Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio, William Heinemann Harcourt, 拢20/$28, ISBN 0434007870 0151005575
VICTORIAN writer Samuel Butler said that even a potato in a dark cellar has a kind of low cunning that stands it in excellent stead. Although he may not have known it, he was recapturing the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza鈥檚 notion of conatus. Sometimes translated as 鈥渆ndeavour鈥�, it is the universal striving in living things for homeostasis and self-preservation.
In Looking for Spinoza the eminent neurologist and writer Antonio Damasio salutes this idea from Spinoza and much else. The Dutch thinker prefigured a view of ourselves, particularly the passionate and emotional side of human nature, that is finally being revealed as true by neurology and physiology.
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So Damasio鈥檚 book interleaves lucid and fascinating explanations of neurological findings with historical and philosophical ruminations on Spinoza, autobiographical accounts of Damasio鈥檚 own search for Spinoza, and finally a certain amount of ethical uplift. It is an unusual mixture, but always rich and often informative.
Extraordinary advances in molecular biology, evolutionary theory and allied brain sciences over the past 50 years have led some writers to a facile scientific imperialism. In the old days, if we wanted to interpret human nature, we went to Homer and Shakespeare, Aristotle and Hume, or to history, anthropology or psychology. But now that we can map the genome and saunter around in the brain, so the reasoning goes, we can jettison those old authorities. We can learn all we need from burgeoning life sciences. Anything else would be reactionary and Luddite.
Damasio is a welcome ally to those who can only partly accept the new triumphalism. Yes, we need be informed about what the sciences uncover, but no, we cannot bypass the real problems of understanding what the data is telling us. Damasio鈥檚 sensitivity to issues of interpretation is exemplary, and his humanism is no mere ornament, rather a deeply felt part of his approach.
Consider that beginners sometimes fall into the error of supposing that all we ever really see is the back of the retina. What they need at this point is not simply more neuroscience, but a better interpretation of what they already have. In fact Spinoza himself seemed to hold something alarmingly close, which is that all our ideas are ideas of our own bodies. The beginner may simply be confusing the proximal and the distal cause of visual experience, but Spinoza had a much more elaborate metaphysical story to tell.
Damasio is rightly wary of much of this, but he wants to rescue a central part of the story, which is that emotional feelings are themselves the brain鈥檚 way of monitoring, or constructing a map of, bodily states. Thus emotions proper are states of the body and brain; emotional feelings are portraits of those states.
Philosophers have been wary of this theory, and the similar view held by American psychologist and philosopher William James, because it does little justice to the way emotions are directed towards external things about which we think. Damasio brings in the outside world through the notion of an 鈥渆motionally competent stimulus鈥�. The term suggests something like a pinprick 鈥� the outside cause of an inner effect.
But part of the problem is that we can feel fear or anger, joy or sadness at Iraq鈥檚 arsenal whether or not it exists. Yet things that do not exist cannot cause anything. This may just mean that there is more work to be done on the nature of thinking itself. But that is certainly no reason not to be grateful to Damasio for the amount that he gives us here.