Damasio: Looking for Spinoza

Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. New York:
Harcourt. 2003.
“Living organisms are designed with an ability to react emtotionally to different objects and events. The reaction is followed by some pattern of feeling and a variation of pleasure or pain is a necessary component of feeling” (11). =E
“But in our attempt to understand the complex chain of events that begtins with emotion and ends up in feeling we can be helped by a principal separation between the part of the process that is made public and the part that remains private. For the purposes of my work I will call the former part emotion and the later part feeling in keeping with the meaning of the term feeling I outlined earlier” (27). =B & E
“In the context of this book then, emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviors. To be sure, some components of the emotion process are not visible to the naked eye, but can be made “visible” with current scientific probes such as hormonal assays and electrophysiological wave patterns. Feelings on the other hand, are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner, the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur” (28). =B
Damasio calls them private and hidden and Massumi says they are unnarrativizable. Pretty much the same thing, but vastly different at the same time.
“Turning emotion and feeling into separate research objects helps us discover how it is we feel” (28). =B
“It turns out that is feelings that are mostly shadows of the external manner of emotions” (29). =B & E
“Emotions proper. This is where we find the crown jewel of automated life regulation: emotions in the narrow sense of the term—from joy and sorrow and fear, to pride and sham and sympathy. And in case you wonder what we find at the very top, the answer is simple: feelings” (34). =B
“The range of reactions encompasses not only highly visible emotions such as fear or anger, but also drives, motivations, and behaviors associated with pain or pleasure” (39). =B
“Even the emotions proper—disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, sympathy, and shame—aim directly at life regulation by staving off dangers or helping the organism take advantage of an opportunity, or indirectly by facilitating social relations” (39). =E
“The primary (or basic) emotions are easier to define because there is an established tradition of disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness—the emotions that first come to mind whenever the term emotion is invoked” (44).=E
“The social emotions include sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation, and contempt. The nesting principle applies to social emotions as well” (45). =E
“Emotions-proper influence appetites, and vice versa. For example the emotion fear inhibits hunger and sensual drives, and so do sadness and disgust. On the contrary, happiness promotes both hunger and sexual drives” (50). =B
“Feeling in the pure and narrow sense of the word, was the idea of the body being in a certain way. In this definition you can substitute idea for ‘thought’ or ‘perception.’ Once you looked beyond the objects that caused the feeling and the thoughts and mode of thinking consequent to it, the core of the feeling came into focus. Its contents consisted of representing a particular state of the body” (85). =B
“a provisional definition, is that a feeling is the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes” (86). =E
“My view is that feelings are functionally distinctive because their essence consists of the thoughts that represent the body involved in a reactive process” (86). =E
“In brief, the essential content of feelings is the mapping of a particular body state; the substrate of feelings is the set of neural patterns that map the body state and from which a mental image of the body state can emerge” (88).
“In other words, feelings are not a passive perception or a flash in time, especially not in the case of feelings of joy and sorrow. For a while after an occasion of such feelings begins—for seconds or for minutes—there is a dynamic engagement of the body, almost certainly in repeated fashion, and a subsequent dynamic variation of the perception” (92). =E