Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 2003, 5 (2)
BOOK REVIEWS
Edited by Bonnie Smolen & Douglas Watt
Antonio Damasio: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and
the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003. ISBN:
ISBN? ?????, 355 pp., $28.00
“THE EGO IS FIRST AND FOREMOST A BODY EGO”
Unraveling the innate affective values of the human
brain might be the most captivating, and conceptually
critical, aspect of the entire mind sciences. In trying to
understand the neural foundations for emotional
behaviors and emotional experience, one is truly seek-
ing to map out the neural ground of our being. We
have seen a critical renaissance in affective neuro-
science in the last ten years, as emotion has become
increasingly the focus of empirical work, and a subject
for major works by leading investigators, one of those
leading the way being Antonio Damasio. In this—his
third—major contribution to the ongoing discussion of
how emotional valuing is organized in the human
brain, Antonio Damasio sails gracefully over this in-
creasingly large body of work. As discussions of our
emotional nature are again penetrating deeply into the
humanities (e.g., McLemee, 2003), many recognize
that a common denominator for bringing clarity to this
topic is a confrontation with the evolved (inherited)
nature of our emotional apparatus which does not
neglect nature–nurture interactions and the complex
and diverse, socially constructed cultural manifesta-
tions of our feelings.
In the present offering, Damasio seeks to captivate
those outside the mind sciences, as he continues to
argue for the importance of certain brain and body
processes in the generation of the many emotional
feelings that characterize the pains and satisfactions of
individual lives. Considering the degree to which this
book reflects Damasio’s meditation on a topic of great
personal interest to him, and no less to us, rather than a
fully balanced account of the scientific state of the
field, we would note that our applause is directed more
toward the former and our criticisms at the relative
paucity of the latter. Damasio’s reversion to what at
least seems to us a more cortico-centric view of experi-
Submit books for review to: Douglas F. Watt, Director of Neu-
ropsychology, Quincy Medical Center, Boston University School of
Medicine, Quincy, MA 02169 (email: drwatt@brahmacom.com).
201
enced emotions in the present book left us a bit sad-
dened, for we had both found his impressive second
book (The Feeling of What Happens, 1999b) to be a
badly needed tonic and valuable corrective to the
prevailing cortico-centric bias in many treatments of
both emotion and consciousness (Panksepp, 2000a;
Watt, 2000b).
Thus, we have invited Antonio Damasio to respond
to our extended critique. There are several issues that
we would like to raise, although we readily acknowl-
edge at the outset—indeed, consider it axiomatic to
admit—the possibility that some confusions may have
arisen from how easily we humans can always misin-
terpret the ideas of others. (Certainly, no one schooled
in psychoanalytic principles would need any convinc-
ing of this!) We also hope that some of our disagree-
ments have arisen from the fact that his book was
written for a general audience rather than for those
who worry about the conceptual and scientific details.
At the very least, we are hopeful that this extended
dialogue will clarify positions on critical issues, and to
the extent that a true major difference of scientific
opinion emerges from the dialogue, we also hope that
those theoretical differences can lead to further em-
pirical tests. Since the most important issue in this
article will be to address potential theoretical/empiri-
cal differences, we will spend much more effort on
differences rather than on similarities. However, we
acknowledge that among neuroscientifically inclined
emotion theorists, our views are closest to those in
Damasio’s second book, and that in general, he has
been the neuroscientist in the past ten years who has
been most successful and influential in redressing the
long-standing and systematic neglect of emotion in
understanding the overall functioning of the mind/
brain. However, as our critical review will highlight,
there are now several issues that deserve to be ironed
out, and we are hopeful that further progress can come
from this exchange with Damasio.
A nonevaluative brief synopsis of the book
Spinoza’s thoughts about human emotions and their
role in his philosophy of life frame Damasio’s medita-
tions. These spiritual brothers have come to remark-
ably similar conclusions concerning the nature of the
202
inner life. Thus, it is understandable that Damasio’s
arguments are contextualized more in personal terms
rather than centered in a substantive history of this
troubled field of inquiry. Read at this level, the book is
a testament to the penetrating thoughts of an intellec-
tual revolutionary of the seventeenth century, as well
as of a modern pioneer who remains one of the few
neuroscientists, in the emerging mind sciences of the
twenty-first century, to unabashedly recognize the im-
portance of emotional feelings in human affairs and
for their role in organizing and underpinning con-
sciousness and cognitions. In advancing his views,
Damasio continues to share an admiration of the clas-
sic James–Lange approach, in spirit if not in terms of a
substantive historical framing.
The scientific impact of this seven-chapter book is
nested between the first and the sixth. In these four
chapters, Damasio outlines his current understanding
of how emotional feelings emerge in the brain. The
remaining three chapters describe Damasio’s personal
resonances with Spinoza’s life and thought and
Damasio’s conjectures on how an emerging under-
standing of emotional feelings can help flesh out the
meaning of a life well lived. We found the final two
chapters to be most fascinating and forward looking
from a humanistic point of view, but we will restrict
ourselves to the more neuroscientific issues summa-
rized in the intervening two hundred pages.
In Chapter 2, Damasio outlines his hierarchical
viewpoint of mental life, grounded on basic “auto-
matic life regulators,” the basic appetites and drives,
with emotional feelings emerging at the very top of
neural evolution—as he says, the “crown jewel” of an
“afterthought” in brain–mind emergence. He also lays
out a battle plan to segregate “emotions” from “feel-
ings” so he can grant lower animals the former, as did
Descartes, but not quite enthusiastically enough the
latter. Thus, Damasio encourages us, in line with
behavioristic traditions, to study the emotional actions
of animals, while reserving the study of feelings to
those who speak in human tongues. He offers “quali-
fied congratulations to us humans” (p. 51) for having
the good fortune to fully experience the pleasures and
pains of existence. Human feelings emerge when
“emotionally competent stimuli” (ECSs) from the ex-
ternal world create “a temporary change in the state of
the body proper, and in the state of the brain structures
that map the body and support thinking” (p. 53). The
ECSs, because of their perceptual–cognitive nature,
arise from cortical areas such as the ventromedial
prefrontal and other sensory association areas of the
cerebral mantle to cascade downward into presumably
unconscious “execution processes” of the amygdala,
basal forebrain, hypothalamus, and brainstem. Even
though one can evoke episodes of intense grief and
eventually depressive despair from those ancient mid-
brain–diencephalic areas, which we share
homologously with animals, Damasio (in concert with
many others) encourages us to assume that those neu-
Book Reviews
ronal stirrings only become conscious when refracted
through various higher cortical reaches of the human
mind.
In Chapter 3, Damasio develops the theme that
“feelings are perceptions” that occur in “the brain’s
body maps” that “refer to parts of the body and states
of the body” (p. 85). Thus emotional feelings are
described as variants of other feelings—“the percep-
tion of a certain state of the body along with the
perception of a certain mode of thinking and of
thoughts with certain themes” (p. 86; emphasis in
original, here and in all other quotes). He asserts that
“feeling in essence is an idea—an idea of the body
and, even more particularly, an idea of a certain aspect
of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances” (p.
88). Such concepts are advanced with many qualifica-
tions, which help distinguish them from those ad-
vanced well over a century ago by William James.
Some of the most striking evidence for these asser-
tions is Damasio et al.’s (2000) demonstration of many
regionally specific brain activations, using PET scan-
ning, as humans deeply experienced the basic feelings
of joy, sadness, anger, and fear, as evoked by their
personal remembrances of emotions past. Thus, feel-
ings may not “arise necessarily from the actual body
states. . . but rather from the actual maps constructed
at any given moment in the body sensing regions” (p.
112) of the brain. All this is well elaborated, along
with a discussion of various social emotions, some of
their potential chemistries, along with comments for
anticipated “naysayers” who might wish to have a
more penetrating discussion of how feelings could
ever emerge from physiochemical processes. For
them, Damasio advances the idea that positive and
negative feelings may be “directly related to the fluid-
ity or strain of the life processes” (p. 131).
In Chapter 4, Damasio discusses his view of joy and
sorrow and the breakdown of social emotions follow-
ing prefrontal cortical damage. We are offered clinical
descriptions of such patients and a robust argument
why “the neural machinery underlying feeling pre-
vailed sturdily in evolution” (p. 179). Damasio pro-
poses that as the brain areas for emotional responses,
presumably all unconscious, meld with higher-brain
maps of the body, human social feelings—from shame
to pride, from awe to indignation, from guilt to com-
passion—emerge in those higher regions of the brain.
He suggests that other great apes such as bonobos may
“show compassion for another suffering being,” but
we humans “also know that we feel compassion” and
can appreciate its positive affects (p. 167), presumably
providing us with an essential foundation for virtue.
He also suggests that, absent such abilities, much of
the social fabric and social-rule structures essential to
the most critical aspects of culture would not have
come into existence.
In Chapter 5, Damasio’s basic framework for link-
ing mind, brain, and body is laid out, with Spinoza’s
notion referenced as the first historical antecedent for
Book Reviews
these basic suppositions. With the added spice of
several clinical disorders, body, brain, and mind are
reunified into a well-woven whole. Damasio now
elaborates the novel central theme of the book, a
proposition asserted to be closely akin to “Spinoza’s
notion of the human mind, which he defines transpar-
ently as consisting of the idea of the human body” (p.
211). Damasio here concurs with the controversial
idea, which one hopes can be constructively debated,
that “the body shapes the mind’s contents more so than
the mind shapes the body’s” (p. 217).
In the remaining two chapters, Damasio shares both
personal resonances with Spinoza’s life and thought
and conjectures on how an understanding of emotional
feelings can help flesh out the meaning of a life well
lived. These meditations include thoughts on the im-
plications of religious and spiritual quests viewed in
the light of his proposals for the basic neuroscience of
emotion and feeling. His thoughts are framed by the
belief that “knowing about emotion, feeling, and their
working does matter to how we live our lives” (p.
287). Who, among the emotionally intact members of
our species, would disagree? For many brain scien-
tists, who are still in denial about the foundational
nature of emotions, this serves as a clarion call to
better conceptualize neuromental realities. That, we
believe, cannot be done without an animal-brain re-
search that brings all the other mammals, at a mini-
mum, within the circle of creatures who most likely do
experience affective states. Of course, our whole con-
ception of how the mind/brain operates depends criti-
cally on such issues. Thus there has to be an open
discussion about such matters.
Certainly, many will question Damasio’s radical
position (echoing Spinoza) that all cognitions are
grounded in body states. We resonate well with this
idea, as did Freud (1923) in his recognition that “the
ego is first and foremost a body ego” (p. 18). Whether
one agrees with Damasio, and Freud, on these particu-
lars, one has to credit that their books have stimulated
and challenged scholars outside brain research to think
about fundamental matters in neuroscientific terms.
We would more readily endorse an only slightly less
radical principle—namely, that cognitive states embed
affective value(s) and that all sustained cognition is
affectively directed and motivated, often invisibly in a
fashion that promotes the illusion of cognitive au-
tonomy from emotion. But the critical scientific issue
is how Damasio’s even more radical position on this
can ever be cashed out or tested empirically. We hope
the book will energize constructive debates about a
host of issues that will eventually be clarified in em-
pirical terms. We welcome specific testable ideas on
these issues from Damasio.
However, there are several basic issues that we
would like to raise about the treatment of feelings that
Damasio has provided in this book. We will develop
some of these issues in detail in this review and
present both our understanding of Damasio’s position
203
on these matters in Looking for Spinoza and discuss
alternative positions that may not be at all obvious to
either lay readers or researchers:
1. We think that either too “neat” or too extensive a
separation between emotion and feeling can lead to
conceptual conundrums.
2. We regard his taxonomy for emotions as poten-
tially problematic, promoting continued confusion
and neglecting previous work, particularly our ex-
isting knowledge about attachment processes of the
brain and the concept of prototype emotional states.
3. Related to this, we feel that he blurs the boundary
between prototype emotion, and the many highly
cognized emotions in humans that are derivative of
those very few prototype states, such that emotion
and cognition are potentially at least somewhat
conflated.
4. Since emotions are active and deeply executive,
then so must the corresponding feelings be, and
from this we might take issue with the passive
image of feeling as “body readout” that seems to
emerge in this book.
5. Related to that, we have a somewhat different
interpretation of his (and other’s) imaging data
finding insular activation as an apparent common
denominator in the experience of emotion.
6. We feel that there might be problems associated
with his proposition that feelings (experienced
emotion) are confined to humans as part of an
extended cognitive consciousness, instead of some
version of emotional experience being integral to
the “core” of a more primitive and primary affec-
tive consciousness.
7. It is notable that the “circle” of experienced affect
has seemingly been drawn in so tightly to include
only our own species (with room perhaps for a few
other well-cerebrated mammals), and we fear this
to be the same kind of error that Descartes made
(ironically), one that has serious implications for
our potential treatment of other life forms, when
our conduct on this point is already far short of
ethical, or ecologically wise. We recognize that
Damasio’s view of this is well within the scientific
mainstream and that affect cannot be directly meas-
ured, but we think that the weight of evidence is
that affective experience, at least at deeply experi-
enced levels of valance and arousal, reflects a very
ancient form of consciousness (Panksepp, 1998, in1998 a or b?
press a). in press a
published?
Can emotions be neatly separated from
feelings? What makes “body mappings”
conscious, and not “going on in the dark”?
Damasio makes much of what he considers “a princi-
pled distinction” between emotion and feelings. A key
 204
element in Damasio’s game plan for the book was to
first take emotion and feeling apart in the first sections
of the book, only to put them back together later. Is he
successful in this surgery, or was the patient left only
partially stitched together and potentially in postopera-
tive shock? Damasio has explicitly chosen to separate
these into distinct categories, with emotions reflecting
the objective aspects that scientists can readily meas-
ure, while feelings are the subjective aspects that
scientists must infer. The same maneuver has been
advanced by Dolan (2002). This is different from the
more traditional way of handling the problem of affec-
tive feelings, where the experiential aspects are just
one of the many attributes of the overall emotional
processes of the brain and body, with the other major
ones being the motor-expressive and physiological
parameters that are comparatively easy to quantify,
and the cognitive-appraisal ones that are not, espe-
cially in animals. A few months ago (December 2002),
one of us [J.P.] attempted in an e-letter1 to coax Ray
1 in press b
A relevant segment of the December 2002 communication from
Jaak Panksepp to Ray Dolan is as follows: “I would like to raise several
issues, in the hope of jogging you slightly in my direction. I find the
emotion–affect distinction you and others (e.g., Damasio) have been
making, coming perhaps too much from the cognitive neuroscience
side, conceptually troublesome (i.e., will cause trouble in clear tradi-
tional communication). I think most, down through the years, have
deemed emotions to be the superordinate category, that includes lots of
dimensions, including the all important affective ones. This allows
some of the other components under that umbrella to be unconscious,
without denying that one of the most interesting aspects (felt values) is
often consciously experience by humans, and probably other animals.
different “Thus, I would tend to go with the most deeply considered psycho-
spelling ok? logical definition, stated so well by Klenginna and Kleinginna (1981, p.
1981 not 355), where they argued that: ‘a formal definition of emotion should be
in refs broad enough to include all traditionally significant aspects of emotion,
while attempting to differentiate it from other psychological processes.’
After an extensive discussion of past definitions and controversies in
the literature, they suggest the following working definition: ‘Emotion
is a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors,
mediated by neural/hormonal systems, which can (a) give rise to
affective experiences such as feelings of arousal, pleasure/displeasure;
(b) generate cognitive processes such as emotionally relevant percep-
tual effects, appraisals, labeling processes; (c) activate widespread
physiological adjustments to the arousing conditions; and (d) lead to
behavior that is often, but not always, expressive, goal-directed, and
adaptive.’
“From a very similar perspective, a list of provisional list of brain-
aspects criteria has been offered for the types of neural systems that
not in refs should be sought in my original 1982 Behavioral and Brain Sciences
article [leading up to J.P.’s Affective Neuroscience, 1998a, pp. 48–49].
The resulting 7-aspect brain-based definition is quite similar to the
psychological definition described above, and unlike many previous
definitions, it emphasizes the essential importance of the internally
felt—the subjectively experienced—aspects of emotional arousal, even
in other animals. Without the criterion of emotional feelings, I think the
concept of emotions makes practically no sense at all, at least philo-
sophically and humanistically. . . .
“This leads me to plead that investigators put affect as one of the
attributes of emotions (as I believe is both reasonable and traditional),
rather than making them such distinctly separate categories that most
people outside our field will wonder what the heck we are talking
about. If more investigators of emotions took affect seriously, then we
would not have such a spate of studies indicating that certain emotions
are unconscious when, in fact, they have not done a proper job in
evaluating affective changes.”
Book Reviews
Dolan back to the more traditional point of view of
how we should use the term emotion (J.P. had also
planned to send the note to Damasio, but inadvertently
did not).
Damasio raises the distinction not only for episte-
mological reasons, but also because he accepts the
likelihood that certain “emotional behaviors” (i.e.,
reflexive approach-and-withdrawal responses) are not
valid indicators of corresponding types of internal
states. Although most would grant this likelihood,
which surely take bacteria and many other “lowly
bugs” out of contention for affective consciousness,
this parsing of feeling from emotion seems to leave the
door closed for perhaps too many other “higher” ani-
mals that don’t have enough idiotypic somatosensory
representation areas to construct as sophisticated a
body image as humans. We do need a better discussion
of the strategies that need to be taken in order to study
affect in animals, and recently some have done just
that (Knutson, Burgdorf, & Panksepp, 2002; 1998 a or b?
Panksepp, 1998, in press b).
Curiously, the tendency to make a major distinction published?
between affective feeling (experienced emotion) and
emotion proper, which are surely intimately related, is
accompanied by the tendency to blur critical distinc-
tions between emotions and cognitions, which are
vastly different species of mental activity, despite their
deep interaction in humans once past early infancy (for
in press a
fuller discussion, see Panksepp, in press a). Indeed, published?
since the aim of science is to carve nature at the joints,
we must seriously consider whether there is a very
flexible joint (or joints) between neural systems that
elaborate our core emotional behaviors and affective
feelings and those that govern our perceptions and
thoughts, rather than it all being one continuous bone.
From our perspective, Damasio’s thesis might have
been better phrased had it more explicitly addressed
subcortical–limbic–affective and cortical–cognitive–
thoughtful distinctions (Panksepp, 2001, in press a). in press a
When one experiences intense emotions, there are published?
remarkable reductions in blood flow in certain areas of
the cortex, as is evident in Damasio et al.’s (2000) own
data (for a graphic depiction of the 189 significant
brain changes, see Panksepp, in press a). Indeed, many inpublished?
press a
cortico–cognitive activities tend to suppress (or at
least heavily modulate) subcortical emotional pro-
cesses (Liotti & Panksepp, in press). It is only at
modest levels of emotional arousal that the two work published?
synergistically and in harmony.
We still need to develop a coherent “affect logic”—
a description of how affective processes systemati-
cally guide thinking and how cognition in turn blends,
inhibits, and otherwise modifies the prototype states—
to bind the two processes of emotion and cognition,
particularly as development proceeds. In this vein,
Damasio and his colleagues have emphasized how the
internalization of complex social affective contingen-
cies in orbitofrontal cortex are critical to the sensible
higher executive and “cognitive” decision-making ca-
Book Reviews
pacities of human beings. Suddenly stripped of such a
life-time accrual of social meanings and the contin-
gencies for affective reward and aversion, we quickly
become thoughtless, impulsive creatures and our pre-
vious social sensibilities collapse completely. We be-
come like bulls in the china shops of our social
attachments and contracts, eventually shattering them
irretrievably as in the tragic case of poor Phineas
Gage, who Damasio eloquently reintroduced in
Descartes’ Error (1994).
There are in fact two major but little appreciated
conundrums in this principled separation between
emotion and feeling: (1) all strong emotions appear to
involve phenomenal alterations (feelings) by their very
nature; (2) Damasio never really explains which of the
truly vast panorama of body mappings become emo-
tional feelings, and which might just remain “under
the waterline of consciousness,” or how this selection
process might happen. It would seem likely that only a
restricted subset of mappings might enter conscious-
ness as potential components of emotional feeling.
Damasio partially acknowledges this around his warn-
ing qualification to the reader that we don’t know
quite yet “how neural mapping is turned into con-
scious perception.” Damasio posited in The Feeling of
What Happens (1999b) that conscious sensory map-
pings in any modality are determined when uncon-
scious sensory mappings of objects (including sensory
mappings of the body happening in higher sensory
cortices) are correlated with ongoing changes in
proto-self systems that map the body. Here is the
problem: this yields the potential formulation that
what becomes conscious in feelings are those body
mappings changed by emotional arousal that are cor-
related with changes in the proto-self systems, but
these proto-self systems in Damasio’s scheme cen-
trally include insula and somatosensory cortex, the
very regions that are supplying the mapping of so-
matic states potentially selected or enhanced into
conscious perception! Therein lies the second and
largely unappreciated conundrum. One cannot have a
higher-order process leading to consciousness (“sec-
ond-order” mapping operations in his parlance, which
he thought happened in the thalamus, superior
colliculus, and cingulate) emerge from the correlations
of regional mappings and activations with themselves
(although we grant that all of these large brain regions
could have recursive neuronal layerings that poten-
tially provide several levels of control that provide
opportunities for remappings). But still, this formula-
tion for feelings (body mappings selected and en-
hanced for conscious perception by processing in
either the same or other closely contiguous body-
mapping regions), leaves one wondering if something
is missing from the equation. One might indeed ques-
tion how insula and particularly S1–S3 could be con-
sidered first-order mapping structures at all, on the
same footing in his framework as multiple reticular
regions, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray
205
(PAG). We would be much more inclined to regard
any idiotypic cortex as sitting at the highest cognitive
levels of the brain, and by definition a “secondary”
mapping structure. Although we agree with Damasio
that multiple aspects of body mapping are
foundational for consciousness, we would favor the
hypothesis that those foundational aspects are largely
if not entirely grounded in a host of subcortical and
brainstem structures (like the PAG and nearby supe-
rior colliculi), while cortical structures (more prob-
ably) provide “extensions” to those foundational
aspects. But the science on these points is hardly
established either way.
We see an alternative and perhaps more traditional
formulation as a way out of this unacknowledged
conundrum: we would suggest that these brainstem
structures (emotion–behavior “executors” in
Damasio’s view) provide the multiaxial autonomic
and humoral somatic tunings essential to emotion
(including critical action-priming, discussed later), as
these brainstem systems are primarily responsible for
those somatic changes that we are conscious of when
we feel the breathlessness of fear, and our faces being
white and drained of color, or the flushness of the face
and our dramatically increased cardiac output in rage
states. But they also likely tune various distributed
paleocortical and even neocortical systems so that
these very changes associated with emotional activa-
tion might resonate through the higher reaches of the
system, including potential effects on the insula,
which has a capacity to integrate somatosensory infor-
mation with several aspects of brainstem activity
(more on the insula later). In any event, despite the
compelling data for insular participation in the genera-
tion of certain sensory-centric affective feelings, the
most robust emotional feeling (emotions being the
action systems of the brain, such anger, fear, seeking,
sadness, joy) have been aroused by deep subcortical
manipulations in both animals and humans.
Damasio does focus on one dramatic recent finding
of this genera—of reversible depressive despair
evoked by localized brain stimulation at the mesen-
cephalic–diencephalic junction just above the substan-
tia nigra (i.e., Bejjani et al., 1999), but it is a very large
conceptual jump (certainly not empirically verified) to
suggest that affective feelings only emerge when such
subcortical systems interact with cortico-cognitive cir-
cuits. It is worth emphasizing that affective states are
next to impossible to evoke by activating these higher
cortical systems using electrical stimulation of the
normal human brain. Conversely, as one activates
subcortical emotional systems, human minds are im-
mediately filled with relevant, affectively loaded
thoughts (e.g., see Heath, 1996; Panksepp, 1985). It is
probably the thoughts about our emotions rather than
the affects that are cortically produced (Liotti &
Panksepp, in press), including perhaps some complex published?
socially constructed emotions such as human spiritual
happiness and shame.
 206
Where are the evolutionarily derived emotional
systems of the brain? Issues related to
Damasio’s taxonomy
If one doesn’t make a principled outline of the proto-
type states, how can one even hope to clarify what
various emotions consist of in neural terms? It appears
that Damasio’s explicit treatment of emotions is a least
somewhat a-categorical. In other words, fear, rage,
sadness, lust, and all of the social emotions related to
attachment (and their manifestations in consciousness)
are approached as though they all have roughly the
same neural correlates, when the evidence is that
“organism defense” states like fear and rage have quite
different substrates than social and attachment-related
prototype states (lust, separation distress, play, other
social emotions that are positively valenced).
Damasio’s et al.’s 2000 imaging study was a refresh-
ing movement toward a more categorical approach,
with a methodology focusing on imaging possible
footnote substrates for four “primary” emotions (“happy,”
numbering/ “sad,” “fearful,” and “angry”) but there remain poten-
order
changed to
tial difficulties with his understanding of the emotions
2 signal the survival utility of objects.
match order taxonomy. But a general homogenization of affective
of processes into some type of sensory–perceptual layer-
appearance ing is especially perplexing in light of his own excel-
in text - ok?
lent dataset (i.e., Damasio et al., 2000) which
highlights how different areas of the brain arousal are
generated during activation of the four “classic” emo-
tional primes.
2
There is a confound in Damasio et al.’s (2000) imaging study of the
four “primary emotions.” This rests in how “happy” in adult humans
could really relate to three, probably quite different, prototype positive
states: (1) Playful/affectionate, joyous in that sense, related to the
mammalian prototype state of rough-and-tumble play that has cognized
first cousins in our sense of humor, and the playful and affectionate
teasing that we do socially. (2) A state that is a critical component of any
long-term attachment—what I would call, for lack of a better formal
term in the literature, “extremely contented nuzzling,” the kind of state
that mammals get into when feeling “fat and happy,” just hanging out
with their conspecifics, not a care in the world. This would be much
more relaxed, more “low key,” than the first state, with presumably
much in common with postorgasmic states and, likely, with much
opioid mediation. (3) A “social dominance” state that might have been
selected for the scripts by many males, and not too many females—
when the male gets the job promotion, hits a home run, or has some
other competitive triumph. The mammalian analogues are obvious.
One can only wonder what the images might have looked like if
these subtypes had been spelled out (say, with scripts sorted in terms of
these three categories) and the three image sets differentially examined.
(This obviously would have required a larger N and not a terribly
feasible goal for a first-pass study.) In any case, one suspects it would
be a very interesting approach to take for a future study, but this all
goes to our point in the essay about taxonomy directly informing and
guiding research methods. Furthermore, it is a comment on the state of
the field that something as critical as State #2 (surely a linchpin in
every secure, close attachment in intimate relationships, and absolutely
vital between parent and child) has had virtually no sustained examina-
tion by those in neuroscience. Although we did not have room to
speculate in this paper about the reasons for this neglect, or reasons for
why these taxonomic issues and confusions are so widespread, we do
regard it as most curious that we have a much, much better understand-
ing of the neural trajectories for fear than we do for these three different
forms of very positive emotion.
Book Reviews
Damasio finds it helpful “to classify the emotions-
proper in three tiers: background emotions, primary
emotions, and social emotions” (p. 43). Although
there is some utility to such a general scheme, we
prefer more resolved schemes,3 and we wonder why
3
An attempt to taxonomize affect has only recently received atten-
tion (e.g., Ostow, 2002; Panksepp & Pincus, 2002). An overview of not in refs
how we conceptualize a credible taxonomy emerging has been summa- not in refs
rized in a recent definition provide by Panksepp (2003c) for the
Concise Corsini Encyclopaedia of Psychology and Behavioral Sci-
ence:
Affect is typically considered to reflect the feelings associated with
emotional processes, which are related in presently unknown ways to
the other major components—expressive, autonomic, and cognitive.
Affective experience has been among the most difficult aspects of mind
to understand scientifically, since it is so thoroughly subjective. Its
importance in human economic, political and social affairs has long
been subsumed under the concept of utility—the recognition that socie-
ties must aspire to the greatest good (and the least suffering) for the
greatest number. As Jeremy Bentham (1789, Introduction to the Princi-
ples of Morals and Legislation) famously said: “Utility is . . . that
property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage,
pleasure, good, or happiness. . . or. . . to prevent the happening of
mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.” Experienced affect is the neural
currency for such cost–benefit “calculations” in the economy of the
brain. When linked to specific perceptions, affective feelings typically
There are, of course, an enormous number of affects, and it is by no
means certain how any are instantiated within the brain. Although
emotional feelings often appear related to objects of the world (since
brains project feelings onto sensory/perceptual processes), affects are
actually elaborated by specific brain systems. To the best of our
knowledge, the critical systems are concentrated in ancient brain areas
also found in many other animals.
Conceptually, affects may be divided into those that reflect bodily
needs and disturbances—the hungers, thirst, and various other pains
and pleasures of the world—while others are more closely related to
instinctual actions—the expressive emotional urges of the mind. To
understand the former, a guiding principle is that objects of the world
that support survival are generally experienced as delightful and pleas-
ant, while those incompatible with survival are experienced as aversive
and unpleasant. The “sensory-linked affects” are typically studied as
perceptual experiences of the brain; for instance, the taste of chocolate
or the disgust engendered by the smell of feces. Such valenced experi-
ences—the varieties of goodness and badness—are mediated by spe-
cific brain circuits that course upward through brainstem, thalamus, and
hypothalamus to ancient limbic cortical areas of the brain. For instance,
people with insular cortical damage are deficient in experiencing
negative feelings such as pain, disgust, and coldness. Yet other cortical
areas (e.g., orbito-frontal cortex) help distinguish many sensory pleas-
ures.
The other major category of affective experience is more closely
linked to emotional systems that allow organisms generate adaptive
instinctual behaviors during various life-challenging situations. Thus,
all mammals have brain systems for i) seeking resources, ii) becoming
angry if access to resources are thwarted, iii) becoming scared when
one’s bodily well-being is threatened, iv) various sexual desires that are
somewhat different in males and females, v) urges to exhibit loving and
attentive care toward one’s offspring, vi) feelings of panic and distress
when one has lost contact with loved ones, and vii) the boisterous
joyousness of rough and tumble playfulness. Each is manifested
through characteristic action patterns that reflect the dynamics of the
associated feelings. All other mammals may experience such basic
feelings because of brain systems they share with humans. For instance,
other mammals are attracted to the drugs that humans commonly
overuse and abuse, and they dislike similar drug-induced experiences.
Of course, there are many socially derived feelings as various basic
emotions are thwarted and blended in real-life situations (yielding
frustrations and feelings such as shame, jealousy, guilt, embarrassment,
many of which may be uniquely human).
The vast human capacity to think and to symbolize experience in
language and culture has added subtle layers of complexity to our
Book Reviews
Damasio seems so consistently to neglect the substan-
tial amount of work that has already been done charac-
terizing various primary emotions, or why he chooses
to validate a problematic distinction between “primary
emotions” and “social emotions” (as “secondary,” im-
plying “second-class citizen status”?). This suggests a
conclusion that is certainly counter to the message in
Chapter 4, where Damasio talks of the catastrophic
consequences for the individual and society if there
were a more widespread collapse of the ability to
incorporate social cues/rules (which give the distress
and needs of the other consideration alongside our
own). Attachment to conspecifics is hardly a “second-
ary” issue. It is probably the primary source of positive
affective states in humans, primates, and mammals. So
this is our most basic difference with this old conven-
tion, of talking about “primary emotions” and “sec-
ondary social emotions”: social connections may not
be secondary to anything in emotional terms. Attach-
ment has to be understood (and researched) as a prime
mover, even though these neural systems probably
evolved from more ancient pain and sexual-choice
mechanisms (Panksepp, 1998a). And there are in-
creasing signs of just that kind of recognition in the
clinical neurosciences, where earlier losses of safe
attachments are seen increasingly as a major potential
risk factor for a host of Axis I and Axis II disorders.
feelings, especially our aesthetic experiences. As scientists categorize
the diverse affective dimensions of life, many are tempted to simplify
emotional complexities into holistic schemes (e.g., positive and nega-
tive affects) that may partly reflect our linguistic capacity to oversim-
plify. But there may also be superordinate brain systems for such global
feelings.
Although humans have many special feelings ranging from awe to
zoophobia, scientific understanding of the evolved nature of feelings is
best obtained through the study of ancient brain systems we share with
other animals. Recent evidence indicates these systems do have chemi-
cal codes, such as the neuropeptides, which help conduct specific neuro-
affective tunes. Most of these substances, which barely cross
blood–brain barriers, must be placed directly into animals’ brains.
However, as related medicinal agents are developed, we can anticipate
the emergence of new and selective psychiatric drugs to control trouble-
some or excessive human feelings. For millennia, humankind had only
one such drug, opium, which could alleviate physical pain as well as the
painful grief arising from social loss.
So what, in a deep neural sense, are emotional feelings? They reflect
the various types of neurodynamics that establish characteristic, men-
tally experienced “forces” that regulate and reflect action readiness
within the nervous system—the pounding force of anger, the shivery
feelings of fear, the caress of love, the urgent thrusting of sexuality, the
painful pangs of grief, the exuberance of joy, and the persistent “nosy”
poking about of organisms seeking resources. Moods and many psychi-
atric disorders may reflect the long-term balance of the various positive
and negative affective systems.
And how do the material events of the brain get converted into the
mystery of subjective experience? No one is certain, but some have
suggested that the core of our being is organized around neuro-symbolic
motor-action coordinates of the brain. The various basic neurodynamics
of such a core “self,” evident in the instinctual action dynamics of each
animal, may be critical for the transformation of brain activities into
emotional experiences. If this is the case, then certain affective values
were built in at the very core of mammalian brain evolution, thereby
providing a solid grounding for mental life. This view of brain–mind
organization, not widely accepted by certain schools of materialist (e.g.,
behaviorist) thought, has the potential to contribute to a more admirable
scientific image of life than was evident during the 20th century.
207
We would doubt that anyone coming from a psycho-
analytic tradition would need any reminders on this
point, given the volume of groundbreaking work done
by psychoanalytic investigators in the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s on the vicissitudes of attachment (Bowlby,
1969; for overviews, see Schore, 1994, 2003).
In highly cognitive creatures such as ourselves, all
these simple paradigms or primes—like the confronta-
tion with a predator (fear), experiencing threats to free
pursuit, territory, or conspecifics (anger), experienc-
ing the loss of mates, offspring, and conspecifics
(separation distress), and the comforts and joys of sex,
attachment, and play—all become increasingly trans-
lated, activated, and realized through complex cogni-
tive operations. Those affective “primes” thus live
increasingly in the rich sea of human symbolic opera-
tions and complex meanings. However, even complex,
highly cognized human emotions probably never lose
the intrinsic grounding to these primes, or else they
cease to exist in the human organism. We would argue
that a close focus on both shared and also distinct
properties of these individual primary or prototype
emotional systems is essential for clarifying the
sources of both emotional behaviors and subsequent
affective feelings of both humans and other animals.
So while emphasizing a principled distinction be-
tween emotion and feelings, Damasio fails (despite his
own fine data, detailed in Damasio et al., 2000) to
make what we would see as a more essential princi-
pled distinction between the “blue-ribbon emotions”
or the prototype states—like fear, rage, lust, and sepa-
ration distress which are shared by all mammals—and
the various highly cognized and derivative states in
humans such as pride, shame, or guilt. Consistent with
this, Damasio fails to distinguish clearly between sad-
ness and depression, which surely are not identical,
even though social loss is a common precipitant for
both. But for Damasio to suggest that taxonomically
sadness and separation distress are on the same footing
as guilt (as another negative affective state) obscures
the dependent connection of guilt to separation dis-
tress. This kind of failure, admittedly widespread, to
separate affective primes or prototype states from their
secondary and more complex cousins neglects basic
developmental principles about emotion in humans:
that all our cognitive equipment potentially makes for
many complex variations of (and even blends) of the
prototype states, and many variations on a theme, as it
were. But a conflation of prototype states with their
cognized cousins makes an already difficult research
task even more difficult.
To illustrate this principle in more detail, let us take
a closer look at two of the most important examples of
this, in terms of guilt and shame, two key complex
social emotions that Damasio does mention in his
analysis, and rightly considers big players in the social
arena. These two are highly cognized states that prob-
ably link primitive feelings of separation distress (the
underlying primitive or prototype state) to complex
 208
internalized self-images and images of others. Guilt
can be understood as stemming from a complex com-
bination of the capacity for separation distress melded
with the awareness that one has harmed a valued other,
and that one therefore feels less deserving of love. In
this state, one has to endure an internal sense of loss
(revealing the underlying tie of guilt to separation
distress). In guilt, one must make reparations to repair
the injury, and while guilty, one must stand outside the
door, so to speak, until such reparations are done.
Guilt experiences that are chronic, and in which no
reparation is possible, result in serious damage to self-
esteem, and much potential for depression and chronic
anger. Shame likewise is probably derivative of sepa-
ration distress, involving slightly different complex
dynamic images of self and other, but is no less
dependent on the underlying prototype state of separa-
tion distress. In shame, one is suddenly exposed as
deficient in the qualities needed to secure and keep the
love of valued others. Compared with guilt, shame
might be the developmentally earlier negative state
not in Refs (see Schore, 1997), even more powerful than guilt in
its potential destructive effects if activated early and
often, although the capacity for some degree of well-
modulated shame and guilt is what distinguishes de-
cent folks from sociopaths (or those with severe
orbital frontal damage!). In many ways, we suspect
that these potential errors of taxonomy stem both from
a lack of immersion with neurological work done on
the emotional “primes” (largely from animal research)
and from the failure to adequately distinguish emo-
tions and cognitions, such that the primes come to be
too easily conflated with their more cognitive cousins.
In our view, these cognized first relatives of the primes
emerge only through a long developmental course in
humans, taking a prototype state and combining it with
images of self and other that must be understood as
dynamic and not static (see Watt, 1986, 1990, for
details of this line of analysis around transference and
like phenomena which will be immediately familiar to
those who resonate with psychoanalytic perspectives).
This discussion of shame and guilt leads us to a
potentially critical weakness in Damasio’s treatment
of emotion: the neglect of attachment and the enduring
(indeed life-long) need for connection. His discussion
of happiness or joy is often without acknowledgement
that attachment processes underpin many positive pro-
totype emotions, particularly play, social affection,
and other positive affective states experienced in the
context of attachments. This, from our point of view,
moves the treatment of positive emotion off its bio-
logical moorings in social attachments and strips the
discussion of a key ethological signpost for further
work.4 Indeed, our early dependence on such attach-
ments, long before our cortex is fully functional, ap-
4
When one of us [D.W.] asked Damasio directly about just this
matter in a personal communication at the April 2000 Neuro-Psycho-
analysis conference in London, there was open acknowledgment of
these considerations (that all that could matter to each of us were just
Book Reviews
pears so profound, so written into our genome and our
brains, that fatal homeostatic derailments are common
in infants cared for physically but seriously neglected
emotionally (e.g., the syndrome of hospitalism that
psychoanalytic clinicians in Britain were the first to
discover and describe). This syndrome suggests that a
primary or primitive attachment experience (what psy-
choanalysis has called “symbiotic merger”) sits as a
poorly understood “supervisor,” as it were, of homeo-
static management in infants. This, of course, is totally
consistent with principles that Damasio and others
have emphasized in which emotion is presumed to be
an evolutionary extension of homeostatic manage-
ment.
These are not trivial distinctions, as taxonomy is-
sues fundamentally inform basic research approaches,
leaving researchers conflating phenomena that need to
be parsed differentially, possibly lumping things that
should be split, and possibly splitting things that might
better be lumped (see footnote 3). Table 1 outlines
these issues in more graphic form, contrasting
Damasio’s concept of functional hierarchies in the
brain from Chapter 2 of the book (on the left) with an
alternative view (on the right), with differences high-
lighted in bold. Note that there are clearly major areas
of concordance and conceptual agreement between
these two, but there are critical differences that lead to
very different experimental strategies for studying af-
fective processes of the brain. Of course, each of these
levels must be understood as functionally interactive
with those above and below.
One might easily wonder what the real difference
here is, given the large similarity. We would place
emotion above pain in an evolutionary hierarchy (like
Damasio), but given that pain is a most basic kind of
proto-qualia, it would seem to make sense to assume
that all functional developments “above” pain must
also have intrinsically conscious aspects too (there we
appear to part company with Damasio). Additionally,
this parsing of functional envelopes more clearly un-
derlines the role that cognition has in modulating
prototype emotions and in generating the cognized and
blended states that characterize the complexity of
adult human emotions.
These problems mean for us that Damasio may
have missed a crucial opportunity in this book to
discuss emotional feelings in more deeply evolution-
ary ways. By not at least entertaining that the various
instinctual emotional operating systems of the brain
may be very closely linked to affective subjective
states of the brain, an empirically productive approach
those internalized connections and our attachments to loved and valued
people, places, and things), so this relative omission (or at least
significant underemphasis) leaves us more than a bit puzzled. We are
only left wondering why Damasio can clearly validate this basic insight
(certainly something that would be axiomatic to any psychodynami-
cally trained clinician—or to any decent person with emotional com-
mon sense, for that matter) and yet give it so little space in his overall
vision of how emotion might work.
 Book Reviews
Table 1
Two Possible Neuro-functional Hierarchies
for the Study of Feelings and the Cognition–
Emotion Border
Damasio’s View Alternative View
Emotionally directed Emotionally directed
cognition cognition
Feeling Cognized emotion/
with modulated social feelings
Emotion Prototype emotions/
with raw feelings
Pain/pleasure Pain/pleasure
Homeostasis/ Homeostasis/
life management life management
to understanding affective feelings again has been
ignored, if not marginalized. We are puzzled why
Damasio chooses to generally ignore the vast amount
of neuroscience work that has already been conducted
addressing such issues. In fairness, these nosology and
taxonomy issues are unfortunately widespread in the
various literature on emotion, creating a little appreci-
ated source of endless problems for both researchers
and students alike (see footnote 3). However, we do
believe that these issues deserve a more resolved
analysis, even for the general reading public, than was
evident in Looking for Spinoza, or, for that matter, in
Damasio’s earlier books.
In contrast to his previous neglect of specific pri-
mary emotions, we have been especially delighted
how Damasio et al.’s (2000) recent work has high-
lighted differential patterns of metabolic activation for
basic emotions, heavily weighted toward activation of
numerous subcortical regions (for a synoptic sum-
mary, see Figure 2 in Panksepp, in press a), which is
published?
strongly resonant with data already harvested from
animal models. What is even more remarkable and
puzzling, in this context, is that Damasio readily ac-
cepts that the primitive interoceptive bodily processes
converging on numerous brainstem systems that regu-
late our internal milieu do provide “background emo-
tions” of basic well-being vs. bodily distress.
Considering his recognition of the critical importance
of such low-level processes in the construction of
a or b? consciousness (Damasio, 1999), one would think that
a fuller consideration of the emotional “action appara-
tus” of the brain, which is so remarkably consistent
with his recent brain-imaging findings, might also be
truly critical for emotional feelings. Unfortunately, his
coverage in Looking for Spinoza does little justice to
the mass of animal and human data suggesting that
affective experience in both is critically dependent on
those subcortical somato-visceral prototype emo-
tional–action operating systems. We would welcome
additional input from Damasio and, perhaps, even a
209
summary of how he views his striking images of
human emotions, where, surprisingly, cerebellar
arousal is as impressive as in any higher sensory field.
This also brings us to our next concern: the essential
tie of emotion to action.
Isn’t action priming essential for the encoding
of emotional values? Can emotional experience
ever be sensory-centric?
We would argue that any theory of emotion and par-
ticularly of emotional valence will fail unless it cen-
trally takes stock of how actions primed in prototype
emotional states tell an unambiguous tale about
whether something is organismically positive or nega-
tive. In our estimation, the likelihood that evolved
emotional systems establish an intentional stance to-
ward the world is not sufficiently developed in
Damasio’s present coverage, even though it could
easily have been achieved had Damasio focused more
on the active than on the passive aspects of emotional
feelings. We see at least some degree of neglect in his
thinking of the intrinsic tie of emotions to action
priming and to (urgently) motivated behavior. This is
subtly reflected in the passive voice in his second
book, which, although we both regarded an excep-
tional synthesis, was still somewhat “sensory-centric”
in its take on consciousness. One could argue that
experience (including emotional experience) is less
heuristically “the feeling of what happens,” and more
heuristically that “I am making this happen.” Sensory
fields are in fact selected by an enormously complex
concatenation of interdigitating executive and motor
mechanisms, and such traditional functional divisions
between sensory and motor sides of the brain may be
misleading in terms of understanding how conscious
states are constructed. Thus, we suspect that emotional
action urges must be at least as important to the core of
feeling as the sensory feedback about autonomic and
visceral changes. We would argue that these action
primes “encode” how a certain kind of stimulus is
unconditionally positive or negative for an organism,
telling the organism unambiguously whether certain
kinds of stimulation are biologically desirable or not.
This “evolutionary motor commentary” can be seen in
running away in fear states, in the passive receptivity
of infant mammals in receiving nurturance, or in fight-
ing against another organism in rage states. These
action patterns or characteristic behaviors constitute a
“motor commentary” on organismic value that is evo-
lutionarily conserved across many lines and through
phylogenesis. To quote a colleague: “Put bluntly, na-
ture tells us in these prototype states to ‘get the hell out
of there,’ ‘terminate the source of the bad stuff with
prejudice,’ or ‘stick around’ and get some more of the
good stuff.” There is simply no other way to under-
stand what emotion really does for us and to us, no
other way to see it except as this primal signature of
 210
value in the brain/mind. Again, we doubt that Damasio
would disagree with this; it just seems that he is drawn
excessively to this more sensory-centric James–Lange
version of events. It is not so much that this is wrong, it
is just incomplete.
By linking emotional feelings so heavily to re-
afferent sensory processes (as if they were species of
body states very similar to taste and hunger), Damasio
has failed to fully acknowledge the possibility that
certain motor-action processes do have a mind—in-
trinsic experiential components—of their own. The
prototype emotional states, expressed through distinct,
genetically ingrained operating systems, generate an
adaptive logic as they captivate higher cortico-cogni-
tive functions into presumably distinct attractor pat-
terns (characteristic “ways of being”). There is
evidence that key structures at the bottom of
Damasio’s hierarchy (his “emotion executors” in
brainstem, PAG, and hypothalamus) all share the criti-
cal ability to widely tune and influence the thalamo-
ok as cortical mantle (see Panksepp, 1998a, 1998b; see also
changed, or Watt, 2000a, for a summary of possible aspects re
summaries
in Panksepp PAG function), probably “gating” the cortical state
and in space into broad “territories” consonant with the basic
Watts? affective state. As an example, when Damasio talks of
the languid slowing of thought in sadness, such effects
would be deeply consonant with the assumption that
the motor- and action-state spaces deeply influence
the cortico-cognitive spaces. The executive aspects of
emotional action systems might well have a special
power to “grab” the global sensory-perceptual work-
spaces of cognitive consciousness, through a host of
reticular, thalamic, and paralimbic mechanisms still
poorly charted. This is likely to be the basic process
underpinning reasonably well validated phenomena
like “state-dependent episodic recall” (we recall sad
events better when sad, angry events better when
angry, etc). In humans, such interactions presumably
help give emotions both distinctly cognitivized and
differential phenomenological textures, including sup-
plying the crucial “emotional coloring to thought” that
Damasio rightly sees as critical to feelings and their
widespread effects.
Although clearly sensory feedback about the vis-
cera is important to experienced emotion, it remains
possible that such feedback is the minor chord, with
the major chord composed of those dynamically felt
“urgencies” that accompany the central integration of
emotional actions. It is hard to imagine someone ever
feeling really truly angry, despite the person’s face
turning red, and feeling lots of sympathetic arousal, if
there was no internal impetus to verbally or physically
strike out. We doubt that anyone would feel great
sadness without longing or reaching out toward the
lost person or loved one or desire to see them. Tears
can be induced by many things, but without being
accompanied by serious internal distress over the ab-
sence of the other and wishes for reconnection (even if
the very impossibility of that lies at the heart of our
Book Reviews
grief), surely it is very hard to believe that those tears
would be accompanied by real sadness. Without an
impulse to secure more or less of something, we
cannot imagine that emotion would feel much like
emotion, but only a sympathetic or parasympathetic
somatosensory shadow of emotion, and a pale one at
that. Emotions move us first and foremost, and the root
of the word (e-motion) doesn’t reflect some semantic
coincidence, cuteness, or sophistry. Without some
form of ancient emotional action urges, we doubt if
there would be much in the way of truly emotional
feelings, just a passive background feeling of the
body. Such urges are surely a very large part of what
critically distinguishes emotional affects from a col-
lection of simple somatosensory perceptions.
Curiously, Damasio in the early part of the present
book does identify emotions with action. He states
(Chapter 2) “in the beginning, there was emotion, and
the essence of emotion is action.” But when he gets to
“feelings,” the executive-action mandates of emotion
appear to vanish, and we are left with a collection of
concatenated body maps revealing states of the body in
various axes, but the view of the emotional pain and
pleasure (the core of valance) advanced through the
haze of all that body mapping is unconvincing. Unable
to construct the essential connection to action priming
and urgently motivated states, Damasio can only sug-
gest that valence relates to states of “ease and strain of
the life process.” We don’t understand how emotions
could feel like emotions if we had no internal sense
that we were driven to act a certain way, and for this
reason we doubt that emotional valence can be mean-
ingfully explained by notions about “life ease versus
strain,” however appealing and poetic-sounding those
might be. We think emotional feelings (albeit not all
other affective feelings) are linked to the dynamic
envelopes we can observe objectively in the manifesta-
tions of the instinctual action apparatus of animals.
Admittedly, this conscious sense of being driven to act
might have important support in sensory regions, prob-
ably stemming from how motor and sensory maps
correlate. But even that would at least put action and
executive activity back into the equation. At least as
far as the primary emotional feelings are concerned,
Damasio seems to have left them out. In simplest
terms, Looking for Spinoza presents an active image of
emotion (which we endorse), and a virtually akinetic
and somewhat overcognitivized image of emotional
feelings (which we cannot endorse). Having such radi-
cally opposed textures for two such intrinsically and
closely related processes just doesn’t fit or make sense
to us.
Functional imaging of emotion: A second look at
the insula “body sensing” revisited
Much of Looking for Spinoza can be seen as Damasio
constructing very detailed bridgework between
 Book Reviews
Spinoza’s seminal notion (that the “idea constituting
the human mind is the human body”) and one set of
compelling empirical data points: Damasio et al.’s
(2000) striking imaging findings about four primary
ok as added, or emotional states (Figure 1 in Damasio et al., 2000).
figure missing
here? This excellent data-bank bears much closer examina-
tion, however, as Damasio’s own vision of what the
data mean is refracted through a sensory-centric lens.
He notes that all the functional brain-imaging work
(including from his own group) highlights insula and
cingulate activations in the experience of emotion
(“feeling feelings”), terming these paleocortical struc-
tures “body sensing regions.” But he does not mention
at any point that they are in fact also executive regions
devoted to the initiation and organization of complex
behavior. The insula has both anterior, more execu-
tive, portions and posterior, more poly-sensory, zones,
and typically the anterior zones have more gyri than
the posterior and perhaps more sensory zones, while
these posterior gyri appear to be at least somewhat
heteromodal in connectivity and not just exclusively
somatosensory. This all raises the question about
whether the role of insula in emotion is just to “pas-
sively” sense changes in internal milieu, or whether it
also has more executive functions, possibly coordinat-
ing integration across modalities, including perhaps
coordinating emotional behaviors. The syndrome as-
sociated with major insular lesions, where patients
lose the ability to experience the aversive/affective
aspects of pain, is instructive. In a real sense, pain no
longer really hurts for these patients, while they retain
the ability to somatotopically localize areas of tissue
damage (assuming that body maps in primary
idiotypic somatosensory cortices are intact). Most
critical for the points we are making about insula not
being a passive “body sensing” perceptual system,
these insula-lesion patients often show major attenua-
tion of normal pain withdrawal and normal
behavioral guarding responses, suggesting a role
again in behavioral organization and not just somato-
sensory perception.
Similarly, the cingulate is perhaps the most critical
and ancient executive cortical structure, required for
all kinds of motivated (affectively driven) behaviors.
Underlining this, extensive lesions of the cingulate
create akinetic mutism (AKM), although probably not
as severe a form of AKM as full ventral tegmental or
PAG lesions. So we would offer as an alternative to
Damasio’s formulation that the insula and cingulate
certainly are “body sensing regions,” but they are
executive regions also (“body sensing” obviously is
critical to figuring what the body needs and requires!).
The anterior insula and much of the cingulate are
presumably critically involved in much if not all moti-
vated action. This suggests the possibility of a quite
different casting of the functional imaging data: that
these regional activations might point to how “feel-
ings” have critical executive/drive aspects widely rep-
211
resented in these broad swaths of brainstem, hypo-
thalamic, insular, and cingulate activations.
Apropos of our comments about the active execu-
tive aspects of insular function being somewhat ob-
scured by the exclusive emphasis on its more
“receptive” somatosensory functions, one might raise
a similar question about Damasio’s notion concerning
some of the proto-self regions, in terms of how all of
the structures in that broad formulation are viewed as
“body sensing.” We think that a part of the problem is
really hinted at in his framing of the “proto-self re-
gions” (brainstem reticular systems, including
aminergic cores, PAG, hypothalamus, even insula,
and somatosensory cortex): they are all termed “body
sensing regions.” It is certainly true that large portions
of the brainstem and hypothalamus are involved in
“keeping tabs” on various aspects of biological state,
but they could just as easily be called “body activating
regions” as body sensing regions. And unlike at the
cortical level, where sensory and motor systems are
clearly divided, the “corrective action” and “sensing”
portions of these brainstem and hypothalamic systems
are tightly integrated and quite hard to segregate.
No effort toward integration of animal and
human affective neuroscience? Correlative
limitations of data from the human clinical side
of the border
There needs to be a more balanced consideration of all
the evidence to advance a lasting understanding of
emotional feelings. The general segregation of the
human clinical neuroscience stream from the animal
behavioral neuroscience stream (as the two primary
streams of data for forming conclusions about emotion
and the brain) is virtually not considered at all in
Looking for Spinoza. If animal research were consid-
ered in a more comprehensive manner, then hopefully
Damasio would be tempted to consider that the sounds
of “joy” (i.e., play vocalizations) and “sorrow” (e.g.,
separation-distress calls), so extensively studied in
animal models (Panksepp, 1998a, in press b), may tell published?
us as much about the “feeling brain” as a study of the
blood-flow changes in human PET studies and the
physiologies and psychologies of his brain-damaged
patients. It might also coax him to widen the cross-
species “circle of affect” more graciously than is evi-
dent in his current equivocations about the existence
of affective states in other animals. In fact, Damasio
(1999, p. 39) has done so in the past by openly 1999 a or
questioning “neurosciences’ reluctance to accept that b?
complex nonhuman creatures have feelings—an atti-
tude that goes beyond the necessary prudence over the
fact that such creatures may or may not know they
have such feelings.” We wonder whether he would
allow such psychological spaces for all mammals?
In order to understand the nature of basic emotional
feelings, there surely must be a closer integration of
 212
animal and human research. Much evidence suggests
that the primitive animalian prototype emotional states
that are still there in each of us, and all our cognitive
pride to the contrary, are only partly modulated by all
that dorsal-brain architecture rather than somehow
rewritten or in any way truly extinguished by our vast
cortico-cognitive capacities. Underneath our cultural
aspirations and achievements, we are fundamentally
another species of mammal, and there is very little data
that an expanded neocortex generates the basic affec-
tive states. There is a mountain of data suggesting that
the basic affective states have their primary locus of
control in subcortical regions. Indeed, we have ad-
mired the dramatic subcortical images of male or-
gasms shown at the last Society for Neuroscience
meeting (Georgiadis et al., 2002), and we note that
cortical processes become aroused and subcortical
processes inhibited when one voluntarily suppresses
sexual emotional feelings (e.g., Beauregard,
Levesque, & Bourgouin, 2001; for summary, see
published? Liotti & Panksepp, in press).
Damasio’s thinking is linked firmly to his human
clinical work, largely correlative, with no more than a
passing whisper about the mountain of causal findings
from other animals. It is understandable that each
investigator will always lead with his or her strong
suit, but in Damasio’s coverage this may have lead to
the excessive mixing of causes and correlates. The
human-brain imaging typically provides only emo-
tional correlates (for discussion of key issues, see
published? Panksepp, in press a). Causes are hard to extract from
human data, except through psychopharmacological
studies (a vast arena of research not adequately cov-
ered in Damasio’s contributions), and a few exciting
deep-brain stimulation studies, as well as surface
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) ones (Nahas,
published? Lorberbaum, Kozel, & George, in press). In the per-
sonal existential experience of one of the senior au-
thors, TMS-induced cortical activation neither of his
somatosensory zones nor of any other cortical area has
generated any surge of subjectively evident emotional
feelings.
The animal data thrives on the study of causal
manipulations, which gives it a special strength that
functional imaging certainly cannot claim in adjudi-
cating key issues, such as whether the basic midbrain,
diencephalic, and subcortical circuitry we share with
other animals is the more essential substrate for human
emotional feelings vs. the higher neocortical regions
(Panksepp, 1998a, 1999). Although it is much harder
to see into animals’ cognitive minds than their affec-
tive ones (e.g., Knutson, Panksepp, & Burgdorf,
2002), we would argue that we shall never have a
causal science of affective processes until we begin to
utilize animal models more widely to work out the
published? underlying neuronal details (Panksepp, in press a, in
published? press b). The conceptual divide between the mass of
existing animal neurobehavioristic data and the human
cognitive data remains so large that few either see the
Book Reviews
need or have the will to build the needed bridges. We
are surprised that Damasio does not explicitly sub-
scribe to the kind of intellectual mandate that can
ground the study of human and animal feelings in
causal as opposed to mere correlative studies.
And where does this leave other animals?
A certain conceptual slipperiness is evident in the
present book in the way Damasio discusses the poten-
tial emotional feelings of animals. On one page he
advises caution in accepting that emotional behaviors,
easily observed even in “simple” animals, reflect emo-
tional feelings, yet on another he seems to acknowl-
edge the likelihood that other animals do experience
emotional states at some level. This ambiguity is cer-
tainly understandable, since the topic of animal emo-
tional feelings remains such a contentious one (e.g.,
Blumberg & Sokoloff, 2003; Panksepp, in press b), published?
but these issues need to be discussed in the context of
the available data and possible predictions, not simply
in general terms. Of course, this is the problem in
painting a portrait of complexity with a broad brush.
That may be the desired level of discourse for general
readers, but it leaves those who wish to deal with such
issues in more explicit scientific ways perplexed as to
where Damasio really stands.
Although there is an intrinsic, perhaps even “eter-
nal,” epistemological barrier to knowing what is expe-
rienced in the mind of another species, particularly
ones without language, there is the enormous weight
of evidence from homology that suggests that the
“principled agnosia” about animal consciousness and
animal emotional states is an argument coming from
prejudice more than true scientific ignorance about
such matters. We share an enormous degree of brain-
stem and mesodiencephalic architecture, considerable
paleocortex, aminergic, and peptidergic neuromodu-
latory systems, basic affective-motivational systems,
and similar attentional mechanisms with a wide vari-
ety of mammals. Additionally, extensive lesions of
those very same shared mesodiencephalic regions con-
sistently have the largest damaging effects on our
ability to be fully conscious and emotional (see Schiff
& Plum, 2000, and Watt & Pincus, in press, for published?
summaries). For us this is enough evidence to suggest
at least a more primitive form of sentience in creatures
besides Homo sapiens, but it may not be enough for
others, particularly those believing consciousness to
be mostly about cognition. To assume an absence of
any kind of phenomenal experience in mammals
means that these multiple behavioral and neural-sys-
tem homologies do not generate any homologies in
terms of the creation of an “inner phenomenal space”
or sentience. This seems to be straightforwardly dual-
istic and therefore untenable.
From these considerations, we would argue that the
default position at this point would be to accept that
 Book Reviews
many other creatures at other levels of the
phylogenetic scale may well have some version of
conscious experience, including the experience of
many positive and negative emotional states, even if it
is exceedingly difficult to specify basic content, or its
fine-grained phenomenal nature. While this conclu-
sion may be intuitively appealing, particularly consid-
ering empathic resonances we can easily have with the
affective states of other mammals, some researchers
believe that since we cannot absolutely confirm such
affective processes in other species, to assume their
existence at all constitutes an unacceptable type of
“anthropomorphism.” We, on the other hand, would
suggest that critical scientific approaches can thrive
with the assistance of a critical, evolutionarily based
anthropomorphism–zoomorphism strategy (Panksepp,
published? in press b). Our shared genes and brain mechanisms
(especially neurochemistries) allow us empirically to
evaluate whether human emotional experiences arise
from the same brain systems that generate emotional
actions in other animals. While sensitive to such tradi-
tional concern, we think that there is the complemen-
tary problem of “species-ism” with respect to both
conscious states in general and feeling primary emo-
tions in particular, species-ism being defined as the
tendency to overestimate one’s own species and un-
derestimate others. In our estimation, those who would
categorically deny affectively experienced neuro-
mental capacities to so many of our fellow creatures
are participating in an intellectual game, which may
open doors to ethical abominations. If we leave too
many other animals out of the evolutionary circle of
affect, then we risk compromising our potential empa-
thy and compassion for the life around us, and thereby
impoverishing the quality of our own souls. And this
ongoing debate about animal emotional states and
animal consciousness emerges at a time when the
evidence of our massive ecological foolishness and
destructiveness is only accumulating. Surely a sober-
ing respect for our virtually unlimited capacity for
hubris (writ large in our intellectual history as a spe-
cies), which Damasio himself nicely comments on in
Chapter 4, should make us exceedingly careful about
making that potential mistake over and over again.
Descartes reified just that kind of grandiose error,
reserving consciousness for Homo sapiens. To our
knowledge, Spinoza did not.5
5
We inquired about such issues from a Spinoza scholar, Professor
Heidi Ravven of Hamilton College, who has provided a concurrent
review of Damasio’s third book, and she indicated that “the striving for
survival and stability is common to animals and humans. Spinoza is
considered in philosophy to be a ‘panpsychist,’ which means that all
things have a striving for stability and self-perpetuation and self-
determination (in varying degrees). But he thinks that the nature of the
pattern of stability for each kind (species) of being differs as it also does
between individuals.” She continues that “Human psychology, Spinoza
tells us in [Ethics III Proposition 57], allows for both the infinite variety
of human beings (i.e., human essences) and of human experience but
closing also for scientific laws and explanations.” For while “the desire of each
quote added individual differs from the desire of another to the extent that the nature
- ok? or essence of the one differs from the essence of the other,” at the same
213
A meditation on emotional qualia
The James–Lange view leads, all too easily, to the
notion that emotional feelings are just another qualia
among many—just another variation on sensory expe-
rience. With this, we simply disagree. Emotional
arousal, particularly strong emotions that by definition
involve subjective states, most certainly are not just
another type of qualia on the same footing as the
“redness of red.” Emotional feelings have an organic
intensity that speaks of vast and primitive layers of
neuronal state processes that were created in deep-
time, embodying unmistakable and truly ancient mes-
sages about how things are good or bad for the life
processes. While we suspect that Damasio would
heartily agree with this notion, there is nothing, even
in the most elaborately dressed up James–Lange view,
that would explain that or help one to understand how
the primal intensity of affective states is actually cre-
ated in the brain. Indeed, the most insidious mistake of
overcognitivized James–Lange types of views may be
to sustain the hegemony of outdated and more cogno-
centric viewpoints on emotion that have yielded little
progress toward unraveling these deep questions about
the ultimate neuro-affective nature of our intrinsic
values.
Spinoza’s concept of conatus (of “striving,
endeavor and tendency”—p. 36) appears to open up a
new and essential dimension of human emotional life
to Damasio that he regards as absent in modern theo-
ries of emotion. We are puzzled that Damasio does not
see the strong corollary in modern affective neuro-
science to “conatus” provided by the concept of a
generalized appetitive motivational SEEKING system
that helps organisms harvest everything from nuts to
social relationships, running from VTA up through the spell
hypothalamus and onto many distributed mesolimbic oput?
and mesocortical targets. We would agree that such a
conceptualization of “conatus” is heuristic, emphasiz-
ing the general organizing and life-affirming role of
emotion, but we might suggest that such principles
already exist in the scientific literature (see Panksepp,
1998a, Chapter 8). We are delighted that Damasio has
found this old gem of an idea in Spinoza’s work and is
poised to polish it for our times.
Indeed, a major service that this book provides is to
introduce readers to the remarkable ideas of a philoso-
pher who has not received the attention he deserves.
time there are substantive commonalities (or similarities) that account
for common principles of behavior across all human beings. In fact, it is
in the Scholium to this very proposition (Proposition 57), in which he
argues for the infinite variations of human psychology, that Spinoza
argues for the even greater difference between the emotions, the
psychology, of human beings and of animals: “Hence it follows,” he
writes, “that the emotions of animals that are called irrational. . . . differ
from the emotions of men as much as their nature differs from human
nature.” In sum, it would seem the Spinoza failed to recognize the level
of evolutionary continuity in human and animal emotions that we
believe can currently be defended empirically.
 214
Of course, every generation during the past three
centuries has had many admirers of Spinoza’s work,
and we must leave it to scholars who have read
Spinoza closely (e.g., Curley & Moreau, 1997; Lloyd,
2002), including the co-reviewer of the current book,
Heidi Ravven, to determine to what extent Damasio’s
introduction does justice to the profoundly naturalistic
view of human life that Spinoza advanced against the
growing and eventually centuries-long “victorious”
tide of Cartesian dualism, with us to this day in various
implicit forms, that still prevents so many neuro-
scientists from coming to terms with the subtle affec-
tive texture of mental life, in humans and in so many
other animals. As a result of Damasio’s efforts, hope-
fully growing ranks of brain/mind scientists and other
scholars will begin to recognize that without a full
confrontation with the nature of emotional feelings,
we will never understand how brains create mental
lives. Despite difference we have with certain aspects
of his arguments, Looking for Spinoza is a precious
contribution to the discussion of this important, diffi-
cult, and timely topic. We trust that Damasio will
confront these substantive challenges to his seminal
ideas with as much positive conatus as is required to
move this important and shared project forward to-
ward a fuller and more universally accepted synthesis.
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Jaak Panksepp & Douglas Watt
email: jpankse@bgnet.bgsu.edu;
drwatt@brahmacom.com
A reply to Jaak Panksepp and Douglas Watt
I must begin by thanking Jaak Panksepp and Douglas
Watt (P & W) for the attention they have given my
recent book and the effort they have made to deal with
its substance. In their text they indicate that they share
many of my views and that they have opted to focus
their appraisal on areas of disagreement. That is where
I will focus my reply as well.
The issues raised by P & W can be divided into two
groups: one group concerns several misunderstand-
ings of my positions; another concerns genuine differ-
215
ences of point of view. I will address the misunder-
standings first.
P & W profess admiration for my last book, The
Feeling of What Happens, especially in regard to a
number of issues over which, after reading of Looking
for Spinoza, they now disagree with me. Considering
that I have not changed my views on any of those
issues, it is reasonable to wonder what could possibly
have caused this misunderstanding. Out of courtesy
and modesty, perhaps I should simply take the blame
and say that it is all my fault, that I simply should have
made my writing more clear so that P & W would not
be so confused. Unfortunately, it is not so easy. I have
no doubt I could have made myself more clear, but
perhaps some of the misunderstandings come from
reading the material with an attitude that I can only
describe as militant. That attitude, which I have previ-
ously encountered in the presentations of one of the
reviewers, Jaak Panksepp, tends to interfere with a fair
appraisal of ideas. It pertains to three tenets:
1. That what counts in the neuroscience of emotions
and feelings are processes that occur subcortically,
especially in the brainstem, and even more espe-
cially in the periaqueductal gray.
2. That animals in general and mammals for certain
have feelings and consciousness as much as hu-
mans do.
3. That feelings are inseparable from emotions and
share their motor-action nature.
Panksepp’s views of research on emotion are filtered
through these three tenets, and only work that passes
the litmus test of adherence to these ideas is given the
seal of approval. For example, work that focuses on
cortical structures or on the amygdala is derided as
“cortico-centric” and “amygdalo-centric”; the absence
of an unequivocal proclamation that animals are con-
scious and feeling beings triggers a lament for any
findings obtained without the upfront acknowledg-
ment of that idea; and attempts to separate the physiol-
ogy of emotion and feeling meets with two objections:
first, the strategy becomes suspect of opening a way to
denying feelings to animals; second, it is seen as
turning feelings into passive states—that is, when
feelings are uncoupled from all the action that is
intrinsic to emotion, they become limp and ineffectual
phenomena. Through and through, P & W fault me, in
my recent book, for a lack of unequivocal obeisance to
these tenets, and although they leave open the possibil-
ity that they misunderstood me, they write largely as if
they did not.
Curiously, once we subtract the requirement to take
an oath of allegiance on these three issues, my posi-
tions are not only compatible but largely overlapping
with those of Panksepp. Specifically:
1. I am convinced, as I have stated repeatedly, my
216
recent book included, that the principal neural
machinery for emotion and feeling is indeed sub-
cortical and that brainstem nuclei play a decisive
role in these phenomena. However, I am also con-
vinced that the emotions and feelings of complex
creatures require the cerebral cortex, in a variety of
roles, and I regard it as unhelpful to brand those
who think so as “cortico-centric.”
2. I also believe that many species, most notably those
with complex nervous systems, are likely to have
consciousness and feelings. I made this position
abundantly clear in The Feeling of What Happens, I
have not changed my position, and I see no reason
to suspect that I did. Nowhere in Looking for
Spinoza do I propose “that feelings are confined to
humans as part of an extended cognitive conscious-
ness,” and no, I have not made the same error
Descartes made on that issue. In fact, I am some-
what more generous than Panksepp in that I at-
tribute consciousness and feelings not just to
mammals but to birds also, and I would have a hard
time denying them to reptiles. However, I do find it
difficult to believe that the human experience of
feelings is precisely the same as that of animals.
Beyond a shared essence, why would humans not
have a greater depth and range for those same
phenomena? It is certainly the case that abundant
memory and reason confer a different range and
depth to our knowing of feelings—this is not a mere
question of being or not being conscious of one’s
feelings but, rather, of being able to reflect widely
on those feelings and on their contexts, a process
that is likely to influence the basic processing of
emotion and feeling. In my recent book, which
focuses on human feeling, I do refer to that high
degree of human knowing and to the obvious fact
that humans can report on feelings in the unmistak-
able ways that language allows. But nowhere do I
deny consciousness or feeling to animals. In fact, in
discussing the social emotions of animals I seem to
go further than Panksepp would. I believe animals
are endowed with social emotions (with the possi-
ble exception of emotions such as awe, and I am not
even certain of that). Curiously, by making social
emotions depend heavily on a supercognitive level,
Panksepp would logically deny them to animals.
Also, while I make a distinction between the
processes of emotion and feeling, I do not do so—
contrary to what P & W state in their description of
my book—to grant emotions but not feelings to
lower animals, or “in line with behavioristic tradi-
tions, to study the emotional actions of animals
while reserving the study of feelings to those who
speak in human tongues.” To claim that feelings
are as approachable in animals as in humans would
be ludicrous, of course, but my aim is neither to
belabor that obvious point nor to deny feelings to
animals. On the contrary, by suggesting that one
can study emotion objectively without necessarily
Book Reviews
factoring in feelings, I am opening up the neurobio-
logical investigation of emotion in creatures of
every size and complexity. My hope is that, in turn,
the full characterization of the phenomena of emo-
tion will lead, in the perspective of my framework,
to an understanding of what feelings must be like,
in a given species, given a certain neuroanatomy
and neurophysiology. My intentions are diametri-
cally opposed to those that P & W attribute to me.
3. Perhaps the most puzzling argument made by P &
W against my separation of emotion and feeling
pertains to the bizarre notion that I conceptualize
feelings as a “passive” process. Say P & W: “Since
emotions are active and deeply executive, then so
must the corresponding feelings be”—I agree and
this is precisely what my framework provides and
accounts for. P & W again: “we might take issue
with the passive image of feeling as ‘body
readout’”—and I disagree, for the following rea-
sons. Even in the simplest mechanism of emo-
tion—the one identified by my notion of
“body-loop”—feeling results from the sensory
mapping of an action program in full swing—that
is, a representation of ongoing movements, specific
complex behaviors, hormonal changes, alterations
of cognitive mode, and so on. The representation of
all this activity is of course “active,” the active
nature of a representation having to do first of all
with the nature of what is represented. On page 111
of the recent book I write: “feelings depend not just
on the presence of a body and brain capable of body
representations, they also depend on the prior exist-
ence of the brain machinery of life regulation,
including the part of the life-regulating mechanism
that causes reactions such as emotion and appetites.
Without the prior existence of the brain machinery
behind emotions there might be nothing interesting
to feel. Once again, in the beginning was emotion
and its underlining. Feeling is not a passive pro-
cess.” P & W disregard the substance of this
account and its summary.
But my account of feelings reveals the active nature
that P & W find so desirable in other ways. In the
recent book, writing about the “as-if body-loop”
mechanism, I explain how the maps that support feel-
ing are not only active in terms of their content, but
also actively constructed by the activity of certain
structures, subcortical as well as cortical. In the dia-
gram on page 90 (Figure 3.1) the construction of
feelings is actually driven not just by mere signaling
from the body proper—what P & W describe inaccu-
rately as “passive signaling”—but is in fact very active
signaling from ongoing action; the construction is also
triggered from subcortical nuclei in the basal
forebrain, hypothalamus, and brainstem, as well as
amygdala (the modifications in signaling that are iden-
tified by the numbers 1, 2, and 3). P & W recommend
“that the motor- and action-state spaces deeply influ-
Book Reviews
ence the cortico-cognitive spaces” on the basis of
signaling from the emotion “executors,” and this is
precisely what one of the components of my proposed
mechanism accomplishes.
Even more surprising to me is the fact that P & W
seem to view brain function in terms of the activity of
centers and discrete regions that accomplish certain
complete functions in a quasi-phrenological perspec-
tive. P & W want to have brainstem regions such as the
PAG accomplish certain results, namely feelings, and
although P & W do not deny possible interactions with
cortical regions, they see those interactions as provid-
ing a minor contribution to the overall process. Obvi-
ously my view is different. I believe that structures in
the brainstem and other subcortical territories have a
dual role. On the one hand, they orchestrate the activ-
ity of numerous small nuclei so that the action pro-
grams of certain emotions can be executed; on the
other, they also map ongoing organism states, some of
which are consequent to the action of those brainstem
nuclei in the first place, and, moreover, they pass on
signals to the telencephalon—namely, to cortical
structures that provide an amplification and refine-
ment of the subcortical activities. In turn, those corti-
cal regions can influence subcortical execution in a
top-down mode, can influence other cortical regions
that support cognitive processes, and can be influ-
enced as a result of those cortically implemented
cognitive processes as well. I entirely agree with P &
W that the most immediate engine for the motor-action
programs resides with certain subcortical structures,
and that a first line of mapping of somatic states also
occurs subcortically in structures such as the
parabrachial nucleus (PB) and the hypothalamus. Yet
in creatures who possess other levels of execution and
mapping, as is certainly the case in humans and other
species, I see no reason to regard the consequences of
activity in a subcortical structure as a finished func-
tional product. Nor do I see any reason not to expect
that the overall product of a multilayered functional
brain will be more complex and refined than that of
simpler brains, which may in fact be more controlled
by lower levels of activity. The diagrams of Chapters 2
and 3, as well as the text, reveal unequivocally the
enormous weight I accord subcortical structures. In
fact, even reading my text in the near caricature P & W
make of it—that is, the engine of emotion attributed to
subcortical structures and the pinnacle of feelings to
cortical regions—it is apparent that the idea of map-
ping entails the incorporation of events that were
generated under subcortical command. Even if that
extreme reading does not coincide with my thinking, I
am still saying that subcortical activity is arguably the
principal player in the making of the contents of
feeling.
P & W’s comments on social emotions are yet
another example of misunderstanding. I cannot begin
to fathom what they mean. They say that I call social
emotions “secondary,” but I cannot see where I do so
217
in this book (my comments on social emotions begin
on page 45, and I could not find the word secondary;
on pages 46 and 47, I discuss social emotions in
animals). Elsewhere I have indeed referred to social
emotions as “secondary,” but not, as P & W suggest,
to make them appear as “second-class citizens”—what
a preposterous idea, one so completely at odds with
the exalted status I propose for social emotions. When
I have called emotions “secondary”, I have done so to
reflect their derivative nature from the primary emo-
tions. Surprisingly, P & W agree with this: they say
that social emotions are “derivations” of primary emo-
tions—that is, they are “secondary,” in that sense. P &
W also fault me for not gleaning the compositionality
of the social emotions, but that is not fair to my
description either. I talk about a “nesting principle”
and suggest how bits and pieces of simpler emotion
components become a part of the derived social emo-
tions in new combinations. Where there is a difference
relates to the fact that P & W establish their “deriva-
tions” at cognitive level, whereas I wish to incorporate
early-action primitives in higher-level processes.
It is time to move to the second group of issues,
those that pertain to genuine differences, although
here too P & W continue to misunderstand and misrep-
resent my views.
The central issue here has to do with the notion of
“raw feels”—one of the key differences noted in their
table. P & W argue that without some sort of primi-
tives, feelings would not even get started. So, together
with the actions that constitute emotions, there must be
some obligate accompanying feeling, no matter how
raw, to get the system off the ground. They say that not
only do we emote, but we also feel “urges” that go
with those emotions, independently “of sensory feed-
back.” Here is my response.
1. I agree that “raw feels” and “felt urges” are integral
to emotional feelings, even if I do not call them by
those names.
2. I require that something felt, no matter how “raw,”
be felt as the result of a sensory process.
3. I require that what is felt pertains to the body. No
matter how raw, what one feels is a feeling of a
body structure, in a certain state. To recognize
simple “urges” is very fine, but I believe that those
simple urges must be first conceptualized as a
certain body action state represented in a sensory
map. The sensory mapping can occur subcortically
and cortically, first one then the other.
4. The primitive body-state mapping may or not origi-
nate in an actual body state, engaged by the emo-
tional action progress. For example, it could
originate—by ancient evolutionary mandate—in
sensory-activity maps of certain subcortical nuclei
and cortical regions, organized under emotive con-
trol by the processing of an emotionally competent
stimulus. Those structures would assume a certain
 218
configuration without the help of signals from
corresponding actual body states. There is no evi-
dence for this, but I am ready to believe that we are
born with such experiential-bound primitives.
What I am not ready to accept is the stealth nature
of P & W’s raw feels. P & W wish to see the
“sensory experience” spring out of the “motor
process” without physiological explanation. In a
ok as curious phrase, P & W state that “motor-action
changed to processes do have a mind . . . of their own.” Given
match
P&W??
a poetic context I might even agree, but the problem
is that P & W never attempt to explain how that
“mind” arises. It is simply there, a given, a first
principle, unaccounted for. For better or worse, I
attempt to explain that primitive “mind,” those raw
feels and urges. I would paraphrase P & W by
ok as saying that “motor-action processes automatically
changed to create an accompanying mind of their own.”
match P&W??
5. P & W’s comments on “sensory feedback” are a
byproduct of their physiological complacency and
of misapprehending my proposal. As I write—and,
again, as Figure 3.1 unequivocally documents—
some of the substrates of feeling do come from
what P & W dismissively call “feedback,” but other
substrates arise directly from the action of trigger-
ing/executor structures (arrows # 2 and 3), or from
modifications of “feedback” signals (arrow #1).
The triggering/executor structures embody all the
ancient emotional urges without which, I entirely
agree, emotions would not be emotions, would not
connect as “intentionally” as they do with an emo-
tionally competent stimulus. But those “ancient
emotional urges” can become “ancient felt urges”
using the mechanism I propose—that is, using
body maps and the changes they represent. After
all, their ancient evolutionary origin is likely to be a
set of body states. The separation between emotion
and feeling remains valid as a research strategy.
Unfortunately, P & W are confused about this
functional architecture and entangle themselves
further when they mix the “urgencies” with their
targets: “We doubt that anyone would feel great
sadness without longing or reaching out toward the
lost person or loved one.”
The lack of clarity on the issues and the prejudicial
analysis of my proposal also muddles P & W’s com-
ments on the neural basis of consciousness, a subject
on which I touch only obliquely in the recent book. P
& W appear to misplace the “gap” area of the problem
of consciousness—which I regard as having to do with
the transformation of neural maps into mental im-
ages—and seem to regard the issue of “raw feels” as a
solution for the problem of consciousness in its en-
tirety. I too believe raw feels are necessary, but the
assistance of other mechanisms, as described in The
Feeling of What Happens, is also required for con-
sciousness to emerge. Incidentally, P & W’s com-
ments on the issue of second-order mapping are
Book Reviews
another instance of confusion. They seem not to real-
ize that the substrates of feelings can be mapped at
multiple levels of the neuraxis, subcortically and corti-
cally, rather than in the insula alone.
It is apparent that P & W expected Looking for
Spinoza to be a comprehensive treatment of my ideas
on emotion and an extensive review of the ideas of
others. I am sorry to disappoint, but the book was
never intended that way. As I explain in Chapter 1, the
book is an update of my views on one issue—the
neurobiology of feelings—framed by my new interest
in Spinoza’s thinking and person. It is not the closing
of a trilogy but, rather, an intermediate work. For that
reason, while I agree with some of P & W’s criti-
cisms—that I could have made use of other classifica-
tions of emotions and provided a review of a
controversial area of scholarship; that attachment
could have played a far greater role in the discussion;
that the reviews of animal research on emotions could
have been far more extensive—I simply have to say
that engaging that literature belongs in another book. I
mean no disrespect to those who have worked on those
problems. Rightly or wrongly, I believed I could make
my points with the material I chose to use.
In closing, I can say again that I wish I had written
more clearly so that P & W would not have misinter-
preted my words. However, that would not have ac-
counted for the genuine differences of perspective that
separate us, and, in the end, I am pleased they have
been brought to light. The effort of considering those
differences carefully may well prove quite fruitful for
everyone concerned.
Antonio Damasio
email: ???
Antonio Damasio: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and
isbn?
the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003. ISBN:
?????, 355 pp., $28.00
SPINOZA AND THE EDUCATION OF DESIRE
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza [1632–77], a some-
what younger contemporary of Descartes, is famous
for being what philosophers call an “ethical natural-
ist.” He saw himself as putting the mind back into
nature. The mind is as natural as the body is, he
insisted (Turner, 2003, p. 472).1 Part of what that
means is that in his Ethics he offered what we today
would call a moral psychology. That psychology was
based on a view of the mind and body as one thing
rather than as two separable things barely holding
together, as Descartes had claimed. Spinoza proposed
that our mind, first and foremost, minds the body. He
intuited that even, or perhaps especially, our ethical
capacity bubbles up from the deepest layers of our-
selves, our most primitive selves, rather than being a
 Book Reviews
product of either God or of reason alone. Ethics thus
begins with our most basic urge for bodily survival
and the maintenance and enhancement of organic
integrity. It is an overwhelming and overriding de-
sire—Spinoza calls it the conatus—that informs and is
expressed in all our behavior and also in all our
thinking. So our highest cognitive abilities and
achievements are as expressive of this basic desire for
self (for organic integrity and stability) as are our most
basic bodily processes of eating, sleeping, reproduc-
tion, and so on. Nevertheless, the conatus can be
extended and elaborated through culture and educa-
tion. We begin as infants caring about our bodies in a
narrow sense, but that concern grows to include con-
cern for our social identities and symbolic selves and
also concern for those around us, extending outward to
the environment and the global community. For that
reason, some scholars have called Spinoza’s theory an
eco-ethic. It is very popular among environmentalists.
I have called Spinoza’s version of the human project,
“The Education of Desire” (Ravven, 1990) What
Antonio Damasio has done in his three books
(Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and
now Looking for Spinoza) is to provide a great deal of
evidence from the neurosciences that the mind–body
foundations—what Spinoza saw as our basic striving
for survival and homeodynamic stability—upon which
Spinoza built his moral psychology may in fact be the
way it works. So Spinoza’s account of how ethics
originates and operates may in fact be true. Antonio
Damasio has drawn the attention of neuroscientists
and the public to the importance and relevance of
Spinoza’s philosophy to the discoveries and also prac-
tice of the neurobiological sciences.
Since the seventeenth century, our standard as-
sumptions in the West have stemmed from Descartes’
ok as changed? mind–body dualism—the independence of our think-
ing capacity from bodily determination, the mind’s
openness to the world through knowledge in contrast
with the body’s narrow confinement to its bounds
within the skin. In addition, our ethical capacity has
generally been seen by philosophers, especially since
Kant, as coming from the glory of our reason interven-
ing in and overriding our (lowly) desires and emo-
tions. We suppose that our desires and reason—that is,
our body and mind—are locked in a battle for control
of our will, our moral triumph coming from the suc-
1
For the standard contemporary view that still sees thought as not
amenable to scientific lawful explanation, see, for example, Mark A.
Turner’s recent Editorial, “Psychiatry and the Human Sciences”
(2003). To represent his own position today, Turner quotes positively
not in Refs Davidson’s essay, “Mental Events” (1970), to the effect that “there is a
categorical difference between the mental and the physical and that
there cannot, in any useful sense, be a science of the mental because of
the impossibility of either strict psychological or strict psychophysical
laws. Against psychophysical laws, Davidson argues that mental and
physical concepts have different conditions of application or ‘constitu-
tive principles‘ and that ‘there cannot be tight connections [psycho-
physical bridge laws] between the realms if each is to retain allegiance
to its proper source of evidence’ (Davidson, 1970, p,. 222)” (Turner,
2003, p. 472).
219
cess of the latter over the former. And we confine
scientific inquiry to that realm of law and necessity,
the body, while locating our freedom in the independ-
ence of our mind from determination by nature.
Spinoza challenged all these claims, but it is only now
in the early twenty-first century that evidence is
mounting that Spinoza, not Descartes, may have been
right when he controversially proposed that the mind
is as natural as the body is. In this review essay, I try to
understand Antonio Damasio’s philosophical posi-
tions on the mind–body problem and on moral psy-
chology as they emerge in Looking for Spinoza and
also in his previous book, The Feeling of What Hap-
pens. I propose a philosophical spectrum of positions
on moral psychology and the mind–body problem with
an eye to locating Damasio’s position on it. At one end
is Descartes’ mind–body substance dualism, and at the
other I place Spinoza’s mind–body (nonreductive)
identity theory. Midway we find the standard reading
of William James, whose psychology seems to retain
some dualistic aspects but also points toward a more
embodied version of itself (Janack, forthcoming). I published?
think neuroscientists may find the proposed spectrum
generally useful in identifying and clarifying where
their research is leading them. In particular, the intro-
duction into the discussion of the neuroscience of the
emotions of Spinoza’s quite radical psychophysical
monism and some of its major implications may help
scientists envision a theoretical possibility quite out-
side the standard ones available in the general cultural
or even methodologically operative in scientific re-
search.
I first discovered what I came to identify as Antonio
Damasio’s Spinozism in his second book, The Feeling
of What Happens: Body and Emotion and the Making
of Consciousness. As a scholar of Spinoza for almost
twenty years and a student of Spinoza for more than
thirty, the discovery of scientific data that appeared to
confirm both the general thrust and even the details of
the account of the emotions upon which Spinoza based
his theory of ethics was like finding the Holy Grail. At
first I doubted my own senses, fearing that I had been
researching Spinoza for too many years and had begun
to project him into every nook and cranny. Returning
to The Feeling of What Happens after a hiatus of
several months to refresh my perspective, I still found
it deeply Spinozist. I enumerated twelve central doc-
trines of Spinoza that now seemed to be supported by
substantial evidence from the neurosciences. I repro-
duce them here:
Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary neuroscience
1. Thought is affective and interested; it is the expres-
sion of interested, desiderative, self-determinion
and -perpetuation (the conatus).
2. Thought originates in images based in the body and
in body experience, and through its reflexivity it ok as added?
builds upon those images—that is, it originates in
and as the consciousness of the body but is not
 220
reduced to, or merely epiphenomenal to, the body.
3. Emotion is the registering of body experience (in
body and mind) as it reflects a person’s furthering
or diminishing (pleasure or pain) by such expe-
rience or encounters.
4. Representation is always of the relation of self/
body and object (external or internal), (a) i.e., of
changes in self/body in response to impinging
objects; it is therefore (b) more fundamentally of
states of self than of objects and developmentally
begins with self yet requires an object, thereby (c)
creating an associative link (which is cognitive and
affective) in imagination and memory between self
and object; and (d) the associative link can endure
and its repetition is triggered subsequently even in
the absence of the object.
5. Conscious thought arises as self-reflection on body
processes and body–world interactions; thinking is
then (progressively) self-reflexive.
6. Our mental and emotional processes are largely
unconscious, especially the etiology of our emo-
tions.
7. Bodily/affective imitation and contagion is a primi-
tive source of sociality and thus the default posi-
tion; the self, as such, is not atomic but not only
partly socially/environmentally constructed and
relationally enmeshed and constituted but also
identified.
8. Value arises from the embodied psychophysical
pursuit of survival and well-being through
homeostatic/homeodynamic somatic mechanisms
governed by pleasure and pain (the conatus).
9. Ethics, at core, is not about reasoning from princi-
ples or finding the right principles or virtues and
determining a hierarchy or coherent set of values. It
does not consist in a process of cost–benefit analy-
sis resulting in decision making and then in the
implementation of those convictions or decisions.
Instead, ethics consists in a process of affective
(embodied) development, rationally informed, and
in expanded self-consciousness. Ethics is about
revising or educating the innate body–mind
conatus promoting survival and self-determination
(through the pain–pleasure axis) to integrate into
ok as itself—i.e., into one’s affective experience of ben-
changed? efit and harm—(what we refer to today as) more
rational, flexible, responsive, and long-term per-
spectives, thereby transcending our more automatic
and primitive response repertoires; it also consists
in incorporating into our self-boundaries an ever-
expanding identification with the natural and social
worlds through the pursuit of scientifically in-
formed self-understanding.
10. Language is imaginative and uses (metaphorical
and other) images based in and on the body.
11. Faculty psychology is wrong: the mind is not
modular but integrated.
Book Reviews
12. There are primary and secondary emotions. Both
kinds are governed by the conatus for survival and
homeodynamic stability. The primary are universal
in all human beings, whereas the secondary vary
according to individual and culture and
happenstance. The secondary are constructed from
the primary plus imaginative associations reflect-
ing personal history and cultural location.
Of the recent affective neuroscience that I found rel-
evant to topics in Spinoza, Antonio Damasio’s The
Feeling of What Happens, in my estimation, provided
the most evidence for Spinoza’s theory, lending sup-
port to points 1–5, 8, 9, and 12. After a little online
research, I discovered the eponymous title of the third
and upcoming book in the series and realized that
Antonio Damasio had indeed become aware that some
of Spinoza’s most characteristic and principal doc-
trines had anticipated his own discoveries in neuro-
science and those of others. While he had discovered
the resonance of recent affective neuroscience with
Spinoza, I had discovered Spinoza in recent affective
neuroscience. I awaited Looking for Spinoza with
bated breath. And Looking for Spinoza has succeeded
admirably in bringing the attention of neuroscientists
and the public to Spinoza’s importance in anticipating
and also explaining theoretically (what we would now
term) the evolutionary origins and the biological pur-
poses of the emotions. I believe that Antonio Damasio
may have backtracked a bit, however, from what I see
as his more radically Spinozist psychophysical
monism in The Feeling of What Happens.
I propose in this essay three points on a continuum
from a mind–body dualism to a mind–body non-
reductive identity theory, in order to suggest possible
positions on the spectrum. The real question is not
who are the real Spinoza, Descartes, or James, but
which position on the spectrum does the preponder-
ance of evidence from the neurosciences now seems to
point to. I can’t answer this question, because I am a
philosopher and not a neuroscientist. But I hope to
offer some conceptual clarity about the positions in
question that neuroscientists might find useful in
thinking about and putting together their evidence. It is
all too easy to inadvertently engage in a kind of
conceptual slippage from one position into another. A
measure of that may have occurred in Antonio
Damasio’s account of the emotions from the second to
the third book. The account of the emotions in The
Feeling of What Happens, which accords well with my
reading of Spinoza, depicts a fully embodied and
monistic (but not materialist reductive) position ac-
cording to which ethics (value) originates in the
body’s fundamental systemic desire for maintaining
organic stability and its extension and elaboration in
the mind. Damasio locates the origin of value as
emerging from what he calls here the perspective of
the body. That phrase, in my view, admirably captures
Spinoza’s understanding as well. In his second book,
 Book Reviews
Damasio is adamant about locating the origin of value
in our organismic urge for homeostasis and, by exten-
sion, in the external objects and situations that pro-
mote it. He offers an account of the body as coming to
include, through its layered neurological mappings of
the encounters between self and objects, an autobiog-
raphy, a culturally and socially inflected sense of itself
as a self, which he terms “extended consciousness.”
Thus the maps that map the body’s encounters with the
environment, juxtaposing self and object in overlap-
ping ways, suggest that the body is part and parcel of a
picture of dynamic growth. The body as depicted in
this self-mapping process has fluid boundaries, ever
expanding to include the dynamic history of its en-
counters incorporated into its own highest levels of
self-mapping. And that history also comes to have
cultural, social, and linguistic inflections. Moreover,
these are held by Damasio to have affective charge and
even meaning. For the body is not said to be a neutral
body that merely depicts to itself the objects it encoun-
ters but, instead, according to Damasio’s theory in the
earlier book, a body whose urge for homeodynamic
stability inflects objects with positive or negative
charge depending on whether the object (or state of
affairs) in question contributes to or detracts from the
body’s stability. This charge, Damasio holds in The
Feeling of What Happens, is the origin of emotions
and of the valuation of objects.
What I have just outlined is a significant part of the
story that Damasio tells in this book, and I have argued
published?
at length (Ravven, in press a, in press b) and still
published
believe, that this conception of the emotions is pro-
foundly Spinozist, providing evidence from the neuro-
sciences that Spinoza got emotions and the origin of
value right. But this deeply Spinozist position seems to
have been attenuated to some extent here in the latest
book. For in Looking for Spinoza Antonio Damasio
introduces a strong dualism, absent from his previous
book, between emotions and feelings that seems to
modify his theoretical account of the emotions and of
the origin of ethics. The dualism posited is a hiatus
between the subcortical and the cortical, and upon this
break our humanness—and especially our human ethi-
cal uniqueness—seem now to hang for Damasio. He
assigns to the mind a certain limited ability to inter-
vene from above in the (bodily) mechanisms of emo-
tion. Thus Damasio’s “Spinoza” opts for a moderate
form of the mind’s (cognition’s) independence of the
body, from which cognitive independence he now
proposes our human ethical capacity emerges. But this
position, I suggest, is more Jamesian than Spinozist,
less radical than Spinoza’s rupture with traditional
religion and standard moral philosophy entailed.
Looking for Spinoza ends with a touching paean to
Spinoza, to his prescience in positing the conatus for
self-maintenance and enhancement as the basis of
each of us; in conceiving the mind as the idea of the
body, as a consequence of which the body provides the
mind with its major contents; in positing the urge
221
toward homeostatic balance as the organic basis of
emotions and hence of value; in proposing thinking as
the idea of the idea, which is tantamount to positing an
idea of the self; in intuiting “the general anatomical
and functional arrangement that the body must assume
for the mind to occur together with it” (p. 210).
Damasio also lauds the nobility of Spinoza’s life and
the rigor of his worldly vision.
He proposes this story as the moral core of
Spinoza’s philosophy:
Spinoza asks for an acceptance of natural events as
necessary, in keeping with scientific understanding.
For example death and the ensuing loss cannot be
prevented; we should acquiesce. The Spinoza solu-
tion also asks the individual to attempt a break
between the emotionally competent stimuli that can
trigger negative emotions—passions such as fear,
anger, jealousy, sadness—and the very mechanisms
that enact emotion. Instead the individual should
substitute emotionally competent stimuli capable of
triggering positive, nourishing emotions. To facili-
tate this goal Spinoza recommends the mental re-
hearsing of negative emotional stimuli as a way to
build a tolerance for negative emotions and gradu-
ally acquire a knack for generating positive ones.
This is in effect, Spinoza as mental immunologist
developing a vaccine capable of creating
antipassion antibodies. There is a Stoic color to the
entire exercise. . . .
Spinoza’s solution hinges on the mind’s power
over the emotional process, which in turn depends
on a discovery of the causes of negative emotions,
and on knowledge of the mechanics of emotion.
The individual must be aware of the fundamental
separation between emotionally competent stimuli
and the trigger mechanism of emotion so that he can
substitute reasoned emotionally competent stimuli
capable of producing the most positive feeling
states. . . . Today the new understanding of the ma-
chinery of emotion and feeling makes Spinoza’s
goal all the more achievable. [pp. 274–275]
Thus Damasio reads Spinoza’s ethics as a form of
cognitive therapy of the emotions: the mind trains and
directs the body through gaining technical understand-
ing and implementing it through a regime of habitua-
tion. In what follows, I call into question certain
aspects of this rendition of Spinoza’s metaphysics,
psychology, and moral vision. I leave to others to
assess the neurobiology that supports these conclu-
sions.
Looking for Spinoza seems to falter from a
Spinozist–monist point of view with Damasio’s strong
distinction between emotions and feelings, a contrast
that puts a wedge between the physical process and the
mental representation of it. “Emotions play out in the
theater of the body,” Damasio tells us, while “feelings
play out in the theater of the mind” (p. 28). Moreover,
Damasio argues throughout the book that emotions
precede feelings, both evolutionarily speaking and in
 222
the individual person as well. Emotions, unlike feel-
ings, are causative of behavior, whereas (mental) feel-
ings arise from the (physical) emotions and are
subsequent to them; also, feelings operate according to
their own patterns of mental association and memory
expressive of, but not in any way contributory to, the
emotion and its behavioral expression. They are thus
epiphenomenal, having little or no causal efficacy in
the complex. This seems to be the significance of
ok as Damasio’s clinical account of the 65-year-old woman
added? patient in Paris who was suffering from Parkinson’s
disease. Electrical currents stimulating certain brain
areas triggered the emotion of sadness and its physical
manifestation in crying that the patient subsequently
felt and reported as sadness and volunteered many
associated sad thoughts while the electrical stimula-
tion persisted (pp. 68 ff.). Another telling example is
Damasio’s long excursis on psychotropic drugs in
Chapter 3, “Feelings.” In this discussion of the altera-
tion of feelings, Damasio proposes that the chemical
intervention of drugs modifies the body maps in sev-
eral possible ways, which consciousness then reads
out, and these are experienced as feelings. Drug-
induced emotions seem to function as the paradigm
case for how emotions operate, and they are similar to
the case of the woman with Parkinson’s disease, for in
both the chemical or electrical intervention physically
induces an emotion that is then read out as a feeling
and that feeling is accompanied by cognitive associa-
tions. The causal directionality is exclusively from the
bottom up, and the cognitive and the somatic are held
apart. Our standard understanding of emotional feel-
ings as informed by experience, culture, and autobiog-
raphy is precluded or sidelined. The affective meaning
of emotions is reduced to the somatic. Damasio’s
telling examples of feelings in this chapter are hunger
and thirst. Emotional feelings are similar to hunger
and thirst, he indicates, but are just more complex and
unified somatic read-outs. Emotions as such are not
about the world and expressive of our complex rela-
tions to the world as fully inflected psychophysical
human beings, but, rather, about the body proper via
the maps of the body proper, and we merely have
mental associations of a social kind with somatic
feelings.2 The cascade of thoughts that feelings trigger
is an effect rather than a cause and stops when the
somatic cause ends. Damasio does allow in passing (p.
124) that thoughts of hope and salvation and despair,
for example, alter the pattern in the brain’s body maps
2 Shirley’s translation of EII P18 S [see footnote 4] introduces the
Damasio makes this point explicitly in Chapter 4, “Ever Since
Feelings” (p. 147): “In neural terms, the mechanism works like this:
When circuits in posterior sensory cortices and in temporal parietal
regions process a situation that belongs to a given conceptual category,
the prefrontal circuits that hold records pertinent to that category or
events become active. Next comes activation of regions that trigger
appropriate emotional signals, such as the ventromedial prefrontal
cortices, courtesy of an acquired link between that category of event
and past emotional-feeling responses. This arrangement allows us to
connect categories of social knowledge—whether acquired or refined
through individual experience—with the innate gene-given apparatus
of social emotions and their subsequent feelings.”
Book Reviews
as do medications and meditation. But the discussion
is left at that point without further explanation or
elaboration.
What I think suggests to Antonio Damasio that the
strong separation and independence of emotions from
feelings that he has proposed can be assigned to
Spinoza is his belief that Spinoza holds a doctrine of
psychophysical parallelism. In this claim, Damasio is
unfortunately mistaken. At the end of Chapter 3, on
feelings, Damasio says that his account returns us to
Spinoza because of “Spinoza’s claim that body and
mind are parallel attributes of the same substance.”
And later he writes:
What is Spinoza’s insight? That mind and body are
parallel and mutually correlated processes, mim-
icking each other at every crossroad, as two faces of
the same thing. That deep inside these parallel
phenomena there is a mechanism for representing
body events in the mind. [p. 217; emphasis added]
But this is not quite right. My colleague Marianne
Janack astutely reminds us that parallelism is a form of
dualism. Moreover, Spinoza never uses the term “par-
allelism”3 but instead repeatedly invokes the term
“identity” to describe what he is talking about. Here is
what Spinoza says that has led some (including
Damasio) to mistakenly attribute to him parallelism:
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the
order and connection of things.
At this point . . . we should recall to mind what
I have demonstrated above—that whatever can be
perceived by infinite intellect as constituting the
essence of substance pertains entirely to the one
sole substance. Consequently, thinking substance
and extended substance are one and the same sub-
stance, comprehended now under this attribute,
now under that. So, too, a mode of Extension and
the idea of that mode are one and the same thing,
expressed in two ways. . . . And so, whether we
conceive nature under the attribute of Extension or
under the attribute of Thought or under any other
attribute, we find one and the same order, or one
and the same connection of causes—that is, the
same things following one another. [EII P7 & S]4
Relevant, too, is Spinoza’s definition of attribute as
perspectival (EI Def. 4): “By attribute I mean that
which the intellect perceives of substance as constitut-
ing its essence” (emphasis added). There is no paral-
add to Refs or at
3 least give 1st name?
term “parallel” into the Spinoza text. But it is not an accurate transla-ok as added?
tion and does not occur in the original Latin. Curley’s translation here add to Refs or at
is more accurate: “[Memory] is nothing other than a certain connection least give 1st name?
of ideas involving the nature of things which are outside the human ok as added?
Body—a connection that is in the Mind according to the order and
connection of the affections of the human Body.”
4
All editions of Spinoza use the same format and so anyone picking
up any edition of Ethics throughout its history from 1670 to the present
and in any language from Latin to modern translations will be able to
find the citation. So, for example, EII P4 S1 is shortened from Ethics,
Part II, Proposition 4, Scholium 1.
 Book Reviews
lelism here except in our minds. It is the nature of the
mind to conceive the monistic—continuous and uni-
fied—universe according to two descriptive regimes.
Thus Damasio errs when he refers to “Spinoza’s claim
that body and mind are parallel attributes of the same
substance” (p. 133) and when he identifies two pro-
cesses going on here, a mental and a physical (p. 217).
There is one process—a psychophysical process—
operative in the individual and in the world, but we can
talk about it in two ways. Damasio has introduced a
dualism, a break, into Spinoza’s monism and complete
continuity. There is no break in Spinoza’s universe or
in the human person, one of its expressions or modes.
The claim of the divine immanence is the theological
articulation of this famous (and infamous) Spinozist
doctrine. The mind overlooking the body but not of it
or within it, so to speak, reintroduces a form of divine
transcendence absent in Spinoza.
Thus Damasio’s psychophysical parallelism of
emotion and feeling puts into question Spinoza’s ac-
count of the emotions rather than confirms it. For as an
identity, body and mind, affect and the idea of the
affect, and even the reflective consideration and theo-
rizing about the affect are, according to Spinoza’s
thorough-going monism, one and the same entity. He
is very explicit on this point (EII P21 & S). And later
he defines emotions in the third of the Definitions at
the beginning of Part III of the Ethics as spanning
body and mind: “By emotions [affectus] I understand
the affections of the body. . . . together with the ideas
of these affections.” Therefore not only does the feel-
ing not succeed the physical affect, but it cannot by
any means be caused by it, in his understanding,
because the mind and the body are in an identity, they
are one entity—“the mind and body are one and the
same thing,” Spinoza insists (EIII P2 S) within which
no causal relation is possible. Mind and body and all
their various expressions can never be in causal rela-
tion to each other (EIII P2). This is a central Spinozist
doctrine and one that philosophers have been chewing
over for centuries. It is an ontological claim but not a
methodological one, since Spinoza’s experimental
work was exclusively in optics and hermeneutics.
Spinoza envisioned at one point writing a treatise on
medicine, but he never lived to work out how he might
proceed with that project.
Damasio seems to miss both that a mind-and-body
identity that excludes all causal relation between them
is Spinoza’s position (e.g., when he claims that
Spinoza proposes bidirectional mind–body causal
interactionism, p. 214) and also that his own account
challenges Spinoza’s position rather than confirms it.
? At the very least Spinoza’s claim entails that feelings
are as causative of actions—although the causes are
differently described—as emotions are and cannot be
merely epiphenomenal to them, as Damasio’s account
proposes. For what Damasio calls emotions and feel-
ings in his taxonomy are, for Spinoza, simply different
ways of describing a single phenomenon. One can
describe the emotion complex both in terms of its
223
physical mechanisms and in terms of its psychological
meaning. Neither is precluded, and both are complete
in their own terms.
The focus of The Feeling of What Happens, in
contrast to Looking for Spinoza, was not on body and
mind so much as on the self, a notion that spans body
and mind in Spinozist fashion: the self’s initial emer-
gence from homeodynamic mechanisms that distin-
guish self and other and create the self-maintaining
response of self to other; its ownership of its awareness
as its own experiences (a position on consciousness
spearheaded by William James: Cooper, 1990, p. 575);
and finally its self-reflection upon the entire process of
self–other encounters as autobiographical and hence as
integrating what first appear as encounters with the
other as dimensions of the self in future encounters.
This picture is somewhat different from the one that
Antonio Damasio paints in Looking for Spinoza. The
self that Damasio describes in the second book spans
the physical, the psychological, the biographical, and
sociocultural. The body and mind are continuous, and
the continuity in question arises from the capacity of
the layers of maps that map the body per se and its
encounters with objects and events to integrate into
themselves as its revisions—to “extend” themselves
(as Damasio puts it) beyond the body per se to—the dashes
symbolizing of the life history of the body as self. So added -
ok?
what perhaps begins as a map of the body proper
becomes through experience an ever-revised and ever-
in-process map of the body as expanding to include its
introjected psychological and social and cultural his-
tory and contexts. So the body that seeks in its
homeodynamic mechanisms to maintain itself through
prosurvival interactions with its environment comes to
incorporate into its sense of self–other boundary a
psychological (emotions having a meaning that is
motivating) and not just a physical self. This psycho-
logical stance is “the perspective of the body.” The
process is bidirectional. As Spinoza puts it, the conatus
for self-preservation is at once a physical and a mental
conatus. It preserves the undivided and indivisible
desiring self as mentally construed and socially con-
structed and also as physically embodied and enacted.
It is just this extended self, according to Damasio in
his second book, that is protected in the secondary
(social) emotions. The stages of the transition from the
bodily “I” to the neurosymbolic “I” propel the saga of
The Feeling and make it the tale of a unified self
unfolding. That Spinozist story has somehow been
attenuated here in Looking for Spinoza, and we are
operating instead within a dualistic metaphysics of
enclosed bodily events with, seemingly, an outside
mental spectator to those events, the latter having no
causal efficacy as motivation per se but only the
efficacy of possible intervention from above. Even
social emotions, Damasio tells us, need not have em-
bedded cognitive cultural components but are geneti-
cally innate and triggered by the environment as they
are in animals, he says (e.g., pp. 46–48). Desire (af-
fect) and higher cognition have been cut off from each
 224
other, and rather than the latter coming to inform the
former, it looks upon it from high above, reason
intervening somehow when bodily desire propels “us”
in the wrong direction. Spinoza would, I think, discern
in this model of the mind the grounds for the same
criticism he lodged against Descartes—namely, that it
falsely portrays the mind as “a kingdom within a
kingdom.” I think that it is to preclude any possibility
of encouraging in his readers what he regarded as this
central Cartesian error that Spinoza, as far as I know,
never refers to or mentions the brain in any of his
writings. The reason for this, I suspect, is not that he
didn’t know that the brain has a more intimate relation
to the mind than other parts of the body. I think his
reason for not mentioning it is, instead, that he wanted
to make absolutely clear that the mind and the rest of
the body are continuous, without ontological breaks of
just the kind that infected Descartes (and, as I show in
this essay, James and Damasio as well). Thus refusing
to make the standard cut between mind/brain and body
was part of his strategy in showing the depth of his
monism. Spinoza did not want to give his readers any
excuse for positing ontological breaks in the human
person or in the world, for that matter. He was acutely
aware of the importance of rhetorical strategies and
the temptations of words to distort meaning. He used
words for both their denotations and connotations,
often to suggest a more pious point of view than his
theories actually amounted to (e.g., his ubiquitous,
“God or Nature”). In fact, in making God identical to
Nature (i.e., the laws of the universe and the embodied
universe itself)—in Spinoza’s parlance, God’s at-
tributes are thought and extension—Spinoza was dra-
dashes matically taking his stand against the standard view of
added -
ok? the universe as directed by a divine mind separate
from it. Instead, God is immanent in the universe just
as the mind is immanent in the body.5
The deep structure of Damasio’s picture is, I think,
Jamesian rather than Spinozist, for according to it we
are locked into a description of psychological experi-
ence as reductively material and of mental life as a
reflection upon it that is not also infused with it. Nor
are emotions (and hence feelings, which are insepara-
ble for Spinoza) transformed via their internally em-
bedded cognitive symbolizations, as Spinoza also
proposes. Instead, for Damasio in Looking for
5
The eminent Spinoza scholar Lee C. Rice comments as follows on
Spinoza’s omission of the word “brain”: “The word <cerebrum> occurs
nowhere in Spinoza so far as I know. For Spinoza the (human) body is
the sentient/cognitive organism, and the brain is only one part thereof.
This fits well with contemporary physiology: much processing of
information takes place in the peripheral and central nervous systems
and the sensory organs themselves long before the data reaches the
brain. E.g., the retina of the eye is selective, eliminates redundancies,
etc., etc.; and all of these processes are cognitive/affective in Spinoza’s
sense as well. In short, we think because we feel, and we feel because of
the kind of body (not just brain) that we have. Remembering Spinoza’s
key postulate for E2/E3:
Homo sentiat
Human beings feel, and feeling is a bodily function, not just a cerebral
one” (personal communication, May 2003).
Book Reviews
Spinoza, emotions, being bodily, are conative whereas
our minds are fundamentally cognitive because desire
does not percolate upward into cognition but instead
stops with the body. Damasio has divided us into
separate conative and cognitive dimensions (not just
perspectives on a single process), proposing that the
content of the cognitive is the reductively conative, so
that in knowing we know the body proper—that is, our
emotions as thus construed. But in doing so we know
the emotions as reductively bodily phenomena—rac-
ing heartbeat, sweaty palms, and so on—rather than as
having psychological meaning as symbolic threats to
or contributions to our physico-symbolic selves. In
Chapter 3 of Looking for Spinoza Damasio proposes
that the contents of feelings, “translate the ongoing life
state in the language of the mind.” “Feeling . . . con-
sists of representing a particular state of the body” (p.
85). Feelings are the awareness of bodily sensations
coupled with the thoughts we have when we feel those
sensations. These are “thoughts with themes conso-
nant with the emotion; and a mode of thinking, a style
of mental processing” (p. 84; emphasis in original).
“Feelings are perceptions.” They are the “brain’s body
maps” and “refer to parts of the body and states of the
body” (p. 85). Now in some ways this sounds familiar,
but there is an important shift here. For what is missing
is what we usually refer to in common parlance as
emotions—namely, psychological states that motivate
us to act in a certain way. What we have instead are
body states proper, maps of those body states proper,
the mental awareness of those states, and, finally,
thoughts we associate (by stream of consciousness)
with those states. But no integrated unified self.
But this is the standard understanding of James’s
position, not of Spinoza’s. Marianne Janack proposes
that
Emotion is, James argues, at base a physiological
phenomenon with psychological inflections. Emo-
tions serve as “somatic evaluations” of our environ-
ment, triggered by particular interactions with the
world that alert us and call our attention to that part
of the world in question. . . . This theory of emotion
implies that a variety of things that many philoso-
phers and anthropologists claim cannot be called
emotions are, in fact, emotions: the startle response,
sheer terror, generalized wonder are all emotions
according to James’ theory. [Janack, forthcoming,
p. ?]
It was James who defined his scientific psychology as published?
“aiming to discover psychophysical correlation laws” p. number?
(Cooper, 1990, p. 574). Cooper cites James in the
Preface to the Principles of Psychology as follows:
Psychology, the science of finite individual minds,
assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and
(2) a physical world in time and space with which
they coexist and which (3) they know. . . . Psychol-
ogy when she has ascertained the empirical correla-
tion of the various sorts of thought or feeling with
definite conditions of the brain, can go no further—
Book Reviews
can go no further as a natural science. If she goes
further she becomes metaphysical. [Cooper, 1990,
p. 574]
Thus James in psychology is committed to what
Cooper (1990) suggests is a “methodological dualism
of mind and body” (p. 580) that comes close to an
epiphenomenalism but does not devolve into it en-
tirely, for he takes consciousness seriously and never
dissolves it even though he at the same time insists on
the dependence of the mental upon the physical (p.
579).
Spinoza’s position, by contrast, is the nonreductive
identity of the psychological and the physical, of emo-
tions and feelings, of body and mind. The claim of the
mind and the body in identity, as one entity, implies
for Spinoza that the cognitive is also affective because
it is conative; and affect is describable, and needs to be
described, in mental or psychological as well as phys-
icalist terms. There is no outside or independent neu-
tral standpoint from which to view the body/mind as
one entity, one self. Any further self-reflection cannot
escape the embodied, affective perspective, nor can
the body escape being enminded, so to speak. There is
nothing outside it except more of the same. What we
can, however, hope for, rather than some quasi-divine
rational intervention from above, is some modification
in the affects themselves through making our intro-
jected autobiographical stories and histories truer and
fuller. This can be accomplished by filling in the
accounts of the causes of the emotions not with exter-
nal perspectives but with our own growing self-
understandings that are part and parcel, at every stage,
of the emotions themselves. For Spinoza describes all
our emotions as having embedded causal claims that
are meaningful and constitute their motivating power.
We can come to understand these stories differently
and from a wider and scientific psychologically in-
formed perspective. (Spinoza saw himself as writing
the first true scientific psychology, one that did not
devolve into moralism in scientific garb.) Thus emo-
tions are not, and cannot be, according to Spinoza,
reductively material in the way that Damasio now
seems to describe them. Nor can they be for Spinoza
narrowly cognitive, merely perceptions. In filling in
the full range of causes that motivate us (an exhaustive
endeavor), we uncover our embedded and embodied
unconscious motivations and include them in our auto-
biographical stories that constitute the self. For
Spinoza explicitly tells us that our emotions are known
to us but their causes are unconscious (EIII P2 S). As a
result, the psychophysical self that is guarded and
whose needs the conatus furthers, as expressed in the
emotions, is transformed. This is the process I have
coined the “education of desire.” Change takes place,
thus, at the affective level of the secondary emotions,
as Damasio too claimed in his second book, rather
than at a supervening, nonaffective level, as Damasio
now claims. The unconscious dimension of emotions
now seems to be reduced to automatic triggers and
225
their associative links (p. 65) rather than full blown
socially and culturally inflected phenomena. Thus
Damasio now contends that “emotion is all about
transition and commotion, sometimes real bodily up-
heaval.” It is about “behavior”—“running, freezing,
courting, or parenting” (p. 63), and feeling is the
awareness thereof.
The learning to create in ourselves emotional
change, which is the central project of the Ethics,
comes from the uncovering and bringing to conscious-
ness of unconscious emotional causes, which then
percolate up as they are further reflected upon. Ration-
ality for Spinoza is a process of expanding toward
fullness the account of the implicit psychological,
cultural, natural, and social causes of one’s own emo-
tions. It is thus itself an affective process rather than a
narrowly and independently cognitive one, for the
attribution of cause is part and parcel of secondary
emotions themselves. Emotions, because they are nec-
essarily directed at objects and states of affairs, are
changed in themselves when the nature and locus of
the object which they are “about” is modified and
differently understood. Spinoza’s project is to change
the object of emotions from isolated to contextualized
and globalized, and from external to internal. Self-
reflection, as internal to the secondary emotions them-
selves, is their cognitive component but has affective
charge and power. It is never of the Jamesian de-
tached-spectator variety. These are some of the impli-
cations for the individual person of Spinoza’s
doctrines of metaphysical monism and divine imma-
nence. These processes operate globally in much the
same way, according to the same principles. For
James, in contrast with Spinoza, there is no uncon-
scious, which is to say, no embedding of a full-blown
cultural, social, autobiographical neurosymbolic self
within the body and its emotional expression.
Now it was just this capacity for the seamlessness
of bodily self and social–cultural–psychological self
that The Feeling of What Happens explored and at-
tempted to account for via levels of self-mappings,
including maps that related self and environment or
object as biographical accretions of the self. It was that
mapping that Damasio suggested in the latter book
that cognition ought to capture. Thus it was a full-
blown cultural and biographical self and not just the
body proper that one knows (as well as desires to
further). So there was no disconnect between body and
self story. There was a proto-cognitive story embed-
ded in our bodies themselves. For James, in contrast
with this, the body seems largely mute and static.6 So
6
Drawing a comparison with Descartes may be instructive here. In
a letter he wrote to Tschirnhaus, Spinoza roundly criticizes the notion
that matter is static, attributing that mistaken position to Descartes:
“from extension, as Descartes conceives it, to wit, an inert mass, it is
not only difficult, as you say, but absolutely impossible to prove the
existence of bodies. For matter at rest, as far as in it lies, will continue at
rest, and will not be set in motion except by a more powerful external
cause. For this reason I have not hesitated on a previous occasion to
affirm that Descartes’ principles of natural things are of no service, not
226
for him there is no further story to tell beyond the
physical one, and any number of cognitive stories
might have a correlation with the bodily events, but
none has an internal connection to them. In this, my
colleague Marianne Janack has argued, James is post-
modern.7 The cognitive tale is ultimately undefinitive,
not to be pinned down, and potentially multiple ver-
sions are equally legitimate. For James, she says,
reasons and causes are indistinguishable. Not so for
Spinoza. For him, the story gets truer as our uncon-
scious motivations—those lodged in the embodied
images that encode our emotional history and hence
constitute our developing selves—are exposed. This is
the story of the relation of the self to its environment,
and of the progressively changed self as it incorporates
the history of those encounters as self to a conse-
quently differently charged and interpreted environ-
ment. It was this kind of process that Antonio Damasio
alluded to and provided neurobiological evidence in
support of in The Feeling of What Happens. In Look-
ing for Spinoza, however, the story has become much
simpler and thinner. And some of the evidence for the
former account remains unexplained in the new ac-
count.
It is also, perhaps unintentionally, unidirectional.
For although Damasio claims that the hierarchical
evolutionary nesting of homeostatic mechanisms,
which he likens to a tree, has two-way communication
with the “roots” (p. 38), the account he offers at least
emphasizes, if not consists exclusively in, the bottom-
up route of the lower levels (immune responses, basic
reflexes, and metabolic regulation at the lowest level,
pain and pleasure behaviors at the next, drives and
motivations at the third, and feelings at the highest)
informing the higher. The top-down movement is dif-
ferent. It is not the continuous informing and trans-
forming of one level by another but, instead,
constitutes a break and an intervention. Damasio de-
scribes the human pinnacle as “the will,” the deliberate
to say quite wrong” (letter #81, Spinoza, 1995, p. 352). The editors’
Note 392 expands on the point (p. 352): “Spinoza’s conception of
extension or matter is, unlike that of Descartes, essentially dynamic.
Motion must be imposed on the material universe in Descartes’ view by
divine ‘thrust.’ This is because there is no concept of force within
Cartesian physics and it must be imported by God.”
Thus for Spinoza the dynamism of extension and the dynamism of
thought are one dynamism described in two ways, or at two different
levels of explanation, as we would say today, since they describe one
entity. Thus the body cannot but be as dynamic and expansive as is the
mind, its alternative description. For James, however, unlike for
Descartes, the body is its own causal force, and it is the mind that is all
but epiphenomenal to it. Nevertheless, the body is for James discreet
and undeveloping; it is an entirely different kind of thing than is the
mind, with a different kind of operative rules, and also does something
quite different. Not so for Spinoza.
7
Janack in this essay also challenges whether James falls into
cognitive–noncognitive dualism. For she proposes that beliefs are
affective in much the same way that emotions are. “Belief,” too, she
says, for James “is a bodily response.” “The ‘feeling’ of truth is a
physiologically based reaction to the relative importance of the objects
or ideas presented.”
Book Reviews
intervention in emotions that humans alone are capa-
ble of because of their reason or higher cortical capaci-
ties. The human cortical capacities thus seem to
provide two new dimensions to the process: first, a
readout of the bodily mechanisms of emotions; sec-
ond, an executive intervention that does not modify
the emotions as such but can help us choose them to
some extent by avoiding or promoting certain ones.
I offer qualified congratulations to us humans for
two reasons. First, in comparable circumstances,
these automated reactions create conditions in the
human organism that once mapped in the nervous add comma after
“that”?
system, can be represented as pleasurable or painful
and eventually known as feelings. Let us say that
this is the real source of human glory and human
tragedy. Now for the second reason. We humans,
conscious of the relation between certain objectives
and certain emotions, can willfully strive to control
our emotions, to some extent at least. We can
decide which objects and situations we allow in our
environment and on which objects and situations
we lavish time and attention. . . . By controlling our
interaction with objects that cause emotions we are
in effect exerting some control over the life process
and leading the organism into greater or lesser
harmony, as Spinoza would wish. We are in effect
overriding the tyrannical automaticity and mind-
lessness of the emotional machinery. [pp. 51–52;
emphasis in original]
This position seems to capture exactly William
James’s claim that “while we can voluntarily and
indirectly exert control over our patterns of attending”
(Janack, forthcoming), we cannot directly change our published?
beliefs or emotions at will.
This, however, is not the Spinozist account. “Men-
tal decision, on the one hand,” Spinoza tells us, “and
the appetite and physical state of the body, on the
other, are simultaneous in nature; or rather, they are
one and the same thing.” And thus “mental decisions
are nothing more than the appetites themselves” (EIII
P2 S). Moreover, even to the layperson Spinoza is
famous and, for many, infamous for his impassioned
denial of the freedom of the will (EII P48 & 49). There
is simply no break in the Spinozist individual from
which an intervention of this sort could proceed. Rea-
son is completely affective and cannot look upon the
affects from a location beyond them. Desire is the very
essence of each of us, Spinoza holds (EIII P7), and
permeates all thinking as it does all bodily expres-
sions. Our ideas, our thinking, no less than our bodily
behavior, is necessarily driven by pleasure and pain
(EIII P28) rooted in our fundamental desire for sur-
vival and the maintenance and enhancement of the
integrity of our self-organization or internal arrange-
ment (EII P13ff.). Moreover, in the Spinozist under-
standing, only the unexamined emotions of the
unexamined life have “tyrannical automaticity and
mindlessness.” The whole project of the Ethics is not
to “override” this “emotional machinery” but to trans-
 Book Reviews
form the emotions themselves from automatic to ra-
tionally informed through their transformation by the
education of desire rather than of intellect per se. Our
desires themselves can be transformed, and different
actions then necessarily follow therefrom; but they
cannot be simply and at best overridden through ra-
tional intervention, as Damasio suggests. For our cog-
nition of our emotions can never change our behavior,
Spinoza insists; only a stronger emotion can dislodge
and replace an initial emotion. “An emotion cannot be
checked or destroyed,” Spinoza writes, “except by a
contrary emotion which is stronger than the emotion
which is to be checked. . . . This affection of the body
[this is Spinoza’s definition of emotions] receives
from its own cause its force for persisting in its own
being, and therefore this force cannot be checked or
destroyed except by a corporeal cause which affects
the body with an affection contrary to the other and
stronger than it” (EIV P7 & Dem.; emphasis added).
I call Damasio’s position Jamesian rather than Car-
tesian because, although both James and Descartes
posit minds that have forms of independence from the
body, James (on the standard reading) proposes a mind
that consists in awareness and belief yet whose effi-
cacy is quite limited and whose content is supplied by
the body proper and its own independent mental asso-
ciations. Descartes is more dualistic, even though he
includes within the mind far more than cognition,
certain emotions themselves, and all kinds of inten-
tional states. Emotions, for Descartes, are never
strictly bodily, but they can be strictly mental. They
designate the direction of the causality of action be-
tween the mind and the body: either the mind is
passive and directed by the body, or vice versa. The
mind can also have strictly mental emotions (which for
Descartes are the best kind), such as arise from cogni-
tion itself. So the mind, contrary to popular belief, is in
fact affective for Descartes, a point the historian of
philosophy, Susan James, emphasizes in her excellent
added to refs book, Passion and Action (1997). For Descartes, emo-
tions also cement body and mind together, preserving
their precarious union. The aim, of course, is to have
the mind direct the body and be the originator of action
rather than the passive follower of bodily desire. That
is what Descartes, in contrast with the position out-
lined as James’s, means by the will. So Spinoza and
William James have in common that they are “always
searching for a way around [Cartesian] substance du-
alism,” as the philosopher Owen Flanagan says of
James (Flanagan, 1997, p. 26). For James this results
in a position akin to epiphenomenalism, the doctrine
that causes are material and that consciousness is a
mere awareness of the body but has no causative
function in its operations, that is only slightly broken
by some limited degree of cognitive independence
from and intervention in the body. While Spinoza opts
for a thorough-going, but nonreductively materialist,
naturalism in his approach to the mind, James at
bottom is a reductive materialist naturalist with a
227
nonnaturalist dimension, and thus, as Flanagan sug-
gests, a not unambivalent one (Flanagan, 1997, pp. was 26f. -
ok, or pp.
26–27). James conceives the cognitive capacity of the 26 ff.?
mind as ideally but limitedly capable of intervening in
the course of the natural and bodily, while Spinoza’s
monism and determinism preclude precisely that pos-
sibility. Spinoza and James share the view that the
mind minds the body and thus that the fundamental
content of the mind is supplied by the body’s doings
and current and remembered conditions. But it is a
different “body” that each has the mind minding.
And this is where Damasio, I think, senses their
common ground, and here, I believe, is the point of
danger for him of slippage from one to the other. In
Looking for Spinoza, Damasio includes his earlier
notion of the body as the neurosymbolic body, the
body maps rather than the body per se. And he, like
Spinoza and unlike James, has an important role for was 60f. -
the unconscious in the body (pp. 60–61). But the ok, or pp. 60
theory in which the unconscious and the neurosym- ff.?
bolic body are embedded is now largely Jamesian—
independent cognition feeling the body proper (rather
than its emotional history or biography) as mapped
and intervening into it when it can. The continuity of
body and mind in layers of unconscious and conscious
self has been lost; emotions/feelings as unified moti-
vations of the mind and body as one entity has been
replaced with a physical automaton that can yet come
to know itself as such and, at best, can stop itself in its
tracks. Perhaps this second story is truer to the evi-
dence emerging from affective neuroscience than the
Spinozist one. I am in no position to make that judg-
ment. But if so, it is a sad story. For Spinoza’s is an
account that embodies the mind but also en-minds the
body. Our body, for Spinoza, is glorious in that the
mind comes to figure within it at some of its deeper
levels, precisely unconsciously. The social, cultural,
and autobiographical environment becomes written in
the body (in the affects), nurture deeply and uncon-
sciously embedding itself continuously and seamlessly
within and as nature. It is that unconscious body
(which embeds the history of its emotional causes) that
is knowable, capable of being brought to conscious
awareness and then explored through ever-expansive
and scientifically informed self-reflection; and that
self-reflection changes some of the beliefs (about its
own causes) that are in part unconsciously constitutive
of the affects in question. Changing the affectively
charged unconscious beliefs embedded in emotions
changes those emotions.
The conatus that drives both our bodies and our
minds toward internal organization and stability, inte-
grating and reconciling the environment to further our
own survival, pushes toward coherence and thus also
toward expansiveness and inclusiveness. More primi-
tive versions of the urge for homeodynamic stability
give way to more sophisticated ones, ones that inte-
grate cognitive dissonance into larger and more com-
plex patterns rather than squelching it. The self sees
228
itself in, and as constituted by, ever larger contexts and
webs of relation. It is that relational self, not the
narrowly related or narrowly dependent one, that
comes to be the subject of the ever-purposive urge of
the conatus. We might see in this a transition from the
most basic and primitive forms of attachment—ones
that are in Spinoza’s view as basic to the social glue as
they are productive of social conflict—to a symboli-
cally extended attachment, a universal identification
with nature, a planetary perspective, and love. The
initial human condition Spinoza describes as one
wherein the “conatus [strives] to bring it about that
everyone should approve of one’s loves and hates”
and each of us either subordinates his desires and
beliefs to those of others or conversely dominates
others to conform to himself. This “need to please
others” Spinoza calls “the main motive of man”
(Tractatus Politicus vii), and he comments that it is
also “the desire whereby all emotions are encouraged
and strengthened; and thus this emotion can scarcely
be overcome. For as long as a man is subject to any
desire, he is necessarily subject to this one (EIII Def.
44 & Exp.). This need is the ur-source of a basic
human sociality, for, like Aristotle, Spinoza believes
that man is a social animal. Yet “in all seeking the
praise or love of all, they provoke mutual dislike”
(EIII P31 Cor. & Exp.), Spinoza suggests, and hence a
more stable sociality can be envisioned, one that is less
prone to devolve into conflict. Spinoza self-con-
sciously uses the metaphor of the Intellectual Love of
God—God is always glossed as Nature in his ubiqui-
tous phrase “God or Nature,” a phrase that uses the
Latin “sive” or “or” of equivalence—to express this
utopian vision, a vision of universal affective identifi-
cation with the natural world symbolized in the divine
immanence. If pointing toward a distant ideal, its
origins and expressions are, nevertheless, in the body
and remain embodied. No escapee to another world
he! For the vision remains rooted in our embodied
emotional selves. If the emotions cannot approach at
their farthest reaches what Spinoza proposes and de-
tails, then his philosophic proposal is empty. We
Spinozists await the verdict of neuroscience whether a
more dualistic or more monistic account of the mind
and body is vindicated. Antonio Damasio’s proposal
of a neurobiological “Spinozism” so far has given us
an ambiguous answer.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Jaak Panksepp (J.P. Scott Center for Neuroscience,
Mind and Behavior Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State
University), Marianne Janack (Department of Philosophy, Hamilton
College), and Allen B. Manning (my husband) for reading the paper
and providing helpful comments and raising important issues.
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Heidi M. Ravven
Email: ???
A reply to Heidi Ravven
I very much enjoyed reading Heidi Ravven’s essay, to
which I turned as the deadline for delivery of these
replies approached. It is a beautifully written and
deeply engaging piece of philosophy. I look forward to
replying to it at length, in person and in writing, at a
later date. For the time being, however, I have the
following to say.
Looking for Spinoza was written in continuity with
Feeling of What Happens, not quite in the same breath
but certainly as an extension of the same set of facts
and interpretations. Looking for Spinoza is neither a
comprehensive review nor a synthesis. It is, rather, a
sidestep meant to allow me some detailing of new
information on the neurobiology of feeling and some
space to reflect on Spinoza the thinker and the person.
My notions of body, mind, self, emotion, and feeling
did not change from one work to the other, and only
the detail of the neural account of those phenomena
evolved. Ravven states, quite correctly, that in Feeling
230
of What Happens, “Damasio locates the origin of
value as emerging from what he calls . . . the perspec-
tive of the body. That phrase, in my view, admirable
captures Spinoza’s understanding as well. In [Feeling
of What Happens], Damasio is adamant about locating
the origin of value in our organismic urge for homeo-
stasis and, by extension, in the external objects and
situations that promote it.” This is precisely the idea
that I still hold and discuss in Looking for Spinoza.
Heidi Ravven suggests that my Spinozist position
has been “attenuated to some extent” in the latest
book. She says that in Looking for Spinoza I introduce
“a strong dualism, absent from his previous book,”
between emotions and feelings, a “dualism” that
seems to modify my theoretical account of the emo-
tions and of the origin of ethics. Moreover, she sug-
gests that this “dualism” produces a “hiatus between
the subcortical and the cortical.” I entirely disagree
with this characterization of my thinking. Let me
explain why.
First, the distinction between emotion and feeling,
which I clearly articulate as a research strategy, has
been present in all of my articles and books for over a
decade. Feeling of What Happens repeatedly honors
that distinction. In Looking for Spinoza I state clearly,
at the outset and at the end of Chapter 3, that in
practical terms emotion and feeling operate together,
as affect, and that my distinction is an investigative
ploy meant to uncover what lies beneath affect.
Second, the use of the word “dualism” without any
additional qualification turns out to be quite mislead-
ing. When we talk about body and mind as distinctive
physiological processes, as we must, we are certainly
engaging in aspect dualism. The reference to body and
mind is inevitable. There is simply no other way of
researching and discussing such topics, whether we
are neurobiologists or philosophers. The Spinoza that
Heidi Ravven and I so much admire was certainly an
aspect dualist, for he repeatedly talks about mind and
body, as distinctive processes, and well he should. But
neither Spinoza nor I are substance dualists, as
Descartes was, and that is the critical issue. The re-
search distinction between emotion and feeling has
nothing whatsoever to do with substance dualism. I
regard both emotion and feeling as neurobiological
processes. In my framework, the body-proper, the
brain, and the mental processes that emerge from the
activity of body and brain are all biological processes.
Third, the research distinction between emotion
and feeling does not map neatly into a subcortical vs.
cortical processing distinction. The most complex
level of processing for feelings does involve the cor-
tex, but it requires an interaction with subcortical
structures; lower levels of operation for feeling can be
achieved with subcortical structures alone; most
processing of emotion involves both cortical and sub-
cortical structures, although the order of engagement
of different brain sectors may be different.
Book Reviews
Given this position, I cannot understand why, in
Looking for Spinoza, I “seem to falter from a
Spinozist–monist point of view with [my] strong dis-
tinction between emotions and feelings.” As far as I
can understand, Spinoza’s monism has to do with the
substance in which and from which both body and
mind processes emerge. The emotion–feeling contrast
does not place “a wedge between the physical process
and the mental representation of it” for the simple
reason that a mental representation is a subset of the
physical, neurobiological process. When I say that
“emotions play out in the theater of the body while
feelings play out in the theater of the mind,” I am using
a literary expression to refer to different levels and
kinds of processing that occur when varied levels of
the central nervous system and of the body-proper
interact, in certain arrangements, to produce the phe- ok or
nomenally different processes that we call emotion phenomenologically?
and feeling. Nor do I believe that feelings are epiphe-
nomenal to emotions, and even less that feelings have
“little or no causal efficacy.” Feelings, being part of
the most complex set of neurobiological phenomena in
our organism, are causally effective within the biologi-
cal enchainment to which they belong.
I am also at a loss to understand why Ravven thinks
that “our standard understanding of emotional feelings
as informed by experience, culture, and autobiography
is precluded or sidelined” by my account. At the level
of mental processing at which feelings occur, which is,
of necessity, a level of neurobiological processing, I
repeatedly refer in all my work to the intervention of
autobiography and culture. I also cannot understand
why Ravven thinks that in my account “the affective
meaning of emotions is reduced to the somatic.” It
certainly focuses on the somatic, actual and mapped,
because my purpose is to elucidate biological mecha-
nisms. How could it not? But when I place those
mechanisms in the broader perspective of living be-
ings in general and humans in particular, I do not
reduce affect to the somatic at all.
Ravven believes that my account of emotion and
feeling puts into question Spinoza’s account of the
emotions. I cannot possibly agree. Spinoza says: “By
emotions [affectus] I understand the affections of the
body . . . together with the ideas of these affections.”
But of course Spinoza did not use the word “emotion”
implied by the usual translations. He used the Latin
word “affectus,” a conceptual blend of emotion and
feeling, and it is only in the context of that blend that
he talks about emotion encompassing the affections of
the body and the ideas of those affections. What I am
attempting to do is to unpack, neurobiologically
speaking, the different phases and components of af-
fect. I see no conflict whatsoever between my ideas
and Spinoza’s.
Finally, I turn to the most important issue raised by
Heidi Ravven. Ravven takes Spinoza’s identity of
body and mind quite literally. My view, however, is
that Spinoza would have liked to know how that single
Book Reviews
natural substance managed to produce within itself
what we call mind. The Spinozian “identity” of mind
and body to which Raven refers is no more a scientific
fact than my saying that emotion plays out in the
theater of the body and feeling in the theater of the
mind. In both instances, these are modes of expres-
sion. They are meant to dramatize a certain historical
moment in the understanding of a complicated prob-
lem given the knowledge of the time. Three-and-a-half
231
centuries later, I believe Spinoza would have wanted
to know, chapter and verse, how that “idea of the body
which constitutes the human mind” comes about in
neurobiological terms. Discovering that deep scien-
tific secret does not diminish Spinoza in any way. It
liberates the contemporary biologist and simply makes
Spinoza’s monistic insight all the more admirable.
Antonio Damasio
Email: ???