In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti focuses on the ‘enactive’ approach and the ways it can be critically applied to the field of affective science so as to reconceptualize some of its key affective phenomena. This work is an important contribution to the field and builds its ideas with an increasingly exponential complexity, a stylistic tactic that makes this both a captivating and challenging read. Through a series or evolving arguments, Colombetti stresses the necessity of exploring ‘affect’ or ‘affectivity’ from an interdisciplinary perspective while acknowledging the advantages of engaging experimental psychology and neuroscience from an ‘enactivist’ perspective. At the core of this book lies Colombetti’s idea that the study of ‘affect’ must remain open to the enactivist approach that accepts the importance of the ‘lived experience’ and the phenomenological tools that make this study possible.
Drawing on a range of theorists from Aristotle to Heidegger to Silvan Tomkins, Colombetti expands the ‘deep continuity’ thesis, that life is always ‘mindful’ and the mind is always ‘life-like,’ as that which grounds and justifies the ‘enacted’ approach as a synthesis of biological, psychological, neuroscientific, and phenomenological ideas. She relies on the deep continuity thesis and the enactive approach to propose that cognition is by definition already affective, that both cognition and emotion are instances of the ‘sense-making’ activity that all living beings experience as they engage in the process of self-regulation and adaptation. Showcasing the scope of her thematic direction, the conception of sense-making in living systems as simultaneously a mark of cognition and affectivity is supplemented by a series of philosophical discussions. These offer a more refined context and include Spinoza’s ‘conatus’ or a sense of ‘fundamental striving,’ Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality and corporeal schema, Maine de Biran’s ‘lived body’ and its conative striving corporeality, Heidegger’s Dasein and the attuned purposefulness of human existence guided by ‘Stimmung’ or ‘moods,’ and Patočka’s emphasis on corporeal self as always having an ‘emotional localization.’
In the latter part of this work, Colombetti takes a closer look at specific affective phenomena and some of the problems that exist within their current conceptualization in affective science and its traditional avenues. Colombetti specifically questions the limitations of the Theory of Basic Emotions (BET), Component Process Model (CPM), as well as the psychological constructionist and componential models of emotion formation and classification. As an alternative to the ‘basic’ emotions of BET, she offers a theoretical framework that aligns with the enactive approach and views short-lived emotional episodes and long-lasting feelings as complex ‘dynamical patterns’ of neural and bodily events. The strength of this position comes from Colombetti’s use of Dynamical Systems Theory’s (DST) conceptual tools to talk about affect as variable and context dependent, and cognition as temporal, embodied, and context situated.
This book likewise addresses the relevance of DST and the three key strands of the dynamical affective science, namely: the role of coordinative muscular structures in the production of emotional expressions; the plasticity and neural self-organizing systems at the core of emotional episodes; and lastly, the interpersonal relations and emergence of patterns of emotional behaviour between multiple subjects within a social environment. Colombetti’s evaluation and case-study application of these tools offer an in-depth overview of the dynamical systems characterization of emotional episodes and ‘moods.’ She further elaborates that dynamic emotion forms are highly variable and at the same time both influenced and constrained by cultural, evolutionary, developmental, and individual-specific factors. This tension is examined as a parallel argument through an analysis of the discrepancy between emotions and moods. Colombetti finds the latter to have a ‘history of intentionality’ that she then traces to Husserl, Heidegger, and most recently to Ratcliffe’s notion of ‘existential feelings.’ Segments like these lend a discernable rhythm to this book and offer a rewarding glance into Colombetti’s enactive approach as a cross-disciplinary researcher.
The cogency of this book’s overarching argument stems from Colombetti’s resilience to attribute meaning-generation to all living systems, effectually proposing that capacity for sense making allows for more complex affective states, from Heidegger’s moods to emotional episodes. While she is careful to acknowledge the experimental case-study history from the 1960s through to the 1990s and its influence on the development of cognitive approach to emotions, Colombetti insists that more attention needs to be paid to the phenomenological features of affect. The Schachter and Singer (1962) study that aimed to develop a theory of uniform arousal by injecting test subjects with epinephrine, or the Valins (1966) study that used pictures from Playboy to show that physiological arousal is sufficient to elicit emotion, are just two of the many examples in this book that are introduced as problematic and in many cases implausible. There are also case studies that draw attention to the differences between ‘basic empathy’ and other affective phenomena such as feelings of closeness, intimacy, and sympathy. For instance, the text mentions a case study by Stel, van Baaren, and Vonk (2008) that attempted to establish a connection between intentional mimicry of affect and the enhancement of social behaviour through a comparison of monetary donations to a charity. Although there is relatively little research on mimicking and ‘emotional contagion’ within social groups, Colombetti presents this as an opportunity to start a dialogue about the paradigms in research scholarship.
By moving away from narrow theories and emphasizing the enactive approach as a valid and conceptually relevant methodology for affective science, this book is an implicit call for researchers to explore new avenues in the study of emotion. Although Colombetti suggests that ultimately the aim of this work is not to re-introduce the enactive approach into affect sciences, it is difficult at times for the reader to perceive it otherwise. Colombetti’s rigorous engagement with current debates in affective science, dynamics systems approach, and neuro-physio-phenomenological methods offer a valuable contribution to the study of emotions and other affective phenomena. As such, this volume serves as a comprehensive resource for students and scholars researching new debates and trends in the philosophy of affective and cognitive sciences.
