Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition

New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Series Editors: John Protevi, Louisiana State University and Michael...

Author: Michelle Maiese

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New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Series Editors: John Protevi, Louisiana State University and Michael Wheeler, University of Stirling This series brings together work that takes cognitive science in new directions. Hitherto, philosophical reflection on cognitive science – or perhaps better, philosophical contribution to the interdisciplinary field that is cognitive science – has for the most part come from philosophers with a commitment to a representationalist model of the mind. However, as cognitive science continues to make advances, especially in its neuroscience and robotics aspects, there is growing discontent with the representationalism of traditional philosophical interpretations of cognition. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have turned to a variety of sources – phenomenology and dynamic systems theory foremost among them to date – to rethink cognition as the direction of the action of an embodied and affectively attuned organism embedded in its social world, a stance that sees representation as only one tool of cognition, and a derived one at that. To foster this growing interest in rethinking traditional philosophical notions of cognition – using phenomenology, dynamic systems theory, and perhaps other approaches yet to be identified – we dedicate this series to “New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science.” Titles include Michelle Maiese EMBODIMENT, EMOTION, AND COGNITION Richard Menary COGNITIVE INTEGRATION Mind and Cognition Unbounded Matthew Ratcliffe RETHINKING COMMONSENSE PSYCHOLOGY A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Stimulation Forthcoming titles Hanne De Jaegher PARTICIPATION SENSE-MAKING An Enactive Approach to Intersubjectivity Zdravko Radman KNOWING WITHOUT THINKING The Theory of the Background in Philosophy of Mind Jay Schulkin ACTION, PERCEPTION AND THE BRAIN New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–54935–7 Hardback 978–0–230–54936–4 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Also by Michelle Maiese EMBODIED MINDS IN ACTION (co-authored with Robert Hanna)

Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition Michelle Maiese Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Emmanuel College, Boston, USA

© Michelle Maiese 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–57697–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

I dedicate this book to Nate, Pat, Gordie, and Monkey, who offered much-needed love and support and helped me retain my sanity and sense of humor during the writing process.

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Series Editors’ Preface

xi

Introduction

1

1 The Essential Embodiment Thesis 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Consciousness In and Through the Body: Sensorimotor Subjectivity 1.2 Five Intrinsic Structures of Sensorimotor Subjectivity 1.3 Life as the Foundation for Sensorimotor Subjectivity 1.4 Essentially Embodied Emotions 1.5 Conclusion

10 10 17 25 34 43 47

2 Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions 2.0 Introduction 2.1 Cognitive Theories of Emotion 2.2 Desire-Based Emotions 2.3 Emotional Intentionality 2.4 Affective Framing

50 50 56 61 71 82

3 Sense of Self, Embodiment, and Desire-Based Emotions 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Unified Consciousness and the Sense of Self 3.2 Immanent Reflexivity 3.3 A Necessarily and Completely Neurobiologically Embodied, Egocentric Point of View 3.4 Embodied Agency and Desire-Based Emotions 3.5 What Does It Mean to Be an Essentially Embodied Self?

90 90 91 95 101 106 114

4 The Role of Emotion in Decision and Moral Evaluation 4.0 Introduction: Egocentric, Caring-Contoured Maps 4.1 The ‘High-Reason’ View of Decision-Making and Moral Evaluation 4.2 The Crucial Role of Emotion and Affect 4.3 The Frame Problem 4.4 Conclusion

123 126 131 145

5 Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Social Cognition 5.0 Introduction 5.1 Concerns about Theory-Theory and Simulation-Theory

151 151 153

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119 119

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Contents

5.2 Rethinking Social Cognition: ‘Primary Intersubjectivity’ and Affective Framing 5.3 Context, Social Roles, and Participatory Sense-Making 5.4 Conclusion

157 173 182

6 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

185 185 187 204 218 233

Breakdowns in Embodied Emotive Cognition Introduction Schizophrenia Psychopathy Autism Conclusion

Concluding Remarks

235

Notes

238

Bibliography

243

Index

255

Acknowledgments The starting points for this work are a chapter from my PhD dissertation, which I completed at the University of Colorado during the Spring of 2005, and also the recent book that I co-authored with Robert Hanna, entitled Embodied Minds in Action. There we argue that consciousness and action are essentially embodied and that a fundamental manifestation of this embodiment is desire-based emotion. While up until recently the prevailing view in both philosophy and the sciences has been that consciousness is correlated with brain activity, more and more theorists have begun to acknowledge that to understand the mind we will need to look beyond the brain and central nervous system. In this book, I further examine emotion as a paradigmatic form of embodied consciousness and discuss how emotions play a central role in self-consciousness, decision-making, moral evaluation, and social cognition. Much of the material in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, in particular, builds upon arguments presented in Embodied Minds in Action. Shorter versions of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the book were presented at conferences in Orlando, Worcester, MA, and San Francisco. I am grateful to the audiences there for their comments, questions, and criticisms. It was at the ‘Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Extended’ conference at the University of Central Florida in October 2007 that I met John Protevi and learned about the series of which this book is now a part. I am grateful to him and Michael Wheeler, the series co-editors, for helping to provide this opportunity. Thanks also to the anonymous referees who reviewed earlier, article-length versions of different chapters of this book, and to the reviewers and editors at Palgrave Macmillan for providing helpful feedback. Completion of the book was facilitated by a course release in the Fall semester of 2009, which gave me extra time for research and writing. Thanks to Sister Janet Eisner, Frank Scully, and Thomas Wall for helping to make this possible. I also would like to thank Robert Solomon, who sadly passed away in January 2007, for sparking my interest in emotion theory and also for being kind enough to serve on my dissertation committee; Luc Bovens and Graham Oddie, for encouraging me to develop Chapter 3 of my PhD dissertation into a book about the emotions; and Nathan Wight, for reading and commenting on my work at various stages. In addition, I am extremely grateful to Robert Hanna for providing me with extensive feedback about each chapter, and for being an ‘awesomely awesome’ dissertation advisor, mentor, co-author, and colleague. Without

ix

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Acknowledgments

his helpful comments and encouragement over the last 8 years, I would have been unable to write this book. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to my family and friends, whose influence appears throughout my work both in terms of the topics and examples I have discussed as well as my overall perspective. I am lucky to have such wonderful people to care about.

Series Editors’ Preface There is little doubt that the phenomenon of consciousness still presents a significant stumbling block to the ongoing march of philosophical and scientific research on mind and cognition, with some thinkers concluding that it is a veritable mystery that will forever elude naturalistic understanding. But have we got the phenomenon right? Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition by Michelle Maiese, the latest addition to The New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science series, deftly executes a creative transformation of our perspective on what consciousness may be. It locates consciousness not in our brains, but as distributed through the structures and actions of our lived bodily engagement with the world. This transition to radical embodiment is driven partly by taking emotional consciousness as our paradigm case. With embodied emotional consciousness placed firmly at the heart of things, Maiese proceeds to show how its elements (e.g. the pre-deliberative process whereby we interpret persons, objects etc. in terms of desire-based bodily feelings) are intimately involved with, and so illuminate, a range of psychological phenomena. These include certain cognitive processes (such as decision-making, moral assessment, and the ability to understand others and ourselves), the formation of a sense of self, and (when the normal structures of embodied emotional consciousness break down) various psychological impairments such as schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism. The ambition of the New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science series is, as its name suggests, to take cognitive science in new directions. This ambition is reflected perfectly in Maiese’s welcome contribution. John Protevi and Michael Wheeler

xi

Introduction

Up until recently, the prevailing view in both philosophy and the sciences has been that consciousness is strictly correlated with the brain and central nervous system, and that neurophysiological facts alone provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for mental life. However, more and more thinkers have begun to challenge this brain-based conception of consciousness and to argue that consciousness is not just ‘instrumentally dependent’ on human bodily form and bodily activity, but also constitutively dependent on the body. Taken together, and taken seriously, these arguments show that consciousness is not simply something that happens within our brains, but rather something that we do through our living bodies and our lived, bodily engagement with the world. Although we are not always, or even usually, conscious of our bodies or vital systems, nonetheless we are always and necessarily conscious with, or in and through, our living and lived bodies. While many theorists have focused on the dynamics of action, perception or thought in their discussions of the embodied mind, what is new and unusual about this book is that it examines emotion as a paradigmatic form of embodied consciousness. It seems clear to me that emotion is embodied in one’s motor system, as well as in complex autonomic physiological changes, and is typically felt in and through one’s body as a whole. In addition, because emotions are grounded in felt desires and essentially involve ‘feelings of caring,’ they play a central role in cognitive and attentional focusing, and therefore are crucially involved in various forms of information processing. From our earliest days, affective processes constitute a set of conscious intentional bodily responses that call attention to those features of the environment that affect our well-being, interests, goals, and desires. Only through the living and lived body can an individual affectively apprehend particular aspects of her surroundings as significant, and this apprehension of significance is crucial for cognition. So this book explores the connection between emotion, cognition, and the essentially embodied nature of consciousness, and challenges the widely held philosophical assumption that the emotions are somehow in tension with, or undermine, cognition and intellect. 1

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Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition

It also highlights how emotion and affect, which are essentially bound up with our lived bodily experience, allow for effective decision-making, moral evaluation, and the ability to understand others and ourselves. In Chapter 1, I spell out and defend the essential embodiment thesis, which says that conscious minds are necessarily biologically alive and completely embodied in all the vital systems and organs of our living bodies. After surveying the research of key theorists such as Gallagher, Thompson, and Lakoff and Johnson, I describe how our basic biological structure and complex self-organizing dynamics as living organisms provide the natural foundation for the key structures of consciousness, including its egocentricity, spatiality, temporality, and intentionality (i.e., directedness). What I call ‘sensorimotor subjectivity’ is a sort of primitive bodily awareness that essentially contains phenomenal consciousness and is bound up with a sense of our whole living body and its egocentric spatio-temporal orientation. By virtue of sensorimotor subjectivity, a subject immediately feels herself to be standing in a direct, effective and intimate connection to the actual and potential movements, perceptions, and overall condition of her own living body. Our lived and living bodily dynamics inform our knowledge and understanding of the world, serve as the source of the spatial and temporal structure of conscious experience, and enable us to engage with the world from a unique point of view. The lived body, therefore, is that which makes possible the disclosure of the world as meaningful, and this is particularly evident in the animate, bodily-engaged dynamics of emotional experience. In short, human cognition and sense-making are bodily activities through and through. Insofar as all perception and action are organized around felt desire, these essentially embodied mental processes are not only egocentrically structured and intentional, but also affective. Indeed, in my view, none of the other structures of consciousness can be understood properly without reference to conative affectivity. Experiencing oneself as an inner source-point, one which is situated in space and time, intentionally directed toward the world, and both actively engaged with and impacted by one’s surroundings, requires that one be invested in one’s well-being and survival. Ultimately, what I will maintain is that the necessary structures that characterize conscious minds like ours are rooted in the autopoietic processes of autonomous, living systems and informed by a conative biological impulse to regenerate and go on living. The autopoietic and metabolic processes of living organisms serve as the basic (and necessary, though not in and of themselves sufficient) ingredients of the ‘natural matrix’ of emotional consciousness. In Chapter 2, I unpack what I mean by emotion and its many varieties, and characterize it essentially in terms of conative affect and feelings of caring. Emotional consciousness, broadly construed, includes background ‘affective orientations,’ moods, and specifically directed emotions such as fear, anger, joy, and sadness. While these various types of emotion usually do

Introduction 3

involve thoughts, evaluations, bodily changes, feelings, action tendencies, and shifts in attention, the essential factor in all emotion is conscious desire, or the consciously felt need for something. Emotions, essentially, are how minded persons like us care, and it is because we care that we are capable of apprehending the world as meaningful and as an arena of possible goals. An essential component of care is desiderative bodily attunement, which is what anchors us in the world and makes all that we encounter intelligible by virtue of the fact that it matters to us in some way or another. However, while I do hold that emotions are essentially desires, I do not believe that emotions are nothing but desires, nor do I think that emotions can be reduced to feelings, neurophysiology, or behavioral dispositions. My central claim will be that an emotion is a mode of essentially embodied, desiderative, enactive appraisal and that the primary way in which we engage with, interpret, and make sense of the world is through the embodied, desiderative feelings of affective framing. Unlike much of emotion theory, which assumes that appraisal takes place in the head and is distinct from bodily arousal and bodily feelings, my account characterizes the cognitive and bodily aspects of emotion as inseparable. Insofar as conscious desire and desiderative bodily feelings are an integral part of the processes of appraisal and interpretation involved not only in emotional experience, but also in cognition more generally, all modes of cognition (arguably) are infused with affect. In short, there is no such thing as wholly emotionless cognition. What I call affective framing is the process whereby we interpret persons, objects, facts, states of affairs, ourselves, and so forth in terms of embodied desiderative feelings. The idea is that, based on what we care about, we immediately focus our attention on particular features of our surroundings that are important to us. Unlike traditional cognitive theories of emotion, my proposed account makes sense of the way in which affectivity and intentionality are bound together in emotional experience, and acknowledges that all processes of appraisal are enabled in part by pre-reflectively conscious, desiderative bodily feelings. Chapter 3 explores the profound significance of embodied, desire-based emotions by discussing the crucial role that they play in the formation of a sense of self. Phenomenologically speaking, the primary ‘sense of self’ is the experience of approaching the world from a particular vantage point or point of view that typically has some degree of coherence and continuity. I maintain that not only the primary sense of self, but also the self itself, are essentially embodied and rooted in our biological nature, although not reducible to that nature. Self-awareness begins as an embodied proprioceptive sense of self rather than as cognitive or psychological understanding, and at every moment of our waking lives we are immediately and nonconceptually aware of the shape, position, and boundaries of our body, at least to some minimal extent. This basic sense of self is immanently reflexive, pre-reflective, and non-conceptual; is a natural outgrowth of our

4


animate, neurobiological dynamics; and is rooted in desire-based emotions and feelings of caring. Immanent reflexivity is a first-order, direct, pre-reflective mode of selfawareness that is intimately connected with the egocentrically centered standpoint that constitutes our embodied spatio-temporal orientation and involves an immediate feeling of being present in the here-and-now. Moreover, this feeling of being present in the here-and-now is inherently conative and affective in nature, and it is this experience of caring that gives creatures like us a sense of self-continuity. In other words, what accounts for a subject’s coherent sense of self is essentially an immanently reflexive, essentially embodied point of view that is rooted in desire-based emotions and formed through engagement with her environment. And the fact that the conscious lives of creatures like us are structured by an egocentric vantage point that is oriented in space and situated in time is a direct result of our autopoietic organization and neurobiological dynamics. Egocentricity and feelings of caring can be understood as an outgrowth of the regenerative and self-regulative processes of autonomous living systems like us. In an effort to go on living and deal with material change in its environment, a living system establishes a pole of internal identity in relation to a pole of an outside world and thereby differentiates itself from its surroundings. Impulses toward self-regard are at the core of what it means to be a human animal endeavoring to stay alive and to live well, and it is the ongoing experience of caring from one’s particular embodied point of view that gives creatures like us a sense of self-continuity and coherence. In this way, the primary sense of self is rooted in a subject’s unique continuing essential embodiment and the necessary conative affectivity of sensorimotor subjectivity, which jointly constitute the essentially embodied self itself. Thus, the self is not a solid, really existing substance, but instead is nothing more and nothing less than a complex dynamic, minded, lived, living, essentially embodied process. If this is correct, then any high-powered unified self-consciousness or reflective personal identity that we possess ultimately rests on our unique continuing essential embodiment, which in turn is rooted in desire-based emotions. I believe this account captures the self’s intrinsic spatiality and temporality, its embeddedness in place and time, and the extent to which emotion and caring are both bodily and mental phenomena. However, it is not just our self-understandings that are rooted in emotion, but also our capacity for understanding the meaning of others’ actions and evaluating what they do. In Chapter 4, I say more about how ‘affective framing’ provides a sort of pre-deliberative, evaluative backdrop that is partially constitutive of decision-making and moral assessment. Affective framing, in effect, serves as a caring-contoured ‘map’ that allows for the spontaneous, continuous coordination of activity and enables us to filter information and sequence activities according to their importance. Thus, unlike what I describe as the ‘high reason’ view of decision-making and moral evaluation,

Introduction 5

which characterizes emotion as being in tension with reason and intellect, my proposed account emphasizes the degree to which emotions come into play in well-functioning cognitive processes. In my view, even highly intellectual processes, such as playing a game of chess or solving a mathematical equation, engage our lived bodily dynamics, desires, and concerns and thus depend on, and are partially constituted by, this capacity for affective framing. Because affective framing plays such a crucial role in rendering the vast array of information that a subject receives meaningful and intelligible to her, diminished or attenuated affective framing results in cognitive and behavioral disruption or even paralysis. To illustrate this, I explore the integral role that the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing play in decision-making and moral evaluation, and argue that, by structuring individuals’ world views and enabling the selective processing of information, emotional experience helps to solve a critical ‘frame problem.’ As I understand it, affective framing is a biologically based, bodily capacity for detecting relevant features that enables us to carve out those aspects of our surroundings that will become the material for deliberation and moral evaluation. Affect and emotion, therefore, not only directly influence these processes, but also significantly assist them and are strictly and inherently necessary (though not alone sufficient) for decision-making and moral evaluation of the sort engaged in by creatures like us. My proposed account thereby acknowledges that affect and cognition are intrinsically linked, and that feeling and appraisal necessarily accompany each other throughout our cognitive engagements with the world. It also highlights how an individual’s affective orientation makes her prone to certain patterns of thought and behavior rather than others, shapes the way she attends to and interprets her surroundings, and thereby allows other cognitive processes of reasoning, deliberation, and justification to get off the ground. Chapter 5 builds on this discussion of affective framing and claims that our capacity for interpersonal interaction and understanding, just like our capacities for decision-making and moral evaluation, depends heavily on emotion and affect. Unlike ‘theory-theory’ and traditional accounts of ‘simulation theory,’ which depict social cognition as disembodied, spectatorial, detached, and individualistic, my proposal emphasizes the embodied, emotive, and interactive nature of interpersonal understanding. In my view, understanding other people’s minds and behavior relies primarily on the desire-based, emotive, essentially embodied dynamics of second-person, face-to-face interaction, and is best understood not as ‘mind-reading’ or as ‘body reading,’ but instead as a sort of shared dance. It is as a result of overall bodily attunement that we understand others’ behavior, and sometimes even experience real, even if second-hand, emotion when we perceive their expressions and gestures. Such bodily attunement is not merely a matter of mirror neuron activation (although it is also partly that), but also involves a vast array of bodily dynamics, so that our whole lived and living bodies,

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not just our brains, resonate with the other person. This sort of bodily attunement, through which one enters into a reciprocal relationship with others, ensures that intersubjectivity is essentially a matter of interaction between, and coordination among, two lived, living bodies. Examples of coordination in the realm of human activity include synchronization, mirroring, anticipation, and imitation, all of which are displayed by infants from a very early age and also are found widely in adults. From the very beginning, our appreciation of others as people is relational and involves a disposition to affect them, and to be affected by them, in various ways. We constantly modulate, and are being modulated and affected by, the expressions, gestures, and actions of others, and this mutual modulation impacts how we make sense of other people as well as our surroundings. Intersubjectivity, therefore, can be understood in terms of reciprocal bodily attunement, which can be cashed out in terms of entrained affective framing patterns. Once two or more parties become part of a coupled system, their bodily dynamics and affective framing patterns are correlated and coordinated, so that each person’s expressions, behaviors, and desires impact the other individual’s desires, patterns of attention, and point of view, as well as the interaction process as a whole. What is more, the interpersonal interaction as a whole causally affects and constrains the behavior of each party involved in the interaction. During second-person interaction, the cares and concerns of each party shift, the bodily dynamics of the interactors are coordinated, and each one’s ‘caring-contoured map’ is modified as a result. Thus, through the coordination and mutual modulation activity that takes place during second-person interaction, our affective framing patterns are continuously being influenced and reshaped by others’ desires and concerns. By virtue of this felt understanding of others’ affective framing patterns, together with our familiarity with others’ dispositions based on our past encounters with them, and whatever knowledge of social roles and context is available, we are able to understand what they do. And, in many cases, we understand others’ goals and desires in relation to the very same network of social roles and projects that provides the framework for our own goals and desires. Social understanding emerges as a product of embodied, emotive, second-person social interactions, which involve coordination and mutual bodily attunement. The final chapter of the book builds on a large body of relevant recent and contemporary work in order to bridge philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry, and in order to explore how philosophical conceptions of mind and consciousness can help us to gain a better understanding of various psychological impairments. Here I explore some of the behavioral dynamics and symptoms associated with schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism, and discuss how these disorders can be understood in terms of a breakdown of affective framing and a disruption in essentially embodied consciousness.

Introduction 7

If it is true that self-awareness and other modes of cognition depend constitutively on affective framing, then, of course, attenuated affective framing capacities and diminished levels of bodily attunement would result in various forms of cognitive dysfunction. I believe that my account of cognition as essentially embodied, affective, and enactive can help to deepen our understanding of the symptomatology of these various disorders. In addition, an examination of these symptoms lends empirical support to my claim that affective framing is necessary for effective cognitive functioning. First, the bodily alienation, disengagement, and ‘unworlding’ that commonly takes place in acute stages of schizophrenia illustrates what our lives might be like if we truly were disembodied minds. As a result of a serious deficiency in desire-based emotions, subjects begin to lose meaningful contact with their sensations and perceptions, their ‘will to live’ is diminished, and they no longer are capable of actively engaging with the world from the standpoint of their own values and concerns. Moreover, without affective framing to lend directedness, structure, and organization to their cognitive processes, schizophrenic subjects often experience a large-scale breakdown of affective bodily attunement and are largely unable to appreciate salience and make full sense of their surroundings. One might illuminatingly say that they lack a ‘map’ of where they are in the world and lose hold of even basic structures of space and time. Another equivalent way of characterizing the same sad fact is to say that they are temporarily or permanently out of step with the emotion-driven dance of sense-making and intentional action. Among psychopaths, on the other hand, the core symptoms are affective processing deficits, impulsivity, lack of realistic long-term plans, and a temporally narrow mode of egocentricity. In my view, both the psychopath’s apparent emotional detachment as well as his antisocial behavior can be understood as resulting from a permanent developmental delay in the formation of long-term, persisting affective framing patterns. It is this lack of long-term affective framing patterns that renders the psychopath largely incapable of making both prudent personal decisions as well as genuine, first-person moral judgments. Thus, the problem is not that psychopaths are without desire-based emotions and affect altogether, but rather that their cares and concerns are temporally narrow. Because psychopaths have not developed complex, persisting affective framing patterns, they are less able to appreciate fully the meaning and significance of the affective arousal they experience, and therefore exhibit a deficit in affective processing. As a result, they find it difficult to attend to relevant features of their predicament and to attach broader meaning to the emotions they are experiencing. In addition, because their affective responses do not focus their attention or guide cognition in the usual way, they experience difficulty in making appropriate decisions and often demonstrate

8


poor planning and impulsive behavior. This deficit in persisting, longterm affective framing patterns also renders psychopaths largely unable to form long-term goals and values of their own, making it more difficult for them to understand fully the values and long-term goals of others. As a result, they are incapable of fully understanding why it is that certain actions are morally wrong, which leads to their apparent egoism and seeming callousness towards others. Lastly, autism involves a failure to connect socially with others, a decreased capacity for communication, and impoverished imagination. I believe that here, as in the case of schizophrenia and psychopathy, these characteristic symptoms can be traced to a disruption in essentially embodied emotional consciousness and a disruption in affective framing. However, unlike schizophrenics, they do not experience a severe breakdown in affective framing, and thus retain their basic hold on reality; and, unlike psychopaths, autistic subjects are capable of fashioning long-term stable values and concerns for themselves, caring about the interests of others, and recognizing that other people’s interests matter. What is distinctive about autistic subjects is that, because they lack the sort of affective, bodily attunement that for ordinary subjects occurs spontaneously and pre-reflectively, they must rely on rules of conduct and general moral principles to navigate the social landscape. In my view, the three broad classes of symptoms associated with affective framing deficits in autism are affective and sensory–motor abnormalities, deficits pertaining to social interaction, and difficulties in making use of contextual information. The various sensory abnormalities commonly found among autistic subjects, including their over- or under-reactivity to stimuli, result from the fact that, although sensory experiences are especially intense, associated stimuli are not experienced as mattering and instead are accompanied by a sense of detachment. Due to this disruption of motor processes, which one might understand as a breakdown in bodily attunement, autistic subjects are largely unable to engage in social referencing behaviors or shared attention and find it difficult to coordinate their own expressions, gestures, and movements with those of others. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that, from an early age, the essentially embodied practices of social cognition among autistic children are broken or out-of-sync. Ordinarily, the perception of another’s body comportment spontaneously arouses various bodily feelings in the perceiver, and also various responsive movements. In the case of autism, on the other hand, everyday bodily attunement and responsiveness are disrupted and the capacity to connect affectively with others is diminished. Taken together, I believe that the symptomatologies of these disorders both illustrate and support my claims that human consciousness is essentially embodied and emotive; and that desire-based emotions are what ground the sense of self and enable decision-making, moral assessment,

Introduction 9

and social interaction. Indeed, I believe the discussion of this final chapter shows that there is no such thing as fully functional human cognition stripped of affect or separate from bodily feelings. When affect and desiderative bodily feelings are left out of human cognition, as many traditional cognitivist accounts seem to recommend, what we get is precisely not effective cognitive functioning. Instead, there is psychopathology.

1 The Essential Embodiment Thesis

1.0

Introduction

Many philosophers of mind and mainstream neuroscientists remain committed to the broadly Cartesian notion that there is a ‘thing’ inside us which allows us to think and feel and is responsible for the wide range of conscious states we experience. While Descartes identifies this ‘thing’ as a non-material substance that exists independently of the body, most contemporary theorists maintain that the thinking thing is the brain and that the brain alone (or the brain together with the central nervous system or CNS) is sufficient for consciousness. Many believe that, as we learn more and more about the brain/CNS, we will be in a better position to discover the neural correlates of conscious. According to proponents of what Alva Noë (2009) calls the ‘Foundation Argument’ and what Andy Clark (2008) identifies as the BRAINBOUND model, the effects in consciousness normally brought about through interaction with the world can be produced by direct stimulation of the brain/CNS, so that, when all is said and done, what we think of as ‘the mind’ is really just a matter of brain/CNS activity.1 Often the idea is that the brain/CNS builds up an internal model of the world, or that mental capacities can be understood as computational processes realized by the brain. Although the non-neural body does act as the sensor and effector system of the brain/CNS, neural activity is only ‘instrumentally dependent’ on human bodily activity and input from the environment, and our mental lives are in no way constitutively dependent on the body. In short, the prevailing view in both philosophy and the mind sciences has been that consciousness is strictly correlated with brain/CNS activity, and that it alone provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for mental life. Recently, however, a growing number of thinkers have begun to challenge the notion that conscious experience is a purely neural phenomenon and that it is the brain/CNS that is fully responsible for ‘realizing’ consciousness. In the spirit of work done by recent theorists such as Thompson, Gallagher, Shapiro, Rockwell, and Noë, and by earlier writers such as Merleau-Ponty 10

The Essential Embodiment Thesis 11

and other existential phenomenologists, the present book begins with the view that mental life is bodily life and that human consciousness is essentially embodied. However, in one very important sense, the view I propose differs strongly from theirs. This is because Thompson, Gallagher, Rockwell, and Noë all hold that consciousness is not only essentially embodied but also extended out beyond the extra-neural body into the external natural and social world. Clark usefully calls this the Extended Conscious Mind thesis (ECM), and notes that it is distinct from his own proposed Extended Mind Thesis (EM), which says only that mental content has external vehicles and does not claim that consciousness is extended. According to Clark, although worldly elements sometimes serve as genuine parts of extended cognitive processes, it is incorrect to suppose that ‘external sources comprise part of the most local machinery that generates conscious experience itself’ (Clark, 2009, pp. 986–987). I agree with Clark that ECM is mistaken, but this is largely because I think that EM likewise is mistaken.2 Items in the external environment can be causally necessary conditions of conscious experience or mental content, but they cannot literally be part of essentially embodied consciousness or mental content. In my view, the matrix for consciousness goes all the way out to the skin, but no farther than that. If this is correct, then both BRAINBOUND and ECM are false. When I say that human consciousness is essentially embodied, what I mean is that the relationship between our conscious experience and our bodily constitution is not one simply of contingent causality or instrumental dependency. Embodiment is not simply a matter of causal influence, or of stimuli to the body producing mental states. Of course it is true that, as a result of facts about my embodiment, I cannot see the wall that is behind me. However, it is also true, and far more significant, that the overall structure of my conscious experience and patterns of engagement with my environment are a function of my embodiment. Indeed, my experience of the world is partially constituted by the facts of my embodiment, so that my body is one of the ‘conditions of intelligibility’ of the world (Borrett et al., 2000, p. 263). Moreover, insofar as conscious experience is structured by our bodily dynamics and our sensorimotor interaction with our surroundings, consciousness is not simply something that happens within our brains, but rather something that we do through our living animal bodies and our dynamic bodily engagement with the world.3 In Embodied Minds in Action (2009), Robert Hanna and I set forth and defend what we call the ‘Essential Embodiment Thesis’ (EE), according to which ‘consciousness like ours’ is essentially embodied. By ‘consciousness like ours,’ we mean the subjective experience of a suitably neurobiologically complex living organism. Such consciousness is subjective insofar as it necessarily involves an egocentrically centered, single point of view that is spatio-temporally located wherever and whenever one’s body is located. It is experiential insofar as it also necessarily involves some kind or another

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of conatively affective content, based on primitive bodily awareness, which serves as the basis for all the sensory and representational content associated with sense perception of the world and acts of thought. And it belongs to a suitably complex neurobiological organism insofar as our mental lives are necessarily instantiated in all the vital neurobiological systems, organs, and processes of our living bodies, including the higher brain, brain stem, limbic system, nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, and cardiovascular system. This account entails that the conscious mind of a creature like us is not a thing, but rather a set of spontaneous capacities in a situated, forward-flowing, living body of a suitable degree of neurobiological complexity. Consciousness like ours requires a conatively affective, motile, suitably neurobiologically complex, egocentrically centered and spatially oriented, forward-flowing living organism that actively engages with its environment. EE has two logically distinct parts (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, pp. 35–36): 1. the necessary embodiment of conscious minds like ours in a living organism (the Necessity Thesis), and 2. the complete neurobiological embodiment of conscious minds like ours in all the vital systems, vital organs, and vital processes of our living bodies (the Completeness Thesis). The first part of EE emphasizes the deep continuity between mind and life, while the second part of the thesis emphasizes how consciousness like ours cannot be restricted to the brain, but rather is spread out throughout our entire bodies, and also shaped and structured by the facts of our embodiment. Now, I believe that the Essential Embodiment Thesis applies to human consciousness in general, but I wish to focus in particular on emotional consciousness as a paradigmatic illustration of the essential embodiment thesis. As I understand things, emotional consciousness includes occurrent emotions such as anger, less focused emotional states (or moods) such as anxiety, long-standing emotions such as love, and particularly stable emotional tendencies such as character traits. Perhaps nowhere are our living bodies more engaged in consciousness than in instances of these various emotional states. Indeed, what I will claim is that one fundamental manifestation of our essential embodiment is our emotions, which are instantiated in all the vital neurobiological systems and organs of our bodies. When applied to emotional consciousness in particular, EE’s Necessity Thesis says that emotionally conscious creatures like ourselves are necessarily alive, and thus cannot be dead, disembodied, or purely mechanical. On the other hand, EE’s Completeness Thesis says that emotional consciousness is fully spread out into our living bodies, necessarily including the brain, but also necessarily not restricted to the brain. The upshot is that the emotional


consciousness of a causally detached brain – say, a living brain floating listlessly in a vat, as in Hilary Putnam’s famous thought-experiment (1981, chapter 1) – just could not have an emotional consciousness like ours, even though it seems both conceivable and logically possible. This is because an emotional consciousness like ours necessarily involves a brain that is causally-dynamically coupled with all the other vital systems, organs, and processes of our living body. Of course, the Completeness Thesis does not entail that, if you lose some body fat, a limb, or some other body part, you lose your mind or your emotions. Essential Embodiment is a thesis about the operative neurobiological dynamics of conscious creatures like us, and not (except trivially) a thesis about our material composition. One reason to think that the Completeness Thesis is correct is that it seems obvious that, if any of the vital systems, organs, or processes in our bodies is destroyed or permanently disabled without a functional replacement that has essentially the same relational causal powers – say, a liver transplant, an artificial heart, or so on – then our consciousness (both emotional and otherwise) will cease to exist, precisely because the whole organism dies. Therefore, the existence of human consciousness in general and emotional consciousness in particular necessarily depends on its complete neurobiological embodiment.4 In addition, it seems equally obvious that significant changes made to the relational causal powers of any of our vital systems, organs, or processes normally produce correspondingly significant changes in the specific character of emotional experience. And this is as true of the non-brain systems as it is of the brain systems. A thyroid gland malfunction, hormone imbalance, adrenaline surge, or heart attack is apt to cause highly significant changes in emotion, mood, and overall affect. Therefore the specific character of human emotional consciousness also necessarily depends on its complete neurobiological embodiment.5 To be sure, a lobotomy or a concussive blow to the head may indeed cause more fundamental changes in emotional consciousness than a thyroid malfunction or hormone imbalance, and there is little doubt that the brain is centrally causally involved in every aspect of normal focused, alert, vivid emotional experience. Thus, I do not intend to deny the necessary and central causal role of the brain/CNS in the constitution of our normal emotional experience. However, at the same time, I am recommending that we should not overemphasize the causal role of the brain,6 since this would undermine our recognition of the equally necessary role of the relational causal powers of the rest of our vital systems, organs, and processes in shaping our conscious emotional lives (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 39). Nor should we overlook how our patterns of bodily engagement with our surroundings shape our conscious lives. Noë (2009) has highlighted the links between action and perception, and pointed out that seeing is a bodily activity that involves moving the eyes and head and body. Because how things look depends on what one does, a central task for a perceiving

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organism is to master the dynamic patterns of sensory stimulation and movement and come to understand the various ways in which its own movement results in sensory changes. Noë describes the different sensory modalities (visual, auditory, tactile) as ‘styles of exploration of the world’ (Noë, 2009, p. 61). Insofar as we enact consciousness, with the world’s help, through our dynamic living activities, neural processes must be viewed in the context of a conscious being’s active relation to the world around it. At this point, it is important to note that, while I agree that human consciousness is in some sense enactive, I am not claiming (as Noë does) that embodied action constitutes perceptual mental content. Instead, I am claiming that enactivity is a necessary condition of consciousness, content, and emotion. Thus, while I endorse a weak enactivity thesis, I do not accept Noë’s strong enactivity thesis. Like Noë, I reject the notion that the brain/ CNS generates consciousness in the way that a stove generates heat. Instead, it is more like a musical instrument which, together with bodily movement, enables people to make music. One example of this is the way in which thought processes are partly embodied in gesture. Drawing on the work of Godwin-Meadow (1999), Ratcliffe (2007) discusses how gesture can facilitate memory retrieval, play a role in the formation of new thoughts, and communicate aspects of thought that are not conveyed in speech (p. 148). Here, bodily activity such as gesture and expression are a necessary condition of the thought processes themselves, illustrating the way in which cognition is dependent upon our bodily capacities. Building on the work of Noë and Ratcliffe, I wish to suggest that emotion is likewise a bodily activity, and that our facial expressions, gestures, and intentional movements give shape and structure to our emotional relationship to the world. Of course it is true that we could not have emotions if we had no brain; but we also could not have emotions if we had no living bodies. This is because the matrix of consciousness, intentional action, and emotion is the living body, which includes, but is not restricted to, the brain and CNS. Anyone puzzled by the claim that consciousness in general, and emotional consciousness in particular, is constitutively structured by embodiment should take note of the broad array of literature that has emerged on this subject in recent years. Indeed, this embodied conception of consciousness does not arise in a vacuum, but rather can be traced to Gallagher’s ideas about how the body shapes the mind; to Noë’s claim that the body is ‘in’ the mind; and to Thompson’s suggestion that mind and life are intrinsically connected. Various theorists have explored how perception and action serve to reveal the essential embodiment of consciousness. They point out that many of the perceptual and motor abilities of the body depend on that body’s being a subjectively lived body, and that ‘without proprioceptive and kinesthetic experience, for example, many kinds of normal perception and motor action cannot happen’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 231). I wish to build on such accounts by exploring how the emotions reveal the essential


embodiment of consciousness, the tight links between mind and life, and the interplay between cognition and affect. Emotional consciousness is constitutively dependent on our subjectively lived, egocentrically structured, spatio-temporally oriented bodies. And our cognitive and perceptual abilities, in turn, are dependent on our capacity for emotion and our desiderative bodily feelings. If EE is true, this means that a disembodied individual, a zombie, or a brain in a vat could not have a conscious mind like ours and could not have an emotional life like ours. This is not to say that disembodied counterparts of our own minds (a.k.a. ‘spirits’) and mindless counterparts of our own living bodies (a.k.a. ‘zombies’) are not logically possible. Still, it is unclear that spirits, zombies, or envatted brains are in any way explanatorily or metaphysically relevant to the nature of our minds or our living bodies. At this point proponents of BRAINBOUND, who maintain that the brain/CNS is the constitutive locus of consciousness, might assert that surely we can produce emotional experience simply by stimulating the brain, or by giving someone drugs. They might claim that electrodes placed appropriately in the living brain could give rise to emotional experience, or that giving someone the appropriate drug might induce various emotional states. Emotions, they might say, are simply a matter of brain activity in relevant neural regions, so that fixing states of the brain fixes one’s emotional condition. However, as Noë (2009) points out, from the fact that we can produce some emotional experience by stimulating the brain, we cannot conclude that we can produce all emotional experience in this way. Stimulation of the brain might be able to produce anger in some free-floating sense, but it is unclear that it could produce the specific sort of anger that I feel when someone pushes me out of his way on the subway platform so that he can get on the train first. It seems that my interaction with the world is required for this specific flavor of anger, and that a drug surely could not produce this effect simply by altering my neurochemistry. A drug might make me disposed to anger; however, my engagement with the world would still be required to lend meaning and intentionality to this experience, and, as I will argue in Chapter 2, this meaning and intentionality are an integral part of much of our emotional experience. But might there be some brilliant mad scientist who could produce ‘my anger at the guy on the subway’ by stimulating my brain? Again, it is doubtful that this could result in emotional experience identical to mine when I am in this situation, for it seems that, in the stimulation case, such experience would take place in the absence of an actual person and an actual subway. This experience would not be a matter of my active bodily engagement with my surroundings, as it is when I have an ordinary, real-life encounter. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that it were possible to create elaborate hallucinations that corresponded to our normal emotional experiences. In that case, Noë points out that we are not imagining that there could be

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an emotional state identical to ours that arises out of neural activity in the brain all by itself (Noë, 2009, p. 174). Instead, it is the brain in a living body plus the actions of the manipulating scientist that are causally sufficient7 for these effects: a brain–scientist system. Once again, it is not the brain all by itself that gives rise to consciousness, but a complicated set of interactions between the brain and the living body of the individual subject, embedded in a larger world. Moreover, when we produce an episode of emotional experience by direct action on the brain, via stimulation or via drugs, what we really do is modulate an already existing state of consciousness. Anyone who has ever taken mood-altering drugs knows that the effects of these drugs are heavily influenced by one’s already existing emotional state before one takes the drugs; and what sorts of effects the drugs will have depends causally on whom one is interacting with, what sorts of conversations one is having, and the context one finds oneself in. Even more significantly, it also depends constitutively on one’s metabolic and digestive states, how much one has had to eat that day, sleep, exercise, and stress. In other words, everything depends on our living bodily condition, in some or other context of where our bodies are located and how they are engaged. This is to say that stimulation of the brain, via drugs or electrodes, indeed can produce changes in emotional consciousness, and this confirms that the brain does play a central role in consciousness; however, from this obvious fact, we are in no way entitled to conclude that emotional consciousness depends only on brain activity or that each emotion has a neural correlate. Genuine simulation of the emotional experience associated with everyday interaction with our environment would require that we supply the brain with a virtual living body to inhabit, in a virtual context and environment. Even then, after we had supplied the brain with a virtual living body with a virtual world to inhabit, it is unclear that we would have anything more than virtual emotion. As the discussion that follows should make clear, this is because our kind of consciousness is very much bound up with our fully embodied, animate, neurobiological dynamics. Likewise, the conscious minds of many non-human animals are bound up with quite similar neurobiological dynamics, and, to that extent, we and they have conscious minds of a similar sort. Of course, when I speak of neurobiological dynamics, this necessarily includes our brains, but such dynamics necessarily are not restricted to our brains. Instead, they are necessarily and wholly spatially spread throughout our living organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. In the next section, I discuss how our conscious lives are rooted in sensorimotor subjectivity in an effort to elaborate and provide additional support for EE. This sets the stage for an exploration of how emotional consciousness and conative affectivity arise out of our lived bodily dynamics and neurobiological structure. Ultimately, what I will suggest is that the necessary structures that characterize conscious minds like ours are rooted in the autopoietic processes of


autonomous, living systems, neurobiological dynamics, and the shape of the human body. All of these structures are interrelated, and all are informed by a conative biological impulse to regenerate and go on living. This is not to say that all living organisms have a mental life, but rather that living organisms are the only sorts of beings that can have a mental life.

1.1 Consciousness in and through the body: sensorimotor subjectivity In recent years there has been a great deal of support offered in favor of the Essential Embodiment Thesis (EE) and the claim that human consciousness is inherently structured by embodiment. My aim in this section is to provide a brief survey of some of the key evidence in order to strengthen my case for EE and argue for the corresponding claim that the capacity for all modes of consciousness like ours ultimately is rooted in sensorimotor subjectivity. Building on the work of theorists such as Evan Thompson, Shaun Gallagher, and Alva Noë, I argue that consciousness should be understood as a living activity and as a ‘something that we do’ with and through our living bodies and brains, rather than a ‘something’ that has a locus somewhere deep inside us, in the brain and central nervous system alone. One body of evidence that supports EE comes from Gallagher (2005a), who persuasively argues that consciousness from the very beginning is structured by embodiment, in particular by what he calls the body schema. Gallagher characterizes the body schema as a system of sensory–motor functions (motor programs, habits, and movements) that operates below the level of self-referential intentionality and does not show up explicitly in the contents of consciousness. While the body image ‘consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body’, a body schema ‘is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring’ (p. 24). According to Gallagher, this integrated set of dynamic sensorimotor processes organizes perception and action in a sub-personal and unconscious manner. The body schema is what allows the normal subject moving around in the world to forget about her body to a large extent and focus her attention elsewhere. While I have some concerns about Gallagher’s characterization of the body schema and the way in which he distinguishes between it and the body image, I agree with him that pre-reflective bodily processes do indeed shape how we experience the world, so that distortions of the body schema give rise to distortions in perception or motor behavior. As he rightly points out, the notion that the perceived world and intentional action are structured by the very shape and capacities of the body is supported by various studies. For example, posture and balance contribute to how we visually perceive our surroundings and help to determine what is located within our line of sight (p. 145). When a subject’s postural

18 Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition

schema is adjusted, this results in perceptual shifts in the external vertical and horizontal planes, and subjects whose development of the body schema is retarded experience deficits in spatial perception. In addition to impacting how we perceive the world, the human shape and posture also influence how we are able to act in it. Human anatomy and skeletal structure enable the upright posture, which in turn allows the development of shoulders, hands, skull, and face. The upright posture also enables us to stand and walk, which in turn affects what we are able to see and thereby redefines our spatial framework for perception and action (p. 148). Objects appear in a body-centered spatial gestalt that is organized in terms of foreground and background, so that posture also affects attention and influences cognitive performance. Changes or anomalies in posture, motility, and physical ability also have an impact on the body image, as do exercise, dance, and other practices that affect motility and posture. And various internal autonomic adjustments associated with stress, pain, hunger, fatigue, and other such states help to constrain and enable perception and action. How one experiences the world is affected by whether one is hungry or fatigued as well as by the levels of certain hormones in one’s body. Gallagher’s work, I believe, lends strong support to the notion that human consciousness is rooted in our embodiment, and that we interact with and engage with the world in the particular ways that we do as a result of the shape and structure of our living bodies. Additional support for EE comes from Lakoff and Johnson (1999), who argue that there are strong reasons to suppose that even our conceptual systems and the structure of our reasoning are rooted in the details of our shared embodiment. They describe how ‘our bodies define a set of fundamental spatial orientations that we use not only in orienting ourselves, but in perceiving the relationship of one object to another’ (p. 34). For example, we project ‘fronts’ and ‘backs’ onto objects because we all have faces and move in the direction in which we see. We understand pushing, pulling, propelling, supporting, and balancing through the use of our body parts and our ability to move them; and we project abstract containers onto space as a result of the way we schematize our own bodies and the objects we interact with daily. Indeed, much of the way that we conceptualize things and reason about them comes from sensorimotor domains of experience. Lakoff and Johnson describe how conventional mental imagery from sensorimotor domains of experience gives rise to conceptual metaphors that are pervasive in human thought and language. In the course of early learning, subjective experiences are regularly conflated with sensorimotor experiences, and, for a time, children cannot distinguish between the two. For example, they conflate the subjective experience of affection with the sensory experience of warmth. Although the children are later able to separate out the domains during a period of differentiation, the cross-domain associations persist and metaphor emerges. These ‘primary metaphors’ are


built up into more complex ones through conceptual blending, and serve to structure our reasoning and experience. Just one example is the way in which a conflation or association between quantity and verticality in a child’s early experience gives rise to the metaphor, ‘More is Up.’ This is linked to the fact that, when the child sees objects added to a pile, that pile grows higher. Another example is ‘Knowing is Seeing,’ which is rooted in the fact that, because we get most of our knowledge visually, knowing and seeing are conflated in a child’s early experience. This primary metaphor is embodied in neural connections (as well as patterns of bodily attunement) established in early childhood and allows us to make inferences and reason about knowing based on our sensorimotor knowledge about seeing. Other examples of bodily-based, primary metaphors are ‘intimacy is closeness’; ‘categories are containers’; ‘time is motion’; ‘states are locations’; ‘purposes are desired objects’; ‘actions are self-propelled motions’; and ‘causes are physical forces.’ What we understand the world to be like is in this way determined by our sensory organs, our ability to manipulate objects, the shape of our bodies, the detailed structure of our brain, and our interactions with our surroundings (p. 102). To elaborate on just one example, the ‘foreseeable events are up ahead’ metaphor is rooted in the fact that normally our eyes are pointed in the direction in which we typically move (ahead or forward). It seems that if our eyes faced toward the side, or if we moved in a direction different from where our eyes pointed, we would not conceptualize foreseeable future events as ‘up ahead.’ In light of the evidence presented above, I endorse Gallagher’s claim that ‘the very shape of the human body, its lived mechanisms, its endogenous processes, and its interaction with the environment work in dynamic unity with the human nervous system to define necessary constraints on human experience’ (2005a, p. 152). Building on Gallagher’s observations, I will maintain that our embodiment defines the contours of sensorimotor subjectivity, and thereby influences all other modes of consciousness. The way that the world is disclosed, whether in perception, action, thought, or memory, is largely a result of a creature’s bodily structure. And, because living animals like us are sensorimotor beings, the environment that emerges for us is a sensorimotor world of perception, action, and emotional significance. It is thanks to our sensorimotor repertoire and our particular capacities for movement and affectivity that we engage with and experience our surroundings in all the particular ways that we do. One might suppose that the body operates largely at the level of unconscious or sub-personal information processing to structure our experience. In this connection, it is directly relevant to note that, according to Lakoff and Johnson, the body’s influence on conceptualization and reason takes place at the level of the ‘cognitive unconscious’; likewise, on Gallagher’s account, all of the bodily ‘pre-processing’ that takes place at the level of the body schema is purely autonomic, sub-personal, and non-conscious. If these

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accounts are correct, then the body does indeed play a role in shaping how conscious processes unfold, but often operates completely at a pre-experiential, preconscious level. This is because, according to Gallagher, none of the dynamic sensorimotor processes that constitute the body schema are phenomenologically accessible. What is missing from such accounts, I think, is the notion of the lived body. One’s consciousness of the body is not limited to the so-called ‘body image,’ nor is the body image the most fundamental mode of bodily consciousness. Of course, Gallagher is right to point out that most of the time one’s body is not present as an intentional object in conscious experience, and that the body image is not the most fundamental form of bodily consciousness. After all, the body image is an explicit cognitive, affective, and practical mental model or pictorial map of our own body, intimately connected with how we think and feel about ourselves, how we present ourselves to others, and how we plan our intentional movements. The generation of a fully explicit body image is closely connected with our recognition that others are seeing us, as well as our encounters with mirrors, and no doubt involves some degree of reflective self-awareness. The phenomenon of unilateral neglect,8 whereby stroke patients can fail to attend to or perceive one side of their body, even while still being able to make effective, skilled, intentional movements of their body (e.g., being able to dress themselves), provides compelling empirical evidence for Gallagher’s claim that body schema and body image are sharply distinct. This is because in cases of unilateral neglect we clearly have a complete and uncompromised primitive bodily awareness and corresponding body schema, along with an incomplete or compromised body image. There is also significant empirical evidence for the converse phenomenon – a normally functioning body image along with a compromised primitive bodily awareness and body schema – in the strange case of Ian Waterman. The victim of a catastrophic illness at age 19, Waterman lost certain crucial aspects of his primitive sense of proprioception below his neck, although he did retain the capacity for normal proprioceptive experience above his neck, and especially in the facial area. As a result, Waterman had to see his own limbs in order to move them, and collapse in the dark. Such examples do support the notion that there is an important distinction to be drawn between body image and body schema. However, it is unclear that the bodily adjustments, hormonal fluctuations, and other ‘sub-personal’ processes that Gallagher describes as unconscious operate completely outside consciousness. After all, how one perceives the world and acts within it depends, to a large extent, on how one is experiencing the world in a bodily way. The feeling of being stressed, being hungry, or being fatigued partially constitutes how one perceives the world and one’s possibilities for action. In this way, the bodily adjustments and hormonal fluctuations that Gallagher describes as part of the body schema in fact form part of pre-reflective bodily experience. Thus, it is not that the body


image is conscious, while the body schema is unconscious; more accurately, it is that body image involves explicit, reflective self-awareness, while the body schema involves implicit, pre-reflective self-awareness. As Thompson rightly points out, the distinction Gallagher draws between body schema and body image leaves out a fundamental form of bodily experience: pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness. Most of the time one’s body is not present as an intentional object, but rather is experienced in an implicit, tacit, and pre-reflective way and is a matter of bodily feelings. This is what Thompson calls ‘sensorimotor subjectivity,’ which he describes as ‘an intransitive and prereflective bodily self-awareness’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 249), one manifestation of which is ‘proprioceptive awareness.’ Gallagher describes this sort of proprioceptive–kinesthetic awareness as a ‘pre-reflective (non-observational) awareness that allows the body to remain experientially transparent to the agent who is acting’ (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 73). It provides a sense that one is moving or doing something, but is not explicitly about particular body parts. To make sense of sensorimotor subjectivity, we need to draw an important distinction between a high-powered conception and a low-powered conception of consciousness. On the one hand, one might understand consciousness or subjective experience in terms of self-consciousness or self-reflection, which points to an individual’s ability to have conscious meta-representational states or thoughts about herself and her own mental states. Clearly it is this high-powered mode of consciousness that is involved in Gallagher’s body image. Sensorimotor subjectivity, on the other hand, is a matter of experiencing oneself as a situated, forward-flowing, living organismic body of a suitable degree of neurobiological complexity.9 This first-order, transitive mode of consciousness is the unmediated, direct, and non-conceptual subjective awareness that forms the basis for all other conscious states. It counts as a sort of primitive bodily awareness, and thus essentially contains phenomenal consciousness. But, insofar as this subjective experience is bound up with a sense of our whole living body and its egocentric spatio-temporal orientation, it is unacceptable to describe such phenomenal consciousness as merely a raw feel or a sensory feel. Instead, sensorimotor subjectivity involves the robust, thick ‘what it is like’ of essentially embodied experience, and is far more robust than so-called ‘quale’ as they are usually depicted. While I cook dinner, I am focused on what I am doing as I measure out ingredients, stir the sauce, cut vegetables, and get jars from the pantry. But, as I am working, I consciously feel my body parts and limbs in their relative positions. I feel my weight shift from one leg to the other as I stand in front of the stove, I feel my wrist move as I stir the sauce, and I feel my fingers move as I cut the vegetables. But I do not pay much attention to how my wrist or my hand feels unless they become uncomfortable. When I touch the spoon, I feel the object I am touching, but I also feel myself touching it and

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being touched by it (Thompson, 2007, p. 250). This is an example of firstorder, transitive, pre-reflectively conscious sensorimotor subjectivity, which is given in and through one’s primitive bodily awareness, and gives one a sense of one’s own unique continuing essential embodiment. In other words, a sensorimotor subject experiences herself as a coherent and individual essentially embodied mind because she immediately feels herself to be standing in a direct, effective, and intimate connection to the actual and potential movements, vital systems, vital organs, vital processes, and overall condition of her own living animal body. The various sensorimotor processes involved in perception and action are not sub-personal and non-conscious, as Gallagher supposes, but rather are lived in and through the body. In my view, sensorimotor subjectivity penetrates into every aspect of our mental lives, so that even relatively non-conscious states (such as those Gallagher describes as part of the body schema and body schematic information processing) are in some minimal sense occurrently conscious. Obviously we are not usually attending focally to our efforts to remain sitting upright in a chair or walk down the street. We generally have bigger and more interesting things to think about. Nor, to the extent that we are usually not thinking about that sort of mental activity, do we usually have any occurrent conceptual access to it. But it does not follow that in and through this body schematic information processing we are not firstpersonally aware at all. As Gallagher readily points out, distortions of the body schema give rise to distortions in conscious experiences of perception and action. Furthermore, any sort of breakdown in normal body schematic processing – say, when Ian Waterman is unable to control his movements because he lacks visual proprioception – has an immediate, vivid, and often highly disturbing subjectively experiential character. What Waterman consciously experiences is a loss of a sense of embodiment or an alienation from his body. If such observations are correct, then the notion that there is a fundamental difference between first-personal information processing (the conscious mind) and sub-personal information processing (the computational mind) is mistaken. If all information-carrying and information-constructing processes in minded creatures like us is at least minimally occurrently conscious, then Gallagher’s claim that the body schema functions beneath the level of personal life cannot be quite right. All information processing is first-personal, although non-conceptual10 and non-self-reflective. Of course, to say that all information processing in minded creatures like us is minimally occurrently conscious is not to say that we are always occurrently conscious of this information processing or that we are attentive to it, whether selfconsciously or self-reflectively, and can form beliefs or make reports about it. It is also not to say that we have conceptual access to it or can form mental models or imagery of it. Instead, the claim is that all forms of our mental activity, including information processing, are fundamentally manifest to


us, as conscious sensorimotor subjects, in pre-reflective bodily feeling and primitive bodily awareness. Even in cases where information processing is non-focal, non-vivid, non-meta-representational, and non-conceptual, it is still nonetheless pre-reflectively conscious. The claim that all information processing is minimally occurrently conscious is entailed by what Hanna and I (2009) dub the Deep Consciousness thesis: necessarily, whenever a creature with a consciousness like ours is in any sort of mental state, then it is also occurrently conscious. Of course, being occurrently conscious is not the same thing as being maximally conscious. States such as dreaming sleep, dreamless sleep, automatism, trances, reflex action, divided attention, subliminal awareness, and cognitive priming are all examples of states that do not involve full conscious awareness. And yet even these relatively non-conscious states still involve some subjective experience and a point of view. Indeed, all access conscious states whose contents are poised for use in thought and action are occurrently phenomenally conscious, at least in a minimal sense. Contrary to what Block (2002) claims, this is true even in cases of blindsight. In such cases, subjects report the absence of visual sensations, but nevertheless are able to point with some accuracy to objects in the parts of their visual fields they say are blind to them. Although blindsighters lack some degree of self-conscious or self-reflective vision, and thus report the absence of visual sensations, they are still guided by pre-reflectively conscious sensorimotor subjective vision. This pre-reflective consciousness is what enables them to point to objects in the self-professedly blind parts of their visual fields. Although the claim that all mental states are minimally occurrently conscious may seem rather bold at first, when properly understood, it is not really so shocking. Indeed, since, presumably, everyone would agree that it is possible for rational, self-conscious, self-reflective animals like us skillfully to drive a car and at the same time drink hot coffee (consciously and pre-reflectively but not self-consciously or self-reflectively), then at least implicitly everyone already concedes a distinction between sensorimotor subjectivity and meta-representational, self-reflective subjectivity. And this is just one example of an action that we carry out ‘automatically’ and ‘without even thinking about it.’ Other such perceptual and motor skills include our ability to walk, navigate our way through doorways, reach and grasp for objects, hold our bodies upright in a sitting position, and even type on our computers. The dissociation between sensorimotor subjectivity and meta-representational, self-reflective subjectivity also is evidenced by the so-called ‘cocktail-party effect,’ in which one screens out the sounds of conversations other than one’s own. If one’s name is mentioned, however, one’s attention immediately shifts to that conversation, which indicates that one must already have had an auditory consciousness of what was being said. Although one experiences other people’s conversations implicitly and without self-reflective awareness of having heard them, what one hears from


other people’s conversations nonetheless is consciously experienced and accessible. Moreover, although sensorimotor subjectivity need not be accompanied by self-reflection, rationality, or high-powered consciousness, all high-powered modes of consciousness presuppose sensorimotor subjectivity. This is supported by the fact that at least some non-human animals – for example, Nagel’s bat – and all normal human infants have sensorimotor subjective or pre-reflectively conscious states that are not also self-conscious or selfreflective. Even among normal adult human animals, sensorimotor subjectivity or pre-reflective consciousness is frequently present even though self-consciousness or self-reflection is not. For example, in the early stages of emotional experience, before one has had the opportunity to consider and reflect on what is happening, one nonetheless is occurrently conscious. Suppose that you wake up to the sound of glass shattering in your living room,11 and, because your attention is focused on trying to figure out what caused the sound, you may very well not self-consciously or self-reflectively experience fear. Still, the sound’s presentation and affective influence involve pre-reflective bodily awareness and have a phenomenal character, so that even when one’s attention is directed elsewhere, there still is something it is like to live through that scary moment. To see that one does consciously hear the sound and feel afraid before turning one’s attention to it, consider the fact that the content of the experience is access conscious insofar as one is poised to make use of one’s pre-reflective emotional experience in guiding one’s actions. On my view, sensorimotor subjectivity penetrates into every aspect of our mental lives, including the seemingly ‘non-conscious’ or ‘sub-personal’ information processing that goes on in emotional experience. Although this information processing is indeed pre-reflective, it still involves subjective experience that is fully first-personal, conscious, and centered around a particular point of view. Indeed, even higher-level cognitive functions are rooted in sensorimotor subjectivity. In motor intentionality, sensorimotor subjectivity operates as an implicit and practical ‘I can,’ or as the source of intentional movement; and, in perception, things are situated and thus appear perspectivally in virtue of their orientation in relation to our subjectively experiencing bodies, so that perceptual experience involves an implicit, intransitive, and pre-reflective bodily self-awareness (Thompson, 2007, p. 249). Thus, consciousness of the body as subject is consciousness of the body as acting and perceiving. Our primary way of being in the world is not reflexive or intellectual, but rather bodily and skillful. If this is correct, then sensorimotor subjectivity is our basic and primary mode of consciousness, and it is part of all other, more high-powered modes of consciousness, including perception, action, emotion, reasoning, imagination, and recollection.


It is crucial to note that this consciousness of the body as perceiving and acting also is essentially affective, for all perception and action is organized around felt desire. Thanks to our embodiment and sensorimotor repertoire, our lived phenomenal world is a spatial and temporal world in which we are affected by what surrounds us, and in turn seek to affect those surroundings. This is because a conscious organism, in feeling things, also ‘immediately and pre-reflectively feels its own situated living bodily presence and dynamic capacities for forward-flowing movement right here and now’ (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 70). And in feeling its own bodily presence, and its capacity for intentional body movement in accordance with its felt needs, the conscious sensorimotor creature inherently also cares about itself and its mental states. In this way, sensorimotor subjectivity is bound up not just with agency, movement, and perception, but also with emotion and affect. In the next section, I explore how the details of human embodiment structure sensorimotor subjectivity, and thereby give shape and form to our conscious engagement with the world.

1.2

Five intrinsic structures of sensorimotor subjectivity

One of the aims of phenomenologists has been to outline the ‘invariant formal structures’ of consciousness that serve as necessary constraints on human experience (Thompson, 2007, p. 28). As Thompson puts it, ‘objects are disclosed in the ways they are – as complex structured manifolds of appearance – thanks to certain essential formal laws under which experience necessarily operates so as to disclose a meaningful world’ (pp. 239–40). Likewise, according to Johnson (1990), our understanding and ability to make sense of the world involves many pre-conceptual and nonpropositional structures of experience. Such recurring patterns arise out of human bodily movement, our capacity to manipulate objects, and our perceptual interactions. In other words, we make use of patterns that characterize bodily experience to organize our more abstract understanding of the world. Hanna and I (2009) argue that there are eight intrinsic (i.e., necessary, internal) structures of every consciousness (p. 75). Here I would like to focus on five of these, and maintain that, by virtue of our embodiment, sensorimotor subjectivity (and consciousness more generally) involves the following necessary structures: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Conative affectivity: phenomenal character and desire-based affectivity Egocentricity: immanent reflexivity Spatiality: orientability and balanceability in proprioception Temporality: spontaneity, motility, and kinesthesia in proprioception Intentionality: directedness toward a target


1.2.1 Conative affectivity Conative affectivity is the ‘experiential’ aspect of consciousness, or what some theorists have described as ‘subjective feeling’ or ‘qualitative feel,’ and which I maintain necessarily involves desire. The most basic way in which I am aware of desire-based affectivity is through primitive bodily awareness, through which I experience myself as a bodily subject that has sensations and carries out movements. Thus, this basic mode of affectivity is a matter of being able to feel the presence of one’s body in relation to the world. It is a bodily ‘feeling of existence’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 229) that is valenced. Varela and Depraz (2005) describe valence as ‘the primordial constitution of self-affection as a dynamic polarity, as manifesting itself in the form of a tension that takes several forms: like-dislike, attraction-rejection, pleasuredispleasure’ (p. 70). Objects, precipitating events, or other triggers impact and affect us, and their meaning and importance (whether it is of positive, negative, or mixed value) is felt. Affectivity is linked to a conscious subject’s felt needs, whether real or merely imagined, insofar as those felt needs constitute ‘what-it-is-like-to-be’ that subject. Such felt needs often seem to arise from the middle of our body, in our ‘guts,’ and emanate upwards, downwards, and outwards towards our heads, lower extremities, and external sense organs. To say that a subject has felt needs is to say that he or she desires things, whether positively as a desire-for or liking, or negatively as a desire-against or disliking. Something impacts the body and feels good, and so the subject desires it. Something imposes on the body and feels bad, and so the subject avoids it. Desire-for and desire-against are experienced by the subject in and through the body during moments of attraction or repulsion, and advance or withdrawal. One might say that this subject has not just sensations, but also a sensibility. Everything that is experienced or experienceable matters in one way or another, and is characterized by a dimension of pleasure or displeasure (or a mixture of both). Even in feeling numb, one directly feels the actual presence or pressure of external things in and through one’s body, but without the more or less insistently intense sense of pleasure or pain that such bodily experience usually brings. Thus, I maintain that for creatures like us all forms of mental activity are grounded in pre-reflective emotional feeling and primitive bodily awareness. This means that our perceptions, cognitive processes, and actions all have a qualitative feel, and how they feel is closely linked to our felt needs and desires. Hearing music, touching soft objects, and seeing the color pink all have a unique conatively affective character. In addition, the very way in which the world is disclosed to us, including what we attend to in perception and thought and what we strive for in action, are all partially constituted by conative affectivity. Actions ‘start from situations which offer something which attracts or repulses us, which looks frightening or tempting’ (Waldenfels, 2004, p. 238). Memory functions in a similar way. We


tend to keep in mind what hurts us, and what we spontaneously remember follows our desires. Everything that appears as something is ‘something which provokes sense, without being meaningful itself, but still something by which we are touched, affected, stimulated, surprised, and to some extent violated’ (Waldenfels, 2004, p. 238). Affect signifies that something is done to us, that what affects us arouses bodily feelings, and that we care about what happens to us and our bodies. Of course, we are not the only creatures with a sensibility and who experience conative affectivity. To the extent that other minded animals likewise have this experience of conative affectivity, their consciousness is similar to ours. 1.2.2 Egocentricity Sensorimotor subjectivity and primitive bodily awareness also necessarily involve egocentricity and immanent reflexivity. First, to say that sensorimotor subjectivity is egocentrically structured is to say that it has an ‘inner’ source-point, as well as an ‘outer’ derivation or dispersal, and that it is able to relate everything that is experienced to this inner source-point (Hanna and Maiese, 200, p. 80). Egocentricity can be understood in relation to the subject–object status of the body, whereby the body serves as both the source and the target of affection. The body functions as the ‘zero point’ in relation to which objects of perception are situated, and from which action proceeds, so that the ego is located wherever the body is located. The I of our subjectivity manifests itself in cases where the ‘inner’ source-point impacts the outer world, a paradigmatic example of which would be intentional body movement. The me of subjectivity, on the other hand, is manifest in cases where the outer world impacts the ‘inner’ source-point, such as when events in the outer world impact the body. A paradigmatic example of this would be sensations caused by the impact of outside objects, for example, the sensation caused when sleet is pelting me in the face. To put it another way, the I is the ‘subjective subject’ of sensorimotor subjectivity and the me is the ‘subjective object’ of sensorimotor subjectivity. Thus, in perception and action, the body is a subject–object, a ‘perceiving thing’ and a ‘moved motor.’ It is always poised for affection as well as action, and this dual status as subject and object is an intrinsic part of our primitive bodily awareness. Second, to say that sensorimotor subjectivity is immanently reflexive is to say that it includes an immediate sense of self, or a direct awareness of itself in a wholly first-order sense. In sensorimotor subjectivity, there is no division or opacity between oneself and the content of one’s own experience. Rather, conscious states are immediately and non-inferentially experienced as one’s own and involve an intrinsic ‘first-personal givenness’ or ipseity (I-ness) (Thompson, 2007, p. 261). This wholly first-order lamination of a conscious state like ours back upon itself is so intimate that G. E. Moore (1930) called it the ‘transparency’ of consciousness. During sensation, things impose themselves on ME (the bodily object) from the outside, and

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during action I AM THE ONE (the bodily subject) who wills and strives and puts forth bodily effort. Both activity and passivity thus seem to presuppose egocentricity and an immediate, bodily sense of self. In this way, sensorimotor subjectivity is essentially a matter of engaging with the world from a unique point of view. 1.2.3

Spatiality

Sensorimotor subjectivity also is essentially spatial, and the body is the source of this spatiality. Subjective experience necessarily occurs here, wherever the body happens to be located. I always experience myself as uniquely located or uniquely positioned, even if I do not know where I am and do not form beliefs or make reports about my location. By virtue of its spatiality, sensorimotor subjectivity is also necessarily orientable and balanceable via the body’s proprioceptive capacities. To the extent that I pre-reflectively experience myself as here, I also am implicitly aware of myself as facing left, facing right, right-side up, upside-down, or tipped sideways. Though I typically am not attending to it, I tacitly feel the difference between different parts of my body and also have a sense of myself as placed, as relatively balanced or poised, in some orientation or another (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 83). But, although somatic proprioception reflects the contours of my body, it does not offer a perceptual perspective on my body, and so the body itself is not a perceptual object. As Gallagher maintains, body posture involves a ‘prenoetic spatiality that is never fully represented in consciousness or captured by objective measurement’ (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 139). The pragmatic and egocentric spatial framework involved in sensorimotor subjectivity does not correspond precisely to objective measurements, but instead is a bodycentered and perspectival spatial framework that involves experiential reference to one’s body. Using information provided by the body schema, we are able to walk through space without bumping into things, locate targets, and catch a ball with accuracy. In vision, touch, and hearing, one’s body serves as the spatial frame of reference for what one sees, feels, and hears. One sees and touches things that are over there, while one’s body always functions as an indexical ‘here.’ Objects are perceptually situated, as well as positioned as potentially manipulable, by virtue of their orientation in relation to this bodily reference point. It also is striking that we make use of patterns that characterize bodily experience to organize our more abstract spatial understanding of the world. Johnson (1990) has explored how our ability to make sense of the world involves many pre-conceptual and non-propositional structures of experience that arise out of human bodily movement, our capacity to manipulate objects, and our perceptual interactions. What he calls ‘image schemata’ are embodied patterns of meaningfully organized experience, including structures of bodily movements and perceptual interactions. One central feature of our bodily life is our experience of containment and boundedness (p. 21).


From the beginning of our lives, we move in and out of a variety of bounded spaces, including cribs, rooms, and vehicles. We manipulate objects, placing them in containers and also are aware of our own bodies as containers, into which we put food. The basis for this recurring spatial organization (our in–out orientation toward our world) is our bodily experience of spatial boundedness, and this is just one example of the way in which the body structures and organizes our experience. Other examples of image schemas, which are rooted in our bodily experience of force and force relationships, include compulsion, blockage, removal of restraint, enablement, and attraction (p. 48). Primitive image schemas such as these, which are rooted in concrete bodily experience, structure people’s understanding of spatial relations throughout the world, and also appear in all of the world’s languages. Throughout the world, creatures like us automatically and pre-reflectively carve up the world according to part–whole, center–periphery, and near–far, and make sense of our surroundings in terms of links, cycles, contact, forced motion, support, and balance (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p. 35). Our bodily orientation and movement shape what these spatial concepts mean, so that, despite cross-cultural differences in our higher-level conceptions of and speech about space and time, there is a universally shared spatial aspect to our human conscious experience. And it is shared by virtue of the fact that we all have bodies of the same kind. 1.2.4 Temporality Sensorimotor subjectivity also is necessarily temporal. One always experiences one’s conscious states as occurring now and as unfolding in time, and the intransitive and direct acquaintance that one has with one’s bodily subjectivity involves a flowing or streaming. This involves a tacit awareness of the just-elapsed phase of experience (retention), bodily consciousness right now (primal impression), and ‘an open and forward-looking horizon’ of what is yet to come (Thompson, 2007, p. 319). Retention serves to provide a sense of ownership for thought and action, while protention gives one a sense of where the thinking process or activity is going ‘in its very making, as it is being generated and developed’ (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 193). The retentional–protentional continuum allows for experiential continuity and the intentional unification of consciousness, which in turn gives sensorimotor subjectivity temporal width and allows it to unfold in time. Our pre-reflective, sensorimotor subjective, non-conceptual experience of what is earlier as well as what is yet to come allows us, at a pre-reflective level, to tell the difference between two successive ringings of the same bell. Even when the temporality of sensorimotor subjectivity is disrupted, such as in cases of amnesia, subjects still parse events in terms of earlier time and later time, and their bodily subjectivity still involves a flowing or streaming.


Moreover, the notion that conscious experience has ‘temporal width’ reveals that one always uniquely locates oneself in time, just as one always uniquely locates oneself in space. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) provide a wide range of examples that strongly support the notion that our most basic sense of time is deeply linked to our understanding of space. In their view, most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space (p. 139). The present time is the time that is at the same location as the stationary observer: ‘here and now.’ The spatial terms ‘behind,’ ‘precede,’ ‘follow,’ ‘arrive,’ ‘approach,’ and ‘zoom by’ likewise have temporal meanings. Expressions such as ‘We’re coming up on Christmas’ and ‘That’s all behind us now’ are just two examples. Times are conceptualized as locations or bounded regions in space or as objects/substances that move. Events are then located with respect to those locations in space or objects that move. We establish histories and calendars using timelines, which allow us to visualize future plans and goals as being spread out in space (p. 155). Events ‘close’ to us in time loom larger and give a greater sense of urgency, and understanding time as moving or flowing allows us to visualize the order of events that are coming up. Typically we are looking ahead, either in the direction of motion or at things or people moving toward us, so that there is a correlation between future encounters and what is ahead of us. Our way of speaking about and understanding time in spatial terms is motivated by our most basic everyday experiences (p. 153). In addition, spontaneity, kinesthesia and motility are all important aspects of the temporality of consciousness. Sensorimotor subjectivity involves either the essentially embodied subject’s immediate sense of moving her limbs or changing her body position on her own through her intentional agency, or at least of being able to do so; or of being moved or changed by something else, whereby the bodily movements or changes are experienced as things that merely happens to her. One way in which the necessary temporality of sensorimotor subjectivity manifests itself is in the flow of ‘immersed skillful action.’ Things in one’s surroundings call for a certain mode of action insofar as one has a sense that one’s situation deviates from some optimal body–environment relationship (and is contrary to one’s desires). The activity one undertakes aims to move one closer to that optimum (thereby bringing the situation more in line with what one desires). In this way, protention and anticipation of the future always involve motivation, an affective tone, and an action tendency or readiness for intentional movement (Thompson, 2007, p. 361). What results is the spontaneity of sensorimotor subjectivity, which involves the immediate sense of time’s asymmetric continuous forward flow. 1.2.5

Intentionality

Sensorimotor subjectivity also is necessarily intentional, or directed to some target. To say that something is intended is to say that ‘something is


given, apprehended, understood, or interpreted, as something’ (Waldenfels, 2004, p. 237). Intentionality commonly is characterized either as the ability of consciousness to direct itself at or towards objects, actions, locations, events, or itself (intentional targets), or else as the fact that conscious mental states are ‘about’ something or another, by virtue of their content. Here I adopt the classical phenomenological view of intentionality (common to the work of Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty), which says that all intentionality necessarily involves (i) mental episodes (mental acts or mental states); (ii) mental topics or objects; and (iii) shareable mental ways of representing those objects, or contents. In my view, not all intentionality involves determinate or explicit content, though all intentionality does involve directedness. Intentionality is evident at a very basic level in awareness of one’s body parts in relation to each other, and also in basic directedness toward what is ‘there’ in space or ‘not yet’ in time, even if there is no precise target toward which one is directed. This is to say that sensorimotor subjectivity is worlddirected, and this is linked to its intrinsic spatio-temporality. Because sensorimotor subjectivity is positioned in orientable space and also flowing forward in irreversible time, it is capable of being there-directed in orientable space and forward-directed in irreversible time. This is to say that sensorimotor subjectivity involves the body’s being directed intentionally to some location or another, and also protentionally directed in time toward some future event or another. Consciousness always is intentional in the sense that it ‘aims towards’ something beyond itself. Although often directed to objects, not all everyday experience is object-directed in a determinate sense. Experiences without determinate objects include bodily feelings, moods, and absorbed skillful activity (Thompson, 2007, p. 23). Associated bodily feelings are often that through which one is conscious of other things in the world, so that these feelings influence other cognitive functions. Any particular instance of perception and action, for example, presupposes a background, more general bodily sense of one’s relationship to the world and what sorts of experience are possible. Ratcliffe (2005a, 2008) has described these background orientations as ‘feelings of being,’ or ‘existential feelings.’ If it is true that all perception and action involves a background bodily orientation, then Thompson’s claim that perceptual experience and action experience are partly constituted by non-intentional bodily self-consciousness is not quite accurate. When I grasp a bottle, I am transitively aware of the bottle, and also aware of my own body, so that I experience my own grasping (Thompson, 2007, p. 264). Although this pre-reflective bodily selfconsciousness is not object-directed, it is still intentional in the sense that these bodily feelings are directed at a target. Indeed, these bodily feelings are that through which I am intentionally directed at the world, so that the body serves as the vehicle for intentionality. As Ratcliffe (2005a) points out, ‘even


when one is not explicitly aware of the body, it still functions as a structure-giving background to all experience’ (Ratcliffe, p. 49). Like Ratcliffe, I think it is important to note that the targets of intentional directedness certainly can be other than just objects. Apart from objects, conscious intentionality also can be directed to the intentional subject herself, to actions, to locations, to events, or to the world in general. Moreover intentional targets, whether objects or otherwise, need not always actually exist. The necessary intentionality of consciousness is linked to the fact that sensorimotor subjectivity necessarily involves conative affectivity, and. since all desire is directed, all occurrent consciousness must include some sort of intentionality. Many theorists have denied that bodily feelings are necessarily (or even usually) intentional, and have made a sharp distinction between bodily feelings and intentional states. This suggests that they already have decided that bodily feelings have no significant cognitive content, and that bodily experience is somehow separate from cognition. But, if the essential embodiment thesis is correct, all modes of consciousness, including cognition, ultimately are rooted in the bodily feelings that constitute sensorimotor subjectivity. And sensorimotor subjectivity and the bodily feelings it involves are necessarily intentional. Moreover, it is through the intentionality of the bodily subject that the world is disclosed in all the particular ways that it is. In sensorimotor subjectivity, the subject is directed toward the world in a ‘bodily and skillful’ way, which impacts the way the world is disclosed. In motor intentionality, for example, things in the world have specific motor affordances, which are defined as such on the basis of motor skills and capacities of the subject. Our bodily shape and physiology dictate that we can see relatively far, but can touch or grasp only objects that are relatively close (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 140). Objects are identified in relation to pragmatic motor goals; and, in perception, incoming stimuli are interpreted selectively and in relation to pragmatic concerns, which Gallagher describes as ‘attunement.’ Perception thereby discloses objects in the world as things with possibilities and potential for future use, so that the world ‘shows up in all the describable ways it does thanks to the structure of our subjectivity and our intentional activities’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 82). However, as should be clear already, the claim that sensorimotor subjectivity (and consciousness generally) are necessarily intentional does not entail that all mental states involve conceptual content or propositional content. Conceptual contents can be understood as descriptive representations, whose minimally necessary function is to categorize, classify, discriminate, and identify things, and provide third-personal, objective information about them, without our necessarily having to be egocentrically directly acquainted with those things. Although intentionality can involve states with conceptual content or propositional content, it need not either exclusively or necessarily do so. It is arguable, for example, that sense perception can have essentially non-conceptual content – that is, representational content


whose structure and function are essentially different from the structure and function of conceptual content. The notion that the contents of some conscious, intentional states in minded animals are altogether concept-less and propositional-less is sometimes called ‘the autonomy thesis.’12 Just as, by virtue of primitive bodily awareness and body schemata, and thereby just by virtue of representing myself essentially non-conceptually, I do not have to tell myself where my hand is or whether it is the same as or different from other things, I also do not have to think about my hand in order to be able to use it skillfully. Indeed, the whole process of learning to play the piano, ride a bicycle, snowboard, dance, and so on, seems to be based on the presupposition that the movements and positioning of one’s body can occur altogether independently of any of the relevant concepts and propositions. This is precisely because the generation and presence of self-reflective representations would slow down or even interfere with the bodily performance itself.13 But is it true that all consciousness like ours is necessarily intentional? What about normal dreamless sleep, free-floating moods, meditative states, or the experience of white noise? These are all examples of occurrent states of consciousness-with and in and through the living body that do not involve occurrent consciousness-of any object in particular. This demonstrates once again that occurrent consciousness does not seem to entail ‘occurrent single-focused, vivid intentionality of objects’ (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 92). Nonetheless, all these various ‘marginal’ forms of intentionality must nevertheless still include sensorimotor subjectivity and primitive bodily awareness, even if this occurrent consciousness ‘is neither single-focused, nor vivid, nor self-conscious, nor self-reflective, nor directed to objects’ (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 92). In other words, it seems clearly to be possible to be in an occurrent state of consciousness like ours, which is always a consciousness-with and in and through the living body, and thus intentional, without also at the same time being occurrently conscious-of any object in particular. Now, all these necessary structures of consciousness and sensorimotor subjectivity are interrelated. It is difficult to separate the necessary spatiality of sensorimotor subjectivity from its necessary egocentricity, and vice versa. Likewise, it is difficult to separate the necessary temporality of sensorimotor subjectivity from its necessary intentionality, and vice versa. But I believe that an examination of the necessary conative affectivity of sensorimotor subjectivity reveals that none of the other structures of consciousness can be properly understood without reference to this structure. Conative affectivity is, I believe, the starting point for an adequate account of consciousness. This is because, first, conative affectivity is needed to understand the necessary egocentricity of consciousness and sensorimotor subjectivity. Experiencing oneself as an inner source-point that both makes its mark on and is impacted by the world requires that one be invested in one’s well-

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being and survival. Second, awareness of one’s body as located in space and oriented toward future possibilities presupposes concern and a basic level of caring about oneself. When I perceive something, my body is affected by my surroundings; and, when I act, I move my body so as to affect my surroundings. The flow of intentional movement and lived sensations is driven by affect, and the processes of affection and intentionality are bodily, spatial, and temporal. When something impacts my body, I care about the way that I am impacted; and, in response, I move my body in certain ways so as to bring the world in line with my desires, or simply to express the fact that my desires have been fulfilled or thwarted. Thus, what I perceive and how I move are shaped by what I care about, so that both perceptual and motor intentionality are strongly linked to conative affectivity and desire-based emotion. If an individual could not desire things and lacked any sort of sensibility, she could not have a sense of her own spatiality and temporality. And, without felt needs, it is unclear how the conscious subject could be selectively attuned and directed to her environment during perception and action. In short, in order to have a bodily experience of oneself as a perceiving, acting, situated subject who is intentionally directed toward the world and carries out voluntary movements, one must be a conatively affective, sensorimotor subject. In the next section, I will explore how conative affectivity and the other necessary structures of sensorimotor subjectivity are rooted in the basic biological processes of autopoiesis and sense-making, which ultimately give rise to the human capacity for emotion and caring.

1.3 Life as the foundation for sensorimotor subjectivity In the last section, I suggested that sensorimotor subjectivity is necessarily conatively affective, egocentric, spatial, temporal, and intentional. I also claimed that, while all these necessary structures of consciousness are interrelated, special attention should be paid to the role of conative affectivity, which I have characterized in terms of desire-based, bodily feelings. I believe that the body’s status as the locus of desire and caring helps to explain the necessary egocentricity, spatiality, temporality, and intentionality of conscious minds like ours. But clearly a further argument for these claims is needed, and this requires an investigation of the sense in which these necessary structures of sensorimotor subjectivity are essentially linked to the neurobiological dynamics of living animals. What I wish to argue is that each of these structures of consciousness is grounded in our neurobiological embodiment and rooted in the fact that the lived body is situated in space and time and engages with (is intentionally directed toward) the world from its own egocentric point of view. In short, these necessary structures of consciousness can be understood as a result of the lived mechanisms, endogenous processes, and


neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Sheets-Johnstone (1998) has described animate form as the generative source of consciousness and maintains that bodily sensitivity and the capacity to respond are fundamental to life. Insofar as sensorimotor subjectivity is grounded in the autopoiesis of autonomous, living systems, the way that the world is disclosed is a result of the organism’s biological structure. For example, a creature’s mode of proprioception, its potential for movement, and the way in which it is sensitive to dynamic modifications in the surrounding world all help to shape its particular form of ‘corporeal consciousness’ (p. 276). Sensorimotor subjectivity thus reflects the deep continuity between mind and the living body. Through an appeal to the enactive approach and the dynamic systems approach, I will discuss how these structures are rooted in the autopoietic processes of autonomous, living systems and their associated bodily and neural dynamics, which together allow for the emergence of sensorimotor subjectivity. The upshot is that everything that is metaphysically required for minds like ours is already present in biological life. As Noë (2009) puts it, the perspective from which the meaningful, nonmechanical nature of conscious existence can come into focus is the biological perspective (p. 39). The term ‘autopoiesis’ was coined by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana in 1971. These theorists sought to explore the biological basis of consciousness and were influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Autopoiesis is not concerned with the origin of life per se, nor with the transition from non-living to living (Luisi, 2003, p. 49). And, although autopoiesis is fully compatible with facts about DNA and RNA and replication, its focus is less on the details of chemical reactions or the ‘information’ encoded in cells, and more on system dynamics. Indeed, autopoiesis is more related to system biology and complexity theory, and is concerned with the various processes connected with life, such as a system’s interaction with the environment and its capacity for ‘sense-making.’ In simplest terms, autopoiesis is the process whereby the constituent processes of living systems ‘produce the components necessary for the continuance of those same processes’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 98). An autopoietic unit is a system that is capable of sustaining itself due to an inner network of reactions that regenerate the system’s components. A cell, for example, has a semi-permeable boundary through which nutrients and some chemicals are able to penetrate, and is able to regenerate within its own boundary all those chemicals (such as glucose, amino acids, or proteins) that are being destroyed. The boundary of the cell, which separates it from its external medium, is of its own making, and the chain of processes taking place inside the boundary serves to sustain and maintain the cell. Thanks to its metabolic network, the cell continually replaces the components that are being destroyed, including its membrane, which in turn produces its own components, in an ongoing circular process (Thompson, p. 98). This allows it continually to recreate the difference between itself and everything else


(Thompson, p. 99). In this way, the cell exhibits self-sustainability and automaintenance. Although at first autopoiesis was limited to cells, eventually it was generalized to higher forms of life. Evan Thompson’s work explores how autopoiesis serves as the basis for the conscious minds of living organisms like us. According to Thompson’s enactive approach, living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain their own coherent patterns of activity. Indeed, their autopoietic organization makes living systems striking examples of autonomous systems. Basic autonomy is the capacity of a system to manage its own flow of matter and energy so that it can regulate and control both its own internal, self-constructive processes as well as its processes of exchange with the environment (Thompson and Stapleton, 2009, p. 24). Thus, autonomous systems can be understood as thermodynamically far-from-equilibrium systems that exchange matter and energy with their surroundings. These self-organizing, thermodynamic systems are unified collections of material elements in rule-governed or patterned motion, involving heat and other forms of energy, that also have dissipative structure and are holistically causally integrated or, in the case of living systems, autopoietic. A dissipative structure is the means by which the natural energy loss or entropy in a thermodynamic system is absorbed and dispersed (hence ‘dissipated’) by the systematic reintroduction of energy and matter into the system, via a non-static causal balance between the inner states of the system and its surrounding natural environment. And holistic causal integration is how a thermodynamic system with dissipative structure selfgenerates forms or patterns of order that determine its own causal powers, and in turn place constraints on the later collective behaviors, effects, and outputs of the whole system, in order to maintain itself. These self-organizing and self-controlling dynamics allow the system to determine the cognitive domain in which it operates. The constituent processes in such systems a) recursively depend on each other for their generation and realization as a network, b) constitute the system as a unity, and c) determine a possible range of interactions with the environment (Thompson, 2007, p. 44). In this way, dynamics systems theory is used as a mathematical model to understand the behavior of autonomous systems in general and living systems in particular. One striking aspect of autopoietic, autonomous systems is that their patterns of interaction with the environment have much to do with the internal logic of the living system itself. The way in which an organism interacts with a molecule, for example, has to do with the way in which this molecule is ‘seen’ by the living organism (Luisi, 2003, p. 54). The way in which the organism makes use of the environment to ‘create its own world’ is what Maturana and Varela (1980) call ‘cognition’ and what Thompson has referred to as ‘sense-making.’ This refers to the way in which living organisms interpret environmental stimuli in terms of their ‘vital significance.’


An autopoietic system always has to make sense of the world and supplement the autopoietic process with what it lacks in order to keep going and remain viable (Thompson, 2007, p. 148). To this extent, living beings embody ‘immanent purposiveness’ and ‘needful freedom.’ They are directed outward toward the world, and must continue to exchange energy with the environment in order to survive. The basic ‘concern’ or ‘natural purpose’ of the organism is to continue living, and this requires that its world serve as an adequate environment. Living organisms help to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of their structure, their needs, and the way they are structurally coupled with the environment. As Merleau-Ponty (1963) points out, it is the organism itself, given the nature of its receptors and bodily organs, that chooses the stimuli in the environment to which it will be sensitive and responsive. For the living organism, information is context-dependent and agent-relative, and thus defined in terms of the meaning that stimuli have for that particular organism. Generally speaking, something acquires meaning for a living organism to the extent that it relates positively or negatively to the ‘norm of the maintenance of the organism’s integrity’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 70). A norm of maintenance can be understood as an organism’s optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium within its environment. So, for example, sucrose has meaning and value as food insofar as it relates positively to the living system’s efforts to maintain itself within the environment in which it is embedded. A bacterium may move in the direction of greater intensities of sugar, and in this way is geared in to the world. It wants and needs sugar, and, even if it does not understand the reason for its movement, it behaves as an agent in some basic sense. As a living organism, it has a relationship with its surroundings, as well as ‘primitive agency, interests, needs, and a point of view’ (Noë, 2009, p. 41). To be sure, its mode of proto-mindfulness is less sophisticated and complex that the human mode of mindfulness, or that of any other sentient animal. Still, it is striking that proto-mindfulness emerges in these very basic forms of life. What is crucial, from Noë’s point of view, is that the proto-mind of the bacterium, this basic life form, does not consist simply in how it is internally organized, but rather in the way that it actively meshes with its environment and engages with it from the standpoint of what has value from the bacterium’s unique point of view. Insofar as the freely moving bacterium relies on a sense of its own energy to determine whether to continue traveling in the present direction or move elsewhere, it can be said have a rudimentary corporeal consciousness (Sheets-Johnstone, 1998, p. 287). Together, ‘immanent purposiveness’ and ‘needful freedom’ establish a relationship between an internal identity and an outside world. The world takes on the meaning and value that it does because we are biological organisms that seek to continue and maintain our identity. Physical and chemical phenomena in and of themselves have no particular significance, and

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only take on meaning in relation to our ‘natural purpose’ to go on living. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) point out, every living being must characterize in order to survive. Even the amoeba must categorize the things that it encounters as food or non-food, as things that it moves toward or away from. Likewise, animals categorize food, predators, and members of their own species, and how they categorize depends on their sensing apparatus and their ability to move themselves and manipulate objects (p. 17). Lakoff and Johnson maintain that most of our categories are formed automatically and unconsciously, as a result of the unique way we function in the world. The fact that we have eyes and ears, arms and legs, and that these body parts work in certain very specific ways rather than others, is what determines the kinds of categories we have and what their structure will be (p. 18). Our sense of what is real and what has meaning is shaped by evolution and by experience. Along these lines, Varela and Depraz (2005) suggest that there are three styles of organism, each one grounded in the mode in which it procures nourishment to sustain itself. In the vegetal mode of being, organisms passively feed on light; in the fungal mode, organisms provide for themselves a digestive environment from which food is extracted; and in the animal mode, organisms’ manner of being ‘is centrally marked by an active search and pursuit of nourishment,’ which involves movement and seeking (p. 72). The structural change that makes this possible is the emergence of the nervous system, whose causal links provide an active interdependence between a sensory and effector surface (muscles). Animal life is an ongoing coupling of organism and context, involving sensorimotor activities conducive to its nourishment and survival. In order to be a genuine sensorimotor agent, the motor behaviors of a living system must be subject to the maintenance of autopoiesis and regulated by internal norms of adaptivity. An adaptive autopoietic system is one that not only keeps itself alive, but also can regulate its interactions with the outside world in accordance with ‘graded norms’ of vitality (i.e. better and worse) (Thompson and Stapleton, 2009, p. 25). What is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ for the organism depends, of course, on its own unique conditions of viability. Among complex multicellular animals with nervous systems, the nervous system establishes a sensorimotor cycle, where sensory experience and movement are interdependent. Sensorimotor selfhood results from the operational closure of the nervous system, which defines an outside to which the system is actively and normatively related and thereby allows the system to be self-producing and self-maintaining (Thompson, 2007, p. 260). Out of the dynamics of living systems emerge the beginnings of sensemaking and cognition. Indeed, what I wish to argue is that our basic biological structure and dynamics as living organisms provide the natural foundation for sentience, conative affectivity, and the other necessary structures of consciousness described in the previous section. In other words, the autopoietic and


metabolic processes of living organisms serve as the basic (and necessary, though not in themselves sufficient) ingredients of the ‘natural matrix’ of consciousness. 1.3.1 Conative affectivity Thompson maintains that the primary condition of life is one of concern and want, and that an organism’s forward trajectory is fueled by desire and need. If this is correct, then it looks as if the basis for caring and desirebased emotion can be found in our very biological structure, and that conative affectivity is grounded in the autopoietic identity (self-regulation) and sense-making of living beings. In other words, desire-based emotion emerges from the sense-making and adaptivity of an autopoietic system. Such a system always has to make sense of the world, for there is a constant need to supply itself with what it lacks to keep going. Adaptivity is a matter of being tolerant to changes by actively monitoring perturbations and compensating for them (Thompson, 2007, p. 147). Sense-making, which serves as the foundation for basic cognitive processing, is how living beings shape the world into an environment of significance and valence. The constant regenerative activity of metabolism endows life with a minimal ‘concern’ to preserve itself and stay in existence, so that the environment becomes a place of attraction or repulsion.14 As organisms continuously regenerate the conditions of their own survival, they establish a concerned point of view that generates meaning. This perspective changes the world from a neutral place to one that always means something in relation to the organism. In this way, autopoiesis is the biological foundation for sentience, affectivity, and valence, all of which comprise sensorimotor subjectivity. The concern, want, desire, and appetite of living systems are all essentially bodily and affective and emerge out of the organizational and dynamic processes of a living body. Through its sense-making in interaction with the environment, a special kind of autonomous system (an animal) enacts a phenomenal world (Thompson, 2007, p. 237). In this way, affectivity, care, and concern arise at a basic level out of vital significance, which is rooted in biological autonomy. 1.3.2 Egocentricity Likewise, egocentricity, or the sense of one’s body as the ‘ego-pole’ or ‘zero point’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 29) for all conscious experience, is grounded in the processes and dynamics of living organisms. Autopoiesis entails the production and maintenance of a dynamic identity (a bodily self) in the face of material change in the environment. By virtue of ‘operational closure,’ or the self-referential (circular or recursive) network of relations that defines the living system as a unity, autopoiesis entails the emergence of a bodily self. Whereas autopoietic closure brings forward a minimal ‘bodily self’ at the level of cellular metabolism, sensorimotor closure produces a


‘sensorimotor self’ at the level of perception and action (Thompson, 2007, pp. 48–49). In both cases there is the co-emergence of inside and outside, and of selfhood alongside an environment of otherness. In an effort to go on living, the living system establishes a pole of internal identity in relation to a pole of an outside world. Indeed, living beings affirm their own identities by differentiating themselves from their surroundings (Thompson, 2007, p. 149). As Varela and Depraz (2005) point out, the origin of life itself is ‘the transition from a chemical environment to a self-produced identity which can give a point of view that is the very origin of sense and meaning’ (p. 72). Only because the system is an adaptive, self-sustaining entity can there arise a perspective or reference point for sense-making, and thereby a cognitive agent (Thompson and Stapleton, 2009, p. 28). It is from the point of view established by this self-affirming identity that the organism evaluates and makes sense of all that it interacts with and encounters. Of course, a living organism is not completely isolated from its surroundings, for it enacts its own identity in the very process of living and interacting with the environment. Through metabolic processes, a cell continually replaces the components that are being destroyed, including its membrane, which allows it continually to create itself in relation to everything else (Thompson, 2007, p. 99). Autonomous systems endogenously create and maintain the constraints that modulate their constitutive processes, and thereby produce their own boundary. An invariant dynamic pattern is produced and maintained by the system itself, and this constitutes its formal self-identity (Thompson, 2007, p. 75). Through the continual chemical synthesis and breakdown of material compounds, the autopoietic system controls and regulates its own boundary conditions, whereby it differentiates itself from its surroundings. Egocentricity thus can be understood as an outgrowth of the self-production and self-regulation of autonomous systems. It is no surprise, then, that all living organisms interact with their surroundings from a particular vantage point or point of view, given ‘operational closure’ and the basic biological impulse to affirm one’s own identity.15 1.3.3

Spatiality

Linked to the notion of egocentricity is the idea that consciousness is spatially situated in a particular location, that is, wherever the body is located. As Thompson suggests, emergence of the bodily self entails the emergence of a world in which one is spatially situated. The living body not only takes a single path through space, but also serves as the spatial point of origin for all perceptually based experiences (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 142). This too comes about through autopoiesis and the self-production of a boundary between inner and outer. Autopoietic organization is characterized by ‘a peculiar circular interdependency between an interconnected web of self-generating processes and the self-production of a boundary, such that the whole system persists in continuous self-production as a spatially distinct individual’


(Thompson, 2007, p. 101). In other words, this boundary is not simply a container for its constituent processes, but is also produced and maintained as a product of those very processes. Metabolic processes in the cell, for example, determine its boundaries, but these processes themselves are made possible by those very boundaries. This spatial individuation (i.e. boundary) establishes the system as a unity in space, which is part of what it means to be an autonomous system. In this way, the dynamics of living organisms set the stage for the necessary spatiality of consciousness. 1.3.4 Temporality From the immanent purposiveness of autopoietic systems also emerges the necessary temporality of consciousness. As a ‘natural purpose’ (a self-organizing being), a living organism must make sense of the world and renew itself in order to survive. Life must have a temporal orientation and be oriented forward in time because its primary condition is one of concern and want, which are essentially protentional. In animal life, this temporal orientation manifests itself via conscious appetite or desire, but the purposiveness of life also is present at a more basic biological level. Metabolism, for example, propels life forward, beyond its present condition and toward a future time when the organism’s needs might be satisfied. This is because an organism must exchange matter and energy with the environment and aim beyond itself and its present condition in order to maintain its identity. Spinoza called this concern conatus, which he understood as the effort and power of life to preserve itself and stay in existence (Thompson, 2007, p. 155). For living organisms, stasis means death. The realization of autopoietic organization requires continual self-renewal and constant regenerative activity, and this basic ‘concern’ of living organisms to go on living is recapitulated in the temporality of consciousness. Out of autopoiesis and sense-making emerges the protentional ‘not yet’ of consciousness. At a higher level, among living animals, this temporal orientation is bound up with the capacity for movement. According to Varela and Depraz (2005), time arises from the basic constitution of the organism’s nervous system, and from its movements toward and away, which signify importance and value. In their view, the emergence of the living present is rooted in ‘motion dispositions,’ which include facial expressions, gestures, posture, stance, and autonomic components such as change of breathing and heartbeat, and which signify readiness for action (p. 69). Even more clearly, this forward trajectory of living animals manifests as the ‘I can’ in motor intentionality. Part of the experience of the ‘flow of action’ is a sense that one’s situation deviates from some optimal body–environment relationship (is contrary to one’s desire), and that one’s activity will take one closer to that optimum (thereby bringing the situation in line with what one desires). (This is the case even if one does not explicitly know what that ‘optimum’ is.) The experiences of living organisms are thus forward-looking, forward-moving, and

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motivationally structured (Thompson, 2007, p. 362). This temporal structure of experience is an expression of life’s immanent purposiveness. 1.3.5

Intentionality

Lastly, out of autopoiesis and sense-making emerges intentionality (Thompson, 2007, p. 159). An entity that is capable of staving off its own dissolution and decomposition develops a unique vantage point and point of view from which the world’s events can be partitioned into the favorable, the unfavorable, the multi-valenced, and the neutral. As self-organizing, autonomous, dynamic systems, living organisms enact meaning in continuous reciprocal interaction with their environments (Thompson, 2007, p. 79). In a basic biological sense, intentionality involves openness to the world. The autopoietic process demands matter and energy and requires the living system to interact with the environment and regulate its boundary conditions. It not only must deal with present conditions, but also must seek to actualize future conditions that will contribute to its regeneration, survival, and adaptive functioning. Thus, particular elements of the external world are selected and discriminated as significant by the system’s selforganizing activity and internal structure. At the level of living animals, the body is that in and through which the organism is directed toward the surrounding world during both perception and action. Through the formation of bodily habits, associations, dispositions, and motivations, a living animal shapes its world into a meaningful domain, so that particular elements of its surroundings take on significance and valence. This higher-level model of intentionality involves subjects playing an active, productive role in making sense of objects. Consciousness emerges as ‘a form or structure of comportment, a perceptual and motor attunement to the world’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 80). The world is disclosed in the way that it is thanks to the structure of our intentional activities, which in turn is rooted in our embodiment and biological dynamics. Intentionality as we humans know it is possible in large part because living is fundamentally a process of sense-making. Of course, this is not to say that sense-making at a basic biological level or autopoiesis on their own entail anything like sensorimotor subjectivity or consciousness like ours; nor does autopoiesis entail the emergence of a full-blown conscious ego or desire-based emotional consciousness. What these biological dynamics do is lay the foundation and set the stage for these necessary structures of consciousness, but this is not sufficient. All organisms have proto-mindedness, but not all organisms are minded. For sensorimotor subjectivity and consciousness to emerge, it is also necessary that the living system in question include a sufficient degree of neurobiological complexity. It must be sentient, capable of experience and sensation, but even sentience is not sufficient for the first-personal experience and egocentricity involved in sensorimotor subjectivity.


Evidence from cognitive ethology and human fetal development suggests that spontaneous fetal movement, or quickening, takes place in the second trimester, before the fetus has first-person awareness or full-fledged sensorimotor subjectivity. Such data suggest that mere sentience is not sufficient for sensorimotor subjectivity, and that the transition between mere sentience and conscious, intentional sentience in a living organism occurs between 25 and 32 weeks after conception, so roughly at the beginning of the third trimester.16 It is at this point that a sensorimotor subjective, firstperson point of view emerges that is egocentric, immanently reflexive, spatially and temporally oriented, and conatively affective. And sensorimotor subjectivity is clearly manifest less than 3 months after this transition has taken place, when neonates typically become able to imitate gestures and respond to others’ faces. Thus, at a sufficient level of neurobiological complexity, the living organism becomes capable of enacting a phenomenal world, and the sense-making constitutive of life emerges as the intentionality constitutive of consciousness. This begins to reveal the inseparability between affect and cognition and the deep connection between life and value.

1.4

Essentially embodied emotions

Consciousness is essentially animate, enactive, and embodied, and this can be seen in perception and action. Indeed, much of the literature on embodied consciousness and the enactive mind has focused on perception and action. Here I wish to build on the insights offered by this work, and add my suggestion that consciousness is essentially conatively affective. If I am correct that conative affectivity is a necessary structure of consciousness, and arguably the most crucial one, then it seems that more attention should be paid to the mode of consciousness in which conative affectivity most clearly assumes center stage: occurrent emotions. In the next chapter, I will have much more to say about what I mean by ‘emotion,’ but for now it is sufficient to appeal to the commonsense notion of emotion and describe how it, like all forms of consciousness, essentially involves sensorimotor subjectivity and the above-mentioned necessary structures. Indeed, I believe emotion serves as a paradigm example of the workings of the embodied and enactive mind insofar as it is a fundamental expression of human subjectivity, conative affectivity, and intentionality. As Colombetti (2007) points out, emotions can serve as privileged tools in the attempt to integrate the mind and body, both because they are simultaneously mental and bodily and also because the body occupies a central place in an adequate account of emotional experience (p. 529). It is clear that the experience of emotions originally is given in the primitive bodily awareness of sensorimotor subjectivity. Take, for example, the emotion of anger, which clearly presupposes sensorimotor subjectivity and

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is rooted in subjective bodily experience. No doubt the body is the vehicle for anger, and emotions essentially and necessarily involve bodily feelings. Emotion is embodied in one’s motor system, in facial and motor changes as well as in readiness activation; and also in complex autonomic physiological changes, including skin conductance, cardiopulmonary changes, and muscle tone manifestations (Varela and Depraz, 2005, p. 68). In the case of anger, these bodily changes likely involve a feeling of one’s heart racing, one’s breathing quickening, and the subjective feeling associated with the release of various hormones. But these bodily feelings are not clearly localizable. Rather, they are diffusely spread throughout the body and often are lived in and through one’s body as a whole, or else are felt in relatively large regions such as the stomach, so that we are literally ‘moved’ or ‘shaken’ (Slaby, 2007, p. 432). Such feelings have to do with how one finds oneself in the world towards which one is intentionally directed. O’Regan et al. (2004) have outlined a useful sensorimotor account of the characteristic properties of sensory and perceptual experience, which I believe can be mapped onto emotional experience. These characteristic properties are ongoingness, forcible presence, ineffability, and subjectivity. The ongoingness of sensory experience can be traced to its ‘bodiliness.’ Sensory stimulation depends on bodily movement, which in turn modifies the way that an object affects one’s sensory apparatus. This captures the sense in which the relation between sensation and bodily movements is ongoing and reciprocal. In a similar way, one’s bodily movements and expressions impact the way that one experiences the world emotionally, which in turn affects subjects’ intentional movements. Putting on a smile can improve your mood; running can produce feelings of elation; and emotional feelings can result in all sorts of intentional bodily movements. Moreover, emotions seem to be a paradigm mode of sensorimotor subjectivity and bodily consciousness. Anger, for example, clearly involves the cardiovascular, endocrine, and hormonal systems, and is expressed in and through one’s bodily posture and orientation as well as facial expressions. The ‘forcible presence’ of sensory experience can be traced to its ‘grabbiness,’ or its tendency to attract our attention. Insofar as changes in the visual field immediately grab our attention, they force themselves on us and command us to take note. One might characterize this as affective allure (Thompson, 2007, p. 374) and of course emotional experience has this feature as well. Perhaps even more than changes in the visual field, emotions attract and direct our attention, and definitely seem to impose themselves upon us and our bodies from the outside. Being overcome with an emotion is a thoroughly grabby, bodily affair. Typically it not only grabs our attention, but also takes control of our bodily response. In a moment of anger, for example, we are likely to find that our body cannot stop shaking, and that we have trouble resisting the frown that settles on our face. (However, this


is not to deny that emotions and perception also have an active element, which involves being poised for engagement with one’s surroundings and actively attending to some things rather than others.) The ‘ineffability’ of sensory experience has to do with the fact that perceptual experiences are active manifestations of skillful knowledge that is difficult to describe or put into words. We find it difficult, or even impossible, to provide a verbal description of our ‘implicit, practical knowledge of the sensorimotor patterns constitutive of perceptual experience’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 259). In a similar way, it is quite difficult to describe what it feels like to be angry or to be sad, or to verbalize the sensorimotor patterns that are constitutive of emotional experience. Expressions like ‘my heart was racing’ attempt to put emotional experience into words, but there is little doubt that such expressions fail to capture fully the experience of being in the grip of an emotion. Lastly, ‘subjectivity’ pertains to the fact that sensory experience is ‘for the subject.’ The feeling of grasping a bottle, for example, is immediately and non-inferentially experienced as mine, and comes with an intrinsic ‘first-personal givenness’ or ipseity (I-ness) that constitutes its subjectivity (Thompson, 2007, p. 261). Likewise, the feeling of being sad is immediately and non-inferentially experienced as mine. All emotional experience involves this first-personal quality of pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness, or what I have called sensorimotor subjectivity. It is also important to note that subjectivity, whether in sensory experience or emotional experience, has an active element as well as a passive element, and a receptive element as well as an affective element (Thompson, 2007, p. 263) Subjectivity is at play not just when we are involuntarily influenced, perturbed, or affected by something, but also when we take a more active cognitive position in acts of attending or responding to that which affects us. It is also important to point out that emotional consciousness manifests the five intrinsic structures of sensorimotor subjectivity. First, occurrent emotional experience necessarily involves conative affectivity. Anger, for example, necessarily involves an experiential aspect, a qualitative feel, and conative affectivity. A creature’s sense of its felt needs and desires is particularly strong in cases where these needs and desires are violated in some way. This corresponds to the fact that all emotions involve valence, and are bound up with bodily feelings of liking or disliking, attraction or repulsion, or a mixture of these. Emotions are experiential states that are phenomenologically salient and hedonically valenced. They are felt in and through the body, and have a certain bodily ‘grabbiness’ or affective allure. Second, emotional consciousness is necessarily egocentric in the sense that emotional experience reveals how the subject is faring in the world. The lived body functions as the ‘zero point’ or vantage point in relation to which things appear perspectivally and take on meaning. In the case of anger, for

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example, it is in relation to me and my own point of view that things in the world appear as violations of felt needs and as ‘offenses.’ As a subjective object, I (or someone I care about) have been treated unfairly. As a subjective subject, I desire to change the situation so as to remove the offense. Anger, like all conscious states, comes with an intrinsic first-personal givenness, and is immediately and non-inferentially experienced as ‘mine.’ It is I who have been involuntarily affected or perturbed by something. Offenses or wrongs impose themselves on me from the outside and I am the one who must deal with or correct the situation. The world is my world, and my emotions are bodily feelings of being positively or negatively affected by something in MY surroundings (Slaby, 2007, p. 438). Third, the egocentric frame of reference that is bound up with emotional consciousness is a spatial frame of reference, and the body is the source of spatiality. In anger, I experience myself as uniquely located, or uniquely positioned. My anger always occurs HERE, wherever my body is located. My posture and bodily orientation often form part of my experience of anger. Even if I do not know quite where I am, I experience myself as uniquely located or uniquely positioned ‘right here.’ Indeed, being ‘here’ rather than somewhere else often is partially constitutive of what caused my anger in the first place and also how I express that anger. In anger, my surroundings appear in a body-centered spatial gestalt, in which the target of my anger occupies the foreground. Fourth, emotional consciousness is necessarily temporal. I am embedded in time in relation to past time (when an offense occurred) and future time (when I may avenge myself). In addition, I have a sense that my situation deviates from some optimal body–environment relationship (is contrary to my desires), and so I seek to bring my situation more in line with what I desire. Anger is a prime example of the intrinsic kinesthesia and motility of consciousness, or the essentially embodied subject’s immediate sense of moving its limbs or changing its body position on its own through its intentional agency, whereby the subject is oriented toward the future. More generally, essentially embodied emotional consciousness, by way of its temporality, involves inherently causal-dynamic subjective experience. As Slaby (2007) points out, affective states are intrinsically motivational and linked to movement impulses and urges of various kinds. Emotional consciousness propels us forward through time, involves spontaneity, and includes an immediate sense that each new experiential moment is unprecedented, underdetermined by what preceded it, and arising at a particular moment in time. It encompasses an experiential response to immediately prior phases of consciousness, together with anticipation of what is yet to come. Anger, for example, has the ‘retention–primal impression–protention’ structure that has been explored so extensively by phenomenologists. In primal impression, the conscious subject is affected and aware of herself as


experiencing the affecting object (the offense). Retention holds on to past, elapsed phases of experience, and protention describes how emotional consciousness is directed forward, to what is yet to come, in the form of action and emotional response. Desire-based emotion thus is part of the flow of action that constitutes the temporal dynamics of conscious experience and bodily/brain activity. The flow of emotional experience is rooted in one’s interests and desires, forward-moving, and motivationally structured (Thompson, 2007, p. 362). Lastly, emotional consciousness is necessarily intentional. As Thompson points out, the word ‘emotion’ literally means an outward movement, which can be understood as ‘the welling up of an impulse within that tends toward outward expression and action’ (Thompson, 2007, pp. 363–364). All anger is directed, even if there is not a clear object, and even if one is not reflectively aware of what one is angry about. In addition, it is often through emotional consciousness that we are directed at the world, so that affect and desire influence our patterns of attention and motivation. Some objects and events grab our attention and move us to action, while others do not, by virtue of the strength of their ‘affective allure.’ As Slaby (2007) points out, emotions are a manifestation of an awareness of significant situations, events, or objects in the environment, and the felt body is that through which we grasp what goes on around us. We have bodily feelings directed towards things beyond our body, so that our emotions count as a bodily sensitivity to what is significant in the world. In the next chapter, I shall have a great deal more to say about the sense in which intentionality is tied to affectivity in emotional consciousness.

1.5

Conclusion

If the essential embodiment thesis, or EE, is correct, then consciousness in general, and emotional consciousness in particular, is essentially embodied and presupposes primitive bodily awareness, or what I (following Thompson) have called sensorimotor subjectivity. Because the structure of our subjectivity and intentional activity is rooted in our bodily structure, an envatted brain could not have a consciousness that was anything like ours. The notion that it could is rooted in the classical cognitivist view that the mind is akin to a digital computer whose internal states carry out information processing. And, if functionalism is true, consciousness can be investigated without regard for the body that ‘houses it,’ for the embodiment of the organism would be irrelevant to the nature of consciousness. Indeed, functionalist and computationalist theories of mind seem to rest on what Lawrence Shapiro (2005) has called the thesis of ‘body neutrality,’ which says that ‘characteristics of bodies make no difference to the kind of mind one possesses’ (p. 175). This is because computations can in principle be run on something that is nothing at all like the human body, so that ‘one needs

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only a phantom body in a virtual environment, constituted in neural connections’ (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 134). Functionalist cognitivism understands mental processing as the manipulation of symbolic representations in the brain, and surely this can be carried about by an envatted brain that is hooked up to a computer. According to this traditional view, consciousness is not fully embodied, but rather embrained, and the mind dwells within the body in the same way as an occupant dwells within a house (Shapiro, 2005, p. 228). However, in this chapter I have argued that the living organismic body cannot and should not be eliminated from our account of the mind and consciousness, and that the mind is far more intimately bound up with the body than many traditional accounts would have us believe. Once we take embodiment completely seriously, and acknowledge the extent to which consciousness and cognition are dynamic processes ‘animated by precognitive habits and sensibilities of the lived body’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 24), then it seems clear that a brain in a vat would have a radically different mode of coupling with its environment, as well as neurobiological dynamics and metabolic processes that were completely different from those of an ordinary human. For one thing, without a humanlike body, the envatted brain would be incapable of humanlike proprioceptive and kinesthetic experience, and without such experience many kinds of normal perception and motor action would not be possible. And, because its autopoietic organization and metabolic processes would be vastly different, its sense-making and intentionality (if it were even capable of this) would not be anything like ours. The work of Varela et al. (1991) supports the view that cognition depends on experience that is informed by a living body with various perceptual and motor capacities, and that all perception and cognition are grounded in sensorimotor subjectivity. Insofar as pre-reflective bodily experience is constitutive of perception, how could a being with no experience whatsoever of its body have perceptual abilities and states that are just like ours? I believe it is safe to say that if EE is correct, then there can be no such thing as an envatted brain with a consciousness like ours. At the very least, as Thompson and Cosmelli (2011) point out, the vat in question would have to supply energy to nourish the cells’ metabolic activity; it would have to be capable of flushing away waste products; and it would have to be complicated and specialized enough to control the administration of stimulation to the brain comparable to that normally provided by its environmentally situated body. In short, it would have to exchange matter and energy with its environment and be capable of regeneration, self-maintenance, and self-renewal. So, it seems clear that the vat would have to be something causally and functionally equivalent to a living, humanlike body (Noë, 2009, p. 12). And even then, unless it had a body that highly resembled a human one in terms of its basic metabolic


processes and neurobiological dynamics, it is doubtful that this artificial life form would lead just the kind of sensorimotor subjective, conatively affective life that we humans do. But if the vat somehow were so effectively constructed as to be the causal–functional equivalent of a living body, then the so-called ‘vat’ would simply be a living body, and my basic point would be fully confirmed.

2 Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions

2.0

Introduction

The guiding thesis of this book is that conscious, intentional creatures like us are essentially embodied, and that one fundamental manifestation of our essential embodiment is our experience of emotion. Insofar as the body is the place where we feel affected by the world, and through which we engage and seek to alter our surroundings or situation, emotion is a bodily activity through and through. In short, the current of activity that flows toward the world and back toward the emotionally conscious subject passes through the body (Noë, 2009, p. 76). As Colombetti (2007) rightly points out, it seems that the emotions can serve as privileged philosophical tools in the attempt to bridge the mind–body divide by virtue of the fact that ‘they appear as simultaneously mental and bodily’ (p. 527). However, emotion theory has not yet fully taken up the essentially embodied view of the mind discussed in the previous chapter. Instead, much of emotion theory assumes that appraisal takes place in the head, and that bodily events and arousal count simply as an ‘objective index of emotion’ rather than as a process of lived bodily experience (Colombetti, 2007, p. 529). Like Colombetti, I wish to move away from these long-standing assumptions, and to reject the view that the cognitive and bodily aspects of emotion are distinct or separable. In my view, there is no such thing as wholly emotionless cognition. As noted in Chapter 1, the Essential Embodiment Thesis, or EE, says that conscious minds like ours are necessarily alive and fully spread out into our living bodies. One reason to think that EE is true, and that emotions are the fundamental manifestation of our embodiment, is the neurophenomenological empirical evidence that supports these theses. For example, recent work on the neurochemistry of human emotions strongly suggests that the vital systems centrally causally involved with and embodying our basic emotions are gut-based, not brain-based.1 Moreover, phenomenological observation also clearly indicates that our emotions are closely bound up with various feelings of bodily changes, including racing hearts, 50

Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions

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quickened breathing, grimacing faces, contracting lungs, tensing muscles, tingling skin, and sweating palms. These bodily sensations, in turn, correspond to various changes in the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, musculoskeletal, and endocrine systems. 2 We are always and necessarily conscious with all our vital systems, organs, and processes, so that our emotions are lived in and through our bodies, and are not simply a matter of brain chemistry. No doubt my claim that emotional consciousness is necessarily embodied needs to be fleshed out with an account of just what I mean by ‘emotion.’ Not surprisingly, there have been many attempts on the part of philosophers of mind and psychologists to provide a reductive analysis of the emotions. These include the passive affect theory, which asserts that emotions are nothing but a species of receptive feeling; the drive-based or motivation theory, which claims that emotions are nothing but certain innate urges or species of motive; the behaviorist theory, which holds that emotions are nothing but certain types of behavioral manifestations or dispositions; William James’s theory to the effect that emotions are nothing but an awareness of certain changes in our physiology; and the recently popular cognitivist theories, which say that emotions are nothing but certain kinds of belief–desire pairs or evaluative judgments. Each sort of account is prone to the same sort of objection, namely that it leaves out some or other component that appears to be intrinsic to our emotional experience. The inability of reductive theories to capture the nature of our emotional experience solely in terms of one or another of the isolated components of passive affect, drive or motive, behavior, neurophysiology, or cognition strongly suggests, as Goldie (2000) has pointed out, that emotion is essentially a complex state, event, or process involving all of these elements (p. 11). Emotions are usually connected to various past episodes of emotional experience, as well as various dispositions to think, feel, and act. Emotion is also dynamic: elements of the emotion may come and go, diminish and intensify. Furthermore, the various elements of emotion are normally held together, at least in part, by belonging to a first-personal history or narrative, so that emotional experience cannot be understood apart from the rest of a person’s character and life (Goldie, 2000, p. 16). For these reasons, rather than attempting to reduce emotion to some single factor, I follow Goldie’s lead and take a thoroughly non-reductive and multi-factored approach. But, to make this a substantive and explanatory claim, it is not enough simply to endorse holism and pluralism and let that be the end of the account. After all, few theorists would deny that emotions involve thoughts, bodily changes, feelings, action tendencies, and shifts in attention. The real issue often seems to be which of these parts of an emotional episode is designated by the label ‘emotion,’ and which of them should be identified as the core of an emotion. Is one of these components essential, so that if it were absent the emotion in question would be lost?

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Jesse Prinz (2004) has called this ‘the problem of parts’ (p. 4). Different theories of emotion offer different solutions to this problem, and many attempt to do so by reducing emotion to one or more of the component(s) in question. I, on the other hand, take a more holistic approach. Although I do maintain that emotions have an essential component, I do not think it is possible to reduce emotion to this component. In my view, the essential factor in all emotion is conscious desire, or the consciously felt need for something. More generally, and to borrow a usefully comprehensive psychological notion exploited by Frankfurt (1988), I maintain that the emotions are essentially how minded persons like us care – how they care about objects of all sorts, about properties of objects, about states of affairs, events, and processes, about each other, about their own lives, and even about their own caring. Drawing on the work of Heidegger, Ratcliffe (2002) maintains that ‘all our dealings with the world presuppose a kind of teleological background’ whereby we are oriented ‘towards-this,’ ‘for-thesake-of,’ or ‘in-order-to’ (p. 289). It is because we care that we are capable of apprehending the world as a significant whole and as an arena of possible goals. The notion of care also captures the intrinsic temporality of our lived bodily dynamics, for it incorporates the sense in which we are anchored in the past, situated in the present, and looking toward the future. An essential component of care is desiderative bodily attunement, which is what anchors us in the world and makes the objects and situations we encounter intelligible by virtue of the fact that they matter to us in some way or another. Emotional consciousness, broadly construed, includes Ratcliffe’s background ‘existential orientations,’ moods, and specifically directed emotions such as fear, anger, joy, and sadness. These modes of consciousness all involve feelings about what matters (Baier, 2004). To put it another way, the one thing that creatures minded like us necessarily are not is emotional zeroes – conscious creatures without conative affect and thus without the ability consciously to desire something or another in some way or another. Of course, this desire-based theory of the emotions does bear an affinity to the old-fashioned drive-based or motivation theories, which claim that emotions are nothing but certain innate urges or species of motive. However, while I do hold that emotions are essentially desires, I do not believe that emotions are nothing but desires, nor do I think that emotions can be explanatorily or ontologically reduced to feelings, neurophysiology, or behavioral dispositions. On my view, desires are consciously felt needs that are necessarily and completely neurobiologically embodied. I will argue that an emotion a. is a paradigmatic expression of the will, which is essentially a set of desires in a reflexive hierarchy together with a further and normally effective first-order desire to spontaneously move one’s body in such a way as to express that very set of desires; and


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b. that it arises against a background of existential feelings, and is a mode of essentially embodied, desiderative, enactive appraisal. Thus, as I will explain further in 2.2, emotions are expressions of the will, which I understand in terms of hierarchies of conscious intentional prereflective and reflective desires, including effective first-order desires and second-order volitions. And, as I will discuss in 2.4, the primary way in which we engage with, interpret, and make sense of the world is through the embodied, desiderative feelings of affective framing. My view is explicitly non-reductive and leaves room for a wide array of factors to play a key role in emotional experience. For one thing, this theory postulates the presence of irreducible and intrinsic consciousness and intentionality in all desires, and thus does not reduce emotions simply to brute drives, biological instincts, or urges. In my view, emotion and cognition are interdependent, and the cognitive–emotional interpretations that constitute affective framing ‘essentially involve organismic processes of selfregulation aimed at sustaining and enhancing adaptive autonomy in the face of perturbing environmental events’ (Thompson and Stapleton, 2009, p. 27). In this way, the sense-making of adaptive and autopoietic systems can be understood as a ‘bodily cognitive–emotional form of understanding’ (i.e., affective framing) that is present in at least a proto-form in all living systems (Colombetti, 2011). In other words, the autopoietic and metabolic processes of living organisms serve as the basic (and necessary, though not in themselves sufficient) ingredients of the ‘natural matrix’ of emotional consciousness. Emotion is one of the central ways in which living organisms are intentionally engaged with the world. There is no doubt that, among some living organisms, these engagements take on an especially complex and sophisticated form. Because my view characterizes the will in terms of irreducible hierarchies of pre-reflective and reflective desires (first-order, second-order, and so on), and suggests that the emotions are paradigmatic expressions of the will, it thereby accommodates the intrinsic and irreducible presence of judgment-based factors (belief, thought, evaluation, etc.) in much of our emotional experience. Moreover, my account emphasizes the extent to which feelings of caring involve bodily attunement and appraisal, so that the cognitive and desiderative elements of emotion are necessarily fused. And, because I hold that desire-based emotions are essentially embodied, my account also clearly acknowledges that bodily changes, feelings, and action tendencies are part of an emotion. Building on the discussion of Chapter 1, I will claim that creatures minded like us are, essentially, conscious desiring suitably neurobiologically complex living organisms, and that one fundamental manifestation of our embodiment is our desire-based emotions. What is more, as I will argue in future chapters, it is the affective, desiderative dimensions of our lives that make possible our sense of self and many other cognitive capacities.

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My account of emotion rests heavily on the discussion of the previous chapter, and the claim that emotions are essentially bodily and affective. However, some emotion theorists have raised doubts about this, and have denied the centrality of irreducible affectivity in emotional experience. In his earlier book The Passions, for example, Solomon (1993) denies that ‘feelings’ are a central feature of the emotions, arguing that feeling is the ornamentation of emotion rather than its essence. In his view, psychological theories that suppose that there are a distinct set of identifiable feelings and sensations for each emotion are deeply mistaken. Solomon’s first objection is that the feelings and sensations associated with one emotion are often no different from the feelings associated with another emotion. Because we cannot always tell emotions apart by how they feel, emotions cannot be individuated on the basis of feelings. Theorists such as Gunther (2004), however, have argued that each emotional attitude is indeed accompanied in experience by a distinctive feeling type. Though it may seem that a throb or a tingle can be associated with many different emotions, our difficulty in individuating them can be traced simply to the fact that we have a limited vocabulary for phenomenological types. Feelings, like colors, are much more fine-grained than the nouns most of us have at our disposal, and have different ‘shades’ that we find it difficult to verbalize. According to Gunther, how an emotion feels is linked to what it is about. Thus, even if it is true that emotions must be individuated partly on the basis of what they are about, this by itself certainly does not show that there can be emotions without feelings. What it shows, to be discussed at greater length below, is that affectivity and intentionality are bound together in emotional experience. Solomon’s second objection to so-called ‘feeling theories’ of emotion is that we often can have an emotion without experiencing any particular feeling. In the most extreme indignation, for example, one finds oneself completely numb, which suggests that one can have an emotion without feeling anything at all. If this were true, it indeed would show that emotions are not necessarily affective. However, it seems more accurate to characterize the numbness Solomon highlights as a weird or unusual species of feeling, rather than as a state absent of feeling altogether. Indeed, it seems true almost by definition that one cannot have or genuinely experience an emotion without at some point experiencing an associated feeling. To say an individual has an emotion is to say that this individual is either currently enjoying, or at some point will undergo, subjective experiences and feelings. Solomon’s last objection is that feelings, like headaches, lack objects or intentionality, while emotions must have objects. I agree that emotions should not simply be identified with objectless feelings or viewed as analogous to headaches, for, as I stated at the outset, emotions are too complex to be reduced to a simple element. However, in my view, the desiderative, bodily feelings that necessarily are part of emotional experience are not objectless, but instead have a rich intentionality.


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Prinz (2005) takes a somewhat different approach, and argues that there can be an emotion without feelings in the event that this emotion is unconscious and unfelt. Although emotions are feelings whenever emotions are felt, unconscious emotions are, by definition, inaccessible to us and in this way similar to other unconscious states. For example, in the case of subliminal perception, if a stimulus is displayed briefly, followed by a mask, we have no conscious experience of it, and yet it can affect subsequent behavior. Likewise, unconscious emotions can affect behavior without being felt. Prinz asks you to imagine that when you wake up to the sound of glass shattering in your living room, your body enters into a ‘fear pattern’ (p. 17). Although you may very well not experience the fear consciously because your attention is directed elsewhere, according to Prinz, it seems reasonable to suppose that you were afraid, but simply didn’t realize it. Here, Prinz seems to equate consciousness with attention and self-reflection, and so it seems clear that he is talking about consciousness in a high-powered sense. But, in the case of fear that Prinz describes, consciousness in a low-powered sense (sensorimotor subjectivity) is very much present. For one’s body to enter into a ‘fear pattern,’ one must already be approaching the world from a single point of view that intrinsically involves subjective experience. In my view, even when your attention is directed elsewhere, you still feel the fear, and so it makes no sense to speak, as Prinz does, of emotions that are unfelt, unconscious perceptions of patterned changes in the body (p. 17). Other accounts that seem to sever the essential link between embodiment and conscious emotional experience include those offered by Laura Sizer and Antonio Damasio. Sizer (2006) distinguishes between the emotion response (the bodily changes) and the emotional feeling (the systems involved in monitoring and sensing changes in the body and brain). Likewise, Damasio (1994) distinguishes between emotions (coordinated suites of changes in the body and brain, such as increased heart rate, musculoskeletal changes, hormonal changes, etc.) and the feelings or conscious experiences of emotions. But I find it difficult to make sense of how bodily changes can be separated or fully distinguished from feelings. When Sizer suggests that consciousness, feeling, and subjective experience occur after the processes of emotional response already have begun to unfold (p. 119), she appears to use the term ‘conscious’ to refer to something like attention or awareness, or what might be described as consciousness in a high-powered sense. Her discussion seems to suppose a body/cognition distinction as well as a body/feeling distinction whereby bodily changes and responses can become detached from consciousness. In my view, on the other hand, so-called emotion responses, such as increased heart rate, musculoskeletal changes, and hormonal changes, are all part of sensorimotor subjectivity and have a phenomenal feel. In Chapter 1, I maintained that such phenomena count as bodily feelings that are conscious in a low-powered sense and partially shape our primitive bodily awareness. To repeat, this is not


to say that emotions can be reduced to feelings, but rather that emotions essentially involve bodily feelings. This is just another way of saying that emotional consciousness is essentially embodied, and that such consciousness need not involve high-level awareness, attention, or the capacity for self-reflection. In my view, emotional consciousness is the place where the heart, the brain, and the rest of the living body all come together, and from which action, perception, and cognition originate. As I will argue in Chapter 3, essentially embodied, desire-based emotions are what provide the basis for human subjectivity, a sense of self, and our egocentrically focused outlook on the world. And in Chapters 4 and 5 I will discuss the central role the emotions play in moral assessment and social cognition.

2.1

Cognitive theories of emotion

Other accounts that tend to mischaracterize, overlook, or downplay the desiderative, affective, and overt bodily dimensions of emotion include the belief–desire account of emotion and also Solomon’s theory of ‘emotion as judgment.’ These highly influential cognitive theories of emotion tend to shunt pre-reflective desires, feelings, neurobiology, and intentional body movements to the sidelines. But in my view these are all intrinsic parts of the complex essence of emotion, which I understand as desire-based. Emotions are essentially embodied and dynamic, they need not have a rich conceptual structure, and they often do not drive us toward concrete goals. However, although I will argue that emotions are not explicitly cognitive in the sense portrayed by many popular theories of emotion, I do not think that emotion can be separated from cognition. In Section 2.4, I will argue that essentially embodied emotions are inseparable from cognition; that they constitute a pre-reflective background that enables cognition; and that they direct and focus cognitive processes according to what we care about. 2.1.1

Emotions as belief–desire pairs

Hume famously asserted that reason is fully subservient to the passions, that practical rationality is instrumental, and that reason’s task is only to represent or infer the means whereby one can attain the ends established by desires. In this way, desires are taken to have a world-to-mind direction of fit, to be a matter of changing the world to suit our ends, and to be psychologically basic facts that are simply given from the start. The notion that desires are essentially a matter of purposes and goals is commonly accepted in philosophy of action. But can emotionally driven action be accommodated within this simple Humean model? Following Davidson (1980), might emotions simply be reduced to a belief–desire complex? I will argue that, while emotional experience should not be understood in terms


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of belief–desire pairs, desire is indeed a necessary and essential component of all emotions. From a commonsense perspective, it seems clear that emotions often do involve certain wants or desires as well as certain beliefs. Traditionally, causal theories of action have held that whether or not an event is an action depends on how it was caused, and that providing a causal explanation of an action is a matter of positing appropriate motivational factors (desires or intentions) and related epistemic factors (beliefs). According to Davidson, for example, citing the primary reason (i.e., the belief–desire complex) yields the cause–effect connection of events and explains an agent’s behavior. At first glance, it may be tempting to analyze emotion in this way, as a pro-attitude in favor of some action (the motivational component) together with evaluative appraisal (the cognitive component). However, there are various sorts of cases in which such an analysis proves inadequate. First, there are cases in which subjects have inappropriate emotions that may have little to do with their beliefs. For example, Steve might believe that Stella is meanspirited, callous, and moody, and yet go on loving her anyway. In such a case, it would be manifestly implausible and inaccurate to explain Steve’s inappropriate emotions by attributing belief–desire pairs that would rationalize them (Rorty, 1980, p. 104). While false beliefs and irrational intentional sets are of course possible, they by no means account for every instance of conservation of the emotions. Another salient range of examples arises from cases of spontaneous, impulsive action, in which we intentionally move our bodies in a sudden, uncalculating, and unplanned way, without or against the rulings of our instrumental judgments. To see this vividly, consider the examples of rumpling the hair of one’s loved one during a wave of affection; throwing an uncooperative tin can opener on the ground in a fit of anger; jumping up and down as an expression of excitement; and rolling in the clothes of one’s dead wife as an expression of grief (Hursthouse, 1991, p. 58). Hursthouse (1991) suggests that these are intentional actions explained by occurrent emotions, so that there is no need to ascribe some suitable belief. In such cases, we will be inclined to say that, while the action was intentional, the agent did not do it for some reason or purpose, but rather simply was in the grip of some emotion. The lack of clear purpose is especially clear, of course, in cases where the agent acts against her better judgment, such as when she flings her phone across the room in a fit of anger and breaks it, thereby acting contrary to her goals. Such examples demonstrate that the traditional belief–desire model cannot provide an adequate characterization of action that is inherently driven by spontaneous, impulsive desire-based emotion and is not instrumentally purposeful at all. A related problem is that postulating a belief–desire explanation of spontaneous impulsive action appears to over-intellectualize the emotions. The belief–desire account would hold, for example, that the intentional


elements involved in fear are desires and beliefs that are related syllogistically. When asked ‘Why did Deirdre suddenly run away from Dan?’ we might answer that Deirdre wanted to get away from Dan and believed that this was the best way of achieving this in the given circumstances. However, it seems that this sort of explanation is consistent with Deirdre’s subjectively experiencing no emotion at all. Yet, other things being equal, surely the best explanation is that Deirdre is intensely afraid of Dan. There seems to be a crucial difference between an action that is performed spontaneously and impulsively on the basis of pre-reflective desire-based emotion and an action that results from the more humdrum self-conscious calculative or deliberative emotions involved in means–end reasoning. In many cases, expressive emotional action is more like an improvisational dance, carried out spontaneously and non-reflectively, than it is like an instrumental act. Because the desires involved in the emotions often are different from desires that seek to bring about some concrete change in the world, we should not presume a Humean theory of motivation according to which all motivation is ultimately due to the instrumental goals of an agent. Precisely because desire-based emotions produce spontaneous actions, whether aimless or impulsive, they differ intrinsically from the mental states, events, or processes involved in purposeful or self-consciously deliberative acts. Desirebased emotions are in this way pre-reflective, and can operate independently of what Searle (2001) called the ‘world-to-mind direction of fit’ that is characteristic of all self-conscious deliberative intentions and instrumental desires (p. 38). At least two further sorts of cases illustrate this. First, one can have an emotion-associated desire for something and yet not want to act so as to change the world to fit that desire. For example, an individual might be overcome with jealousy about her friend’s job success and want desperately for her not to get another promotion, and yet have no goal whatsoever to bring this about. And, second, if an agent feels very proud about how things have turned out (say, she has won an award) and spontaneously smiles, her pre-reflective desire-based emotions are directed toward the way things just are and not toward some different non-actual way she wants them to be (Goldie, 2000, p. 78). Thus, as Doring (2003) points out, an emotion need not provide an end for action at all, or imply that the world should be changed in some way (p. 219). While our actions indeed do sometimes reflect our symbolic desires3 or instrumental goals, in many other cases we intentionally move our bodies in a spontaneous, impulsive way and purely on the basis of pre-reflective desire-based emotions. 2.1.2 Emotions as judgments? Given the fundamental importance of pre-reflective desires, it may seem unclear how we should account for the specifically cognitive element involved in the emotions. In ‘Emotions and Choice’ (1980) and The Passions


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(1993), Solomon famously argued that both the intentionality of the emotions and their active status can be captured by characterizing emotions as evaluative judgments. As forms of judgment, emotions supply standards of interpretation and evaluation to our experience and constitute the framework within which these experiences and facts has some meaning for us. So, according to the early Solomon, an emotion is a ‘personal evaluation of the significance of [a particular] incident’ that projects our values and ideals (1993, p. 126). Note that Solomon does not regard emotions as judgments simpliciter, but rather as constitutive judgments that supply standards of interpretation whereby decipher, evaluate, and make sense of our experiences. For example, our choosing to get angry is what makes a comment offensive, and we constitute, not find, the charms and virtues of those whom we choose to love. Because agents shape and structure their world according to these constitutive judgments, Solomon finds it plausible to consider them judicative actions. Although I agree with Solomon that emotions do play an important role in shaping our interpretation of the world by rendering certain facts salient and focusing our attention, I find it implausible to suppose that emotions simply are judgments. For one thing, there may be instances of emotion without judgments. I may feel sad or angry or anxious, for example, without my feelings involving any sort of judgment, or even if I judge that there is nothing to be sad or angry or anxious about. Likewise, I may be afraid to take trips on airplanes even if I (rightly) judge that they are the safest mode of travel. Such examples demonstrate that our emotions are sometimes irrational and may not change even if we know that the corresponding judgments are not true. The idea that a change in judgment need not give rise to any change in the corresponding emotion has led some to point out that emotions have a certain cognitive impenetrability.4 In addition, it seems clear that one can make relevant judgments and yet not feel the expected emotion. For example, I might make a rational judgment to the effect that I am guilty and yet not feel guilty, or judge that I should be angry after being slighted, and yet not feel angry (Roberts, 1984, p. 399). Such cases indicate that our emotions often do not line up neatly with our well-considered judgments. So, then, why did Solomon insist that emotions are judgments? One reason that Solomon gives for identifying emotions with judgments is their common ‘logic.’ Because emotions have a characteristic conceptual form and logic, he maintains, their structures can be explicitly formulated and formalized like any other logical or conceptual system (Solomon, 1993, p. 195). Each emotion is defined according to its characteristic judgments, and the logic of an emotion dictates the logic of the resulting emotional expression: joy demands a joyful expression and love a loving expression. Because anger is essentially a judgment of condemnation, there can be no anger

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without the desire to punish. In addition, the relationship between beliefs and emotions is a matter of logic, so that a change in beliefs necessarily inspires a change in emotions. I cannot be angry at John for something I believe and know he did not do. According to Solomon’s early work, my anger vanishes immediately upon the refutation of the fact I was angry about. Everyday experience, on the other hand, indicates that the beliefs and emotions of agents do sometimes conflict. For example, Sue may recognize that her husband John was not truly unfaithful and that this occurred only in her dream the night before. However, she nevertheless may still feel angry at John. Emotions sometimes do persist in the face of evidence that suggests they should disappear. Indeed, much of ordinary human experience indicates that the logic of judgments differs significantly from that of emotions.5 Along these lines, Greenspan (1980) considers how the phenomenon of ‘mixed feelings’ might bear on the question of whether emotions should be identified with judgments (p. 223). She points out that a basically rational person might have contrary emotions about the very same object. For example, if Judy is happy that John won the award, and yet also unhappy that he won the award, we can then regard Judy’s happiness and unhappiness as contrary attitudes towards the same object. However, suppose we then try to identify Judy’s emotions with the following evaluations: A. John’s winning the award is good. B. John’s winning the award is bad. It is unlikely that a basically rational person such as Judy would hold both of these contrary beliefs at the same time. Indeed, if asked about her evaluative view of the situation, Judy is likely to qualify her judgments so that they are no longer genuine contraries: A. * John’s winning the award is good insofar as he deserves it. B. * John’s winning the award is bad insofar as I really wanted to win it. One can have contrary emotions, on the other hand, without qualification, and also without them ‘blending’ together into a single intermediate emotion (Greenspan, 1980, p. 232). Moreover, an emotion can persist even when it is accompanied by much stronger opposing feelings, so that the notion of contrariety must be understood somewhat differently in the case of emotions. While contrary emotions can both be ‘true’6 (insofar as they are appropriate), contrary judgments cannot. Such considerations suggest that the structure of emotional talk and the way the emotions operate in our experience differ from the structure of judgment talk and the way judgment operates in our experience. As Jenefer Robinson (1983) points out, the logic of emotion is actually more similar to the logic of desires than it


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is to the logic of judgments (pp. 735–736). Neither conflicting desires nor conflicting emotions can be ‘summed up’ into one intermediate emotion or desire. And, like inconsistent desires, inconsistent emotions can persist unchanged in a basically rational person, since there may be adequate reasons for both of the two conflicting desires or emotions. In addition to this failure to exhibit full logical complexity, emotions also appear to violate the Principle of Force Independence, which says that there is a distinction and separation between content and force, that is, between what a sentence or utterance says and the way that it is said (Gunther, 2003, p. 279). This principle stems from the work of Frege, who suggests that in an assertoric sentence two features should be distinguished: the content, which it has in common with the corresponding propositional question; and assertion. Illocutionary force has to do with the different ways in which the same content can be used in different ways in language. However, emotions differ from cognitive states such as belief and judgment in that their force (the attitude they involve) is an indissoluble aspect of their content, so that feelings and emotional contents are linked (Gunther, 2004). What an emotionally expressive utterance says and the way that it is said cannot be separated, and this begins to reveal that what an affective experience is about (its content) cannot be separated from its phenomenal character (its force). Taken together, I think these considerations collectively show that emotional content cannot be mapped onto beliefs or judgments, and that emotion is much more likely to be intrinsically connected to desire than traditional cognitive theories acknowledge. As William Lyons (1980) points out, the centrality of desire in emotional experience is not at all surprising in view of the obvious fact that emotional reactions are typically deeply related to our basic wants, and also deeply informed by a broader set of goals and values (p. 186). Furthermore, because an agent’s desires serve as a causally determining factor in how she interprets things, whatever cognitive element is involved in emotion always will be linked to desire.

2.2

Desire-based emotions

Thus, while I have rejected the belief–desire account of emotion, I do not wish to deny the central role that desires play in all emotions. Even if emotions need not involve forward-looking, goal-directed desire, this does not yet establish that emotions can lack associated desires altogether. For, while I agree that so-called emotional desires need not have a world-to-mind direction of fit in the sense that they provide concrete ends for action, it is not clear that ‘desire’ has to be understood in this narrow sense. When I throw my papers across the room in frustration, it is because I want to in some minimal sense, or because I feel like it. Because goal-directed or purposeful desire does not exhaust the conative aspect of emotion, I believe that we


need to expand our understanding of desire and include impulse, urge, and drive in our characterization. This reflects my understanding of desire as a felt need. Moreover, and in direct opposition to the thesis that there can be emotions without desires, I maintain that in normal circumstances it is impossible for a subject minded like us to feel an emotion without also and thereby desiring to spontaneously and impulsively move her own body self-expressively in some way or another, which can include bodily orientation and facial expression. If this is correct, then all emotions are inherently poised to cause basic intentional actions, and in particular to cause body movements that create self-depicting displays of those very emotions. To be sad is normally also to have a pre-reflective conscious effective first-order desire spontaneously and impulsively to move one’s body sadly; to be happy is normally also to have a pre-reflective conscious effective first-order desire spontaneously and impulsively to move one’s body happily; to be frustrated is normally also to have a pre-reflective conscious effective first-order desire spontaneously and impulsively to move one’s body frustratedly; and so on. Although emotions do sometimes overcome us, they also play a quite active role in our conscious lives and bodily activities. Again, this is not to say that all desire-based emotions are connected to self-conscious deliberative action, but rather that all instances of caring and desire-based emotion are inherently poised for essentially embodied agency. (What is more, as I discuss in the next chapter, this sense of being a source of agency helps to ground self-awareness.) But this is not classical or full-strength metaphysical and methodological behaviorism about the emotions, for I am not claiming that for each emotional type necessarily there is some specific way of moving one’s body. Classical behaviorism about the emotions is wrong when it states that specific emotions are necessarily correlated with any specific type of overt body movements (or with dispositions to make such movements), much less identical with them. In addition, while classical behaviorism holds that all mental states happen only at the surfaces of animal bodies, EE holds that all mental states are necessarily and completely neurobiologically embodied. Thus, it says that the emotional life of a conscious, intentional creature like us necessarily happens in and through the brain and necessarily in and through all the other vital systems as well, whether or not any overt body movements can or do occur. This includes movements in the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and endocrine systems. In this way, EE allows for conscious emotional states even in cases where bodily movement cannot (bodily paralysis) or does not (action suppression) occur. However, I do think that classical behaviorism did contain something of fundamental importance for the philosophy of mind, for behaviorism recognizes, as Wittgenstein (1953) put it, that, ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (p. 178). What I mean is that conscious,


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intentional minds like ours are necessarily and completely embodied in motile, living organisms, and that there is no emotion that cannot be spontaneously impulsively expressed in overt intentional body movements. To repeat, these need not be purposeful or goal-directed movements, and might involve something as simple as grimacing or making an inarticulate noise under your breath. In many cases, emotional expressions are somewhat passive and not fully under our control. Flushing, sweating, tears, various facial expressions, and chills are all in some sense ‘pictures of the human soul,’ and we often reveal our feelings without self-reflectively intending to do so. This has led some theorists to suppose that emotions are suffered in a passive mode and that they should be understood as forces or intrusions that overcome and overwhelm us. However, it is important to note that, in addition to their passive face, many or most emotions also have an active face. While the onset of emotional expression is often rapid, too fast for us to recognize what is happening, it does not take very long for us to realize that we are crying, flushing, or shaking with anger. At this point, we can choose either to accentuate or attenuate our response, interrupt it, or refuse to acknowledge what is happening. It seems that fairly early on in life most of us begin to develop the ability voluntarily to inhibit, suppress, or stifle our bodily expressions of emotions. However, even if it is true that the dampening or inhibition of spontaneous impulsive self-expressive acts associated with emotions is always possible to some extent, then that in turn presupposes that it is indeed normally a necessary component of every such emotion to pre-reflectively consciously want to move our bodies in some self-expressive way. This is supported by the observation that the intentional stifling or suppression of the pre-reflective conscious effective first-order desire to move one’s body in an emotionally self-expressive way is usually only partially successful. For example, putting on a poker face when desperately disappointed is usually still, in some subtle way, a self-depicting bodily picture of one’s disappointment. To recognize this, one need only compare and contrast the poker face of desperate disappointment with the sort of poker face that is put on when one is desperately bored at a faculty meeting. The claim that emotion necessarily involves wanting to move our bodies in some selfexpressive way also is supported by the fact that most of the time emotions are plainly visible in the features or gestures of the people who are experiencing them. To see emotion-based desires at work, we need only look to the spontaneous kissing of lovers; the temper tantrums of children; the tearing out of one’s hair in frustration; and one’s jumping up and down in excitement. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that necessarily for every emotion there is normally a further pre-reflective conscious effective firstorder desire to give spontaneous bodily self-expression to that very emotion, in some way or another.

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2.2.1 Must emotions involve desire? What I have proposed is that emotions are essentially how minded animals, and especially human persons, care. Caring is how we feel about objects of all sorts, how we feel about each other, how we feel about our own feelings, and how we feel about our own lives, in part or as a whole. This is to say that caring involves feelings of ‘subjective import’ (Helm, 2001, p.199), which are intrinsically connected to a creature’s desires regarding her surroundings and circumstances. These include both primitive and basic wants, such as the desire for survival and overall well-being, as well as more sophisticated and complex desires pertaining to an individual’s projects, social attachments, and sense of identity. And both basic as well as more complex desires include both those directed toward the past (backward-looking desires) as well as those directed toward the future (forward-looking desires). Indeed, on my view, every emotion involves felt desire(s), whether forward-looking (hope), backward-looking (pride), or both forward-looking and backwardlooking (anger). In short, emotions are essentially a matter of our wanting or not wanting things to be a certain way, in conjunction with the way that the world actually is (or at least how we take it to be). What is also crucial, of course, is that these are felt desires that are completely neurobiologically embodied, so that caring is something that we do in and through our living bodies, and not just in our hearts (as the usual saying goes) or just in our heads. When we care about something, our pulse and breathing quicken, our skin tingles, and our palms sweat. These bodily changes are at the core of our feelings of caring and intricately bound up with our felt needs and wants. However, some theorists would object to my suggestion that desire is an essential component of emotion. Stocker (1996), for example, maintains that while some emotions do involve desire, others lack it, so that affectivity cannot be reduced to desire. Again, I do not wish to claim that emotion can be reduced to desire, but rather that desire is the essential factor in all emotions. But is Stocker correct in maintaining that desire can be missing from emotion? To argue for this claim, he considers instances of intellectual or aesthetic interest and maintains that this sort of emotional experience need not involve desire. Stocker supposes that he is walking down a familiar street with a friend who instructs him to notice much that he has taken for granted, and that suddenly, upon viewing the street in a new way, Stocker finds the street ‘vivid, exciting, and alive, with wonderful colors, shapes, variety and form’ (pp. 29–30). He maintains that although he saw and felt the street emotionally, desire was not a part of what it was for the scene to be felt as vivid and exciting. Another example Stocker gives is shame, which he describes as a way of living out one’s felt vulnerability. In his view, feelings of shame need not involve any desire, not even the desire to hide or to be rid of one’s vulnerability. He believes that such examples demonstrate that some instances or even types of emotion do not involve desire and are merely ways of seeing and feeling.


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Of course, much in this discussion hinges on what we mean by desire. According to what Stocker describes as a functional or explanatory theoretical account of desire, desire is that which, together with belief, explains or gives direction to action. However, I already have noted that I do not think desire should be understood simply as a driving force behind instrumental, goal-oriented action, nor do I wish to adopt merely a biological–functional account that characterizes desire solely in terms of the biological impetus to preserve one’s life and well-being (though, of course, this basic desire is important, and deeply connected to the processes of autopoiesis discussed in Chapter 1.) Instead, I have characterized desire in terms of felt needs and wants, and as a matter of caring, which I believe is necessarily linked to affectivity. Again, consider the examples above and whether they involve desire in the sense that I have described. In regard to the first case, Stocker claims that he saw and felt the street emotionally, but denies that these emotions involved desire. In my view, on the other hand, a street can be experienced emotionally only in relation to one’s desires, or only if one cares about one’s surroundings. So what sorts of desires are in play in the case Stocker describes? If one experiences the street as vivid and exciting, this could be a result of one’s desires for beauty, color, shape, and variety; it could be a result of one’s desire to share this moment with one’s companion and see the world through her eyes; or it could be the result of one’s overall satisfaction and the desire to be precisely where one is at the present moment. In any case, if one’s experience of the street did not tap into one’s desires, needs, and wants, and one did not care about what one saw, who one was with, or whether one was there at all, one would not experience the street as vivid and exciting. Of course, this is not to suggest that intellectual or aesthetic interest involves instrumental desires to achieve something in particular, or that such interest is connected to particular goals Stocker had at that time. Rather, Stocker’s feelings of excitement and being alive suggest that, for a moment, some sort of desire to be at peace with his surroundings and to be faring well in the world was being fulfilled. In addition, these feelings of excitement surely involved spontaneous, pre-reflective desires to move his body in some self-expressive way, even if this amounted to no more than smiling or quickening his pace. Likewise, feelings of shame necessarily involve desire, though these may not be purposeful desires to do anything in particular or take action in any specific way. However, if a person did not want others to think well of her or desire to have behaved differently, it is unclear how she could feel ashamed. Indeed, the emotion of shame is essentially a matter of one’s desires being thwarted in particular ways, insofar as one’s conception or view of oneself is not what one wants it to be. And, like all emotions, shame involves desires to move one’s body in a way expressive of that emotion, even if all this amounts to is a simple change in posture. One might object at this

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point that there may be other sorts of desires that are purely intellectual and do not involve much at all in the way of affectivity. On the contrary, I cannot think of an example of a desire that lacks any phenomenal quality whatsoever and is completely unfelt. But, even if there are such ‘intellectual desires,’ they are very different from those involved in emotional experience. I believe that the desires necessarily involved in emotions are inextricably connected with affectivity and intentional bodily movement, and can be understood in terms of caring. 2.2.2 The will as a hierarchy of desires To repeat, as I understand things a desire is a felt need for something, or a preference for something, or a wish for something. Desires and wants, therefore, can be taken to be essentially equivalent. To desire X is to want X; to desire to X is to want to X; and conversely. Now, earlier I suggested that an emotion is a paradigmatic expression of the will, which is a set of desires in a reflexive hierarchy that includes both effective first-order desires and second-order volitions, and now it is time to say more about just what this entails. In The Importance of What We Care About, Frankfurt (1998) famously argues that the ability to structure one’s will through the formation of secondorder volitions is essential to personhood (p. 12). To make sense of these second-order volitions, Frankfurt first distinguishes between mere desires and effective desires. Some desires, such as idle wishes or preferences, may not be at all likely to play a role in what an agent actually does or tries to do. These Frankfurt distinguishes from effective desires, ones that will or would move an agent all the way to action, which he characterizes as a conscious animal’s will. For example, suppose that I have an effective first-order desire for a bowl of ice cream that gets me off the couch and all the way to the freezer, the ice cream scooper, and eventually to eating some ice cream. Frankfurt would say, and I agree, that this is what I have willed, or is my will, on that occasion. However, clearly this is not the only sort of desire that influences the course of our lives. Due to our unique capacity for self-reflection, persons like us also are able to form second-order desires with respect to our firstorder desires. That is, we are capable not only of wanting (not) to x, but also of wanting to (not) want to x. However, this wanting to have the first-order desire need not entail wanting that first-order desire actually to be satisfied. For example, I might want to scold a co-worker, and want to want to scold her (because I am angry and have deemed she deserves to be scolded), and yet not want this desire to be effective in action because it would involve more grief than it is worth. A second-order desire becomes a second-order volition when an individual not only wants to want to x, but also wants the desire to x to move him or her all the way to action and to ‘provide the motive in what [he or she] actually does’ (p. 15). Frankfurt’s hierarchical


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model thus suggests that at least some of one’s second order-desires, namely second-order volitions, are directed to the determination of precisely which first-order desires are to be effective in action and thereby constitute one’s will. Suppose, for example, that Sam not only wants to get good grades in school, but also embraces this first-order desire. In addition to wanting to have the desire, Sam approves of it as a motivating factor and thereby decides what he wants his will to be. Indeed, Frankfurt believes that when Sam embraces his desire to get good grades, he wills that this desire guide his conduct and thereby makes it ‘more truly his own’ (p. 18). If he neglects to study for a test and instead goes to the movies, he will feel as if he has betrayed himself in some sense. Frankfurt suggests that the formation of a person’s will is ‘a matter of his coming to care about certain things’ (p. 91). Because what a person cares about will often bear a strong connection to what he thinks is best for himself to do under various circumstances, a person often will guide himself in what he does in accordance with what he cares about. In this sense, as paradigmatic expressions of the will, desire-based emotions often guide our action and direct us toward particular goals. In addition, as Frankfurt points out, caring can act as a means of integrating the various moments of one’s life into a continuing history. This is because caring ‘implies a certain consistency or steadiness of behavior’ and affects the way a person guides or directs himself (p. 84). Various desires will arise and compete for priority; while some desires are granted preference, others are rejected as unworthy of satisfaction. When we speak of a person with integrity, we speak of a person with a ‘coherence and unity of purpose over time’ (p. 175). Likewise, when we speak of someone who has made a decision, we say that she has ‘made up her mind’ and organized her desires into an integrated whole (p. 172). Of course, there are cases when this hierarchy is not fully integrated and one’s various desires are in tension with each other. For example, I might decline an invitation to present a paper at a philosophy conference because the idea of doing so scares me and I effectively desire to avoid public speaking. However, at the same time I might want not to want to decline the invitation, because I know that accepting such invitations is good for my career and also that giving in to my fears is not beneficial in the long run. Since both my career and my long-term best interests are things that I care about deeply, if my fear of public speaking is too strong and my wanting not to be ruled by this fear fails to motivate me to accept the invitation, then this serves as an instance of so-called weakness of will. If my fear of public speaking is effective in action, then it constitutes my will on this occasion, despite my second-order volitions to the contrary and the fact that these feelings of fear are not fully integrated with all that I care about. According to this hierarchical desire model, the will is a dynamic hierarchy of desires that is structured by first-order desires, second-order desires,

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and second-order volitions. The will bottoms out in conscious effective first-order desires, and consists also in a structured complex of higher-order or reflexive desires, in particular second-order volitions. This hierarchy of desires is dynamic insofar as it is actively configured by a conscious subject over time and inherently open to gradual or even radical reconfiguration, as she continually ‘makes up her mind’ and ‘changes her mind,’ and sometimes even transforms her will and thereby ‘changes her life.’ These dynamic patterns in the mind are diachronic rather than synchronic and serve to connect an agent’s past intentions and preferences with her future plans. If these observations are correct, then Frankfurt was right on the mark when he suggested that what we care about is of extreme importance. Insofar as occurrent emotions guide our actions and future plans and structure our intentional behavior, they are paradigmatic ways of expressing what we care about. It is important to note that evaluative beliefs about desires often can play a crucial role in shaping the way our wills are configured. This is because evaluative judgments typically give rise to new desires, which in turn make us more prone to certain types of thought and action. When evaluative judgments and effective desires are not in line with each other, agents experience some degree of internal tension. For example, Doug may want his desire to belittle Dana’s ex-boyfriend to be effective in action, yet also disapprove of this desire, knowing it to arise out of unfounded jealousy. This is very different from a case in which an individual both endorses a first-order desire at a higher level and also regards it as providing a justifying reason for action. For example, Nick may want his desire to take revenge to be effective in action and also endorse this desire as providing a justifying reason for action in motivationally effective practical reasoning. Because Doug endorses his desire at the higher level but disapproves of it in an evaluative sense, there is a sense in which his overall mental life lacks coherence. Nick, on the other hand, whose second-order volition and evaluative judgment are in alignment, seems to illustrate far more integrity. In order to understand the complex ways in which the human mind in general, and emotional experience in particular, are structured, Frankfurt’s hierarchy of desires needs to be expanded to include the role of evaluative beliefs. In other words, we need to acknowledge that evaluative beliefs about our emotions can help to generate new higher-level desires, influence our second-order volitions, and thereby alter our overall emotional and mental condition. For example, once I come to disapprove of my temper tantrums, I may come to adopt a second-order desire that my first-order desire to angrily throw things not be effective in action. In some cases, these evaluative judgments help to give rise to relatively stable second-order volitions that constitute what Bratman (2002) has called ‘self-governing policies’ (p. 76). These policies concern the relevant functioning of an agent’s desires in a wide variety of situations. For example,


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an agent might come to have a self-governing policy that demands that she not cry in public. Such observations show that judgments and reflective evaluation often do play a role in the emotional lives of adult humans. However, even though we must leave room for the role of higher-order evaluation in emotional experience, it is crucially important not to over-intellectualize the will. Conscious effective first-order desires need not necessarily be accompanied by any occurrent or even dispositional reflective consciousness of any sort, whether this takes the form of deliberative self-consciousness, higherorder thoughts, or some other form of higher-order self-representation, selfconception, or memories of episodes in one’s own life. Moreover, to form a second-order volition, and want a particular first-order desire to be effective in action, higher-order thoughts or reflection are not needed. Therefore the reflexivity of the hierarchy of desires that constitutes the will of an animal minded like us does not necessarily entail the reflectivity of a special hierarchy of self-conscious representations. This is clearly shown by the existence of non-rational intentional agents, such as normal human toddlers or great apes, who clearly have wills. I have suggested that an emotion is a paradigmatic expression of the will, which I have characterized as a set of conscious first-order desires, together with a reflexive superstructure of hierarchically ordered desires, normally also together with a further pre-reflective conscious effective first-order desire to spontaneously and impulsively move one’s body in such a way as to express the relevant desire-set. For example, for Sarah to be upset about losing her job is for her to want various things about the world, herself, and her situation to be different, and also for her pre-reflectively to want to spontaneously and impulsively move her body sadly, whether by crying, frowning, snapping at other people, or moping about listlessly. Given this account, it is easy to see how Sarah’s sadness can persist even if she judges that the position was not a good fit and believes that she will find a better job. This is because her emotion is not essentially a matter of judgment of belief, but instead a matter of embodied desire. 2.2.3

Existential Orientation

At a more basic level, this set of desires that Frankfurt characterizes as the will emerges against a background existential orientation that can be described in terms of bodily attunement. Ratcliffe (2008) uses this term ‘existential orientation’ to describe one’s general sense of one’s relationship to the world, which constitutes the background to all one’s experiences, thoughts, and activities. Rather than there being some single, constant ‘natural attitude,’ existential feelings or orientations vary from person to person and change in all sorts of ways over time. These ways of finding oneself in the world are constituted by bodily feelings and can be understood as spaces of possibility that determine the various ways in


which things can be experienced. These feelings are not just experiences of the body or of the world, but instead are that through which we engage with the world during perception, cognition, and emotion.7 I agree with Ratcliffe that these background orientations are not evaluations of specific objects, but instead set the stage for evaluation of specific objects. I have suggested that the central feature in emotional consciousness is embodied desire or caring, and I believe that what one cares about certainly is rooted in one’s existential orientation. It is against the backdrop of one’s existential orientation and one’s feelings of ‘being in the world’ that an individual’s will takes shape and certain projects and commitments take on significance. As Ratcliffe rightly points out, one’s existential orientation is more fundamental to world experience than a directed emotion such as anger or pride, and is in fact part of what makes all such occurrent emotions possible. Indeed, the sense one has of ‘being in a world’ shapes not only one’s perceptions and sense of potential future actions, but also one’s emotions, and thus serves as a sort of all-encompassing ‘lens’ through which one encounters the world. As we engage with our surroundings, ‘we encounter objects as ‘‘what they are’’ in the context of a background of emotional attunement, which anchors our cognition of worldly objects and structures our relationships with them’ (Ratcliffe, 2002, p. 302). The practical connectedness that Ratcliffe describes is predicated on some things mattering and other things not mattering. While sometimes objects or events are experienced in a totally detached way, stripped of all practical significance, in other cases they are experienced as totally overwhelming. What constitutes our different existential orientations at different times are our feelings of caring and desire. Drawing from the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Ratcliffe uses the notion of a ‘horizon’ to capture the sense in which the feeling body serves as a framework through which world-experience is structured. One might understand the ‘horizon’ as the pre-reflective, background sense of belonging to the world that offers up a space of possibilities for acting and being acted upon. A change in existential orientation thus means a change in one’s ‘horizon’ and an altered sense of what sorts of possibilities for action and experience a situation offers. Of course, as Ratcliffe readily points out, we are not indifferent to these systems of possibilities, for some things ‘call out to us’ and have ‘an affective pull,’ (2008, p. 132) while other things do not. Ratcliffe’s description of the horizon and the notion that perception and action are structured by a background bodily orientation, together with his claim that perception is enactive, anticipate my proposed account of affective framing, to be developed shortly. According to this account, consciousness is a process whereby we actively constitute our world of experience, and do so against a backdrop of desiderative bodily feelings.


2.3

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Emotional intentionality

In this section, I will argue that all desire-based emotions have intentionality, that this intentionality is essentially embodied, and that it necessarily includes affect or feelings. To describe how and what an emotion is about, or to describe an emotion’s being directed in some way or another at some thing or another, is to describe that emotion’s intentionality. Otherwise put, and generally speaking, intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind. I wish to argue that a particular way of representing an object (where the notion of an ‘object’ is taken in the maximally broad sense that includes individual objects, oneself, other persons, facts, states of affairs, properties, etc., which may or may not actually exist) necessarily partially constitutes every desire-based emotion, and that the desire-based emotional representation of an object, in turn, is partially constituted by the subject’s embodied feelings about that object. I believe that the intentionality of emotions is neither reducible to nor requires the intentionality of belief, judgment, or thought, so that the intentional content of emotions need not be understood as the content of a belief or as the object of a propositional attitude. Indeed, I want to describe the intentional content of a desire-based emotion in terms of its egocentrically centered and essentially embodied focus rather than in terms of something that necessarily falls under a conceptual or propositional description. Now, it is sometimes thought that the phenomenal character of experience lacks representational content altogether. For example, it is often held that pains have intrinsic, introspectively accessible properties that are wholly non-intentional and that are solely responsible for their phenomenal character.8 And, because phenomenal properties are typically thought to be non-causal, non-representational, non-functional, and often non-physical,9 intentional mental states such as beliefs and desires often are regarded as inherently not phenomenal. This allows Chalmers (1996) and others to distinguish between the ‘easy’ problem (accounting for intentionality, belief, and cogitation) and the ‘hard’ problem (explaining why the performance of these functions is accompanied by phenomenal experience) of consciousness. If it were true that the phenomenal character of emotion (its affectivity) could be separated from its intentionality (its representational content), then this would indeed make some parts of consciousness easier to account for, and also lend some support to a thoroughly functionalist cognitive theory of emotion that holds that the intentional contents of emotion are intrinsically propositional and conceptual. However, I believe that this sharp division between phenomenal experience and intentionality is mistaken. This is because while intentional content and phenomenal experience are indeed distinct, there is no intentional content without phenomenal character. Following Horgan and Tienson (2002), I maintain that the phenomenal aspects and intentional aspects of


conscious mental states are necessarily connected (p. 520). First, what our intentional states represent or track depends on the phenomenal experiences they involve. As Searle (1992) points out, our intentional states always have a subjective feel and an aspectual shape. There is something it is like to think that Anne is coming over for dinner tonight, and also something it is like to hope that Anne is coming over for dinner. And the phenomenological difference between wondering whether Anne is coming for dinner and doubting whether she is coming over corresponds to a difference in intentional content. Moreover, what mental states are about differs depending on their subjective feel and aspectual shape. My representation of Anne’s coming over for dinner differs depending on whether it involves feelings of apprehension or excitement. Likewise, my representation of an insect differs depending on whether it involves feelings of disgust or curiosity. It also seems clear that the specific phenomenal character of an emotional state (i.e. what it is like to undergo it) often is inseparable from that state’s intentional content. The claim that emotions are to be characterized and individuated solely on the basis of how they feel, and that emotions are just feelings, is inadequate. This is because the phenomenal character of experience tends to have much to do with what that experience represents, is directed toward, or is about. The overall phenomenal character associated with a temporally extended scene, for example, is a matter of the objects (and the properties they instantiate) that are presented in that scene. Thus, my immediate and direct fear of a mountain lion is likely to have a phenomenal character that is different from my immediate and direct fear of getting into a car accident. Similarly, experiences of anger are typically thoroughly intentional and occur in certain situations, in relation to a particular harm or perceived wrongdoing (Horgan and Tienson, 2002, p. 522). Of course, in some instances, there might be free-floating emotional experience, such as a sense of angst that influences one’s overall phenomenal state or a mood that is not about anything in particular. However, even these phenomenal states are intentional in some minimal sense to the extent that they involve directedness toward and engagement with the world. And, insofar as the distinctive phenomenal character of emotion (affect) is essentially linked to what emotions are about, emotions can be understood as intentional states that are intrinsically phenomenal. How an emotion feels is bound up with its world-directedness, so that intentionality and phenomenology are essentially united in emotional experience (Slaby, 2007). 2.3.1

Emotions as non-propositional and non-conceptual

Of course, it is possible for someone to feel an emotion and yet fail to have the complex thought that some theorists argue is a necessary component of the emotion. In my view, to be discussed at far greater length below, this fails to make emotion wholly non-cognitive, for emotion always counts as a way of making sense of and understanding the world. However, I agree


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wholeheartedly with the claim that the necessary cognitive component is not necessarily conceptual or propositional. In this way, my approach differs from the standard cognitive theories of the emotions discussed earlier, which characterize the intentional contents and objects of emotions as intrinsically conceptual or propositional, and at best extrinsically phenomenal. In my view, emotions essentially involve desires and feelings of caring, and these felt desires intrinsically contain phenomenal character. As I argued in the previous chapter, this felt dimension of emotional consciousness, in turn, is a matter of ongoing bodily dynamics and primitive bodily awareness. If that is correct, then the phenomenal character or felt dimension of emotion is precisely what it is like to be, for an essentially embodied conscious creature like us, during the occurrence of desire-based emotions. Such considerations are right in line with EE, and they suggest, contra traditional cognitive theories, that the intentional contents of emotion are intrinsically phenomenal and only extrinsically conceptual or propositional. Of course, this claim does run counter to some highly influential accounts of the emotions. For example, in his classic study Action, Emotion, and Will, Kenny (1963) maintains that all desires and emotions have content in the way that belief has content. He argues that emotions are essentially directed to objects and that in general it is not possible ‘to ascribe a piece of behavior to an emotional state without at the same time ascribing an object to the emotion’ (1963, p. 60). Similarly, Lyons (1980) claims that a person is not really in a state of fear until he both believes that he is in danger and also wants not to be (p. 94); and Zemach (2001) argues that anger is caused by a belief that a bad thing happened, which causes the agent to view the situation as outrageous, which in turn justifies some action, say, an attack (p. 202). Despite the initial plausibility of such proposals, I believe that the thesis that emotions necessarily have propositional objects and are essentially a matter of rationalized mental predication is mistaken. If emotions do indeed all require objects of desire, as I have argued, nevertheless these need not always be propositional in structure. Along these lines, Baier (1990) points out that when music arouses our emotions, ‘there are not a series of reportable belief states with any particular propositional content’ associated with those emotions (p. 12). In Seeing and Knowing, Dretske makes similar claims regarding ‘non-epistemic seeing’ and suggests that perception does not necessarily have belief content. Because the statement ‘S sees D’ does not logically entail ‘S believes P,’ it is not logically inconsistent to say that someone saw something without believing himself to be visually aware of anything (1969, p. 10). To demonstrate this, Dretske draws attention to preoccupied states in which creatures see things without being aware of them, as well as to the conscious perceptual states of human infants and non-human animals. He points out that while you very likely saw most of the leaves on, say, the tree in front of your house this morning as you left


to go to work, it is very unlikely that any belief or propositional content accompanied the seeing of any particular leaf (p. 11). It also seems obvious enough that a normal human toddler or a non-human animal living across the street could consciously see the same leaves on that same tree without having any beliefs or propositional contents at all. In much the same way, it is highly doubtful that belief or propositional content is required in all cases of desire-based emotion. There is nothing logically inconsistent in supposing that someone experiences an emotion without any sort of belief or propositional content accompanying that emotion. And there do also seem to be many real-world cases of this. For example, anyone can be in a bad mood or a good mood without any accompanying beliefs or propositional thoughts at all. And when people are at dance clubs, lost in the throbbing music, and rhythmically moving along with many other dancers, they often find themselves unselfconsciously experiencing a wide variety of vivid emotions: amusement, excitement, free-floating sexual desire, nervousness, nostalgia, or sheer joy. Depending on their desirebased emotional state, they will make spontaneous impulsive efforts to move their bodies in a number of different ways, but this rarely is accompanied by beliefs or thoughts about their body movements. And, finally, it also seems very plausible that both normal human infants and toddlers, as well as at least some non-human animals, are capable of experiencing desire-based emotions without having any corresponding beliefs or propositional thoughts, whether occurrent or dispositional. Another reason for doubting the thesis that desire-based emotions entail beliefs or propositional contents is the potential for error. We can be mistaken about precisely what we are desiring or feeling, and as a consequence can be quite confused as to precisely which desire-based emotion we are actually experiencing in that context. For example, in experiencing a certain intense emotion, Ken may think that he passionately loves Karen, when in reality he mainly feels very bitter and resentful towards her. However, like non-epistemic perceptions, desire-based emotions have a unique content, structure, and psychological function, and cannot be mistaken in the same way as propositions, beliefs, judgments, or thoughts. When we say that someone is experiencing a ‘false emotion,’ what we really mean is that it is inappropriate (in relation to its object and surrounding context), phony (in relation to the sincerity of the emotional agent), or self-deceived (in relation to the agent’s level of self-knowledge). Because a desire-based emotion has a unique content, structure, and psychological function, it is not subject to the same logical constraints of correspondence-to-the-facts and consistency to which propositions, beliefs, judgments, and thoughts must adhere. Such considerations support the view that the representational content of emotional experience need not be either propositional or conceptual in order to play a role in motivating judgments and actions. Such content thus counts as access conscious in Block’s sense, and cannot be relegated to the


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domain of sub-personal, non-conscious bodily and neuronal processes. As Poellner (2003) argues, episodic conscious states as they are directly experienced at the personal level feature content that is non-conceptual, need not be defined over propositional items, and certainly is not language-dependent. Over the course of one’s waking hours, one is not constantly attentive to one’s lived-through emotional experience in the way in which one is attentive to an object. Experience as it is lived through has not yet been brought under conceptual apparatus to be examined and categorized, and thus cannot be identified and re-identified in different contexts. To be sure, when we reflect on our experiences, they then become objects for us, but this modifies the nature of our experience. To see this, note that once a state is conceptualized as depression, a person may come to think of his condition as long-lasting and hopeless and therefore sink even more deeply into that state (Elster, 2000, p. 106). Conceptualization also may give rise to further emotional reactions toward one’s emotional dispositions: for example, one might feel angry at one’s tendency to feel guilty. However, this sort of self-reflective conceptualization is not required for emotion, and typically is not present in the earliest stages of such experience. Indeed, because it is only upon reflection that emotions can be identified and re-identified, lived-through emotional experiences cannot yet be grasped conceptually as objects. For example, as Jeff experiences anger, he is not attending to his anger as such and will not necessarily identify this experience as the same as or similar to feelings he encountered yesterday. It is only when he transforms these experiences into intentional objects by reflecting upon them that he conceptually represents them and becomes able to identify these feelings as similar (Poellner, 2003, p. 53). In other words, lived-through and yet-to-be-examined emotional experience does not involve categorization, but instead consists in an unreflective awareness of affectively framed things or events. In addition, because the content of emotional experience is poised for use in reasoning and action, it counts as access conscious in Block’s sense. Emotions involve experiential content that plays a guiding role in reasoning (Poellner, 2003, p. 48), serves to focus attention, and helps shape the course of the subject’s activities. For example, feelings of anxiety may lead an agent, unreflectively, to avoid certain situations, pride may lead her to walk with a certain energy in her step, and anger may cause her to lash out at another before she has had the chance to reflect on her angry feelings. Thus, it seems clear that the non-objectdirected, pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness associated with unreflective emotional states often guides action. Note that the intentional content of such experience is also essentially nonconceptual in that its semantic structure and psychological function are categorically different in nature from the structure and function of conceptual content. While conceptual content determines our allocentric or thirdpersonal and indirect description of objects, by sharp contrast, essentially


non-conceptual content determines our egocentric or first-personal and direct acquaintance with objects and with ourselves in space and time, and guides our fine-grained patterns of attention and bodily movement. During emotional experience, one usually does not become aware of one’s body as object (though this may be the case in certain pathological cases, such as anorexia or schizophrenia), but instead is acquainted with one’s lived body as that through which one is directed at the world. Such desiderative bodily feelings are phenomenologically available to the subject and shape what she does as well as what she pays attention to, but do not involve the subject being directed to the body as an intentional object or forming beliefs and judgments about the body. Like the ‘how-to-move’ content of primitive bodily awareness, the affective content of immediate emotional experience is non-conceptual, guides attention and action, and is minimally occurrently conscious in a pre-reflective, sensorimotor-subjective sense. 2.3.2

Emotions, intentionality, and perception

It is the sorts of considerations just rehearsed that have led many theorists of emotion to claim that emotional intentionality has more in common with sense perception than it has with belief or thought. Roberts (1984), for example, recommends ‘construal’ as an alternative to judgment and maintains that when a person judges himself to be guilty without experiencing the emotion of guilt, what he lacks is a non-visual analogue of ‘seeing-as’ (p. 399). He judges himself to be guilty but does not construe himself as guilty. A man with obsessive fears about his house burning down, on the other hand, might construe his house as subject to great danger despite the fact that he also judges it to be highly improbable that this will happen. In this connection, one obvious parallelism between sense perceptions and desire-based emotions is that, even when the latter are under our control, they usually are experienced as simply arising and thus bear a resemblance to the sensations associated with external perception. Along these lines, Doring (2003) holds that an emotion’s representational content resembles the content of sense-perception in that (as, e.g., the fact of the persistence of the Müller–Lyer illusion and others even under changing conceptual and propositional information shows) it might not be revisable in light of belief or better knowledge (p. 223). In her view, emotions have a unique formal structure that makes them unlike beliefs, and more similar to perceptual evaluations that also have an inherently felt dimension. She therefore proposes that we understand an emotion’s motivational force in terms of ‘affective perception’ (p. 220). An emotion’s intentional content is representational content that is directed at a particular object or target and resembles the content of sense-perception. While I agree that the intentionality of the emotions has a greater structural resemblance to the intentionality of sense perception than it does to the intentionality of beliefs or thoughts, I also think that it would be a


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mistake to conclude that an emotion is a special subspecies of sense perception. On the contrary, from the standpoint of the desire-based theory of the emotions that I have set forth, the fact that emotions are more similar to perceptions than they are to beliefs or thoughts depends on the deeper fact that emotions are desire-based, and on the further fact that desires are more similar to perceptions in terms of their structure and psychological function. But, because the intentionality of emotions and perceptions is indeed similar in certain respects, it is still possible to exploit relevant analogies between them in order to understand better the intentionality of desirebased emotion. One of these relevant analogies is between the role of sensations or sensing in perception and the role of affect or feeling in desire-based emotion. Just as sensations and sensing in perception pinpoint the objectively real properties of perceived objects in a highly fine-grained way, and explicate their salience, so too affects and feelings in desire-based emotion pinpoint the cognitive objects of those emotions in a highly fine-grained way and explicate their salience. For example, sensations enable me to see the characteristic red of an apple even in dimly lit conditions or with a shadow thrown across it, and also to see the characteristic shape of the apple even when it is partially occluded. Similarly, affects or feelings allow me to tell the difference between a friendly kiss and a lovers’ kiss, or between a genuine compliment and a patronizing remark. They also tell me (correctly or not) whether walking down a particular dark alley is potentially dangerous or perfectly safe. What the various quasi-perceptual accounts of emotion get right is the idea that emotions focus attention, shape interpretation, structure inference-making, and thereby shape our overall understanding of our surroundings. Another thing that such accounts get right is that idea that while emotion does involve an element of appraisal, this element should not be understood in terms of evaluative judgment, since the content of an emotion need not be capturable in terms of a proposition. It is precisely because emotional experience sometimes involves unreflective emotional engagement with the external world that it can be achieved by infants and non-human animals. To repeat, what is crucial is the way in which the intentionality of the emotions is infused with affective phenomenal experience. As Goldie (2000) notes, while it is possible to recognize something as dangerous without feeling fear, there is a special affect-charged way of recognizing something as dangerous that does entail fear (p. 36). This affect-charged mode of recognition is what he calls ‘feeling-toward,’ or thinking of with feeling, which is for him a matter of perceiving or imagining an object in some way. Like Goldie, I believe that affect plays a central role in the constitution of emotional experience and the grounding of its intentionality. Thus, it should be clear that I am sympathetic with the general spirit of such quasi-perceptual accounts. However, I also believe that they are

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mistaken in some important respects. First, given that the mode of recognition involved in emotions need not be in any way articulate or reflective, it is mistaken to associate it with thinking, as Goldie does. Moreover, Goldie mistakenly attempts to distinguish between two kinds of feelings: bodily feelings (which are intentionally related to the body) and ‘feelings towards’ (which are essentially related to an object). He does not acknowledge the sense in which feelings of body are ‘feelings toward’ objects other than the body. As Ratcliffe (2005a) has correctly noted, and as I will discuss at greater length below, feelings of the body and feelings towards objects out in the world ‘are two sides of the same coin’ (p. 48). Second, while I have argued that emotion is more like perception than it is like judgment, belief, or thought, nevertheless emotion is unlike sense perception insofar as the intentional objects or targets of emotion need not be immediately present or actually given. Because desire-based emotions arise not merely in response to causal impacts upon the senses, but also frequently as a result of having memories or imagining scenarios, it is a mistake to construe desire-based emotion as affective perception, as Doring (2003) does. 2.3.3 Affectivity and embodied appraisal Perhaps, then, it is possible to characterize emotional intentionality and affectivity in relation to the living body. Although Solomon admitted in his later work that in The Passions he was too dismissive of feeling, he still believed that cognition or judgment, properly understood, can capture this missing component. So, despite retaining his cognitivism, he made a real effort to avoid over-intellectualizing the emotions and came to hold – correctly, I believe – that the cognitive component of emotion need not be articulate, reflective, or self-conscious (Solomon, 2003). According to the revised version of Solomon’s thesis that ‘emotions are judgments,’ although emotions involve recognition and response, this does not entail that emotional judgments are all doxic or propositional. This is because the element of affect or feeling that is missing from cognitive accounts can be identified with the body. Solomon rightly pointed out that many of our cognitive responses have more to do with the habits and practices of embodied and mobile beings rather than with reflective judgments, and on these grounds maintained that emotions can be understood as intentional states directed towards the condition of one’s body. However, according to Solomon, bodily events are by-products of appraisal, and do not contribute to the elicitation of the emotion. Similarly, Lyons (1980) has argued that evaluations and wants together cause unusual bodily changes associated with the central nervous system and subjective feelings, and that this is sufficient for an emotion (p. 60). Likewise, according to Damasio’s (1994) somatic feeling theory, while the evaluative process is very much a part of the emotion, this process is separate from feeling. The evaluative process comes first, followed by a certain neurobiological


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state on which an emotion supervenes, and then a feeling. Taking a similar approach, Sizer (2006) suggests that an emotion response and an emotional feeling are two distinct events, and that bodily changes involved in emotion can be separated from affectivity and feeling. According to Sizer, changes in the body and brain such as increased heart rate, musculoskeletal changes, and hormonal changes (emotional responses) should be distinguished from the feelings or conscious experiences of emotions, for conscious experience of an emotion sometimes occurs after the bodily processes of emotional response have begun to unfold. In her view, emotions are more like heart attacks and indigestion than itches and tickles. Conscious feelings arise from the brain systems that monitor and represent the body, and these systems are neurologically distinguishable from the systems involved in processing affectively salient stimuli and initiating and coordinating emotion responses (Sizer, 2006, p. 121). And last, but certainly not least, there is the embodied appraisal theory developed by Prinz (2004). While Sizer, Lyons, Damasio, and others maintain that emotional intentionality comes first and is followed by neurobiological processes, Prinz claims that neurobiology comes first, and then emotional intentionality comes along subsequently to monitor these bodily changes. Prinz rightly denies that emotions require conceptualized appraisals or necessarily are constituted by propositional attitudes. In his view, a state is cognitive just in case it involves representations that are controlled by structures in executive systems, and which are activated, maintained, and manipulated by the organism rather than by the environment. Because he believes that emotions are passive and often not under the organism’s control, he concludes that, most of the time, emotions are not cognitive. Thus, in Prinz’s view, emotions are not cognitive appraisals, but rather mental states that detect and register bodily changes, represent objects or events as having some bearing on one’s interests and concerns, and thereby track organism–environment relations. For example, fear registers an array of bodily changes, tracks danger, and represents events as posing a threat to one’s interests and concerns. As Prinz readily points out, danger is a relational property, for ‘something can be dangerous only to some creature or other, and whether or not something is dangerous depends on the creature in question’ (p. 63). Drawing from the work of Paul Lazarus, Prinz describes these relational properties that pertain to well-being as ‘core relational themes,’ and maintains that emotions track these core relational themes by registering changes in the body (p. 68). Insofar as certain bodily changes reliably co-occur with certain organism–environment relations (core relational themes), emotions use our bodies to tell us how we are faring in the world. Such accounts all imply that emotional intentionality generates neurobiological processes that are distinguishable and separable from associated affects or feelings. Sizer’s account, for example, separates bodily changes

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and emotional response from affectivity and feeling. It also sets up for us a choice between viewing emotions as similar to heart attacks and indigestion or to itches and tickles. However, surely, if we are presented with such a choice, our response should be that the emotions are not truly like any of these things! Heart attacks, indigestion, itches, and tickles are all internal, passive processes, and thus do not capture the sense in which emotions are dynamic, enactive, and ways of reaching out into the world. Of course, it is difficult to deny Sizer’s claim that many so-called emotional responses occur immediately and automatically, without the need for conscious intervention or reflective thought. However, why suppose that this necessarily means that the processes of emotional response are non-phenomenal, nonexperiential, and non-intentional? Of course I welcome the proposal that emotions and embodiment are closely linked and that many emotions do in fact involve characteristic bodily changes that help to determine what sort of emotion an individual is feeling (Goldie, 2002, p. 238). However, as Colombetti (2007) has pointed out, the different accounts of the appraisal–body relation outlined above all ask us to suppose that appraisal is an abstract intellectual process, and that the body plays merely an indirect role in allowing a subject to understand the environment. Such accounts would lead one to believe that behavioral and physiological processes have little or nothing to do with the experiential character of appraisal (Colombetti, 2007, p. 534). But, if the account that I am presenting is correct, the bodily changes, affectivity, and feelings that emotions involve cannot be separated from their element of appraisal. After all, as Solomon (1993) notes, feelings grounded in body awareness alone cannot reveal what an emotion is about or even which emotion you are experiencing. The feeling of one’s heart racing, for example, differs experientially depending on what it is about, and whether it is associated with anger, fear, rapturous love, or too much coffee. By identifying emotional feelings with bodily symptoms or manifestations, the theories described above imply that feeling has at best a secondary role in our emotional experience. However, to suppose that affective feeling is simply a matter of our awareness of bodily changes that occur after emotional intentionality has taken place is to adopt a very narrow view of emotional feelings. On my view, by sharp contrast, feeling is part of the body–environment relation, and thus this relation does not need to be perceived in order to induce feelings (Northoff, 2008, p. 74). Rather than being the object of conscious awareness, a particular bodily condition is lived through in the very process of evaluating the meaning of one’s environment (Colombetti, 2007, p. 543). Feelings in the body can be of something outside the body, so that bodily feelings are that through which one is conscious of something else (Ratcliffe, 2005a, p. 44). In other words, the essentially embodied intentionality of the emotions is necessarily infused with feeling. This affective infusion, in turn, plays a definite and ineliminable role in emotional


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intentionality by determining the cognitive focus of emotions. In this way, the affective dimension of emotion is inextricably linked to its intentionality, so that appraisal and bodily processes are constitutively interdependent and bodily feelings play a key role in generating meaning (Colombetti, 2007, p. 543). Once appraisal is understood as distributed over a complex network of brain and bodily processes, and as thoroughly corporeal, emotion then can be characterized as a sense-making faculty of the whole embodied and situated organism (Colombetti, 2011). Thus, since conscious minds like ours are essentially embodied, and since emotions are desire-based, and since the phenomenal character or felt dimension of consciousness is grounded in primitive body awareness, there is no doubt whatsoever that the feelings associated with bodily changes and movements are a necessary part of emotion. Insofar as one is aware of and attuned to one’s surrounding environment through one’s affectively aroused body, there must be a body as well as a body–environment interaction to provide content to the appraising process (Colombetti, 2007, p. 536). The ‘lived body’ and its relationship to the environment serve as the constitutive basis of personal significance and meaning (Northoff, 2008, p. 70). In short, intentionality, feelings of caring, and neurobiology are all intrinsically connected, essential aspects of emotional experience. This is just another way of stating the thesis that emotions are essentially embodied, desire-based phenomena. I believe that my claims that emotions are desire-based, and that desiderative bodily feelings are involved in these processes of appraisal, actually fit quite well with much of Prinz’s (2004) account. Remember that Prinz supposes that emotions register and track patterned physiological responses that convey information about our well-being. A fear representation, for example, becomes active when a sufficient number of the bodily changes that can occur in a dangerous situation are detected (p. 73). But how we are faring in the world, as Prinz readily points out, is not entirely an objective matter, for core relational themes are grounded in our needs and interests. Because our concern for our well-being goes well beyond our instinctive desire to survive, whether organism–environment relations are important and whatever significance they have depends to a large extent on what the creature in question cares about and desires. This is to say that emotions are elicited by things as they relate to us, or, as I would phrase it, only in relation to our desires and feelings of what matters. When Prinz characterizes sadness, for example, as a representation of the loss of something valued, I would describe this as the loss of something one cares about. In my view, whether one experiences bodily changes that provide the basis for sadness when one becomes estranged from a co-worker depends on whether and to what extent one desired and cared about that relationship. Likewise, whether one experiences the bodily changes that provide the basis for fear when one sees a large spider depends on whether


one interprets the spider as something that undermines one’s desires and whether one cares about being as far away from spiders as possible. This is to say that, if I have not interpreted the situation as being in conflict with my desires, my heart will not race and my pulse will not quicken. In other words, desire and caring are at the root of core relational themes, and they must be present if the bodily changes Prinz describes are to occur. Interestingly, I believe my view of emotion as desire-based is supported also by Prinz’s discussion of ‘valence’ or the positive or negative tone of emotion. Valence is essential to emotionality, in Prinz’s view, and he equates it with inner reinforcement that serves as an imperative impacting future behavior. Emotions call for ‘More of this!’ or ‘Less of this!’ so that negative emotions encourage us to withdraw from situations that elicit them and positive emotions encourage us to seek out the situations that elicit them. I believe that this characterization of emotions as valenced, embodied appraisals lends support to my claim that emotions are grounded in felt wants and needs and that they are intrinsically motivating in the sense that they involve desires to move our bodies in one way or another (even if it is simply to express that emotion). Indeed, I find it reasonable to suppose that desire and caring are at the root of valence, and that this is at least part of what allows emotions to play an active role in shaping intentional behavior.

2.4

Affective framing

So how should we understand the processes of appraisal and interpretation that are involved in emotional experience? I have just argued that emotions are not simply registers of changes in the body, and, as the previous discussion will have made clear, while all desire-based emotional intentionality does involve an element of appraisal, this element should not be understood in terms of evaluative judgment or belief. The fact that emotional experience can be attributed to ordinary human infants and at least some non-human animals demonstrates that desire-based emotion sometimes involves non-propositional, non-judicative, non-belief-based, and nonthought-based engagement with the external world. But if emotional intentionality is fundamentally neither judgment, nor belief, nor thinking, nor perception, nor a matter of body monitoring, then what is it? Just what sort of feeling-infused cognition does emotional interpretation involve? What is needed is an account that brings together the bodily nature of emotions with their world-directedness (Ratcliffe, 2008, p. 26). To answer these questions, we must abandon a disembodied conception of cognition and acknowledge that our capacity to understand our surroundings is essentially bodily and affective. Indeed, I believe that what we need is an account of emotional interpretation that helps to make sense of the way in which affect and intentionality are linked in essentially embodied emotional experience and allows for representational content that is both


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non-propositional and non-conceptual. Such an account should also capture how the constitution of meaning and personal significance involved in appraisal depends on the relationship between body and environment (Northoff, 2008, p. 72). What I call affective framing is what mediates this relationship. I believe that the notion of affective framing captures the idea that appraisal is an inherent part of emotion, and that emotions convey meaning and personal significance in-and-through the body. My account builds on Gallagher’s (2005a) claim that things appear in a body-centered spatial gestalt, organized in terms of foreground and background, and influenced by the shape and structure of one’s body. But, in addition to this, the body organizes stimuli within the framework of its own pragmatic concerns. Gallagher maintains that affordances are defined as such on the basis of possibilities projected by the body schema, but also admits that the possibilities afforded by brute physiology typically are numerous and that physiology alone does not fully specify action or attention. The body schema, he says, is selectively attuned to the environment as a result of ongoing interaction between the brain, body, and surrounding world. I would agree, though as I noted in Chapter 1, I do not believe that these selective mechanisms can be described simply as unconscious, sub-personal, sensory–motor functions. Instead, I wish to argue that such selective attunement operates at the level of pre-reflective bodily consciousness and is constituted by desire-based emotions. These bodily feelings are intentional in the sense that they are directed at the world, but they are not directed exclusively at the body or body parts, nor are they merely experiences of bodily states. Like Ratcliffe (2008), I believe that it is through our living, feeling bodies that we experience, think about, and act upon our surroundings (p. 28). The striving and affective character of the lived body is the backdrop for all experience, perception, and action (Colombetti, 2011). What I call ‘affective framing’ is the process whereby we interpret persons, objects, facts, states of affairs, images, ourselves, and so on in terms of embodied desiderative feelings. As I understand it, a frame is a cognitive shortcut that people rely on in order to carve out and highlight features of their surroundings and thereby make sense of the complex world around them. The way in which an agent interprets an object, situation, or event, and also highlights some considerations while overlooking others, carves out the ‘starting points’ for deliberation, thought, and other cognitive processes. I believe that the affectivity involved in our mental lives thus permeates our patterns of understanding and enables us to make sense of the world. Arguably, it is not just in cases of emotional engagement, but also in cognitive processes more generally, that intentionality is affective intentionality. 2.4.1

Framing as non-computational and essentially embodied

It is important to note that although I am borrowing the term framing from the field of cognitive science, I am not using the term in its usual way.


According to the intellectualist tradition of Plato and Descartes, thought can be treated as a kind of computation. Computer programs are algorithms, and, if we are computers, then it must be possible to uncover what sort of program we are running to perform various cognitive tasks. However, if this is the case, it seems that even a relatively straightforward cognitive task like playing a game of chess presents a daunting computational challenge. The chess player must select, from among an astronomically large number of possible moves, the single move that brings her closer to victory (Noë, 2009, p. 104). This requires that the player form an accurate representation of the state of play, calculate the consequences of possible moves, and then select the move with the greatest strategic advantage. Along these lines, researchers in AI whose goal it is to create a computer that can mimic intelligent human behavior face various challenges, one of which is to get the system to notice the features of the environment that are salient given its required task. This difficulty stems from computers having too much potential data to consider and no way to ‘frame’ or make a cut from the stream of information. What is necessary is a mechanism to help agents get a handle on which facts to pay attention to and which to ignore. The mechanism or process whereby human agents limit data and systematically simplify decision-making and other cognitive procedures appears to be grounded in considerations of relevance, salience, and context. With respect to the game of chess, the question becomes how to get the computer to select the move that brings it closer to victory. Although it looks as if researchers have figured out how to accomplish this in the case of chess, they still are working to uncover how these ‘framing’ problems are dealt with in more complex instances of problem-solving, memory, decisionmaking, and other more sophisticated modes of cognition. As Noë rightly points out, however, there is an important sense in which these researchers are approaching their work with mistaken assumptions. Human players of chess actually do not need to select the good moves from among the nearly infinite number of possible moves, and this is because ‘very few moves are even relevant to play at a given moment’ (p. 105). In many cases the board forces our move, and there are really only one or two potential moves even worth considering. Thus, a competent chess player ‘does not face the computational problem of evaluating moves from among the potential infinity of possibilities,’ for the moves worth considering seem already to be carved out in advance (p. 105). Although all this sounds plausible enough, Noë’s observations simply raise the central question: what is it that enables the chess player to see that there are only a few moves worth considering? This is the very achievement that researchers in AI wish to understand and simulate via a computer program. Like Noë, I believe that by approaching framing in computational terms these researchers make a crucial mistake. They overlook that true mastery in a mental sport such as chess gets expressed precisely in the absence of


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the need for a great deal of deliberation or the application of some algorithm, rule, or move-making strategy (Noë, p. 106). Instead, it is almost as if the chess player plays the game largely ‘by heart.’ Along these lines, I wish to suggest that all of our judgment, deliberation, and decision-making take place in a context or setting, part of which is constituted by a background of bodily attunement. At a very basic level, our framing is non-deliberative and involves bodily engagement, bodily fluency, and bodily attunement. Our habits of skillful expertise are bodily habits, so that, even for an extremely intellectual game like chess, there are some moves that simply ‘feel right’ or grab our attention, while other moves never even come into view. To capture this idea, I would like to propose that all cognitive processes presuppose the capacity, at some basic level, for affective framing. In my view, an affective frame operates as a gut-driven shortcut whose interpretive focus is targeted and contoured by a creature’s embodied desires and cares. Most of us have a pre-theoretical, non-intellectual understanding of where to direct our attention in a given context, which is built up through learning and our embodied interactions with our surroundings and linked to our basic desire to maintain biological well-being. Such framing is mediated by the body’s past and current conditions and activity, as well as corresponding bodily feeling. One’s patterns of affective framing constitute one’s basic ‘affective orientation,’ which ‘conditions and circumscribes the kind of cognitive engagement one is able to have with the world’ (Ridley, 1997, p. 174). As a result, the subject perceives and evaluates her world through a corporeity that is always already affectively nuanced (Colombetti, 2007, p. 542). Drawing from the work of Husserl, Thompson (2007) describes affect as the allure of consciousness, the pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego. Allure motivates attention and implies a ‘dynamic gestalt or figure-ground structure’ whereby some objects emerge into affective prominence, while other objects become unnoticeable (p. 374). This sort of allure operates prior to conceptual and propositional information processing, and begins to yield a pre-reflective, fine-grained emotive mapping of that world, so that we can immediately10 target and focus our cognitive attention. As animals with consciousness like ours navigate their way through the world, obviously they do not sequentially process all of the cognitive and practical information that is potentially available to them, but instead almost always home in on certain very specific things rather than others. If intentionality in general and emotional intentionality in particular did not involve an underlying process of affective framing, then agents in the world would be faced with a potentially endless array of possible cognitive and interpretive options, and presumably would merely shut down from information overload. To see further why such a framing mechanism is necessary, consider the following question: given a stream of incoming information,

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on what parts of the stream will the subject focus her attention? Familiar examples of perceptual multi-stability such as the Jastrow duck-rabbit phenomenon show that the mapping from attention to the natural stimulus can be uniformly underdetermined even across our species, including all cognizers who possess the concepts DUCK, RABBIT, and PICTURE. It is because cognizers attend to different aspects of a visual stimulus that they may see either the duck or the rabbit. Likewise, although we tend not to notice it, some degree of attentional focusing likewise takes place in all of our interactions with our surroundings, including both sensory perception as well as more abstract thought processes. My hypothesis is that as individuals navigate through their surroundings, much of this focusing occurs at a pre-reflexive level and involves conative affectivity as one of its central components. This is how subjects are able to become attuned to subtle features of their environment and what is going on with other people. For example, it is because two cognizers focus in on different aspects of another person’s tone of voice, posture, and facial expression in a particular encounter that one person finds the individual friendly, while the other person finds her condescending. Indeed, affective framing seems to be at the very core of first impressions, and is reflected in the notion that sometimes we ‘have a funny feeling’ about people that we cannot fully explain, justify, or even articulate. This is often how we are able to tell the difference between patronizing remarks and genuine compliments, between playful banter and veiled hostility, and between classrooms full of ‘engaged’ students and ones where students seem to have ‘checked out.’ The idea is that something must sufficiently determine, right down to the most fine-grained levels, what we specifically attend to in emotional perception, memory, or imagination. And this is a job that the affective frames of feeling are well qualified to carry out, since they (and, it seems, they alone) are as fine-grained as phenomenal character itself. To be sure, the affective frames of feeling are not required only for fine-grained differences in attentive focusing, but are operative at all levels of grain in attentive focusing, including the most rough-grained levels. Affective framing also explains how, depending on their mood and emotional condition, subjects focus in on different features of their environment and form different interpretations of their situation. This sudden, non-inferential, and pre-reflective way of discriminating, filtering, and selecting information allows us to reduce the overwhelming clutter of information to something first-personally manageable and confer upon it specific cognitive significance and specific purpose. In this way, desire-based feelings play a definite and necessary role in the constitution of emotional experience and its intentionality by determining one’s attentive focus and thereby fixing precisely which features of our surroundings become salient for us.


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For example, if Raymond is feeling anxious and frustrated and has to attend a large and noisy party, he is likely to interpret his surroundings in an overall negative light and may find the whole experience just one big nuisance. If, before I even begin, I am fearful about snowboarding down the mountain, it will appear steeper, icier, and all the more dangerous as I ride up on the chairlift. Such examples illustrate how emotional intentionality is desire-based intentionality whose attentive focus is determined by affective framing. It is by virtue of affective framing that the representational content (or intentionality) of an emotion cannot be separated from that emotion’s phenomenal character. This reflects the fact that in experiencing an emotion, our framing of a situation, person, or object is infused with affect, so that feeling and appraisal are intrinsically linked (Goldie, 2002, p. 242). In my view, affective framing is indeed a mode of cognition, but one that occurs during an essentially embodied, spontaneous experience of the world. Northoff (2008) suggests that recent neuroimaging data actually are more compatible with a view of appraisal as embodied, embedded, and relational than they are with multi-component approaches that construe appraisal as disembodied. Such data indicate involvement of anterior cortical midline structures in both emotional feelings and appraisal, which suggests that that they are not distinct and separate components. There also is evidence of ‘reciprocal modulation and attenuation between medial and lateral prefrontal cortical regions during feeling/appraisal and emotional judgment’ (Northoff, 2008, p. 94). Such empirical data demonstrate that appraisal and feelings involve overlapping and dependent brain regions, which lends support to the notion of affective framing. An affective frame operates, in effect, as an egocentric caring-contoured map that helps the subject to find definite points, lines, and contours of salience in the complex world around her. As a result, her interpretations are shaped to a large extent by her desires, goals, fears, and values, and grounded in her habitual patterns of bodily response. While the prefrontal lobe no doubt plays a crucial role, the provision of affective and motivational color or tone to events and situations is not simply a neural achievement. Such framing is best understood as distributed over a complex network of brain and bodily processes; for affective arousal engages not just neural circuitry but also metabolic systems and endocrine responses, and the impact of this arousal is spread throughout the body in muscles, increased blood flow, heart rate and blood pressure increases, and vascular constriction. Affectivity thus is bound up with physiology and bodily feeling, which in turn directly biases the competition for processing resources in favor of information we feel is important. In Chapter 4, I will discuss affective framing in greater detail and argue that it plays a fundamental role in both decision-making and moral evaluation.


2.4.2 Affective framing, existential orientations, and emotions I have suggested that affective framing, or our way of viewing the world through emotionally contoured filters, allows us to find definite points, lines, and contours of salience in the complex world around us, and thereby helps us to orient ourselves in that world. As I will argue in the chapters to come, this is why desire-based emotions play such a crucial role in the formation of the sense of self, moral agency, and various modes of social cognition. However, it is important to note that the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing often lie in the periphery, as more of a background framework or orientation through which our sense of the world’s meaning is structured (Ratcliffe, 2005a, p. 46). Affective framing thus can be understood as the practical, existential orientation which Ratcliffe maintains structures all experience and conceptualization (Ratcliffe, 2005a, 195). Recall that Ratcliffe uses the term ‘existential orientation’ to describe the more general sense of one’s relationship to the world and characterizes these ways of finding oneself in the world as spaces of possibility that determine the various ways in which things can be experienced. He believes that bodily feelings constitute the basic structure of these background orientations and that all intentional states, including occurrent emotions, presuppose an existential orientation and a background of existential feeling. Whenever you are happy or sad about a particular event, for example, you are already in a world and take for granted certain patterns of significance, practical salience, and value (Ratcliffe, 2008, p. 23). Specific emotions arise only because certain things are deemed significant and worthy of our attention and concern. Like Ratcliffe (2005b), I believe that we do not ever represent the world in some abstract, detached manner, but instead are always ‘teleologically intertwined and inseparable from it,’ attuned to it by way of desiderative, bodily feelings (p. 197). My proposed account helps to advance Ratcliffe’s professed goal of overcoming dichotomous dualisms and bringing together cognition and affect. I have used the term ‘affect’ to highlight the centrality of experienced feeling together with physiological arousal, and the term ‘framing’ to highlight how cognition requires the carving out and selection of some data rather than others. However, I believe that the notion of affective framing more fully captures the way in which bodily feelings, desire, and cognition are linked in our everyday experience; and also how bodily feelings are part of the structure of intentionality (the directedness) of consciousness. Unlike an existential orientation, affective framing does not always lie solely in the background of our experience. It is true that, by virtue of existing desiderative, bodily feelings (affective orientations), we come to experience full-blown, occurrent emotions such as anger, shame, pride, or joy. In other words, affective framing and feelings of caring serve as the backdrop against which object-directed emotions (as well as the rest of our thoughts and experiences) often arise; and in this sense affective


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framing, like Ratcliffe’s existential orientations, can be distinguished from ‘emotions’ that are directed at particular objects. However, these emotions in turn help to constitute new patterns of affective framing, so that by virtue of experiencing certain emotions we assume a particular ‘emotional world view’ and therefore engage with our surroundings in all the particular ways that we do. The desiderative feelings involved in occurrent emotions serve as a bodily ‘sounding board’ that structures our world orientation, so that the experienced world is always a reflection of our needs, capacities, and concerns (Ratcliffe, 2005b, pp. 188–189). One might say that emotion attunes us to the world, shaping how we interpret it, influencing how we act in it, and defining the space of possibilities for the experience of objects (Ratcliffe, 2002). Here desiderative bodily feelings occupy more of the foreground, typically adding content and valence to what lies at the focal point of our experience. In this sense, affective framing is the type of worlddirectedness and intentionality that is paradigmatically involved in occurrent emotions. In instances of standard emotions such as anger, fear, and pride, bodily feeling, desire and experience of the world are inextricable, and are central to what it means to experience that emotion. Occurrent emotions in this way help to give new lines and form to our egocentric caring-contoured map, which in turn influences higher-level processes such as evaluation and judgment. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, our ability to understand other people’s behavior and evaluate what they do is grounded in our capacity for affective framing, and no doubt our patterns of attention and world-directedness are shaped by occurrent emotional experience. In addition, past affective experience can impact the sorts of emotional experiences a subject has later in life. Drummond (2004) describes how recollections of a past association, together with an individual’s interests and attitudes, can shape her sense of what she experiences in the present. When a bee approaches, for example, she does not need to remember that she was once stung by a bee in order for fear to arise in her. Instead, ‘the sight of the bee passively re-collects that previous experience into the present and informs [her] present encounter with the bee’ (p. 121). She then responds in a manner that suits her recollected experience of the past, even though it may not match her beliefs about the present experience. According to Drummond, these sorts of emotional associations are shaped not just by past experience, but also by familial, social, and cultural traditions. I would suggest that all such associations ultimately are grounded in one’s desires and felt needs and constitute each person’s unique patterns of bodily attunement toward the world. In the next chapter, I will explore how these patterns of bodily attunement and the embodied, desiderative feelings of emotional consciousness help to constitute an egocentric, spatiotemporally situated, sensorimotor subjective point of view. This, in turn, paves the way for a sense of self.

3 Sense of Self, Embodiment, and Desire-Based Emotions

3.0

Introduction

Many philosophers approach the issue of personal identity by seeking to address how it is that an individual can remain the same person over time despite various qualitative physical and psychological changes. Often such discussions raise questions about whether there is such a thing as a ‘person’ or ‘self’ that persists through time, and some philosophers have argued that this notion of a ‘self’ is a fiction and that self-consciousness is an illusion.1 Others have held that a self truly does exist and that through self-consciousness we can be assured of the existence of our own self. 2 In the context of such debates, either the ‘self’ is treated as some sort of substantial entity that exists (according to Realists about the self) or else the ‘self’ is treated as a mere myth that does not exist (according to Irrealists about the self). As I hope will become clear, I wish to sidestep this debate, given that it arises only in the context of highly questionable assumptions to the effect that Realism and Irrealism about the self exhaust the relevant logical space of options. While I agree with the Irrealists that the self is not a solid, really existing substance that serves as a stable basis for our fleeting and momentary sensations, feelings, and motivations, this hardly shows that the self is merely a fiction or an illusion. We cannot conclude that the self is a ‘nothing’ simply on the basis that it is not a substantial ‘something.’ Phenomenologically speaking, ‘the sense of self’ is the experience of approaching the world from a particular vantage point or point of view that typically has some degree of coherence and continuity. As Varela et al. point out (1991), our memories, personality, and plans seem to come together in a ‘coherent point of view, a center from which we survey the world, the ground on which we stand’ (p. 59). This chapter elaborates on the phenomenological description provided by these authors, and also discusses the metaphysical underpinnings of the sense of self. My key claim is that not only the sense of self, but also the self itself, are essentially embodied and rooted in our biological nature. 90

Sense of Self, Embodiment, and Desire-Based Emotions

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I will argue that the point of view that constitutes our basic sense of self is a) immanently reflexive, pre-reflective, and non-conceptual; b) an intrinsic structural property of essentially embodied, conscious creatures like us; c) a natural outgrowth of our animate, neurobiological dynamics; and d) rooted in desire-based emotions and feelings of caring. Our most basic way of being acquainted with ourselves is not through reflection, nor is there some ‘pure self’ (Waldenfels, 2004, p. 240) to which we can gain access. Instead, one’s sense of self ultimately is grounded in one’s immanently reflexive and immediate sense of self, which in turn rests on one’s unique continuing essential embodiment and the necessary conative affectivity of sensorimotor subjectivity, which jointly constitute the essentially embodied self itself. Unlike self-consciousness or self-reflection, each of which requires that one possess a self-concept or the ability to form beliefs about oneself, immanent reflexivity (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 68) is non-conceptual and non-propositional. For a state of consciousness to be immanently reflexive is for it to be directly attentive to itself, and to care directly about itself, without any division or opacity between itself and the content of its experience. This first-order, direct self-awareness is intimately connected with the egocentrically centered standpoint that constitutes our embodied occupation of, and orientation in, actual space and time, and spontaneously yields the characteristic spatio-temporal representation I am here now (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, 73). Moreover, this immediate feeling of being present in the here-and-now is inherently conative and affective in nature. A conscious embodied subject, in feeling and caring about things, and in feeling her own presence, inherently also cares about herself and her own mental states, and it is this experience of caring that gives creatures like us a sense of selfcontinuity and personal identity. If this is correct, then to understand the formation of a coherent sense of self we should look to the connections between emotion, desire, agency, and bodily experience.

3.1

Unified consciousness and the sense of self

Some3 philosophers have held that human consciousness is necessarily unified, and further, that this unity serves as the foundation for personal identity and an individual’s unique sense of self. They maintain that the contents of phenomenal consciousness ‘are unified into one coherent whole, containing a unified “me” in the center of one unified perceptual world, full of coherent objects’ (Revonsuo, 1999, p. 174). In characterizing the structure of consciousness, for example, Searle (1992) maintains that the unity of consciousness exists in at least two dimensions: the horizontal and the vertical. Horizontal unity is the organization of conscious experiences through stretches of time, or what some philosophers have described as diachronic unity. When one speaks or thinks a sentence, one has a sense of what one said or thought several moments ago, when one began speaking

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or thinking. Vertical unity, or what might be described as synchronic unity, which Kant termed ‘the transcendental unity of apperception,’ on the other hand, is a matter of being simultaneously aware of all the diverse features of one’s conscious state. As Searle puts it, ‘I have my experience of the rose, the couch, and the toothache all as experiences that are part of one and the same conscious event’ (1992, p. 130).4 Likewise, Bayne and Chalmers (2003) describe the conscious field as a subject’s total, all-encompassing state of consciousness, which subsumes all of the subject’s perceptual experience, bodily experience, and emotional experience. In their view, this is what serves as the ‘singularity behind the multiplicity’ in our experiential lives (p. 4). Similarly, according to Dainton (2004), it is obvious from a phenomenological perspective that ‘all our experiences of all types, typically occur together, in unified experiential ensembles’ (p. 368). There is something it is like to experience a bodily sensation and an auditory experience together, and this experienced togetherness constitutes co-consciousness. Such theorists also imply or assume that this so-called unity of phenomenal consciousness serves as the necessary basis for a sense of self. Searle, for example, asserts that without the presence of horizontal and vertical unity, we could not bind the elements of consciousness into a unified column or make normal sense of our experiences (1992, p. 130). Thus, two of the central characteristics of non-pathological forms of consciousness are that the subject’s conscious states come to her as part of a unified temporal sequence, as well as part of a ‘unified conscious field.’ Insofar as this unified field ‘only exists as experienced by some “I”, some human or animal that has the experiences,’ it is the mark of ‘normal’ subjectivity and sense of self (Searle, 2000, p. 4). Likewise, Bayne (2004) maintains that one’s distinct phenomenal experiences seem to be ‘subsumed by a single, maximal experience, which might be understood as an experiential perspective on the world or a unique point of view’ (p. 219). And Dainton (2004) argues that an account of our existence and persistence conditions is rooted in the phenomenal unity and continuity found in our stream of consciousness, and that such unity is both synchronically and diachronically sufficient to provide a solid foundation for an account of the self (p. 367). Strawson (1997) similarly grounds the self’s unity in its phenomenal character and argues that any explicitly self-conscious experience has to present itself from one single mental point of view. However, while the theorists just discussed emphasize the continuation of this point of view through time, Strawson argues that phenomenal unity is short-lived and fleeting. What he describes as synchronic unity is an experientially unitary or unbroken hiatus-free period of thought or experience, which he maintains are brief in human life (p. 413). According to the Pearl View that he sets forth, many mental selves exist over the course of a particular human life, one at a time and one after another, like pearls on a string. A mental self exists at any particular moment or uninterrupted period of consciousness, but exists


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only for a short period of time (p. 425). Thus, Strawson’s account of the self focuses only on its vertical or synchronic unity and denies its horizontal or diachronic unity. He maintains that because the basic form of human consciousness is gappy and episodic rather than enduring, one need not experience oneself as having long-term diachronic continuity. In his view, ‘one can have a vivid sense of oneself as a mental self’ and yet have ‘little or no interest in or commitment to the idea that the I who is now thinking has any past or future’ (p. 419). No doubt there are some key differences between these accounts. For example, while Strawson emphasizes the gappiness of consciousness, Dainton maintains that our streams of consciousness are fully connected and that there are indeed diachronic phenomenal connections within and between specious presents. A specious present has temporal depth and includes earlier and later parts; and, because the transition between these parts is directly experienced, and so phenomenally connected, the parts are diachronically co-conscious (Dainton, 2004, p. 374). Thus, according to Dainton, in addition to experiencing continuously, continuity is something we experience all the time. Throughout our waking and dreaming hours, we directly experience change or persistence (Dainton, 2004, p. 373) These differences aside, what the accounts of Strawson and the others have in common is that they describe the unity of consciousness in terms of what they take to be the subject’s egocentric or subjective point of view or stream of consciousness, and her ability to bring all of the contents of conscious experience into a single phenomenal field. According to Searle, such unity is grounded in a sense of experiential continuity across time and in our capacities for memory, while Dainton describes unity in terms of linked ‘experience producers’ and the co-consciousness of experiences. Strawson, on the other hand, holds that, because phenomenal consciousness is in perpetual flux and there is radical disjunction, a subject’s sense of self-unity is shortlived and fleeting. In support of his denial of diachronic unity, Strawson points out that human thought has very little natural phenomenological continuity or experiential flow and is constantly put off track by detours (p. 421).5 In short, Searle and Dainton maintain that the demands of diachronic unity are satisfied, while Strawson denies this. What is interesting is that, upon closer examination, it appears that the disjunction Strawson describes sometimes exists not just at the level of diachronic unity of the ‘conscious field’ but also at the level of synchronic unity. To see this, consider an instance of divided attention in which Sally is reading the newspaper and simultaneously listening to the radio, and so is aware of different objects as the contents of more than one representation. In a sense, what we have here are two phenomenal points of view, without full integration of her experience of what it’s like to read the newspaper with her experience of what it’s like to listen to the radio. There seems to be no ‘single phenomenal perspective’ (Bayne, 2004, p. 221) in


the sense of some overall phenomenal state that subsumes these individual experiences and unifies them. At this moment her phenomenal consciousness is somewhat split, lacking in full experiential unity. Here we have a case in which a subject appears not to bring all of her current contents of consciousness into a single phenomenal field, and it is unclear whether there is any experienced togetherness or a ‘unified experiential ensemble’ of the sort many theorists describe (Dainton, 2004, p. 368). No doubt Sally is conscious of both reading the newspaper and listening to the radio, but it is unclear that she experiences the two together rather than separately or that these experiences are phenomenologically integrated. On the other hand, it seems altogether clear that she retains a point of view as well as a fully coherent sense of self. The case of the split-brain patient perhaps serves as even stronger evidence for the claim that a breakdown or disruption in the unity of the phenomenal field need not entail a breakdown in one’s sense of self. This individual’s corpus callosum has been severed for medical purposes, which prevents the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex from communicating directly with each other. While such a patient typically behaves quite normally, performance breaks down when input to the two hemispheres has been artificially segregated (Nagel, 1971, p. 401). For example, when presented with a cat on the left half of her visual field and a dog on the right half, the patient will report seeing only a dog. This is because the left hemisphere, which dominates speech, receives input only from the right visual field (Bayne and Chalmers, 2003, p. 13). Likewise, a smell from a clove of garlic fed to the right nostril will elicit a verbal denial that the subject smells anything, even though the subject will be able to point at the clove of garlic with her left hand if asked. All the while, the patient will protest that she smells absolutely nothing, and so cannot possibly point at what she smells (Nagel, 1971, p. 400). Is this an instance of a breakdown in phenomenal unity? According to those committed to the notion of a unified phenomenal field, two conscious states are phenomenally unified when they are jointly experienced, and when there is ‘something unified it is like to be in both states at once’ (Bayne and Chalmers, 2003, p. 6). For the split-brain patient, however, it is doubtful whether there is a ‘single something-it-is-like that captures’ what it is like to see the cat while seeing the dog. But even in the event that there is no ‘total phenomenal state’ or no single, unified phenomenal field that includes both of these intentional contents, there is little reason to think that the split-brain patient lacks a coherent sense of self. This indicates that the sense of self is rooted not in the phenomenal unity of one’s various states of transitive consciousness, or ‘consciousness-of,’ but rather in what some theorists have called ‘intransitive state self-consciousness.’ Having a conscious thought about a new car, smelling an odor, and seeing a bright color are all examples of transitive state consciousness, or consciousness-of objects. Both instances of divided attention, as well as the


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experiential lives of split-brain patients, indicate that one can have various states of transitive consciousness without bringing the contents of these states together into one phenomenal field and experiencing their togetherness. Thus, phenomena such as divided attention and dissociated information processing6 are cases in which a subject feels herself to have a fully coherent individual life, yet does not or even cannot bring all of her current contents of transitive state consciousness into a single phenomenal field. So what accounts for a subject’s sense of self-coherence and continuity even in these cases? According to Kriegel (2004), all of consciousness, including transitive state consciousness, is dependent on intransitive self-consciousness, which he describes as ‘peripheral self-awareness’ (p. 190). When one has a mental state self-consciously, there is a subtle, peripheral awareness of oneself implicit in that state insofar as ‘one is aware of oneself precisely as the state’s owner, or subject’ (p. 189). However, one’s attention is focused not on one’s internal state, but instead on the object in the world that one is thinking about or perceiving. It is not as if one introspects or reflects or attends to one’s thoughts and perceptions as one would attend to an object, for intransitive self-consciousness is not consciousness of an object. Instead, there is a background, peripheral, non-reflective awareness of self involved in all of our conscious states. I agree with Kriegel that there is some background sense of self that persists, however disjointed the intentional contents of an individual’s experience are. In my view, this is because, even when a subject is incapable of bringing all of her contents of transitive state consciousness into a single phenomenal field, she still is able of interacting with her surroundings from a unique point of view that is a source of desiring and caring. Even though the contents of her phenomenal experiences are not fully integrated, she is still able to approach the world from a single egocentric perspective and has a sense that these different experiences are hers. I will argue shortly that what accounts for a subject’s coherent sense of self is essentially an immanently reflexive, essentially embodied point of view that is rooted in desire-based emotions and formed through engagement with her environment. Such an account builds on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the lived body shows up as ‘mine’ as the background condition for activity, and as a vehicle through which I am actively, dynamically involved with my surroundings.

3.2

Immanent reflexivity

The first thing to say about this background sense of self is that it is immanently reflexive and that it involves a mode of self-awareness that is more basic than the sort required for reflection, thought, or attention. In this way my account differs significantly both from that of Strawson (1997), who focuses on the conceptual structure of the subject’s successive senses

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of self, or the ‘sense of selves,’ as well as from higher-order theories of self-awareness, which understand it as some kind of reflection, introspection, higher-order monitoring, or the formation of a self-concept. What these different theories have in common is that they posit two distinct levels of mental activity, one of which monitors the other in some way (Janzen, 2006, p. 47). These accounts typically understand self-awareness as the ability to think ‘I’ thoughts or to conceptualize oneself as the subject, bearer, or owner of different experiences. In many instances, such accounts imply that one is self-conscious only if one can conceive of oneself as oneself and has the linguistic ability to use the first-person pronoun to refer to oneself. One upshot is that infants and non-human animals then necessarily lack a sense of self, which seems clearly false. Another problem with these higher-order theories is that they treat the self as an object and overlook the fact that ‘when one is directly and non-inferentially conscious of one’s own occurrent thoughts, perceptions, or pains, [these experiences] are characterized by a first-person givenness that immediately reveals them as one’s own’ (Zahavi, 2005, p. 26). Note that this sort of first-personal self-reference is fundamentally different from third-person description, for I could be ignorant of all those properties that would identify me from a third-person perspective and yet still remain in possession of first-personal awareness: I could remain aware that an ongoing experience is mine. This is because we are acquainted with our own subjectivity in a fundamentally different mode from the way in which we are acquainted with objects (Zahavi, 2005, p. 27). However, this first-person givenness of conscious life is left unexplained by accounts that emphasize higher-order reflection and the formation of a self- concept. Finally, if we consider our everyday phenomenology, it seems clear that normally we do not experience higher-order mental states whereby we think about or perceive our conscious states. For example, when I think ‘a squirrel is over there,’ typically this is not accompanied by the thought that ‘I am seeing something’ (Ho, 2007, p. 220). Of course there is little doubt that we are capable of thinking such thoughts and that we do indeed carry out this sort of reflection in moments of careful self-analysis or deliberate introspection. However, there is also little doubt that prior to encountering our mental states in a spectatorial, reflective, or detached way, we already find ourselves in a world (Ratcliffe, 2008). The bulk of our conscious experience involves not higher-order reflection, but rather an implicit self-awareness that is an intrinsic component of that experience. As Matthew Ratcliffe (2005a) points out, any particular experience ‘has, as a background, a more general sense of one’s relationship to the world’ that is constituted by tacit bodily feelings through which we are conscious of specific aspects of our surroundings (p. 45). This implicit, unthematic mode of self-awareness lies at the core of ‘lived through’ experience and cannot be construed along subject–object lines.


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For these reasons, I believe that the way that we conceive of ourselves fails to capture our most basic source of a sense of self. In fact, this is a sense of self only in a derivative sense, and is grounded in a more primary and fundamental sort of self-awareness that I will describe as ‘immanent reflexivity.’ It is to this more basic mode of self-awareness that we should look to find the source of our sense of self-coherence and self-continuity. For a state of consciousness like ours to be immanently reflexive is ‘for it to include an immediate sense of self, or for it to be directly aware of itself in a wholly first-order sense – that is, to be folded back upon itself, to be directly attentive to itself, and care directly about itself, without any division or opacity between itself and the content of its own experience’ (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 81). Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty describe this sort of pre-reflective consciousness as self-luminous, and as simultaneously both aware of its objects as well as self-aware in and through itself. This sort of direct, first-order consciousness has no hidden or concealed parts and ‘is characterized by its fundamental self-givenness or selfmanifestation’ (Zahavi, 2005, p. 34). The basic idea is that ‘in immanent reflexivity the content of consciousness entirely fills up my consciousness, leaving as a remainder only the primitive solipsistic fact of my owning, here and now, the whole world of which I am conscious’ (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 81). Thus, self-consciousness in its basic form does not involve an additional mental state, but rather should be understood as ‘an intrinsic feature of the primary experience’ (Zahavi, 2005, p. 20). Zahavi (2005) maintains that in this pre-reflective mode of self-awareness one simply lives through one’s experiences and there is ‘an immediate and noncognitive relation of the self to itself’ (p. 21); Ho (2007) rightly depicts such self-awareness as a ‘veridical nonconceptual awareness whose “object” is too interwoven with the awareness to be directly and properly expressible’ (p. 221); and Stanghellini and Ballerini (2004) describe ipseity as a pre-reflexive, pre-thematic, precognitive sense of self that is based on affectivity and cannot be understood apart from corporeality and proprioception – our basic sense of the position and orientation of the parts of our own living bodies. Building on the work of these authors, I wish to suggest that all of our conscious thoughts and sensations involve an immanently reflexive, implicit sense of self. As I argued in Chapter 1, the Deep Consciousness Thesis says that all mental states are conscious, and thus that there are no unconscious acts of thought or perception. This is because all mental states and processes presuppose sensorimotor subjectivity, and it is this primitive mode of bodily awareness that provides the foundation for a sense of self and the capacity to have a single point of view. In short, our most basic sense of self is a bodily sense of self. Mark Johnson (1990) describes how one central feature of our bodily life is our experience of containment and boundedness (p. 21). From the beginning of our lives, we move in and out of a variety of bounded spaces,


including cribs, rooms, and vehicles. We manipulate objects and place them in containers, and also experience our own bodies as containers into which we put food. We also experience physical containment in our environment insofar as things envelop us and boundaries separate us from that which lies beyond us. Our essential embodiment gives a very definite character to our perceptual experience and establishes a center and a periphery, so that one’s world either radiates out centrifugally from one’s body or else flows in centripetally toward one’s body. As one interacts with the world from this perceptual and experiential egocentric standpoint, one develops an implicit awareness of the distinction between self and other (Johnson, 1990, p. 124). As Sheets-Johnstone (1999) notes, the first realizations we have of ourselves as infants are realizations about bodies – the body that we are and the bodies we are not (p. 63). In addition, objects are both perceptually situated as well as positioned as potentially manipulable by virtue of their positioning and orientation in relation to our bodies. The pragmatic and egocentric spatial framework involved in sensorimotor subjectivity is a body-centered and perspectival spatial framework that involves experiential reference to one’s body. Such ecological self-awareness ‘manifests itself as an integrated or global sense of where [one is] spatially in relation to the immediate environment’ and what one is capable of doing (Gallagher and Marcel, 1999, p. 21). In this way, primitive bodily awareness shapes our earliest understanding of the world in perception and action, as well as our sense of self, so that sensorimotor subjectivity ultimately paves the way for more sophisticated forms of cognition, including self-consciousness and self-reflection. Unlike accounts that focus on higher-order thought and self-conceptualization, my account’s emphasis on immanent reflexivity and essential embodiment accommodates the fact that, among creatures like us, the most basic sense of self involves content that is non-conceptual and non-propositional. As Bermúdez (2000) points out, there is good reason to think that some first-person contents are non-conceptual and do not require mastery of the concept ‘I’ or the semantics of the first-person pronoun (p. 44). He argues that non-conceptual first-person contents are involved in somatic proprioception and certain navigational abilities. Similarly, Thompson (2007) maintains that during ‘absorbed skillful coping’ we experience our activity as a steady flow, even though there is no thematic or explicit awareness of our body movements (p. 315). Along similar lines, I hold that non-conceptual content involves egocentrically centered representations of intrinsic relational topological and temporal properties of things, and that its special function is to guide fine-grained sensorimotor control of the body. Indeed, as I suggested in Chapter 1, the whole process of learning to play a musical instrument, dance, or ride a bike seems to demonstrate that the movements and positioning of various part of one’s body are not self-consciously represented by means of concepts or propositions. These activities involve a basic mode of self-acquaintance that is non-propositional and lacks the sort


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of conceptual structure upon which many theorists have focused in their discussions of our sense of self. One might object, at this point, that the kind of ubiquitous, immanently reflexive, essentially embodied self-awareness that I have described simply need not accompany all of our conscious states. According to Rosenthal (1997), for example, transitive consciousness can occur without intransitive consciousness. He describes the ‘cocktail-party effect,’ a case in which one screens out the sounds of conversations other than one’s own. If one’s name is mentioned, however, one’s attention immediately shifts to that conversation, which indicates that one must have had an auditory consciousness of what was being said. So far this description seems accurate, but Rosenthal then goes on to claim that what this shows is that a subject can be conscious of ‘x’ without the state in virtue of which the subject is conscious of x itself being conscious. In his view, one is transitively conscious of ‘x’ if one is in a mental state whose content pertains to ‘x,’ for example a thought about ‘x’ or a sensation of ‘x.’ However, this thought or sensation need not itself be conscious. Applied to the case at hand, the claim seems to be that one can have auditory consciousness of ‘x’ without being conscious of hearing ‘x.’ But, if the subject were not conscious of hearing ‘x,’ how could she be conscious of what was said? Here Rosenthal seems to overlook the ‘ordinary and usually unreflective awareness of our own experiences’ (Poellner, 2003, p. 46) and the way in which we typically experience our mental states implicitly and unthematically, without them becoming objects of awareness. It seems clear that the mental states (e.g., hearing the melody) in virtue of which we are conscious of objects or events in the world (e.g., the melody) are themselves conscious, though typically not in a reflective way. As discussed in Chapter 1, the basic bodily awareness involved in sensorimotor subjectivity usually does not require reflection, attention, or central focusing, but instead is pre-reflective and peripheral. The discussion up until now already has begun to reveal that to be aware of oneself as a so-called ‘mental presence’ is always already to be aware of one’s body in some way. For this reason, Strawson’s description of the body as a mere vehicle or vessel for the mental thing that one truly is, as well as the corresponding implication that one’s sense of self is fundamentally unattached to anything bodily, is deeply mistaken. Such a view reflects classical Cartesian assumptions to the effect that the essence of the self is to think, that the self is only contingently linked to the body, and that the self and the body are fundamentally different in the sense that the body is spatially extended while the self is not. I, on the other hand, have maintained that one’s sense of self is not grounded in some purely disembodied point of view, but instead in an essentially embodied point of view that is situated in a spatially and temporally extended world. As Gallagher (2005a) rightly points out, self-awareness begins as an embodied proprioceptive sense of self rather than as cognitive or psychological understanding, and some


primitive and primary sense of embodied self is operative even in infancy (pp. 78–79). At every moment of waking conscious life, it seems that one is immediately and non-conceptually aware, with lesser or greater accuracy, of the shape, position, boundaries, and extent of one’s body.7 It is the body that provides the basis for one’s egocentric, spatial frame of reference, so that an experiential awareness of one’s body is built right into the structures of perception and action. If EE is correct, then the sense of a unique continuing essential embodiment, constituted by the immediate feeling of one’s own bodily presence, is at the core of our sense of self. But can our sense of self at times become separated from its bodily basis, such as in cases of sickness, injury, or paralysis? In such cases, we may experience ourselves as seemingly different from our disobedient bodies insofar as we do not fully identify with them (Meijsing, 2000, p. 48). If the condition of one’s body does not match up with one’s wants and desires, in particular one’s basic biological desires to be healthy and flourish, one may feel frustrated by one’s own body, disappointed in it, or even alienated from it. However, it is important to note that even these feelings of frustration and estrangement are fully neurobiologically embodied, and that in sickness one experiences one’s self as engaged in a fully embodied battle with an infection or disease. Of course, it is true that when one’s bodily experiences, sensory perceptions, thinking processes, and emotional comportment are altered as a result of sickness this does sharply modify one’s sense of self, qualitatively speaking. Likewise, in injury or in instances of partial paralysis, one experiences oneself as unable to do certain activities and as being plagued by various sorts of pain or discomfort. In cases of paralysis or extreme injury, such as loss of a limb, this may result in extreme disruptions of one’s habitual bodily dynamics that lead to particularly pronounced qualitative changes to one’s sense of self. Because there is no purely mental ‘core self’ of the sort that Strawson describes and which exists somehow apart from its corporeal basis, there is no ‘true self’ that remains unchanged through time regardless of what happens to one’s body. Note that this does not mean that if someone loses a limb, or suddenly becomes paralyzed, she thereby becomes a different person. In non-pathological cases, one still retains a sense of being one and the same self through time. This is because, as I will discuss further below, beneath these qualitative changes, there is a more enduring sense of self that is rooted in our overall neurobiological dynamics and our essentially embodied, egocentric point of view. In my view, the sorts of disruptions and distortions of body schemas or body images mentioned above do little to disprove that the sense of a unique continuing embodiment grounds one’s sense of being one and the same self through time. In Chapter 6, I will discuss how schizophrenia involves severe impairment and fragmentation of the sense of self, though even in these pathological cases the sense of self does not disappear altogether. In my view, only the total loss of bodily awareness and of every


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sense of a unique continuing essential embodiment would seem to entail the complete extinguishing of a sense of self.

3.3 A necessarily and completely neurobiologically embodied, egocentric point of view As noted in the previous section, this essentially embodied, primitive mode of self-consciousness that I have termed ‘immanent reflexivity’ is intransitive in the sense that it is not directed to the self as an object. But does this mean that the sense of self is an intrinsic, non-relational property of our experience, or a mere quale or raw feel? In contrasting transitive and intransitive consciousness, Kriegel (2004) describes the former as a relational property, and the latter as an intrinsic, non-relational property. In my view, however, immanent reflexivity is not only intransitive, nonreflective, and intrinsic, but also relational and reflexive. This awareness of the self is not in any way a detached, spectatorial affair, nor is it an awareness that resembles our awareness of objects. Instead, I believe that immanent reflexivity is an intrinsic structural property among conscious creatures like us. In Embodied Minds in Action (2009), Robert Hanna and I say that a property P is an internal property of something X if and only if the instantiation of P in X constitutes a proper part of X;8 and that P is an intrinsic property of something X if and only if P is a necessary, internal property of X (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 23). So, while having a finger is an internal property of a human hand, it is not an intrinsic property, given that it is possible to have human hands that lack fingers. One example of an intrinsic property of a human being (as opposed to a human corpse) is the property of ‘being alive.’ Hanna and I also note that an intrinsic property can be either a nonrelational or a relational property of something. Thus, unlike most contemporary analytic metaphysicians,9 we allow for the existence of intrinsic relational properties of things. This is because we believe that it is a mistake to suppose that relational properties must all be extrinsic or accidental, external properties, and can never be necessary, internal properties. In our view, there is arguably a perfectly real and widespread class of necessary, internal, relational properties.10 For example, the properties of globally orientable spaces – that is, comprehensive spaces intrinsically containing directions such as up, down, right, left, behind, in front – are necessary, internal, relational properties of the real material things that are embedded in those spaces, for example human body parts such as hands. And the same goes for real material things that are embedded in globally asymmetric or dynamically irreversible time-relations – that is, time-relations that imply time’s arrow – like past, future, before, and after (for example, living organisms such as human beings). When intrinsic relational properties are specifically based on globally orientable or dynamically irreversible

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space–time structures, we call them intrinsic structural properties (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 24). Granting all this as backdrop, why not think that immanent reflexivity, just like being alive, is an intrinsic structural property of conscious creatures like us? What I will argue is that the fact of immanent reflexivity is bound up with our neurobiological embodiment, and that this primitive sense of self is rooted in the globally orientable and dynamically irreversible space– time structures of the human body. As I maintained in Chapter 1, ‘sensorimotor subjectivity,’ which is the primitive mode of bodily experience that grounds one’s sense of self, necessarily involves an egocentric, spatial, and temporal structure. This is to say that one’s sense of self is intimately connected with the egocentrically centered standpoint that constitutes our embodied spatio-temporal orientation. It is important to note that although I have rejected the claim that it is some unified phenomenal field or some purely mental point of view that grounds the sense of self, I do not wish to deny that a sense of self necessarily involves both phenomenal experience and a point of view. After all, in order for a creature to form a sense of self, there must be some organization that is sensed as a reference point for all of its experiences, even when these experiences cannot be brought into a single phenomenal field. In my view, one’s sense of self necessarily is egocentrically centered in the sense that it has an ‘inner’ source point, as opposed to an ‘outer’ derivation or dispersal, so that the creature in question is able to relate everything that is experienced to this inner source point (Hanna and Maiese, 2009, p. 80). Roughly speaking, the I is the ‘subjective subject’ side of the self and the me is the ‘subjective object’ side of the self. As a subjective subject, one experiences oneself as the author and source of one’s bodily movements; and as a subjective object one experiences oneself as impacted by objects in the external world (even though, as stated earlier, one typically is not aware of one’s body in the same way that one is aware of other objects). In these ways, a subject’s sense of self is grounded in bodily awareness and her immediate sense that this body is hers, which are crucial parts of the direct, first-order, egocentrically structured awareness involved in immanent reflexivity. Bodily consciousness is linked to the sense that one is animated from within by both sensation as well as motility. When we touch objects, we not only feel the things we touch, but also feel ourselves touching them and being touched by them. Such bodily experience reveals the lived body’s unique status as a subject–object vantage point, a ‘perceiving thing’ that is also a source of agency (Thompson, 2007, p. 250). As discussed in Chapter 1, this awareness of one’s body as belonging to oneself and being distinct from the rest of the world is rooted in an organism’s autopoietic organization and capacity for self-regeneration. As a result, ‘even the simplest organism is already a kind of “selfless self,” in that it, in maintaining its own


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organization, distinguishes itself from what it is not’ (Meijsing, 2000, p. 47). It is interesting to contrast my proposed account with that of Strawson (1999), who understands this inner source point as a purely disembodied mental presence, and maintains that ‘the constantly impinging phenomena of one’s mental life are far more salient in the constitution of one’s sense that there is such a thing as the self than are the phenomena of bodily experience’ (p. 489). In his view, even when we are preoccupied with our bodies or things in the external world, mental activity is always and necessarily present. These remarks imply that the phenomena of one’s mental life are separable from the phenomena of bodily experience and that the central question is whether it is the mental or the bodily that grounds the sense of self. However, if the mind and the body are intricately intertwined and we take seriously the essential embodiment thesis, then of course it is true that mental goings on are always present even when we are preoccupied with our bodies. According to EE, the I and me that constitute my egocentric point of view are centered around my body, for all mental activity is essentially embodied. Insofar as the subject’s egocentric vantage point is spatially extended and located wherever her body is located, the sense of self also is rooted in the necessary spatial structure of sensorimotor subjectivity. Bodily sensations are spatial in the sense that they are felt in a particular location in an egocentrically centered objective space that is first and foremost part of one’s body (Meijsing, 2000, p. 38). Drawing upon J.J. Gibson’s picture of the ‘ecological self,’ various theorists have maintained that, through somatic proprioception, the perceiver gains fine-grained, detailed information about her position, movement, limb disposition, and other bodily properties. Such ecological self-awareness ‘manifests itself as an integrated or global sense of where [she is] spatially in relation to the immediate environment’ and what she is capable of doing. (Gallagher and Marcel, 1999, p. 21). According to Bermúdez (1997, 2000), this is a primitive, pre-reflective form of self-awareness that has non-conceptual first-person content, is available from birth, and provides immediate access to the embodied self. Proprioceptive awareness keeps track of the body as the center and focal point of body-relative egocentric space and is what makes orientation and action possible (2000, p. 145). In his view, a crucial part of what grounds first-person thought and linguistic capacities for self-reference is the ‘continuity of a single [bodily] path through space-time’ (1997, p. 465). This is because the overall coherence of psychological space can be characterized at least in part in terms of some sort of internal coherence of the content of perceptually based states. Such coherence is grounded in ‘the spatiotemporal continuity of the body which is [the perceptual states’] point of origin’ (Bermúdez, 1997, p. 464). As Johnson (1990) points out, one’s world both radiates out from one’s body and also flows back in towards it, which gives rise to a self–other distinction,

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a subject–object orientation, and the sense that what is central to one’s conscious being is one’s subjectivity or ‘inmost dimension’ (pp. 124–125). Moreover, in having subjective experiences, a conscious creature also immediately feels its own spatial presence. For example, my experience necessarily occurs here, wherever that might happen to be, and even if I do not know or am confused about where I am. Even if I falsely think that I am running frantically to catch a plane to Chicago, when actually I am asleep in my bed in Boston, I am experiencing myself as uniquely located, or placed. To the extent that I am aware of myself as here, I feel the difference between my right side and my left side, between the upper and lower bounds of my body, and between my front and my back. And, furthermore, I always place myself, as relatively balanced or poised, in some orientation or another, even if I am disoriented or experience a loss of balance. For me to feel lost or dizzy is not for me to be aware of myself non-orientably, or without any sense of balance whatsoever, but rather for me to have a disrupted sense of my own spatiality. In addition, the sense of self is also linked to the temporal structure of experience, and the fact that there is a usual sense of anticipation and familiarity that accompanies our conscious lives. The Husserlian ‘retentional– protentional’ structure of sensorimotor subjectivity helps to generate a sense of self and personal identity, and of being the perspectival origin of one’s experience. By virtue of having an essentially embodied consciousness, it seems that I necessarily experience myself as occurring now, even if I happen to be confused or mistaken about what the time or date actually is, and that I orient and place myself in time in relation to earlier time and later time, and to past, present, and future time.11 Thompson (2007), drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporal consciousness, discusses how the present moment as a structure of awareness does not change or vary, despite the fact that the contents of the present moment arise and perish (p. 325). We live through a number of different experiences, but our self-awareness remains an unchanging dimension of this experiential flow, consisting in the basic awareness that ‘I am here now.’ We experience absorbed activity ‘as an immediate coupling or dynamic attunement to our environment,’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 326) so that our conscious lives are always already situated in the present moment, even in the odd event that we have difficulty remembering what happened before and cannot anticipate the future. A creature that was completely atemporally conscious, on the other hand, would lack even a present-tense sense of self. Closely connected to the temporality of the sense of self are its spontaneity and motility, which reflect one’s immediate sense of time’s asymmetric continuous forward flow. First, the essentially embodied sense of self is intrinsically spontaneous, so that one has an immediate sense that each new moment is unprecedented, underdetermined by what preceded it, creative, and self-guided (Hanna and Thompson, 2005). This is true even when


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the experiential contents of the newly arriving moments are not terribly exciting. Second, the sense of self is intrinsically motile, so that one has an immediate sense of moving and changing, and of being able to move or to change on one’s own, or to be moved or changed by something else. One has a sense of what one has just been doing, what one can do, and what one is prepared to do, which is a manifestation of the self’s temporal extension (Gallagher and Marcel, 1999, p. 23). Or, more generally, an essentially embodied sense of self is a sense of oneself as inherently dynamic and directly engaged with one’s world, and involves the vivid sense of things happening both inside and outside of you. What is more, for there to be a just-past phase and a yet-to-come phase of experience, the creature must care about what just transpired and care about what is yet to come. In other words, the temporal structure of experience, which I have suggested helps to give rise to the sense of self, is bound up with affective tonality. It seems that the retentional–protentional structure of sensorimotor subjectivity, whereby there is preservation of past experience and anticipation of what is to come, has its source in felt needs and desire-based emotions. This begins to reveal the way in which the sense of self is bound up with affectivity, felt need, and desire-based emotion, all to be discussed further below. If these insights are correct, then it is reasonable to suppose that one’s inner source-point is an essentially embodied mental presence or point of view. Insofar as one necessarily experiences oneself as engaging with the world from a particular location here and now, the egocentric point of view is essentially a spatial and temporal point of view. But why suppose that these are necessary, intrinsic structures, and not merely accidental, extrinsic structures of consciousness? In my view, it is as a direct result of our autopoietic organization and neurobiological dynamics that the conscious lives of creatures like us are structured by an egocentric vantage point that is oriented in space and situated in time. In Chapter 1, I discussed the way in which autopoiesis entails the production and maintenance of a dynamic identity (a bodily self) in the face of material change in the environment. In an effort to go on living, the living system establishes a pole of internal identity in relation to a pole of an outside world and thereby differentiates itself from its surroundings. Egocentricity can be understood as an outgrowth of the autopoietic organization (including the regenerative and self-regulative processes) of autonomous living systems like us. As Sheets-Johnstone (1998) claims, bodily sensitivity and a creature’s consciousness of its own potential for movement play a crucial role in helping it to adapt to its environment (p. 288). Given its bodily structure, sense organs, and current situation, a creature has certain corporeal possibilities and not others. Self-regeneration and metabolism propel life forward, beyond its present condition and toward a future time when the organism’s needs might be satisfied. Among living animals, this spatio-temporal orientation is bound up with the capacity for perception, movement, and intentionality.

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What I wish to suggest is that immanent reflexivity, which can be expressed as the basic sense that ‘I am here now,’ is rooted in the globally orientable, dynamically irreversible space–time structures of autopoiesis. Thus, immanent reflexivity is a necessary, internal, relational property, or what I have called an intrinsic structural property, of conscious, living creatures like us. Of course, I do not wish to suggest that all life forms have an immanently reflexive sense of self, for it seems clear that a sufficient degree of neurobiological complexity also is required. While unicellular and multicellular eukaryotic forms of life may exhibit proto-mentality insofar as they move toward or away from chemicals in the environment and sources of food,12 they do not have a sense of self. However, I think it is safe to say that this basic mode of self-awareness is shared by ordinary adult human beings, infants, chimpanzees, horses, dolphins, cats, dogs, and many other non-human animals. At first it may seem odd to grant a primitive sense of self to these non-human animals, but it is important to remember that the sort of basic bodily awareness that I have in mind is not a transitive conceptualized awareness of one’s body as object, ‘but rather an intransitive and direct acquaintance with one’s bodily subjectivity’ that does not require the capacity for language, thought, or reflection (Thompson, 2007, p. 316). To be sure, this is a sense of self only in a primitive sense, and much remains to be said about the development of a more sophisticated sense of personal identity. To flesh out the account further, I must move now to a discussion of embodied agency.

3.4

Embodied agency and desire-based emotions

I have suggested that proprioception is one of the key aspects of implicit bodily awareness that are necessary in order to have a sense of self. Proprioceptive– kinesthetic experience provides a sense that one is positioned, moving, or doing something, but is usually a ‘pre-reflective (non-observational) awareness that allows the body to remain experientially transparent to the agent who is acting’ (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 73). What Gallagher (2005a) describes as the proprioceptive self is a sense of self that involves a sense of one’s motor possibilities, body postures, and body powers, and which is tied to one’s ‘embodied capabilities for movement and action’ (p. 74). I believe that proprioceptive awareness is a key facet of essential embodiment insofar as it ‘accounts for the fact that we are not lodged within [our bodies] as a pilot is within a ship, but that our bodily awareness is the consciousness we have of ourselves, not of something that we own’ (Meijsing, 2000, p. 40). While proprioception is an experience, and therefore mental, it is thoroughly corporeal and physical insofar as it is a bodily mode of awareness. An examination of proprioception thus reveals the sense in which our sense of self is essentially embodied. However, is proprioception necessary for a sense of self? What happens to an individual without proprioception?


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Meijsing (2000) discusses the famous case of Ian Waterman to explore whether an individual without proprioception still would have an awareness of himself as a bodily subject. The victim of a catastrophic illness at age 19, Waterman lost certain crucial aspects of his primitive sense of proprioception (such as the sense of touch) from the neck down, although he did retain the capacity for normal proprioceptive experience above his neck, and especially in the facial area. As a result, Waterman was unable to perform simple body movements without great effort. However, he was able to recover the ability to get on in the world ‘by endless, never abating concentration, by conscious planning of every moment, and especially by using visual feedback’ (Meijsing, 2000, p. 42). In short, Waterman had to see his own limbs in order to move them. Unlike the automatic and routine movements of ordinary subjects, his were planned and consciously monitored. For Waterman, the body image was not proprioceptively maintained, but rather visually maintained, and so crucial information about position, posture, and touch was missing. As Meijsing points out, visual perception does not carry the same guarantee that a particular body is one’s own, for it seems that without proprioception one cannot be sure, for example, that the legs that one sees crossed are one’s own legs (p. 43). But does it follow from the fact that Waterman’s proprioceptive awareness was disrupted that his sense of self was disrupted? In fact, Waterman’s case begins to reveal that the capacity for self-movement typically plays a crucial role in grounding the sense of self. Note that Waterman was able to move with the help of visual feedback, and, conversely, that his capacity for self-movement made visual perception possible. For most subjects, proprioception is crucial, for this is how ‘a self-moving, active organism gets information about the environment, information about where it is and where it is going’ (Meijsing, 2000, p. 45). Because Waterman lacked this capacity, he had to compensate for this by relying on visual perception to provide feedback about his movements, where he was, and where he was going. By virtue of active self-movement together with visual perception and some extra effort, his egocentric vantage point remained intact. It also is interesting to note that Waterman could skillfully drive an automobile, often without having to look at or specifically think about his limbs, and found it immensely easier to drive 300 or 400 miles than to stop and fill up his car with petrol (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 58). It seems reasonable to conclude that the practice of driving (i.e., a process of active self-movement) somehow temporarily reinstated aspects of Waterman’s primitive bodily awareness. What helped to transform Waterman’s limbs from a somewhat detached, intentional object of perception to part of his lived body was his capacity for self-movement. It seems clear that our ability to exert force so as to change our surroundings is crucially bound up with our sense of self. One of the primary ways in which we distinguish between the bodies that we are and the bodies we


are not is through our special capacity to move our bodies in accordance with our desires. Indeed, the notion that essentially embodied consciousness is inherently dynamic and directly engaged with its world points to the key role that authorship and agency play in grounding a coherent sense of self. As Bermúdez (2000) points out, somatic proprioception yields not only an awareness of the limits of the body (or felt boundaries) but also an awareness of the body as a spatially extended and bounded physical object that is distinctive in being responsive to one’s will (p. 150). The sense of self is grounded not simply in an awareness of bodily movement, but also in an awareness of oneself as the one initiating such movement.13 This is why Sheets-Johnstone (1999) identifies not just fields of sensation, but also the power to govern, as the two crucial aspects of the unity of the self. Drawing on the ideas of Husserl, she characterizes the sense of a unified self in terms of a ‘sphere of ownness’ that is fundamentally different from our experience of other things and living beings. This is an experience of one’s self as a psychophysical unity, a ‘corporeal subject of experience’ that in addition ‘hold[s] sway with respect to the movement and activities of [one’s] animate organism’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, pp. 51–52). In short, one experiences one’s self first and foremost as an agent. The self of self-awareness is the localized actor, and this sense of self is in place long before there is any thinking or narrating (Meijsing, 2000, p. 47). As Thompson (2007) notes, the lived body manifests itself primarily as an implicit and practical ‘I can’ during motor intentionality. It is crucial to note that the sort of forceful interaction that forms a recurrent pattern in our bodily experience moves in both directions, both inward and outward. As spatially bounded, contained beings we experience limitations, restrictions, and the exertion of force on us from things in our environment. In addition, we experience our own motion, directedness of action, and the degree of intensity with which we exert force on objects in our surroundings. Some of the most common force structures that operate constantly in our experience include compulsion, blockage, counterforce, enablement, and attraction (Johnson, 1990, p. 45). These repeatable structures that emerge from our forceful interaction with our surroundings give comprehensible order to our perceptions, action, and overall understanding of the world. For example, whenever we interact with the world, there is always a structure or sequence of causality involved in our forceful bodily experiences (whether we are being acted upon or are agents in a particular case). This experience of force paves the way for our understanding of possibility and necessity and our sense that alternative actions are open to us (or some other agent) in a given situation (Johnson, 1990, p. 49). Thus, it seems clear that our experience of forceful interaction is linked to our awareness of affordances in our surroundings. If these observations are roughly correct, then one’s awareness of oneself as a single, coherent being does not consist simply in proprioceptive


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awareness of one’s body, its boundaries, and its movements. Another important foundation for a sense of self is the awareness of oneself as the author and ultimate source of these movements, and as one who has the power to change one’s position at will. The sense of self is very much connected with the ‘I govern’ and its connections to self-movement, and also can be traced to animation, movement, experienced motivations, and felt bodily awareness, all of which are crucial aspects of our embodiment. What one gains through agency (one’s capacity as a doer) as well as through felt bodily experience (one’s capacity as a perceiver) is a unique sense of oneself as an embodied mind whose mental states and bodily states are intertwined. Experienced motivations, agency, and bodily feelings are all very common ways in which one can experience oneself as standing in a direct and intimate connection to the movements and overall condition of one’s own living body. However, even if one admits that self-movement is typically bound up with one’s sense of self, one might doubt whether it truly serves as a necessary basis for the sense of self. Without the ability to move at all, such as in cases of complete paralysis, would a subject lose her sense of self? And on my account, since being essentially embodied also means being emotionally embodied, does this mean that without the capacity for bodily emotional expression one’s sense of self would disappear? It seems that Mother Nature has provided us with a multifaceted feedback system and that we need some sort of feedback about our bodies, whether from proprioception, visual perception, or some other source, in order to have a sense of self. As Meijsing (2000) points out, because there is no known case of a person who is afflicted with both paralysis and lack of proprioception from birth, we do not know what would happen in such a case. However, the account that I have offered here does entail that, to have a sense of self and a conscious life like ours, one must experience oneself as standing in a direct, intimate relationship to one’s living body. It is possible, though, that neither proprioception, nor visual perception, nor self-movement on its own is necessary to ground this relationship and serve as the basis for the sense of self. Instead, might all of these different modes of bodily self-consciousness have a common basis? Legrand (2006) maintains that bodily consciousness, or what I have described as one’s basic sense of self, consists in experiencing one’s body as a locus of the convergence of perception and action. This mode of pre-reflective bodily consciousness depends on a matching of sensory and motor information, in particular a specific match between the intention and the motor consequences of this intention, which includes both the action as well as the proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensations associated with the action (p. 113). Action monitoring, which consists of a comparator between a copy of the motor command and the sensorial reafferences, allows the organism to register the fact that it has executed a given movement and

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thereby underlies consciousness of a bodily self (p. 111). Here Legrand builds on the notion that the sense of self emerges in the ‘I can’ of intentional movement together with the ‘I perceive’ and ‘I am affected’ of perception. The sense of self as a bodily subject-and-object is connected to being affected and then responding, often via self-movement. As Legrand rightly notes, there is no pure self or pure body, for our sense of self is essentially embodied. While I agree with the general spirit of this account, I think it fails to mention the core element that underlies the fact that body is the point of convergence of action and perception. This is the fact that the body is the locus of desiring and caring. In my view, the fundamental manifestation of essential embodiment, and what grounds our sense of self both via agency and perception, as well as bodily feelings and proprioceptive awareness, is desire-based emotion and the fact that we care about our lives from our own egocentric perspective. Our desire-based emotions are instantiated throughout the vital neurobiological systems and organs of our living bodies and serve as a focal point for conscious experience starting in infancy. By ‘desirebased emotion’ I mean to emphasize once again that an essential factor in all emotion is conscious desire, or the consciously felt need for something or another, and that emotions are intrinsically connected to agency and bodily affection. Indeed, desire-based emotion is the psychological foundation of all choice, volition, willing, and sensation. In Chapter 1, I argued that, for creatures minded like us, necessarily for every emotion there is an intrinsic pre-reflective and normally effective first-order desire to give spontaneous bodily self-expression to that emotion in some way or another. Desire-based emotions, which include salient drives, inclinations, liking and disliking, moods, passions, and feelings, are essentially the way in which creatures care about themselves and their surroundings, and want things either to be a certain way or not to be a certain way. On the one hand, these conatively affective states serve as an original energy source of intentional body movement, which might be understood in terms of appetite, drive, impetus, or urge. Here one experiences oneself as an ‘I’ or a subjective subject. On the other hand, desire-based emotions are a result of being impacted by one’s surroundings in particular ways, and caring about the way in which one is impacted. Here, one experiences oneself as a ‘me’ or a subjective object. The ubiquity of desire-based emotions reflects the fact that everything that appears as something is ‘something which provokes sense ... [and] something by which we are touched, affected, stimulated, surprised, and to some extent violated’ (Waldenfels, 2004, p. 238).This is to say that our experience of the world is necessarily valenced. Objects or events attract or repulse us, we are provoked by what strikes us, and we experience ourselves as affected by our surroundings. For objects and events to matter, there must be a sense of an ‘I’ or ‘me’ to whom they matter. The different modes of bodily consciousness, including both somatic


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proprioception and active self-movements, are rooted in the experience of one’s body as a locus of desire and caring. This basic sense of self, grounded in desire-based emotions, arises in infancy and manifests in the infant’s desires to reach for objects and to fulfill its felt needs. Thus, one of the earliest modes of self-experience is as ‘I-alone-doing’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, p. 53). Likewise, an adult, in experiencing herself, ordinarily discovers herself as engaged in some activity or other – even when standing or sitting still or not doing anything that is particularly noticeable by others or that is particularly exciting to her. When Sheets-Johnstone maintains that voluntary movement is driven by an ‘experienced affective spring’ (1999, p. 56), she draws attention to the fact that agency and activity stem from desires and emotions. In ordinary cases, one has a pre-reflective desire to spontaneously move one’s own body in such a way as to express the way one wants the world, oneself, or other people to be. However, even when one cannot, does not, or has not yet moved, one experiences oneself as a desiring creature that wants things to be a certain way, or not to be a certain way. Even individuals who are paralyzed typically are capable of some forms of bodily self-expression, and clearly they experience their surroundings and situation as either conforming to or being in tension with their desires. But, even if an individual is completely paralyzed and incapable of bodily expression, she still can have a sense of self in the event that she cares about her condition and her continued bodily existence continues to matter to her. This reflects the fact that our desire-based emotions are invoked not just when we move, but also when we try to move and fail, or when we plan to move; or when, for whatever reason, we are unable to move; as well as when the world impacts us in ways that we either do or do not desire. Thus, the basic sense of self consists in the ‘I alone desiring and caring,’ which allows the subject to care about her surroundings and the experiences of her own felt body, and to will different parts of this felt body to move. This explains the directedness of perception and action and accounts for why certain objects in the environment are perceived as significant or viewed as affordances. Understanding the body as a locus of desire/caring also allows us to make sense of why one experiences one’s body as both subject and object. As a subject, I can move so as to get what I desire, and both my perceptions and interpretations are shaped by what I desire, value, and deem significant. But, on the flip side, objects out in the world impact me and affect me in ways that either match or thwart my desires. Particularly when the world impinges on me in ways that go against my desires and concerns, I experience myself as a sort of subject–object. All of this simply confirms the notion, discussed at length in Chapter 1, that one’s body is a lived body situated in a world whose meaning, significance, and possibilities for perception and action are all fundamentally a matter of desirebased emotions. What gives the self synchronic unity is the sense one has of

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oneself as the ‘I’ and ‘me’ of one’s subjective experiences, even if one cannot bring these experiences into a single, unified phenomenal field. And what gives oneself this sense of the ‘I’ and ‘me’ is the possession of an egocentric perspective, grounded in desire-based emotion, and commonly manifested through agency and felt bodily experience. One might wonder, then, whether the account I have offered can help us to make sense of anosognosia for hemiplegia, a highly unusual disorder characterized by an inability to recognize that one is paralyzed down one side of the body. Such patients claim that their body and movements are normal even though they are paralyzed. But, despite their lack of insight into the current state of their bodies, such patients never claim that they feel disembodied, and retain some sense that their bodily boundary is the edge of their self (Carruthers, 2008, p. 1,305). Carruthers (2008) maintains that the sort of body representation that underlies this sense of embodiment is an offline representation, and that the anosognosiac relies on a stable offline representation of what her body is like to understand the current state of her body. However, because this offline representation is now out of date, her judgments about her body and its movements are incorrect (p. 1,307). It is important to note that, unlike Gallagher’s body schemata, which he claims are never conscious, offline representations of the body underlie the conscious sense of embodiment. Moreover, offline representations are not constructed directly from sensory input (insofar as they are offline), but instead represent what the body usually is like and what kinds of movements it usually is capable of making. Carruther’s observations about offline body representations fit nicely with the notion of background bodily attunement, or what in Chapter 2 I called ‘affective framing.’ It is likely that our sense of self rests ultimately neither on our current perception of the body, nor on proprioceptive awareness (though both are usually at play), but rather on background patterns of bodily attunement and essentially embodied, desiderative feelings of affective framing. This is why the anosognosiac retains her sense of embodiment and sense of self, for she still approaches the world from an essentially embodied perspective or vantage point.14 If these observations are accurate, then it is correct but nevertheless incomplete to say that one’s sense of self is rooted in mere bodily awareness and agency. For, even when either proprioception or agency is severely compromised, one can still have a salient sense of self. It is more accurate to say that one’s sense of self is grounded in how one is in touch with one’s own living body in the experience of desire-based emotions, and that only when there is disruption in these desiderative feelings of bodily attunement does a disruption in the sense of self result. Note that embodied self-awareness has a sort of natural continuity and experiential flow, the source of which is a self that cares about its well-being and its place in the world. Even though bodily states (as well as thoughts, feelings, and movements) are in perpetual


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flux and may be phenomenally disjointed from one another, they have a common reference point as their source. This reference point is a living, essentially embodied mentality that exists as a desiring entity during time, grows old, and eventually dies. I believe the notion of embodied mentality, rooted in desire-based emotions, captures the self’s intrinsic spatiality and temporality, its embeddedness in place and time, and the extent to which emotion and caring are both bodily and mental phenomena. Note that even subjects who suffer from ‘depersonalization,’ and experience themselves as lacking in personality as a result of depression, in most cases still possess an embodied, egocentric perspective, grounded in desire-based emotions, which gives them a sense of self-coherence. An individual who truly did not care about her life, experiences, or activities at a particular time not only would lack a coherent sense of self at that time, but also would be, altogether of a conscious life like ours. But what about one’s sense of diachronic unity, or self-coherence through time? Remember that Strawson (1997) maintains that because human thought has very little natural phenomenological continuity or experiential flow, we should conclude that the sense of self lacks diachronic unity (p. 421). What is necessary for a sense of diachronic self-unity according to my account, on the other hand, is an egocentric source point for a creature’s experiences and activities together with background feelings of bodily attunement. In my view, what gives one a sense of self-coherence over time is the sense one has of caring about oneself through time and of being the continuous source of the felt needs and desires involved in one’s actions and experiences (even if a memory impairment limits one’s self-access only to the present and anticipation of the future). Thus, it may be that those with more stable or persisting desires and emotions possess a stronger sense of diachronic self-unity than do others with less stable characters. It is important to note, however, that insofar as it is rooted in our autopoietic organization and neurobiological dynamics, the sense of self is not simply a phenomenological reality, but also a metaphysical one. An individual could not completely lack a sense of diachronic self-unity and yet retain a consciousness like ours. I will say more about this below. For now, one might wonder what can be said about those individuals, described by Strawson (1997), who have an extremely poor personal memory, do not anticipate or form intentions about the future, have no tendency to see their lives in narrative terms, and tend to ‘live life in a picaresque or episodic fashion’ (p. 419). Is their sense of self diachronically unified? Strawson thinks not, and maintains that ‘one can have a vivid sense of oneself as a mental self, and a strong natural tendency to think that that is what one most fundamentally is, while having little or no interest in or commitment to the idea that the I who is now thinking has any past or future’ (p. 419). Given the biological dynamics of human organisms, it is unclear whether the sort of individual Strawson describes, who does not care at all

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about her continued existence, possibly could exist. However, if such an individual did exist, he or she would lack a sense of self, for, in my view, what gives one a sense of self-unity and coherence is the fact that we care about our lives, activities, and experiences from an embodied, egocentric perspective. Certainly, emotions and desires usually are intricately linked up with time, and it is our experience of caring about our lives over the course of moments, days, months, and years that gives us the sense of having a continued existence. Even those who live life in a somewhat episodic or picaresque fashion still care about their lives, both their past and their future, albeit to a diminished extent. If they did not care about or desire anything, they would experience motivational deficits and would find it impossible to make sense of their lives from a particular point of view. Both their sense of agency as well as their sense of self would be utterly extinguished.

3.5

What does it mean to be an essentially embodied self?

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, there is a great deal of philosophical debate surrounding the metaphysical reality of the self. While some theorists are firmly committed to the reality of the self, others maintain that the notion that there is some substantial self or ‘pure self’ is simply an illusion or a useful fiction. To some extent, I have sidestepped this issue, for I have focused so far mainly on the ‘sense of self’ rather than the question of whether the self is metaphysically real. However, one might wonder whether this ‘sense of self’ simply is a useful phenomenological notion that helps us to understand our existence, or instead counts as a necessary feature of the conscious lives of creatures like us. As Varela et al. (1991) note, it is true that one constantly acts as if one had a lasting, permanent ego-self that serves as the basis for one’s personality and which must be preserved. However, they doubt whether there is truly anything in our experience that ‘will answer to our basic, emotional, reactional conviction in the reality of the self’ (p. 64). In their view, the activity of our minds is tumultuous and there is no experiencer who remains constant throughout this rapidly shifting flow of mental occurrences. We are forced to recognize the absence of a substantial self or a ‘really existing ego-self’ (p. 64) in the momentariness of experience. Although I agree with the authors that it is a mistake to posit a ‘pure original, and unchangeable consciousness as a ground’ of experience (p. 71) and understand the self as such, I doubt whether the reality of the self can be denied altogether. Instead, I have maintained that the sense of the self is fundamentally rooted in bodily experience, and that immanent reflexivity is an intrinsic structural property of conscious creatures like us. Like phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I understand the sense of self as characterized by a first-person givenness and a sense of ‘mineness.’ I have suggested that the egocentricity, spatiality, and temporality that constitute


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our sense of self are the result of our autopoietic organization and neurobiological dynamics and linked to our basic biological impetus to go on living. Thus, the sense of self is not simply a useful fiction or an illusion, but instead a necessary structural component of conscious, living creatures like us that results from our active endeavors to stay alive as we interact with our surroundings. So, while it is true that there is no separable substance that is the self, this hardly shows that the sense of self is an accidental or extrinsic feature of our conscious lives. Why is it, then, that Varela, Thompson, and Rosch deny that the body or bodily experience serves as the basis for our sense of self? After all, they point out, and I agree, that ‘we look at the world from the vantage point of the body, and we perceive the objects of our senses to be related spatially to our body’ (1991, p. 65). They also admit that, emotionally, we often treat the body as if it were the self, and that the body serves as the location point of the senses. But, they wonder, do we really think of the body as the same as the self? If we lose a finger, we don’t feel as if we have lost our identity. Moreover, because the entire makeup of the body changes rapidly through the turnover of one’s cells, the cells that make up my body now are totally different from the cells that will make up my body in seven years. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch wonder whether the cells ‘make up some kind of pattern through time that is supposedly [one’s] self,’ and question just what it is that remains permanent throughout this change (1991, p. 65). In my view, it is because they conceive of the body as a heap of compositional stuff that they deny the bodily basis for the sense of self. What they have overlooked is that the body in question is a dynamic, emotive, living, immanently structured, minded body. Still, it is important to acknowledge that the notion that there is some enduring ‘substantial self’ or ‘pure self’ is mistaken. Such a notion perhaps arises from our tendency to grant too much ontological significance to a metaphor that grows out of bodily experience. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) point out, although these metaphors about the self do reflect the dynamics of much of our experience and inner life, they do not entail that there is a ‘self’ that each individual essentially is (p. 288). By virtue of the egocentric structure of sensorimotor subjectivity, our consciousness involves a particular point of view; by virtue of its spatial structure, this point of view emanates from the place where the body is located; and, by virtue of sensorimotor subjectivity’s temporal structure, this ego is directed toward the future. This gives rise both to the commonsense notion that there is a ‘something’ that actually exists that is the self, as well as to philosophical views such as Strawson’s to the effect that many purely mental selves exist over the course of a particular human life, like pearls on a string. However, it is much more plausible to suppose that the self ‘exists’ in the same way that Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘image schemata’ for boundedness, containment, and forceful interaction ‘exist.’ This is to say that some of our experiences have a

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certain recurring dynamic structure by virtue of which we can understand them, and that what provides this dynamic structure is the fact and nature of our essential embodiment (Johnson, 1990, p. 102). The world presents itself in the way it does because of our embodiment, our bodily capacities and skills, and our essentially embodied desire-based emotions and moods. Together with these schemata, the sense of self acts as a constraint insofar as it shapes the way in which we interpret and understand our world and what sorts of inferences we make. Like the image schemata that Lakoff and Johnson discuss, the self serves as a structure for organizing our experience and comprehension and helps to explain how anything can be meaningful for us. In short, the self is not a solid, really existing substance that serves as a stable basis for our fleeting and momentary sensations, feelings, and motivations, nor is it some other kind of fixed and permanent entity. Instead, I have described it as picked out by an essentially embodied mental point of view that I have termed ‘immanent reflexivity.’ I believe that this is an intrinsic structural property of conscious, living creatures like us and that it is a natural outgrowth of our animate, neurobiological dynamics. So the self itself is nothing more and nothing less than a dynamic, minded, living, essentially embodied process – in effect, a life-form, or form of life. The impulses toward self-regard that Varela et al. (1991) describe as ‘instinctual, automatic, pervasive, and powerful’ (p. 62) are an expression of our desirebased emotions, which in turn are an expression of our animate, neurobiological dynamics. Likewise, the tendency to become preoccupied with the self and get caught up in what they describe as ‘ego-clinging’ is rooted in our neurobiological dynamics. Although the authors are correct that ‘egoclinging’ can indeed lead to a fair measure of suffering, I believe this sort of self-regard is also at the core of what it means to be a human animal endeavoring to stay alive and to live well. A conscious subject, in feeling things, and in caring about things, and in feeling her own presence, inherently also cares about herself and her own mental states. It is the ongoing experience of caring from one’s particular embodied point of view that gives creatures like us a sense of self-continuity and coherence. This is precisely why, as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch point out, one feels angry and scared when one is threatened; one becomes greedy when one hopes for self-enhancement; and one becomes bored when the situation at hand seems irrelevant. This ongoing experience of caring, which is a background to all of one’s changing perceptions, bodily sensations, feelings, and motivations, is biologically based. It cannot be extinguished by the loss of specific body parts, but only by the complete destruction of one’s neurobiological dynamics. For this reason, it is simply not possible, as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch suppose, that one could undergo a sudden total body transplant and still count as oneself. Nor would it be possible for our stream of consciousness to flow smoothly on, its subjective character remaining much the same, if it


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were ‘housed in (or sustained by) a succession of numerically different bodies’ (Dainton, 2004, p. 366). As should be obvious by now, according to EE, there simply is no way to extract one’s mind and implant it in a different living body. If it is true that one’s processes of sense-making are very much a matter of one’s embodiment, perceptual mechanisms, patterns of discrimination, motor programs, and bodily skills (Johnson, 1990, p. 137), then our overall patterns of making sense of the world are thoroughly bound up with our living bodily dynamics. A different body, with different neurobiological dynamics and its own unique mode of coupling with its surroundings, necessarily would entail the emergence of a quite different stream of consciousness. In short, because the mind is essentially embodied and alive, a completely different living body entails a completely different sense of self. But is multiple embodiment possible, and could a multiply embodied creature possess a coherent sense of self? Consider Borgy, a fictional StarTrek-like creature with a single mind ‘housed’ in three separate bodies. As Bayne (2004) describes things, Borgy’s mind is implemented in three different brains, which communicate by way of miniature radio transmitters. Because he has three bodies, Borgy’s perceptual experiences are structured around each of them. Nevertheless, he is a single subject of thought and action, and is able to act with one (or more) of his bodies in the same way that an ordinary individual acts with one (or more) of his limbs. Because the information from each of the three bodies is non-inferentially available for the control and guidance of any of his other bodies, Borgy is able to coordinate the information received from his various bodies. According to Bayne, Borgy is a multiply embodied creature, and though its experiences are ecologically disunified, it has a unified phenomenal field. Borgy’s experiences are indexed to each of his three bodies, so that the representational contents of his experiences take his multiple embodiment into account. Just as our experiences are tagged to a foot or an arm, his experiences are tagged to one of his bodies (Bayne, 2004, p. 227). Does Borgy have a coherent sense of self? If so, the ‘I’ or ‘me’ that constitutes his point of view would have to be centered around each of his three bodies, which is to say that his egocentrically centered standpoint would be located wherever his bodies are located (i.e., in three separate places). There would be no continuity of a single path through space and time, but rather multiple (although perhaps informationally integrated) paths through different locations. In this case, what will make the experiences and actions of each of his three living bodies his? I have suggested that among neurobiologically complex creatures like us, it is the autopoietic and adaptive processes of self-maintenance and regeneration that give rise to a sense of self. The biological impetus to go on living and effectively adapt to one’s surroundings is what grounds the necessary egocentric, spatial, and temporal structure of the sense of self and provides the living organism with a

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vantage point from which to make sense of its surroundings. In my view, what gives one a sense of self-unity and coherence is the fact that one cares about one’s life, activities, and experiences from an embodied, egocentric perspective, or a background of desiderative, bodily attunement. But for Borgy, three living bodies entail three separate backgrounds of bodily attunement, three separate egocentric vantage points, and three separate source points of desire, motivation, and self-movement, even if the information from these source points somehow can be integrated. There is little doubt that the egocentric, spatial, and temporal structure of Borgy’s experience differs radically from that of conscious animals like us. Borgy is a corporation or society, not a single animal. Its neurobiological dynamics are radically different, its proprioceptive awareness is spread out over multiple living bodies, and there seem to be three distinct embodied points of view from which Borgy attempts to make sense of the world. Because a self requires a unique, essentially embodied point of view, it is impossibly difficult to imagine how Borgy could have a coherent sense of self or what this sense of self would be like. Insofar as Borgy is a team, not a self, there is little doubt that it would differ categorically from creatures like us, both phenomenologically and metaphysically.

4 The Role of Emotion in Decision and Moral Evaluation

4.0

Introduction: egocentric, caring-contoured maps

In Chapter 2, I argued that, in order for us to make sense of the world’s meaning and significance, some parts of our surroundings must assume greater importance than others. As Pirsig (1974) writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: All the time we are aware of millions of things around us ... We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select ... We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call the handful of sand the world. (p. 69) What I have termed ‘affective framing’ allows us to make this selection and thereby provides a sort of pre-deliberative, evaluative backdrop that is partially constitutive not just of emotion, but also of perception, cognition, and decision-making. While much contemporary psychology and philosophy views affect as ‘post-cognitive,’ and thus based on a ‘prior cognitive process in which a variety of content discriminations are made and features are identified, examined for their value, and weighted for their contributions’ (Zajonc, 1980, p. 151),1 I have argued that all cognition is infused with affect and evaluative in some basic sense. Our understanding of our surroundings is always partially constituted and informed by our needs, interests, and desires. Thus, affective reactions to stimuli typically are the very first cognitive reactions that subjects have, and they go on to inform and shape ‘higher-level’ cognitive acts of perception, thought, and judgment. In my view, there is no information processing that does not have an affective component, since without the assistance of affective framing these cognitive processes could not even effectively get started. This is because affective framing allows for the spontaneous, continuous coordination of 119


activity that takes place outside our self-reflective awareness and often prior to conceptual information processing. For example, affective framing plays an important role in determining which information in working memory will be held onto, which will fade out, and which will be called into conscious attention when needed. It also underlies the ability to kindle, sustain, and renew the drive and motivation needed to carry out the plans and achieve the goals one holds in mind, and helps us to assign weights and priorities so that we may filter information and sequence activities according to their importance. Affective framing in effect serves as a caring-contoured ‘map’ that steers us where we want to go, so that we can ‘stop’ and ‘go’ appropriately, and so that motivation can be harnessed in support of various cross-temporal behavioral tasks. As Ratcliffe (2005b) points out, ‘the experienced world is ordinarily enriched by feelings that we sew into it, that imbue it with value and light it up as an arena of cognitive and behavioral possibilities’ (p. 188). One way to understand an affective frame is as a sort of emotionally colored lens, whereby our desiderative bodily feelings influence our patterns of cognitive focus, attention, and interpretation. However, just as Descartes’ notion of clear and distinct perception is not a matter of seeing with one’s eyes, affective framing is not a matter of simply carving out a visual field. While Descartes was emphasizing the importance of reason and ‘seeing with the mind’s eye,’ I am emphasizing the importance of desire-based emotion and ‘seeing with the heart.’ The notion that we rely on desire-based emotions to filter information about our surroundings builds on Colombetti and Thompson’s (2008) claim that emotions are simultaneously bodily and cognitive–evaluative, enactive, and the conveyors of personal meaning and significance (p. 59). It also builds on Ratcliffe’s (2005b) claim that bodily feelings shape the manner in which things appear to us and therefore structure our reasoning (p. 187). Affective framing might be directed toward a person, an object, a state of affairs, an image, a memory, or a proposition, and is a matter of interpreting or experiencing the world in terms of subjective import. This is to say that the interpretation involved is shaped to a large extent by an individual’s desires, goals, fears, and values and typically is grounded to some extent in an agent’s habitual way of attending to and viewing things. Of course, there are cases in which one’s cognitions and judgments appear to be ‘cool’ and the affective charge behind them remains inconspicuous (Ridley, 1997, p. 174). However, I believe that even in these cases cognitive processes are grounded in affect and bodily feeling and carried out against the backdrop of an affective orientation. Even playing a game of chess or solving a geometry problem, for example, engages our lived bodily dynamics, desires, and concerns. This is to say that thought is not prior to and more basic than feeling, but rather inseparable from it, insofar as all thinking is colored and contoured by an individual’s affective stance. But why suppose this is so?

Role of Emotion in Decision and Moral Evaluation

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In Chapter 1, I described how this process of affective sense-making arises out of autopoiesis and the living organism’s efforts to sustain its existence and well-being. Affective framing and the desiderative, bodily feelings it essentially involves are linked to value, significance, and meaning. It is because an individual ‘subjectively experiences the environment in terms of value and emotional feelings’ (Northoff, 2008, p. 88) that (arguably) all intentionality and world-directedness is bound up with an individual’s needs, concerns, desires, and capacities. In its most basic form, affective framing involves a low-level mode of appraisal that has to do with ‘ecological significance to the organism’ and involves schematic evaluation that is spontaneous, tacit, fast, automatic, and below the threshold of awareness (Northoff, 2008, p. 89). This primitive sort of evaluation allows the organism to appraise the environment in terms of survival and wellbeing, ‘thereby singling out what matters to and concerns the organism and what is of significance to it’ (Northoff, 2008, p. 89). Affective framing in this way exemplifies the sense in which mind is in life, and how personal significance and value are linked to an individual’s lived bodily dynamics. It is only from the perspective of the organism–environment relationship and the basic desire for survival and well-being that affective framing and the constitution of value become possible. Affective framing thus is a clear expression of the organism’s egocentricity, for it presupposes a personal point of view from which things in the environment take on value and significance. Insofar as it operates as an egocentric caring-contoured map, affective framing helps the subject to make sense of and navigate her way through her surroundings and draws her attention to certain features of the case at hand rather than others. In short, it constitutes her emotional world view and thereby makes the multitude of information she receives meaningful and intelligible to her. This is not to say, of course, that affective framing is our only way of engaging with our surroundings and avoiding information overload in order to make our way toward effective cognition and problem-solving. Concepts help us to organize complex information into coherent categories and thereby get our cognitive and practical encounters with the world ready for judgment, inference, and self-conscious deliberative intentions. Affective framing, on the other hand, typically occurs during an essentially embodied pre-reflective subjective experience of the world that operates prior to conceptual and propositional information processing and yields a pre-reflective, non-conceptual, fine-grained, emotive mapping of that world. What’s more, our various modes of cognitive engagement with the world depend on, and are partially constituted by, this capacity for immediately focusing our attention on what we care about, so that in the absence of affective framing cognitive capacities are incomplete and impaired. This means that our cognitive engagements with the world are essentially bodily and felt, ‘as opposed to abstract products of reason decoupled from one’s


sense of being there’ (Ratcliffe, 2005a, p. 57). Effective cognition always presupposes the emotive sense-making involved in affective framing, and is more a matter of adaptive self-regulation than abstract problem-solving (Thompson and Stapleton, 2009, p. 26). As Ratcliffe (2005b) points out, even philosophical outlooks may owe a great deal to one’s bodily, affective disposition or ‘temperament.’ Everyone has heard the jokes about weirdly distanced, badly dressed, hugely bearded Analytic metaphysicians, and cool, laid-back Continental philosophers with shiny black leather jackets and carefully shaved heads. Certainly, the way we conceptualize reality in our scientific accounts of the world likewise is structured by our human capacities, concerns, and preferences. As various feminist philosophers have rightly noted, because all knowledge-seeking is situated in a particular social context and culture, it is unclear whether science ever can provide us with a ‘view from nowhere’ or give us access to an external reality free of subjectivity.2 Drawing on the work of Descartes and Kant, Louise Antony (2002) describes how inborn conceptual structure is a crucial factor in the development of human knowledge and maintains that dispassionate mind would lead to epistemic chaos rather than truth (p. 137). Because the native structure of the mind places specific limitations on the ‘kinds of concepts and hypotheses the mind [can] form in response to experience,’ humans are ‘natively biased toward certain ways of conceiving the world’ (p. 123). Antony maintains that such ‘bias’ is extremely useful because it helps us to organize and make sense of the incoming flow of sensory information. I agree, but in my view it is not just native conceptual structure, but also bodily structure and emotional comportment, which influence how our minds cognize the world. As I have described, human beings are biased toward certain ways of cognizing the world by virtue of their bodily structure, cares, and concerns. Such bias not only cannot, but also should not, be eliminated, for before any scientific inquiry can get off the ground its scope must be limited. One must have a sense of which research questions are significant and which hypotheses are worth pursuing, and our emotional orientation helps to attune us to some questions rather than others. Moreover, feelings also frequently play a role in telling us when to stop asking questions, searching for evidence, and testing a hypothesis, as well as whether or not to accept some claim or finding. Our felt doubts lead us to continue asking questions, whereas feelings of conviction constitute a sense of satisfaction with a conclusion or result (Ratcliffe, 2008, pp. 257–258). Along these lines, Poincaré (1921) writes in The Foundations of Science: Now we have seen that mathematical work is not simply mechanical, that it could not be done by a machine, however perfect. It is not merely a question of applying rules, of making the most combinations possible according to fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be


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exceedingly numerous, useless, and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones or rather to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules which must guide this choice are extremely fine and delicate. It is almost impossible to state them precisely; they are felt rather than formulated. (p. 390) I believe that the rules Poincaré mentions, which are fine-grained and delicate, and felt rather than formulated, are the dictates of our desiderative bodily feelings that we know ‘by heart,’ so to speak. Arguably, all of our world-experience and sense-making activities, including those that occur in the context of philosophy, science, and mathematics, are essentially embodied and occur against the backdrop of our desire-based emotions. Clearly, then, the account of affective framing I have proposed entails the abandonment of the traditional distinction between cognition and affect, for feelings permeate the world-directed, intentional aspect of affective framing. Insofar as we engage with and make sense of our surroundings by way of bodily feelings, affective framing provides a pre-reflective backdrop against which we cognitively engage with the world. But, while I agree with Slaby (2007), for example, that affective intentionality is bodily, and that intentionality and phenomenology are united in emotional experience, I also think a more radical thesis is true. In my view, all intentionality is affective intentionality, and the mind’s directedness toward the world arguably is never a cold, detached, disembodied, purely brainy affair. This is because bodily feelings always are implicated in our awareness of things outside the body, and it is only through the felt and feeling body – the body as an emotional sensorium – that one can affectively apprehend something as significant. This apprehension of significance is crucial for various forms of cognition, including effective decision-making, moral evaluation, and social cognition. Without affective framing, we would enter into a state of cognitive and behavioral paralysis, and effectively engaging with our surroundings would become impossible. To support this claim, I will devote this chapter to exploring the necessary role that affective framing plays in decision-making and moral evaluation. In the next chapter, I will discuss the integral role that the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing play in interpersonal understanding.

4.1 The ‘high-reason’ view of decision-making and moral evaluation The claim that emotions partially constitute cognition runs sharply counter to traditional views that emphasize the distorting influence emotions sometimes have on decision-making, knowledge, and observation. The notion that emotion is inherently opposed to reason constitutes a deeply entrenched


philosophical picture, going back at least as far as Plato’s doctrine of the tripartite soul in the Republic and Phaedrus, where we learn of the supposed dichotomy between the masterly ‘reasoning’ part of the soul on the one hand and the subservient ‘spirited’ and ‘appetitive’ (or passionate) parts of the soul on the other. Plato describes reason as a charioteer whose job it is to guide emotion and desire and keep these two unruly ‘horses’ from getting out of control so that they do not lead us astray. According to this view, emotions are inherently disruptive and overwhelming compulsions or forces not under our direct control that threaten to victimize us at every turn. These intrinsically passive emotive feelings are at best arational and at worst downright irrational. In short, this dichotomous picture tells us both that our rationality is inherently non-emotional and also that our emotions are inherently non-rational. Obviously it would be a mistake to suppose that this view is completely ungrounded. After all, it cannot be denied that our emotions do sometimes overcome us and cause us to deviate from ideals or standards of rationality, either by merely failing to do rational things (arationality) or by doing downright perverse things (irrationality). It is also true that emotions do not necessarily obey the laws of logic, nor do they always change to match our beliefs and judgments. People’s feelings may be contradictory, as in the case of ambivalence, or they may be inconsistent with what reason dictates. In addition, our feelings may be irrational or illogical and are often the products of cultural bias or personal prejudice. For all these reasons, emotions may cloud our better judgment and lead us to make poor decisions. However, this obvious fact should not lead us to conclude either that the emotions are in any way intrinsically opposed to rationality or that the experience of the emotions is intrinsically passive. It is a crucial fallacy to think that the true proposition 1. Emotions sometimes cause us to act in ways that deviate from our selfconscious deliberative intentions and good reasons for action and distort our better judgment entails the proposition 2. Emotions can and should be eliminated from decision-making and moral evaluation. After all, even if emotions do sometimes lead us astray, it may still turn out that most of the time they help us to ‘get it right,’ and that without them various forms of agency and cognition could not even get started. To be fair to Plato, perhaps he acknowledges the important role of the emotions to the extent that the ‘chariot’ can go nowhere unless the ‘unruly horses’ of desire and emotion are there to move it along. In fact, a growing number of thinkers have begun to acknowledge the importance of the emotions in intentional agency, and some maintain that emotion is integral to practical reasoning and decision-making, especially when these processes


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involve complex personal and social matters.3 This is because emotions involve various patterns of discrimination, focus, and salience that allow us to see what sort of action is fitting or appropriate given what we care about (Zemach, 2001, p. 30). It is because our emotions are particularly good indicators of import that so many of our difficult decisions seem to be grounded ultimately in an appeal to ‘gut instinct.’ Might similar considerations apply in the case of moral assessment? I will argue that, as in the case of decision-making, the most effective processes of moral evaluation rely heavily on what I have termed ‘affective framing.’ Indeed, without the help of our desiderative bodily feelings, creatures like us would be unable to make everyday decisions and moral judgments. This is because, by structuring individuals’ world views and enabling the selective processing of information, emotional experience helps to solve a critical ‘frame problem.’ However, according to what might be called the ‘high-reason’ view of decision-making, we should strive to set aside our feelings in favor of reason when deciding among competing options. The most extreme version of this view says that logic and analysis alone will generate the best available solution to any problem4 and that it is calm, dispassionate option assessment and deliberation, rather than emotion, that will produce the best decisions. Once feelings and desires have assigned a subjective utility to each end, reason calculates the expected results for each potential course of action and selects the one with the highest expected utility through a process of cost–benefit analysis (Evans, 2002, p. 498). This wholly instrumental conception of rationality thus recommends against any emotional influence in rational choice. Just as the ancients believed that reason must keep emotions in check if individuals are to act virtuously, many contemporary philosophers maintain that it is self-interested or instrumental reason, rather than emotion, that is crucial for sound moral judgment. For example, in his introductory text on moral philosophy, Rachels suggests that in making moral judgments ‘we cannot rely on our feelings, no matter how powerful they may be. Our feelings may be irrational: they may be nothing but the products of prejudice, selfishness, or cultural conditioning’ (2003, p. 11). While Rachels no doubt is correct that we should take care that our feelings do not lead us astray when making moral judgments about others’ actions, this fact need not entail the further conclusion that we can and should eliminate emotions from moral judgment altogether. Hauser et al. (2007) point out that while the notion that our moral judgments are the product of ‘conscious reasoning’ and decision is widespread in philosophy, psychology, and law, there is good reason to think that at least some of our moral judgments are ‘intuitive’ and largely the result of emotions. Correspondingly, they distinguish between moral judgments that are a result of conscious reasoning and those that are the result of intuition, and note the importance of both. Likewise, Haidt (2007) distinguishes between

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‘moral reasoning’ and ‘moral intuition’ and characterizes moral reasoning as a controlled, cool, and relatively non-affective process that consists of processing information about people and their actions in order to make a judgment or decision. Moral intuition, on the other hand, is a ‘fast, automatic, and (usually) affect-laden [process] in which an evaluative feeling of good-bad or like-dislike (about the actions or character of a person) appears in consciousness without any awareness of having gone through the steps of search, weighting evidence, or inferring a conclusion’ (Haidt, 2007, p. 998). Although I appreciate these authors’ recognition that emotion drives much of moral judgment, I reject the idea that we can clearly distinguish between conscious reasoning and what they call intuition. What I wish to suggest is that there is not truly any such thing as the ‘cool’ and relatively affectless moral reasoning Haidt describes, since all the conscious reasoning and decision-making involved in moral judgment is infused with affect and enabled by affective framing. In fact, as I will argue shortly, it is not possible to eliminate the influence of emotions on decision-making and moral judgment, nor is it even a worthy goal. Indeed, there is a serious problem associated with what I am describing as the ‘high-reason’ view of decision-making and moral evaluation, which treats reason and judgment as separate from emotion. In fact, it is plausible to suppose that emotion is necessary for one of our most enlightened modes of reason: non-egoistic, non-instrumental reason. This sort of reason is nonconsequentialist and centered on principles governing what we ought to do, regardless of self-interest. The demands of non-egoistic, non-instrumental reason arguably are in line with most people’s deepest desires and needs and what they care about most, such as love, loyalty, and integrity.5 If so, then emotion may even be essential to moral agency and the capacity for nonegoistic, non-instrumental reason.

4.2

The crucial role of emotion and affect

The problem, in a nutshell, is that it is arguably false that affect and emotion truly can be coherently subtracted from decision-making and moral evaluation. This is because a) affect and emotion directly influence decision-making and moral evaluation; b) they significantly assist in effective and efficient decision-making and moral evaluation; and c) they are strictly necessary for decision-making and moral evaluation of the sort engaged in by creatures like us.6 While few theorists would doubt the truth of a), b) is more controversial, and I doubt that very many people would be willing to assent to c). I, on the other hand, will attempt to show that all three claims are true. I should note at the outset, however, that I do not wish to claim that affect and emotion are sufficient for decision-making and moral judgment. Thus, my account still leaves plenty of room for the role of deliberation, more abstract thought processes, and reasoning.


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4.2.1 Affect and emotion influence decision-making and moral evaluation Phenomenology clearly supports the idea that feelings influence our decisions and moral assessments, and many philosophical theories rest on the assumption that because emotions do influence decision-making and moral evaluation, sometimes for the worse, we must strive to set them aside. Whenever we make a decision or make a moral judgment about what someone else has done, our emotions of excitement or sadness or anger influence how we approach things. And if we think about emotion in a broader sense, in terms of what we care about and what concerns us, it perhaps becomes even more obvious that these desiderative bodily feelings impact our decisions and judgments. For example, if I care deeply about (am highly passionate about) gender equality, I am more likely to decide to incorporate gender issues into my college courses. Likewise, I am more likely to judge an offhand sexist comment to be morally suspect, wrong, and/or blameworthy. For many of us, it’s just a no-brainer that evaluative judgments always partially determine and partially express our feelings and desire-based emotions, and are thereby directly affected by them. Such claims also are supported by many psychologists who now believe that affective states often have a pronounced impact on evaluative judgment. There is evidence that manipulating emotional reactions – such as through hypnosis – can alter moral judgments, and it appears that affective reactions often are good predictors of people’s moral assessments (Haidt, 2007, p. 998). Research by Slovic and Peters (2006), for example, indicates that emotion guides perceptions of risk and benefit and that people judge risk both in terms of how they feel about something as well by how they think about it. When subjects’ feelings toward an activity are favorable, they tend to judge the risks as low and the benefits as high (and conversely). Other work suggests that because emotion biases perceptual–processing resources, it may very well be critical for evaluating objects and locations in terms of current and future goals. Neuroimaging indicates that attention and emotion are coordinated in the brain: two prefrontal regions (the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex) are consistently activated during both attentionally demanding tasks as well as emotional evaluations (Fenske and Raymond, 2006, p. 312).7 Brain scan studies likewise lend empirical support to the idea that emotions come into play when we respond to morally significant events. For example, Moll et al. (2003) found that when subjects made moral judgments, as opposed to factual judgments, areas of the brain associated with the emotions were active; and Greene et al. (2001) found emotion activation as subjects considered moral dilemmas such as those invoked in trolley cases. No doubt there is further evidence that might be presented. However, because I doubt that very many readers will object to the claim that emotions influence decision-making and moral judgment, I will move on to the more controversial claims.


4.2.2 Affect and emotion assist in effective and efficient decisions and assessments There is much phenomenological and empirical evidence supporting the idea that affect and emotions significantly assist us in making decisions and moral judgments. Phenomenologically speaking, it seems clear that most of the time subjects do not normally plot utility functions or make extensive calculations in order to come to a decision. Given limited time and energy, people often do better to consult their feelings to home in quickly on significant considerations rather than engaging in lengthy cost– benefit analyses. It also is easy enough to imagine how a lack of emotions might very well inhibit decision-making for creatures like us. Imagine the case of a woman named Lucy, who possesses only an extremely limited capacity for feeling and emotional experience. Her life is governed by routines and habits, which are guided entirely by clock-time: at certain times on the clock, she sleeps, eats, and does various chores. In everyday life, Lucy seems to get on well enough. However, in the event that Lucy is placed in a novel situation in which a spontaneous response is required, will she be able to recognize the situation as demanding anything of her? Note that if she performs well in this novel situation she will not experience strong feelings of pride or happiness; and if she performs badly she will not feel ashamed or disappointed. Being outside routine and habit, these new circumstances likely will lack importance or significance from her personal point of view (Allen, 1991, p. 16). As a result, her behavior will be stereotyped, unimaginative, and lacking in creativity and initiative (Damasio, 1994, p. 57). Damasio’s work (1994) supports this hypothesis. He describes a patient named Elliot with prefrontal damage (resulting from tumors) and impaired emotional capacity. Elliot was likely, all of a sudden, to turn from the sorting task he had initiated to reading one of the documents he was trying to sort; and then spend the entire day doing so. Alternatively, he would spend the whole afternoon deliberating about what criteria of categorization should be applied, or would carry out one particular task too well, at the expense of his overall project. Tests showed that Elliot’s perceptual abilities, past memory, short-term memory, language and math abilities, and working memory were all intact (p. 42). However, despite this seemingly normal intellect, Elliot was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision in question involved personal or social matters. So what did Elliot lack? Damasio points out that Elliot was emotionally contained and controlled and exhibited almost no emotional reaction to the medical ordeal he had endured. Damasio hypothesizes that it was Elliot’s disaffectation that contributed to his defects in response selection and decisionmaking and rendered him unable to choose the most advantageous course of action.


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The first-person accounts of Temple Grandin (1999), a high-functioning autistic, likewise indicate a link between emotional deficits and deficiencies in decision-making capacities. Grandin notes: After many years I have learned – by rote – how to act in different situations. I can speed-search my CD-ROM memory of videotapes and make a decision quickly. It is like surfing the Internet in my mind ... I try to avoid situations where I can get into trouble. Grandin also reports that she has developed a rule system to guide her social interactions and behavior and taken note of various ‘sins of the system’ to avoid. Thus, she knows that it would be ill-advised to cut in line at the movies, commit arson, steal, or physically assault others. However, despite her ability to acknowledge and methodically apply these previously learned rules, there is a sense in which she is not ‘moved’ by the wrongness of many of these ‘sins.’ Faced with a decision she has never encountered before, she likely will find it difficult to take the fine-grained features of her situation into account. This leads to a more general point. People with autism operate in the way one might expect all humans to operate if decision-making were simply a matter of clear-headed rule-following. However, most of us make decisions spontaneously and in accordance with what we ‘feel like’ doing rather than speed-searching our memories to discover an appropriate course of action. Of course, it is not that autistic people completely lack emotions or affect, but rather that their desire-based emotions do not fully come into play during information-processing. As a result, they are likely to experience difficulty in novel social situations or highly nuanced scenarios in which they can ‘get into trouble.’ This illustrates how rule-following and logical calculation alone will tend to result in less fully effective decision-making processes, precisely because decision-making is not inherently a mechanical process. Hence the tendency to make decision-making processes more rote or more mechanical actually reduces their effectiveness. Lastly, psychological accounts of psychopaths indicate a link between affect and effective moral judgment. Psychopaths are profoundly deficient in negative emotions, rarely experience fear and sadness, and have difficulty recognizing them in the facial expressions and speech sounds of others. As Prinz (2006) points out, this makes it difficult for them to experience empathetic distress, remorse, or guilt, which in turn leads to antisocial behavior and may also result in very poor decisions. Although psychopaths may give lip-service to understanding morality, they don’t fully understand the meaning of any moral concepts that they use. Despite whatever abstract knowledge of moral concepts they possess, it seems they simply do not care about the suffering of others.


In a study by Robert Hare et al. (1991), the team presented subjects with a string of letters, asked whether this string was a word, and measured subjects’ response times and brain waves. While non-psychopaths identified emotionally charged words like ‘rape’ more quickly and exhibited larger and more prolonged EEG responses, psychopaths showed the same response times and EEG patterns regardless of whether the word was emotionally charged (‘cancer’) or neutral (‘tree’). This suggests that psychopaths do not form the associations or react in the same way to affective words, and that they are deficient in their ability to process and use emotion. In another study, psychologists presented subjects with color slides and later tested their memory of the scenes (Nadis, 1995). The eighth of the 15 slides appeared in two versions: one showed a woman riding a bicycle in front of two cars, while the other showed this woman with blood oozing from head, lying beside the bicycle, with the two cars in the background. While non-psychopaths remembered the emotional slide more vividly and tended to pay more attention to its central details, psychopaths did not exhibit the same focus and remembered both slides equally well. It appears that because psychopaths do not care about the woman who has blood oozing from her head, the slide fails to grab their attention. Together, these observations and empirical data lend support to the thesis that decision-making and moral judgment processes that are lacking or deficient in affective framing will be less efficient and effective. One way to understand the positive influence of the emotions on cognition is in terms of instinct. Hanoch (2005), for example, contends that the mechanism that allows us to perform such spontaneous and unreflective calculations in many instances of decision-making is evolution. On this view, natural selection has retained certain neural structures based on their ability to generate adaptive behaviors given certain stimuli (p. 140). As a result of connections forged between certain forms of emotional arousal and certain forms of stimuli over the course of our evolutionary history, the experience of certain emotions serves as an alert system. While this sort of account seems quite plausible in at least some instances of fear, the story appears more complicated with respect to feelings of empathy, indignation, or guilt. This is because it is not only evolution, but also learning and socialization, which shape the way our brains and patterns of bodily attunement are configured and forge connections between stimuli and patterns of thought and behavior. As de Sousa (1987) points out, the ‘paradigm scenarios’ that define an individual’s emotional repertoire are a matter of learning and development. As a result of concerns we develop and emotions we experience in early life, linkages are set between feelings and certain characteristic objects. However, insofar as the process of establishing such links is ongoing, emotions are largely a product of cultural influence and habituation rather than mere primitive instinctive responses (p. 182). Likewise, on my view, feelings and emotion come into play in decision-


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making and moral evaluation not merely as a result of instinct, but more fundamentally as a world view and a magnifying or telescopic lens – not a distorting lens – built up over time, through which individuals interpret their surroundings. As I suggested in Chapter 2, although we tend not to notice it, some degree of attentional focusing likely takes place in all of our interactions with our surroundings, including both sensory perception as well as more abstract thought processes. My hypothesis is that as individuals try to make sense of and evaluate others’ actions or decide what to do, much of this focusing occurs at a pre-reflective level and involves conative affectivity as one of its central components. This is why, depending on their mood and emotional condition, subjects home in on different features of their environment and form different interpretations of their situation. Embodied desiderative feelings make some judgments compelling, and others not, by getting us to focus on a partial field of evidence and make certain characteristic inferences. In this way, desire-based emotions can be understood as constituting interpretive frameworks, patterns of attention, determinate patterns of salience, and inferential strategies (Jones, 2004, pp. 335–336). In short, these embodied desiderative feelings of affective framing reveal saliences that we might not otherwise recognize with the same speed and reliability (Goldie, 2004, p. 98) and thereby attune us to the world.

4.3 The frame problem The evidence presented so far strongly supports the claim that affect and emotion both directly and significantly influence decision-making and moral evaluation and make it more efficient and effective. But is affect strictly necessary for making decisions and moral judgments? Prinz (2006) argues that one reason to think that emotions are necessary for moral judgment is that they are required for moral development. The three main techniques that parents use to train their children to conform to moral rules all recruit emotions. The threat of punishment elicits fear, orienting a child to some harm she has caused to another person elicits distress, and love withdrawal and ostracism elicit sadness. Insofar as each technique conditions the child to associate negative emotions with misdeeds, it recruits emotion to provide moral instruction. I believe that Prinz is on the right track here, insofar as affect and emotion do seem to reorient our interpretations and enable understanding. However, I believe that desire-based emotion serves an even more far-reaching cognitive function than Prinz describes, insofar as it plays a strictly necessary and integral role in solving what might be termed a ‘frame problem.’ As Dreyfus (2007) understands it, the frame problem has to do with recognizing significance, ‘knowing which facts [are] relevant in any given situation,’ and being able to identify the relevant modifications when the


context or state of the world shifts (p. 248). Central to the work being done in artificial intelligence (AI) is the notion that it is possible to formulate ‘explicitly specifiable rules of thought’ that govern the move from one cognitive state to another (Anderson, 2003, p. 94) and then program these rules into a computer. Much of the early work in AI and robotics involved robots operating in environments that to some extent had been designed specifically for them. The goal was to produce a plan of action for the robot to achieve whatever goal it had been given within this mostly static environment. The difficulty, of course, is that, in the real world, things change. To be truly ‘intelligent,’ a robot must be able to cope and adjust its plan of action to fit the new situation, and thus be truly dynamic and immediately sensitive to these changes. However, the robot should not have to replan as a result of every change to its surroundings, but rather only those changes that are relevant and likely to impact whether it achieves its goal. After all, only some of these changes matter, while others should be ignored. To illustrate this, Anderson (2003) writes: For a heavy robot moving across a room the location and dynamics of big, solid objects is likely relevant, but the speed and direction of the draft from the open window is not. Unless the task is to carry a stack of papers. Likewise, the broken and deeply pitted floor tiles make no difference to a robot with big, spongy wheels, but might matter to one with different means for locomotion. In general, what counts as a relevant fact worth noticing – say, whether something falls in the general class of obstacle or not – will depend both on the capacities of the agent and the task to be performed. (pp. 97–98) In short, the computer needs some way of identifying which changes in its surroundings are important and which should be ignored. It seems clear that this ability to detect relevance and select which facts are significant is a crucial aspect of human intelligence. And the problem is that it is unclear how to get the robot to accomplish this simply by following an algorithm. It seems that programming many thousands of facts into the computer hardly helps, since effective agency requires that the computer determine which of many facts are relevant to its proposed action. This in turn requires that the agent know a good deal about each of its potential actions, and also that it can determine whether a given fact about its environment is relevant to a particular fact about its potential behavior. Even if the computer had a straightforward set of relevance rules, it is unclear that it could apply these rules successfully in any efficient way. This is because what is relevant is constantly changing, based on the interplay between various aspects of the environment, situational factors, and the robot’s particular abilities. Changing any one factor can change the relevance of some other factor. Carried out by a computer system manipulating


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formal symbols, all this rule-following would take too long and would be too cognitively ‘expensive,’ and is therefore ‘biologically implausible’ (Anderson, 2003, p. 97). Moreover, it is reasonable to suppose that ‘in order to identify the possibly relevant facts in the current situation one would need a frame for recognizing,’ but this would result in a ‘regress of frames for recognizing relevant frames for recognizing relevant facts’ (p. 248). Without an immediate, intuitive means of detecting relevance, robots could respond only to fixed features of their surroundings, not to context or a changing environment. 4.3.1 Physical grounding and the detection of relevance It seems clear that creatures like us have some other way of recognizing and ‘responding directly to relevance so that the frame problem does not [ever even] arise’ (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 263). Appealing to the work of Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus (2007) proposes that the body and world are coupled in a way that allows ordinary subjects to avoid the frame problem. Human intelligence is grounded in and ultimately dependent upon a more basic way of coping, which is rooted in a feedback loop between an embodied agent and the perceptual world, and shared by many non-human animals. On this view, experience presents the subject with more and more finely discriminated situations, on the basis of which her responses are adapted and refined. This everyday coping with the world requires that ‘embodied beings like us take as input energy from the physical universe and respond in such a way as to open them to a world organized in terms of their needs, interests, and bodily capacities’ (p. 251). Such responses are not predetermined or fixed, but instead are shaped by the active interaction of an agent with her surroundings. But just how is it that input from the world is organized in terms of a subject’s needs, interests, and capacities? The capacity to respond flexibly and adaptively to the significance of particular contexts and situations, which are ever-changing, seems to require non-conceptual, non-reflective, actionoriented ways of coping with one’s surroundings. During such activity we are in a sense one with the world, rather than being one step removed from objects in our surroundings in order to think about them, reflect on them, or represent them (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 255). We are engaged in a steady flow of activity in response to our sense of the current situation, and during the course of this activity our body serves as a ‘grouping of lived-through meanings’ that steers us toward some optimal body–environment relationship (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 153). Here Dreyfus (2007) attempts to build on Freeman’s (1991, 1995, 2000) work and the notion that it is the brain of an active animal, understood as a non-linear dynamic system, which enables it to detect relevance and select facts about its environment that are significant. Freeman maintains that cognition is grounded in the relationship between an actively engaged


animal and its surroundings, and looks to sensory perception among rabbits to demonstrate that learning is based on the coupling of the brain and environment. He begins with the idea that organisms actively seek to improve their current situation. For example, when hungry, a rabbit sniffs around to find food, and its neural connections are strengthened to the extent that the achieved results satisfy its needs. According to Freeman’s neurodynamic model, because these neural connections have been formed, when the rabbit is once again in a state of seeking and encounters a similar smell, it enters into a distinctive pattern of neural activity. These characteristic patterns of neural activity can be understood as ‘attractors,’ and the set of ‘basins of attraction’ that an animal has learned can be understood as an ‘attractor landscape.’ According to this model, the brain’s current state is the result of the animal’s past encounters, and this influences how the animal responds to its current situation (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 258). In short, once a stimulus has activated a specific attractor landscape, the animal is able to respond directly to the contextual significance of the current input. The activation of attractors allows the animal to perceive significance, make choices between available options, and engage in adaptive behavior; and a shift in attractors will result in a shift in attention and a change in the animal’s course of action. Each new learning experience sets up a new attractor and rearranges the other attractor basins in the landscape, so that patterns of neural activity are constantly dissolving, reforming, and changing (Freeman, 2000, p. 22). On the basis of past success or failure, physical input acquires particular meaning and significance for the animal. This constantly updated pattern of attractors corresponds to the agent’s constantly changing experience of the significance of her surroundings. This is a dynamic model in which ‘each time a new significance is encountered, the whole perceptual world of the animal changes so that significance as directly displayed is contextual, global, and continually enriched’ (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 261). Moreover, as a non-linear dynamic system, the brain also is self-organizing and exhibits circular causality. This means that ‘the whole brain can be tuned by past experience to influence individual neural activity’ and that neural activity is constantly drawn toward certain characteristic patterns. If this model of the brain as a dynamic physical system can be programmed into a computer, then, according to Freeman, robots will have a way to detect relevance and avoid the frame problem. Dreyfus clearly finds Freeman’s approach compelling, and agrees that whenever there is a change in the current context, we respond to it only if in the past it has turned out to be significant (2007, p. 263). Through learning, our skill in recognizing and responding to relevant changes in the world is constantly improved, and our familiarity with certain contexts helps us to build up certain habitual patterns of response. However, as Dreyfus so importantly acknowledges in his conclusion, ‘how we directly


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pick up significance and improve our sensitivity to relevance depends on our responding to what is significant for us given our needs, body size, ways of moving, and so forth,’ as well as personal and cultural factors. To develop the computer program Freeman describes, it seems we would need not only a model of dynamic brain functioning, but also a ‘model of our particular way of being embedded and embodied such that what we experience is significant for us in the particular way that it is’ (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 265). In other words, to create a robot that is responsive to the significance of the environment as it shows up for human beings, our program would have to include a model of a body much like ours with similar needs, desires, interests, and ways of moving. Dreyfus asserts that super-computers programmed with detailed descriptions of human bodies and motivations have little chance of being realized in the real world. I agree, but in my view this is because our capacity for detecting relevance is even more deeply grounded in our physical embodiment than Dreyfus allows. Like Anderson (2003), I think that the notion of ‘physical grounding’ (p. 102) is at the root of intelligence and the key to solving the relevance problem (or what I have called the ‘frame problem’). Brooks (1999) maintains that humans have inherited from their ancestors a wide array of capacities for meeting their needs and dealing with changes in their environment, and that this evolved ‘substrate’ of capacities constrains the operation and organization of higher-level thought in humans (p. 135). Just one example of this, discussed in Chapter 1, is how the structure of our conceptual schemas is shaped in large part by the form and organization of the human body. My account of the mind as essentially embodied builds on the suggestions of Anderson and Brooks, and says that our immediate capacity for detecting relevance and value is ‘physically grounded’ in our bodily form, structure, neurobiological dynamics, and the fact that the human body as a whole is an autonomous, autopoietic, non-linear dynamic system. In Chapter 1, I described autopoiesis as the process whereby living systems produce the components necessary to regenerate and sustain themselves. Living beings are autonomous in the sense that they can manage their own flow of matter and energy in order to regulate themselves and control both their own internal, self-constructive processes as well as their interaction with the environment. One striking aspect of autopoietic, autonomous systems is that their patterns of interaction with the environment flow from the internal structure of the living system itself. Living organisms interpret environmental stimuli in terms of their ‘vital significance,’ and among animals this is essentially constrained by bodily form, internal bodily structure, and bodily based capacities. Living organisms in this way determine what counts as useful information on the basis of their vital structure, their needs, and the way they are structurally coupled with the environment. Generally speaking, something acquires meaning for a living organism to


the extent that it relates positively or negatively to its survival and selfmaintenance. In other words, the world takes on the meaning and value that it does because we are biological organisms that seek to continue and maintain our identity over time and survive in the surrounding natural and social world. No doubt detecting relevance and significance in a complex social world such as ours goes well beyond mere survival and self-maintenance, and has much to do with adapting and faring well in a specific sociocultural context. Learning no doubt plays a huge role, and over time we develop habitual patterns of bodily response and become selectively attuned to certain aspects of our surroundings. What I propose, then, is that we make use of some of Freeman’s key insights, but suppose that it is the animal body as a whole, and not just the brain, which is a non-linear dynamic system, and that the dynamic coupling of its whole body and surrounding world is what enables the human animal to detect relevance. The attractor landscapes that Freeman describes concern not simply our neurological dynamics, but rather bodily dynamics more broadly construed. Living creatures are dynamical and adaptive beings that interact with their environment through exchanges of matter and energy. This gives rise to value-driven points of view, so that orderly pattern and structure appear where previously absent and lived bodily dynamics come to exhibit certain characteristic patterns. Brain and body are interdependent and mutually regulating, and as the animal interacts with the environment a global pattern of distributed, coherent bodily activity comes to govern its sense-making activities. The whole human body, and not just the brain, thus behaves as a ‘pattern-forming, self-organized system governed by nonlinear dynamical laws’ (Kelso, 1995, p. 6). A living being’s specific cares and concerns can be understood as the self-organized attractors that embody the constraints constructed by the interplay between the system’s own internal (bodily) dynamics and its environment. Initial conditions of one’s genetic make-up plus development and learning shape the contours of this bodily landscape, and thereby shape the animal’s patterns of attentional focusing as well as its future activity. Affective framing, which is rooted in our neurobiological dynamics, thus selectively attunes living organisms to their environment and allows them to immediately recognize particular factors as relevant given their specific needs, body size, ways of moving, and current situational factors (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 265). To some extent, an individual’s particular affective framing patterns are a matter of her unique needs, desires, pleasure, pains, and motivations. However, many of these patterns of affective framing will be quite similar among creatures like us, given that we strive toward highly similar sorts of body–environment relations (generally speaking) and all need the same sorts of things (food, physical contact, warmth, freedom from pain) in light of our basic biological make-up. And, because we are selectively and


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adaptively attuned to the natural and social environment, the frame problem never even arises for creatures like us. 4.3.2 Affect’s necessary role in decision-making and moral evaluation For this reason, it is doubtful whether we ever make decisions in the way that the so-called ‘high-reason’ view describes. To see this, note that is highly unclear whether the rational cognition involved in cost–benefit analysis is sufficient to limit the amount of information that one takes into account in order to arrive at a reasonable decision in a timely manner. This, in turn, is because there are numerous antecedent conditions that might be relevant, as well as a variety of possible consequences and potential changes brought about by an action. If one is to stop listing outcomes and make a decision, one must have some mechanism or process one can rely on to delimit the time for decision-making (Evans, 2002, p. 499). Otherwise, the process of sifting through the exponentially large range of potential outcomes will take too long, and one will be unable to hold the different options and consequences in working memory. I have noted that in the fields of psychology and artificial intelligence, this is what is known as one of the ‘frame problems’8 for decision-making, and that for agents like us this so-called ‘problem’ of information overload never seems to arise. This is because we have a way of immediately focusing our attention on those features of the world that strike us as most relevant and important given the context in which we find ourselves and the nature of the decision we are trying to make. Some theorists have suggested that, insofar as emotions serve as an ‘attention-limiting focus’ that makes certain pieces of information immediately salient, they help to provide the interpretive structure needed to avoid the frame problem9 described above. Evans (2002), for example, has developed a ‘search hypothesis’ about emotion in an attempt to make sense of the mechanism whereby agents sift through information. He views problem-solving as a kind of search in which the state space of many problems is enormous. Instead of trying to figure out all the consequences of an action, the agent simply imagines the consequences of a course of action and gauges her feelings, so that the experience of emotion acts as an ‘affective decision weight’ (Forgas and Bower, 1998, p. 196) that represents the prospective utilities corresponding to each course of action. Emotions prevent her from getting lost in an endless exploration of possible consequences by providing her with a biasing device that delimits the range of outcomes to be considered and helps her to detect relevant facts. Insofar as emotions highlight certain features of the world that strike her as important, they assist her in processing information and thereby coming to a decision. While I agree with Evans’ claim that emotions play a central role in information processing, there is also a worry that his hypothesis simply causes the frame problem I described above to resurface. Evans’ hypothesis


suggests that search procedures generate one potential outcome at a time so that the agent can evaluate each one before moving on to generate another. However, it is unclear how this mechanism ‘knows’ which consequences are relevant and deserve consideration before, or at the expense of, others. In other words, it is unclear how the intentional agent comes to know what counts as a reasonable domain of variables to consider and which outcomes are important to include in this domain. If we determine relevance by applying a test, as Evans seems to suggest, then the problems of combinatorial explosion that we started with are multiplied, since we must first apply this test to every possibly relevant consideration. To even begin reasoning, it seems we must have some other, spontaneous, nontest-driven way to determine relevance. Deliberation proceeds on the basis of a restricted set of features, so that ‘much of the work of deliberation is carried out before an agent sets out to deliberate about how the reasongiving considerations best support action’ (Jones, 2004, p. 340). Thus, the way in which an agent interprets a situation, highlighting certain factors while ignoring others, crucially affects the process of deliberation. As Jones (2004) rightly notes, the starting points for deliberation are selected via a framing process. Note that a similar framing process is crucial for effective moral evaluation insofar as it involves elaborate cognitive processes of inference and interpretation whereby we attempt to uncover the social meaning of people’s actions. The meaning that an observer assigns to someone else’s action depends on the inferences and interpretations this observer makes about the intentions and circumstances of the actor. Any particular action or behavior can have a multitude of different interpretations depending on which aspects of it the observer highlights as significant, and it is the task of the moral observer to select from among these possibilities in order to begin moral assessment. As stated earlier, the sort of knowledge base and competence that underlies our ability to identify some features as relevant so that we can evaluate a particular state of affairs cannot be captured in terms of law-like generalizations or the application of some sort of test or procedure, for the application of principles or rules requires that the individual already has focused her attention on some specific characteristics of the case at hand to which to apply these rules. Before one begins the process of abstract moral reasoning, one must ‘seize upon a specific characterization’ of the motives, reasons for action, context, and consequences at stake in the case that one is attempting to evaluate (Wilkerson, 2001, p. 146). Whatever the mechanisms are that enable this sort of interpretive activity, it seems clear that they work very quickly and come on the scene prior to explanation, prediction, or theoretical reasoning. Moreover, given that there is no single way to characterize a particular state of affairs, the particular interpretation that is made will reflect that person’s context, interests, and point of view. This suggests that our usual means of reducing the overwhelming clutter of


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information in order to make it more manageable is not just spontaneous and immediate, but also unavoidably subjective and egocentric. What I am maintaining is that here, just as in the case of decision-making, affective framing perfectly fits the bill. This biologically based, bodily capacity for detecting relevant features is what enables us to carve out those pieces of our world of experience whose contents will become the material for deliberation and moral evaluation. This framing process is spontaneous, dynamic, and egocentrically structured, and constitutes our subjective outlook toward the world. The desiderative bodily feelings it involves draw our attention to what is important to us, and often shape our thinking and behavior before we have had a chance to notice their effects. I have argued that such framing is rooted in our living biological dynamics, and is a process of ‘singling out what matters to and concerns the organism and what is of significance to it’ (Northoff, 2008, p. 89). It is important to note that affective framing is essentially bodily, and that the feelings involved are not a matter of perceiving bodily changes that represent the environment, but rather feelings of the body–environment relation itself (Northoff, 2008, p. 74). Moreover, while the brain no doubt plays a crucial role, the desiderative bodily feelings involved in affective framing also centrally involve increased arousal, blood flow, and changes in heart rate and skin conductance. Together, these feelings of bodily ‘grabbiness’ serve to focus our attention and highlight those features that are most relevant given our cares and concerns. One might suppose that this spontaneous, tacit, almost automatic mode of appraisal also is unconscious and non-cognitive. George Northoff (2008), for example, points to a low-level mode of appraisal that highlights ecological significance and allows an organism to make sense of the environment from the standpoint of its own survival and well-being. Although he recognizes that the way in which individuals subjectively experience their environment is always in terms of feelings and emotions, Northoff deems such appraisal unconscious and non-cognitive because it occurs below the threshold of reflective awareness and higher-order cognitive functioning. I, on the other hand, have characterized consciousness in terms of lived bodily experience and have asserted that desiderative, pre-reflectively conscious bodily feelings play a constitutive role in the processes of framing and appraisal. Although such feelings do typically occur outside reflective awareness, they are part of our lived bodily experience. Therefore I believe that affect and cognition are intrinsically linked, and that feeling and appraisal necessarily accompany each other throughout our cognitive engagements with the world. An individual’s affective orientation makes her prone to certain patterns of thought and behavior rather than others, shapes the way she attends to and interprets her surroundings, and thereby provides the range of ‘rather than’ alternatives from which she selects (De Sousa, 1987, p. 181). In De Sousa’s words, ‘emotions set the

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agenda’ for what an individual wants and values and provide ‘supplemental principles’ about what is most important (p. 196). After all, it is not as if all we ever do is experience the world and then step back to interpret it and reflect on it. Rather, our cognitive engagement with the world involves, and is in fact constituted by, an immediate, pre-reflective, non-inferential interpretation of our surroundings of which we often are not at all reflectively aware. By way of affective framing, we are able to direct our self-conscious or self-reflective attention to those features that our desiderative bodily feelings have underscored as weighty. Ultimately this often leads toward further deliberation about possible courses of action or examining the reasons for thinking an individual or group has behaved rightly or wrongly. So I certainly do not deny that reasoning and careful justification play a crucial role in later stages of decision-making and moral judgment, but rather want to make the further claim that the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing play a strictly necessary and integral role insofar as they help these processes to get off the ground. Of course, as I have noted already, affective framing is not our only way of engaging with our surroundings and avoiding information overload in order to make way toward effective decision-making and moral evaluation. Concepts enable categorization, and thus allow for the logical organization and simplification of descriptive information. For example, categorizing someone’s behavior as ‘accidental’ may go a long way in the process of moral evaluation; and categorizing an item of clothing as ‘on sale’ can definitely factor into an individual’s decision to buy it. One might wonder, then, why individuals cannot do all their framing purely cognitively and conceptually (i.e., without the help of their emotions), and then attempt to describe an actual or possible situation in which an individual does not experience any desiderative bodily feelings, yet nevertheless genuinely makes a moral judgment or decision. In that case, of course, it would be mistaken to claim that affective framing is strictly necessary for decision-making and moral judgment. For example, imagine a case in which someone makes a racist remark in my presence. Is it not plausible to suppose that, even though I judge that the action is wrong and that a certain emotional response on my part would be fitting or appropriate, I nevertheless do not feel angry or frustrated? In this sort of case, given my lack of affect, have I not really made a moral judgment? Perhaps I recognize that someone else might feel angered or saddened by such remarks, but I am totally and completely unmoved by them. If the account I have spelled out is correct, then affective framing is strictly required for all kinds of attention and judgment, and such a case is not truly possible. This is because, without the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing to carve out relevant factors to attend to, such comments necessarily would pass by without my even noticing them, whether morally or otherwise. If nothing mattered to me, then the vast stream of information


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flowing through me, including that pertaining to my surroundings as well as what my companion is saying, simply would escape my attention. My experience as a whole necessarily would take on precisely the sort of neutral valence that characterizes catatonic subjects. In short, if nothing matters to me, then cognition ceases to exist for me, including the recognition of racist comments as racist. Because specific patterns of bodily arousal are necessarily part of moral appraisal, without them, the morally relevant features of the case at hand necessarily will escape my awareness, precisely because I will then have no online capacity for attention. As Colombetti (2011) puts it, ‘I appraise the meaning of a situation through my being embodied and situated in it, and through the specific state of my body.’ Without the assistance of affective framing, I will be unable to grasp any meaning whatsoever, of any situation. This claim is supported by the empirical fact that the systems for appraisal overlap a great deal with the systems for arousal. Pessoa (2008) explores how cognitive and affective processing are integrated in the brain, and claims that the cognitive and emotional contributions to executive control cannot be separated and that they conjointly and equally contribute to the control of thought and behavior. Likewise, Panksepp (1998) describes emotion as a collection of meaning-generating and adaptive mechanisms that are rooted in specific neural and endocrine processes, and which allow the organism to adapt to life-challenging circumstances. And Lewis (2005) discusses how the sub-personal processes that underlie appraisal and emotion are a distributed network of self-organizing and mutually influencing brain and bodily processes. Together with the amygdala, bodily arousal and endocrine activity help to maintain an organism’s homeostatic equilibrium, enhance attention, and prepare the individual for action. But, if affective framing is strictly necessary for moral judgment and indeed for all cognitive attention whatsoever, one might wonder what is going on when people seem to make dispassionate moral judgments. Psychopaths, for example, seem capable of identifying actions that society has deemed wrong even though they are unable to feel that they are wrong. It appears that their reasoning capabilities and conceptual abilities are intact, and yet something has gone awry. One plausible response is that such an individual is simply ‘going through the motions’ rather than making a genuine moral judgment. To some extent, this is correct. As I will discuss in Chapter 6, although the psychopath knows which actions others regard as wrong and has some basic grasp of moral concepts, his understanding of these concepts is very limited and superficial (Fields, 1996, p. 267). Lacking a full measure of emotion and value in his own life, the psychopath is ‘capable of no more than a stereotyped and rigid application of formulae he has learned’ (Duff, 1997, p. 196) and lacks the more fine-grained moral knowledge that would be conferred by affective framing. For this reason, although he may be able to apply moral labels, he lacks ‘the creative capacity to understand

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the significance of the [moral rule or value] in question, and to discuss, extend, and criticize its application’ (Duff, 1997, p. 195). Still, in my view, even merely ‘going through the motions’ in this way requires some degree of affective framing, however diminished, insofar as one must be able to interpret the situation as warranting that sort of response. To identify an action as wrong, one must be able to home in on the relevant wrong-making features of the act, and I have suggested that this requires some degree of desiderative bodily feelings and arousal to assist with attentional focusing. At this point, it is important to remember that I am using the term ‘desire-based emotion’ in an intentionally broad sense, and that even in the absence of a paradigm emotional response such as anger, there may very well be affect (desiderative bodily feelings) involved. Along these lines, I also want to emphasize that psychopaths are not entirely without emotion and affect, but instead merely experience diminished arousal and affect. This leads to a diminished capacity for moral evaluation and a tendency to make poor decisions about social matters. But a diminished capacity is still categorically different from no capacity. Correspondingly, if a relatively ordinary subject like me seems to feel little or no emotion when I hear racist remarks, and I am almost completely unmoved by them, then necessarily the force of my moral judgment will be diminished greatly as a result. Phenomenologically speaking, my moral judgment necessarily will have less conviction involved in it. One possible explanation for my apparent lack of emotion in the face of racist remarks is that I have grown inured to them and stoical in the face of such remarks, because I have trained myself not be distracted or overly disturbed by such things. However, although I have learned to suppress and manage my occurrent emotions, there is little doubt that affect and emotion are still present to some extent and that they help me to attend to relevant aspects of my situation. Another possible explanation of my lack of moral responsiveness is that I just do not know how to deal with the intense emotions I am experiencing, and so I go completely numb. Note, however, that many such instances of emotional numbness may very well signify not that I am lacking in emotions, but rather that I am attempting to deal with the fact that I am experiencing too much emotion, by shutting down my receptivity. In none of these instances do we have a case of moral assessment without any emotion whatsoever, for there are no real-world agents completely devoid of affect and emotion. Intentional agency itself strictly requires affectivity and affective framing. What about decision-making more specifically, however? Is it not possible to decide when to schedule a doctor’s appointment or which type of cereal to buy without relying on one’s desire-based emotions? I believe that, even in these mundane cases, the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing necessarily come into play. This is because without desire-based emotions, individuals would lack the ability to focus their


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attention on specific goals. They would not ever care when they saw the doctor, or even whether they saw the doctor at all, nor would they ever be drawn toward one sort of cereal rather than another. The world of product advertising would collapse for lack of interested consumers. Without affective framing to help them carve up the incoming stream of information they received, putative intentional agents would be faced with a potentially endless array of possible cognitive and volitional options, and would all shut down from massive information overload. After all, it is only once an intentional agent has carved out her relevant options, based on her cares and concerns, that she then can proceed to the task of weighing pros and cons and, when necessary, engage in careful deliberation. A significant deficiency in affective framing capacities therefore could lead to the sort of behavioral paralysis that we see in cases of severe depression. Alternatively, it could lead to the sort of behavior commonly exhibited by the psychopath, whereby information is irrationally constrained only by concerns of the present moment. Rather than acting in accordance with carefully formulated calculations or being guided by his concerns and interests, the psychopath often acts impulsively or for the sake of trivial gratification (Fields, 1996, p. 274). Because the psychopath is deficient in affect and emotion, his decision-making is not framed or structured by any overarching sense of what he cares about. To consider more fully the necessary role of affective framing in ethical decision-making, consider the following fictional case of a tough decision faced by the members of a transplant committee at a local hospital (http:// www.classroomtools.com/tranplnt.htm [accessed September 21, 2010]). Imagine that these individuals must decide which of four needy patients, all of whom have a rare tissue type, will receive the liver that has just become available for transplant. The decision must be made quickly, within the next 12 hours, because after that time the liver will be unusable. In addition, because of the patients’ rare tissue type, it is unlikely that another liver compatible with their bodies will become available in time to save the lives of the other three patients. The committee members must decide by a majority vote who will receive the liver. But how will the members go about making their decision, and what are the key features they will and should consider? The high-reason view suggests that the committee members should be impartial, set aside their emotions and prejudices, and attempt to make some sort of dispassionate judgment about who should receive the liver. What the decision will amount to, in that case, is a level-headed cost–benefit analysis and a consideration of the pros and cons of giving the liver to each patient. But how are the committee members to determine just which features are relevant and should be factored into their decision? Is age, religion, or ethnicity relevant? Should the committee members take into account the person’s occupation and whether he or she plays an active role in the community?

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We can imagine that, after reading about the patients’ backgrounds, the committee members come up with the following profiles: ●

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Patient #1 is a male, aged 65, who has four adult children, and whose wife is dependent on him for in-home care due to a debilitating illness. His liver damage is the result of cirrhosis caused by long-term alcoholism, and without a transplant he will die from cirrhosis within 6 months. If he gets the transplant, he should live a normal lifespan, as long as he stops drinking. Otherwise, the cirrhosis will recur and could damage his new liver. Patient #2 is a female, aged 35, who is married and has two young children. Her liver damage is the result of a chronic disease, and without the transplant she is likely to die within a month. With the transplant, she will have about 15 years to live, until the disease destroys her new liver. Patient #3 is a male, aged 21, who is unmarried and has no children. His liver damage was caused by eating a poisonous mushroom, and without the transplant he is likely to die within a week. With the transplant, he is likely to live a normal lifespan free of liver disease. Patient #4 is a female, aged 28, who is married and has five young children. She is a legal immigrant farm worker, and her liver damage was caused by exposure to a toxic chemical sprayed on the fruit field where she was picking produce. Without the transplant, she is likely to die within a month. With the transplant, she should live a normal lifespan.

Note that the ability to home in on particular features is no small cognitive feat, though it is one we tend to take for granted. I have argued that the very ability to identify such information as relevant, while ignoring the person’s level of education, political views, and so on, depends crucially on affective framing. The committee members do not have to go through a process of deliberation to identify the key deciding factors, but rather seem to be able to do so intuitively (i.e., non-conceptually and pre-reflectively) and on the basis of built-up patterns of bodily attunement. Moreover, they likely attach great significance to whether patients are partly responsible for their condition, and what sort of impact their death will have on dependants. In fact, I hypothesize that, after reading this fictional example, most readers will not need to spend any time at all on deliberation, and will instead almost immediately come to the conclusion that patient #4 should get the liver transplant. This patient’s role in looking after young children, her lack of culpability, and her potential to live a healthy, normal life following the transplant all are factors that we immediately recognize and focus on as important. Of course, it is possible that someone with fears or prejudices about immigrant farm workers would come to a different conclusion, and it is just this sort of undue prejudice that the ‘high-reason’ view warns against. Once again, I do not deny that our emotions sometimes do lead us astray. However, I


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also want to insist that without the substantive assistance of our emotions, and equipped only with the capacities of so-called ‘affectively neutral’ conceptual frames, we would not be able to engage in the sort of spontaneous, gut-driven judgment that so often informs human ethical decision-making in a fully effective and morally warranted way. Thus, although it does seem quite true that conceptual framing plays an integral role in decision-making and moral evaluation, these processes could not get off the ground without the help of affective framing. I have claimed that this is because the emotions enable the very fine-grained attentional focusing that is needed to highlight specific details in accordance with what we care about, what moves us, and what strikes us as important. This is crucial for ordinary decision-making and moral evaluation, which are themselves extremely fine-grained processes that require the subject to attend to some particular features of the case at hand rather than others. Because general rules and principles for the weighting of pros and cons or the evaluation of the moral merits of an action are more general and coarse-grained, the application of such rules and principles can come into play only after the agent already has determined, right down to a very fine-grained level, what her focus will be. In other words, before we begin to weigh pros and cons, apply moral principles, and examine consequences and motive, we must home in on certain options and aspects of the situation we are attempting to respond to or evaluate (Wilkerson, 2001, p. 146). This is a job that the affective frames of feeling and emotion are particularly well qualified to carry out, since their especially fine-grained phenomenal character reveals saliences quickly and pre-reflectively. For example, Sally’s feelings of apprehension and nervousness as she decides whether to give a conference talk at the APA highlight one set of considerations as salient, while her feelings of pride and excitement focus her attention on other considerations. As Jaggar (1989) points out, just as observation directs and partially defines emotions, emotional attitudes influence what features of the world are selected as important (p. 160). Even observers who do not recognize that they are influenced by their emotions approach everyday decision-making and moral assessment with a particular world view and patterns of attention and response that are infused with affect and unavoidably subjective.

4.4

Conclusion

It seems at the very least reasonable to conclude, then, that an individual who is emotionally deficient will tend not be ‘moved’ by any of the features of the case at hand and likely will have to list all of the facts, consequences, and motives associated with the case before making any sort of decision or moral judgment. Given the potentially endless array of considerations she would have to take into account, it would be extremely time-consuming for

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her to engage in the sort of everyday decision-making and moral assessment that ordinary human agents perform by way of affect-based framing. Thus, the goal cannot be to eliminate emotion from decision-making and moral evaluation, for individuals who are emotionally deficient will experience serious deficits. What about conscious creatures utterly lacking in emotions? We know of no such creatures in the actual world. Although I admit that as a matter of bare conceptual or logical possibility there could be a minded being without emotions – perhaps some sort of alien (e.g., Vulcans? Data?), angel, or god – this being would not have an inner life in the sense that we do. This is because, to the extent that a creature like us consciously exists, necessarily that individual is either occurrently caring about something, on the verge of caring, or at least capable of caring. To put it another way, for a creature like us, everything that is experienced or experienceable matters in one way or another and we feel that it matters. Why else, for example, would a creature like us ever be attentive to anything? If it is true that bodily arousal and the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing are at least partially constitutive of the processes of interpretation and sense-making, it seems clear that a subject with no emotion or conative affectivity whatsoever would be incapable of decision-making and moral evaluation. More significantly, in my view, such an individual would not even qualify as a conscious creature like us. This follows directly from my claim, in Chapter 1, that egocentricity and conative affectivity are necessary structures of consciousness for living organisms like us. Of course, there is an obvious objection to the view that emotions open us to a world of values and are a necessary part of our ability to make moral judgments. I certainly do not want to accept an emotivist or sentimentalist view, according to which moral judgments are nothing but an expression of one’s feelings and emotions. According to Prinz (2006), for example, one cannot sincerely attest that killing is wrong without at least being disposed to have negative emotions towards killing. His sentimentalist view says that ‘to believe that something is morally wrong (right) is to have a sentiment of disapprobation (approbation) towards it’ (p. 33). Moral judgments express sentiments, and sentiments are dispositions to have emotions, which Prinz understands as feelings of patterned bodily changes. Thus, when I say that something is wrong, I am referring to the property of causing the emotion of blame in me. In Chapter 2, I raised some concerns about Prinz’s account of emotion, and I believe that his account of moral judgment likewise faces some serious problems. First, as Prinz points out, there is the issue of error. If ‘wrong’ refers to whatever causes disapprobation in me, then it may seem that I could never judge something to be wrong in error. Prinz attempts to address this difficulty by supposing that we have long-term sentimental policies, abstractly construed, concerning particular types of action. Error occurs when we misidentify an action as being of that particular type. For


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example, suppose we have a negative sentiment toward betrayal, and we mistake a particular action for an instance of betrayal. In that case, our emotion of blame and the corresponding moral judgment are in error. But does this truly solve the problem, for how can we ever say that an individual’s ‘sentimental policies’ are unreasonable? Suppose, for example, that an individual has sentiments of disgust associatively linked in long-term memory to specific kinds of action, in particular shows of affection among samesex couples. Prinz maintains that we do not need to have meta-cognitive policies concerning our sentiments, so there is no room in his account to determine whether certain sentiments or sentimental policies are warranted. Moreover, if harboring a moral belief is simply having a sentiment of approbation or disapprobation, then wrong turns out to mean ‘wrong for me.’ If the moral terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ express sentiments, and moral judgments refer to response-dependent properties, then morality loses its objective basis. Indeed, Prinz believes that moral values are not driven by reason or observation, but instead hinge on culturally inculcated passions. This is why we do not find more moral convergence across cultures. While I agree that basic moral values do not have a purely cognitive (i.e., emotionless) source, I also do not think that they can be reduced to sentiments. In my view, cognition and affect are essentially linked and inseparable during the course of human sense-making, so that affective processing and reasoning are necessarily intertwined. This means that although affect is necessary for moral judgment, it is not sufficient. After all, it is important to acknowledge that there are instances when affective framing leads to error, such as when we ‘actually only [look] at the world through the lens of our disgust, or our shame, and mistakenly [suppose] the evoking situation to have the kind of morally significant features that would warrant these emotions’ (Jones, 2006, p. 48). For example, suppose that I have an emotional feeling of disgust in response to seeing an interracial couple holding hands. Here my affective framing patterns threaten to distort moral judgment insofar as they highlight the hand-holding as something relevant and significant. However, it is possible that overcoming such prejudices is something I care about, and that I desire to redirect my patterns of attention. With the help of reflection and rational assessment, I might come to disregard the features that affective framing initially highlighted as relevant, by recognizing them as a false alarm. My initial emotional feelings are not sufficient for moral judgment, but instead only partially constitute it or enable it. While my desiderative bodily feelings are crucial for the highlighting of morally relevant features, reason, deliberation, and reflection also play a role. This is because reason and observation can directly influence our emotional world view, and we can step back and evaluate a particular instance of affective framing against the backdrop of all that we care about. Just as affect modulates attention and cognition, self-reflection can modulate affect and emotion.

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Therefore, if I am correct, then it is true that moral judgments are ‘hot,’ but this does not mean that they refer simply to response-dependent properties or that morality is subjective. Moral judgments are distinct from sentiments, and from judgments of liking or disliking, by being answerable to reasons (Jones, 2006, p. 49) Prinz’s account leaves us without any way of saying that some sentimental policies are better than others, or that morality has some objective force apart from the individuals experiencing the sentiments. Suppose a psychopath experiences no sentiments of guilt when he tortures someone, and suppose the person he tortures is a bad man with no friends or family and nobody who cares about him. Even in the extremely unlikely event that nobody feels sadness or disgust or anger upon learning about his torture, hasn’t a serious wrong been done all the same? Moral judgment is our way of making sense of this, and we can accomplish this to various degrees of accuracy and effectiveness, but in some sense the action remains wrong regardless of our judgments. I believe that my account leaves adequate room for morality to have an objective basis. In my view, affective framing is a mode of attentional focusing that constitutes our way of valuing and interpreting the objects, events, and states-of-affairs that occupy our surroundings. However, is important to note that the way in which a person affectively frames something may be different from the objective nature of that state of affairs or even the nature the person believes it to have. We know that emotions sometimes distort moral judgment and ‘skew the epistemic landscape’ (Goldie, 2004, p. 99) by highlighting features of the world that are not morally relevant, steeping us in bias, or blinding us to certain aspects of our situation. Insofar as the objects or events that we come to feel strongly about may be different, in some morally objective sense, from what our emotions indicate, the moral assessments that we make with the help of affective framing sometimes may be unwarranted or just plain mistaken. Once we understand emotion’s role in providing us with an interpretive lens, the danger of relying on a warped emotional outlook becomes readily apparent. For these reasons, the claim that the ability to make evaluative moral judgments depends on emotion is likely to encounter some resistance. Such a reaction likely stems, at least in part, from the fact that, while we readily acknowledge the way in which emotions sometimes lead us astray, we tend to overlook the way in which they assist us with deliberation and moral judgment. It is true that, if people do not have the right emotional dispositions that properly attune them to the world, their emotions will tend to distort perception and may contribute to faulty moral evaluations and decisions. However, if they do have the right dispositions, then they will be more accurate, effective, and insightful evaluators. On the other hand, without the help of their emotions, their capacity for decision-making and moral judgment will be seriously impaired. Thus, the goal should not be to eliminate emotion from the process of decision-making and moral


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evaluation,10 but rather to cultivate the proper emotional dispositions, so that an individual feels the appropriate emotions at appropriate times and in relation to their appropriate objects. Because emotions serve to highlight some aspect of the world that is particularly important or significant for us, being properly emotionally attuned to the world can contribute greatly to apprehensions of what is valuable (Turski, 1994, p. 156). Aristotle believed that becoming fully formed moral individuals is largely a matter of the education of our emotions. Viewing a situation from a new angle can alter our affective patterns, as can considering additional consequences, or talking with people who raise new arguments. Haidt (2007) maintains that most moral change occurs as a result of social influence, and is caused by others’ presentation of counter-evidence that challenges our current beliefs (p. 999). It is clear that we are capable of at least some degree of change in moral outlook, and that, as we begin to cultivate certain emotions in ourselves, we may develop a capacity to grasp the significance of certain events and become attuned to nuances we could not previously recognize. In short, Aristotle was right: the ability to make good decisions and insightful moral observations depends greatly on the cultivation of emotional intelligence and virtue. On my account, good habits amount to habitual patterns of bodily attunement and affective framing processes that connect us directly to that which is truly worth caring about. It is worth asking, of course, just what it is that makes for successful affective framing and allows a rational agent to latch onto considerations that she SHOULD recognize as relevant or reason-giving when engaged in social interaction, decision-making, or moral evaluation. For successful affective framing to take place, the agent not only must latch onto those features that mesh with or reflect her concerns, values, and what she cares about. In addition, she must latch onto those considerations that really are reason-giving and relevant, and which match up with what she SHOULD care about. As Jones puts it, ‘correct framings capture considerations that obtain in the situation and that mesh with concerns that the agent should value’ (Jones, 2004, p. 344). In her view, rational framings are ones produced by a method that is reliable at latching onto these relevant considerations and well keyed to the reason-giving features present in the situation. A detailed argument for the claim that morality is objective, and that some framings are morally correct while others are not, is beyond the scope of this book. However, I do strongly believe that Jones is on the right track when she proposes that the considerations that count as reasons for a moral judgment all tap into significant human interests. The fact that an action was done on a Tuesday is not the sort of consideration that counts as reason for a moral judgment, but a threat to human well-being and survival certainly is. This is consistent with the idea that sense-making and the recognition of value ultimately are rooted in autopoiesis and a living organism’s efforts to


survive, preserve its integrity, and satisfy its preferences. No doubt the recognition of moral value and disvalue is a far more sophisticated capacity, and one that involves our caring about the interests of others as well as our own. There are some things that we all care about, or should care about, simply by virtue of our being living, rational, human animals, and these are the considerations that form an objective basis for morality. Because we are social animals, morality is not simply about self-interest, harm, and fairness. According to Haidt (2007), group solidarity is attained through the formation of moral communities within which selfishness is punished and virtue is rewarded. Nearly all societies have developed an array of practices, stories, and social norms that ask people to look beyond simple self-interest and connect them to something beyond the self (p. 1,001). Peace, decency, loyalty, and cooperation are extremely important for group survival, and as I will explore more deeply in the next chapter, there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that we are naturally empathically attuned to the desires and interests of others. In concluding this chapter, I should note that another strong reason to think that affective framing is necessary for moral evaluation has to do with the fact that it plays an integral role in social cognition, or our ability to make sense of others’ actions, thoughts, and feelings. Insofar as the ability to evaluate others’ actions as morally good or bad rests at least partly on one’s ability to understand others’ behavior and make sense of their desires and intentions, social cognition is at the core of moral evaluation. Likewise, the ability to recognize one’s own actions and behavior as right or wrong depends on the ability to understand others’ emotions, wants, and interests and appreciate the impact one’s own behavior has on them. Thus, showing that affective framing plays a necessary role in social cognition would go a long way toward showing that it is also a necessary component of moral evaluation. This will be one of my central goals in the next chapter.

5 Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Social Cognition

5.0

Introduction

I have argued that decision-making and moral evaluation depend constitutively on affective framing, and also that these cognitive processes should be understood as enactive and essentially embodied. In this chapter, I will maintain that social cognition and interpersonal interaction likewise are a matter of emotional engagement, and that our ability to interpret other people’s actions, thoughts, feelings, and expressions largely depends on our capacity for affective framing. Such framing affords us an implicit, spontaneous, embodied understanding of social behavior and renders other people’s behavior decipherable. Building on the claim that the mind is essentially embodied and enactive, I will argue that processes of so-called ‘mind-reading’ and ‘body-reading’ are inherently intertwined and that understanding other people’s minds and behavior relies necessarily on the desire-based, emotive, essentially embodied interaction process itself. My view signals a significant departure from many traditional accounts of social cognition, which adopt a more Cartesian outlook and view interpersonal understanding as a process of mentalization whereby we discover the mental states that are tucked away inside others’ heads. Similarly to the way in which the ‘high reason’ view of decision-making emphasizes rational deliberation, and the way in which the ‘high reason’ view of moral evaluation emphasizes conceptual understanding, this traditional outlook on social cognition holds that interpersonal understanding involves higher-order cognitive processes such as theorizing and inference-making. The two most popular cognitivist models used to describe our capacity to make sense of other people’s mental states and actions are the ‘theorytheory’ and the ‘simulation-theory.’ According to the ‘theory-theory’ (TT), ordinary human adults are able to ‘read minds’ because they make use of a folk-psychological theory of mind that allows them to make sense of and predict other people’s behavior. This is largely a matter of drawing upon causal–explanatory generalizations (a tacit psychological theory) about 151


links between mental states and observable behavior. Relying on a set of causal laws that interrelate inputs, internal states, and behavioral outputs, we are able to attribute mental states and make inferences about an agent’s future behavior (Goldman, 1995, p. 186). Some theorists believe that we have a ‘theory of mind’ module in our brains, that tacit knowledge of the theory is innate, and that its development is largely a matter of the maturation of something we already have rather than learning something entirely new. Simon Baron-Cohen has maintained that this innate mindreading module evolved due to its important role in allowing our ancestors to understand and predict others’ behavior. Our ability to employ this folk-psychological theory to explain and predict others’ behavior initially surfaces at about 4 years of age. The ‘simulation-theory’ (ST), on the other hand, suggests that mind-reading is a matter of mentally simulating another person’s mental life. The ability to attribute mental states depends on our having an ability to simulate others’ mental processes, which itself cannot be explained in terms of the possession of a body of theoretical knowledge (Wringe, 2003, p. 354). According to people proponents, it is reasonable to suppose that when some are trying to work out another person’s motives and intentions, they can make a good start on doing so by considering what their intentions and motives would be if they were situated as they take this other person to be situated (Wringe, 2003, p. 356). Our own mind serves as sort of model that we can use to simulate the other person’s mental state and then predict what he or she will do. Some theorists have described it as a matter of feeding another person’s mental states into one’s own practical reasoning mechanism and then ascribing the output to this other person. According to Goldman (1995), one first imagines being ‘in the shoes’ of the agent and pretends to have the same initial desires or beliefs that the available background information suggests the agent has. Next, one feeds these pretend states into some ‘inferential mechanism’ and allows this mechanism to generate outputs. These output states can be viewed as ‘pretend’ or surrogate states, which allow one to predict what the other person will do. During this simulation procedure, there is a sense in which one allows one’s own psychological mechanism to serve as a model for the other person’s mind (Goldman, 1995, p. 189). The two theories of mind are similar insofar as they both depict mindreading as a matter of inferring people’s mental states on the basis of their outward behavior. However, while the ‘theory-theory’ (TT) maintains that mind-reading is primarily a matter of cognition and intellect, the ‘simulation-theory’ (ST) leaves more room for the notion that we draw heavily from our emotions, desires, and practical skills. Insofar as it recognizes the role that emotions such as empathy play in our attempts to understand others’ mental states and behavior, the ‘simulation-theory’ is better equipped to

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explain emotion’s central role in understanding other minds.1 Nevertheless, I will maintain that both TT and ST face insurmountable difficulties, and that although it may be true that we sometimes rely on theory or simulation to understand other people’s behavior, these accounts fail to explain the basic underpinnings of social interaction and cognition. First, both outlooks face a ‘frame problem’ for social cognition; second, by focusing so much attention on internal mental states, they overlook the importance of outward bodily behavior, environment, and context; and third, they mistakenly involve a spectatorial and detached view of interpretation and interpersonal understanding that ignores the crucial role of the emotive interaction process itself. In my view, if an intelligent alien life form were to read much of the contemporary work on social cognition, it never would suspect that we humans are the sorts of creatures who can laugh with others until tears come, cuddle babies, kiss, or dance. I should note that although these criticisms are hardly new or original, they are an important starting point for the account of social cognition that I wish to outline. To move toward a more adequate account of social cognition, I will build on Gallagher’s characterization of primary intersubjectivity, Hutto’s emphasis on second-person interaction, Ratcliffe’s emphasis on social roles and affective relations, and De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s notion of ‘participatory sense-making.’ My central aim is not to criticize the work of these thinkers, but rather to synthesize and elaborate some of their central insights in order to begin to describe the sense in which social cognition is enactive, affective/emotive, and essentially embodied. This is what I call ‘the Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Theory of Social Cognition,’ or 4ET for short.

5.1

Concerns about theory-theory and simulation-theory

What follows is a relatively brief summary of some of the main criticisms theorists have leveled against TT and ST. Taken together, I think these objections show that a strictly cognitivist and non-emotive approach to social cognition is mistaken, and that an approach that focuses more on the essentially embodied, desire-based, emotive interaction process itself is needed, namely 4ET. 5.1.1 The frame problem As Wilkerson (2001) points out, a ‘frame problem’ for social cognition arises because some characterization of both the situation and the person’s behavior is required before one can theorize or simulate his mental state. Proponents of ST rightly maintain that ‘theoretical generalizations cannot be applied because there is simply no way to explain how the proper generalization can be found in the rapid time necessary to gain an understanding

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of behavior’ (Wilkerson, p. 145). Generalizations about behavior will not work unless you already know the salient features of the situation to which to apply these generalizations. However, a similar problem arises for ST, insofar as putting oneself in the other’s situation requires that one already have a characterization of that situation. Just as theorizing requires something to theorize about, simulation (putting oneself in the other’s place) requires that one already has some understanding of the ‘place’ the other is in. In short, the sort of mimicry and imaginative projection that the ‘simulation-theory’ calls for already presuppose some sort of acquaintance with another person’s behavior and overall mental state. For example, one can simulate another person’s embarrassment and come to understand his resulting behavior only after one has already apprehended that he shows signs of being embarrassed. Ratcliffe (2007) rightly wonders: ‘how does one pick up on those features of the environment that are psychologically relevant and recognize which mental states a person is likely to have in a given situation?’ (p. 10). And, as Goldie (1999) points out, given that different people react to emotional stimuli in different ways, in order for me to make an accurate attribution of an emotion to someone I will need to draw on information about this person’s character and situation before I begin the simulation process. Hutto (2004) notes that most third-person predictions operate with ‘framing’ information about the other person’s background beliefs, desires, and context already in hand (p. 564). For example, in a simulation process, I must take into account relevant differences between me and my target and then adjust for these differences. However, ‘if I were in a position to determine in what respects the other’s perspective is different from mine, this would obviate the need for the explanation’ (Hutto, 2004, p. 567). What is left unexplained is how particular beliefs and desires are selected to act as pretend inputs for simulation, and supposing that simulators rely on some sort of theory, as some hybrid accounts suppose, does not address this problem. Because we must have a sense of the relevant features to take into account in a particular case in order to designate THE reason for acting, third-personal approaches seem to be of limited use. In this way, the debate between TT and ST seems to overlook one of the crucial cognitive achievements of interpersonal interaction, namely how it is that we settle upon a characterization of situation and behavior and identify the salient characteristics that will figure into explanation and prediction (Wilkerson, 2001, p. 149). Before either theoretical reasoning or simulation takes hold of the results to generate predictions and explanations, much interpretation of behavior and situation already is settled. Thus, as Wilkerson maintains, ‘there must be some prior, interpretive moment in which the conditions for simulating and theorizing are found’ (p. 149). However, how such an initial interpretation occurs is left unaccounted for by both TT and ST.


5.1.2 Social cognition as disembodied, detached, and individualistic? Both TT and ST seem to assume that mental states are inner, that social cognition is detached, and that understanding others is an individual achievement. First, as Ratcliffe (2007) points out, both TT and ST assume that we have a commonsense understanding of mindedness and that this understanding centrally consists of an ability to attribute internal mental states in order explain and predict others’ behavior. These causally efficacious inner states are regarded as tucked away inside people’s heads, in the realm of the mind, and because we cannot directly perceive internal states such as thoughts, feelings, or intentions we need some special cognitive process that will allow us to infer their presence. The central fact that we understand others largely on the basis of external signs such as bodily comportment, expression, and movement is largely overlooked. Second, a general problem surrounding such accounts of interpersonal understanding, according to Gallagher, Hutto, and Ratcliffe, is that these approaches involve a ‘spectatorial view of interpretation’ (Hutto, 2004, p. 549). Social perception is understood as a third-person process that involves observation of the other person, and which must be supplemented by cognitive elements such as theorizing or simulation (Gallagher, 2008a, p. 535). The common presupposition of TT and ST is that folk psychology represents a commonplace, accurate description of everyday interpersonal understanding, and that the ability to attribute internal propositional attitudes and deploy psychological concepts lies at the core of all social scenarios we encounter. However, this account of folk psychology is not simply a description of what the ‘folk’ do, but instead a contentious philosophical account that conceives of interpersonal understanding in a particular way (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 16). And, as many theorists have noted, it is unclear whether explanation and prediction truly are at the center of our everyday social practices, for it seems that understanding other people’s mental states is very different from applying a theory or solving a scientific problem. We typically do not have to ask ourselves ‘What emotions does this behavior express?’ because this would require us to take up a certain distance from the other person. Third, a closely related concern is that both TT and ST suppose that social cognition is an individual achievement that happens within a particular person’s brain and body, and that social phenomena are external events that require interpretation (De Jaegher, 2009, p. 537). We perceive the other person’s behaviors and expressions, and then use mind-reading, inference, or simulation to understand him. According to these accounts, social cognition is the work of a detached observer who is trying to understand the actions of another individual. What is overlooked is the very process of interaction itself, through which joint meanings are generated and individuals’ distinct perspectives are intersubjectively fused and modified. Thus, such approaches mistakenly depict social cognition as an individual

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achievement, resulting entirely from cognitive processing going on inside one party’s head, when in fact there is good reason to think that social understanding typically emerges through the process of second-person interaction itself. 5.1.3 Moving beyond theory-theory and simulation-theory In response to such worries about TT and ST, advocates of second-personal approaches have characterized intersubjective interaction as an embodied practice whose success depends on our being embedded in particular contexts. For example, Gallagher’s proposed ‘interaction theory’ emphasizes the importance of embodied interaction and direct perception. He points out that in ordinary social interactions I typically do not occupy an observer position, but rather come to understand others via perception–action loops and through the various things I am doing with or in response to others (Gallagher, 2008b, p. 168). Communication between individuals often occurs in an embodied manner, via their postures, gestures, and facial expressions. To understand what others are doing, we look to the situation and what the agent is doing, how the agent is doing it, and what the agent is expressing. What is more, all of these perceptions are informed by our habitual ways of understanding and our knowledge of various social practices and cultural norms. Together, direct perception (which Gallagher deems a central component of what he calls ‘primary intersubjectivity’) and awareness of context (a component of what he terms ‘secondary intersubjectivity’) are usually sufficient to arrive at an understanding of other people. And, even when one must appeal to theorizing or simulation to make sense of puzzling behavior, it is sensory perception and context that allow us to identify another person’s behavior as perplexing (Gallagher, 2008b, p. 168). In his view, ‘before we are in a position to theorize, simulate, explain or predict mental states in others, we are already in a position to interact with and to understand others in terms of their gestures, intentions, and emotions, and in terms of what they see, what they do or pretend to do with objects, and how they act toward ourselves and others’ (Gallagher, 2001, p. 91). Similarly, Hutto (2004) notes the limits of third-person, folk-psychological theorizing and claims that a second-person approach is needed. He maintains that through hearing narratives we all learn what sort of behavior is to be expected in particular contexts, and that it is these common expectations that enable us to understand one another. The sort of mentalistic ascriptions postulated by TT and ST in fact play only a very limited role. In most situations we know what to expect from other people and rely on shared norms of readability, and this ‘obviates the need to employ any mediating knowledge or theoretical principles’ (Hutto, 2004, p. 558). Likewise, according to Ratcliffe (2007), much of our ability to understand others depends not on folk psychology, but rather on a shared understanding of interlocking social roles, norms, and artifact functions (p. 21). Social


understanding, interaction, and the coordination of behavior are achieved by active, embodied agents, and much of our behavior is regulated and coordinated by way of shared environmental and cultural structures that people themselves have constructed. Because labor is divided according to certain roles, signs cue particular actions, and there are particular patterns of activity that regularly occur in specific social situations, relying on some internalized belief–desire psychology is typically unnecessary. Practical familiarity with a shared context thus helps make interpersonal understanding possible. Moreover, we typically are able to perceive the goal structure of actions in the gestures, expressions, and movements of others. According to Ratcliffe, engaging with another as a person involves adopting a personal stance, comprised of affective and bodily relatedness, and it is these social encounters where we address another as ‘you’ that provide the greatest insight into interpersonal understanding (2007, p. 23). I fully agree with these theorists that our usual mode of social cognition is embodied, pragmatic, and second-personal, and characterized by interaction grounded in environmental and contextual factors. While we do sometimes engage in mentalizing, inferring, explaining, and predicting, our basic mode of social cognition more closely resembles body-reading than it does mind-reading. Thus, as I stated earlier, my aim is not to criticize these alternative accounts, but instead to elaborate the idea that the mind is essentially embodied, desire-based, emotive, and enactive, and that all social cognition is fundamentally affective and interactive. After explaining some of these accounts in greater detail, I will argue that affective framing lies at the core of social cognition, and that this helps to make sense of the special way we engage with other conscious, living creatures like us as opposed to inanimate objects.

5.2 Rethinking social cognition: ‘primary intersubjectivity’ and affective framing Gallagher’s (2001) proposed account of social cognition, interaction theory (IT), challenges the Cartesian idea that others’ mental states are hidden away and inaccessible and rejects the notion that we ordinarily act as spectators of others’ behavior. Indeed, he has argued quite persuasively that neither theory-theory nor simulation-theory captures the primary way in which we relate to, interact with, and understand others. Instead, he believes that our ability to understand other persons ultimately rests on a form of embodied practice that is emotional, sensory–motor, perceptual, and non-conceptual (2001, p. 85). These are our basic ways of understanding others, and whatever theory of mind abilities we have depend on these embodied practices that we carry out in our interactions with others. In part this is because before we can form a theory or simulate another person’s mental state, we must already have specific pre-theoretical knowledge. In particular, we need some basic


understanding of what it means to be an experiencing subject, an understanding that particular kinds of entities and not others are subjects, and an understanding that these subjects are similar to and yet different from ourselves. In Gallagher’s view, this basic understanding comes through primary intersubjectivity and the ‘embodied practices’ we carry out in our secondperson interactions with others. We do not see facial contortions and then infer that someone is feeling sad, but rather have a direct perception of his sorrow, insofar as it is ‘written all over his face.’ In short, rather than having to infer mental states, ‘we perceive them in the movement and expression of the other’s body’ (Gallagher, 2001, p. 90). Gallagher’s account lends strong support to the notion that social cognition is essentially embodied, emotive, and enactive, and that it relies heavily on the human organism’s lived bodily dynamics. In what follows, I will maintain that affective framing lies at the core of this sort of ‘direct perception’ and is part of what makes primary intersubjectivity possible; and also that various forms of ‘motor resonance’ and coordination of bodily behavior depend on the mutual modulation of interactors’ affective framing patterns. 5.2.1 Primary intersubjectivity as pragmatic and affective According to Gallagher (2001), the first set of capacities that ultimately forms the basis for social cognition among ordinary human adults consists of pre-theoretical (non-conceptual) capabilities for understanding others, is anchored in embodied intersubjective perception, and is manifest from early infancy. Following Trevarthen (1979), Gallagher refers to this set of basic capacities as ‘primary intersubjectivity.’ The existence of such capacities is supported by the fact that young children appear to be highly sensitive to the feelings, attitudes, and interests of others long before they are able to pass the false-belief test. This is because, from the beginning, the child is in a context in which shared feeling and mutual responsiveness are part of the psychological landscape. Babies do not need to figure out that their mother is animate, because somehow they take for granted that they shares a common world with their mother as well as a common interest in that world (Noë, 2009, p. 31). It seems unlikely that babies have a conception of the minds of others as private and unobservable, since in their first hours of life they are drawn to faces and quickly become quite skilled at detecting what others are feeling. Prior to age three, children already have a working sense of what it means to be an experiencing subject and can identify other entities in their environment that are subjects similar to and yet different from them. In neonate imitation, newborns demonstrate proprioceptive awareness of their own body, recognize a distinction between self and non-self, and also recognize that the other is in fact the same sort of entity as them. Infants somehow are able to distinguish between inanimate objects and people, and are capable of responding to human faces in a way in which they do not respond to


other objects. The newborn infant not only can pick out a human face from the crowd of objects in its environment, but also can imitate the gesture it sees on that face and use facial gesture to provoke response from others. And it is highly implausible to suppose that when they imitate facial gestures, this imitation is mediated by theorizing or strictly cognitive simulation. Instead, this occurs in a direct and unmediated manner. Infants appeal to their innate body schema, which allows them to map others’ facial expressions and bodily movements onto their proprioceptive bodily experiences.2 They also are attracted to their mother’s voice, and have what might be called an ‘eye direction detector’ and an ‘intentionality detector.’ Infants as young as 6 months perceive grasping as goal-directed; at 9 months they follow the other person’s eyes and start to perceive various body movements as goal-directed; and at 10–11 months they are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries (Gallagher, 2008b, p. 166). This ability to interpret bodily movement as goal-directed clearly does not require advanced cognitive abilities, since it surfaces at such a young age, and appears to operate quickly and automatically. This evidence supports the idea that infants are capable of a ‘non-mentalistic, perceptuallybased embodied understanding of the intentions and dispositions of other persons’ (Gallagher, 2008b, p. 166). In short, they look to others’ bodies and expressive movements in order to discern their intentions and emotions and make sense of their behavior. For this reason, Gallagher has maintained that minded animals’ capacity to ‘read’ other minded animals is primarily a form of body-reading rather than mind-reading. The basic bodily capacities that make humans naturally attuned to the expressions of others are largely pre-reflective, emotional, sensory–motor, perceptual, and not intellectually governed. In his view, primary, embodied intersubjectivity is the basis for all face-to-face intersubjective experiences, and even comes into play in those instances when we explain or predict what other people believe, desire, or intend in a more intellectual way. I wish to extend Gallagher’s work, and to say more about the way in which social understanding emerges as a product of the embodied social interactions of primary intersubjectivity, which are both enactive and essentially emotive. First, just what does it mean to say that social cognition is enactive? Remember that according to the enactive approach to the mind, cognition of any kind is a dynamic process in which the living organism as a whole actively constructs meaning. In their efforts to make sense of the world, ‘organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations whose significant value is to be added later,’ but instead actively participate in the interpretation of their surroundings (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007, p. 488). Living systems are autopoietic in the sense that they continuously regenerate themselves and ensure their survival by exchanging matter with the environment. In the process, they establish a boundary between themselves

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and the environment, and thereby establish a concerned point of view. How the organism copes with, relates to, and couples with its local and nonlocal environment has implications for its continued existence and wellbeing, and so the world changes from a neutral place to one that always means something to the organism. The organism’s efforts to generate and sustain its identity and satisfy its preferences and concerns in this way create a perspective of value, so that certain aspects of the environment take on significance. Thus, there is a deep sense in which even these very early engagements of primary intersubjectivity are very much pragmatic. However, I do not mean to suggest that our understanding of others is purely instrumental or that it begins as an understanding of cultural norms and the roles people play in relation to our projects, since this would be to cast social cognition at too high a level of sophistication. After all, infants do not understand social roles and norms or have ‘projects’ per se, and yet the evidence cited earlier clearly seems to indicate that they are capable of some degree of intersubjective understanding. Still, there does seem to be an important sense in which the infant’s basic interests, desires, and concerns structure the meaning of social interactions from the very beginning. In other words, before we ever have full knowledge of cultural norms or social roles, our encounters with others are nonetheless practical insofar as we engage with them from the perspective of our felt needs and desires. However, it would be a mistake to suppose that such desires and concerns always are instrumental and self-interested, since even babies are capable of non-self-interested caring. Empathic crying is just one example of this. (Nothing is more commonplace than the fact that when a baby starts to cry, and there are other babies around, the other babies usually start to cry too.) Indeed, one of our basic needs is for social contact and the establishment of a relationship, and this certainly involves other-directed cares and concerns. My key point is that rather than making inference about others’ mental states, our pre-reflective faith in the consciousness of others is indeed some sort of practical commitment (Noë, 2009, p. 33). We interpret not just our surroundings, but also the people around us, from the perspective of our felt needs and desires, some of which are non-self-interested and non-instrumental. I have maintained that a living organism’s perspective of value is rooted in the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing through which it engages with and makes sense of the world. This account builds on the work of Colombetti (2011), who describes the striving and affective lived body as the pre-reflective backdrop against which all experience, including perceptual experience and other forms of cognition, takes place. It also builds on Gallagher’s (2008a) claim that social perception is enactive and involves more than simple feature detection. He proposes that our perceptual experience is a richly informed direct grasp of whatever is presented, and that a certain ‘emotional coloration’ comes along with perception. Direct


intersubjective perception is relatively ‘smart,’ in his view, insofar as it does not need to be supplemented by theorizing or simulation to accomplish the task of interpersonal understanding. The infant almost immediately is able to parse the environment into entities that manifest expressiveness and others that do not, and also vocalizes and gestures in a way that seems affectively tuned to the vocalizations and gestures of others (Gallagher, 2008a, p. 539). Thus, the reason why we are able to discern others as conscious subjects rather than mere role players or tools to be used to advance our goals has to do with our affective relationship to them. There seems to be a special kind of perception that is perception of persons rather than tools or instruments, and this ability to recognize the other as a person consists in ‘the emotional-conative-cognitive ability to perceive the existence of others as similar to one’s own, make emotional contact with them, and intuitively access their mental life’ (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 10). Indeed, from the very beginning, perception of others’ agency and goals engages one’s own motor and affective processes in a way that neither theory-theory nor simulation-theory acknowledges. At this basic level of interpersonal experience, one’s own body serves as ‘a sense-giving orientation through which all experience is structured’ (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 128). Like all living organisms, an infant has values and preferences in some basic sense, and so its surroundings take on meaning and significance. When we are infants, others take on special meaning and significance for us not only because we must depend on them to satisfy our basic needs and ensure our continued existence and well-being, but also because we spontaneously care about other persons and their basic needs. In this way, the fact that we live and directly engage with other persons is one of the most significant aspects of our rational human predicament. Just as the enactive approach suggests that I perceive a car not as some object among others, but as something I can use, it also suggests that I see others as beings with whom I can communicate, who can either help me achieve my goals or thwart them, and who can be the targets of my love, trust, or empathy. Thus, this early phase of social attunement involves ‘the emotions, the affections, and the desire to communicate’ (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 68). Affective framing enables especially ‘smart’ social perception insofar as it allows for bodily attunement and enables the infant to highlight aspects of its predicament that are relevant from the standpoint of satisfying its basic desires, including its basic non-instrumental, non-self-interested desires. It seems clear that the young infant does not notice everything about its surroundings or ‘clue in’ to all of the behavior of the other persons, but instead focuses on only certain aspects of what caregivers do, namely those actions that involve the giving or withholding of care and comfort and the establishment of a loving and trusting relationship. In this sense, the infant’s basic apprehensions of the movements and expressions of the other’s body are affectively framed. When interacting with others, the infant homes in

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on aspects that are relevant from the standpoint of fulfilling its basic needs and desires, including the desire for physical contact, warmth, nourishment, and the development of a communicative, loving, trusting relationship. It is likely that this desire for communication, love, and trust is partly rooted in the fact that the infant quickly recognizes that building up this communicative relationship is crucial for the satisfaction of other basic needs, but also partly rooted in the fact that infants spontaneously love and trust others for their own sakes. In my view, thinking of ‘smart’ perception in terms of affective framing helps us to flesh out De Jaegher’s (2009) claim that ‘perception is an activity imbued with meaning from the start’ (p. 537), as well as Gallagher’s (2008a) suggestion that perception is informed by one’s past interactions with others, previous experiences, habitual ways of understanding, and established cultural norms and practices (p. 540). Patterns of affective framing begin to develop in infancy, and over the course of our experiences we build up further patterns of bodily attunement and a sort of ‘emotional world view’ that structures how we attend to and make sense of our surroundings. Thus, perception and cognition cannot be separated, and the roots of social cognition can be found in the necessary conative affectivity of our lived bodily dynamics. 5.2.2 Early communication, coordination, and mutual modulation The conative affectivity of our conscious lives most definitely can be seen as our relationship with others begins to take shape. People use expressions, gestures, and other bodily movements to invite the infant into some sort of communicative activity with them. This includes smiling, gesturing, sticking out their tongues, cooing, and grasping the infant’s hand. Infants directly perceive others’ desiderative feelings in their actions, gestures, and expressions, and also become directly aware of the mutual influence that exists between them and their caregivers. Their experiences inform them that, just as they can elicit gestures, actions, and expressions from others, others in turn can elicit these responses from them. The other’s gestures, expressions, tones of voice, and movements all afford certain possibilities for communication, and these are the sorts of possibilities afforded only by other animate, conscious, self-conscious creatures. Thus, from the very beginning, our appreciation of others as people is relational and involves a disposition to affect them, and to be affected by them, in various ways. And the recognition of others as loci of experience and activity, with their own unique egocentric perspective, is a matter of bodily, perceptual, affective relatedness between people (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 129). Here the phenomenological tradition is a valuable source of insight, insofar as it moves the emphasis away from a cognitive–mentalistic conceptualization of social cognition and instead focuses on the connection between intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. Drawing on the ideas of Sartre, Ratcliffe describes how there is ‘an affective transformation of one’s


body, which one becomes aware of as an object situated within the context of another’s projects’ (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 162). The infant develops an awareness of her body as an object impacted not simply by brute features of her surroundings, but also by the other as agent. While I agree that we do objectify others to some extent, we also are capable of engaging in direct ‘I–Thou’ relations, whereby we directly perceive each other as essentially embodied subjects. A mother cuddling or breast-feeding her infant is a prime example. Caregivers who act to satisfy the infant’s needs (whether for food, warmth, or social connection) are quickly perceived as another locus of agency, and the infant also becomes aware of herself as an active subject who is capable of prompting a response from the other person via her own bodily movements. Some of the bodily processes that help to give rise to this sense of relatedness, cooperation, and sharing include the key elements of primary intersubjectivity identified by Gallagher: a) a perceptual ‘intentionality detector’; b) an ‘eye direction detector’; and c) a ‘shared attention mechanism’ (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 167). This suggests that there is a link between the perception of others and the goal-oriented potentialities of one’s own body, and that the direct perception of others as persons involves bodily responsiveness. We interact with people by responding to feelings, gestures, and expressions with our own feelings, gestures, and expressions. Along these lines, Merleau-Ponty (1964) emphasizes the immediate perceptual linkage and the transfer of a corporeal schema whereby we recognize other conscious beings as like ourselves. Immediate perception, together with the internal imitation of others’ actions and bodily resonance, serves as the basis for understanding their behavior. And Scheler (1954) points out that intersubjectivity involves the ability to identify oneself with the other’s body via an immediate perceptual bond. Likewise, various contemporary theorists have called attention to this sort of bodily responsiveness or ‘motor resonance.’ According to Hutto (2004), imitation and motor mimicry can be characterized as ‘instinctual responses to situations or other people, for which our innate systems naturally are calibrated’ (p. 551). The information to which they are calibrated is bound up with a kind of intentional directedness informed by our biological needs, and this enables perception of one’s social environment that is quick and reliable. It is unlikely that in order to engage in acts of imitation and mimicry, infants and animals need to rely on psychological principles and make inferences about people’s beliefs and desires. Instead, they simply read another person’s basic desires and goals straight off his or her reactions and expressions (Hutto, 2004, p. 554). In some cases, this ability to ‘read’ others pretty reliably is a result of our having been shaped by evolution to respond to these social environments. While I agree with Hutto that such capacities are adaptive, and rooted in our needs and interests, I find the metaphor of ‘reading others,’ whether their minds or their bodies, far too Cartesian and intellectualist. In my view, the metaphor of ‘dancing with other people’

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more effectively captures the sense in which social cognition is essentially embodied, emotive, and interactive. Social cognition, roughly, is the shared dance of human life. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Gallagher (2005b) suggests that social cognition involves processes that occur on the level of bodily sensations, in particular kinesthesis, or sensory experience of one’s own movement (Gallagher, 2005b, p. 97). When we see someone else act in a certain way, our own kinesthetic system is activated in a way that mirrors the perceived action of the other person. Perception of others thus involves an activation of the kinesthetic modality, so that the other person’s body serves as something that interacts with my body and activates my sensory–motor system (Gallagher, 2005b, pp. 97–98). Gallagher believes that mirror neurons are an important part of this account and that they can help to explain how this intermodal link between proprioception and perception of others is innate. Mirror neurons are activated when we perceive another animate body doing an intentional action, but are not activated if we see the very same action performed by a tool or machine. They also code for intentional action abstractly, without regard to who is performing the action or to the specific context. As a result of activation of the mirror neuronal system, there is a natural ‘pairing’ that takes place from body to body, at the kinesthetic or proprioceptive level, in a way that shapes our perceptual experience (Gallagher, 2005b, p. 101) For example, we recognize a specific emotion in others on the basis of the activation of brain areas responsible for the experience of that emotion in ourselves. Such activation thus contributes to the perceptual understanding of another person’s instrumental or expressive actions. This acknowledgment of a natural ‘pairing’ at the bodily level is extremely important. Again, the dance metaphor nicely captures the reciprocity and interactivity that are so crucial for effective social cognition. However, I believe that pointing to mirror neurons for a complete explanation of how this occurs reaffirms the false idea that the brain is the source of all of our cognitive achievements. In my view, it is as a result of overall bodily attunement that we understand others’ emotions, and sometimes even experience real, even if second-hand, emotion when we perceive the expressions and gestures of others. Such bodily attunement is not simply a matter of mirror neuron activation, but involves a vast array of bodily dynamics, including muscles, increased blood flow, heart rate and blood pressure increases, vascular constriction, and metabolic and endocrine responses. I can perceive others’ desiderative bodily feelings on the basis of their expressions, gestures, and bodily movements, to which I become attuned by way of what Colombetti (2011) describes as a ‘bodily cognitive-emotional form of understanding.’ As will be discussed further below, it seems clear that during interpersonal interaction, our whole bodies, not just our brains, resonate with the other person. This sort of bodily attunement, through which one enters


into a reciprocal relationship with others, ensures that intersubjectivity is essentially a matter of intercorporeality (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 68). In addition, as De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) rightly point out, an appeal to mirror neurons does not explain the dynamics of the interaction process itself, and how social cognition emerges and is modulated by specific patterns of engagement and interaction among the parties involved. These theorists maintain that social cognition involves ongoing engagement and coordination, which is the non-accidental correlation between the behaviors of two or more coupled systems. This involves coherence or matching of behavior over and above what is expected given what those systems are capable of doing. Examples of coordination in the realm of human activity include synchronization, mirroring, anticipation, and imitation, all of which are displayed by infants from a very early age. One striking example is how, when we see a smiling face or some other facial gesture, we immediately and involuntarily attune to it with a mimetic response. And perhaps even more striking is the phenomenon of infectious laughter, since it is more obviously fully embodied. We laugh with our diaphragms, stomachs, throats, and the central parts of our body, not merely with our lips. When other people laugh, we are inclined to laugh too; when other people are anxious, we become anxious; and when others are at ease, this puts us at ease. These are just a few very common examples of emotional contagion or what some theorists have described as ‘automatic emotional resonance’ (Hatfield et al., 1994, p. 2). In addition, interaction partners mirror each other’s movements, anticipate them, temporally synchronize or desynchronize them, and alter them in accordance with the intricate to-and-fro glances, utterances, and gestures that occur between them (De Jaegher, 2009, p. 539). Even second-person interactions between infants and caregivers are characterized by reciprocation of affect and emotions, and infants naturally become distressed when others stop interacting with them (Striano and Reid, 2006, p. 471). This suggests that from the very beginning we modulate, and are being modulated and affected by, the expressions, gestures, and actions of the other person, and this mutual modulation impacts how we make sense of others as well as our surroundings. Parents and their infants have a common interest in the world, and the dynamics of their interaction are shaped and influenced by their mutual needs and interests. On the one hand, from the very beginning of a child’s life, other people use expressions, gestures, and other bodily movements to invite him or her into some sort of communicative activity with them. For example, a caregiver makes a pointing gesture and draws the child’s attention to something he or she wants the child to see. On the other hand, children of a very young age are aware of their ability to influence the behavior of others. After only 6 weeks of interactive experience, infants display a classic still-face effect. In response to a social partner who suddenly stops interacting, they first reduce their smiling

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and gazing, and then attempt to re-engage the social partner (Striano and Reid, 2006, p. 471). This indicates that very young children have some basic awareness of their own ability to modulate and impact others’ behavior. Thus, there is little doubt that prior to developing a capacity for theorizing or explicit inference-making, we are involved with others, and that ‘it is our joint cohabitation that secures our living consciousness for each other’ (Noë, 2009, p. 33). As a social agent involved in a social interaction, the infant is ‘at once prodder and prodded,’ and so is her caregiver (De Jaegher, 2009, p. 540). Even something as simple as a father or mother matching his or her own emotions to those of the child demonstrates that intersubjectivity is a matter of reciprocal bodily attunement (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 91). In the context of these ‘collaborative mutual involvements’ and modulations, the seriously posed question of whether other minds exist not only does not arise, but seems insane. De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) maintain that the concept of coordination can help us to make sense of this ‘natural pairing’ of bodily behavior, and recommend that we understand social cognition as an ongoing process in which the patterns of interaction can directly influence individuals’ efforts to sustain, modify, or discontinue a social encounter. They seek to uncover how ‘the physical, interactional coordination of behavior, in particular movements, relate[s] to our capacity to share meanings and to understand each other’ (p. 496). The gestures, utterances, facial expressions, and intonations that arise over the course of the interaction themselves influence what kinds of behavior coordination are likely to occur. In this way, influence occurs in both directions, from the coordination onto the unfolding of the encounter; and also from the dynamics of the encounter onto the likelihood of coordination (p. 492). The infant who reduces her smiling and gazing, and then attempts to re-engage her social partner through smiles and vocalization, is in effect inviting her social partner to communicate with her and coordinate his behavior. Whether and how this social partner responds, or simply ignores her, will shape what the infant does next. Therefore, even this extremely simple social encounter influences the persons involved and regulates their behavior so that the encounter as a whole is not reducible to individual behaviors. The individuals involved do remain autonomous interactors, but the relationship that arises between them has its own properties that constrain and modulate individual behavior. In other words, the dynamics of the interaction itself influence what each individual interactor will do next. 5.2.3 Coupled interactors and entrained affective framing patterns I believe that the affective–desiderative body is the backdrop for all social cognition, and that the basic sense of others as people that underlies the dynamics of coordination and mutual modulation described by these authors is rooted in the bodily attunement and receptivity of affective


framing. As I suggested earlier, the fact that infants are so sensitive to social cues such as eye movements and vocal cues suggests that social perception is relatively ‘smart’ from a very young age. When engaging in what I have described as the shared dance of social cognition, the infant highlights those aspects of the caregiver’s behavior, facial expression, posture, and vocalization that are relevant from the standpoint of fulfilling his or her basic needs and desires. This indicates that we are born with a primitive perspective of value and affective framing patterns that influence how we make sense of our surroundings from a very young age. While it is true that our affective framing patterns become more complex as we develop new cares and concerns and take on projects and long-term goals, I have maintained that some sort of perspective of value is present from the very beginning. In my view, the fact that infants quickly are able to discern which objects in their environment are living beings, as opposed to inanimate objects, indicates that persons have an affective and desiderative pull on us in a way that mere objects do not. This is because other persons are directly presented to us as individuals who have desires, cares, and concerns, and for whom events and objects in the world matter and have significance. Very early on, we begin to experience objects in the world, and the world as a whole, as having various salient possibilities not just for us, but also for others. (A particular object is not just something that I can intend, but also something that you or anyone else can intend if appropriately placed in the same context.) In large part this is because our desires and perspective of value influence the way in which our surroundings take on meaning for us. Other people’s desires and resulting actions have an immediate and also mediate impact on whether we attain our desires and needs. In particular, we experience others’ egocentric perspectives as distinct from our own when our desires do not correspond directly to their desires, or our desires are thwarted by others’ actions. But in addition to this, from almost the very beginning, it seems that we are always making sense of our surroundings together with other people. Infants as young as 4 months old are attuned to the eye gaze of others and use eye gaze cueing to help them process objects. In one study, infants watched a video presentation that showed an adult gazing towards one of two objects (Striano and Reid, 2006). When presented with the same objects a second time, infants looked at the uncued object for significantly longer. This indicates that the uncued object was more novel, and that infants not only followed the gaze of the adult, but also acquired information about the object at which the adult was gazing. In addition, joint attention helps young infants to recognize the relevance of social information, and they rely on eye contact and tone of voice to determine when information is intended for them. This illustrates how the sense-making activities of caregivers modulate and influence the way that infants engage with and attend to their surroundings. And it is because other conscious, living subjects have

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desires, intentions, and an egocentric perspective that they can engage us in sense-making in this way, whereas inanimate objects cannot. What others care about has some sort of pull on us and can impact our affective framing patterns by shifting our attention or reorienting our perspective of value. But just how does all of this occur? At this point, I would like to appeal to Juarrero’s (1999) discussion of complex adaptive systems theory to help conceptualize a) affective framing and b) the causal dynamics involved during coordination and mutual modulation. It is important to note that Juarrero describes the human brain as a self-organized, complex adaptive system that encodes stimuli with context-sensitive constraints. However, perhaps this metaphor can be modified to accommodate the fact that the living body as a whole is a complex adaptive system, and to reflect the sense in which mentality is essentially embodied, desiderative, and affective. Moreover, it is possible that the notions of constraint and entrainment involved in this approach can be used to flesh out what is going on in instances of coordinated interpersonal interaction. In Chapter 1, I discussed the sense in which living creatures like us are complex, self-organizing dynamic systems. We will recall that dynamic systems theory is the mathematical theory of sets of physical elements – where each such set is perceived by us as a single entity – whose states change over time in ways that depend on their current states according to rules. Thus, the collective behaviors, effects, and outputs of dynamic systems occur in some ordered pattern that can be mathematically described in relation to their present conditions. One way to describe such patterns is in terms of ontogenetic landscapes, which are constantly modified, dynamical portraits of a system and its interactions with the environment over time. Such topological portraits represent a system’s phase space or its potential over time and illustrate the coordinates which that system is more and less likely to occupy. Attractors can be thought of as valleys or basins that represent the coordinates that the system is likely to visit. The deeper the valley, the stronger the attractor’s pull. The broader the basin, the greater the variability in behavior the attractor allows. Insofar as they represent constrained pathways within self-organized phase space, attractors can be thought of as embodying the system’s second-order constraints. Separatices, on the other hand, are sharp peaks that represent the states that the system is unlikely to occupy. The steeper the walls of the separatix, the more unlikely it is that the system will make the transition to that state. According to Juarrero, prior intentions restructure this multidimensional phase space so that a new set of coordinates and new dynamics obtain. In this way, she uses the metaphor or model of ontogenetic landscapes in order to explore how agents carry out intentional action. I want to suggest that ontogenetic landscapes also can serve as a very useful way to conceptualize the sort of ‘caring contoured maps’ that constitute affective framing. These landscapes depict not simply our neurological dynamics,


but rather bodily dynamics more broadly construed. Living creatures are dynamical and adaptive beings that interact with their environment through exchanges of matter and energy. This gives rise to value-driven points of view, so that orderly pattern and structure appear where previously absent. The top-down constraints of affective framing are selectionist and reduce the number of ways in which component aspects of our lived bodily dynamics (including brain activity, heart rate, metabolic processes, circulation, etc.) can operate. As Kelso (1995) puts it, these different parts of the system ‘no longer behave independently, but are sucked into an ordered, coordination pattern’ which influences their behavior (p. 8). But unlike Kelso, who focuses on applying the principles of self-organization to the human brain, I believe that it is not simply neuron firings that entrain, but also lived bodily dynamics as a whole. This includes the operation of integrated neural–somatic systems, sensorimotor processes, hormones, the circulatory system, and the respiratory system. Brain and body are interdependent and mutually regulating, and this produces a global pattern of distributed, coherent bodily activity. Affective framing patterns thus can be understood as self-organizing structures that change the probability of a living being’s behavioral options. A living being’s specific cares and concerns can be understood as the self- organized attractors that embody the constraints constructed by the interplay between the system’s own internal (bodily) dynamics and its environment. These desire-based attractors shape the contours of the system’s overall organization and thereby constrain available alternatives such that its behavior is characteristically drawn to certain patterns (Juarrero, 1999, pp. 153–154). And, just as our essentially embodied ‘desires-for’ count as attractors on the ontogenetic landscape, our essentially embodied ‘desiresagainst’ can be understood as separatices. Initial conditions of one’s genetic makeup plus development and learning shape the contours of this bodily landscape, so that a caring-contoured topography unique to each individual is progressively constructed over time. These constrained pathways within self-organized space continue to be modified as a result of ongoing interaction between the living system and its environment, and consciousness and meaning emerge out of the entrainment and self-organization of these lived bodily dynamics. Thus, in the language of complex dynamic systems theory, one might say that affective framing carves out a special phase space and thereby sets the scope of ‘rather than’ alternatives from which the agent selects (Juarrero, 1999, p. 181). A creature’s desiderative bodily feelings and overall bodily comportment constitute its current state and constrain its future activity and potential for engaging with the environment over time. As already noted, the fact that we live in a world alongside other living creatures seems to be one of the most important aspects of the human condition. We interact not with an environment consisting solely of inanimate objects, but rather one filled with other living beings that are more


or less sentient. Might these metaphors from dynamic systems theory help us to make sense of the sort of coordination in affective framing I have proposed? As the behavior of individual interactors becomes coordinated in the way De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) describe, a more complex organization emerges with novel properties that the isolated individuals lacked. Being engaged in a second-person interaction reduces the number of ways in which the individual parties can behave and also gives them new functional roles. Now that they are ‘components’ of a larger system, the individual interactors cannot do certain things (such as break off a conversation mid-sentence without explanation), and the interaction process as a whole modulates the behavior of each party involved. One might say that the larger dynamic framework (the interpersonal interaction) in which they are embedded redefines them, modulates their bodily dynamics, and shapes how they can and are likely to act. On the other hand, the relational whole also has a qualitatively different repertoire of states and behaviors, and thus has greater potential than the previously uncorrelated ‘parts.’ (To see this, think about how much progress can be made during joint projects or brainstorming sessions; more mundanely, consider the fact that a genuine conversation requires at least two interactors.) As De Jaegher and Di Paolo point out, causal relations flow in both directions: part (interactor) to whole (interaction) and whole (interaction) to part (interactor). They describe participatory sense-making as ‘the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own’ (2007, p. 497). What I wish to propose is that, once two interactors become part of a coupled system, their bodily dynamics and affective framing patterns become entrained to some extent. During second-person interaction, one person’s expressions, behaviors, and desires restructure the phase space of the interaction process as a whole, so that the other individual’s desires, patterns of attention, and point of view are altered. Insofar as they are correlated and coordinated, two interactors are made interdependent. The interpersonal interaction as a whole causally affects and constrains the behavior of each party involved in the interaction. Coordinated interaction is characterized by the entrainment of affective framing patterns in interactors’ lived bodily dynamics, so that not only intentional action, but also intentional interaction, is a complex dynamic process. The many examples of so-called ‘motor resonance,’ bodily reverberation, affective transformation, bodily attunement, and bodily coordination to which many theorists have drawn attention are indicative of this. During second-person interaction, the cares and concerns of each party shift, the bodily dynamics of individual interactors exhibit ‘phase attraction,’ and each one’s ‘caring-contoured map’ is modified as a result. One should understand this as a process of coming to see oneself as a


person among other persons, with whom one shares a common form of life,3 and by whom one’s perspective and behavior can be adjusted and (sometimes) transformed. 5.2.4 The pull of others’ desires Phenomenologically speaking, it is easy enough to recognize that other conscious beings arouse one’s embodied cares and concerns and have the capacity to alter one’s sense-making in a way that inanimate objects do not. To see this, consider the fact that when complete strangers on the street talk to you or ask for directions, it is difficult to ignore them. Korsgaard (1996) has drawn attention to this strong sort of hold that other people have on us. Just as I have maintained that the perspective of the living organism is a source of meaning and value, she maintains that humanity is the source of all reasons and values. On her broadly Kantian view, it is the reflective structure of human consciousness that gives rise to moral obligation insofar as it enables us to obligate ourselves. But just how is it that we obligate one another? One might suppose that rational consistency alone requires that just as I regard my own humanity as a source of value, I must regard your humanity in the same way. As Korsgaard points out, however, although rational consistency can require me to acknowledge that your desires have the status of reasons for you in the same way that mine do for me, it cannot force me to share in your reasons and desires. One might understand desires and reasons as a sort of private property, and suppose that we need some special reason (e.g., the fact that we are friends or have signed a contract) to take the reasons of others into account. Thus, rational consistency alone cannot be what forces us to share our reasons. At this point, Korsgaard notes that if others are going to obligate us, we must be conscious of them and they must be able to intrude on our reflections. People might think that desires and reasons are private because they suppose that consciousness is private. But, appealing to the work of Wittgenstein, she argues that just as the idea of a private language is inconsistent with the normativity of meaning, the idea of private reasons is inconsistent with the normativity of reasons. The normative demands of meaning and reasons are demands that we make on ourselves and each other. This suggests that human intentional consciousness is not private, and that at any moment others can intrude into my consciousness by talking to me or calling out my name. As Korsgaard points out, if I hear my name, this makes me stop in my tracks. Now, if I walk on, I will be ignoring and slighting the other person, and this will take a ‘certain active resistance’ (1996, p. 97) on my part. It seems, then, that by calling out my name this other person has obligated me and given me a reason to stop. This person is now in a real sense a law to me, so that rather than needing a reason to take the desires of this person into account, it seems I need a reason not to.

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Korsgaard is right to deny that desires and concerns are a kind of private property and that we each act on our desires without paying attention to the desires of others. For, as she points out, we stop to give others directions, hold open doors, step aside, and respond to cries for help. My aim is not to provide a full critical discussion of Korsgaard’s account of normativity or morality, but rather to draw attention to some of her core insights here. First, intentional consciousness is not private, because the space in which meanings and reasons exist is a space that we occupy together. As noted previously, we participate jointly in sense-making, and participatory sense-making is made possible in large part by the fact that mental states are essentially embodied and out in the world for all to see. Second, there is a sense in which humans serve as an end or a law for one another. According to Korsgaard, we are laws to one another insofar as we are persons with reflective capacities. Note, though, that in my view even infants are in some way a ‘law’ to others, just as others are ‘laws’ to them. Moreover, as even Korsgaard is willing to admit, the desires and concerns of non-human animals, beings without reflective capacities, likewise have a pull on us. She notes that ‘the cries of an animal are no more mere noise than the words of a person,’ and that these cries give us a reason to change its condition (1996, p.106). In addition, there is empirical evidence that suggests that non-human animals’ desires and intentions have a strong modulating influence on the behavior of other animals. Bekoff (1999) describes play as one of the ways in which many mammalian and avian species negotiate agreements to engage in cooperative social interactions. Through the ‘bow’ and other play markers, animals communicate their desire or intention to play. Since, in the context of play, animals use action patterns that are used in contexts of aggression or mating, they must finetune their ongoing motor patterns so that it is clear to the other animals that they want to play (rather than fight or mate). Thus, it appears that animals engaged in social play use specific signals to modulate the effects of behavior patterns usually performed in other contexts (Bekoff, 1999, p. 118). They use the bow to foster cooperation and thereby modulate the behavior of other animals. This reveals some sort of motor reverberation, ‘pairing,’ or bodily attunement among non-human animals similar to that found among humans during primary intersubjectivity. In addition, it suggests that reflective capacities must not be required for living organisms to be a ‘law’ to one another. Of course, I do not mean ‘law’ in the very same way that Kant or Korsgaard does. I am not, in this context, making any substantive claims about the moral status of non-human minded animals. What I do mean is that from the very beginning, the desires of others have a sort of pull on us, just as our desires have a pull on them. It is plausible to suppose that we have this sort of ‘pull’ on one another as a result of being loci of desiderative bodily feelings. Once we understand living organisms as a source of meaning and


value, it makes sense to suppose that desiring something lends it value not just for us, but for all conscious, intentional beings. As Sartre might put it, there is more than one perspective of value looking out on the world, and others’ perspectives inevitably influence and modulate our perspective. In some sense, this recognition that one’s perspective is just ‘one among others’ amounts to being ‘epistemologically dethroned’ (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 65), but it also involves the immediate sense that one shares a world with others who have the power to impact the way in which one makes sense of things. This occurs by way of attunement of bodily expressions, ‘motor resonance,’ perceptual–motor coupling, coordination of bodily comportment, etc. These sorts of communicative, embodied interactions allow the desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing to shift, so that our desires and patterns of attention are adjusted (albeit sometimes only slightly) in accordance with what others desire. Perhaps this helps to explain why, when others smile at you, it is difficult to avoid smiling back at them, even if you don’t particularly like them. For the infant, child, and even young adult, there is a constant reorienting and adjusting of affective framing patterns as caregivers attempt to get them to care about and attend to specific things (e.g. looking over here, smiling, sharing one’s toys, completing one’s homework). On the other hand, one quickly learns that one has the power to adjust the affective framing and reorient the attention of others in accordance with what one desires. As self and other engage in a play of mutual modulation, they recognize one another as egocentrically situated loci of desiderative feelings, each with an ability to prompt a response from the other. I have argued that this capacity for mutual modulation has much to do with our ability to alter, and sometimes even transform, one another’s affective framing patterns.

5.3

Context, social roles, and participatory sense-making

In the spirit of work done by theorists such as Gallagher, Hutto, and Ratcliffe, I have claimed that there is strong reason to think that our usual way of being in the world is affective–desiderative (rooted in desiderative bodily feelings) and pragmatic (characterized by interaction grounded in environmental and contextual factors) rather than merely mentalistic or conceptual (essentially characterized by explanation or prediction). In the previous section, I focused on the basic capacities that underlie social cognition, and maintained that affective framing and the dynamics of mutual modulation play an integral role in primary intersubjectivity. But, of course, these basic capacities do not disappear as one gets older, but instead become more sophisticated. In this section, I again build on the work of the theorists mentioned above to elaborate and unpack the sense in which more sophisticated modes of social cognition are essentially embodied, affective–desiderative, and enactive.

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5.3.1 Situational understanding and affective framing Gallagher has described how secondary intersubjectivity builds on the primary perceptual and interactive capabilities that constitute primary intersubjectivity. Beginning at around 12 months of age, infants start to use both related behaviors performed by the agent as well as the causal constraints of the situation to understand a gesture or action. As young children begin to recognize context as significant and to comprehend how surrounding situational factors help to define the actions of others, shared or joint attention emerges as a central element in social understanding. In a non-conceptual and non-theorizing way, infants are able to see bodily movement as an expression of emotion and also as goal-directed intentional action. By the 18th month, many children can re-enact and complete goal-directed behavior that an observed subject does not complete (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 88). It appears that given the specific context and the other person’s actions, they can see what the person wants to do, and that this involves a perceptual capacity that is ‘fast, automatic, irresistible, and highly stimulus-driven’ (Scholl and Tremoulet, 2000, p. 299). As a more sophisticated mode of intersubjectivity begins to emerge, individuals develop a more advanced form of situational understanding and an awareness of social roles. Various theorists have pointed out the way in which social encounters are pragmatically embedded, so that we understand others in large part through the pragmatic circumstances that define their particular roles and define our relationship to them. Ratcliffe (2007), for example, rightly points out that the commonsense social world that serves as a background for action and thought is not the world of physics, but instead a world of norms, conventions, and various theoretical and practical activities. Drawing on the work of Heidegger and Gurwitsch, Ratcliffe maintains that understanding others is embedded in our practical dealings with a shared world, and that those who share a common environment of standardized equipment typically have a rich situational understanding of what they and others are doing. Moreover, others often are encountered as occupiers of distinct social roles, which involve a range of behavioral norms. Shared situations, through which we encounter each other in our respective roles, operate as a context in which we are able to interpret others’ behavior and successfully interact with them (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 76). Likewise, Stanghellini (2004) maintains that individuals in a given cultural context rely on an ‘interpretive order,’ which he describes as a set of interpretive procedures shared in a tacit, undiscussed manner by members of that culture (p. 67). This allows individuals to understand the conventional and socially derived meanings of things, and also to recognize context-relevant cues that can help them make sense of others’ actions. In this way, to a large extent, social understanding rests on background knowledge about social roles, social norms, and the functions of various artifacts, such as telephones, computers, and cars. Such artifacts afford


certain kinds of action, and which action opportunities they offer is integral to our sense of what they are. I have suggested that this notion of affordance is linked to our cares and concerns, so that the meaning that a particular object has for us has much to do with the desiderative bodily feelings through which we encounter it. When shared norms are in place and we share a common situation with others, we find it relatively easy to understand others. Labor is divided according to certain roles, signs cue particular actions, and there are particular patterns of activity that regularly occur in specific social situations. The assumption is that others inhabit the same social world we do, so that ‘as one coordinates one’s activities with others, one need not attribute intentional states but can instead work on the implicit assumption that they will do “what people are supposed to do” in that kind of environment’ (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 91). Indeed, as Clark (1997) points out, one of the functions of human culture is ‘to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political, and institutional constraints’ (Clark, 1997, p. 180). Utilizing regularities and patterns in the external environment helps to reduce demands on our internal cognitive resources by giving us a sort of script which outlines ‘what is to be done next’ in the situation at hand, and thereby regulates activity. Practical familiarity with a shared context makes inference-making, theorizing, simulation, or reliance on some internalized belief–desire psychology completely unnecessary in most cases. As Ratcliffe puts it, usually ‘you need not worry about what is hidden in people’s heads because the guidance system they are following is out there in the world for all to see’ (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 117). I agree that shared environmental structures do serve as a sort of scaffolding for social cognition, and in my view this is largely because such structures provide a shared setting in which many different individuals pursue much the same goals and projects. Here the relatively ‘smart’ social perception afforded by affective framing is supplemented by background context and social norms. One might say that we assume that in a given context or situation, others want much the same things that we want, and that having shared norms in place facilitates the process of making sense of others. When we posit reasons for action, this often takes the form of simple assertions about the features of a situation that are commonly understood. But again, to say that they are commonly understood is another way of saying that to a large extent, others want the same things we do, and use the very same sorts of tools to achieve these goals. We understand others’ goals and desires in relation to the very same network of social roles and projects that provides the framework for our own goals and desires. For example, ‘many strategic interactions in sport involve a practical, situation-specific grasp of “what is to be done” ’ (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 115), and this immediate grasp of the situation at hand involves the recognition that others playing the sport want the very same thing you want: to score

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points and win! When one attunes oneself to a situation and participates in a shared regulatory framework, predicting what other people will do next is quick and spontaneous. This is not to say that relying on situational understanding always is sufficient for social cognition. Ratcliffe (2007) rightly points out that in cases where the designation of roles and norms is not sufficient for understanding and explanation, it is likely that knowledge of person-specific character traits and dispositions (likely based on past observation and experience) helps us to interpret others. In other words, at this point more specific knowledge about other people’s desires and concerns come into play. By virtue of our understanding of others’ affective framing patterns, our familiarity with others’ dispositions based on our past encounters with them, and whatever knowledge of social roles and context is available, we are able to understand what they do. Do narratives sometimes also play a role in social cognition? Narrative competency begins developmentally when the child begins to gain language and comprehend stories, and can be an important part of developing an understanding of social situations. Hutto (2004) has maintained that through hearing narratives we all learn what sort of behavior is to be expected in a particular context, and it is these common expectations that enable us to understand one another. In most situations we know what to expect from other people and rely on shared norms of readability, and this ‘obviates the need to employ any mediating knowledge or theoretical principles’ (Hutto, 2004, p. 558). According to Hutto, narratives play two key roles in interpersonal understanding. First, they shape our expectations by making us familiar with a wide range of ordinary situations and ordinary reasons for acting. In this way, folk psychology is an instrument of culture, and through storytelling we learn not just how people often do act, but also how they should act, or how society expects them to act. Second, narratives function as ‘normalizing explanations’ that can help us make sense of behavior that seems odd or perplexing. What is crucial to note is that such narratives come into play only when another person deviates from our expectations, and that when things are as they should be we have no need to appeal to narratives. If a situation is familiar and we have enough background information there will be little need to predict or explain what another person does. Moreover, narratives are very different from the sorts of theoretical explanations that we find in the natural sciences, which involve a deductive structure, general laws, and known regularities. This is in large part because action explanation goes beyond simply chronicling what has happened during a particular time frame, and involves discriminating and selecting which specific event, under which description, is the important one for purposes of explanation (Hutto, 2004, p. 562). What is crucial for my purposes is to note that both the situational understanding that Ratcliffe describes, as well as this capacity for constructing and making sense of narratives that Hutto emphasizes, are rooted partially


in our capacity for affective framing. Earlier in this chapter I suggested that primary intersubjectivity, which involves mutual body-attunement and sensory perception, requires the ability to highlight salient aspects of others’ bodily expressions, behaviors, and gestures. In short, individuals must get a handle on which aspects of the social situation to pay attention to, and desire-based emotions are what solve this ‘frame problem’ for social cognition. There is a sense in which our bodies reverberate with those salient aspects of others’ behavior, and this alteration in our patterns of bodily attunement alerts us to the desires of others. Building on this discussion, what I wish to argue now is that just as perceptions of movement and expression in the other’s body are affectively framed, so too are the processes of contextual understanding. To see this, note that to achieve situational understanding and acknowledge social roles one must be able to pick out salient features of one’s situation, the relevant tasks that need to be performed in that situation, and how people are likely to relate to each other. This requires a basic sense of the context in which one finds oneself, a sense of the desires and concerns people in that context are likely to have, and an ability to select the background knowledge that is relevant to the social situation one is trying to understand. Because affective frames involve various patterns of discrimination, focus, and salience, they indicate import and help individuals to sift through this information. In addition, our familiarity with social contexts is built up through bodily attunement and the development of affective framing patterns, which allow us to readily detect relevant features of our social surroundings. As I will discuss further in the next chapter, because autistic subjects lack a well-tuned awareness of context, they have difficulty picking up on the relevant shared norms and roles that most of us rely on to regulate interaction. It seems clear that narrative capacities likewise depend heavily on our capacity for affective framing. When constructing a narrative, one must select the appropriate events, order them within a temporal series, and discern their relevant properties in order to make them intelligible. And, as Hutto (2004) points out, presenting a narrative requires identifying which events are significant, why, and under what description. Exactly which details are relevant will vary from context to context and, in my view, according to the desires and cares of the person doing the explaining. The sort of practical, bodily responsiveness involved in affective framing enables us to highlight features of the shared environment that are salient, identify the relevant details in a given context, and thereby provide an explanation of what another person has done. In this way, the stories that we tell are not simply the result of observing what others are objectively doing, but rather partially constituted by desiderative affect. Our interpretations of others are enriched by the bodily feelings we sew into them (Ratcliffe, 2005b, p. 188), so that affective framing serves as a background bodily orientation through


which we actively engage in interpersonal understanding. In addition, as I will discuss further below, much of what other people are doing, feeling, and thinking in particular social situations is influenced by the social interaction itself, and cannot be understood in isolation from the actual, contextsensitive social structure or dynamics of the interaction. Thus, these more sophisticated modes of intersubjectivity, like primary intersubjectivity, are fundamentally affective, enactive, and interactive. 5.3.2 Enactive social cognition and situational understanding In Section 5.2, building on the work of De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) and others, I argued that social understanding emerges as a product of embodied, second-person social interactions, which occurs through a process of coordination and mutual modulation. Living, lived bodies resonate with other living, lived bodies in a way in which they do not resonate with inanimate objects. This is in part due to the coordination and mutual modulation activity that takes place during second-person interaction, whereby our affective framing patterns are continuously being influenced and reshaped by others’ desires and concerns. Of course, as I stated earlier, this sort of bodily attunement and mutual modulation is not limited to the lives of infants, but rather grows more sophisticated over time. As we get older, our felt needs and desires become more wide-ranging and varied and we develop a range of projects that involve a great many aims and goals. Many, or even most, of these goals require us to interact with others, to exchange information with them, and to enlist their assistance. And typically these goals are undertaken within a culture with various norms, social roles, and behavioral expectations that allow us to develop an understanding of social situations and anticipate what people are likely to do in these situations. As our desires and goals become more complex, so too do our forms of interaction and social cognition. Now I wish to explore briefly the way in which situational understanding and second-person interaction are co-constitutive (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 179). That is, just as most of our interactions are structured by shared situations, interactions likewise can serve to create shared situations that then act as a basis for mutual interpretation. Pre-established situations and social settings are not set in stone, but instead can be reshaped through interpersonal interaction. De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) describe how patterns of coordination can directly influence the meaning and significance of a situation for the individuals involved. For example, during a dialogue over a low-quality conference line with a short time delay, pauses between turns are unavoidable. However, even though both parties are aware of these time delays, they remain unsure of the cause of any particular pause, and so may be unsure of its potential significance (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007, p. 497). If one individual does not respond immediately, the other, anticipating a disagreement, may attempt to rephrase what she has just said. In this


way, the particular dynamics of the interaction (in this case, its temporal coordination) can alter the way in which individuals make sense of the encounter, even though this change is not intended by either party. In such a case, one might say that the shift in meaning is created by the interaction dynamics themselves, and not simply by the individuals. When coordination breaks down, one individual’s misinterpretation of the other’s intentions can provoke a response that is itself misinterpreted, leading toward an overall breakdown in interaction. Here the interaction dynamics serve to shape and modulate both parties’ situational understanding. Each individual’s behavior influences the behavior of the other, so that the way each person understands the situation is mediated by the sense-making activities of the other person(s) involved in the encounter. Indeed, there are a wide range of examples that illustrate how, through the coordination of intentional activity, individuals’ sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making emerge that are not available to each individual alone (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). It is important to note that, at this sophisticated level of interpersonal interaction, participatory sense-making arises in a particular social context in which individuals may be performing specific tasks, undertaking projects, and fulfilling social roles. Thus, it seems clear that situational and cultural factors influence the way that interactions unfold and the degree and type of behavior coordination and joint sense-making that is possible. Still, the meaning of the social situation emerges as a product of the whole interaction between them and depends on their patterns of bodily coordination and mutual modulation. Thus, even in complex social settings where norms and roles play a part in social cognition, understanding others still has much to do with bodily attunement, ‘motor resonance,’ and perceptual–motor coupling. Just as a smiling face invites us to smile back, somebody grasping a knife and cutting up a carrot in a sense invites us to join in that activity with them. We involuntarily attune to it with a mimetic response, and our patterns of bodily attunement shift. Of course, in many cases, we do not actually mirror other actions, because these motor impulses are suppressed at the spinal level. However, there is still a sense in which the other person’s desires and actions tend to engage us at a bodily level. Hutto (2004) notes that we often find ourselves adopting bodily stances similar to those of others when we take an interest in their projects (p. 551). And perceptual–motor coupling is particularly evident in cases of intricate bodily coordination, such as dance or sport, where there is a great deal of bodily attunement and mutual modulation. Examples of coordination include motor mimicry, matched or coordinated body positions, and complementary movements or gestures. Such mutual modulation also is evident in kissing, where someone’s being a ‘good kisser,’ just like being a good dancer, is largely a matter of his or her being appropriately attuned to another’s body by way of

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motor mimicry and coordinated bodily positions. When a young man once advised my friend Audra to ‘follow the rhythm’ during a make-out session, surely what he was talking about was bodily attunement and coordination of lip and mouth movement. However, it is clear that sport, dancing, and kissing are not modulated by the assignment of propositional attitudes, for this would make substantial demands on our cognitive resources and likely would make these activities become awkward and uncoordinated. Instead, these are instances in which an action is directly and spontaneously apprehended, and one immediately responds with a similar or complementary gesture that allows the other person to see that one has recognized the meaning of her action (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 141). While Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) describe this development of a shared context of bodily attunement as a kind of primitive dialogue, I find this characterization overly intellectualistic. Because dancing captures the sort of bodily coordination, reciprocity, and interactivity crucially involved in bodily attunement, I have maintained that it serves as a much better basic metaphor – and not just an example – for social cognition. In many instances of coordination, the sense-making activity of one party orients the attention of the other, so that in effect one individual leads his or her interaction partner in a shared dance. For example, when one interactor visually scans the room in search of a lost object, and the other grabs his attention and points to it, the sense-making activity of one person modulates the sense-making of the other. As a result, the two individuals are able to participate in an act of joint sense-making. Another example that De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) present is that of Janet, who stands in front of an open window and takes an appreciative breath of fresh air in such a way as to make sure that John notices it. In their view, this is a communicative act, whereby Janet is trying to adjust ‘John’s cognitive and affective take on the world’ so that he sees the world in the way that she currently sees it (p. 499). Janet wants John to attend to a particular part of the world and notice certain things that are visible to both of them, ‘to engage imaginatively with certain possibilities which these things present,’ and ‘to frame the visible world in a certain way’ (p. 499). During such orientation, John does not relate to Janet as a detached observer, but rather is directly affected by Janet’s intentions. Because his sense-making activities are heavily modulated by hers, there is no need for explicit deciphering. One might say that Janet is trying to get John to adjust his affective framing patterns, so that coordination proceeds by way of bodily attunement. John understands Janet’s intentions insofar as his own perspective and patterns of affective framing are influenced and shifted by Janet during the encounter. Likewise, during a game of charades, all of the interactors must adjust their sense-making so that it converges towards the ‘right’ gesture and the ‘right’ interpretation. The meaning of gestures is jointly constructed and transformed during the game. Here one’s ‘understanding of the other person


is constituted within the perception-action loops that define the various things that [one] is doing with in or in response to others’ (Gallagher, 2008b, p. 168). And this is made possible, of course, partly by the fact that people have common goals and make themselves quite receptive to the desires of others. During second-person interaction, other people’s desires and cares impact how we make sense of things and shift our affective framing patterns. To see this, note that John understands Janet’s desires, thoughts, and emotions in large part because of the impact of her expressive behavior and action on his perspective and patterns of attention, and because of the joint sense-making that unfolds. His affective framing processes are shifted over the course of the interaction in accordance with Janet’s desires. This change in affective framing patterns is constituted by changes in his bodily dynamics, which goes a long way in helping him to understand Janet’s perspective. Thus, the reason why social interactions often seem so transparent and direct is that they engage us at a basic bodily level. As I maintained in Section 5.2.3, once two interactors become part of a coupled system, their bodily dynamics and affective framing patterns become entrained to some extent. This is evidenced not just by ‘motor resonance,’ but also by galvanic skin responses, hormone fluctuations, and changes in heart rate and blood pressure. Classroom interactions are another striking example of participatory sense-making. Certainly both I and my students understand what others are doing in the classroom at least partly through an appeal to social roles. As the person occupying the ‘professor’ role, I am supposed to perform certain behaviors; and, as individuals occupying the ‘student’ role, they are supposed to perform certain behaviors. Thus, there is a framework of practical goals and shared concerns that structures our interaction and makes others’ actions intelligible to us. But, in addition, there is a sense in which the very way in which the encounter unfolds structures interpersonal understanding. What occurs during classroom interaction, including gestures, utterances, facial expressions, and intonation, can steer the encounter and either facilitate its continuation or cause it to break down. If I make a joke and my students laugh, there is a coordination of behavior, and this in turn affects the way that the encounter unfolds. If coordination fails to occur, for example because the students misinterpret or misunderstand my joke, their utterances and gestures may express perplexity or frustration. In that case, these relational dynamics then influence the degree of behavior coordination that is likely to occur during the next few minutes of our class session. The interaction process in the classroom itself takes on a sort of autonomy, so that it is not reducible to individual actions; indeed, although individuals do influence classroom dynamics, classroom dynamics, in turn, modulate and constrain individual behavior. Classroom dynamics characterized by mutual respect and good humor make it far less likely that any

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one individual will act out or speak rudely to another student. However, in classrooms where communication has broken down and there is little or no coordination of sense-making activity, there is much less rapport between the parties involved and a much higher incidence of misunderstanding and social conflict. As the leader orchestrating this interaction, I attempt to ensure that the students’ perspective matches my own, that they care about learning the material and want to be actively involved in class discussion. I always hope that, to some extent, my own enthusiasm and love of philosophy is contagious. I use gestures, irony, humor, and tone of voice to invite them into a sort of dialogue with me and their fellow classmates. A good philosophy discussion becomes a sort of social dance in which many actors participate and there are fluid patterns of communication and response. In cases with particularly high levels of participation, sense-making becomes a shared activity and students in the classroom engage in what might even be described as a process of joint cognition. However, if we fail to achieve this sort of coordination because, for example, one of us responds to the other’s attempts at humor with blank stares, the social encounter may begin to break down. The way we attempt to repair our interaction in order to remain a ‘coupled system’ is through a re-attunement of movements, expressions, gestures, or utterances (De Jaegher, 2009, p. 540). As parties involved in a group conversation, we frequently must readjust our individual sense-making activities and coordinate our communicative efforts. It seems overwhelmingly clear that only beings with essentially embodied desiderative feelings can coordinate their sense-making activities in this way.

5.4 Conclusion I have maintained that our primary mode of social cognition is secondperson interaction, which occurs through a process of coordination and mutual modulation of sense-making activities, and is, as it were, a dance of intentional conscious agents. I also have argued that this process is enactive and fundamentally affective–desiderative. But how is it that we understand others who are engaged in very different activities from us or who are experiencing very different emotions? (Gallagher, 2008b, p. 169). It seems that in some cases, we do approach social cognition from a somewhat detached standpoint and that our understanding of others’ thoughts and desires is limited. For example, we sometimes observe what strangers are doing from a distance and have no direct interpersonal engagement or communication with them. In third-person interaction, where there is not much bodily coordination or mutual modulation, and there is no background social context to help us make sense of others’ actions, our understanding of them may very well be somewhat opaque. In short, if opportunities for bodily attunement are unavailable, and there is little in the way of context or


cultural norms to assist us in making sense of what others are doing, our understanding may very well be very limited. In most cases, though, we do have some contextual cues at our disposal and are operating in some sort of shared social situation. Thus, we often can understand some of what others are doing through an appeal to cultural norms and familiar social structures that provide a framework for the desires and concerns they are likely to have. And, to some extent, we view what others are doing in particular situations through the lens of what is significant and important to us. For example, when I am at the grocery store, I tend to think that others, like me, want to load up their shopping carts with food and get out of the store as quickly as possible. Thus, I regard their behavior from the standpoint of my own desires and concerns, and in a sense project my own desires onto others. (Of course, this makes me highly susceptible to misinterpreting others’ behavior, for it is quite possible that their desires are quite different from mine. For example, although I assume that everybody else feels the same way as I do about grocery shopping, the fact of the matter is that some people might very well enjoy their time there. My inability to appreciate this may make it difficult to make sense of their aimless meandering through the grocery aisles.) What I mean to suggest is that, when we observe others in third-person interactions, a number of different conceptualizations and interpretations of what they are doing are always possible. We tend to interpret other people’s actions according to a particular world view and patterns of attention and response that are informed by our capacities, concerns, and preferences (Ratcliffe, 2005b, p. 191). Thus, just as we approach second-person interaction in terms of essentially embodied communicative and behavioral possibilities, and in terms of the sorts of possibilities for sense-making and action that others afford us, we likewise approach third-person interaction from the standpoint of what is important to us. Insofar as desiderative bodily feelings shape the manner in which others appear to us, they structure our understanding of others and allow us to discriminate quickly which aspects of a social situation to focus on during third-person social cognition. In this way, affective framing assists us even when we are engaged in more detached, spectatorial modes of social cognition. Moreover, I believe that third-person interaction, which involves observing other people and attempting to understand their thoughts, actions, and feelings, is dependent on our capacities for enactive, second-person interaction. To see this, note that in many instances of thirdperson interaction, when we observe somebody act in a particular way, our own kinesthetic system may be activated in a way that mirrors the perceived action. We see a stranger reach for a box of cereal, for example, and our own motor system is activated in a way that mirrors reaching behavior. Even though here the person may be a perfect stranger who is not trying to communicate with us or adjust our perspective, there is some degree of behavior coordination and modulation. We understand others’ desires and intentions

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in large part because our bodies reverberate with the gestures, behaviors, movements, and postures of other people. What’s more, observation at a distance can quickly transform into second-person interaction, such as when the woman at the far end of the grocery aisle suddenly becomes the person we have to navigate around to get to the cashier. Most social cognition does involve some element of face-to-face, second-person interaction. And in all cases, as Gallagher points out, the other person’s body is not first a field of expression to thematize visually, but rather something that intentionally and consciously interacts with one’s own body (2005b, p. 98). So what would happen if an individual with a deficit in affective framing capacities attempted to understand others’ mental states and behavior and uncover the social meaning of their actions? In my view, without this form of ‘smart’ perception, he would not be able to engage in bodily attunement, and so would not either ‘move’ or be ‘moved’ in the appropriate way by the desires and concerns of others. He would be out-of-step, and out-of-rhythm, like a clumsy dancer. His own sense-making and attention would not be influenced and modulated by the desires and concerns of others, and he would lack the complex patterns of bodily attunement that enable various forms of social communication. The bodily dynamics of such an individual would be inadequately coordinated or coupled with those of his interaction partner(s), and as a result he would be less equipped to engage in participatory sensemaking. In addition, his capacity to highlight some contextual features as more salient than others would be diminished. In the next chapter, I will explore how impaired social cognition, which appears in schizophrenia and psychopathy and is the core deficit in autism, can be understood along these lines, as the result of a diminished capacity for affective framing and essentially embodied attunement. I believe that the discussion of the present chapter lends strong support to the claim that social cognition is not ever without desiderative affect and that it is a process that essentially engages both body and mind. Insofar as our desiderative bodily feelings constitute our world view and provide us with interpretive lenses, they help to solve the frame problem (as outlined previously) and thereby play an integral role in our capacity for understanding others. From our earliest days, affective processes constitute a conscious intentional bodily response that calls attention to those features of the environment that affect our well-being, interests, goals, and desires. Only through the living and lived body can an individual affectively apprehend particular aspects of her surroundings as significant, and this apprehension of significance is crucial for cognition. Without it, creatures like us would find it impossible to interact with and understand others. Two disembodied Cartesian souls would find it just as metaphysically impossible to interact with each other socially as it is metaphysically impossible for them to interact causally.4

6 Breakdowns in Embodied Emotive Cognition

6.0

Introduction

In the previous chapters, I have argued that our essentially embodied desirebased emotions and affective framing processes constitute essential parts of the necessary foundation for our sense of self, our ability to engage in moral evaluation, and our capacity for social cognition. It follows naturally from this account that impaired affective framing results in disruptions to these cognitive processes. Because desire-based emotions and the bodily feelings they essentially involve are linked to value and significance, diminished emotion yields a world stripped of much of its felt importance. As I argued in Chapters 4 and 5, it seems that there is no such thing as fully functional cognition stripped of affect, because the absence of emotion constitutes a state of ‘cognitive and behavioral paralysis’ and is likely the mark of a ‘sick soul’ (Ratcliffe, 2005b, p. 188). This chapter explores some of the behavioral dynamics and symptomatology of schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism and discusses how these disorders can be understood in terms of attenuated or disrupted affective framing processes and diminished levels of bodily attunement. I believe that psychiatric disorders can shed light on how the mind works and how healthy subjects develop a sense of self, make decisions, engage in moral evaluation, and understand others’ behavior. As Baron-Cohen (1999) points out, ‘in psychiatric conditions, aspects of the mind malfunction, revealing the joints more easily’ (p. 176). In the case of schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism, ‘revealing the joints’ means exploring the way in which affect and desiderative bodily feelings ordinarily are bound up with attention and cognition. When affective framing capacities are impaired or underdeveloped, this has a serious impact on subjects’ ability to make sense of themselves and their world. In my view, the disruptions in the sense of self that are characteristic of schizophrenia, the impairments in decisionmaking and moral judgment that are characteristic of psychopathy, and the deficits in social cognition that are characteristic of autism, all are rooted in 185

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disrupted bodily attunement and a breakdown in embodied emotional consciousness. Of course, it would be a mistake to overlook the extent to which these different cognitive functions are interrelated or to suppose that all of the symptoms associated with a particular psychopathology can be traced to a breakdown in one specific cognitive function. Indeed, the discussion of this chapter will reveal the way in which one’s sense of self, one’s ability to make decisions and moral assessments, and one’s capacity for social cognition are fully intertwined. A deficit in one area of functioning typically has an impact on the other functions, leading to a range of symptoms for each disorder. It is important to acknowledge that each of these disorders probably does not form a homogeneous class, and that any description of the associated disturbances will not apply to all cases. For this reason, I will simply focus on characteristic symptoms and behavioral manifestations. My aim is not to establish diagnostic criteria for these disorders or to suggest that all cases labeled ‘schizophrenia,’ ‘psychopathy,’ or ‘autism’ are the same. Nor do I wish to contest the notion that sometimes these labels are misapplied by psychologists, psychiatrists, and lay people. Instead, I hope to show that my proposed account of cognition as essentially embodied, affective, and enactive can help us to reach a better understanding of the common symptoms of these disorders. If it is true that schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism all can be traced to an affective framing deficit or disruption, it would make sense to suppose that there is some commonality with respect to symptomatology. And, indeed, this is precisely what we find. I will argue that the symptomatology associated with these disorders not only is consistent with my proposed account of affective framing, but also lends empirical support to it. The available evidence shows that without affective framing to ‘imbue [the world] with value and light it up as arena of cognitive and behavioral possibilities’ (Ratcliffe, 2005b, p. 188), various modes of cognition begin to falter. The discussion of this chapter also serves to reveal some of the deep flaws surrounding what I have described as a ‘cognitivist’ approach to cognition. Remember that this sort of approach overlooks the intricate way in which cognition and emotion are intertwined and the extent to which our understanding of the world is a product of our embodied, desiderative engagement. What is striking is that when affect and desiderative bodily feelings are left out of cognition, as many cognitivist accounts seem to recommend, what we get is not a stable sense of self, enlightened decision-making, wise moral judgments, or effective social interaction. Instead, there is psychopathology. In some sense, schizophrenia can be seen as the real-life human embodiment of the ‘view from nowhere’ sometimes recommended by philosophers and scientists (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 22). Here the subject adopts a third-person perspective toward his bodily sensations, mental states, and other people. Divorced from his bodily self and lacking in desiderative

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bodily feelings, the schizophrenic subject becomes more like the ‘pure self’ that Strawson (1997) posits. But this results not in self-knowledge, but rather in the fragmentation of reality and a loss of contact with other people. Likewise, psychopathy might be viewed as the real-life embodiment of the abstract moral reasoner who relies not on his emotions and desires, but instead on rules and principles, to determine whether an action is morally right or wrong. However, here we see that a failure to be guided by cares and concerns makes it to difficult to develop long-term values of one’s own, and thus makes it difficult to understand how such interests and concerns could play a significant role in the lives of others. While psychopaths are able to recognize moral concepts in an intellectual sense and can become quite adept at the abstract application of rules and principles, they lack genuine understanding of the role that moral concerns play in the lives of ordinary subjects. Finally, the autistic subject relies on the sort of procedure recommended by proponents of theory-theory to understand other people. He or she adopts a third-person perspective toward the social sphere and turns interpersonal interaction into a sort of game that requires theorizing, inference-making, and the application of abstract algorithms and rules. However, as we have seen, without desiderative bodily feelings and the capacity for affective attunement, what results is not a mature capacity for understanding others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions, but rather a detached, deficient mode of social cognition.

6.1

Schizophrenia

A patient is diagnosed with schizophrenia if he or she exhibits at least two of the following symptoms for at least 1 month: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms (such as flattened affect, alogia, or avolition). Some theorists understand this broad class of symptoms in terms of ‘unworlding’ (involving a loss of vital contact with reality) and bodily alienation (involving a fragmentation of the structure of experience). Generally speaking, schizophrenia is understood as involving a diminished sense of self and a loss of contact with the outside world. Lysaker and Lysaker (2005) argue that schizophrenic patients often experience a fragmentation of self, so that aspects of themselves fail to cohere and are not embedded in an intelligible history. In their view, the self is dialogical, built up ‘through interactions between self-positions or voices that are not centrally integrated’ (p. 3). Over the course of our daily lives, most of us move among a wide ensemble of self-positions, which involves an ongoing series of dialogical exchanges and syntheses that occur over the course of self-exploration and self-presentation (2005, p. 10). In schizophrenia, however, there is a disruption in the flow of dialogue that compromises the individual’s sense of self. The authors point out that if the

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structure of dialogue were to disintegrate, then multiple self-positions without organized interaction might remain; or perhaps one self-position would gain dominance and become a lone voice for the schizophrenic subject. They maintain that the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia both fuel and are fueled by difficulties in sustaining dialogue within the self and with others. For example, both hallucinations and delusions can hinder dialogical capacity and strain a subject’s ability to partake in diverse internal conversations. Conversely, disruptions in internal dialogue might lead to the availability of fewer self-positions, which could cause the singular voice of a hallucination or delusion to gain strength. On the other hand, if one is unable to draw together the various self-positions associated with a particular social role, efforts to fulfill this role would be disjointed and incoherent. As a result of diminished dialogical capacity, an individual’s dedication to various projects would lessen and his sense of direction in life would dwindle. As the authors put it, ‘devoid of multiple and interacting self-positions, such a self would have little to talk about and little would unfold in the course of a life story’ (Lysaker and Lysaker, 2005, p. 16). Importantly missing from Lysaker and Lysaker’s dialogical account of the sense of self, and its disruption in schizophrenia, is the lived and living body. Although they are correct that there is no integrating author or ‘substantial entity’ at the core of dialogical activity, there is an ego-centered, desiderative, bodily perspective that grounds our sense of self. As I argued in Chapter 3, although the self is not a ‘something,’ it is not a ‘nothing’ either. Our capacity to move among the habits and behavior patterns of various self-positions is rooted in the living body; and so the self can be understood as a life form, or a form of life. The ongoing series of dialogical exchanges and syntheses that Lysaker and Lysaker (p. 10) describe as being crucial for a coherent sense of self is in large part a complex dynamic movement among different patterns of habitual bodily response. In my view, it is a disruption of bodily attunement and a severe deficiency in desiderative bodily feelings that lead to the dialogical disruptions and self-disturbances highlighted by these theorists. Indeed, many of the core symptoms of schizophrenia, including bodily alienation, unworlding, language disturbances, and delusions, can be understood as the direct result of the radical breakdown in the neurobiological dynamics of affective framing that occurs during acute phases of schizophrenia. 6.1.1 Bodily alienation In Chapter 1, I described immanent reflexivity as a matter of being immediately and tacitly present to oneself as an essentially embodied subject. I maintained that sensorimotor subjectivity grounds one’s sense of being at the center of one’s experiences and having first-hand contact with one’s sensations, movements, and thoughts. However, in schizophrenia there is a felt scission between the subject and her body, leading some theorists to


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characterize those who suffer from the disorder as ‘deanimated bodies’ or ‘disembodied spirits’ (Stanghellini, 2004). Fuchs (2005), for example, argues that the relation of the schizophrenic subject to the world is deprived of its immediacy due to what may be described as a disembodied mind (p. 96). He understands ‘the mind’ as the integration of a multitude of living bodily processes through which we constitute the world and maintains that selfaffection and self-movement are the means through which the embodied self can relate to its surroundings. Ordinarily subjects have a tacit, transparent knowledge of the body, and are not aware of their bodies as thematic, explicit, or focal objects of awareness. However, in schizophrenia, there is diminished self-affection, and the tacit self-awareness normally present in experience, which I have termed ‘immanent reflexivity,’ is weakened or lost. The subject may attempt to compensate for this loss of implicit, tacit bodily knowledge through ‘hyperreflexivity’ and the thematization and objectification of the body. In addition, the loss of bodily transparency may result in a weakened sense of agency, an impaired capacity to recognize familiar patterns, and an inability to recognize the meaning of emotions that are felt (Fuchs, 2005, p. 102). Even normal sensations of sexual desire or hunger may lose their contextual meaning, and the resulting loss of basic selfawareness and agency may generate a sense of alien control. Instead of being transparent to the subject, her bodily exterior may become opaque and seem unfamiliar, artificial, and divorced from the self (Fuchs, 2005, p. 103). Sass (2004, 2007) likewise describes how schizophrenic subjects experience ‘a fragmented and alienated sense of the lived body, which produces a sense of disharmony and artificiality that can disrupt the flow of motor activity’ (2004, p. 134). Patients experience a variety of quasi-affective sensations and bodily states, including ‘sensations of movement or pulling or pressure inside the body or on its surfaces; electric or migrating sensations; awareness of kinaesthetic, vestibular, or thermic sensations; and sensations of diminution or enlargement of the body or its parts’ (2004, p. 135). Often these experiences are accompanied by disruption of motor activity and a diminution of automatic skills. Some patients even describe numbness or vertigo, and report losing a sense of contact with their arms and legs. However, these strange sensations often feel artificial because they lack a sense of personal relevance. Rather than being part of one’s coherent and meaningful engagement with the world, they are experienced as freefloating and distant. As sensations lose their connection with the patient’s sense of self, they become alienated and thing-like, and one’s surroundings lose ‘their emotional aroma’ (Sass, 2007, p. 370). Sass also has maintained that one notable feature of schizophrenia is that subjects often seem prone to exaggerated as well as diminished levels of affect, and can be simultaneously emotionally agitated and deadened (2007, p. 380). He hypothesizes that acute phases of schizophrenia might involve ‘an ongoing internally generated state of emotional activation (tonic

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hyperarousal) that could be accompanied by a diminished capacity or willingness to react to many types of environmental stimuli (phasic hypoarousal)’ (2007, p. 363). On the one hand, the tonic hyperarousal typically found in acute phases of schizophrenia causes the subject’s background ‘resting state’ to be anxious and agitated. Here there is arousal that is not experienced as part of an embodied attitude or orientation toward the world (Sass, 2007, p. 366). On the other hand, environmental stimuli lose their sense of relevance and importance. Even though bodily tensions and associated affective states are felt, they lack worldly context and significance, which results in a diminished emotional reaction. Similarly, Stanghellini and Ballerini (2004) describe how subjects suffering from schizophrenic depersonalization experience a loss of ease in their actions, changes to body morphology, and an increasing sense of distance from their own bodies. Subjects may attribute ‘thingness’ to their own body and dismiss its emotional qualities, which results in feelings of vagueness, fogginess, and self-uncertainty (Stanghellini and Ballerini, 2004, p. 263). Schizophrenia appears to involve a disorder of coenthesia, or what Stanghellini (2004) describes as an impairment of the ‘functional symphony’ in which all of a subject’s various sensations are synthesized. Because intermodal integration of signals begins to break down, integrated perception of one’s surroundings becomes very difficult. Together with abnormal sensations, this disturbance of the synthesis of sensations leads to a loss of a sense of self and sensory–motor disintegration (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 125). Subjects may experience a lack of contact between various parts of the body, and sometimes report that ‘they feel their limbs detached from the prime initiator’ of movement or that their actions are ‘detached from the energy that should spontaneously feed it’ (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 157). States of the body and the self in general are experienced as somehow disconnected from one’s life, so that the subject begins to feel deanimated and devitalized. As a result of this ‘crisis of sensory self-consciousness’ (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 196), subjects experience a sense of lifelessness and emptiness, and a loss of contact with their own actions. Of course, it is not that subjects are literally disembodied or completely deanimated. Instead, one might say that, as a result of a serious deficiency in desire-based emotions, subjects begin to lose meaningful contact with their sensations and perceptions. Because the subject’s ‘life urge’ or ‘will-to-live’ is diminished, her bodily sensations lose their salience and significance, and may even begin to seem unreal. One might say that once the necessary conative affectivity of sensorimotor subjectivity begins to falter, the subject’s sense of self is diminished. She no longer experiences herself as an animated, desiring subject who actively engages with the world from the standpoint of her own perspective of value and concern. This makes sense on my account, given that a disruption of desiderative bodily feelings would result in a diminished sense of immediate acquaintance with one’s own


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body and a loss of a sense of self. In my view, the loss of personal relevance, the diminishment of ‘self-affection,’ the disturbed perceptual or cognitive ‘hold’ or ‘grip,’ and the seeming disruption of background bodily sensation such patients experience are all indicative of a breakdown in what I have termed ‘affective framing.’ I have argued that affective framing ordinarily lends directedness, structure, and organization not just to one’s thinking, but also to one’s perception, action, memory, and imagination. However, in schizophrenia, the desiderative bodily feelings that give one a sense of self and attune one to a world of potential actions and experiences have been disrupted. Sensations and experiences that might normally highlight salience are experienced as free-floating, detached, and meaningless. Bodily feeling has lost its intentionality, its desiderative tone, and its world-directedness, and thus has become more like the mere sensation depicted by many standard accounts of emotion. Physiological arousal that cannot be identified cognitively or that lacks intentionality (i.e., free-floating arousal that is not bound up with an affective frame) tends to be experienced as disruptive. Without some framework in which bodily feelings can take on relevance and significance, these sensations lose their desiderative component and there is a breakdown in self-experience. Such feelings of bodily alienation thus signal a large-scale breakdown of emotion–affective attunement, or what I would describe in terms of undelineated, inadequately contoured, affective framing patterns. Ordinarily, affective framing allows a subject’s cares and concerns to serve as a backdrop for all of her experiences, including basic perceptual experiences and bodily sensations. Without this framework to help the subject make sense of things, intermodal binding and sensory integration begin to break down. The subject begins to experience sensations that lack a sense of personal relevance and are experienced as free-floating rather than being meaningfully directed toward the world (Sass, 2004, p. 135). One might say that essentially embodied consciousness has lost its spontaneous intentional directedness and ‘vital reactivity’ (Sass and Parnas, 2001, p. 351). In the absence of ‘the targeted and temporal nature of “concern” ’ (Sass, 2004, p. 134), the world as a whole begins to lose its practical significance. 6.1.2 Disengagement and unworlding The alteration of bodily experience described in the last section is linked to a loss of attunement with one’s surroundings. Once bodily feelings begin to lose their desiderative component, the subject experiences diminished self-affection and objects in her surroundings likewise begin to lose their emotional coloration and significance. Stanghellini (2004) points out that ‘if the urgency of life is switched off, the ready-to-hand meanings of things in the world’ begin to fade away (p. 22). This is because, as Ratcliffe (2002) notes, ordinarily ‘we encounter objects as “what they are” in the context

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of a background of emotional attunement, which anchors our cognition of worldly objects and structures our relationships with them’ (2002, p. 302). Similarly, I have maintained that the caring-contoured, bodily ‘map’ provided by affective framing constitutes a background that determines the possible scope of intentional actions and ways in which the world might be disclosed. However, as a result of a result of a severe deficiency in desiderative bodily feelings, the schizophrenic subject no longer apprehends things against the backdrop of a caring-contoured ‘map,’ and as a result objects in the world appear as devoid of meaning. Without a perspective to ground meaning and value, the urgency of life diminishes and objects in the world lose their significance. Like bodily alienation and disturbed self-experience, ‘unworlding’ is a result of the schizophrenic subject’s inability to appreciate salience. Indeed, many theorists have pointed to distinctive abnormalities of the salience and stability of the objects and field of awareness that result in disturbed perceptual or cognitive ‘hold’ or ‘grip’ among schizophrenic subjects (Sass and Parnas, 2001, p. 348). Interestingly, many ‘negative’ symptoms are not straightforward deficit states, but instead are accompanied by ‘positive’ aberrations (Sass and Parnas, 2001, p. 350). For example, negative symptoms such as poverty of speech, affective flattening, apathy, and general inattentiveness to surroundings are accompanied by disturbances in cognition, perception, action, emotion, and bodily experience. Patients seem to have a hyperreflexive awareness of body sensations that ordinarily would not be attended to, as well as an acute awareness of the background structures of action and experience. When that which is typically a matter of automatic and spontaneous processing becomes explicit, it ‘can no longer perform the grounding, orienting, [and] constituting function that only what remains in the background can play’ (Sass and Parnas, 2001, p. 351). In this way, the ‘ipseity disturbance’ characteristic of schizophrenia, as described in the last section, leads to an impaired capacity for cognitive engagement with one’s surroundings. As a result of this ‘unworlding,’ the cognitive or perceptual world undergoes a certain fragmentation and objects seem to lack their recognizable significance and relevance. Interestingly, there is a diminishment of the effects of context on perception. Patients experience deficits in perceptual grouping, so that objects do not stand together in an overall context, but rather appear as meaningless details (Sass, 2007, p. 373). They also have difficulty excluding distracting visual, auditory, and tactile input when trying to concentrate on selected parts of the environment (Maher, 2003, p. 14). In addition, people, actions, or things may seem to be stripped of their recognizable ‘affordances,’ which can result in feelings of anxiety, wonderment, or awe. Patients feel somehow cut off from the external world and experience their surroundings as a distant spectacle rather than ‘as a terrain of personally relevant opportunity and risk’ (Sass, 2007, p. 372). Because their


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situation is not imbued with care or concern, events may unfold without a sense of urgency or personal relevance, resulting in disengagement, detachment, and depersonalization. Minkowski and Targowla (2001) describe this phenomenon as ‘pragmatic weakening’ and a loss of vital contact with reality. They examine the case of Paul, a socially withdrawn 17-year-old who was unable to exercise his intellectual abilities ‘in accord with the requirements of reality’ (p. 271). Although Paul had a sharp mind and sound reasoning skills, he began to complain about a lack of energy and mental fatigue and to become preoccupied with monitoring his actions, repeatedly making sure that he closed doors and inspecting dishes and plates. While at first glance his behavior resembled that of a phobic or obsessive, what was missing was the emotional and personal element. Rather than being anxious, Paul was apathetic, and the questions he became preoccupied with concerned ‘the objective order of things, such as the accuracy of a clock or the length of a feather duster’ (Minkowski and Targowla, 2001, p. 273). In addition, because he became attached to words or letters, and no longer attended to the meaning of sentences as a whole, he lost his ability to read. The authors suggest that the essential disturbance that Paul suffers from involves an attitude with respect to reality in general: ‘a passive attitude, characterized first and foremost by endless questions that are asked indifferently, without rhyme or reason, about objects that he sees in front of him or ideas that pop into his mind’ (p. 273). There is no context to frame these ideas, and so he takes an interest in external objects that in no way reflects the necessities of life. What results is a disturbance in ‘self-conduction’ and a tendency to be more influenced by immediate circumstances than by the pursuit of a specific goal. Thus, he is unable to set aside ideas and questions that do not pertain to this goal, and also unable to deal successfully with interruptions and then return to the pursuit of his goal. For most of us, there is a certain dynamism and flexibility in our activity, which enables us to alternate between moments of work and moments of rest. For Paul, on the other hand, everything has the same importance. He does not pursue any specific goal, but rather adopts a passive attitude to his surroundings and has a weakened sense of the future. Due to his lack of vital propulsion toward the future, he lives in a kind of ‘autistic exploration,’ and his endless questioning is a way to compensate for his loss of contact with reality. Along similar lines, some theorists have characterized schizophrenia as a loss of common sense. Drawing from the work of Scheler, Stanghellini (2004) maintains that schizophrenia involves a ‘loss of practical references to the world,’ so that things do not ‘directly and immediately relate to [one’s] body as existentially relative utensils’ (p. 194). As a result, the categories ordinarily used by the subject to organize her perceptions and make sense of causal interactions begin to vanish. What results is an ‘adynamic world’ in which nothing seems to have a causal impact on anything else. Once concrete objects lose their incarnated givenness, they may even transform

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into images, so that the world becomes, in a sense, ghostly. Schwartz et al. (2005), on the other hand, describe this loss of common sense in terms of Husserl’s notion of ‘unbuilding’ (p. 92). Husserl believed that mental activity at the lower levels automatically constitutes a special, temporal, causal world. Among ordinary subjects, ‘the ego attends to objects which appear as themes against a horizon or background of which mental life is automatically aware’ (Schwartz et al., 2005, p. 102). However, among schizophrenic subjects, the basic automatic syntheses that usually constitute the ontological structure of the world have been weakened. When this background breaks down, the subject faces the task of actively re-conceiving and explicitly articulating the most fundamental principles of being and human life (Schwartz et al., 2005, p. 106). As a result, schizophrenic subjects are intensely concerned with aspects of reality that for most of us are very concrete and commonplace. Schwartz et al. trace this impairment to the dopamine system in the brain, which they claim is responsible for calculating salience and assigning meaning. In schizophrenia, this system is no longer fine-tuned and becomes overactive, underactive, or inappropriately active. Many things become salient even though they are not; or things become stripped of their meaning because of an underactive dopamine system; or the patient assigns inappropriate salience and motivational significance to stimuli (Schwartz et al., 2005, pp. 106–107). Because the lower strata of mental life are not functioning properly, the subject feels threatened with a kind of self-lessness and world-lessness. And, because time and continuity through temporal change are not automatically constituted for them as basic ontological constituents of reality, the ego must strive to impart this structure. Thus, according to Schwartz et al., unworlding results from the weakening of the automatic syntheses in pre-reflective mental life. While these theorists present a useful description of some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, I think we should challenge their claim that such symptoms result simply from a lack of fine-tuning in the dopamine system or some other breakdown in neural functioning. In my view, the disruptions in mental life involved in schizophrenia should be understood instead as disruptions in essentially embodied consciousness. The breakdown in ontological structure that the authors describe is accompanied by disturbances of bodily experience and a lack of directedness, and this is no accident. Schizophrenia is a direct result of the fact that the bodily processes through which subjects ordinarily constitute the world are seriously impaired. One might say that schizophrenia patients have lost their footing in the world because the mediating processes of desiderative bodily attunement that would normally allow them to enact a meaningful world have been disturbed. Without the guidance and attentional focusing ordinarily afforded by affective framing, they lack a ‘map’ of where they are in the world and lose hold of even basic structures of space and time.


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Thus, in my view, the case of Paul described by Minkowski and Targowla (2001) should be understood in terms of severe disturbances in desirebased emotions and affective framing. What the authors call ‘élan vital,’ or ‘vital thrust,’ echoes my emphasis on desire-based emotions and felt needs (rooted in the dynamics of egocentrically structured, living organisms). Among ordinary subjects, the ability to locate ideas and images on a hierarchy of importance is rooted in bodily attunement and affective framing. But, due to his incapacity for affective framing, everything takes on the same importance for Paul, and as a result his personality becomes dispirited and disjointed and he begins to lose his sense of self, as well as his directedness toward the future. The complete disorganization in his actions and conduct and the ‘pragmatic weakening’ these authors describe result from Paul’s inability to find definite points, lines, and contours of salience in the world around him. For Paul, the interrogative attitude can be seen as a compensation mechanism, a way to maintain some minimal contact with the world despite his severe deficit in affective framing capacity. Some patients, in the chronic and withdrawn phases of the illness, may even turn their attention ‘away from external or social reality in favor of a preoccupation with a delusional or quasi-delusional realm of inner fantasy’ (Sass, 2004, p. 138). In these virtual worlds, objects are unreal, action is either impossible or irrelevant, and subjects have no sense of neediness or yearning. As Sass notes, one striking feature of these imaginary worlds is their lack of any particular target or focus of concern (2004, p. 142). The dream world lacks the potential for uncertainty, danger, and potential disappointment typically found in the real world, and thus represents a kind of escape. Sass describes a patient named Wolfi whose lack of ‘normal, engaged temporality is reflected in the flattening and unreality of space characteristic of his quasi-delusional world’ (2004, p. 142). It makes sense that a subject deficient in affective framing capacities would feel more at home in a world where the affective tone is more a matter of generalized mood, for in that sort of world one’s inability to appreciate context and salience is not such a detriment. In the real world, a subject who cannot make sense of her surroundings or even her own sensations is likely to experience external events as quite overwhelming. In the dream world, on the other hand, what feels like a virtual self can find a home in a virtual reality. Generally speaking, because the desiderative bodily feelings through which subjects ordinarily constitute the world are greatly diminished, schizophrenic subjects are largely unable to appreciate salience and recognize affordances. In addition, they begin to lose their temporal footing and their sense of the future. This is because the flow of intentional movement and lived sensations is driven by conative affectivity, and the processes of affection and intentionality are bodily, spatial, and temporal. Because what one perceives and how one moves are shaped by what one cares about, both perceptual and motor intentionality are strongly linked to conative

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affectivity and desire-based emotion. Without felt needs, the conscious subject cannot be selectively attuned and directed to her environment during perception and action, nor can she have a sense of her own spatiality and temporality. In short, in order to experience oneself as a perceiving, acting, situated subject who is intentionally directed toward the world and carries out voluntary movements, one must be a conatively affective, sensorimotor subject. However, among schizophrenic subjects, the spatial and causal structure of reality, which for most us is experienced as pre-given and ‘always-already’ there, begins to break down (Schwartz et al., 2005, p. 103). As a result, such subjects may have difficulty understanding ordinary causal relations, using predictable input sequences to anticipate and respond to upcoming events, and predicting regularities in the environment (Maher, 1999). Thus, among schizophrenic subjects, a serious deficiency in conative affectivity and affective framing capacities results in the inability to anchor oneself successfully in the world. 6.1.3 ‘Unworlding’ of the social sphere Schizophrenia and its associated bodily symptoms involve not just a disruption of the sense of self and an inability to make sense of one’s surroundings, but also an inability to connect with others. Indeed, some theorists believe that social cognition impairments and difficulties with interpersonal interaction, recognition of social cues, and understanding other people’s beliefs and intentions are at the core of the schizophrenic condition. Stanghellini and Ballerini (2004), for example, maintain that one of the central features of schizophrenia is a fracture in social life, or what they call ‘schizophrenic autism.’ Subjects’ capacity to understand others by means of pre-reflective and non-propositional attunement is compromised, and this significantly affects their ability to establish relations with others and to communicate with them according to shared norms. Most of us conceptualize reality in an implicit, pre-thematic, spontaneous manner, and it is the lived body that structures and organizes our perceptions and field of experience. Intersubjectivity ordinarily is a matter of intercorporeality, ‘a communion of flesh and not a relationship between separate persons’ (Stanghellini and Ballerini, 2004, p. 263). In schizophrenic autism, however, the ability to detect significance and relevance is distorted and there is a loss of vital contact with reality. As Stanghellini and Ballerini put it, ‘detachment from the social world appears to derive from the lack of this fundamental structure, of this ontological setting, necessary and indeed crucial to be a Self’ (2004, p. 264). I have argued that this ‘fundamental structure and ontological setting’ is afforded by affective framing, and that without a caring-contoured ‘map’ to lend structure and meaning to experience, subjects find it extremely difficult to make sense of themselves and their surroundings. As a result of the loss of context, the interpersonal world likewise loses much of its reality and significance, so that deficits in


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intersubjective capacities are directly linked to the ‘unworlding’ described in the last section. These deficits also are directly linked to the phenomena of bodily alienation and disruptions in bodily attunement. For ordinary subjects, attunement occurs via bodily resonance and the mutual modulation of affective framing patterns, so that affectivity serves as a medium of connectedness. However, as noted previously, schizophrenia clearly seems to involve a breakdown in sensorimotor subjectivity and sensory self-consciousness. In schizophrenia a subject’s bodily sensations lose their meaning and may be experienced as detached or distant from the self, ‘devoid of immediacy’, and disconnected from one’s life (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 176). In addition, subjects may exhibit affective responses, bodily feelings, and expressions that are odd or do not match up with their situation. These odd proprioceptive experiences and bodily sensations, often experienced as detached from the self and meaningless, make it difficult to establish interpersonal connections. But just why is this? As Stanghellini (2004) notes, the schizophrenic subject’s distance from her own emotions renders her unable to perceive the other as another person, since she lacks the affective–conative capacity to get involved in others’ lives, pick up on context-relevant cues, and make sense of others and their situation (p. 14). If it is true that intersubjectivity is a matter of intercorporeality and bodily attunement, it naturally follows that a disruption in one’s own sensorimotor subjectivity would be accompanied by impaired social cognition. Along these lines, what I wish to argue is that as a direct result of bodily alienation and disrupted bodily experience, such subjects are impaired in their capacity to identify with others’ bodies and attune themselves, immediately and spontaneously, to another person’s subjective situation. A central component of intersubjectivity is reciprocity, or what I have described as the bodily experience of mutual modulation. The sort of reciprocal bodily modulation described in Chapter 5 helps ordinary subjects to identify subjectively with one another and to appreciate, in some basic sense, what it is like to approach the world from another’s unique viewpoint. However, without the experience of body resonance that usually takes place in second-person interaction, subjects have a diminished sense of what is shareable in their surroundings and are unable to participate in reciprocal bodily attunement. Without a ‘smooth’ perception of one’s own body schema and bodily dynamics, it is difficult to participate in the sort of mutual modulation in affective framing patterns that ordinary subjects undergo. As a result, other people do not have the requisite ‘pull’ on the schizophrenic subject and are unable to modify the subject’s desires and influence her attentional focus. To some extent, this is because the schizophrenic subject is herself severely lacking in attentional focus and is no longer able to approach the social world from a perspective of desire and value. As Stanghellini points out, the detached, third-person mode

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in which the schizophrenic person relates to others is the same mode in which she relates to herself and involves ‘the same objectifying attitude’ (2004, p. 132). A person who feels like a deanimated body is likely to find other people, and the social world as a whole, utterly lifeless and lacking in meaning. Because schizophrenic subjects lack the sort of implicit, spontaneous understanding of social behavior ordinarily afforded by affective framing, they may even come to conceive of the social world as an impersonal game regulated by impersonal norms,1 much as autistic subjects do2 (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 99). Alternatively, the schizophrenic subject may experience the intersubjective, social world as a sort of threat. Some subjects report a fear of losing their identity by slipping into the other’s point of view or into common ways of thinking. Comments such as ‘I am afraid to get trapped in their way of thinking’ and ‘Interpersonal mental bonds are total death for me’ are not uncommon (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 99). Subjects seem to be afraid of excessive attunement, and fearful that the affective framing patterns and concerns of others will take complete control over their own. Some subjects even report a sense of being colonized or obliterated (Lysaker et al., 2005, p. 338) and fear a complete loss of the self. One common response is to reject common ways of thinking or attempt to bracket them. In my view, the perceived threat is a direct result of a dramatic diminishment or weakening of conative affectivity and the sense that one’s ‘hold’ or ‘grip’ on the world is disappearing. 6.1.4 Language disturbances It is not difficult to see why bodily alienation and ‘unworlding’ might also lead to the overall jumbling of thought and speech, insofar as even the meaning of words may become abstract and divorced from context. Ratcliffe (2008) describes how, for most of us, experience unfolds in a relatively structured, harmonious fashion, as possibilities offered by the world are actualized through our activities. He points out that, if the possibilities offered up lacked structure and shifted so as to break up patterns of salience and expectation, then this flow would be disrupted. The schizophrenic experiences changeable feelings that do not relate to each other in stable ways and so do not facilitate the unfolding of an organized possibility space. As a result, the structure of experience is fragmented, patterns of significance are disrupted, and subjects lose their hold on the world. This loss of structure can result in conversations slipping off track, so-called ‘word salad,’ and the overall jumbling of thought and speech. Some of the language disturbances commonly found among schizophrenics include the repetition of phrases, frequent uncompleted sentences, the production of neologisms, circumlocution, and sudden termination of an utterance before it is complete. Maher (2003) maintains that these disturbances are caused ‘by defective deployment of inhibitory activity necessary


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to exclude intrusions’ (p. 19). He argues that the effective focusing of attention on a limited and significant aspect of sensory input, as well as the production of a complex motor action, is made possible by the active inhibition of other competing patterns of input and output (p. 11). So the ability to speak a sequence of words in a sentence is made possible by the ability to inhibit associations for each separate word, as well as the ability to screen out external sources such as the speech of others. Among schizophrenic subjects, however, associations and intrusions do disrupt the sentence, and various language disturbances result. For example, it is difficult for such subjects to determine which of the several meanings of a given word is intended in cases where a word has multiple meanings. To focus one’s attention on a limited and significant aspect of language input, one must actively inhibit word associations that are not relevant to the case at hand. (e.g., there is an association between the word ‘orange’ and the word ‘Florida,’ but certainly this association is relevant to the intended meaning of a person’s speech only in very particular contexts.) Otherwise, one’s ability to comprehend others’ language and produce meaningful speech will be disrupted by irrelevant associations (Maher, 2003, p. 11). Thus, understanding an utterance requires that one monitor the context in which it is spoken. In the case of schizophrenia, where word associations intrude, the result may be that associations to the most common meaning of a word intrude into an utterance in which a less common meaning was intended (Maher, 2003, pp. 16–17). Maher maintains that, because schizophrenia patients are insensitive to context, they are highly susceptible to intrusions and both internal and external distractions. This can result not just in language disturbances, but also in the sense that the words coming out of their mouths are not controlled by them, and that there is a discrepancy between their intentions and actions. 3 Both the disorganized ‘possibility space’ described by Ratcliffe, as well as the language disturbances outlined by Maher, reveal a framing deficit. I have maintained that it is by virtue of affective framing that contextual features take on meaning, because in order to inhibit irrelevant input and screen out unneeded information, we must have some way of determining which input is salient. However, because schizophrenic subjects are unable to appreciate the salience of contextual features, they find it difficult to determine which meaning of a particular word is intended, and are extremely prone to the intrusion of irrelevant word associations. Moreover, in many cases, their overt utterance is not in line with the inner thought that prompted it, largely due to their inability to exclude distracting input (Maher, 2003, p. 18). In this way, the language disturbances involved in schizophrenia can be understood, I believe, as yet another symptom of the severe breakdown in affective framing that partially constitutes the schizophrenic condition.


6.1.5

Thought insertion and alien control

Some of the most common delusions found in schizophrenia include ‘morbid objectification,’ thought insertion, and alien control. I will propose that such delusions ultimately can be traced to bodily alienation and a breakdown in affective framing. Morbid objectification occurs when states of the body, mental states, and the self in general begin to be experienced as a sort of object. As the subject loses contact with her body, embodied self- consciousness is replaced by incorporeal, noetic self-consciousness4 (Stanghellini, 2004). Often sensations and bodily tensions do not feel genuine, and instead are ‘experienced at a subjective distance, almost as objects in themselves’ (Sass, 2004, p. 135). Likewise, the immediate experience of thinking is replaced by a second-order noetic awareness of perceiving that one is perceiving, acting, or thinking (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 19). Subjects sometimes report examining their experiences as objects and being mere spectators or scanners of their own mental states. Once thoughts and other mental states have been objectified or appear detached from the self, various forms of delusion naturally follow. For example, if ordinary inner dialogue is experienced as an external, objective reality, a subject may report hearing ‘voices.’ Here inner speech becomes an ‘object-like’ entity with perceptual characteristics of which the subject becomes explicitly aware. Or the subject may report that she feels moved by, or under the control of, some external power. Here the source of one’s actions, thoughts, and emotions is spatialized and located outside oneself, and thereby experienced as a ‘quasi-entity existing in outer space’ (Stanghellini, 2004, p. 158). As subjects lose their first-person perspective on their sensations and thought processes and begin to adopt a third-person perspective on them, they lose their sense of agency and control and begin to feel alienated from their thoughts and actions (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 204). In this way, the delusions commonly found in schizophrenia result from a loss of sensitive, vital contact with one’s bodily dynamics and sensations, which in turn signal a breakdown in affective framing and an inability to appreciate salience. Various theorists have puzzled over just what it is that leads a person to misattribute an action he clearly performs, or a thought he clearly thinks, to someone else. Some have supposed that we simply do not, or even cannot, understand what patients are trying to communicate. Read (2001) goes so far as to say that this mental illness is incomprehensible and that ‘problem cases of schizophrenia centrally involve the problematic of dealing with nonsense’ (p. 467). Similarly, Thornton (2004) proposes that perhaps severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia are simply a matter of being other-minded, though this is not something on which we can get any grasp. While Thornton may be correct that genuine empathic understanding of schizophrenia escapes us, this hardly means that no understanding of the disorder is possible. Although the beliefs voiced by schizophrenic subjects


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often do not obey norms of logic and rational consistency, this does not mean that their expressions are utterly incomprehensible, nonsensical, or even irrational. As Maher points out (1999), one way to understand delusional thinking is as a rational response to a bizarre experience. The processes used by deluded persons to reason from experience to belief are not fundamentally different from the processes utilized by non-deluded persons. Schizophrenic subjects form delusional beliefs as a result of anomalous, intense experiences that cry out for some sort of explanation. These include alterations in the intensity and vividness of sensory input, difficulties in focusing attention and in discriminating between relevant and irrelevant aspects of the environment, and experienced discrepancies between one’s intentions and the actual form of one’s response. Thus, when patients say that their actions or thoughts are not their own, what they are expressing is an altered aspect of experience. For example, when subjects initiate speech or action, they expect to hear themselves saying what they had intended to say, or to witness themselves doing what they had intended to do (Maher, 2003, pp. 5–6). When their experience of speech or movement is discrepant with their intentions, they experience a mismatch. Even if they know, at some intellectual level, that nobody else is controlling their movements, this does not terminate the experience of alien control. According to Maher, ‘the resulting comprehensive delusion is not an example of disordered thinking, but of normal adaptive thinking applied to explain very abnormal experiences’ (2003, p. 19). Similarly, according to Ratcliffe (2008), when patients report having thoughts that are not their own, what they are communicating is that their experiences are embedded in a background of anomalous existential feeling. In schizophrenia, there is no background feeling of anticipation, and so a thought ‘just suddenly appears and seems alien, surprising, as though it came from elsewhere’ (pp. 204–5). Thought insertion thus is symptomatic of an existential change involving diminished and disorganized bodily feeling. Here Ratcliffe appeals to Gallagher’s claim that thought ordinarily has a protentional structure and involves a sense of anticipation or expectation. Like the flow of motor activity, a subject’s train of thought usually is intentionally directed toward the future. According to Gallagher (2005a), protention, or the forward-looking temporal structure of thought and action, is essentially linked to affective tonality. Likewise, I have argued that the temporal structure of conscious experience is rooted in conative affectivity and that it is by virtue of our desiderative bodily feelings that we can anticipate the future. However, among schizophrenic subjects, this time-perspective is curtailed, and thoughts are experienced as random and out of their control largely due to disruptions in the forward-looking, temporal structure of experience. According to Gallagher, affective disturbances of protention generate the experience of thought insertion, so that one still has a sense of ownership of the thought, but not agency.


Articulated in terms of the ‘mapping’ metaphor I have expressed previously, these are thoughts that are ‘off the map.’ Thought ordinarily depends on a background of beliefs, desires, and interests, so that which trains of thought are opened up to a subject usually depends on her particular background of cares and concerns. It is only when a thought appears against the backdrop of her beliefs, desires, and background bodily orientation that a subject will experience herself as the owner and agent of the thought. In schizophrenia, however, this background bodily orientation is severely attenuated. When thoughts do not arise against the structure-giving backdrop of a person’s desiderative feelings, her sense of the future, or her current situation, these thoughts seem out of context. This is what makes inserted thoughts different from unbidden thoughts that just spring spontaneously to mind. While thoughts that simply arise unbidden are contextually situated and experienced as congruous with what the individual cares about and in line with felt significance, inserted thoughts are experienced as utterly random. This breakdown in temporal structure also results in disruption of motor activity, delusions of control, and a sense that one’s own embodied actions emanate from some other source (Gallagher, 2005a, p. 197). Frith and Gallagher (2002) describe instances in which patients intend to move and make movements consistent with their intention, but nonetheless have a sense that there is an alien force at work.5 They maintain that this is because, although the patients are aware of their intention to move and get sensory feedback associated with movement, they do not make pre-reflective predictions about what’s going to happen and so do not experience the initiation of the movement. Movement that does not involve a pre-reflective sense of anticipation of future action is experienced as alien, and as under the control of someone else. To explain what has gone awry in such cases, theorists tend to look to the brain. Gallagher, for example, proposes that the sort of mechanism that underlies protention and the sense of anticipation is likely a matter of widely distributed and dynamical neurophysiological processes (2005a, p. 204); and Maher claims that the feeling that one’s written, spoken, or motor behavior is discrepant with one’s intention has a neural locus (2003, p. 6). While of course I agree with these theorists that the brain plays a crucial role, I also want to emphasize the extent to which desiderative bodily feelings ordinarily ground our sense of agency. I believe that underlying this breakdown in the contextual and temporal structure of experience is a radical disruption in essentially embodied pre-reflective sensorimotor subjective awareness and a deficiency in desiderative bodily feelings. As a result of extreme bodily alienation, schizophrenic subjects do not feel fully or vitally in touch with their bodily dynamics, movements, postures, and expressions. Although they are aware of their intention to move and get sensory feedback associated with movement, their movements are not experienced as being connected with their desires. One might say that these


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are experiences of the embodied self as a subjective object, and yet they do not seem to emanate from the self as a subjective subject. Thus, despite the subject’s recognition that the movements are being made by her body, she feels alienated from them because they are not linked to her desire-based emotions in the appropriate way. Even if the movements are in line with the subject’s self-reflective intentions, nevertheless, if such movements do not emanate from her desiderative bodily feelings, then she will not experience making an effort or wanting to make them. Because of this disconnect between desiderative bodily feelings and proprioceptive awareness of bodily movement, the schizophrenic subject’s sense of self and self-agency is seriously disrupted. I should note that some theorists have described such symptoms in terms of ‘disownership’ experiences, which involve the sense that one’s thoughts or actions originate outside one’s desire and will and are not truly one’s own. One might suppose that in cases of thought insertion, schizophrenic patients judge that the thoughts they are having actually belong to another person and have been placed in their mind by some outside source. Radden (1998) maintains that the schizophrenic subject often experiences feelings, impulses, and actions as not her own, but instead as ‘made’ responses initiated by someone else (pp. 664–665). This fundamental alteration in the sense of possession and control of one’s own thoughts, actions, sensations, and feelings results in a loss of a sense of self. Insofar as Radden maintains that such experiences involve not just feelings of alienation, but also of disownership, one might interpret her account as being in tension with Gallagher’s claim that schizophrenia involves a loss of agency rather than a loss of ownership. However, I believe the difference between Gallagher’s and Radden’s accounts is primarily a difference in the words they use to describe the symptoms rather than a fundamental difference in outlook. Like Gallagher, Radden emphasizes that the schizophrenic subject lacks a sense of agency, and often experiences her body as a passive instrument that is being used by someone else. But, despite these fractured and divided experiences, the subject is still capable of distinguishing the self from the nonself; and also capable of separating her own experiences from those which do not belong to her. The patient does not have any doubt that it is her own mind upon which thoughts, feelings, and impulses are imposed, and thus the boundary between the self and the non-self remains intact (Radden, 1998, p. 668). It simply feels to the patient as if the actions, thoughts, feelings, and impulses do not emanate from her will. In my view, the schizophrenic subject recognizes that the mental episodes are hers because they still involve her own embodied perspective and a first-personal mode of givenness. But, because these experiences of her own essentially embodied mind do not seem to emanate from her desire-based emotions, she feels alienated from them. These observations about some of the core symptoms of schizophrenia support my thesis that one’s sense of self rests on one’s unique continuing

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essential embodiment, which is manifested fundamentally through desirebased emotions. Having a coherent sense of self goes beyond the ability to distinguish between self and non-self and involves some of sort of consistency between one’s desire-based emotions, thoughts, and actions. A person subjectively experiences herself as a fully coherent individual if, and only if, she immediately feels herself to be standing in a direct and intimate connection to her living body over time, and cares about herself and her own mental states from her own particular egocentric perspective. The bodily alienation commonly found in schizophrenia thus is best understood in terms of a severe attenuation in desiderative bodily feelings, which involves a weakening of the sense of self and a disruption in affective framing. As a result of this self-estrangement, schizophrenic subjects find it difficult to make sense of their social environment and are incapable of participating in the sort of mutual modulation and reciprocal bodily attunement found among ordinary subjects. In addition, to compensate for their felt lack of connection to their bodies, subjects may exhibit a heightened reflective awareness of bodily processes that normally would be pre-reflective. As a result, their actions and thoughts may come to be experienced as objects apprehended from a third-person perspective, somewhat distant and detached from the self. In my view, schizophrenia thus represents a radical breakdown in essentially embodied, affective self-consciousness.

6.2

Psychopathy

Although the term ‘psychopathy’ may very well apply to a heterogeneous group of individuals,6 a specific range of traits is included on almost every list of distinguishing features. The psychopath is commonly described as a persistent wrongdoer who does not exhibit signs of genuine remorse or guilt, is impulsive and irresponsible, and typically lacks realistic long-term plans. He is distinguished from ordinary criminals by his lack of prudence and his tendency to commit crime when the risk of getting caught is extremely high (Levy, 2007, p. 130). The criteria for psychopathy that Cleckley (1941) cites in his clinical description of this disorder include irresponsibility, impulsive behavior, failure to learn from experience, and the absence of longterm goals; and the distinctive emotional and interpersonal features he cites include diminished affect, defective insight, absence of nervousness, lack of remorse, egocentricity, pathological lying, superficial charm, and absence of close relationships. Cleckley hypothesizes that the source of psychopathy is a deficit involving a failure to process the emotional meaning of language. Among ordinary subjects, certain linguistic cues evoke strong associations and provoke strong affective reactions. Among psychopaths, on the other hand, such cues evoke little or no emotional response. Psychopaths typically are profoundly deficient in negative emotions, rarely experience fear and sadness, and have difficulty recognizing them in the facial expressions


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and speech sounds of others. As Jesse Prinz points out, this makes it difficult for them to experience empathetic distress, remorse, or guilt, which in turn leads to antisocial behavior and impaired decision-making. Not surprisingly, many theorists have looked to the brain to uncover the source of these two dimensions of psychopathy. Blair et al. (2005), for example, point to the neurological underpinnings of psychopathy and its associated emotional and behavioral impairments. According to their ‘integrated emotions systems model’ of psychopathy, most of these impairments can be understood as a result of disorder in the amygdala, a central part of the emotional brain, which is involved in processing affect-laden representations and is crucial for moral socialization. While I agree that it is important to acknowledge the role of brain dysfunction in accounting for psychological disorders, I believe that psychopathy also involves a subject’s general patterns of bodily attunement and arousal. One might say that psychopaths are not moved, in a literal, bodily sense, by the concerns and sufferings of others. What I wish to suggest is that the core symptoms are affective processing deficits, impulsivity, lack of realistic long-term plans, and a temporally narrow mode of egocentricity. In my view, both the psychopath’s apparent emotional detachment as well as his antisocial behavior can be understood as resulting from a permanent developmental delay in the formation of long-term, persisting affective framing patterns. It is this lack of long-term affective framing patterns that renders the psychopath largely incapable of making prudent personal decisions as well as genuine, first-person moral judgments. Note that the problem is not that psychopaths are without desire-based emotions and affect altogether, nor do they suffer from the severe deficiency in conative affectivity found in schizophrenia. Insofar as they have desire-based emotions and are moved to act by their desiderative bodily feelings, they are rooted in the world in a way that schizophrenic subjects are not. The central problem, in my view, is that they have not built up any complex, long-term affective framing patterns. As Kennett (2006) argues, available evidence suggests that psychopaths have only a weak capacity to stand back from and evaluate their desires, estimate the consequences of their actions, and forgo immediate rewards in favor of longer-term goals (p. 76). Often they fail to adopt the necessary means to their ends, lose track of their supposed goals, and instead focus on immediate satisfaction and pleasure. Their cares and concerns are temporally narrow, which results in a range of cognitive impairments. 6.2.1 Evidence of a deficit in affective processing among psychopaths Psychopaths often are thought to be lacking in conscience and insusceptible to feelings of guilt, fear or anxiety. In addition, they have difficulty processing emotional expressions of distress and thus do not recognize the


distress cues of those around them. This lack of emotional understanding could be regarded as evidence for the view that psychopaths suffer from a lack of negative affect. Along these lines, Cleckley (1976) observes that there is a mismatch between the expressed and experienced values of emotions among psychopathic individuals. Although such individuals understand the definitional or lexical meaning of emotions, they do not understand the affective value attached to them. Hare and Jutai (1988) found that in a word-matching test, psychopathic subjects grouped words primarily according to their non-emotional characteristics and relied more on learned associations than on the words’ emotional significance. Similarly, in lexical decision tests (in which subjects must report whether or not a letter-string is a word), while healthy individuals are faster at responding to emotionally charged words than to emotionally neutral ones, psychopathic subjects do not exhibit this advantage (Lorenz and Newman, 2002). Williamson et al. (1991) found that psychopaths also showed less physiological response to emotionally charged words relative to controls. From such evidence, one might be inclined to conclude that psychopaths simply are lacking in emotional experience and that their lack of negative affect, in particular, interferes with various modes of cognitive processing. Overall, the research does support the notion that some form of affective deficit is central to psychopathy. However, in my view, the source of this deficit is not simply a lack of affect, but rather impaired affective processing. As Kronder et al. (2005) point out, while psychopaths can indeed report on and describe an affective dimension to their lives, there is a problem surrounding how the negative affect is processed. If so, then Johns and Quay’s (1962) famous suggestion that ‘they know the words, but not the music’ is somewhat misleading, insofar as it implies that psychopaths’ difficulties stem mainly from the lack of a phenomenally rich and colorful emotional life. According to Kronder et al. (2005), a more appropriate summary of psychopaths’ affective functioning would be that they know the words, and hear the music, but cannot sing the song (p. 422). Indeed, a wide range of studies support the notion that psychopaths suffer from deficits in affective processing, which I will describe in terms of diminished affective framing capacities. First, there is some evidence to suggest that psychopaths do not react in the same way as ordinary subjects to stimuli that pose a threat to their immediate interests. In a study conducted by Patrick et al. (1993), subjects in a prisoner population viewed 27 color photographic slides depicting nine pleasant, nine neutral, and nine unpleasant scenes. On six of the trials for each slide type, an acoustic startle probe consisting of a 50 ms burst of white noise was presented through headphones. The experimenters recorded blink startle reactions to the noise probes as well as skin conductance and heart rate responses to each slide. Ordinarily startle probe reactions are inhibited during pleasant slide viewing and potentiated or heightened during the viewing of unpleasant slides.


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This is because the presence of aversive cues ordinarily mobilizes withdrawal or avoidance behavior. However, psychopaths exhibited a diminished or reversed startle probe reaction during exposure to aversive slides, indicating a deficit in their capacity for defensive response modulation (Patrick, 1994, p. 327). This absence of startle potentiation indicates that, among psychopaths, aversive stimuli do not prime defensive actions or protective responses (Patrick, 1994, 323). On the other hand, psychopaths exhibited normal levels of arousal in terms of skin conductance and heart rate, and did not differ from non-psychopaths with respect to self-reports about how pleasant and arousing the slide stimuli were (since subjects in both groups rated the aversive slides as highly unpleasant and arousing). It is interesting that, despite their ability to use emotional language appropriately, psychopaths exhibited a deficit with respect to the processing of affective stimuli. It appears that while they experience the bodily arousal involved in emotion, they are unable to appreciate its full meaning. A study by Herve et al. (2003), which investigated the ability of psychopaths to understand the literal and emotional meanings of metaphors and language commonly used in everyday life, adds support to this hypothesis. The test consisted of 60 metaphorical statements ranging from very negative to very positive in emotional valence. Subjects were asked first to explain the literal meaning of each statement, and then to sort the statements into six bins according to their emotional valence, ranging from very positive to very negative (p. 1,498). Subjects’ interpretations of the metaphors were measured for aptness (appropriateness) using a three-point scale. With respect to the sorting task, experimenters tabulated a) total valence errors (the number of times that pairs of metaphors were incorrectly assigned to the wrong valence category during sorting, e.g., placing negative metaphors on the positive side); b) large valence errors (the number of times that metaphors were incorrectly sorted as belonging to the two most intense valence categories); and c) small valence errors (the number of times that metaphors were incorrectly placed in the least intense of the opposite valence categories, possibly indicating random guesses). The groups participating in the study did not differ significantly in terms of either completion time or aptness score and gave correct interpretations of the literal/denotative meaning of the metaphors used. However, the psychopaths differed significantly from the non-psychopaths with respect to sorting the metaphorical statements in terms of their emotional valence. In particular, psychopaths made numerous large valence errors, which means that they incorrectly sorted positive metaphors into the ‘very negative’ bin and negative metaphors into the ‘very positive’ bin (Herve et al., p. 1,502). For example, one individual interpreted the metaphor ‘The sea is the mother of life’ as strongly negative, and the metaphor ‘Man is a worm that lives on the corpse of the earth’ as strongly positive. The authors hypothesize that this apparent ‘confusion’ resulted from ‘a tendency to evaluate and process linguistic stimuli more on


the basis of their denotative than on their connotative or emotional content’ (Herve et al., p. 1,504). Psychopaths know what the sentence means on a semantic level, but miss its connotative content and ‘affective’ meaning. However, this is not due to a lack of arousal, but rather to inability to attend to or process the relevance or meaning (positive or negative) of the arousal they experience. Evidence gathered by Gray et al. (2003) using the Implicit Association Test likewise supports the notion that psychopaths exhibit affective processing deficits. In this test, subjects press a corresponding response to classify uppercase words as either ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant,’ and lowercase words as either ‘violent’ or ‘peaceful.’ When the same response key is assigned for both unpleasant and violent words (i.e., the congruent condition), most people find this task easy. On the other hand, when the pleasant and violent words share the same response key (i.e., the incongruent condition), most people find this confusing. The association between ‘pleasant–unpleasant’ and ‘violent–peaceful’ is measured by taking the reaction time for the incongruent condition and subtracting the reaction time for the congruent condition. As expected, the psychopathic subjects showed a much lower implicit association effect than the non-psychopathic subjects. Gray et al. point to abnormal beliefs about violence to make sense of these results. However, arguably what the results show is that diminished affective framing capacities lessen their ability to make associations, and thus there is less interference from these emotional associations during the test. Along similar lines, a study conducted by K.S. Blair et al. (2006) showed that psychopathic individuals exhibit reduced affective priming relative to comparison individuals, but no significant differences in terms of semantic priming. In priming tasks, the degree to which the target word is related to the prime determines the degree to which the response to the target word is facilitated or inhibited. These priming effects are found whether prime and target words are associatively or categorically related to each other. Through learning, the representations of a particular word, including its semantic representation, are associated with the activation of affect representations, so that the representation of a particular word later can come to activate these affect representations. Concepts of emotional words will share features that code the concept’s valence. Affective priming of the concept SNAKE by the concept GUN, for example, is predicted by this account, since there is overlap between the affective features associated with the two concepts (i.e., negative affect). Reduced affective priming among psychopaths suggests that, during learning, they form weaker connections between word representations and affective responses. This is consistent with the finding that they exhibit difficulty with valence-based word discriminations. Psychopathic subjects also appear to exhibit social cognition deficits, though not to the extent found in some other populations. While generalized impairments in processing facial affect have been found in disorders


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such as autism and schizophrenia, Richell et al. (2003) found that psychopathic individuals, on the other hand, exhibit no generalized impairment in theory of mind abilities. Their social cognition deficits instead seem to center on the processing of facial affect, in particular fear and sadness. Blair’s Integrated Emotions Systems (IES) model proposes that fearful and sad expressions serve to condition developing children to avoid engaging in antisocial behaviors that elicit these expressions. Among ordinary subjects, distress cues elicit empathy, which in turn reveals moral significance and inhibits aggression. Antisocial individuals such as psychopaths, on the other hand, exhibit deficits with respect to fear and sadness recognition (Marsh and Blair, 2008, p. 459). What is the source of such deficits? Because fearful expression deficits have been linked to amygdala dysfunction, theorists such as Marsh and Blair (2008) and Richell et al. (2003) point to a correlation between amygdala dysfunction and antisocial behavior. Just what role does the amygdala play? One possibility is that the perception of an emotion causes the viewer to simulate the perceived emotional experience. The viewer may draw on information from an amygdala-based fear simulation to reconstruct and identify the expresser’s emotional state (Marsh and Blair, 2008, pp. 461– 462). Impaired recognition of fearful expressions, which ultimately is rooted in brain dysfunction, thus results in a reduced response to fear. Greenspan (2003), on the other hand, maintains that psychopathy likely has a developmental source and that emotion responses that reveal moral significance are picked up initially from others. Beginning at a young age, most of us begin to care about others’ emotional reactions and to guide our behavior accordingly. Because we get our full set of resources for self-control from emotions that reflect others’ reactions to us in early life, agents who lack this early experience of empathy and trust may have a kind of moral ‘learning disability’ that results in psychopathy (Greenspan, 2003, p. 420). In my view, whether psychopathy has a developmental source or a strictly biological source, the crucial thing to acknowledge is that psychopaths have not developed complex, persisting affective framing patterns. This results in reduced affective priming effects and an inability to appreciate fully the meaning and significance of the affective arousal they experience. Indeed, the evidence cited thus far indicates that the affective responses of psychopaths do not guide and assist cognition in the usual way. There is a disconnect between affective response and cognitive processing, so that arousal lacks its usual orienting effect. Our response to stimuli ordinarily takes place against the backdrop of habitual dispositions and background affective and bodily states. However, psychopaths are lacking in this background of general bodily attunement, and perhaps the most striking evidence of this is the ‘failure of aversive cues to prime normal defensive actions’ (Patrick, 1994, p. 321). In addition, insofar as interpersonal understanding centers on the mutual modulation of affective framing patterns, a deficit in the ability

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to recognize a fearful facial expression signals the fact that psychopaths are not moved in the proper way by the emotions of others. These deficiencies with respect to affective modulation appear to be most striking with respect to negative affect, with the emotion of fear, in particular, failing to structure psychopaths’ interpersonal interactions. 6.2.2 Impulsivity and poor planning It is important to note that the psychopath’s deficit in emotion processing is not absolute. While psychopaths are receptive to affectively charged stimuli, they find it difficult to interrupt and reallocate their primary focus of attention. As a result, they are deficient in their ability to connect emotion experiences to contextual cues, and therefore emotion does not enhance their ability to process contextual information. Moreover, because emotions fail to redirect their attention appropriately, they are less likely to learn the contextual variables that predict motivationally significant events. Because psychopaths do not experience emotion against the backdrop of fully developed affective framing patterns, they find it difficult to attend to relevant features of their predicament and attach broader meaning to the emotions they are experiencing. Thus, in a sense, an attention deficit, rather than an inability to feel emotion, may be what makes psychopaths seem fearless and cold-blooded (Glass and Newman, 2009). What I will suggest is that this attention deficit is grounded in a permanent development delay in the formation of enduring affective framing patterns. Pham et al. (2003) conducted a range of tests to measure selective attention and executive control deficits among psychopaths. In the ‘Tower of London’ test, for example, subjects were asked to move, as quickly as possible, three beads of different colors across three pegs of different lengths in order to replicate a model presented by the experimenter. The test consisted of 27 problems of varying difficulties. In facilitating problems, it was possible to move a bead directly to its target position, and this move would be conducive to finding the optimal solution to the problem. In the misleading problems, on the other hand, moving a bead to its target position on the first move would increase the number of subsequent moves needed to replicate the model. Results showed that psychopaths exhibited more excessive movements when they were trying to solve misleading problems, tended to break the rules more often than control subjects did, and took a significantly longer time to complete the models than the controls (Pham et al., 2003, p. 401). This suggests that because psychopaths have difficulty controlling their attention when exposed to distracters, their capacity to plan out tasks that require behavior inhibition is impaired. In my view, the data cited by Pham et al. indicate that psychopaths tend to be guided by the more or less arbitrary directedness of current movements, and find it difficult to maintain their attentive focus on longer-term goals. This also may be why psychopaths tend to demonstrate maladaptive response preservation and


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to have difficulty inhibiting punished responses. Their failure to anticipate adverse consequences has to do with their impulsivity and inability to make use of affective framing to structure how they attend to and make sense of their situation. Note that given their attention deficit, psychopaths have something in common with individuals who suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Like ADHD subjects who have difficulty keeping their longer-term goals in view as well as dealing with interfering factors that might undermine their judgment or resolve (e.g., to do their homework), psychopaths have difficulty dealing with distracting stimuli and often act without sufficient forethought. However, unlike ordinary ADHD subjects, psychopaths often seem to be lacking in long-term goals altogether. As Kennett (2006) points out, when psychopaths ‘do wrong,’ this is not because their self-control has been defeated, but rather because there was not much to defeat (p. 77). The ability to stand back from and evaluate one’s preferences, and to determine whether or not they provide reasons for action, requires a broader framework of cares and concerns against one which can make these assessments. This sort of affective, attentional focus is precisely what the psychopath lacks. In my view, the poor decision-making and antisocial behavior commonly found among such subjects can be traced to the fact that their behavior often is not shaped by long-term concerns or experiences of the past, but instead often appears narrowly focused on the present moment. Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of psychopaths is their impulsivity and seeming inability to anticipate adverse consequences or punishment. Often they do not make use of what they have learned from past experience or take into account the possibility that that there are more efficient means available to achieve the same goal. They rarely pause to reflect, and have difficulty making use of ‘information signaling the need to proceed more cautiously or to generate an alternative response to the situation’ (Newman, 1987, p. 466). Because they do not form associations between negative consequences (e.g., punishment) and particular types of action, and have difficulty making use of situational cues, they have difficulty making well-considered decisions about what to do. Available empirical evidence supports the view that psychopaths are impaired with respect to behavioral inhibition and response modulation. For example, Newman (1987) and his colleagues developed a task to assess the ability of disinhibited subjects to use punishment cues to withhold inappropriate approach behavior. In the task, subjects are exposed repeatedly to a series of two-digit numbers that appear one at a time. They must learn, by trial and error, which are the ‘good numbers’ and which are the ‘bad numbers.’ If subjects press a button during the display of a good number they win tokens; and if they press the button during the display of a bad number they lose tokens. Two types of errors are possible. First, subjects can respond to bad numbers (errors of commission); second, they can fail

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to respond to good numbers (errors of omission) (Newman, 1987, p. 467). It is reasonable to expect that disinhibited subjects such as psychopaths, who have difficulty learning to use environment cues to regulate approach behavior will commit more commission errors than controls. Results confirmed that psychopaths make significantly more commission errors, but not more omission errors, than controls (Newman, 1987, p. 468). According to Newman, this reveals a response modulation deficit, or a decreased ability to alter a dominant response set. Once psychopaths are focused on obtaining a reward, they are less likely to interrupt their response set and consider punishment cues that signal a need for behavioral inhibition. However, it is not that psychopaths are insensitive to punishment or have a general tendency to over-respond. Instead, they have difficulty altering a dominant pattern of response, so that once response has been activated by a desire for reward, punishment fails to interrupt their goal-directed behavior (Newman, 1987, p. 472). Note that this response modulation deficit cannot be traced simply to an absence of affect or of emotional experience more generally. Howland and Newman (1985) found that in comparison to controls, disinhibited subjects (including psychopaths) typically display greater heart rate acceleration and larger skin conductance responses after punishment than after reward. Such emotional arousal indicates that such subjects do experience an emotional or motivational reaction to punishment. However, rather than altering their response, disinhibited subjects actually respond more quickly after punishment feedback. In a modified version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, Newman (1987) and his colleagues asked subjects to sort cords into piles according to three different rules involving the color, shape, and number of stimuli on a card. At any time, only one rule was in force, and this changed several times during the task in accordance with the subject’s performance. Each time the rule changed, subjects had to rely on negative feedback to alter their response set. Newman found that in contrast to controls, ‘who displayed slower response times in reaction to negative feedback, psychopaths failed to interrupt responding and actually displayed a small increase in speed of responding following the rule changes’ (Newman, 1987, p. 474). Such results appear to suggest that ‘disinhibited subjects experience an emotional reaction to negative feedback that involves response facilitation as opposed to response inhibition, particularly when they are set to respond for immediate rewards’ (Newman, 1987, p. 474). Because psychopaths’ reaction to punishment involves response facilitation, they find it difficult to learn from punished errors and avoid similar mistakes in the future. These results indicate that among psychopaths, deficient response modulation is potentiated by a context of reward. But just what is going on here? According to Newman, it seems that ‘the availability of reward produces in them an emotional/motivational state that is characterized by a readiness to


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respond and a resistance to altering their established response set’ (Newman, 1987, p. 476). As a result of experiencing heightened arousal, they tend to display an increase in the vigor of ongoing behavior rather than switching the focus of their attention. Thus, compared with controls, they are far less responsive to punishment cues in terms of altering their response set. On the other hand, if there is no need for them to alter their established response set, psychopaths are likely to perform as well as or even better than controls, probably as a result of increased attentional focusing. In my view, this can be explained by their lack of fully developed, long-term affective framing patterns. First, because their arousal is not adequately affectively framed, it becomes difficult for them to detect its meaning. Ordinarily, the physiology and bodily feeling associated with affective arousal directs subjects’ attention to relevant aspects of their situation (in this case, punishment cues). However, the arousal experienced by psychopaths is interpreted simply as fuel for their current endeavors, making it difficult for them to know when to ‘stop.’ Once they have been potentiated for reward, they get locked onto a particular behavior pattern and, like ADHD subjects, find it difficult to shift attention. In a sense, desire for reward takes over the ‘steering,’ and arousal following punishment simply increases their vigor and persistence rather than leading to behavior alteration. To the extent that a situation entails the need to alter one’s response strategies in light of changing environmental conditions, psychopaths tend to be at a relative disadvantage (Newman, 1987, p. 478). When they are focused on earning rewards, they do not respond normally to threat cues by altering their goaldirected behavior (Glass and Newman, 2009). Perhaps even more significantly, because their past arousal was not appropriately affectively framed, they have not built up long-term associations and patterns of bodily attunement to make sense of their current situation. When ordinary subjects receive negative feedback, extensive associations between negative consequences and the stimulus context are formed. This in turn facilitates recognition of the stimulus context on subsequent occasions, which elicits caution and increases the likelihood that a subject will respond more appropriately in the future (Newman, 1987, p. 477). One might say that through learning and conditioning, subjects tend to build up habitual patterns of bodily response to particular stimuli and types of situations. However, as Newman (1987) points out, this network of associations regarding negative experiences is less extensive among psychopaths (p. 478). They have difficulty linking emotionally significant events (such as punishment) with environmental cues (Glass and Newman, 2009, p. 230). Because their response to any situation is more likely to be governed by the prospect of reward associated with the stimulus context, the threat of punishment or failure is less likely to shape their response. This suggests that emotion-facilitated memory plays a crucial role in learning from experience.

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In my view, this lack of network of associations and the corresponding deficit in emotion-facilitated memory can be traced to a deficiency in enduring affective framing patterns. In Chapter 2, I maintained that among ordinary subjects, the bodily attunement afforded by affective framing allows us to make sense of our environment and adaptively coordinate our goaldirected activity. Affective framing underlies the ability to kindle, sustain, and renew the drive and motivation needed to carry out one’s plans and achieve one’s goals. It serves as a sort of caring-contoured ‘map’ that steers us where we want to go, so that we can ‘stop’ and ‘go’ appropriately and attend to relevant aspects of our surroundings. Psychopaths, on the other hand, enjoy little in the way of felt associations between particular situations and negative consequences, and thus are far less likely to suspend goal-directed behavior in response to emotion-related information. One might say that their pre-reflective, fine-grained emotive mapping of that world has not been adequately contoured and shaped by past experience. As a result, they are driven by their desire for reward in the immediate moment and tend to make choices governed by more temporally proximal outcomes. Often they are unable to enter into a state of self-imposed hardship in order to obtain greater long-term gains, and will act impulsively to escape from or avoid future situations that involve immediate unpleasantness (Barkley, 1997, p. 242).7 Likewise, they have a diminished capacity to follow rules, and the farther into the future the behavior is to be performed, the more difficult it is for them to comply with a temporally prolonged instruction. In short, their timing is permanently off, so that their behavior is more contingency-shaped and the prospect of immediate gratification or the avoidance of pain takes over the ‘steering.’ In short, the most salient features become the ones that are most immediate, and future outcomes are discounted. The impulsivity commonly found among psychopaths can be understood in this way as a direct result of a lack of fully developed, persisting, affective framing patterns. As I will discuss in the next section, this has profound implications for their ability to participate in moral life. 6.2.3 Moral judgment and the psychopath’s apparent egoism In Chapter 4, I discussed the link between desire-based emotion and moral judgment and briefly explored how a subject deficient in affective framing capacities likewise would experience deficits with respect to moral judgment. In my view, as a result of their deficit in persisting, long-term affective framing patterns, psychopaths are largely unable to form long-term goals and values of their own. This renders them unable to understand fully the values and long-term goals of others, and thus impacts their capacity for moral judgment. What I will argue is that psychopaths do not have a full understanding of why it is that certain actions are morally wrong. Various philosophers have drawn attention to the sense in which psychopaths seem to lack a moral compass. Prinz (2006) has claimed that although


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psychopaths may give lip-service to understanding morality and have abstract knowledge of moral concepts, they do not fully understand the meaning of any moral concepts that they use. Similarly, Deigh (1995) argues that psychopaths are deficient in their capacity for empathy, which in turn prevents them from seeing others as autonomous agents. As a result, they are bound to an egoistic view of their relations to others, have no interest in other people’s welfare, and care only about fulfilling their own purposes (Deigh, 1995, p. 761). Along similar lines, Fields (1996) argues that because psychopaths are incapable of forming other-regarding moral beliefs, they have no reason to concern themselves with others’ welfare and little motivation to perform actions that run contrary to their own self-regarding impulses. Does this mean that the psychopath should be understood as a psychological or ethical egoist, or, as Deigh (1995) might put it, one who does not advance beyond the egoistic view (p. 758)? In my view, to describe a psychopath as someone who regularly gets away with illegal or objectionable behavior in his own interests is not yet to provide the full story. It is true that psychopaths do manipulate and deceive others and that they often appear to promote their own interests without concern for others. This, together with the fact that they are not inhibited by others’ emotional responses in a normal way, makes many psychopaths appear on the surface to be quite egoistic (Greenspan, 2003, p. 419). However, as Greenspan (2003) notes, psychopaths also appear to be quite impaired in their ability to function in their own interests. They have difficulty keeping track of their own interests and preferences over time in a way that would be required to promote their long-term projects. Appealing to the work of Damasio (1994), Greenspan suggests that psychopaths fail to ‘mark’ their memories of wrong or unsuccessful choices with emotional anxiety, and so are unable to bring their past failures to bear on practical reasoning (2003, p. 420). Such a suggestion appears to be consistent with the empirical evidence, outlined in the last section, which suggests that psychopaths suffer from a response modulation deficit. Because they lack the affective/emotional ability to match their responses appropriately to context, they both radically overdo things and radically underdo things. One might say that they are ‘out of tune and out of rhythm’ with respect to intentional action. If Greenspan is right, then psychopathy results largely from a failure to make emotional associations. I agree, but wish to make the further claim that choices are recognized as ‘wrong’ or ‘unsuccessful’ only against the backdrop of broader, long-term cares and concerns. Perhaps the psychopath’s failure to make emotional associations results directly from the fact that he lacks the sort of complex affective framing patterns that ordinarily help subjects to structure and make sense of their experience. In this sense, enduring ‘moral values’ rest largely on the development of long-term affective framing patterns. Without these built-up patterns of response, psychopaths are not receptive in the normal way to moral considerations and

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cannot do the ‘dance of morality.’ Psychopaths might be aware intellectually that their actions violate established rules, but they have not adequately internalized these rules into their framework of cares and concerns. And this, I would argue, is because among psychopaths this broader stable framework of cares and concerns is largely absent, and in its place is affective chaos and psychodynamic instability. Their apparent lack of self-control is simply impulsive behavior, driven by their desires of the moment. Of course, I do not wish to deny that psychopaths rarely exhibit any sincere concern for the interests of others or show remorse or guilt for their actions when they cause harm to others. This is why their actions seem so thoughtless and indifferent and why it may appear that they care only for themselves and have little or no concern for others. As Fields (1996) notes, ‘it is not that [the psychopath] is strongly motivated by a firm conception of his happiness to act as he does, but that he seems to lack the capacity to restrain even half-hearted desires for immediate gratification’ (p. 274). As discussed already, psychopaths often act on the basis of their whims of the moment rather than their well-considered interests or long-term goals. Following Duff (1997), what I wish to argue is that the psychopath’s lack of concern for others signals not egoism, but rather the absence in his own life of any stable values (p. 194). Duff maintains that the life of a psychopath lacks the stable structure of emotion and value that gives cohesion and intelligibility to the lives of ordinary subjects and connects people to one another. In my view, as a result of a deficiency in long-term affective framing patterns, the life of the psychopath ‘consists of discrete episodes and impulses, limited to the present moment and the immediate context’ (Duff, 1997, p. 193). Given this lack of an overarching framework of care or concerns, which can be traced to a breakdown in affective framing, the psychopath has no long-term cares and concerns of the sort that rightly would be deemed ‘enduring moral values.’ As a result, although he grasps others’ factual beliefs about morality and can provide a factual account of his actions, he does not understand the emotional and moral significance that particular aspects of life have for others. For example, the psychopath might report that gender discrimination is wrong insofar as he is able to apply moral principles and make dispassionate moral assessments. However, this individual does not fully understand the emotional and moral significance that such discrimination has for some people’s lives. Perhaps for this reason, Prinz (2006) finds it more appropriate to suppose that these ‘reports’ on morality are dispassionate judgments about morals rather than dispassionate moral judgments (p. 38). He views psychopaths as similar to anthropologists who can report on morality without making genuine moral judgments. Although I raised several critical worries about Prinz’s sentimentalist account of moral judgment in Chapter 4, I believe that Prinz is absolutely correct to point out that affect is necessary for genuine moral judgment. Psychopaths fail to exhibit the sorts


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of long-term affective framing patterns and associated embodied desiderative feelings that would make it reasonable to suppose that they have developed and internalized stable values of their own. As a result, they find it difficult to recognize the wrong-making features of their own actions as well as the behavior of others, except perhaps when the behavior of others impinges upon their own immediate concerns and desires. This demonstrates very clearly that moral understanding is not purely an intellectual matter and that it goes well beyond the ability to utilize descriptive criteria in order to apply moral labels. In addition, one must be able to see how the rules apply in cases that do not fall exactly under the specified set of descriptive criteria; to discuss and criticize these moral rules; and to see how and why these values provide reasons for action. While psychopaths typically do learn about social conventions and moral rules, they know them merely in a detached, ‘cold,’ intellectual sense. Because they have not built up corresponding affective framing patterns, they fail to grasp the moral/ conventional distinction or to be especially ‘moved’ by certain forms of wrongdoing, such as physical abuse. They may recognize the moral rule in an intellectual sense, but fail to see that the rule applies to their choices and actions. Affective framing deficits make it difficult for them to recognize the broader significance of actions, both their own and those of others, and to home in on morally relevant factors not clearly captured by some rule. Relatedly, it also makes it difficult for them to appreciate the concerns and values of others. As Duff notes, understanding others’ values does not require sharing in their concerns, but it does require that we have moral values and a moral language of our own. The psychopath fails to appreciate the moral implications of actions because he does not understand ‘that dimension of human life which includes both moral values and those interests and emotions which make our actions morally significant’ (Duff, 1997, p. 197). Because the psychopath lacks stable cares and concerns of his own, he is unable to understand many of the interests, concerns, emotions and relationships that give moral significance to people’s actions. Since he cannot understand fully the meaning of love or friendship for his own life, for example, and does not have an ‘affective form of life’ of his own, he fails to appreciate the importance of such concerns in the lives of others (Duff, 1997, p. 197). This lack of understanding is evidenced by the fact that the psychopath often commits wrongs against victims ‘for whom the normal criminal would feel too much pity or affection, such as parents, wife, or girlfriend’ (Fields, 1996, p. 263). Insofar as he simply does what he feels like doing at the time, it is true that he does what he wants. However, unlike the egoist, the psychopath has no well-developed sense of his own interests and concerns. This is supported by the fact that the threat of punishment is largely inefficacious for psychopaths, and that such an individual ‘commits his thefts or frauds when the normal criminal would foresee inevitable detection’ (Fields, 1996,


p. 263). Indeed, the data surrounding psychopaths’ startle reflex cited earlier, and their apparent irresponsiveness to punishment cues, seem to count against the notion that psychopaths are self-absorbed egoists. Often the life of the psychopath is characterized in terms of failed opportunities, wasted chances, poor decisions, and astonishingly self-destructive behavior (Fields, 1996, p. 267). In my view, this is a direct result of the fact that the psychopath lacks a stable structure of long-term cares and concerns that can frame his actions and decisions. And, because his affective framing capacities are permanently impaired, chaotic, distorted, or offline, he finds it extremely difficult to comprehend the values, interests, and emotions of those around him. Smith (1984) has objected to this account of psychopathy and maintained that the psychopath indeed does have values and concerns that guide his actions. It is simply that the psychopath has radically extended the values of manipulation, egoism, and self-absorption that are actually practiced in our society. However, I believe such a suggestion overlooks the sorts of attentional deficits suffered by psychopaths and the way in which such deficits often contribute to maladaptive behavior. It is important to point out that unlike ‘ordinary’ self-absorbed egoists who are able to manipulate others on behalf of their long-terms schemes and goals, the psychopath finds it difficult to see past his concerns and interests of the present moment. Thus, in my view, while the psychopath does have values and concerns in some malfunctioning or wholly superficial sense – the sense in which a person who is just thrashing around in the water is ‘swimming’ – his attention is limited largely to the present moment. In this sense, the psychopath resembles a young child who is focused on immediate gratification and unguided by past experiences or future goals. He has little in the way of longstanding desires and cares or built-up patterns of bodily attunement that would enable him to attend to what he cares about in some more-or-less enduring sense. For this reason, the psychopath exhibits attentional deficits, poor decision-making, and a diminished capacity for moral agency and moral judgment.

6.3

Autism

The name ‘autism’ stems from the Greek word for ‘self,’ and the term was introduced by the psychiatrist E. Bleuler (1911) to describe a subject’s ‘detachment from outer reality and immersion in inner life’ (Stanghellini, 2001, p. 295). Autism is a psychiatric condition that starts early in childhood and is characterized by abnormal social development, decreased capacity for communication, and impoverished imagination. Most studies agree that autism is biologically based and that it primarily impacts intersubjectivity and the ability to be receptive and responsive to the mental life of others. Subjects with autism typically fail to connect socially with others, find it difficult


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to communicate, and exhibit extremely repetitive behavior (Baron-Cohen, 1999, p. 177). Often they are unable to role play or engage in pretend play and seem to be lacking in creativity and imagination. Many find change in their own environment upsetting and rely on rituals, routines, timetables, calendars, and lists to maintain order in their lives. I will argue that the three broad classes of symptoms associated with autism are affective and sensory–motor abnormalities, deficits pertaining to social interaction, and difficulties in making use of contextual information. Such symptoms can be traced to a disruption in essentially embodied emotional consciousness and a breakdown in affective framing. Note that while autistics do exhibit diminished empathy and a weakened sense of emotional connectedness, they are able to participate in moral life in a way that psychopaths cannot. This is because, through the development of moral rules and principles of conduct, they can fashion long-term stable values and concerns for themselves and care about the interests of others. Kennett (2002) maintains that underlying this capacity for rulegoverned conduct is ‘generalized moral concern,’ which she characterizes as Kantian moral feeling that is bound up with a sense of duty. Autistic subjects are capable of recognizing that other people’s interests matter and are reason-giving, and thus they are capable of deep moral concern. Kennett points out that while many of us are empathically engaged spontaneously and become immediately attuned to the concerns of others, autistics overcome their emotional detachment only through the application of rules of conduct and general principles in order to navigate the social landscape. This might be described as a ‘cold’ methodology that engages the intellect to a great extent in order to bring about the sort of affective, bodily attunement that for ordinary subjects occurs spontaneously and pre-reflectively.8 Along these lines, Temple Grandin reports that she has developed a rule system to guide her social interactions and behavior. These rules differentiate between ‘Really Bad Things’ such as not committing murder, ‘Courtesy Rules’ such as not cutting in line at the movie theater, ‘Illegal But Not Bad’ things such a slight speeding on the freeway, and ‘Sins of the System’ such as smoking pot and getting thrown in jail (Grandin, 1999). While most of us have a pre-reflective, bodily sense that certain actions are morally wrong, many autistic subjects have to appeal to intellect and rules to bring about this bodily attunement and thereby avoid doing ‘really bad things’ to others. Psychopaths, on the other hand, appear to be severely deficient in long-term values and concerns, generally unable to recognize appropriate reasons for action (whether for themselves or for others), and incapable of the subjective realization that other people’s interests are reason-giving. One might say that the sort of ‘generalized moral concern’ Kennett highlights does not show up anywhere on the psychopath’s ‘caring-contoured’ map. As a result, the psychopath’s deficit in long-term affective framing patterns results in an inability to participate in moral life. For the autistic

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subject, on the other hand, long-term affective framing patterns are intact, and what have broken down are the desiderative bodily mappings that normally guide face-to-face interpersonal interactions in the present moment. Sensory abnormalities, difficulties with social cognition, and an inability to make use of contextual information all flow from this breakdown. 6.3.1 Affective and sensory–motor dynamics Baron-Cohen has argued that severe cases of autism should be understood as ‘mindblindness,’ resulting from a failure to develop a normal ‘theory of mind’ (ToM). As I discussed in Chapter 5, ToM is understood as the ability to speculate or theorize about what is going on in others’ minds, infer their mental states, and predict what they are going to do. According to BaronCohen, we theorize ‘an enormous amount, as a natural way of thinking about why people do what they do’ (1999, p. 177). To make sense of the central deficit in autism, Baron-Cohen distinguishes between consciousness of the physical world and consciousness of the mental world. To demonstrate that children with autism are conscious of the physical world, Baron-Cohen points out that they search to find occluded objects, are capable of mental rotation, and are able to represent in their mind how physical objects appear from different visual perspectives. In addition, they respond to the same range of physical stimuli that others do and affirm that they can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste things (1999, p. 178). On the other hand, autistic children seem to be relatively unaware of the mental world. They do not perform well on ‘false belief tests,’ do not exhibit a clear understanding of how physical objects differ from thoughts about objects, have difficulty distinguishing between really acting and ‘just pretending,’ and have difficulty understanding more mentalistic causes of emotion. In addition, they are less able to deceive, have difficulty understanding metaphor, sarcasm, and irony, and fail to produce most aspects of pragmatics in their speech. From these experimental data, Baron-Cohen concludes that autism can be conceptualized as involving degrees of mindblindness and a developmental delay in the capacity for mind-reading (1999, p. 182). Baron-Cohen’s argument hinges on the claim that while children with autism are conscious of the physical world, they are relatively unaware of the mental world. However, there is a great deal of evidence indicating that autistic subjects exhibit wide-ranging sensory abnormalities and that their engagement with the physical world differs dramatically from that of ordinary subjects. As McGeer (2001) notes, some of the abnormalities associated with autism have little to do with ‘theory of mind’ capacities. These include sensory–motor problems, unusual physical sensitivities and insensitivities, slowed orienting of attention, oddities of posture and gait, tics, twitches, and abnormalities in perceptual processing. A study by Leekam et al. (2007) showed that over 90 percent of children with autism have sensory abnormalities, with sensory symptoms in multiple sensory domains. First-person


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autobiographical accounts likewise reveal that subjects have unusual sensory experiences, including insensitivity to pain and atypical responses to auditory, visual, tactile, and olfactory stimuli. Some of the abnormalities most commonly found among autistic subjects include being distressed or unusually fascinated by certain sounds; exhibiting an unusual degree of interest in bright lights, shiny things, and the feel of certain surfaces; aimlessly manipulating objects to seek sensory stimulation; spinning around or running in circles more often than their peers; peculiar gesturing or hand-flapping; exhibiting a negative reaction to gentle touch; and refusing food with certain textures (Leekam et al., 2007, p. 897). In addition, Shanker (2004) notes that children with autism express less overall emotion, less positive emotion, and more negative and neutral emotion. They also display atypical facial expressions of positive emotion, marked by asymmetry, reduced movements in the eye and mouth regions, shorter durations, and lower intensity. In light of such evidence, Gallagher (2004) claims that the source of autism is a range of neurological disruptions that impact sensory–motor processes. Gallagher thus cites disruption in brain activity as the ultimate source of autism and points to research indicating that the normal timing of apoptosis (the natural pruning of the excess neuronal cells with which we were born) is disrupted in the autistic brain. This in turn leads to both sensory–motor problems and difficulties with social cognition. Some of the brain-based sensory–motor problems Gallagher cites include movement disturbances, problems with sitting, walking and crawling, and abnormal motor patterns. In my view, while Gallagher is correct to emphasize the sensory–motor problems associated with autism, his account mistakenly affirms the assumption that brain dysfunction alone is the source. Why not suppose that sensory–motor problems themselves, while perhaps associated with the disruption of the normal timing of apoptosis (or some other neural dysfunction), play a direct role in interfering with social understanding? As I discussed in Chapter 5, there is evidence that a subject’s understanding of another person’s actions and intentions depends importantly on a mirrored reverberation in the subject’s own motor system. As Gallagher points out, ‘problems with our own motor or body-schematic system could significantly interfere with our capacities for understanding others’ (2004, pp. 210–211). This is because disruption of one’s own sensory–motor processes could contribute directly to the disruption of processes that enable interpersonal understanding at the level of what he calls ‘primary intersubjectivity.’ Along these lines, Shanker (2004) maintains that the source of autism is a set of ‘sensory challenges’ that impede children’s abilities to engage in co-regulated affective interactions with caregivers. According to his dynamic developmental model, autism results not from a genetic malfunction in mechanisms specifically designed to process emotional information, but instead from disordered interaction patterns, which have their roots in

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sensory–motor disruptions. This makes it difficult for autistic children to undergo healthy emotional development, which in turn impacts their cognitive, linguistic, and social development. To understand autism, we must look at subjects’ bodily dynamics and their relationships to others. Shanker maintains that due to an over- or under-reactivity to stimuli, the infant’s opportunity to engage in important learning experiences is undermined, and that diminished co-regulated affective interaction hampers the child’s emotional development (2004, p. 226). Deficits in facial expressions, for example, may exacerbate problems with social interaction and the development of intersubjectivity insofar as they impact a caregiver’s responsiveness to the child. On the other hand, a child who is overreactive to visual stimuli may resort to tuning out the world as much as possible as a way to cope with the sense of being overwhelmed by stimuli. For example, he may avert his gaze in order to reduce his stress. However, the more the child avoids interaction with others, the more he or she is deprived of the sorts of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that would allow for the development of a personality, inner life, and adaptive responses (Shanker, 2004, p. 229). The loss of engagement and relatedness also may cause the child to withdraw even more into his own world and to engage in behaviors that are even more aimless or repetitive. As a result, he or she will be unable to develop the social, communicative, and imaginative skills needed to make good regulative use of other people. The innate capacity for imitation, for example, ‘would hardly be evoked in a sustained and potentially regulatory manner if autistic children find their contact with others, on the whole, far too stimulating to be tolerated’ (McGeer, 2001, p. 129). What I would add to this account is the idea that the various sensory abnormalities commonly found among autistic subjects, including their over- or under-reactivity to stimuli, are all rooted in an affective framing deficit. Although sensory experiences are especially intense, associated stimuli are not experienced as mattering and instead are accompanied by a sense of detachment. As a result, the individual may become distressed and overwhelmed. For example, among autistic children who are hypersensitive to certain sounds, intense auditory experiences are not accompanied by feelings of subjective import, and bodily feelings are devoid of their usual desiderative element. Because a child is unable to make sense of the meaning of such stimuli, he or she may very well feel overwhelmed or distressed and withdraw from the situation in order to escape being bombarded by intense, seemingly meaningless stimuli. Alternatively, the child might rely on repetitive behavior as a way to reduce or deal with overwhelming sensory stimuli. Likewise, problems with sitting, walking, and crawling among infants, and abnormal motor patterns such as spinning around in circles, peculiar gestures, and hand flapping among older children, are the result of an affective framing deficit. As a result of insufficient guidance from the desiderative


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bodily feelings of affective framing, their bodily movements are likely to appear random, disjointed, or even robot-like. This is because, as Hanna and I (2009) have argued, the feelings of affective framing ordinarily determine the fine-grained intentional targets of cognitive attention, in particular the goals of intentional action. In principle, the very same arm movement considered purely as a physical event can be part of a wave, part of a dance, part of a stretching exercise, part of a political rally, part of a committee meeting, or part of some other goal-directed act. What fully determines its being part of a specific action is the will of the minded subject, essentially including his or her affective framing of the arm movement. Body movements not structured and framed appropriately by desire-based emotive goals, on the other hand, are things that merely happen to the minded subject, either by being deterministically imposed on him or her, or else by occurring as a matter of chance. Such non-framed movements are typically presented to us either as mechanical and lacking in fluidity (e.g., like a puppet or robot) or random and peculiar (e.g., like a leaf tossed to and fro in the wind). This provides a plausible explanation for why autistic subjects have a tendency to engage in either repetitive, stereotyped activities or random and peculiar bursts of behavior, rather than ones specifically tailored to their specific context or situation: they pre-reflectively represent their own bodies as either machines or chaotic dynamic systems. As a result of this disruption of motor processes, which one might understand as a breakdown in bodily attunement, autistic subjects are largely unable to engage in social referencing behaviors or shared attention. Because their own bodily experience is attenuated and distorted, they find it difficult to coordinate their own expressions, gestures, and movements with those of others. If the bridge between self and other is sustained by perceiving and reproducing the expressed bodily feelings of others (smile for smile, frown for frown) and participating in the sort of mutual modulation I described in Chapter 5, certainly this will be disrupted if one’s own bodily feelings lack salience and felt meaning. As a result, others’ gestures and expressions will not arouse the subject’s own embodied, desiderative feelings, and she will not clue in to other people’s emotional comportment or intentions. Thus, the sensory disturbances commonly associated with autism, which are symptomatic of a disruption in embodied emotional consciousness, lead directly to an inability to attune oneself to other people, to understand one’s context, and to filter information effectively. 6.3.2

Social interaction and knowing how to dance with others

Social and communicative impairments are, no doubt, the most commonly discussed aspects of autism. Many theorists have stressed that autistic individuals have an inability to conceptualize mental states and processes, have little interest in meeting another’s eyes, demonstrate little tendency to engage in social referencing behaviors or shared attention, and seem to have


little understanding of how their behavior affects others. Proponents of the theory-of-mind (ToM) theory maintain that our natural way of understanding the social environment depends on our ability to ascribe beliefs and desires and interpret others’ behavior in mentalistic terms. They suppose that ‘our normal procedure is to treat [others] as bearers of mental states hidden behind their embodied, behavioral manifestations’ (Gallagher, 2004, p. 201). While ordinary subjects take a theoretical stance in order to understand another person’s mind, autistic subjects suffer from impaired mindreading ability. However, there are strong reasons to doubt the claim that autism results primarily from a subject’s lack of a ToM. First, it is important to note that many high-functioning autistic individuals, who would be capable of passing false-belief tests, nevertheless exhibit certain abnormalities of social behavior that impact reciprocal relating and communication (Kennett, 2002). This suggests that possessing a ToM may not be sufficient for wellfunctioning social cognition. If this is true, then to understand the social life of the autistic subject we cannot simply point to his lack of a ToM. Moreover, it is not at all clear that the use of a ToM to engage in so-called ‘mind-reading’ is even necessary for social cognition. As I discussed in Chapter 5, I side with Gallagher in thinking that understanding social cognition as a matter of mind-reading overlooks the extent to which perception and bodily engagement are involved in the process of understanding others. Gallagher rightly notes that these second-person interactions involve ‘modes of understanding that are pragmatic and evaluative’ rather than theoretical (Gallagher, 2004, p. 202). For this reason, the distinction that Baron-Cohen makes between understanding the physical world and understanding the mental world is mistaken to the extent that it fails to acknowledge the sense in which understanding other minds is largely a matter of becoming attuned to others’ living, lived bodies. As Baron-Cohen (1999) himself notes, gestures, gaze-monitoring, and other aspects of joint attention often are absent in children with autism. The central role of gesture, joint attention, and other forms of bodily coordination highlights the way in which understanding others’ minds has a bodily basis. For these reasons, I have claimed that social cognition rests largely on the capacity for body attunement rather than theorizing or ToM-based simulation.9 Like Gallagher (2004), I believe that if possessing a ToM is not a good explanation for non-autistic intersubjective experience, then lack of such a theory cannot provide an adequate explanation for autism. Recall that according to Gallagher’s interaction theory, our primary forms of intersubjective understanding develop very early on in life. Infants can sense that certain kinds of beings in their environment are indeed subject– agents like themselves, and are able to interpret the complex dynamic bodily movements of others as goal-directed, conscious, intentional movements (Gallagher, 2004, p. 205). These basic capacities to interact with others,


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which Gallagher calls ‘primary intersubjectivity,’ center on perceptual experience and the ability to see others’ desires, intentions, and feeling in their bodily movements, facial expressions, and eye direction. If the bodily attunement theory outlined in Chapter 5 is correct, then others’ conscious intentions and desires are not hidden, private, or internal, but rather directly manifest in their essentially embodied comportment. If our conscious minds are nothing more and nothing less than our own individual forms of life – immanent dynamic structures of our living bodies – then although they are egocentrically centered and contingently private, since the interior movements and parts of our living bodies are normally hidden from others, they are nevertheless also necessarily to some extent manifest at the surfaces of our living, lived bodies. In this sense, as the later Wittgenstein would have put it, ‘nothing is hidden,’ which from the standpoint of the essential embodiment theory I will reinterpret as meaning: Nothing mental is necessarily hidden, and something of the mental is always and necessarily manifest at the surfaces of our living, lived bodies. Essentially embodied practices that are desire-based, emotional, sensorimotor, perceptual, and essentially non-conceptual serve as our primary basis for understanding others (Gallagher, 2004, p. 204). Like Gallagher, Sparaci (2008) understands intersubjectivity as being grounded largely in embodied practices and only rarely involving theorizing and simulation (p. 207). Sparaci’s Social Orienting Model (SOM) describes autism as a disorder that arises at a very early stage of development. In particular, SOM emphasizes that intersubjective understanding originates in a form of direct perception and involves direct social intercourse and embodied practices. The infant directly perceives others as the bearers of emotions and mental expressions and thus has no need to approach the other as an object that needs to be interpreted via theory or inference (Sparaci, 2008, p. 208). In early interactions between child and caregiver, such as play, joint attention, and gesture, the body plays a key role in allowing the infant to gain familiarity with her caregiver’s intentions and attune her behavior accordingly. Infants typically rely on various forms of non-verbal communication, such as bodily contact, posture, head nods, facial expression, gestures, eye contact, and pitch/volume of speech to interact with others. Sparaci highlights gesture, in particular, as one of the key aspects of primary intersubjectivity. For example, a child may attempt to grasp an object that is out of reach and leave her hand hanging in the air. At this point, a caregiver comes to interpret the gesture, assign meaning to it, and assist the child. An unsuccessful grasping movement thus emerges as a communicative act. In Chapter 5, I argued that the bodily attunement which Ratcliffe describes as ‘affective reorientation,’ and which Stanghellini describes as a ‘harmonization’ of mental activities, can be understood in terms of the mutual modulation of affective framing patterns. Autistic subjects, however, find it

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extremely difficult to connect with others and to achieve this sort of natural harmonization. In my view, autistic subjects’ social drifting and their associated inability to be attuned to others have their roots in disrupted or etiolated patterns of essentially embodied experience. It is interesting that those with facial paralysis find it very difficult to interact smoothly with others, and that, without the feedback and reinforcement that facial gestures normally provide, there is significantly diminished interpersonal engagement (Ratcliffe, 2007, p. 169). Similarly, becoming blind can deprive people of the ability to respond back and forth with expressions and gestures, and thus disrupt the openness and receptivity to others that they once took for granted. Autism appears to involve a similar type of disruption or etiolation of social understanding. From an early age, the essentially embodied practices of primary intersubjectivity among autistic children are broken or outof-sync. Indeed, studies have found that autistic infants exhibit attention, imitation, temperament, reflex, movement, and posture anomalies. Autistic infants between 8 months and 1 year of age do not use the noises found to be common among normal babies to express their needs and feelings. Ricks and Wing (1975) also found that non-verbal forms of communication were not used easily or naturally by autistic children, which suggests they do not develop these dynamically implemented skills as part of the normal process of maturation. Such children tend not to use gesture as a part of joint attention and are correspondingly deficient in their use of gesture to engage in social communication (Sparaci, 2008, pp. 215–216). Ratcliffe claims that ‘an absence of the to-and-fro of expression and gesture that ordinarily operates as a harmonious backdrop for mutual understanding’ results in a breakdown of interpersonal understanding (2007, p. 169), which gets it exactly right. We normally interact with others by responding to feelings with feelings, both of which are captured and conveyed in a patterned system of bodily gestures and coordinated movements. This is, as it were, our ‘body language,’ or (to reverse the biblical phrase and use Goethe’s apt reformulation in Faust) ‘the flesh made word.’ But the linguistic metaphor can be misleading because it is too cerebral or intellectual. An even more apt analogy, I have proposed, is dancing. Ordinary subjects perceive actions, gestures, and expressions through activation of their own motor systems and bodily feelings, and thereby know ‘how to dance’ with others. The perception of another’s body comportment spontaneously arouses various bodily feelings in the perceiver, and also various responsive movements, such as turning to face a speaker and looking him or her in the eye. In the case of autism, on the other hand, lack of expression on the part of the autistic subject is met by lack of expression by the other party, resulting in disrupted patterns of affective response. Because this capacity for everyday bodily attunement and responsiveness – this ‘knowing how to dance’ with others – is disrupted in those with autism, their capacity to connect with others and affectively interact with them is diminished. First-person social


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interactions come to be ruled by third-person ‘It-It’ relationships, resulting in more or less ‘disembodied’ social relationships. (As an analogy, imagine two people attempting to dance together over Facebook or Skype.) In my view, the social cognition deficits involved in autism can be understood as resulting from a severe disruption of the mutual modulation of affective framing patterns that ordinarily occurs during face-to-face interaction. In the previous section, I suggested that as a result of deficiency in affective framing capacities, the autistic subject undergoes bodily sensations and tensions that have lost much of their felt meaning and significance. This makes it extremely difficult to ‘connect’ at a bodily level with others and participate in a normal way in the mutual modulation of affective framing patterns. In addition, the deficit in affective framing makes it difficult to attend to relevant features of another person’s body comportment, facial expressions, and gestures. As a result, the significance of various social acts and the nuanced meaning of many social encounters likely will escape autistic subjects, and they will find it highly difficult to engage in the dance of intersubjectivity. To see just how nuanced even everyday social situations are, note that there is a highly fine-grained difference between a ‘friendly kiss’ and a ‘lover’s kiss,’ as well as between ‘playful sarcasm’ and ‘angry sarcasm.’ Ordinary subjects distinguish between the two types of kiss by attending to the highly specific, fine-grained features of the kissing movements as they unfold; and they distinguish between the two types of sarcasm by attending to highly specific, fine-grained features of the speaker’s volume and intonation patterns. What makes this attentional focusing possible, and what is lacking among autistic subjects, is affective framing and the ability to home in on relevant features of one’s surroundings. Indeed, some first-person accounts of those with autism strongly indicate that desire-based emotions are crucially involved in attempts to understand others’ mental states and behavior and uncover the social meaning of their actions. Rather than relying on the sort of pre-reflective, spontaneous affective framing that I have described, Temple Grandin reports that she has devised a rule system to guide her social interactions. While her emotions sometimes are very strong while she is experiencing them, she describes much of her memory processes as emotionless and compares them to ‘surfing the Internet of web pages in [her] mind’ (Grandin, 1999). Similarly, her second-person contact with others likely more closely resembles exchanges taking place over Facebook or Skype than it does ordinary face-to-face, essentially embodied, emotive interactions. She has learned how to approach social relationships and social situations using her intellect, and reports having great difficulty with new social situations if she does not have a similar situation from the past to use as a guide. According to Grandin, because she is unable to grasp human emotions intuitively and pre-reflectively, she instead relies on pure logic. One might say that the whole of her


social life resembles the sort of detached interaction that often takes place at an APA convention. As Shanker (2004) points out, autism thus exemplifies the Cartesian view of social cognition and empathy often articulated in the literature. This Cartesian framework assumes that we hypothesize what is happening internally in someone’s mind on the basis of outer behaviors, and that consequently we need an inferentially structured theory of mind to see other people as agents (Shanker, 2004, pp. 220–221). One might say that people with autism operate in the way one might expect all humans to operate if the theory-theory or simulation-theory were true, by appealing to a set a generalizations and approaching social cognition from a detached, thirdperson perspective. Because they cannot perceive the intentions or emotions of others in their bodily comportment or participate fully in reciprocal bodily modulation, high-functioning autistics may employ theorizing strategies or mentalizing as a way to compensate. However, this is because they lack the ordinary way of understanding others, and so must try to make algorithmic and explicit what for most of us is second nature (p. 212). In autism, a first-person perspective based on pre-reflective, essentially non-conceptual bodily attunement (affective framing) is replaced with a third-person perspective involving the application of algorithms, general principles, and abstract rules (Stanghellini and Ballerini, 2004, p. 266). The various social cognition deficits that result can be understood as a direct result of impaired affective framing capacities and deficient patterns of bodily attunement. 6.3.3 Making use of contextual information In addition to the sensory and perceptual problems described in 6.3.1, autistic subjects exhibit impairments in language use and attention and often have difficulty integrating perceptual input at a cognitive level (Leekam et al., 2007, p. 894). Generally speaking, autistic subjects appear to be impaired in the foregrounding and backgrounding of information, and are unable to experience wholes without full attention to the constituent parts. In addition, subjects sometimes exhibit a delay or lack of spontaneous functional speech (De Villiers et al., 2007, p. 293) and their discourse may be lacking in cohesion and coherence. They have a tendency to violate informal rules governing dialogue, such as turn-taking, are unable to understand conversational implicature, and tend to become overly focused on a single topic. Often they say things that lack relevance to the hearer, do not anticipate what hearers will want to know, and have a tendency to take figurative speech (including metaphor, sarcasm, and irony) literally. In my view, these various information processing deficits are rooted in an inability to make proper use of contextual information, which in turn is rooted in impaired affective framing. The ability to use language appropriately and understand what others say clearly goes well beyond knowing the literal meaning of the expression


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used, and also involves an understanding of what it would be reasonable for a person to mean given the setting in which the speech occurs. The meaning of ‘Mark is at the bank,’ for example, is highly context-sensitive and rests on knowledge about whether Mark frequently goes angling at the river or instead works at Chase Manhattan (De Villiers et al., 2007, p. 295). Many autistic subjects suffer from deficits concerning the appropriate use of language, or what De Villiers et al. (2007) call ‘pragmatic deficits.’ The authors found that while autistic subjects do not have much difficulty with pragmatics when it comes to the content of literal speech, they exhibit pronounced deficits with respect to figurative speech. This makes it difficult for them to understand metaphor, irony, and conversational implicature, and to home in on social and contextually-based meanings that go beyond the semantic meaning of what is said (De Villiers et al., 2007, p. 315). Such difficulties indicate that they have a deficient understanding of the relationship between language and social context and how language must be interpreted in relation to the perspective and intentions of the speaker. Likewise, their own discourse may be characterized by a lack of cohesion and coherence. Autistic subjects have a tendency to violate informal dialogical rules such as turn-taking and to continue talking about a single topic regardless of whether it is relevant to the hearer. Stanghellini (2001) describes the autistic person’s use of language as much like a soliloquy rather than a ‘cooperative process whose aim is interlacing one’s own world with that of others’ (p. 296). In autism, as in schizophrenia, there is a loss of vital contact with social reality, and the natural attitude toward everyday experience and communication is disrupted (Stanghellini, 2001, p. 297). In addition, there is a disruption in the integration of perceptual input. To make sense of many of the information processing difficulties associated with autism, Frith (1989) claims that the disorder is characterized by ‘weak central coherence.’ Central coherence is the tendency to engage in global, configural processing, and to rely on context to integrate diverse information in order to construct higher-level meaning (Frith, 1989). It is importantly interesting that even autistic subjects who show evidence of some so-called ‘mentalizing’ abilities and pass false-belief tests exhibit weak coherence effects (Frith and Happé, 1994, p. 125). In my view, this provides support for the notion that something like ‘weak coherence’ is more central to the disorder than the ability to ‘read’ others. While ordinary subjects tend to process information in terms of its contextualized meaning, autistic subjects often show a preoccupation with details and parts, fail to extract gist or configuration, and have difficulty picking up on contextual cues (Happé, 1999, p. 217). Much experimental evidence has demonstrated detail-focused perceptual processing among autistic subjects. For example, because they have an ability to see parts over wholes and thus a greater ability to segment the design into constituent blocks, autistic people consistently show superior performance on Block Design tests (Frith and Happé,


1994, p. 122). Autistic children also excel at the Embedded Figures Test, which involves spotting a hidden figure among a larger design or meaningful drawing. In addition, they tend to have a knack for locating tiny objects (such as thread on a patterned carpet) and are good at detecting minute changes in familiar layouts (such as the arrangement of items on a bathroom shelf) (Frith and Happé, 1994, p. 122). When asked to make judgments about standard textbook visual illusions, such subjects tend not to succumb to illusions as much as ordinary subjects do. Because autistic subjects focus on the to-be-judged parts without integrating them with the surrounding illusion-inducing context, they are better able to make accurate judgments (Happé, 1999, p. 218). Many of these superior abilities seem to be related to a disembedding skill. While ordinary subjects have difficulty homing in on embedded figures, probably due to the fact that the whole drawing or visual scene becomes the focus, autistic subjects ‘have privileged access to the parts and details normally securely embedded in whole figures’ (Frith and Happé, 1994, p. 122). According to Frith and Happé, weak central coherence impacts not just perceptual processing, but also language ability and memory. For example, autistic subjects have difficulty with the disambiguation of homographs. These are cases in which, in order to choose the correct (i.e., contextually appropriate) pronunciation in a sentence, one must understand the final word as part of the whole sentence’s meaning. Because contextual disambiguation is difficult for autistic subjects, they tend to give the word’s more common pronunciation regardless of the preceding sentence’s meaning and overall context (Frith and Happé, 1994, p. 124). In addition, they demonstrate poor gist memory for story material, find it difficult to answer comprehension questions and fill in gaps in a story test, and do not derive the usual benefit from meaning in memory tests. While ordinary subjects recall sentences much better than unconnected word strings, autistic subjects seem not to make as much use of semantic relations or grammatical relations in memory. For them, reading a sentence is more like reading a list of unconnected words (Happé, 1999, p. 219). Such evidence indicates that autistic subjects are poor at tasks requiring the recognition of global meaning and the interpretation of individual stimuli in terms of overall context. However, as Frith and Happé are quick to point out, such individuals are relatively good at tasks where attention to local information and detail is advantageous. In their view, the disconnected islands of ability and savant skills often found in autism are achieved through relatively abnormal information processing, which they describe in terms of weak central coherence. Savant abilities might very well be a direct result of a local and detail-observant processing style (Frith and Happé, 1994, p. 125). For example, if autistic subjects show a persistent local-processing bias, this might explain some individuals’ superior ability to learn note names for individual pitches and account for why


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‘absolute pitch’ is easier for them to acquire (Happé, 1999, p. 220). It also might explain why many autistic children can construct jigsaw puzzles at lightning speed and demonstrate savant skills in areas such as calculation and verbatim memory. According to Frith and Happé, because weak central coherence confers both advantages and disadvantages, just like strong central coherence, it is more appropriately described as a ‘cognitive style’ rather than as a cognitive deficit. While I do agree that exploring some of the tasks at which autistic subjects excel can help us to gain a better understanding of the disorder, I also think it would be a mistake to overlook the way in which their inability to appreciate context impairs their cognitive and social abilities. As Happé notes, it is likely that a failure to integrate information in context might contribute to everyday social difficulties. Piecemeal processing of faces, for example, might hamper emotion recognition and make it difficult to pick up on subtle facial expressions. Moreover, as I suggested in Chapter 5, social cognition in general relies heavily on the ability to home in on relevant contextual features. What Gallagher calls ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ involves second-person encounters that are highly contextually embedded and pragmatic. As Gallagher points out, without a background context, secondary intersubjectivity is disrupted because other people’s intentions and the meaning of their behavior are not clear. Similarly, McGeer (2001) claims that interpersonal understanding requires practical know-how and the ability to draw upon internalized norms of interpretation and explanation. This is not theoretical expertise, as theory-theory supposes, but instead can be understood as the ‘insider’s’ expertise of a ‘normatively invested skilled participant who is attuned to others because she knows the nuances of minded behavior in two deeply related ways’ (McGeer, 2001, p. 116). First, she is capable of understanding others’ thoughts and actions by appealing to shared folk-psychological norms; and, second, she can make her own behavior meaningful to others by operating in accordance with these same norms. Understanding others involves bringing shared norms to bear, for our outlook on what people generally do and what they can be expected to do is linked to our views about what they ought to do. What is crucial to note, of course, is that our sense of what people will and should do depends largely on our situational understanding. In short, shared norms are intimately bound up with context. As McGeer points out, much of the work of interpersonal understanding is not really done by us at all, whether implicitly or explicitly, but instead is ‘carried out by the world, embedded in the norms and routines that structure each interaction’ (2001, p. 119). The ability to apply norms and identify situations in which relevant routines are appropriate rests on a capacity for navigating different social contexts. Autistic subjects’ difficulty with integrating information in context is evidenced by their tendency toward extreme literal-mindedness and their frequent blindness to deceit and sarcasm. Given their inability to recognize


global meaning, subjects are likely to overlook the broader implications of someone’s speech. Many theorists also have noted the autistic lack of imagination, evidenced by the absence of pretend play during childhood, as well as the tendency to focus on superficial details and miss the larger meaning of things. Being able to distinguish between pretending and ‘real’ action requires that one understand the broader context in which action occurs. Thus, their inability to situate someone else’s behavior in a particular social context makes it difficult for them to distinguish between appearance and reality. Subjects also often demonstrate notable rote memory skills, though they ‘show little concern with focusing on what’s worth remembering for other cognitive purposes’ (McGeer, 2001, p. 114). In addition, given their inability to make full use of contextual information, subjects may be very resistant to changing routines or situations and strive to maintain sameness. I have characterized the ability to identify relevant contextual features as a matter of essentially embodied affective framing, and also believe that subjects’ capacity for essentially embodied affective framing ultimately underlies central coherence and the ability to integrate information in a given context. Without the direction and attentional focusing provided by essentially embodied affective framing, autistic subjects find it difficult to ascertain the broader meaning of things and may focus instead on superficial details. Deriving global meaning requires interpreting details against a background of significance, and it is precisely this background of bodily significance that is diminished among autistic subjects. This inability to detect salient contextual features surfaces in their insusceptibility to certain perceptual illusions, their knack for finding embedded figures within a larger design, their difficulties with ‘gestalt’ perception (i.e., seeing whole figures or scenes as opposed to their parts), and the absence of perceptual ‘switching’ with ambiguous figures such as the Jastrow duck-rabbit. While affective framing provides most of us with a richly contextual emotive ‘map,’ autistic subjects are significantly less guided by such a map, and therefore may find it easier to screen out context (in the case of finding embedded figures within a larger design), but more difficult to see the big picture as opposed to its parts. Thus, autistic subjects’ inability to see the big picture applies both in perceptual processing as well as in making sense of social situations and interpersonal interactions. In my view, without sufficient desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing to serve as an emotive map, subjects will find it difficult to navigate through different social situations and develop the rich appreciation of context enjoyed by ordinary subjects. This is why autistic subjects find it difficult to pick up on subtle social cues or tones of voice in order to detect deceit or sarcasm. An affective framing deficit also can explain some of the other non-social symptoms associated with autism, including restricted range of interest, obsessive concern for


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sameness, preoccupations with objects or their parts, and proficient rote memory (Gallagher, 2004, p. 211). In my view, the notion of affective framing adequately explains the tight link between bodily–affective processes and perceptual and cognitive abilities, and the way in which these linkages are disrupted in cases of autism.

6.4 Conclusion I have argued that schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism all can be understood as some sort of disruption or deficit in affective framing. In schizophrenia, the ‘urgency of life’ is lacking and the desiderative aspect of bodily feelings is largely missing. As a result, subjects experience a vastly diminished sense of self, a loss of vital contact with their surroundings, a sense of detachment from their actions and thoughts, an inability to understand others, and an overall deficiency in their ability to utilize contextual information. In psychopathy, subjects have a less robust moral sense than ordinary subjects as a result of a deficiency in long-term cares and concerns and a limited range of desire-based emotions. Psychopaths do not experience the radical disruption in sensorimotor subjectivity that schizophrenic subjects undergo, and so they retain their basic grip on reality and the social world. But although their desiderative bodily feelings allow them to attend to features of their present circumstances, they appear to be unable to develop the sorts of complex affective framing patterns that would enable them to have more enduring and stable values. Lastly, unlike the psychopath, the autistic subject has enduring cares and concerns and takes a strong interest in his own long-term welfare as well as the interests of others. This anchors the autistic subject to the world and opens up the possibility that some of them can overcome their deficits through more intellectual, rule-governed means. Thus, it seems clear, on the one hand, that autism does not involve impairments that are as radical and severe as those involved in schizophrenia. On the other hand, however, like the schizophrenic subject, the autistic subject undergoes bodily tensions and feelings that have lost much of their desiderative component, salience, and felt meaning. Because their information processing fails to be guided by their desiderative bodily feelings, autistic subjects undergo the same sort of ‘unworlding’ and anxious detachment, though to a lesser degree. The relatively ‘smart perception’ ordinarily afforded by essentially embodied affective framing is disrupted, making it difficult for autistic subjects to recognize relevant features of their social situation and appreciate context. In some sense, both schizophrenia and autism can be understood as lying on a continuum, ranging from radically disordered common sense in the case of schizophrenia to moderately disrupted common sense in the case of autism. No doubt there are key differences between these disorders. However, it is important to note that all three are characterized by disruptions in action,


cognition, and essentially embodied affect, and that all three disorders involve a diminished ability to make use of context to frame and integrate various sorts of information. Taken together, the symptoms and disruptions in cognition associated with these various psychological conditions provide significant support for my claim that one’s sense of self, one’s capacity for decision-making and moral judgment, and one’s ability to understand and assess others’ actions all are grounded in desire-based emotions, one’s unique continuing essential embodiment, and the capacity for affective framing. If so, then all of cognition truly is essentially embodied, enactive, and emotive.

Concluding Remarks

This book has explored the connection between emotion, cognition, and the essentially embodied nature of consciousness. Its central aim has been to bring together important work being done in philosophy of mind, philosophy of emotion, and philosophical psychology so as to move toward a new theoretical framework in which all of our conscious experience and cognition can be understood as inherently arising out of active, living, essentially embodied, and emotive interactions with our surroundings. I have challenged the widely held philosophical assumption that the emotions are somehow in tension with or undermine cognition and intellect. Instead, I highlight how emotion and affect, which are essentially bound up with our lived bodily experience, allow for effective decision-making, moral evaluation, and the ability to understand others and ourselves. This discussion reveals, in my view, that human consciousness and cognition are desire-based emotive, essentially embodied, and enactive. According to the Essential Embodiment Thesis (EE) I have spelled out, human consciousness is necessarily instantiated in all the vital neurobiological systems, organs, and processes of our living bodies. The conscious mind of a creature like us is not a thing, but rather essentially a set of more or less fully realized spontaneous capacities in a desiring, affective, motile, suitably neurobiologically complex, egocentrically centered, spatio-temporally oriented, living organism that actively engages with its environment. If EE is correct, then our conscious lives are partially constituted by, and not just instrumentally dependent upon, the facts of our human animal embodiment. To illustrate the way in which human consciousness is essentially embodied, various theorists have discussed how the dynamics of perception and action are structured by the details of the human body. While of course I strongly support the work of these theorists, I believe that the emotions are an even more striking illustration of EE. Because emotion so clearly involves bodily feelings, and because emotional experience is so clearly spread throughout our living bodies, I argue that it depends constitutively on our complete neurobiological dynamics and is a fundamental 235

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manifestation of our embodiment. In addition, emotion is one of the clearest expressions of conative affectivity, which I depict as a central structure of human mental activity and a natural outgrowth of our lived bodily dynamics and neurobiological structure. Desire-based affectivity helps to ground the necessary spatiality, temporality, egocentricity, and intentionality of conscious experience, and is an expression of the basic biological impetus to go on living. While being alive is not sufficient for consciousness like ours, it is a necessary precondition for caring. Echoing Evan Thompson, one can say correctly also that ‘emotions are in life.’ In so far as emotions are a paradigmatic expression of human caring, it is natural to suppose that all emotions are essentially desire-based. Once again, this is not to say that emotions can be reduced to desire or understood exclusively in terms of desire. I have argued that desire is a necessary, and indeed essential, part of all emotional experience. This includes not just occurrent emotions such as anger or excitement, but also less focused moods, more-or-less enduring affective orientations, and more stable character traits. All these different types of emotional experience are rooted in desire, and necessarily involve desiderative bodily feelings. But these desiderative bodily feelings (i.e., feelings of caring) are not separate or distinct from cognition, as so many theorists have supposed, but instead are intertwined with cognitive processes. In fact, without influence from the emotions, a wide range of cognitive functions cannot even get off the ground. This is because feelings of caring play a crucial role in focusing our attention so that we can make sense of those environmental stimuli that we pre-reflectively identify as important. What I have called ‘affective framing’ is an essentially embodied, emotive, pre-reflective sense-making process whereby conscious agents like us are able to adapt to and navigate through their surroundings. This not only helps us to stay alive, but also satisfies our biological and conscious, intentional impetus to adapt and live well. Affective framing helps to capture the way in which cognition is enactive, and how value and significance are actively constructed by agents as they interact with the world around them. In this way it moves us past the inner–outer, mind–body distinctions commonly assumed by cognitivist accounts, by acknowledging that our understanding of the world is very much infused with bodily feelings. The desiderative bodily feelings of affective framing enable subjects to form a sense of self, make decisions, morally evaluate actions, and understand others’ behavior. When the capacity for affective framing diminishes, is temporally narrow, or completely breaks down, serious cognitive deficits and various forms of psychological disorder result. This confirms the notion that affect and cognition are inseparable, and that without the attentional focusing and desiderative bodily attunement afforded by affective framing we would be unable to think effectively, decide, make moral assessments, understand others, or even understand ourselves. Emotionless cognition is

Concluding Remarks

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decidedly not some ideal to strive toward, for it would result in cognitive and behavioral paralysis and mental breakdown. No doubt my account raises epistemological questions, for it implies a certain necessary degree of subjectivity in our knowledge and understanding of the world. However, I believe that even though all of human cognition is infused with affect and thus partially subjective, we still can attain some sort of objective knowledge and move toward truth via shared essentially embodied understanding and rationality. This shared understanding and rationality is a matter of embodied structures that emerge in our bodily functioning and are recurring patterns in our dynamic experience. These recurring structures of embodied human understanding and rationality allow us to interact successfully with our environment and are the means by which we have a shared, relatively intelligible world (Johnson, 1990, p. 209). Thus, the fine-grained selection of particular aspects of our surroundings is not ad hoc or arbitrary, and not subjective in the sense that we pick out just ‘whatever we like.’ Instead, our selections are constrained by the facts of our embodiment, including our bodily form, structure, and biological make-up. Of course, mere survival is not our sole desire, and we build up even more sophisticated patterns of bodily attunement through learning, personal experiences, the roles we play in specific social contexts, and so on. However, because we share a more-or-less common bodily structure and a more-or-less common sociocultural way of life, our affective framing patterns are more similar than they are different. Although truth is not always an absolute, universal, or objective notion, we can see the world through shared public eyes to arrive at a contextually situated, humanly universal, and humanly objective truth that inherently reflects our human purposes and the nature of our interactions with our environment. What we strive for, then, is objectivity for us, that is, shared structures of essentially embodied understanding and rationality, or shared human perspectives (Johnson, 1990, p. 212). How we carve up our world depends partly on what is out there and partly on the referential scheme we bring to bear, given our purposes, interests, and goals. In this sense, the world is indeed our world, and we come to know and understand that world by caring about the objects, events, situations, and people that inhabit it. We develop a rationally guided understanding of our surroundings, as well as other people, necessarily by means of becoming attuned to them on the basis of our desiderative bodily feelings. And, in the event that we are unable to rely on our desire-based emotions to guide our rational thinking and intentional action, our thoughts and movements start to lack fluidity and we begin to lose touch with the meaning, value, and significance of our surroundings. This suggests that humans like us essentially are desiring, emotional, rational animals, and that caring is one of the most important aspects of the rational human predicament in all its varieties.

Notes 1

The Essential Embodiment Thesis

1. While both Noë and Clark argue against BRAINBOUND with respect to cognition, only Noë rejects BRAINBOUND with respect to consciousness. Clark (2009) makes it explicit that he accepts BRAINBOUND with respect to consciousness. 2. Robert Hanna and I explicitly argue against ECM and EM in Embodied Minds in Action, chapter 8, under the rubric of the Embodiment Fallacy. 3. However, this is not to say that the world is part of the machinery that generates conscious experience, or that enactivity constitutes consciousness, content, or emotion. The enactivist thesis that I endorse is weaker than the one set forth by Noë. 4. Note that the claim is not that the relevant set of neurobiological properties alone is a sufficient condition of the existence of a consciousness like ours. Robert Hanna and I (2009, chapter 6) have argued that the existence of a consciousness like ours is jointly hylomorphically constituted by relevant mental and neurobiological properties. 5. Just as in the case of the existence of consciousness like ours, so too the relevant set of neurobiological properties alone is not a sufficient condition of the specific character of a consciousness like ours. Both the existence and the specific character of a consciousness like ours are jointly hylomorphically constituted by relevant mental and neurobiological properties. Again, see Hanna and Maiese (2009). 6. For example, the 29 January 2007 issue of Time magazine was entirely devoted to the topic, The Brain: A User’s Guide, and included supportive articles by or interviews with many leading contemporary philosophers of mind and cognitive neuroscientists. 7. According to the metaphysical account Hanna and I set forth in Embodied Minds in Action, the brain–scientist system is not synthetic a priori/strongly metaphysically necessarily sufficient – that is, jointly hylomorphically constitutively sufficient – for consciousness or emotional experience like ours. 8. See Gallagher (2005a, p. 40). 9. See Hanna and Maiese (2009, chapter 1). 10. The thesis of Non-Conceptualism says that representational content is neither wholly nor solely determined by a conscious animal’s conceptual capacities, and that at least some contents are both solely and wholly determined by its nonconceptual capacities. The version of Non-Conceptualism that I favor says that the representational content of a state is essentially non-conceptual if and only if its semantic structure and psychological function are inherently different from the structure and function of conceptual content. See, for example, Gunther (ed.) (2003) and Speaks (2005). 11. I borrow this example from Prinz (2005). 12. See Gunther (ed.) (2003, part IV). 13. See, for example, Sudnow (1993). 238

Notes 239 14. Of course, as Colombetti (2011) points out, this strict attraction/repulsion dichotomy is overly simplistic when it comes to the experiences and appraisals that characterize human life. Often human life is characterized by ambivalence and internal conflict, and stimuli are valenced in mixed and complex ways. I believe that what we care about, including our long-term will and character, might be characterized more appropriately in termed of what Colombetti calls ‘multi-dimensional valence.’ 15. For a further discussion of this, see Jonas’s (1966) existentially oriented philosophy of biology. 16. See, for example, the studies cited in Boonin (2003, chapter 3). An earlier study by Prof. Maria Fitzgerald of the Dept. of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at UCL in 1995 placed the emergence of sentience at between 22 and 26 weeks. See British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology Notes 94 (1997). http://www. parliament.uk/post/pn094.pdf. Accessed on October 18, 2010.

2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

3

Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions See, for example, Damasio (1994, 1999, 2003), Pert (1999), and Prinz (2004). See Damasio (1994) and Prinz (2004). See Goldie (2000, pp. 129–134) for a discussion of this. See Greenspan (1980, pp. 233–234); Goldie (2000, p. 76); and Drummond (2004). See Hanna and Maiese (2009, chapter 5). The very fact that it is odd to speak of ‘truth-makers’ with respect to the emotions supports the claim that the ‘logic’ of emotion differs from that of judgment. Interestingly, Ratcliffe (2008) is hesitant to widen the category of ‘emotion’ so as to include existential orientations, since he believes that this would obscure the difference between states directed at particular objects and orientations that constitute the background against which all our experiences, thoughts, and activities occur. See Tye (1996, p. 274) for discussion of this. Note that Tye himself disagrees with this view of ‘qualia.’ In his view, phenomenal character is nothing but an aspect of intentional content. See Güzeldere (1998, p. 37), who finds this view of phenomenal properties overly narrow. This interpretation is direct and immediate insofar as it occurs spontaneously and does not involve reflection or analysis, though of course these interpretive activities do mediate between the world and the individual’s experiences.


1. See Dennett (1991, p. 429). 2. See McGinn (1999, p. 163). 3. For example, Kant, Nagel, and Searle all have articulated views which either explicitly state or imply that this is so. 4. Along similar lines, some theorists have described the unity of consciousness as an awareness of multiple objects, all at the same time, as the contents of a single representation. See, e.g., Brook (1999, p. 43).

240 Notes 5. Strawson (1997) claims that his own ‘fundamental experience of consciousness is one of repeated returns into consciousness from a state of complete, if momentary, unconsciousness’ (p. 422). 6. This occurs in cases of neo-commissurotomy—i.e., the surgical severing of the corpus callosum, the main connection between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. See, e.g., Nagel (1971). 7. Sometimes this basic bodily awareness is temporarily disrupted (as when my hand ‘goes to sleep’) or temporarily extended beyond one’s own skin (as in Ramichandran’s fascinating experiments with rubber arms), and sometimes, catastrophically, it is permanently disrupted (as in apraxia) or pathologically distorted (as in anorexia). 8. For a plausible analysis of proper parthood, see, e.g., Koslicki (2008). 9. See Langton and Lewis (1998). The standard usage, deriving from the work of David Lewis, and more remotely from Leibniz, has it that an intrinsic property is automatically a non-relational or monadic property. 10. See, e.g., Humberstone (1996). 11. Recall that severe amnesia would not be a counterexample to this thesis. To feel as if one had no past or not future, while of course highly disruptive for one’s sense of self, is not to have a conscious life that is completely atemporal, for one likely still would have a sense of events unfolding in the present. 12. Sheets-Johnstone (1998) describes these organisms as possessing corporeal consciousness, but I think it is more appropriate to speak of them as proto-conscious. 13. Likewise, Butterworth (1999) emphasizes embodiment and maintains that the principle of self-unity comes from the ‘perceptual-ecological aspect of self, which engages the world with a unitary sense of self-agency’ (p. 206). 14. A patient suffering from body integrity disorder, on the other hand, experiences a disruption in her sense of embodiment and sense of self. This disorder involves a longstanding, stable desire to amputate one or more limbs, and likely results from a failure to include or integrate the affected limb in the offline representation of one’s body (Carruthers, 2008, p. 1,310). In such cases, disruption in the background sense of bodily integration and bodily attunement constitutes a breakdown in affective framing, and therefore involves a disruption in the patient’s sense of self.

4

The Role of Emotion in Decision and Moral Evaluation

1. Note that Zajonc seeks to challenge this claim that affect is ‘post-cognitive.’ 2. Thompson (2007, p. 86) likewise makes this point. 3. See, for example, Damasio (1994), Zhu and Thagard (2003), and Evans (2002). There is also some contemporary Kantian ethics literature that explores the connection between desire/emotion and action. See, for example, Schapiro (2009). 4. I borrow this phrasing from Damasio (1994, p. 171). 5. In fact, this sort of reason may very well be dependent on and driven by non-selfinterested emotions such as altruistic emotions, ‘whatever-the-consequences’ emotions, integrity-based emotions, authenticity-based emotions, Humean sympathy, empathy, and Kantian respect. 6. This is similar to the argument strategy that Prinz (2006) follows. 7. See also Compton (2003) and Vuilleumier (2005). 8. For more on the frame problem, see Ford and Hayes (eds) (1991) and Ford and Pylyshyn (eds) (1996).

Notes 241 9. Of course, this is not the only frame problem discussed in the literature. For a further exploration, see Ketelaar and Todd (2001). 10. For a related account of how emotion is necessarily involved in all evaluation and observation, see Jaggar (1989).

5

Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Social Cognition

1. Indeed, the account I propose might be understood as an extension of the simulation-theory, as long as simulation is characterized as essentially embodied, emotive, and enactive. For a further discussion of how such an account might be developed, see Winkielman et al. (2008). 2. Of course this could be construed as a type of simulation, but what is crucial to note is that such simulation is essentially embodied. We create ‘living pictures’ of other people with our own bodies, by means of our proprioceptive responses to them. For example, this is illustrated by the way in which people stand and modulate their facial expressions when they are talking to each other at social gatherings. Thus, there is a sense in which 4ET is a non-cognitivist version of simulation-theory. 3. Note the deep connection here with Wittgenstein’s (1953) account of forms of life. He maintains that the norms for meaningful language use are socially governed and that we are able to use language and understand each other because we share a common, human form of life. 4. As Kim (2005) argues, because any causal relationship between these immaterial souls must take place outside physical space and thus cannot include a spatial relation, it will always be impossible to determine which cause produced which effect. He claims that ‘the radical nonspatiality of mental substances rules out the possibility of invoking spatial relationships to ground [the] cause-effect pairings’ (p. 80) of mental-to-mental causation, and refers to this as the ‘pairing problem’ for Cartesian substance dualism.

6 Breakdowns in Embodied Emotive Cognition 1. It is interesting that this conception of social interaction very closely matches some of the basic assumptions of rational decision theory. 2. This is not surprising, given that in my view, both disorders have a common source. 3. For more about illusions of control and pathologies of intentional agency more generally, see Gallagher (2005a, chapter 8). 4. Once again, it is interesting how many of these pathologies produce illusions that almost perfectly match the dualistic or over-intellectualized conceptions of the mind or self that so often appear in philosophical discussions. 5. Frith and Gallagher say it would be ‘like giving a lecture with a carousel projector where you press a button to make the slides move forward. But every time you’re about to press a button, the slides move forward just before you press. I think the way you would interpret that, which would be reasonably correct, is that there is someone in the control box anticipating your needs and advancing the slides’ (2002, p. 66). 6. For the purposes of the current discussion, I will set aside cases of ‘acquired sociopathy’, in which socially inappropriate and aggressive behavior surfaces after a

242 Notes frontal brain lesion. Instead, I will focus on what some have called ‘born psychopaths.’ 7. Note that Barkley’s description is meant to apply to subjects with ADHD, but I believe this characterization applies equally well to psychopaths. 8. Robert Hanna maintains that Kantian respect should be understood as a prereflective, spontaneous higher-order desire to be moved by non-self-interested, non-selfish, non-consequentialist first-order effective desires, together with an essentially embodied emotional responsiveness to the dignity of other persons and of oneself. For more on this, see Hanna’s forthcoming book, The Rational Human Condition. If Hanna is correct, then the autistic subject’s application of moral rules might be understood as a disembodied version of Kantian ethical reasoning. 9. Once again, note that I am open to the possibility that simulation happens in a non-conceptual, pre-reflective, essentially embodied direct mirroring of another person’s bodily comportment and dispositions to move in certain ways. If so, then the bodily attunement theory I have presented might be construed as an essentially embodied simulation theory.

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Index aboutness, 71 see also intentionality absorbed skillful activity, 23, 31, 98, 133 action monitoring, 109 adaptivity, 4, 38, 39, 53, 116, 236 affective allure, 44, 45, 47, 85 affective framing, 3, 4, 5, 53, 82–3, 85–9, 119–23, 136, 139–40, 145–6, 149, 161–2 as ‘caring-contoured’ mapping, 4, 87, 89, 192, 232 vs. conceptual framing, 140, 145 deficiency in the capacity for, 7, 8, 143, 185–7, 194–5, 213–14, 215–16, 227, 232 definition of, 3, 83 affective intentionality, 83, 123 as construal, 76 as feeling toward, 77 as perception, 76–8 affective priming, 208, 209 affective tonality, 105, 201 see also valence affordance, 32, 83, 108, 111, 175, 192, 195 alien control, 189, 200–4 amygdala, 141, 205, 209 animals, non-human, 16, 24, 38, 106, 172 anosognosia for hemiplegia, 112 antisocial behavior, 129, 205, 209, 211 Antony, L., 122 apoptosis, 221 Aristotle, 149 artifacts, 174 artificial intelligence, 132–3, 137 aspectual shape, 72 Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), 211, 213 attentional focusing, 1, 86, 131, 136, 142, 145, 213, 227 see also affective framing attunement, 32 background bodily, 3, 5–6, 19, 42, 52, 69–70, 83, 85, 112–13 deficiencies in bodily, 7–8, 185–6, 194, 196–7, 213, 219, 223

habitual patterns of, 130, 144, 149, 162 reciprocal bodily, 6, 164, 166, 170, 172–3, 177, 179 autism, 8, 129, 218–33 disembedding skills associated with, 230 dynamic developmental model of, 221–2 hypersensitivity symptomatic of, 220, 221, 222 language disturbances in, 220, 228–9 repetitive behaviors symptomatic of, 219, 222 savant abilities symptomatic of, 230–1 sensory abnormalities symptomatic of, 8, 220–3 weak central coherence found in, 229–31 autopoiesis, 34, 35–7, 38–42, 105–6, 121, 135–6, 149–50 Baier, A., 52, 73 Ballerini, M., 97, 190, 196, 228 Baron-Cohen, S., 152, 185, 220, 224 Bayne, T., 92, 93, 94, 117 behavior inhibition, 210 Bermudez, J., 98, 103, 108 blindsight, 23 Block, N., 23, 74, 75 block design tests, 229 body-reading, 5, 151, 157, 159 body schema, 17, 19, 22, 28, 33, 83, 100, 159, 197, 221 vs. body image, 17, 20, 21 body transplant, 116 Borgy, the multiply embodied creature, 117–18 care and caring, 1, 2, 4, 34, 39, 52, 53, 64, 67–8, 161, 167 see also emotion, as desire-based Carruthers, P., 112 Cartesian Dualism, 10 Chalmers, D., 71, 92, 94 Chess, 5, 84–5, 120

255

256 Index Clark, A., 10, 11, 175 Cleckley, H., 204, 206 cocktail party effect, 23, 99 coenthesia, 190 cognitive ethology, 43 cognitivism, 9, 47, 48, 51, 151, 186, 236 Colombetti, G., 43, 50, 80, 83, 85, 120, 141, 160, 164 common sense, loss of, 193–4, 233 complex dynamic systems, 36, 42, 168 biological autonomy of, 36, 39, 53 dissipative structure of, 36 holistic causal integration of, 36 operational closure, 36, 39, 40 self-organization of, 35, 36, 169 conative affectivity, 2, 4, 26, 38, 39, 43, 86, 91, 131, 146, 162, 190, 195–6, 236 conceptual content, 32 consciousness access v. phenomenal, 23, 24, 74, 75 ‘easy’ problems vs. ‘hard’ problem of, 71 egocentric structure of, 27–8, 33, 39–40, 105, 121 high-powered vs. low-powered, 21 intentionality of, 3, 15, 24, 30–4, 42–3 necessary structures of, 2, 25, 33–4, 42–3, 146, 236 natural matrix of, 2, 39, 53 spatial structure of, 2, 4, 12, 18, 25, 28–9, 30, 40–1, 46, 83, 98, 100, 103–4, 108 temporal structure of, 4, 21, 25, 29–30, 31, 41–2, 46, 52, 91, 104–5, 113, 195–6, 201, 202 context, 6, 8, 37, 84, 122, 133, 134, 136–7, 154, 156–7, 174–8, 179, 183, 189–90, 192, 193, 196–7, 199, 202 conversational implicature, 228–9 coordination of bodily movement, 6, 157, 158, 165–6, 170, 184 see also mutual modulation core relational themes, 79, 81, 82 see also emotion, Prinz’s theory of cost-benefit analysis, 125, 128, 137, 143 coupled systems, 6, 13, 37, 133, 135, 165, 170, 181–2 coupling, perceptual-motor, 173, 179 Dainton, B., 92, 93, 94, 117 Damasio, A., 55, 78, 79, 128, 215

dancing, 33, 58, 74, 98, 180, 215 social cognition as, 5, 163–4, 180, 184, 226 Davidson, D., 56, 57 De Jaegher, H., 153, 155, 159, 162, 165, 166, 170, 178, 180 de Sousa, R., 130, 139 Deep Consciousness Thesis, 23, 97 Deigh, J., 215 delusions, 187–8, 195, 200–2 depersonalization, 113, 190, 193 desiderative bodily feelings, 3, 54, 76, 81, 88–9, 120–1, 123, 127, 139–40, 146, 184, 191, 202–3 desires effective first-order desires, 52–3, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 110 second-order desires, 66, 67 devitalization, 190 Di Paolo, E., 153, 159, 165, 166, 170, 178, 180 disaffectation, 52, 128 disownership experiences, 203 divided attention, 93, 94, 95 dopamine system, 194 Doring, S., 58, 76, 78 Dretske, F., 73 Duff, J., 141–2, 216–17 dynamic systems approach, 35–6, 42, 133–5, 168–9, 170 ecological significance, 121, 139 egoism, 8, 204, 205, 216, 218 Embedded Figures Test, 230, 232 Embodied Minds in Action, 11, 101 see also Hanna, R. emotion bodily grabbiness of, 44, 45, 139 cognitive impenetrability of, 59 cognitive theories of, 56–7, 58–60 definition of, 52–3 as desire-based, 61–3, 64–6 ‘logic’ of, 59–61 paradigm scenarios for, 130 Prinz’s theory of, 55, 79, 81–2 ‘search hypothesis’ about, 137–8 Solomon’s theory of, 54, 58–60, 78 somatic feeling theory of, 78–9 emotional associations, 89, 208, 215 emotional sensorium, 123 Emotivism, 146–8

Index 257 empathy, 152, 161, 209, 215, 219, 228 enactive appraisal, 3, 53, 70, 83, 85–87, 119–20 see also affective framing enactive approach to the mind, 14, 17, 43, 120, 151, 159, 162 entrainment of affective framing patterns, 168, 169, 170–1 envatted brain, 15, 47–8 Essential Embodiment Thesis, 17, 11–15 essentially embodied agency, 62, 106–12 essentially embodied appraisal, see affective framing Evans, D., 125, 137–8 existential feelings, 31, 53, 69–70 existential orientations, 88–9 see also existential feelings Extended Conscious Mind thesis, 11 Extended Mind thesis, 11 eye direction detector, 159, 163 Facebook, 227 false emotion, 74 feelings of being, 31 see also existential feelings felt needs, 25, 26–7, 34, 45–6, 52, 64–5, 105, 111, 160 Feminist philosophy, 122 Fields, L., 141, 143, 215, 216, 217–18 first-person givenness, 96, 114 folk psychology, 155, 156, 176 frame problem, 5, 131–3 for decision-making, 137–8 for moral evaluation, 138–9 for social cognition, 153–4, 177, 184 Frankfurt, H., 52, 66–8, 69 Frith, U., 229, 231 Fuchs, T., 189 Gallagher, S., 2, 10–11, 14, 17–18, 19–22, 28, 29, 32, 83, 99, 106, 112, 153, 155, 156, 157–159, 160–161, 162, 163, 164, 174, 201, 202, 203, 221, 224, 225, 231 gestalt, 18, 46, 83, 85, 232 gesture, 5, 6, 8, 14, 41, 63, 156, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 180, 181, 182, 223, 224, 225, 226 Gibson, J.J., 103 Glass, S., 210, 213

Goldie, P., 50, 51, 58, 77, 78, 87, 148, 154 Goldman, A., 152 Grandin, T., 129, 219, 227 Greenspan, P., 60, 209, 215 Gunther,Y., 54, 61 Gurwitsch, A., 174 hallucination, 15, 187, 188 Hanna, R., 11, 12, 13, 23, 25, 33, 91, 97, 101, 102, 223 Hanoch, Y., 130 Happé, F., 229–31 Hare, R., 206 Heidegger, M., 31, 35, 52, 174 ‘high-reason’ view, 123–4, 126 of decision-making, 125, 137, 143 of moral evaluation, 125–6 of social cognition, 151–2 Horgan, T., 71, 72 horizon, 70, 194 Humean theory of motivation, 56, 58 Hursthouse, R., 57 Husserl, E., 31, 35, 70, 85, 97, 104, 108, 114, 164, 194 Hutto, D., 153, 154, 155, 156, 163, 173, 176, 177, 179 image schemata, 28, 115–16 imitation, 6, 158, 159, 163, 165, 222, 226 immanent reflexivity, 4, 27–8, 91, 95–100, 101, 102, 106, 116, 188–9 Implicit Association Test, 208 Importance of What We Care About, The, 66 see also Frankfurt, H. impulsivity, 7, 205, 210–13, 214 infancy, 24, 74, 82, 98, 106, 111, 162 communicative activity during, 162–3, 165–6 social cognition during, 6, 158–9, 161–2, 167, 174, 222, 224–5, 226 intentionality, 3, 15, 24, 30–4, 42–3 intentionality detector, 159, 163 intentionality of phenomenal experience, 71–2 intercorporeality, 162, 164–5, 196, 197 interrogative attitude, 195 intrinsic structural property, 101–2, 106, 114, 116 ipseity, 27, 45, 97, 192

258

Index

Jastrow duck-rabbit phenomena, 86, 232 Johnson, M., 2, 18, 19, 25, 28–9, 30, 38, 97, 108, 115–16, 237 joint attention, 167, 174, 224, 225, 226 joint cognition, 182 Jones, K., 131, 138, 147, 148, 149 Juarrero, A., 168, 169 Kant, I., 92, 122, 171, 172, 219 Kennett, J., 205, 211, 219, 224 Kenny, A., 73 Kinesthesia, 25, 30, 46, 164 Kissing, 63, 179, 180, 227 Korsgaard, C., 171–2 Kriegel, U., 95, 101 Lakoff, G., 2, 18, 19, 29, 30, 38, 115–16 language disturbances, 188, 198–9, 228–9 Legrand, D., 109–10 lexical decision test, 206 life form, 37, 106, 116, 188 living and lived body, 1, 2, 14, 20, 34–5, 48–9, 81, 102, 184 boundedness and containment of, 28–9, 97–8 experience of forceful interaction, 108 as a locus of desiring and caring, 34, 110–11 spatiotemporal continuity of, 103–4 Lysaker, J., 187–8 Lysaker, P., 187–8 Maher, B., 198–9, 201, 202 McGeer, V., 220, 222, 231–2 Meijsing, M., 100, 103, 106–7, 108, 109 memory, emotion-facilitated, 213–14 Merleau-Ponty, M., 31, 35, 37, 70, 95, 97, 114, 133, 163 metabolism, 39, 41, 105 mindblindness, 220, 231 mind-in-life thesis, 2, 14, 34–5, 121 mind-reading, 5, 151–2, 155, 157, 220, 224 Minkowski, E., 193, 195 mirror neurons, 164–5 mixed feelings, 60 moral understanding, 131, 145, 216–17, 219 morbid objectification, 200

motor resonance, 158, 163–4, 170–1 mutual modulation, 6, 165–6, 168, 172–3, 178–82 Nagel, T., 24, 94 narrative, 113, 156, 176, 177 natural purposiveness, 37, 38, 41 neurobiological dynamics, 4, 12, 13, 16–17, 34–9 Newman, J., 206, 210, 211–13 Noë, A., 10, 11, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 35, 37, 48, 50, 84–5, 158, 160, 166 non-conceptual content, 21–3, 32–3, 72–6, 98–100, 121 non-propositional representations, 28, 72–5, 82–3, 91, 98 Northoff, G., 80, 81, 83, 87, 121, 139 ontogenetic landscapes, 168–9 Panksepp, J., 141 paralysis, 62, 100, 109 participatory sense-making, 153, 167–8, 170, 172, 179–82 Passions, The, 54, 58–9, 78 see also Solomon, R. Pessoa, L., 141 Phaedrus, The, 124 see also Plato phenomenologists, perspective of, 10–11, 25, 46–7, 97, 114 phenomenology of intentionality, 71–2 Pirsig, R., 119 Plato, 84, 124 Poellner, P., 75, 99 posture, 17, 18, 28, 41, 46, 86, 106, 156, 167, 220, 225 primary intersubjectivity, 156, 157–161, 163, 221, 224–5, 226 primary metaphors, 18–19 primitive bodily awareness, 2, 12, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 33, 55–6, 73, 76 Prinz, J., 52, 55, 79, 81–2, 129, 131, 146–7, 148, 205, 214–15, 216 proprioception, 20, 22, 28, 35, 97, 98, 103, 106–8, 109 psychopathy, 7–8, 129–30, 141–2, 143, 148, 187, 204–18 affective processing deficits in, 206–8 attentional deficits in, 210–11, 213

Index 259 psychopathy – continued attenuation of negative affect in, 206, 209–10 executive control deficits in, 210–11 impaired decision-making in, 211, 218 integrated emotions Systems model of, 205 response modulation deficits in, 211–212 quale, 21, 101 Rachels, J., 125 Radden, J., 203 Ratcliffe, M., 14, 31–2, 52, 69–70, 78, 83, 88–9, 96, 120, 122, 155, 156–7, 162–3, 174–6, 185, 198, 201, 226 rationality, 24, 124, 125, 161, 171, 237 Republic, The, 124 see also Plato Roberts, R., 59, 76 Rosch, E., 114, 115, 116 Rosenthal, D., 99 Sartre, J., 31, 97, 162–3, 173 Sass, L., 189–90, 191, 192, 195 Scheler, M., 163, 193 schizophrenia, 7, 186, 187–99 bodily alienation symptomatic of, 188–91 deanimation symptomatic of, 190–1, 198 disengagement symptomatic of, 191–6 hyperreflexivity and thematization of the body, 189 pragmatic weakening symptomatic of, 193, 195 schizophrenic autism, 196–8 Searle, J., 58, 72, 91–2, 93 secondary intersubjectivity, 156, 174–5, 231 second-order volitions, 53, 66–8 self, the, 3–4, 90 Pearl View of, 92–3 Realism v. Irrealism about, 90 as subjective subject vs. subjective object, 27, 46, 102, 110, 203 as substance, 4, 90, 115, 116 self-agency, sense of, 111, 202–3

self-consciousness, 4, 90 as ecological self-awareness, 98, 103 as implicit, pre-reflective self-awareness, 21–2, 25 noetic, 200 as nonconceptual, 75, 91, 97, 98 as self-reflection or selfconceptualization, 21, 90, 95–7, 98 transitive v. intransitive, 94–5, 99 self-positions, 187–8 self-regeneration, 35–6, 102–3, 105 sense-making, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42, 53, 117, 121, 136, 147, 149–50 sense of self, 27–8, 90–1 see also self-consciousness sensibility, x, 26, 27, 34 sensorimotor subjectivity, 2, 4, 17–25 Sentimentalism, 146–8 Shanker, S., 221–2, 228 Sheets-Johnstone, M., 35, 37, 98, 105, 108, 111 situational understanding and shared norms, 174–6, 177, 178–9, 231 Skype, 227 Slaby, J., 44, 46, 47, 72, 123 Slovic, P., 127 social cognition, 151–84 Cartesian view of, 151, 228 cognitivist view of, 151–2 as direct perception, 156, 158, 225 as embodied interaction, 151, 156, 173, 178 as essentially embodied, emotive and enactive, 6, 153, 183–4 scaffolding for, 175 as second-person understanding, 156–7, 158, 170, 178, 181, 183, 184 Social Orienting Model of, 225 as third-person observation, 155, 182–3, 228 social roles, 6, 156–7, 174–6, 177, 178 Solomon, R., 54, 56, 59–60, 78, 80 Sparaci , L., 225, 226 sphere of ownness, 108 see also ipseity Spinoza, B., 41 split-brain patients, 94–5 Stanghellini, G., 97, 161, 166, 173, 174, 186, 190, 191, 196, 197–8, 200, 229 startle response, 206–7, 218

260 Index Stocker, M., 64–65 Strawson, G., 92–3, 99, 100, 103, 113, 115 synchronization, 6, 165 Targowla, R., 193, 195 temporal consciousness, 29–30, 41–2 motility of, 30, 46, 104–5 protentional structure of, 29, 30, 31, 41, 46–7, 104–5, 201 retentional structure of, 29, 46–7, 104–5 spontaneity of, 30, 46, 104–5 theory of mind, 151–2, 202, 224, 228 interaction theory, 156, 157, 224 simulation theory, 5, 152–3, 154, 228 theory-theory, 5, 151–2, 153, 187, 228, 231 Thompson, E., 11, 14, 21, 24, 25, 27, 31, 35–6, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 47, 48, 85, 98, 104, 115–17, 236 thought insertion, 200–2 Tienson, J., 71–2 Tower of London Test, 210 transcendental unity of apperception, 92 unbuilding, Husserl’s notion of, 194 unilateral neglect, 20

unity of consciousness, 91–5 diachronic, 91–2, 93, 113 horizontal, 92, 93 phenomenal, 91, 92–5, 102, 112, 117 synchronic, 93–4, 111–12 vertical, 92, 93 unworlding, 7, 191–2, 194, 196–8 valence, 26, 39, 42, 45, 82, 89, 110, 141, 207, 208 Varela, F., 26, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 48, 90, 114, 115, 116 view from nowhere, 186 vital significance, 36, 39, 135 Waterman, I., 20, 22, 107 Wilkerson, W., 138, 145, 153–4 will, the, 52, 69, 223 hierarchical desire theory of, 52, 53, 66–9 self-governing policies of, 68–9 weakness of, 67 Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, 212 Wittgenstein, L., 171, 225 word associations, intrusions of, 199 Zahavi, D., 96, 97 Zemach, E., 73, 125 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 119

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