page 7 -
'Life being a high wire act, most feelings are
expressions of the struggle for balance, ideas
of the exquisite adjustments and corrections
without which, one mistake too many, the whole
act collapses. If anything in our existence can
be revelatory of our simultaneous smallness and
greatness, feelings are'
OK. - feelings here are ideas - expressions of the
struggle for balance
ideas
so if feelings are ideas -
this makes some sense of the bedrock claim
and if so - why the term 'feeling'? - 'ideas' obviously
- at least on this page - works well
and we get introduced to the meaning of life
the struggle for balance
look I know I'm being a bit petulant here - and I hope
Damasio doesn't take offense because I think he's written
a great book
but why 'balance'?
and what is balance?
hope it's a bit more substantial than feeling
the point is how do you know this is what life
is about?
sure you've made your observations constructed
your theories
and yeah we all have hunches
but balance could be anything or nothing
poetry is not philosophy - or science
and the thing that worries me here is we are going
to see - if we haven't already - a teleological
argument -
if what our feelings reveal is a struggle for balance
balance must be the goal
teleology
this is the biologists curse - and it seems one way
or another - they fall in -
biology never really got beyond Aristotle
OK enough with the insults
the worry is Damasio is going to try and hoist this
'balancing act' on to Spinoza
let's hope he falls off the wire before that happens
'Emotion and related reactions are aligned with the
body, feelings with the mind. The investigation of how
thoughts trigger emotions and of how bodily emotions
become the kind of thoughts we call feelings provides
a privileged view into mind and body, the overtly
disparate manifestations of a single and seamlessly
interwoven human organism.'
the situation has gone from serious to grave
how thought triggers emotion -
Spinoza on emotions - 'I understand the modifications
of the body by which the power of action of the body
is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and
at the same time the ideas of these emotions'
so thought triggering - emotions
it sort of sounds like Damasio might be thinking that
thought is something other than emotions
that we are dealing with two categories - and one can
trigger the other
too much Descartes is a bad thing -
'and of how bodily emotions become the kind of thoughts
we call feelings'
I'm starting to think there is something really wrong
with the way Damasio has read Spinoza
if indeed - the above statement is meant to be Spinozistic
now it might be me who's misreading Damasio - but it
sounds to me like he's saying that there is some kind
of dynamic relation between body and mind -
'bodily emotions become the kind of thought we call
feelings'
and for 'feeling' here - read 'thought'
how body becomes thought -
is this it?
if so - it's not Spinoza - in fact it's everything
he argued against
Antonio - this is going to be a hard one to swallow
(can I suggest Wild Turkey)
there is no becoming in Spinoza
Hegel might be the next book
think of it this way -
what we have from Spinoza is a logical description
of reality -
it's a vision of what is
Spinoza believes we can see reality sub specie
aeternitatis
there is no movement - no becoming
in this perspective
the power of Spinoza's thought is that he doesn't
depend on science for the truth of his
outlook - it is meta - meta physics
