LE EMOZIONI NELL'INTERAZIONE TRA MENTE E CORPO: UNA PROSPETTIVA EVOLUZIONISTA

The term ¿emotion¿ derives from the Greek word pathos, and from the Latin e ¿ moveo: to move, to remove, to pull outside from the inside of the body. In the ancient Greek culture pathos indicated a passion, a passivity, the moment which the man it endures an external action, word or an event. In a general point of view the emotions are subjective experiences of important intensity that is involved the individual in its physiological and mental globality, always accompanied from physiological modifications and, often, from behavioural and expressive modifications of the organism. The emotions can be pleasant, disagreeable, destructive or creative. They constitute a complex phenomenon, a process that involved all the organism. For long time the study of the emotions has been neglected from the scientific world. It was diffuse opinion that the emotions were a secondary and less noble aspect of the mental life of a man. Today there is a cultural revaluation of emotional aspects, in a picture more general search finalized to the improvement of the quality of life. Of fact, in the contemporary study of the mind, the focus is on the role of the emotions and the neurobiologic functions to theymconnected, in the attempt to undestend the emotional states, the introspection and the consciousness, on the bases of the neurobiologic rules that regulate the social identity. Since the first philosophical reflections, of Platone and Aristotle and, successively,of Cartesio, in fact, the dichotomy between emotion and reason appeared. Since the activity rations was considered the fondation of the human behavior, the emotion, disturbing, was considered the animal part of the not human primate, and ration assumed a despicable meaning in the physical existence. For the rationalist philosophy of XVII century, the emotion was a distortion, a factor of disturbance of the rational behavior, and it was lacking scientific interest. The emotions were considered primitive answers that the individuals employed in situations that they failled to control through more evolved answers, such as reflection and reasoning. The affectivity was in contrast to the cognition and intelligence. Hume, in 1739, asserted that the relationship reason-emotions commonly is analyzed in prejudicial key: ¿there is not more common in philosophy, and also in the daily life, than to speak about the conflict between passion and reason for giving the palm to the reason, and in order to assert that the men are virtuous single in the measure in which they obey to its order ¿. For Hume, instead, ¿the reason is, and must be, enslaved of the passions, and cannot to claim a different function under no circumstances, that to serve and to obey to them¿, it is an antithetic principle to all the philosophical tradition. Charles Darwin was the first scientist and philosopher which proposed a new version the dimension of relationship, he considered the emotion to the par of the behavior and treated also the cerebral life of the animals like an element of adaptation for the survival of the species and therefore re-entering in evolutionistic logic.