RAY DOLAN* Reviews
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brainby Antonio Damasio Harcourt/Heinemann: 2003. 368 pp. $28/£20
In the past decade, Antonio Damasio has published two hugely influential books on human emotion, Descartes' Error (Picador, 1995) and The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt, 1999). It is no coincidence that their publication coincided with a belated recognition, within psychology and the neurosciences, that emotion constitutes a fundamental component of mind. Both works had the enviable and elusive quality of appealing in equal measure to scientific and general readerships. Looking for Spinoza effortlessly embraces these qualities and, with its beguiling narrative (suggested in the title), provides the reader with an intimate account of intellectual insight and discovery.
Damasio's work on emotion has championed an important distinction between emotion and feeling. Emotion refers to the external consequences of processing an emotion-eliciting object; feeling refers to a private internal experience engendered by an emotional occurrence. Feeling states, which are given an extended treatment in this book, are closely bound up with neuronal mappings that index perturbations in the homoeostatic state of an organism.
Damasio has suggested that these mappings provide the underpinning for an emergent self, an idea that he develops in finely measured tones in the opening passage of Looking for Spinoza. He suggests that human experience is founded in "feelings of myriad emotional and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming of the most universal of melodies". One is reminded here of W. H. Auden's remarks on the passing of his fellow poet W. B. Yeats: "The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers."
Damasio rediscovered the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza when verifying the accuracy of a long-cherished quote he had retained from Spinoza's The Ethics. What was intended as a brief diversion took on the quality of a journey. On re-reading Spinoza, Damasio experienced a deep resonance with his own ideas. Spinoza wrote extensively, and insightfully, about emotion. For Spinoza, any emotion was a variant of one of three primary affects, involving joy, sadness or desire. These emotions constituted universal properties of mind or common notions. Indeed, his assertion that "each one from his own affect, judges, or evaluates, what is good and what is bad" presages recognition that emotions have a role in sensing value. Even more radical was his proposal that "the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body", which echoes Damasio's thesis that the very foundation of consciousness is bound up with representing bodily states.
Homoeostasis and its regulation is a recurrent motif in Looking for Spinoza. In higher organisms, the biological imperative for self-preservation involves a complex of hierarchically arranged regulatory systems. Damasio argues that a nested organization of these systems provides for basic reflexes, pain- and pleasure-related behaviours, drives and motivations, right up to the full flowering of emotion proper. He also acknowledges a connection to Spinoza's suggestion that drives, motivations and emotions are fundamental to our humanity.
Damasio develops this theme to make a powerful case that ethical behaviour has emerged from an overall programme of bioregulation. He asks what would be different in our behaviour without emotion and feelings. We have partial answers to this question from detailed analysis of patients with damage to specific sectors of their brains. For example, patients with damage to the ventral prefrontal cortex have handicaps that manifest in amoral behaviour, a state that appears to reflect an inability to deploy social emotions such as shame, guilt, compassion and gratitude.
His suggestion that emotions and feelings are the bedrock of our ethical systems has the wider implication that an inborn capacity to acquire ethical norms depends on certain circuitry in the human brain. He suggests that a requirement for the display of ethical behaviour necessitates that categories of personal and social knowledge be connected with fundamental feelings, such as joy and sorrow.
A parallel theme to this extended account of human feeling is a search for the identity of the seventeenth-century philosopher. Spinoza stands out from his contemporaries by virtue of his resolute adherence to the rational, an attitude that makes him a supremely modern figure. He dared to deny the validity of the Bible's revealed truth, a stance that threatened every political structure that was underpinned by religious belief and dogma. He went so far as to argue that faith was "a mere compound of credulity and prejudices — aye prejudices, too, which degrade man from rational being to beast". Not surprisingly, such radical views made him an outcast from his family and community, culminating in a ritualistic excommunication from his synagogue.
Spinoza had a deep concern about the requirements for a good life, and devoted considerable attention to this in his Theologico-Political Treatise. Damasio contends that Spinoza's prescription for a life well lived — an ethical system and a democratic state — is of itself insufficient to achieve the sustained joy that Spinoza equated with human salvation. The added ingredient is a yearning borne out of an urgent need to give meaning to one's life. This yearning, he suggests, is a deep trait of the human mind that reflects a powerful biological mechanism for self-preservation: the conatus of Spinoza.
Looking for Spinoza is exceptionally engaging and profoundly gratifying. It achieves a unique combination of scientific exposition, historical discovery and deep personal statement regarding the human condition. It dares to ask how our accumulating knowledge of the human brain should inform the way we live our lives and organize our social world. Its erudition and wisdom provide a powerful statement that the pursuit of scientific knowledge about the human brain can go hand in hand with an overarching concern for our fellow humans.