Abstract
The present paper questions the taken-for-granted identity between surprise and emotion, according to its common meaning in psychology. I therefore hypothetize that the introduction of the concept of valence offers a crucial contribution in order to dismantle the above mentioned identity, thus paving the way for a more fruitful understanding of surprise, namely including cognition, bodily experience, time and language.
Such a discussion about the emotional valence-character of surprise therefore requires to open up the fitting epistemological background for it. Instead of a mere body-brain interaction I will suggest the necessity of a more encompassing setting, namely: body-heart-brain, descriptible with the double-face rhythm of surprise, both lived emotional and cardio-vascular: hence the hypothesis of cardiophenomenology as an integrated epistemology including heart into the body-brain circulation: far more than the mere one-sided third person neurological level, the heart both in its physiological and in its lived affective aspects thus represents a unique possibility of intertwinning first person lived affections and third person organic pre-conscious sensations.
The hypothesis of cardiophenomenology unfolds the general framework of the inquiry into the dynamics of surprise as including an emotional component while not being an emotion as such. In the end surprise will be identified as an encompassing circular phenomenon.
For the audio-video presentations of the Conference “Surprise, an Emotion?” at the University of Carbondale (25–26 september, 2013), and especially to hear the initial oral presentation, go the following link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYanpUeuyeQ.
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Notes
- 1.
An experience therefore is all the more pre-conscious when it is merely lived through. Typically many sensory and emotional lived experiences are pre-conscious in the sense that I am immersed in or permeated by such states, moods or fluctuations without being aware of them. But their are not unconscious because I may become aware in the aftermath of what I lived, if for example a specific event reactivates the previous sensation or emotion. But I would also extend such a pre-conscious lived dynamics of experience to imaginary, perception and remembering insofar as they are lived through in a way Husserl would name « passive » (in the sense of receptive).
- 2.
R. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Translated by Stephen Voss, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1989.
- 3.
I. Kant, Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, ed. Robert B. Louden, Introduction by Manfred Kuehn, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- 4.
P. Ekman & W. Friesen, “Constants across cultures in the face and emotion” (1971/1993), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, pp. 124–129.
- 5.
Let me also mention the primacy of fear in William James’ account of emotions in the corresponding chapter in Principles of Psychology. Here fear clearly appears as a possible name for surprise, which is besides not thematized at all by W. James.
- 6.
R. Plutchik, Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion, New York: Academic, 1980, and Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution, Washington, DC: American Psychological, 2002.
- 7.
On such a time-embeddedness between surprise and anticipation, see my book Lucidité du corps. De l’empirisme transcendantal en phénoménologie, Den Haag, Kluwer, 2001, Section II; see also N. Depraz and F. Varela, “Au cœur du temps: l’auto-antécédance II” in: Intellektica n°36/37 (J.-L. Petit éd.), Compiègne, février 2004, pp. 182–205. See more recently my research hypothesis within the ANR I am leading, in “Shock, twofold dynamics, cascade: three signatures of surprise. The micro-time of the surprised body” in: Surprise at the intersection of phenomenology and linguistics, N. Depraz & A. Celle eds., Boston-Amsterdam, Benjamins Press, submitted [from my talk entitled “Experiential phenomenology of surprise: ‘l’éclair me dure’”, Proceedings of “La surprise à la croisée de la phénoménologie, de la psychiatrie et de la pragmatique,” 21–22 March 2013, University of Rouen/Ens-Cnrs-archives-Husserl. video recording available at http://www.univ-rouen.fr/audio/2010/index.php?vid=337], and Th. Desmidt, M. Lemoine, C. Belzung & N. Depraz, “The temporal dynamics of emotional emergence,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2014. Available at the following link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-014-9377-8.
- 8.
On such a dynamic between surprise and attention, see my article “An Experiential Phenomenology of Novelty: The Dynamic Antinomy of Attention and Surprise,” in Journal for Constructivist Foundations, Special Issue Neurophenomenology, Vol. 8, n°3, S. Stuart & M. Beaton eds., 2013.
- 9.
See N. Depraz, “La surprise. Une dynamique circulaire de verbalisation multivectorielle,” in La surprise à l’épreuve du langage et des langues, N. Depraz & Cl. Serban eds., Paris, Hermann, 2015.
- 10.
Let me note that Husserl thematizes disappointment as a non-fulfillment of expectations, thus identifying a possible negative name of surprise, which is quite coherent with Plutchik’s combined naming of sadness and surprise as disappointment. I will come back to the Husserlian surprise as disappointment below.
- 11.
Exemplarily in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins that are currently in the process of being edited at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven by U. Melle and Th. Vongehr, namely the second volume dealing with affective acts. In this second volume, a manuscript entitled Gefühl (cerca 180 pages) was dealt with at the Husserl-Archives in Paris during the year 2014–2015, read through and worked out as a French translation in the framework of a workshop led by N. Depraz and M. Gyemant. I thank the Husserl-Archives in Leuven for permitting us to do so. This manuscript is accepted with the editor Vrin and currently in course of edition.
- 12.
See my footnote 10 for dis-appointment as an indirect negative polarized surprise of what does not meet my expectations. For this perceptual level of analysis, see Experience and Judgment (1939), Northwestern University Press, Paperback, 1975, §21, and more thoroughly, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on transcendental logic (1918-1926) (1966), American translation by A. Steinbock, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.
- 13.
See E. Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit (1883–1904/1905), Hua XXXVIII, 2004, french translation by N. Depraz, Paris, Vrin, 2008, for example Appendix II, or again Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, op. cit., §35.
- 14.
See N. Depraz, “L’inscription de la surprise dans la phénoménologie des émotions de E. Husserl,” first given as the opening talk of the monthly Research Seminar “Emotions and volitions” (04/10/2013) at the Husserl-Archives (ENS-CNRS) organized in the framework of the ANR Research project I am directing Emphiline-EMCO “La surprise au sein de la spontanéité des émotions: un vecteur de cognition élargie” (2012–2015), published in Alter n°23 (2016), « La Surprise » (N. Depraz ed.) under the title “Husserl et la surprise”. It is available in its original initial PDF draft at the following ANR link: http://129.199.13.46/spip.php?article492. It was also published in Spanish in the Proceedings of the Conference in phenomenology organized by Leonardo Verano in Columbia in November 2013 in Eidos, Revista de filosofia, n°21, Universidad del Norte, 2014 under the title “La inscripción de la sorpresa en la fenomenología de las emociones de Edmund Husserl.”
- 15.
M. Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1916), BoD – Books on Demand, 2013; The Nature of Sympathy, Routledge & K. Paul, 1954, reimpressed 2008 by Translation Publishers, New Brunswick.
- 16.
J.-P. Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (1938), Paris, Hermann, 2010; Sketch for a theory of the emotions, Methuen & Co edition, 1977, Routledge Classics, 2001.
- 17.
M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), Tübingen, Niemeyer, 2001; Being and Time, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.
- 18.
See P. Ricœur, his analysis of the « émotion-surprise » and his reference to Sartre in Philosophie de la volonté I, Paris, Cerf, 1949, p. 238; see also Ph. Cabestan’s talk, 13th of June 2013 at the ENS in the framework of a Conference organized by N. Depraz, “La surprise au risque de sa valence émotionnelle,” about “Sartre: surprise et magie de la surprise” (http://savoirs.ens.fr/expose.php?id=1375), published in Alter (2016), “La surprise” (N. Depraz ed.).
- 19.
J.-P. Sartre, L’être et le néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1945; Being and Nothingness, Washington Square Press (1993), Paperback, 2003: about the Other, p. 170: “the malice of others always surprises me…”; but p. 755: “the Other cannot surprise me; the being which is wishing to bring into the world, which is myself-for-the-Other,—this being I already enjoy possessing”; about the object, p. 219: “in the knowledge of a transcendent object indeed there is a revelation of the object, and the object revealed can deceive or surprise us; and finally, about death, p. 686: “but the unique quality of death is the fact that it can always before the end surprise those who wait for it at such and such a date.”
- 20.
J.-P. Sartre, Les mots, Paris, Gallimard, Folio Poche, 1977 (1ère éd.), pp. 88–89. See also the famous setting at the hairdresser’s: “Un jour, j’avais sept ans, mon grand-père n’y tint plus: il me prit par la main, annonçant qu’il m’emmenait en promenade. Mais, à peine avions-nous tourné le coin de la rue, il me poussa chez le coiffeur en me disant: ‘Nous allons faire une surprise à ta mère’. (…) Le surlendemain de l’opération, Auguste était venu voir mon grand-père. ‘Je vais, lui avait-il dit, t’annoncer une bonne nouvelle’. Karl fut trompé par l’affable solennité de cette voix: ‘Tu te remaries ! – Non, répondit mon oncle en souriant, mais tout s’est très bien passé. – Quoi, tout?’ Etc., etc. Bref les coups de théâtre faisaient mon petit ordinaire et je regardai avec bienveillance mes boucles rouler le long de la serviette blanche qui me serrait le cou et tomber sur le plancher, inexplicablement ternies; je revins glorieux et tondu. Il y eut des cris mais pas d’embrassements et ma mère s’enferma dans sa chambre pour pleurer: on avait troqué sa fillette contre un garçonnet. Il y avait pis: tant qu’elles voltigeaient autour de mes oreilles, mes belles anglaises lui avaient permis de refuser l’évidence de ma laideur. Déjà, pourtant, mon œil droit entrait dans le crépuscule. Il fallut qu’elle s’avouât la vérité. Mon grand-père semblait lui-même tout interdit: on lui avait confié sa petite merveille, il avait rendu un crapaud; c’était saper à la base ses futurs émerveillements.”
- 21.
Aristotle, Poetics, edited and translated by St. Halliwell, (Loeb Classical Library), Harvard 1995, 24, 1460a12-14 et 25, 1460b25.
- 22.
About surprise in Aristotle, see A. Hourcade, “La surprise dans la Poétique d’Aristote” in N. Depraz & Cl. Serban eds., La surprise à l’épreuve du langage et des langues, Paris, Hermann, 2015.
- 23.
A. Smith, “Wonder, Surprise, and Admiration” one feels when contemplating the physical World (1795), Lecture on Astronomy, Section I: Of the Effect of Unexpectedness, or of Surprise, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 3 Essays on Philosophical Subjects [1795], ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982: “We are surprised at those things which we have seen often, but which we least of all expected to meet with in the place where we find them; we are surprised at the sudden appearance of a friend, whom we have seen a thousand times, but whom we did not imagine we were to see then.” Thus surprise is not identified with the rareness or the extraordinariness of its object like it is the case for wonder, but via the relational situation of a “displacement” within the most familiar and sedimented context of experience.
- 24.
Ch. S. Peirce, « On phenomenology » (Harvard Conference 1903), in Pragmatisme et pragmaticisme (OC I, Paris, Cerf, 2002, pp. 295–296): the definition of surprise was early attested by the founder of pragmaticism, Ch. S. Peirce, who really appears as being the philosopher of surprise, while defining the « action of experience as a series of surprises », stresses straightaway its selfgenerating process.
- 25.
See for example H. Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris, P.U.F., Quadrige, 2011, p. 56, footnote 1. In Bergson’s work surprise is omnipresent as a structural “unexpected rupture” grounded in our habits and mechanical routines, for which the philosopher provides numerous figures: the surprise of laughter, of insight, etc.
- 26.
D. Davidson, (1982) Rational animals. Dialectica 36:318–327, and (2004) Problems of rationality, University Press, Oxford, p. 7, who retrospectively concurs with Husserl and Smith, while defining (1982) surprise as a proof of the mastery of concepts of true and false belief. For him you cannot be surprised without possessing some beliefs. Conversely, if you possess some beliefs you are faced with the possibility of being surprised, because something can happen that may change your mind and your beliefs. Davidson gives as an interesting daily example the case of somebody putting her hand in her pocket and finding a coin. If she is surprised upon finding the coin, then she realizes that her previous belief about her pocket was false. She therefore can be credited with the belief that there is an objective reality independently from (previous) beliefs.
- 27.
D. Dennett, (2001) “Surprise, surprise,” Commentary on O’Regan and Noe. Behav Brain Sci 24(5), p. 982: “Surprise is only possible when it upsets belief.”
- 28.
See for example A. Ortony, G. Clore & A. Collins, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988; R. Reisenzein, Meyer, W.-U., & Schützwohl, A. (1996). “Reactions to surprising events: A paradigm for emotion research.” In N. Frijda (Ed.), Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotions (pp. 292–296). Toronto, Canada: IS, and about surprise as a “metacognitive feeling,” see R. Reisenzein, “The Subjective experience of surprise” in H. Bless and J.-P. Forgas eds., The message within. The role of subjective experience in social cognition and behavior, Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, 2000, pp. 262–279.
- 29.
A. K. Seth (2013), “Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self,” Trends in cognitive sciences, 17 (11), pp. 565–573: the model suggests that emotion is induced by a mismatch between interoception (understood as a key-bottom-up process of emotional emergence) and the top-down process of prediction of what interoception may be. In that regard, the insular cortex is a key structure involved in the process of comparison between interoception and prediction. When this comparison results in a mismatch, it generates a prediction error signal from the insula to the neural structures involved in autonomic and motor regulations, what eventually trigger reflexes related to emotion. Such a strictly third person computational model describes a neurocognitive process of predictive coding that can be understood as a “neural correlate of protention,” based on the Bayesian probabilities approach. It is a brain-centered model that pays no attention to the first person approach toward emotion with no integrative proposal for the experience of emotion. Although interoceptive mismatch can be considered an aspect of surprise, it is a strictly cognitive truth-valued account of surprise. From a broader phenomenological perspective, surprise results greater than the mere moment of the mismatch, as it structurally encompasses the phase of anticipation and aftermath in a global experience involving the three systems of the brain, the body/heart and the context. Since Dennett and Davidson’s belief-truth oriented understanding of surprise make a similar extension of surprise to its ‘prior’ expectation-belief phase, I aim at extending their simple truth-valued conceptions by discussing the broader emotional and heart-bodily levels and by including the aftermath, which is not discussed by these authors. More on this in Th. Desmidt, M. Lemoine, C. Belzung & N. Depraz, “The temporal dynamics of emotional emergence,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 2014, op. cit.
- 30.
For more on surprise as an emotionally cognitive process, see N. Depraz, “The surprise of non-sense,” in Massimiliano Cappuccio & Tom Froese (eds.), Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense Making, Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.
- 31.
The explicitation microphenomenological interviews proceed from two different but correlated experimentations: a psycho-linguistic task and a psycho-physiological experiment. 50 interviews with English students are presently completed for the linguistic task (80 are programmed); 45 interviews with subjects with three different groups (depressive, in remission, test-subjects) are now completed (on the basis of 75 subjects for the experiment). Although the corpus is still in the course of being analyzed, some interviews are already transcribed and analysed and allow for preliminary indications which question and/or confirm the a priori categories on the basis of emerging experimental and experiential ones. I will give some examples of such a crossing-checking categorization in the following.
- 32.
E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, Akademia Verlagsbuchhandlung, Prag, 1939, pp. 94–95; Experience and Judgment [1939], Churchill, J. S., and Ameriks, K., translators [1973]; London: Routledge, Northwestern University Press, Paperback, 1975, §21, a) “Der Ursprung der Negation”: “(…) statt der Erfüllung der Erwartungsintentionen tritt Enttäuschung ein. Z. B. es sei eine gleichmässig rote Kugel gesehen; eine Strecke lang ist der Wahrnehmungsverlauf so abgeflossen, daß diese Auffassung sich einstimmig erfüllt. Aber nun zeigt sich im Fortgang des Wahrnehmens allmählich ein Teil der zuvor unsichtig gewesenen Rückseite, und entgegen der ursprünglichen Vorzeichnung, die da lautet ‘gleichmässig rot, gleichmässig kugelförmig’, tritt das die Erwartung enttäuschende Bewußtsein des Anders auf: ‘nicht rot, sondern grün’, ‘nicht kugelig, sondern eingebeult’.”
- 33.
P. Ricœur, Philosophie de la volonté I, Paris, Cerf, 1949, p. 239: “(…) Comment un bref jugement de nouveauté peut-il avoir pour corps un battement de cœur, une inhibition diffuse, une certaine stupeur qui fige le visage et dispose les parties mobiles des sens à l’accueil ? Pourquoi en retour cette disposition du corps est-elle une disposition de l’esprit à considérer l’objet et à s’attarder sur lui (…) Dès lors la pensée incarnée n’est plus jamais punctiforme ni réduite à glisser infiniment sur les choses sans s’y arrêter; le corps empêche que la rencontre avec le nouveau reste une touche fugitive; il fait que la conscience s’étale, s’écrase en quelque sorte (…) le corps amplifie et magnifie l’instant du penser, en lui donnant pour épaisseur de durée le temps de saisissement du corps; par la surprise une pensée s’impose en quelque sorte physiquement.” (My underlining.) See N. Depraz, “La surprise. Une dynamique circulaire de verbalisation multivectorielle,” in La surprise dans le langage et dans les langages, N. Depraz & Cl. Serban eds., Paris, Hermann, 2015. English trans. by S. Davidson, “Surprise. A Circular Dynamic of Multi-Directional Verbalization”, in: Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy—Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XXVI, No 1 (2018) pp 1–17.
- 34.
See Transcription 007 Emphiline philo mp3.
- 35.
See Transcription 010 Emphiline philo mp3.
- 36.
See Transcription 004 Emphiline philo mp3.
- 37.
For more details about such the processual duration of surprise, see N. Depraz, “Shock, twofold dynamics, cascade: three signatures of surprise. The micro-time of the surprised body”, art. cit.
- 38.
See Transcription 004 Emphiline philo mp3.
- 39.
See N. Depraz, “La surprise. Une dynamique circulaire de verbalisation multivectorielle,” art. cit.
- 40.
See N. Depraz, “The surprise of non-sense,” art. cit.
- 41.
For a philosophical-phenomenological account, see N. Depraz, Lucidité du corps. De l’empirisme transcendental en phénoménologie, Den Haag, Kluwer, 2001, IIème Section, and more recently and scientifically atunned, see Th. Desmidt, M. Lemoine, C. Belzung & N. Depraz, “The temporal dynamics of emotional emergence,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, art. cit.
- 42.
For a first investigation of valence with this hypothesis, see N. Depraz & F. Varela, 1999/2004/2011: “At the source of time. Valence and the constitutional dynamics of affect,” 1999, PURH, Ipseity and Alterity (S. Gallagher and Ph. Brun eds.) Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, S. Gallagher & S. Watson eds., Rouen, Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2004; E. Thompson ed. Emotion, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2011.
- 43.
K. Lewin, “Defining the ‘Field at a Given Time’,” Psychological Review. 50, pp. 292–310, 1943, repub. in Resolving Social Conflicts & Field Theory in Social Science, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1997.
- 44.
K. Lewin, A Dynamic Theory of Personality. Selected Papers, New York-London, Mc Grawhill Co., 1935, English trans. by D. K. Adams & K. E. Zener.
- 45.
N. H. Frijda, The Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 1986. p. 207.
- 46.
For a provisional sketch about this assumption, see R. Casati & E. Pasquinelli, « How can you be surprised? The case for volatile expectations », Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2007, 6: 171–183, p. 172; about surprise as a metacognitive emotion, see A. Ortony, Clore, G., Collins, A., The cognitive structure of emotions, op.cit.; for the cognitive interpretation of surprise as a prediction error within apredictive coding, see A. K. Seth, art. cit.
- 47.
For a more detailed account about these statements, see N. Depraz, “The surprise of non-sense,” art. cit.
- 48.
J. J. Paton et col., « The primate amygdala represents positive and negative value of visual stimuli during learning », Nature, 2006, 439, 7078, p. 865–870.
- 49.
E. A. Murray, “The amygdala, reward and emotion,” Trends Cogn. Sci., 2007, 11, 11, pp. 489–497; L. Pessoa, “On the relationship between emotion and cognition,” Nat. Rev. Neurosci., 2008, 9, 2, pp. 148–158.
- 50.
For a more detailed analysis based on two patients, for which we correlatively analysed the explicitation microphenomenological interviews and the heart frequency dynamics during the crisis-phase (6 seconds), see N. Depraz & Th. Desmidt, “Cardio-phénoménologie,” Strasbourg Conference (2014, April), La naturalisation de la phénoménologie vingt ans plus tard, J.-L. Petit and T. Pozzo eds., Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, n°38, 2015.
- 51.
R. Reisenzein, Meyer, W.-U., & Schützwohl, A., “Analyse von Reaktionen auf überraschende Ereignisse: Ein Paradigma für die Emotionsforschung,” in H. Mandl (Hrsg.), Bericht iiber den 40. Kongreß der DGPs in München 1996, pp. 830–836, Göttingen, Hogrefe, published in English under the title: “Reactions to surprising events. A Paradigm for Emotion Research,” in N. Frijda (ed.), Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotions, Toronto, Canada, 1997, pp. 292–296.
- 52.
Art. cit., p. 292.
- 53.
R. Reisenzein & Ritter, D. (1999), Surprise: A “metacognitive feeling.” Manuscript under review; T. Ruffman & Keenan, T. R. (1996), “The belief-based emotion of surprise: The case for a lag in understanding relative to false belief,” Developmental Psychology, 32, 40/19 ; A. Schützwohl (1998), “Surprise and schema strength,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, pp. 1182–1199; Schützwohl, A. (1999), Surprise: A psychoevolutionary paradigm for emotion research, New York: Springer; A. Schützwohl (1999), The structure of the intensity of surprise. Unpublished manuscript, University of Bielefeld; A. Schützwohl & Reisenzein, R. (1999), “Children’s and adult’s reactions to a schema-discrepant event: A developmental analysis of surprise,” International Journal for Behavioral Development, 23, pp. 37- ; J. Stiensmeier-Pelster, Martini, A., & Reisenzein, R. (1995), “The role of surprise in the attribution process,” Cognition and Emotion, 9.
- 54.
R. Reisenzein, “The subjective experience of surprise.” In H. Bless & J.-P. Forgas eds., The message within: The role of subjective experience in social cognition and behaviour, Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, Chapter 15, pp. 262–279.
- 55.
R. Reisenzein, art. cit., p. 262: “When describing the model depicted in Figure 15.1, I made no explicit assumptions about the consciousness versus unconsciousness of the processes that it postulates. However, as noted in the introduction, surprise does have a conscious aspect that probably serves specific adaptive functions, and the theory of surprise must pay heed to this fact.”
- 56.
R. Reisenzein, art. cit., p. 262.
- 57.
R. Reisenzein, art. cit., p. 266.
- 58.
Let’s notice that the collective experimental work set out in the nineties does not seem to have been carried on, except for R. Reisenzein’s own individual work, who is now fullprofessor at the University of Greifswald and mentions among his fields of research “the psychology of surprise.” Among more recent publications, see two 2009–2010 articles entitled “Surprise” (in Ramachandran’s Encyclopedia and in Oxford Companion to the affective sciences); see also with Schützwohl, 2012: “Facial expressions highly surprising event.”
- 59.
“Cardio-phenomenology” as the integrated approach corresponding to the model of surprise unfolded in this article will be only sketched here. It was first mentioned as “a heart-centered model” in “The Rainbow of emotions. At the crossroads of neurobiology and phenomenology,” 2008, Continental Philosophy Review 41, (B. Heiner ed.), pp. 237–259, as a direct following up at the Collège de France in a Conference org. by B. Andrieu & A. Berthoz, “Le corps en acte” (22/23 sept. 2008) with a talk entitled “Le cœur: corps du corps,” then in Tours, 2009, 23th-24th June, at the Journées Psychiatre, Phénoménologie, Philosophie de l’esprit, (Th. Desmidt, org.) on the theme “Emotions et psychiatre,” with a talk entitled again “Le cœur: ‘corps du corps’.” It was again more thoroughly presented explicitly under the label “cardiophenomenology” in Berlin, October 2013, in the framework of the Mind and Life Conference “European Conference on Personal and Societal Change from the Contemplative Perspective” (10–13 October) with a talk entitled “On becoming surprised: an experiential cardio-phenomenology of depression” (unpubl. Powerpoint available). The full-fledged theoretical contention of cardio-phenomenology is defended in N. Depraz & Th. Desmidt, “Cardiophénoménologie” in: La naturalisation de la phénoménologie, 20 ans après (Colloque International, Université de Strasbourg, 22–23 avril 2014), J.-P. Petit éd., Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, 2015. “Cardiophenomenology: a refinement of neurophenomenology” is actually submitted to the Journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
- 60.
A. Bailly, Abrégé du dictionnaire grec-français (1895), Paris, Hachette, 1901, article καρδία, cœur: 1. (Anatomie) organe du corps. Ex: “Πάσχω τὴν καρδίαν,” Je souffre du cœur; 2. siège des passions ou des facultés de l’âme, de l’intelligence. Ex: “ἐκ βάθους καρδίας,” du fond du cœur.
- 61.
Very early for example: J. A. E. Eyster & E. C. Swarthout, “Experimental determination of the influence of abnormal cardiac rhythms of the mecanical effificency of the heart,” Arch Intern Med (Chic). 1920; 25(3):317–324. See also Gesell R. A. “On relation of pulse pressure to renal function,” Am J Physiol, 1913; 32:70. For a phenomenological inspired approach, see Merleau-Ponty’s La nature (1956–1960), Paris, Seuil, 1995, pp. 188–199, which relies on G. E. Coghill’s dynamic anatomy and morphogenesis, Anatomy and the Problem of Behaviour, NY/London, Mac Millan, 1929, as well as on A. Gesell & C. B. Amatruda’s The embryology of behaviour (1945), New York, Harper, 1982.
- 62.
About the heart and its intelligence proper, see very early B. Pascal’s “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” in Pensées, Section IV Des moyens de croire, n° 277. See also a remarkable early intuition in P. Ricœur’s Philosophie de la volonté. 2. Finitude et culpabilité, Paris, Seuil, coll. Points, 1960, 2009, Chapter 4 “La fragilité affective,” pp. 125–126: “le cœur serait le moment fragile par excellence (…) une philosophie du cœur est-elle possible, qui ne soit pas rechute au pathétique (…)?” See finally N. Depraz, “Délimitations de l’émotion. Approche d’une phénoménologie du cœur,” Alter, n°7 Emotion et affectivité, 1999, pp. 121–148, in particular, p. 143 onwards, entitled: “La singularité cardiale de la mobilité émotionnelle.”
- 63.
About the german word Gemüt, see Kant’s Anthropology (1798), §87, Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins, still unpublished manuscript, in course of translation into French by N. Depraz & M. Gyemant; G. Strasser, Das Gemüt, Utrecht, Uitgererij Het Spectrum, 1956, English transl. Phenomenology of Feeling. An Essay on the Phenomenon of the Heart by R. E. Wood, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1977; Ricœur, op. cit., p. 125 and for an equivalence with thumos, pp. 153–183, Depraz, art. cit., p. 124.
- 64.
About such a view, see M. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., along with Coghill’s and Gesell’s contentions.
- 65.
On our current Emphline ANR Research project, the experiment uses four kinds of physiological measure: (1) cardiac frequency; (2) breath frequency; (3) skin conductivity; (4) cerebral pulsatility.
- 66.
N. Depraz, « Consciousness and First-Person Phenomenology: First steps towards an Experiential Phenomenological Writing and Reading (EWR), Sangetha Menon, Anindya Sinha & B. V. Sreekantan eds., Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self, Heidelberg, Springer, 2014 (from NIAS Conference in Bangalore, India, January 2012).
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D. Dennett, (2001) “Surprise, surprise,” Commentary on O’Reagan and Noe. Behav Brain Sci 24(5), p. 982.
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Depraz, N. (2018). Surprise, Valence, Emotion: The Multivectorial Integrative Cardio-Phenomenology of Surprise. In: Depraz, N., Steinbock, A. (eds) Surprise: An Emotion?. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 97. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98657-9_2
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