A decade ago, when I first began practicing with my mindfulness teacher while struggling to make rent and make meaning out of my borrowed stardust, one meditation she led transformed my quality of life above all others — both life’s existential calibration and its moment-to-moment experience:
You are asked to imagine having only a year left to live, at your present mental and bodily capacity — what would you do with it? Then imagine you only had a day left — what would you do with it? Then only an hour — what would you do with it?
As you scale down these nested finitudes, the question becomes a powerful sieve for priorities — because undergirding it is really the question of what, from among the myriad doable things, you would choose not to do in order to fill the scant allotment of time, be it the 8,760 hours of a year or a single hour, with the experiences that confer upon it maximum aliveness, that radiant vitality filling the basic biological struggle for survival with something more numinous.
The exercise instantly clarifies — and horrifies, with the force of its clarity — the empty atoms of automation and unexamined choice filling modern life with busyness while hollowing it of gladness. What emerges is the sense that making a meaningful life is less like the building of the Pyramids, stacking an endless array of colossal blocks into a superstructure of impressive stature and on the back of slave labor, than like the carving of Rodin’s Thinker, cutting pieces away from the marble block until a shape of substance and beauty is revealed. What emerges, too, is the sense that the modern cult of productivity is the great pyramid scheme of our time.
Wall clock featuring Discus chronologicus — an early eighteenth-century German depiction of time. (Also available as a print.)
Oliver Burkeman reckons with these ideas in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (public library) — an inquiry equal parts soulful and sobering, offering not arsenal for but sanctuary from our self-brutalizing war on the constraints of reality, titled after the (disconcertingly low) number of weeks comprising the average modern sapiens lifespan of eighty (seemingly long) years.
After taking a delightful English jab at the American-bred term “life-hack” and its unfortunate intimation that “your life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally,” Burkeman frames our present predicament:
This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.
In consequence, we lose sight of the fundamental tradeoff that the price of higher productivity is always lower creativity. All of it, Burkeman observes, is the product of an anxiety about time that springs from our stubborn avoidance of the elemental parameters of reality. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson lamented that “enough is so vast a sweetness… it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” he writes:
Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough — that you are enough — because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.
This pursuit of efficiency hollows out the fullness of life, flattening the sphere of being that makes us complete human beings into a hamster wheel. Burkeman terms this “the paradox of limitation” and writes:
The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead — and work with them, rather than against them — the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
Echoing physicist Brian Greene’s poetic meditation on how our mortality gives meaning to our lives, he adds:
I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.
Time-Catcher by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
At the crux of facing the limits of reality is the fact that we must make choices — a necessity that can petrify us with “FOMO,” the paralyzing fear of missing out. And yet, as Adam Phillips observed in his elegant antidote to this fear, “our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”
We have different coping strategies for managing the melancholy onus of having to choose. I am aware that my reliance on daily routines, unvaried meals, interchangeable clothing items, recursive playlists, and other life-loops is a coping mechanism aimed at automating certain choices in order to allay the anxiety and time-cost of having to make them afresh each day. Others orient orthogonally to the problem, avoiding making concrete choices and commitments, in life and in love, in order to keep their options “open” — an equally illusory escape from the grand foreclosure that is life itself.
But however we cope with the fearsome fact of having to choose, choose we must in order to live — and in order to have lives worthy of having been lived. It is, of course, all about facing our mortality — like every anxiety in life, if its layers of distraction and disguise are peeled back far enough.
One of Salvador Dalí’s etchings for a rare edition of Montaigne’s essays
With an eye to the etymology of “decide” — which stems from the Latin decidere, “to cut off,” a root it shares with “homicide” and “suicide” — Burkeman considers the necessity of excision:
Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility… Since finitude defines our lives… living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact.
[…]
It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.
Facing our finitude is, of course, the most challenging frontier of our ongoing resistance to facing the various territories of reality. The outrage we intuitively feel at the fact of our mortality — outrage for which the commonest prescription in the history of our species have been sugar-coated pellets of illusion promising ideologies of immortality — is a futile fist shaken at the fundamental organizing principle of the universe, of which we are part and product. Only the rare few are able to orient to mortality by meeting reality on its own terms and finding in that reorientation not only relief but rapturous gladness.
Liminal Days by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
A generation after Richard Dawkins made his exquisite counterintuitive argument for how death betokens the luckiness of life, Burkeman offers a fulcrum for pivoting our intuitive never-enough-time perspective to take a different view of the time we do have:
From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult… There you were, planning to live on forever… but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given — as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.
Our anxiety about the finitude of time is at bottom a function of the limits of attention — that great strainer for stimuli, woven of time. Our brains have evolved to miss the vast majority of what is unfolding around us, which renders our slender store of conscious attention our most precious resource — “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” in Simone Weil’s lovely words. And yet, Burkeman argues, treating attention as a resource is already a diminishment of its reality-shaping centrality to our lives. In consonance with William James — the original patron saint of attention as the empress of experience — Burkeman writes:
Most other resources on which we rely as individuals — such as food, money, and electricity — are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.
Annie Dillard captured this sentiment best in her haunting observation that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” — a poetic sentiment that, on a hectic day, becomes an indictment. What makes our attention so vulnerable to distraction is the difficulty of attending to what is consequential in the grandest scheme — a difficulty temporarily allayed by the ease of attending to the immediate and seemingly urgent but, ultimately, inconsequential. (Who among us would, on their deathbed, radiate soul-gladness over the number of emails they responded to in their lifetime?) “People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy,” Rilke admonished a century before social media’s stream of easy escape into distraction, before productivity apps and life-hacks and instaeverything. “But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.”
Burkeman writes:
Whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude — with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out… The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise — to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.
And so we get to the crux of our human predicament — the underbelly of our anxiety about every unanswered email, every unfinished project, and every unbegun dream: Our capacities are limited, our time is finite, and we have no control over how it will unfold or when it will run out. Beyond the lucky fact of being born, life is one great sweep of uncertainty, bookended by the only other lucky certainty we have. It is hardly any wonder that the sweep is dusted with so much worry and we respond with so much obsessive planning, compulsive productivity, and other touching illusions of control.
Vanish by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
Burkeman — whose previous book made a similarly counterintuitive and insightful case for uncertainty as the wellspring of happiness — writes:
Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again — as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favored candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win.
[…]
And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state — because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional — as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve gotten it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, “into proper working order.”
The primary manifestation of this — and the root of our uneasy relationship with time — is that, in the course of our ordinary days, we instinctively make choices not through the lens of significance but through the lens of anxiety-avoidance, which increasingly renders life something to be managed rather than savored, a problem to be solved rather than a question to be asked, which we must each answer with the singular song of our lives, melodic with meaning.
Art by Arthur Rackham from a rare 1926 edition of The Tempest. (Available as a print.)
Leaning on Carl Jung’s perceptive advice on how to live, Burkeman makes poetically explicit the book’s implicitly obvious and necessary disclaimer:
Maybe it’s worth spelling out that none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But it’s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.
[…]
If you can face the truth about time in this way — if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human — you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing — and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing — whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.
In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying and clarifying Four Thousand Weeks, drawing on a wealth of contemporary research and timeless wisdom from thinkers long vanished into what Emily Dickinson termed “the drift called ‘the Infinite,'” Burkeman goes on to devise a set of principles for liberating ourselves from the trap of efficiency and its illusory dreams of control, so that our transience can be a little more bearable and our finite time in the kingdom of life a little less provisional, a lot more purposeful, and infinitely more alive.
Complement it with Seneca on the Stoic key to living with presence, Hermann Hesse on breaking the trance of busyness, artist Etel Adnan on time, self, impermanence, and transcendence, and physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic exploration of time and the antidote to life’s central anxiety, then revisit Borges’s timeless refutation of time, which Burkeman necessarily quotes, and Mary Oliver — another of Burkeman’s bygone beacons — on the measure of a life well lived.
“A purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his revolutionary theory of how our bodies affect our feelings just before the birth of neuroscience — a science still young, which has already revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos inside the cranium as much as the first century of telescopic astronomy revolutionized our understanding of our place in the universe.
Meanwhile, ninety miles inland from William James, while Walt Whitman was redoubling his metaphysical insistence that “the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern… and is the soul,” Emily Dickinson was writing in one of her science-prescient poems:
The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and you — beside —
The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As sponges — Buckets — do —
Art by Margaret Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)
It is the task, the destiny of science to concretize with evidence what the poets have always intuited and imagized in abstraction: that we are infinitely more miraculous and infinitely less important than we thought. The universe without, which made us and every star-dusted atom of our consciousness, is ever-vaster and more complex than we suppose it to be; the universe within, which makes the universe without and renders our entire experience of reality through the telescopic lens of our consciousness, is ever-denser and more complex than we suppose it to be.
A century and a half after James, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio picks up an empirical baton where Dickinson had left a torch of intuition. In his revelatory book Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious (public library), he makes the bold case that consciousness — that ultimate lens of being, which shapes our entire experience of life and makes blue appear blue and gives poems their air of wonder — is not a mental activity confined to the brain but a complex embodied phenomenon governed by the nervous-system activity we call feeling.
Decades after Toni Morrison celebrated the body as the supreme instrument of sanity and self-regard, neuroscience affirms the body as the instrument of feeling that makes the symphony of consciousness possible: feelings, which arise from the dialogue between the body and the nervous system, are not a byproduct of consciousness but made consciousness emerge. (Twenty years earlier — an epoch in the hitherto lifespan of neuroscience — the uncommonly penetrating Martha Nussbaum had anticipated this physiological reality through the lens of philosophy, writing in her superb inquiry into the intelligence of emotions that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”)
One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known drawings of the brain.
Damasio’s premise rises from the flatland of earlier mind-based theories by a conceptual fulcrum both simple and profound:
Feelings gave birth to consciousness and gifted it generously to the rest of the mind.
This view defies both extremes that dominate our present models of consciousness, each unimaginative and intellectually unambitious in its own way, as all extremes invariably are: materialism, which confines it to the neural activity of the brain, and mysticism, which places it entirely outside the contours of the body and beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Damasio writes:
Any theory that bypasses the nervous system in order to account for the existence of minds and consciousness is destined to failure. The nervous system is the critical contributor to the realization of minds, consciousness, and the creative reasoning that they allow. But any theory that relies exclusively on the nervous system to account for minds and consciousness is also bound to fail. Unfortunately, that is the case with most theories today. The hopeless attempts to explain consciousness exclusively in terms of nervous activity are partly responsible for the idea that consciousness is an inexplicable mystery. While it is true that consciousness, as we know it, only fully emerges in organisms endowed with nervous systems, it is also true that consciousness requires abundant interactions between the central part of those systems — the brain proper — and varied non-nervous parts of the body.
Drawing on the native poetics of our physiology, Damasio offers a definition of consciousness:
Consciousness… is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution… These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.
One of the doodles Darwin’s kids left all over his manuscript of On the Origin of Species.
A century and a half after Darwin scribbled a note to himself in the margin of one of his manuscripts — “Never say higher or lower in referring to organisms… Say more complicated.” — Damasio details the levels of complexity by which various organisms manage the living wonder of themselves. All life-forms, from bacteria to Bach, share a basic machinery of stimulus-detection called sensing. Organisms with nervous systems are capable of minding — the nurobiological process of mapping information into patterns and translating it into mental images.
These images furnish representations of the world, making it comprehensible and therefore survivable as the organism navigates that world by a sort of native biological intelligence that powers the basic self-care necessary for maintaining homeostasis — maintenance that eventually comes aglow with feeling. More complex organisms can manipulate those images, integrating them into a system of reference we call knowledge, which the nervous system makes explicit by creating patterns and committing them to memory, so that the organism can plan, reason, and reflect.
Ultimately, feeling conspires with minding and knowing to give rise to the system-level phenomenon of consciousness from the infrastructure of the nervous system and the body: Our perceptual senses — sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste — render the external world in mental images; our feelings render the internal world, representing in our own minds the state of our bodies — those roiling inner worlds in which all sense of wellbeing is won or lost. From this sense of ownership of ourselves arises the phenomenon of consciousness — the functions that makes possible the novel responses we call adaptation, or art.
Damasio writes:
Consciousness gathers together the bits of sapience that reveal, by dint of their coincident presence, the mystery of belonging. They tell me — or you — sometimes in the subtle language of feeling, sometimes in ordinary images or even in words translated for the occasion, that yes, lo and behold, it is me — or you — thinking these things, seeing these sights, hearing these sounds, and feeling these feelings. The “me” and “you” are identified by mental components and body components.
Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme
The most crucial of these bits of sapience manifest as mental images formed by body-mind interactions:
Turn a mind inside out and spill its contents. What do you find? Images and more images, the sorts of images that complicated creatures, such as we are, manage to generate and combine in a forward-flowing stream. This is the very “stream” that immortalized William James and gave fame to the word “consciousness” because the two words were so often paired in the phrase “stream of consciousness.” But… the stream… is simply made of images whose near-seamless flow constitutes a mind.
[…]
When we relate and combine images in our minds and transform them within our creative imaginations, we produce new images that signify ideas, concrete as well as abstract; we produce symbols; and we commit to memory a good part of all the imagetic produce. As we do so, we enlarge the archive from which we will draw plenty of future mental contents.
But it is the feeling coloring these mental images that makes our consciousness what it is — every perceived and stored scene or song, landscape or idea, is already infused with affect in the jar of memory, and that is what makes it shimmer with meaning.
Insisting that “we should celebrate the wealth and the messiness we have been gifted by affect,” Damasio writes:
What you perceive or remember, what you try to figure out by reasoning, what you invent or wish to communicate, the actions you undertake, the things you learn and recall, the mental universe made up by objects, actions, and abstractions thereof, all of these different processes can generate affective responses as they unfold. We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feelings in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions.
[…]
Feelings are commingled with the things and events we feel thanks to the exceptional and intimate cross talk between body structures and nervous system.
The Human Heart. One of French artist Paul Sougy’s mid-century scientific diagrams of life. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)
Mapping the four-billion-year history of living organisms along its branching streams, Damasio envisions the distributary that led to us as a cascade of three evolutionary stages: being, feeling, and knowing, which continue to coexist in each of us modern sapiens, coursing through the various anatomical and functional systems that give us life. No invention of nature, Damasio argues, powered a greater leap than the emergence of nervous systems, which made minds possible — but their inception, like so many great inventions, was an unbidden byproduct of solving pressing necessities:
Complex, multicellular organisms with differentiated systems — endocrine, respiratory, digestive, immune, reproductive — were saved by nervous systems, and organisms with nervous systems came to be saved by the things nervous systems invented — mental images, feelings, consciousness, creativity, cultures.
Nervous systems are splendid “afterthoughts” of a non-minded, non-thinking, but pioneeringly prescient nature.
These astonishing afterthoughts of evolution became the stage on which the theater of consciousness plays out. Damasio explains:
Nervous systems enable both complex movements and, eventually, the beginning of a real novelty: minds. Feelings are among the first examples of mind phenomena, and it is difficult to exaggerate their significance. Feelings allow creatures to represent in their respective minds the state of their own bodies preoccupied with regulating the internal organ functions required by the necessities of life… Feelings provide organisms with experiences of their own life.
He considers how this transformative afterthought might have evolved and how it gave us the capacity for feeling that forever changed the course of life on Earth:
Feeling probably began its evolutionary history as a timid conversation between the chemistry of life and the early version of a nervous system within one particular organism… Those timid beginnings provided each creature with an orientation, a subtle adviser as to what to do next or not to do or where to go. Something novel and extremely valuable had emerged in the history of life: a mental counterpart to a physical organism.
[…]
Feelings… provide the urge and the incentive to behave according to the information they carry and do what is most appropriate for the current situation, be it running for cover or hugging the person you have missed.
Art by Olivier Tallec from What If…? by Thierry Lenain
Through this essential feedback loop of feeling, we are able to assess how we are doing at the basic task of living — not only at the binary state of whether or not we are staying alive, but on the qualitative scale of how well our actual experience maps onto our optimal experience. Pleasure and pain, love and longing — these are all varieties of conscious experience that allow us to fine-tune our flourishing. They all arise when stimuli trigger molecular messages that travel from body tissues and organs, through nerve terminals, into the central nervous system and the brain, producing mental images that give us valuable information we experience as emotional states, which serve to steer us toward corrective action.
This might seem mechanistic and unpoetic, but out of this biological feedback loop arises our capacity for problem-solving and poetry, for beauty and transcendence, for everything we call creativity. In consonance with the consolation Lou Andreas-Salomé offered to her dispirited poet-friend Rainer Maria Rilke — “A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs.” — Damasio observes:
The human experience of pain and suffering has been responsible for extraordinary creativity, focused and obsessive, responsible for inventing all kinds of instruments capable of countering the negative feelings that initiated the creative cycle.
[…]
Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity.
This feedback loop of feeling is unavailable to organisms in the less developed being stage of evolution, and yet out entire sense of being — the meta-awareness we experience as a self — is contingent upon it. Damasio writes:
Not surprisingly, feelings are important contributors to the creation of a “self,” a mental process animated by the state of the organism, and are anchored in its body frame (the frame constituted by muscular and skeletal structures), and oriented by the perspective provided by sensory channels such as vision and hearing.
Once being and feeling are structured and operational, they are ready to support and extend the sapience that constitutes the third member of the trio: knowing.
Feeling provides us with knowledge of life in the body and, without missing a beat, makes that knowledge conscious… The maps and images created on the basis of sensory information become the most abundant and diverse constituents of mind, side by side with ever present and related feelings. More often than not, they dominate the mental proceedings.
[…]
Once experiences begin to be committed to memory, feeling and conscious organisms are capable of maintaining a more or less exhaustive history of their lives, a history of their interactions with others and of their interaction with the environment, in brief, a history of each individual life as lived inside each individual organism, nothing less than the armature of personhood.
Illustration by Hugh Lieber from Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber
This understanding defeats a popular dictum of the self-help world — the comfort-blanket belief that one cannot cause another person’s feelings or be caused to feel a certain way by another person’s actions. No: One person can very much make choices and take actions toward another that impact and impair the other person’s homeostasis — that is, the organism’s sense of stability and safety — thus producing in that other person the negative feelings that are the organism’s feedback loop to protect homeostasis: pain, our primary signal for course-correction.
This is where our physiology and psychology converge. Offering neuoroscientific affirmation of Hannah Arendt’s searing philosophical-political indictment that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed,” Damasio writes:
We are quite familiar with the direct way in which illness gives way to discomfort and pain or exuberant health produces pleasure. But we often overlook the fact that psychological and sociocultural situations also gain access to the machinery of homeostasis in such a way that they too result in pain or pleasure, malaise or well-being. In its unerring push for economy, nature did not bother to create new devices to handle the goodness or badness of our personal psychology or social condition. It makes do with the same mechanisms.
This is so because feelings are not purely mental phenomena but delicate interleavings of body and mind — the serpent of consciousness biting its own tail:
The power of feelings comes from the fact that they are present in the conscious mind: technically speaking, we feel because the mind is conscious, and we are conscious because there are feelings… Feelings were and are the beginning of an adventure called consciousness.
Art by indigenous Gond artist Bhajju Shyam from Creation by Thierry Lenain
In the land of language, however, the adventure has been burdened by a great deal of cultural baggage, loaded with misconceptions and misuses. Consciousness is a young English word, not yet born when Milton wrote that “the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Today, particularly in panpsychic theory, it is often used interchangeably with mind, which plunders it of the essential role of feeling. Damasio points out that even in the older Romance languages, which include his native Portuguese, one must settle for the word conscience, already blunted by its multiple meanings. My native Bulgarian might come closest to Damasio’s model — the most literal translation of our word for consciousness is self-knowledge.
This, indeed, is the crux of Damasio’s case for feeling — feelings are how we know that our experience is our own, that the bodies through which experience courses are our own, that the perspective through which images flicker on the screen of the mind is our own. I am reminded here of something I once heard Gloria Steinem say, in the midst of a twenty-first century cultural dark age for conscience: “The place where we need to go is where our bodies… are our own. This is the basis of democracy.”
With an eye to this essential parameter of ownership — the great revelation made possible by feeling — Damasio writes:
Feelings let the mind know, automatically, without any questions being asked, that mind and body are together, each belonging to the other. The classic void that has separated physical bodies from mental phenomena is naturally bridged thanks to feelings… Self-reference is not an optional feature of feeling but a defining, indispensable one.
[…]
What does it mean to say “I am conscious”? At the simplest level imaginable, it means to say that my mind, at the particular moment in which I describe myself as conscious, is in possession of knowledge that spontaneously identifies me as its proprietor… Some knowledge about the current operations of my body [and] some knowledge as retrieved from memory, about who I am at the moment and about who I have been, recently and in the long ago past… [produce] mental states imbued with feeling and a sense of personal reference.
At the heart of this idea is the loosening of the brain’s stronghold of consciousness and its diffusion through the entirety of the living organism — a reconfiguration that, as Damasio puts it, “requires the placement of that mind in the setting of its body.”
Katharina Fritsch: Display Stand with Brains, 1989. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Photograph: Maria Popova.)
This embodied model of consciousness looms with some profound consequences.
One, which Damasio does not address directly — perhaps because it is self-evident, or perhaps because he prefers not to ruffle the feelings (that is, the consciousnesses) of those who take flight from evidence in such beliefs — is a bold debunking of certain escapist fantasies from our creaturely reality: both the fantasies haunted by our parochial past and its various religious mythologies of an immortal soul that survives the death of the body (“soul” being the conceptual placeholder for consciousness before the word was coined), and the fantasies haunting the techno-utopian future with Silicon dreams of machine consciousness and technology-assisted ways of preserving human consciousness beyond the lifespan of the body by digitizing and migrating the contents of the brain alone.
Another, which Damasio does touch on at the end of the book, is a humbling antidote to the dual hubris with which humanity regards itself and other life-forms: the hubris of human exceptionalism across species, which presumes that our superior cognitive capacity relative to other animals automatically means superior consciousness (a hubris readily deconditioned by what we have been learning, for instance, about the complex consciousness of the far more modest-brained octopus), and the within-species hubris that treats individuals with higher cognitive capacity measured by our deeply flawed IQ metrics as superior to those with other, less computationally driven and computable forms of intelligence and sensitivity.
Art from Cephalopod Atlas, the world’s first encyclopedia of deep-sea creatures. (Available as a print, aface mask, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
And this is the optimistic underdone I hear in Damasio’s model: By understanding as a full-body phenomenon the consciousness that lenses our view of reality and shapes our life-experience, we can not only become better stewards of our own bodies and of the planet we share with other bodies, human and nonhuman, but we can begin to dismantle the artificial hierarchies and categories by which we have long bolstered our creaturely centrality across the various scales and spectra of existence, from Ptolemism to anthropocentrism to racism, choosing instead to be both humbled and hallowed by the evolutionary wonder of consciousness.
In the remainder of Feeling & Knowing, Damasio goes on to detail the three universes of experience from which our mental images spring, how our chemistry and our skeletal frame converge to produce our sense of belonging to ourselves, the role of affect in how we allocate attention, and much more, including how the discoveries of science in the epochs since Emily Dickinson penciled her far-seeing verse have clarified her core insight:
Dickinson was candidly committed to an organic view of mind and to a modern conception of the human spirit. And yet, in the end, what turned out to be wider than the sky was not the brain but life itself, the begetter of bodies, brains, minds, feelings, and consciousness. What is more impressive than the entire universe is life, as matter and process, life as inspirer of thinking and creation.
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