This gets an unequivocal Hell Yeah from me, which is all the more humbling and gratifying because I started and subsequently gave up on this book close to a year ago after the hundred pages of Phineas Gage business that make up its first third. The reason for this frustration is that I was reading the book from the perspective of a theoretical humanities scholar in the year 2019, a reader of affect theory and an Oliver Sacks enthusiast—that is, many of Damasio’s extremely carefully constructed claims about the material basis of consciousness and the neurological inseparability of rationality and emotion were not just old news but deeply held philosophical commitments. I, the choir, did not need preaching to.

Revisiting this text as part of a larger project juxtaposing neurology and the Heidegerrian critique of Western metaphysics, I cannot help but marvel at Damasio’s restraint and circumspection as he builds his argument across 250 pages. He is a very different type of thinker from Oliver Sacks, who has an unbelievable ability to coax out the poetic/literary/religious/philosophical significance from a short neurological or psychiatric narrative like an orchestra conductor or a snake charmer. Damasio needs to show you the specific empirical basis of each small claim that slowly builds the case for his theory of cognition (the somatic marker hypothesis) and his model of selfhood (continually reactivated representations of the body) at the book’s conclusion.

What is most remarkable is his self-assurance when he finally arrives—Damasio quite literally does not tell us what Descartes’ error was until the last ten pages of the book. That error, dualism itself, is really a whole hatful of errors which includes the cogito as well as the notion that any rationality can be wholly distinguished from the body. By demonstrably disproving the existence of “pure reason” (and he does in fact use this phrase), Damasio is in fact critiquing the whole subjectivist tradition of Western metaphysics that stretches from Descartes to Locke to Kant. But this is not a simple refutation of dualism on the basis that “materialism is better” (because, like, duh); rather, Damasio wants to uproot the deep-seated and deeply appealing intuition that undergirds cogito ergo sum, the intuition that my experience of my own mind is really special and irreducible. To that point, Damasio offers the explanation that Descartes and Kant and the like, lacking the understanding that experiencing one’s own consciousness is not demonstrably unlike experiencing one’s own body, simply mistook awareness of thinking for thinking itself.

To all of which there’s little I can say but “get his ass, sir.”