Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions

Abstract

The guiding thesis of this book is that conscious, intentional creatures like us are essentially embodied, and that one fundamental manifestation of our essential embodiment is our experience of emotion. Insofar as the body is the place where we feel affected by the world, and through which we engage and seek to alter our surroundings or situation, emotion is a bodily activity through and through. In short, the current of activity that flows toward the world and back toward the emotionally conscious subject passes through the body (Noë, 2009, p. 76). As Colombetti (2007) rightly points out, it seems that the emotions can serve as privileged philosophical tools in the attempt to bridge the mind–body divide by virtue of the fact that ‘they appear as simultaneously mental and bodily’ (p. 527). However, emotion theory has not yet fully taken up the essentially embodied view of the mind discussed in the previous chapter. Instead, much of emotion theory assumes that appraisal takes place in the head, and that bodily events and arousal count simply as an ‘objective index of emotion’ rather than as a process of lived bodily experience (Colombetti, 2007, p. 529). Like Colombetti, I wish to move away from these long-standing assumptions, and to reject the view that the cognitive and bodily aspects of emotion are distinct or separable. In my view, there is no such thing as wholly emotionless cognition.