Independent Perspective News

By EMILY EAKIN

In the middle of the 17th century, Spinoza took on Descartes and lost.

According to Descartes' famous dualist theory, human beings were composed of physical bodies and immaterial minds. Spinoza disagreed. In "The Ethics," his masterwork, published after his death in 1677, he argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but one continuous substance.

As for Descartes' view of the mind as a reasoning machine, Spinoza thought that was dead wrong. Reason, he insisted, is shot through with emotion. More radical still, he claimed that thoughts and feelings are not primarily reactions to external events but first and foremost about the body. In fact, he suggested, the mind exists purely for the body's sake, to ensure its survival.

For his beliefs, Spinoza was vilified and — for extended periods — ignored. Descartes, on the other hand, was immortalized as a visionary. His rationalist doctrine shaped the course of modern philosophy and became part of the cultural bedrock.

But it seems history may have sided with the wrong man. For more than a decade, neuroscientists armed with brain scans have been chipping away at the Cartesian façade. Gone is Descartes' lofty Cogito, reasoning in pristine detachment from the physical world.

Fading fast are its sophisticated modern incarnations, including the once-popular "computational model," according to which the mind is like a software program and the brain like a hard drive.

Lately, scientists have begun to approach consciousness in more Spinozist terms: as a complex and indivisible mind-brain-body system. And now Dr. Antonio Damasio, the head of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center in Iowa City and leading anti-Cartesian crusader, says that Spinoza was right in other ways as well. In particular, Dr. Damasio argues in his new book, "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain" (Harcourt, 2003), the philosopher anticipated one of brain science's most important recent discoveries: the critical role of the emotions in ensuring our survival and allowing us to think. Feeling, it turns out, is not the enemy of reason, but, as Spinoza saw it, an indispensable accomplice.

"Science is proving Spinoza more current," Dr. Damasio said over tea at his hotel during a recent visit to New York. "He intuited the basic mechanism of the emotions."

A slight, fine-featured man with elegant manners and a shock of white hair, Dr. Damasio, 58, exudes old-world charm. His conversation is a velvet murmur that hints at his Portuguese roots; his passion is in his hands, which slice the air in quick, graceful movements as he speaks.

And these days, his pronouncements carry considerable weight. His theories are technical (he distinguishes between feelings and emotions and talks of an elaborate "body loop"). And in their details they are sometimes controversial. But his general emphasis on affect — or feelings — strikes most experts as beyond dispute.

"His contributions at the human level have been remarkable," said Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and director of Affective Neuroscience at the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "He's done some of the most spectacular brain-imaging work that shows us what emotions are like in the brain."

In short, Dr. Damasio is at the forefront of what neuroscientists are calling an "affect revolution" that is turning decades of scientific wisdom on its head and reverberating through other fields as well.

"Academics are throwing themselves into the study of emotion with the rapturous intensity of a love affair," The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in February, in an article that included a list of 25 recent scholarly books, from philosophy and history to literature and political science, all devoted to affect in one way or another.

And while Dr. Damasio hardly deserves all the credit for this trend, thanks to his breakthrough research and two previous, surprisingly accessible books — "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain" (1994) and "The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness" (1999) — he can take a good deal. He is required reading in literature seminars. Writers like Ian McEwan and David Lodge have acknowledged his work in their novels. He's even inspired a piano concerto, "Body Loops," and a quintet that was given its premiere at Lincoln Center last week.

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