The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

"Nearly 30 years ago, in 1994, Antonio Damasio published Descartes’ Error , which shows with Hanna Damasio, through precise neuroscientific mapping, how the notion of “pure” reason is a myth, that thought cannot be disentangled from emotions, and that rational judgments are profoundly conditioned by affective states. It was an epochal publication, in many ways. Here was a neurological picture of how what we conceive as our highest faculties of procedural decision-making and moral judgment are essentially undermined in the absence of emotional processing. No, I chose a more recent book by him, The Strange Order of Things: Feeling and the Making of Cultures (2018). Damasio here draws a line from bacteria and the first forms of life to human culture, to show how the mechanisms that were present at the dawn of life are the same ones at work in our embodied, feeling states, those that allow ultimately for human culture and for our “flourishing”, a term he uses frequently in the book and takes seriously. What he does here is trace the genealogy of “minded life”, in order to ground firmly in our biology our very capacity to represent the world and ourselves to ourselves. Single-cell organisms are capable of sensing and responding, but they are not minded – yet this is the beginning of mind. From engaging in basic perception and action, multicellular organisms become able to create representations of the world both outside and inside themselves, via the advent of nervous systems that, he makes very clear, serve these organisms. Ultimately the brain in organisms such as ourselves serve the rest of body, too. Nervous systems respond to external and internal sensations, and as their complexity grows, so they start to map these outer and inner, exteroceptive and interoceptive (or visceral) sensations within the brain. In fact these maps are what we refer to when we say something is “in my mind”. So the story he tells lays the ground for a biological theory of consciousness – one that he has developed in his most recent book, Feeling & Knowing – that is profoundly anti-dualistic. He shows how our consciousness belongs on the continuum of the history of life. We are very much like other minded beings in that we have revulsion to pain and attraction to pleasure – all conditions for our inherently valenced relation to the world. Feelings stir us to action. Damasio is quite adamant to distinguish the two, all the more that we tend to use the word “emotion” to refer to what in fact are feelings. He calls emotions “action programs activated by confrontation with numerous and sometimes complex situations”, not always conscious, and whose upshot are the basic and not so basic emotions we know, such as fear, anger, joy, and so on. Feelings, on the other hand, are provoked by the emotive responses to sensory experience and drives – they are the “felt experiences of emotions” (99-100), and the upshot of the homeostatic regulation, that is, the set of biochemical processes by which we constantly adjust to a constantly changing environment. Damasio shows in this book how feelings contribute to cultural processes insofar as they are the motives of intellectual creation: they prompt the detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies. And both emotions and feelings partake of affect , which, as we now know, is always present and somehow an aspect of all our functions – Damasio puts it beautifully: “There is no being, in the proper sense of the term, without a spontaneous mental experience of life, a feeling of existence. The ground zero of being corresponds to a deceptively continuous and endless feeling state, a more or less intense mental choir underscoring everything else mental”. (100) I fully agree. And I can’t help but lament that cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience remain two distinct fields, although I can see how complex it would be to integrate affect into the experimental protocols of cognitive science. Exactly. I think it’s quite profound because he explains how our cultural artefacts are produced out of our own, dynamic, necessarily felt relation in the world, out of our being embedded in it, indeed, as biological organisms. He effectively gives the physiological picture that underlies the intuitions set forth within the “4E” movement in philosophy that has grown out of phenomenology, and which argues that we are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And on this picture culture participates in the loop, because these cultural products in turn help us regulate ourselves as well–they are homeostatic regulators of sorts."