Descartes’ Error

Descartes’ Error is a work by Antonio Damasio (1994).

Core claims

• Damasio does not merely add emotion back into cognition; he dismantles the entire metaphysical architecture of the res cogitans by demonstrating that what Descartes called “clear and distinct ideas” are themselves bodily states misrecognized as disembodied thought.
• The somatic marker hypothesis is not a theory of decision-making but a theory of soul: it restores to scientific psychology what depth psychology has always known—that the body is the primary organ of meaning, and that reason divorced from feeling is not higher cognition but damaged cognition.
• By grounding his argument in the case of Phineas Gage, Damasio inadvertently produces a modern pathography in Hillman’s sense—a study of how the destruction of feeling-toned embodiment annihilates not just social competence but psychic individuality itself.

Related questions

• How does Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis map onto Jung’s concept of the feeling-toned complex, and where does the neuroscientific model fall short of what Hillman describes as pathologizing in Re-Visioning Psychology?
• Von Franz argues in Dreams of Descartes that Descartes failed to integrate the feeling and sensation functions revealed in his 1619 dreams. Does Damasio’s neurological critique of Descartes confirm or complicate von Franz’s typological diagnosis?
• Bosnak’s Embodiment explicitly names Descartes’ system as a defense against mercurial embodied intelligence. How does Damasio’s clinical evidence for the body’s role in reasoning support or challenge Bosnak’s claim that images are “embodiments of their own intelligence”?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/damasio-descartes-error/

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