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The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind
A proposal that extends the enactive approach developed in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to issues in affective science. In The Feeling Body , Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science—the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 19, 2018
Colombetti offers an enactivist account of emotions. She draws on theories in embodied cognitive science to provide a new framing to core phenomenological insights about emotions, especially from Husserl and Heidegger. This book elegantly and precisely presents these phenomenological ideas, and it is richly informative to readers unfamiliar with embodied cognition or phenomenology. But unfortunately Colombetti does not contribute too many new ideas of her own, and she also misses out on some of the key, rich existential implications of these original phenomenological theories. I will summarize her theory and give an example of a deeper existential implication of Heidegger's theory of emotions that Colombetti misses in this book.
Colombetti clarifies that emotions can be understood in two distinct senses: as objective sensations in the body, or as transparent mediums through which objects in the world appear. The former sense is commonplace, and the latter is less intuitive and controversial. Colombetti argues that given that all experiences are disclosed from our embodied standpoint, all experiences necessarily manifest a prereflective dimension of belonging to ourselves—this is based on Zahavi’s interpretation of Husserl’s theory of prereflective subjectivity as necessary of all experience. Emotions modulate and color this dimension of subjectivity. Since emotions arise from and modulate bodily and cognitive systems, which constitute our embodied standpoint, any emotional change has impact on perceptual experience.
Colombetti draws heavily on Heidegger's argument for the transcendental role of emotions. Heidegger originally argues that objects perceptually show up for us on the basis that we care about them, or they concern our existence, in some way. According to Heidegger, the mode by which objects appear depends on a number of transcendental conditions, including the nature of our concern or attention towards the object, the embodied skills we have developed that familiarize the object in a particular way, and the mood we are in (Heidegger 1927). Mood has this transcendental role because it modulates the ways we employ skills and attend to objects.
Colombetti presents all of this in her book. But she neglects one key feature of Heidegger's analysis. Heidegger stresses that some strong or unusual moods have a special role to play in forcing us to face up to the strangeness of consciousness. Heidegger’s favorite example is "angst," which might be understood as depression in our contemporary lexicon (Heidegger [1927] 2010, 178). When we are angsty, we cannot access the usual meaning in the world, or care about objects in our usual way. As consequence, objects are stripped of their familiar significances. This forces us to realize that the meaning of objects is not absolute and inherent. Angst, among other potential emotions of its kind, reminds us that perceptual reality depends on elements of our subjectivity, and we should not take the world, or our selves for this matter, for granted. I think this is a very special and important feature of emotions, generally. Since they determine what shows up in the world, and they are shifting, they are powerful reminders that objects show up as meaningful (not just objective splotches of color or shape) and that this meaning is ultimately fluid.
Overall, this is a terrific book for readers who have the itch that emotions have been conceptualized in a limited way in mainstream cognitive science. Colombetti shows just this: emotions should be understood as omnipresent and fundamental states of our embodiment, and they are a whole lot more important and prevalent than most cognitive scientists and psychologists make them out to be.
Colombetti clarifies that emotions can be understood in two distinct senses: as objective sensations in the body, or as transparent mediums through which objects in the world appear. The former sense is commonplace, and the latter is less intuitive and controversial. Colombetti argues that given that all experiences are disclosed from our embodied standpoint, all experiences necessarily manifest a prereflective dimension of belonging to ourselves—this is based on Zahavi’s interpretation of Husserl’s theory of prereflective subjectivity as necessary of all experience. Emotions modulate and color this dimension of subjectivity. Since emotions arise from and modulate bodily and cognitive systems, which constitute our embodied standpoint, any emotional change has impact on perceptual experience.
Colombetti draws heavily on Heidegger's argument for the transcendental role of emotions. Heidegger originally argues that objects perceptually show up for us on the basis that we care about them, or they concern our existence, in some way. According to Heidegger, the mode by which objects appear depends on a number of transcendental conditions, including the nature of our concern or attention towards the object, the embodied skills we have developed that familiarize the object in a particular way, and the mood we are in (Heidegger 1927). Mood has this transcendental role because it modulates the ways we employ skills and attend to objects.
Colombetti presents all of this in her book. But she neglects one key feature of Heidegger's analysis. Heidegger stresses that some strong or unusual moods have a special role to play in forcing us to face up to the strangeness of consciousness. Heidegger’s favorite example is "angst," which might be understood as depression in our contemporary lexicon (Heidegger [1927] 2010, 178). When we are angsty, we cannot access the usual meaning in the world, or care about objects in our usual way. As consequence, objects are stripped of their familiar significances. This forces us to realize that the meaning of objects is not absolute and inherent. Angst, among other potential emotions of its kind, reminds us that perceptual reality depends on elements of our subjectivity, and we should not take the world, or our selves for this matter, for granted. I think this is a very special and important feature of emotions, generally. Since they determine what shows up in the world, and they are shifting, they are powerful reminders that objects show up as meaningful (not just objective splotches of color or shape) and that this meaning is ultimately fluid.
Overall, this is a terrific book for readers who have the itch that emotions have been conceptualized in a limited way in mainstream cognitive science. Colombetti shows just this: emotions should be understood as omnipresent and fundamental states of our embodiment, and they are a whole lot more important and prevalent than most cognitive scientists and psychologists make them out to be.
December 26, 2017
[used in thesis]
September 9, 2024
Mi parte favorita de esto libro es que antes de leerlo pensé que había enloquecido y ya no pienso eso. Me puso muy sentimental (😂)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews