No departure to "Pandora"? Using critical phenomenology to differentiate "naive" from "reflective" experience in psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine (A comment on Schwartz and Wiggins, 2010)

In their recent paper Michael A. Schwartz and Osborne P. Wiggins [1] discuss the difficulty of integrating hermeneutical/teleological and scientific/biological approaches to understanding living beings. They point out that traditional solutions so far as they presuppose "metaphysical dualism" fail to integrate these perspectives due to their inability "to explain the relationship between mind and body [...] because it was obvious from our own daily experience that mind and body were intimately united." Moreover, they contend that our culture crossed a point of no return with Darwin's theory of evolution. According to Schwartz and Wiggins, we are no longer able to keep the two perspectives of our life separate. Nevertheless, we would like to point out that human cognitive development is characterized by a fundamental "common sense dualism" between mind and body [2-4]. This "common sense dualism" is therefore so built-in or accustomed, or as we like to say, "embodied" in a fundamental sense. As Hume argued, it prereflectively determines our reflective experiences: "Custom operates before we have time for reflexion." [[5], p. 72] Despite well-meaning efforts of researchers and philosophers to view the mind and brain as ultimately the same, the tendency towards a dualistic thinking is nearly intractable.Moreover, this deeply embedded common-sense dualism is reflected in the blockbuster hits like "Matrix" [6] or online games like "World of Warcraft," albeit as expressed in terms of a virtual reality. These postmodern myths suggest that we are able to transform our experience of self as if it were merely a matter of changing the "software." That is, we seem to find ourselves in the midst of a prevailing cultural "hysteria" in response to the recent advances in neuroscientific research. The latter is often interpreted as inevitably leading to a neurobiological determinism, be it feared or revered as an ultimate solution, whether one chooses to side with its proponents or o