Spinoza's Monism and the Idea of the Body: A reply to Heidi Ravven

I very much enjoyed reading Heidi Ravven's essay, to which I turned as the deadline for delivery of these replies approached. It is a beautifully written and deeply engaging piece of philosophy. I look forward to replying to it at length, in person and in writing, at a later date. For the time being, however, I have the following to say.

Looking for Spinoza was written in continuity with Feeling of What Happens, not quite in the same breath but certainly as an extension of the same set of facts and interpretations. Looking for Spinoza is neither a comprehensive review nor a synthesis. It is, rather, a sidestep meant to allow me some detailing of new information on the neurobiology of feeling and some space to reflect on Spinoza the thinker and the person. My notions of body, mind, self, emotion, and feeling did not change from one work to the other, and only the detail of the neural account of those phenomena evolved. Ravven states, quite correctly, that in Feeling of What Happens, “Damasio locates the origin of value as emerging from what he calls … the perspective of the body. That phrase, in my view, admirably captures Spinoza's understanding as well. In [Feeling of What Happens], Damasio is adamant about locating the origin of value in our organismic urge for homeostasis and, by extension, in the external objects and situations that promote it.” This is precisely the idea that I still hold and discuss in Looking for Spinoza.

Heidi Ravven suggests that my Spinozist position has been “attenuated to some extent” in the latest book. She says that in Looking for Spinoza I introduce “a strong dualism, absent from his previous book,” between emotions and feelings, a “dualism” that seems to modify my theoretical account of the emotions and of the origin of ethics. Moreover, she suggests that this “dualism” produces a “hiatus between the subcortical and the cortical.” I entirely disagree with this characterization of my thinking. Let me explain why.

First, the distinction b