The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind

Notes

Introduction 1. Throughout the book, I use the term “body” to refer to the organism “minus” the brain (and, relatedly, I use the term “organism” to refer to the brain and body together). By “brain” I refer only to a part of the central nervous system—the one that, in vertebrates, is located within the skull (in vertebrates, the central nervous system also includes the spinal cord). I often follow convention in using “neural activity” in place of “brain activity,” although it is important to remember that brain activity does not reduce to neural activity but includes biochemical activity; conversely there is “neural activity” going on in the body as well, in the peripheral (somatic) nervous system, as well as the autonomic or visceral one (whose divisions —sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric—all include a host of neurons and ganglia). 2. Most of the embodied-embedded literature in philosophy of cognitive science focuses on cognition only, with no discussion of its affective dimension or at least of its relation to emotion (see, e.g., A. Clark 1997; Noë 2004; Wheeler 2005; Chemero 2009; Shapiro 2011). As for the enactive approach, Thompson (2007) dedicates a chapter to emotion, and in another he extensively discusses empathy (see also Thompson 2001). He also often emphasizes the affective nature of cognition, and the integration of cognition and emotion (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2008; Thompson and Stapleton 2009). Yet much more, I think, can be said about affectivity from an enactive perspective, as this book hopes to show. 1 Primordial Affectivity 1. Admittedly, in practice moods are not always clearly differentiated from emotions (see Fox 2008, chap. 2, for a useful overview). The elicitation of emotion in the laboratory, for example, is called “mood induction” and is sometimes effectuated with procedures that, indeed, elicit what look prima facie more like moods than Notes 206 Notes emotions—as when subjects are asked to recall events from their past to self-induce sadness or joy. The study of mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety, is also an important subject area in affective science. 2. Note that unlike emotions and moods, passions, affections, and sentiments have fallen off the contemporary (scientific, and also largely ordinary) map of the affective mind. Because in this book I deal primarily with current work in affective science , I will not discuss these further constructs. However, for a history of these notions and their relation to the category of emotion, see Rorty 1982; Dixon 2003; and Charland 2010. 3. Further authors who could have been discussed in this chapter, e.g., are Schopenhauer , Ribot, Bergson, Erwin Straus, and Jonas. 4. This section of the chapter builds on arguments previously explored in Colombetti 2010. There, however, I did not distinguish between affectivity and emotion. 5. The Roman numeral indicates the part of the book, and the Arabic numeral its proposition. I use this notation instead of page numbers to facilitate finding the relevant passages in different editions of the Ethics. When quoting, I use the edition published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1894. 6. Descartes discussed the division of mind and body in several works, most notably Meditations on First Philosophy ([1641] 1996). This work, however, does not refer to the pineal gland, whose role is mentioned in The Passions of the Soul ([1649] 1989) and Treatise of Man ([1664] 2003). 7. Scholars debate whether parallelism, aspect dualism, or even epiphenomenalism (just to mention some possibilities supported by the text) are better characterizations of Spinoza’s account of the mind—body relation. For a discussion of various interpretations, see, e.g., Delahunty 1985. 8. Spinoza uses the term “ideas” in different ways. Importantly, he distinguishes between “adequate ideas,” which are produced in the mind by the activity of the mind itself, and “inadequate ideas” or “images,” which are left in the mind by experience (e.g., in perceiving, imagining, hallucinating, dreaming). 9. This interpretation is along the lines of Jonas 1965. Jonas argues that Spinoza’s metaphysics enable an account of living organisms as self-maintaining and immanently animated that is precluded by Cartesian mechanism and dualism (see also Hampshire 1951). Toward the end of his paper, Jonas talks of “Spinoza’s insight into the essentially dual character of the organism: its autonomy for itself, and its openness for the world: spontaneity paired with receptivity,” where receptivity is not just the passive reception of stimuli from outside but the complement of spontaneous striving : “The affectivity of all living things complements their spontaneity; and...