which the natural and social sciences addressing addiction pass right by because they do not lend themselves to empirical investigation. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) notes, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”2 It is a colossal understatement to say that addiction is a huge problem of living.
Addiction can provide an (unwanted) opportunity for a person to confront the most basic existential dilemma: Shall I live or shall I die? Those who choose the former have a Herculean task ahead of them, and ultimately must answer the question, “How should I live?” The first philosophers grappled with that question, and we still grapple with it today. We philosophers have a treasure trove of concepts to help people ask and answer that question for themselves. This is the usefulness and value of philosophy. Philosophy can help provide many ways to live these questions and show that there is not only one right way to do so.
I’ve always said I feel like a throwback in the world of philosophy. My orientation belongs firmly in the ancient world of Greece circa 450 BCE. I turn to the Greeks because they understand philosophy as an activity and as a way of life. Philosophy is an orientation in the world. To be philosophically oriented is to be curious about everything, but especially the nature of the world, the human condition, and an individual’s place in the world. Philosophy explores these basic issues, aiming to describe and explain them. Philosophy also aims at prescription, which is most clearly seen in moral philosophy where the most basic concern is how one ought to live. The exploration of any or all these questions is living with a philosophical orientation.
Furthermore, I think of ancient philosophy as the origin of self-help. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were concerned with living a good life, which requires a great deal of self-examination. The way to live well is to embody certain character traits and attitudes that lead to self-improvement. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) argued that the happiest life is the virtuous life and only those who have the right sort of concern for their character can realize this. Friends matter importantly to one’s character and happiness. Our friends can make us better. The wrong friends can also make us worse off. Any addict would say the same.
The ancients understood the “care of the soul” as the most important undertaking in human life. As the term “soul” may leave some people uncomfortable, I substitute “person” or “self” for “soul.” Care of one’s self is the most important undertaking in life, and making this claim raises a very important question: Just what is a self?
Consider this question I received from a friend who had been sober for a short while. She asked, “Am I the same person now that I am sober as I was when I was still drinking?” She felt she had a drinking-self and a non-drinking self. Her question grabbed hold of me. I had asked myself a version of this question many times. When I look back on my drinking days—on what I was doing, thinking, and feeling—it now seems as if I am watching someone else’s life. In a world of high definition video, I experience my memories like one of those grainy filmstrips popular in the 1960s and 1970s. But those are my memories, experiences, and stories. It is my life and it is my self. In asking the question, “Am I the same person?” I often want the answer to be a resounding “No!” I still feel guilt, shame, embarrassment, and regret at some of the things I remember doing. I do not remember all of it because I was a regular blackout drinker—if I did, it would probably cause me only more grief and shame. While I can imagine some of the things I did, fact tends to be stranger than fiction, so that makes me cringe all the harder. However, I wouldn’t be the person I am now, doing the work I am doing, without having had all those experiences. So, in another sense, I do want the answer to be a resounding “Yes, I am the same person!”
When my friend asked this question, I was teaching a class in modern (1600–1800) philosophy, and we were reading John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). One question philosophers were grappling with at the time was, “What unifies a person such that his identity maintains continuity over time?” What ties it all together? One answer Locke offers is memories. Our memories are the ties that bind each of us into a whole.3 Memories are like the “shrink-wrap” around our consciousness that makes each of us either have or be a continuous self.
I sometimes asked my students, “What about regular blackout drinkers who are still walking, talking, and doing plenty of other things, but have no memory of them? Do such people have a unified self or a divided self? No self? Multiple selves?”
Locke claims that a person’s identity doesn’t extend to that which he does not remember. The conclusion is that a person who has no memories of his past has no identity. This claim seemed as extreme to my students and my friends as it does to me, in part because even though we may not recall particular incidents, we still believe that they are a part of our identities. We now know that even though few people have conscious memories as toddlers, our experiences at that young age are very much a part of who we are today. We were also uncomfortable with the implications it had for responsibility. If I don’t remember doing something, am I not responsible for it? Surely this is not a tenable position.
Having gaping holes in our memories can be very disconcerting; the gaps may be felt acutely. We may spend a huge amount of time trying to fill in the blanks. And where we do not remember, we may be able to imagine. Imagination is a powerful faculty unparalleled in its ability to outstrip other mental faculties. When we act on the basis of imagination, we can find ourselves in all sorts of difficulties in short order.
This discussion about Locke and blackout drinkers is what prompted me to explore addiction and recovery through the lens of Western philosophy. I became convinced that philosophy has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of addiction and recovery and hence the meaning we can make of our lives.
Philosophy may not be the first discipline people would think of as a helpful and friendly companion to understanding addiction and recovery. Some might view it as the last-minute party crasher. Part of the issue is that philosophy has lost its place in our contemporary world: it is both nowhere and everywhere. It is nowhere in the sense that as an academic pursuit philosophy is largely ignored, trivialized, or roundly abused in the larger world. Yet it is everywhere in the sense that philosophy and its perennial questions underpin many of the new academic disciplines.
In a genealogy of academic disciplines (picture a family tree), philosophy has many descendants. In the seventeenth century, “natural philosophy” was an experimental inquiry into the nature of things, which then developed into specific physical sciences such as biology and chemistry. Philosophers were often deeply involved in what we now regularly refer to as scientific inquiry. Philosophers were the original physicians, mathematicians, and even what we now call engineers. René Descartes (1596–1650), known as the Father of Modern Philosophy, invented the Cartesian coordinates (remember the “x” and the “y” axis on which you had to plot points in your high school geometry class?). Another philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), is arguably the inventor of calculus. William James (1842–1910)—whose work had a profound impact on Bill Wilson and the founding of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous—was an American physician, philosopher, and founder of the American discipline of psychology, which is only about 120 years old. Most recently, neuro- and brain scientists are entering the fray, hypothesizing that addiction is a chronic biochemical condition. But here, too, the questions about the relationship between the mind and the body pop up anew and still resist any obvious answers.
I am not trying to justify philosophy’s place in a set of discussions about addiction that has steadily become more scientized and medicalized, but rather I want to show that philosophy underpins many of the questions and methodologies of the different sciences that address addiction. Go far enough and deep enough into any of these disciplines, and you will encounter some of the very philosophical questions that launched their creation. As these new specializations have developed and assert more and more authority in our society, their lineage back to philosophy is more
