Sobering Wisdom

Philosophical Explorations of Twelve Step Spirituality

Jerome A. Miller,Nicholas Plants

• Éditeur: University of Virginia Press
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813936543
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Philosophy of Religion

Originally developed by Alcoholics Anonymous, the Twelve Step program now provides life direction for the millions of people worldwide who are recovering from addiction and undergoing profound personal transformation. Yet thus far it has received surprisingly little attention from philosophers, despite the fact that, like philosophy, the program addresses all-important questions regarding how we ought to live. In Sobering Wisdom, Jerome A. Miller and Nicholas Plants offer a unique approach to the Twelve Step program by exploring its spirituality from a philosophical point of view.

Drawing on a variety of thinkers from Aristotle to William James and from Nietzsche to Foucault, as well as a diverse range of philosophical perspectives including naturalism, Buddhism, existentialism, Confucianism, pragmatism, and phenomenology, the contributors to this volume address such questions as the relation of personal responsibility to an acknowledgment of powerlessness, the existence of a "higher power, " and the role of virtue in recovery. Ranging in tone from deeply scholarly to intensely personal, their essays are written in an accessible way for a broad audience that includes not only philosophers, theologians, and psychologists but also spiritual directors, health professionals, and addiction counselors. Perhaps most important, the book is also conceived for those involved in Twelve Step programs whose lives are being transformed by the experience.

PART ONE

Facing Powerlessness,
Experiencing Empowerment

J. JEREMY WISNEWSKI

Being Powerless to Change

The Wisdom of the First Step

STEP ONE: We recognized that we were powerless over our addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.

It is very fitting that this collection begins with Jeremy Wisnewski’s philosophical reflections on his own ordeal of addiction and the breakthrough made possible by his acknowledgment of it. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, the great twentieth-century German thinker, Wisnewski describes the “world” of addiction phenomenologically: he helps us see it “from the inside”—from the addict’s own perspective. This approach enables him to show how taking the First Step is an excruciating struggle. But it is also an opening to possibility, as Wisnewski, with an assist from the American pragmatist William James, explains. This is the first of our many encounters with Twelve Step paradoxes.

There are times when there is nothing else in the world. Everything points either to it or away from it. It is the color spectrum that allows you to see the bright and the dull. That is the core truth of addiction.

To be addicted is to live in a world colored by one’s object of addiction—it appears everywhere, in everything, behind each emotion, before each decision. Addiction comes in myriad forms, but these forms seem to share a common structure: addiction organizes one’s entire existence—it is the force around which a life comes to orbit. It defines how one sees one’s possibilities, one’s potential actions, and even one’s relationship with others. Every addiction has its own peaks and valleys—and each object of addiction displays things in its own unique way. Some addictions are not as disruptive or chaotic as others—but they all organize things, highlighting what’s important and what is merely incidental.

Addiction is an imperialist. It colonizes every aspect of a life. In the most severe cases, nothing remains untouched. Addiction is not content to stay in its own arena, happily consuming its object when possible. It must reach out—it must become the center—and it will take a backseat to nothing. This is why, for the addict, to give up the addiction is not a simple matter. Everything must change. The center must be found again. This is why, for the addict, a world without the object of addiction is an almost unintelligible world—a distant shore, a greener pasture.

The addict is powerless over his addiction. He is his addiction. It demarcates the boundaries of his experience, of what is intelligible and what is not. To begin to overcome addiction requires seeing this, and all that it means: to know one is addicted is to know that there is nothing one can do—that one’s entire world is owned by a substance, and indeed exhausted by it.

And herein lies the essential irony of addiction, as well as the wisdom of the First Step: it is only by recognizing that one is no longer in control—that one lives under the thumb of a tyrant—that one can begin to find the world again.

Addicted Phenomenology: The World of the Addict

I have been a recreational drug user for most of my life. I first went to a drug rehabilitation institution when I was thirteen years old. I went again at fifteen. Most of my drug use has involved fairly common substances—alcohol and marijuana. There have been periods, however, when my drugs of choice were on the harder side: LSD, PCP, and hydrocodone have all been central features of my life at various times. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say they were my life.

In each of my addictions, I found a similar situation: my life became organized around my addiction. The actions that were most palatable were those that allowed me to indulge my habits, regardless of what other values I once had. I have lied to and stolen from family members, all the while claiming to love them and to recognize the importance of honesty. I have tried to deceive doctors in order to get prescriptions. I have sold things of great value—even if they did not belong to me—just to get the money needed for my immediate gratification. The values the addict once held most dear are soon eclipsed by the immediate needs that constitute the addict’s world.

The world of the addict is a world of consumption and subterfuge. Addiction doesn’t simply make one do one’s drug of choice with more frequency—though it certainly does that; it also changes the way one understands and feels about more run-of-the-mill activities. Life is organized around opportunities for use, or around the creation of such opportunities. The most disturbing thing about the addict’s behavior is not simply what he will do. While I am now disturbed by my own past actions, I am far more disturbed by the fact that these actions seemed necessary, even right, at the time I decided to do them. Addiction doesn’t simply lead you to do things you regard as unacceptable; it changes what you count as acceptable in the first place. Addiction doesn’t just alter our actions; it alters how we perceive actions in general.

Addictive behavior constitutes the world of the addict. A “world,” in the phenomenological sense of the term, is the context within which one acts—a context that defines what matters and that makes certain courses of action stand out above others. When the philosopher Martin Heidegger says that human beings are “being-in-the-world,” this is exactly what he has in mind.¹ To be human is to exist within a context that organizes our activities and gives sense to our lives. For the most part, the world we occupy is a familiar and intelligible one, and this familiarity and intelligibility make it possible for us to act with the fluidity that accompanies normal activity.

The addict’s world has a distinct character, but it too is a structural whole like the world of the non-addict. In everyday language, we speak of “the world of business,” “the world of fashion,” and “the entertainment world.” Such phrases capture, albeit crudely, Heidegger’s central idea: to be in a world is to be absorbed in it—to experience certain things as important, and others as not. In the business world, for example, the importance of profit and loss stands out in a way that it does not in the world of concern captured by the word “poetry.” Worlds organize experience, make them intelligible, and accentuate certain things over others.

In an important sense, then, we live in different worlds—but this should not be exaggerated. As Heidegger argues, our being is a “being-with” (Mitsein); our world is a with-world (Mitwelt).² In watching the Olympics, to take an easy example, one sees precisely how much is shared. The space of concerns that motivate the Olympian is worlds away from my own concerns, but I am able to understand it—to inhabit it vicariously, as it were. As I watch gymnasts, I am quickly brought to see precisely those things that are of concern to the gymnast: the slight bounce of a landing, the grace of a motion, the need to get every movement exactly right without appearing stiff or inelegant. The “world of the athlete,” in other words, is not my own, but it is one I can understand and, indeed, one I can appreciate.

To talk of the “world of the addict,” then, is not to talk of a world totally unintelligible to the non-addict. In many ways, the non-addict understands implicitly what the addict’s world is like: it has a central element (the object of addiction) that makes certain actions more apparent than others, that organizes one’s time, and that constitutes the addict’s sense of what’s important. In a fundamental respect, then, the world of an addict is like the world most of us inhabit: for some, a career makes our actions intelligible and gives us a sense of what’s important; for others, one’s family centers things; for still others, it is athletic accomplishment, or music, or food.

But for all the structural similarity, the world of the addict is not identical to the world of the non-addict. In addiction, there can be no happy balance between one’s addictive behavior and other activities. While one can have a successful career and also a wonderful relationship with one’s family, occupying the domestic and the commercial world successively and with equal dedication, addiction will not be made to play second fiddle. In addiction at its worst, every other care and concern is subordinated to a central obsession: consumption of the object of addiction. Indeed, the intelligibility of other things becomes indexed to what one craves: one works in order to have money to use; one’s relationships become a means to fulfilling one’s desires—a source of support for one’s habits, whether the support be financial, emotional, or even spatial (after all, one must use somewhere).

Addiction comes in many forms, and I have no desire to be overly reductionist. My addiction to hydrocodone was of a remarkably different character than my addiction to PCP: the urges in PCP were stronger; the situation seemed more desperate. I did more that I regret to satisfy the addiction. Physical addiction may well influence and shape an addict’s world in ways we may not find in psychological addiction. Similarly, addiction to legal substances (as opposed to illegal ones) may change certain features of one’s phenomenological world simply by virtue of the social milieu in which one acts. These are important differences, but they should not be allowed to mask an underlying similarity: to be addicted to something is to understand oneself, and everything around one, in a particular way—it is to inhabit a world where satisfying one’s addiction occupies a central position, eclipsing other ways of acting, other values, and, indeed, other worlds. For the addict, we might even say, the world he finds himself in is not even his world—he lives only to serve his master, in a world that makes him powerless to do otherwise. The addict finds himself thrown into a world he never directly chose, constituted by desires and values that he does not necessarily want to have, and powerless to change that world without losing the very things that allow him to understand himself as he does.

Addicted Logic: The Decision to Quit

And then things become too much to bear. One recognizes, at a distance, that one’s addiction is out of control. Small events become opportunities to engage in one’s addiction: a trip to the grocery store is a chance to get high in the car without having to explain one’s need to get high; a social evening becomes a reason to partake in one’s substance of choice—after all, this just is what I do to relax. A bit of stress becomes an excuse—I work so hard, I deserve a break. It happens with such ease that soon there are only excuses: one is using constantly, and one sees faintly, from the backseat, as it were, that addiction is driving one to its destination.

And when you’ve decided to give it up—well, you don’t really know if the decision is a real one until after you spend some time away from all the resolutions. When (and if) you give it up, that’s when you know whether or not you actually made that decision—there, on that day, when you swore oaths to yourself, weak-kneed but strong-willed, or at least pretending to be.

That’s the thing about addiction. The decision to quit is always somehow tentative. “I’m going to do it!” the addict says, already counting up the exceptions, tallying them next to the days it would be better to quit. “I’ve decided to quit,” the addict says, “but I will do it only after the weekend.” The decision to quit is, ironically, usually a decision not to quit yet.

And strangely, the decision to quit produces the desire to do more of the very thing one will quit. The “last hurrah” is planned. When it is over, though, it wasn’t quite big enough to really be the last one. The date on which one will quit is pushed back into an indefinite future. The addict who sees his problem is always going to quit, and always at some point in the future. By planning to quit, he acknowledges that his behavior is out of control but only in an impractical way. If he realizes that he is unable to put his plan into action, he acknowledges his powerlessness in a much more primal way. However, if he does quit for some amount of time—a week, or a month—he is liable to find reason to celebrate his accomplishment by doing the very thing he is celebrating not doing.

This is addicted logic: at its center is one’s addiction, looking always for a reason to use again. Here we see again the extent to which the world of the addict is constituted by her addiction. Even reasoning all too often turns out to be servicing one’s addiction. But the reasoning of the addict is not an exceptional kind of reasoning. Indeed, it is the normal form of reasoning, but at its most primitive form: we want something, and we invent reasons (or discover them—describe it as you like) to justify getting what we want. As Hume tells us, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”³ Whatever else one thinks of Hume’s claim, this much is clear: addiction thrives on enslaving.

Addicted logic is dialectical. It returns again and again to the object of addiction. As it discovers reasons to quit, it supplements those reasons with their opposites. A reason to continue throws itself into the mix of reasons to quit—and if not a reason to continue, a reason not to quit just yet.

The addict is a torn beast. His desire for his substance—and “desire” is still too weak and generic a word—is so strong that he knows he must quit. And he does want to quit, but it is a want that must exist alongside his desire to continue. He has not forsaken the drug, he has only sworn off it temporarily, and only tentatively at that. He will not do what he wants; he will do rather what he does not want to do—he will refrain. He will stare at his desire, only to finally give in to it—to treat himself, just one more time; to have a(nother) farewell hurrah; to celebrate his most recent victory by conceding defeat. He has proven he can quit, and therefore deserves to reward himself with what he cannot have.

And here are the facts the addict confronts: using this will kill you and you do not want to die; but yo...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Thanks Giving
• The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous
• Introduction: A Meeting Place for Philosophy and Twelve Step Spirituality
• Part one | Facing Powerlessness, Experiencing Empowerment
• Part two | A Power Greater than Oneself?
• Part three | Recovering Selfhood
• Part four | “I Can’t, We Can”: The Role of Others in Recovering Selfhood
• Part five | Transforming Virtue: Taking a Moral Inventory of Twelve Step Spirituality
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index