In his book Self Comes to Mind (published in French as L'Autre moi-même), he draws an ambitious link between feelings and human culture. According to him, it's feelings, that is, the conscious experience of the body's state, that above all explain the emergence and development of civilizations throughout history: human cultures developed because individual organisms feel things and build increasingly sophisticated responses to those feelings.

To connect feelings and culture, he draws on the biological concept of homeostasis, an organism's ability to maintain internal balance in the parameters that support its survival and growth: body temperature, blood sugar, hormonal balance and so on, everything that safeguards and improves health. Damasio expands this notion of homeostasis by borrowing from Spinoza's philosophy, specifically the concept of conatus. In Spinozist philosophy, conatus is the tendency of every living being to persevere in its own existence and improve upon it. Damasio links conatus to homeostasis by arguing that homeostasis isn't simply a balance of the body's physiological parameters, but is also the natural tendency of every living being, from bacteria to humans, to persist and improve its own existence, which he sees as the very driving force behind evolution.

Emotions, then, which the life sciences define as biological programs that regulate the organism, play a part in this homeostasis. That's why faced with danger, we feel fear: our heart races, our muscles tense, our hormones shift, and all of this happens automatically, before we're even consciously aware of it. An emotion is a homeostatic mechanism.

Then come feelings, which Damasio defines as the conscious awareness of these bodily changes: the body produces an emotion of fear, muscles tighten, the heart races in response to danger, and the feeling is the conscious awareness of that emotion, the subjective experience of the body's state. According to Damasio, feelings serve a function: signaling what supports life and what threatens it. They form an information system refined over the course of evolution, extraordinarily sophisticated and deep, like complex biological programs that take in all physiological information, every homeostatic parameter, from bacteria to organs, and from organs to the whole body. Feelings let the organism know what's working and what isn't for the sake of life's development.

Damasio's brilliant insight lies in the link he draws between what humans consciously feel (their feelings) and the solutions they seek in response to those feelings. Feelings like suffering, lack, injustice, despair, and illness give rise to inventions that have driven the development of every field that makes up our society. Medicine, law, religion, economics, institutions, art … All of these are responses to feelings. They form homeostatic processes that, whether at the scale of an individual, a group, or a whole society, allow a return to balance and further growth, a way of "persevering in one's being." Law restores social balance, morality restores balance in relationships, and art seeks to transform or share felt experience. All these responses to feeling ultimately pursue the same goal: improving conditions and fostering flourishing. The logical conclusion, then, is that culture isn't separate from biology, it's biology's natural extension, its culmination.

Another key idea in the book is that feelings come before reason. Feelings are what first signal what's important, what's vital, what's good or bad, pleasant or harmful, what deserves our attention. Reason comes afterward, allowing us to build more elaborate strategies and responses.

So what does this have to do with art?

Well, if we follow Damasio's reasoning through, art is precisely the domain devoted to exploring, expressing, and sharing human feelings. By expressing them through the many forms creative fields offer like writing, music, painting, sculpture, theater, film, fashion, art gives feelings a shape, a color, a face, a melody; it lets multiple faces play out within a single narrative, and makes the infinite variety of human states of consciousness accessible to our awareness.

Through contact with works of art, we can feel what others have felt, and there's an obvious first layer here of connective, sharing, and legacy functions that play an essential role for society: for collective consciousness, for the formation of group identities, for collective memory. A clothing or shoe brand unites people who recognize themselves in its world. Do we buy a pair of shoes simply to have something to wear, or because the brand's style and visual universe evoke something we're drawn to and something we recognize ourselves in because we resonate with the feelings and ideas that emerge from its aesthetic? A musical genre likewise brings together fans who form communities. When we listen to music, we share an emotional landscape that feels good, that makes us feel connected. And that connection can grow into full-fledged communities with their own ideas, visual identity, and dress codes: reggae, metal, punk, and so on.

But what interests me most here is art's ability to alter the state of the body, and by extension, the feelings we have access to. Art seeks to produce or explore feelings and to let viewers experience them in turn. Through contact with art, we gain access to feelings we didn't know, feelings we can't reach on our own. It creates associations we'd never made before, atmospheres otherwise inaccessible within our everyday field of consciousness, combinations of colors, notes, and words that carry us into worlds foreign to our own subjective experience. Art thus expands the repertoire of what a person, a group, or an entire society can feel — and in doing so, enlarges what we might call "the space of lived experience."

The implications here are potentially enormous. If, as Damasio explains, feelings come before reason, then art, and everything else that shapes our feelings, has the power to renew, redefine, and extend the very framework of reason, opening up possibilities we don't yet know exist. Damasio explains that our brain is constantly building maps of the world. A work of art, by offering feelings we've never experienced, has the power to create an entirely new map of the world, to reveal previously unknown aspects of reality, to make perceptible possibilities that had until then been out of reach. Exploring and expanding our emotional repertoire, in other words, expands the ground on which our reason operates : it widens the very spectrum within which our thinking takes shape.

I've been talking about things that sound grand, but I believe this holds just as true on a smaller scale : for the group, for the individual. It's probably true at every scale, in fact. We can see it clearly: watching films or listening to music, activities that for most of us are simply part of daily life, open doors within who we are. Both shape our identity by offering us models like characters, feelings archetypes, that we then associate with an image, a lifestyle, a way of dressing, of smoking, of drinking, of speaking, of living out romantic relationships. When cigarette, alcohol, phone, or clothing brands place their products in films, isn't it precisely because those products hold this power to influence the people watching, to shape desire itself? Is smoking desirable in itself — is rolled tobacco in a paper cylinder inherently "cool"? Or is it the image built up by countless film characters that makes it appealing? From the bad boy in Grease to countless mob films, cigarettes are staged through characters and stories the viewer can identify with. And identification is exactly that: weaving an emotional bond between ourselves and an object of our perception, recognizing in that object a feeling that moves us, or one we wish to cultivate further, or even a feeling we didn't know we had, one that seems to expand who we are and feed our very being.