total genius as abject failure. His thoughts about himself and his place in the world were black and white; everything for him was all-or-nothing. Talk about high expectations breeding low self-esteem. Sound familiar? The man was tortured, and philosophy was for him both the illness and the cure. It had a hold on him.5
Wittgenstein’s odd and tortured ways of being in the world show up in his philosophy, especially when he is trying to identify all that we take for granted in our own worldviews and how we typically project our assumptions about the way things should be onto other people and different ways of living. This was another aspect of his work that simultaneously attracted and repelled me. His examples often take readers aback. For example, he asks: What would you do if you encountered a person selling wood who priced by height rather than volume? At first, you’d think it makes no sense; it seems stupid or wrong or the person must have fallen off the turnip truck back at the bend. But Wittgenstein challenges us to excavate those assumptions and to explore where the lines are between sense and nonsense and what the limitations and difficulties are in trying to understand people who, in effect, operate with some really different organizing principles.
What are we willing to let go of, and what will we hold onto, regardless of how many of our other beliefs we must sacrifice? To people who are not addicted, addicts seem to operate with as skewed a worldview as those wood sellers. What kind of people would risk their livelihoods when the boss has threatened to fire them for being too hungover to work? Who would forsake their family and give up their dreams just to get high? It seems crazy that people do these things, but it seems just as crazy that other nonaddicted people get sucked into our worlds, believing they may be able to make a person stop using. These really are meaning-of-life questions and have a familiar ring to addicts.
Introducing Wittgenstein and his approach to philosophy serves to explain my approach in this book. Like Wittgenstein and the ancients, I believe there is no higher obligation than caring for your soul or your self, and philosophy is an important means to that end. Philosophy aims to make its practitioners better people. When we don’t care for our person in all its dimensions—mental, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual—we run the risk of creating a great deal of confusion and suffering. In our addictions we create confusion and suffering for ourselves and for those around us. By not caring for our person, we are not capable of the best sort of life, as Aristotle would say.
Like Wittgenstein, I understand diagnosis to be an important function of philosophy. Using some of the central concepts of philosophy, I describe and diagnose some of those “problems of life” emblematic of addiction. Good diagnosis always aims to identify the source of the problem so that one treats the cause and not just the symptoms. The symptoms matter enormously, and a person can experience great relief when they are treated. But if the underlying cause is not adequately addressed, recurrence is a likely outcome.
The work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is also important to this task. Kierkegaard stands out from other philosophers in his ability to explore what each person is up against in herself (one of the reasons Wittgenstein was so taken by Kierkegaard’s work). Kierkegaard shows us how we can hinder and even lose ourselves in all sorts of ways: One of the most surprising ways is that we can lose ourselves and be in great despair when we are happy. As Kierkegaard says, “deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells anxiety . . . for despair the most cherished and desirable place to live is in the heart of happiness.”6
My work follows Wittgenstein’s methodology, and my aim in this book is to diagnose by describing some of the forms of suffering that accompany addiction. As mentioned previously, addicts often suffer from self-deception, which has many faces or guises. Rationalization, denial, and minimization are some of the more familiar forms. At first glance, other forms are less familiar, but just as common and dangerous, including shame, lack of self-trust, hedging your bets, procrastination, and feeling like a moral failure by placing demands on yourself that cannot possibly be met.
As Wittgenstein notes, the “cure” involves changing how one sees and understands a problem or situation. Diagnosis alone is not sufficient; however, it is an important step to the dissolution of problems. Understanding without action is purely ornamental; action dissolves problems. For example, a person who always worried about being caught in lies about his using dissolves that worry when he stops using. That worry is no longer viable because his actions are different. One important action that must be taken repeatedly is making a passionate commitment to different ways of living. Such a commitment may lead to what Aristotle calls “flourishing” and many others might call a life of great recovery.
HOW IS ADDICTION LIKE LIVING IN A CAVE?
PHILOSOPHY HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE, BUT one with the higher or loftier goal of living a good and just life. This pursuit has involved examining the nature of just about everything. Socrates, one of the first Greek philosophers, who appears as a character in the Dialogues of Plato (his student), always asked a guiding question, “What is it?” The “it” could be justice, piety, beauty, courage, temperance, or knowledge. For Socrates, these are the crucial virtues around which life should revolve, which is why he interrogated people when they invoked these concepts. His agenda was to draw the line between what appears to be just or pious, for example, and what justice or piety really are. The stakes are enormously high; Socrates once engaged a man who was prosecuting his own father for impiety or offense to the gods. Socrates attempted (unsuccessfully) to get this man to see that prosecuting his own father might be the impious act.
In his pursuit of knowledge about the nature of virtues, Socrates first had to debunk popular opinions about them. Popular opinion tends to have a stronghold on many of us. Debunking happened in the context of a dialogue, but in reality, it more closely resembled a cross-examination. Socrates looked for the essence, the “necessary property,” or “ineliminable trait” that made particular acts pious or just. He interrogated every definition offered to him by asking for examples, pushing and pulling against those definitions, turning them inside out and upside down, stretching that definition to see if weird things followed, exploring what follows when a particular definition is put into practice, and excavating hidden assumptions in those definitions. Being in a dialogue with Socrates was intellectual gymnastics on an Olympic level, and for good reason: Socrates took his philosophizing as a commitment to help people avoid making mistakes that would have long-lasting if not eternal effects on their soul. This isn’t exactly glamorous work, but it is vital in the pursuit of knowledge of any sort. Socrates’ work prompted the seventeenth century philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) to describe himself as an under-laborer, clearing away the rubbish that gets in the way of acquiring knowledge.7 We now call this work conceptual analysis, one of the most powerful tools a philosopher has to wield.
How does philosophy approach or provide us with a better understanding of addiction? How can we engage with popular views about it? Socrates would ask, “What is it?” And he wouldn’t be alone: psychiatrists, psychologists, chemical dependency counselors, and people in recovery programs are asking this question. Neuroscientists have entered the fray, searching for both the cause and effective management of addiction. Yet there is no definitive consensus on what addiction is or on what substances and behaviors have the potential to become addictive. Defining addiction remains an area of heated debate, with incredibly huge stakes on both a personal level and on social and public policy levels.
Despite differences of opinion, most of us can recognize—and through recognition, perhaps better understand—certain behaviors and situations in which “normal” use of alcohol and other drugs turns to destructive dependency. We can see a problem even if we cannot agree on an exact definition or description of it.
One sort of recognition can be found in examining
