A central aim of this research is to consider the experience of CFS, a psychosomatic illness, through a theoretical and methodological lens that avoids imposing the mind/body dichotomy. Embodied mindfulness provides the required ontological and methodological focus.
When the pragmatics of mindful awareness is brought to bear on the theoretical problem of the mind/body dichotomy, this problem is transformed. Starting from the observation that the mind and the body can become dissociated and can be brought together, the practitioner acknowledges that the relationship between the mind and the body is not fixed, it is open to change. Western philosophy does not deny this insight but rather fails to acknowledge it.
In summary it is because reflection in our culture has been severed from its bodily life that the mind/body problem has become a central topic for abstract reflection. Cartesian dualism is not so much one competing solution as it is the formulation of this problem. Reflection is taken to be distinctively mental, and so the problem arises of how it could ever be linked to the bodily life. … From the standpoint of a mindful, open-ended reflection the mind/body question need not be, What is the ontological relation between the body and mind, regardless of anyone’s experience? – but rather, What are the relations of body and mind in actual experience (the mindfulness aspect), and how do these relations develop, what forms can they take (the open-ended aspect)? (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.30)
In other words, it is because reflection has become disembodied (considered distinctly mental) that the mind/body dichotomy arises in the first place. From this perspective, Cartesian dualism is not a possible answer to a problem that experience demonstrates need not arise, but a problem in itself. If reflection on the mind/body dualism starts from the embodied experience that the mind and body can be in different states of relation, then it can progress to the question of what this relation is in embodied experience and how this relation can be transformed. A body without a mind is merely a collection of raw materials, and a mind without a body does not exist. Both mind and body are emergent aspects of an organism.
Achieving a state of embodied reflection requires effort, but not in the sense of the effort required to acquire something new, rather, it is the effort involved in unlearning habitual patterns that impede the practitioner from recognising that naturally the mind and the body are coordinated, by virtue of being two aspects of a single organism rather than having any separate existence. If the reflection mindfulness brings to bear on the mind/body problem is always embodied within the asker and mindful of the process of asking, then the disembodied question “what is mind?” does not arise (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.30). What follows from this position is the assumption that consciousness is embodied and that an embodied architecture of consciousness will need to reflect this fact. This approach therefore actively avoids engaging mind/body dualism.
Torrance (2005) highlights the importance of the enactive contribution to debates surrounding the Cartesian anxiety. He also discusses the middle way between absolutism and nihilism that was proposed in The Embodied Mind and has been developed in later work. The argument for this middle way is presented in section 4.13 below. As Torrance comments, this middle way was established on the basis of Varela and Maturana’s notion of autopoiesis, the ‘entre-deux’ of Merleau-Ponty, and the “‘middle way’ of the Madhyamika tradition of Buddhism, which asserts the ‘groundlessness’ of both the outer world and the inner world of the ego” (Torrance 2005 p.359-60).
What this middle way offers is a means by which the science of cognition can be used as a basis to a science of consciousness (Torrance 2005). Undoubtedly an important contribution to these disciplines, this is also an important aspect of the enactive approach for the present research. In order to study a psychosomatic experience it is necessary to have a science of consciousness that is embodied.
Not only does such an approach allow for the disciplined scientific investigation of conscious experience, one that allows mind and body to function equally as sources of meaning, it also allows “cognition and experiential consciousness … to be best seen as two parts of the same process – that of the lived, embodied action of the organism within its world” (Torrance 2005 p.361). This supports the possibility of research that engages a circulation between first-person subjectivity and third-person objective approaches. I would argue that this is particularly necessary for the consideration of the psychosomatic. Boldly put, we need to get the hard problem of consciousness out of the way in order to get started in researching psychosomatic phenomena. Appendix L presents a summary of the hard problem of consciouness and its releveance to this research. Psychosomatic phenomena require the ability to comprehend the circulation between first and third person evidence, just as they require engagement with both psyche and soma. Ideally comprehensive studies of psychosomatic phenomena would engage both the ‘neuro’ and the ‘phenomenal’ directly and in mutual constraint. This theme will be developed further in section 5.2.