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

.AND THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTION HEIDEGGERS ATTUNEMENT Printed in the Netherlands.

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Heideggers attunement and the neuropsychology of emotion

MATTHEW RATCLIFFE
Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, Durham, UK (E-mail: mratcliffe@philosophy.ucc.ie)

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 supporting 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 privileged domain of inquiry.

Heidegger and attunement In Being and Time, Heidegger is highly critical of the traditional philosophical neglect of emotion. He remarks how, according to the traditional view, affects and feelings come under the theme of psychical phenomena, functioning 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 peripheral 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 an irreducible pre-theoretical background, relative to which the world and the manner in which we are situated within it is disclosed or rendered intelligible. To appreciate Heideggers account of mood and the manner of its departure 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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Heideggers primary concern in Being and Time is the question of the meaning 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 understanding of Being has historically been hidden and obfuscated by our explicit concerns 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 investigation Dasein, in order to distance himself from traditional philosophical 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 intentionality 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 detached, 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 better clue to the nature of our understanding of Being than the traditional emphasis on theoretical intentionalities. Employing his account of practical activity as a guide, Heidegger goes on to claim that there is a kind of holistic, meaning-giving background that is presupposed 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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which must be the case for any disclosure of beings; it is a condition of sense for all intentionalities, all relationships that Dasein has with beings. What are the constituents of care? According to Heidegger, all our dealings with the world presuppose a kind of teleological background which is most readily apparent in our relations with equipment; all our engagement with the world incorporates the towards-this, the towards-which, the for-thesake-of and the in-order-to (1962, p. 415). The structure of care simply reflects these essential teleological dimensions of experience. Care is the condition for the possibility of apprehending the world as a significant whole, as an arena of possible projects, goals and purposes. It incorporates the sense in which Heidegger claims that we are anchored in the past (facticity), situated in the present (fallenness) and forever looking to the future (projection), and the way in which these dimensions are inseparable from each other as conditions of engagement with the world. Its primary element is teleologically directed orientation towards future possibilities (e.g., 1962, p. 279); in its very structure, care is ahead of itself (1962, p. 263). Given this reorientation of philosophical perspective, one can see why Heidegger regards moods and emotions as so important. His contentions that practical activity is not reducible to the theoretical and that all our comportments towards the world presuppose a background of care and concern suggest a greater emphasis on the role of moods and emotions, which play a conspicuous role in our practical engagements with the world but are perhaps less evident as a component of the theoretical intentionalities that philosophers have traditionally emphasised. An essential constituent of care is attunement [Befindlichkeit]7 (e.g., 1962, p. 172). Heidegger introduces this term to convey the centrality of mood as a condition of Daseins Being-in-the-world. But what kind of phenomenon does attunement identify? It is used by Heidegger to convey the way in which he thinks that emotion, and more specifically mood [Stimmung], constitutes the sense of Daseins inextricable entanglement with contexts of worldly significance. Moods, for Heidegger, give sense to Daseins world and to the manner in which Dasein finds itself relating to the world. Dasein always belongs to a world, which is first disclosed by background moods as a significant whole in which Dasein dwells (1962, p. 174). So, for Heidegger, mood is primordial, meaning that it is presupposed by the intelligibility of all explicit forms of cognition and volition. It is a condition of sense for any encounter with beings, whether theoretical or practical. It is thus prior to the intelligibility of all such beings and not reducible to them. Hence moods are not subjective or psychic phenomena8 but are instead prior to the sense of a theoretical subject-object distinction. They comprise a taken

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for granted background relative to which any conceivable beings and engagements 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 primordial ground whereby 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 in Being and Time. Heidegger takes the emphasis away from theoretical cognition and claims that all such cognition presupposes a more primordial, disclosive understanding, 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 generally. 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 sciences adopt and take to be a privileged epistemic conduit to fundamental ontology is in fact just one way of disclosing beings, which by no means discloses 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 cognition) 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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ronment [Umwelt] that our attunement discloses. This environment, as Heidegger 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 determining 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 intentionalities and the disclosure of theoretical entities but he is not maintaining that feelings replace such intentionalities. Rather, mood is prior to theoretical intentionalities and its fundamentality is passed over by the sciences, which restrict their deliberations to beings that have already been disclosed in a particular manner. Thus the sciences, according to Heidegger, cannot legitimately lay claim to a privileged perspective on moods and emotions. This is because attunement, construed as a precondition for the intelligibility of theoretical detachment, serves to undermine the very epistemological and ontological assumptions that privilege theoretical attitudes in a philosophical 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 inadequate means of grasping the sense of Befindlichkeit, one might wonder how an 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 of Angst in Being and Time and What is Metaphysics?. Angst and 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 characterises Angst as a

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ground-mood [Grundstimmung], I will refer to it as an emotion here. It manifests itself as a specific, occurrent episode rather than a prolonged, dispositional state and, as such, seems closer to commonsense use of the term emotion than mood. However, Heideggers Angst does seem distinct from emotions such as fear, in that it has no specific intentional object but is instead 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). Despite this, I will argue in Section 6 that the role that Heidegger ascribes to Angst can also be ascribed, in varying degrees, to many other states that we ordinarily term emotions. Thus regarding Angst as an emotion allows one to extend the scope of Heideggers account and apply it to the understanding of emotional 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 reveal 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 of Angst, 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 cradle 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 disintegrates 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 parasitic 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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logic breaks down. His play on the nothing being prior to logical negation is intended to convey this. Hence Heidegger is advocating a radical transformation of traditional epistemologies and ontologies, which emphasise theoretical 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 original way of understanding ourselves and our world than any form of theoretical cognition. Heideggers account of Angst proved to be such a departure from accepted views that Rudolph Carnap (1959) famously claimed it to be not only misguided 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 inanity. 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 meaning. Hence absence of semantic content is obscured by the subjective feelings that meaningless linguistic constructions continue to generate. Carnap concludes that, as the work of philosophers such as Heidegger is mere feeling 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 metaphysician 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 saying 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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This is perhaps because Carnaps critique can be expressed independently of his 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 intellectual 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 standpoint 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 nutshell, 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 presuppositions concerning the human mind and its place in the world. Detached contemplation 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 have neglected emotion, preferring to focus on theoretical cognition, whilst regarding emotion as a kind of superficial subjective film that clouds objective judgement. 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 noncognitive, involuntary passions or feelings. There are also many hybrid accounts (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 evaluative constituents of propositional attitudes or they are distinct from such attitudes 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 interesting 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 introduce 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 or primordial than propositional reasoning. I will suggest that Heideggers account is both meaningful and plausible, serving as an illuminating perspectival framework from which to interpret certain neuropsychological case studies that traditional views seem constitutionally incapable of accommodating. Thus Heideggers radical departure 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 little attention 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 reasoning 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 explosion, 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, structure 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 contemporary neurological patients with similar injuries also suffer from both an absence 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 decision making was so flawed that he could no longer be an effective social being. (1995, p. 38) Hence there are cases where emotional impairment is reliably coupled with a catastrophic failure of practical reasoning. Neurological studies of the damage suggest that this coupling is no coincidence. A complex of intimately connected structures are involved, as opposed to distinct brain systems involved in distinct tasks that are coincidentally damaged together. On the basis 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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call decision making, with a special emphasis on the personal and social domain. This same collection 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 argues 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 that we 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 perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus mark those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves 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 criteria, 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 successful 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 emotions 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 environmental conditions, which serve to structure ones interactions with the environment. Sometimes these responses are implicit and hidden from deliberation but they can also manifest themselves as conscious feelings. In addition to primary and secondary emotions and feelings, Damasio also emphasises background feeling, which is, he claims, the most neurologically and psychologically 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 terms mood 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 feeling because 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 of body 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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ary descriptions of profound distortions of mood. For example, he quotes Styrons 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 judgement but something that determines the way in which the world is opened up for explicit deliberation. Moods and emotions are neither cognitive in the traditional 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 belonging 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 deliberation 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 activity, 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 and moods are not explicitly cognitive but neither are they independent of cognition. Instead they constitute a pre-propositional background that enables cognition; 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. Phylogenetically newer brain areas rest within the cradle of old, the centrality of brain-body feedback constituting a neurological correlate of the psychological centrality of emotion. Mind and body are essentially welded, with emotion and 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. However, 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 their underlying neurological damage. For example, a number of experiments have correlated unusual emotional reactions with impaired decision-making, using skin conductance response to measure level of emotional arousal during the performance of various tasks (1995, Ch. 9, 1996, 1997). Whilst the specifics of Damasios psychological interpretations and neurological diagnoses are open to doubt, the general claim that emotions play a central role in structuring 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 accord 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 different kinds of neurological damage suggest that emotions and moods do not merely constitute a necessary background for practical and social deliberation but also for theoretical activity and, more specifically, the ability to identify 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 specifically visual processes. A neurological explanation has been ventured, which attributes the Capgras delusion to an impairment of normal neural connectivity between the temporal 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 emotional response as evidence that the person present is not her brother after all but a duplicate. This explanation has been tested experimentally by measuring the galvanic skin response (GSR) of Capgras sufferers and normal subjects 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 sufferers are not simply altogether bereft of emotional responses, as their emotional responses to photographs of disturbing and emotive scenes are normal (Ramachandran 1998, Ch. 8). Hence Capgras delusion can be plausibly accounted 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 human beings. As Ramachandran (1998) reports, one patient suffered the delusion in relation to his pet dog. The delusion is not restricted to recognition and identification but, as further experimental paradigms have shown, also manifests itself in a more general failure to make mental taxonomies or groupings of events and objects (Ramachandran 1998, pp. 170171). Ramachandran suggests, following observations of one patient who experienced confusion in respect of categorisation 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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identical to the object of a previous experience or as being of the same type as a previously encountered object. Ramachandran (1998, p. 170) hypothesises that, in the absence of an emotional glow, the brain simply sets up a completely new category and doesnt integrate an object or person into pre-existent categories:
It may be that to link successive episodes the brain relies on signals from the limbic system the glow or sense of familiarity associated with a known face and set of memories 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 indispensable role in such tasks. Processes that we commonly term emotional constitute a kind of background, relative to which recognition and categorisation 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 emotions serve to quietly enable cognitive processes involved in recognition and categorisation. Whats more, when there is conflict between traditionally cognitive 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 intentionality, to our ability to identify, recognise and categorise. We encounter 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 backdrop for intentionalities, for an understanding of the world as stable, enduring 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 background that serves to structure explicit intentionalities and determine the possible scope of intentional acts and objects, the way in which the world is disclosed. Hence these studies go against traditional philosophical assumptions 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 of Angst here but will argue instead that the sort of role Heidegger attributes to Angst is applicable to emotions more generally. That is, emotions can, to varying degrees, 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 repeated 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 feature common to all instances is a constitutional failure to comprehend leftside 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 have a defect in reasoning and decision making, and a defect in emotion and feeling. (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 concerning the inextricability of emotion, reason and tacit representation of body state. Anderson and Tranel (1989) similarly note a correlation between unawareness of disease states or unrealistic assessments of ones health and impairments 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 representations of somatic states [. . . .], disruption of the representations of integrated somatic 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 anxiety 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 consistent 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 specific emotions constitute a mechanism whereby coherent narratives are punctuated, 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 doubt that 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 interpretation 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 run smoothly. 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 damage 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 renounce 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 of the narrative coherence that comes with everyday attunement to the world. Thus it increasingly appears that the traditional emphasis on detached intelligence 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 theoretical detachment and propositional logic, maintaining that both are dependent 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 frameworks 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 quite literally 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, when one 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 upheaval. In everyday life, punctuation of narrative coherence always involves an emotional response. The emotion is not a feature additional to such punctuation but is rather constitutive of it.30 Heideggers attunement and the limits of science Given the parallel between Heideggers account and these neuropsychological 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 studies I have discussed all proceed in two essential steps. First of all, the neuropsychologist 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 cognitive brain causally situated within the activity of the old emotional and bodily-oriented brain. One might argue that the neurological description explains the psychological description; subjects suffer certain symptoms because of damage to specific 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 naturalisation 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 maintains 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 assumptions on which the privileged status of scientific ontologies rest. Without the

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cognitive fundamentality of detached, theoretical contemplation and of the systematic, 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 characterising 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 transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/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 there are 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 metaphysicians 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 that cannot 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 disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original form of questioning.

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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 Phenomenology 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 for Seiende and attunement in place of state of mind for Befindlichkeit. See Olafson (1987, p. 178) for some further remarks on Heidegger and the traditional view. 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. See Being and Time, Part 1, Division 1, III: The Worldhood of the World. 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 reducing one to the other. Fell argues that pragmatist interpretations of Heidegger rest upon a confusion between different senses of primacy in Heidegger. See Ratcliffe (in press) for a more detailed discussion of how Heidegger construes the relationship between theory and practice. Befindlichkeit is 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 follows, I will adopt Stambaughs (1996) translation of Befindlichkeit as attunement, a term which does not presuppose anything of the theoretical paradigm that Heidegger is trying to leave behind. 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. As Harr (1992, p. 162) puts it, all mood is phenomenologically, preconceptually universal 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

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

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totality inasmuch as the subject and the object are indissociable within it. 10. See also Being 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 evaluation (1980, p. 53). 14. See Griffiths (1997) for a comprehensive appraisal of current philosophical and scientific 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 historical 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 emotions 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 would have to involve a description of pre-objective, sense-giving capabilities rather than objective 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 indifferent. [....] 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 book Descartes 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 inextricable. 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 consciousness. 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 manifestations 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 disagree in suggesting different specific neural pathways but agree that these pathways connect 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 appropriate 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 affective significance (1993, p. 695). 23. The term derives from the Greek nosos and gnsis, meaning disease and knowledge. 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 fissure. The damage affects the white matter under these regions, disrupting their interconnection 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 such lateralisation 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 philosophical 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 all instances 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 emphasis on traditionally negative emotions. Even though punctuation is not always a necessarily negative occurrence, I freely grant this and accept that philosophy in general

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(and also Heidegger) have placed too much emphasis on the so-called negative emotions. 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 awareness 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) explain 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 particularly, contribute to progress, in specific contemporary theories, by complementing some crucial aspects and calling them into question in others.

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