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Spinoza's anticipation of affective neuroscience

December 2003
Consciousness & Emotion 4(2):257-290

DOI:10.1075/ce.4.2.07mor

Authors:

Hamilton College

Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that now seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by Lakoff and Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of affective neuroscience in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) (with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identified as affective imitation.

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Spinoza’s anticipation of

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contemporary aﬀective neuroscience*

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Heidi Morrison Ravven

Hamilton College

Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psycholo-

gy rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have

gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is

supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neuro-

sciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of

recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the

natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza

that now seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neuro-

sciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by

Lakoﬀand Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philoso-

phy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

(1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of aﬀective neuro-

science in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999)

(with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by

Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis

of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive

sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social

psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identiﬁed

as aﬀective imitation.

Keywords: Spinoza; aﬀective neurosicience; Damasio, Lakoﬀ; Rizzolatti;

Gallese; ethical naturalism; naturalistic fallacy

“It is impossible for man not to be part of

Nature and not to undergo changes other than

those which can be understood solely through

his own nature and of which he is the adequate

cause” (EIVP4)1

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258 Heidi Morrison Ravven

Theories of Spinoza for which there is now evidence

from modern emotion theory

Since the seventeenth-century our standard assumptions in the West have

stemmed from Descartes, mind-body dualism, the independence of our

thinking capacity from bodily determination, and 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 generally has been seen

by philosophers, especially since Kant, as coming from the glory of our reason

intervening in and overriding our (lowly) desires and emotions. We suppose

that our desires and reason, i.e., our body and mind, are locked in a battle for

control of our will, our moral triumph coming from the success 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 independence of our

mind from determination by nature. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a

somewhat younger contemporary of Descartes, challenged all these assump-

tions, but it is only now in the early 21st century that evidence is mounting that

Spinoza, not Descartes, may have been right. Spinoza is famous for having been

what philosophers call an “ethical naturalist.” He saw himself as putting the

mind back into nature. Mind is as natural as the body is, he argued pointedly

against Descartes. In his Ethics Spinoza oﬀered what we today would call a

moral psychology. His psychology was based on a view of the mind and body as

one thing rather than two separable things barely holding together, as Descartes

had claimed. Spinoza’s doctrine is a radical but non-reductive psychophysical

monism, a mind-body identity theory that reduces neither body to mind nor mind

to body. He maintains the causal eﬃcacy of both the mental and the physical.

Spinoza proposed that our mind, ﬁrst and foremost, minds the body. The

mind is the consciousness of the body. He intuited that even, or perhaps

especially, our ethical capacity bubbles up from the deepest layers of ourselves,

our most primitive selves, rather than being a product either of God or of

reason alone. Ethics thus begins with our most basicurge for bodily survival and

for the maintenance and enhancement of organic integrity. It is an overwhelm-

ing and overriding desire — 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 as our bodily desires are

of this basic desire for self, for organic continuity and dynamic stability. The

conatus begins with the urge for mere survival and bodily integrity, but can be

extended and elaborated through culture and education. We begin as infants

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 259

caring about our bodies in a narrow sense, but this concern grows to include

concern for our social identities and symbolic selves and also concern for those

around us, extending outward to the environment and the global community.

This is Spinoza’s naturalized ethic. It contrasts sharply with Kantian concep-

tions of the freedom of the will as the sine qua non of ethics understood as the

(human rational) intervention in and overriding of natural necessity.2Spinoza

envisioned how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than

disrupt them, and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His

radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number

of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers

together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports

Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. If

Spinoza’s philosophy of mind and his theory of the aﬀects turn out to be

generally correct, we would do well to heed his suggestions about what ethics

may really be about.

I will begin by enumerating twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that now

seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences:

1. Thought (all mental processes including moral thinking) is aﬀective and

interested; it is the expression of interested, desiderative, self-determinion

and perpetuation; that is the conatus (EIIIDef of the Emotions #1;

EIVP37Dem; EIIIP12; EIIIP13; EIIIP2S).

2. The body is the ideatum of which the mind is the idea (Goodman);3

thought originates in images and through its reﬂexivity builds upon images

based in the body and in body experience (i.e., it originates in and as the

consciousness of the body — the mind minds the body) but the mind is not

reduced to, or merely epiphenomenal to, the body4(EIIP13; EIIP17S; EIID3

& Exp; EIIP43S; EIIP49S; EIIP22).

3. Emotion is the registering of body experience (in body and mind) as it

reﬂects the body’s furthering or diminishing (pleasure or pain) by such

experience or encounters (EIII General Deﬁnition of the Emotions, Expli-

cation; EIIIP11&S; EIIIP37Dem).

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

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260 Heidi Morrison Ravven

the object (EIIP16 and Cors 1 & 2; EIIP19; EIIP26; EIIP27. EIIAx3;

EIIP18S; EIIP17 & Cor & Dem).

5. Consious thought arises as self-reﬂection on body processes and body-

world interactions; thinking is (progressively) self-reﬂexive (EIIP22; EIIP23;

EIIP21S; EVP30).

6. Our mental and emotional processes are largely unconscious, especially the

etiology of our emotions; (EIIP12, EIIP28, Dem & S, and EIIP29 taken

together indicate that the mind has only unconsious knowledge of many of

its own processes. See also EIIIP2S and EIV Preface).

7. Bodily/aﬀective imitation and contagion is a primitive source of sociality

and thus the default position. The self as such is not atomic, but also it is

not only partly socially/environmentally constructed and relationally

enmeshed and constituted, but also identiﬁed (Ravven and Goodman,

2002)5(EIIIP21; EIIIP27; EIIIP31S). This is Spinoza’s famous doctrine of

the Imitation of the Aﬀects.

8. Value arises from the embodied pursuit of survival and well being through

homeostatic/homeodynamic somatic mechanisms (Ravven, 1989, p.3–32)6

governed by pleasure and pain — the conatus) (EIIP13 Lemma 5; EIVP39;

EIVP38 & Dem; EIVP18S; EIVP22Cor; EIIIP28).

9. Ethics, at core, is not about reasoning from principles 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 analysis 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 itself, i.e.,

into one’s aﬀective experience of beneﬁt and harm (what we refer to today as)

more rational, ﬂexible, responsive, and long term perspectives, thereby tran-

scending our more automatic and primitive response repertoires. It also consists

in incorporating into our self-boundaries an initially primitive aﬀective

identiﬁcation with others, in the automatic process Spinoza calls the Imitation

of the Aﬀects, which can be reﬂectively transformed into an empathy that

extends more widely, ﬁnally encompassing the entire natural and social

universe (EIIIP39S; Cf. EIIIP9S; See also EIIIP51S; EIVP8; EIVP14; EIVP7

& Dem; EIIIP27; EIIIDef 3; EVP3Cor; EVP42; EVP35Cor; EVP30).

10. Language is imaginative and uses (metaphorical and other) images based in

and on the body (EIIP49S).

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 261

11. Faculty psychology is wrong; the mind is not modular but integrated

(EIIP48S).

12. There are primary and secondary emotions. The primary are universal in all

human beings and governed by the conatus for survival and homeodynamic

stability, whereas the secondary vary according to individual and culture and

happenstance. The secondary are constructed from the primary plus imagina-

tive associations reﬂecting personal history and cultural location (EIIIP11S;

EIIIP15; EIIIP56&Dem; EIIIP51S; EIIIP57&Dem; EIIIP46).

The evidence from the cognitive and aﬀective neurosciences

Lakoﬀand Johnson’s “Philosophy in the Flesh”

One arena of support for Sinoza’s account of the mind comes from the work of

second generation cognitive scientists. Spinoza’s understanding of our rational

capacities as embodied rather than independent, which he developed as a

critique of Cartesian mind-body dualism, anticipates Lakoﬀand Johnson’s

conclusions from recent cognitive science. Philosophy in the Flesh is thus the ﬁrst

source of the empirical evidence that supports a philosophical turn from

Cartesian assumptions and toward Spinozist ones. In addition to Lakoﬀand

Johnson, we ﬁnd a second arena of support for many of the Spinozist points

enumerated above in aﬀective neuroscience. Both the work of one of the

founders of aﬀective neuroscience, Antonio Damasio, and Damasio’s assess-

ment of the state of the ﬁeld in his The Feeling of What Happens, bear out the

core of Spinoza’s account of the emotions and of the origin of value. They do so

to such an extent, in fact, that Damasio himself has come to see his work and

also the general thrust of the ﬁeld as anticipated by Spinoza! The third book in

Damasio’s trilogy to bring his discoveries and those of other aﬀective neuro-

scientists before the general public is entitled Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow,

and the Feeling Brain (Harcourt. 2003).I have decided not to discuss this book

in this context despite its promising title because I believe that Antonio

Damasio may have backtracked a bit from what I see as his more radically

Spinozist psychophysical monism in The Feeling of What Happens. He seems in

this book to attribute to Spinoza a rather cognitivist account of the emotions in

which independence from the grip of the passions occurs via a kind of cognitive

therapy that can override the bodily aﬀects in a voluntarist manner (Ravven, 2003).

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262 Heidi Morrison Ravven

Finally, there are also telling discoveries, especially those of Giacomo

Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues, in the neural basis of emotional

contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and

intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted

in the mechanism to which he called attention and which he identiﬁed as

aﬀective imitation. This is the third domain of contemporary research that

Spinoza’s theory of the emotions anticipated.

Spinoza anticipated many of the conclusions that George Lakoﬀand Mark

Johnson draw from recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The

Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999). This

work attempts to initiate a revolution in contemporary philosophy in the light

of a body of recent discoveries in cognitive science. Lakoﬀand Johnson contrast

the assumptions of Anglo-American analytic philosophy over the past century

with the developing consensus in cognitive science. They argue that the

evidence now strongly suggests that analytic philosophy has been mistakenly

committed to the position that the mind is disembodied in important ways.

It is the [analytic] view that the contents of mind, the actual concepts, are not

crucially shaped or given any signiﬁcant inferential content by the body. It is

the view that concepts are formal in nature and arise from the mind’s capacity

to generate formal structure in such a way as to derive further, inferrred,

formal structures. (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.37)

Analytic philosophy, of course, does not deny that the body is necessary for

there to be a mind or that neurons carry out the thinking processes. What it

denies is that thinking is given any signiﬁcant content by the body. Instead,

“conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain that just

happens to reside in a body” (37) but there is little or nothing in the body that

actually informs concepts. In thus positing a radical diﬀerence between percep-

tion and conception (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.37), analytic philosophy is in

keeping with the modern philosophical tradition, and merely develops further

the Cartesian dualistic conception of the human person as well as Kantian

notions of human autonomy and the independence of reason, and hence of

morals, from the body and from desire. But second generation cognitive

scientists, they say, have discovered strong evidence that all these basic tenets of

analytic philosophy are false. Lakoﬀand Johnson call for “an empirically

responsible philosophy” (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.3) that brings to bear

empirical evidence on philosophical claims largely considered up to now

amenable only to reasoning and argument. Even ethics can and ought to be

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 263

considered empirically, they insist. Toward the end of the book Lakoﬀand

Johnson oﬀer an extended treatment of how human beings actually think about

moral issues. “Every aspect of second-generation cognitive science,” they say, “is

at odds with the account of reason that Kant requires [for his moral theory],”

namely, that reason functions independently of the body overridingdesire and the

aﬀects — a radicalization of Descartes’ position (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.438).

Lakoﬀand Johnson suggest that recent cognitive science builds upon three

major discoveries: First, that the mind is embodied in the sense that “reason is

shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable

details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the speciﬁcs of our everyday

functioning in the world” (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.4). Thinking develops

from our sensory motor experience and neural structures toward higher cortical

areas (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.4). Second, reasoning, far from being literal,

operates by means of metaphors from bodily experience. Inference is body-

based and metaphorical, and hence our concepts are largely metaphorical and

imaginative (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.3). Also, because reason is body based,

it is not dispassionate but emotionally laden. Finally, the third discovery is that

thought is predominantly unconscious. The “unconsious thought [that] shapes

and structures all conscious thought” (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.13) includes

“all our automatic cognitive operations, …[and] all our implicit knowledge.”

“All of our knowledge and beliefs are framed in terms of a conceptual system

that resides mostly in the cognitive unconscious.” It “shapes how we conceptu-

alize all aspects of our experience” (Lakoﬀ& Johnson, 1999, p.13).

Spinoza anticipated all three major discoveries of second generation

cognitive science in at least rudimentary ways and he went on to rethink

philosophy, in large part contra Descartes, on their basis. Lakoﬀand Johnson’s

point, that the body shapes thinking, is captured in Spinoza’s tenet that the

body is the ideatum of which the mind is the idea, i.e., thought is the concsious-

ness of the body, the body made conscious (Spinoza, #2).7As a result, all

thinking is aﬀective and involves somatic images from which it cannot be

detached at any level. Their argument for the evolutionary character of thought,

that is, that it builds self-reﬂexively upon perception and always retains its

bodily and perceptual basis, is captured in Spinoza’s understanding of bodily

images and thinking as the self-reﬂexivity of the mind upon those images and

always with associated images (Spinoza, #5). The bodily basis of thinking, the

images, are never transcended or left behind but always reconstructed and

restructured, as we ﬁnd in Ethics V when Spinoza writes at length about the

reordering of images. Spinoza captures the metaphorical character of language

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264 Heidi Morrison Ravven

in his claim that language is imaginative, although he doesn’t anticipate the full

range of how the metaphorical character of thinking operates, focusing primari-

ly on the associative (personal and cultural) character of thinking and its

symbolic character, and also its incorporation of memory (#10). Spinoza also

believed that our categories are imaginatively constructed, and he lays out in

detail (EIIP40S1) the way categories arise imaginatively from body experience.

Finally, he is acutely aware that our motivations are unconscious (Spinoza, #6).

He is not fully aware of the full range of the cognitive unconscious, but the

current understanding of it is completely consistent with his theory and point

of view. Philosophic and scientiﬁc thinking, according to Spinoza, can and

ought to inform imaginative metaphor with a rigorous and inﬁnitely expanding

delineation of causes. The mind never transcends its imaginative basis but

instead ideally puts it in the service of knowledge and reason.

Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio (1997) identiﬁes “the central issue in the neurobiology of

emotions” as “the long-standing controversy over the role of the body in the

processing of emotions.” He locates emotions in the body as well as in the

brain. “ 3People probably have both body-loop and as-if-body-loop mecha-

nisms to suit diverse processing conditions,” Damasio writes. “The critical

point,” he goes on, “is that both mechanisms are body-related.” Damasio

concludes that “the combination of animal and human studies will eventually

reveal … the continuity of processes that begin with a triggering mind stimulus,

proceed to emotional responses and to their sensory representation, and

conclude with the conscious readout known as feelings.” Damasio’s break with

(once) standard cognitive and neuroscience is ﬁrst in treating emotions as an

object of study at all, and second, in locating emotion in the body as well as the

brain. And his third break from the standard view is suggested by Daniel

Dennett. Dennett (Dennett, 1995) calls the conclusion that more primitive

brain regions become the basis for higher operations, for rational thinking, a

“major implication” of Damasio’s research and one that is “underappreciated.”

He quotes the ﬁrst book in Damasio’s trilogy, Descartes’ Error, p.128: “Nature

appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the appara-

tus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.” Hence Damasio’s

account, although based in the body and avoiding free ﬂoating rules of mental

operation, is not reductionist either somatically, neurophyhsiologically, or

materially. The mind is embodied but not epiphenomenal to either the body or

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 265

to primitive brain functions. He puts it precisely: “the dependence of high

reason on low brain does not turn high brain into low reason”8— or, we might

add, into no reason at all.

That is to say, consciousness, higher cortical mental processes, and reﬂexive

thought are real — have causal eﬃcacy — and they bestow evolutionary

advantage. Lakoﬀand Johnson and Damasio are clearly in agreement on this

point as is Jaak Panksepp, the major investigator of the neurobiology of both

human and animal emotion (Panksepp, 2002). Lakoﬀand Johnson, as we saw

above, emphasize the bodily basis in perception of conception, especially of

category formation. Lakoﬀ’s discoveries in the metaphorical character of

thinking provide evidence from a diﬀerent set of body-brain mechanisms for

the claim that higher mental processes use and build upon the mechanisms of

the lower, and Panksepp provides evidence from animal studies. So, on the one

hand, Damasio (and Lakoﬀand Panksepp) avoid the Cartesian Scylla of the

computational model of the independence of mind from shaping by the body; and

on the other, they avoid the Charybdis of a materialist reductionism that maintains

the epiphenomenalism of consciousness, and hence of all thinking and emotion

(Harnad, 2001, vol. 21).9(We might say that they avoid the Cartesian danger of

splitting body and mind and then oscillating between the two as to which is really

“real.”) Thought is embodied; it is ﬁrst and foremost about the body.

Thus three basic conclusions of Damasio’s research were anticipated by

Spinoza, namely, the attempt to establish a science of the emotions; the claim

that the mind “minds” the body and builds upon that basis through the

reﬂexivity of thinking; and the claim that thinking processes build upon and

with bodily processes (images and homeostatic mechanisms — the latter is

Spinoza’s conatus and ratio, #8). Three additional Spinozist anticipations now

come into play in Damasio’s account, the complete aﬀectivity of thinking, the

identity (or perhaps, overlap, for Damasio) of thought and emotion,and also the

primarily self-focus of emotions (Spinoza, ##1, 2, and 3). Emotions areabout the

body, about the self. Let’s turn to Descartes’ Error to see how all this ﬁts together.

“Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain”

Antonio Damasio’s major thesis in his ﬁrst book for the general public,

Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, is the aﬀectivity of

thought. Damasio reports that he had come to the conclusion that all thinking

is aﬀectively laden, having ﬁrst accepted the standard notion of the separation

of reason from the emotions (Damasio, 1994, p.xi). But as a result of his

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266 Heidi Morrison Ravven

experience with patients whose neurological defect kept their reasoning power

intact whereas their emotions were severely truncated, he changed his mind.

For he discovered that, oddly enough, those with injury to their ability to

experience emotions but not to their cognitive capacties were incapable of the

kind of rational decision making (including ethical decisions) and the carrying

out of those decisions that philosophers standardly (and wrongly) ascribe to

reason and thinking alone. Rational decision and action, he concluded, require

emotion and cannot take place in its absence. “Feeling,” he realized, “was an

integral component of the machinery of reason” (Damasio, 1994, p.xii). To say

that feeling has a strong role to play in reason is to claim not only the aﬀectivity

of thought but also the incorporation into thought of the regulatory mecha-

nisms that drive emotions. Emotions are not merely feelings, but “expressions”

of the “mechanisms of biological regulation” (Damasio, 1994, p.xii). It is thus

the feedback loops of biological regulation that are operative in reason through the

infusion of it with emotion (Spinoza ## 1, 3, 8). Damasio thus proposes that:

Human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many

levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center. Both “high

level” and “low level” brain centers, from the prefrontal cortices to thehypothala-

mus and brain stem, cooperate in the making of reason. The lower levels in the

neural ediface of reason are the same ones that regulatethe processingof emotions

and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism’s survival.

In turn, these lower levelsmaintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually

every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations

that generate the highestreaches ofreasoning, decisionmaking, and,by extension,

social behavior and creativity. Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play

a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high

reason (Damasio, 1994, p.xiii, my emphasis).

Feeling, including emotion, has another important dimension besides its

aﬀectivity and its regulatory role. It is the feeling of the body (Spinoza #2). It is

“the direct perception of a speciﬁc landscape: that of the body,” Damasio

emphasizes (p.xiv). Feeling oﬀers us momentary glimpses into body states, into

salient parts of the body landscape (Damasio, 1994, p.xv). They oﬀer us “a

glimpse of the organism in full biological swing, a reﬂection of the mechanisms

of life itself as they go about their business” (Damasio, 1994, p.xv). And ﬁnally,

feelings are not isolated and merely consecutive, but have associations with

objects to which they are connected through temporal proximity and the recall

of memory. “Because the sense of the body landscape,” Damasio writes, “is

juxtaposed in time to the perception or recollection of something else that is

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 267

not part of the body — a face, a melody, an aroma — feelings end up being

‘qualiﬁers’ to that something else.” Feelings connect the external world to

internal body states (Spinoza #4).10

Moreover, the particular state of the body, positive or negative, depends on

its state of pleasure or pain, and also helps determine the style and adequacy of

the thinking — quickly operative and fecund, or sluggish and impoverished,

respectively (Spinoza #3).

The qualifying bodystate, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by

a correspondingthinking mode: fast moving and idea rich when the body-stateis

in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow moving and repetitive,

when the body-state is veers toward the painful band (Damasio, 1994, p.xv).

So it is not only feeling and emotion whose primary object is the body, but

thinking itself is about the body — as it was for Spinoza. For “the mind had to

be ﬁrst about the body, or it could not have been” (Damasio, 1994, p.xvi). “Our

very organism,” Damasioproposes, and not “some absolute external reality is used

as the ground reference for the constructions we make of the world around us and

for the construction of the ever-present sense of subjectivity that is part and parcel

of our experiences”(Damasio, 1994, p.xvi). “On the basis of the ground reference

that the body continuously provides,” the mind must be ﬁrst about the body, but

“can then be about many other things, real and imaginary” (Damasio, 1994, p.xvi)

(Spinoza ##2, 4). Damasio’s research suggests precisely the theory that Spinoza

adumbrated! Damasio’s account of emotion, of how it arises and what it signiﬁes,

is very close to Spinoza’s, even eerily so (##2, 3, & 4)!

Descartes’ Error focuses on three main themes. Piero Scaruﬃ, (1999) the

Italian cognitive scientist, identiﬁes them succinctly as follows:

1. Human reason depends on the interaction among several brain systems rather

than a single brain centre. 2. Feelings are views of the body’s internal organs.

Feelings are percepts and they are as cognitive as any other percept. 3. The mind is

about the body: the neural processes that are experienced as the mind are about

the representation of the body in the brain. …the mind derives from the entire

organism as a whole. The mind reﬂects two types of interaction: between the

body and the brain, and between them and the environment (my emphasis).

The ﬁrst theme elaborates and provides evidence for Spinoza’s #11, the second

for ##1, 2, 3, and the third for ## 2, 4, 5.

In maintaining that “the background state of the body is monitored

continuously” (Damasio, 1994, p.153), Damasio makes a distinction between

feeling and emotion:

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268 Heidi Morrison Ravven

The process of continuous monitoring, that experience of what your body is

doing while thoughts about speciﬁc contents roll by, is the essence of what I call

a feeling. If an emotion is a collection of changes in body state connected to

particular mental images that have activated a speciﬁc brain system, the essence of

feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental

images that initiated the cycle. In other words, a feeling depends on the juxtaposi-

tion of an image of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the

visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody (Damasio, 1994, p.145).

This is similar to the account anticipated by Spinoza. An ongoing (background)

monitoring is implicit in Spinoza’s account insofar as the identity of body and

mind entail that bodily images are ever occurrent and accompanying even when

images are also being rearranged through reﬂexive cognitive processes. Thus

Spinoza proposes that:

Whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the human mind [i.e.,

the human body] is bound to be perceived by the human mind; i.e., the idea of

that thing will necessarily be in the human mind. That is to say, if the object of

the idea constituting the human mind is a body, nothing can happen in that

body without its being perceived by the mind (EIIP12).

Emotions are aﬀections of the human body and the ideas of those aﬀections,

Spinoza says (EIIP22) and in (EIIP19): “The human mind has no knowledge of

the body, nor does it know it to exist, except through ideas of the aﬀections by

which the body is aﬀected.” Moreover (EIIP26): “The human mind does not

perceive any external body as actually existing except through the ideas of

aﬀections of its own body.”

Spinoza, like Damasio, locates the link between body and mind, and

between emotion and cognition, in images, images arising from and in the

body. In fact, contemporary neuroscience helps us understand how images can

be bodily, a claim that Spinoza makes that on the face of it seems strange and

even a category mistake. Spinoza writes in (EIIP17S) (#2), that he “assign[s] the

word ’images’ to those aﬀections of the human body the ideas of which set forth

external bodies as if they were present to us, although they do not represent

shapes.” The bodily image, the concept or idea of it, and the emotion are barely

distinguishable intellectually — Spinoza in fact calls them one entity (see

below) — and whenever one tries to deﬁne one, the entire constellation enters

in. The idea is distinguishable as non-pictorial and reﬂexive, a reﬂexivity that

characterizes and constitutes thinking but which remains linked to bodily

images, which are induced either directly or via Spinoza’s version of what

Damasio calls the “as if” loop. Spinoza proposes an “as if” type mechanism

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 269

when he writes that the imagination reproduces the somatic state created by an

initial association of emotion and an occasioning impinging object or state of

aﬀairs when it is recalled from memory (e.g., IIP18Dem, Spinoza #4d). For

Spinoza, body and mind, the idea of the body and the idea of the idea, are one

and the same — “the idea of the body and the body itself — that is mind and

body — are one and the same individual thing, conceived now under the

attribute of Thought and now under the attribute of Extension. Therefore the

idea of the mind and the mind itself are one and the same thing, conceived

under one and the sameattribute, namely, Thought” (EIIP21S). One important

implication of this point is the cognitive character of emotion along with its

bodily character. The usual distinctions simply don’t apply or work.

So too, Damasio: “The factual knowledge required for reasoning and

decision making comes to the mind in the form of images” (Damasio, 1994,

p.96). Perceptual images are formed from the varied sensual modalities. “Those

neural representations must also be correlated with those which moment by

moment constitute the neural basis for the self” (Damasio, 1994, p.99).

Moreover, “feelings” Damasio contends, “are just as cognitive as any other

perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral-cortex processing as any

other image” (italics in the original, Damasio, 1994, p.159).

To be sure, feelings are about something diﬀerent. But what makes them

diﬀerent is that they are ﬁrst and foremost about the body, that they oﬀer us

the cognition of our visceral and musculoskeletal state as it becomes aﬀected by

preorganized mechanisms and by the cognitive structures we have developed

under their inﬂuence. Feelings let us mind the body. …They let us mind the

body ‘live,’ when they give us perceptual images of the body, or ‘by rebroad-

cast,’ when they give us recalled iimages of the body state appropriate to certain

circumstances, in ‘as if’ feelings (italics in the original; Damasio, 1994, p. 159).

What Damasio calls the “as if” loop plays an important role in both his and

Spinoza’s account of emotions. Damasio here provides the empirical evidence

from neurobiology for what Spinoza describes as imaginative “association” and

associative memory and Damasio calls “juxtaposition” (Damasio, 1994, p.159).

Damasio’s Juxtaposition or Spinoza’s Association accounts for the aﬀective

valence, our sense of the value, of external objects. They have positive or

negative value for us because they are associated with particular body states and

the feelings (pleasure or pain) we experience as expressive of those body states

— as Spinoza predicted! Association/Juxtaposition is also the source of ethical

feelings, Damasio suggests, a source analogous to Spinoza’s conatus. Both

accounts locate the source of value in the basic functional state of the body, self-

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270 Heidi Morrison Ravven

monitored aﬀectively as enhanced or diminished, pleasurable or painful, as

objects and states of aﬀairs aﬀect it.

Feelings oﬀer us a glimpse of what goes on in our ﬂesh, as a momentary image

of that ﬂesh is juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so

doing, feelings modify our comprehensive notion of those other objects and

situations. By dint of juxtaposition, body images give to other images a quality

of goodness or badness, of pleasure or pain (Damasio, 1994, p.159).

Moreover, Damasio, like Spinoza, points out that these associations or juxtapo-

sitions are not one time aﬀairs but enter into memory and have an ongoing

inﬂuence. “Although the external bodies by which the human body has once

been aﬀected may no longer exist,” Spinoza writes in the Demonstration to

IIP17C, “the mind will regard them as present whenever this activity of the

body is repeated.” Spinoza’s “association” and Damasio’s “as if loop” suggest

how experience is incorporated into emotional memory. “In numerous

instances,” Damasio writes, “the brain learns to concoct the fainter image of an

‘emotional’ body state, without having to reenact it in the body proper. …There

are thus neural devices that help us feel ‘as if’ we were having an emotional

state, as if the body were being activated and modiﬁed” (Damasio,1994, p.155).

Although Spinoza doesn’t realize that these states may not be exactly the same

body state as originally engaged but weaker versions (Damasio, 1994, p.156),

they nevertheless play exactly the role that Spinoza assigned to them:

As if devices would have developed while we were growing up and adapting to

our environment. The association between a certain mental image and the

surrogate of a body state would have been acquired by repeatedly associating

the images of given entities or situations with the images of freshly enacted

body states (Damasio, 1994, p.156).

Spinoza’s version (IIP28) is this: “If the human body has once been aﬀected by

two or more bodies at the same time, when the mind afterwards imagines one

of them it will straightway remember the others too.” Spinoza concludes in the

scholium that we can now “clearly understand what memory is. It is simply a

linking of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body, a

linking which occurs in the mind parallel to the order and linking of the

aﬀections of the human body.”

Damasio proposes that the “as if” loop is not “a ﬁxed repertoire of emotion-

al/feeling patterns which would not be modulated by the real-time, real-life

conditions of the organism at any moment” (Damasio, 1994, p.158). Instead,

“the body landscape is always new and hardly ever stereotyped.” Thus not all

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 271

our feelings can be of the “as if” type, he says. Damasio proposes that the

relation between “body signals and signals about the [external] entity causing

the emotion” may occur through activity in “convergence zones … by means of

reciprocal feedforward and feedback connections … maintained with their

source of input” (Damasio, 1994, p.162). He further maintains that his account

makes clear that the chemical account of emotions is insuﬃcient to understand

them. The reason is that the neural account identiﬁes the associative links

between body and experience as necessary for understanding emotions, an

understanding that we now realize cannot be adequate if it is reductively

materialist as is the strictly chemical account.

The Somatic-Marker Hypothesis

In Descartes’ Error, Damasio introduces the Somatic-Marker Hypothesis: it is

that the “mind is not a blank at the start of the reasoning process” that results

in decision making but instead “is replete with a diverse repertoire of images,

generated to the tune of the situation [one is] facing, entering and exiting …

consciousness in a show too rich … to encompass fully” (Damasio, 1994,

p.170). Each of the possible options available for choice is presented in a set of

images that carries with it aﬀective valence, an associated feeling tone that

“marks” the image. Damasio proposes that:

When the bad outcome connected with a givenresponse option comesinto mind,

however ﬂeetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Because the feeling

is about the body, I gave the phenomenon the technical termsomatic state…;and

because it “marks” an image, I called it a marker (Damasio, 1994, p.173).

Thus it is associated aﬀective valences from personal or cultural history incor-

porated into one’s body images that mark one’s (potential) choices in this way.

Decision making is far from being a detached cost-beneﬁt analysis. Instead it is

an aﬀective process driven by one’s own history, one’s own associative memory

embodied in one’s personally and culturally particular secondary emotions, the

ones grafted upon the basic human emotional repertoire through experience

(so too, Spinoza #12).

In short, somatic markers are a special instance of feelings generated from

secondary emotions. Those emotions and feelings have been connected, by

learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios. When a negative

somatic marker is juxtaposed to a particular future outcome the combination

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272 Heidi Morrison Ravven

functions as an alarm bell. When a positive somatic marker is juxtaposed

instead, it becomes a beacon of incentive (Damasio, 1994, p.174).

Damasio’s account elaborates and speciﬁes Spinoza’s theory except that his list

of primary emotions versus the secondary associatively constructed ones is

slightly diﬀerent from Damasio’s. Even so, both accounts graft emotions onto

what Damasio terms “innate regulatory dispositions whose function is to ensure

survival of the organism.” These dispositions express themselves in an “internal

preference system [that] is inherently biased to avoid pain, [and] seek potential

pleasure.” Moreover, “achieving survival coincides with the ultimate reduction

of unpleasant body states and the attaining of homeostatic ones, i.e., functional-

ly balanced biological states” (Damasio, 1994, p.179). Damasio has provided

the neurological evidence for (and translation into contemporary scientiﬁc

terms) of Spinoza’s theory of the conatus as a bodily survival mechanism that

plays out as the maintenance of a homeostatic “ratio,” expressed as desire and

governed by pain and pleasure. The homeostatic mechanism, according to

Damasio, also incorporates into itself personal and cultural associations that

inform and can widely transform the pain/pleasure axis rather than operating

in an automatic, pre-programmed way — as Spinoza, too, envisioned it would

(#12). The reason is that both personal history and culture and socialization are

incorporated in roughly the same way, namely, through the factual or cultural

beliefs that inform the secondary emotions. Thus complex emotions, Damasio

says, arise as a result of the socialization process, with the result that “speciﬁc

classes of stimuli [become connected] with speciﬁc classes of somatic state”

(Damasio, 1994, p.177). Emotions are part of a somatic self-regulatory system

that incorporates environmental data, including the cultural, into itself —

precisely Spinoza’s theory, a theory that is body-based but not reductively

materialist. Our bodies, and not only our minds, in this way live and bring forth

repeatedly our memories, personal and cultural, as attitudes, as an internal

preference or motivational system embodying social conventions and even

ethical rules (Damasio, 1994, p.179).

“The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in

the Making of Consciousness”

In his second book, Damasio takes on one of the two diﬃcult problems of

consiousness, not the more standard problem of its representational character

but rather that of the sense of ownership we have of our internal states, percep-

tions, thoughts, etc. Building on Descartes’ Error, Damasio extends the account

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 273

of our bodily (self-)monitoring to describe how our neurochemical signalling

of the ever ongoing changes in our internal milieu is rendered into images and

mapped neurophysiologically as well as regulated through homeostatic/

homeodynamic feedback and feedforward loops that themselves become the

rudiments of a bodily self (a proto-self) upon which the feeling of having (and

owning) a moment-by-moment registering of the environment (a core self) can

architectonically be built, and ﬁnally upon that an experience of an ongoing and

ultimately historical self, extending into past and future (an autobiographical

self), can emerge. Consciousness solves the problem of “the mismatch between

the demands of the environment and the degree to which organisms can cope

with these demands by means of automated and stereoyped devices” (Damasio,

1999, p.303). For consciousness can provide novel images and integrate them

into its own survival mechanisms (Damasio, 1999, p.303).

The features that most distinguish Damasio’s position are the following: 1.

It develops a “multileved, interactive, distributed view of self identity”; 2. it

places an “emphasis on the bodily basis of the self”; 3. it entails an “insistence

on emotion as a necessary and key component of consciousness”; and 4.

proposes “that language is not necessary for the proto- and core selves, nor even

for much of our autobiographical sense of self,” and thus that language is at

least initially a translation of pre-linguistic images (Johnson, 2001).

Douglas F. Watt, Director of Neurology at Quincy Hospital in Massachu-

setts, proposes that “what is largely unique about Damasio’s formulation is the

hypothesis that the most basic foundations for self (the proto-self) are in

systems that represent the body, in the systems that face, as it were,permanently

inward” (Watt, 2000, p.74; italics in original) — a position that Damasio, we

have seen, shares with Spinoza. In addition, Watt sees as central Damasio’s

claim that what is represented in consciousness is neither the “basic self

structure” nor the object, but rather always and necessarily “the interaction of

the two” (Watt, 2000, p.73, italics in original). Damasio’s account diﬀers from

most others, Watt further suggests, in the rootedness of its explanations in the

body and in primitive brain areas upon which it builds rather than focusing

narrowly on higher brain areas and on conscious and higher thinking. “Most of

the current concepts about self … centre on high level and consciously accessi-

ble representation of self in cortex and pre-frontal systems.”

In contrast with the dominant view, Damasio insists (Watt, 2000) that “the

notion of self in its most primitive and basic foundations in the brain has to be

unconscious, and mostly subcortical, and deeply grounded in the brainstem.”

This position is consistent with those of the neuroscientists Metzinger and

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274 Heidi Morrison Ravven

Panksepp. Metzinger’s research suggests (Watt, 2000) that body images capture

primitive levels of sensory-motor re-entry, and Panksepp’s research gives further

evidence of “the likely hierarchy of self systems in the brain, and the likely depen-

dence of cortex on subcortical systems” (Watt 2000, 73–74). This view of the self

emerges from The Feeling of What Happens (henceforthFWH)11 (Watt 2000):

[Damasio] makes the key point that in the shifting sands of sensory representa-

tions, the most stable anchor for a continuous self is in these dedicated

homeostatic systems, whose job is intrinsically to keep basic physiological body

ﬂuctuations within the narrow parameters required for the maintenance of life.

Because of this stable anchor for the ‘proto-self’ the brain has both a biological

and dynamical representation for the state of the organism, not the consious state,

but the state of the body in the deepest possible sense. The proto-self is deeply

unconscious in his scheme, because it is a ‘ﬁrst order mapping’ as he calls it.

But these systems project to other systems performing ‘second order

mappings’, by which Damasio means a joint mapping of the proto-self, a

mapping of the object and a mapping of changes in the proto-self being

initiated by the interactions with the object. These second order mappings

(forming the basis for a core self and ‘core consciousness’) in turn inﬂuence the

higher systems in the cortex that map the object in greater detail, enhancing the

salience of any sensorimotor mappings relating to both the interaction with

and the perception of the object (my italics, Watt, 2000, p.74).

Core consciousness derives from the mapping of self-object interactions and is

preverbal but grasped in images. It requires the continual updating of the core

self, “which is based on these second order mappings of changes in the state of

the organism generated by the interaction with the object, and also the essential

ability to generate images of the object in any sensory modality” (Watt, 2000,

pp.74–75). Objects are mapped as aﬀectively laden images deriving their

emotional charge from their positive contribution to, or interference with, the

urge for survival instantiated in the mechanisms of homeodynamic stability.

Higher levels of consciousness, the third level of the self — for example, the

extension of self into past and present, conscious thinking, language, complex

secondary emotions, and, at the outer reaches, ethics and culture — are

extensions of core consciousness and of the core self, of its overlapping

mappings of the body and of its regulation of its interaction with the world to

maintain dynamic stability and maximal functioning. If we add Lakoﬀ’s

discoveries and theory into the Damasio hopper, we can now begin to explain

the metaphorical bodily basis of thinking and language in extended conscious-

ness’s symbolization of its lower layers of body and body-object mappings. The

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 275

reader is no doubt aware by now that Damasio’s account precisely (and

astoundingly) captures and conﬁrms Spinoza’s account of the emotions and of

the foundations of ethics (Spinoza, ## 1–5), ﬂeshing out the details of how it is

instantiated in neurobiology and providing the empirical evidence to substanti-

ate it. The crucial point is not merely that Spinoza anticipated contemporary

discoveries in the neurosciences, but that he reconceived ethics in terms of his

incipient neurobiological understanding and did so in a non-reductive way.

Furthermore, he had some understanding of how the cultural components are

integrated into and extend the biological, and he proposed how ethics could

best be reconceptualized to reﬂect its natural origins and realistic natural

human goals while also being reshaped to enable and facilitate the highest forms

of cultural and social achievements.

“Consciousness,” Damasio writes (Damasio, 1999, p.11), “from its basic

levels to it most complex, is the uniﬁed mental pattern that brings together the

object and the self.” The presence of the self in relationship to a given object in

its simplest form occurs as an image, “the kind of image,” Damasio proposes,

“that constitutes a feeling…. The presence of you is the feeling of what happens

when your being is modiﬁed by the acts of apprehending something” (Damasio,

1999, p.10). The empirical evidence shows that “some parts of the brain are free

to roam over the world and in so doing are free to map whatever object the

organism’s design permits them to map,” whereas other parts of the brain are

conﬁned to representing an organism’s own state. “They can map nothing but

the body and do so within largely preset maps” (Damasio, 1999, p.21). In

maintaining the body’s internal dynamic state within narrow parameters so as

to ensure its survival, the brain needs to detect minimal variations in the body’s

internal chemical proﬁle and to command actions aimed at correcting the

detected variations. So “the part of the organism called the brain holds within

it a sort of model of the whole thing” (Damasio, 1999, p.22). This model,

Damasio says, is “ 3a collection of brain devices whose main job is the automat-

ed management of the organisms’s life.” The information to accomplish this

task is provided by “neural maps which signal, moment by moment, the state of

the entire organism” (Damasio, 1999, p.23).

Consciousness, Damasio proposes, “is a device capable of maximizing the

eﬀective manipulation of images in the service of the interests of a particular

organism.” For consciousness brings to the organism the capacity to connect

inner regulation with the processing of images. It thus enables regulation to be

ﬁne tuned to the precise details of the environment (Damasio, 1999, p.24). “It

places images in the organism’s perspective by referring those images to an

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276 Heidi Morrison Ravven

integrated representation of the organism, and in so doing allows the manipula-

tion of the images to the organism’s advantage” (Damasio, 1999, pp.24–25).

This constitutes evidence for Spinoza’s notion of the conatus of the mind. We

become conscious, Damasio proposes, neither in the self-mapping nor in the

object mapping but instead precisely when we know that our own state has been

changed by the object and, when that object is salient, aﬀectively charged

(Damasio, 1999, p.25) — this is exactly what Spinoza says ideas grasp (## 4 &

5). One’s internal states “occur naturally along a range whose poles are pain and

pleasure,” whose aﬀective valence is then attributed to the juxtaposed (and

seeming cause of the) external (and sometimes internal) object or event. Our

internal states thus “become unwitting nonverbal signiﬁers of the goodness or

badness of situations relative to the organism’s inherent set of [survival] values”

(Damasio, 1999, p.30) — Spinoza’s #8. They deﬁne an embodied personal

point of view, an interested perspective from the standpoint of our body

(Damasio, 1999, p.127). Rudimentary consciousness further consists in the

narrative (or the history) of the chain of experience of our encounters with

objects and situations that acquire aﬀective valence for us in this way. It is thus

at bottom the story of our body’s experience in the world and it is preverbal but

capable of verbalization and endless self-reﬂexive elaboration (Damasio, 1999,

p.30). “The apparent self,” Damasio concludes, “emerges as the feeling of a

feeling” (Damasio, 1999, p.31), the earlier stages of which are unconscious.12

“There is good evidence in favor of the covert nature of emotion induction,”

Damasio writes (Damasio, 1999, p.43), a position that again precisely supports

Spinoza’s claim that we are not consciously aware of the causes of our emotions

(#6). Although Spinoza did not articulate the role of preverbal narrative in the

formation of consciousness, I have argued that he did attribute to primitive

thinking (imaginatio) a narrative and biographical, as well as a metaphorical,

character (Ravven, 2002).

Spinoza’s position, translated into the terms of neurobiology, seems to be

that ethics operates by juxtaposing a wider and rigorously scientiﬁc understand-

ing (mapping) of the world (“the object” in neurobiology) with the mapping of

our internal state (the self) according to the criteria of our homeodynamic

regulatory mechanisms of self-maintenance that guard the “selectively perme-

able wall that separates the internal environment from the external environ-

ment” (Damasio, 1999, p.137). That would entail, just as Spinoza predicted, the

correction and ﬁlling in of the associations that constitute secondary emotions

to make them more realistic and more rational in their embedded assessment

of their objects (causes). But in addition, Spinoza seems to claim that the

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 277

boundaries of the self that is mapped are transformed and not just the object. It

is the self that is changed, the boundaries of the self widened, as much as the

object comes to be reconceived in ethics, according to Spinoza. For we take as

our object the self and come to understand ourselves in the fullest, in fact,

inﬁnite causal relations, relations that not only embed us in our natural context

but deﬁne us. This theory, too, has some support in Damasio’s account of the

Extended Consciousness and the Extended Self. First, it seems entailed in the

description of core consciousness that the feedback and feedforward mecha-

nisms that Damasio delineates would allow for ﬂexibility in the mapping of the

self-maintaining mechanisms so that they integrate information from the object

mappings into the self-mapping through the higher order map that relates the

two. The higher level mapping of self and object would seem to be a dynamic

moment-to-moment awareness that also reﬂects past experiences and future

hopes. This seems to be what Damasio calls the Extended Self. “Extended

consciousness,” he writes (Damasio, 1999, p.196), “still hinges on the same core

‘you,’ but that ‘you’ is now connected to the lived past and anticipated future

that are part of your autobiographical record.” Furthermore,

the autobiographical self hinges on the consistent reactivation and display of

selected sets of autobiographical memories. In core consciousness, the sense of

self arises in the subtle, ﬂeeting feeling of knowing, constructed a new in each

pulse. Instead, in extended consiousness, the sense of self arises in the consis-

tent, reiterated display of some of our personal memories, the objects of our

personal past, those that can easily substantiate our identity, moment by

moment, and our personhood (italics in original; Damasio, 1999, p.196).

Hence the autobiographical self focuses upon itself as object: “The secret of

extended consiousness,” Damasio writes, “ 3is revealed in this arrangement:

autobiographical memories are objects, and the brain treats them as such …

Each of them generate[s] a pulse of core-consciousness, a sense of self-know-

ing”(Damasio, 1999, pp.196–97). So it would be an ever-transformed self-

mapping that encounters a more ﬁlled in and wider object-mapping.13 Damasio

outlines the reﬂexive development of biographical identity in the interplay of

self and object and self-taken-as-object in this way:

In short, extended consciousness emerges from two tricks. The ﬁrst trick

requires the gradual buildup of memories of many instances of a special class

of objects: the objects of the organism’s biography, of our own life experience,

as they unfold in our past, illuminated by core consciousness. Once autobio-

graphical memories are formed, they can be called up whenever any object is

being processed. Each of those autobiographical memories is then treated by

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278 Heidi Morrison Ravven

the brain as an object, each becoming an inducer of core consciousness, along

with the particular nonself object that is being processed. While relying on the

same fundamental mechanism of core consciousness — the creation of

mapped accounts of ongoing relationships between organism and objects —

extended consciousness applies the same mechanism not just to a single

nonself object X, but to a consistent set of previously memorized objects

pertaining to the organism’s history, whose relentless recall is consistently

illuminated by core consciousness and constitutes the autobiographical self.

The second trick consists of holdng active, simultaneously and for a substantial

amount of time, the many images whose collection deﬁnes the autobiographical

self and the images which deﬁne object. The reiterated components of the

autobiographical self and the object are bathed in the feeling of knowing that

arises in core consciousness (Damasio, 1999, pp.197–98).

Damasio thinks that, in its most basic form, extended consciousness is attribut-

able to primates, to baboons, chimps, and bonobos, and perhaps even to dogs

(Damasio, 1999, pp.198, 202). He suggests that there are “ 3covergence zones”

in the “higher level cortices and in some subcortical nuclei” where the memories

that are widely distributed are brought together and activated in a coordinated

manner, held over time by working memory and then treated as an object, a pulse

of core consciousness (Damasio, 1999, pp.221–22). Then particular objects trigger

not just the core self but simultaneously the autobiographical self-complex of

former objects now incorporated into self (Damasio, 1999, p.222).

Damasio proposes that at the pinnacle of consciousness is conscience

(Damasio, 1999, pp.230–233) and cooperation.

The imagetic level of “self in the act of knowing” is advantageous for the

organism because it orients the entire apparatus of behavior and cognition

toward self-preservation, as Spinoza would have wished, and eventually toward

cooperation with the other, as we must wish (Damasio, 1999, p.305).

Damasio is mistaken in thinking that Spinoza urged us toward self-preservation

but not toward cooperation as the latter’s ultimate expression. Spinoza’s

progressive identiﬁcation of the self with the natural cosmos in the highest kind

of knowledge, scientia intuitiva’s deepest and widest (scientiﬁc) grasp of self in

nature, extending to inﬁnity, in Damsio’s terms, the self-object autobiographi-

cal dialectic, is the ﬁnal ethical standpoint. It depends for its plausibility on the

possibility of our permeable boundaries including wider parts of the world (the

object) within its own urge to self-determination and stability, within its own

experience as object-become-self through the reﬂexivity of thought (Spinoza

#5), and ﬁnally through scientiﬁc self-understanding and social engagement. I

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 279

think we can safely conclude from the discoveries of neurobiology that, while

surely overstating his case, Spinoza may nevertheless have been on the right track

in his insistence that the conatus is the “sole basis for virtue,” that is to say, the

furthering of the homeodynamic stability of the self as it encounters the world is

the source of value and the centre from which all value extends outward.

To take a page from George Lakoﬀ, I think that our implicit assumptions

about the mind-body relation are in part driven by an image that is false and

leading us to false conclusions. We falsely think of cognition on the analogy of

seeing (as Spinoza explicitly warned us not to) and so we assume that our

thoughts, like our eyes, are focused outward and also that both the perception

and the processing are located in our heads. We think of our bodies as discrete

but our minds as opening the world to us through representation. This model

turns out to be largely false. Neurobiological evidence suggests, instead, that,

through an ongoing mapping of the self and interactions among diﬀerent self-

maps, we enact and reenact and also modify our relation to the environment,

physical and even social, encoding them mostly unconsciously in the body

through neural network-making and emotional associations. Thus our body is

“neurosymbolic” (Panksepp, 2003b) and our mind self-reﬂexively (and often ex

post facto) captures that ongoing enactment in overlapping mappings. Emo-

tions are the writing into the body of some of our experience in the world. The

immune system displays a diﬀerent kind of embodiment of our experience in

the world (as Gerald Edelman has proposed) and evolutionary change another.

The self thus constantly enacts the boundary between self and other as it aﬀects

us and we respond to it — a position that I have argued is Spinoza’s from his

earliest philosophical outpourings (Ravven, 1998). Thus the body, as Spinoza

anticipated, is as ﬂuid as the mind is in its ongoing incorporation of external

objects and states of aﬀairs in their eﬀects upon us and as harboring our own

access to pleasure (or avoidance of pain).

The body is ever changing in its responses (but within the ﬁxed limits set by

its homeodynamic mechanisms and according to the capacity for ongoing

ﬂexibility of various neural systems) and in the embodied (and for the most

part unconscious) memories of those responses. Moreover, not only does the

environment write itself upon us physically and mentally in our images and in

our unconscious, but we also extend beyond our bodies externally, incorporat-

ing parts of the environment into our self and then enact concurrently (and no

doubt in memory as well) the emotional states of others — a process that turns

out to be, as Spinoza predicted, automatic and unavoidable. So we do not just

see others as discrete and outside of us, but we are others, we identify with

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280 Heidi Morrison Ravven

others, in aﬀective contagion and enactment and also in the patterns of em-

bodiment of our socialization — a phenomenon that no doubt is part of what

underlies our basic hard-wired attachment processes.14 Some additional

evidence for the speciﬁcally social character of the relational self comes from a

diﬀerent quarter entirely, namely from primate studies. For Spinoza posits not

only the ﬂuid boundaries of the self but also the speciﬁcally social character of

the emotions. I am referring to Spinoza’s famous theory of the Imitation of the

Aﬀects. Spinoza regards the mechanism of emotional imitation as underlying

the most basic and primitive kind of sociality. This doctrine, too, has support

form the neurosciences. Aﬀective Imitation is the third pillar of Spinoza’s

ethics, in addition to the homeodynamic operation of the conatus and the ﬂuid

boundaries of the self. The imitation of the aﬀects is Spinoza’s biological and

psychological elaboration of Aristotle’s claim that man is a social animal. Both

Spinoza’s social psychology and his political theory have as their basis the

tendency of emotions to be held in common, to be contagious. This mechanism

promotes a primitive form of social cohesion and ethics, one that can be

transcended in favor of higher forms of sociality, in Spinoza’s estimation. Much

of Spinoza’s depiction of ethical development in the Ethics delineates a process

that Spinoza envisions as a transformation from the imitation of the aﬀects of

the most similar and local others to a more cognized empathic identiﬁcation

with others and with the larger environment through deep and rigorously

developed understanding.

Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues

The support for Spinoza’s doctrine of the Imitation of the Aﬀects comes largely

from primate studies (and some recent human studies) performed by Giacomo

Rizzolatti and his students and colleagues. The research in question concerns

mirror neurons and mirror systems in primates and also in humans. These are

“neurons that discharge both when [a monkey or human] performs a speciﬁc

action and when it observes another individual performing a similar action”

(Kohler, et. al., 2002, p.846). Hence there is “an action/observation/execution

matching system” (Buccino, et. al, 2001 p.400). This “mirror system” entails

that “when individuals observe an action, an internal replica of that action is

automatically generated in the premotor cortex” (Buccino, et. al, 2001 p.400)

but not of the type that necessarily itself induces action — although that can

happen, too or instead — but as a kind of internal reeanctment that enables

action recognition, and hence it is a form of immediate social cognition. And

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 281

emotion recognition and imitation is due to mechanisms of this kind

(Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L, Gallese, V., 2001, pp. 662 and 667). Evidence is

growing that this mirror system operates in human beings and not only in

monkeys based on analogous neural substrates (Buccino, et. al, 2001 p.400;

Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L, Gallese, V., 2001, p. 664; and Gallese, 2001, p. 37). The

human system “includes a rich repertoire of body actions,” and operates at the

preverbal level (Buccino, et. al, 2001 p.403), which suggests that its operation

is due to “direct matching” rather than “visual analysis of the diﬀerent elements

than form an action” (Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L, Gallese, V., 2001, p. 661; see

also, Kohler, et. al., 2002). Yet the purpose of this mirroring is not necessarily,

or primarily, to induce imitative action in the observer, although it can. Action

imitation is a very primitive response (operative, for example, in birds all taking

ﬂight in danger) and does not necessarily involve even understanding (action

recognition) of what is imitated, but nevertheless “creates an interpersonal link

between subjects” (Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L, Gallese, V., 2001, pp.667–68). More

advanced forms of mirroring do not entail the actual imitation of the actions. For

“in conditions in which mirror neurons become active, hardly any imitation would

be useful” (Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L, Gallese, V., 2001, p.667).

The proposed relevance of this line of research to Spinoza’s Imitation of the

Aﬀects and his conjectures about higher forms of empathic sociality emerges in

Vittorio Gallese’s analysis, in his article, “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis”

(Gallese, 2001), of the implications for social cognition of the discovery of

mirror systems. Gallese proposes here a new answer, derived from recent

discoveries in research on primate brains, to the standard philosophical

problem and even conundrum of how we can know other minds and come to

understand others’ intentions. According to classical cognitivism, an account

based on the presupposition that the mind is “a functional system whose

processes can be described in terms of informational symbols according to a set

of formal syntactic rules,” “the understanding of other minds is conceived solely

as a predictive, inferential, theory-like process” (Gallese, 2001, p.42). Recent

discoveries, however, call this account of the theory of mind into question,

suggesting instead that knowledge of other minds occurs at a more primitive

level and as a result of automatic mechanisms of mutual enactment in the body.

“Agency,” Gallese believes, “constitutes a key issue for the understanding of

intersubjectivity” (Gallese, 2001, pp. 33–34). Virtual enactment in observers

produces intersubjective understanding and emotion across individuals at the

level of the body itself rather than primarily at higher cognitive levels and in

conceptual systems that represent others to the self by inference across atomic

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282 Heidi Morrison Ravven

individuals. Gallese says that “the main aim of [his] arguments will be to show

that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities,

the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded

in the relational nature of action” (italics in original).

The evidence that Gallese cites in support of his alternative account of

intersubjectivity is a series of six neuron recording experiments carried out in

the 1990s, his own and those of others (Gallese, 2001, p.35), which are also

consistent with both earlier discoveries and the work of a number of other

neuroscientists including Damsio’s work on the “as if” loop of emotions

(Gallese, 2001, p.37 and Note 5). They discovered that “a particular set of

neurons, activated during the execution of purposeful, goal-related hand

actions, such as grasping, holding or manipulating objects, discharge also when

the monkey observes similar hand actions performed by another individual”

(Gallese, 2001, p.35). They called these neurons “mirror neurons.” Mirror

neurons require an interaction between an agent and an object to be activated,

and the agent can be human or monkey (Gallese, 2001, p.36). Even more

signiﬁcant was the ﬁnding that one third of the mirroring was exact, but in two

thirds of the mirroring there was a more general congruence instead, leading to

the conclusion that “they appear to generalize across diﬀerent ways of achieving

the same goal, thus perhaps enabling a more abstract type of encoding”

(Gallese, 2001, p.36). The motor schema of the observer enacts in an “as if”

pattern the motor schema of the actor. It is the same activation pattern in the

premotor cortex of both but only necessarily executed by the ﬁrst. Thus it is a

link embodied in the neurons of observer and observed in a goal oriented action

that creates a shared physical basis for mutual understanding. Gallese proposes

“that this link [between the observed agent and the observer] is constituted by

the embodiment of the intended goal, shared by the agent and the observer.” He

further suggests that “the embodiment of the action goal, shared by agent and

observer, depends on the motor schema of the action, and not only on a purely

visual description of its agent” (Gallese, 2001, p.36). Recent, albeit preliminary,

data also indicate that “an action observation/execution matching system exists

also in the posterior perietal cortex, possibly constituting part of a cortical

network for action recognition” more generally (Gallese, 2001, p.37). Since a

number of studies have shown that human beings also have the kind of “mirror

matching system” originally discovered in monkeys (Gallese, 2001, p.37).

Gallese suggests that “whenever we are looking at someone performing an

action, beside the activation of varioius visual areas, there is a concurrent

activation of the motor circuits that are recruited when we ourselves perform

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 283

that action” (Gallese, 2001, p.37). “Our motor system becomes active as if we

were executing that very same action that we are observing” (Gallese, 2001,

p.37). That is to say, “action observation implies action simulation” (italics in

original) (Gallese, 2001, p. 37). Our motor system “resonates” with the system

of an agent, engendering in us at the very least a kind of empathy and often

contagious behavior (Gallese, 2001, p.38). That is to say, we reproduce the

motivation of the acting other within ourselves.

Why do we do this? Why does our motor system produce mirroring across

individuals? Gallese suggests that this mechanism is instrumental in enabling

individuals to adapt to particular social environments. It is a form of social

cognition — I would call it even, or perhaps even more precisely, group

motivation: “The neuroscientiﬁc results here brieﬂy summarized,” Gallese

concludes, “seem to point to a crucial role played by action, in virtue of its

relational nature, in establishing a meaningful link between agent and observer”

(italics in original; Gallese, 2001, p. 39). The process is automatic, unconscious

and non predicative, Gallese points out, unlike the introspection and inference

model (Gallese, 2001, p.39 Note 9). Mirror neurons also seem to be involved in

the linking of actions and predictive outcomes in forward models, which

suggests that it originated as a mechanism to better control (and predict) one’s

own actions through motor equivalence in oneself. “Through a process of

‘motor equivalence’,” then, we can “predict the consequences of actions

performed by others” (Gallese, 2001, pp.40–41). Therefore, it would seem that

“action is the ‘a priori’ principle enabling social bonds to be established” (my

emphasis) and it happens without the observer theorizing about the other

person or using propositional attitudes to project oneself into the other’s world

(Gallese, 2001, p.40). The shared action (i.e., motivation) described occurs in

the body and between bodies, linking bodies, rather than in the mind consid-

ered independent of the body. The mind, on this analysis, reﬂects the inter-

subjectivity enacted in the (observer-actor) bodies rather than creates a cogni-

tive link between atomically discete, closed in bodies. Thus it is an embodied

form of empathy (or proto-empathy) that constitutes “our felt capacity to

entertain social relationships with other individuals, the ease with which we

‘mirror’ ourselves in the behaviour of others and recognize them as similar to

us” (Gallese, 2001, p.42). Gallese proposes to extend the concept of “empathy”

to explain all thebehaviors that enable us to establish a meaningful link between

ourselves and others Gallese, 2001, pp.42–43). In its basic form, he suggests,

empathy means that “the other is experienced as another being like oneself

through an appreciation of similarity” (Gallese, 2001, p.43). Most important,

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284 Heidi Morrison Ravven

Gallese believes that this mechanism expresses itself not only in mirrored actions

but in shared emotions, body schema (Gallese, 2001, p.44; Spinoza #7).

To capture the range of bodily and embodied experiences we share with

others, Gallese introduces the term “shared manifold of intersubjectivity”

(Gallese, 2001, p.44). Gallese cites Antonio Damasio’s account of “as if body

loops” to help us grasp the role of simulation mechanisms in both our own

recall of emotions and, he proposes, between individuals. The shared manifold

operates, he proposes, at three diﬀerent levels: at the top is “the phenomenol-

ogical level … responsible for the sense of similarity, of being individuals within

a larger social communtiy of persons like us”; in the middle is the functional

level consisting in the “as if” processes, the simulation routines enabling models

of others to be created; and at bottom is 3. the subpersonal level the neural

circuitry of mirroring that creates common body states (Gallese, 2001, p.45). In

conclusion, Gallese points out that “there is preliminary evidence that the same

neural structures that are active during sensations and emotions are active also

when the same sensations and emotions are to be detected in others.” So it

seems “that a whole range of diﬀerent ‘mirror matching mechanisms’ may be

present in our brain” in addition to the action simulation architecture ﬁrst

discovered. In fact, it “is likely a basic organizational feature of our brain”

(Gallese, 2001, p.46). Thus rather than representing an external world needing

powerful thought processes to grasp and represent, our understanding of others

begins within us, internal to our own bodies and to our experience of our own

bodies, rather than outside us as mysterious ciphers never truly to be grasped

but only reconstructed across an unbreachable chasm, as if we are the blind

man trying in vain to describe the elephant.

So perhaps in the Shared Manifold of Intersubjectivity we have a hint that

Spinoza might have been right after all (#9) even in what some have (mistaken-

ly) called his rational mysticism. It is his vision that the ethical task before us

begins with the Imitation of the Aﬀects, a primitive emotional contagion across

similars promoting what Spinoza calls the Group Mind. Then this most

primitive level of sociality can be transformed, via self-reﬂection and a complex

and broad understanding of our shared stake in the natural and social worlds,

into a universal empathic identiﬁcation. The several avenues of recent research

in aﬀective neuroscience and embodied cognitive science outlined in this paper

suggest that Spinoza’s ethical naturalism, rooted as it is in prescient proto-

biological and psychological theories, may indeed contribute to our reconceiv-

ing of ethics on a sound neuroscientiﬁc basis.

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Spinoza’s anticipation of contemporary aﬀective neuroscience 285

Notes

*!This essay, which is a condensed and revised version of a more extended analysis (Ravven,

<DEST"rav-n*">

in press STUDIA SPINOZANA), was written before the appearance of Antonio Damasio’s

third book, Looking for Spinoza (2003) and before Panksepp’s (2003) recent critical overview

that appeared in the last issue of this journal. It is possible that Damasio may have revised his

view from his second to his third book, toward a more dualist position than the strong

Spinozist monism evident in The Feeling of What Happens. The author’s analysis of the

position taken in Looking for Spinoza will be available in a forthcoming review (Ravven,

2003).

1. All quotations from the Ethics will be based on the Shirley translation, Baruch Spinoza: The

Ethics and Selected Letter, translated by Samuel Shirley, edited and introduced by Seymour

Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982) and will be cited in the form: E IV P3 Dem or E II

P13 S, i.e., Ethics Part IV, Proposition 3, Demonstration or Ethics Part II, Proposition 13

Scholium. All editions of Spinoza use the same format and so anyone picking up any edition

of the 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.

2. These initial paragraphs are emended from (Ravven, 2003).

3. As Lenn E Goodman succinctly puts it in his (unpublished) essay, “An Idea is not

something like a picture on a pad.”

4. Goodman writes tellingly on this point in “An Idea,” 1–2:

Spinoza’s bold proposal that our consciousness is the idea of the body is germane to what we

would call the mind-body problem … For it does not make the mind identical to the body

or require it to be a mere function of the body, whose every state is passively determined by

some prior body-state. Yet neither does is sunder the mind from the body … leaving the

body in free fall or the mind to ﬂoat untendered.”

5. My paper, (Ravven, 2002) is devoted to demonstrating the social character of the self,

according to Spinoza, at both the primitive level and at the highest levels of development

against the standard account of Spinoza as a philosophical atomic individualist and ethical

prudentialist and egoist. It is a claim I introduced in (Ravven, 1998) and I have explored its

historical philosophical roots in (Ravven, 2001).

6. For an extended treatment of Spinzoa’s psychology as a systems theory governed by

homeostatic/homeodynamic mechanisms see (Ravven, 1989).

7. All numbered points (e.g., #2, #3, etc., refer to this enumerated list of twelve points).

8. Damasio writes (Damasio, 1994, xiii) that “the dependence of high reason on low brain

does not turn high brain into low reason.”

9. Stevan Harnad (Harnad, 2001), cognitive scientist at the University of Southamption, UK,

faults Damasio for not taking a reductively materalist epiphenomenalist position on

emotion. Many reviews of the book presuppose either cognitivist or reductive materialist

assumptions and critique it from one of those dogmatic angles.

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286 Heidi Morrison Ravven

10. This is a position that Spinoza derived from Descartes (and aspects also from Hobbes)

but transformed in terms of his own philosophical account. It is the Spinozist version of the

theory that is conﬁrmed by Damasio’s research. See Ravven, 2002.

11. (Damasio, 1999 ) is abbreviated as FWH.

12. John Searle (Searle, 1998, p.76 and elsewhere) , proposes that what we mean by an

unconscious mental event, a seeming oxymoron, is that it is one that in principle can become

conscious. If that were not the case, it might be below consciousness but would not be

mental, like the mechanisms that regulate the levels of sodium in our blood, for example,

which are below our consciousness but not capable of becoming conscious to us.

13. If so, this would bear out Hegel’s understanding of the dynamic and mutually integrative

relationship between subject and object in The Phenomenology of Mind! We even see here

how Hegel’s thinking on this may indeed have emerged from the deepest understanding of

Spinoza! We see in both Spinoza and Hegel how philosophy can be built upon a neurobio-

logical basis and extend its insights upon that basis into both ethics and epistemology.

Spinoza’s coherence theory of knowledge or understanding also seems to be based on the

homeodynamic model of organic stability. The question thus arises whether this is merely a

metaphor based on the body (in Lakoﬃan terms) or whether that account is borne out by

the neurobiology of thinking. Does the survival value of thinking, for example, translate into

its coherence in the way Spinoza suggests it does insofar as it is driven by the conatus of the

mind? These and other similar questions await further exploration.

14. I am grateful to Douglas Watt for a helpful discussion (unpublished) of attachment

processes.

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