In her recently published book The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti advances a unique enactivistic approach, which reintegrates cognitive and affective science with the philosophy of mind and phenomenology. The author particularly points to the leading role that the disciplines of experimental psychology and neuroscience have for the central aim to further develop the enactivist approach by extending it to the research field of “affect” resp. “affectivity”. As such, Colombetti’s research on affectivity is inspired by the hypothesis that enactivism is “a highly suitable framework for an account of affectivity that characterizes it as an essential dimension of the mind” (p. xiii). Consequently, the enactive paradigm provides the conceptual background for Colombetti’s project of the reconceptualization of emotional experience.

The book is thematically subdivided into seven chapters that are in the following commented separately along the lines of their central hypotheses:

In the first chapter (Primordial Affectivity) the reader is introduced to a sophisticated approach to the affective roots of the mind. The general claim is that the dimension of affectivity entails much more phenomena than emotions, moods, and feelings. Consequently, approaches that still would follow the assumption that the realm of affectivity is bailed out solely with analyses of the specific intentionality and phenomenality solely of the emotions and moods should open up to the idea of expanding the realm of affectivity in order to address the complexity of emotion experience. Moreover, also those approaches that rather remain scratching on the surface or generally spare out the enactivist perspective on affectivity equally get critically assessed in the light of Giovanna Colombetti’s central claim: that affectivity has to be regarded in the first place as highly depending on the organizational properties of life, according to which even the most “simple” living systems (e.g. a bacterium), can be determined as being affective (p. 2). The hanger for this idea is Colombetti’s concept of `primordial affectivity´, which allows one to criticize not only current notions of affecticity as being too narrowly defined, but which furthermore appears as refreshing alternative to common theories, such as “core affect” (as for instance suggested by James Russel 2003 Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion) or Stern’s account of “vitality affects” (Stern 1985 The Interpersonal World of the Infant) that aim to capture this “basic” dimension of affectivity. This becomes obvious when Colombetti compares her account of primordial affectivity, for instance, with the conception of core affect that is determined as a “primitive feeling” to which a certain valence or arousal is always central. As such, it remains, however, a neurophysiological state, which is always consciously detected or represented by the organism. With the specification of affectivity in terms of primordial affectivity, Colombetti, in contrast, aims to go further: she expands the concept of affectivity in such a way, that to qualify as affective and sense-making organism no longer depends on the nervous system, but rather, that consciousness is enacted through and by the organic system as a whole. Consequently, even those organisms that do not possess a nervous system qualify as affective organisms in this very primordial sense. Therein the concept of primordial affectivity fully assumes the enactive spirit, as it depends on a theory of the reciprocal relationship of an organism and its particular environment, especially, in terms of “bringing forth a world of significance” (p.21). Instead of focusing exclusively on the capability for conscious “assessment” that is often regarded as the prerequisite for characterizing an organism as somehow enabled for being engaged in sense-making procedures, Colombetti’s notion of primordial affectivity allows to emphasize that this is not the decisive criterion for including organisms to the realm of affective beings. When affectivity is determined as a property of the organization of living systems, which appears prior to any sort of consciousness, the parlance of some kind of “significance” or sense-making — also for a bacterium — seems reasonable. Moreover, it would be misleading to conclude that the concept of primordial affectivity (like alternative conceptualizations of affectivity that are discussed in this first chapter) can be labeled as “noncognitive”. Inasmuch as Colombetti stringently follows the enactive path and conceptually ties primordial affectivity to the enactive-sense-making-hypothesis, this notion in fact addresses a cognitive-affective sense-making phenomenon. And therein it certainly shows a high potential to challenge some prominent recent theories of enactivism, too. Although some enactive approaches may agree with Colombetti that affectivity needs to become acknowledged for its deepest levels (e.g., in terms of most basic self-regulation processes according to adaptivity, or in terms of stressing an organism´s autonomy), some of them would probably not define the respective processes involved on that stage as being “truly” cognitive ones (as e.g. Damasio 2010 Self Comes to Mind, chap. 2), even when some sort of sense-making without “brain” is confirmed on a conceptual level.

The reader is invited to follow Colombetti’s specific reading of the fundamental processes of life regulation as enabling organisms to maintain themselves, and that these very processes can be understood as already meaning generating and therefore affective” (p.23; italics K.J). Insofar as Colombetti follows an enactive characterization of cognition, i.e. determining cognition to be already affective (xvii; p.18), her account of primordial affectivity then necessarily has to count as “sense making” in terms of cognition, too. And still the skeptic might however insist that it is one thing to claim that emotion and cognition both are integral to sense-making in organisms, and that it is quite another to claim that the emotions and cognition, as well as conative or “striving” aspects of sense-making (for which Colombetti also critically reflects on recent accounts of vitalty), are already adequately addressed with such a primordial dimension of being. A way of avoiding a fundamental misreading of her account as one claiming a rich emotional life and complex cognition even to a microbe, is to grant primordial affectivity the status of a property: The fundamental capacity of an organism is to be responsive to and be in exchange with the world, i.e. to maintain itself in continuous processes of self-regulating activity. Especially with respect to this dimension of self-regulation Colombetti’s enactive approach entails also a refusal of the common assumption that an organism´s evaluations are prior to its emotions and desires. In line with Spinoza´s idea of the conative dimension of affect, resp., his famous account of conatus (Spinoza [1677] 1894 Ethics) according to which all things strive to persevere in being, we can state with Colombetti, that what counts as “good” or “bad” for an organism cannot be longer defined as something an organism acquires through somehow “disembodied” evaluation. In reversing the standard theories of evaluative orientation and by stressing the purposive nature as intrinsic to all organisms, that what really is of importance for organisms is enacted in terms of their continuity (p.5; see also chap. 4). This is anchored by the hypothesis that even the most non-complex organisms stand in a regulatory interaction with the world, which then makes it possible to transform the world into an environment, thus, into a space to which salience, value, meaning, sense, etc. is essential (cf. Thompson & Stapleton 2009, Making sense if Sense-making 24ff). While richer forms of mind then generally correspond with more elaborated modes of affective-cognitive sense-making processes, the various degrees of conscious awareness determine the possibility for specific competence for (self-)reflexive assessment, respectively. Consequently, the functional role of primordial affectivity for enabling the conscious experience of valence and the processes of striving also in richer and differentiated ways, i.e. in terms of significance and meaning in higher developed organisms becomes transparent with Colombetti’s enactive theory. As such, her approach deeply embraces the core of enactivism, namely, the idea of a deep continuity of life and mind, i.e. that the “[…] organizational properties distinctive of mind are an enriched version of those fundamental to life” (Thompson 2007 Mind in Life, x).

In having thus prepared the enactive grounds for her interdisciplinary view on the feeling body and emotion experience, the author continues to explore the emotions as being not the only repositories of affectivity, and elegantly navigates the reader with the second chapter (The Emotions: Existing Accounts and their problems) through the complex debate about the nature of the emotions. The chapter starts with the author’s solid critique of a theory of basic emotions (BET). Colombetti continues to find also arguments against those theories that often have been reconsidered as an adequate alternative to BET. According to her assessment, neither the common theories that follow a psychological constructionist perspective, nor a theory that integrates a more sophisticated “component-process-model” (CPM) can qualify as adequate theories of the emotions, or sufficiently describe what happens during emotion experience.

The main problem of the BET is to contribute to the conviction that the existence of a fixed number of pancultural emotions (cf. Ekman & Friesen 1971Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion; 1987; Ekman & Heider 1988 The Universality of Contempt Expression), i.e. “basic emotions”, can be asserted to exist (for a reassessment of what can be called “basic” in all emotions see also: Ekman & Cordaro 2011 What is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic). Especially, the idea that basic emotions can be clearly discriminated from those emotions that are not panculturally established, and thus have no such distinctive organismic traits, is rejected by Colombetti. Her analysis points to the problem of the arbitrariness by which some emotions have been labeled as “basic”. Consequently, the “building-block-theory” (Levenson 2011 Basic Emotions Questions; Panksepp & Watt 2011 What is Basic about Basic Emotions) that contributes to a unifying perspective on basic and nonbasic emotions (see also: Prinz 2004 Gut Reactions), and the “disunity-thesis-theory” (Griffith 1997 What Emotions Really Are) that stress a verifiable line of discrimination between such allegedly basic emotions and the “nonbasic” ones are targeted by Colombetti’s critique. As a result, the author suggests to drop the idea of a somehow clear-cut set of such discrete emotions all together with the idea that these may function as the “building blocks” for more complex or higher cognitive emotions. In particular, she disagrees with those theories that seem to fully deny the emotions (or rather: emotional episodes) as biological entities (or: biological events). According to Colombetti’s view, emotions neither can be tamed within the frames of a strong constructionist account, which claims that emotions formulate along the lines of mere categorization processes (e.g. Barrett 2006 Valence is a Basic Building Block of Emotional Life), nor can the component process model (as it has been proposed by Scherer 2009 The Dynamic Architecture of Emotion) convincingly describe emotional experience, at least not, when one favours a theory of the emotions that fully matches the enactive hypotheses. However sophisticated the component theory may be, its model of the emotional process, as Colombetti elaborates in chapter four, seems not to allow for “the organism to generate emotional episodes without the pervasive guidiance and control of an army of appraisal checks” (p. 52); thus, it cannot follow up with the most relevant aspects of biological self-organization and the complex reciprocity of different processes in an organism which are so central to Colombetti´s enactivist theory of emotion. Consequently, she focusses on a different account of the emotions which reveals a new perspective on emotional episodes as dynamical patterns.

In chapter three (Emotional Episodes as Dynamical Patterns) Colombetti introduces the research paradigm of embodied dynamicism as integral to enactivism (cf. Thompson 2007, 10; Colombetti p. 5) and enters the realm of dynamical affective science (p.56ff). Within this specific disciplinary frame, emotional episodes can be conceptualized as “self-organizing configurations of the organism” (p. 82). This means that emotional episodes always correspond to specific “second-order constrains” or rather: “emotion forms” (p. 69), which are the highly integrative patterns according to which the processes of recruiting or entraining the respective neural, muscular or autonomic processes in specific emotion experiences take place. In analogy to emotional episodes, also moods become reconceptualized in terms of such a dynamic perspective. But in comparison to emotional episodes, the “mood forms” of the organism fundamentally differ with respect to their time-scale, i.e. these are normally understood as lasting longer than the emotions, and are not “about” objects. Colombetti also mentions the influence moods have on emotional episodes and vice versa. If one is in a certain mood, this also determines to some extent which kinds of emotional episodes one might be experientially open to in processes of self-and-world-disclosure. In addition, certain recurring emotional episodes can, of course, induce severe mood changes. One might also add that in certain psychopathologies such affective patterns can become very rigid on the most structural physiological level, and as such, lead to the constant enaction of behavior and corresponding evaluative experience that then may count as symptomatic from a psychiatric-phenomenological view on certain mental disorders (cf. Jacobs 2013 The Depressive Situation).

Central to Colombetti’s understanding of emotional episodes as flexible and loosely assembled dynamical patterns is also that these have a cultural and individual specificity, as well as a reliable cross-cultural recurrence. With this chapter, Colombetti emphasizes as an important task of future affective science to further investigate in which situational context and in what kind of variations these “emotion forms” of the organism occur. By leaving the ideas of “basic emotion” and the “building block-view” behind, Colombetti asserts that each of such complex dynamical patterns has to be regarded as being shaped by evolutionary processes and developmental time spans, which counterbalances the need for debating whether one emotion may be more “basic” than the other. This reflects in large parts basic ideas of Jason Clark´s convincing approach on the homology between higher cognitive and basic emotions (Clark 2010 Relations of Homology). With his approach, the disunity-hypothesis on emotions can be opposed within a debate on their complexity that stresses the plasticity of basic emotions, their adaptivity, and thus, especially their functional dimension. Albeit Clark retains the construct of basic emotions, his central claim that complex emotions are homologous with basic ones has fostered a unifying perspective on the emotions. As such, Clark’s theory is discussed by Colombetti especially with respect to the advantage that one does not need to stick to the building block theory of the emotions. Such an adoption of evolutionary considerations asserts that basic emotions can become molded into different ones, i.e. they might keep some basic features, but also may change their functionality due to the process of adaptation. Then the question arises whether emotions might become not only more complex in function, but whether complexity shows also in terms of emotion appearance (e.g. its bodily manifestations). The striking difference to the dynamical account is, that such an evolutionary approach to the emotions, rather than all too enthusiastically predicting that emotional episodes in humans will become manifest with such a variability, thumps on evidence for it.

Colombetti continues in chapter four (Reappraising Appraisal) to question, how we can understand the evaluative processes of self-and-world-disclosure in organisms after the standard theory of appraisal has been critically assessed. Apparently, emotional episodes cannot be nailed down to the mere arousing aspect these have for an organism. One could rather follow the assumption that experiencing an emotional episode always already means to be in a specific evaluative mode, to which a kind of arousal may be central, but which cannot be reduced to it. This view is fortified not only by the phenomenological perspective, but also backed by neuroscientific considerations, which exemplarily stress that appraisal does not necessarily has to be explained in terms of a distinct process or a separate mechanism triggering the specific emotional responses of an organism. This supports the theory of enactivism to which it is evident that the activity of appraising is nothing to be separated from, but rather always has to be regarded as overlapping with the deepest bodily (non-cognitive) dimensions of emotionality, or as Colombetti puts it: with what is traditionally regarded as the bodily components of emotion (p.112). This overlap shows not only from a mere temporal perspective on the appraising process, thus is empirically backed, but moreover is already close to the conceptual implications of `conatus´, which mirrors on a conceptual level the reintegration of organismic activity (bodily corporal dimension) with all sorts of (dynamic affective) evaluation.

A highlight for phenomenologists is chapter five (How the Body Feels in Emotion Experience), that provides the reader with a thoughtful analysis of the complex modes of embodied emotion, while especially the author´s explanation of such specific experiences, such as “being absorbed in an activity”, points towards the merits of a phenomenological view for her enactivist approach. The insight “that the debate on the bodily nature of emotion experience cannot progress without a phenomenological account of bodily feelings that does justice to their complexity” (p. 132) is thoroughly reflected. It acuminates in Colombetti’s critique of the hypothesis that there has to be nonbodily emotional experience, because some emotion experiences do not involve feeling of the body. That the body itself does not have to be the intentional object to account for emotion experience as being something fundamentally bodily becomes clear, when Colombetti illustrates the multifaceted ways the body is felt with more or less conspicuity. In addition to this fundamental difference between conspicuousand inconspicuous bodily feelings, the distinction of foreground and background bodily feelings becomes important for her analysis of emotion experience, too. Colombetti’s systematization of bodily feelings delineates background bodily feelings, in which the body rather tacitly enters emotion experiences (as a vehicle, i.e. as that, through which an organism experiences its world), from foreground bodily feelings. The latter belong to the conspicuous bodily feelings, to which it is central that the body is the intentional object, thus stands in the focus of one´s attention. In contrast to conspicuous bodily feelings, the inconspicuous ones include feelings of the body, while the body as such is an intentional object rather at the periphery of attention. On first sight it appears a bit puzzling that foreground bodily feelings are determined as a specific subclass of the conspicuous feelings on the one hand, and simultaneously become described as “bodily feelings where the body is not (italics K.J.) an intentional object of experience” (p.132) on the other. But what this particular case shows, is, that we can at least address those emotional situations in which the body, albeit being not the intentional object of awareness, still is much reflected (somehow remains “at the front of awareness” S. 132) by an organism that enters emotional experience. This illustrates the usefulness of Colombetti’s categorization of embodied emotional experience and therein develops further other fine-grained systematizations of emotional (as bodily) experience in phenomenological emotion research (e.g. Matthew Ratcliffe 2008 Feelings of Being).

The author further maintains in chapter 6 (Ideas for an Affective “Neuro-physio-phenomenology”) that it is first and foremost an empirical task to answer the question in which ways the lived experience of emotion is underpinned by bodily and brain processes, and even more important: how exactly the “subpersonal brain-centered” and mere “bodily” perspectives relate to each other. Here Colombetti strenghtens her claim for interdisciplinary research on the feeling body, as any neuroscientific exploration of the emotion experience can benefit from implementing a wide range of study methods, such as using first- and second-person methods for gaining first-person data (p.159). According to Colombetti’s point of view, it unfortunate that there have not yet been made the same efforts for developing methods to investigate the lived experience of emotion as for the development of elaborated methods measuring bodily and brain activity during emotion. This gets emphasized by her outline of an affective neuro-physio-phenomenology, which is devoted to integrative perspectives that focus on the organism as a whole. Colombetti speculates on the high potential for new scientific findings by extending the current research on brain activity in order to find also adequate methods that measure bodily activity. That consciousness is nothing that sufficiently is described in terms of mere brain activity, but enacted by the living organism as a whole calls for testing the hypothesis of the continuity of life and mind within such an interdisciplinary framework. The skeptic, who does not like to raise the common “armchair”-objections (such as whether the investigation of emotional experience may not be fundamentally distorted by the very testing scenarios themselves) may ask further: What practical impact have these particular studies? The central questions may not solely be whether the continuity hypothesis can be empirically tested, and how promising certain methods are for reaching maybe even groundbreaking results that allow for a deeper scientific understanding, for instance, of changes in emotional experience in certain psychopathologies. Rather, one must ask whether and how exactly specific attitudes associated with enactivism as a philosophy of life may become fostered or even habituated in people. To uphold a brain scan or EEG results of someone who felt once anger induced in the lab, while being infront of two people that have a serious quarrel, and to further explain in detail to them, how their brain and bodily activities relate while they are fighting, might eventually not have the same practical implications as to remind them of their humanity, to probably reflect on their conatus, and to ask themselves, whether enacting in conflict is actually a good `emotion form´ to share. Another practically relevant insight of enactivism might be to see some necessity in investing also in projects that take the enactivist thinking seriously in lights of ethical and political thinking, too. Colombetti’s book does not really address this point of the ethics of enactivism, and what enacting it may entail. The ethical dimension of enactivism, of course, has many facets. Its applied dimension is revealed when one engages, for instance, in projects that aim to find solutions of how to stop poisoning our environments (thus ourselves). Another might probably see crucial hypotheses of animal ethics further grounded by the enactivistic approach, and find one more reason for stopping to eat tons of meat. The ethics of enactivism also include a meta-level, inasmuch as these may contribute to the prevention of a future “staying in lab-minded” research agenda. This would allow eventually to open to certain aspects of those approaches (e.g. about certain forms of self-regulation, alternative life-styles, etc.) that currently are still perceived as either too unscientific, or even already have been labeled as esoteric/exoteric threats for a “true” scientific enactivism. Therefore, the extent to which the enactive paradigm relies on its ethical dimension in order to manage its intra- and interdisciplinarity is also an empirical question that needs to be addressed.  

Chapter seven (Feeling Others) finally deals with the issue of social cognition where Colombetti puts much emphasize on the affective-embodied dimension that fundamentally allow for and shape processes of social interaction. Colombetti’s analysis of how we experience ourselves in relation to other living bodily beings exemplarily points to the distinction between someone´s capacity for basic empathy and other phenomena such as feelings of sympathy, impressions of others, or specific feelings of intimacy. The concept of basic empathy refers to someone’s ability for a direct perception of the subjective and particularly emotional modes of enaction of other organisms. In Colombetti’s opinion, this basic empathy is furthermore a necessary requirement for experiencing sympathy. While one might agree with the conceptual considerations of Peter Goldie (2000, The emotions, p.198) that in order to be enabled for sympathy, an individual does not necessarily has to have either a full understanding of the other’s situation (e.g. his “narratives” etc.) nor has to have a complete characterization of the other´s (non-)psychological traits, according to Colombetti, at least a minimal “awareness of the other as a locus of experiencing, a lived body” (p.185), thus: basic empathy, is needed for being able to enact modes of sympathy. Her concept of basic empathy aims to account for the experiential dimension of sympathy as a feeling for the other. What on first sight might appear as entailing an all too reductionist perspective on ´empathy`, addressing it on such a basic level (yet not in terms of primordiality!) makes perfect sense, if one takes into account that Colombetti tries to fill a gap in most accounts of sympathy, namely, when one further aims to conceptualize the ability to grasp someone´s subjectivity and to simultaneously address it is as experienced in the symapthizer due to an enactivist perspective. Consequently, sympathy cannot be entirely disentangled from awareness of the other persons’ experience, but much more important for Colombetti is that if one puts emphasis on sympathy as a fellow feeling, this necessarily implies more than the criterion of a simple awareness of an other as center of consciousness (as Goldie suggests it). It rather inclines one to further stress the feeling dimension of it in terms of one lived body being open to other bodily beings. Inasmuch as sympathy includes basic empathy as an experiential prerequisite, it is not longer possible to address it adequately as “a lonely subject´s desire to be kind” (p.185), but rather straightforwardly reconceptualize it as dynamic interactional pattern that enfolds, and is modulated in processes of encountering the attitudes and expressions of the other with empathy.

One might note that Colombetti’s ideas on basic empathy can not only inspire the ongoing discussion of autism, but also is relevant for the reconceptualization of incapabilities of psychopaths (cf. Maibom 2014 Without Fellow Feeling; Jacobs 2014 Psychopathic Comportment). It certainly supports to those accounts that stress a fundamental lack of empathy to explain why psychopaths are not only antisocial, but explicitly enact amorally. It is of high relevance to continue the discussion on the role of mimicry in the development and enhancement of prosocial behavior, which Colombetti addresses, too. She does not only review the existing approaches that evidence this particular enhancing function of mimicry, but further links this to phenomenological considerations. The ability to mimicry others is reassessed for having