Comedy and tragedy are the two fundamental outlooks upon the human condition, while joy and sorrow are the two basic of our feelings. Is it possible that such profound and all-embracing essentials might have a physical location in some particular small corner of our brain? To address the question we will look at two opposite classic philosophical tradition, and a recent finding from science.
René Descartes separates mind from body, to regard human and animal bodies merely as superior machines, the mind as the thing that is uniquely apart, uniquely human. This Cartesian philosophy begins by imagining a disembodied mind: the cogito “I think therefore I am,” whereas the body and the material world become the thing thought about, res cogitans.
Whereas Descartes always seemed to begin from an idea, Baruch Spinoza begins here from a body-state: when we are in love the feeling suffuses our entire body. The mental process of assigning a cause comes second. He proposed that the starting-point for our thinking about the nature of humankind should be physiology and the process of life-regulation. For him, everything was body, nature, and material. His system left no room for transcendence; his God was wholly immanent, in some sense synonymous with nature.
Spinoza’s ideas were considered dangerous for political as well as religious reasons. To begin from the body and the principle of physical wellbeing was to reject the idea of a natural hierarchy in which some men inherited comfort by divine right while other men (and all women) had a more lowly status. At the same time, “biologism” (the survival of the fittest) is also a threat to liberal ideas (witness the horrible history that led from “social Darwinism” to the Nazi party). His quest was to develop an ethical system that was both cognisant of the force of biology and true to what we would now call the “enlightenment” principles of liberty and justice.
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist, opposes the old distinctions between mind and body, reasoning and feeling based on new knowledge about the workings of human brain. He studied the brain injury by asking these questions: What do we learn about ourselves when we encounter someone who, as a result of damage to a particular bit of the brain, has suddenly lost the ability to feel embarrassment – or compassion, or fear, or sociability? What do we learn about the nature of consciousness from, say, amnesiacs who retain all their core biological functions but have lost their sense of individual identity?
Damasio then confirmed that things traditionally kept apart by philosophers (such as rational decision-making and emotional mood) actually happen together in the brain and, further, that the brain functions by mapping the body. The Cartesian thought-experiment of a disembodied mind is a contradiction in terms, since the mind only exists in conjunction with the body. Damasio’s argument is in line with William James’: every time we have a thought about our emotions we bring with that thought an accompanying body state. So for Damasio, the brain is mapping a body that is still only imaginary. From feeling comes the capacity for imagination and hence for empathy. If we can imagine our future self, we can also imagine other selves. The human mind thus has a natural capacity not only for self-interest, as Thomas Hobbes had proposed, but also for disinterest (in the proper sense of the word).
Rey's Rapt 