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1 Primordial Affectivity 1.1 Reclaiming a Broader and Deeper Notion of Affectivity Affective scientists, as their name implies, study affective phenomena. As we shall appreciate in more detail as the book unfolds, they focus especially on emotion, understood as a psychological faculty of its own, distinct from but also importantly linked to other faculties, such as perception, attention, memory, and so on. This emotional faculty manifests itself in a variety of different and primarily short-lived emotions—sadness, fear, happiness, guilt, pride, shame, and many others. Affective scientists also (although more rarely) study moods, which they see as differing from emotions mainly in intensity and duration, in particular as being less intense and longer lasting than emotions.1 I discuss several affective-scientific approaches in this book; however, the aim of this initial chapter is to emphasize that emotions and moods do not exhaust the realm of affectivity.2 The emotions and moods of the affective scientist are usually temporary episodes that take place in an otherwise affect-free mind. They are, in other words, mere contingent happenings of the mind. Even when moods, unlike emotions, are (sometimes) said to be always present, they remain “surface” phenomena that could be taken away from the mind, while the mind would still be such. Affectivity as I understand it and discuss it in this chapter goes beyond such fleeting events: it is a broader phenomenon that permeates the mind, necessarily and not merely contingently. The mind, as embodied, is intrinsically or constitutively affective; you cannot take affectivity away from it and still have a mind. Affectivity as discussed in this chapter refers broadly to a lack of indifference, and rather a sensibility or interest for one’s existence. The etymology of the term already points to this meaning: “affectivity” refers to 2 Chapter 1 the capacity or possibility to be “done something,” to be “struck” or “influenced ” (the term comes from the past participle of the Latin verb afficio, “to strike, to influence”—itself a compound of ad, “to,” and facio, “to do”). This influence is not merely physical or mechanical (as when one says that the daily amount of sunlight affects the air temperature) but psychological . It refers to the capacity to be personally affected, to be “touched” in a meaningful way by what is affecting one. In this broad sense, it is not necessary to be in a specific emotion or mood to be in an affective state; one is affected when something merely strikes one as meaningful, relevant, or salient. Drawing on the enactive approach, in this chapter I argue that affectivity thus understood depends on the organizational properties of life, such that all living systems—even the simplest ones—are affective; hence the term primordial affectivity. As we will see in detail later, according to the enactive approach, all living systems are sense-making systems, namely (and roughly for now), they inhabit a world that is significant for them, a world that they themselves enact or bring forth as the correlate of their needs and concerns. In the enactive approach, this activity of sense making is the mark of cognition . What I add to this idea is the point that the activity of sense making is simultaneously also affective. To clarify, the claim is not that all living systems, including the simplest ones, have emotions. The claim is rather that even the simplest living systems have a capacity to be sensitive to what matters to them, and in this sense they are affective. Nor is the claim that even the simplest living systems are conscious; rather, the simplest living systems already realize a relationship with themselves and the world in which they are situated that entails purposefulness and concern for their existence. But such purposefulness and concern need not be accompanied by consciousness; rather, they ought to be understood as properties of a specific organization that sets up an asymmetry between the living system and the rest of the world, which consists in a perspective or point of view from which the world acquires meaning. Once embedded in more complex organisms, this perspective will also (at some point, although when and how is not the present concern) exhibit awareness. Affectivity thus characterized is not just broader but “deeper” than the emotions and moods of affective science, in the sense that it grounds them or makes them possible; in other words, without the primordial capacity to be affected, no specific emotions and moods would appear. The idea that...

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