The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

Name: The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
Author: Antonio R. Damasio

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures is a work by Antonio R. Damasio (2018).

Core claims

Damasio’s central argument—that feelings preceded cognition as the engine of cultural creation—constitutes the most rigorous biological case yet made for what depth psychology has always intuited: that affect, not reason, is the architect of the psyche’s symbolic life.
By grounding homeostasis in single-celled organisms lacking nervous systems, Damasio dissolves the Cartesian mind-body split not philosophically but empirically, revealing that what Hillman called “soul” and what biology calls valence share the same structural logic of interior self-monitoring.
The book’s “strange order” thesis—that culture, sociality, and feeling precede complex nervous systems in evolutionary history—inverts the standard neuroscience narrative and provides a material substrate for Jung’s collective unconscious without requiring metaphysics.

How does Damasio’s claim that homeostasis generates culture compare to Hillman’s argument in Re-Visioning Psychology that pathologizing—not adaptation—is the royal road to soul-making? Are these competing accounts of what drives psychic life, or do they address different registers of the same process?
In what ways does Damasio’s concept of feeling as the organism’s self-monitoring bridge the gap that Tarnas identifies in Cosmos and Psyche between depth psychology’s subjective insights and the objective cosmos known by natural science?
How does Bosnak’s thesis in Embodiment that images carry autonomous, quasi-physical intelligence relate to Damasio’s demonstration that affective states operate independently of conscious cognition—and what would a synthesis of these two frameworks mean for clinical practice?