Investing the mind with feelings: how emotions help us think. From the article:

Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, sets out to investigate “why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves … and how brains interact with the body to support such functions”. We are not floating seraphim, he reminds us, but bodies that think – and all the better for it….

Damasio, whose books include The Feeling of What Happens and Self Comes to Mind, is a scientist but also a convinced, one might say a crusading, humanist. He wants us to recognise the richness of life in all its aspects, good or bad; but he is no sentimentalist. The human condition is one of struggle and assertion and the will to prevail: “Life comes equipped with a precise mandate: resist and project life into the future, no matter what.” Here again the shadow, or the radiance, of Nietzsche’s thinking falls across the page….

There are echoes here too of William James, that most endearing of philosophers, as when Damasio pauses for a brief, Jamesian consideration of the anomalous fact that for all the hi-tech sophistication of modern life, we still cling to the primitive pleasure and reassurance of the domestic fireplace. And James would have been delighted by Damasio’s “everydayness”, his readiness to acknowledge the fundamental underpinnings of even our highest endeavours….

h/t Pocket Hits