humans are able to achieve not only a "concern for the individual self" but with "sufficient integration of the now, the past, and the anticipated future" a more effective game plan for survival and well-being. (p. 178) Feelings signal the conscious mind to become involved and this has proven adaptive.

What I think is profound about this argument is how naturally it would have arisen from the evolutionary experience. Before humans and other sophisticated animals arose, most creatures probably made little or no distinction between themselves and their environment. Their responses were mostly automatic and they had no sense of self. Along comes this great leap forward called consciousness and it works because it makes us more effective at protecting ourselves. It also makes us more fearful of death, of course, which is part of the human predicament.

Despite some difficulties, I am very much impressed with Damasio's effort, and I think that his approach from neuroscience and biological evolution, and through the use of scientific experiment, is eons ahead of the old schools in psychology which attempted to understand human beings based on arbitrary models such as psychoanalytic theory or on limited approaches such as behaviorism. But it must be realized (as I'm sure Damasio does) that we are at a tentative stage of understanding. Some even say that we will never be able to completely understand how our brain works. Some even cite Russell's paradox and Godel's proof about the limitations of self-referential systems (the brain/body is such a system) and deny that it is even theoretically possible for us to completely understand ourselves. Maybe only our artifacts, our computers will be able to understand us.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
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Jan 16, 2019Joshua rated it really liked it

Shelves: spirituality, knowledge, science, philosophy, biography, psychology, historical, nonfiction

This book was both not enough of and way more than I expected. I enjoyed the physiological discourse for which I picked up the book, and appreciated the philosophical overtones that were brought out in the latter parts.

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Oct 31, 2016Ari Landa rated it really liked it

Not an easy book to go through. Can get a bit too technical and sciencey, also the writing isn't as fluid as others (Perhaps there's a lot of "feelings of ideas" in the writing style which clouds the sentence syntax:)). That said it's a very smart book that explains a lot and also invites a lot of questions regarding the implications of feelings on the cognitive brain. For example, if the brain is built up from emotions to feelings to rational logic, and just as feelings are a more complicated expression of emotions, would we then say that rational logic is just a more complex expression of feelings? Is all knowledge "feeling based?" I think Spinoza would say emphatically yes. But what does that mean for us humans? For example, should we forget about arguing politics and just focus on the underlying "feeling of the idea" we're arguing about? If two academics differ in their theories do they also have a differing underlying "feel" of their worlds? Is there any idea in our world that exists outside our feeling brain? Do feelings, or the idea of the feeling (or the feeling of the idea) guide our philosophical perspectives or intellectual discoveries? I would have liked to see a bit more speculation at the end of the book regarding possible implications of this idea. Nonetheless, a difficult but worthwhile read. (less)

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Feb 15, 2020Frank Strada rated it liked it

Shelves: books-reviewed

Much of Damasio's book is about brain anatomy. Too much detail (I skimmed most of this section), but his point is well taken: that Spinoza, who lived in the 17th century, had it right regarding human feeling and emotion, despite his lack of knowledge about neural systems.

Baruch Spinoza is known for his book Ethics and his Treatise on Politics and Religion, which had to be published under a pseudonym in once case and posthumously in the other. He advocated separation of church and state and democracy (long before Jefferson), both radical ideas in his time. But perhaps he was most reviled for his religious beliefs. He wrote about the primacy of reason in finding truth and used reasoned arguments to show that there is no supernatural god; that god is nature.

Damasio's focus is on Spinoza's writings on feelings and emotions, and what it is to live a virtuous life and to understand God. His views got him banished from the Jewish community in Amsterdam when he was just 24 years old forcing him to live the remainder of his life in a sort of exile in Holland.

I would recommend this book if you're interested in how the European Enlightenment influenced how we think today. Spinoza was perhaps the spark that led to the ideas put forward by the likes of Voltaire, Diderot, Jefferson and Franklin. (less)

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Feb 19, 2018Drenda added it

Damasio is a prominent researcher in the field of neurology and has written a series of books describing the achievements in his field to the lay public. He is also a very informed reader of Spinoza and part of the charm of this book, and there is much charm to be found here, is that he is more than willing to expand on both his field and his interest.

Much of the time the researcher and the philosopher are just two different stories. Spinoza could not deliberate on the physiological basis of human sensing, emoting and cognition since it was exactly in his time that the first scientific studies of the human body were being made. Much later, initial studies in brain functioning were pointed at finding specific locations in that organ for the specific processes: seeing, movement, language. That has been left far behind as the search is on for neural mappings wherein many nerve pathways are combined with chemical pathways in order to produce the smallest change in an organism. But it is easy to see how Spinoza could become a favorite of a broad minded neurologist. Both start from a foundation of human behavior that centers in the individual's basic need to maintain itself. Spinoza's description of this most basic concern can sound almost Darwinian, as, of course, does the neurologist's. Once again, the basic aim of any organism is to maintain itself. One branch of organisms were most successful with the development of sensitivities to the outside world-seeing, hearing, touch-that combined with increasing mobility, allowed them to flee predation and find nourishment. That entailed the development of an advanced nervous system, which needed to become more complex as the world became more complex. For homo sapiens, for example, the world became extremely complex when individuals had to deal with group interaction and social responsibilities. In fact, the neural interactions became so complex that the ultimate organizer was evolutionarily advantageous-consciousness.

No one really denies the trouble that happens with the appearance of that ultimate organizer, consciousness. Descartes came at the issue from the side of consciousness and left us with the unfortunate tradition of mind/body dualism. The sciences since the Enlightenment have come to the problem from the side of the body and many in that community have dealt with it by simply collapsing the mind into the body, claiming that with enough time, research will eliminate mind musings with complex neural mappings. Damasio tries to avoid such a simple minded approach and readily lists consciousness as one of the ingredients necessary to describe human behavior. He admits that neurology can't bridge the gap between mind issues and brain issues:

We can describe neural patterns-with the tools of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuro-
chemistry-and we can describe images with the tools of introspection. How we get from the
former to the latter is known only in part (p. 198)

However, when I read Damasio, I can't foresee any movement toward bridging the gap except with finding more and more complex neural interactions. I have many paragraphs in this book where I had to write 'by finding more complicated neural pathways?' Perhaps Damasio would say higher-order pathways, meaning some pathways have organizing functions over many other pathways, but I either don't buy the distinction or Damasio is left with defending higher-order in some way that is really not brain function. Consequently, Damasio falls back into the usual scientific collapse of mind into body.

His philosopher hero, Spinoza, would not have allowed such a collapse, since that eliminates an aspect of a thing, and Spinoza was all about inclusion. Spinoza's monism covered everything under the sun and beyond. He not only said that mind and body are aspects of the same thing, but that 'thing'-nature/god-has a multitude of aspects, perhaps an infinite number, being indeed, god/nature. The universe is one glorious or morbid whole, a stone, light waves, a hydrogen atom, smoke from the fireplace, a human being all equally reflecting that immutable being. the only thing that human being have going for them is the slight possibility f moving toward the joy of realizing this infinitely faceted whole.

I believe there is a way to take Spinoza's decription of the mind/body gap seriously, that they are aspects of the same thing, without collapsing either side into the other. Dmasio himself provides a hint as to how this might be done. He says at one point that the basic unit of neurobiology was not the atom but the cell, being in itself a striving system maintaining its own integrity while contributing to higher levels of organization. I assume most people who fall under the mantel of biology would say the same. So we have biologists who have their language for best describing the world, the physicists who use the language of the atom-why not be inclusive as Spinoza encourages and allow the language of the geologist, the sociologist, the chef and the beekeeper. Each language reflects an aspect of nature/god in its own way, often with no means of translating to another language without destroying its own integrity. I think few people in the western tradition, and with the obvious exceptions, would deny Damasio's outline of how consciousness came about. But once it was there, it became its own aspect of the human condition, with a language no longer translatable to its physiological foundation. (less)

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Feb 17, 2010Freddie Berg rated it it was amazing

Never thought I would understand Spinoza. Never thought I would understand feelings. Never thought I would understand the psychophysiology and chemistry of the brain. Made me even more grateful to doctors and healers of all stripes and plaids.

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Mar 04, 2014Freddie Berg rated it it was amazing

An excellent explication of many issues. Initially skipped a few sections on the complexity of neural electricity. Re-read other portions over several years, and still pick it up from time to time. Offered it to several friends. On my all time favorites shelf.