immanence

The study of emotions, particularly within the field of affective neuroscience, is a complex field riven by paradigmatic division. In my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, I proposed a way to engage with one’s experience, including one’s emotional or affective experience, within an “eco-ethico-aesthetic” (or “logo-ethico-aesthetic”) practice that could help us deal with the “Anthropocene predicament.”

In the following two-part article, I reflect on that attempt in light of recent debates in the field of affective neuroscience. In part one, I summarize my understanding of what’s at stake between two approaches to emotions, represented by two recent popularizations of some fairly complex neuropsychological theory: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. While emerging from rival and in some respects opposite schools of thought, both books proclaim “new paradigms” in the understanding of the human mind. The projected second part will apply the debate between these perspectives to the process-relational “practices of the self” I introduced in Shadowing the Anthropocene, and will revise and extend those practices in the process.

Introduction: Mapping the mind

If the best way to learn anything is to internalize it through application, the best way to learn a system of psychology, or a “map of the self,” is by applying it to oneself. Charles Hampden-Turner’s classic book Maps of the Mind includes sixty ways of mapping the human being. His categories of maps range from the historical and religious to the psychoanalytical, existential, psychosocial, creative, linguistic/symbolic, cybernetic, structural, and “paradigmatic.” The book covers everything from Daoism and St. Augustine to Blake, Darwin, Marx, Weber, Freud, Lacan, Bateson, Chomsky, and Varela. While Hampden-Turner’s book is very user-friendly and incredibly comprehensive for its time (it came out in 1982), it desperately needs updating.  

Applying a map of the psyche — i.e., the mind, the self, whatever you call this thing that may not be a “thing” at all, depending on the map, but that concerns the core of how we experience the world — is one thing when you’re trying to learn the map. It’s another when you’re trying to learn and change the territory. That’s where a theory of change becomes helpful. In religious talk, “theory of change” often equates with what is called “soteriology,” the theory of salvation (which scholars of religion tend to generalize to include theories of enlightenment, liberation, and the like). Theories of change are premised on the idea that the way things are is not good enough; that we can and should do better. In social theory, that equates to a theory of emancipation.

In Part Two (of three) of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, I outlined a “map of the self” alongside some practices that are intended to help us to live in accordance with an ideal. The ideal is presented by the process-relational model of reality, which (in the book and in other writing) I have connected with Buddhism, ecology, and a liberationist politics more generally, in addition to the more direct philosophical sources in which it’s rooted (Whitehead, Peirce, Deleuze, and others). For key sources like Whitehead and Peirce, affect, emotion, and/or feeling is considered primary; cognition and behavior arise dependently out of the feeling or “affective tone” that colors our encounter with things. The case for this primacy of affect (and/or aesthetics) was made, in one influential variant, in Whitehead’s critique of the “bifurcation of nature” (found in his Concept of Nature, among other places), but it finds many echoes in environmental, feminist, decolonial, and related strands of more recent thought.

There is, therefore, a lot at stake in how we conceptualize our affective relationship to the world. With that in mind, I’ve been reading up on some debates in the neuroscience of affect and emotion, which has made me revisit my own thinking somewhat. The remainder of this article will serve as a preliminary remapping of this terrain.

Affective neuroscience: basic emotions vs. constructionism

The field of affective neuroscience has recently featured a vigorous debate between two very different understanding of emotions. The first, the Basic Emotion theories, are sometimes referred to by the mechanisms they posit (“emotional circuits,” “somatic markers,” et al.) or by their nature as perceived by their critics (“nativist,” “essentialist”), and sometimes simply called “the classical view.” The second nowadays tend to be called “constructivist” theories; most prominent among them is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “theory of constructed emotion.” (There are other theories, such as Ledoux’s and Brown’s “higher order theory of emotional consciousness, which fall somewhere between the two.)

Basic Emotion theories posit that there are several emotional complexes that are innate to human experience. These are rooted in evolutionary continuities with other species and are broadly “homologous” to what is found in those other species. How many of them there are varies from one theorist to another: Silvan Tomkins proposed eight (surprise–startle; interest–excitement; fear–terror; distress–anguish; enjoyment–joy; contempt–disgust; shame–humiliation; anger–rage), Paul Ekman proposed six (happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, disgust), Jaak Panksepp proposed seven (fear, lust, care, play, rage, seeking, and panic/grief), while others like Antonio Damasio break things down in other ways. However they are identified, emotions are irreducible and are part of our biological inheritance. Moreover, they are recognizable fairly universally in visible phenomena like (for primates) facial expressions, even if those phenomena can, for humans, become complicated by culture. In its popular guise, this “classical” view sees emotions as both “primitive” or “primordial” and as potentially working at cross-purposes with our “reason.” But that emotion-reason dualism is not required by the basic emotion theory; it just tends to come with it.

Constructivist theories, by contrast, posit a complex interplay between neurological, psychological, and social factors by which degrees of affective arousal, characterized by positive and negative valences, are interpreted to take specific forms, which we call “emotions.” These work as part of the brain’s efforts to “predictively” process experience. The brain, in this view, is less like a reactive machine and more like a predictive machine, one that constructs (or “simulates”) our experience, moment to moment, based in part on what it has learned from previous experiences, which it is constantly comparing with the sensory information it is receiving. Emotions are in this sense “constructed” in ways that are specific to humans. It’s difficult to say what is biologically shared between humans and other species beyond the forms of “arousal” and “valence” that are at the core of these complex interpretations. But culture plays a powerful role in shaping what we think of as our emotional life.

Whereas basic emotions theories are often criticized as “essentialist,” constructivist views are often viewed as “relativist” and criticized for their novelty, since they appear to reject decades of work that has ostensibly proven the universality of certain expressions of human emotion. As Lisa Feldman Barrett explains in How Emotions are Made, emotional constructivism combines social constructionism, psychological constructionism, and neuroconstructionism. It is avowedly anti-essentialist. Where basic emotion theories find their starting point in observed behavior and are strongly grounded in decades-long, cross-species research, constructivist theories find their starting point in neurophysiological data, which they argue have failed to confirm the assumptions of “basic emotions” except in a circular way, with “classical” preconceptions shaping the research, which then mirrors those same preconceptions in its outcomes.

In How Emotions Are Made, Barrett argues that the two views have been at war “throughout recorded history,” from the ancient Greeks (Plato versus Heraclitus) and Buddhists (dharmas as essences versus dharmas as conceptual constructs) to early modernity (Descartes and Spinoza versus Hume and Kant) and beyond. Even Darwin was confused on the matter: Barrett depicts On the Origin of Species as the font of a genuinely novel, anti-essentialist biology, but his later The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals as presenting an inexplicably essentialist about-face. William James, in his Principles of Psychology (among other works), was a thoroughgoing anti-essentialist, but John Dewey mischaracterized him and by christening his own mistaken view the “James-Lange theory of emotions,” contaminated the reception of James’s true views for decades. And so on. Now, Barrett writes, “Modern neuroscience has given us the tools to settle the conflict, and based on overwhelming evidence, the classical view has lost” (369), as “the final nails” are being driven “into the classical view’s coffin” (413).

Barrett’s body budgeting

The debate between the two paradigms hinges in part on how we define what is shared or “universal.” For all of Barrett’s constructivism, she does agree that there are universals. There are the affects, which rise and fall and have their valences (positive or negative). There is the brain’s nature as a predictive mechanism, which leads to what Barrett calls “affective realism,” by which she means that you experience what you believe, and that therefore changing experience requires changing your beliefs. There are “concepts,” which are essential to emotions — though not anyone’s particular concepts, since those vary (which leaves us needing to hash out the differences when one set of emotion concepts encounters another). And there is “social reality,” which is the ultimate context within which emotional experience occurs.

Regarding the first of these, our affective life is said to be a matter of “body budgeting,” that is, of maintaining a balanced energy level regulating one’s ability to meet one’s needs. Barrett writes: “The most basic thing you can do to master your emotions, in fact, is to keep your body budget in good shape” (424). When she gets to the inevitable self-help part of the book (it is, after all, a trade paperback selling for a little over $10), she spells out what that might mean. Get enough sleep and exercise, eat good food, cultivate friendships and a healthy lifestyle, embrace touch and physical pleasures, and resist the temptations of advertisers and unhealthy peers and employers. Pay attention to the “granularity” of your emotional experiences, trying on “new concepts” to see which ones fit best. Learn new words. All of that adds to the flexibility by which we make sense of ourselves and of others. Avoid rumination, addiction, and junk food. Be creative and curious, treating others with a gentleness befitting of their own potential flexibility.

Her chapters 9 through 12 read like a guide to creative living, “chicken soup” for the psychological constructivist soul, complete with citations to Buddhism and mindfulness meditation on the usefulness of deconstructing one’s self-concepts. “[Y]our self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions, including our familiar pair of networks (interoceptive and control), among others, as they categorize the continuous stream of sensation from your body and the world” (461).

The virtue of the constructivist revolution, Barrett argues, is that it gives us power over our minds and, by extension, over the world. We are not puppets in the hands of our biologically wired emotions. Instead, we can change our concepts and reality will follow. “It is your responsibility to learn concepts that, through prediction, steer you away from harmful actions” (376). As the New Age (and neoliberal) mantra goes, we can create our own reality. But if this is the extent of our social reality, I would argue it is rather thin.

Asma/Gabriel’s triune brain

This brings me to the Asma/Gabriel book. Part of my goal in brushing up on affective neuroscience was to see how the “layer-cake” model of the brain described decades ago by brain scientists like Paul MacLean has held up. I knew that MacLean’s triune brain model — which sees the human brain as having evolved in three main waves, the first creating a so-called “reptilian complex,” the second a paleomammalian “limbic system,” and the third, most recent, “neomammalian brain” being centered around the neocortex — is mostly no longer considered an accurate description of brain anatomy (see here, for instance). But I wasn’t sure how much of the overall conception — that the human brain consists of older, more “primitive” layers and newer, more cognitively “modern” layers, with interaction between the layers moving in both directions (“top-down” and “bottom-up”) — still holds.

If Barrett’s work tries to present the “final nail in the coffin” for that view, The Emotional Mind, a 2019 book by philosopher Stephen Asma and psychologist Rami Gabriel, presents what may be the most holistic recent defense of the layer-cake model. It is “holistic” in the sense that their examination stretches from neuroscience and ethology to archaeology, culture, religion, and the arts, in ways similar in scope to what one finds in “evolutionary psychology” and “evolutionary” literary and cultural studies, but more nuanced and complex than either of the latter. While they mercilessly (if briefly) critique evolutionary psychology with its Pleistocene-rooted, neo-Darwinian adaptationism, they reserve their deepest blows for the “rational choice” model of human nature, according to which humans, by nature, are rational agents calculating costs and benefits, not just individually but all the more so collectively, with cost-benefit accounting explaining the evolution of human social systems and behavior. Instead, they draw on a complex understanding of embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and affective cognition, or what is sometimes called “4EA cognition,” though they don’t use that term. They more commonly refer to “extended” (as well as “distributed”) mind, applying that notion to the emotions in a way that makes it possible to study culture, ritual, religion, the arts, and much else as parts of the affective-cognitive social apparatus that makes humans human. Asma/Gabriel write:

Our social and cultural world is designed to trigger and manage affect, partly because this is the most expedient means of triggering prosocial behavior, but also because we [humans] are connoisseurs of emotion and pursue their intrinsic as well as instrumental values. (7)

All of this, in my view, puts their work on a different level of interest for me and others who study culture as it is lived.

Asma and Gabriel build on the “affective turn” represented by the work of neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio, Richard Davidson, and especially their own mentor (as they refer to him), Jaak Panksepp. They see this work as having “trickled” in recent years into disciplines as wide ranging as ethology, economics, therapeutics, and pharmaceutics. “But the time has finally come,” they write, “for a full-scale exploration of the evolution of emotions and mind in the biologically rooted human being” (2). They are hardly the first to broach this goal (I can think of numerous Freudians, Jungians, Lacanians, and many others who’ve tried it before them), but they are, to my knowledge, among the first to bring contemporary neuroscience to such a broad and sweeping task, and perhaps the most ambitious to attempt it. The book, unfortunately, draws on such a wide scope of literature as to make it difficult to assess (I certainly cannot claim to do that) and because its writing is much more academic than Barrett’s, it will not garner nearly the attention as her volume. But its publication by Harvard University Press is significant. (Here’s a summary of the book’s arguments.)

So what is the model of the brain and mind found in Asma and Gabriel? They state that their goal is to

think about consciousness itself as an archaeologist thinks about layers of sedimentary strata. At the lower layers, we have basic drives that prod the animal out into the environment for the exploitation of resources. Thirst, lust, fear, and so on are triggers in evolutionarily earlier regions of the brain that stimulate vertebrates toward satisfaction and a return to homeostasis. Subsequently, the brain of a mammal creates a feedback loop between these ancient affective systems and the experiential learning and conditioning that the creature undergoes. And, finally, another feedback loop exists between the neo-cortical “rational” cognitive processes and the aforementioned sub-cortical triggers and learning systems. As Jaak Panksepp argues, there are bottom-up causes of mind (i.e., those that push the organism to satisfy specific physiochemical requirements) but also top-down causes (i.e., those that regulate limbic experiences through neocortical cognitive and behavioral strategies). Conscious subjectivity does not suddenly arise at the top arc of this feedback circle; rather it exists throughout creatures of the mammalian clade as a foundational motivation process related to biological homeostatic triggers. (3)

In other words, there really are three layers to the human mind. While they acknowledge that MacLean’s “triune brain” is not a literal map of the brain, Asma/Gabriel nevertheless consider it a useful “metaphor,” “roadmap,” and “heuristic.” The three layers of the brain, put simply, are these:

1. A “bottom” or “core” of “primary process” functions, which consists of “instinctual drives” like fight-or-flight and “intentional seeking,” which is responsible for sensory and homeostatic affects, is mostly localized in subcortical parts of the brain, and is loosely shared with all vertebrates;
2. “Secondary processing,” which is responsible for social emotions, is “sculpted” by conditioning, habituation, and learning, and is common especially to mammals;
3. And a “tertiary” layer, which is responsible for higher cognitive functions (linguistic, symbolic, and executive/planning) and is localized mostly in the neocortex.

It’s not always clear to me if they are intending this model to be a model of the emotional brain, with primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions, or of the brain as a whole, with emotions consisting of specific complexes that emerge at the intersections of the three layers. In either case, the three layers interact in complex ways. Following Panksepp, the authors favor a conception of seven affective “systems” common to mammals (including humans) that include four “primary” emotions (seeking/expectancy, rage/anger, fear/anxiety, and lust) and three “secondary” and social emotions (care/nurturing, play/social joy, and panic/sadness). Other, more complex emotions like angst, regret, awe, and wonder, arise out of a combination of sources including the social and the cognitive (i.e., all three layers).

The details here are less important than the fact that these emotional systems — “open-ended, domain-general, feeling/behavior matrices” (211) — have “energized” human cognition and contributed significantly to shaping human social evolution, which is seen to have developed as a “mosaic of developmental systems” (5) inclusive of the biological, the ecological, and the psychological. The “basic affective circuits energize, orient, and direct” — elsewhere they say “permeate, infiltrate, and animate” (10) — “the higher-order processes and behavior of the animal toward necessary and desirable elements in the world that will help achieve homeostasis and satisfy basic bodily needs and psychological drives” (40). Where computationally oriented cognitivists focus on the tertiary level (linguistic or rule-based decision making) and behaviorists on the secondary (conditioning), Asma and Barrett propose an “embodied, enactive, embedded, and sociocultural” view (10) that that recognizes various “emergent” and “dialectical” (5) forms of interaction.

Similarities and differences

For all the clear differences between this “basic emotions” model and Barrett’s constructivism — recall that both are claiming to present “new paradigms,” and both see each other as rivals — the similarities need to be acknowledged. Both Barrett and Asma/Gabriel agree that there are “core” affects, while disagreeing on how extensive they are and how much they have shaped human behavior. For Barrett, the core is constituted by positive and negative forms of arousal aimed at maintaining an energetic “body budget.” Everything else emerges evolutionarily, not in two big waves that build “on top” of each other, but through complex, species-specific, and path-dependent evolutionary routes. There is therefore no “reptilian” or “mammalian” brain hidden, like an old model-T Ford engine, inside or “beneath” the stylishly revamped surface of the 2020 Human. For Asma and Barrett, on the other hand, Barrett’s minimalist view “radically underdetermines the phenomenology, neuroscience, and ethology of emotions.” Defining affect rather similarly (as “conative motivation” or “conative motivational drive”; note the Spinozan foundation there, which I’ll come back to), they attempt to trace the evolutionary steps and complexities that have factored into producing human beings and that still shape our lives today.

Both acknowledge two-way interaction between the affective “core” (or base) and the linguistic and conceptual mind (or superstructure; I’m using those Marxian terms to indicate something that I will come back to in a moment). But where Barrett seems to favor a “top-down” model in part because it allows us more freedom (thus her advocacy of it as a new paradigm that is supposed to be both more accurate and more conducive to modern life), Asma/Barrett favor a “bottom-up” approach because it accounts better for the evolution of human behavior, and therefore presents a more accurate understanding of who we are and how we got to be this way. (Their critique of Barrett is found at the very outset of the book; see pp. 10-13.)

Let’s look a little more closely at their respective accounts of how affect interacts with cognition.

For Barrett, linguistic, propositional thinking seems to provide a fairly hard boundary line demarcating humans, who can have emotions because we have the conceptual apparatus to turn our affective impulses into emotions, from other animals who, by and large, do not. This separation between humans and other animals is one of the points Asma/Gabriel and other Basic Emotions theorists critique in the new constructivism. The question really is about the relationship between what’s “above” (thought) and what’s below (bodily affect), or what I am tempted to call “superstructure” and “base.” Does base shape superstructure, or is superstructure free to thoroughly reshape base? Or is the relationship fully two-way and, if so, is it a two-way relationship between two stable and pre-existing entities, or is it so fully dynamic and dialectical as to be impossible to disentangle?

It turns out that both agree that entanglement is profound, but that disentangling, or what Asma/Gabriel call “decoupling,” is possible. For Barrett, it is not so much that we are “torn” between an old, emotional (“hot”) brain and a newer, cognitive (“cool”) brain. Rather, you might say that at this point it is all cool, or at least could be cooled off — which requires concepts, which Barrett tends to define propositionally. And while Asma/Gabriel talk of “hot” and “cool,” more primitive and “later,” “tertiary-order” cognition, they also acknowledge that the latter opens up opportunities for greater freedom. Through symbolic thought, they argue, the indicative dimension of communication (“That creature is a snake”) and the imperative dimension (“I should run away”) can be decoupled. Language provides us with the ability to “emotionally domesticate” ourselves (p. 192), which means to gain some distance over our emotions and their expression.

In other words, where Barrett tends to assume that “decoupling” is a good thing and that it mainly proceeds from the top down, Asma/Gabriel see the relationship as more complex. In a recent blog post, they define and clarify their notion of affect as follows:

Affect as conative motivational drive is amenable to being decoupleable because it predates — and remains functional — through all evolutionarily later cognitive abilities; that is, its primacy ensures that it has a use within any mental context. And, unlike other mental functions, affect can filter through any mental operation, infusing pertinent elements with salience; affect dyes our thoughts with value and meaning. Accordingly, we have described several roles played by affect including, as a mode of presentation, as an intentional arrow, and as motivation for locking onto appropriate affordances. [emphasis added]

Affect and reason, in other words, are autonomous and relate to each other in complex ways. In contrast to Barrett’s focus on the discontinuity between humans and others made possible by the emergence of language, Asma and Gabriel start from the “embodied cognition” that we humans share with other beings. Affect is primary, for Asma/Gabriel, and its roles are several. There’s a resonance here also with Peircian ideas of semiosis in Asma’s and Gabriel’s verbiage of “intentions-in-actions,” or “biological aboutness,” a “non-representational teleology” that is “affectively structured long before it becomes cognitively structured in the Homo lineage” (44).

One way in which I find Asma/Gabriel’s model richer than Barrett’s is in the simple fact that there are three layers here, with recognition given to the importance of each and with room to maneuver between them. This is a point I’ll come back to in Part 2 of this article. But as an example of why it’s important, it’s helpful to look at their respective view of “concepts” (which is so central to Barrett).

In a sense, one could say that “concepts” emerge fully formed for Barrett. For Asma/Gabriel, on the other hand, the “tertiary-level” constructs that Barrett calls “concepts” are rooted in more basic, primary or secondary level distinctions, such as “images,” “nonlinguistic prototypes,” and “analogical models.” (The later chapters elaborate on this work, but see also their writing on “task grammars” and “image grammars” for a flavor of it.) Language does not replace these, as constructivists tend to suggest; rather, it builds on them and interacts with them. Our self-concepts (which, if we follow Peirce, are “signs” or symbolic constructs) are not just things that are organized from the “top.” They interact all along with emotions and the movements between affects and their objects (since every feeling or emotion has an “aboutness” to it). In the words of Asma and Gabriel, the “propositional aboutness of language (indicative referential content) is already embedded in the emotional aboutness of our social interaction with other humans, who we are trying to assuage, impress, attract, or destroy” (203). Or to put this into dialogue with Lacan, the Symbolic (the tertiary level) does not merely overtake and restructure the Imaginary (secondary) and the Real (primary). The latter two also partake in restructuring the former. The feedback between the three is constant and ongoing.

I’l leave it there for now. In Part Two of this article, I plan to relate Asma and Gabriel’s rendition of the “triune” self, as well as Barrett’s constructionist model of emotion, to recent work on affect in the social sciences (notably Margaret Wetherell’s excellent Affect and Emotion: A Social Science Understanding), in neo-Spinozan ethical and political theory, and in neo-Gurdjieffian theory (and practice) concerning the “three-centered” nature of humans. That will lead me back to reworking some of the process-relational practices I outlined in Shadowing the Anthropocene.

Some further reading on contemporary affective neuroscience

Joseph Ledoux, “Rethinking the emotional brain,” Neuron  73 (2012), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3625946/

Elliot Jurist, Review of Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332585981_Review_of_How_Emotions_Are_Made_The_Secret_Life_of_the_Brain

Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel, “United by Feelings,” Aeon, August 22, 2019, https://aeon.co/essays/human-culture-and-cognition-evolved-through-the-emotions

“On the nature of fear: experts from the fields of human and animal affective neuroscience discuss their own definitions of fear and how we should study it,” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/on-the-nature-of-fear/?print=true

Julie Beck, “Hard feelings: Science’s struggles to define emotions,” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/hard-feelings-sciences-struggle-to-define-emotions/385711/

Caruana, “What is missing in the ‘Basic Emotion vs. Constructionist’ debate”:  http://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/summer2017/What-is-missing-in-the-Basic-Emotion-vs-Constructionist-debate-Pragmatist-insights-into-the-radical-translation-from-the-emotional-brain-Fausto-Caruana.pdf