Spinoza defined eternity as the existence of eternal truth (a Platonic hangover) ... the opportunity to achieve inner peace and happiness ('Heaven on Earth'?)
‘Love and Wisdom’ – a review/essay of the book: “LOOKING FOR SPINOZA” by Antonio Damasio (Harcourt – 2003). © H. J. Spencer (July, 2017)
ABSTRACT Damasio, a world famous Neurologist, shares his two obsessions in this important book. Here, he goes beyond his earlier investigation of the power of emotions to influence human decisions into the more intangible but more influential areas of feelings, analyzed on the broad spectrum from joy to sorrow. As the views are based on reproducible, empirical findings they are difficult to ignore. The biological feelings are central to everyone’s viability (homeostasis) and are important to every person and even to broader societies. He rediscovers this foundational perspective in the writings of world-famous philosopher, Spinoza; one who was hugely influential to modern developments in western thinking but has retained his reputation for difficult reading. None-the-less, the numerous nuggets of wisdom make this a very important book for many people, especially the thoughtful ones. Damasio adds his personal interpretations of Spinoza’s radical philosophy to include the vital importance of love in our search for happiness, while acknowledging that we exist in a heartless universe. I enjoyed this book so much, it has gone straight onto my most recommended booklist of non-fiction.
SUMMARY FEELINGS Like so much that is central to our subjective lives, feelings have resisted examination by most scientists as it is difficult to objectify the evidence. Fortunately, digital technologies, like CT, PET and MRI machines have entered psychology, along with direct surgical analysis on conscious brain-injured patients These phenomena have been minimally understood since ancient times while we now dedicate massive resources today to manipulate our feelings with alcohol, drugs (medical and illegal), sex (real and virtual) and widely varied social and religious practices. Feelings, like our sense of personal awareness (also called consciousness) have remained elusive but now Damasio informs us of some of the latest exciting findings and thinking on this subject. He provides examples of rare, individuals with damage to certain locations in their brains, who are unable to feel compassion or even embarrassment when appropriate yet could feel happy, sad or fearful before injured. Others, with an injury in a different brain region were unable to experience fear yet could still feel compassion. Very specialized diseases can also provide insight into selective brain areas; rarely do all feelings disappear. There seems to be a one-way link from emotions to feelings, when an emotion could not be manifested then the corresponding feeling was lost. The opposite is not true: some patients who lost their ability to experience certain feelings still could express the corresponding emotions. This is seen that emotions are deeper and more fundamental than feelings. In contrast, all of the major functions of the mind, like perception, learning, memory and language, involve several large regions of the brain; even so, most regions in the brain are still highly specialized. Damasio believes that feelings are comparable to perceptions; some are activated by external situations but others are triggered by bodily changes. He even dares suggest that sexual desire shares much similarity with real bodily appetites like hunger and thirst. Since Damasio places memory at the center of our response system, he sees the differences here with how the memory associates a lot more wealth of personal data about desirables objects than our responses to non-extreme triggers stimulating hunger and thirst.
EMOTIONS Damasio easily distinguishes bodily reactions to sexual desires to more elevated attachments; he describes the impact of the two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin that are present when long term fidelity results from personalized strong attractions. Damasio admits that common usage compounds emotions and feelings but for the purpose of analysis, he separates the public displays of emotions from the feelings that usually stay private. Similarly, he distinguishes the private functions of the brain with our concept of mind, which is never observed (because it is the totality of internal processes on one integrated person). Damasio and I both reject Descartes’ distracting dualist theory of two distinct substances (body and spirit), with an unexplained mysterious inter-connection. None-the-less, most occurrences of emotion are actions or movements, so they are visible to others as they are seen in the face or in behaviors, while feelings are always hidden unless verbalized by the ‘feeler’. Admittedly, some components of the emotion process are not readily visible but can be ‘observed’ scientifically through hormonal assays and electro-physiological wave patterns. Many simply assume that the hidden is the source of the expressed. Damasio believes that emotions developed first because they were easier to implement in the physical body, even in animals with minimal brains. All living organisms (from amoeba to humans) are born with devices that automatically solve the basic problems of life; this innate and automated equipment of life governance he calls the homeostasis machine. At the lowest levels are found simple responses, such as approaching or withdrawing of the organism relative to some object; next increases in activity (arousal) or decreases in activity (quiescence); higher up, we find competitive or co-operative behavior. This may be described in a tree-like manner with behaviors near the treetop associated with pleasure (reward) or pain (negative or punishment). It is important to remember that the experience of pain or pleasure is not the cause of the pain or pleasure behaviors. Also, near the top are drives and motivations, such as hunger, thirst and sex. Spinoza called them appetites, while desire was reserved for when we become driven by these appetites. Beyond survival, the goal of homeostasis is to achieve a state of well-being. All homeostatic processes govern life at all times, in every cell in our bodies. When changes are detected in the organism they are detected and actions taken in a way to create (or restore) the most beneficial situation for its own self-preservation and efficient functioning. Spinoza erected his whole system of ethics on this obvious intuition, he called this drive conatus (Latin for ‘striving’). Advanced life forms, like animals, “get the message” from either chemical molecules conveyed in the bloodstream or by electrochemical pulses transmitted along nerve pathways. All of this occurs within an organism, a material body limited by a boundary, defining the co-operative whole. Damasio has found it helpful to classify emotions-proper into three tiers: background, primary and social. Background emotions may be distinguished from moods (which are extended states sustaining a given emotion over long periods: hours, days or weeks). Classical background emotions occur within the immune system, the metabolism and our automatic reflexes. The primary (or basic) emotions include fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness and happiness. The social emotions include sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy gratitude, admiration indignation and contempt. Some species can simulate some emotional bodily states internally, as happens in the process of turning the emotion of sympathy into the feeling of empathy. Although separated for analysis, Damasio eventually recombines both feelings and emotions in their natural pairing.
THEORY Damasio’s major theoretical contribution is his theory that feelings are related to neural mappings of the whole body state in the brain. This theory was building on an original conjecture by world-famous American psychologist William James, that we feel emotions when we perceive changes in body states.
The biological hypothesis was that when feelings occur there is a significant activity in those small areas of the brain (like the cingulate cortex, the insula, the hypothalamus and brain stem nuclei) that receive signals from varied parts of the body (called the somato-sensing regions) and thus map the ongoing state of the organism. Interestingly, it was also found that changes in skin conductance always preceded the signal was being felt. The valence (positive or negative) of emotions were also reflected in the thinking parts of the brain (frontal cortex); the fluency of ideation is reduced in sadness and increased in happiness, as many have noticed. Sadly, these same areas are strongly activated when taking narcotics. Even bodily changes (‘shivers’) triggered by powerful music evoke similar brain responses. Pain awareness (iced hands and mild electric shocks) induced strong responses in the insula. The cingulate and insular cortex areas are very much engaged when people view erotic films; however only males (mysteriously) engage their hypothalamus while viewing these films. Feelings are seen here as the mental sensors of the organism’s interior, witnesses of our life, as it is being lived. There is also strong evidence that feelings, along with their causative appetites and emotions, play a decisive role in social behavior. Patients with brain lesions (destroyed tissue) that occur in areas necessary to processing emotions and feelings are usually not able to continue with their earlier normal life: all of them cease to be financially independent but they rarely become violent. It is not easy for these types of patients to determine who is trustworthy and disregard social conventions and ethical rules that they once followed without question. Worse, they lose their natural empathy; so effectively they are no longer independent human beings. Surprisingly, they remain intelligent in the sense of solving logical problems while retaining earlier high IQ scores.
BODY: BRAIN & MIND Modern neuroscience has identified deep sites in the brain that play major roles in reacting to emotional triggers, such as the amygdala, the hypothalamus and certain areas at the top of brainstem, which tie directly into nerves of the spinal column. These act like switching centers, which are triggered by activity elsewhere in the brain; when these centers fire they send activation signals to other sites. Many animal studies have shown that the amygdala is an important interface between visual and auditory emotional stimuli and the triggering of certain emotions, especially fear and anger. The hypothalamus is the master executor of many chemical responses central to many emotional reactions. Directly (or via the pituitary gland) it releases into the bloodstream chemical messengers that have dramatic impacts all over the body, such as serotonin or dopamine. When brain-damaged patients were facing social decisions they were failing to activate emotion-related memory that would have earlier helped them make the usual type of advantageous decisions, especially for situations involved strongly conflicting options and uncertainty of outcomes: anticipating future outcomes of actions is important in living an independent life. Even failure to understand regular facial expressions in others becomes a problem. Feelings help us solve nonstandard problems involving creativity, judgment and decision-making that require the manipulation of large amount of knowledge. The fact that many very intelligent people, such as Bertrand Russell, make a mess of their private lives shows that we need a lot more than data or intelligence in life. Only at that mental level of biological processing and in the full light of awareness is there sufficient integration of the now, the past and the anticipated future. Spinoza, a person of his time, still agreed that the old Greek idea of substance still had some validity; but unlike Descartes (and many moderns) with their mind-body dichotomy, Spinoza saw humans as only one substance – a better term today would be one system or organism, with many processes including those we call mental and spiritual. Damasio adds the useful thought that consciousness is the process whereby a mind is imbued with a reference to what we call ‘self’: a necessary construct for seeing ourselves as a single system. Mental phenomena have ben revealed as closely dependent on the operation of many specific systems of brain circuits; the mind is grounded in the ‘body-proper’ as its helps maintain all of the body.
SPINOZA Damasio, born in Portugal, not only has an intellectual interest in but also a shared cultural one with Spinoza, whose Sephardic ancestors lived in Portugal for several years before fleeing from religious persecution to Holland, where Baruch de Espinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam during Holland’s Golden Age to a very prosperous ex Portuguese merchant and an important personage in the DutchJewish community. An extremely intelligent child, well versed in Jewish intellectual traditions, the young Spinoza broke all these links to pursue an impoverished life of the mind, relying on patronage gifts and health-threatening lens grinding. He declined the professorship in philosophy at Heidelberg (when only 41) to preserve his independence and maximize his own time for study. His philosophical writings are now considered some of the most difficult in the western philosophical tradition. Much of his focus was in justifying ethics in a well-run society without invoking social or religious traditions, which did not enamor him in the eyes of his local communities. His central observation is that good actions are those that, while producing good for the individual via the natural appetites and emotions, do not harm other individuals. This is today a view that is shared with Damasio, as well as many thoughtful people. Spinoza was one of the first philosophers to suggest that happiness is the power to be free of the tyranny of negative emotions. Happiness is not a reward for virtue: it is virtue itself. Spinoza invented the recursive idea of an idea, which allowed relationships and symbols to be constructed. This includes the idea of the relationship between two other ideas – an object perceived and a body modified by this perception. Spinoza defined eternity as the existence of eternal truth (a Platonic hangover) rather than a continued physical existence over time (as many do). Thus, he did not believe in the immortality of any aspect of personality (such as the ‘soul’): this may have been one of the major reasons he was expelled (at age 24) from his religious community, as this was a Jewish heresy and unwelcome to most Christian believers too. At this time, he renamed himself in the universal Latin of scholars: Benedictus Spinoza. Spinoza eagerly agreed with Galileo that the universe could be described in the language of mathematics (I am not as convinced), so much so that he tried to construct his system of ethics (in The Ethics) in an axiomatic manner, much as Euclid proved his theorems of geometry. He built his system on what he believed were self-evident ontological, metaphysical and epistemic truths. This approach relies on the acceptance of these starting assumptions (axioms), such as the belief in the existence of God. The key to his whole system was the idea that there is only one substance in the whole universe (I see the electron playing this role) and that substance is conceived of as God as Nature. This foundational substance, he called the Monad, has infinitely many attributes but finite humans could only perceive Descartes’ infamous twins: extension (material reality) and thought (mental activity). Ironically, many see this scheme as abolishing Free-Will since every thing that happens is a necessary part or expression of the divine nature. Since everything is part of one reality there cannot be such a thing as ‘Evil’, we just fail to see the causal connections (a thorough-going Determinist) or as some Christians rephrase this: “God moves in mysterious ways.” These views were so controversial that his books were publicly burned (wisely, he deferred publishing the bulk of his writings until after his death). Few philosophers read him but even fewer (including Leibniz would not admit this) and certainly did not further comment on his thinking, as was the tradition in philosophy. For all his atheism, Spinoza did not shy away from religious terminology, in which he had been embedded. Later admirers, including Einstein, even saw him as “saintly”. Spinoza was the supreme rationalistic pantheist among Western philosophers and became a major inspiration of subsequent romantics, such as Wordsworth.
LIVING WELL Damasio acknowledges the cool rationality (Stoical) of Spinoza’s attitude to the cruel barbs of life but disagrees with his retreat from deep rewarding personal relationships. Both of us have been lucky in love (Damasio’s wife is even a colleague) and readily recognize the life-enhancing benefits of a loving relationship, rarely found by intellectuals, who spend so much time alone, fascinated by their research. Spinoza, like Bertrand Russell was emotionally scarred by the early loss of his mother. Love seems to need early nurturing from a loving mother. Spinoza was truly revolutionary in realizing the importance of one’s political environment to one’s personal happiness. This was the thrust of his masterpiece on ethics, recommending tolerant, fear-free democratic societies, with equitable laws, like he enjoyed in Holland and have become the model (at least, in theory) for most modern states. He admits that many people seek some clarity about the meaning of their lives, so they will turn to religion. Accordingly, Spinoza avoided threatening the religious beliefs of ordinary people (one reason he wrote in Latin). His attempts to immune himself by rationality alone from the severest feelings of loss resemble the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Vedantic Hinduism. Our intrinsic empathy readily is activated by the emotional threats of death, which most adults can imagine (at least some times). Spinoza’s intellect and study prevented him from too easily accepting the well-known narratives promising postmortem ego continuity and eternal rewards. Spinoza’s ideas of God eliminate traditional ideas of a provident God, conceived in the image of humans but this God neither punishes people for their bad behavior. When one fails to be less than kind to others, one punishes oneself (there and then) by denying oneself the opportunity to achieve inner peace and happiness (‘Heaven on Earth’?). Spinoza’s salvation is about repeated occasions of a genuine form of happiness that cumulatively make for a healthy mental condition. From a modern perspective, we can add seeking out beauty (such as great art), love and friendship and aiming to achieve a life that is well-balanced, well-tempered and well-intended, such as encouraging greater social justice (the wellbeing of others, especially the victims of life’s misfortunes). Retreating into focus on the self (‘modern individualism’) will certainly defeat these efforts to live well. Spinoza was central to the generation of rationalist philosophers and was the first great philosopher to follow Descartes – only to repudiate him in a way, only to become the orthodoxy in the 20th century. His detached, almost unaffected attitude, to the unimportance of our personal problems in the overall scheme of things has brought aid and comfort to many hard-pressed individuals, especially disciplined intellectuals. Spinoza recommends that people learn to accept natural events as necessary, in line with scientific understanding. For example, death and the break in our positive relationships cannot be prevented ; we should just accept the natural process. People must also learn to avoid the emotionally competent stimuli that can trigger negative emotions – passions such as fear, anger, jealousy, sadness. Instead, the individual should substitute emotionally competent stimuli capable of triggering positive, nourishing emotions. This is easier for the lucky few born with a cheerful disposition but difficult for the many people who suffer the traumas of depression. Spinoza repeats the ancient Stoic advice of building a tolerance for distress by mentally rehearsing emotional stimuli. He also recommended more people keep current with scientific discoveries of both biological and mental sciences. Damasio sees Spinoza’s approach as a means to making life meaningful and to make human society tolerable. The aim is to return us, through the use of blending feeling and reason, to the relative independence humans lost after we gained consciousness and autobiographical memory. Damasio is well-qualified to note Spinoza’s influence on researchers in the mind and brain sciences, especially because Spinoza’s ideas seem so grounded in biology and cognitive science. Ironically, he soon had a major impact on later philosophers, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Russell.
One of the little known views of Spinoza was his recognition of intuition as the most sophisticated means of achieving knowledge: a path open even to those never exposed to extensive education; this is an opinion shared by myself and Damasio. Spinoza has also been a major influence in western culture. He was a powerful iconoclast, threatening the ancient edifice of organized religion at its foundations and by extension, threatening the political structures closely associated with religion. Spinoza is today still regarded as one of the most difficult philosophers of the Rationalist School. We can do no better, at the end of this extensive retelling of Spinoza’s achievements, than to quote one of today’s expert in this admirable philosopher. Michael Morgan, professor of philosophy at Indiana University and the editor of the only Complete Works of Spinoza (2002) views Spinoza as “among the thinkers extraordinarily creative and novel; his thinking is marked by a marvelous intensity and focus; and yet his deepest commitments are to the most embracing unity and sense of comprehensiveness that one can find in the tradition of Western Philosophy. His writing and his thought are marked by a kind of heroism that is rare and beautiful – even breathtaking. ... His thinking shows a passion for unity and totality, coupled with a strong fidelity to the integrity of the particular. There is no parochialism. ... For him, life was always a struggle against our finite limitations of perspective and particularity. Life was not life without such limitations but neither could life be what it could be, if we were satisfied with them.”
If readers here have got the impression that attempting to study Spinoza directly is just too difficult then this book is a much easier shortcut; even more so, then this review might simply prove sufficient.
