Damasio On Mind and Emotions

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Damasio on mind and

emotions: A conceptual
critique
Svend Brinkmann
Published online: 11 Jul 2012.
To cite this article: Svend Brinkmann (2006) Damasio on mind and emotions: A
conceptual critique, Nordic Psychology, 58:4, 366-380
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1901-2276.54.4.366
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ARTICLE Nordic Psychology, 2006, 58 (4) 366-380
Damasio on mind and emotions:

A conceptual critique
SVEND BRINKMANN
Brinkmann, S. (2006): Damasio on mind and emotions: A conceptual critique. Nordic

Psychology, 58, 366-380.
Damasio’s theory of emotions and feelings has recently become influential in psychology and
related disciplines. The theory states that feeling an emotion consists of having mental images
that arise from neural patterns that represent changes in body and brain (and these changes
make up the emotion). In this article, I first criticize Damasio’s general theory of the mind,
before moving on to a critique of his theory of emotions. This critique involves four points.
I argue that it is flawed to say (1) that we observe our feelings, (2) that feelings necessarily
involve experiences of changes in body states, (3) that feelings are private, and (4) that feelings
are always caused.
Key words: Emotions, feelings, mind, normativity, Damasio
Correspondance: Svend Brinkmann, Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Jens Chr.

Skous Vej 4, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. E-mail: svendb@psy.au.dk
One of the truly classic subjects in psychology is the emotions. It is a subject

that preoccupied great philosophers and scientists like Aristotle, Spinoza,
Rousseau, Kant, and Darwin, and of course also distinguished psychologists
such as Wundt, James, and Freud, along with many others. In recent years, one
of the most influential theories of the emotions is found in the works of the neu-
robiologist, Antonio Damasio (1994; 1999; 2003). Damasio has published his
theory in a number of books, which demonstrate that it is possible to combine
thorough scholarship with an exposition of one’s views that is accessible and
enjoyable to read, also for non-specialist readers. For that reason, Damasio’s
theory has become well-known in many circles and quite influential in con-
temporary psychology, both theoretical and applied.
In this article, I shall argue that in spite of the merits of Damasio’s theory,
it suffers from a number of flaws. These flaws are not primarily empirical but
conceptual. However, the conceptual flaws are likely to bias the ways in which
empirical emotion research is conducted and the research questions that are
raised. Damasio’s work as a neurobiologist is rightly praised, and I shall not
argue against any of his neurobiological points as such. Instead, I shall argue
that the implications he draws in relation to a genuinely psychological approach
NP, 2006 (4) Damasio on mind and emotions: A conceptual critique 367
to the emotions are misguided, and that they rest, above all, on fundamental
conceptual mistakes.
The mereological and the homunculus fallacies

My criticism of Damasio’s theory owes much to the work of the neurologist
M.R. Bennett and the philosopher P.M.S. Hacker. Their examination of the
philosophical foundations of neuroscience (Bennett & Hacker, 2003) is a wel-
come contribution to a field that suffers from significant conceptual problems.

The most important of these, which we also find in Damasio’s writings, is what
Bennett and Hacker refer to as the mereological fallacy. ‘Mereology’ is the logic
of part-whole relations, and the mereological fallacy in neuroscience is com-
mitted when scientists ascribe (psychological) properties to a part of the living
human being, typically the brain or the “mind”, which in fact make sense only
when ascribed to a human being (or an animal) as a whole. For example, when
Damasio describes how the brain “attends” to the image of an object (1999:18)
or how our brains are “perceiving” a particular “body landscape” (1994:263),
he commits the mereological fallacy, for, literally, brains do not “attend” or “per-
ceive”. Only humans and other living animals do so, and, of course, they could
not do so without their brains, but that does not mean that it is their brains that
do the attending or perceiving. In general, when Damasio (2003) talks about
“the feeling brain”, he talks about a part of the organism in a way that makes
sense only when one considers the organism as a whole.
It should be kept in mind that if it is true that it does not make sense to ascribe
psychological predicates to the brain, it likewise does not make sense to ascribe
their negations to the brain: The brain does not “see”, for example, but neither
is it “blind” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003:72), just as the sandwich I am about to
eat is not awake – but neither is it asleep! The point is that it is not, as such, an
empirical fact that the brain does not attend, perceive, think, feel, see or decide.
It is not something we discover about the world, for it is a conceptual fact; i.e.,
a fact about how we can meaningfully apply the psychological predicates in
our language. As Wittgenstein pointed out in his Philosophical Investigations:
“only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human
being can one say it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious
or unconscious.” (1953:§281).
The accusation that Damasio is guilty of committing the mereological fallacy
is merely one out of a number of problematic points that will be discussed in
this article. The other points concern more directly his theory of feelings and
emotions and they are directed against his view that (1) we observe our feel-
ings, (2) that feelings are experiences of changes in body states, (3) that feel-
368 Svend Brinkmann NP, 2006 (4)
ings are private, and (4) that feelings are always caused. In addition, I argue
that Damasio’s general approach to the mind – he argues that having a mind
means to have the ability to form representations that can become mental
images (Damasio, 1994:90) – is misguided. Damasio’s theory of consciousness
is wedded to a version of representationalism (an image theory of perception
and cognition), and he sees consciousness as a device “capable of maximizing
the effective manipulation of images in the service of the interest of a particular
organism” (Damasio, 1999:24). Although he tries to distance himself from the
well-known problems inherent in representationalist epistemology – in particu-

lar incarnated in the homunculus fallacy – in my view he is largely unsuccessful
in this regard. For example, in The Feeling of What Happens, he says on page
11 that there “is no homunculus, either metaphysical or in the brain, sitting in
the Cartesian theatre as an audience of one and waiting for objects to step into
the light”. But later, on the very same page, he describes what he sees as the
two central problems of contemporary neuroscience: “the problem of how the
movie-in-the-brain is generated, and the problem of how the brain also gener-
ates the sense that there is an owner and observer for that movie.” (Damasio,
1999:11). However, the reader is left with the task of figuring out what possible
difference there can be between the old homunculus and the new “observer”
of the alleged movie-in-the-brain.
Damasio’s theory of emotions and feelings

One of the most famous emotion theories is that of William James (1890). In
his Principles of Psychology, James explains his theory by saying that “bodily
changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling
of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” (ibid:1065). Thus, accord-
ing to James, common-sense is wrong when it says that we are sorry and weep
because we lose our fortune, or that we meet a bear and run because we are
frightened. James’s hypothesis states that “this order of sequence is incorrect”
(ibid.). According to James, it is more correct to say that “we feel sorry because
we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we
cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, of fearful” (ibid:1066).
Damasio says with approval of James’s theory that he (James) “seized
upon the mechanism essential to the understanding of emotion and feeling.”
(Damasio, 1994:129), and Damasio states that “feelings are largely a reflection
of body-state changes, which is William James’s seminal contribution to this
subject.” (Damasio, 1999:288). Now, in order to understand what Damasio
is saying here, and why he supports James’s counter-intuitive conclusions, we
need to introduce his important distinction between emotions and feelings, and
this will in fact involve an exposition of all the basic mechanisms described by
his theory.
“Feeling an emotion is a simple matter”, Damasio (1999:280) says: “It con-
sists of having mental images arising from the neural patterns which represent
the changes in body and brain that make up an emotion.” (ibid.). In short, an
emotion is “a specifically caused transient change of the organism state”, and
a corresponding feeling results when this change of the organism’s body and
brain is represented “in terms of neural patterns and ensuing images.” (ibid:282).
Emotions are thus primary in the chain of events, feelings secondary, and a third
element enters when we finally come to feel our feelings. The feeling of feelings
(which in turn are feelings of emotions) is what Damasio means by conscious-
ness: When the emotional mental images are accompanied “by a sense of self
in the act of knowing, and when they are enhanced, they become conscious.
They are, in the true sense, feelings of feelings.” (ibid.).
Emotions, feelings, feelings of feeling

This may seem unduly complicated, but the idea is in fact clear enough once
one grasps its essential features. The tripartite structure of (1) emotion, (2) feel-
ing, and (3) feeling of feeling is explained throughout Damasio’s works. In
Descartes’ Error, he defines the essence of emotion as “the collection of changes
in body state that are induced in myriad organs by nerve cell terminals, under
the control of a dedicated brain system, which is responding to the content of
thoughts relative to a particular entity or event.” (Damasio, 1994:139). Thus, first
there is the exterior event, which triggers an interior mental representation: the
angry dog approaching the person is represented in the person’s mind-brain. The
emotion, in turn, is the bodily response to the mental image: the person’s skin
colour, body posture, and facial expression change in response to the mental
image (ibid.). This is the emotion but not yet a feeling proper. The emotion
becomes a feeling only when these bodily changes are observed by the mind.
An emotion is finally felt when the mental images that initiated the emotional
cycle (e.g. the mental image of the angry dog) is “juxtaposed”, as Damasio says
(ibid:145), i.e., put side by side with the experiences of bodily changes, and this
experience is itself made up by mental images. The feeling of an emotion thus
happens when a mental image of bodily changes is accompanied by a mental
image of some exterior event, when, that is, the two representations are put
side by side in the mind. According to Damasio, a feeling is therefore not “an
elusive mental quality attached to an object, but rather the direct perception
of a specific landscape: that of the body.” (ibid:xiv). Here we quite clearly see
the inspiration from William James’s idea that feelings are perceptions of bodily
conditions and changes.
Damasio’s theory involves the suggestion “that virtually every image, actually
perceived or recalled, is accompanied by some reaction from the apparatus of
emotion.” (Damasio, 1999:58). This leads him to his celebrated “somatic marker
hypothesis”: that somatic responses to mental images increase the efficiency
of rational decision processes. Emotions are necessary if we want to make
reasonable and wise decisions in our lives. Descartes’ error, Damasio claims,
was to separate “cold cognition” from “warm emotion”. It is true that an excess
of emotion can lead to defective cognitive processing (if one’s rational mind is
“clouded” by emotional perturbations), but so can a lack of emotional response,
Damasio claims. He supports this (in my view reasonable) conclusion with
neurological evidence indicating that patients with damages to those regions
of the brain that are involved in the control of emotional reactions and evalu-
ations are unable to make reasonable decisions in their lives, although some
of them are able to think rationally and logically, e.g. when taking standard
neuropsychological tests.
I agree with Damasio that emotion and cognition are much more interde-
pendent than many cognitive models of decision-making have presupposed
(especially some cognitivist models inspired by computer analogies). However,
I disagree with the premises that lead him to this conclusion. For it is miscon-
ceived to think, like Damasio, that emotions are somatic images that inform us
of what it is good and bad to do. Why is this misconceived? The reason is that if
Damasio were right that emotions were somatic images that notify us of good-
ness and badness, then we would identify goodness and badness in terms of our
bodily reactions. But this is not the way evaluations work: The reason I know
that someone committed some unjust act, for example, is clearly not because
I flush in anger upon hearing of it (Bennett & Hacker, 2003:216). Rather, I am
indignant (and may or may not flush in anger) at someone’s act because it is
unjust, and I know that it is unjust, not because I feel flushed, but because the
act disregards someone’s rights, is disrespectful, is biased, or something similar
(ibid.). Thus, I have a reason to feel angry when someone acts unjustly, and
anger is thus a normative response to an event. It cannot be understood in pure
causal terms as Damasio tries, when he claims that feelings are caused by emo-
tions (e.g. 1999:70). Except for special cases (e.g. when evaluating the taste of
food), we do not identify goodness and badness in terms of our bodily reactions,
but in terms of the normative character of events and situations.
Mental images
Before moving on, I must attend to a loose end in Damasio’s theory. According
to him, “our mind is made up of images” (2003:213). But what are these
“images” that play the leading role in feelings, emotions, consciousness, and
mental life more generally? In Damasio’s eyes, the human animal is a three-part
organism made up of body, brain, and mind. The brain’s task is to supervise
the bodily functions and keep the body in equilibrium. The mind’s function, in
turn, is to supervise the brain. The mind is not something distinct from the brain
(Damasio denies that he is a mind-brain dualist), but is the brain as it super-
vises or monitors how it (the brain) supervises the body. All these monitoring
processes involve what Damasio calls mental images. Damasio uses the term
“image” as largely synonymous with “representation” (cf. Damasio, 1999:320).
He claims that:
When you and I look at an object outside ourselves, we form compara-

ble images in our respective brains […] But that does not mean that the
image we see is the copy of whatever the object outside is like. Whatever
it is like, in absolute terms, we do not know. The image we see is based
on changes which occurred in our organisms – including the part of the
organism called brain – when the physical structure of the object interacts
with the body. (1999:320).
This means that, strictly speaking, what we see and hear are not objects and
events in the world, but images (i.e., mental representations) of objects and
events: “the structure and properties in the image we end up seeing are brain
constructions prompted by an object.” (Damasio, 1999:321). We do not see
objects, but “brain constructions” of objects. Thought, consequently, is defined
as “a flow of images” in the mind (ibid:318), and:
images are probably the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the
sensory modality in which they are generated and regardless of whether
they are about a thing or a process involving things; or about words or
other symbols, in a given language, which correspond to a thing or proc-
ess. (Damasio, 1994:107-8).
Images are thus involved in all mental processes: perceiving, feeling, thinking,
planning, and executing actions (Damasio, 2003:194). The images constructed
by our brains can be “faint” (e.g. in the form of recollections) or “lively” (e.g.
in the form of perceptions), but both are kinds of images (Damasio, 1994:108).
Consequently, we cannot know anything about the external world, i.e., about
what our mental images correspond to: “All that you can know for certain is that
they [the images] are real to your self, and that other beings make comparable
images.” (ibid:97). We see here that Damasio’s representationalist image-theory
of the mind leads to solipsism; the view that a person can know with certainty
only that she herself exists and has experiences, and Damasio’s reassurance
that we can know that others form comparable images to our own seems
philosophically unwarranted. If my own images are all I can know about, then
I have no way of knowing whether others have images (consciousness, feelings,

thoughts etc.) or not.
But could we not save some of Damasio’s image-theory by distinguishing
between perception and thinking, and by arguing that only the latter involves
images? This would perhaps save the theory from the accusation of solipsism,
but I do not think it works. Of course, I do not want to deny that thinking can
involve images (and some people probably do use images in their thought
processes), but what makes the manipulation of mental images thinking, can-
not be anything about the images themselves. For how could I know whether
my mental image of, say, a stout person was an image of a pregnant woman
or an obese man, unless the meaning of this image was already determined
conceptually? Nothing about the image itself forces an interpretation upon us.
Wittgenstein once asked: “What makes my image of him into an image of him?”
(1953:177). His answer was that it is not that it looks like him, for images can
“look” like things in countless ways. There has to be something else that consti-
tutes the reference of images to objects. Wittgenstein argued that something can
be an image of something else only in the stream of human life, i.e., in certain
practices where some things are normatively taken to represent other things in
public usage (this is part of Wittgenstein’s general argument that meanings are
necessarily public and normative). The main problem for Damasio’s theory and
other theories that frame the mental in terms of images is, thus, that imagery is
insufficient to make an image the image it is.
So far I have argued that Damasio is guilty of committing not just the mere-
ological fallacy and the homunculus fallacy, but also that his image-theory of
the mind in general is untenable. I have also presented his theory of emotion
and feeling, and some consequences of the theory can now be spelled out.
First, feelings are said to be experiences of emotions (which in turn are bodily
changes), and feelings can thus be observed in ourselves: “you cannot observe
a feeling in someone else although you can observe a feeling in yourself when,
as a conscious being, you perceive your own emotional states.” (Damasio,
1999:42). So feelings are perceptions of emotional states, and emotional states
are nothing more and nothing less than changes in body states. Furthermore,
feelings are private. Emotions, Damasio says, “are outwardly directed and pub-
lic” (ibid:36) (because they are publicly visible in terms of bodily changes), but
feelings “are inwardly directed and private” (ibid.) (because they are based on
private mental images). A feeling is “the private, mental experience of an emo-
tion” (ibid:42; see also Damasio, 2003:28). In addition to (1) being observed, (2)
being experiences of bodily changes, and (3) being private, feelings are also (4)
caused, viz. by emotions (ibid:70). These four points will now be criticized.
(1) We do not observe our feelings

I shall argue that it is wrong to say that we can observe a feeling in ourselves,
and that it is equally wrong to say that we cannot observe a feeling in others.
From an everyday point of view, it seems that we do observe the feelings of
others. We can often see the happiness in someone’s face or the fear in some-
one’s reactions. Damasio would say that this might seem to be the case, but
that it is only the emotion and not the feeling that we observe in others. But
how can he make this distinction? As Hacker (2004:207) says, “there is no dif-
ference between having an emotion and feeling an emotion (being jealous and
feeling jealous), any more than there is a difference between having a pain and
feeling a pain.” We do not know how to distinguish between a person who is
happy and one who feels happy, or a person who is angry and one who feels
angry. The evidence we have that someone is happy is the same evidence that
the person feels happy. And the evidence, of course, is behavioural (in a broad
sense). The feelings of others are expressed in their body postures, gestures,
tone of voice, and in what they sincerely say about themselves. All this can be
observed, and if it could not, it would be impossible to learn the emotion words
in our language. These are taught ostensibly, i.e., by pointing to exemplars, e.g.
when we read a book to a child and point to a drawing of a man and say: He is
happy. If emotion words were taught by getting the child to associate a private
mental image (observed only by the child) with a word, then there would be
no way of knowing what image the child had at the particular moment, and
the child would not know which inner sensation to associate with the word.
As we shall discuss further below, emotion words are taught with reference
to public objects and events, not with reference to private mental images or
somatic perturbations.
But if it is correct to say that we can observe feelings in others, why is it not
similarly correct to say that we can observe them in ourselves? The reason is that
there is an asymmetry between first and third person mental languages. When I
say of someone that she is happy, then I am making a report of something that
I have observed, but when I say that I am happy, I am not making a report of
anything. Why not? Because reports can be correct or incorrect, but if I master
the use of the concept ‘happy’, then I cannot be incorrect about whether I am
happy. Saying that I am happy is an expression or an avowal of my happiness,
not a report of inner going-ons. Reports can be true or false, but expressions
and avowals can be sincere or insincere (for, of course, I can be insincere in
the avowals I make if I try to hide my feelings) (Harré & Tissaw, 2005:189).
Children are born with a repertoire of emotional expressions, and we do not
have to teach them that when they are hungry or frustrated, they should cry, or
that when they are cheerful, they should smile. Their cries and smiles are not
reports of something they observe in themselves. Infants’ cries and smiles are
expressions of frustration and cheerfulness, and, as Harré and Tissaw (ibid:188)
argue, the verbal substitutes for innate expressions, which we learn when we
grow up and acquire emotion words, are likewise such expressions. They are
not reports of something we observe in ourselves, but ways of expressing what
we feel.
Thus, Damasio’s two assertions that we observe feelings in ourselves and that
we do not observe them in others are based on the same fundamental mistake:
The misguided distinction between having and feeling an emotion. According
to him, we can have an emotion that we do not feel, just as I can have a coin
in the pocket that I am unaware of. But emotions are not “objects” (like coins)
that can be “observed” (correctly or incorrectly) and of which we can give
reports. Rather, they are expressions of what is important to us, and this makes
it less mysterious why feelings can be observed in others, but not in ourselves
(I can be wrong when describing the feelings of others, for all such reports can
be faulty, but I cannot similarly be wrong when I sincerely say that I am dis-
appointed, for example). I do not want to deny that there can be a difference
between feeling an emotion and realizing what emotion one feels (see Hacker,
2004:207) – and psychotherapy is often a practice that serves to make people
realize what emotions they in fact feel – but this is not the difference Damasio
postulates between feeling an emotion and having an emotion.
(2) Feelings are not experiences of changes in body state

My argument against Damasio’s claim that feelings are experiences of changes
in body state is based on two points: First, some feelings do not involve changes
in body state at all, and second, concerning those feelings that sometimes do
involve such changes, the bodily changes are insufficient to identify the char-
acter of the feeling. As regards the first point, Bennett & Hacker (2003:213)
mention some examples of emotions where no bodily perturbations are present:
I can love someone without undergoing any somatic change, e.g. I do not stop
loving my wife in the absence of “butterflies” in the stomach. That I feel love
for her is expressed in the way I live my life, not in any somatic perturbations.
Likewise, I may fear that the inflation rate will rise in my country, but this fear
need not involve any somatic changes at all. And I can feel grateful that some-
one is helping me without this gratefulness manifesting itself in any corporeal
changes. Many more examples could be mentioned.
So Damasio’s point seems to be too general; not all feelings involve changes
in body state that are experienced. But some feelings are clearly associated with
changes in body state, and the question then is if such changes are what define
the feelings we feel, as Damasio claims. Now, when Damasio argues that feel-
ings are experiences of changes in body state, he cannot mean that any change
in body state causes a corresponding feeling. The changes in body state brought
about by a constipation gives rise to certain (unpleasant) sensations, but it seems
wrong to say that this necessarily involves emotions and subsequent feelings.
As Harré (1983:136) has noted, dread, anger, indigestion, and exhaustion all
have behavioral manifestations as well as distinctive experiential qualities, but
we only classify dread and anger as emotions, whereas we think of indigestion
and exhaustion as “mere” sensations (cf. Brinkmann, 2006). The basis on which
to make this distinction (between sensations and emotions) has not to do with
the somatic source of the respective phenomena, but is, as Harré makes clear,
grounded in the fact that only dread and anger fall within (what he calls) “a
moral order”, whereas indigestion and exhaustion are pure physiological phe-
nomena that do not belong to such a moral order. We are not morally blamed
for cases of indigestion, but quite often we are morally blamed for being angry.
Anger can be justified or unjustified, indigestion is merely there as the result of
causal processes. Damasio himself denies that emotions are normative when
he claims that we are not “striving for goodness when we […] react with hap-
piness or fear to certain objects around us.” (Damasio, 2003:51). In my view,
he overlooks the fact that a large part of moral development in human life is
about learning to react emotionally properly to objects around us (more on this
below).
Summing up, we can say not only that feelings need not involve experiences
of body changes in order to be feelings, but also that the relation between emo-
tions and body change is less evident than Damasio thinks. In any case, feelings
are not “about” or “a reflection of” body-state changes (Damasio, 1999:288),
for what they are about and reflect is the object of the emotion. What I fear
is not my bodily changes, but the frightening bear. What I am proud of is not
some somatic change, but my achievements. And what I feel guilty about is not
bodily perturbations, but my wrongdoings (see Bennett & Hacker, 2003:215,
for more examples). Again, we see that emotions occur on the background of
some normative order that determines what is worth fearing, being proud of,
and feeling guilty of.
(3) Feelings are not private

I have already indicated above why I think that Damasio is wrong to say that
feelings are private, and this can now be argued in greater detail. If feelings
were private, then the only way to learn the words for feelings would be to
associate them with some private mental content, i.e., with the feeling as such
(according to Damasio’s questionable distinction between emotion and feeling).
But, as Wittgenstein argued in his famous argument against the possibility of a
private language (Wittgenstein, 1953), this would mean that there could be no
way of determining whether such words were applied correctly or incorrectly.
If, for example, the word ‘anger’ referred to some private feeling that only I
could know about, then the only ground I could have for sincerely saying “I
am angry” would be that I had some inner feeling that I had privately labelled
‘anger’. But how could I know if it was rightly so labelled? Wittgenstein’s
argument here is that given these premises, there is no way of knowing this. If
feelings (and other mental phenomena) were strictly private, then there could
be no difference between correctly applying words for feelings and it seeming
that we apply them correctly. And without this normative difference, we cannot
speak of correctness at all.
Thus, if feelings were private entities of some sort, then the person having
the feelings would be the only one to know about them, which would lead
us straight to solipsism. Wittgenstein once asked rhetorically: “Could some-
one have a feeling of ardent love or hope for the space of one second – no
matter what preceded or followed this second? – what is happening now has
significance – in these surroundings. The surroundings give it its importance”
(Wittgenstein, 1953:§583). We cannot meaningfully say that someone has “a
feeling of ardent love or hope” in such a short time period, in total abstraction
from the person’s context. These feelings (like many others) demand temporal
extension and specific contexts, and this demonstrates that they are not ascribed
on the basis of private feelings. “Ardent love or hope” are feelings that a person
can have only as part of long-term commitments to certain people and values;
they are not discrete objects that we each privately observe in ourselves. If
Damasio were right that feelings were private in this sense, then there would
be nothing wrong in saying that someone had a feeling of love or hope for the
space of one second, regardless of the wider context (the “surroundings”, as
Wittgenstein says) in which the person were situated.
(4) Feelings are not caused

The final objection to Damasio’s theory is perhaps the one that is most difficult
to grasp: How can I claim that feelings are not caused? To begin with, I do not
deny that the physiology of our bodies can be described by causal laws, but
I will maintain that when we talk about phenomena like feelings, thoughts,
and actions, we talk about something that cannot be grasped as completely
causally determined. As an initial way of explaining this point, we can make
an analogy with logical reasoning: Without doubt, there is causality involved
in the brain processes that allow humans to reason logically, but that does not
mean that the practice of logical inference can be understood causally. Logic is
normative, since its standards of correctness cannot be determined by empiri-
cal causal processes (e.g. in people’s brains). I will argue that the same can be
said to apply to human mental life, including emotions, thoughts, and actions,
which, in this light, can only be grasped if one grasps the reasons on which
mental phenomena are based (Brinkmann, 2006). As Baker and Hacker have
explained: “reasons and motives are no more causes of action than the premises
of a syllogism are the causes of its conclusion” (Baker & Hacker, 1982:239).
The reasons we have for feeling in certain ways (such as the reason I have for
feeling guilty when I behave unjustly) are categorically different from causes
and cannot be reduced or understood in terms of causality.
If feelings were caused by emotions, as Damasio says, then it would be
inconceivable why we are so often praised and blamed for feeling specific
feelings. An important part of psychological maturity is about feeling the right
feelings at the right times. Thus, there is a normative aspect to feeling. Quite
often, emotions are subject to reason (e.g. when people learn to feel more
accurately in psychotherapies). In raising our children, we work long and hard
to make them feel properly. We constantly say such things as “shame on you!”
(when the situation affords shame, e.g. when the child behaves badly), “aren’t
you happy?” (when the situation affords happiness, e.g. when the child is given
a present) and “don’t be afraid!” (when there is no reason to be frightened). We
teach the children how, when, and what to feel. We teach them the norma-
tive affordances that call for specific patterns of emotional response in specific
contexts. We teach them about the normative structure of reality (Baerveldt &
Voestermans, 2005). We teach them when it makes sense to apply emotions
words, or, in Wittgenstein’s terminology, we teach them the grammar of emotion
words (i.e., the normativity that determines what linguistic moves are allowed
to make sense in what “surroundings”, and what are not, e.g. why it does not
make sense to say that one feels ardent love in the space of one second). Again,
contra Damasio, it is clear that we teach children to respond with feelings to
specific objects and not to private somatic changes. We teach them to fear
fast-driving cars; we do not teach them to fear images or bodily perturbations
in relation to fast-driving cars.
In wanting to become a respectable empirical science, psychology has

very often tried to establish causal laws that allegedly govern the vagaries of
mental life. In relation to emotions, the relevant question then becomes: What
causes us to feel in specific ways? However, if it is true that an essential part
of emotional life is not causal, but normative, then this is an insufficient way
of investigating the psychology of feelings. Louch has characterized the way
psychologists work in this area as follows:
The psychologist presumably starts with the description of behaviour given

as a case of anger or fear, lust or protectiveness, sorrow or joy, and then
wishes to raise the question ‘Why do men in general, or this subject in
particular, respond in this way?’ (Louch, 1966:119).
According to Louch, what these psychologists overlook is that this question,

as a question about emotion proper (but perhaps not as a question about the
physiology of certain bodily responses), is idle (Louch, 1966:119). For in know-
ing that what we are dealing with is a case of fear, for example, the behaviour is
already explained (ibid.). This is due to the normativity of emotion words: To say
that someone is afraid “is to see the situation as dangerous” (ibid.). An explana-
tion of the event that refers to the situation as calling for a certain normative
response is a complete psychological explanation, and any further questions
about the event and why the action is performed “appears to be a biological
question”, argued Louch (ibid.).
Smedslund (1997) is another psychologist, who has tirelessly argued that
psychological phenomena are determined by normative and conceptual con-
nections rather than causal connections. We know, for example, that surprise is
something we feel in unexpected situations, not because we have established
an empirical correlation or a causal law that states that people tend to feel
surprised whenever something unexpected happens. We know that surprise is
something we feel in unexpected situations, because there is a normative con-
ceptual connection between ‘surprise’ and ‘unexpected situation’ (the former
is defined as what we feel in the context of the latter). So if some experiment
(unexpectedly) were to demonstrate that ‘surprise’ and ‘unexpected situation’
do not correlate (or correlate negatively), this would not falsify the idea of a
relation between them, but would immediately prompt us to look for flaws in
the experimental design. That emotions and feelings exist in such normative
connections (rather than mere causal ones) is a key to understanding the nor-
mativity of emotional life.
Concluding remarks
This is not the place for an exposition of an alternative theory of emotional life,
which does not contain the conceptual mistakes found in Damasio’s theory.
However, it should be mentioned that an alternative normative view of the
emotions has been with us since Aristotle. As Aristotle said of the emotions:
It is possible, for example, to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and
pleasure and pain generally, too much or too little; and both of these are
wrong. But to have these feelings at the right times on the right grounds
towards the right people for the right motive and in the right way is to feel
them to an intermediate, that is to the best, degree; and this is the mark of
virtue. (Aristotle, 1976:101).
According to Aristotle, emotions and feelings are not just brute, instinctual, or
causally determined reactions, but should be seen as public manifestations of
what is important to persons. And it is possible for persons to be misguided
about what is important. Death is something that rightly calls for a feeling of
fear in humans, but a fear of pigeons is an unwarranted and thus a patho-
logical feeling. I may feel proud in relation to some achievement that one can
rightly be proud of, but it is also possible to feel proud without justification. In
the Aristotelian view, emotions exist in this way within a moral order (Harré,
1983).
If we follow in the footsteps of Aristotle and also Wittgenstein (as well as
some contemporary psychologists like Rom Harré), then we will pose differ-
ent research questions than Damasio. First, we will see conceptual analysis
of our words for feelings and emotions as very important, and as determining
how it makes sense to study feelings and emotions. Second, we will not look
for ways in which (questionable) mental images, bodily changes, and private
feelings are causally related to each other. Instead we will study how different
cultures set up different normative moral orders that compel people to feel in
specific ways. In the words of Baerveldt and Voestermans (2005:468), we will
then be engaged in “understanding ‘culture’ as an inherently normative order
and emotions as the primary way in which we are tied to that order.” This is
a consequence of the idea that our emotional lives are normative. In essence,
this is just to return to Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1894) program for a descriptive psy-
chology that views mental life as lived in socio-historical relations, and which
focuses on “the depiction of the parts and connections of mental life as they
are experienced in their totality.” (Teo, 2001:206). This by no means implies a
rejection of neurobiological studies of the emotions and other psychological
matters, but it does mean that a genuinely psychological approach to emotions

and other psychological phenomena should include references to the normative
socio-cultural order on the background of which such matters are experienced
and identified.
REFERENCES
Aristotle (1976). The Nichomachean Ethics. London: Penguin.

Baerveldt, C. & Voestermans, P.P. (2005). Culture, Emotion, and the Normative Structure of
Reality. Theory & Psychology, 15(4): 449-473.
Baker, G. P. & Hacker, P. M. S. (1982). The Grammar of Psychology: Wittgenstein’s Bemerkungen
Über die Philosophie der Psychologie. Language and Communication, 2(3): 227-244.
Bennett, M.R. & Hacker, P.M.S. (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Brinkmann, S. (2006). Mental Life in the Space of Reasons. Journal for the Theory of Social
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Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York:
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Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of
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Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando:
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Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Damasio on mind and

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Damasio on mind and emotions:

Brinkmann, S. (2006): Damasio on mind and emotions: A conceptual critique. Nordic

Correspondance: Svend Brinkmann, Department of Psychology, University of Aarhus, Jens Chr.

One of the truly classic subjects in psychology is the emotions. It is a subject

The mereological and the homunculus fallacies

come contribution to a field that suffers from significant conceptual problems.

well-known problems inherent in representationalist epistemology – in particu-

Damasio’s theory of emotions and feelings

Emotions, feelings, feelings of feeling

When you and I look at an object outside ourselves, we form compara-

I have no way of knowing whether others have images (consciousness, feelings,

(1) We do not observe our feelings

(2) Feelings are not experiences of changes in body state

(3) Feelings are not private

(4) Feelings are not caused

In wanting to become a respectable empirical science, psychology has

The psychologist presumably starts with the description of behaviour given

According to Louch, what these psychologists overlook is that this question,

matters, but it does mean that a genuinely psychological approach to emotions

Aristotle (1976). The Nichomachean Ethics. London: Penguin.

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