by Claudio Curciotti
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Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a book by portuguese neurologist and professor at the University of Southern California Antonio Damasio, which has been published in 1994 and translated into italian by the title L’errore di Cartesio: emozione, ragione e cervello umano.
Damasio wrote such a dissertation on the basis of the scripts by Marleu-Ponty, who is considered a disciple of the phenomenology derived from Husserl.
Damasio is among those authors who believe in the Pre-Socratic idea that emotion and reason are not separate within the human being,
First step towards monism is criticising that set of views which has been predominant over the last centuries in the occidental philosophy: the theory of the dualism between Res Cogitans v.s Res Extensa, soul against body, being the mind a non-physical substance.
Damasio condemns such a dualism, by bringing together scientific empiricism and philosophical speculations, and by offering evidences of clinical cases from its psychiatric centre. Briefly, he says that mind cannot be considered as separate from the body, as pure soul or pure mind.
When assuming the existence of the world in fact we are relating with the other, with something different from us, which causes changes in our body. At first the senses decode the external reality, and this is why the body is so important to us.
For instance, when taking decisions, we tend to get emotional, to follow instinctively our senses, non rational entities, corporal one.
And this is something serious.
The distinction between mind and body, as if the latter was a burden, or a “place” for instinct, passion and sin (as a priest would say), has been the archetypal error of the occidental and anthropocentric culture
The trascendental spirit against the immanence of things. Old thoughts, dangerous thoughts. When separating it, we are creating ideal models which are impermeable to external contamination. A pure spirit free from every passion is hiding a racist thought, a fear of the difference.
When a man feels the need to be hybrid, to get mixed, wars for identities just stop. The paradox is that the whole occidental and anthropocentric culture seems to be built on such a misunderstanding.
Hybris, according to greek philosophers, means a violation of measure by mankind within the world order. But who defined the order of the world. After theories such as the relativity, the chaos, the complexity, can we still think of an order in things? If hybrys means to overcome this order, then it is welcome.
The other, a man with a different background or a new technology, even if formally is changing our nature, as a matter of fact is only remodelling or developing it, by widening its limits.
And those who defend these limits by raising fears, like what are we going to do with all these immigrants and computers, which are likely to transform us in robots, well, all such defenders of humankind are doom to extinction.

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