Embodying Daoist Internal Arts: Walking the Line between the Reification and the Instrumental Use of Cognition

Vittorio Giovine

doi:10.1177/00380385211044319

Abstract

Existing research into the body pedagogics of cultural practices emphasises tacit/pre-reflective/corporeal knowledge, yet the role of cognition requires further non-dualist/non-conflationist theoretical elaboration. This article contributes to this task through an ethnographic case study of Daoist Internal Arts (DIA) – eastern self-cultivation practices including neigong, qigong and tai chi. Daoist Internal Arts practitioners employ cognitive thought to facilitate a phenomenological shift from a Cartesian/dualist to a non-dualist mode of embodiment whereby mind and body are experienced in their ontological unity. Yet the effective use of thought in this process requires practitioners to walk a fine line between reifying cognition as a substance separate from corporeality, thus opposing mind and body, and utilising it as an instrument to address corporeality and foster mind–body unity. In underscoring this ambivalent character of cognition, I outline a sociological perspective of embodiment that avoids both dualist and conflationist accounts of cognitive and corporeal dimensions.

Highlights

The Need for a Non-Dualist/Non-Conflationist Theorising of CognitionBy engaging with occupational, sporting, religious and educational contexts, a number of sociological studies concerned with embodiment have in the last decade shed light on Sociology 00(0)the ways culturally structured practices are learned and incorporated
The first alternative suggests that our conscious deliberations are the product of our body embedded in material, social and cultural environments, yet risks reducing cognition to an epiphenomenon and endorsing an inverted Cartesianism whereby the mind becomes a mere reflection of embodied experience (Leys, 2011; Shilling, 2017; Wetherell, 2012)
My aim in what follows is to approach this research gap in a way that avoids the pitfalls of both dualism and conflationism, while allowing the distinctive properties attached to mind and body, the reflective and pre-reflective, cognition and corporeality, to remain analytically meaningful

Summary

Introduction

The ways culturally structured practices are learned and incorporated. By focusing on the body pedagogics associated with the transmission of culture – that is, the institutional/ organisational means, the experiences and the embodied changes involved in this process – these studies have deepened our understanding of the mutually shaping interactions between our bodies and their surrounding material, social and cultural environments, and the impact of those interactions on the ways we experience and act in and on the social world (Shilling, 2017). If empirical investigations into body pedagogics have foregrounded the active role of the sensing/feeling body and its tacit/pre-reflective/practical knowledge in the emergence, reproduction and transformation of cultural practices, Shilling (2017) argues that the significance of cognition at a theoretical level remains underdeveloped (see Burkitt, 1999; Crossley, 2014; Noble and Watkins, 2003) This lacuna appears to be part of a determination to avoid any re-proposition of the disincarnated Cartesian person of early sociological accounts, with its associated mind–body dualism, which underpins the related culture–nature, language–matter, psychical interiority–corporeal exteriority, voluntarism–determinism and agency–structure divides. My aim in what follows is to approach this research gap in a way that avoids the pitfalls of both dualism and conflationism, while allowing the distinctive properties attached to mind and body, the reflective and pre-reflective, cognition and corporeality, to remain analytically meaningful

A Dynamic Relationship

Methodology

Concluding Remarks