Descartes' Error

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Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a book by neurologist Antonio R. Damasio, in which the author presents the argument that emotion and reason are not separate but, in fact, are quite dependent upon one another.


Damasio explores in depth the unusual case of Phineas Gage, a man whose ability to feel emotion was damaged after an accident destroyed part of his brain. Specifically, he demonstrates that, while Gage's intelligence remained intact after the accident, his ability to make rational decisions and to reason became severely handicapped because his emotions could no longer be engaged in the process.


Damasio uses this case, and refers to other brain damage cases, to develop his thesis on emotion and its relationship to human activity. He argues that first, rationality stems from our emotions, and second, that our emotions stem from our bodily senses. The state of the mind, or feeling, is merely a reflection of the state of the body, and feeling is an indispensable ingredient of rational thought.


The title of Damasio's book makes reference to René Descartes, French author, philosopher and mathematician of the 17th century. In what can be considered one of the major works of the Enlightenment, Descartes describes his search for truth in the book "Discourse on Method". He was determined to avoid being misled by widely accepted ideas that had not been subjected to rational examination or discourse. His "method" therefore was to reject all that was not proven. Inevitably, this resulted in precious little to believe! He determined that when all else was rejected, he was still left with the undeniable fact that he was conscious, he could think. This became the first truth, summarized by his famous phrase, "I think, therefore I am", and the building block upon which he constructed his philosophy.

In Descartes' approach, thought is the proof of existence, it is the basic truth. Damasio argues that the body is the genesis of thought. To emphasize the body-mind order of things, in contrast to Descartes' apparent mind-matter sequence, Damasio titled his book "Descartes' Error". It must be noted that the two arguments are on different planes. Descartes as a philosopher develops a method of reasoning based on the indisputable observation that if we think, we must exist. Damasio as a scientist examines the physiological processes that contribute to the functioning of the mind.


The book presents the “somatic-marker hypothesis” and explains it in depth. This is a treatment of the controversial "mind/body" relationship, the issue of the mind/body relationship lying at the roots of psychology.

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