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In the context of the materialized body, “emotion-based signals” serve as “somatic markers” that create “feelings of knowing.” So, “[t]here is no dichotomy between self-as-object and self-as-knower.”³¹⁶ Or, to put this another way, feeling and thinking, emotion and cognition, form an integrated meaning system.

There are “deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning,” says Mark Johnson, elaborating upon Damasio. These are the “neuro chemical bases of feeling and emotion.” We are “creatures of the flesh,” whose “visceral connections to life and the bodily conditions of life” are the primordial ground of our meaning. “[E]mbodied meaning … emerges as structures of organism–environment interactions and transactions.”³¹⁷ There is a chemistry and neurology of pleasure, pain, and fear. Not only are they felt in the body as medium for their meaning (meaning-as-representation^§AS1.2.1); often they are also visibly felt (meaning-as-communication^§AS1.2.2).

For this grammar we parse feelings and emotional meanings across the same threefold range of materialization that we have used elsewhere: likeness, directedness, and abstraction.^§AS1.1

Likeness we’re putting first, because this is where we have shelved it already in our “supermarket”^§MS0d of meanings. However, now it is not first analytically, because when it comes to feelings and emotions, likeness is secondary, mimicking or acting out embodied expressions of emotion that have been materialized in the first instance as directedness or abstraction.

Directedness indicates the rawest and most spontaneous signs of our emotions, feelings that cause us to laugh, cry, wince, blush, sweat, shiver, recoil, scream, or sigh, and often involuntarily. When we feel these in ourselves or see them in others, the relation to the feeling or the seeing is one of directedness – meaning is a process of pointing in the direction of emotion. Here are some entries for a catalogue of directed emotional meanings: happiness/sadness; safety/fear; consilience/anger; relish/disgust; pleasure/pain; enjoyment/discomfort; mania/depression; and of course there are many more.

Abstraction occurs in more elaborated emotional frames, where the emotional meaning is determined more by context and convention. Abstracted meaning is by functional social agreement, learned by cultural attribution rather than involuntary eruption. Here are some possible entries for a catalogue of conventionally abstracted emotions: admiration/jealousy; love/hate; pride/shame; certainty/doubt; confidence/embarrassment; sympathy/indifference; empathy/apathy; focus/distraction; excitement/complacency; relaxation/stress; surprise/boredom; serenity/anxiety; expectation/shock; contempt/appreciation; drive/laziness; motivation/discouragement; and many more, not to mention intermediate variations between these antinomies, as well as a panoply of ambiguous combinations. Such abstract emotions are historically contingent, though for that, no less felt. Notwithstanding their cultural relativity, such meanings are just as embodied in the human biome, their feeling as deeply embedded in the body. Viscerally, such emotions can be life-affirming or life threatening.

Of course, the place we have put each of these pairs in the catalogue of emotional directedness or abstractions is rough. Person to person, context to context, an emotion may be more or less directed, more or less abstract. And any can be repeated or imitated, by way of likeness.

Nor do these emotions ever stay the way they are for long. As much as they are immanent, vital bodily experiences, they are always ready to change or be changed. We experience this emotional transposability in the dialectic of mood swings, or emotional games of bait-and-switch. Love-hate, pride-jealousy, drive-laziness – we feel these and other emotions as unities-in-tension, vital immanences always warning or promising the imminence of the alternative, the always-readiness of transposition.

The medium for emotional meanings is the physiological frame of the body. These are meanings whose chemistry and neurology we share with other sentient creatures. And even when we reach the heights of reasoning smarts we have as a species, reason is layered over emotion, cognition over body-as-medium, humanity over our animality. Reason, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, and even our frame of moral reference, are grounded in embodied experience and the sensorimotor system.³¹⁸

And between bodies and other media – speech, sound, object, space, image, and text – the traffic runs both ways. Not only can other media represent emotion-in-body, but other media can evoke these physiological effects – (mere!) words or images can trigger body chemicals and neurons, so we feel with our bodies what is written or pictured.

We have been examining thus far the centered self, the self made bodily aware of its own meanings – Damasio’s “self brought to mind.” We also want to mention the empathetic self,^§AS2.5b when, by transposition from material to ideal,^§MS3.1 self transposes its-self to an-other.^§MS2.2

Conversely, the absence of emotion as another kind of emotional presence. This is the unaware, unconscious self, meaning without necessary or even adequate knowing. For its failure to read emotions or to speak to them, this kind of self is sent to the school of “emotional intelligence,” an antidote for unawareness first named as such in 1964 by Michael Beldoch.³¹⁹ Though of course, this kind of self presents itself to everyone at least fleetingly, when embodied meanings happen before you know it, and emotional self-recognition is an after-effect.

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³¹⁶ Antonio Damasio, 2010, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, New York: Pantheon, pp. 9–10, 108ff.; Antonio Damasio, 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, New York: Penguin Putnam.

³¹⁷ Mark Johnson, 2007, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 11, 54, xi, xii.

³¹⁸ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books, pp. 555–58.

³¹⁹ Michael Beldoch, 1964, “Sensitivity to Expression of Emotional Meaning in Three Modes of Communication,” pp. 31–42 in The Communication of Emotional Meaning, edited by J.R. Davitz, New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 126–128. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Anthony Damasio’s “Self Comes to Mind” §AS1.4.3b