were regarded as the eccentric elderly relative who gets wheeled out only on special occasions. So I’m wheeling myself out and bringing attention to the experiences that are emblematic of addiction. I’m also exploring the kinds of meanings we are able to make of our addiction and recovery experiences.
Yes, science does rule and has enormous authority in our world. But as Wittgenstein noted, even if all scientific questions are answered, there remain the problems of life. Which brings me back to my colossal understatement: Addiction is a problem of life. Rates of addiction have been increasing along with the number of substances and behaviors to which a person can become addicted. With more states legalizing marijuana, the chances of more people becoming addicted increase significantly. If food addiction is legitimized by the American Psychiatric Association, we may see exponential growth in the numbers of people who are addicted. This underscores the need for philosophy to participate in these discussions and for all of us to make use of its rich reserve of concepts and tools that have been sharpened over millennia.
For me, as a philosopher and as an alcoholic, questions about addictions are, at rock bottom, questions about the meaning of life. No discipline frames these sorts of questions as well as philosophy. I am staking a strong claim that philosophy is relevant—perhaps more than ever—in our world and in our lives.
PHILOSOPHICAL DIAGNOSES AND CURES
AN EMBARRASSING ADMISSION IS THAT I NEVER USED TO PAY attention to my alcoholism as part of my identity as a person or as a scholar. It was cordoned off as a fact about me that didn’t have a lot of relevance as to who I am or how I am in the world. I certainly never thought it mattered to what I found philosophically compelling. But when I look back on the philosopher who has most influenced me, I’ve had to shake my head in disbelief that I didn’t make more connections sooner. This goes to show the ways a person can be opaque to herself even or especially when she think she knows herself so well.
By training, I am an ethicist and a scholar of Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. When I first encountered Wittgenstein as an undergraduate student, I was intrigued, dazzled, put off, and utterly stumped. His philosophy was a total puzzle to me, but something in his work and attitude toward philosophy resonated with me. I was bitten by the philosophical bug.
Wittgenstein wrote that working in philosophy is similar to working in architecture. It is more of a “working on oneself” in which a person has his own interpretation, way of seeing things, and expectations.4 The reference to architecture may sound odd, but Wittgenstein believed good architecture had to embody certain virtues or traits that were also important for being a good person and living a good life. Wittgenstein regarded himself as an architect. In conjunction with an actual trained architect, Wittgenstein designed a house for one of his sisters in Vienna in 1925. Architecture must demonstrate good proportion, balance, simplicity, functionality, and congruity both within a building and between the building and its environment. Proportion and balance are related; a large room with small windows strikes a discordant chord. Something feels off when you enter a room where the windows are not in proportion to the size of the room and do not align with one another. Simplicity is pleasing. Wittgenstein had no tolerance for design elements that had no function and served no real purpose. They are distracting ornamentations. Congruity relates to the entire property: Is the house in agreement with its environment? A Swiss Chalet in the midst of an urban setting would seem out of place, wrong even. There is a beauty to congruity and an ugliness or failure to incongruity.
Philosophy, like architecture, embodies these same elements or virtues. Philosophy should aim to help a person realize balance, simplicity, proportion, and functionality so that she can design a life that has congruity. One’s life—one’s house—can be congruent with the world around oneself.
A philosopher’s work, according to Wittgenstein, is to liberate herself and others from bewitching pictures, skewed conceptual schemes, and unreasonable and perhaps unjustified expectations. The practice of philosophy is a remedy for confusion that disrupts the balance or congruity of one’s beliefs and actions. Whether the confusion is induced by the outside world or self-inflicted, it makes it more difficult to stay connected to and in agreement with the world. In other words, Wittgenstein was trying to get rid of the “stinkin’ thinkin’” of philosophers. That is a huge task, as he kept realizing. Above all else, philosophy ought to aim for clarification—of oneself, one’s place in the world, and the ways one derives meaning from life. Philosophy, when practiced well, can be useful. It can enable us to grapple in productive ways with questions about the meaning of life and who I am and how I want to be in the world.
For Wittgenstein, as well as for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, philosophy has a built-in moral command to become a better person. Anyone who is trying to live a life of recovery is trying to become a better person, which is why philosophy, addiction, and recovery belong together.
Using illness and disease metaphors, Wittgenstein talks about philosophy, culture, or our times. Philosophy as typically practiced generates as much confusion as it does clarification, which explains why Wittgenstein spent so much time diagnosing the “sicknesses” of philosophy. He believed that much of what philosophers did created false problems, which they then spent (wasted) a great amount of time and energy trying to solve. This tendency might sound familiar to addicts.
Wittgenstein takes a striking approach to philosophical problems: rather than solve them, he believed one ought to dissolve them. Many of the problems that have vexed philosophers for centuries are pseudo-problems that arise from our having certain expectations, assumptions, and beliefs about how things should be. For example, many people believe they are completely transparent to themselves but entirely opaque to all others, as if each of us were a self-contained privacy unit. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to understand others, because each of us can only understand herself. We become bewitched by this picture of human nature and interaction. Wittgenstein’s aim is to help us shake off this bewitchment, so that we may see/experience/inhabit the world differently. When we can do that, we can make different meanings, bringing us back to the meaning-of-life questions. It is along these lines that Wittgenstein’s philosophy and amplifications of it have much to offer discussions about addiction and recovery.
A person’s history and experiences are important in understanding her philosophy. Learning about Wittgenstein’s life made me see him as a fellow traveler, one who appears never to have been comfortable in his own skin. As a person, he makes a kind of sense to me, even though our life stories are radically different. Learning about him as a person also has helped me understand why he was concerned with particular questions and why he found so many “answers” unsatisfactory.
Wittgenstein was a tortured man, for all kinds of good reasons. Born to enormous wealth in Vienna in 1889, his formidable family provided the type of fodder that could keep a stable of phychoanalysts happy for many careers. Wittgenstein had a father who was an overbearing captain of industry, at least two older brothers who committed suicide, a third brother who died when he seemed to intentionally put himself in harm’s way, and another brother, Paul, who was a concert pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, as well as doting and commanding older sisters. He gave away his portion of his family wealth to his relatives in the belief that, since they were already so rich, more money couldn’t possibly corrupt them. He lived in England for most of his adult life except for a brief period in Norway, where he was a notoriously unsuccessful elementary school teacher. His family was Jewish and during World War II, his sisters made a deal with the Nazi regime that allowed them to continue to live in Vienna in exchange for their gold and other holdings. This so offended and affected their brother Paul that he never spoke to them again.
No matter
