When written in 2003 Antonio Damasio was a Van Allen Distinguished Professor and Head of the Neurology Department at the Univ. of Iowa College of Medicine and also an Adjunct Professor of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. (For his other books I’ve read, click on his name.) This was a gift book.

The back cover has an adequate summary: “Joy, sorrow, jealously, 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.” Before elaborating on the above summary, there are some features of his writing which, as a thorough reader of elegantly written books with new ideas or worldviews, I wish to praise: a detailed 4-pp Table of Contents (listing Chapters and often several chapter subtitles) and the great detail in some of his many endnotes, whose length adds significant meaning to the concepts noted. These qualities were also present in books that led into this book: Descartes’ Error (book 332) and The Feeling of What Happens (book 339). Book 340 builds upon and refers often to these two previous books.

Unlike these preceding books, the chapter order is not well defined by the Contents: Ch 1 – Enter Feelings – is an introduction to Damasio’s hypotheses and the relevance of Spinoza. He explains: “Emotion and feeling played an important but very different part in two of my previous books. Descartes’ Error addressed the role of emotion and feeling in decision-making. The Feeling of What Happens outlined the role of emotion and feelings in the construction of the self. In the present book, however, the focus is on feelings themselves, what they are and what they provide.” …”The main purpose of this book, then, is to present a progress report on the nature and human significance of feelings and related phenomena, as I see them now, as neurologist, neuroscientist, and regular user.” As for Spinoza’s relevance, “Spinoza is thoroughly relevant to any discussion of human emotion and feeling. Spinoza saw drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings – an ensemble Spinoza called affects – as a central aspect of humanity. Joy and sorrow were two prominent concepts in his attempt to comprehend human beings and suggest ways in which their lives could be lived better.” Most of Ch 1 is about Spinoza. All of Ch 6 – a Visit to Spinoza – is about Spinoza’s life and philosophical works.

In Ch 2 – Of Appetites and Emotions – Damasio admits that the common usage of the word emotion tends to encompass the notion of feeling. “But in our attempt to understand the complex chain of events that begins with emotions and ends up with feelings, we can be helped by a principled separation between the part of the process that is made public [emotions] and the part that remains private [feelings].” Why? “Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind.” In the rest of the chapter he works out in detail, using results from neurology and neuroscience, how emotions develop. To picture this he envisions an emotional “tree” whose branches fork as one goes up the tree. At the tree’s base are metabolic regulation, basic reflexes, and immune responses. Lying higher are pain and pleasure behaviors. Then come drives and motivations. Above these come emotions. The reason for this ordering is “All of the reactions, directly or indirectly, exhibit an apparent aim: making the internal economy of life run smoothly.” …”Even the emotions-proper – disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, sympathy, shame – aim directly at life regulation by staving off dangers or helping the organism take advantage of an opportunity, or indirectly by facilitating social relations.” Often, instead of saying ‘running smoothly’ he uses the term homeostatic regulation.

In Ch 3 – Feelings – he offers a provisional definition: “a feeling is the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes.” In his detailed arguments he describes body states, body maps in the brain, and mental maps, along with the various information-sensing organisms as well as the ways, both neural and biochemical, by which information moves, both to and from the brain and the sensory organs, with several flow diagrams with neural and philosophical features shown in parallel. He makes very coherent and reasonable arguments in Ch 3 as to what feelings are and why they take a position at the top of the tree of Ch 2. Key to many of his arguments are examples of patients he and coworkers observed to be lacking in normal functionality due to specific injuries of their bodies or brains.

Ch 4 – Ever Since Feelings – describes particular feelings, such as joy and sorrow. “Feelings are the mental manifestations of balance and harmony, of disharmony and discord.” He goes on to discuss in detail feelings with respect to social behavior and how it evolved to promote the positive feelings, morals, and ethics. He considers a what-if-world: “But one wonders how the world would have evolved if humanity had dawned with a population deprived of the ability to respond towards others with sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, and other social emotions that are known to be present in simple form in some nonhuman species.” This precedes a figure with four groupings for which he identifies the ‘emotionally competent stimulus’ capable of triggering the emotion, consequences, and physiological basis of the emotion. This figure induces deep thought.

Ch 5 – Body, Brain, and Mind – reviews his arguments in Descartes’ Error, but with the insight he gained from Spinoza’s philosophy. As before, he discredits Descartes’ mind/body dualism and, with reinforcement from his interpretation of Spinoza’s ideas, insists there must be a body/brain/mind unity. He reminds us that it is important to note that consciousness and mind are not synonymous. “In the strict sense, consciousness is the process whereby a mind is imbued with a reference we call self, and is said to know of its own existence and the existence of others around it.” …”Consciousness and conscious mind, however, are synonymous.” But he offers no details of mind itself.

Ch 7 – Who’s There? – is a well-described declaration of the importance of the human hunger to know. He asks, “How relevant to the achievement of a contented life is the knowledge of emotions, feelings, and mind-body biology that we have been discussing in this book? There is no doubt that emotions and feelings themselves are part and parcel of what we are, personally and socially. The question is: Does knowing how emotions and feelings work matter at all to how we live? I suggested earlier that such knowledge makes a difference to the governance of social life, but here I wonder if it may be just as pertinent to the inner circle of personal life governance.” He discusses spirituality, first of Spinoza, Einstein and William James, then his own. Damasio says that spiritual experiences are humanly nourishing and can be evoked by religion, which gives him hope. He ends with “I believe the new knowledge may change the human playing field. And this is why, all things considered, in the middle of much sorrow and some joy, we can have hope.”

Although this book did not say as much about the mind as I had hoped it would, it was a thought-provoking read that I enjoyed very much. I give it a very high recommendation, as I did his books Descartes’ Error (book 332) and The Feeling of What Happens (book 339). I’m glad I read them in chronological order. If asked to choose only one book to read, I’d be hard pressed to do so, as it would depend on which aspect of Antonio Damasio’s ideas and hypotheses one was interested in.