Are emotions nothing but a form of neural electricity? In a new book, the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio finds a surprising precedent for his ideas in Spinoza
Jonathan Bate
Spinoza. The starting point of the body
A new treatment for Parkinson's disease involves the implantation of tiny electrodes in the patient's brain stem. A low-intensity electric current then charges the motor nuclei and allows the patient to move his hands without tremors and walk like a human. A team at Salpeterier Hospital in Paris treated a 65-year-old woman with this method, but there was a small mistake: the electric charge passed two millimeters below the correct point of contact.
The woman's expression immediately changed to sadness. She began to cry and talk about the hopelessness of her life, that she was worthless, that she was disappearing into a black hole. The doctors realized that something was wrong and cut off the current. In less than two minutes her behavior returned to normal.
Another story: one of the radical treatments for epilepsy is surgical removal of the brain area responsible for seizures. Before he puts his hand to the surgeon's knife, the surgeon must identify the areas of the brain that should not be removed because they play a vital role (for example, suppress speech and vision). This is done by stimulating the brain with electricity and observing the results. In one patient, the stimulation of several areas adjacent to each other persistently provoked fits of laughter, as Antonio Damasio writes in his book: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain "Looking for Spinoza (Heinemann Publishing). So, for example, the patient was shown a picture of a horse. In normal situations she would see him as a normal horse. But when the relevant part of the motor area in her left frontal lobe was fired, she saw the horse in the picture as the funniest creature on earth.
Grief and joy: the basis of our emotional life. Is it possible that such essential elements can have a physical location in some corner of the brain? Are emotions nothing more than a form of neural electricity?
Some will find the ghosts of "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley in these images of lab technicians wearing white coats and inserting electrodes into the brain to artificially induce depression and laughter. But who can say which stimuli are artificial and which are natural? All kinds of things make us sad or happy: reading books, snorting cocaine, watching movies, plays and football games, going on pilgrimages or religious revival meetings, having sex, getting drunk. Whatever the reason, there is great promise in studying the mechanics of strong emotions.
An ancient philosophical tradition links the sensations to the body and the processes of reason to the soul. Since René Descartes, the tendency to see the bodies of humans and animals only as supreme machines, and in the soul - something that is human and different from the body. Cartesian philosophy opens with a description of a mind without a body ("I think means I exist" - the famous cogito).
Damasio is a renowned neurologist and neurobiologist. In his book from about a decade ago, "Descartes' Error", he claimed that the new knowledge we have about the activity of the brain and its mechanisms puts a question mark on the old separations between thinking and feeling, between mind and body.
What do we learn about the nature of consciousness from people with amnesia, for example, who have all the basic biological functions left but who have lost their sense of individual identity?
In his new book, "The Feeling of What Happens," Damasio finds a surprising precedent for his vision: Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher for whom "the human soul is the idea of the human body." In his thinking based on the starting point of the body, Spinoza was revealed as a thinker who preceded modern biology. Two hundred years before Darwin's idea of evolution and before the work of Ernst Heckel, the father of scientific ecology, Spinoza claimed that the starting point for our thinking about the nature of humanity should be physiology and the laws and processes that explain and regulate life. For Spinoza, everything was body, nature, materiality. His method left no room for transcendence. His God was inherent and permeated all of creation, in a sense synonymous with nature.
Spinoza's ideas were considered dangerous for political reasons as much as for religious reasons. When the starting point is the body and physical well-being, it follows from this the rejection of the "natural" hierarchy in the framework of which some people inherit a comfortable life by virtue of divine right, while other men (and all women) are members of an inferior status. At the same time, biologicalism - the belief in the survival of the fittest and those who are described as the fittest - also threatens liberal ideas (just look at the dismal history from "social Darwinism" to the Nazi party). Spinoza strove to develop an ethical method that would both take into account the power of biology and be faithful to what would today be called the "Enlightenment" principles of freedom and justice. He has a lot to teach us about ethics in the current era of genetic engineering.
And what about the political consequences of Damasio's neurological Spinozist conception? Like Spinoza and Damasio, the starting point of William Hazlitt, in the philosophical essay "Of Human Action" "An Essay on the Principles" was the body. Imagine a child putting his hand in the fire. The feeling of physical pain teaches the brain about the danger. "I won't touch the fire again, otherwise it will hurt," thinks the boy. But wait, says Hazlitt. When the child learns the lesson, he imagines a being that does not yet exist, his future self.
To adopt Damasio's terms, the mind maps a body that is still only imaginary. The ability to imagine grows from feelings and, as a result, the ability to empathize. If we can imagine our future selves, we can also imagine others' selves. The human soul therefore has a natural capacity not only for self-interest as Hobbes claimed, but also for the absence of such interest, for the absence of personal appeals. According to Hazlitt's friend, this insight was the starting point for a lifelong commitment both to politics that was radical for its time and to the power of empathy that can be found in the arts. He seems to have seen Damasio's findings as cause for joy, not despair.
