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    287HEIDEGGERSATTUNEMENTANDTHENEUROPSYCHOLOGYOFEMOTION

    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 287312, 2002. 2002Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

    Heideggers attunement and the neuropsychology of emotion

    MATTHEW RATCLIFFEDepartment of Philosophy, University of Durham, Durham, UK

    (E-mail: [email protected])

    Received 29 May 2001; received in revised version 13 January 2002

    Abstract. I outline the early Heideggers views on mood and emotion, and then relate his

    central claims to some recent finding in neuropsychology. These findings complement

    Heidegger in a number of important ways. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to make

    sense of certain neurological conditions that traditional assumptions concerning the mind are

    constitutionally incapable of accommodating, something very like Heideggers account of

    mood and emotion needs to be adopted as an interpretive framework. I conclude by support-

    ing Heideggers insistence that the sciences constitute a derivative means of disclosing the

    world and our place within it, as opposed to an ontologically and epistemologically privi-

    leged domain of inquiry.

    Heidegger and attunement

    InBeing and Time, Heidegger is highly critical of the traditional philosophi-

    cal neglect of emotion. He remarks how, according to the traditional view,

    affects and feelings come under the theme of psychical phenomena, func-

    tioning as a third class of these, usually along with ideation [Vorstellen] and

    volition. They sink to the level of accompanying phenomena (1962, p. 178).1

    In other words, emotions and moods are construed as a superficial subjective

    gloss that taints our cognition of the objective world and are considered pe-

    ripheral to an understanding of how we represent and engage with the world.

    Heideggers account is, to put it simply, a complete reversal of this sort of

    view.2 Emotions, and more specifically moods, are philosophically central for

    Heidegger.

    3

    They are not merely subjective or psychic phenomena but anirreducible pre-theoretical background, relative to which the world and the

    manner in which we are situated within it is disclosedor rendered intelligible.

    To appreciate Heideggers account of mood and the manner of its depar-

    ture from traditional accounts, it is important to grasp the way in which it is

    situated in the context of Heideggers broader project in Being and Time.

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    288 MATTHEWRATCLIFFE

    Heideggers primary concern inBeing and Time is the question of the mean-ing of Being. The Being of beings is not itself a being (1962, pp. 2526)

    but a meaning-giving background, an understanding of which is presupposed

    by the intelligibility of worldly beings. Heidegger claims that our understand-

    ing of Being has historically been hidden and obfuscated by our explicit con-

    cerns with specific beings, and proposes to uncover this implicit understanding.

    To do so, he selects a specific being as his theme, as a clue from which to

    start an inquiry into Being. Heidegger chooses ourselves as his focus; we are

    the beings that have an implicit understanding of Being, an understanding that

    philosophy can attempt to make explicit. He christens the subject of his in-

    vestigation Dasein, in order to distance himself from traditional philosophi-

    cal construals of the self as a theoretical, internal subjectivity that relates

    intentionally to entities in an objective, external world. Heidegger contends

    that, in construing the self as such, philosophers have obscured the way in

    which we relate to the world and have thus also obscured the nature of our

    understanding of Being:

    In this characterization of intentionality as an extant relation between two things extant,

    a psychical subject and a physical object, the nature as well as the mode of being of inten-

    tionality is completely missed. (1982, p. 60)

    Heidegger claims that this mischaracterization is evident in the emphasis that

    philosophers have placed on detached, theoretical cognition of an object by a

    subject (as epitomised by the positive sciences) over active involvement with

    a world of tools and equipment. He argues, contrary to such emphasis on

    theoretical intentionalities, that we do not generally encounter beings as de-

    tached, theoretical entities [Vorhanden] but as available or ready-to-hand

    [Zuhanden] and entwined in a tacit, holistic contexture of equipment.4 In

    emphasising Zuhandenheit, Heidegger does not want to reduce all theory to

    practice,5 but to draw attention to the way that philosophical thinking has been

    restricted by its emphasis on Vorhandenheit, by its exclusive attention to what

    Heidegger thinks is just one way in which we encounter beings.6 However,

    he does claim that our practical engagements with the world constitute a bet-

    terclue to the nature of our understanding of Being than the traditional em-

    phasis on theoretical intentionalities.

    Employing his account of practical activity as a guide, Heidegger goes onto claim that there is a kind of holistic, meaning-giving background that is pre-

    supposed by the sense of both theoretical and practical encounters with the

    world. This background, which Heidegger terms care [Sorge], constitutes

    his initial characterisation of the Daseins understanding of Being. Care is that

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    290 MATTHEWRATCLIFFE

    for granted background relative to which any conceivable beings and engage-ments with beings are disclosed as intelligible; a mood assails us. It come

    neither from outside nor from inside, but arises out of Being-in-the-world,

    as a way of such Being. (1962, p. 176). As moods are constitutive of our

    understanding of Being (that whereby beings are rendered intelligible), we

    cannot escape moods or accommodate them fully into theoretical perspectives.9

    Mood is not a property of the theoretically characterised subject, but a more

    primordialgroundwhereby things can show up for us as this or that, an

    all-enveloping cradle which discloses or gives meaning to all our conceptions

    of theoretical beings and all our engagements with practical beings.

    Thus we can see how mood takes on a new importance for Heidegger and

    how this philosophical elevation of mood is a consequence of the reorientation

    of philosophical perspective that is central to his overall project inBeing and

    Time. Heidegger takes the emphasis away from theoretical cognition and

    claims that all such cognition presupposes a more primordial, disclosive un-

    derstanding, of which moods are an essential constituent. As a consequence,

    moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical

    perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities,

    whether theoretical or practical. As I will argue in the following sections this

    centrality is not restricted to those emotional states that we commonly term

    moods but can also be adapted so as to encompass emotions more gener-

    ally.

    Heidegger on science and mood

    Heideggers dramatic revision of traditional assumptions concerning mood

    points to major philosophical implications for the status of scientific views

    of the world and scientific theories of emotion more specifically. Heidegger

    proposes that the theoretical, cognitive, detached perspective which the sci-

    ences adopt and take to be a privileged epistemic conduit to fundamental

    ontology is in fact just one way ofdisclosing beings, which by no means dis-

    closes the way things are in a way more fundamental than practical attitudes.

    Hence philosophy and the theoretical sciences have obscured the nature of our

    understanding of Being by putting one form of understanding (detached cog-

    nition) on a pedestal and mistakenly construing it as a privileged perspective.

    Heidegger claims that, contrary to philosophys historical preference for all

    things theoretical, attunement, as a constituent of care, is more basic to our

    grasp of the world and our place in it than detached, scientific cognition.

    Both theoretical and practical activity presuppose a sense of world or envi-

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    291HEIDEGGERSATTUNEMENTANDTHENEUROPSYCHOLOGYOFEMOTION

    ronment [Umwelt] that our attunement discloses. This environment, asHeidegger explains, is a structure which even biology as a positive science

    can never find and can never define, but must presuppose and constantly

    employ (1962, p. 84). It is a pre-given cradle of intelligibility, a realm of

    disclosedness which is constituted by our attunement: any cognitive de-

    termining has its existential-ontological Constitution [Konstitution] in the

    attunement of Being-in-the-world; but pointing this out is not to be confused

    with attempting to surrender science ontically to feeling. (1962, p. 177).

    Heidegger is claiming that mood is a condition of sense for theoretical in-

    tentionalities and the disclosure of theoretical entities but he is not main-

    taining thatfeelings replace such intentionalities. Rather, mood isprior to

    theoretical intentionalities and its fundamentality is passed over by the sci-

    ences, which restrict their deliberations to beings that have already been dis-

    closed in a particular manner. Thus the sciences, according to Heidegger,

    cannot legitimately lay claim to a privileged perspective on moods and emo-

    tions. This is because attunement, construed as a precondition for the intelligi-

    bility of theoretical detachment, serves to undermine the very epistemological

    and ontological assumptions that privilege theoretical attitudes in a philosophi-

    cal account of mood and emotion. The theoretical attitude cannot be taken as

    basic if its sense rests on a constitutive background of mood, and the entities

    it discloses should not be taken as basic to what is if the attitude that renders

    them intelligible is itself derivative.

    Given that the theoretical, scientific perspective is, for Heidegger, an inad-

    equate means of grasping the sense ofBefindlichkeit, one might wonder howan appreciation of the way in which he maintains that moods disclose the

    world and our place in it might be reached. Heideggers answer is, in brief,

    that a certain kind of emotional state is able to disclose the more general way

    in which moods disclose; it discloses disclosure, by punctuating the way in

    which tacit moods constitute the way in which we find ourselves enveloped

    in a world of projects, purposes and significance. This brings us to Heideggers

    discussion ofAngstin Being and Time and What is Metaphysics?.

    Angstand the punctuation of attunement

    In What is Metaphysics?,10 Heidegger is concerned with the way in which

    emotion can disclose disclosure. He focuses on a specific emotion, anxiety

    [Angst], which he regards as especially salient in respect of its potential to

    reveal the underlying structure of the way in which Dasein ordinarily finds

    itself in a world. Despite the fact that Heidegger characterisesAngstas a

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    292 MATTHEWRATCLIFFE

    ground-mood [Grundstimmung], I will refer to it as an emotion here. Itmanifests itself as a specific, occurrent episode rather than a prolonged,

    dispositionalstate and, as such, seems closer to commonsense use of the term

    emotion than mood. However, HeideggersAngstdoes seem distinct from

    emotions such as fear, in that it has no specific intentional object but is in-

    stead a general comportment towards beings as a whole; that in the face of

    which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world (1962, p. 231). De-

    spite this, I will argue in Section 6 that the role that Heidegger ascribes toAngst

    can also be ascribed, in varying degrees, to many other states that we ordinar-

    ily term emotions. Thus regardingAngstas an emotion allows one to extend

    the scope of Heideggers account and apply it to the understanding of emo-

    tional states in general, rather than restricting it to the specific sub-class that

    we ordinarily term moods.

    For Heidegger, anxiety is a suspension of the everyday significance that

    beings have for us, a retreat from the familiar context of things that is disclosed

    through attunement. In anxiety, things lose their familiarity, their significance;

    we are pulled away from the world of familiar objects and concerns, as the

    everyday attunement that ordinarily ties us to the world breaks down to re-

    veal a kind of primordial unfamiliarity; the nothing:

    The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get

    no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this no holds on things comes

    over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing. (1978, p. 101)

    This nothing, Heidegger explains, is not itself a being (1978, p. 102) but a

    kind of relationship between Dasein and the totality of beings, which severs

    our everyday ties to beings and thus discloses the way in which attunement

    ordinarily anchors us to a world.

    In the experience ofAngst, our relationship with the world disintegrates

    completely, revealing in the process the dependence of all intentionalities,

    whether theoretical or practical, on everyday attunement. Heidegger claims

    that even propositional logic depends for its sense on a meaning-giving cra-

    dle of attunement. The nothing of anxiety constitutes a profound disturbance

    of our primordial, attuned familiarity with the world and, when that breaks

    down, so does logic. As Heidegger puts it, the idea of logic itself disinte-

    grates in the turbulence of a more original questioning (1978, p. 105).So Heidegger is again turning traditional philosophical views on their head

    by making the claim that the intelligibility of propositional logic is itself para-

    sitic on a more original world-disclosing background of mood and that, when

    this attunement is punctuated by a certain kind of emotional episode, even

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    293HEIDEGGERSATTUNEMENTANDTHENEUROPSYCHOLOGYOFEMOTION

    logic breaks down. His play on the nothing being prior to logical negationis intended to convey this. Hence Heidegger is advocating a radical transfor-

    mation of traditional epistemologies and ontologies, which emphasise theo-

    retical detachment and propositional logic as primary elements in the project

    of self-understanding, whilst playing down emotions. For Heidegger, moods

    and their primordial disruption constitute a more originalway of understand-

    ing ourselves and our world than any form of theoretical cognition.

    Heideggers account ofAngstproved to be such a departure from accepted

    views that Rudolph Carnap (1959) famously claimed it to be not only mis-

    guided but utterly meaningless. According to Carnap, Heidegger departs so

    radically from established conditions of use for emotion terms that his account

    is bereft of any clear relationship to accepted criteria of application for words

    and sentences, criteria which constitute linguistic meaning. Whats more, when

    logic breaks down, we do not find a more original form of questioning but in-

    anity. Carnap goes on to claim that, when we read philosophers like Heidegger,

    our past associations with previous word usage serve to sustain a superficial

    illusion of meaning. However, all that is really at play is a feeling of mean-

    ing. Hence absence of semantic content is obscured by the subjective feel-

    ings that meaningless linguistic constructions continue to generate. Carnap

    concludes that, as the work of philosophers such as Heidegger is mere feel-

    ing bereft of all sense, they are in the wrong job:

    Perhaps music is the purest means of expression of the basic attitude because it is entirely

    free from any reference to objects. The harmonious feeling or attitude, which the meta-physician tries to express in a monistic system, is more clearly expressed in the music of

    Mozart. [. . . .] Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. (1959, p. 80)

    Carnaps own extreme brand of meaning-verificationism has since died a slow

    but fairly decisive death, thus allowing for the possibility that Heidegger is

    talking about what we ordinarily term emotions and moods, whilst say-

    ing something completely novel at the same time. However, Carnaps charges

    against Heidegger have remained influential in certain philosophical circles.

    Indeed they have done much to precipitate Heideggers near exclusion from

    Anglo-American philosophy throughout the twentieth century and exacerbate

    the so-called analytic/continental schism in philosophy more generally. As

    Polt puts it:

    What is Metaphysics? led indirectly [via Carnap] to Heideggers banishment from the

    world of Anglo-American philosophy, and for decades this banishment prevented most

    English-speaking philosophers from using Heidegger as food for thought. (Polt, 1999, p.

    122)

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    294 MATTHEWRATCLIFFE

    This is perhaps because Carnaps critique can be expressed independently ofhis more general commitment to verificationism and in a manner that still

    strikes many philosophers as plausible:

    1. Logic and emotion are utterly distinct and logic is impervious to emotion.

    Any claim to the contrary is either senseless or plain wrong.

    2. The contention that logic disintegrates is intolerable, and can only result in

    irrationalism and obscurantism, the antithesis of any respectable intellec-

    tual activity.

    Hence the conviction remains that moods and emotions can have no bearing

    on the integrity of propositional logic. Much of philosophy also retains Carnaps

    assumption that scientific objectivity constitutes a privileged epistemic stand-point best suited to revealing the way things most fundamentally are. So

    the continuing neglect of Heideggers account11 is, I suggest, essentially

    a symptom of radically divergent philosophical starting points. In a nut-

    shell, Heideggers account is antithetical to generally accepted assumptions

    of both philosophical and scientific inquiry. These assumptions constitute a

    deeply sedimented framework of ontological and epistemological presuppo-

    sitions concerning the human mind and its place in the world. Detached con-

    templation is seen as the primary perspective from which philosophy should

    be done and the structure of thought is predominantly characterised in terms

    of theoretical, propositional intentionalities which reflect that primacy.12

    Heidegger claims that philosophers working within this framework haveneglected emotion, preferring to focus on theoretical cognition, whilst regard-

    ing emotion as a kind of superficial subjective film that clouds objective judge-

    ment. Things have changed however; philosophical interest in emotion has

    increased in recent years, as has resistance to the view that emotions are wholly

    separate from intentional states. For example, Solomon (1977) argues that

    emotions are themselves essentially cognitive/intentional and cannot thus be

    adequately characterised as noncognitive feelings or affects. There is now a

    complex debate between those who regard emotions as primarily cognitive,

    intentional, evaluative and voluntary, and those who regard them as non-

    cognitive, involuntary passions or feelings. There are also many hybrid ac-

    counts (e.g., Lyons, 1980),13 which claim that emotions involve a combination

    of cognitive evaluation and physiological disturbance or feeling. Indeed, a

    plethora of sophisticated views have emerged in recent years, incorporating

    different elements from the two contrasting pictures.14

    However, despite this increased interest in emotion, the structure of the

    debate still presupposes that theoretical, detached cognition epitomises the

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    nature of our most basic relationship with the world. Emotions are either evalu-ative constituents of propositional attitudes or they are distinct from such at-

    titudes and thus peripheral to the way we relate to the world. The terms of

    current philosophical debates continue to privilege theoretical perspectives and

    propositional attitudes, and hence preclude any engagement with Heideggers

    view, insofar as they are conducted within a set of shared presuppositions

    concerning the nature of human understanding which are utterly at odds with

    Heideggers philosophical starting point.

    My focus here will not be on the recent philosophical discussion but on some

    scientific findings which, I will suggest, go against the ingrained assumptions

    underlying contemporary philosophical debates and point to some interest-

    ing and informative comparisons with Heideggers account. In the following

    sections I shall argue that, contrary to pervasive assumptions concerning the

    epistemological fundamentality of the detached, theoretical perspective and

    the ontological fundamentality of the view of the world that it discloses, some

    of the science actually seems to be coming out on Heideggers side. I will in-

    troduce some findings in neuropsychology that appear to support Heideggers

    general account of mood and emotion over accepted views, even endorsing

    his claims that certain emotions can punctuate world-disclosing backgrounds

    of attunement in a way that is more basic orprimordialthan propositional

    reasoning. I will suggest that Heideggers account is both meaningful and

    plausible, serving as an illuminatingperspectival frameworkfrom which to

    interpret certain neuropsychological case studies that traditional views seem

    constitutionally incapable of accommodating. Thus Heideggers radical de-parture from deeply sedimented philosophical presuppositions is neither

    wholly antithetical to science nor meaningless but rather an informative

    perspectival reorientation. My discussion will point to some wide-ranging

    repercussions for science and philosophy more generally . . . and serve to

    muddy the waters that separate scientifically minded philosophers from bad

    musicians.

    The neurology of emotion: Damasios theory

    Antonio Damasio, in his discussions of the neurology of emotion, outlines what

    he takes to be the traditional biological view of emotion:

    The old brain core handles basic biological regulation down in the basement, while up

    above the neo-cortex deliberates with wisdom and subtlety. Upstairs in the cortex there is

    reason and willpower, while downstairs in the sub-cortex there is emotion and all that weak,

    fleshy stuff. (1995, p. 128)

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    Damasio claims that science, like philosophy, has historically paid too littleattention to emotion, regarding it as something distinct from and additional

    to the structures and processes that comprise human cognition.15 In contrast

    to this picture, Damasio argues that the machinery of intelligence and reason-

    ing is not only built upon the machinery of emotion but also from within it.

    The psychological correlate of this neurological organisation is that emotions

    constitute a kind of cradle within which cognition rests. Any neurological

    damage to the working of emotions therefore has a profound effect on human

    reasoning, which essentially takes place relative to a background of moods

    and emotions.

    Damasio (1995) surveys a number of case studies of emotional impairments

    resulting from specific neurological damage. He begins with the well-known

    case of Phineas Gage. A mining accident occurred in 1848, involving an ex-

    plosion, which injured Gage in a rather gruesome way; the iron enters Gages

    left cheek, pierces the base of the skull, traverses the front of his brain, and

    exits at high speed through the top of the head (1995, p. 4). Gage slowly

    recovered from his injuries and seemed superficially normal but, as time went

    on, it became apparent that his personality had altered radically; Gage was

    no longer Gage (1995, p. 8). Gage was unable to keep a goal in mind, struc-

    ture his action, sustain a chain of thought or hold down a job. He appeared to

    lose all sense of his social responsibilities and commitments to his family. It

    was as though his life had lost context and structure. In conjunction with this,

    he displayed a near absence of emotion. Damasio observes how contempo-

    rary neurological patients with similar injuries also suffer from both an ab-sence or comparative lack of overt emotion and an inability to perform in

    practical and social situations, to sustain a chain of reasoning, finish a task,

    focus on a problem or commit themselves to a course of action. In the case of

    one neurological patient, Damasio remarks that the machinery for his deci-

    sion making was so flawed that he could no longer be an effective social be-

    ing. (1995, p. 38)

    Hence there are cases where emotional impairment is reliably coupled with

    a catastrophic failure of practical reasoning. Neurological studies of the dam-

    age suggest that this coupling is no coincidence. A complex of intimately

    connected structures are involved, as opposed to distinct brain systems in-

    volved in distinct tasks that are coincidentally damaged together. On the ba-sis of such studies, Damasio proposes that emotions play a central role in the

    cognitive processes that guide choices and ensure that we choose effectively:

    . . . there appears to be a collection of systems in the human brain consistently dedicated

    to the goal-oriented thinking process we call reasoning, and to the response selection we

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    297HEIDEGGERSATTUNEMENTANDTHENEUROPSYCHOLOGYOFEMOTION

    call decision making, with a special emphasis on the personal and social domain. This samecollection of systems is also involved in emotion and feeling, and is partly dedicated to

    processing body signals. (1995, p. 70)

    In any situation, we are faced with a combinatorial explosion of possibilities

    for deliberation and action. However, if we are to deliberate and act effectively,

    we can only consider a few of these options explicitly and the ones that we

    consider had better be relevant to our predicament at the time. Damasio ar-

    gues that emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of

    explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and

    structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focussed and relevant in

    our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia.16

    Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so thatwe only consider from a pre-structured set of options.

    Damasios (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are

    cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the somatic marker

    hypothesis. The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with per-

    ceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and

    thus mark those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with vari-

    ous kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively,

    as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals fo-

    cuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we in-

    corporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states,

    a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate

    certain possibilities, whichfeel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation

    upon otherfeel goodsignals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and struc-

    tured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest them-

    selves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states

    (which may or may not involve actual changes in body state):17

    Preorganized mechanisms are important not just for basic biological regulation. They also

    help the organism classify things and events as good or bad because of their possible

    impact on survival. In other words, the organism has a basic set of preferences - or crite-

    ria, biases or values. Under their influence and the agency of experience, the repertoire of

    things categorized as good or bad grows rapidly, and the ability to detect new good and

    bad things grows exponentially. (1995, p. 117)

    Hence, according to Damasio, emotions are not themselves intentional or

    cognitive but neither are they separate from cognitive processes. Instead, they

    constitute a kind of cradle which structures explicit deliberation and ones

    practical comportment toward specific intentional objects. So emotions dont

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    just cloud reason (although they can do); they are also a prerequisite for suc-cessful reasoning, in that they tune us to the world, making it relevant to us

    by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off

    others.

    Damasio proceeds to distinguish between different kinds of emotion. There

    are primary emotions, which are innate, hard-wired connections between body

    states and types of perceptual objects/situations, such as snakes or small, dark

    spaces. However, in the case of creatures such as ourselves, equipped with

    the ability to learn a vast myriad of new things, secondary emotions are in the

    majority. These are learned associations between types of environment or

    perceptual object and bodily states. For example, one is not born with a fear

    of the dentist but one often learns it. At the neurological level, primary emo-

    tions depend solely on the limbic system whereas secondary also incorporate

    the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices (1995, pp. 133134).

    Both primary and secondary emotions involve discrete responses to envi-

    ronmental conditions, which serve to structure ones interactions with the

    environment. Sometimes these responses are implicit and hidden from delib-

    eration but they can also manifest themselves as consciousfeelings. In addi-

    tion to primary and secondary emotions and feelings, Damasio also emphasises

    background feeling, which is, he claims, the most neurologically and psy-

    chologically fundamental of the three emotion categories. Though Damasio

    emphasises that his concept of background feeling departs in some ways

    from commonsense conceptions of mood,18 it has much in common with

    Heideggers description of primordial mood. (Hence I will use the termsmood and background feeling interchangeably.) According to Damasio,

    background feelings are ever-present, although ordinarily tacit. They serve to

    structure the everyday ways in which we encounter the world, the basic ways

    in which we find ourselves in the world:

    . . . I am postulating another variety of feeling which I suspect preceded the others in

    evolution. I call it background feelingbecause it originates in background body states

    rather than in emotional states. It is not the Verdi of grand emotion, nor the Stravinsky of

    intellectualized emotion but rather a minimalist in tone and beat, the feeling of life itself,

    the sense of being. (1995, p. 150)

    Background feelings are instantiated by tacit, dispositional representations ofbody states and constitute a kind of anchor that ties us to the world and opens

    it up as a meaningful realm of deliberation and action. They are, if you like,

    the rhythm of life, a quiet metronome, whose beat structures, or attunes, all

    our interaction with the world and underlies explicit cognitive deliberation.

    Damasio appeals to a number of neuropsychological studies and also to liter-

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    299HEIDEGGERSATTUNEMENTANDTHENEUROPSYCHOLOGYOFEMOTION

    ary descriptions of profound distortions of mood. For example, he quotesStyrons lucid description of the experience of depression:

    Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance. I can think

    of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which

    cognition was replaced by that positive and active anguish.19

    Such descriptions, in conjunction with Damasios accounts of neurological

    patients, suggest that mood is not merely something that clouds explicit judge-

    ment but something that determines the way in which the world is opened up

    for explicit deliberation. Moods and emotions are neither cognitive in the tra-

    ditional sense nor mere affects, but, as for Heidegger, a background that

    binds us to the world, anchoring us in a context of goals, projects and relevant

    environmental patterns. Moods and emotions constitute a sense of belong-

    ing or attunement, a basic feeling of orientation, of being, without which

    explicit cognition could not occur. Mood, in particular, serves as a background

    that constitutes ones sense of self, world and ones place in the world. It is,

    quite simply, the rhythm of life.

    The neurological correlate of this psychological dependence of explicit de-

    liberation and cognition on background feeling is a causal dependence of

    cortical function upon the function of mid-brain and limbic system structures,

    which sustain an implicit map of emotional and more general bodily activ-

    ity, a map that serves to modulate and structure what are traditionally thought

    of as higher cognitive processes. So Damasios work points to a revision of

    the traditional picture of emotion on two fronts. First of all, emotions andmoods are not explicitly cognitive but neither are they independent of cogni-

    tion. Instead they constitute a pre-propositional background that enables cog-

    nition; the world is encountered in the context of background feelings and

    moods that structure deliberation and action. Discrete emotions rise up from

    that background to focus cognition more specifically. Second, as a neurological

    correlate of this psychological picture, traditionally lower brain functions

    are not properly regarded as separate from higher functions but are instead

    a necessary causal prerequisite for the operation of cortical processes. Phyl-

    ogenetically newer brain areas rest within the cradle of old, the centrality of

    brain-body feedback constituting a neurological correlate of the psychologi-

    cal centrality of emotion. Mind and body are essentially welded, with emotionand embodiment incorporated as essential components in cognitive processes,

    from which they cannot be separated.20

    Damasios account is comprised of a collection of inter-linked hypotheses

    that incorporate a number of speculative and contentious components. How-

    ever, early experimental tests lend some support to both his interpretations of

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    the psychological predicament of neurological patients and the nature of theirunderlying neurological damage. For example, a number of experiments have

    correlated unusual emotional reactions with impaired decision-making, us-

    ing skin conductance response to measure level of emotional arousal during

    the performance of various tasks (1995, Ch. 9, 1996, 1997). Whilst the spe-

    cifics of Damasios psychological interpretations and neurological diagnoses

    are open to doubt, the general claim that emotions play a central role in struc-

    turing deliberation appears highly plausible.

    The psychological phenomena and their neurological correlates that Damasio

    describes cannot be accommodated within a traditional view that allocates

    cognitive primacy to detached, theoretical intentionalities. Indeed, they ac-

    cord far better with a Heideggerian conception of moods and emotions, as

    states that bind us to the world in a fundamental way that is presupposed by

    the possibility of theoretical cognition. However, one could argue that, though

    these results point to such a role for mood and emotion in human reasoning

    processes, that role is restricted to the kinds of performance that we would

    ordinarily term practical or social. Hence the traditional view is still

    vindicated insofar as paradigmatically theoretical, cognitive processes are

    unaffected by distortions in emotion. Some of Damasios findings seem to

    bear this out. A common characteristic of his neurological patients was that,

    despite their inability to accomplish practical and social tasks, their results

    in all traditional intelligence tests came out as normal. Their logical and more

    generally theoretical skills were unimpaired (1995, pp. 4143, 1996, p.

    1413).However, I will now argue that the psychological effects arising from dif-

    ferent kinds of neurological damage suggest that emotions and moods do not

    merely constitute a necessary background for practical and social delibera-

    tion but also for theoretical activity and, more specifically, the ability to iden-

    tify and categorise objects that is surely central to any such activity.

    Emotion, identification and categorisation

    There is a rare neurological condition, christened Capgras Syndrome after

    its discoverer, which inflicts sufferers with the powerful delusion that close

    friends or relatives have been replaced by imposters. Careful observation and

    interrogation suggest that this delusion is absolutely genuine; subjects really

    do firmly believe that close relatives or loved ones have been replaced.21

    Curiously, the syndrome only presents itself when the object of the delusion

    is visibly present. During telephone conversations, the delusion vanishes. This

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    suggests that any viable explanation will involve reference to specificallyvisual processes.

    A neurological explanation has been ventured, which attributes the Capgras

    delusion to an impairment of normal neural connectivity between the tempo-

    ral lobes and limbic system (Ramachandran 1998, Ch. 8).22 The temporal lobes

    are associated with visual object and especially face recognition, and are

    ordinarily complexly connected to various parts of the limbic system, such as

    the amygdala, involved in the generation of emotional responses to stimuli.

    Thus it has been suggested that Capgras delusion has its source in a failure to

    generate normal emotional responses to familiar faces. This would explain why

    the delusion is generally restricted to friends, family and loved ones, those

    people who ordinarily elicit strong emotional responses. A Capgras sufferer

    might recognise her brother but then construe the absence of familiar emo-

    tional response as evidence that the person present is not her brother after all

    but a duplicate. This explanation has been tested experimentally by measur-

    ing the galvanic skin response (GSR) of Capgras sufferers and normal sub-

    jects when presented with a selection of photographs of familiar and unfamiliar

    faces. If normal subjects are shown a sequence of photographs of unfamiliar

    people and close relatives, GSR reliably increases in the case of familiar faces.

    In Capgras sufferers, GSR is uniformly low, suggesting that normal emotional

    responses are not generated, even though a face may be acknowledged as

    appearing just like my mother. Similar experiments demonstrate that suf-

    ferers are not simply altogether bereft of emotional responses, as their emo-

    tional responses to photographs of disturbing and emotive scenes are normal(Ramachandran 1998, Ch. 8). Hence Capgras delusion can be plausibly ac-

    counted for in terms of a failure to connect familiar faces with emotions they

    previously elicited, due to damaged neural pathways between the temporal

    lobes and limbic system. The delusion is especially apparent in relation to

    familiar faces because, as Ramachandran puts it, only they ordinarily elicit

    that special emotional glow (1998, p. 166). However, it should be noted that

    Capgras delusion is not invariably associated with faces or indeed with hu-

    man beings. As Ramachandran (1998) reports, one patient suffered the delu-

    sion in relation to his pet dog.

    The delusion is not restricted to recognition and identification but, as fur-

    ther experimental paradigms have shown, also manifests itself in a more gen-eral failure to make mental taxonomies or groupings of events and objects

    (Ramachandran 1998, pp. 170171). Ramachandran suggests, following ob-

    servations of one patient who experienced confusion in respect of categorisa-

    tion that was not restricted to faces or people, that an emotional feeling of

    familiarity is constitutive of the ability to classify an experienced object as

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    identicalto the object of a previous experience or as being of the same typeas a previously encountered object. Ramachandran (1998, p. 170) hypothesises

    that, in the absence of an emotional glow, the brain simply sets up a com-

    pletely new category and doesnt integrate an object or person into pre-exist-

    ent categories:

    It may be that to link successive episodes the brain relies on signals from the limbic sys-

    tem the glow or sense of familiarity associated with a known face and set of memo-

    ries and if this activation is missing, the brain cannot form an enduring category through

    time. (Ramachandran 1998, p. 170)

    Insofar as diachronic object recognition and categorisation are essential to the

    performance of any cognitive task, whether practical or theoretical in nature,it seems that, if Capgras syndrome does indeed have its source in a failure to

    associate visual percepts with emotional response, then emotion plays an in-

    dispensable role in such tasks. Processes that we commonly term emotional

    constitute a kind of background, relative to which recognition and categori-

    sation take place. In recognising a familiar face on a day to day basis, we are

    seldom explicitly aware of our emotional response and yet it seems that emo-

    tions serve to quietly enable cognitive processes involved in recognition and

    categorisation. Whats more, when there is conflict between traditionally cog-

    nitive recognition processes and emotional responses, emotions can actually

    override those processes in judgements of sameness. Thus again it seems that

    emotions are a necessary backdrop to explicit cognition, and that this role is

    not restricted to the practical and social spheres but cuts to the heart of in-tentionality, to our ability to identify, recognise and categorise. We encoun-

    ter objects as what they are in the context of a background of emotional

    attunement, which anchors our cognition of worldly objects and structures our

    relationships with them. It is not that emotions and moods are themselves

    invariably intentional in nature but rather that they serve as a necessary back-

    drop for intentionalities, for an understanding of the world as stable, endur-

    ing and familiar. Again the terms of the traditional philosophical debate fail

    to accommodate these findings. Emotions are neither constituents of explicit

    intentionalities nor wholly distinct from intentional states. They are a back-

    ground that serves to structure explicit intentionalities and determine the pos-

    sible scope of intentional acts and objects, the way in which the world isdisclosed. Hence these studies go against traditional philosophical assump-

    tions concerning the cognitive primacy of theoretical intentionalities and

    propositional attitudes, and have a far closer resonance with Heideggers

    notion of world-constituting attunement.

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    Emotion and narrative coherence

    In this section, I will address a neuropsychological correlate of Heideggers

    claims that (a) emotions punctuate world-disclosing backgrounds of attunement,

    and (b) there is a sense in which the interplay between emotion and mood is

    prior to logic. I will not discuss Heideggers specific example ofAngsthere

    but will argue instead that the sort of role Heidegger attributes toAngst is

    applicable to emotions more generally. That is, emotions can, to varying de-

    grees, punctuate world-constituting background moods.

    Anosognosia23 is a well documented but puzzling condition that arises from

    specific brain injury.24 Sufferers are completely paralysed on the left sides of

    their bodies but are unable to acknowledge their paralysis. In response to re-

    peated questioning, they resolutely deny that they are paralysed and concoct

    all manner of narratives to excuse the fact that their left limb fails to move in

    response to a request. Ramachandran (1998, Ch. 7) relates how one patient,

    when presented with a tray with glasses on it was asked to pick it up with both

    hands, grasped one side of the tray with the right hand, with the result that the

    tray fell and the glasses smashed. Such behaviour suggests that the delusion

    is utterly genuine. The precise nature of the confabulation varies but the fea-

    ture common to all instances is a constitutional failure to comprehend left-

    side paralysis.

    Damasio (1995, p. 64) remarks that anosognosia is invariably associated

    with a comparative lack of emotion and concern; anosognosics [. . . .] have

    more than just a left-side paralysis of which they are not aware. They also havea defect in reasoning and decision making, and a defect in emotion and feel-

    ing. (p. 68). Damasio (1995, Ch. 4, 2000, Ch. 7) also claims that the brain

    areas damaged in anosognosia are not only concerned with emotion but with

    producing the most comprehensive and integrated map of current body states

    available to the brain (1995, p. 66), thus corroborating his hypotheses con-

    cerning the inextricability of emotion, reason and tacit representation of body

    state. Anderson and Tranel (1989) similarly note a correlation between una-

    wareness of disease states or unrealistic assessments of ones health and im-

    pairments of emotion:

    . . . unawareness of disease states is often associated with disturbances of affect [. . . .]

    and impaired affective responses may play a critical role in the genesis of unawareness.

    Presupposing that affective experience is dependent upon the co-activation of neural rep-

    resentations of somatic states [. . . .], disruption of the representations of integrated so-

    matic states would not only damage the very structures necessary to detect a change in

    motor function, but would also interfere with the normal experience of concern or anxi-

    ety regarding any acquired difficulties. (1989, p. 336).25

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    Given this correlation between anosognosia and lack of overt emotion,Ramachandran (1998, Ch. 7) puts forward an intriguing explanation of the

    phenomenon. He suggests that the left side of the brain is generally involved

    in constructing coherent narratives, which make sense of worldly situations

    and sustain a coherent sense of our relationship with them. Without additional

    input from the right brain, the left brain will strive for coherence at any cost.26

    Any new event, however anomalous, will somehow be incorporated into the

    narrative, thus retaining consistency. Hence a narrative anomaly like sudden

    paralysis is not recognised but rather distorted so as not to puncture a consist-

    ent narrative which structures ones sense of self, world and their relationship.

    Ramachandran observes that anosognosia patients suffer from a comparative

    lack of general emotional concern. He ventures the hypothesis that anosognosia

    has its source in damage to normal emotional processes and argues that spe-

    cific emotions constitute a mechanism whereby coherent narratives are punc-

    tuated, shocking people out of stable interpretations of events. Without the

    emotional response, a patient will strive for narrative coherence but will be

    oblivious to the feelings of doubtthat ordinarily interrupt such narratives and

    break down entrenched coherence. Without specific emotional interruptions,

    there is nothing to break down coherence, nothing to disturb an ongoing in-

    terpretation of events27. Hence without this background of everyday emotional

    reactions, anosognosia sufferers are oblivious to their plight.28 I suggest that

    Ramachandrans account of anosognosia29 supports Heideggers account of

    emotional punctuation of constitutive mood. It is as though we are ordinarily

    tied to a familiar context, a background of significance in which things runsmoothly. It is specific emotional responses to aspects of this situation that

    disturb the sense of familiarity and consistency which ordinarily surrounds

    us, which unsettle us, to varying degrees, from our attunement to the world.

    Furthermore, Ramachandran remarks that syndromes such as anosognosia

    are simply incompatible with a construal of the mind as primarily propositional

    in nature:

    . . . the reason anosognosia is so puzzling is that we have come to regard the intellect as

    primarily propositional in character that is, certain conditions follow incontrovertibly

    from certain premises and one ordinarily expects propositional logic to be internally

    consistent. (1998, p. 132)

    What anosognosia seems to show is that, in certain cases of neurological dam-

    age to brain areas correlated with emotional response, the accepted norms of

    rationality drop out. No amount of appeal to accepted propositions and the

    principles of formal logic will convince an anosognosic to permanently re-

    nounce their denial of paralysis. It is as though the sense of the proposition I

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    am unable to move my arm is dependent upon an affective punctuation ofthe narrative coherence that comes with everyday attunement to the world.

    Thus it increasingly appears that the traditional emphasis on detached intelli-

    gence and reasoning fails to capture the way in which we find ourselves in

    the world. If the mind is construed as primarily propositional in nature and

    human cognition as most fundamentally a matter of detached, theoretical

    intentionalities, it is simply impossible to accommodate the phenomenon of

    anosognosia, the phenomenon of a more generally lucid person sincerely

    denying the facts of their paralysis. The reason conditions such as anosognosia

    seem bizarre is that they are so utterly removed from traditional assumptions

    concerning reason, emotion and embodiment, assumptions that need to be

    discarded if we are to devise a coherent framework from which to understand

    such phenomena. Heideggers conception of a world-disclosing attunement

    that is punctuated by specific emotions (I generalise from his discussion of

    Angst) constitutes a far more conducive philosophical framework from which

    to interpret such phenomena. This framework renounces the primacy of theo-

    retical detachment and propositional logic, maintaining that both are depend-

    ent upon a more basic sense-giving background of moods and emotions, which

    discloses the world and our place in it. Hence I suggest that, in order to make

    sense of anosognosia, we need to accommodate something like Heideggers

    contention that certain kinds of emotions can disturb pre-propositional frame-

    works of familiarity in which we are ordinarily anchored by background mood.

    Heideggers account is not only meaningful but something like it is actually

    required as an interpretive backdrop for neuropsychological cases that quiteliterally fly in the face of reason.

    Whats more, it is arguable that this world-constituting interplay between

    emotion and mood, which is especially salient in the case of anosognosia, is

    also apparent in our ordinary, everyday phenomenology. Consider watching

    a film or reading a book that involves a plot twist. As the twist is revealed,

    there is a sudden surge of emotion, which accompanies a dramatic revision

    of ones interpretation of events. It is not simply that the emotion coincides

    with the revision of ones prior assumptions concerning a chain of events.

    Rather, the shock is constitutive of ones reorientation towards the story.

    Without the accompanying emotion, a plot twist is simply not grasped; the

    nature of a fundamental rupture in coherence is not registered. Similarly, whenone performs a chain of goal-oriented actions, realisation of discrepancies in

    the course of events is invariably correlated with some form of emotional

    response. When the world fails to accord with ones expectations, emotion is

    a constitutive component in the reinterpretation of events. Without emotional

    responses, one is not uprooted from a coherent interpretation of events, a set

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    of assumptions and expectations; an upheaval is invariably an emotional up-heaval. In everyday life, punctuation of narrative coherence always involves

    an emotional response. The emotion is not a feature additional to such punc-

    tuation but is rather constitutive of it.30

    Heideggers attunement and the limits of science

    Given the parallel between Heideggers account and these neuropsychologi-

    cal studies, we now need to inquire as to the relative status of Heideggers

    philosophy and neuropsychological studies: Is one more fundamental than the

    other? Can we explain one in terms of the other? The neuropsychological stud-

    ies I have discussed all proceed in two essential steps. First of all, the neuropsy-chologist ventures a psychological account, which incorporates observations

    of behaviour and documents psychological impairments and distortions in

    respect of various cognitive tasks.31 It is this stage of the inquiry which, I

    suggest, results in descriptions which are incompatible with the propositional

    mind. Next, there is an attempt to correlate psychological impairments with

    specific forms of neurological damage and, in so doing, infer something about

    both normal and abnormal brain function and anatomy. As we saw, Damasio

    (1995) ties in the psychological priority of emotions in respect of various

    cognitive tasks with a neurological account of the activity of the new cogni-

    tive brain causally situated within the activity of the old emotional and bod-

    ily-orientedbrain.One might argue that the neurological description explains the psychologi-

    cal description; subjects suffer certain symptoms because of damage to spe-

    cific neural pathways that contribute causally to relevant brain functions. One

    could even contend that the objective neurological description underlying the

    psychological/phenomenological description can be viewed as a naturalisa-

    tion of some central Heideggerian claims.32

    First of all, it is important to note that any such view of the primacy of an

    objective, scientific account over phenomenological description is, as explained

    in Section 3, utterly contrary to Heideggers own philosophy. Heidegger main-

    tains that the sciences constitute a restricted means of disclosing beings and

    that the objective organisation of beings disclosed by science is by no means

    a fundamental or privileged disclosure of the world. And Heideggers own

    view is, I suggest, largely vindicated by my discussion of neuropsychology.

    Neuropsychological studies of emotion, in prioritising moods and emotions

    over theoretical cognition, are pulling apart the basic epistemological assump-

    tions on which the privileged status of scientific ontologies rest. Without the

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    cognitive fundamentality of detached, theoretical contemplation and of thesystematic, logical manipulation of propositions, scientific ontologies lose their

    epistemological warrant. In other words there is no justification for their claim

    to ontologically privileged status.

    Rather than allocating primacy to the science, I am inclined to suggest that

    psychological descriptions of neurological patients constitute what Heidegger

    might call a partially disclosive perspective on the role of emotion and mood,

    a perspective that has to suspend the ordinarily taken for granted, objective,

    scientific view of the mind in order to interpret these patients coherently. The

    subsequent neurological picture constitutes one way of disclosing the role of

    mood and emotion, a derivative, theoretical construal that, in its assumption

    of objectivity, fails to express the role that mood and emotions play in giving

    sense to objective perspectives, in opening up and disclosing the world as a

    possibility for scientific ontologies. To explain, if mood and emotion play a

    sense-giving role in enabling objective conceptions of the world, then any

    perspective which takes objectivity as a given will be incapable of charac-

    terising that role. The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is

    constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given

    is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the tran-

    scendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an ob-

    jective/causal description. Emotions and moods, as described by Heidegger

    and hinted at by neuropsychological studies, are not solely characterisable as

    part of the objective psyche but also as a disclosive background that renders

    objective conceptions of self and world intelligible. Hence I suggest that thereare many ways in which the role of the emotions can be partially disclosed to

    us, and that scientific inquiry constitutes one such avenue, which is by no

    means privileged.

    Once we get past the restrictions of unsustainable objectivism, the reasons

    for dismissing Heideggers account outright or regarding it as derivative or

    merely poetic are all undermined. Carnaps pronouncement that metaphy-

    sicians are failed musicians rests on a mischaracterisation of our epistemic

    relationship with the world; the human mind is not the verificationists mind.

    Indeed, adopting a Heideggerian characterisation of mood and emotion, it

    would seem that an appreciation of music, inextricably entwined as it is with

    emotion, has the potential to disclose ways of finding oneself in the world thatcannot be characterised in explicit propositional form. In so far as it touches

    us emotionally and thus discloses the way in which we find ourselves in the

    world, music is indeed meaningful, in a primordial way that Carnap failed to

    recognise. The line between philosophers and failed musicians thus disinte-

    grates in the turbulence of a more original form of questioning.

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    Acknowledgements

    I am grateful to Andreas Dorschel, Shaun Gallagher, Martin Kusch, Joan

    McCarthy, Tony OConnor, Norman Sieroka, an anonymous referee and an

    audience at the April 2001 conference of the British Society for Phenomenol-

    ogy for some helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

    Notes

    1. I shall be referring primarily to Heideggers Sein und Zeit(Macquarrie and Robinsons

    1962 translation). Quotes from Macquarrie and Robinson have been amended, with the

    term being in place of entity forSeiende and attunement in place of state of mindforBefindlichkeit.

    2. See Olafson (1987, p. 178) for some further remarks on Heidegger and the traditional

    view.

    3. I treat moods as a specific sub-class of emotions. Heideggers discussion focuses on

    moods. However, I will suggest in what follows that his theory can be generalized to

    encompass emotions more generally.

    4. SeeBeing and Time, Part 1, Division 1, III: The Worldhood of the World.

    5. Heidegger seeks neither to reduce all theory to practice nor to reduce practice to theory

    (See e.g., 1962, p. 238). See also Kockelmans (1989, p. 166) and Fell (1992). Kockelmans

    stresses that Heidegger seeks to accommodate both theory and practice, rather than re-

    ducing one to the other. Fell argues that pragmatist interpretations of Heidegger rest upon

    a confusion between different senses of primacy in Heidegger.

    6. See Ratcliffe (in press) for a more detailed discussion of how Heidegger construes the

    relationship between theory and practice.7. Befindlichkeitis not easy to translate. Dreyfus (1991, p. 168) laments the fact that no

    English term seems to capture its sense, and settles for affectedness. Similarly Harr

    (1992, p. 159) describes Befindlichkeit as primordial affectivity or affectedness.

    Macquarrie and Robinson (1962) rather misleadingly refer to it as state of mind. Though

    this is might seem the closest approximation to the original German, it is inappropriate

    when applied to Heidegger. In introducing the term Dasein precisely to escape the

    subject-object distinction and in emphasising practical engagement with equipment over

    theoretical subject-object intentionalities, Heidegger is trying to distance himself as much

    as possible from theoretical, subjective characterisations such as state of mind, which

    he views as derived from a more primordial sense of Being-in-the-world. In what fol-

    lows, I will adopt Stambaughs (1996) translation ofBefindlichkeitas attunement, a

    term which does not presuppose anything of the theoretical paradigm that Heidegger

    is trying to leave behind.8. Hence Heidegger is not guilty of psychologism. See Kusch (1995) for a discussion of

    anti-psychologism and the origins of phenomenology in 19th-century Germany.

    9. As Harr (1992, p. 162) puts it, all mood is phenomenologically, preconceptually uni-

    versal and total. It is the whole of being-in-the-world that reveals itself with such a

    coloring or climate of joy or sadness, and never a thing taken in isolation. There is also

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    totality inasmuch as the subject and the object are indissociable within it.10. See alsoBeing and Time, Division 1: V, VI and Division 2: IIV.

    11. English language philosophical and scientific accounts of emotion are generally bereft

    of references to Heidegger. Solomon (1977) is an exception.

    12. An especially vivid example of this is Jerry Fodors (1975) characterisation of thought

    as the internal manipulation of symbolic, propositional structures; a language of

    thought.

    13. According to Lyons, the concept of an emotion as occurrent state involves reference to

    an evaluation which causes abnormal physiological changes in the subject of the evalu-

    ation (1980, p. 53).

    14. See Griffiths (1997) for a comprehensive appraisal of current philosophical and scien-

    tific debates concerning emotion.

    15. As Damasio puts it, throughout the twentieth century and until quite recently, both

    neuroscience and cognitive science gave emotion a very cold shoulder (2000, p. 38).

    However, as Damasio acknowledges, there are exceptions to sciences general histori-

    cal neglect of emotion. For example, both Charles Darwin (1872) and William James

    (1884, 1893) drew attention to the importance of emotions, though Darwin focussed more

    specifically on their expression.

    16. Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1992) put forward a less detailed but in some ways similar

    account. They claim that emotions play a central role in decision making, bridging the

    gulf between randomness and rationality; emotions are a result of coarse cognitive

    evaluations that elicit internal and external signals and corresponding suites of action

    plans (p. 209). DeSousa (1990, pp. 190197) also ventures the possibility that emo-

    tions play a nonpropositional role in decision-making, determining patterns of salience.

    17. Heidegger does not explicitly state that emotions are embodied. However, his account

    of Dasein as essentially entangled in a world of equipment, projects and purposes rather

    than surveying the world from a detached, theoretical perspective suggests some sense

    of embodiment must be at play. Any account of embodiment applicable to Dasein wouldhave to involve a description of pre-objective, sense-giving capabilities rather than ob-

    jective description of a body that is located in the world as one object amongst others.

    18. As Damasio explains, the background feeling is our image of the body landscape when

    it is not shaken by emotion. The concept of mood, though related to that of background

    feeling, does not exactly capture it. When background feelings are persistently the same

    type over hours and days, and do not change quietly as thought contents ebb and flow,

    the collection of background feelings probably contributes to a mood, good, bad or in-

    different. [....] I submit that without them the very core of your representation of self

    would be broken. (1995, pp. 150151).

    19. William Styron (1991)Darkness Visible (p. 15), quoted by Damasio (1995, p. 147). Styron

    borrows the description positive and active anguish from William James.

    20. This is why Damasio calls his bookDescartes Error. In contrast to Cartesian views,

    Damasio regards the body as an essential frame of reference, which is integral to the

    performance of more traditionally cognitive processes. Thus mind and body are inex-

    tricable. This also points to some interesting comparisons with Merleau-Pontys (1962)

    discussion of the how the body serves as an indispensable, sense-giving reference frame

    for all perception, thought and action. Indeed, Damasio (2000) argues that dispositional

    representations of ones body comprise the foundation for both selfhood and conscious-

    ness. This makes the parallel even more compelling.

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    21. Sometimes the delusion is even more extreme. As Ramachandran (1998, p. 166) notes,in a case on record the patient was convinced that his stepfather was a robot, proceeded

    to decapitate him and opened his skull to look for microchips. These more violent mani-

    festations of the delusion have been correlated with alcoholic intoxication (Thompson and

    Swan 1993).

    22. See Ramachandra (1998, Ch. 8) and Young et al. (1993). Ramachandran and Young disa-

    gree in suggesting different specific neural pathways but agree that these pathways con-

    nect visual and emotional areas of the brain. As Young et al. explain, the basis of the

    Capgras delusion lies in damage to neuro-anatomical pathways responsible for appro-

    priate emotional reactions to visual stimuli. The delusion would then represent the patients

    attempt to make sense of the fact that these visual stimuli no longer have appropriate af-

    fective significance (1993, p. 695).

    23. The term derives from the Greek nosos and gn sis, meaning disease and know-

    ledge. Hence it is a lack of awareness of disease.

    24. According to Damasio, Patients with anosognosia have damage in the right hemisphere,

    in a region which includes the cortices in the insula; the cytoarchitectonic areas 3, 1, 2,

    in the parietal region; and area S2, also parietal, located in the depth of the sylvian fis-

    sure. The damage affects the white matter under these regions, disrupting their intercon-

    nection and their connections with the thalamus, the basal ganglia, and the motor and

    prefrontal cortices. Damage to only parts of this multi-component system does not cause

    anosognosia (200, p. 211).

    25. Anderson and Tramel (1989) broaden their investigations beyond the specific syndrome

    of anosognosia in order to investigate correlations between right-side brain damage and

    unawareness of disease states more generally.

    26. Other areas of neuropsychological research lend credibility to the idea of the left brain

    constructing coherent narratives. For example, split-brain research (see e.g., Gazzaniga

    1994) suggests that the left brain will resort to autobiographical confabulation in order

    to sustain a coherent narrative. (Neuropsychologists are keen to point out that any suchlateralisation is invariably a matter of degrees rather than an absolute division.) Dennett

    (1991) takes such observations one step further and argues that the self is essentially a

    fictional narrative strung together by the brain. The connection between narrative and

    selfhood is also made by certain thinkers in the Continental tradition, such as Ricoeur

    (e.g., 1992). The central source of disagreement between the two traditions concerns

    whether scientific narratives constitute epistemologically privileged descriptions of self

    and world (see McCarthy unpublished). See Gallagher (2000) for a discussion of philo-

    sophical and scientific conceptions of the narrative self.

    27. Indeed, Ramachandran refers to the mechanism as an anomaly detector. (See p. 280,

    footnote 9).

    28. Unlike Capgras sufferers, most patients thankfully recover from anosognosia within a

    few weeks.

    29. Ramachandrans account is not intended to be applicable to allinstances of anosognosia.

    30. Gallagher (personal communication) points out that emotions not only punctuate but also

    contribute to moods, sustaining or enhancing them. Emotions can support coherence on

    occasions, fine-tuning and consolidating the rhythm of life, rather than shattering it to

    varying degrees. Thus the emphasis on punctuation perhaps places excessive empha-

    sis on traditionally negative emotions. Even though punctuation is not always a nec-

    essarily negative occurrence, I freely grant this and accept that philosophy in general

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    311HEIDEGGERSATTUNEMENTANDTHENEUROPSYCHOLOGYOFEMOTION

    (and also Heidegger) have placed too much emphasis on the so-called negative emo-tions. See Lyons (1980, Ch. 12) for a discussion of the relationships between good vs.

    bad, and helpful vs. disruptive emotions.

    31. This is of course a simplification. Several different experimental paradigms are employed

    by neuropsychologists to make observations. For example, Anderson and Tramel (1989)

    employ a standardized awareness interview to assess the degree of subjective aware-

    ness of disease states. See McGlynn and Schachter (1989) for an account and critique of

    observational techniques in neuropsychology.

    32. Similar attempts have been made in relation to Husserls phenomenology. One can, it is

    claimed, extract specific insights from Husserlian phenomenology and apply them in

    the service of science. The goal, as Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, and Roy (1999, p. xiii) ex-

    plain is to assess the extent to which the sort of phenomenological investigation [Husserl]

    initiated can favor the construction of a scientific theory of cognition and, more particu-

    larly, contribute to progress, in specific contemporary theories, by complementing some

    crucial aspects and calling them into question in others.

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