VII - Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body

Summary

There are now quite a number of popular or semi-popular works urging rejection of the old opposition between rationality and emotion. They present evidence or theoretical arguments that favour a reconception of emotions as providing an indispensable basis for practical rationality. Perhaps the most influential is neuroanatomist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which argues from cases of brain lesion and other neurological causes of emotional deficit that some sort of emotional ‘marking/ of memories of the outcomes of our choices with anxiety, is needed to support learning from experience.

Damasio's work has interesting connection to such issues as how to understand psychopaths, agents who lack normal feelings of guilt and other moral motives based on empathy. It seems that psychopaths are not like the rational ‘amoralists’ of philosophic lore but rather are unable to follow through reliably on long-term plans they make in their own interests. A failure of emotional empathy—with one's own future self, in effect—apparently yields elements of practical irrationality.

On the other hand, Damasio wrongly sets up Descartes and mind/body dualism as a philosophic foil for his view. His real target seems to be Fodorian computationalism and similar views in cognitive science (‘the mind as software program’). He even implicitly recognizes, at one point toward the end of the book, that his announced target, Descartes' cogito, does include emotions, or at any rate their mental aspect (‘suffering’), and he cites Descartes’ detailed account of emotions in The Passions of the Soul. But Descartes’ explanation of emotions in that work in terms of ‘animal spirits’ (essentially an outdated predecessor of neurological impulses) seems to bridge body and mind (or soul), despite his official dualism.