The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind

289 Pages·2013·2.68 MB·English

by  Giovanna Colombetti

The Feeling Body

The Feeling Body
Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind
Giovanna Colombetti
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

Acknowledgments
I began working on some of the ideas advanced in this book already during
my Ph.D. dissertation. I thus owe a big intellectual debt to my supervisor,
Andy Clark, for his many suggestions and his encouragement. I also bene-
fited at the time from the interdisciplinary environment of COGS at Sussex
University, and from a short but inspiring visit at Indiana University, where
I attended Esther Thelen’s seminars. Further impetus came from working
as a postdoctoral fellow with Evan Thompson, whose vision has since then
greatly influenced and inspired my work, and whom I want to thank also
for introducing me to Asian philosophies and practices, as well as for his
advice and support.
Several other people have contributed to the final shape of this book
with useful comments, objections, clarifications, advice, or reading sug-
gestions, for which I am grateful: Ken Aizawa, Rory Allen, Tony Atkinson,
Luca Barlassina, Alfonso Caramazza, Erik Christensen, Jason Clark, Marco
Colombetti, Vito Colombetti, Trami Dac, Jonathan Davies, Tia DeNora,
Ezequiel Di Paolo, Barney Dunn, Marco Giunti, Paul Griffiths, Neil Harri-
son, Michael Hauskeller, Tony King, Kerrin Jacobs, Natalia Lawrence, Doro-
thée Legrand, Sabina Leonelli, Brian McLaughlin, Kevin Mulligan, Wayne
Myrvold, Søren Overgaard, Federica Pacifico, Doria Polli, Simon Procter,
Matthew Ratcliffe, Jim Russell, David Sander, Corrado Sinigaglia, Cristina
Soriano, Steve Torrance, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Sven Walter, Mike Wheeler,
Wendy Wilutzky, Kim Wright, Carlos Zednik, Adam Zeman. I also want to
thank Willem Kuyken and Alison Evans of the Exeter Mood Disorders Cen-
tre for allowing me to attend the Postgraduate Certificate in Mindfulness-
Based Cognitive Therapy in 2010–2011, and for what I learned from them
and the other teachers (especially Christina Feldman and Jenny Wilks) and
students. The discipline of mindfulness not only supported me in a difficult
year but helped me shape some of the ideas for this book as well.
A mio padre,
e al ricordo di mia madre
© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Colombetti, Giovanna.
The feeling body : affective science meets the enactive mind / Giovanna Colombetti.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01995-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Emotions and cognition. 2. Affective neuroscience. 3. Philosophy of mind. I.
Title.
BF531.C58 2013
128—dc23
2013016542
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
1 Primordial Affectivity 1
1.1 Reclaiming a Broader and Deeper Notion of Affectivity 1
1.2 Spinoza’s Conatus: Striving as the Ground of All Affects 4
1.3 Enter the Lived Body: From Maine de Biran’s Experience of Effort to Henry’s
“Interior Quivering” 7
1.4 Heidegger’s Care and Moods, and Patočka’s “Physiognomic Impressions” 11
1.5 Enactive Sense Making 15
1.6 Primordial Affectivity and Affective Science 20
1.7 Conclusion 24
2 The Emotions: Existing Accounts and Their Problems 25
2.1 Introduction 25
2.2 The Theory of Basic Emotions (BET) 26
2.3 Assessing Existing Criticisms of BET 29
2.4 The Arbitrariness of the Alleged Basic Emotions 36
2.5 The Problematic Unity/Disunity Debate 40
2.6 Alternatives to BET and Their Problems 46
2.7 Conclusion 52
3 Emotional Episodes as Dynamical Patterns 53
3.1 Introduction 53
3.2 Fundamental Concepts of Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) 54
3.3 Dynamical Affective Science 56
3.4 Implications for the Debate on the Nature of the Emotions 70
3.5 Discreteness and Boundaries 75
3.6 Moods 77
3.7 Conclusion 82
viii Contents
4 Reappraising Appraisal 83
4.1 Introduction 83
4.2 Beginnings 84
4.3 Downplaying the Body in the 1960s and 1970s 87
4.4 Appraisal Theory Today: The Body as a Mere Interactant 94
4.5 Eroding the Neural Boundaries between Cognition and Emotion 98
4.6 Enacting Appraisal 101
4.7 Phenomenological Connections 106
4.8 A (Brief) Comparison with Prinz’s “Embodied Appraisal” 109
4.9 Conclusion 111
5 How the Body Feels in Emotion Experience 113
5.1 Introduction 113
5.2 A Taxonomy of Bodily Feeling 115
5.3 Conspicuous Bodily Feelings in Emotion Experience 118
5.4 The “Obscurely Felt” Body 122
5.5 Feeling Absorbed 128
5.6 Conclusion 132
6 Ideas for an Affective “Neuro-physio-phenomenology” 135
6.1 Introduction 135
6.2 Neurophenomenology in Theory and Practice 136
6.3 Neurophenomenology and the Study of Consciousness 139
6.4 Affective Neuroscience and Emotion Experience 143
6.5 Outline of an Affective Neuro-physio-phenomenological Method 148
6.6 Bodily Feelings and Emotion Experience 163
6.7 Conclusion 170
7 Feeling Others 171
7.1 Introduction 171
7.2 The Experience of the Other as a Leib 173
7.3 Perceiving Emotion in Expression 176
7.4 Impressive Others 179
7.5 Feeling Close 181
7.6 Sympathy 184
7.7 Doing as Others Do 187
7.8 Do We Mimic Others to Read Their Minds? 190
7.9 Mimicry as a Mechanism for Social Bonding 194
7.10 Beyond Strict Mimicry 198
7.11 Conclusion 201
Epilogue 203
Notes 205
References 229
Index 261
x Acknowledgments
I also benefited from various visits at different research centers. In par-
ticular I thank Klaus Scherer for my visits to the Swiss Center for Affective
Sciences in Geneva in 2010 and to its Summer School in 2011, and Dan
Zahavi for my visit to the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen
in 2011. I learned a lot from both of them and their collaborators. An espe-
cially intense visit was arranged by Achim Stephan at the Cognitive Science
Institute in Osnabrück in 2012; I thank him for his support, his comments,
the workshop on my manuscript, and the wine-tasting retreat in the Rhine
Valley.
Particularly heartfelt gratitude goes to those who read and commented
on whole draft chapters and greatly helped to improve them: Carl Craver,
John Dupré, Julian Kiverstein, Joel Krueger, Tom Roberts, and all the post-
graduate students in Osnabrück who read a whole draft of the manuscript
and worked to provide comments and criticisms.
And finally, thanks to my family for being a perennial source of a variety
of feelings—especially my mother, who left us unexpectedly while I was
working on this book, too early to see what I have been up to all this time.
The last thought goes to Brian Rappert, for our discussions and for grace-
fully dealing with the whole range of my affective spectrum throughout
this journey.

This work has been funded by the European Research Council under the
European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013),
project title “Emoting the Embodying Mind (EMOTER),” ERC grant agree-
ment 240891.
Earlier versions of some of the arguments in this book can be found in
the following works:
“Enactive Appraisal.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007):
527–546.
“The Feeling Body: Towards an Enactive Approach to Emotion” (with E.
Thompson). In Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness,
ed. W. F. Overton, U. Müller, and J. L. Newman, 45–68. New York: Law-
rence Erlbaum, 2008.
“From Affect Programs to Dynamical Discrete Emotions.” Philosophical Psy-
chology 22 (2009): 407–425.
“Reply to Barrett, Gendron, and Huang.” Philosophical Psychology 22 (2009):
439–442.