Self and Emotional Life
Page 9
The unity of the body and mind determines a conception of bodily manifestations of mental processes. These manifestations coincide with what are called today neural maps, that is, sorts of material surfaces upon which all kinds of events, both mental and affective, inscribe themselves. These inscriptions, in their turn, give way to feelings, which are superior forms of social emotions: embarrassment, shame, guilt, contempt, indignation, sympathy, compassion, awe, wonder, elevation, gratitude, pride.5
Deprived of such emotions or feelings, humanity wouldn’t have been able to survive. This point leads Damasio to consider the importance of the notion of the conatus in Spinoza: “For Spinoza, organisms naturally endeavor, of necessity, to persevere in their own being; that necessary endeavor constitutes their actual essence. Organisms come to being with the capacity to regulate life and thereby permit survival. Just as naturally, organisms strive to achieve a ‘greater perfection’ of function, which Spinoza equates with joy. All of these endeavors and tendencies are engaged unconsciously.”6
Because of this extremely modern conception of the conatus, Spinoza may be regarded as a “protobiologist.” There are, according to this conception, “four” Spinozas: the religious scholar, the political thinker, the philosopher, and the fourth one, “the protobiologist.” Damasio writes: “There is a fourth Spinoza; the protobiologist. This the biological thinker concealed behind countless propositions, axioms, lemmas, and scholia.”7
In order to study or discover this fourth Spinoza, it is necessary, again, to stress the importance of the conatus. “It is apparent that the continuous attempt at achieving a state of positively regulated life is a deep and defining part of our existence—the first reality of our existence as Spinoza intuited when he described the relentless endeavor (conatus) of each being to preserve itself. Striving, endeavor, and tendency are three words that come close to rendering the Latin term conatus, as used by Spinoza in Propositions 6, 7 and 8 of the Ethics, Part III. In Spinoza’s own words; ‘Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being’ and ‘The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.’”8
Damasio shows that the different actions of self-preservation hold the different parts of a body together and maintain the unity of the whole. Fighting against external threats of destruction allows the unity of the individual being to take shape and helps the constitution of the body scheme or schema. Despite the transformations due to age or experience, the conatus remains the same all through life because it respects the same structural design. The conatus is a process of repetition or recurrence of the self. This repetition as such is the very origin of personal identity. Emotions and feelings play a major role in this repetition process. The more the organism increases its power of acting—by feeling joy—the more the different parts of the organism fit together and stick to their unity.
“Armed with this revised conception of human nature,” Damasio continues, “Spinoza proceeded to connect the notions of good and evil, of freedom and salvation, to the affects and to the regulation of life.”9 The ontological and ethical meaning of affects is rooted in this biological tendency to survive. Being itself is survival, or endeavor. God, or Nature, is within ourselves. Ontology thus means the immanent presence of nature in us. Can we deduce that this immanence gives way, in Damasio as in Deleuze, to the construction of planes of immanence?
Mappings
The title Looking for Spinoza may be read in two ways. It first means “in search of Spinoza.” But, it may also signify looking “in his place,” in Spinoza’s place, trying to see something that he was not able to see or to look at himself—being his eyes for him. What Spinoza was not able to see clearly by himself, because of the limited state of scientific observation, discovery, and experiment in his time, was the architecture of the nervous system. Damasio helps Spinoza to see more distinctly what Spinoza only had a sense of without exactly measuring the importance of such a discovery: “We can fill in the brain details and venture to say for him what [Spinoza] obviously could not.”10
For the neurobiologist, the most striking and insightful statement of the Ethics is formulated in proposition 13 of book 2: “The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body.” This statement is elaborated in other propositions too: “The human mind is the very idea or knowledge of the human body”; “the Mind does not have the capacity to perceive … except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications (affections) of the body”; “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and is so in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a great number of impressions.”11
Damasio affirms: “Spinoza is not merely saying that mind springs fully formed from substance on equal footing with the body. He is assuming a mechanism whereby the equal footing can be realized. The mechanism has a strategy; events in the body are represented as ideas in the mind. There are representational ‘correspondences,’ and they go in one direction—from body to mind. The means to achieve the representational correspondences are contained in the substance. The statements in which Spinoza finds ideas ‘proportional’ to ‘modifications of the body,’ in terms of both quantity and intensity, are especially intriguing. The notion of ‘proportion’ conjures up ‘correspondence’ and even ‘mapping.’”12
What Spinoza was not able to see by himself is thus the neural activity of “mapping.” Mapping characterizes the way in which events in the body are represented as ideas in the mind. As “representational ‘correspondences,’” the coincidence between ideas and bodily events draws neural maps that, looking apparently very much like the Deleuzian “planes of immanence,” inscribe bodily messages on an internal projective surface.
Spinoza “could not say that the means to establish ideas of the body include chemical and neural pathways and the brain itself. Of necessity, Spinoza knew very little about the brain and about the means for body and brain to signal mutually.… He carefully avoids mentioning the brain when he discusses mind and body, although we can be certain from statements elsewhere that he saw brain and mind as closely associated. For example, in the discussion that closes Part I of The Ethics, Spinoza says that ‘everyone judges of things according to the state of his brain.’”13
Damasio proposes to substitute the term image for idea. Images emerge from neural patterns, or neural maps, formed in populations of neurons that constitute neural networks or circuits. Emotions and feelings play a major role in the way in which our brain forms these images. They render the mind-body correspondence easy or uneasy. Here again, Spinoza sensed this point in developing his conception of joy and sorrow. “The maps associated with joy signify states of equilibrium for the organism. Those states may be actually happening or as if they were happening. Joyous states signify optimal physiological coordination and smooth running of the operations of life. They not only are conducive to survival but to survival with well-being.… We can agree with Spinoza when he said that joy (laetitia in his Latin text) was associated with a transition of the organism to a state of greater perfection.… The maps related to sorrow, in both the broad and narrow senses of the word, are associated with states of functional disequilibrium. The ease of action is reduced.… If unchecked, the situation is conducive to disease and death.”14 The variability of the conatus is induced by the modulation of the instinct of survival. The ontological tendency to endeavor in one’s own being is interpreted in terms of life drives. In that sense, wonder is the very expression of these vital impulses.
The Third Person’s Perspective
If mind and body are two aspects of the same thing, if they mirror or reflect each other, then it is not even useful to use the terms mind and body any longer; it is not even useful to refer to their unity as a conscious subject. The term organism designates them both. It is the organism as a whole that is capable of wondering, that persists in life. We thus have to admit the existence of an impersonal admiratio.
This nonsubjective state can nonetheless be emotional because, as we just saw with Spinoza, it is linked with the conatus and its joyful and sorrowful variations. What we have to study now is what happens when the process of mapping is interrupted, when this auto-heteroaffection is impaired as a consequence of brain damage. In effect, to declare that passions are originarily nonsubjective means that they can be materially, empirically cut off from the subject.
7.
ON NEURAL PLASTICITY, TRAUMA, AND THE LOSS OF AFFECTS
The Two Meanings of Plasticity
The brain’s exposure to accidents directly involves its plasticity. Under the term neural plasticity hides, in fact, two plasticities. One is positive: It characterizes the formation process of neural connections and the fact that these connections may be transformed during our lifetimes under the influence of experience and of the kind of life we are leading. Every brain has its own form and there is no such thing as two identical brains. So, in the case of the healthy plastic brain, every kind of event is integrated into the general form or pattern of the connections, and the series of events of our lives constitute the autobiographical self. There exists a second kind of plasticity, however, which refers to brain damage and its destructive power. This negative plastic power consists in the transformation of the patient’s previous personality and in the emergence of a new individual proceeding from the explosion of the former identity. We see clearly here that plasticity appears as an accurate balance between the ability to change and the resistance to change.
Damasio states that “the circuits are not only receptive to the results of first experience, but repeatedly pliable and modifiable by continued experience.”1 This “good” plasticity, so to speak, can be interrupted by what neurobiologists call “disconnection.” A lesion that occurs in a brain region “does more than gashing a hole in this region. It removes this region from the whole brain organization.… Cerebral lesions are always disconnections.”2
Why should we call the destructive work of disconnection plastic? Isn’t plasticity an inappropriate name here? To answer this issue, I refer to the famous case of Phineas Gage, which is related by Damasio in Descartes’ Error and by Mark Solms in The Brain and the Inner World:
In the 1840s, an unfortunate man by the name of Phineas Gage was laying railways tracks in the midwestern United States. He was pressing down a charge of dynamite into a rock formation, using a tamping rod, when the charge suddenly exploded. This caused the tamping rod to shoot through his head, from underneath his checkbone into the frontal lobe of his brain and out through the top of his skull. Partly because the rod passed through so rapidly, probably cauterizing the tissue on its way, the damage to Gage’s brain was not very widespread; only a relatively small area of frontal tissue was affected.… Gage did not even lose consciousness, and he made a rapid physical recovery. His physician, however, reported some interesting changes when he published the case in a local medical journal a few years after the incident. Dr Harlow noted that, despite the good physical recovery and the relatively small extent of the brain injury, his patient was radically changed as a person; his personality was changed.… Let’s read a passage from Doctor Harlow’s report: “he is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows.… In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said that he was ‘no longer Gage.’”3
Let’s focus on the statement that “his mind was radically changed.” The specific operation of such a “radical” change cannot be of the same type as the one fulfilled by the plastic power of experience upon neural connections. Why not? First of all, a brain lesion interrupts all kinds of experience. The events that cause the pathological “radical change” are purely contingent, external, and totally unanticipated. They cannot be assimilated or interiorized by the psyche or by the brain. Second, the sort of transformation that occurs in such cases is not a partial modification but a complete metamorphosis of the personality. In Gage’s case, there is no existential phantom limb phenomenon. The previous personality is totally lost and there is no remainder. Of course, some aspects of this personality are preserved: language, cognition, and reasoning. These faculties are strangely intact. But the emotional brain has been badly injured and this causes a dramatic change. Even if some capacities remain untouched, the patient is unrecognizable. Such a transformation may nevertheless be said to be plastic in the sense that it forms and sculpts a new identity.
The two plasticities are two different kinds of relationships between events and affects. When brain damage occurs, it interrupts the economy of our affects. Solms declares: “In our clinical work as neuropsychologists we have met hundreds of Phineas Gages, all with damage to the same part of the brain. This is a fact of obvious importance for anyone with an interest in personality. It suggests that there is a predictable relationship between specific brain events and specific aspects of who we are. If any one of us were to suffer the same lesion in that specific area, we would be changed in much the same way that Gage was, and we, too, would no longer be our former selves. This is the basis of our view that anyone with a serious interest in the inner life of the mind should also be interested in the brain and vice versa.”4
The destructive plasticity forms what it destroys. It is not a simple annihilation or suppression to the precise extent that it has a result. This result is the formation of “someone else,” a new self, a self that is not able to recognize itself. The accident appears to be the plastic explosion that erases any trace and every memory, and that destroys any archive. And yet, such a damaged mind is still alive. It is a kind of survival that absolutely renounces the possibility of redemption or salvation.
The event of the brain damage occurs without presenting itself and forever stays out of access, out of interiorization, remaining exterior to any “becoming-subject.” Destructive plasticity is a biological deconstruction of subjectivity. All the questions Derrida raises under the name of heteroaffection—the impossibility of a presentation of the self to itself, of the I to itself, the impossibility of regarding the event as an accident belonging to the subject—all these questions seem to coincide precisely with the problems that are addressed in the neurobiological redrawing of the self.
The Loss of Affects
Brain damage is also a theoretical accident that happens to the very idea of the accident in its traditional definition. All the cases of brain damage that Damasio exposes are cases of absent subjectivity. Such a subjectivity is absent to itself and to its essence as well as to its accidents—a subjectivity without affects, the extreme form of heteroaffection.
The “survivors of neurological disease,” as Damasio calls them in The Feeling of What Happens,5 lead a life that is sometimes almost totally destroyed in its temporality and its structure. All these survivors share something in common: they all endure a profound change of personality caused by this destruction: “Prior to the onset of their brain damage, the individuals … affected had shown no such impairments. Family and friends could sense a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ dating to the time of neurologic injury.”6 The loss of the previous self almost always leads the patients to indifference, coldness, and a lack of concern, “a marked alteration of the ability to experience feelings.”7
All the cases that Damasio examines show this characteristic, which he calls “disaffectation” and, sometime
s, “cold blood.” One of the first examples of this phenomenon is exposed in Descartes’ Error, in chapter 3, “A Modern Phineas Gage.” This modern Phineas Gage is named Elliot. He was suffering from a brain tumor that had to be removed. “The surgery was a success in every respect, and insofar as such tumors tend not to grow again, the outlook was excellent. What was to prove less felicitous was the turn in Elliot’s personality. The changes, which began during his physical recovery, astonished family and friends. To be sure, Elliot’s smarts and his ability to move about and use language were unscathed. In many ways however, Elliot was no longer Elliot.”8 Damasio continues:
Bit by bit the picture of this disaffectation came together, partly from my observations, partly from the patient’s own account, partly from the testimony of his relatives. Elliot … seemed to approach life on the same neutral note. I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning. I learned that his behaviour was the same in his own daily environment. He tended not to display anger, and on the rare occasions when he did, the outburst was swift; in no time he would be his usual self again, calm and without grudges.
This was astounding. Try to imagine it. Try to imagine not feeling pleasure when you contemplate a painting you love or hear a favorite piece of music. Try to imagine yourself forever robbed of that possibility and yet aware of the intellectual contents of the visual or musical stimulus, and also aware that once it did give you pleasure. We might summarize Elliot’s predicament as to know but not to feel.9