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Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

Name: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
Author: Antonio Damasio
ISBN: 9780156028714

by Antonio Damasio

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Overview

The last in a trilogy of books that investigates the philosophical and scientific foundations of human life

Joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe—these and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza devoted much of his life's work examining how these emotions supported human survival, yet hundreds of years later the biological roots of what we feel remain a mystery. Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio—whose earlier books explore rational behavior and the notion of the self—rediscovers a man whose work ran counter to all the thinking of his day, pairing Spinoza's insights with his own innovative scientific research to help us understand what we're made of, and what we're here for.

Synopsis

"In clear, accessible and at times eloquent prose, Damasio is outlining nothing less than a new vision of the human soul, integrating body and mind, thought and feeling, individual survival and altruism, humanity and nature, ethics and evolution." -SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

JOY, SORROW, JEALOUSY, AND AWE-these and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. Thought to be too private for science to explain and not essential for understanding cognition, they have largely been ignored. But not by Spinoza, and not by Antonio Damasio. In Looking for Spinoza, Damasio, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, draws on his innovative research and on his experience with neurological patients to examine how feelings and the emotions that underlie them support human survival and enable the spirit's greatest creations. Looking for Spinoza rediscovers a thinker whose work prefigures modern neuroscience, not only in his emphasis on emotions and feelings, but in his refusal to separate mind and body. Together, the scientist and the philosopher help us understand what we're made of, and what we're here for.

"Exceptionally engaging and profoundly gratifying . . . Achieves a unique combination of scientific exposition, historical discovery and deep personal statement regarding the human condition." -NATURE

Antonio Damasio is the Van Allen Distinguished Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center and is an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The recipient of numerous awards, he is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Damasio's books are read and taught in universities worldwide.

The Los Angeles Times

Damasio's thesis is both philosophical and scientific. The emotions have physical location, indeed they are physical a part of the material construction of the brain. But that is not all: The physical structures of the brain can be transformed by the emotions. In a more classical age when bodies and souls were deemed separate and unequal by God, such a notion would have been attacked as atheism. Now it is simply unnerving. — Margaret Jacob

About the Author, Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio is the Van Allen Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center and is an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego. Descartes' Error was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. He lives in Iowa City and Chicago.

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Editorials

Nature

Looking for Spinoza is exceptionally engaging and profoundly gratifying. It achieves a unique combination of scientific exposition, historical discovery and deep personal statement regarding the human condition. It dares to ask how our accumulating knowledge of the human brain should inform the way we live our lives and organize our social world. Its erudition and wisdom provide a powerful statement that the pursuit of scientific knowledge about the human brain can go hand in hand with an overarching concern for our fellow humans.

The Los Angeles Times

Damasio's thesis is both philosophical and scientific. The emotions have physical location, indeed they are physical — a part of the material construction of the brain. But that is not all: The physical structures of the brain can be transformed by the emotions. In a more classical age when bodies and souls were deemed separate and unequal by God, such a notion would have been attacked as atheism. Now it is simply unnerving. — Margaret Jacob

Publishers Weekly

The third in a series that began with Descartes' Error, this book deftly combines recent advances in neuroscience with charged meditations on foundational 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the result is Damasio's fullest report so far on the nature of feelings. A Salk Institute professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center, Damasio makes a useful distinction between emotions, which are publicly observable body states, and feelings, which are mental events observable only to the person having them. Based on neuroscience research he and others have done, Damasio argues that an episode of emoting begins with an emotionally "competent" stimulus (such as an attractive person or a scary house) that the organism automatically appraises as conducive to survival or well-being (a good thing) or not conducive (bad). This appraisal takes the form of a complex array of physiological reactions (e.g., quickening heartbeat, tensing facial muscles), which is mapped in the brain. From that map, a feeling arises as "an idea of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process." Because they "bear witness to the state of life deep within," feelings are a vital guide to decision-making. Damasio goes on to connect his own views to Spinoza's and sympathize with that thinker's "secular religiosity," which identified God with nature. He ends by discussing spiritual feelings, which he relates to "the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection." Given his professional background, it is not surprising that Damasio is more persuasive when talking neuroscience than philosophy. But overall, he succeeds in making the latest brain research accessible to the general reader, while his passionate Spinozist reflections make that data relevant to everyday life. (Feb. 3) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Los Angeles Times

"Damasio has the rare talent of rendering science intelligible while also being gifted in philosophy, literature and wit."

— Margaret Jacob

San Francisco Chronicle

"In clear, accessible and eloquent prose, Damasio is outlining a new vision of the human soul."

— William Kowinski

Nature

"Looking for Spinoza is exceptionally engaging and profoundly gratifying."

— Ray Dolan

Scientific American

"Compelling."

Library Journal

In different ways, these two books are concerned with understanding human consciousness and consider the theory of evolution as key to explaining it. Both are written in engaging, largely jargon-free prose that will be accessible, and of interest, to the educated reader. Damasio (Descartes' Error; The Feeling of What Happens) is the more strictly "scientific" of the two authors, using his experience and experiments as a neurologist in trying to show that there is no split between mind and body-that, as Spinoza has argued, they are really unified and codependent. In the process, he investigates the phenomena of emotion and feeling and correlates them with happenings in the brain. An interesting portion of the book details his visit to Spinoza's home in Amsterdam. Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Consciousness Explained) is the more strictly "philosophical" of the two, using "thought experiments" and analogies to argue in detail how Darwin's theory can be extrapolated to account for consciousness. Unfortunately, both authors have somewhat missed the mark in their approach, which is primarily empirical and materialistic. Another way of looking at things can be seen in one of Shakespeare's plays, where Caesar, having been forewarned of trouble, has decided not to go to the senate that morning, and explains thus: "That I cannot come is false, and that I dare not ser the cause is in my will-I will not come." He does not attribute his decision to his hormones or to the activity of his brain (as our two authors presumably would)-his response is a dynamic one, in terms indicative of human agency. And it is this element that both books do not sufficiently recognize. This aside, both authors have a deservedly large readership, and librarians in most academic and public libraries will want both [Damasio's book was previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/02, and Dennett's was previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/02.]-Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, DC

Kirkus Reviews

A leading neurologist and critically praised science writer (The Feeling of What Happens, 1999, etc.) argues that research on human emotions supports the 17th-century philosopher's conclusions about the mind-body problem. Damasio (Neurology/Univ. of Iowa Medical Center) begins by describing his visit to Spinoza's home and grave in the Hague. Spinoza's ideas, the author reminds us, were so radical that they were suppressed for decades after his death in 1677, though they survived to be picked up by Enlightenment thinkers and to influence many modern scientists. At the center of his philosophy was the assertion that the mind, and by implication the soul, was not separate from the body but intimately connected to it. At this point, Damasio launches into a detailed summary of the neurological evidence that emotions and feelings, which he carefully distinguishes, arise directly from the brain's imaging of the body's physical states. Studies of patients with injuries to discrete areas of the brain indicate that specific sites are responsible for specific emotional states, he notes. Moreover, the chemical and physical events leading to feelings can often be traced with considerable accuracy. Unfortunately, the author's account of these potentially revolutionary investigations is highly abstract and couched in reader-unfriendly jargon. The evidence seems to be that even such exalted emotions as altruism and civic responsibility can be accounted for by physical processes based in the evolutionary needs of the human organism to survive and reproduce. The feeling of contentment that follows ethical behavior is similar to those called up by acts that directly benefit the organism. Having made thesepoints, the narrative returns to an account of Spinoza's life, with particular emphasis on his estrangement from the Portuguese Sephardic community in the Netherlands and his impact on later thinkers. The Spinoza sections flow smoothly; this would have been far more valuable if the neurological sections were as clear and engaging. Even so, it will reward close study. Fascinating and important material, though it deserves better exposition.