The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind

Introduction

Introduction This book takes several ideas from the so-called enactive approach developed in cognitive science and philosophy of mind over the last twenty years or so and applies them specifically to the field of affective science. The result is both a further development of the enactive approach itself, by extending it to a further domain of inquiry, and a reconceptualization of various affective phenomena as they appear in affective science that, I think, does more justice to their complexity. Affective science, to be sure, is not a field with clear boundaries. Like its close relative cognitive science, it is a research area in which multiple disciplines study a common object of interest—which in this case is “affect” or “affectivity,” broadly understood to include related phenomena such as emotions, feelings, moods, and mood disorders. In a liberal interpretation, any theory or study that explores these phenomena can be seen as contributing to affective science. Not only psychology and neuroscience, then, but history, anthropology, ethology, sociology, computer science, political science, education, literature, and philosophy—just to mention some, and in no particular order—can be seen as disciplines making up the field. The more these disciplines cross-fertilize, the better are our chances of gaining an accurate understanding of affectivity, and thus of ourselves (as well as of other creatures). In this work, however, I focus primarily on the two disciplines that arguably have the most prominent role in the field, namely, experimental psychology and neuroscience. My goal is to bring a variety of “enactivist” ideas to bear on these two disciplines, in different ways. I see enactivism as a highly suitable framework for an account of affectivity that characterizes it as an essential dimension of the mind, as well as a rich source of ideas for how to conceptualize and study a variety of affective phenomena. xiv Introduction What, however, is enactivism? There are now various accounts that call themselves “enactive.” The version of enactivism on which I draw in this book is the one originally articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) and further elaborated more recently by Thompson (2007, 2011a, 2011b), as well as others (see, e.g., the collection of papers in Stewart, Gapenne, and Di Paolo 2010). It is a complex tapestry of several interrelated and mutually supporting ideas from different fields of inquiry, notably cognitive science , biology, and the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. As such, it is not a radically novel framework but a synthesis of various ideas (some older, some newer), one that keeps evolving by incorporating new empirical studies and theoretical perspectives. Enactivism explicitly traces its sources to various phenomenological and existential philosophies. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991, xv) presented their approach specifically as a continuation of Merleau-Ponty’s work, and further “phenomenological connections” (especially with Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, but not only) are discussed in more detail by Thompson (2007). Other important affinities can be found, for example, in the pragmatism of James and Dewey, Gestalt psychology, the cybernetic movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and ecological psychology (see also Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010). Because of this complexity, it is not easy to characterize the enactive approach briefly, and one always runs the risk of overlooking some important features. For the purposes of this introduction, I outline only some of enactivism’s major ideas and themes, leaving the illustration of more specific points to individual chapters. I should also emphasize that I do not address all facets of the enactive approach in this book. Rather, I pull out from its tapestry those threads that I think are more relevant for affective science, and weave them further. For now I limit myself to the most visible strands and mention why I think they are promising for a study of affectivity. One of the central ideas of enactivism is embodiment. According to it, the mind is not an immaterial Cartesian substance, a thinking thing, but neither (and more controversially) is the brain its minimally sufficient physical basis. Rather, the mind is enacted or brought forth by the living organism in virtue of its specific organization and its interaction with the world. Particularly significant for present purposes is that the body, in the enactive approach, is not just a sensorimotor system, namely, a physical system that links sensory inputs and motor actions. Enactivism importantly also emphasizes the wetter and bloodier self-regulatory dimension Introduction xv of embodiment, which...