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A review by dilby
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by António R. Damásio
Marvelous. If Descartes' Error was a methodical deconstruction of the dualist notion of "pure reason," The Feeling of What Happens represents an equally rigorous attempt to explain the powerful intuition that motivated it: the feeling that "my experience" is truly and meaningfully mine, that experience is something quite special and distinct from everything else we are made aware of in the world.
As it turns out, the body-minded-brain (a useful Damasian formulation) works very hard to render experience in a disembodied first-person point-of-view. Operating beneath and alongside our consciousness is a network of embodied cognitive processes involving constant successive representations of the body, the always already emotionally charged construction of sensory images (sight, sound, taste, touch, proprioception, etc), the perception of "background feelings" and information about our surroundings, and so on and so forth. Consciousness is material, but it hides its materiality.
Equally significant, for me, is Damasio's ongoing reframing of human experience around feeling and emotion, a project he continues from the previous book. Consciousness itself is, in Damasio's view, a feeling that one's experiences are one's own, or rather a feeling of one's experiences as one's own. The complex organization of such feelings into a unified and narrative self is one of the features that seems, for our perspective, to be unique to human beings.
The primacy of feeling as a process relating organisms to objects (which here means literally anything that can affect something else) points Damasio in the direction of the radically level playing field of Spinoza's ethics, which frames interactions between any two beings in terms of potentia agendi ("the potential to do" or "the ability to act") and is the seed that blossomed into posthumanism and affect theory. Although perhaps I am reading too much into this because I know that the title of Damasio's next book is Looking for Spinoza. Either way, I'm reading it ASAP.
As it turns out, the body-minded-brain (a useful Damasian formulation) works very hard to render experience in a disembodied first-person point-of-view. Operating beneath and alongside our consciousness is a network of embodied cognitive processes involving constant successive representations of the body, the always already emotionally charged construction of sensory images (sight, sound, taste, touch, proprioception, etc), the perception of "background feelings" and information about our surroundings, and so on and so forth. Consciousness is material, but it hides its materiality.
Equally significant, for me, is Damasio's ongoing reframing of human experience around feeling and emotion, a project he continues from the previous book. Consciousness itself is, in Damasio's view, a feeling that one's experiences are one's own, or rather a feeling of one's experiences as one's own. The complex organization of such feelings into a unified and narrative self is one of the features that seems, for our perspective, to be unique to human beings.
The primacy of feeling as a process relating organisms to objects (which here means literally anything that can affect something else) points Damasio in the direction of the radically level playing field of Spinoza's ethics, which frames interactions between any two beings in terms of potentia agendi ("the potential to do" or "the ability to act") and is the seed that blossomed into posthumanism and affect theory. Although perhaps I am reading too much into this because I know that the title of Damasio's next book is Looking for Spinoza. Either way, I'm reading it ASAP.