An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction 9781350114227, 9781350114241, 9781350114210

Citation preview

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Also Available at Bloomsbury Phenomenology and the Social Context of Psychiatry: Social Relations, Psychopathology, and Husserl’s Philosophy, Magnus Englander The History of Reason in the Age of Madness: Foucault’s Enlightenment and a Radical Critique of Psychiatry, John Iliopoulos Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death, Paolo Palladino Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology: Thinking Interculturally about Human Existence, David Chai

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction Anna Westin

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Anna Westin, 2020 Anna Westin has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Not Finished Yet © MM Westin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1422-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1421-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-1423-4 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Carolyn and John Paul

vi

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

viii 1

Part One 1

Existing discourses on addiction

19

Part Two 2 3

The phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, relation and desire Lévinas: The hopeful relation preceding freedom

43 70

Part Three 4 5

The existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful experience and entangled freedom Kierkegaard: Relating to the other as love

99 120

Part Four 6 7

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and love in relational subjectivity A hopeful dialogue of addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps Conclusion

147

Notes Bibliography Index

191

159 184

221 237

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of the people who helped this book come together. Researching at St. Mary’s University gave me the opportunity to discuss addiction with colleagues from a diverse array of disciplines, for which I am grateful. Trevor Stammers and Carole Murphy offered generous direction in the early stages of the research. Later on, correspondence with Jim Orford, Sandhoor Goodhart and Wendy Dossett, and the academic friendship of Margaret Adam and Rossi Borkowski helped me to interpret the nuances of addiction, Lévinas and hope. Encouragement from Graham Twelftree and the London School of Theology community enabled the later delivery of the work. A particular thanks to Hannah Marije Altorf and Pia Matthews, whose wisdom and grace navigated my research journey and to my parents, Carolyn and John Paul. Finally, thankfulness is extended to the wider Winstanley community, friends I have informally discussed with, and to the people I have seen walking out the road of addiction and healing in their own way, and those who walk with them.

Introduction

This research started with a simple question: What is addiction? Addiction had interested me for a while. My parents’ work in counseling, inner city schools and prisons meant that they had both dealt with people with addictions on a regular basis. More personally, there were times in my own life where I needed to reflect on my own experience of disordered appetite. Through these encounters with addiction and appetite, I also came to see the wide range of human experiences that addiction encompassed. There was something about the general human experience that was being expressed through this diagnosis. Young middle-class women and weathered middleaged men experienced it. Some lives showed addiction in the more obvious signs of tremours, a red blotchy face and thin or distended frame. Others hid it away as they continued engaging with work and wider social relations. Like the writers of the nineteenth century, some even perceived their appetite as having the ability to unlock their creative powers and communicate hidden realities. As a philosopher I found the ambiguities interesting. How could one word, addiction, refer to so many kinds of experiences? What was it saying about human experience in general? Renton, in T2 Trainspotting, summarized the often paradoxical experience of addiction when he shouts: ‘You’re an addict. So be addicted. Just be addicted to something else.’ But just how does an addicted person choose? This ambiguity was further reflected in the varied reactions I would receive in conversations about my research. ‘Oh,’ some would say, ‘of course you know that we are all addicted in some way.’ When I probed further, they would define addiction as a generalized practice of overconsumption. ‘I’m addicted to my phone, my sister is addicted to chocolate, and my dad is a workaholic.’ Others would point to specific instances of addiction nearer to their own experience – the pain of losing a brother to alcohol consumption, the suffering of a friend going through withdrawal in prison, the confused memories of a teenage eating disorder. With those I spoke to, addiction seemed to encompass many

2

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

different kinds of human experiences. What I became interested in was not so much how people categorized the term of addiction: Was it biochemical? Social? Genetic? Moral? Rather it was more how it affected an understanding of subjectivity (that is, how they saw themselves or others as addicted) and how a person relates to others. I became interested in what addiction, as a specific kind of experience, was saying about being human more generally. Much of the current research on addiction focuses on this concept of identity in addiction. For instance, Frank Schalow’s excellent book Toward a Phenomenology of Addiction: Embodiment, Technology and Transcendence gives a thorough overview of how addiction is tied to the ‘human predicament’ and emerges from the ‘act of existing’ as a human in the world (2017: 9). Jim Orford develops a fascinating study on addiction as a kind of excessive appetite (1995), and Christopher Cook looks at the individual’s experience as one of desire (Cook 2006). Yet as a philosopher, I felt there were still questions that were unaddressed. I was drawn to three puzzles in particular. (1) First, I generally found that addiction theories work towards solutions, but not the meaning of the experience. However, I am interested in the meaning of the experience, regardless of whether or not the riddle is ‘solved’. Existential phenomenology is more interested in the meaning than the solutions to experience. The current philosophical literature gives a good overview of this, which is what I will expand on in this book. (2) Second, through studying the therapeutic language of addiction, as referenced in the Twelve Steps literature in particular, I found that there are certain assumptions about human experience that contrast with the tradition of existential phenomenology. Here I found that the helplessness of the addict’s identity revealed the challenges of freedom that addiction presents. However, it could not account for the existential choice of being human nor the relational responsibility accounted for in both Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Lévinas. For instance, the Twelve Steps suggests that addiction is the primary self-definition (I am an addict), whereas Lévinas says that who we are is ‘for-the-other’. Another example is that the Twelve Steps acknowledges the helplessness of the addict, whereas for Kierkegaard, we engage freely in individually becoming a subject.

Introduction

3

(3) This brought me to my third question: Namely, if the addicted person is primarily understood in terms of her relation to the object of addiction, then how can we understand the concept of hope? If there is a possibility of a hope based on an exit from suffering in addiction, how can we talk about it while doing justice to a certain loss of freedom that is evidenced in the relation? It is this third puzzle that became the underlying question of the book, and developed the thesis of what I undertook to discover. Addiction presents serious challenges to relations of responsibility and freedom; however, because the self is a relational subject, this threat to freedom is still met with a possibility of hope. This requires examining the particular experience of addiction, and assessing how the subject lives this experience as an existential self, in the midst of the embodied and very real relation of addiction. But exploring the role of hope in an experience of addiction requires identifying a diversity of terms, situating the discourse in the current addiction conversation and clarifying the methodological choices a bit further. This introduction will outline how these initial questions and thoughts developed into a philosophical exploration of the addicted subject as an agent. In the first section, I will give an overview of contemporary theories of addiction. Second, I will explain how I use existential phenomenology as a method for understanding this experience of addiction. In the third section, I develop this existential phenomenology through specific concepts found in Lévinas and Kierkegaard, suggesting that addiction can be discussed through their understanding of subjectivity, and the role of the infinite but hopeful self and other relations that forms the basis for this conscious selfhood. Finally in the last section, I will briefly outline how each discussion can build on the other, accounting for the breadth of the addiction experience, while maintaining that addiction still contains the possibility for a hopeful relational subjectivity.

I  Previous research on addiction Engaging with the previous research in addiction reveals one thing straight away: it is a concept that is very difficult to define. As we will see in more detail in Chapter 1, addiction research classifies addictive experiences in numerous

4

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

ways, depending on the discipline from which it is approached. It has been classified as a mental illness, but not like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. It is volitional, and yet sometimes seems to override volition. It is a moral flaw, but also a genetic trait, a disease that cannot be helped, but also a conditioned response to situational circumstances. It is a lack of human connection or the wrong kind of human connection. It is simple. It is complex, curable, but sometimes lifelong. It is your experience; it is a part of your experience. The attempts at defining this one word are endless. So much so that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V (DSM-V), the most recent ‘bible’ of mental disorders, has chosen to avoid the term altogether and substitute in a variety of loosely related categories (Sisti, Young and Caplan 2013: 146).1 So there are many ways to conceptualize what addiction is, and a lot of different kinds of conversations used to define its borders. Research in the biological and human sciences of physiology and psychology, theology and philosophy have each taken their turns at trying to interpret this experience. As we shall see in Chapter 1, some experts have wished to reduce the experience of addiction to a kind of materialism by stating that the addictive experience is a specific combination of neural pathways and chemical reactions in the brain. Identifying the causes of addiction can unlock the secret to successfully alleviating the condition physiologically. This account would, for instance, highlight the role that neurotransmitters have in facilitating addictive behaviours, or look at how the body responds to substances in particular ways. So it can seem that what underlies the process of understanding addiction is recognizing how to alleviate it, that is, how to engage with successful treatment. It is a matter of identifying and solving the cause of the addiction rather than understanding what addiction can reveal about the human experience. Others, theologians and philosophers in particular, have looked to explain it in terms of moral wrong choosing. In engaging with addiction as a moral issue, the prevention or the cure can be found in changing the behaviour that caused it, through the development of virtue or strengthening of the will. There is a tendency to problematize addiction based on the goal of treatment, or moral betterment, rather than exploring addiction as a part of the human experience. For instance, the focus in philosophy has been about whether an addicted person is ethically responsible for their actions and how that reflects free choice (see, for instance, Chapman 2012; Poland and Graham 2011). Theological discussions often highlight sin and salvation as the context of

Introduction

5

addiction (Cook 2006: 127). Theologians have also looked at how the ‘different degrees of addiction’ challenge the development of classical Christian virtues (Dunnington 2011: 36). The theological and philosophical accounts thus often look at similar themes such as right or wrong choosing, but within different orientations of human experience. While each definition seems to answer some of the questions about how the addicted subject relates to themselves and others around them, it is generally framed as a moral puzzle that requires solving. What these theories seem to suggest is that addiction can be defined and treated. But what I want to contribute is an exploration of subjectivity that can also include the experience of addiction. I do not need to figure out how to treat or solve addiction as much as engage with the complexity of understanding it, through using the tools of philosophy. Reflecting on addiction in terms of existential phenomenology, I am not so interested in knowing how to stop addiction from happening. Rather than trying to find a solution to addiction, I want to understand it a bit more clearly. The central question of hope remains open: Are people still capable of subjective relationship, despite specific, and often extremely severe, challenges to freedom? I am interested in addiction as a means of understanding the human experience, without needing to moralize it or try to fix it.

II  Existential phenomenology as a context of discourse Because I think that understanding the subjective experiences of addiction can tell us more about what it means to be human, I have tried to explain addiction in terms of existential phenomenology. Phenomenology is, as Simon Critchley puts it, the ‘science des naïvetés’, a study of what we engage with normally; the ‘work of reflection that is brought to bear on unreflective, everyday life … reminders of what we already know but continually pass over’ (2002: 7). Giving particular critical intention to the ordinary encounters we experience as humans, phenomenology can help us to clarify and understand meaning when these experiences seem complicated. This method situates the human experience as lived in a concrete and specific individual life alongside others. It takes into account the conscious experience of the subject as a body and as perceiving and engaging with the world around them, while also recognizing the importance of reason and

6

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

questions concerning being and existence that bring the subject beyond its particular experience. I think that this approach is especially important in investigating addiction, as it engages both the physical experience of habit and consumptive practice, enabling us to explore how insights such as Jim Orford’s psychology of excessive appetites (1995) could explain the human experience philosophically. Philosopher Havi Carel in her recent book Phenomenology of Illness (2016) gives a brilliant and thorough account of how philosophy can address the embodied experience of illness, by moving beyond a ‘naturalistic account of disease’ with insights from philosophy (1). Carel writes that illness ‘challenges central philosophical concepts’ (2), and suggests that physical illness can provide us with a ‘philosophical tool’ that, in distancing us from ordinary human experiences and behaviours, can reveal ‘aspects of human experience that normally go unnoticed’ (2016: 5). Carel provides a clear framework for philosophers who wish to explore embodied experiences, and I found her way of sorting content and thinkers of great benefit to my writing. For instance, she explores the body as limit (‘Illness as Dis-ability’, 2016: 78), and looks at how the ‘I can’ (79) of existentialism explains this. She also looks at relation, through how the subject experiences his- or herself as ill, and separated from the other (‘‘Insider’ and ‘Outsider’ Perspectives’, 2016: 133), and the concept of limit (‘Illness as Being-Towards-Death’, 2016: 150). So, for Carel, illness provides a way of problematizing and engaging with specific aspects of human experience. I will use the experience of addiction in a similar way to understand human experience as relational. For this exploration, existential phenomenology was an effective way of engaging with how human experience can be understood in addiction, because of how it can be used to explore the lived experience of a subject. It was also a particularly helpful method of exploring how addiction can be an embodied experience of suffering.2 So, while I want to distinguish addiction from illness, I think that Carel’s method is particularly effective in teasing out significant questions about what addiction experiences actually entail. Let me explain more of what I mean by existential phenomenology by showing how Carel uses it. Carel wants to show how illness is a kind of human experience, in a way that gives us room to explore the human subject as far as he or she is ill. One of the challenges in understanding illness thus is that it

Introduction

7

requires a subjective account of experience that can be understood by others (see the research of Jaspers 1997; Ratcliffe 2008; Stanghellini 2004, ct. in Carel 2016: 19). This is where existential phenomenology becomes an effective way of engagement. Carel sees everyday human experience as philosophically significant. She uses phenomenology because of how it can reveal ‘implicit structures of experience’ (2016: 20). Existential phenomenology is more specifically concerned with the ‘pre-reflective everyday life, human subjective experience, and existential themes such as freedom’ (23), which I found to be particularly relevant in looking at addiction, for instance, in considering how addiction can affect responsibility and self-perception. Carel shows how philosophy through existential phenomenology can explore illness in terms of a specific way of being in the world. Developing the bioethical dimension of philosophical discourse, Carel and Macnaughton write that biomedicine, in its examination of the lived body, does not hold enough to fully understand the living experience of illness. The experience of the body is tied to a wider network of relations between the self, values and the other. Given the complexity of illness, it requires that ‘metaphor, emotion and spiritual and existential dimensions’ which, while ‘not part of the language of the clinic’, are studied as ‘central parts of the experience of the patient’ (2016: 295). This takes into account that a particular person experiences the body in a particular way rather than being just a ‘neutral object’ that we can understand through ‘objective measures’. The body is ‘filtered’ through prior (often unseen) influences, such as relations and value structures (297). Using existential phenomenology as a method for engaging with the embodied experience is also developed further in the work of Fredrik Svenaeus. He further notes that the body is both an ‘intentional’ structure and a biological organism; that is, it is both ‘living’ and ‘lived’ (2016: 208). In order to study illness, then, we need to account for how we live our illness. ‘I am my body, I am my world’ (211): this connects the body to a meaningful way of being in the world, as a particular body. So, if we are looking at, for instance, addiction, we want to examine it not only as a disease, or a ‘disturbance of biological functions’ (212) to be treated like an object – phenomenology tells us we need to look at it as how it is lived (Carel 2016; Svenaeus 2016: 212). In examining addiction, we therefore need to look at how this experience disturbs and shapes the meaning-making processes connecting this particular person to the world around her.

8

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

This contemporary discourse of existential phenomenology is situated within an ongoing conversation. In their reading of experience, Svenaeus and Carel draw on the experience of the body, as developed in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Illness is ‘mooded’, to use Heidegger’s language, to permeate our whole experience (Svenaeus 2001). In his recent book Toward a Phenomenology of Addiction, Frank Schalow outlines how addiction can be read as an emblematic Zeitgeist of our time. However, rather than limiting the discourse to Heidegger, he establishes a discourse with an ‘eclectic character’ that ‘precludes endorsing the vision of any single thinker or even philosophical movement’ (2017: 5). This, he says, reveals how ‘the tendency to become addicted may qualify as the “norm” … by pointing to a destabilizing force endemic to the human condition’ (9). It is this fascinating discovery of what addiction speaks both specifically and generally that the phenomenological method uncovers. Furthermore, the existential phenomenology that Schalow, Svenaeus and Carel engage with offers what a more analytical-centred account can often overlook. It is the ‘subjective experience’ of the conscious self that is embodied as ill (Carel 2016: 6). In this book, I will look at how this particular experience can disrupt and shed light on the experience of the subject alongside others. Carel writes that ‘to study the lived experience of illness is necessarily to explore its existential, ethical and social dimensions’ (2016: 1), which is a view that I will explore further. Understanding experience means looking at the different complexities in the detail of this experience. I will agree with Carel that embodiment, explored philosophically, is inherently a discourse on relation, and I will explore how this relation takes place between the self and others, as an example of self-becoming. I am therefore much indebted to Carel for her method, and to Schalow and Svenaeus for their individual outworkings of embodied phenomenology. My research, however, will diverge from these thinkers in a few ways. First, Carel suggests that illness focuses and informs philosophy. In contrast, I want to look at how philosophy can inform illness,3 or in this case, how philosophy can inform addiction. Secondly, whereas Carel is interested in understanding physical illness, and the ‘loss of faith in one’s body’ (2016: 9), I will look at what this ‘loss of faith’ looks like in terms of the subject’s ability to respond and choose as a hopeful and choosing subject. Like physical illnesses, addiction may be a chronic and ongoing behaviour. As with some fatal illnesses, addiction

Introduction

9

may be experienced ‘unto death’. However, it may also just manifest itself at a particular time, as a particular acute experience that eventually recedes or disappears completely as time progresses. I am interested in how the subject understands his or her addiction, while still engaged in the human experience of relating to others. So where Carel offers an existential phenomenology of physical illness, I wish to engage with addiction. Her understanding of illness through the lens of subjective experience gives insight into how I engage with addiction. It provides the idea of understanding the subject in relation to hisor herself, and to others. But it is problematic to understand addiction in terms of illness (for reasons I will discuss in future chapters). I am therefore using existential phenomenology to give a more comprehensive account of addiction, framed in a particular way.4 This diverges slightly from Svenaeus’ account of finding meaning after the rupture of suffering, as I will suggest that addiction is a relation that already contains a kind of meaning-making structure. Also, though I build my position on the shared view of Schalow that there are ‘common existential questions that challenge addict and non-addict alike’, that is, ‘basic questions that express the existential predicament which each of us share as being-in-the-world’ (2017: 26), and that this ‘being-in-the-world’, to reference Heidegger, already requires ‘being-with others’ (31), I will suggest that the other-relation requires a notion of the infinite to correspond to the unique claims on hope that addiction requires us to engage with. Thus while I will be engaging with the existential phenomenological method for my enquiry, I will frame it in a particular way. I have suggested that addiction challenges an understanding of hope in our relation to the other. I will examine the relational subject more closely, and how addiction expresses itself as a way of relating to the other. For this, I will appeal to the writings of Lévinas and Kierkegaard. It is not merely that a relation is present, but rather looking at exactly what characterizes this relation. If the relation towards the object of addiction defines the human experience, then the person is an addict. But if there are other relations that define the person, then it seems it would be more suited to say that the person is addicted. I found the writings of Lévinas and Kierkegaard of particular help in developing an existential phenomenological account of the addictive experience. I have chosen these two thinkers because of the detailed manner with which they explain our subjectivity in terms of the infinite manner in which we relate to others and

10

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

ourselves, in a way that incorporates a possibility of hope. Lévinas meditates on ordinary encounters of life and considers their philosophical importance to how we understand ourselves as an encounter with another. Kierkegaard engages with the adventurous subjectivity of experience that permits us to grapple with how we can engage with the paradoxes of entanglement and freedom, despair and hope. Both, therefore, frame subjectivity as a kind of extended relation between the self and the other. Though often Lévinas is understood in terms of our relation to the other, and Kierkegaard in terms of our relation to subjectivity (see, for instance, Westphal 2008a), as I looked into the writings, I found the patterns of relation to be more nuanced. Kierkegaard and Lévinas engage with philosophical themes of freedom, responsibility and suffering, framed within the overarching exploration of the human experience as relational and hopeful. Understanding addiction requires looking at questions about human experience rather than defining the conditions under which a person is ‘cured’ or whether particular behaviours are right or wrong. In borrowing concepts from literature, theology and psychology, Lévinas and Kierkegaard bring insight into particularly difficult subjects and how we can engage with human subjectivity. Their thought provides interesting parallels, contrasts and comparisons for developing questions about what it is to be a human, both generally and applied to the concept of addiction. Using their insights on subjectivity and relation, I will suggest that Lévinas and Kierkegaard offer us tools to uncover an experience of hope, even in the midst of addiction.

III  Terminology and chapter overview This book thus engages with how we can understand addiction in terms of human experience, and the specific relational role of hope in this experience. It is important to develop the context for this discussion. Here I first want to clarify the terminology that I will be using. I will suggest that Kierkegaard and Lévinas read experience in a particular way, which I have termed a hopeful relational subjectivity. The concepts of relation and hope will be used philosophically. Hope will refer loosely to the possibility of a future experience that may differ from a subject’s current reality. Defined relationally, it implicitly involves the self–other relation. Drawing on Matthew Ratcliffe’s

Introduction

11

phenomenology of feeling (2008), I will suggest that this definition of hope is more than a bodily state of emotion. Rather, it is a relation that unites the lived and embodied experience of consciousness with a subject’s choosing. I will develop this concept through Lévinas’ reading of responsibility as an exit from suffering. I will also look at how Kierkegaard understands hope through his task of self-becoming, and the paradox of subjectivity. Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s reading of experience is developed through their understanding of relational subjectivity. This subjectivity expresses itself as a love-relation between the subject, the other and God (the infinite or eternal relation). But here love is not the felt or preferential love of aesthetic immediacy or feeling.5 Rather, it is a relation that orients us towards the other. Hope is thus worked out through the relation of love, where I become a subject for-the-other. However, love is also experienced as a way in which a subject relates to him- or herself (self-love). I will argue that this concept of self-love can be found in Kierkegaard.6 More controversially perhaps, I will suggest that it also can be found in Lévinas, through his understanding of subjectivity.7 To justify these interpretations of experience, I will look at how Kierkegaard and Lévinas understand the self as becoming a subject,8 and the subject as relating to the other. I will therefore refer to the ‘self ’ as prerelational, and the ‘subject’ as a being-in-relation. The ‘other’ will reference the human other, and at times, the concept of God.9 These discussions on subjectivity and relation will then be applied to the subjective experiences of addiction, as a way of problematizing the concept of the addict, and bringing the discourse of addiction into a broader conversation of hope and relation. Let me explain how this discussion will progress. Part I starts with the first chapter, ‘Existing Discourses on Addiction’, where I will examine interdisciplinary perspectives on addiction. Here I will give a general overview of the literature that investigates how addiction is caused and how it is treated. First, I will explore how a physicalist account alone may be inadequate to represent the complexities of this experience. Second, I will predominantly draw on Orford’s discussion of addiction as an excessive appetite, as a contrast to the disease model of addiction. Third, I will also look at how the widely used Twelve Steps Program offers a conceptualization of the addictive experience as relational. In subsequent chapters, the focus of my exploration will be primarily on the Twelve Steps because of its popularity and because it closely

12

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

mirrors my understanding of addiction in relation, while contrasting it at significant points. In Part II, I will then look at what philosophy can contribute to the exchange through the existential phenomenology of Lévinas and Kierkegaard. I have chosen to dedicate two chapters to exploring each thinker. The two chapters on Lévinas are grouped according to specific concepts found in his writing that relate to the addiction discourse in particular. These concepts are then explored in two parallel chapters that focus on Kierkegaard, before being brought together and teased out in further detail at the end of the thesis. The second chapter, ‘The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire’, will focus on Lévinas’s phenomenology, which he develops as ethics.10 It will look at the language of Judaism that Lévinas uses to understand the human subject, as existing for the other. A person becomes a subject as he or she responds to an infinite other. I chose to start with Lévinas, as he reveals a basic pattern of infinite relation that characterizes much of the addiction discourse. The addicted person exists in relation to an other. For Lévinas, however, the other is human, so relating to an object like we relate to humans is problematic. Lévinas’s thoughts will be brought into conversation with addiction as I examine how the relation between the subject and the human other can be replaced with an object. Lévinas suggests that we relate to others through infinitely desiring them. But in addiction, the desire is often for an object (for example, alcohol) rather than a person. This can therefore confuse how we orient our experience, as well as how we relate to other people. Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom’. Here, I will look at how Lévinas understands freedom in terms of responsibility. Freedom is important for Lévinas, but he understands it in the context of how we respond to the other. In turning to respond to the other, who I am is a being-for-the-other. Human experience is understood through responsibility for others. Our relation to the other, however, is not predicated on knowledge. The relation is one of encounter; the other reveals herself to me. The encounter with the other is a hopeful relation, characterized by it bringing us out of the isolation and overwhelming experience of the closed off ego. This is, for instance, explored in Lévinas’s use of language, as a way of engaging with the other that is beyond us. I will conclude this chapter by trying to conceptualize addiction experiences as relations of responsibility and revelation.

Introduction

13

The two chapters that follow in Part III will examine how Kierkegaard structures the human experience. His writings reveal a complex understanding of human experience as a subject occupied with the task of becoming heror himself. This is not completely straightforward because the subject is entangled. The subject is therefore limited, while also being free. Chapter 4, ‘The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom’, looks at how Kierkegaard characterizes the subject as choosing itself in freedom. This is understood through the concepts of anxiety and despair, and the change that happens as the individual engages with experience through repeated free choosing. I will argue that this experience is hopeful, however, because it brings the subject to a relation beyond anxiety and despair. Hope then ties to a person’s experience of freedom and self-becoming. Because the problem of freedom often emerges in addiction discourse, I will look at how Kierkegaard’s hopeful engagement might help to explain the challenges of being addicted. I will also suggest that the subject that freely chooses itself, despite the experiences of despair and anxiety, is also choosing an experience of self-love. This relation of self-love becomes a useful way of exploring how we understand a person’s relation to his or her addiction. Chapter 5, ‘Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love’, will examine how Kierkegaard’s individual becomes her- or himself in a kind of infinite relation to others. Commentators have suggested that Kierkegaard does not develop a robust account of the subject’s relation to the other. However, I will argue that it is in the inter-human relation that the individual’s self-becoming is actually revealed. The self-love developed in the previous chapter is simultaneously enacted as love for others. So, becoming oneself as a subject is not something done in isolation, but is developed as a relation of love. I will explore this understanding through contrasting the aesthetic and ethical other-relations with the religious other-relation that Kierkegaard develops through his writings. I will then tie in this concept of love with addiction, looking at how addiction can be understood in terms of loving relation between the subject and the other, and where addiction might be a particularly effective way at looking at the demanding nature of this kind of love. Part IV begins with Chapter 6, entitled ‘Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Love, Hope and Relational Subjectivity’. This chapter engages specific themes of responsibility, relation and freedom found in the texts of the two thinkers, and explored in some detail in the previous chapters. Bringing their writings

14

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

together, I will show where the similarities and differences lie. I will suggest that Lévinas and Kierkegaard engage with similar themes, and that their understanding of the subject is not as different as it may at first appear. For instance, I will suggest that Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s understanding of freedom, suffering and relation develops a subjective experience of infinite love. This love-relation is simultaneously both inwardly (self-love) and outwardly (selfless love) experienced. It is also hopeful, because it orients experience towards the future, and provides an exit from totality and egoism (as experienced, for example, in suffering). So there can be these moments of hope, due to the infinite of the subject towards the other, which is a relation prior to the experience of suffering, anxiety or despair. Chapter 7, entitled ‘A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps’, takes these comparisons between Lévinas and Kierkegaard and applies them to the Twelve Steps Model of addiction. In this chapter, I examine how it is possible to use the themes of relation, responsibility and self-becoming as ways of understanding the human experiences of addiction. I will suggest that Lévinas and Kierkegaard offer a conceptualization of this experience that addresses the limitations of physicalist accounts of addiction, while also problematizing the Twelve Steps experience of being ‘an addict’. The Twelve Steps understands addiction within a relational context (through peer support, a Higher Power relation and mentorship), and emphasize treating addiction in relation. However, it is the relation to the object of addiction that still frames the person’s experience. Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s concepts of self, freedom and language challenge this totalizing view of addiction. In my interpretation of these two thinkers, the subject becomes him- or herself through relating to others. The addicted person belongs to the human community. Addiction is not a phenomenon that is out there, as a separate way of being human. Kierkegaard and Lévinas both assert the universality of human experience.11 Though addiction presents particular challenges to subjectivity,12 Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s existential phenomenology is unconditional (Westphal 2008: 27).13 This means that an addicted subject can experience hopeful relational subjectivity, expressed as love, as well. I therefore suggest that this reveals the strengths of the relational aspects of a Twelve Steps understanding of addiction, while problematizing the notion that ‘I am an addict’. This brings us to conclude that a person can be addicted without being defined as an addict.

Introduction

15

The goal of this analysis is therefore to look at how particular lived experiences can be explored philosophically in a way that gives meaning to human experience in general. Carel writes that illness modifies, and thus sheds light on, normal experience, revealing its ordinary and therefore overlooked structure. Illness also provides an opportunity for reflection by performing a kind of suspension (epoché) of previously held beliefs. (2016: 11)

It is ‘these characteristics’ that ‘warrant a philosophical role for illness’ (11). Addiction is not the same as an illness. It is physically displayed through a person’s behaviour. It is also psychologically experienced through a conscious engagement with an object. As such, it provides fascinating insights to the exploration of what it means to be human. Studying this particular way of ‘being in the world’ reveals themes of a common humanity. The addicted person can still experience him- or herself as a hopeful relational subject. Therefore, while this text concentrates on addictive experiences, my wish is that it also challenges the stigmatization of the addicted subject as separate from the human experience of becoming oneself alongside others. Taking time to examine experiences of addiction can therefore help us to understand more general concepts concerning what it means to be a human subject. When I started this research, I supposed that all of us are addicted to something in some way. In order to address the problematic way of seeing addicted people as not ‘like us’, I thought that it required seeing the possibility of addiction in all of us. I thought that we were connected because of our potential to all be addicts in some way. For instance, some are addicted to relationships, while others are addicted to alcohol. But having studied the contemporary research on addiction alongside Kierkegaard and Lévinas, I do not think this is an accurate representation of the human experience. Not all people are addicted. It is not a generalized experience, and it does not need to be in order for us to relate to others who are addicted. But also importantly, those who are addicted are still engaged in the same human experience as those who are not. Though the specific experiences differ, each of us is confronted with responsibility and freedom. Each of us, whether addicted or not, is engaged in becoming ourselves alongside others. This text is therefore an exploration of addiction experiences, while maintaining the experience of a hopeful relational subject.

16

Part One

18

1

Existing discourses on addiction

Addiction is deeply interconnected with how we engage in the world around us. In Ringwald’s account of addiction, he draws on the story of a New Yorker named John. John recalls his experience of addiction, stating: ‘I was always in pain. The drugs stopped working and I was left with me’ (2002: 1). There are generally two ways of looking at addiction. Either the person is an addict, or the person has an addiction. The classifier reflects an understanding of the role of addiction on the identity of the subject. People often use the two terms interchangeably, but I will argue that philosophically speaking, it is important to distinguish between the two. This is because each provides a different account of the interaction between addiction and human experience. Either the addiction experience is the permanent primary relation of an individual’s human experience or the experience can be changeable, and is secondary in defining human experience. It is the difference between saying ‘I am an addict’ and ‘I have an addiction’. In this chapter, I will attempt to explain this distinction between being an addict and having an addiction through surveying the addiction literature. This chapter will therefore provide the situation for the discourse to unfold. This requires looking at what characterizes this relation between addiction and the subject, while accounting for the loss of freedom and questions of responsibility that highlight the addiction experience. Previously I have suggested that addiction is a part of the human experience. In order to explore this, I need to look at how different theories of addiction reflect particular ways of understanding what it is to be human. Before I can ask how the existential phenomenology of Lévinas and Kierkegaard helps us to understand these experiences, I will therefore need to look at some of the existing theories of addiction. I will not be able to provide an outline of all viewpoints in this discourse, but I will examine how the past

20

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

views of addiction have shaped contemporary discourse. In order to clarify this conversation, I will divide the discussion on addiction into three general categories of discussion: addiction as physiological, addiction as psychological and addiction as relational.1 I am aware that there may be overlaps between each category, and will explain the reasoning behind these distinguishers as the chapter progresses.

I  An evolving concept: The history of addiction Addiction discourse generally includes a specific set of relations.2 In this book, I will mostly examine the addicted person from the point of view of the subject, with an occasional recourse to seeing the addicted person as other. The healthcare professional and other carers will generally be understood in terms of the other, as will any mention of God. Anticipating the philosophical language of Lévinas and Kierkegaard, I will use the subject to refer to a single person, and the other to reference a person other than the human subject. Aside from these relations, I will examine the addicted person’s relation to the object of addiction, as a non-human other. I am aware of the complexity surrounding the term person in bioethical literature,3 but will here assume that the person is a human being with a psychological and physical self, and a capacity to relate. This will be further developed through Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s understanding of the subject in subsequent chapters. Before we look any further at how we want to figure out the philosophical significance of addiction, it is important to know how the term has been used. Recorded experiences similar to what we now refer to as addiction have been found in early accounts of human history (Cook 2006: 9).4 Over time, views on addiction have changed. Theories of addiction dating before the middle of the nineteenth century predominantly defined it as a moral or spiritual deficit: being addicted was equated with lacking in a moral character. The addicted person lacked the necessary willpower and self-control necessary to behave in a morally and righteously virtuous manner (McKim and Hancock 2013: 92). The subject is blamed for choosing a destructive behaviour that could have been avoided.5 Currently identified as the moral model, the perspective states that ‘addictive behaviour, whatever its differences from ordinary behaviour, is sufficiently under the control of the agent for him or her to be held responsible

Existing Discourses on Addiction

21

of it’ (Levy 2011: 89). That is, addictive behaviour is just another form of behaviour that is ‘normal (enough)’. It is the goal rather than the behaviour itself that differs (89). However, it is tricky to classify addictions as immoral when some of the contributions that substances give a self could be linked to her own understanding of self-flourishing. Seen from this perspective, the status of virtue could be viewed quite arbitrarily. For instance, the poor women drinking gin could be classified as being morally corrupted, while the distinguished opium-eating poets could be seen as courageously authentic. This suggests that there is an ambiguity in defining addiction as essentially ‘immoral’, aside from context and social status. This moral model also raises another question: what if the person chooses to be addicted? Addiction could be seen as an authentic choice that enables the self to develop as a creative or as a successful business person. As illustrated through accounts such as Thomas deQuincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater, it seems that some behaviours that could be classified as addictive (he cites opium) can also be linked to the development of creativity, etc. (2009). Framing addiction morally may be an easy default, but it may be problematic when looking at the complexity of why people are in some instances choosing particular behaviours. The second common conception of addiction, the disease model, developed as a response to the moralism of the former model. In the early 1900s, with the emergence of new humanitarian movements and the development of medicine and psychology there was a widespread push to move beyond defining addiction as morally corrupt and chosen behaviour to defining addiction as a disease (McKim and Hancock 2013: 92). As new diseases were discovered and explored, addiction was understood in a similar way. It started out as a hypothetical understanding of addiction, but became more definitive as time went on (Orford 1995: 2).6 The shift from moralism to disease was significant, because it moved the addicted person from a classification of ‘moral corruption’ meriting punishment to an ill member of society. This theory was later embraced through the establishment of the Twelve Steps Alcoholics Anonymous movement in the middle part of the twentieth century (McKim and Hancock 2013: 92). Schalow illustrates the intricacies of developing this ‘first program for treating addiction’ (2017: 26), which he suggests contains an implicit self-questioning characteristic to the phenomenological method. But founder Bill Wilson was no philosopher; he

22

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

was ‘a man of unremarkable qualifications’, a stockbroker, who along with Dr. Robert Smith, developed the Twelve Steps that involved an honest selfrecognition of helplessness, and the need for the other’s help in getting through. These steps then formed the core of the Alcoholics Anonymous community, which later branched into other anonymous Twelve Steps groups, bringing addiction from an isolated moral failing, into the context of a community of peers with a similar experience. Though officially AA does not align itself with any one definition of addiction, it usually invokes the disease model as a way of distinguishing addiction from moral failing and individual responsibility. Yet usually understanding something medically under the ‘social construction of disease’ brings the treatment into the realm of medical professionals (Murphy 2015: 8). This can be helpful in terms of taking it away from moralism’s limitations, but can also raise problems when ‘issues previously seen as “natural” or nonclinical’ are studied as medical cases (8). As Orford identifies, another challenge of the disease model is that there are different views on what is seen as addictive behaviour, and thereby what is classified under the disease. The classifications fluctuate even among researchers. For instance, whereas addiction traditionally relates to the triad of drugs, alcohol and sex, some researchers wish to expand this definition to include gambling and food behaviours (1995: 3).7 Defining addiction as a disease is also challenging when it comes to assessing whether it is a chronic, relapsing or temporary experience. When quantitative analyses suggest that most people ‘mature out’ of addictive behaviours, the compulsion that defines the disease is put into question (see, for instance, Pickard 2012: 40). It used to be that the disease model was seen in contrast to the moral model, but as we can see from its problematic definition, it actually seems to contain moral claims within it. Helplessness is just medicalized. As the sociological work of addictions experts such as Jennifer Murphy show, the disease model can be problematic because of how often it uses moralistic language to identify behaviours. Now the moralistic model and the disease model overlap. Whereas the disease model was initially developed to save people from the stigmatizing labels of moral deficiencies, Murphy actually suggests that it ‘promotes the paternalistic8 policy of coerced treatment, because the state [carer, etc.] is actually saving sick people from themselves’ (2015: 47). This once again shows that there is a difficulty in defining addiction. There are different distinctions that have been made, such as, on what it is to be addicted,

Existing Discourses on Addiction

23

what it is to have an addiction and what it means to have had and no longer have an addiction. This short overview already shows that there are two ways of looking at it predominantly that are still being used. These two models show the complexity of understanding whether someone is an addict or is addicted. I will come back to the moral model and the disease model. However, there is more to be said about addiction. In the next section, therefore, I will look at a few contemporary examples of different perspectives contributing to the discourse.

II  Addiction as physiological Examining the history of addiction, we can see how moral and disease models developed as particular ways of addressing what it is to be addicted. Researchers still debate over what ought to be classified as addiction, though most embrace a definition that encompasses ‘both substance and “process”, or behavioural addictions’ (Katehakis 2016: 74). The literature points to how this discourse is developed in a particular way, through addressing addiction physiologically, psychologically and relationally. Let me explain a bit more about this threefold distinction in addiction literature. First, I have suggested that one of the ways that addiction can be explained is through human physiology. I have used this term to encapsulate perspectives on addiction that focus on the biological structures of the body.9 Recent neurobiological research has also brought a new angle on addiction, by highlighting the importance of brain physiology in this process. Understanding the different physiological approaches will therefore show how the physical body mechanisms interact in addiction. Second, addiction can be understood in terms of psychology. Researchers such as Jim Orford have contributed significantly to what is known about addiction through examining how it affects a person’s psychological wellbeing. Third, I will examine the relational dimension of addiction.10 The rise of sociological studies on addiction populations, the role of stigma and the presence of others in the addicted person’s experience suggest that relation plays a significant role. It also raises the challenge of understanding the similarities and differences in relating to another human versus relating to the object of addiction, and whether there is space in addiction discourse for the concept of a Higher Power, or God.

24

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

In the next section, I will examine how addiction is understood physiologically. Looking at addiction physiologically means that it is understood and treated through its effects on the body. Physiologically, we can look at how addiction engages the brain and other parts of the body to bring about particular behaviours. Treating the body’s physiological structures is then paramount in addressing the addictive behaviours. However, this theory is particularly tricky, because there is so much going on in a human’s physiology. One perspective that is currently enjoying significant status in the discussions is scientific research on the effect of addiction on brain structures. Here, the physiology of the brain takes centre stage. According to this perspective, the brain is ‘critical to our identity, the organ of individuality and mind that gives us our unique thoughts, personality and behaviour’ (Kagan 2006, qt. in Carter and Hall 2012: 1). The structures and mechanisms of the brain therefore become central in defining and understanding how to treat addiction. Often addiction has been referred to as a process in which the brain is ‘hijacked’ by a substance. The addicted person’s brain processes are overwhelmed to a point whereby he or she lacks the capacity for responsible control and choice over a specific behaviour (Pickard and Pearce 2012: 1, 6). In this situation, an addicted person cannot have responsibility for their behaviours because he or she lacks the preliminary agency of control. According to this theory, if someone were addicted to alcohol, she or he would have little choice but to drink to excess. Looking at the physiology of addiction, other researchers such as Marc Lewis have pointed to the role of learning in the brain. Drawing on research about the neuroplasticity of brain structures, Lewis suggests that addiction is learned and engrained as a particularly salient habit. So addiction is explained in terms of physiology, but this physiology is one that is adaptable and changing. He writes that ‘addiction may be a frightful, devastating and insidious process of change in our habits and our synaptic pattern. But that does not make it a disease’ (2015: 44), citing how the limbic structures of motivation are engaged in the addictive process (45). For instance, the amygdala ‘acquires and maintains emotional associations’ and the dorsal striatum is ‘activated when goal-directed behaviours shift from impulsive to compulsive’ (45). Lewis shows that the research done on the physiology and plasticity of the brain does not mean that a person is permanently an addict. This is an interesting perspective, but I think that it can overlook some of the more intricate and

Existing Discourses on Addiction

25

subtle aspects of addictive experiences, such as how an individual might attribute meaning to their addiction. Other researchers look at how the object of addiction can interact with physiology to develop particular effects. For instance, Muller and Schumann (2011) use results from research conducted on laboratory rats to distinguish between addiction and drug instrumentalization. They suggest that consuming drugs ‘for their effects on mental states’ is not the same thing as addiction. So, just because a person may consume painkillers to alleviate pain, or opium for its ‘feel-good’ qualities, it does not mean that he or she is necessarily addicted to that substance. This research is similar to Pickard and Pearce (2012), who distinguish between types of control. For example, someone who consumes alcohol with a certain amount of control over his or her behaviours is not addicted. However, a person who consumes alcohol without similar behavioural control could be addicted (Muller and Schumann 2011: 293). The physiological understanding of addiction is not just about control. It is also about the harm that addiction may cause. In this case, addiction could be looked at in terms of the harm that it causes to the people involved. Interaction with addiction could be framed in terms of its adverse effects on a person’s physiology. However, research shows that most people who consume substances do not become addicted, which means that the harmful consequences seem to come from a particular kind of behavioural use, rather than just the substance itself (Muller and Schumann 2011: 293).11 Muller and Schumann suggest that addiction to illicit substances can often start with conscious use to ‘advance one’s own fitness’ through a variety of ways. These would include easing social interactions, enhancing sexual and cognitive performances, alleviating stress, producing hedonia and improving physical appearance through weight loss (303, 308). Thus addiction involves a conscious choice made for a specific end. So Muller and Schumann suggest that only ‘a minority of those who take drugs engage in compulsive consumption’ (2011: 308).12 It causes physiological harm, but only to a few who take drugs. I think that this provides an interesting challenge to the moral theory of addiction and the disease theory of addiction. It seems to be less about the actual substance of addiction, and more about the experience of the person who is taking it. This emphasis on the importance of the subject of addiction, as opposed to the object of addiction, is something that I will look into further in the subsequent chapters.

26

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

However, though people may take substances without getting addicted, there are others who do. So if we are considering a physiological understanding of addiction, it is important to look at what distinguishes regular behaviours of consumption from addictive behaviours. In 1931, Tatum and Seevers noted that not all drugs cause physical dependence. That is, not all substances make someone physically dependent enough to develop withdrawal symptoms and encourage compulsive self-administration. Drug habituation became the term adapted for drug consumption that does not cause physical dependency. Whereas addiction had harmful consequences, it was suggested that habituation was less harmful. Tatum and Seevers also suggested that there was a distinction between physical dependence and psychological dependence.13 Physical (physiological) dependence looks at how the drug affects the body’s regulatory systems. A drug can, for instance, create unseen withdrawal symptoms that could affect the brain’s neurochemistry. Without the drug, the brain would not function in its normal capacity, creating a craving for the drug (cited in McKim and Hancock 2013: 96–97). Yet as we have seen within the physiological view, there are confusing contradictions. Sometimes a substance does harm, whereas sometimes it does not. McKim and Hancock note that these early theories of addiction lack basic explanations for key behaviours. For instance, why do some drugs, such as marijuana, only cause mild withdrawal symptoms? Why is it that not all people (such as some heroin users) who consume addictive drugs become addicted (i.e. they can stop voluntarily even though they may have withdrawal symptoms)? Finally, why do some relapse into drug use even after physical dependence has worn off (2013: 97)? The questions that were raised by Tatum and Seevers in the 1930s were later addressed by Charles Schuster’s positive reinforcement theory of addiction. According to McKim and Hancock, Schuster suggests that drugs are self-administered because they act as positive reinforcers and … the principles that govern behaviour controlled by other positive reinforcers apply to drug self-administration. (2013: 99)

When someone takes a substance, it is because there is something about that substance that causes an agreeable response. Taking the substance is therefore linked to its positive benefits. To illustrate this through a series of tests on laboratory rats, Schuster showed how animals will self-administer drugs (in

Existing Discourses on Addiction

27

this case, morphine) in low doses. Because the doses were so low, the animal would not develop any physical dependence. However, positive reinforcement effects of the addictive substance often turn sour after too much drug use. Still, positive reinforcement does seem to be a contributing cause for initial drug use. This suggests that though physical dependence is a significant factor in determining addiction, it cannot be the only reason for consuming and abusing drugs (99). Therefore, addressing the physical dependence of a drug cannot be the only means of treating addiction. Understanding addiction requires seeing how physiology interacts with other dimensions of human experience to more fully account for its effect on human behaviour. Let us look back to our dual classification of addiction: either a person is permanently an addict, or a person is addicted to a particular object or behaviour for a set amount of time. If addiction is understood as physiological, then it is the physiological aspects of the person that must be treated in order to alleviate the addiction. Each theory of what addiction is corresponds to a particular understanding of how it ought to be treated (if, of course, addiction ought to be treated). Treating addiction as a primarily physiological experience is the premise behind pharmacological treatment. Through administering medication, physiological (primarily neurophysiological) states are changed to enable the person to engage more freely in non-addictive behaviours. Addiction is treated through medication that corresponds with the person’s particular addiction.14 The medication, through its chemical interaction with body systems works on specific parts of the physiological mechanisms at work in the addictive experience. For example, nicotine patches reduce cravings to smoke through providing a measured amount of nicotine into the body through the skin. Another example of using medication to treat addiction is when a person addicted to heroin will take a mixed agonist–antagonist to block the drug effects (Nutt 2010: 141).15 The goal of pharmacological treatment is to diminish addiction’s physiological effects on the person in order to change his or her behaviours.16 Depending on the situation, specific medication will be employed to act as either an agonist or antagonist. The agonist works to increase the effect of the drug, whereas the antagonist works to decrease the effect of the drug (Stimmel 2015). It should be noted that pharmacological treatments are often used in conjunction with other treatment methods. However, some research suggests that drug treatments are limited in their long-term

28

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

effectiveness, and can create potentially harmful secondary symptoms (Orford 1995: 87).17 It is also challenging to distinguish between the initial effectiveness of the medication and its placebo effects, and how it contributes to long-term health.18 But a difficulty in finding a specific drug treatment that is effective in all cases may reflect the inherent difficulties underlying any conceptualization of addiction. Already it seems that understanding addiction requires something more than a physiological account. For example, when studying the body researchers might need to look at the emotional motivation behind why a person would choose a particular substance over another. Current research in neurobiology offers a link between the brain’s effect on learning and addictive experiences (Humphreys and Bickel 2018). Here we can see how the physiological model intersects with psychology. Challenging a disease model of addiction, Lewis suggests that science needs to meet the ‘subjective experience’ of learning (2015: 10). In this account, addiction does not have to be ‘a deliberate choice if it’s not a disease’ (22). Pointing to the neurobiological structures of the brain, Lewis suggests that addictive experiences present a salient environment for deep learning to occur in the brain. However, as recent findings in neurobiology have indicated, the brain’s neuroplasticity means that learning may be altered. Habits formed can, under some conditions, be changed. Therefore, though addiction can change the brain by affecting its neurochemistry and the behaviour that results can become compulsive, it is also possible that another pattern of learning can occur (Lewis 2015: 33). The evidence in this model suggests that physiological accounts of addiction need psychology to account for the subject’s experience of addiction. As the next section points out, psychological accounts of addiction present a framework of interpretation that significantly shapes how we view this experience.

III  Addiction as psychological So while physiological accounts of addiction show how the body interacts with addiction, it lacks some answers concerning why specific people might be addicted and others might not. Orford stresses that there is a strong psychological dimension to addiction. He refers to people with addictions

Existing Discourses on Addiction

29

as having an excessive appetite for specific objects, which he classifies psychologically. The person engages with behavioural patterns that reflect the need to fill this appetite (1995: 1). I will suggest that a psychological model of addiction is primarily focused on a person’s appetite and behavioural patterns that are associated with this appetite (for example, understanding why a person might eat without being hungry). This is a model that Orford develops in his foundational work on the psychological dimensions of addiction, Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addictions (1995). Here he challenges the idea that people are born with addictive personalities. He suggests that addiction is rather about a kind of behaviour towards certain objects.19 Orford writes that a main problem in addiction theory is how difficult it is to establish a link between using a substance and becoming addicted to a substance. The use of a specific substance does not necessarily predict a causative addictive effect (125–127). For example, just because someone uses cocaine does not mean that she will necessarily become addicted to it. Other environmental and biological factors contribute to varying physiological reactions (140), including genetic traits, socioeconomic circumstances, accompanying stress, comorbidity of other illnesses (physical illness such as chronic pain, mental illness such as depression), etc. Of course, this hinges on what excessive behaviour is deemed harmful. Orford, for instance, refers to the classic triad of addiction as excessive appetites for drink, sex20 and drugs, and more recently adds excessive eating and gambling (10). However, some researchers wish to classify further excessive behaviours, including abnormal patterns of working and shopping (compulsive buying disorder, or CBD – see Black 2007: 14), as addictive. Orford’s psychological framework identifies addiction as an excessive appetite. This is primarily to challenge the disease model of addiction, which he suggests is problematic in how it perceives behaviour. The psychological accounts assume that the source of addiction lies within the person rather than the object for that particular person. Otherwise why choose that particular object? The addictive behaviour is caused by the person’s psychological response to this object. An effective way to dampen this appetite could therefore be through changing the behaviour of the person, by altering how he or she engages with the object. Behavioural modification, such as that used in cognitive behavioural therapy, looks at changing how the person perceives the appetitive object. So, for the person with an excessive appetite, the goal would

30

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

be to change the object (for example, food) into something less appealing. The simple logic is that a change in psychological associations will change the behaviour, to ‘increase self-control over addictive behaviour’ (Weirs et al. 2016: 210). Behavioural modifications have in the past included electric-shock therapy (hardly ever used in current practice), token reward systems, negative stimulus conditioning and self-control procedures. The goal of behaviour modification is to reinstate a pattern of ‘discrimination in specific appetitive behaviours’ (Orford 1995: 189).21 However, as with drug treatment, behavioural controls have proven to be limited when used exclusively. Many people struggle to retain control over their behaviour over a prolonged period of time.22 Others seem to never achieve a sense of control over their appetitive behaviours in the first place (190).23 Caroline Knapp shows the psychological complexity of addiction in her memoir on alcoholism. She writes: Alcoholism … is a progressive illness; it sneaks up on you so subtly, so insidiously, that you honestly don’t know you are falling into its grip until long after the fact. ...[In the beginning] the drinking felt more like an experiment, an act based on some hypothetical remedy I’d begun to form about the connection between liquor and anxiety, liquor and sadness, how one corrected the other. ‘Drink as a remedy’ ... Over time, the lesson folded into the soul: liquor eases. (1996: 18, 32, 63)

Knapp expands this internal logic further, writing that there is a sense of deep need and the response is grabbiness, a compulsion to latch onto something outside yourself in order to assuage some deep discomfort. ... Fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Fill up the emptiness; fill up what feels like a pit of loneliness and terror and rage; please just take it away, now. (60–61)

I have chosen Knapp because of her illustrative account of addiction. Her writings reveal the many factors that go into the addictive experience to make it psychologically salient. Treating addiction, then, requires addressing the cause of this salience. However, this requires understanding the person presented individually. In the sixties, addictions researcher R. E. Reinert tried to figure out why addictive experiences were so complex. He suggested that modifying the

Existing Discourses on Addiction

31

excessive appetite requires figuring out the generalized role that the substance plays in the person’s life. So for instance, whereas others may associate the appetite with a specific mood or activity, the addicted person has generalized the appetite to account for a great variety of situations, modes, feelings and activities … in such a way that a greater or lesser feeling of discomfort is felt if [the behaviour] is absent from the situation. (1968: 41)

Reinert explored this further by using alcohol addiction to show how someone might originally ‘drink for the same reasons anyone else does’ (1968). However, as time passes, the person uses drinking either for ‘a greater variety of the reasons or establish particularly strong connections between alcohol and a few of the reasons’ (1968). Addiction, according to Reinert, is a bad habit. The difference between the addictive behaviour and other behaviours is the difference in the role that the addictive object has within each person’s psychological narrative. Addiction has been linked to a long list of psychological characteristics,24 including a propensity for feelings of despair and shame, an extreme preoccupation with a specific object (Orford 1995: 78–79) and impulsivity (Bloningen et al. 2011: 2167–2168). People who are addicted present a great diversity of personalities and engage in varying behavioural patterns (Brunch 1974, qt. in Orford 1995: 143). For instance, contrary to the Twelve Steps Program that suggests an addict is always an addict, Pickard illustrates the difference between those who live with long-term and short-term addictions (those who ‘mature out’). She suggests that the fundamental question is about what purpose the consumptive behaviour serves in the person’s life. Addiction, for her, is a means of coping with adverse emotions and wishes to distinguish a model of addiction as disordered consumptive practices25 and compulsion (2012: 41). However, this list of traits does not give us much information on the cause of addiction.26 It also raises the question as to what exactly is problematic about addictive behaviour from a psychological perspective. This question has been taken up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM-IV defines addictive behaviours under ‘substance abuse’ and ‘substance dependence’, whereas the most recent DSM-V (2013) has amalgamated these two headings into one ‘overarching disorder’ (APA 2013: 20). According to the latest definition of the DSM-V, a mental disorder is

32

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

a syndrome characterised by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behaviour that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distresses or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. (APA 2013: 20)

This is, of course, a tricky definition that practitioners have criticized. It is problematic, for instance, to classify someone with a mental disorder when the behaviour could be a reaction to a particular situation or relation.27 Caution is therefore advised in the placement and use of diagnoses. But it seems that practitioners are often aware of this challenge. The exact diagnosis that reveals the disorder is tricky to articulate. Even the ‘bible’ of mental disorders does not seem to be able to offer clear-cut answers about addiction and so has to resort to vague terms.28 However, the DSM does provide a helpful summary that can highlight the difficulties in the process of defining addiction. The DSM-V notes that this reflects how ‘the science of mental disorders continues to evolve’, and that the boundaries between many disorder ‘categories’ are more fluid over the life course than the DSM-IV recognised, and many symptoms assigned to a single disorder may occur, at varying levels of severity, in many other disorders. (APA 2013: 5)

Including addiction-like experiences under ‘Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders’, the premise of this concept is that both substance abuse and dependence can be classified along a continuum.29 This therefore means that an addiction, such as gambling, is classified under the same chapter as other addictive and substance-related disorders, such as alcohol-use disorder, due to its similar physiology, brain origin and treatment (APA 2013: 1).30 This is another reason why it is important to keep the concept of addiction as broad as possible for this discussion. As seen in the development of the DSM, the psychological understanding of addiction is difficult to define with precision. Often addiction is described in terms of the behaviours that it generates: withdrawal, dependence, etc. But the psychological understanding of addiction is also linked to its causes. The definition and the cause of addiction can overlap to generate a confusing picture of what is happening in the subjective experience of the person. For instance,

Existing Discourses on Addiction

33

Simona Giordano, in Understanding Eating Disorders, suggests that referring to a person as having an eating disorder just means that he or she manifest ‘some types of experiences and behaviour’ (2005: 63). This classification will not explain behaviour but will rather just summarize this condition, and to some extent, predict what might result from it. As Gilbert Ryle points out, a description is not the same as an explanation (1978, qt. in Giordano 2005: 24). So, even if the diagnosis is able to classify the behaviour as, for example, an eating disorder, it does not explain why someone may act this way. Giordano clarifies that ‘in most instances the psychiatric diagnosis merely has a descriptive character’ (2005: 69). However, then she also seems to make this more difficult by suggesting that the definitions of some forms of addiction (‘substance use disorders’ specifically) actually do contain an understanding of what is going on and what may have caused it. She writes that ‘abnormal experiences and behaviour are in a proper sense caused by the illness, and … the illness actually explains those experiences and behaviour’ (2005). So, in order to see why an individual has a mental illness, one must go beyond the definition, except for specific circumstances in which the actual illness itself causes the behaviour.

IV  Addiction as relational We have seen how addiction can be understood in terms of physiology and psychology. But while most of this discourse so far has been on the addicted person, other perspectives demonstrate the role of the interpersonal relation.31 For instance, a central theory of addiction is the concept of attachment, developed through adapting John Bowlby’s original attachment theory (1969) to experiences of addiction. This theory suggests that a person’s ability to emotionally and psychologically connect with a primary caregiver can have lasting adverse psychological implications.32 This is seen, for instance, in the study taken of 101 patients that were admitted for ‘alcohol-related behaviours’, which suggests that there is a connection between alcohol abuse and the inability to form long-lasting interpersonal attachment (Dumbrava 2000, Flores 2004, qt. in De Rick et al. 2009: 100).33 This very brief overview of attachment theory motions to the important role of others in a person’s understanding of self in relation. In this framework, the relation between the

34

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

self and the other is not only important to one’s own self-understanding, but constitutes relations integral to the inner structures of consciousness. A recent article that trended on the popular Huffington Post website illustrates this emphasis on the interpersonal relation. Its title reads: ‘The Likely Cause of Addiction has been Discovered, and it is Not What You Think’ (Hari 2015). In his article, Johann Hari writes that addiction is primarily caused by disconnection. Hari references Gabor Maté’s work on addiction in connection to his popular book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2008). What this research highlights is the importance that others have in addiction. This relational aspect of addiction is something that sociology, theology and Twelve Steps have had a particular amount to say about. Suggesting that human relations play a role in addiction is one thing. However, finding out exactly what that role is could be a different matter altogether. Different perspectives suggest that addiction could be seen as a kind of relation, in which the object of addiction is related to in a human-like way. Others think we could examine the effect of addiction on relations with others, such as family and friends. Another perspective that I am not going to look into very much is how the effect of others may actually contribute to developing an addiction. In this section, I will specifically be examining the interpersonal (social) relation between people, and a person’s relation to a Higher Power.34 This opens up the relational discourse on addiction in terms of moral responsibility, stigma and ethics. It can also link in with accounts of healing and relations to the infinite that offer perhaps more unusual accounts of experience. This can be difficult to conceptualize because the relations are subjectively experienced, and often require the reliance on personal narrative. As such, I have drawn on a few sociological studies to illustrate how these relations can be perceived. The support of others is often perceived as central to the success of recovery. Pickard and Pearce suggest that the therapeutic community of a group of peers promotes essential elements of emotional and relational hope, support and encouragement that cannot be found when recovering alone. They identify this as an experience of belonging, created by the frequency of contact, stability, positive perception and presence of mutual concern between people (2012: 639). This experience of belonging serves as a motivator for behavioural change, while also simultaneously providing a protected environment for the individual to ‘risk’ changing. It also reflects how outside of a therapeutic community, the person can feel isolated, and can be prone to ‘loss of hope,

Existing Discourses on Addiction

35

self-blame, disengagement and relapse’ (Pickard and Pearce 2012: 644). This seems to reflect what Maté and Hari suggest, which is that addiction has strong links to human relationships. How we interact with others is an important part of understanding addiction. But not only are relations with others important to understanding why addiction happens; they also seem to be key to different theories of recovery. Flanagan suggests that ‘the solution [is] social’ (1991: 146). So other people are an essential part of treatment, and this can also be linked to understanding why addiction develops in the first place. While others can provide a context of support and encouragement for the addicted person, the interaction between the addicted person and others is not always a positive one. This is, for instance, found in the stigmatization of addiction. Erving Goffman defines stigma as ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting [and often will prevent] an individual from being fully accepted by the rest of society’ (1963, qt. in Murphy 2015: 150). Murphy links this to stigma that develops from seeing addicted people as criminals and ‘weakwilled’, along with institutionalizing and medicalizing addiction through treatments in prison and courts35 and defining it as disease (150–151).36 Her account shows how stigma distances people from each other based on perceptions about them. Dealing with the separation generated by stigma is therefore important when considering the interpersonal relation in addiction. The Twelve Steps offers a framework for these experiences: the Steps function as guideposts to understanding addiction in a particular way, and engaging with how it can be treated. The Twelve Steps is one of the most popular ways of understanding addiction (McKim and Hancock 2013: 157),37 and one of the reasons for its popularity is because it directly engages with this relation between people. The prototype for the Twelve Steps Program affiliates, Alcoholics Anonymous, emerged out of the Oxford Movement, which was a faith-based group established at the turn of the century. In this Movement, participants sought to live an authentic, pre-institutional Christian faith in community. The practice included gathering together in groups to engage in scrupulous ‘self-examination, acknowledgement of character flaws, restitution for harm done to others and working with others’ (Orford 1995: 302). In his study, Schalow suggests that American founder Bill Wilson, who ‘had no professional expertise’ on addiction, and was a stockbroker rather than a psychologist or medical professional, developed the Steps by ‘incorporating a personal, self-

36

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

questioning response to the crisis pervading human existence’ (2017: 26). Thus Bill Wilson is both ‘a concrete figure in search of self-understanding’ and ‘a pioneer of the first program for treating addiction’ (27), the result of which means that the program provides ample material for philosophical discussion. Another of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, however, did have a medical background. As a doctor and a self-professed alcoholic, Dr. Bob Smith partnered with Bill Wilson in developing and applying the effective nature of the Oxford movement faith-based accountability groups. The Twelve Steps thus started in its original form as a theocentric self-help group for people struggling with similar alcohol-related behaviours (302). The Twelve Steps do not strictly adhere to one definition of addiction. Yet, it has been suggested that some of the language used invokes the disease model of addiction (Murphy 2015: 136). This definition generally suggests that through genetic predisposition and a wide variety of possible social circumstances, the person has gotten him- or herself into a destructive habit of behaviours.38 The destructive behaviours that cause the addiction are interlinked with each other and addiction is central to defining the identity of the person. The person is an addict. The widespread popularity of the Twelve Steps Program suggests that there is something in this interpersonal approach to addiction that is important. The Twelve Steps Program tries to break down the barriers of stigma through peer dialogue.39 The power of connection felt between people who have been separated because of their addiction is felt through the shared narratives in the Big Book, which functions as a sort of textbook for the Twelve Steps. For example, one woman writes how sharing her story with another provided a ground for hope for the future to develop outside of isolation. She writes of her exchange with another addicted person: Our Hawaiian sales rep seemed frustrated; I thought he was disappointed that he hadn’t managed to write an order for a couple he had just finished working with. I went over to console him. He said, no, his mood had nothing to do with the couple; instead, he explained … ‘I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for a year and a half, except I just drank again this past week. I’m a mess about it.’ … To my amazement I spoke the words, ‘Mike, I think I’m one too.’ Mike’s mood instantly changed. I recognise now it was hope. (AA 2001: 325)

This account shows a regular encounter in the Twelve Steps that brings the subject into relation with others. Distinct from other frameworks, rather than

Existing Discourses on Addiction

37

engaging with health care professionals, the addicted person shares stories with his or her peers. The Steps also focus on the connection between the addicted subject and others outside of the group. Step Ten, for instance, underlines a common humanity among addicted and non-addicted people that enables them to connect with others. The Big Book, the touchstone text for the Steps, underline this realization: ‘we begin to see that all people, including ourselves, are to some extent emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong, and … we approach with tolerance and see what real love for our fellows actually means’ (AA 1981: 92). The Program offers a context of others who share similar experiences (Robinson 1979, qt. in Orford 1995: 303). In this context, the person can feel supported rather than isolated, and is given direction through the group ideology asserted by the members (303). There are also other aspects of the program that can be helpful, in terms of bringing the person into relation with others. The original Alcoholics Anonymous model characterizes addiction as a ‘loss of freedom and willpower’ (Orford 1995: 20). The person needs an external source that can restrain and overcome his or her own lack of internal control (AA 1981). In the case of AA, the external source is both the group and the Higher Power. Framing addiction within this understanding of addiction makes particular sense as it emerges in the midst of a shift from moralizing addiction to treating it more medically. While the primary relation in the Twelve Steps is between the subject and peers, there is also the second type of relation offered in the Twelve Steps Program. There is a centrally religious (or at least spiritual) element within the original AA. The program emerged out of an understanding of God’s ability to save the person from his or her addictive behaviour (Taub 2011: 57). Powerless over alcohol, the person must appeal to a greater power outside of him or herself (McKim and Hancock 2013: 157). The original program structure therefore involves two forms of external relations: the relation between the subject and others, and the relation between the subject and God.40 Recent modification of these religious principles has changed the AA structure from a theocentric belief system, to a more sociological approach wherein the organizations uphold an ‘intensely-held, highly cherished belief system’ (Glaser 1973, in Orford 1995: 304). Frederick Glaser writes of the gradual change from theocentric to social therapy: ‘Before … the programs had Religion; now they have religion. The change is one from theological to

38

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

sociological, which is less of a change than one might suppose’ (Glaser 1973, in Orford 1995). We will look at this further in the coming chapters, but for now it is important to underline that the Twelve Steps engages interrelationally between people, and has language for a higher power relational aspect as well. These two relations will be ones that I will refer back to as I engage with addiction from a philosophical perspective. However, aside from its important emphasis on relation, the AA theory poses some challenges regarding self-definition and addiction. This very popular program requires further analysis, as it illustrates a particular way of conceptualizing the addictive experience. Current research, such as that summarized by the more popular critical accounts of Lance and Zachary Dodes (2014) challenge the success of this popular method.41 It is a type of group therapy that comes in different forms to meet the needs of different kinds of addictions. In ‘treating the disease’, the person is turned from a ‘responsible agent to a passive victim of disease’ (Pickard and Pearce 2012: 1). The Program offers a view of addiction as relational. Yet, it also seems to suggest that addiction is permanent and the defining element of human experience. Looking at theological accounts of relation, the Twelve Steps seems to offer some interesting crossovers. The God-relation, now more commonly replaced by the higher power relation, and the central importance of community are important parts of theological accounts of addiction. For instance, psychiatrist Gerald May’s writing suggests that the experience of addiction is similar to the desire for God. Desire, he says, is ‘a hunger to love, to be loved, and to move closer to the Source of love’, suggesting that ‘modern theology describes this desire as God-given’ (1988: 1). May writes that authentic transformation of the self leads ‘to freedom for desire’, which is the desire to love (2005: 73). Addiction, then, is a distortion of this primary desire.42 However, the question of responsibility that a desire-based framework of addiction invokes may be problematic, as is similarly the idea in the Twelve Steps that a person is helpless in their addiction. This view seems to go hand in hand with the disease model of addiction, which is not in keeping with the orthodox Christian doctrine of free will and human choice. In this model, the fall is not chosen. Sin is passively a part of the human experience. Dunnington’s theological framing of addiction as habit, and the development of choice and virtue contribute an essential piece to the conversation that once again brings out the importance of freedom and responsibility. He writes that addiction may

Existing Discourses on Addiction

39

be more linked to ‘the absence of a shared or ultimately justified telos [which] makes modern persons uniquely bored’ (2011: 115). Dunnington suggests that a more nuanced understanding of sin problematizes the concept of habit, as both voluntary and involuntary action (133). These theological conversations, where the human being is understood in terms of relation (relation to God), bring in important philosophical concepts of freedom and relation with others.

Conclusion However, while sociological, Twelve Steps and theological frameworks of addiction generate interesting conceptualizations of what addiction is, and how to treat it, I think that there is still more that could be explored. In the previous sections, I have grouped addiction theory under the headings of physiology, psychology and relation. As we have seen, the categories overlap, and I have only offered a generalized picture of a complex and quickly growing field of addiction research. Older definitions are being challenged by new developments in neurobiology, psychoanalysis and sociology. Addiction has been understood as a disease, a moral fault or an excessive appetite for a specific object, determined by a ‘failure to distinguish between moderation and excess’ (Orford 1995: 29, 33).43 Yet while each account provides an understanding as to what addiction is, there is still more that can be added to this discourse. I think that the texts of Lévinas and Kierkegaard can particularly develop some of the more difficult existential phenomenological aspects of this experience. While acknowledging that there are key factors that are similar in each experience of addiction, what I find striking is the variance and the role of the subjective perspective. Reading the addiction narratives reveals the variety of causes, conditions and experiences pertaining to each individual person’s addiction. It is challenging to generalize. The definition is hard to consolidate (Batho 2017). Treatment successes vary, and there are many different motivations for behaviour. Many theories, such as is illustrated by the excerpt of Knapp’s memoir and May’s theology of desire suggest that addiction arises out of a form or sense of lack and a profound hunger for something. It is an internal hunger for relation, which Knapp directs towards other people and May directs towards God. This hunger is externalized through consumption and addictive behaviour. Insofar as this relation is seen as problematic, the

40

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

disorder is linked to language of a disordered appetite and a disorder of desire. However, while this concept of appetite and desire is interesting, I think that Lévinas can contribute philosophical insight into what is going on in this relation. Lévinas looks at desire. Unlike needs that are satisfied, the trouble with desire is that it is infinite. But it is not a helpless desire. The desire shows that a person is responsible. It invokes the idea of a response and conversation between two people. Another idea that has emerged in this chapter is how the subject engages with the addictive substance. This object relation is of central importance, and frames how the self engages with others and itself. For instance, the person who is drinking may not only develops a physical dependence, but may also cut herself off from her family and lose her job. The narrative of addiction provided by Knapp clearly illustrates how an addiction to a particular object can affect relations to other people. Regardless of whether it is described as primarily physiological, psychological or relational, the addicted person’s experience is being largely determined by the object that he or she is addicted to.44 This is where I think philosophy, and existential phenomenology in particular, can help to unpack some of what is going on in more detail. The addiction does not produce a different human experience, but it brings out important parts of what it means to be a subject of one’s own life. It reveals key concepts such as responsibility, a hopeful relation and freedom. When a person defines her- or himself according to an object, it can pose a problem for how we understand freedom, response and relation. When addiction is seen as separating the person from others, it raises interesting questions about how we relate to other people and a higher power. I think this is where a language of existential phenomenology can be very valuable. Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s philosophy in particular will be able to engage with these challenges in a way that acknowledges the unique subject as a choosing individual, while avoiding some of the pitfalls of stigmatizing language that are presented in objective accounts of addiction. Addictions show how an object relation that can first be seen as both enjoyable and (often) beneficial to the body, can become a source of relational isolation.45 This is, for instance seen in practices that tie us to a community, such as eating together at dinner time or having a drink in celebration. In the following chapters, I will examine how an object relation, like that found in addiction, can be understood in terms of human experience and relation.

Part Two

42

2

The phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, relation and desire

The last chapter looked at how the addiction discourse has developed as a way of understanding and treating addiction. Drawing on physiology, psychology and theories of relation, I suggested that an exploration of subjectivity in addiction experiences could benefit the current discourse. I thought that this could be done effectively through existential phenomenology. Rather than finding concrete ways of solving the puzzle of addiction, existential phenomenology offers tools to better understand what it is to be an addicted person. I have chosen Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren Kierkegaard because their writings on the subject and the other bring out themes of freedom and responsibility that is key to understanding the relation between addictive experiences and hope. Lévinas and Kierkegaard develop the themes central of the existential phenomenological framework and the subject as being-in-theworld in relation to the other, offering a context in which further existential phenomenological dialogue can situate itself. In this chapter, I will introduce particular concepts found in Lévinas, a phenomenological thinker whose thoughts on how our subjectivity is connected in infinite relation with others has significantly contributed to philosophy’s understanding of the subject and the other. This chapter will aim to do three things: First, I will show how Lévinas’s particular phenomenology develops a concept of responsibility that connects to a philosophical universalization of Jewish ethics. Second, I will look at how Lévinas understands this ethics, through the separated self that becomes subject to an exchange with others. This, Lévinas suggests, is an infinite desire for the other, which is distinct from our desire for non-human objects. In the third part, I will show how desire can be a helpful way of engaging

44

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

with addiction. Desire is often used to refer to an addicted person’s relation to objects of addiction (alcohol, drugs, etc.). But distinguishing between object and human other is important in understanding the subtleties of this experience. This chapter will therefore introduce Lévinas, while situating his concept of desire as responsibility in discourse with addiction.

I  The phenomenology of Lévinas In this section, I will show how Lévinas engaged with a phenomenological exploration of human experience as relation, and how he used religious language philosophically to do so. In order to get to grips with Lévinas’ challenging texts, it is important to understand how he was writing. Simon Critchley suggests that ‘life, for Lévinas, is love of life, and love of what life is from: the sensible, material world’ (2002: 20). In Of God Who Comes to Mind, Lévinas shows how much of Western thought about the subject has been relegated to understanding our deficiency, or ‘man’s inferiority to his task’ (GCM: 43). Rather than framing the human experience as a struggle with deficiency towards death, Lévinas suggests that human experience is ‘bursting of the “more” in the “less”’ (50). Life, then, is less about figuring out how to survive it, and more about grappling with what it looks like to live in the midst of ‘the idea of the Infinite’ (51) that is encountered indirectly through our human experience. While Lévinas’s contemporaries used the social sciences to understand this relation, he uses phenomenology. Lévinas is primarily concerned with our lived experience alongside others. This ties into his view of the subject and the other. He is concerned with how he thinks the ‘social sciences’ have sought ‘to explain away human subjectivity in the name of abstract principles’, which acts as a kind of ‘dehumanising’ (Cohen 2006: ix). Lévinas suggests that we cannot understand others theoretically. Only they can speak on their behalf. So we cannot generalize about others, or understand others based on knowledge about them. In Of God Who Comes to Mind, Lévinas writes that often ‘one limits the human … to the identical’ (51). But explaining the other in identical terms to oneself does not explain the ‘meaning of the infinite’ to which each person belongs (Cohen 2006). Each person must represent himor herself.

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

45

Lévinas’s concern for ethics, and the responsibility towards the other, emerges in part as a response to the inhumanity of historical events in the twentieth century. He is concerned about how theory and thematizing the other can blur the distinct human face in front of us (Totality and Infinity 46; Otherwise than Being 151). Reflecting on the Nazi regime and thinkers who supported National Socialism, it seems that people can be good theorists, and can evaluate being-in-general, without translating that to responsible engagement with the individual human other (Lévinas 2001a: 99).1 Lévinas wants to bring the human face-to-face encounter back into our discourse. He is writing both before and after the Shoah, where as a Jewish European, he saw his family and friends killed by a developed nation that were engaging in principled behaviour, and who, at least theoretically, knew their philosophy and religion. According to Richard Bernstein, Lévinas is looking for meaning in life in a time of incomprehensible destruction and suffering, and wants to challenge the philosophies asserting power and violence (2002: 257).2 On this account, what philosophy needs is not another abstract thematization of a perfect being, which can then be used ‘to comprehend and to apprehend him, to unveil and to dominate him’ (Lévinas 2001c: 116). He wants philosophy to ‘breathe differently’, by ‘bringing the idea of social proximity as an original mode of spirituality, meaning and intelligibility’ (117). Of course, what this looks like as it emerges as a particular way of doing philosophy is influenced by other elements as well. Philosophy, for Lévinas, is ethics; it needs it to be enacted ‘in the bones’, to be lived out between people. This philosophy is not based in theory alone; it is realized through the face-to-face vulnerability of encountering another person. Because Lévinas wants to avoid a theoretical encounter with the other, his ethics cannot be read as a system. It is more of a conversation between people. He is interested in how we experience life in relation to other distinct selves. The self, as the subject of a specific sensible life, is subject to the call of others. This interaction is the foundation of the ethical exchange. This exchange between the subject and the other Lévinas refers to as ‘first philosophy’, because the rest of philosophy is situated within it.3 But Lévinas is careful to distinguish how he will use particular words. This is as true of the philosophical as the religious words that he employs. So, for instance, ethics is not theory, but a particular and irreducible communication engaged with by the subject and the other. Given these difficulties, it is helpful to see how Lévinas connects his use

46

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

of religious language with phenomenology. For this I primarily draw on the texts of Lévinasian scholars Simon Critchley and Claire Elise Katz.4 This ethical encounter, developed through religious language as phenomenology, is the infinite ethical relation between the subject and the other, framed as responsibility. Critchley writes that it is the performative saying, proposing or expressive position of myself facing the other. It is a verbal and possibly also non-verbal ethical performance, of which the essential cannot be captured in constitutive propositions. It is, if you will, a performative doing, that cannot be reduced to a propositional description. (2002: 18)

Lévinas is describing an active exchange between people. It cannot be theoretically represented because it is being experienced. Trying to understand the exchange, as communication, is the basis of Lévinas’s phenomenology. The other has called first, and the subject responds to this call. It is a performance played out in ‘sensible experience’, or what Critchley refers to as ‘the embodied exposure to the other’ (21). It seems that it is a sensible person, vulnerable to pain and suffering, ‘passive, open to the pangs of both hunger and eros’, who is central to the ethical exchange (2002). So the subject can feel as a part of her experience. She is capable of loving others, and needs to be fed and cared for. Using Lévinas’s philosophy to engage with the meaning of this can, therefore, show us how who we are requires the other. Philosophy as phenomenology is the ‘science des naïvetés’, a study of what we engage with normally. It is the ‘work of reflection that is brought to bear on unreflective, everyday life … reminders of what we already know but continually pass over’ (Critchley 2002: 7). Through this understanding of experience, philosophy is the ‘intentional analysis’ (6) that studies its underlying structures. Like Carel’s explanation of existential phenomenology applied to illness, Critchley suggests that Lévinas’s engagement with lived experience looks at the ‘intentional life that gives meaning to life but which are forgotten out of naiveté’ (9). Our naiveté is that we can understand life theoretically. But we miss out on the ordinary details that are brushed aside as insignificant. It is in this detail that understanding the subject really happens. Lévinas sees phenomenology as a means of finding structured meaning without generalized systems and dogmatism (Ethics and Infinity 19). For him, it is a living philosophy that does not descend into the chaotic loneliness of

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

47

existentialism. We must not merely ask how we know what we know (qu’est-ce que?), but must try to understand the signification behind what we know (EI 21). Lévinas is also careful to distinguish this phenomenology as ethics. It is not moral theory, but it is also not ontology. Critchley notes that Lévinas’s phenomenological ethics diverges from Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of being precisely on this point. While Heidegger also reflected on being, he was interested in being in a general sense, or what Lévinas will refer to as ontology. Lévinas wants to keep the irreducible singularity of the subject and the other. The other is not something I can ‘[take] hold of (prend) and comprehend (comprend)’ (2002: 16).5 Any philosophical phenomenology of the other cannot reduce the other to the same as me. So phenomenology is understood ethically. Being is situated in a self who becomes subject to the call of another. In the Introduction, I showed how Carel uses existential phenomenology in a similar way. In Phenomenology of Illness, Carel writes that phenomenology is ‘the description of lived experience [and consciousness]’ that ‘privileges the first-person experience’ (2008: 8). Phenomenology differs from the definition of illness that offers a physical description that is ‘objective (and objectifying), neutral and third-personal’ (2008). She cites Maurice MerleauPonty’s phenomenology as key to understanding the ill self as lived body. Yet while Lévinas emphasizes the sensible experience, he also seems to be using phenomenology in a manner that differs from Merleau-Ponty. For instance, in Humanism of the Other, Lévinas shows that for Merleau-Ponty, the body is central to our engagement with the world. ‘The body … expresses this world at the same time as it thinks it’, which means that ‘in expression we are at the same time subject and part’ (2006: 16). But for Lévinas, while we experience life through the body,6 it is our relation towards others that underlies who we are in the world. Lévinas sees the underpinning structure of human experience as one of inter-human relation. The emphasis is on the subject defined in relation to the other, rather than on the experience of being as body, culturally signified (Humanism of the Other 17). For Lévinas, the relation between humans is the ‘irreducible structure on which all other structures rest’ (TI 79). It is the primacy of this infinite relation towards the other that distinguishes MerleauPonty’s phenomenology from Lévinas. This relation to the other is framed in a particular language. It is phenomenology, but developed through the religious concepts of Judaism. Lévinas was both a philosopher and a theologian, and though he wished for

48

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

his philosophy to be understood apart from his theology, he uses religious language to frame his ethics. Looking at how religious language informs Lévinas’s philosophy helps with understanding some of the subtleties in his writing. His phenomenology discusses what it is to be human, in the context of a prior relation. This prior relation is towards the infinite, played out in the relation towards the other human.7 Lévinas’s phenomenology is a study of the religious concept of the holy, but it is framed in philosophical language as ethics. This holiness is a verb. It is enacted as a response towards the other. Lévinas engages with this Jewish question as a human question. He borrows from Judaism to inform a universalized understanding of what it is to exist alongside others. Danielle Cohen-Lévinas writes of Lévinas that ‘Il mettait son oeuvre spirituelle dans son existence plutôt que dans son sermon’ (‘He put his spiritual writings in his [lived] existence rather than in his sermons’, 2015, trans. Westin). In his philosophy, he addresses concepts of being, of response, freedom and subjectivity that are of philosophical significance to an audience outside of a particular religion. He is not only interested in containing his philosophy to a particular group of people. Katz points out that ‘[Lévinas] had a secular, non-Jewish audience to which his philosophical writings are also directed’ (2012: l27). This audience was also his philosophical interlocutor that had taught him the phenomenological method that he employed. Lévinas explains holiness in terms of the ethical relation to others (Derrida 1999: 4).8 In Totality and Infinity he refers to this as the ‘new’ metaphysics. Metaphysics opens up a dimension of height (TI 33) through the relation to the other. The relation to a human other is where the subject encounters the infinite within lived experience. Lévinas is developing Descartes’s idea of the infinite, which comes from beyond us and exceeds our understanding (GCM 50). Produced ‘from the exchange with the other’, it is the process of revelation (TI 26). The other contains ‘more than’ my capacity and breaks through as ‘a surplus of being’ (27). Lévinas notes that this relation contains an essential ambiguity, an ambiguity that permeates the other-relation. He writes ‘The true life is absent.’ But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained by this alibi. It is turned towards the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ and the ‘other’. From the familiar towards the yonder. (33)

Lévinas offers a discourse on the everyday human experience, as a relation between the subject and the other through ethics, but with the height of an

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

49

infinite obligation. The infinite height means that we are always responsible; the ethical relation is continuously bringing us outside of our self-enclosure. Invoking the height of human experience as an encounter with others, Lévinas wants to urge philosophy beyond Heidegger and Nietzsche’s being and power. In this call to the ‘otherwise than being’9 (OB 3), he applies the ethical ordering of the Bible as a philosophical framework of relation. Each description of the human experience becomes an explanation of a holy encounter. For Lévinas, this holy encounter emerges between the subject and the human other. The other is transcendent because he or she is infinitely beyond me and cannot be comprehended by me. Others possess a world of their own that demands a response. The encounter thus brings the subject outside of his- or herself.10 Lévinas wants to maintain subjectivity without relegating response as an extension of one’s own egoism (Llewelyn 2002, p. 121). In Otherwise than Being, he goes as far as saying, ‘All my inwardness is invested in the form of a despite-me, for-another’ (p. 11). Lévinas wants to challenge an abstract understanding of being with an other-centred phenomenology of ethical relation. ‘Esse,’ he writes, ‘is interesse; essence is interest’ for the other (OB 4). Lévinas’s phenomenology of relation borrows from language outside of philosophy to explain human experience.11 This is particularly true regarding the religious language that he uses. This Jewish language brings another way of looking at human experience (TI 58). Phenomenology is understood as relation, but this relation is also framed as an enactment of the holy that has philosophical significance for human experience. The concept of the holy is particularly effective because it shows us a relational experience in which the subject and the other remain distinct. Susan Neiman, explaining the importance of religious language in describing human experiences, writes that much of [the] power [of a work] derives from its refusal to respect traditional disciplinary boundaries and her consequent ability to live with creative tension … use of philosophical theology is an unexplored instance of these capacities. (2002: 70)

The tension of applying the religious terminology to philosophy generates insight into the complexity of the human condition. I would suggest that, similarly, Lévinas invokes the language of the holy that brings renewed understanding to the phenomenological discourse of being as relation.

50

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

More specifically, I think that the use of religious language in Lévinas’s writing accomplishes two general objectives. First, it engages with the complexity of a subject that experiences itself in this relation. Second, it brings new language to the general philosophical discourse on human experience. Religious language thereby enables Lévinas’s understanding of relation. As phenomenology explores the unique particularities of a person engaged in living his or her own experience, this specific way of reading experience opens it to new tensions that develop fresh insight. Lévinas frames the human experience as an engagement with the holy. The relation between the subject and the other reflects this foundational identity. Holiness as separation presupposes a distinction between humanity and God, and human beings and neighbour, and becomes the basis for his ‘first philosophy’.12 This attentiveness to religious language in Lévinas is further highlighted in scholarship of Merold Westphal.13 Westphal, however, seems to suggest that Lévinas is primarily a theologian, and sees Lévinas as using philosophy to explore a particular theology of revelation. I will maintain that Lévinas is doing philosophy, but using religious language to frame his engagement. The God of Lévinas remains ‘beyond being’, and is understood philosophically in relation to others. God is transcendent, just like the human face, and can only be engaged with through other people. No language can really lay hold of this ‘excess that lies beyond being’ (Wyschogrod 2002: 189). The ethical human relation engages with this infinite transcendence. Sandhor Goodhart, in considering the God of Lévinas, writes that [God] is neither the simple-minded God of … abstract theology, nor the hidden God and his poetic imagery, but a God who confers complete responsibility for our own actions upon the integrally responsible man, the man who gives up the perspective of the child and assumes upon his shoulders the responsibility for full consciousness. And that consciousness is always necessarily one of suffering. (1996: 180–181)

The God-relation implies ethics, and the obligation towards the other that is interpreted as both welcome and being taken hostage. It is one of human response and responsibility. It is also one of suffering. Richard Bernstein writes that Lévinas creates a ‘philosophical project, best understood as an ethical response to evil’ (2002: 253).14 Wyschogrod

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

51

writes further that Lévinas intentionally leaves behind the phenomenology of Heidegger and ‘the climate of that philosophy’ (EE 19), as a system that engenders violence, and commands the Hebrew Scriptures and Talmud ‘to correct the hubris of philosophical rationality’15 (2002: 189). Putnam shows that the central importance of ethical engagement with the other is a particularly Jewish understanding of philosophy, and does not think it problematic for Lévinas to ‘do philosophy’ in this way (38). Many scholars show the interaction between Lévinas’s religious language and his philosophy (see for instance, Westphal 2008). But it is interesting to see how this actually shapes a particular understanding of human experience. Putnam, for instance, suggests that this can be seen in how the story of God and Abraham informs Lévinas’ concept of call and response. In the Torah, Abraham is singled out by God to leave the land of his forefathers and move to a new place. Though childless, he is given the promise of being a father of a great nation. This event is referred to through the concept of teshuvah, or turning. Abraham turns towards God who has commanded him. The command of God towards Abraham seems to exist prior to philosophical justification, and is seen as a kind of received revelation. Putnam writes that ‘One can – indeed, one must – know that this [turn] is commanded of one without a philosophical account of how this is possible’ (2002: 48). For Lévinas, this relation of revelation ‘precedes’ and even ‘conditions reason’ (Katz 2012: 93). It is not pure reason that calls to the subject, but a command from elsewhere. Lévinas’s universalized approach to ethics is conditioned by his Jewish wrestling with the command (Katz 2012: 122; Putnam 2002: 38). It is engagement as response, but a response towards someone who commands us from beyond. Lévinas develops his philosophy of responsibility through the relation between the self and the other. The self becomes the subject of an exchange. Rather than being defined according to reason or freedom (Katz 2012: 122), Lévinas’s subject is an outworking of teshuvah. Abraham turns towards God, as the self turns towards the other. Catherine Chalier goes as far as to suggest that Abraham’s whole humanity ‘lies in the answer to the call he heard’ (2002: 106), which reflects Lévinas’s statement that ‘I am responsible for the other’ (Éthique et Infini 98). The hard part is that we do not know that it will be reciprocated. Even for Abraham, ‘it is [a promise of] a land which he has no certainty of entering or settling’ (Chalier 2002: 106). Chalier explains that in engaging with

52

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

the command of God, Abraham is able to grasp his own subjectivity.16 She writes that it is only on condition that he loses himself, that is, only on the condition that he gets rid of all that which, by keeping him prisoner of his past … would make it impossible for him going forward to the Promised Land. (2002: 106)

Abraham’s response to God (‘Here I am’, hineni) is at both a surrender of self (Putnam 2002: 33, 39) and a movement towards the other, in which the self becomes a subject of an exchange (Chalier 2002: 106).17 This response is worked out in the wider context of an entire lineage of people. Abraham becomes subject of an exchange with the wholly other, as a template for the human other relation, to ‘be holy, as God is holy’. This expression of ethics becomes ‘a particularism that conditions universality’ (Putnam 2002: 34). The Jewish ‘election’ is one of response rather than privilege, which means that is a universal ‘nobility based … on the position of each human [moi]’ (DF 21). Lévinas distinguishes the holy from the sacred. In a sacred experience, the other is merged with us, whereas in the holy, the other remains distinct from us. Reflecting this separation between the subject and God and the subject and the human other, Lévinas states somewhat cryptically that one ought to love Torah more than God (Llewelyn 2002: 129). It is not the experienced sacred unity invoked in the love of God that is emphasized, but the illeity of God and God’s separation. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas writes that illeity shows the separation between the subject and the other. Rather than referring to the other as the same, the il (he) ‘indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me’ (12). It is the irreducible distinction between the self and the other that is emphasized in the relation. For instance, in saying ‘Thanks be to God’, beni-soit-Il (BV 119), a person is maintaining the ‘remoteness and disjunction from the speaker’ (Llewelyn 2002: 129). God, and the human other, are approachable, but remain at a distance. Let me explain this distinction further. In juxtaposing the sacred (le sacré) and the holy (la sainté), Lévinas shows how he will use the separation of holiness rather than the sacred to underpin his ethical theory of relation (Critchley 2002: 27). The experience of the holy is one in which the other remains separate and incomprehensible. The sacred, however, suggests that the subject and other have somehow become fused as one. I know the other completely. Lévinas describes it as similar to the experience of the il-y-a, where

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

53

a self whose own experience of itself is limitless and ‘eclipsing’, ‘pre-relational’ (Caruana 2006: 564, 566). The sacred offers the self a direct access to the divine that eradicates any obligation towards the other, ‘a seething, subjective mass of forces, passions and imaginings’ (DF 102). Holiness, however, lays the boundaries for a distinct ethical self. In the sacred experience, the self is anonymous. In the experience of holiness, the subject is addressed distinctly and separately. Caruana describes how Lévinas’s concept of holiness traces the theme of the book of Leviticus, which begins with the distinctive call of holiness, and finishes with the ethical call to love the stranger (Lev. 19:33-34). Holiness, understood phenomenologically, is inherently ethical. Lévinas writes that ‘the face is a living presence; it is expression’ (TI 66). The holy comes to me through the face. Panim, the Hebrew word for face, holds the presence of the other (Putnam 2002: 575). In Difficult Freedom, he develops this further. The ‘face-to-face relation’ brings the other to me as an ‘interlocutor’ (8). Through the face, the being is not only enclosed in its form and offered to the hand, it is also open, establishing itself in depth and in this opening, presenting itself somehow in a personal way. (Putnam 2002)

It is through the face that the other speaks. But it is also through this presence that we recognize how distinct the other is from me. Thus ‘the life of expression’ consists in undoing thematizations that are imposed on others. I should treat the other as myself because she or he is also a human being (Waldenfels 2005: 66), ‘an equal’ (DF 8). However, this human being is not the same as me, and remains separate from me. I have shown how Lévinas uses religious language to express his phenomenology, particularly through the concepts of holiness and teshuvah. Yet the link between Lévinas and Judaism goes further than just specific philosophical concepts. It is also connected to how Lévinas uses language to explore the human experience. Lévinas suggests that human experience can be approached as like reading, where language brings the other into relation with the subject (TI 194). Llewelyn suggests that this reflects how Lévinas reads the Jewish Bible. He sees it as an encounter of reading between the subject and the other that requires a response.18 In this language exchange, the self moves towards itself through its movement towards the other, as a movement towards the infinite.19 The other is not comparable to us, but remains

54

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

‘absolutely different’ (TI 194), like a pattern of language that relates separate terms as a dialogue (Llewelyn 2002: 132).20 There are similarities between the pattern of subject and the other, and Lévinas’ reading of Scripture, which exists as an exchange between two distinct people. For Lévinas, the dialogue of the Bible is ‘le livre par excellence’ (Entre Nous 12), where human experience is mapped out in words through the history, prophecy and poetry of the Jewish people. Llewelyn goes as far as to suggest that Lévinas reads the Bible as a ‘quest for truth and … universality’ which results in an ‘infinite density of questioning reflecting the infinite density of the content of the Word’ (2002: 103). Understood in this way, there emerges a specific connection between the language of the Bible and the ethical movement towards the other. However, for Lévinas, this reading of the Bible is not exclusive to Judaism; it reveals a universal system of human relation. He reads the Bible philosophically, using it to uncover the ethical relation.21 This is seen when Lévinas states, ‘What I have said about ethics, about the universality of the commandment … even if there is no reward, is valid independent of any religion’ (The Paradox of Morality qt. in Bernstein 2002: 257). His interpretation of Jewish election, the idea of a particular group of people being set apart, is a human election of responsibility rather than privilege (Putnam 2002: 33–4). He clarifies this further in Difficult Freedom, writing that ‘a truth is universal when it applies to every rational human being’ (DF 21-22).22 The particular conditions of the Jewish people become the conditions that root an ethics of responsibility for all rational beings (DF 22).23 It is a recounting not only events of the past, but of real events that continue to unfold (EN 15). In the Jewish tradition, the subject becomes a part of an exchange, understood through the Hebrew term hineni. Hineni, ‘here I am’, is interpreted by Lévinas as the subject’s ‘me voici’. Hineni articulates the ethical response assumed by Abraham. It is a commandment that the subject engages with without knowing how it can be fulfilled. Abraham is commanded by God to leave his homeland towards a land of promise without knowing how this could possibly happen (Putnam 2002: 47–8). This is an ‘ungraspable’ command. Abraham relates to God without knowing the specifics of what will happen, just as we are called to enter into an unfamiliar relation with the other. Thus the relation between the subject and the other is distinctly asymmetrical. Abraham presents himself ‘without reservation’ and the need to ‘sympathise or understand’ (38). This is also the way that Lévinas sees the subject responding to the other. For Lévinas,

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

55

one never fully understands the other person, and he or she always remains slightly beyond my grasp. Thus, ‘the closer I come to another, the more I am aware of my distance from grasping the other’s essential reality and the more I must respect that distance’ (28).24 This responsibility towards others therefore has a ‘height’ of the infinite (Cohen 1994: 1). When the subject is called to be holy as God is holy, the other becomes like another Abraham. Abraham extends the me voici to God. But he also extends the hospitality to other humans, opening up his tent towards the foreigner as an extension of the hineni towards God. The me voici invokes an unreserved response to the call of the other. This differs from sympathy or empathy, because the other does not have to be understood before I am held responsible for them. The other is unknown, and yet the subject is obliged. It is the choice to respond without fully knowing the other, towards the foreign face, that is the movement towards holiness (Critchley 2002: 27). This ethical response is an act of human generosity towards all human others. The obligation to the other is an obligation towards one who is, like me, capable of feeling both hunger and satisfaction (Putnam 2002: 69). Understanding experience is not an abstract exercise, based on reason alone. It is ‘something lived in consciousness’, as a real human being in relation with others. This ‘interesse’ (OB 4) is ‘the movement or happening by which the opaqueness brightens and clears’ (Cohen 2006: xxx). Engagement in the phenomenology of human experience is the context of relation, and Lévinas’ challenge to the generalized being of ontology.25 Response is not given slavishly (TI 213),26 but in service towards ‘the poor, stranger, widow and orphan’ (251).27 The other is the place in which the trace of God meets the subject through the other in non-preferential human relation (Llewelyn 2002: 130).28 In this section, I have tried to show how Lévinas uses religious language to frame his ethics of relation. However, while I have discussed that the relation occurs between the subject and the other, I have not yet showed the subtler ways with which Lévinas engages with this philosophically. We are still left trying to understand who the subject is, and how he or she relates to the other. In the next section, I will therefore examine Lévinas’s phenomenology of relation, and how the self becomes a subject through relating to the other.

56

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

II  Lévinas on ethical response Previously, I have shown how Lévinas connects his ethical turning, reflective of Jewish religious concepts, to the philosophical concept of response. In this section, I will look at what this looks like in the phenomenological discourse of the self and the other. For this, I will predominantly look at Lévinas’s earlier works, including Time and the Other, Existence and Existents, and Totality and Infinity. First, I will explore the concept of the il-y-a, which emerges out of anonymous being through hypostasis. Second, I will look at the emergence of the subject, as the self opens itself up to the response of another human face. Third, I will show how this ethical relation is developed as the relation of desire, which is a particular form of love. This section will provide the philosophical framework to show how Lévinas can help us to understand the experiences of addiction. The first task is thus to figure out what Lévinas means by the subject and the other, and thereby also to grapple with the difficult ideas of what ambiguous being and pre-ethical relations could look like. I have suggested that scholars interpret Lévinas’ thematic pattern of response towards the other as developed with ‘striking continuity’ (Bernstein 2002: 252). Lévinas scholar Richard Cohen argues that the heart of Lévinas’s text is rooted in the ethical proximity towards the other and the subsequent call for justice. Thus, he suggests, ‘each successive text branches out, filigrees, presents successively richer, fuller, more nuanced analyses, testifying to the cornucopian genius of Lévinas’s central ethical vision’ (Cohen 1998: xi). This poetic description is a helpful way of seeing what Lévinas is doing in the midst of the diverse range of his dense texts.29 Lévinas develops a philosophy of human experience based on response. But this response is between two separated beings. Existence is something with which we are engaged. It becomes as it is acted out, which makes it difficult to speak about. Lévinas shows this to his reader in Existence and Existents (EE) where he writes that The distance between that which exists and its existence itself, between the individual … [and] act of their existence, imposes itself upon philosophical reflection. … It is as though thought becomes dizzy pouring over the emptiness of the verb to exist, which we seem not to be able to say anything about, which only becomes intelligible in its participle, the existent, which exists. (1988: 1)

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

57

Here Lévinas shows how challenging it is to actually say anything about existence generally. Existence is personalized, through the one who exists. To put it simply, Lévinas seems to be saying that anonymous (impersonal) being is pre-relational. It does not have a contained form. It is faceless and abstract. This anonymous, general being is the il-y-a, or the ‘there is’.30 This il-y-a is prior to contentment and separation that the sensory enjoyment can provide: it is non-sense (non-sens). It is for itself, an ‘impersonalité’ (impersonality) (Perez 2001: 115–21). Contrasting the sensing and determinate ethical subject that enacts the good, the il-y-a is evil (mal) (112–13). So, the il-y-a is central to understanding human existence. It is philosophically important in understanding the possibility of the ethical relation. But, left as it is, it seems quite sinister, because it is also the possibility of violence. The il-y-a is anonymity (the ça rather than the autre), and posited as an it.31 There is neither language nor possibility of communication, because it exists undifferentiated. However, Lévinas is not interested in leaving philosophy in the il-y-a. It is in engaging with ‘the idea of Being in general in its impersonality’ (EE 3) that the separate being (the self) emerges. In the moment that Lévinas calls hypostasis, the I posits itself. It is the ‘upsurge of an existent into existence’ (25). Here, a single being is separated from being in general, as consciousness.32 It is ‘the instantiation of time into being’ (Dalton 2006: 220), in which the self emerges in time. Lévinas writes that ‘the present is then a situation in being where there is not only being in general, but there is being, a subject’ (EE 71, qt. in Dalton 2006: 220). This self, however, still exists in isolation. It approaches the world through its needs and consumes objects as it corresponds to those needs. I am hungry, so I find food to eat. There is a separate relation that is happening here, but it is between the self and its objects. This isolated state is one of contentment. The self is happy because it is able to feel its needs and fulfil them. In some sense, it is a being without lacking.33 The self engages with the world of objects in enjoyment, and enjoyment becomes the ‘ultimate relation with the substantial plenitude of being, with its materiality’ (TI 133). We have needs that are to be fulfilled, rather than as a result of a degradation of being. It is not evil to be hungry; rather, it is a need pointing towards the fulfilment found in eating food.34 As sensing beings, our relation to objects such as food is used to restore us, and ‘we enjoy them or suffer from them; they are enjoyment’ (TI 133). Enveloped within its own cocoon of need and fulfilment, the self approaches the world as a series of

58

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

consumable objects. It exists for itself, prior to ethical responsibility, and is contained within the happiness and satisfaction of its needs. The pre-ethical self is already a separate and contained being, with the ability to eat and drink.35 The happy pre-ethical self is therefore the state of separated contentment that preconditions the exit towards the other. Thus for Lévinas, ‘to live is to enjoy life’ (TI 116). Recognizing that it is hungry, it eats bread and after it eats the bread, it is satisfied. The self knows hunger and satisfaction. Therefore, when the other approaches the self, it is not ‘wanting’ anything (104). As pre-ethical ego, which I have referred to as the self, is limited to its private experience of life as through the determinate relation to the world of content (Llewelyn 2002: 131). But this is not an experience of the good. It is only in recognizing and responding to the other human that the self exits its happy isolation into human relation. This occurs through the recognition of the ‘preliminary appeal of the other’ (OB 70, 89). The relation to the other is not one of enjoyment in this way that we enjoy objects. In the emergence of the ethical self, I experience that there is another outside of myself that is separate from me. This other is not a content that can be consumed. The human face possesses a secret non-consumable quality. The other is not an object and therefore lies outside of my possession. So it is out of the il-y-a that the self emerges to confront the other. The il-y-a separates itself in hypostatic enjoyment, before being confronted with the face of the human other. This experience of being is a verb. It is ‘the verb to be’, which is ethics (Cohen 1998: xxxi). Insofar as human experience is ethics, it requires the self-exit of relation towards the other. A subject does not exist in isolation but with others (Alterité et Transcendence 1995: 105), through life lived out in time and space. Existence occurs in the interaction between friends, neighbours, family and strangers. In Difficult Freedom, Lévinas shows the limits of approaching human experience through knowledge based on reason alone. He writes: ‘I do not only know something, I am also a part of society’ (8). Philosophizing about human experience is not just figuring out what we can know about others and ourselves. It is about understanding experience as relation. The other ruptures the isolation and enjoyment of the pre-ethical. It is as if the other says, ‘Here I am, outside of you, worthy of your attention’ (Critchley 2002: 20–1; TI 61). The other’s ‘here I am’ (me voici) requires a response. All of a sudden the spontaneous ego that exists for itself is put into question because there

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

59

exists another outside of itself. It cannot approach others as a consumable object because they possess a human face. The subject is already ‘indebted’ to respond (EE 71, 72, 122, 124). To engage in the human exchange involves this recognition and turn towards the other.36 Another way of understanding it is through conversation: ‘the verb that temporalises is [the] saying’ (Cohen 1998: xxxii). The other speaks (‘saying’) from a unique face and brings any abstract being into a concrete conversational context. The self is made subject to the response of the irreducible other outside of him- or herself (Grøn 2008b: 27). It is now subject of an exchange. This ethical movement differs from the ontological movement in which one kind of being becomes another kind of being. It is also distinct from the theoretical obligation towards rationally ordered maxims. It is an ethical movement, ‘lived in the sensibility of an embodied exposure to the other’ (Critchley 2002: 21), within the physical world and between two bodies capable of communication, hunger and vulnerability. The sensing subject is capable of feeling satisfaction, but this means that it is also capable of feeling pain.37 So, the assumption of ‘responsibility for full consciousness’ means, in the words of Sandhor Goodhart, ‘that consciousness is always necessarily one of suffering’ (1996: 181). This being-for-the-other, when taken up in consciousness and the sensing self, is played out in the world of human experience, but it is an experience that contains suffering.38 As the response towards suffering illustrates, we are indebted to respond to the call of the other, whether we assume the response or not. Critchley writes that ethics is experienced as ‘a demand that I both cannot fully meet and cannot avoid’ (2002: 21). The movement from self to other is infinite because, unlike the objects of our needs, we cannot ever satisfy the response. Neither can we ever fully understand or consume them. The movement towards the other invokes the good. This is not just because he or she brings about a response from me and enables me to become an ethical subject (TI 178), but also because the human face moves us beyond engagement based on need. The other shows us that there is more, beyond our own enclosed ego. The other invokes transcendence, by revealing a world that is not contained in our own, and a height that I cannot experience in isolation (Sebbah 2000: 39). The other’s face then becomes the exchange of the good, where the good is the movement between the subject and the other (Waldenfels 2002: 70). The face is the source from which the other speaks, and the experience of the good, which

60

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

again highlights Lévinas’s concern with concrete corporeal experience: ‘It is the hungering, thirsting, enjoying, suffering, working, loving, murdering human being in all its corporeality … whose otherness is at stake’ (TI 69). Philosophy is embodied in human relation and ethics is enacted between real, localized human beings. Lévinas suggests that unless social interaction is founded on ethical relation, we may easily fail to acknowledge the humanity of the other (Critchley 2002: 13). He fears the repercussions of the faceless other and a world in which some are deemed worthy of our ethical attention and others are not. But we do not need to determine a reasonable foundation for our response (Waldenfels 2005: 65). Lévinas suggests that a lot of the time we act ethically without reasoning why we do so.39 Even though we may not completely understand the situation or suffering (think, for instance, of the plight of a Syrian refugee family or the plea of the displaced Jewish populations in the Shoah), we are still indebted to respond. We do not respond because we are the same as the other. Humanity is a plurality of individuals with different histories, shapes, cultures and sizes that cannot be ‘fused into unity’ (Le Temps et L’Autre 20, Westin, trans.). The subject therefore seems to engage in a kind of covenantal fidelity with the other. Despite difference, each face is capable of communication and each body feels pain. The call to be holy as God is holy does not contain a ‘because’ clause (Putnam 2002: 35). It is pre-reflective, determined by the invocation of the human face, but not contingent on a specific way of ‘being’ human. Lévinas’s philosophy, therefore, ‘is not the clearing of being, but the place where ethics ruptures Being’ (Bernstein 2002: 252). The question is not about understanding the concept of being (ontology). Rather, it is about how being articulates itself (ethics). Ethics is the first philosophy. Lévinas shows that ethics is enacted as the human experience of response towards the other. One way that Lévinas clarifies between ethics and other kinds of relations is through distinguishing between need and desire. Previously I have suggested that a relation of need fits into the understanding of the presubjective il-y-a. Prior to the me voici, the il-y-a exists in a state of atheistic selffulfilled happiness, able to meet his or her needs through consuming external objects but does not feel responsible to others. This contrasts with the concept of desire, which exists insatiably beyond the individual. Being made aware of this other, the subject comes to desire the other without fully understanding him or her. In his later work, Lévinas writes

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

61

that this ‘desire – far from carrying in [it] only the hollowness of need [is] … bursting of the “more” in the “less” (GCM 50). This desire for the other is infinite, because it is a relation towards other who ‘belongs to the very meaning of the infinite’ (51). The infinite dimension of desire reflects both the heights of the holy, discussed previously, and the irreducibility of the other’s face. I cannot contain the other but only approach them. The other is prioritized, and I give to them from an experience of satiety. For Lévinas, the other is never a thing or an object. I cannot ever fully possess this other as I did with the contents that have satisfied my needs in the past. The other is another human who is like myself, but separate. It is when one responds to the other human outside of itself that a subjective self emerges. The pre-ethical self becomes subject to the call of the human other. For Lévinas, desire is not fuelled by need; it is an aspiration towards the desirable other. An object such as an apple or air can be consumed and made part of oneself, for example, but we cannot do this with other humans. It is therefore an infinite gesture: ‘A face obsesses and shows itself, between transcendence and visibility/invisibility’ (OB 158). The other, separate from me, overwhelms me with its illeity,40 and I become a subject ‘incomparable with the other’ (OB 158). No one can stand in for me, and no one can replace the irreducible face before me. Desire, contrasted with need, is the void that proceeds from the subject towards an inconsumable other (TI 62). The void, or psychism, points to a self that is capable of sensibility and vulnerability and which opens itself up to being affected by other human beings (Critchley 2002: 21). Desire is for the other, ‘but by him who lacks nothing’, and emerges ‘where a being separate from the other is not engulfed in the other’ (TI 61). The other brings experience into an encounter of desire, and shows us the limitations of our egoism. The subject cannot possess the other in desire (need); rather, it is a metaphysical desire. But like ethics, Lévinas’ metaphysics is ‘not a knowledge about’ (Chalier 2002: 110) what is being said, but an ‘infinite quest for original meaningfulness’ (111).41 This meaningfulness is the presence of another human being, represented as a face. Metaphysical desire, in Lévinas’s understanding, can never consume the subject of its affection. Unlike food and drink, the other person can never fully become a part of myself. He or she always exists separately to the subject. This distinction between consumable and inconsumable content, between sameness and

62

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

illeity, is critical in understanding subtle variances between human and object relations. Though scholars are at times reluctant to force a normative application of Lévinas’s work, I think that it can help us to better understand some of what is going on in challenging moments of human relation. In the next section, I will therefore look at how Lévinas’s distinction between need and desire can help us to understand the experience of addiction.

III  Applying the subject–other relation to addiction As we have seen previously in Orford’s discussion of excessive appetites, addiction can be interpreted as the blurred interchange between desire and need (1995). Often the object of addiction is described as possessing a ‘desirable’ quality, or a particular kind of salience. The quest for the object orients the direction of a person’s thought and behaviour. But rather than being a desired human other, the object of desire in addiction is oftentimes a consumable object that is more like what Lévinas describes as a ‘content of life’. It is something we need and consume. A need is satisfied once we eat the bread: we do not have infinite need. Need is defined according to its ability to be satisfied in enjoyment. In Humanism of an Other, Lévinas writes that ‘need opens onto a world that is for me; it returns to self ’ (2006: 29). This differs from desire, ‘an obsession’ that is ‘one-for-the-other’ (OB 159). The infinite desiring that cannot possess an object refers to the relation between human beings. This reversal of obsession is one of addiction’s great perplexities. It is as if the infinite movement oriented for a human relationship has become redirected towards a human–object relation. But according to Lévinas, desiring the other instils an insatiability within us. It ruptures our egoism without providing enjoyment, and orients the self as subject towards the other. Here, then, I want to look at how Lévinas’s understanding of human experience can inform our discourse on addiction. Jeffrey Nealon writes about addiction and its relation to Lévinas in his essay entitled ‘“Junk” and the Other: Burroughs and Lévinas on Drugs” (1995). Through the drug addiction narrative of Burroughs, Nealon demonstrates how ‘junk’ takes on the characteristics of Lévinas’s human other, and in turn challenges Lévinas’s concept of responsibility. Junk is the casual term that Burroughs uses for

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

63

drugs. The consumable object substitutes the human other; the self desires the other like a human other. The drug does not have a human face but ‘becomes like’ a human: a person starts desiring it like one would desire another human’ (1995: 1). The other becomes a consumable other (‘junk’, or drugs), while still maintaining itself as an object of addiction. Lévinas has previously stated that the content from which we live ‘does not enslave us; we enjoy it’ (TI 114). The content of life is comprised of things we need for survival. We consume and engage with sensible objects in order to sustain our physical bodies. We have a need (hunger), we consume (bread), and the need is satisfied. Thus the need provides enjoyment in its satiation. We recognize what it is to be hungry and what it is to be satisfied.42 In the experiences of addiction, however, a person can consume a ‘content of life’ that does not leave us satisfied. Whereas Lévinas has showed us that a person is satisfied once the need is met, in addiction, one drink does not quench thirst; another is needed. In this way, the object becomes like a human other. It assumes an insatiable quality, opening up the self to the infinite obsession that Lévinas has previously linked to desire (OB 159). Rather than fulfilling a need, the object creates a need and somehow assumes a human-like face that has the power to call out as obligation. It is as if the object of addiction has become an other, rather than a thing. Consuming the object does not satisfy our need for it.43 Lévinas clarifies what he means by the need for objects when he writes that ‘Needs are in my power; they constitute me as the same and not dependent on the other’ (TI 116-117). In addiction, however, it is hard to know whether my need for the object is actually within my power. It seems to be more of a desire, or an ‘obsession’, than a need. In addiction, my separation and real isolation is confirmed. I possess my addiction and am, in some sense, ‘liberated’ because of my need. But when I ‘sink my teeth into the real’ of the object (116), the real does not satisfy me. Thus the notion of ‘living from’ this object becomes the problem, because I cannot seem to escape my own solipsism. I am not satisfied by it. I live from my own needs and respond to the world through this, which leaves me separate without being a subject (I am the one who hungers and must feed myself). In other object-relations, once the object of the need is consumed, the need abates. However, in addiction I ‘sink my teeth’ into an object whose need overwhelms me. The purpose of need, the satisfaction that leads to enjoyment, evades me, while taking on the qualities of an infinite desire.

64

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

This, I would argue, dislocates the ethical relation between self and other as human and self and other as object of addiction. I am responsible not towards the other human being, but towards answering to the demands of the object of addiction. The voiceless object assumes an in-suppressible voice that calls out, calls out without ceasing and my ethical response then moves towards that voice, towards that ‘face’ that calls. It is as if there is a shift in the ethical relation. It is as if the responsibility towards the other becomes the responsibility towards the object44 of addiction. This relation becomes even more difficult to understand when the object of addiction actually does possess a human face. This can be seen, for example, in research on addictive relationships and sexual addiction (Katehakis 2016). So it seems that, if we look at what Lévinas is saying about human experience and desire, we can apply it to addiction in two ways. First, as Nealon shows us, addiction relates the subject to an object without a face (as need). Second, addiction relates the subject to an object with a face (as desire). Let me explain this distinction further:

a  Addiction: Subject and object In addiction towards an object without a face, the subject consumes the object as it would any other object. This is similar to what Nealon describes in his article. The person ingests the food, drinks the wine, in accordance with the felt ‘need’. However, distinct from other objects, this object becomes infinitely desirable and does not leave me feeling satisfied. I therefore ‘live from’ a relation to a thing that cannot satisfy me. This problematizes what it means to need something, and what it means to be satisfied, because the need in addiction remains unsatisfied. This seems to link it to desire. Yet the object does not possess the human qualities (consciousness, capacity for suffering, etc.) that the subject responds to.

b  Addiction: Subject and other An addictive relation towards another person is a bit more complicated. This is, for instance, seen in sex addiction or other relational addictions. In this addictive experience, the subject consumes a perceived ‘object’.45 But

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

65

this perceived object has a face; it is a person. The relation perhaps develops according to an experience of need. However, distinct from other objects, this relation does two things. It takes on an infinite quality of desire. Like the relation to objects in the first example (alcohol, etc.), this relation does not satisfy, so it is like desire. However, for Lévinas, this relation ought to be ethical; it ought to be characterized by infinite desire. The challenge here is that in Lévinas’s relation of ethical desire, the subject cannot fully possess the other, who remains distinct. Yet it seems that in addiction the inter-human relation is characterized as if between a subject and a consumable object, rather than a relation of responsibility. The two distinctions of relation, as applied to addiction, reorient need and desire and can therefore problematize Lévinas’s understanding of responsibility. The relation towards the object (with or without a face) contains aspects of a relation towards an object (need-driven, consumable) and a relation towards other (insatiable). These relations, both need-based and insatiable, therefore have aspects of the ethical relation and the object relation. In this way, addictive relations (and behaviours) could be seen to involve some kind of ethical46 characteristic, insofar as it invokes an infinite response that is oriented towards the other (illeity). If we can apply Lévinas in this way, then the challenging implication seems to be that the object of addiction is treated as both the other and the object. The other is something that can be consumed while also being someone towards whom the subject is responsible. The infinite voice that overwhelms us in its calling becomes a need that dictates the relational direction from which we live. Nealon suggests that in addiction the economy of ‘finite need’ has been replaced with the ‘infinite economy of total need’ (1995: 3). I would argue that it is this replacement that can produce a relation towards the addicted object that mirrors the ethical response, maintaining the ipseity of the ego, as for-itself. In the previous section, I have examined how addiction creates its own challenges in engaging with Lévinas’s ethics. This system is based on a blurred distinction between desire and need. I have shown how Lévinas explains desire and need, and I have linked this to a view of addiction. This has been more of a speculative comparison than something that Lévinas says directly. Aside from using similar concepts (obsession and desire) to refer to the relation to the other, however, Lévinas does incorporate an illustration of an excessive consumption of alcohol in Otherwise than Being. In this specific instance, he

66

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

seems to suggest that this object-relation can challenge our relation to others because it may get in the way of our ability to perceive need.47 Writing about drunkenness, he shows how it separates the individual from his or her responsibility – by blocking the response to the call of the other. He refers to it as the ‘strange place of illusion’, where intoxication acts as ‘artificial paradises’ (OB 192). Lévinas writes: The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and responsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother … touching the other without being assigned to him. (OB 192)

Here he seems to be saying that the effects of alcohol blur the clarity of the ethical relation. It creates an artificial context that mimics the movement of responsibility, while also (this is my interpretation) distancing the subject from the other. The significance of this passage is not because excess or indulgence is problematic per se. Rather, it seems to be because of its effect on our relation of responsibility towards the other. In both instances, in order to understand addiction through Lévinas, we need to look at it in terms of how it shapes our other-relation. The person consumes the object of desire, as if creating a new kind of ethical relation towards the object of addiction. In this, the relation towards human other can be put aside in an act that Lévinas equates with ‘a murder of the brother’ (OB 192). Nealon looks at how addiction likens the subject–other relation to one between a self and a perceived object. Both of these accounts show how addiction can challenge our other-orientation. However, what I also think Lévinas can contribute to this discussion is how the other is understood in addiction, as a means out of egoism. For instance, this could be how reconnecting the relation towards the other may promote recovery from the isolation of addiction, as seen in therapeutic communities of peers such as the Twelve Steps Program. We have seen how Lévinas’s use of desire can be understood relationally. But I think that Lévinas can help us to understand other parts of the addictive experience as well. Addiction researcher Elizabeth Hirchman shows how desire plays an important role in behaviour. Compulsive consumption, which includes addiction in its more extreme form, is defined as ‘a response to an uncontrollable drive or desire’ (1992: 158). This desire is directed towards the experience of a feeling or the use of a substance ‘that leads an individual to repetitively engage

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

67

in a behaviour that will ultimately cause harm to the individual and/or others’ (O’Guinn and Faber 1989, qt. in Hirchman 1992: 158). This response possesses its own relation to the addicted individual, and can blur the lines of ethical responsibility. Hirchman illustrates, for instance, that though an outside view of the addictive behaviours may seem ‘insane … disordered, illogical, fragmented … destructive’, there is an inner logical system that possesses coherence and is both ‘productive’ and ‘sensible’ (174). This is what I have previously referred to as the addicted person’s experience of a different ‘ethical’ responsibility. Hirchman suggests the addicted person uses addiction to create a ‘safe space’. In order to cope with life circumstances (for example, dealing with difficult memories), the person uses objects (and, sometimes humans as objects) as a way of relating in a less painful way. Sex softens the loneliness; drinking blurs the chronic pain, etc. However, it is this coping strategy that Lévinas criticizes, because it is an act of coping that cuts the person off from responding to the other.48 So, rather than the human ethical relation orienting the first philosophy of experience, addiction may take on a relational significance that permeates all of the patterns of relation. For instance, the person addicted to alcohol engages in his addiction to the exclusion of his response to his child, etc. But creating this ‘safe space’ (ordering) is ‘tragically ironic’, Hirchman suggests, because the ordering that has been created is a ‘mental-emotional environment that is disconnected from the outside world’ (1992: 175). This safe space out of which the person wishes to relate to the world cannot unite them with the rest of the world because it begins in disconnection (non-response), and ‘exists only as a co-constituted reality between the self and the addiction’ (1992). Hirchman shows that the difficulty in the addictive pattern of relation is found in its practice of ‘substitution’ (1992: 158).49 The addicted person seems to relate to the world through an object, rather than towards human beings, creating an environment of dissociation (or, to use Lévinas’ own language, egoism). This may be evident to others without being evident to the addicted person. One of the major challenges for theories of addiction is that the addicted subject sees this internal system as making sense subjectively. For a person outside to show that this relation is problematic is difficult, which is why programs like the Twelve Steps emphasize that the addicted person himself or herself needs to ‘admit complete defeat’ (AA 1981: 22). The sponsor may help this realization, but it is owned and worked through by the person. This relational exploration of addiction reveals how therapeutic communities

68

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

such as Alcoholics Anonymous may provide insight into how peer support can enable a person’s self-exit. The internal logic of this object-relation is brought into a context of others who can relate to the experience of addiction. The way that an addicted person’s manageability contrasts with his or her ‘defeat’ has interesting implications for this thesis. It shows how difficult it is to explore the subjectivity of addiction, without trying to treat it. It also reveals the intricate crossovers between objects and people-relations in the experience of addiction. Using the language of the Twelve Steps, the addicted person recognizes the defeat that this pattern of manageability brings, which shows a way of understanding the subjectivity of addiction. However, the Twelve Steps Program also suggests that an addicted person will always have an addictive relational outlook on the world (AA 1981: 91–2). The subject is an addict, managing his or her addiction. Therefore, even though the subject connects with peers and relates to others outside of themselves, it is still within the definition of subject as addict. This view of human experience seems to contrast with Lévinas’ definition of human experience, as substitution, or for-the-other (OB 160). From this perspective, the addicted person has created his or her own ethical ordering. This way of relating towards the world is through the addiction relation. What is challenging about this is that if this is true, then the Twelve Steps definition of addiction is problematic, because it seems to mean that the addicted person can never exit from ipseity to engage with illeity. For example, the person addicted to alcohol can be abstinent, but he or she will always approach the world as an addict, with a potential to re-engage with alcohol. In a therapeutic community the members have all acknowledged a commo­ nality in their addictive behaviour. This can acknowledge the shared logic, thereby revealing its internal inconsistencies (for instance, alcohol is used to connect, but can cause disconnection through aggravating anti-social behaviours). Peers can come alongside the addicted person to reveal how managing life in this way might be problematic. Yet still, the subject is defined as an addict.

Conclusion Though being a part of a community of others, and even engaging in acts of reconciliation etc., the subject-relation that the Twelve Steps advocates is not exactly the same as Lévinas’s subject. In the Twelve Steps, the other is

The Phenomenology of Lévinas: Religion, Relation and Desire

69

not the non-addicted carer, but is another who shares a similar experience of addiction. This peer has seen the ‘impact’ of addiction ‘bleeds through family and society’ (Groman et al. 2013) and the Twelve Steps Program gives an opportunity to relate with other addicted people. This presents a new way of relating to addiction and to others, and challenges the internal dialogue of the addicted person. However, the Twelve Steps does not address Lévinas’s concept of subject as for-the-other. The addict is still an addict, though in a context with others. Yet Lévinas, in his universalized responsibility, suggests that there is no exception to the infinite relation towards the other. In this, he differentiates between need of objects and desire for the face, and opens up a discourse about the transcendence of the other and the subject’s ability to respond as constitutive of being human. In the next chapter, I will examine how Lévinas’s understanding of freedom and language can develop this concept of relation, and can further develop what it is to be addicted.

3

Lévinas: The hopeful relation preceding freedom

In the previous chapter, I looked at how Lévinas uses phenomenology and religious language to develop a concept of subjectivity. This subject can only be understood in relation to others. The other human face calls out to me and I become subject to it: I am infinitely responsible. I showed how this differs from how the subject interacts with objects. The distinction between the object-relation and the other-relation was developed through the concept of desire, as a form of love, which I differentiated from need. I suggested that this differentiation in Lévinas could be helpful in understanding the subjective experiences of addiction. Having laid out Lévinas’s phenomenological theme of the subject–other relation in the last chapter, I will look at how this shapes his understanding of freedom and conversation. First, I will show how Lévinas uses the otherrelation to order our freedom. I will link this to how freedom is defined in addiction discourse, more specifically in terms of the addicted person’s ability to choose. In the second part, I will look at Lévinas’s use of language, through the phenomenon of conversation. Here Lévinas shows how conversation and revelation requires that the other represents her- or himself singularly. I will argue that the ability to reveal oneself in conversation, through the limits of language, challenges addiction discourse that limits the human experience to addiction. Third, I will suggest that Lévinas can help us to look at addiction as a dialogue that enables the person to experience addiction as a part of the movement of human experience as relation. This is a hopeful relation of conversation. This chapter will therefore look at freedom and conversation as a way of engaging with the intricacies of addiction.

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

71

I  Lévinas on freedom Lévinas’s concept of freedom is important to the phenomenological study of addiction for two main reasons. First, Lévinas explores the limits of freedom through his discourse on ethics, a conversation often highlighted in addiction literature, when linking choice to questions of responsibility. Whether or not an addicted person can choose is an important part in figuring out what it means to be addicted. It is often this ‘loss’ of freedom that distinguishes an addictive experience. Second, Lévinas treats freedom in a different way to his contemporaries. He realizes its importance, but problematizes its ability to guide philosophy. These deliberations (the problem of choice in addiction and Lévinas’s concept of freedom) are particularly interesting as, used in discourse, they may bring us a different understanding of addictive experiences. In his early writing of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas discusses what freedom means. He writes that ‘ontology, which reduces the other to the same, promotes freedom – the freedom is the identification of the same, not allowing itself to be alienated from the other’ (TI 42). Here, freedom seems to be problematized. Ontology, which Lévinas wants to avoid because of how it reduces the other to a part of a totality, emphasizes freedom based on the sameness of the subject and the other. But, as we saw in the last chapter through the concept of illeity, Lévinas stresses the phenomenological difference of conscious experience between two persons. Because of a shared experience of need and language, we can relate to the other, but we are not a copy of the other. This means that how we approach freedom is tricky; we cannot just assume that the other person wants the same freedoms as us. Neither can we assume that by guarding our freedom, we are also guarding the freedom of other people. It is in this context that Lévinas suggests the modern tendency to unquestionably value our personal spontaneous freedom is problematic. The subject as free is actualized through the ability to choose freely,1 and the defence of this freedom then becomes the ultimate problem that the self is confronted with. But when one person’s freedom cannot be reconciled with another’s, theory is developed to protect freedom. Protection of freedom therefore raises its challenges. Often it is framed as freedom of the same (totality), and the freedom of ‘my freedom over your freedom’ (a kind of egoism). However, this then undermines the conversation between the subject and other. Lévinas writes that ‘it is not man that possesses freedom, but freedom that

72

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

possesses man’ (TI 45). Freedom requires something prior to its unquestioned spontaneous autonomy. In the introduction to Humanism of the Other, Cohen writes that Lévinas’s world view defends ‘humanism – the worldview founded on the belief in the irreducible dignity of humans, a belief in the efficacy and worth of human freedom and hence also of human responsibility’ (2003: ix). Freedom therefore plays an important role in Lévinas’s writings. However, freedom is guided by his first philosophy. It is understood in the context of relation. The call of the other still preconditions the freedom of the self from egoism. Though any limitation of spontaneous freedom is modernity’s ‘scandal’ (TI 83), the prior relation towards the other makes spontaneous freedom problematic. Spontaneous freedom requires the separation of the ego. The ultimate ‘problem is to ensure … reconciling my freedom with the freedom of others’ (ibid.). This is done through our knowledge of how the world works around us. We try to protect our freedom through accumulating knowledge about the world around us. This protective structure of freedom emerges out of ‘knowledge of the world … the knowledge of failure. The consciousness of failure is already theoretical’ (83), and theory is premised on ‘a being that [already] distrusts itself ’ and wants to secure itself from the other (82). This discounts the subject that is defined by its engagement with the other who speaks for him- or herself. It also discounts the difference between the self and the other. Let us look at this a bit further. It seems that in his critique of freedom, Lévinas is challenging two things in particular. First, he is troubled by the freedom that centres on the individual as ego, or self-contained. Second, he questions how freedom can be understood theoretically without reducing others to the same as us. Let us start with the first point. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas shows how self-freedom, the freedom of the ego-for-itself, has framed philosophy. He writes: We have been accustomed to reason in the name of the freedom of the ego – as though I had witnessed the creation of the world, as though I could only have been in charge of a world that would have issued out of my own free will. (122)

Freedom forms an integral part of the human experience. Lévinas’s thoughts on humanism inform how he understands freedom. He suggests that

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

73

contemporary moral theory starts with protecting freedom, and structuring human relations from this. Lévinas wants to reverse the order of priority; rather than beginning with moral theory that protects freedom, Lévinas’s humanism starts with the subject–other relation, which then orients his understanding of freedom. He writes: This antecedent of responsibility to freedom would signify the Goodness of the Good: the necessity that the Good chose me first before I can be in a position to choose, that is, welcome, its choice. (OB 122)

Responsibility of the other is prior to my choice. I do not choose the other: the other calls out to me. Freedom is contextualized in the humanistic outworking of responsibility, which is what we saw in the last chapter. In defining humanism in this way, and thereby the questions of freedom that encompass it, Lévinas wants to connect and particularize phenomenology to the human subject, diverging from the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl’s abstraction of being in general. But he also wants to challenge the social sciences that framed human experience based on accumulating knowledge about a person and in which ‘the interiority of an ego identical to itself dissolves in a totality without folds or secrets. All that is human is outside’ (HO 59). He wants to re-centre phenomenology on the human being, while maintaining the interior experience of the subject and avoiding the potential isolation of Sartre’s self for-itself. This humanism acknowledges freedom, but it is a freedom developed through relation. Lévinas wants to re-centre philosophy on the ‘difficult freedom’2 that emerges out of a love for the other, a giving to the neighbour. In Otherwise than Being, he writes, ‘Has not the Good chosen the subject with an election recognisable in the responsibility of being hostage, to which the subject is destined?’ (122) This is a ‘difficult freedom’. Taking the language of humanism, he centres the exchange not on the protection of individual freedom, but on relation. This humanism focuses on the irreducibility of the human face, and the possibility of freedom that emerges through assuming responsibility for the other (Cohen 2003: ix). Unlike Sartre’s existential humanism, this humanism is for-the-other. It is ‘the one-for-the-other as the one-his-brother’s-keeper, as the-one-responsible-for-the-other’ (HO 6). Taking phenomenology from the abstraction of Heidegger, being is given a face, concrete needs and an infinite presence that places the neighbour beyond our full understanding.

74

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Any freedom that is experienced emerges out of this humanism, where I, as a subject, exist for the other. Unlike Heideggerian ontology, being has a particular face. Distinct to Sartre, it is the relation to the other that precedes freedom. Cohen argues that while at first glance Sartre’s humanism seems human-centred, the problem is that activity stays within itself (2003: xviii). Meaning is found within what the subject will make of it, as seen when Sartre writes that ‘[man] shall attain existence only when he is what he projects himself to be’ (2007: 23). The external world derives its meaning from the self-reflective consciousness. A person maintains a ‘pure reflective distance’ from the world, filtered through self-consciousness. Human freedom is derived from a subjective self-reflection (Cohen 2003: xvii). Lévinas, however, interprets freedom through the lens of a subject that is first directed towards the other.3 Lévinas therefore engages with freedom within his first philosophy of ethics. But though Lévinas critiques the spontaneity of Sartre’s unquestioned for-itself freedom, he is sympathetic to the subjective perspective of existentialism. This is the second point: Lévinas does not want to theorize about a kind of general human freedom. As a Lithuanian Jew versed in the existential Russian laureates Puskin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (Hand 1989: 2), Lévinas values the existential experience of the subject and the role of freedom. It is just that it is understood within the outworking of an infinite response towards the other. If I am to open up towards the other, to respond to the other, I must have some understanding of my separation from him or her. Who I am is distinct, yet oriented towards the other. However, staying within oneself without the other affirms one’s egoism and autonomous isolation. This is problematic for Lévinas’s humanism. It is impossible to remain in oneself because ‘the humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility for the others’ (HO 67). One’s subjectivity is to be lived from, as towards the other. Self-absorption is given up in response to the other, where the ‘first person singular subject’ is relinquished in favour of the neighbour (Llewelyn 2002: 121). The concept of infinite relation and incomprehensibility in Lévinas means that it is difficult to find a standard normative way of relating to others. Putnam writes that a genuine engagement with another human must presuppose a separation and distinction between each other’s realities. The other is not comprehended, but must reveal herself to us. If concern for the other emerges just as a reflection of one’s own interpretation of the world, then

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

75

we are narcissistic (2002: 41). Lévinas suggests that acting based on knowledge about something has the tendency of ‘[returning] to its island to be shut up there’ without challenging the subjectivity that serves as the reference point for philosophical discourse (OB 78). The subject does not comprehend the other. The other reveals herself by addressing me. For Lévinas, the subject–other relation serves as a place of welcoming and giving, from a subject ‘at home with [it]self ’ (TI 170). It is not our defence of freedom that sets up a relation of hostility towards the other, but rather the ability to respond to the other. Responsibility precedes freedom, and my freedom receives its significance in engaging with the other. Michael Bernard-Donals suggests that Lévinas’s ethical openness is ‘a “giving”, where the person gives up his or her name (“I am I”) in favour of being responsible to and for the other’ (2005: 64). The personal freedom, found in a name, is given in assuming the preference for the other. Yet there is no guarantee that the other will give to us. The relation is asymmetrical. Despite the response of the other, I am always called to respond. The autonomy to act freely formyself is relinquished for the welcome of response, and the ability to respond to the need of the other. In this Lévinas does not thereby give up a notion of freedom, but frames it through responsibility. The ‘fundamental fact’ of human vulnerability establishes freedom in relation (Westphal 2008a: 99), and humanism is for the other. Lévinas suggests that most theories of freedom are based on criticism and distrust of the other. For instance, Katz remarks that for Lévinas, ‘The discussion of rights is already at a level of discourse that has forgotten the ethical, the faceto-face-responsibility for the other’, because it is situated on ‘the sovereignty of the ego’ (2012: 6). The self is attempting to defend its borders. Here, interesting connections can be drawn to addiction, and I think that Lévinas’s insights on theories of freedom are particularly helpful in discussing how theory might interact with experience. In addiction, our understanding of the person with an addiction is generally based on what we know about addiction and how her or his behaviours line up with that theory. Two things are often maintained: First, the addicted person’s spontaneous freedom to choose has been limited by addiction. Second, we can understand what it is to be that person based on our theories of addiction (for instance, a weakened ability to ‘say no’, or a helplessness over their condition). In the next section, I will unpack the two statements further.

76

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Let us first examine how spontaneous freedom can be understood in addiction. I think that there are parallels between the addiction discourse and what Lévinas says in Totality and Infinity. He writes that theory ‘admits not only the undiscussed value of spontaneity, but also the possibility of a rational being situated within the totality’ (TI: 83). Addiction discourse tends to place a central importance on figuring out whether or not a person can choose his or her behaviour, and whether there might be limits of responsibility.4 This discourse is therefore tied to defining what addiction actually is. For instance, Orford highlights the ‘excessive appetite’ that accompanies addiction (1995). Audrey Chapman illustrates the genetic association with a predisposition towards dependence and addiction, while maintaining that its complex nature ‘makes it unlikely that single causes and simple diagnostic criteria are likely to provide clear guidance’ (2012: 7).5 Finally, others such as Knapp liken the addicted experience to ‘a [destructive] love story’ (1996). In each of these accounts, the addicted persons’ responsibility for their behaviour varies, but the person still seems to have some capacity to choose the behaviour. The concern for responsibility is therefore often developed in response to an individual’s freedom to choose. The addicted person is labelled as diseased, as ‘helpless’ or as ‘hijacked’ (Satel and Lilienfield 2013: 141). Spontaneous freedom, which is valued as a crucial aspect of being human, is compromised. So, this person is now somehow ‘different’. Treating addiction, professionals try to figure out how to get back the spontaneity of a freely choosing self. This is where medication and cognitive behavioural therapy, even the Twelve Steps’s invocation of the Higher Power comes in. We try to re-secure the freedom lost to restore the identity of the subject as chooser. However, asserting spontaneous freedom often ends up creating incommensurable conflict between the subject and others (as particularly evidenced in the application of addiction). For example, my ability to choose means that I can choose a particular way of living that may be in conflict with anothers. My choice of excessive alcohol consumption can be the very thing that the other finds problematic because of its effects on home life, health costs, etc. So, theories about addiction involve understanding which behaviours are seen as harmful or not harmful, and how to limit the damage of freedom from occurring. I think that the addiction discourse often centralizes around freedom. (Can the person choose to become addicted? is the person always going to engage in addictive behaviours?) But it also shows the challenges that

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

77

understanding freedom brings. It seems, for instance, that some choices are not always freely chosen, such as a person’s use of alcohol. Freedom to choose is a part of how addiction is treated (for instance, choosing to engage with the Higher Power, choosing to attend Twelve Steps meetings, or abstaining from alcohol). However it is also this freedom to choose, or at least this particular choice of object over others, which enabled the addictive experience in the first place.6 To avoid this, addiction theory usually suggests that people either do not engage with certain behaviours at all (e.g. prohibition movement of alcohol), or they restrain/limit themselves through the use of aversive medication, cognitive behavioural therapy, etc. So the person is actually not completely free to choose. In either instance, however, the subject, whether fully spontaneously free, or problematically free, is still relating to the world egoistically. This kind of discourse on freedom is based on a theory in which the reality of the world comes through knowledge of a world where the spontaneously free I occupies the centre (TI 83). If we look at how Lévinas wants to conceptualize response as an exit from the ego, then securing the egoism seems to be counter to this infinite relational subjectivity of encounter. Addiction theory therefore emerges in awareness that our freedom will somehow fail us.7 But Lévinas shows us that prior to this failure is an infinitely relational subject, which provides the context of exit from egoism, or what I will refer to as a situation of hope. This brings us to the second point: Lévinas is not just concerned about an ego-centred world view. His subject is primarily for-the-other. Along with this, he is also concerned about understanding a person based on theory; that is, based on knowledge about him or her. He wants the person to reveal herself to us.8 This orients the subject and the other towards the future, and provides an exit from egoism. The other actually ‘liberates the subject from its captivity’, which Rudolf Bernet calls an example of Lévinas’s ‘temporal modality of hope’ (2002: 93). But in addiction, it seems helpful to have some kind of theoretical relation to the other. We (the family member, practitioner, mentor, etc.) presuppose that we know what it is to be a particular person through the label of addict or addicted. For instance, a person exhibits an excessive appetite towards alcohol and he or she suffers from withdrawal and dependence. Therefore, this person can be understood to be addicted to alcohol. Theory gives a type of framework for how the person is treated.

78

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Let us explore this a bit further. When professionals are asked to diagnose a person with an addiction, they examine the person based on particular facts that generate questions about the behaviour. These questions are then used to assess whether he or she is addicted or not. For example, looking at a person’s drinking habits, a professional may try to figure out whether or not they are out of control. If a person is drinking compulsively, then this person may be addicted. This is an example in which a person is approached based on knowledge about him or her, rather than the person’s own subjective representation. But it can be difficult to approach a person theoretically while also realizing that he or she is other, and presents herself ‘in a personal way’ (DF 8). Lévinas warns that ‘it has meaning, but it leads us to the agent in his absence’ (TI 66). I think that this gives a particular insight into the limits of diagnosis and addiction theory. For instance, when a person is given the label of ‘addict’, it is presupposed that there are facts known about what it is to be an addict. This person depends on alcohol; she suffers withdrawal symptoms, and has difficulty managing simple ordinary tasks. In this theory of addiction that is applied to the person, the person is understood through knowledge about him or herself, rather than engagement in conversation where she reveals herself (TI 66). We can see here that an examination of Lévinas’s critique of spontaneous freedom and theory highlights subtle challenges in trying to understand a person as addict. But aside from problematizing current models of addiction, I think that Lévinas could also help us to understand the experience of addiction further. Lévinas’s orients the emphasis from the isolated self to a response to the other. Freedom is understood in this relation. Applied to addiction, rather than looking at addiction theory as a grappling with the problem of free choice, relation can be used to order this freedom. In this understanding, it would not make sense to refer to a person as an addict, because her human experience is never completely defined by whether or not choice is possible. Our humanity, according to Lévinas, is always tied to our relation of response to the other. We are for-the-other, whether addicted or not. So because Lévinas decentralizes the freedom of the ego and establishes the centrality of the other, as well as maintaining the irreducible subject, I would think it problematic for Lévinas to define someone according to his or her addictive behaviours. However, I do think that Lévinas can give some insight

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

79

into particular parts of addictive experiences. First, let us look at the initial choice of addictive behaviours. Addiction can, to a large extent, problematize the relation towards the other, and I have at times wondered whether Lévinas would ever allow for freedom to choose an addictive behaviour in the first place. As we saw in the previous chapter, Lévinas equates intoxication with the building of ‘artificial paradises’, which distance us from the other, and acts as ‘a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother’ (OB 192). It would therefore seem that on this account any behaviour that interrupts the other relation is unethical and a break of subjectivity. This idea seems quite easily applicable in determining what to do with the freedom to choose alcohol and perhaps even overeating, but it becomes more difficult to distinguish between choosing behaviours that are seen to be addictive, in relation to another human being. So, for example, something like a work addiction done under the pretence of being ‘for the other’ may be more difficult to define as unethical, as would co-dependent relationships, and so on, where the subject is actually seemingly filling a need, or responding to the other. More detailed understanding of the limits and boundaries of self may therefore be required in order to recognize this relation more precisely. An ethic of infinite responsibility is challenging and arguably not one that can answer the detailed specifications of what ought to be considered an ethically justifiable work or relational boundary. But Lévinas is as nuanced as he is demanding. A person is always responsible, but the subject cannot generalize about the other. Nealon summarizes Lévinas’s approach in his application to addiction, stating that ‘the problem is not the absence or evasion of self … [but] rather, the absence or evasion of the other or response’ (1995: 22). Therefore, one is always responsible ‘for the pain and fault of others’ (OB 112). Referencing this responsibility, I come to my second point: If we are responsible for the other, are we responsible for the other’s addiction as well? For instance, are we responsible even for an addicted person’s need for food or drink? My freedom is given for the other; however, what if being for-theother and responding to his or her need is actually fuelling an addiction? Take, for instance, co-dependent relationships, where the subject–other response is problematized. The Twelve Steps engage with these relational challenges, by asserting the centrality of addiction and problematizing an addicted person’s relational patterns. For instance, when reflecting on how a Jewish person could engage with the Program, Rabbi Shais Taub suggests that the Twelve

80

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Steps break the cycle of co-dependency that compromises both freedom and personal responsibility. Quoting the Torah teacher Hillel, he emphasizes the central importance on being-for-another. He writes, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’ (2011: 128). Lévinas answers the second part of the question with the first, in an inversion (as though the other was asking us this question): the subject will be for-the-other. The difficulty, which Lévinas does not seem to focus on, is whether the other ever reaches a point of assuming subjective responsibility. The third point worth considering is the concept of powerlessness, as a relation of non-freedom. This phrase is popular in the Twelve Steps Program, and refers to the condition in which a person’s life becomes unmanageable due to his or her addiction. An example of this is found in one of the anecdotal stories found in the Program’s Big Book. Featured among the collected narratives is the story of an anonymous man who experiences his addiction to alcohol as powerlessness. In this experience, he does not seem to have the capacity to do anything about his addiction. This anonymous narrator writes: I was willing to do anything in the world to stop drinking. I was willing to admit that I had gotten hold of something that I didn’t know how to handle by myself. (AA 2001: 187)

In this quote, the man seems to acknowledge the need for another’s help. Recognizing his loss of freedom over the object-relation, he turns to something beyond himself. In this instance the other that he turns to is his Higher Power. He says: I admitted that from then on I was willing to let God take over instead of me. Each day I would try to find out what His will was and try to follow that, rather than trying to get Him to always agree with the things I thought up for myself were the things that were best for me. (AA 2001)

This seems to outline a similar kind of relation to the one that Lévinas describes between the subject and the other in Useless Suffering, and the relational orientation of freedom in Totality and Infinity. In the example above, the man opens himself up to the response of the other, resulting in an (albeit neither simple nor straightforward) ability to abstain from alcohol. Previously, using his own freedom of agency to choose he had tried to quit but failed (AA

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

81

2001: 188). However, upon responding to the relation to the Higher Power, and putting ‘His world first’, the person eventually experiences a restoration to health and relation with others. One of the founders of the program, a medical doctor by the name of Bill also showed how the other-relation had been important in his recovery journey. He wrote that he ‘was very, very grateful that he had given God the credit for having done it [abstained from alcohol]’ (AA 2001: 191). Taub describes this as the ‘belief that God is always paying attention’ (2011: 67). I think that there are ways in which this other-relation (i.e. the God-other relation, where the other is the addicted person) parallels Lévinas’s suffering other in Useless Suffering. Here the other is totally overwhelmed by the phenomenon of suffering so that it is experienced as ‘the plaintiveness of pain, hurt [mal]’ (US 157). Lévinas calls it a ‘passivity’ that is undergone by the person, which ‘overwhelms’ the senses (US 157). The subject, in assuming the suffering of the other, offers a way out of this overwhelming experience in which the person is ‘condemned to itself without exit’ (US 158). Thus the ‘beyond takes shape in the interhuman’ (US 158). This seems to be similar to what is described in the Godrelation of the Big Book narratives, where God (or the Higher Power) offers a beyond. For Lévinas, however, the subject is human and always responsible. The love-relation that is characterized as desire in the last chapter does not wait for God’s response. We bear it ourselves. In the Twelve Steps narrative, the addicted person receives the help. In Lévinas, God is only accessed through the response towards the other, as a trace of the good (GCM 166). In the Twelve Steps, God is accessed directly.9 Yet, interestingly, both the Twelve Steps and Lévinas understand the relation towards God to involve an orientation towards the community. For instance, in the Twelve Steps, it says that ‘here our common welfare comes first’ (AA 2001: 563). So the other-relation seems to mediate the addictive experience. The person is not able to choose to stop the addiction freely for him- or herself. This freedom to choose abstinence is helped by the relation to the other (human or God). Freedom is given a secondary role. Just as Lévinas’s response conditions freedom, so abstinence in the Twelve Steps seems to start as the self relates towards the other. However, the point of divergence comes in how the God-relation is understood, and the role that the community of peers has in providing an exit from addiction.

82

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

II  Ethics: Revelation and communication I have briefly shown how Lévinas’s understanding of freedom can fit into our discourse on addiction. He problematizes how modern philosophy has emphasized individual freedom, the centralization of theory and the protection of the ego. In Lévinas’s embodied phenomenology, he can explore the ‘livedbody’ without the ‘pitfalls of … dualism’ that Schalow describes (2017: 19). I have argued that Lévinas’s phenomenology thereby also problematizes parts of the addiction experience, as understood by the Twelve Steps. I want to develop this discourse further through looking at particular ways in which Lévinas uses language. In his challenge to moral theory, Lévinas points out how it is difficult to use generalizable language to understand the separate other. Reflecting on his concept of revelation, I will first show how Lévinas uses language to draw out the alterity of the other. Second, I will examine how Lévinas uses conversation, where the ethical exchange is a moment of teaching and language. Lévinas wants to maintain freedom while moving it under the jurisdiction of responsibility. Freedom emerges out of this response towards the other. Howard Caygill writes It is upon the third member of the liberal political trinity of freedom, equality and fraternity] that Lévinas focuses his attention … he tries to rethink fraternity on the basis of alterity and thus to derive the concepts of freedom and equality from fraternity rather than leaving it as their supplement. (Caygill 2002, qt. in Westphal 2008: 131)

Any notion of human freedom is therefore contingent on the responsive openness towards the other. The primacy is on the relation to the other, rather than the freedom of the self. However, though the subject is responsible towards the other, it can be difficult to know who this other is. For Lévinas, we cannot fully grasp or understand the other; we can understand the other theoretically. He or she is separate, and like the face, both open and closed off from me. ‘The basic intuition of moral growing up,’ Lévinas writes, ‘perhaps consists in perceiving that I am not the equal of the other’ (DF 21). There is an irreducible distance that defines our relation to others. The other is different to me. But we can still relate to each other. This ‘absolute difference’, suggests Lévinas, is ‘established

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

83

only by language’ (TI 194).10 To respond to the alterity (otherness) of the other, he or she must be able to communicate with me in order that I can respond. The other is incomprehensible and reveals his or her presence through discourse, which relates the subject ‘with what remains essentially transcendent’ (TI 195). We therefore open ourselves towards the other in communication. Communication presents that which is separate from me and reveals the other to me. Lévinas writes that ‘to become conscious of a being is … on the basis of a “said”’ (OB 99). But the relation to the other is a continuous dialogue, a continuous saying in the present tense (6).11 He is careful to make a distinction between the dialogue of an interlocutor and any thematic ‘knowing’ about something, which he calls the ‘said’. Lévinas suggests that past Western philosophy12 has resulted in a ‘thematic exposition of being [as] knowing’ (99), or a said that is over and done with, so that in knowing being, we know what it is to be human. However, Lévinas wants to highlight the irreducibility of the other. The other is completely separate from my ability to thematize him or her as the same. There is no general category for the other. He or she is addressed personally, transcending any category that I may have.13 Each face requires a personal and continuous address. In this distinction between knowing and revelation, or the said and saying, Lévinas differentiates between an epistemological and phenomenological engagement with the other. Epistemology bases itself on knowledge about something. But Lévinas suggests that we cannot know about other human beings. He or she must address us. So when we say that we may know something about the other, we still always remain apart (TI 64). We are ‘disturbed’ by the passing trace of the other, but we cannot contain or exhaustively know who this other is (as seen in the last chapter on desire and consumption). So if we look at this in terms of addiction, for instance, knowing about a person’s drinking patterns does not reveal the subjective experience of what it is for that person to be addicted. Just knowing that Jane drinks to excess, or Jack suffers from withdrawals from heroin does not mean that I know what it is to be Jane or Jack. Referencing Lévinas, Critchley writes that there is something about the other person, a dimension of separateness, interiority, secrecy or what Lévinas calls ‘alterity’ that escapes my comprehension. That which exceeds the bounds of my knowledge demands acknowledgment … one cannot ultimately acknowledge everything about the other person. (2002: 26)

84

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

The other exists separate to my knowledge about him or her. This alterity is defining of the relation and maintains the distance between myself and the other. So when the other approaches me, there is a distance and absence in the questioning. But something about that person is also being consciously communicated to me. Questioning the other presupposes that ‘someone signifies something to someone else’ (TI 202). Lévinas writes that language ‘already presupposes an authentication of the signifier’ (TI 202).14 In questioning the other, I seek a meaningful response. I want to know something about the other that cannot be revealed without this exchange (Sebbah 2000: 62). This movement of speech, of question and response, is an act of generosity. The other shares a world that is apart from my own and cannot be known except through this dialogue (TI 12). The subject and the other therefore both have something to offer. I offer myself as listener and thereby recognise that I have something to give the other. Engaging with the other is an initial act of generosity as I give of my world to him or her. Lévinas writes that ‘the other is not an object that must be interpreted and illumined by my alien light. He shines forth with his own light and speaks for himself ’ (TI 14). Exposed to the question of the other, the self becomes subject to conversation, which is a kind of teaching (Katz 2013: 128–9). The ambiguous il-y-a is posited in time, and becomes the subject of a conversational exchange. So this suggests that meaning is produced in the discourse between the self and the other. Meaning is not Plato’s ideal essence, recollected as if forgotten, but said and taught by ongoing revelatory presence (TI 66).15 In contrast to this, approaching someone from his or her actions means that the other is exposed but not given the exchange to express him or herself. The other is ‘enter[ed] as if by burglary’ (66-67). Engagement with someone, therefore, occurs through the vocative (69). This means that for Lévinas, we cannot understand the other solely though his or her observable behaviours. He writes that ‘action does not express. It has meaning, but leads us to the agent in his absence … [the other is] exposed, but does not express himself ’ (TI 66-67). Gaining knowledge through observable behaviour is important, but it does not open us up to the unknown world of the other. For example, just as I can observe the activities of a stranger at a local pub to gain facts about his or her drinking patterns, I cannot claim to actually ‘understand’ him or her from these actions.16 Only the other can

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

85

personally represent him- or herself to me (DF 8). This does not mean that such knowledge is not important. It does not mean that observing the actions (behaviours) of others is a waste of time. Lévinas is merely stating that it cannot give a full account of what it is to be that person. I think that Lévinas’s understanding of saying and the said, of knowing about someone versus discoursing, can help us to understand the complexity of addictive experiences. For instance, through research we can know about addictive behaviours based on what has been observed. With recourse to individual narratives and observations, we can say that we know something about addiction. A person eats an excessive amount of donuts when he or she feels lonely. Another habitually takes cocaine before a work deadline, etc. This knowledge helps us to develop theories of addiction that may enable us to understand addiction, in terms of treatment. It can also frame our philosophical questions about responsibility and stigmatization trends, etc. However, this knowledge about behaviours does not tell us the specifics of the subjective experience of addiction. It is similar to Lévinas’s problematization of social sciences, which he says approach the other from observation, ‘mathematical identities identifiable from the outside’ as a way of ‘understanding man’, and ‘the subject is eliminated from the order of reasons’ (HO 59). This, Lévinas suggests, can ‘pass for a very firm formulation of materialism’ (HO 59) that relinquishes subjectivity to signifiers. But this does not do justice to the complexity of human experience, and so he asks further: ‘Isn’t the identity of the subjective ruined by the contradictions that tear apart this reasonable world?’ (HO 59) These contradictions that tear at us are only revealed face-by-face, through the exposure to the other. So, employing Lévinas’s discourse on communication to addiction, it may be problematic to say that because someone has observably addictive characteristics, we can understand what his or her experience is like. We must allow the other space to speak, and we must allow his or her response to shape our understanding, as a sort of revelation. A definition of addiction is employed in the absence of the other, in the absence of a full engagement with the unique face. It is important for purposes of clarifying and conceptualizing their patterns of behaviour, but it does not tell us about the subjective experience of the person. Lévinas emphasizes that knowledge as ‘categorisation is not an act of justice’ (TI 67). Justice, as enacted ethics, emerges out of the revelatory relation of the other.

86

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Lévinas makes the careful distinction between knowledge and revelation. Whereas knowledge can be acquired through research and observation about someone, revelation can only come from the encounter of the saying. In applying this idea to addiction, I think objective knowing could be similarly applied to the knowledge-based definitions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Having observed behaviours in the past, the professionals determine a diagnostic criterion that can be applied to understanding future cases, by treating others exhibiting common symptoms in a similar way. However, when knowledge about a person is based on observed behaviours, overgeneralizations can happen which are not connected to a continuous revelation and speaking.17 In the Twelve Steps, a person is always an addict. But what happens when someone ‘matures out’ of addiction? In other theories, the brain is compromised in its decision-making. But what about the plasticity of the brain, and the capacity for making other decisions? One theory alone cannot tell us about this subjective experience. Lévinas suggests that knowledge only partially reveals what is going on.18 ‘The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation’ (TI 64-65). Revelation requires a continuously unfolding encounter and is manifest through conversation (the ‘saying’). He suggests that revelation is allowing the other to speak (TI 69). Who we are is the subject of a discourse with the other. Looking at addiction, then, the relation between the subject and the other, between the ‘professional’ and the addicted person must involve the space for an ongoing conversation. Wild, in the introduction to Totality and Infinity, shows how the experience of the other differs from the subject. He writes that ‘the other, who is essentially like me on the surface [nonetheless] inhabits a world basically other than mine, essentially different from me’ (Wild 1969: 13). In engaging with the saying of the other, understanding addiction means appealing directly to the person who is addicted. Knowledge about addiction is important, but it lacks the revelatory element of experience that only the other can provide. Let me unpack this concept of conversation a bit further to see if it really can help us to understand the subject of addiction. Lévinas suggests that when we converse with the other it already implies that he or she is distinct from me. The ‘strangeness of the interlocutors’ (TI 72) requires that I am open to being taught. The other is separate from me, but can reveal herself through the saying (continuous present speech). Approaching the other through

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

87

generalities about her existence (i.e. if she has more than four drinks a day, then she must be an addict) is not consistent with the reality of a person’s separation from me. This means that the one who speaks to me retains her ‘fundamental foreignness … outside of my knowing’ (100). This foreignness, this separation, is also the other’s freedom,19 because the other ‘remains the ungraspable’ (Welz and Verstryne 2008: 160). This is the hopeful otherness that I have referenced previously. In recognizing the other, I am in a position to give to her. I respond to the hunger of the other (TI 75). But, as we saw in the last chapter, this is the hunger of desire, or love. Lévinas maintains the distinction between consuming the other and giving to the other through his emphasis on separation. Each human is a stranger to me. I relate to the other out of my own separation (see the previous chapter). Coming face-to-face with the other, I cannot force my categories on the other. The one engaged in experience must speak to me, and through that reveal to me some of who he or she is. This is not, however, a meaningless chat. It is an encounter that presupposes that I have something to give. I, in turn, desire the other, but not like the need for food (to consume), but rather out of the act of goodness. The subtlety of the distinction of hunger here is significant. Previously, I discussed how the need and grabbiness of a consuming hunger exists opposite to the metaphysical desire for the other that emerges out of a sense of separation and completion. Here, however, Lévinas introduces another kind of hunger. There is the hunger of the other that suggests through our communication that our relation is not arbitrary, but rather an act of giving. It is this relation that is ethics and this exchange that brings signification, in which the other expresses him- or herself (92).20

III  Defining addiction as dialogue For Lévinas, the ethical encounter is conversation, but this conversation also problematizes spontaneous freedom and reveals itself individually as a form of teaching. Having looked at what Lévinas says about the subject’s encounter with the other, I want to examine a few comparisons more closely. In this section, I will suggest that addiction discourse can benefit from engaging with Lévinas’s concepts of language and freedom. Addictive experiences, I will argue, can be understood as kinds of dialogue. I will conclude by examining how Lévinas’

88

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

concept of God can help us to understand this relation of revelation. Here, I will suggest that Lévinas’s responsible subject can challenge the passivity of addiction by positing the infinite hopeful response, the possibility of exit, as central to human experience. Using Lévinas in juxtaposition with psychology is nothing new, so engaging in a Lévinasian dialogue on addiction seems to fit well in key ways. Bettina Bergo suggests that Lévinas’s own extensive use of psychological terminology reflects his early studies in the discipline.21 So concepts such as revelation are used to explain the subjective experience of being invoked by the other. Philosophical revelation is therefore ‘an ethical behaviour and not theology’ (TI 78).22 She says that, in his early writings in particular Lévinas maintains that everyday affectivity and the basic facts of embodied consciousness (… like his phenomenological descriptions [of existence] …) afford us the means with which to describe the subjective life as a continuum from waking consciousness all the way to unconsciousness. (2005: 143)

These writings offer insight into how Lévinas understands being, and are, I think, helpful in showing why Lévinas can be used to understand addiction. For Lévinas, psychological categories are used to articulate the experienced embodiment of being wanting ‘to get out of itself ’ (152). I would also argue the same for physiological categories, as seen in Lévinas’s phenomenology of physical pain in Useless Suffering. Lévinas’s subject is not trapped in an isolated ego. Rather, the experience of relation shows us that there is always an exit. Here we see how Lévinas can use psychological and physiological language to develop his phenomenology of relation. It shows the reader what it is to be a subject engaged in the world while also invoking the presence of the other. This exit is also developed through the language of conversation and revelation.23 The embodied relational phenomenology of Lévinas is communicative. This is shown, for instance, when he writes that ‘the invoked is not what I comprehend: he is not under a category. He is the one to whom I speak— he has only a reference to himself; he has no quiddity’ (TI 69). In the face-to-face exchange of conversation, the subject opens up to receiving from the other. The subject is taught by the other (Strhan 2012: 10). Each person has a story to tell, and it is in ‘conversation’ (TI 71) that the subject enters into a vulnerable relation of conversation and relation.

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

89

Looking at this in relation to addiction, I think that this reveals some particular challenges in current discourse. For instance, I think conversations in which the professional learns from the addicted person in a way that transforms their understanding is limited. Lévinas wants discourse to reveal the other to us, as ‘the constitution of truth in a struggle between thinkers, with all the risks of freedom’ (TI 73). However, it is difficult, for instance, to see this ‘struggle between thinkers’ in the asymmetry of the patient–practitioner relation. Often the addicted person is told that he or she is ‘an addict’, and then given a theory for engaging with this experience. The professional relation is enacted between the one who has knowledge to ‘help’ and the one who receives knowledge. However, if the subject is the practitioner, and the other is the addicted person, Lévinas seems to suggest that the addicted person can actually be the one through whom the practitioner receives revelation. In this exchange, our own comprehension of the other is brought into question. For Lévinas, the gaze of the other becomes ‘a discovery of one’s weakness and unworthiness’ (TI 83). This could be developed in an honest and detailed engagement with methods such as reflective practice.24 Acknowledging the inability to fully understand the other without her self-revelation, seeing one’s own deficits, misapplied words and actions, and confronting this, practitioners may move towards a more Lévinasian understanding of the other person, and in turn, oneself. But this kind of practice is not always available for the practitioner. Not all practitioners are being counselled themselves, and it often seems impossible with restrictions on appointments to carve out specific time to reflect on practice and the possibility of receiving from the person one is working with. The Twelve Steps seems to give more of a space for conversation, through the peer group narratives and personal engagement with a mentor. In Twelve Steps groups, a person is asked to identify him- or herself as their ‘illness’,25 and acknowledge the addiction within the context of community. In conjunction with meeting in groups, Twelve Steps program participants are also encouraged to have a mentor. This other is also ‘an addict’, but has been engaged in abstinent practice. Marta Perez et al. define the ‘mentormentee model’ as revolving ‘around the willing presence of a volunteer who has achieved the “goal”, working in partnership with a person who is aiming to achieve the goal’ (2014: 2). The mentor accompanies the addicted person

90

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

on his or her recovery journey by meeting up with him or her, and providing support and accountability. When someone joins the Twelve Steps Program, the person acknowledges his or her addiction in front of a community of peers. Responsibility for one’s experience as ‘an addict’ comes with this identification. This personal connection and contact to the mentor and the group could be seen as an acknowledgement of significant ongoing revelation between the self and the other. For instance, the replacement of substance-using friends with ‘abstinent’ friends (Humphreys 2004) and increased participation in Twelve Steps activities (including broader involvement outside of meetings) has been correlated to an increased success of abstinence. For instance, comparative studies suggest that Twelve Steps participants show over ‘over 60% greater improvement in ASI (Addiction Severity Index) alcohol and drug composite scores’ (Timko 2006: 678–88). Looking at the Program through what we have learned from Lévinas and the other-relation, one of the Program’s greatest strengths may lie in the development of the peer network. This is the context in which relation is established and communication to others through mutual revelation, as, for instance, seen in mentorship. There are not the same power structures that can be challenging in a patient–practitioner relation. Here, all are peers, part of a similar journey of abstinence, and all are in a position of vulnerability and disclosure. The person is given room to speak and shares in the ongoing journey of abstinence within a context of others. Twelve Steps relations can therefore seem quite similar to Lévinas’s conversation. Revelatory encounters emerge between members. Communication is established in peer relation, which extends beyond the regular patient–practitioner model of treatment. However, there are other ways in which the Twelve Steps understanding of addiction could be problematic to Lévinas’s concept of ethical subjectivity. For instance, the label ‘I am an addict’ does not seem to be a statement of revelation. It is a statement about a person’s experience. I am an addict, because I have an excessive appetite for alcohol that I find overwhelming. This means that the relations are somewhat pre-established: when the mentor engages with a mentee as ‘an addict’, he or she is saying that the person is already known. Who the person is, is an addict. I think that Lévinas shows us two important things here concerning revelation and knowledge in addiction treatment. First, though it is helpful

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

91

to use factual knowledge to guide treatment of addiction, understanding human experience based on knowledge alone is incomplete. Revelation requires ongoing disclosure.26 This is a relation of the present directed towards the future, beyond knowledge of the past. In terms of addiction, this could mean that each person has treatment that addresses his or her specific life experiences that cannot be revealed outside of conversation. Methods of treatment such as psychotherapy and group therapy (AA), for instance, give individuals space to articulate their own story of addiction. The other must reveal what is going on, which is what we can loosely call Lévinas’s concept of truth (TI 64-70). Second, if we look at Lévinas’s concept of conversation, then both the mentor and the addicted person have something to teach the other. This challenges the patient–practitioner power structure that suggests that the addicted individual can only receive from the mentor and the mentor can only give to the individual. This discussion has followed the primary importance that Lévinas places on inter-human responsibility. However, the other-relation and the concept of revelation also converge through the concept of God, or the Higher Power. Lévinas writes that ‘the problem of transcendence and of God and the problem of subjectivity irreducible to essence … go together’ (OB 17). In this chapter, we have problematized spontaneous freedom, based on the concept of relation. Lévinas shows us that this relation is accessed through the revelation of the face and conversation. What we saw in the last chapter was that Lévinas equates this with the religious language of the holy. God is holy and remains separate from us; we can only access God through the trace that is revealed by the separate other (TI 78).27 Thus, ‘the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. A relation with the Transcendent free from all captivation by the Transcendent is a social relation’ (TI 78). According to Lévinas, then, we also converse and relate to God. However, this is not so much through presence as through absence, experienced in the trace left in the infinite distance between the subject and the other. So the subject relates to a God who cannot be pinned down or ever fully understood. Yet, I would argue, it contains traces of the hopeful relation of desire that characterizes the relation to the other. God’s trace is experienced as the subject receives the revelation of the beyond from the other, and is ‘glimpsed in the ethical experience’ (Urbano 2012: 50), where ‘the dimensions of the divine open forth from the human face’ (TI 78). God cannot be accessed

92

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

directly, but is only known through relation to the human other. John Caruana writes that a subject’s relation to God ‘redirects me (detour) towards the frankness (directness) of the other’ (2006: 573). This is shown when Lévinas writes that the goodness of the Good – of the Good that neither sleeps nor slumbers – inclines the movement it calls forth to turn away from the Good and orient it towards the other, and only thus towards the Good. (OB 69)

Lévinas interchanges the Good with the concept of God. The relation towards God requires the hopeful reorientation of love, through the face of the other. In this wholly other, Lévinas wants to emphasize the separation between God and humanity (Urbano 2012: 53). He suggests that as we try to fit God into a being that we can understand, we limit and make God something that God is not. The good exists beyond being, and so can never be fully comprehended. Referencing Descartes’ infinite, God is a god who comes to mind, rather than through mind (GCM 62). As Ryan Urbano puts it, ‘the subject is not the origin of the idea of God’ (2012: 74). Lévinas differentiates between the rational ‘thematis[ation of] God’ and the idea of God as beyond being, writing that ‘the problem … is whether the meaning that is equivalent to the esse of being, that is, the meaning which is meaning in philosophy, is not already a restriction of meaning’ (GP 131). God is traced in human consciousness, but God is not a product of this consciousness. God is not a noun. Michael Smith writes that ‘God cannot be a noun because a noun, a name, would thematise God, and to thematise is to place within the realm of being’ (2005: 88). Lévinas therefore refers to God as a-Dieu. God is approached through the other, rather than through reason alone. But the other is not God; it is merely that God is accessed via the other. In Of God Who Comes to Mind, Lévinas writes, ‘That this transcendence be produced from the … relationship with the other means neither that man is God, nor that God is the great Other’ (108). We can trace God through the commandment that orients us towards the other (hineni). Thus the invocation of God means an invocation of a responsible relation towards others.28 This embodied relation reveals traces of God. Having looked at Lévinas’s concept of God, and God’s revelation through the other, I want to apply this to the Twelve Steps concept of the Higher Power. As seen in the previous chapters, the Program started within the Christian revival

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

93

of the Oxford Movement, which meant that the God-relation was central to the experience. Over time this has been modified to the concept of the Higher Power, as well as concepts of God that are socially constructed, or based on other faiths. However, the concept of the Higher Power is still central to the relational experience of a person in the Program. This is seen, for instance, when addiction researcher S. M. Timmons suggests that the addicted person’s relation to God29 actually becomes an external reference point for the subject. God is both external to, and greater than, the addicted person (2012: 1158). This concept of God as separate from the subject, can, I think, help us in our comparisons of the Twelve Steps and Lévinas. For example, in both cases the relation to God invokes a movement from an inward relation to an other-relation. Both the Twelve Steps concept of God and Lévinas’s concept of God are also similar in their understanding of the otherness of God. In the Twelve Steps, God has to be different than the person for the self to see God as someone worth relating to for help. In Lévinas, God is beyond understanding, and brings the self into the infinite relationship with the other. In the Twelve Steps Program, to ‘recognise God’ allows the person to ‘acknowledge addiction’, which then completes its movement in restoring a relation between the self and others (Timmons 2012: 1153). Meeting with God (as external to self, and as greater than self) therefore seems to increase abstinence. However, the relation towards other humans also facilitates abstinent practice. God therefore is integral to the movement towards abstinence, but this occurs in a human community. For Lévinas, however, God is always experienced indirectly, through the other. This means that it would be problematic to say that God ‘helped’ me with my addiction. The person carries responsibility for this individually. This suggests that while there are likenesses between Lévinas’s model of relation and the Twelve Steps (for instance, the face of the other is connected to abstinence and a movement ‘out’ of self, through the faces of others in the group), for Lévinas, God’s action is not felt directly but only ever experienced through the face of the other.30

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how Lévinas understands freedom through relation. I then developed what this relation looks like, through the concepts of revelation and conversation. This, I further suggested, could be helpful as a way

94

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

of understanding addictive experiences. I showed how addiction discourses could benefit from a conversation-based relation between the subject and the other, and suggested that the Twelve Steps Program typifies this conversation encounter through the network of peers. This mutuality of sharing the journey of abstinence in the companionship of peers is one of the key elements that make the Twelve Steps so effective. However, there are a few differences that suggest that the Twelve Steps’s other-relation is not exactly understood as Lévinas’s asymmetrical response. Fellowship in the context of the Twelve Steps is referred to as ‘a sense of community, friendship relationships and shared concerns found within groups’ (AA 2001: 417). The peer relation is not the asymmetry of the other that calls out to us and puts us into debt towards them before we even know it. This relation between persons with addiction can look like this, or certainly does look like this often, when one person is going through a particularly rough time, and the community comes to aid them with more support. However, it seems to be a common experience (a sameness) rather than a responsibility that particularly identifies Twelve Steps relations, which differs from Lévinas’s hopeful relation that permits a self-exit. I then finished the chapter by looking at the other-relation, as the relation to God. I suggested that Lévinas’s God is revealed indirectly through the face of the other, which I contrasted with the Twelve Steps concept of the Higher Power that is directly revealed to the addicted person. Twelve Steps invokes a personal God. When someone admits powerlessness and recognizes God, this God must be able to help the person directly (Taub 2011: 67). Unlike Lévinas’s enigmatic God who cannot be experienced except through obeying the command of responsibility to the other, this God seems to directly relate to the subject. If this God were not going to respond to individuals directly, would they lift their eyes to God in crisis? Or would they just highlight that they are a part of a community of addicted people, and only look to the group for any trace of God’s presence? There seems to be more of a direct invocation of God’s presence and power in the Twelve Steps program (though not specifically defined) that enables the person to acknowledge God and the presence of others, rather than merely the just relation of other human beings through which God manifests himself. Thus the face of the other (peer) is important, but it is engaged with through the help of God, rather than a relation to God via the face of the other human being only.

Lévinas: The Hopeful Relation Preceding Freedom

95

Lévinas therefore opens up the wider understanding of relation, as foundational to responsibility and ethics, and links the encounter of the transcendent other to the relation of self to neighbour. But whereas similar parallels to this relation can be found in Twelve Steps models of addiction treatment, the essential difference remains that Lévinas’s other remains inextricably other. This, I suggests, permits a relation of hope; the other confronts us, and ruptures our self-enclosure through revelation. Experienced in the trace of this subject–other relation, the God who comes to mind is therefore separate, distant and holy. Lévinas shows us how experience, even if felt as the enclosure of suffering, can be hopeful because of our encounter with the other. This challenging understanding of subjectivity as for-the-other, I have argued, orients our freedom through relation, as an ongoing conversation of revelation.

96

Part Three

98

4

The existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful experience and entangled freedom

In the previous section, I explored how Lévinas’s phenomenology orients the subject towards the other. Lévinas understands the human experience through the ethical subject–other relation. I have suggested that this provides a hopeful reading of experience as relational, even despite the presence of suffering. Lévinas uses religious and psychological language to develop an understanding of human experience, the concepts of freedom, responsibility, revelation and language. Lévinas’s exploration of these themes, I argued, can help us to understand addictive experiences through general human experience. Lévinas develops a demanding ethics of subjectivity. He starts with a phenomenological explanation of the il-y-a and the self in ontological language, then breaks with ontology to develop a particular kind of ethical metaphysics in which the subject emerges as being for-another. In this movement, the human experience is re-oriented towards the other person, and it is in this encounter that the trace of the infinite and the good is encountered. I was interested in looking at how this could be understood in terms of self-love, and the subjects’s relation to itself. Lévinas says that the subject starts as a contented and self-contained ego. Egoism is ruptured by the encounter of the other, who makes me a subject. This is a hopeful encounter, because it provides an exit from totality.1 Kierkegaard also uses religious and psychological language to frame his philosophical discourse, and explores human experience through the concepts of language, freedom and revelation. However, Kierkegaard and Lévinas seem to explore these concepts in different ways. For Lévinas, the human experience is an articulation of hineni, the unreserved ‘here I am’. This experience is premised on the I, as a separate consciousness. Kierkegaard takes time to look

100

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

at what this separate consciousness is. In this chapter, I will begin by looking at how Kierkegaard explores human being. More specifically, I will examine how he uses religious and psychological language as a way of studying lived experience. Second, I will try to understand what Kierkegaard means by the existential subject. To do this, I will examine what he says about relation and freedom, and the particular way in which Kierkegaard develops this self through the concept of anxiety and self-love. Finally, I will conclude by examining how Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity could help us to understand what the subjective experience of a person with addiction may be, in terms of freedom and limits on a subject’s self-becoming. I will suggest that Kierekegaard’s inward subject-relation, experienced as self-love, can help us to further construct a human experience founded on an infinite relational subjectivity.

I  Kierkegaard as thinker In the Introduction, I suggested that it is important to look at addiction from the experience of subjectivity. Understanding how it is to be human sheds light on addiction. We can look at addiction through more general human questions of freedom, hopeful relation2 and love. Kierkegaard is particularly good at doing this because he engages with the human experience in its lived (existential) complexity. In this section I will briefly show how Kierkegaard uses religious and psychological language to explore these concepts. Kierkegaard probes the human experience through writing in a diversity of styles and pseudonyms. For Kierkegaard, this means looking at how we freely choose who we are (Davenport 2013: 240). He acknowledges that there are different ways of doing this, but that this choice is part of being human. Kierkegaard writes pseudonymously that ‘every human being is primitively intended to be a self ’ (The Sickness Unto Death 33), and John Davenport interprets this underlying human experience as a capacity for determined resolve that unites the agent’s energies … [involving] alternative possibilities but also a positive control over her plans, purposes and even final ends. (2013: 240)

For Kierkegaard, the human experience involves choosing. This means that we also have some freedom to choose, even when it is complicated. Who we are

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 101

involves the choices about whom we are choosing to become. Kierkegaard’s reading of human experience, as a committed choosing, has been understood through a variety of perspectives. Davenport suggests that Kierkegaard is developing a ‘practical phenomenology’ of human experience (233). He is studying what it means to exist as a free chooser. Existence is actively committed to and engaged with by the individual in question. It is a ‘subjective activity and personal assimilation and transformation of experience’ (Collins 1953: 23). The outworking of this is often unseen, and a task that takes a lifetime to accomplish. Kierkegaard uses pseudonyms and different writing styles to engage the reader in the existential task of becoming an individual. Differing from a theory of human existence, it is up to each person to commit to his or her own subjective becoming. Kierkegaard frames this task with the help of particular language. In the previous chapters, I looked at how Lévinas uses religious language in a philosophical manner. For instance, Lévinas suggests that command, election and holiness can be understood philosophically as the outworking of a relation between the subject and the other. Kierkegaard seems to do something similar. Although other philosophers such as de Beauvoir (1965, qt. in Poole 1998: 55) and Sartre use his existentialism to develop their own accounts of self in the world, for Kierkegaard, self-becoming occurs in relation to God. In Philosophical Crumbs, he writes that self-knowledge actually makes a person become ‘confused about himself ’ (122). A large part of Kierkegaaard’s existentialism is therefore recognizing the confusion and complexity of the self-becoming experience and finding a language to explore and clarify it. Alongside religious language, another important contribution to this existentialism (particularly as it relates to addiction) is his use of psychological language. While religious language provides content for concepts such as subjective becoming to be developed in a particular way, I suggest that Kierkegaard’s use of psychological language fits into an existentialism of embodied living. Owen Flanagan and Gregg Caruso note how Kierkegaard serves as an important precursor to the contemporary third wave of existentialism, neuroexistentialism, ‘caused by the rise of scientific authority of the human sciences and a resultant clash between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons’ (2018: 1). This exploration of Kierkegaard will situate him within the humanism of relational existentialism and provide a

102

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

framework for discussing the contemporary discourses between these images of the human being, as revealed in addiction discourses. An example of how Kierkegaard is able to bring existentialism into discourse with scientific concepts of self, is through his use of health metaphors. Scholars have spent significant amounts of time attempting to show how Kierkegaard’s engagement with psychological provides a kind of narrative of his own life.3 For example, the aesthetic poet’s psychological turmoil (A in Either/Or) could be understood as a partial self-reflection of Kierkegaard’s own discovery of subjectivity and self-assertion. In Either/Or the narrator articulates the fluctuations of emotions that he undergoes in this process: ‘I seem destined to suffer every possible mood, to gain experience in all directions. I lie every moment like a child learning how to swim, out in the middle of the sea’ (49– 50).4 According to this way of reading Kierkegaard, the psychological language of this quote would reflect Kierkegaard’s own inner journey. This interpretation of psychological language in Kierkegaard is, for instance, shown by Arbaugh and Arbaugh, who claim that the movement described is not only one of general philosophical interest, but Kierkegaard’s ‘own melancholy’ (1968: 160) which motions him towards exploring and understanding concepts such as dread and despair, and gives the study of emerging and responsible subjectivity ‘a deep personal awareness … as a background’ (161). Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is, according to this explanation, played out in a philosophical exploration of inexplicable psychological states. Kierkegaard’s subjective writing is further explained by Podmore,5 when he writes: Despair (sickness of the Spirit) and divine forgiveness are decisive psychological and theological themes essential to both Kierkegaard’s relational vision of the ‘self before God’ and his personal struggles with guilt and consciousness of sin. (2009: 174)

Like the use of religious language, it is possible, therefore, to see this link in Kierkegaard’s own personal hermeneutical process.6 Yet, while it seems that Kierkegaard’s writings do reflect many of the questions he had about a life lived with God, I think it difficult to reduce all of his thought to his externals workings of inner dramas. What I think can be said, however, is that Kierkegaard uses psychological language to paint a picture of the existential human experience. For example,

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 103

often the pseudonym seems to relay an experience of subjectivity that is primarily interpreted through his psychological state. In The Concept of Anxiety, the subject becomes itself in exploring anxiety. In Sickness Unto Death, the pseudonym reflects on the experience of despair. The poet in the pseudonymous writings of Either/Or articulate the experience of fluctuating emotions when he states, ‘I seem destined to suffer every possible mood, to gain experience in all directions. I lie every moment like a child learning how to swim, out in the middle of the sea’ (49–50). Arbaugh and Arbaugh claim that the psychological moments described are not only one of general philosophical interest, but Kierkegaard’s ‘own melancholy’ (1968: 160). This enables him to open up the exploration of concepts such as dread and despair, and gives the study of emerging and responsible subjectivity ‘a deep personal awareness … as a background’ (161).7 Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is then, according to this interpretation, linked to psychological language to explain it. Kierkegaard emphasizes a dynamic relation between the narrator and the reader and psychological language is used to understand the existential task of becoming a subject. It is not static, but is embodied as a living task. Kierkegaard’s narrator, as the roundabout physician reveals himself as a trace, only to encourage the person to actively assume his or her own task of subjectivity. I do not think that Kierkegaard merely uses psychological language to map out his own existential journey. Rather, I would argue that, like religious language, he uses it to bring philosophy beyond an account of the self that is developed by reason alone. This would further the intention spelled out in Philosophical Crumbs, which is to reveal the difference of each individual, rather than to understand experience identically (118).8

II  Kierkegaard’s subject: Anxiety, hope and freedom In the previous section, I have shown how Kierkegaard uses religious and psychological language to engage with the existential task of becoming an individual. This is particularly obvious in The Sickness Unto Death, and further in The Concept of Anxiety, where Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Haufniensis develops the concept of subjectivity through themes of freedom and anxiety. In this section I will first look at how Kierkegaard understands the subjectrelation through anxiety. Second, I will examine how he uses anxiety to

104

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

work out an existential concept of freedom and possibility. This is where I will suggest that Kierkegaard’s subjective relation is hopeful, because it brings the subject out of anxiety and despair. Third, I will suggest that this subjectrelation can also be understood through Kierkegaard’s concept of self-love. When writing about Lévinas, I suggested that his concept of freedom was important not only in understanding how he develops his ethical subjectivity but also because of its emphasis in addiction research. Lévinas understands the central importance of freedom in the human experience, but engages with it through responsibility. Kierkegaard uses freedom, but relates it to how we become ourselves. He suggests that the subject is always choosing him- or herself. However, as addiction shows us, freedom is not always straightforward: Does a person choose to become addicted? Once addicted, is there any choice to engage with the behaviour or substance? I think that Kierkegaard’s understanding of freedom can help us to understand these difficult questions about the subjective experience of addiction. What I am suggesting here is that in order to understand the subjective experience of addiction, we need to look at the concept of freedom. I have shown how Lévinas predicates freedom on responsibility. However, for Kierkegaard, the freedom to choose who we are becoming is of central importance.9 Kierkegaard’s subject is not born an individual (Davenport 2013: 230–3). This is a life task. Through the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, the human experience is developed through relation. The subject is ‘a relation that relates itself to itself, and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another’ (SUD 13). When Anti-Climacus writes that ‘the self is not the relation it is the relation’s relating itself to itself ’ (SUD 13), it sets the human experience apart from accounts of substances dualism.10 The subjective individual relates inwardly and outwardly towards others. Choosing this relation is what constitutes subjectivity (Davenport 2013: 234–5). Kierkegaard’s philosophy is an outworking of what this subjective relation means, and how we ‘become ourselves’.11 At the beginning of The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard’s pseudonym suggests that the human being becomes an individual through self-choice. He writes A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered this way, a human being is still not a self. (SUD qt. in Davenport 2013: 235)

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 105

Rather than being presented as a being, the subject is constantly becoming. The ‘I am’ seems to be more a recognition of potentiality than actuality, uncovered through the interweaving of texts and the personal engagement with the process of choosing subjectivity. It is within the process of moving from potential to actual existence that the subject becomes an individual. However, this potential expression of subjectivity grounds the subject in a relation to the other: ‘The human self is … a relation that relates itself to itself, and in relating itself to itself relates it to another’ (CA 13).12 This subjective relation takes place coram Deo, before God (Tietjen and Evans 2011: 276). The recognition of the other is, however, not fully realized in the initial experiences of anxiety and despair. Thus, the subject is initially, in some way, ’lost’, or self-deceived. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym articulates the subjective becoming as a process of freedom and relation that are explored through the religious language of sin and salvation. Allen has described this text as ‘exceedingly difficult’, which he attributes ‘partly to our unfamiliarity with Kierkegaard’s literary sources, but more particularly to its mode of expression, abstractness and profundity’ (1968: 158). I agree. However, though this text is, at times, frustratingly dense, I think that it also offers a nuanced way of understanding the philosophical concept of the subject. The individual becomes herself through the paradox of entangled freedom. Arbaugh and Arbaugh describe the text as a ‘subtle psychological study’ that lays ‘a foundation for the investigation of anxiety as a key factor in the dynamics of neuroticism’ (1968: 158). Despite potential similar structural similarities with Hegel’s systematics, Kierkegaard’s treatment of anxiety is unique.13 Anxiety, according to this account, is the ‘ambivalent dizziness’ that accompanies being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the possibility of an unknown subjectivity, ‘not yet willed into being’ (1968). With Dunning, I will suggest that Kierkegaard treats anxiety as ‘the internalisation of the eternal’ (1985: 11). The eternal relation towards God is inwardly chosen and received by the subject. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is connected to the eternal and thereby to freedom. I want to look more closely at how anxiety reveals freedom, and what this means about how we understand the subject. Haufniensis suggests that unfocused, restless anxiety reveals a person’s ‘inability to rest transparently in God’ (Tietjen and Evans 2011: 276). When this is chosen, it becomes an embodied form of mis-relation, or sin. Kierkegaard is using this religious

106

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

language to explain the self-relation. Kierkegaard’s God-relation is a part of the subject’s inward self-relation. For him it seems that ‘sin is not tied necessarily to particular actions but instead is a condition, or a way of relating to God’ (Tietjen and Evans 2011). Sinfulness is the choice of a particular kind of relation. This is the relation of a restless self. Haufniensis links this to creation, suggesting that the restless choice enters through the figures of Adam and Eve. But each person chooses this restless relation (sin) freely in each moment. Each person has the choice presented to him or her as a result of being human. The choice exists for each, preconditioned by creation, but each person is also free to choose it. The subject chooses the relation to the eternal, and resting in that choice dissipates the experience of anxiety. Anxiety, psychologically understood, reveals the ‘restless repose’ in which sin arises. Haufneinsis’s ‘new science’ shows how it points to human experience as the struggle of possibility revealed in the life of the individual (Dunning 1985: 12). Anxiety indicates the emergence of subjectivity, and reveals ‘what it means for humans to exist in a genuine or authentic sense’ (Tietjen and Evans 2011: 274), relating towards the self and outwardly towards others. The concept of ‘entangled freedom’ is used to expresses this tension (275). I will explain this term in fuller detail later on. Haufniensis explains that he needs to use different kinds of language to articulate the ‘human adventure’ (CA 281). He is not concerned with specific classifications of ‘anxiety as an isolated state of mind’, but rather‚ what anxiety reveals about being human’ (Grøn 2008a: 2). It is an exercise in understanding. Haufniensis suggests that the synthesis of subjectivity can be understood through the concept of anxiety. He claims that ‘whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate’ (CA 177, qt. in Grøn 2008a: 1). This applies to all humans (‘this is an adventure that every human being must go through’) but it is experienced individually. This is because a person ‘is individuum and as such simultaneously [themselves] and the whole race, and in such a way participates in the individual and the individual in the whole race’ (CA 300). Haufniensis illustrates this paradoxical concept through the religious imagery of creation, and the character of Adam. Adam is the first human created, and exists individually as himself while also being the origin (with Eve) of the whole human race. It seems that he means here that Adam is both ‘himself and the race’ (301). What would follow is that our understanding of Adam would then also explain human experience more generally.

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 107

The subject is not posited as a relation, or a synthesis, until Adam and the fall. It is ‘[b]ecoming involved with choice’ (Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1968: 162). Spirit is introduced as this inward relation; it is the entangled freedom that realizes itself as paradoxically both finite and infinite. Adam, in his pre-fall (‘innocent’) state is both psyche and body, like us, but ‘is not yet spirit: for spirit in man is on the one hand an aspiration for the divine and on the other a love for the world’ (Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1968: 163). Because the human race is generated from Adam and Eve, he writes that it is possible ‘that what happened to one individual can happen to all’ (CA 54). The individual is always responsible for his or her own choices, and the subject must choose for herself. So anxiety, and the possibility of sin, enter human history through this first choice. This possibility is not externally visible; it enters as a qualitative change. It affects the spirit-relation of subjectivity, which brings about the possibility of sinfulness. But sin also seems to be chosen individually (CA 53). This means that ‘[t]he consequence of hereditary sin or the presence of hereditary sin in the single individual is anxiety, which differs only quantitatively from that of Adam’ (CA 53). Though present as possibility, this experience is chosen by each person.14 It affects the inward relation of the spirit. In Kierkegaard’s writings, read phenomenologically, the experience of mis-relation seems to be a kind of suffering. Similarly, The Sickness Unto Death explores this mis-relation of self as an experience of despair. Sylvia Walsh explains this phenomenon as a ‘misrelation to oneself and to God that results from a person’s unwillingness to become a self ’ (2013: 302). So anxiety, like despair, seems to be understood as a qualitative mis-relation of subjectivity, that is experienced as suffering. This distinction between qualitative and quantitative change needs further unpacking. Simply put, quantitative acts happen historically in time. For instance, choosing to try heroin would be a quantitative choice, enacted in time. But the emphasis that Kierkegaard usually places is on the qualitative experience. This is encountered in the inwardness of subjectivity. A qualitative change involves the spirit and can therefore be unseen. Ferreira suggests that a qualitative change happens when a person engages with the paradox of subjectivity (1998: 229). It is not just a simple choice. It is more of a combination of a free choosing of who we are, as infinite and finite, with a synthesis that comes from beyond us (1998). The approved affirmation of subjectivity, what Kierkegaard understands to be the subject choosing itself, is explained through the movement of anxiety. The subject is free and unfree, bound in time, while

108

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

engaged with the infinite. This paradox of anxiety, Grøn writes, means that anxiety is both ‘that from which one should free oneself and, at the same time, that which one has to go through to be free’ (2008a: 2). Thus the human being is both a subject, and a self that is continuously confronted with ‘the task of becoming’ herself (64). Laying hold of this freedom of self-choosing is therefore not something rationally abstracted, or something that can just be willed into existence. It seems to be the grappling with a continuously uncovered relation. As I interpret this text, Haufniensis seems to be developing a kind of existential phenomenology.15 It is a reading of the human experience, with the possibility of suffering. The human Adam is a composite of the body and soul (psyche), which is unified by spirit. Through the synthesis of spirit, the body and soul are also affected. This synthesis is possible because the existential subject exists as an embodied chooser. Each person has a capacity for free choosing. For Kierkegaard, choice affects the spirit of the individual. Because the spirit binds the body and the soul together, it affects the body and soul as well. Sin figures into this understanding because it enters in the innocent anxiety of a choice. It manifests itself through the awareness that the human is free to choose. This choice means that a person has to choose between the eternal and the finite. The choice then ‘brought anxiety along with it’ (CA 52). Anxiety is linked to the conditions for the actuality of freedom, experienced as spirit. Where there is possibility of freedom, there is anxiety of spirit. So anxiety emerges as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ (CA 61), as the individual begins to recognise itself as a synthesis of polarities, as entangled freedom, as infinite and finite, as spirit. It ‘emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down onto its own possibility, laying hold of its finiteness to support itself ’ (CA 61).16 The awareness of spirit clarifies this paradox. We recognize more of our immense freedom and possibility, and our anxiety increases. Or, as Grøn writes, ‘anxiety is the possibility of freedom’ (2008a: 65). The grappling with spirit is the experience of becoming a subject. But even as the experience of anxiety increases, anxiety is not any ‘thing’ concretely. It exists as the ‘selfish infinity of possibility, which no longer temps like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets (angster) with its sweet anxiousness (Beangstelse)’ (61). Thus the ‘nothingness’ of anxiety is experienced more and more as something the individual tries to avoid, or to which he or she succumbs. The concept of anxiety reveals how the subject exists as a paradox that is constantly wrestling to be at home with itself, as a synthesis of the infinite

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 109

and finite. Anxiety is increased when trying to understand the self otherwise. For instance, we try to understand ourselves externally rather than inwardly, through our relation to the natural world (objective anxiety) or other people (subjective anxiety), only to realize that the source and resolution of anxiety is internal. In this recognition, ‘The self understands that its anxiety is about itself ’ (CA 49). Insofar as it realizes this, it can also realize that it exists as spirit (i.e. it is not just to be experienced as a body and psyche, or in relation to another body or thing). Something else underlies this relation. When the relation is realized, the subject becomes an individual, and the resolution of anxiety is posited because the source of anxiety is found.17 This is the hopeful resolution of anxiety through relation. The subjective choosing is articulated through the religious language of salvation; it is an inward relation towards God that affects the spirit (CA 53).18 But anxiety, positing freedom, exists in context, and individual engagement with salvation is enacted in time. Grøn writes that ‘the concept of existence accentuates the relation of selfhood and temporality’ (2013: 281). This is because ‘[e]ach human being comes into existence as this individual, has her own life, and dies her own death’ (2013: 281). The subject acts both in historical linear time and with a concept of eternity, ‘where time is constantly intersecting eternity, and eternity constantly permeating time’ (CA 79–80). I have shown how Haufniensis develops an existential phenomenology of the human as being body and psyche sustained by spirit (81). This human being exists in time and moves through time, so relation to the eternal occurs in the present time. The temporal-eternal synthesis experienced by a person is not the same as the psyche-body synthesis. But because the spirit is relational, what happens to spirit affects the psyche and the body as well. This idea of time is important, because it distinguishes existential individual experience from theoretical and abstract knowledge about experience. Time is necessary in order for us to choose who we are becoming, and individual choice happens through the context of time. Haufniensis suggests that we can understand time in two different ways. First, it can be understood as an infinite succession of time, spatialized as the contentless present. It is a series of finite contentless pieces of time that come to an eventual halt. Life that is in time has no true present. It is only defined by succession. Understanding someone this way could mean, for instance, that John is a heavy drinker, who grew up in New York, moved to Chicago, split

110

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

up with his girlfriend, and started frequenting the local bar daily. This differs from the second understanding of time, which Haufniensis calls the ‘moment’. Unlike the infinite succession of time, the moment (Øieblikket) is the synthesis ‘in which time and eternity touch each other’ (Grøn 2013: 277). Understanding human experience through the moment requires engaging with the existential questions of what it is to be that particular individual. Haufniensis’s concept of the moment merges finite experience with the infinite, and it is important to his concept of subjectivity. The spirit is an infinite relation. However, the spirit is ‘posited’ in the moment (CA 88). The eternal and finite are always intersecting in the experience of the moment; the spirit is this synthesis, and brings together the psyche and body of the self as well (90).19 The moment is distinct to the historical: that is, rather than about facts that have passed by, the future-oriented moment brings the possible eternal in the actual present. The moment is future-oriented, which is the sphere of possibility. Because the future exists for the subject, and the eternal opens up the future, the future is equated with the possible, or the hopeful. It is actualised in the present moment, in which there is ‘the possibility of a new beginning’ (Grøn 2013: 283). Understanding experience through this concept is more about experience as the freedom to choose the possible. This future-orientation towards the infinite brings out hope about human experience that I think is unique to Kierkegaard. Hope ties to the moment because it ‘allows non-being – the future insofar as it does not give itself to anticipative foresight – to be at the heart of the “I’’ (Kangas and Kavka 2008: 129). Kangas and Kavka clarify further that in this way, an identity is forged, without representation or knowledge, between the one who hopes and what is hoped for. What is hoped for becomes real in the one hoping, even if … claimed by an essential nonknowing. (Kangas and Kavka 2008)

It brings possibility into the present experience of the subject. I think it is particularly interesting to look at this when problematizing addiction, which we will see at the end of the chapter. Of course, it might seem naive to assume that the future is possibility if the past has been hampered by challenges and limitation. But for Kierkegaard, the process of becoming a subject is a continuous unrelenting movement towards the future possibility. This is the possibility of the subject choosing herself in relation to the eternal.

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 111

Entangled freedom is anxiety’s fearful suggestion that the future will be the same as the past, and is articulated in the concept of anxiety, in the understanding of hereditary sin.20 This anticipation of the future by the past is anxiety. Anxiety suggests that ‘the possibility is lost before it has been’ (CA 91), and that the freedom to choose does not actually really exist.21 The possibility of the future is tethered by (‘anticipated by’) the past and the person waits, anxious that the possible actually is not possible for them in the emerging moment. The entangled relation to past experience anticipates an anxiety for the future. So anxiety, as entangling the person in this prior un-freedom is not actually the sin, but it is the conditioning milieu for sin to be chosen: namely, that we cannot choose otherwise. Anxiety does not explain sin, but preconditions it. Grøn suggests, however, that ‘the paradox of [this existential relation] brings eternity and existence together’ (2013: 284). He references Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where Climacus states that ‘the eternal truth has come into existence in time’ (209). The self-relation at rest in the eternal, understood through the moment, becomes the expression of possibility in existence. The subject is released through its entangled freedom. The eternal touches the temporal and anticipates the possibility of the future. It is therefore here that anxiety is referred to as a person’s ‘highest dignity’, and ‘it is dread, more than noble reason, which marks the glory of mankind’ (Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1968: 159). The human experience is not defined by a capacity for reason. Abstract thought is not where a person experiences freedom. Freedom is rather the experience of choosing oneself in freedom and possibility. Freedom is found in the possibility of the future. Wrestling with this is anxiety, which means that this anxiety is that ‘which constitutes a personality’ (Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1968: 159). Anxiety, then, is the mark of an ‘uneasy relation to the eternal’ (CA 81), and human experience involves ‘the moment’ where the subject posits his- or herself as both finite and eternal (CA 81). Only a free spirit can be in anxiety, and ‘has such possibilities of existence’ (Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1968: 159). Timothy Jackson writes that the challenge of existence is to realise true freedom, historically, by moving beyond mere freedom of choice – by, as it were, binding oneself voluntarily to an integrated identity (libertas) such that there is no longer a question of raw choice (mere liberum arbitrium). Formal freedom of choice is thereby transcended or transformed in time. (250)

112

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Kierkegaard is not interested in rationally developing a theory of freedom. He is concerned with lived existence. Understood in relation to subjectivity as spirit, ‘the self22 is freedom’ (Jackson 1998: 244). Leaving The Concept of Anxiety, I want to have a further look at what Kierkegaard means by this possible subjectivity and the individual experience of being in relation to oneself. Kierkegaard uses anxiety and despair to explore the human experience, but he also looks at this self-relation through the concept of love. In this section, I want to look at how the individual experience of the moment can be seen through the concept of self-love. Timothy Jackson suggests that Kierkegaard assumes all human beings have a potential for love, just as each person has a potential for freedom (1998: 241). Accordingly, I think that we can say that, for Kierkegaard, love, and self-love in particular, is an articulated kind of self-relation. It is a courageous relation towards subjectivity, Grøn suggests, because it means ‘to stand by oneself in leading one’s life, and not to give in to despair’ (2013: 290), or succumbing to anxiety. Before developing the self–other relation in the next chapter, I want to briefly look at what Kierkegaard says about self-love, as I think that understanding Kierkegaard’s work on freedom and becoming a subject is a way of understanding his concept of self-love. In the discussion on Lévinas, I suggested that his early writings use ontological language to explain the phenomenology of the subject. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas reveals a self that is at-home with itself prior to its ethical response. The self becomes subject through welcoming the other as an extension of hospitality, distinct from itself. In some ways I think that this concept of separation and enjoyment in Lévinas is a form of self-love, or at least enjoyment, that can then experience the other as separate.23 I would suggest that Kierkegaard’s self-relation requires this understanding of self-love as connected to its understanding to the self as relational (both inwardly and through outward acts of love). This process of becoming a subject, whereby the individual chooses herself, is another way of expressing the concept of proper self-love. For Kierkegaard, the concept of self-love grounds the other relations that we have to people. But this notion of self-love can sit uncomfortably with us. Lippitt writes that people can find it difficult to understand this kind of love distinct from selfishness and indulgence. He gives the example of John Calvin who ‘describes self-love as “a noxious pest”’, while Karl Barth wryly opines

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 113

that ‘God will never think of blowing on this fire, which is bright enough already’ (Calvin 2008; Barth 1963, qt. in Lippitt 2013: 2). And yet, he shows, it seems fundamental to Kierkegaard’s understanding of human experience. In Philosophical Crumbs, the pseudonym Johannes Climacus shows how this subjectivity is connected to our relation to others. He says that self-love is the ground or goes to the ground in all love, which is why any religion of love [Kjaerlighed] we might conceive would presuppose … one condition and assume it as given: to love oneself in order to command loving the neighbour as oneself. (PC 112)

In keeping with Kierkegaard’s existentialism,24 self-love cannot just be understood in terms of reason.25 I think that it also connects with Kierkegaard’s aim of building up his reader in the ‘task of selfhood’ (Jackson 1998: 129; Tietjen and Evans 2011: 274). Teaching a person ‘to love themselves’ (WL 23) is an outworking of Kierkegaard’s existential task. This ‘right way’ of loving oneself (22) affects both our subjective relation and our relation to others. Lippitt wonders what Kierkegaard means by loving ourselves in the right way (2013: 46). Evans and Roberts show that in order to love ourselves properly, that is, in order to relate towards ourselves, we need to relate to the infinite, the source of our ‘greatest good’. They write that ‘[f]or Kierkegaard a relation with God is the greatest good a person can have’ (2013: 221). But this also connects to loving other people, because Kierkegaard writes that ‘[t]o love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbour correspond perfectly to one another; fundamentally they are one and the same thing’ (WL 22). This other-relation I will develop more fully in the next chapter. However, Lippitt also cites other ways of loving oneself in a right way. Reflecting the concept of the moment mentioned earlier, he references Roberts’ suggestion that hope is important to this relation, ‘a construal of one’s future as holding good prospects’ (2007, in Lippitt 2013: 148). It is ‘relating oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good’ (149).26 Kierkegaard has explained this previously as the condition of the moment. So it seems that self-love is articulated through the individual relation to the hopeful moment. Self-relation as love therefore picks up on themes that Kierkegaard has developed elsewhere in pseudonymous writings. I have showed that the subjective relation requires examining the other-relation that is seen as the

114

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

source of this good, which I will look at further in the next chapter. However, aside from that, we can see here that Kierkegaard’s understanding of human experience requires freedom, relation and hope. While all human beings have the capacity to become individuals, each person must assume the task for himor herself.

III  Applying Kierkegaard’s subject-relation to addiction Kierkegaard’s concept of self-relation, and of freedom and self-love in particular, has important implications for our understanding of addiction experiences and treatment. For instance, Kierkegaard’s psychological language consists of vocabulary that is similar to the Twelve Steps Program. However, while parallels can be drawn between these two accounts, I think that Kierkegaard’s subject that continuously chooses to become herself in freedom exists in tension with the Twelve Steps understanding of addiction as a permanent, unchosen human experience. I will explain this further in this section below. If we look at how Haufniensis uses the psychological language of anxiety to illustrate a philosophical concept of freedom, we discover interesting ideas that illuminate how addiction shapes the existential task of becoming a subject. Three thoughts in particular stand out when considering addiction from a Twelve Steps perspective. First, realizing that the human is capable of anxiety parallels the initial realization of an addicted person’s capability to choose. Addiction (according to some perspectives, including the Twelve Steps) seems to determine particular choices. The person has to choose the addictive behaviour in order to become addicted. The Twelve Steps describe this experience as a state of ‘helplessness’, where the addicted person cannot choose otherwise. However, I would argue that even if there are strong genetic links or social factors that suggest addiction is determined prior to choice, the person still has some capacity for choice.27 For instance, even if a person is ‘helpless’ in relation to alcohol, the Twelve Steps concept of abstinence still seems to involve free choice. The person has to choose to engage in the abstinent lifestyle, or even to choose to surrender herself to a Higher Power. Second, this brings us to the concept of freedom. The problem here is whether people are able to assert their freedom to end addiction. Haufniensis seems to suggest that, as the individual recognizes and chooses herself, anxiety

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 115

is alleviated. There is an exit from the experience. But in the Twelve Steps model of addiction this particular freedom from the experience is not present. An addict always remains in a state of recovery. In Kierkegaard’s relational subjectivity, the individual chooses herself freely in relation to the eternal. In the Twelve Steps it seems that this choice (also done in relation to the eternal) is done in helplessness.28 However, if we look at how the individual is asked to engage with the Twelve Steps, it seems that choice is important. For instance, the person is asked to ‘exercise special vigilance’ (AA 1981: 92), and to willingly ‘make amends’ with the people who have been hurt as a result of addiction (77). This, along with engaging in abstinence towards the addictive behaviour or substance, suggests that some free choice must be possible. This leads to the third point, which is the centrality of hope and self-love in the discourse on addiction. If the addicted person remains an addict, then even if she is able to experience a relation to God (the Higher Power) and others that enables a sober lifestyle, it seems different from the hope that Kierkegaard offers of a future that is different from the past. The individual is qualitatively29 changed as spirit in this encounter with the infinite-finite synthesis. But in the Twelve Steps, can the subject hope for the possibility of a chosen life without addiction, or is the future still anticipated by the past? Let me unpack this further. Like with despair in Sickness Unto Death, it seems that Haufinensis suggests the realization of a particular state of being (anxiety) is the first step towards health. In The Concept of Anxiety, this is primarily because we recognize that we are spiritual beings, and therefore that we are a relation of paradoxes. This is the first step to alleviating anxiety and we are no longer groping in the dark. This could loosely be considered parallel to the Twelve Steps’ initial recognition, where the addicted person realizes that his or her behaviour is out of control and needs to surrender. This comes from recognizing a helplessness over trying to fix things alone. Becoming aware of anxiety is one step closer to becoming oneself, just as realizing that a person is addicted can be a step closer to the possibility of sobriety. It could be that, because the individual exists as synthesis of finite and infinite (as entangled freedom), there is therefore no such thing as complete freedom. The subject is always entangled. Choice is maintained in this limited sphere, and self-becoming is an act of limited freedom. This is similar to the Twelve Steps subject who exists in recovery. He or she is not in a state of complete

116

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

freedom of relating towards a specific substance (for example, not drinking though sober) with complete freedom in behaviour, but living within given limitation of conditions. Just as Kierkegaard’s subject can live with anxiety, the addicted individual can exist in recovery. Of course, this could be a healthy way of dealing with an addiction. For instance, knowing that it is difficult to abstain from alcohol, drinking alcohol as an articulation of ‘freedom’ could be impractical. But what I would like to challenge here is not whether in a particular instance a person who has an addiction ought to engage with that object, but whether an addiction is a permanent existential state, beyond the hope of a possible chosen otherwise. Let us look at this idea a bit further. Grøn writes that in the freedom of choice in The Concept of Anxiety: What anxiety is supposed to reveal is that the individual himself is more than what he is determined or viewed to be. Anxiety detaches the individual from their content by which he would otherwise be absorbed. (2008a: 71)

Experiencing anxiety actually makes the person aware of him- or herself as spirit. Rather than only relating to the content of life (work, mortgage, etc.), the person realizes that there are other relations at play in experience. It is this type of consciousness which is the awareness of ‘being something other and more than we are determined to be’ that is consciousness in which individuality emerges (2008a). In The Concept of Anxiety, the person is confronted with choosing herself in anxiety as synthesis. But in doing so, this freedom is far from arbitrary. It is a specific freedom that is the freedom of choosing a particular kind of self-relation seen as good. As with Lévinas, Kierkegaard’s freedom is not the ability to make random choices (Grøn 2008a: 73). When the individual chooses, it is an either/or situation. The individual chooses between two things. It is not indifference; it involves a particular kind of choosing. Either it is that the past conditions the future, and I am limited to a state of anxiety, or it is possible that the infinite moment can bring into this time and my life a possibility of freedom. That is why he says that ‘Freedom’s possibility announces itself in anxiety’ (CA 74). What Kierkegaard is concerned with is ‘not anxiety as an isolated state of mind but what anxiety reveals about being human’ (Grøn 2008a: 2). I would suggest that the Twelve Steps, while showing the serious effects that addiction can have on a person, does not frame the human being in a narrative of hope for the

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 117

future (or a facet of what Kierkegaard will later refer to as ‘proper self-love’). This is because the new subject-relation does not grant the ‘end of all anxieties’, or the end of addiction. It merely keeps behaviour in check.30 However, in contrast to this reading, it could be that when someone says ‘I am an addict’, he or she is making an existential choice. In this view, being an addict is committing some kind of self-becoming task. And this choice is not random. The addicted person may well know from experience (this is emphasised in the Twelve Steps) that there is no simple freedom when it comes to maintaining an abstinent lifestyle. The person realises where he or she has come from, or the reality of a current experience, and realise that things need to change. The Steps then facilitate the process of how to choose between behaviours that are enabling or disabling in terms of the person’s addiction. The process of recovery is inextricably linked to this anxiety, which paradoxically produces a kind of freedom within this limitation of free choosing. As the person engages in the Twelve Steps, the intention is to become free from the substance or behaviour that ensnares, and can get about living with a regular job and possibility of commitments, etc. This could be an example of where choosing abstinence (here applied to abstaining from the addictive object) is freedom (ref. Grøn 2008a: 75). I would like to look at this explanation of addiction further, because again I think that it lacks Kierkegaard’s existential freedom. Freedom is an active state of being: to be free. But in order to exist as free, we must become free (for we all are ‘determined’ in relation to past experiences and mindsets). Then, ‘by becoming free’ we come into subjective agreement and consequently become ourselves (Grøn 2008a: 78). This is beyond a moral choice of behaviours, Haufniensis suggests. Freedom is an experience of an inward relational agreement. This only comes from the paradox of a finite self that chooses the infinite or eternal Good (God). Sin, in this philosophical understanding, is the misalignment of subjectivity. So Kierkegaard is not talking about being able to function ‘better’ or conforming to existing moralities. He is saying something more subtler than this. Freedom is inwardly relating to the infinite. Applying this freedom to the Twelve Steps process, as a means of reorienting the individual towards his- or herself, can become helpful in initiating this task, but it lacks the ‘transparent’ peaceful resting that Haufniensis characterizes as the end of all anxieties. The end of all addiction, where the identity of the subject is fully established (fully resting) in the God-relation, who through the

118

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

moment, brings the paradoxical inward relation together in unity. So it could be said that the person in recovery exists in anticipation of his or her future guilt, or future mis-choosing. A future anticipated by the past mis-choices renders the recovery process as one of inherent anxiety.31 As the subject recognizes itself, the choice between the either/or, the choice of choosing oneself outside of what the content of life speaks it to be, this is the cause of anxiety. Yet the intentional finish is not to remain in anxiety, but to experience it as one ‘finds’ oneself. In the Twelve Steps, Step Seven seems to indicate a shift. It states that ‘to those of us who have hitherto known only excitement, depression or anxiety … this newfound peace is a priceless gift’ (1981: 74). However, the newfound peace of the Twelve Steps member is still amid the definition of subject as addict. Yet if we are really mapping out the parallels between addiction recovery and anxiety then even to presuppose this problematic state of anxious waiting (and indeed in order to anticipate any release from the anxious entanglement of this waiting), the self must experience themselves as spirit.32 Without consciousness of spirit, there is no anxiety. So if crudely linked to the Twelve Steps process, we can see a similar model of anxiety emerging. Engaging with the first Step (‘admitting powerlessness over substance’), the individual is confronted by the anxiety of naming the experience as an addiction and the anxiety of limitation. Now the person needs to ‘cut themselves off ’ from the free engagement with that particular substance in its specific forms (for example, restricting time at the pub, eliminating the post-dinner smoke). These may even have seemed to be ‘enjoyable freedoms’, but were actually parts of the addictive relation. However, defining oneself based on the objectrelation seems to liken the despairing anxiety to un-freedom. So then these latter movements seem to raise anxiety, just as the awareness of self as spirit increases the anxiety of subjectivity.

Conclusion The writer Henri Nouwen writes that ‘[t]he spiritual life is a long and often arduous search for what you have already found’ (1999: 29). If we look at Kierkegaard’s understanding of spirit as the subject-relation, or the existential condition, the quote takes on a particular relevance. Becoming oneself is the

The Existentialism of Kierkegaard: Hopeful Experience and Entangled Freedom 119

task of a lifetime. In The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis writes that ‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself ’ (61). Kierkegaard’s concept of self is also the concrete possibility of freedom in this lifetime. The repetition of the moment of is required; the subject needs to return to its synthesis, and to its resting ground in the eternal. However, the subject is free, open to the possible and the eternal. The experience of the end of anxiety is not some far off dream that can be expected eschatologically at the end of time. It is lived in in this finite experience, as we assume the task of becoming ourselves in relation to the infinite. It is the articulation of individuality as proper self-love. Applied to addiction, this means that the addicted person still remains free, and that, though encumbered by the pain and difficulties of past situations, there is still hope in this experience.

5

Kierkegaard: Relating to the other as love

In the last chapter I examined different ways in which Kierkegaard understood the subject-relation. I suggested that his use of religious and psychological language could help us understand the subjectivity of addiction experiences. This is particularly seen through the concepts of freedom, hopeful relation and self-love. Using these concepts, I looked at how theories of addiction such as the Twelve Steps understand human experience, and argued that Kierkegaard’s insights can contribute to the further exploration of what addiction means. These concepts, I suggested, provide a reading of addiction that orients the inward subject through self-love. The previous chapter looked at how the subject relates to his- or herself. In this chapter I will examine how the subject relates to the other. In Kierkegaard’s writing, this interaction between the subject and the other takes on different expressions through his writings on the aesthetic, ethical and religious experiences. Lévinas introduces the concept of desire to frame the subject–other relation. Here I will look at how Kierkegaard uses love to understand the subject–other relation. In this chapter, I will suggest that the subjectivity of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works can be read through the existential concept of love, as a way of freely and hopefully entering into the other-relation as an individual. This chapter will then examine how this way of reading subjective existence can be used to understand the other-relations in addictive experiences. Developing the concept of self-love as becoming oneself, I will explore how Kierkegaard’s other-relation is an outworking of love. First, I will look at how Kierkegaard develops the aesthetic and ethical other-relations as instances of selfish love. Second, I will explore how Kierkegaard’s infinite yet inward subject–God relation expresses itself as love for the human other. Third, applying this subject–other relation to addiction, I will look at how we

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

121

can use aesthetic, ethical and religious love to understand instances of relation in addictive experience.

I  Kierkegaard’s other-relation as love I am interpreting Kierkegaard’s writings as particular explorations of the human experience (aesthetic, ethical, religious). The self that becomes itself is a relational subject, a subject that loves. Love is therefore the embodied articulation of the existential task.1 Just like the subject-relation, the otherrelation is enacted as love. The relation towards the other, expressed as love, seems to emerge out of this prior eternal (God)-relation. This other-relation is not something that I can have objective knowledge about. It grounds my inward synthesis, but it is also commanded from outside of me. Lévinas says that a prior relation defines my freedom, and there are aspects of this that also resonate in Kierkegaard’s concept of love. My freedom is experienced as loving response. I would suggest, therefore, that a way of understanding the difference experiences of the aesthetic, ethical and religious is through looking at how they are responses of different kinds of love.2 Before exploring this further, clarification is needed. Love can be understood as many things. First, I will understand love as referring to the subject- and other-relation that Kierkegaard explains in Works of Love. In my interpretation, I am in agreement with Lippitt’s distinction between self-love and selfish love, as well as his suggestion that the erotic experience of love can also be a part of love’s relation between the self and the other.3 Grøn suggests that ‘love is to see love’ (2013: 287). This experience emerges through the subject–other relation. In exploring how this inward relation can be communicated, I will examine how Kierkegaard uses language.4 Kierkegaard recognizes the limits of communicating the subjective human experience, and uses language as ‘a double aspect’, both as a ‘medium of spirit, that which makes possible distinctive selfhood’ and ‘that which creates the breach between ourselves and nature or immediacy’ (56). In this chapter, I will focus on the first aspect in particular. Grøn suggests that ‘it is difficult to “read” the phenomena of love’ (2013: 286). I have suggested that it can be read as particular ways of expressing the human experience in relation. The first experience that this chapter will examine is

122

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

what Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms refer to as the ‘aesthetic experience’, a relation that expresses a kind of self-enclosure.5 In Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes that love ‘does not stand or fall with the contingency of its object’ (39). A relation towards the other expressed as love is not contingent on situation or circumstance, but grounded in something that can last. According to Johannes di Silentio in Fear and Trembling, each person is ‘great in proportion to the greatness of that which he strove’ (6), which I have interpreted through the concept of relation. The subject finds expression as a being that loves. The individual then becomes great (stor) through the relation (betingelse) to the other. It is not necessarily a physical greatness, but something as we saw in the last chapter, developed as a quality of spirit.6 This qualitative change occurs when the subject engages with the paradox of an inward choosing, which is also referred to as faith.7 This change is expressed as a particular kind of love-relation. But there are different ways of relating (or ‘seeing’ relation, to use Grøn’s interpretation), and the aesthete relates to the other in a certain way. For instance, in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, the main narrator (Victor Eremita) develops two different kinds of other-relations. The first account is explored through the aesthete (referred to as A). A is described as ‘self-conscious to a fault’ (Cross 1997: 142). The second account is developed as the ethical character of Judge Vilhelm, which the narrator refers to as B. The writings of A outline what has come to be known as Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, which I read as a particular kind of relational human experience. The aesthete’s life pursuits are based mostly on pleasure, and his relation to other people furthers this general theme. While Kierkegaard’s texts emphasize the importance of the inward self-relation, the aesthete relates to himself through the externals in his immediate experience.8 In this way of relating, the narrator suggests that ‘his exterior has been in complete contradiction to his interior’ (EO 28). Let me explain more about what this means. In the text, the main relation that the aesthete has is towards himself. He is so occupied with his own ‘reflective fantasy’ that he does not commit to living out his own life himself (Cross 1998: 143). This contrasts with what Kierkegaard will say of the love-relation, which manifests itself in ‘the world of actuality’ (WL 159). The aesthete’s inability to ‘attain existence’ seems to be connected with the aesthete’s relation to immediacy. Cross writes that ‘he takes it as a given that only experiences can make one’s life meaningful’ (1997: 145).

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

123

This results in a poetic existence in which the person is ‘possessed by virtue of the ambiguity in which his life had passed’ (EO 249). Though the aesthete concerns himself with experience, it is for the end of what pleasure it can give him. So ‘[a]s soon as reality [loses] its power to incite him he [is] disarmed’ (250). When things do not go according to plan, the aesthete feels disillusioned.9 However, for Kierkegaard, love is not disillusioned but remains hopeful. In this hopeful engagement with experience that expresses itself in relation, it seems that Kierkegaard wants to work it out in the non-ambiguous ‘world of actuality’ (WL 159). Hühn and Schwabb write that ‘the actuality of human life [for Kierkegaard] is grounded in the unconditional demand made on the self to be what it is’ (2013: 88). But for the aesthete, ‘being what it is’ ties the person to a set of delicate conditions put in the right place at the right time. The aesthete, while able to feel things strongly, is in a vulnerable and ambiguous position. If things change, if the mood is altered, the meaning of the life task is gone. The whole landscape can change in an instant, and disillusionment blocks the possible. Tout n’est rien. An example of how the aesthete’s subject-relation is played out in relation to the other can be seen in The Seducer’s Diary. Here, a young man called Johannes documents his efforts at seducing and then rejecting his love interest, Cordelia. Outwardly, the initially infatuated aesthete does all that he can to win the affection of Cordelia. But inwardly it seems that his whole relation to her is more of a selfish kind of game. It is never really about the girl’s best interest, but about how this girl makes the seducer feel. So once her affection has been won and their engagement has been secured, Johannes changes the external plot to get rid of her. He writes What am I doing? Am I deluding her? Not at all, that would be no use. … Then what am I doing? I am fashioning for myself a heart in the likeness of her own. An artist paints his beloved, that’s his pleasure; a sculptor forms her. (EO 325)

The relation between Johannes and Cordelia is problematic. Johannes relates to Cordelia as an artist relates to an object that he is working on, instead of as a human relating to another human being. The responsibility, if there is any in this relation, is of crafting the other into something for the self to enjoy rather than to enable the other to freely choose to become herself. Contrasting what

124

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

Kierkegaard will define as the ‘relationship of conscience’ (WL 137), Johannes asserts a manipulative position of power over Cordelia’s vulnerability. He uses her faithful and innocent character to secure her affection. In this relation, Johannes believes he knows all there is to know about Cordelia. He relates to her like an object, rather than entering into any kind of meaningful dialogue that establishes her individuality.10 This relation seems to be problematic in terms of one’s subjective becoming, but it is also challenging with regard to freedom. The aesthetic limits the other’s communication. Conversation is not between an individual looking to understand the other who is also assuming the subjective task. The other is approached as already understood, and thereby silenced. This contrasts with the other-relation in Works of Love, where Kierkegaard ‘urges us to love the person we see’ (Lippitt 2013: 86), rather than ‘the self-generated image of the other person’ (Ferreira 2001, qt. in Lippitt 2013: 86). The other represents herself and communication reveals her subjectivity to us. I would argue that even Cordelia, as the aesthetic object in this case, enters into this language game that portrays the other as an aesthetic object. She recounts that sometimes he was so spiritual11 that I felt myself annihilated as a woman, at other times so wild and passionate, so filled with desire, that I almost trembled before him. Sometimes I seemed a stranger to him, at other times he gave of himself completely. (EO 253)

Language as communication between the two is then used for the aesthetic goal, which is the experience of desire (reduced to feeling) for the other. But it is not the kind of desire that Lévinas explicates. Nor is it Kierkegaard’s infinite desire of love that approaches ‘everyone … as a single individual … in inwardness before [the infinite] absolutely equal’ (WL 139).12 Rather than seeing the other as someone who is also becoming an individual who exists before the infinite,13 the other is related to for what she can give the subject. What is problematic in the aesthetic way of relating to the other is not its emotive passion, but rather how it sees and communicates with the other person, as a reflection of the subject’s own inward anxiety. The interrelation between the aesthete and the other is consistently inconsistent. In the example of ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, the aesthete (Johannes) is consistently acting in his own interest. He is committed to choosing both his relational project and

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

125

the poetic reflective living of experience. However, this is not the same as the consistency of love. The seducer engages consistently with the other until his need is met. The consistency is chosen for the self, rather than the other, and establishes an inconsistent other-relation. The seducer writes: What I feared most was that the whole process [of securing Cordelia’s love] might take me too long. I see, however, that Cordelia is making great progress; yes, that it will be necessary to mobilize everything to keep her mind on the job. She mustn’t for all the world lose interest before time, that is before the time when time has passed for her. (EO 339)

This movement of ‘selfish love’ is not for the other, but to experience something pleasurable for the self. Kierkegaard wants to distinguish this immediacy from love. Love sees the other person for his or her own sake, rather than for something that we can get from them. This neighbourly relation is lacking in the aesthetic relation. In love, there is no inherent partiality towards the other; there is no preference or ‘distinction’ to this love (WL 36). We will discuss this neighbourly love further on, but here it is presented as the contrast to aspects of selfish love, the love of the aesthete who relates to the other in order to gain something for herself.14 The love-relation, in order for it to be consistent with Kierkegaard’s concept of freedom, must allow for the other to be free as well. I am not trying to control the other. This would hinder the other’s self-becoming.15 Thus ‘the commandment [to love] bids me avoid even the subtle ways of trying to control another’ (96). For Kierkegaard, we relate to objects differently than we do other humans (Osolsobe 1992: 106). The enjoyment we have for music or artwork differs from the committed and free relation of love towards other human beings. Unlike objects, other humans too are capable of becoming authentically themselves. This is why Kierkegaard stresses the qualitative difference of a loving relation. As we become ourselves individually, our interaction with other people takes on a quality as well. We recognize (‘see’) that the other is becoming an individual as well; our interaction with the other, particularly through our communication in language and action therefore ‘hinges on setting the other free’ (CUP 192). This contrasts with the relation between the aesthete and the other. I have spent time developing the aesthetic relation towards the other because I think that it gives a clear picture for how Kierkegaard understands

126

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

the self–other relation. But, say, Cordelia gets fed up, or the aesthete becomes bored. The relationship crumbles, and the person experiences despair. It is through this experience that Kierkegaard develops the ethical other-relation. This ethical relation brings the self out of its dependency on immediacy, and into a rationally constructed relation with others. This ethical relation is not inwardly received as ‘a relationship of conscience’, which means that it is not ‘a relationship of love’ (WL 138), but it is understood through reason. The ethical universal defines the self according to its ‘enduring ethical commitments’ (Evans and Roberts 2013: 212). These ethical commitments shape who the person is and how he or she relates to others. Aside from Kierkegaard’s various characters (such as Judge Vilhelm), a common way to understand the ethical relation is through Kierkegaard’s own experiences. In the last chapter, I suggested that this personalized reading has limits. Shakespeare, for instance, warns of a ‘voyeuristic fascination’ with his life (2013: 21). However, I think that Hannay’s perspective in particular shows how the act of self-becoming can be expressed individually. As a young man, Kierkegaard split off relations with his demanding and melancholic father. Rather than engaging with an austere form of Christianity, he immersed himself in the buzz of Copenhagen’s vibrant cultural life. However, Kierkegaard eventually became disillusioned with its aestheticism,16 and reconciled himself with his father and his father’s Christianity. This marked a time in which Kierkegaard sought ‘to engage in human affairs’ through establishing a family and assuming civic responsibility (Hannay 1982: 5). However, these roles did not satisfy Kierkegaard either. He ended his engagement to Regine Olsen and decided against ordination, instead devoting himself exclusively to his writing (Hannay 1982: 8). For Kierkegaard, living the ethical life was not the same as existing as an individual. However, in recognizing the limit of an ethical theory that is attained through reason, Kierkegaard is not rejecting reason. Rather, he seems to be saying that it will not give us enough; we cannot explain human experience through reason alone (Evans and Roberts 2013: 215). Kierkegaard seems to be criticizing how theoretically construed other-relations, as ethics, can distance the subject from her experience of becoming. For instance, in Either/Or, the pragmatic ethical character Judge Vilhelm writes to the aesthete to urge him to change his way of engaging with the immediacy of life by entering into ethical relations. In a letter to the aesthete, Vilhelm writes: ‘You are far too adept in the

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

127

art of speaking in altogether general terms about anything, and without letting yourself be personally affected’ (EO 383). Engaged in the civil life, married and participating in society, Vilhelm’s life is outwardly focused towards the other. Kierkegaard wants to maintain the other-relation that the ethical develops.17 The self chooses to receive itself. However, this relation, based on reason, does not determine who we are. Subjective existence is not the same as participation in institutional roles; the individual is not the same as being a ‘good’ sister, father, citizen or friend. Shakespeare writes that The ‘objectivity’ that Kierkegaard resists is that of the neutral and impartial spectator, who is able to judge what the truth is from an elevated vantage point. Objective truth is the correspondence of thought and reality that is valid independently of whether or not we happen to accept it. (2013: 23)18

It seems that Kierkegaard does not want to get rid of our other-relation. He just does not want ‘who’ we are to be defined by how we participate in ‘objective truth’, and its construction of ‘thought and reality’ (2013). For ethics to address the problem of self as subject, it needs to be established beyond appeals to objective reason worked out in ethical relations. I think that the ethical other-relation is problematic for two reasons: First, it suggests that we are able to judge experience objectively. This means that we are not engaged with experience as a subject, but as an observer. Second, because an ethical institution determines the relation to the other, it is still self-interested. Specific relations have priority. Fulfilling ethical obligations towards the other determines who the person is. First, Kierkegaard critiques ethical objectivity as a way of relating to the other. As exhibited in accounts of the ethical in Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Sickness Unto Death and Concluding Unscientific Postscript in particular, Kierkegaard contrasts the ethical universal with the individualized experience of love. Hannay suggests that Kierkegaard wants to warn society of ‘its well-protected complacency’ (1982: 1). The ethical Vilhelm’s other-relation in social life lacks an individual critical judgement. Simplified to objectivity and rational ideals, the inner spiritual existence of the individual is surrendered to the growth ‘of a universal science of spirit’ (1982).19 This is distinct from a ‘relationship of conscience’ (WL 138) that is made possible through the inward self-relation. Furthermore, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus writes that the height of a person’s happiness

128

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

is ‘a good which is not distributed wholesale, but only to one individual at a time’ (116). But when an individual’s subjective task (of becoming a self) is made objective, it becomes problematic. The problem, Climacus will say, comes from determining our self-choosing according to a human-made ethical system. He asks: ‘Who is to write or complete such a system? … Surely a living human being, i.e. an existing individual’ (CUP 109). The thinker who thinks of this system is not outside of experience but inside of it. As such, it manifests subjective inwardness, which ‘has no objective, external guarantee of its validity’ that is ‘truth’ (Shakespeare 2013: 23). Shakespeare suggests that human experience is passionately subjective, which means that individuality ‘demands commitment and action rather than the speculative gaze of philosophy’ (Shakespeare 2013). Speculation about universal systems of human experience is a ‘comical contradiction’, because individuals can really only focus their attention on their own ‘persistent striving’ (109) to become themselves. Climacus writes As soon as it is remembered that philosophising does not consist in addressing fantastic beings in fantastic language, but that those to whom the philosopher addresses himself are human beings; so that ... the question is what existing human beings, in so far as they are existing beings, must needs be content with: then it will become evident that the idea of a persistent striving is the only view of life that does not carry with it an inevitable disillusionment. (CUP 110)

Climacus is concerned with the concrete striving of becoming uniquely oneself, through claiming the significant uniqueness of one’s own existence. He contrasts this with an abstract system of value, writing that ‘In a speculativefantastic sense we have a positive finality in the System … [b]ut this sort of finality is valid only for fantastic beings’ (CUP 110). Love for the other is therefore a relation addressed to ‘every one by himself as the single individual [den Enkelte]’ (WL 139). This means that ‘the ethical is [the individual’s] complicity with God’ (WL 139). God, the infinite relation, grounds the subject–other relation. Climacus seems to be saying that the distinguishing quality of relation is not about fitting a particular description, but that it is done before God. So even an ethical relation, understood world-historically, may have little significance. It is more like an actor’s well-executed performance. The individual is therefore inwardly

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

129

striving to become herself before the infinite, but it is often difficult to see what this looks like.20 The second critique of the ethical relation is that it is still self-interested. For instance, in The Sickness Unto Death, the person moves from unconscious despair to despair over particular things. In the ethical relation, the person is still capable of despair, because experience is tied to an ability to achieve the ethical ideal. The ethical relation contains an element of self-interest, because it defines who the person is: a doctor, a political activist, etc. In this relation, the person can still despair, because of the possibility of not achieving that definition. In The Sickness Unto Death, Hannay suggests that the despair of the ethical comes in realizing that we are not the selves that we assume we are, or try to be (1998: 333). The ethical21 suggests that we become ourselves through realizing our place in the institutionalized system. But this often seems impossible. People get tired, burnt out, angry and depressed. Our existential shapes do not always seem to fit with a generalized moulded order of things. Anti-Climacus says that we despair over ourselves. We just cannot seem to be good enough for this ethical order. This enables us to develop a ‘healthy scepticism’ (Hannay 1998: 333) about understanding the self through ethical actions alone. Hannay argues that Judge Vilhelm’s choice to remain in the ethical is actually, for Anti-Climacus, a choice to remain in despair. I would argue that it lacks the existential picture of freedom: that ‘there is something eternal in the self ’ (335) which this ethical relation cannot fully articulate.22 Despair is overcome, not through the ethical, but through the paradoxical surrender of the individual through the recognition that ‘for God all things are possible’ (SUD 54).

II  God and neighbour: The other-relation as love Beyond despair is the hope of freedom. The paradox of faith is that the eternal exists in us, and that our other-relation can take us out of despair. This otherrelation towards God grounds our experience of subjectivity, or of a cohesive self-synthesis. It also enables the selfless love towards the other. Kierkegaard’s individual subject–other relation is chosen and lived in existence, rather than as a rationally understood and accepted concept.

130

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

For Anti-Climacus, ‘[t]hose murky selves that see themselves in abstract universal terms are not selves standing before God’ (SUD 76).23 Kierkegaard’s individual is not stuck in despair. Becoming ourselves, as we saw in the last chapter, engages with hope and self-love. This way of ‘seeing’ the world (to use Grøn’s expression) reflects the qualitative change of spirit. Love is reflected in the subject- and other-relation. It differs from the ethical and the aesthetic in two ways.24 First, it grounds the subject- and other-relation in love, as the person becomes herself towards God. Second, this God-relation establishes a selfless love towards the human other. I am therefore arguing that the individual becomes a subject through a self-relation that at the same time orients us towards the other. To ‘become an individual’, we become ourselves for another. This is the journey in which the individual becomes herself through choosing a self-relation and relation to God, worked out in ‘fear and trembling’. The relation between the subject and God that defines love is not always seen externally. Whether or not a person has become an individual is about the inward relation. We have seen how in The Concept of Anxiety Haufniensis explains the person as body and psyche relating through spirit. In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus calls this inward relation a change in the quality of the person (22–23).25 This continuous self-choosing before God brings together the paradox of being (Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1968: 25). But it is not brought about through ethical consistency or wilful choice. Climacus says that it is a ‘free, non-volitional qualitative transition’26 in which the individual becomes another man, not in the frivolous sense of becoming another individual of the same quality as before, but in the sense of becoming a man of a different quality, or we may call him: a new creature. (PF 22-23)

For Kierkegaard, what differentiates the ethical from the religious is the spiritrelation. Ferreira writes that this experience is an ‘irruption of inwardness’ through a ‘qualitative shift in perspective’ (1998: 230). The qualitative transition seems to affect how we ‘see’ the world as well, because its outworking is love. An example of the religious individual is found in the story about the knight of faith and his beloved in Fear and Trembling. In this narrative, the knight of faith falls in love, but then surrenders his beloved. In so doing, he relinquishes the relation that had become the ‘whole significance of … reality’ (FT 183). This is the movement of infinite resignation. It is the ‘pathos-filled actuality of suffering’ that consciously empties itself (PF 47). This chosen relinquishment

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

131

is made with passionate ‘decisive interest’, and is ‘constituted by captivating yet free engagement’ (Adams 1990: 226). It is chosen freely. At the same time, it cannot be done through a person’s own strength (FT 59), so it is not the same as ‘acts of willpower’ (Adams 226). Choosing to exist towards God provides ‘the exit from the self ’ (Lévinas 1998b: 29).27 Thus religious existence, and the existential change that it brings about, has an infinite quality. Unlike the ethical that is ‘unconditionally communicated in actuality’ (CUP 77), the religious change is an inwardly received and chosen revelation. Also contrary to the ethical, the religious relation is ‘an absurdity to the understanding’ (191). In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus says that it is ‘only in the inwardness of self-activity’ that the person is brought into a God-relation. However, once established, the individual realizes that it is ‘possible to see God everywhere’ (CUP 243, 246).28 This possibility is both ‘a new self-understanding and a new ... understanding of the world’ that is brought about not by willing but an ‘approving affirmation’ of being towards God (Ferreira 1998: 229). Previously, the person existed as ‘infinite and finite, possibility and necessity, the eternal and the temporal’ (Dreyfus and Rubin 1994: 10). Through continuous and committed choice, a subjective experience is thereby transferred from the past to the future (11). I have found Grøn’s interpretation of the experience helpful. He suggests that the individual, as a synthesis of ‘heterogenous elements’ (2008a: 13), is quite a ‘fragile’ thing, which is why it is prone to anxiety and despair.29 The self tries to ‘[get] the heterogeneous that we are to cohere’ (10). But it is the choice of the God-relation that enables the heterogeneous paradox to come together. The subject, as spirit, is relational: the spirit is the relation that relates itself to itself (Tietjen and Evans 2011: 275). In the last chapter, I have called this selflove.30 However, this qualitative change (subject–God relation) manifests itself as love towards the other. This inward relation makes it difficult to communicate to the other through specific language structures (Shakespeare 2013: 57). Each experience of becoming an individual is unique (Kaufman 1992: 91).31 So if we are looking at how people relate to each other, it is through the individual experiences that we see love at work. The self–God relation thus qualitatively transforms our relation towards the other as one of love. This might seem a bit like a Lévinasian reading of Kierkegaard, but I think that Kierkegaard’s writings show a direct movement between the self–God

132

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

relation and the self–other relation. The inward quality of love develops relationally. Like with the self-relation in the last chapter, the possibility of loving the other is developed through the God-relation. The individual participates in the ‘truth of the eternal’ (the God-relation) through choosing herself before God, as paradox. The love for the other is extended by a self that also receives him- or herself in love. This love is received as a revelation; it is an inward qualitative change that makes possible the ‘hidden life of love’ (WL 27). The self becomes herself in love, and therefore living as oneself means living in love. Because love is rooted in the eternal moment (where for God all things are possible at any time), as an eternal source, this kind of love is limitless. This love-relation, however, develops as a quality, which means that it ‘depends upon how the deed is done’ (WL 30).32 Kierkegaard writes that ‘one can perform works of love in an unloving way, yes, even in a self-loving way, and when this is so, the works of love are nevertheless not works of love’ (WL 30). Intention seems to be important here: our love of the other, the neighbour, comes out of a prior ‘[abiding] in love’ (WL 33) that signifies the subject– God relation.33 It is this relation that emerges qualitatively that distinguishes the religious love of self to other from different loves. This is quite a difficult concept to understand. Kierkegaard is essentially saying that we can act in a very similar way, and yet one can be out of love and the other not. For instance, people that are working with addicted clients might work out of love for the client. However, the person could also be working for the client because it is a good career move, which would be more of a selfish self-love than a love for the other. Making distinctions about love based on appearance is problematic. This means that while Kierkegaard says that love reveals itself in works, it is hard to know whether the act is done in love based on the acts themselves. So how is any distinction made between a loving other-relation, and others that are merely out of self-interest? Lippitt suggests that works done through the quality of love have a common middle term. Loving works might not look the same, but what will qualify the act is whether the God-relation is the ‘kind of filter through which each … loves passes’ (2013: 82). Trying to figure out exactly what this love filter looks like is exemplified through his understanding of love as mercy. Kierkegaard writes that The fact is that the world does not understand the eternal. Temporal existence has a temporal and to that degree an activist conception of need and also has a materialistic conception of the greatness of a gift and for the

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

133

ability to do something to meet the need. ‘The poor, the wretched may die – therefore it is very important that help be given.’ No, answers the eternal; the most important is that mercifulness be practiced, or that help be the help of mercifulness. (WL 302)

Again Kierkegaard shows us that it is difficult to judge whether love is present based on a person’s actions. He clarifies that there are works done in the name of love (other-relations) and works done in love that are grounded in the eternal (subject–God–other). Kierkegaard seems to make the distinction here between quality and unity of intention over quantity and external recognizability of the love act done. The inward subject–God relation expresses itself as love towards the other, but sometimes it is difficult to recognize this relation at face value.34 So there seems to be a tension between the inward relation and its external expression, between this way of seeing the world (to reference Grøn again), and how we enact this. If it is through the love-relation that we ‘see’ the other, then this quality affects our actions (works) towards others, as well as our communication (language). As with the works of love, the language that we use takes on a particular quality. But this is tricky because language communicates an inwardly experienced relation. Trying to communicate this subjectivity in actuality [Virkelighed] therefore reveals the limits of our language and communication (Shakespeare 2013). We speak through love, and yet, it is difficult to actually quantitatively pinpoint which words are spoken in love and which are not. Berthold writes that Kierkegaard accepts that language is a necessary intermediary between our subjectivity and our ability to communicate with other human beings. But Kierkegaard seems to have a mixed relation to communication as the mediator between inwardness as actuality. Communication ‘is continually accomplished by a sense of lament over forsaking the interior’ (2009: 19). It falls short of articulating the inward relation. Berthold suggests that communication always contains an element of sorrow because it forsakes inwardness with the ‘intervention of the word’ (19). Yet communication is necessary for our relation to others. Love, established as the inward God-relation, requires communication and action as a way of ‘loving the very person one sees’ (WL 169). This relation to the eternal not only governs the relation to the other, but also to the self, as self-love: ‘You shall love yourself in the right way’ (22).35 Love is, therefore, the expression of abiding in the eternal relation.

134

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

So this seems to mean that Kierkegaard’s human experience is love. The self becomes ‘love-ing’, which orients the self as a subject towards God and the human other. The continuous choosing of this relation is what develops this experience of subjectivity. Kierkegaard writes that, in choosing this loverelation ‘now all is overcome’ (WL 345). But it is then continuously engaged with, chosen, communicated and enacted. He therefore writes further that Now it is a question of his standing and continuing to stand, of his not losing the victory as soon as he wins it. … Can a man more than conquer? Yes, one can, if after having conquered one stands, keeps the victory, continues in victory. (WL 345)

Love orients the subject towards itself, but through the other human and through the eternal. It orients the subject towards the other, but through inwardness. It is the chosen self–other experience as love through which the individual continues to live.

III  Applying the subject–other relation to addiction I think that it is possible to interpret the aesthetic, ethical and religious at work in these different individualized experiences of addiction. Dreyfus and Rubin note that ‘What is so striking about [addictive feelings] is that it includes characteristics that virtually every person has’ (1994: 4). They argue that the addictive experience is a human one, which is ‘a contemporary response to a problem first described by Kierkegaard’ (1994), and suggest that addictive experiences are individual engagements with the general challenge of being human.36 In this chapter, I have tried to show that Kierkegaard’s subject–other can be a way of understanding these experiences. This is the inward relation expressed outwardly towards the other through language and acts. This inward relation is also a relation between the subject and the other (eternal). So it seems for Kierkegaard that the expression of this subject-eternal (God) relation is love towards the other outside of us. While the aesthetic and ethical experiences can be understood as kinds of love-relations, it seems that Kierkegaard wants to distinguish them from religious love. In the next section I will look at how these different experiences of relating to the other (aesthetic, ethical, religious)

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

135

can help us understand the subjective experience of addiction. I will start by looking at the aesthetic love as a way of understanding addiction. After that, I will look at how Kierkegaard’s ethical relation can help us to understand challenges in addiction. Finally, I will suggest that Kierkegaard’s religious, or eternal, love is a helpful way of showing the subjective experience through how we speak and act alongside others in addiction. Earlier on in this chapter, I argued that the aesthete engages in a kind of ‘selfish’ other-relation that can often assume a problematic power structure. This is of particular interest when looking at addiction, insofar as it shows the importance of avoiding control of the other (an instance of ‘selfish self love’) and maintaining the other’s freedom. Let me explain this more clearly. In addiction, the subject-relation to the object or behaviour of addiction often outweighs the significance of the subject–other relation. As such, other people who interact with the addicted person can often feel as if they are being used or controlled. Michael Brandon Lopez discusses how Kierkegaard’s Works of Love can interact with concepts of relation in addiction. He notes that the addictive experience can often lead to the instrumentalization of the other, who becomes a means towards the addictive substance or behaviour. In addiction, the relation towards the other is therefore primarily defined by the ‘non-dialectical I at its center’ (Lopez 2009: 72). This means that the relation towards the other is not one of love and mutual upbuilding. It is to gain something from the other. Lopez suggests that addiction reveals a deceived self-concept is at the core of a relation to others. This deceived self-concept is then extended through the subject–other relation. 37 Lopez suggests that Kierkegaard’s aesthete reflects the subject–other relational experiences of addiction. In not being able to fully claim oneself as an individual, and in failing ‘to take ownership’ of oneself, the person also fails to take up ownership as a self in community. Love is displaced from person to object. We pursue love of an object rather than a person. The pursuit of the other is not the eternal love, but ‘a condemnation of self to objects; to objectideas about life that negate [one’s] own ability to communicate meaningfully with [others]’ (2009: 70–1).38 For instance, the other is a drinking friend, or a drink, or a source of income. So rather than engaging with the individual other as spirit,39 the person is stuck in inwardness, where ‘instead they find only loneliness … and yet none of them wants to be alone’ (Lopez 2009: 73). Lopez

136

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

seems to suggest that we all long for other-relations, but often the addicted person self-isolates. The aesthetic experience journaled in Diapsalmata expresses this paradoxical tension within the aesthete.40 It also echoes of the addictive melancholia described by Knapp in previous chapters. In Kierkegaard, the writer chooses an inward relation towards the other (Echo), not for the sake of the other, but because this relation maintains their inner state (sorrow),41 just as Johannes chooses to relate to Cordelia as an artist relates to a canvas. This seems similar to some experiences of addiction. Lopez suggests that it is the destructive result ‘that can be wrought within a community where there is a longing for love, but a failure to recognise it’ (2009: 73). The aesthete strives towards something, but it is not a self-synthesis worked out in love. Rather, it is a failure ‘to embody it and become it’ (2009). Here we have been looking at the aesthetic experience of the addicted person towards others, but there are other ways of relating to others in addiction. Dreyfus and Rubin, in ‘The Case of Commitment as Addiction’, share the narrative of adult children of alcohol-dependent parents whose experience of subjectivity (or self) is similar to the aesthetic account of Cordelia. They report that children of alcohol-dependent parents often recount feelings of emptiness, inadequacy, isolation and depression, as well as difficulty trusting and being intimate. They are overly responsible or easily manipulated. They often feel alone, vulnerable, confused and frustrated … and trust and put others before themselves. (1994: 4)42

This kind of relation does not seemed to be characterized by selfishness, but it also does not seem to be the ‘proper self-love’ relation that we looked at in the previous chapter. It rather reminds me of the aesthetic self–other relation of Johannes and Cordelia. Cordelia writes of the helpless state that she is left in after Johannes’ departure. The narrator describes her as ‘the unhappy girl [who] would retain the consciousness [of the event] with double bitterness because there was not the slightest thing she could appeal to’ (EO 250).43 Cordelia’s experience seems similar to what Climacus will call despair: ‘in despair not wanting to be oneself ’ (SUD 80). This is understood as an experience of immediacy, or a self that has not fully become his- or herself before God. In this relation, perhaps, both the lover and the beloved choose an experience based on aesthetic immediacy. The selfish lover pursues the other

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

137

for his own poetic experience. The beloved victim despairs of ‘something earthly’ (EO 80), which is the loss of her earthly lover. The despairing person ‘runs up against something’ (82), which is the inability to attain what is desired. The person despairs over his or her life experience that now feels devoid of meaning, because the meaning had been attached to that external condition (in Cordelia’s case, being loved by Johannes). So in this immediacy it seems that both are victims (lost without assuming individuality), because both end in despair over their situation. What is particularly interesting here is the consequence it has on the other’s narrative: both are in despair in this aesthetic self-love. This has significant parallels to the felt experience of despair in addiction. In this aesthetic relation, self-love causes a person to be stuck in his or her experience. The possibility of becoming is lost with the loss of the other. The aesthetic portrayal in the Diapsalmata starts with the Latin phrase ad se ipsum, which translates as ‘to himself ’ [unto oneself], reflecting the continual pattern of solipsistic love characteristic of aesthete. This solipsism becomes difficult when the person becomes unable to ‘forsake their individual pain’, which is ‘rooted deeply within the inability’ to fully engage in a loving relation towards the other (Lopez 2009: 74).44 Solipsism, or a selfish self-relation, then affects the other-relation. This can be seen through the experience of communication. For instance, in the Twelve Steps Program, the addicted person is asked to share their experience of addiction with the group (L. 1993: viii). Communication becomes a way of self-exit, and challenges the selfish self-relation. The group provides a context for a safe sharing of experiences. However, it does not always mean that the relation towards the self or the other is love. Communication is a way of articulating the relation, but it can also be a way of articulating aesthetic anxiety. Gillian Bridge has, for instance, looked at the use of language in addiction narratives. Borrowing the research of Chung and Pennebaker, she suggests that an addicted person often uses self-referential words, rather than other-oriented words.45 The continuous reference to the ‘I’ has, in their psycholinguistic work, been linked to higher rates of depression and other mental health challenges. This may not be what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote on aesthetic love, but I think there are some interesting parallels. The continuous self-reference in communicating with others seems to not fully get at the self-love as exit, or the freedom of setting the other free that he references. It lacks the ‘secret to communication’, which frees the other

138

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

person to realize their individual relation and which is to ‘build up’ the other (WL, p. 199).46 The aesthetic other-relation shows us how relating to others as objects can be problematic, as well as why this self-referential viewpoint may limit our self-becoming and love towards others. This is a particularly poignant part of relation in addiction. Here it seems that the first point of reference is the experiential environment of the self. Knapp gives another example of this in her memoires of alcoholism. In this she writes about a particular romantic relationship that had just started. She writes that this person ‘looked like a new solution to an old set of puzzles, a person who could help me … . I thought: Here it is. New life’ (1996: 171).47 The other is approached, but it is through the experience of the self, which confines the other to the experience of the self. Knapp acknowledges that relating to the other in this way can be problematic. She writes that ‘Of course, attaching all your hopes and fantasies to something – or someone – outside yourself almost always has disastrous results’ (1996: 171). As we saw with Kierkegaard’s despairing aesthete, if the other does not conform to what we were hoping for, if the experience changes, or the relationship crumbles, then the subject is left in increased anxiety.48 While the aesthetic relation leaves the person in despair of immediacy, the ethical relation tries to rescue the self through the universal. This section will examine how the ethical experience can help us to understand addiction, through particular reference to the Twelve Steps Program. I think that Kierkegaard’s ethical relation is particularly relevant in understanding the ‘institutionalisation’ of addiction through the literature of particular programs. If there ever was an ‘abstract murky term’ (SUD 76) then addiction seems to fit. It is this abstract term that becomes the subjective reference for a member of a Twelve Steps Group. The person identifies herself by name, but is then generalized as an alcoholic, binge/restrictive/compulsive eater, etc. The subject-relation towards the other people in the group comes from partaking in this term. Others are also addicts, although working through their own journey of recovery. This means that the subject- and other-relation in Twelve Steps happens through this particular abstract term. It could be suggested that the sharing of stories in a group setting brings the subject into relation with others, rather than through a relation to a general term. The first step of admitting powerlessness, ‘that our lives had become unmanageable’ (1993: 1), reveals that current relational experience is not

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

139

working, which is arguably a despair of sorts. In the Twelve Steps literature, the addictive experience does not help us to develop a solid relation to other people. Life becomes unmanageable. The addiction relation misconstrues the relation towards others, objectifying them or shutting them out. We saw this previously in examining the aesthetic other-relation. However, the ethical relation can help us understand other parts of the otherrelation in addiction. From this perspective, addiction could develop a relation of security and identity. There is a kind of order to existence in addiction. So we could say that addiction, as an abstract definition of experience, can give a sense of security and self-cohesion. In this case, addictive experiences contain elements of Kierkegaard’s ethical relation. But there are other ways in which addiction could contain ethical relational experiences. For instance, in treating addiction, the person engages with a series of institutional relations: institutions of Society and the Family (to use Hegelian terms). These are exemplified in the person’s relation to a family, a carer or a self-help group. Rather being an isolated ethical relation (the addicted person towards the concept of addiction), this ethical relation is interpersonal (between the self and the human other). In the Twelve Steps, the relation to the other is framed by role that the addicted person must play. For instance, she is the recipient of care, and the other fulfils the role of carer. As with the aesthetic relation, this self–other relation becomes ethical in both directions. The therapist needs a client (the addicted person) in order to fulfil their role. In order for the therapist to relate to the individual ethically it seems that he or she can only relate to the person as addict. Without the addiction (in cases of addiction therapy), the relation ceases to exist. So for the ethical role of the therapist to be complete, the addicted person must also fulfil his or her role as addict. Another example of the ethical self–other relation in addiction could be seen between the addicted person and the family. The addicted person occupies her role as family member, and the obligations assume within that role (financial provider, support, etc.). In this relation, addiction can disrupt how the person fulfils her role and can even disrupt others from theirs. For instance, the addictive behaviour may mean financial instability, infidelity or an inability to provide the security and emotional attachment of a parent that children need.49 This frustration can lead to experiencing despair because the addicted person cannot seem to realize the task that is required of them. The

140

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

addicted person ‘despairs over’ who he or she is, or cannot seem to be (SUD 93). If continuously unable to fulfil the role of parent or family member, the person may remain in despair. A third example of how the ethical can help us to understand the other relation in addiction is through the addicted person’s relation to the self-help group. Relating to the group as a member may mean that the person feels a pressure to assume a particular way of ‘being an addict’. For instance, for a member of AA, affirming oneself as an addict simultaneously affirms one’s need for the group, and secures the group identity. Even when abstinent, one is still ‘an addict’ in recovery, suggesting that one is continuously recovering without reaching any final resolve. This relation, if it is ethical, rests on the person continuously identifying him- or herself as an addict. This common recognition strengthens the bond between participants and their individual narratives, as seen in the following quote Even before your drinking got bad and people began to cut us off, nearly all of us suffered the feeling that we didn’t quite belong. … When we reached A.A., and for the first time in our lives stood among people who seemed to understand, the sense of belonging was tremendously exciting. (AA 1981: 57)

The other-relation is developed through group participation. Participation in the group is established not through individuality, but by one’s common suffering/separation through the abstract unifier – addiction. But this is just one way of looking at these relations, and a limited one at that. The Twelve Steps is more nuanced. The Program points to the Higher Power relation as central to the human experience of addiction. This Higher Power addresses the individual rather than the group, thereby challenging us to look at this experience beyond the aesthetic and the ethical (unless the Universal Ethical spirit takes a personal direction, beyond the Institution, which a Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel does not seem to allow). Any suggestion that the Twelve Steps is an unconscious form of despair is also complicated further by the expression of the opposite in its literature. The Big Book states that ‘the joy of living is the theme’ (2001: 106), which is fulfilled in the twelfth step of sharing one’s process of recovery with others. It is difficult to know whether or not this joy of recovery is a spontaneous freedom, or a joy based on the fulfilment of an ethical relation with others. Is it possible for an addicted person to experience this joy without the Twelve

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

141

Steps? Is this joy contingent on sharing the ethical process of working the steps and being continuously committed to an ongoing working out of one’s recovery? Are individuals striving to become joyful, and is this then more of an ethical imperative that ‘takes its capacity to be natural powers’ (SUD 76)? These are big questions, and I cannot presume to answer them all in this book. However, looking at the religious relation may help us understand more. Understanding exactly what the role of the Higher Power is may allow us to figure out whether or not this is an ethical (‘natural powers’) movement, or something that Kierkegaard would classify as the religious relation, relying on the eternal to facilitate a qualitative inward transformation. Trying to figure out the role of the Higher Power relation in the Twelve Steps has resulted in grappling with Kierkegaard’s self–God relation, and how it plays out in our relation to others. I have not found it easy to figure out the exact specifics of Kierkegaard’s self-eternal (God) relation. It seems that Kierkegaard wants to couple individual striving with a change at the level of spirit, that is beyond the human’s own capacity to orchestrate (except that the individual must also choose the leap to faith). Amid some of my confusion, therefore, I return to the limits of what I want to discuss here: namely, how the God-relation enables the other-relation. In Kierkegaard, this is expressed as love. The duty to love is commanded from outside the subject. However, this outsider (eternal) is the one who grounds the inward subject-relation. Love for other requires a love for oneself, but it is paradoxically also a ‘self-renunciation’ (WL 188). The individual is asked to ‘give up … selfish desires and longings, give up … arbitrary plans and purposes’ in order to ’work disinterestedly in the good’ (WL 188). According to Lopez, addiction can make this especially difficult as it can result in a ‘fog’, or ‘a failure to recognise [love], to embody it and to become it’ (Lopez 2009: 73). Giving up one’s own pain, one’s own sorrow, or craving can seem impossibly hard in addiction. According to Lopez, Kierkegaard’s love ‘is something that we become … inseparable from our individual being and [manifested in] community’ (75). Yet we must also ‘choose it freely’ (WL 188). Addiction may present an exceptionally difficult version of ‘choosing’ love through self-renunciation for the other, because it is not just a momentary but continuous self-renunciation. The quality of love is its endurance through time, reflecting the eternal. Kierkegaard writes that ‘[t]he love which simply

142

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

exists, however fortunate, however blissful, however satisfying, however poetic it is, still must survive the test of the years’ (WL 47). Is it a misreading of Kierkegaard to say that the enduring ability to abstain from addictive behaviours is the same quality as this enduring selfless love? Perhaps it is, if the addiction instrumentalizes the other or if it uses the other for its own selfish interests. If it is just a matter of looking at interpersonal relations, then enduring behaviour that continues to renounce this way of engaging with others could be a form of love. However, if only looking at the actual drinking behaviour, without its instrumentalization of the other, then would an individual still be able to love? Lévinas is definite in his view of drinking when he states alcohol can act as ‘murder’, insofar as we are not as able to respond or hear the call of the other. As Kierkegaard also admits to this infinite debt of love towards the other, and self-renunciation, it would be difficult to see how an individual could engage in alcoholic behaviour and be a self-renounced loving neighbour to the other. But it does not mean that it is impossible.

Conclusion This chapter has suggested that Kierkegaard can problematize some theories of addiction experiences, both in terms of a person’s subject-relation and relation to others. Kierkegaard shows us concepts that help us to figure out how addictive experiences can affect our relation to others. This has been shown through developing Kierkegaard’s concepts of aesthetic, ethical and religious other-relation. Applied to addiction, this suggests that Kierkegaard reveals problematic aspects of relational structures that often occur between the addicted subject and the other. However, it seems that Kierkegaard cannot explain how we are to understand certain experiences of subjectivity. For instance, this seems to be particularly true when examining recent reports of babies who are born with ‘Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome’ (NAS). As a result of exposure to drugs in the womb, the baby is born with ‘pretty much the same symptoms of an adult who is going through withdrawal’. This baby is ‘the most victimised victims in all of the drug crisis’ (Neff 2016). The baby is born into a state that seems to epitomize the helplessness of despair, but it is through no chosen

Kierkegaard: Relating to the Other as Love

143

fault of its own. The challenge with the newborn is that it is not merely made psychologically vulnerable, but the baby also enters into an unchosen physical dependence. It is not fully clear how Kierkegaard’s theory can account for this kind of subjective experience. Thus, concluding the chapter, a few questions remain about Kierkegaard’s subjective engagement and how it applies to addiction. While Kierkegaard’s philosophy raises important points about how we understand addiction, the Twelve Steps also seems to present a concept of subjectivity that has points of congruity with Kierkegaard’s entangled self. For both, the development and assertion of personal subjectivity is central to the task of becoming oneself, and of reaching abstinence. For Kierkegaard, the pseudonyms are required to ‘trick’ the reader into realizing that she is lost, and taking ownership of the task of becoming herself as an individual project.50 But though the task ends in a ‘peaceful transparent resting’ and ‘joy’, it is marked with anxiety and despair. Perhaps more troublingly, it seems that it is only Kierkegaard who, through his pseudonyms, can bring the person to recognize this lostness. Similarly, the Twelve Steps gives a particular way for the subjective experience of addiction to be reconstructed. A common experience is individualized and retold in the group setting. The group is needed to facilitate the sharing of experiences, and to enable a new construction of experience to occur, but within the definition of subjectivity (addictive experience) that the Twelve Steps provides. There may be personalized versions of the stories, but the subject still constructs his or her experience within a specific framework of addiction. In looking at these questions, and the ones posed in this chapter, this chaper suggests that while there are many practical and social benefits to the Twelve Steps that ought not be overlooked, it could pose a problem for the existential task of becoming oneself as an individual. Furthermore, the Twelve Steps and Kierkegaard present a challenging depiction of human experience that requires another to help us understand ourselves within a particular framework of existential experience. As such, it is the role of the next chapter to widen the discourse through returning to Lévinas. In this way one can see how both thinkers can be understood together as a way of expanding the existential phenomenology of subjectivity as a hopeful relation, and how they can help us to distinguish between having an addiction and being an addict.

144

Part Four

146

6

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and love in relational subjectivity

The previous chapters have examined how Lévinas and Kierkegaard understand human experience. Looking at specific concepts, such as relation, freedom and responsibility, these chapters have shown how these thinkers can inform the experience of addiction. It has been suggested that each thinker brings subjectivity into the hopeful self-exit of relation. This chapter will bring this conversation between Lévinas and Kierkegaard together by comparing their ideas and most valuable findings for this thesis. I will show how their respective philosophies provide a way of relating to the subject and the other, through the relation of love. Kierkegaard and Lévinas are both developing an existential phenomenology of relation. This particularly means looking at how the self becomes a subject, through relation to others. This chapter will explore some of the intricacies of what this means. It is divided into three parts to simplify this comparison. The first part will look at the self, prior to subjectivity. This starts with looking at how the self exists as separate. In Lévinas, this is understood through the experience of the il-y-a and then through the egoism of enjoyment. In Kierkegaard, the self exists in egoism (selfish love) through the aesthetic and ethical, anxious and despairing experience. The second part will then look at how the self becomes a subject through the relation with the other. This section will show how Lévinas uses responsibility and desire to develop subjectivity. It will compare and contrast this with Kierkegaard’s use of freedom and selfless love to develop a relation of being for the other. The relation towards the other, as love, is hopeful, I will argue, because it provides an exit from the egoism of the self. Finally, this section will look at how Kierkegaard and Lévinas understand this hopeful love-relation through

148

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

the experience of suffering. It is this hopeful relation of love that ruptures the static enclosure of suffering as ‘an addict’, which will be explored in the last chapter.

I  The separate self (prior to subjectivity) Previous chapters have shown how Lévinas and Kierkegaard both develop an existential phenomenology of relation. While at a cursory glance, both thinkers may seem to differ in their views of this relation, I would suggest that they are actually rather more alike. Drawing on the themes developed earlier in the thesis, it will be shown how both Lévinas and Kierkegaard start with the concept of a self in separation. This self then only becomes subject through its relation to the other. This chapter will suggest that, by reading Kierkegaard alongside Lévinas, we can see the development of a relational subjectivity. This relational subjectivity, it will be argued, is extended as a unified experience of love: subjective love (self-love), and love for the other. Both Kierkegaard and Lévinas share a central concept of a separated self. Yet Lévinas wants to distance himself from Kierkegaard’s existentialism, as he critiques what he calls the Kierkegaardian subject’s secret (see Lévinas 1998a). This secret is an inner world that remains unshared with the other. Despite Lévinas’s protests, however, it does not seem that the two thinkers are as dissimilar as he may think.1 Often their thoughts are complimentary in the understanding of relation. This section will therefore develop this comparison through examining how both philosophers explore the pre-relational self. Once we see how both thinkers view this self, we may better grasp the concept of a relational and suffering subject.2 I am suggesting that Lévinas and Kierkegaard develop a self-concept that is similar in key ways. In both, the self does not become a subject until it emerges through experience. For Lévinas, the ambiguous being is described as the il-y-a, which then becomes enclosed through its enjoyment of the sensory word as an egoism. It is when the self responds to the other that subjectivity emerges. For Kierkegaard, the subject emerges though the relation of self-love. Aesthetic and ethical, despairing and anxious existences reveal a self engaged in the world, but without the relation of love that conditions subjectivity. Through the inwardly received relation, the self becomes subject and engaged in the

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and Love in Relational Subjectivity

149

world in love. The inwardly received qualitative change is simultaneously experienced through our relation to the other. Simmons and Wood suggest that, while on the surface Lévinas and Kierkegaard ‘make an odd couple’, comparing the two thinkers reveals ‘moments of harmony’ (2008: 2). This is first of all revealed through the concept of self. One of the concepts that develops this in Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s thought is their understanding of separation. This first came out of a conversation that I had with Lévinas scholar Rossitsa Varadinova Borkowski (2016). I was trying to understand how Lévinas could demand so much of the responsible subject. She introduced me to the often-overlooked concept of enjoyment in his writings and argued that it is through this philosophical exploration of separation and experience that the relation between the subject and the other situates itself. Trying to understand more about what this separation and enjoyment could mean, I wanted to see how Kierkegaard’s self also could compare in his understanding of human experience and consciousness. Not much work has been done on this comparison, so I am aware that more work is required to develop this further. But I hope this will be a start. The self exists in reality. Both Lévinas and Kierkegaard develop an existential phenomenology of relation that requires engaging with life, and how we live in and amid it. We are sensing beings, rational, individualized and passionate, experiencing the complexities of life in a body that is capable of suffering and in a relational world where we exist alongside others. Lévinas and Kierkegaard show us a way of understanding this experience (Simmons and Wood 2008: 2). The self is not understood through abstraction; it is developed through the embodiment of a living being. Lévinas and Kierkegaard both look at this self as subject of a life. But this laying hold of existence is, for both writers, an engagement. For Lévinas, the il-y-a preconditions the self. It is possibility of being, prior to a relation in time. It is the ‘possibility’ out of which the separated, yet relational, subject emerges. For Kierkegaard, the self approaches the world as an individual. Though this individual is relational, it engages in relation as a separate choosing self. Let me explain this separation a bit more. In Totality and Infinity Lévinas writes that ‘[s]eparation designates the possibility of an existent being set up and having its own destiny to itself ’ (TI 55). This possibility is enabled through separation (278–9). It is ‘the upsurge of an individual existent into existence’

150

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

(229), and the ‘demarcation of an individual consciousness’ from a totality of general being (TI 229). Separated from the totality of being, which Lévinas refers to as the il-y-a, the conscious self emerges through enjoyment. Here the self exists as separate. It is firstly identified as ‘I’. The I, suggests Lleweyn, reveals the separated happy and enjoying self. It is the ‘first person singularity of the world of happiness in time’ (2008: 72). This is distinct to the ethical ‘me’ of the subject. Lévinas writes that ‘[t]he present is then a situation in being where there is not only being in general, but there is a being, a subject’ (EE 78). Responding to another independent being requires a separate consciousness.3 But in responding to the other, the I turns into me. I am for the other, or as Llewelyn writes, ‘the constitution of my selfhood is due to … responsibility’ (2008: 72). This other-relation will be developed further on, but here it is important to show how the distinction is drawn. Kierkegaard is also concerned with the self prior to subjectivity. Llewelyn suggests that the self ‘in his or her first person’ is central to both Kierkegaard and Lévinas. However he clarifies that ‘while for Kierkegaard in this context this first person singularity is that of the I, for Lévinas it is that of the me’ (2008: 72). Kierkegaard develops this self through his aesthetic and ethical writings, as well as through exploring anxiety and despair. Here he develops the ‘conditions, aims and limits of human action’ (Welz 2013: 442). In The Concept of Anxiety, for instance, Haufniensis seem to suggest that contained within each person is ‘subconscious desire to become differentiated, a self, an individual’ (McLachlan 1986: 183). It is this possibility that creates the tension of anxiety, conditioned by freedom, ‘because the individual is not conscious of what it has to do’ (McLachlan 1986: 183). Kierkegaard’s writings suggest that human experience can be understood as a struggle between disinterestedness and complete absorption in the world. It is this ‘“absorption” of the “human subject”’ (Simmons 2008: 44) in a life that is grounded beyond itself that Lévinas finds appealing in Kierkegaard. For example, Kierkegaard’s ‘strong notion of existence’ (PN 66) sounds similar to what Lévinas develops in Existence and Existents, when he states that existing involves a relationship by which the existent makes a contract with existence. … Existence … burdened with itself … does not purely and simply exist. Its movement of existence, which might be pure and straightforward, is bent and caught up in itself, showing that the verb to be is a reflexive verb: it is not that one is, one is oneself. [en s’est] (EE 16)

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and Love in Relational Subjectivity

151

This self finds itself burdened with an engagement in existence. Haufniensis’s self experiences a ‘fundamental anxiety for itself and its condition in existence’ (Simmons 2008: 45). Caught up in this, anxiety finds relief as the subject chooses herself. The opposite of this is the ‘refusal to undertake’ or to engage with this ‘burden of existence’ (Simmons and Wood 2008: 17). Rather than engaging with the responsibility of struggling with existence, the self abdicates responsibility and remains in the isolation of anxiety. She is already ‘fatigued by the future’, and does not wrestle with the task of becoming a subject of existence (Simmons and Wood 2008: 17). I have emphasized the role of existential phenomenology in this discourse because it is through experience and observation that these thinkers lay hold of a philosophy of human existence. So it seems that both thinkers have an understanding of a separate self that is engaged in the task of living. For Lévinas, the ‘concrete individual is a living body that enjoys its own existence’ (Large 2015: 53). Enjoyment characterizes the separate self. But it is the response to the other that characterizes the subject. Kierkegaard’s aesthete also enjoys life. But this experience of a self is not the same as the ‘proper self love’ of the subject, which Kierkegaard explains in Works of Love (22). This self-love orients consciousness towards the neighbour (the other). Kierkegaard therefore says that ‘if anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbour either’ (WL 22). So it seems that in both Kierkegaard and Lévinas, the task or responsibility of existence seems to be connected with the separate self. However, the self starts to look a bit different for each thinker. As we saw previously in Llewelyn’s interpretation, both Kierkegaard and Lévinas use the first person singular, but they seem to use it in two ways. For Kierkegaard, it remains the consciously willed ‘I’ (Simmons 2008: 45). For Lévinas, the self starts as an ‘I’ and emerges as a ‘me’ through the hypostatic encounter with the other. He critiques Kierkegaard’s being as essentially ‘for itself ’ (en-soi), rather than emerging as a subject via encounter into being ‘for-the-other’ (pour l’autre) (Simmons 2008). Lévinas says that the relation towards the other is asymmetrical. Yet Ferreira suggests that ‘[Lévinas’] commitment to the “ethics of the welcome” and his understanding of hospitality’ seem to ‘support a functional equivalent of the “as yourself ” self-love that Kierkegaard highlights’ (2008: 92–3).4 Both develop a phenomenology of the separate self. But the self, engaging in existence, becomes a subject for-the-other. This subjectivity is in both instances

152

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

established beyond the self. They suggest that the subject really engages with life by giving herself to the other.

II  Subject as for-the-other For both thinkers, we do not exist in abstract. For Lévinas, the self encounters the other in a ‘world of happiness in time’ (Llewelyn 2008: 72). In existing, the self is ‘singled out, elected, by the other who accuses me of not fulfilling my duty’ (Llewelyn 2008). This means that ‘the constitutive of my selfhood [as subject] is due to duty, or … responsibility’ (Llewelyn 2008). For Lévinas, I am a subject, responsible for the other. It is through this other-relation that I understand who I am. In both Lévinas and Kierkegaard we have an understanding of the self that becomes a subject through engaging with existence. It is as if ‘we receive ourselves from elsewhere’ (Welz 2013: 453). Welz notes, for instance, that Lévinas is ‘in favour of a more comprehensive phenomenology of the conditions of factual existence’ (445). Both thinkers seem to interpret subjectivity based on relation. It is ‘the subjectivity of a subject come late into a work [that] does not consist in treating this world as one’s project’ (OB 122, qt. in Welz 2013: 452). I have suggested that this reveals how both Lévinas and Kierkegaard see the human subject as relational. Previous chapters have argued that Kierkegaard also develops a relational subject. This is through his concept of love. Love is revealed in the qualitative transformation of subjectivity, of being in relation to the Infinite other. This Kierkegaard describes as a twofold love-relation: the subject relates to itself in love, and at the same time relates outwardly to others in love.5 Thus Welz suggests that for Kierkegaard, ‘human love is not only a form of consciousness or self-knowledge but also … praxis, of acting for the good of the other’ (Lincoln 2000, qt. in Welz 2013: 443). Subjectivity, I am claiming here, is expressed as for-the-other. Another way of saying this is that the subject exists inwardly and outwardly in a relation of love. Lévinas seems to be equally concerned with this relational subjectivity, which is one of the few points that he seems to agree with on Kierkegaard directly. This is based on a subjectivity that is ‘absorbed in the world in which it is involved’ (McLachlan 1986: 182). The world is constantly changing, which means that human existence ‘demands

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and Love in Relational Subjectivity

153

continuous involvement’ rather than a reflective distance (McLachlan 1986). This concept of a relational subject has elsewhere been described as hopeful. It is hopeful because the relation actually brings us out of ourselves. The other provides an exit for us to become a subject, and we provide an exit for them in our response. While I have remarked about the difference between Kierkegaard’s ‘quality’ of response (love) as distinct from Lévinas’s simple command to respond (hineni), there are similarities in how it plays out. For Lévinas, the desire for the other does not emerge from need or lacking. It originates from something that ‘exceeds me’, and that the self cannot contain.6 Lévinas also uses the concept of ‘welcoming’ the other, where the other is not seen as either enemy (as in Hobbes) or a complement to oneself (as in Plato), but a neighbour. Response, according to Lévinas, is offered as welcome. It is an ‘aspiration conditioned by no prior need’ (HO 29). The other-relation continuously ‘overflows the capacity of the I’, and is an extension towards the infinite that cannot be found in my ego, but from beyond. This response towards the other, as welcome, comes from a contented self that reaches beyond to grasp something of the infinite. Kierkegaard also looks at the infinite other-relation, which he identifies as love. He sets it apart from different other-relations, and shows that love as a way of relating to the other, contains both suffering and self-love. For Kierkegaard, the difficulty with love is that many different ‘kinds’ of love exist, without having the same ‘quality’ to them. It is therefore the intention behind our response that is important. Love invokes a movement towards the other.7 This relation of love, as a responsibility and desire for the other, is important to both thinkers. It is also the relation that provides an exit or ‘beyond’, from suffering and egoism, and thereby establishes the subject in hope. Love addresses the other. Drawing from Works of Love, Practice in Christianity and Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Roberts suggests that Kierkegaard’s other-relation as love is practised in concrete ethical relation. It is not an abstract moral theory but an active relation to existence. So rather than presenting how an other-relation ought to be, Works of Love serves as a lesson in practical wisdom (Roberts 1998: 173). This seems to tie in with Kierkegaard’s previous understanding of a person’s infinite/eternal (God)-relation. God exists as a subject rather than thing, and as a ‘mode of relationship’ (Wood 1998: 70). What sets the other-relation apart as love, rather than an ethical absolute, is

154

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

that it is received through the existential task of faith. He writes that ‘Man’s highest achievement is to let God be able to help him’ (JP 22). This is an actively chosen movement towards God. God is defined as a being of ‘open possibilities, not fixed finalities’ (Mooney 1998: 287). God is the good. In asking for God’s help in faith, the individual receives existence back, ‘paradoxically’ delivered with ‘new and surprising meaning’ (Mooney 1998). When understood in terms of ethics, the relation becomes love that is extended towards the other. Lévinas’s good is the ethical good. God is good because God orients us towards the infinite other. The ordering of God and neighbour is expanded through the understanding of the relation between the self and the neighbour. Wells notes that the distinction between Lévinas and Kierkegaard concerns the treatment of the other and God (2012: 69–81). According to Lévinas, every human has the ability to break the immanence of the ego through responding to the other. Wells suggests that it is not so much that Kierkegaard’s narrative contradicts Lévinas’s ethics, nor that Lévinas rejects Kierkegaard’s subjectivity.8 Kierkegaard is challenging an epistemic knowing of the subject isolated from the other. Climacus’ religious individual requires loving the other. Lévinas defines his concept of subject in relation to responsibility. For him, we desire the other. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas writes that this desire contains ‘the idea of infinity …’ that is inaccessible to egoism (84). For Lévinas, the idea of infinity ‘is the welcoming of the other’ (TI 84). Desire is met in response towards the desirable face. I think that this is similar to how Kierkegaard uses the qualitative change of spirit. It contrasts our willed self-improvement projects, but permits freedom. The qualitative change also orients ourselves towards the other. This comparison is important for me to explain because it shows why Lévinas misreads Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wants to leave behind the idealism of Greek abstraction. But he does not want to leave the person in despair or anxiety. The paradoxical resting found in God grounds the subject, and points the subject towards the other. Both thinkers therefore stress the importance of relating to the other (as response, as love). However, in Lévinas, the infinite demand orients the subject towards the other, whereas in Kierkegaard, it is the subject that is in infinite need of the other. Much of the scholarship comparing Lévinas and Kierkegaard has focused on the sequence of priority between the self, the human other and God.9 For instance, Lévinas seems to take issue with Kierkegaard’s subject because of his or her inward orientation. He writes that Kierkegaard’s

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and Love in Relational Subjectivity

155

‘subject has a secret, for ever inexpressible, which determines his or her very subjectivity’ (PN 67). It is the ‘thorn in the side’ (PN 67), ‘which continues to call the self to itself. Subjectivity is defined by anxiety for itself and its condition in existence, namely, its sinfulness’ (Simmons and Wood 2008: 45). Simmons writes that it is as if Lévinas defines Kierkegaard’s self solely in terms of being ‘for itself ’ (pour soi), rather than being ‘for-the-other’ (pour l’autre) (Simmons and Wood 2008). Yet, Simmons suggests that even a generalized reading of Kierkegaard’s individual will show that the relation is not pour soi but pour l’autre. For Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity to remain inwardly related at the expense of external relation would mean staying in anxiety.10 Lévinas suggests that Kierkegaard’s other-relation reduces all external relations into ‘inward dramas’ without opening us out towards the human world around us (1998a: 29–30). However, I think that Kierkegaard’s concept of love challenges this, because it brings the subject into relation with others. The quality of love is this infinite impossibility made paradoxically possible through a God-relation that must be further worked out in the human-tohuman relation. It is hopefulness, but it is embedded in existence. Mooney writes that Kierkegaard is concerned with this human existence here and now.11 Loss and restoration happen not in a future reality, but are hoped for and received in the present. According to Mooney, any real repetition is ‘something received, a grant of life and the world’ (1998: 284).12 Lévinas criticizes Kierkegaard for his subjectively anxious self. But others criticize Lévinas’s other-relation as being too demanding. The infinite obligation seems far too heavy of a burden to carry. Westphal goes as far as to say that the demand of Lévinas’s other-relation keeps Kierkegaard’s subjectivity in check. I have tried to show how there might be a different way of looking at this dilemma, through developing their view of love. Lévinas’s pour l’autre (for-the-other) establishes itself in the being-for-another human, whereas for Kierkegaard it is the being at rest in God. This means that the other-relation expressed as love, while demanding, also provides the hopeful exit from egoism. I have explained this relation quite ambiguously. The next section will show how this can be seen through experience. Both Kierkegaard and Lévinas use the experience of suffering to explore relation and subjectivity. Understanding how the self becomes the subject of an exchange, and thereby provides a hopeful exit can be seen in how both thinkers engage with the experience of suffering.

156

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

III  The subject–other relation in suffering There are different instances in which the experience of suffering features in both Kierkegaard and Lévinas. For Kierkegaard, it is often portrayed through the psychological language of anxiety and despair. For Lévinas, it is through the embodied experience of pain in the suffering other.13 Simmons writes that it is this experience of suffering that makes Kierkegaard’s writings appealing to Lévinas. He suggests of Lévinas that, ‘If the Western ontological tradition is characterised by the triumph of truth, Kierkegaard’s philosophy affirms a truth that is “persecuted”’ (2008: 46). But how Lévinas and Kierkegaard understand suffering is complex. Human existence does not have to be explained; it is through taking up the task of existing that we find meaning. As soon as a comprehensive theory of experience is provided, paradox and otherness of living has been missed. This way of reading experience is similarly found in Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s interpretations of suffering. The experience of suffering does not have meaning in itself; it is only found through taking up the suffering of the other. For both thinkers, human existence includes suffering. For Kierkegaard, it does not make sense to argue why a particular experience of suffering occurs. Rather, it is within the unification of the present pain with the future hope that the moment reconciles the two together.14 Most of what we have seen on suffering in Kierkegaard has been about the suffering undergone by a subject becoming herself. But we are also brought into the suffering of the other through love, which Kierkegaard explains in Works of Love. So suffering is a part of the same human experience as the experience of hope and love. In understanding suffering, Lévinas points to the other. He uses the French word mal to explain suffering, which is seen as a constriction of freedom, but also ‘an overwhelming of one’s humanity so concretely violent and cruel that we can only describe such pain as “evil” or “absurd”’ (Bernstein 2002: 255). The experience of the suffering self is ‘useless’ (Simon 2009: 134). As soon as we try to make sense of it, we miss the experience completely.15 Lévinas suggests that the experience of suffering isolates us. In an interview with François Poiré, he states that suffering is experienced par excellence as a being closed up within oneself, this superlatively passive suffering is like the impossibility of ‘getting out of it.’ At the same time there is, in this being closed up in oneself of suffering, the sigh of the cry which is already a search for alterity. (Is it Righteous to Be? 57)

Lévinas and Kierkegaard: Hope and Love in Relational Subjectivity

157

Lévinas suggests cautiously that this cry is a kind of prayer, that ‘anticipate[s] the word God’ (Is it Righteous to Be? 57). The God-relation ‘comes to mind’ through the approach of the face of the other. He writes that it is ‘this proximity [of the other], along with all that it implies of love and responsibility, is always at once the approach of the face and a hearkening to the voice of God’ (Is it Righteous to Be? 57). Though we cannot always find meaning in our pain, it can open us towards the other. And, in being responsible for the other, we are also called to suffer for the other. Suffering thus becomes the ‘personal, intimate and responsible involvement in the life of another’ (Bernstein 2002: 134). For Lévinas, then, the concepts of God and other, suffering and response are inextricably linked. It is these links that provide a similar reading of human experience to Kierkegaard, and his relation of selfless neighbourly love. Westphal describes Kierkegaard’s understanding of love as ‘neighbour love’ that puts Kierkegaard’s ‘responsible self … under unconditional obligation to and for the neighbour’ (2008a: 27). This means that subjectivity is ‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 56, qt. in Westphal 2008a: 27), where love can look like suffering for the other. Westphal makes an important comparison between love and an obligation enacted towards the neighbour. Love, even in suffering, becomes a way of expressing the inward relation: ‘the he in the depth of the you’, to borrow from Lévinas in Basic Philosophical Writings (141, qt. in Welz 2013: 452). This is what Welz calls Kierkegaard’s ‘phenomenology of the invisible’ (2007: 14). She says that ‘Kierkegaard shows that what we see with our eyes depends on how we see with our heart’ (174). For both Kierkegaard and Lévinas, then, this way of seeing suffering is a way of understanding how the subject becomes itself for the other, and in doing so, can provide a hopeful exit amid the other’s isolation.

Conclusion If love or responsibility involves suffering on behalf of the other, then it involves a reorientation of our experience towards the other. In Works of Love the task of loving the neighbour is one that is received and enacted by a subject. It is a quality of relation, granted in ‘a stance of receptivity and willingness, rather than willed achievement’ (Mooney 1998: 290), and is the ‘labour involved in remaining open’ (SUD 38). This seems to echo Lévinas’ concept of hineni.16 In

158

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

both Lévinas and Kierkegaard, we become a subject that can love and suffer for the other. Kierkegaard and Lévinas demand much of their readers. First, they are not easy to read. Lévinas’s language is tricky to figure out, and Kierkegaard chooses different masks through which to reveal himself. Second, the engagement with experience that they invite the reader into is one that involves continuous choice and responsibility amid the possibility of suffering. However, the rewards for wrestling with these writings outweigh the difficulties. Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s works enable an exploration of human experience that is realistic about the suffering that it can entail, without relinquishing the core of subjectivity, which is a hopeful relation of love that points us towards others. Their readings present a challenge to how one can view human experience. The next chapter will argue that this challenge also ruptures the discourse on addiction, by problematizing the permanence of the ‘addict’ experience. For both Kierkegaard and Lévinas, the relationality of the subject with the other suggests that who I am is rooted and challenged by loving response and hopeful engagement in experience.

7

A hopeful dialogue of addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

Eric, an addicted person in a Rochester, New York treatment facility was interviewed by Ringwald about his experiences in rehab. Eric said: ‘One day they were talking about being set free. That really hit home with me’ (2002: 1). Eric understood how freedom and anxiety are conflicting paradoxes in the addicted experience. The last chapter explored how Kierkegaard and Lévinas use existential phenomenology to understand the human experience. It teased out the themes of freedom and relation that are particularly nuanced in the dialogue on addiction, suggesting that the relational understanding of subjectivity is developed through the concepts of suffering, hope and love. This, alluded to at the end of the chapter, challenges the Twelve Steps statement that ‘I am an addict’, as a permanent state of enslaved identity, or identity without exit, as Eric’s quote alludes to. This chapter will look at how the challenge develops, as a particular way of looking at the addictive experience. This chapter will look at the relational subject through four points of comparison that bring up key components of the Twelve Step Program’s construction of the addictive experience. It will start by examining how the subject as understood by Lévinas and Kierkegaard relates to the Twelve Steps’s definition of addict. Second, I will consider how the relation to the other reveals particular elements of interest in the Twelve Steps’ peer-relation. Third, I will look at how the use of the concept of God1 in the Twelve Steps (also referred to as the Higher Power), and in the works of Kierkegaard and Lévinas, can be brought into conversation with one another. Finally, I will problematize the concept of a ‘beyond’ addiction, by engaging with the relations of suffering and hope.

160

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

I  Subject: Addict or addicted? The previous chapters looked at different ways in which Kierkegaard and Lévinas understand human experience. Both thinkers use the separate self to engage in the relation with the other. The self becomes a subject in its relation to the other. This other is distinct from the subject, but similar enough to be relatable. In both accounts, the other-relation is therefore also a foundational part of the self that becomes itself as a subject. After understanding what Kierkegaard and Lévinas mean by this, some time is spent looking at how this could be used in addiction. For instance, Chapter 1 examined how addiction can challenge the idea that our relational subjectivity defines us. In addiction, the relation to the object (food, alcohol, etc.) is what defines ‘who’ the person is: he or she is ‘an addict’. But it was argued that self-definition that depends on an object seems to be a problematic way of looking at human experience, if seeing it through existential phenomenology. For both Lévinas and Kierkegaard, the human experience is understood as emerging into existence through relation, with at least some capacity for freedom. Looking at how the Twelve Steps interprets the subject is interesting because it problematizes this view of relation and the capacity for freedom. This in turn problematizes how experience can be fundamentally hopeful. According to Twelve Steps literature, it seems that its definition is based primarily on a person’s object-relation. For instance, the Big Book says that ‘[a] s we became citizens of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down’ (2001: 151). Instead of primary relations being human-oriented (being for the other, etc., to use the language of Lévinas), the primary relational definition is object-oriented. In this case, it is the object of addiction. Who the person is, is an addict. In the Twelve Steps structure, this is reflected in the initial group introductions. A person introduces herself through her addiction. This definitional process allows the person to confront her problematic substance relation. However, the subject that is presented is defined in terms of a specific part of the human experience, and a specific relation, rather than its entirety. This remains, even if the person has stopped the addictive behaviour. So the introductory remarks tell us something about how the Twelve Steps method perceives the human experience. The addiction relation is what defines the person’s human experience. I am an addict. One could see how this can

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

161

be a useful way for someone to see oneself. In addiction, the object-relation seems to be of primary importance, and other relations take a passenger role. So it is understandable to feel like the object is the fundamental relation in human experience.2 Other relations are secondary in respect to getting this ‘thing’. For instance, family money disappears to pay for drink, and time is spent figuring out strategy for the next food binge instead of with friends, etc. (see examples in the Big Book 1953/2002: 53). So it seems that it would make sense to focus on the object of addiction as the self-defining relation, and to manage other relationships in response to this. By focusing on this relation, putting it in context to diminish it, speaking about it, trying to disentangle oneself from it, life may become more manageable. It is important that the addicted person recognizes the effect that the object has on their life, if he or she wants specific behaviours to change (Ringwald 2002: 21).3 However, as a philosopher it becomes problematic when this object-relation is what defines the subject. This way of understanding experience is primarily seen through the focus on individual narratives. In the Twelve Steps Program, people are encouraged to share their personal stories of addiction with the wider group. Case stories are also an important part of the Twelve Step literature (see, for instance, AA 1981: 17). As shown in the individual therapeutic process, going over one’s life experience as a narrative with other people can increase interconnection between people, reveal unseen patterns of behaviour, and bring about a cohesion to the experience. Knapp writes about how sharing her addiction experience with another person revealed troubling relationships that she had not been previously aware of. For instance, she realized that addiction had become an isolating experience, and writes that at one point, ‘I had no real friends’ (1996: 145). Knapp says of the recognition of this isolation: I don’t think you can really get out of [addiction] until you simply have no other choice, until the sense that your back’s against the wall grows too strong and too irrefutable, until you are simply in too much pain – too desperate and deeply bored and unhappy – to go on. (1996: 145)

In sharing her experience through her narrative, she is able to see it in a new way. She sees how it has hindered her relation to other people. So Knapp engages with her therapist to help her to transition from her feeling of being trapped within herself and her addiction, to small activities that develop a different

162

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

relation to others. Expressing her first person story to her therapist thereby changes her experience with others. Here, the ‘slow and arduous process’ of dissociating from addictive patterns to a ‘more normal relationship with food’ also corresponds to developing a ‘more normal relationship’ with ‘the world’ and other people (1996). Through seeing how her addictive behaviours affect her human experience, Knapp is able to distance herself enough from her addiction to recognize its inability to provide any concrete content. This is specifically true of her relation to other people. Similarly in the Twelve Step Program, there is a recognition that ‘the philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off ’ (AA 1953/2002: 37). The person acknowledges that she needs the self–other relation. In re-telling her experience, an addicted person can recognize that their addiction has caused isolated from others (AA 1953/2002: 53). In this narrative context, addiction is understood within the wider context of human experience, and the person is able to situate and see how their addiction may have affected these other relations. For instance, Hänninen and Kossi-Jännes suggest that the stories that addicted people share help ‘to make the addiction and recovery understandable, released the protagonist from guilt and had a happy ending by which the values of the story were realised’ (1999: 1837). However, this self-narration may have other effects. For example, when the person is continuously re-telling her experiences, it may have an impact on general mental health outcomes. Current neurophysiological and psycholinguistic research correlates the repetition of a person’s own story (the use of ‘I’/’me’) with lowered mental health resilience in some areas. In recent studies on the therapeutic effects of specific word choices, the extensive use of I-language in narrative has been linked to increased rates of depression (and a decreased personal psychological resilience in overall mental health) (see Chung and Pennebaker 2007: 343–59). This can, of course, be a problematic way of viewing experience (Dodes and Dodes 2014: 129). However, trying to understand the subjective experiences of addiction is important, which is why the existential phenomenology of Lévinas and Kierkegaard is particularly valuable. This focus on the indvidual’s story is interesting, particularly as it relates to the concept of self in Kierkegaard. I have suggested elsewhere that the self is still in anxiety if left in its inward relation (see Hannay 2003). The task of becoming oneself as a subject necessarily involves relating to the other. Life

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

163

is done in relation. The subject chooses to relate to the other, from anxiously defining itself according to externals, into an embodied experience of love for the other. For Lévinas, the self is defined as ‘for the other’. Subjectivity is asserted, not in relation towards objects that can be consumed (that is the il-y-a relation), but towards other conscious selves that are related to beyond the ego. Lévinas and Kierkegaard are constantly bringing us out of ourselves, of the solipsistic I, and into relation, in their active outworking of human experience. In his mosaic of masked texts, Kierkegaard will suggest that who we are is not a definite or pre-established ‘thing’, but worked out through the progress4 of becoming. Who we are involves choosing who we are becoming. It is a life project (a ‘task’) of continuous and consistent self-choosing. But this choosing who we are to become is challenging, suggests Kierkegaard, because human beings are both free and unfree. We are a paradox of opposites, of finitude and infinitude, spirit, body and psyche. The task of becoming oneself is complicated and needs to be examined from different angles. Kierkegaard writes his texts through a variety of pseudonyms that take on different personalities, as a way of creating a paradoxical blend of contrasting voices that lead a person to engage with her own task of self-becoming. Because Kierkegaard thinks that people are often not aware that they need to choose their subjectivity and navigate the paradoxes of ‘who’ we are, he needs to ‘trick’ the reader out of her fog of objective realities. Comfortable with a ‘life as normal’, and the activities of life, a person may not know that he or she needs to choose to become a self. Yet Kierkegaard is also aware that he has not fully been able to recognize himself as completely individual. As a result, he states that he is both reader and writer, bringing his reader into conversation with a task that he is still struggling to lay hold of completely for himself. This, the previous chapter argues, necessarily involves the other.5 The other is the one that brings the paradox of subjectivity together (eternal/self-love) and towards which our subjectivity is extended (neighbour/selfless love). In developing this task of subjectivity, Kierkegaard suggests that we are lost without realizing it. In the previous chapter, I suggested that this can be understood as an experience of suffering. Suffering, through despair or anxiety, takes on many forms. For example, we can form our values as a part of a crowd, or according to social roles and institutions, or we can even base our life choices on pleasure. So, who I am becomes tied to my job, my family role, my passionate feelings, and my enjoyment … the list goes on. But because it

164

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

is difficult to realize this, we need to be ‘tricked’ into seeing that we have not chosen ourselves as an individual. Kierkegaard wants to show the reader that she has the capacity to choose. Like a psychologist, he tries to bring her from the entanglement of despair to show how ‘existential freedom’ (Davenport 2016: 238) is possible. I have found Kierkegaard’s indirect style a particularly useful way of engaging with addiction. More specifically I have been interested in looking at similarities and contrasts with the Twelve Step method of treatment. The Twelve Steps were developed as a way of implementing an abstinent (sober) lifestyle of ‘strenuous work, one alcoholic with another’ (1953/2002: xvii). In this model, complete abstinence is seen as a lifelong commitment (Cook 2006: 29). One of the reasons behind this disease-like treatment of addiction is its origin. The Twelve Steps model emerged out of a time where addiction (alcoholism) was linked to moral weakness.6 Rather than defining addiction as something morally blameworthy, the Twelve Steps wanted to show how difficult it was for the addicted person. In using terms such as ‘helplessness’, the addicted person was given language for what she was experiencing that gave her permission to ‘give up struggling’ alone, and recognizing the need for an external framework. It was in this realization that permanent change could then happen through the invocation of a higher power to help the person in their addiction to form new ways of engaging, through sharing the journey of abstinence with others (Cook 2006). At times it seems as if Kierkegaard looks at human experience in a similar way. While in the Twelve Steps the person realizes that he or she has an addiction, and requires others to come alongside to enable abstinences, Kierkegaard uses his pseudonymous writings to show that a person becomes an individual through free and decisive choosing rather than ‘being ruled by passive motives’ (Davenport 2016: 239). The reader realizes that she has not chosen herself as an individual, but has based identity on objects of pleasure, socially accepted norms, ethical responsibilities, etc. Kierkegaard acknowledges that it is difficult for people to see that their understanding of human experience has been one of despair or anxiety. The experiences he describes seem to often be unconscious, which is why the indirectly addressed pseudonymous works are used.7 Likewise, it is often hard for the addicted person to see that she is addicted. It is an experience that has become so customary and routine that it has

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

165

unconsciously shaped one’s life experience and sense of subjectivity. The Big Book states that ‘All of the Twelve Steps … are [employed] to deflate our egos’ (1953/2002: 53). The Twelve Steps show how this way of doing human experience is not working for the person. Abstinence requires giving up old ways of coping. However, for Kierkegaard, it seems that the purpose of the pseudonyms is not to ‘deflate the ego’, but rather to enable the person to choose who she is to become. Individuality is chosen freely. This contrasts with the identity of ‘the addict’ that assumes a passive selfhood. Kierkegaard therefore presents a hopeful engagement with experience, because it brings the self out of isolation and passive experience and into a chosen experience of free relation.

II  The other and the peer-relation This reading of Kierkegaard and Lévinas seems to problematize aspects of subjectivity in the Twelve Steps. For both Lévinas and Kierkegaard, it is difficult to speak about the subject without looking at the other. The Twelve Steps also looks at the addicted person’s relation to the other. This section will examine how Lévinas and Kierkegaard can shed light on this concept of the other-relation in addiction. In conjunction with sponsorship and group meetings, the Twelve Steps are used as a way for the addicted person to recognize her entanglement in addiction. The Steps highlight that a person cannot overcome addiction alone.8 The life of sobriety is actively engaged with, along with a life that is reconciled to past divisions caused by addiction. People are encouraged to ask for forgiveness and pursue complete abstinence. However, the human experience is still that of an ‘addict’. Even in following the steps and engaging in abstinent practice, the person is still defined according to this state of implicit powerlessness. Every meeting begins with this affirmation: ‘We acknowledged that we were powerless over alcohol’ (Step 1). Kierkegaard requires something more of the individual. He wants people to choose themselves, despite anxiety and limit, in the possibility of freedom. Of course, he acknowledges, there are challenges. Freedom is accessed in entanglement and limit9 (for him, we are wrestling with the paradox of being both finite and infinite). Yet even despite this, a person can still choose to

166

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

become herself individually. For both Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps the human experience of the subject is central. In the Twelve Steps, the individual task is to reach sobriety; for Kierkegaard, it is the task of becoming oneself. For Kierkegaard, I need the pseudonyms to ‘trick’ me into realizing that I am lost. I require taking ownership of the task of becoming myself as an individual project. However, though the task is marked with anxiety and despair, it ends in a ‘peaceful transparent resting’ and ‘joy’.10 So becoming a subject is essentially a hopeful process. Of course the Twelve Steps experience can contain hope. It can also show how distinct elements of each experience are from the other. But despite variances, the subject understands her experience within a specific framework of addiction. The controlled environment is one of peer recoverees. The problem is that in the Twelve Steps, the hopeful selfexit into relational subjectivity is jeopardized by the permanence of addiction. The person relates to others, and might experience a hopeful exit from their particular behaviours (drunkenness, etc.). But it is still framed in the permanent state of addiction: the exits are temporary, and the reality is the individual’s self-relation as addict. Yet despite this addict-relation that only seems to provide temporary exits, the addicted person still exists in a world where he or she has to engage with others. The addicted person is still relational. Lévinas shows this through his responsible subject. The relation is one of ‘welcome’. It is a ‘non-allergic relation’ towards the other. Lévinas is constantly bringing this face of the other into central focus. When thinking about how the Twelve Steps understands the subject, I wondered how this Lévinasian other-relation would work. In developing this tight knit community of peers, are we limiting this ethical encounter, thereby also limiting who we become (for-the-other)? The Big Book does mention the other. The Twelve Steps call for ‘affirmative action [towards others], for it is only by action that we can cut away the self-will which has blocked the entry of God … into our lives’ (1953/2002: 31). However, this does not seem to be the same as Lévinas’s relation to the other. The relation to the other comes from the relation to God (or the Higher Power11), based on a person’s helplessness towards addiction. It seems that this relation with the other is from an anxious encounter with the sensible world, rather than what Lévinas explains as the ‘living body that enjoys its own existence’ (Large 2015: 53). The relation towards the world as the other then emerges from this anxiety, and the addicted person of the Twelve Steps seems to struggle with

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

167

Kierkegaard’s self-love and Lévinas’s enjoyment that extends into the otherrelation. Lévinas has laid the groundwork for understanding the importance of relation, which can provide a meaningful engagement with the Twelve Steps. He highlights the human being’s simple ability to respond. This is the concept of desire, or love. The human face opens towards the other. This other can never be reduced to the same as us. He also challenges the initial acts of addiction (for example, drinking enough to be unaware of responsibility towards the other), as hiding oneself from being able to respond to the need of the other. This indicates a responsibility both in the person with an addiction, and in the community committed to helping them. As such, it plays off important strands of the Twelve Step process of interrelation, the sharing of experiences through language, and the person’s own responsibility to engage with sobriety. Let us look further at the challenges of generalizing the addictive experience as a way of relating to others. In the Twelve Step Program, the addicted person is brought into a network of peers. Whereas in patient–practitioner relations, the practitioner is the expert who invokes their understanding based on their expertise to lead the patient into recovery, the Twelve Steps stresses that each person is a part of the same process of recovery. People engage with the program individually and share their story from their experience. No one is giving them expert advice. Insofar as Lévinas suggests that we cannot comprehend someone, but can only relate as he or she represents the face to us (stressing the importance of language as ethics), this could fit well into this understanding. For Lévinas, the self exists as separate, but only becomes a subject in responding to the other. Similarly, the Twelve Steps requires engagement with the other. This is something particularly challenging in both Lévinas and the Twelve Steps, because it seems that one’s experience is primarily about relation that requires the other, rather than an individuality that one can choose by oneself. Yet it is precisely this relation to the other that enables Lévinas’s concept of self-exit and the Twelve Steps’s movement towards sobriety. Though no one is seen as an expert in the Twelve Steps, the role of a mentor and the group as a whole, aid the person ‘so that they do not carry [the] load alone’ (AA 1953/2002: 56). So though each person comes with his or her own experience of addiction, and each person is met as a singular addictive

168

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

experience, as an addict, there is still an external relation that shapes the person’s self-relation.12 The group and the sponsor13 relation shape the selfconstruct of what it is to be an addict. Yet Lévinas stresses the intra-human dialogue as revealing beyond what we can know of the other. Revelation as encounter is based on the idea that the other has to reveal to us beyond what we can comprehensively know about him or her. But do sponsorship and group processes allow for this? Lévinas explains that the transcendent ethical relation between the subject and other can be understood in dialogue, or through the concept of teaching (Katz 2012: 129). Teaching is not about finding the familiar in the other, but receiving a revelation of difference from us. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas writes that ‘inasmuch as [the other] is welcomed this conversation is a teaching [enseignement] … it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I can contain’ (TI 51–77, qt. in Katz 2012: 129). The subject requires the other to reveal to me beyond what I know. The self is confronted in revelation, and becomes subject to the other. This is, I think, a particularly challenging point in Lévinas’s work: we seem to depend on the other to assume our subjectivity. However, as I have shown earlier, this is premised on a prior self that exists separate and content. So we may require the other to ‘teach’ us who he or she is, and in so doing we become a subject, but we do not need the other to exist as a separate self. There is a similar encounter of teaching in the Twelve Steps, where each person uses communication to establish the peer relation. Each person shares his or her story of addiction, creating an environment of learning and support. However, what is emphasized is not difference, but sameness. Members are encouraged to look for the similarity.14 Identification with the other is important to see the shared commonality of the addiction experience. It also reflects an understanding of the subject ‘as addict’, rather than the subject that is identified as itself.15 To complicate matters further, Lévinas is more nuanced. There does seem to be a kind of paternalism that develops in his illustration of teaching as relating to the other. For instance, in Totality and Infinity the father–son relation is invoked as a means of showing the importance of discourse. Someone is the father, and the other is the son. Lévinas therefore seems to suggest that it is not this general relational structure that is problematic, but how it is engaged with. So, for example, think of when a new member of the Twelve Steps establishes a communicative relation with their mentor. Lévinas could perhaps see this

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

169

relation as a teaching. However, the emphasis is always on teaching the subject to engage with others.16 The teacher as mentor would approach the student as other, through a series of questions and engagement, recognizing that confronting the self is still a face that cannot be fully comprehended. Teaching is therefore also an act of learning from the other. Yet in the sponsorship role, as within the group, it seems that the addict must abdicate her ability to respond as herself and her task of disclosing herself beyond a group’s comprehension. The group rules, while worked out actively, are received passively without possibility of discourse (or challenge). The subject is not the same as the other. There is no totalized or absolute addictive experience that can be comprehended in such a way as to invoke a paternalistic relation between the subject and the group/sponsor. The other is always beyond comprehension. Similarly, for Kierkegaard, the challenge with communicating one’s experience with others is that it is an inward experience. The self-relation is subjective. Language communicates it, but only in partial truths, because it is difficult to communicate unseen qualitative changes of spirit! Kierkegaard does not want to leave us stuck inside ourselves.17 The self is becoming itself in relation to the eternal, as a subject, and consequentially in relation to others. This is hopeful, because it leads the self out of its ego-anxiety or despair towards the other. But subjectivity is still truth, and though Kierkegaard makes room for the eternal command to love the other (as Lévinas makes room for the commanded hineni towards the other), he does not want to define the subject according to an objective standard. The existential task is the individual’s task, not the group’s consensus. Even the expert advice of the other is filtered through the freedom of the subject’s project of choosing itself authentically. Communicating an addictive experience is difficult, because language is limited. While a case could be made for Kierkegaard’s own role as guide as a type of mentorship role, the guidance Kierkegaard offers is always partial, and brings the subject awareness of his or her own task of self-choosing.18 Consequentially, receiving the expertise of another is only done in the greater task of becoming oneself individually. Of course, the reason that I am referring to the Twelve Steps is because of the perceived success and prevalence of the Programs in addiction treatment (as has previously been argued). Even recent conversations with researchers such as Wendy Dossett (April 2017) have brought home just how much the

170

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

program resonates with a wide variety of addiction experience.19 For instance, the Program develops an interrelation between people that brings the self out of the isolated experience of addiction. It can also provide a framework for people to confront their addiction without peer stigma, and structure with which to engage.20 However, it still poses specific challenges to Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s existential phenomenological task of becoming oneself in relation to the other. The definition of subjectivity occurs in relation to a concrete object, rather than an infinite other. Likewise, the assertion of the particular subject-relation, applied to the general group, does not include much space for the individual other-relation, as a relation beyond the subject, to develop. So the construction of the subject-definition and the other-relation in terms of freedom, response and sacrifice are limited. Suffering exists, but it is managed in egoism. The exit of the other’s response, though perhaps containing elements of hope and love,21 does not provide a permanent exit from the addictive experience. Let me bring the concept of suffering into this. For both Lévinas and Kierkegaard, suffering plays a central role in the human experience. This suffering is revealed in relation to the subject and the other. For instance, as seen in the last chapter, Lévinas suggests that suffering is useless in and of itself (mal, or evil), and only finds meaning when assumed on behalf of the other. In assuming suffering onto oneself and providing an exit for the other’s suffering, the ethical relation is developed. This is what Lévinas has elsewhere termed the relation of desire, or love. The self is a subject that responds (see, for instance, US 164–5).22 Through providing an exit, the subject also becomes a source of hope. In Kierkegaard, the human experience is a task of constant choosing amid suffering. He articulates this experience through the concepts of anxiety and despair, and ‘a multiple and dramatic renunciation’ (Westphal 2008b: 29). The language of renunciation and suffering is perhaps suggestive of the Twelve Steps’ prescribed abstinence and surrender to the Higher Power. However, as mentioned before, Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s philosophy shows that we need to also understand human experience beyond suffering. That is, the continuous sacrifice of the object-relation in the Twelve Steps shows the challenge with identifying the subject as addict, rather than as addicted. The addict is stuck in the object-relation, as the mode of relating to the other. This relation is not one of revelation from beyond. The concept of exit from suffering is where suffering becomes ethical, and the self becomes

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

171

for-the-other. Could this be compared to the peer that exists for the addict? Perhaps, but the full ‘exit’ is not attained. Hope is only temporary. Though engaging with abstinence, which could be a kind of exit from suffering, the subject is still defined according to its suffering, as addict. For Kierkegaard, suffering (anxiety, etc.) can be involved in the task of the subject. However, the subject is not one who suffers,23 but rather one who has chosen his or herself and is paradoxically reconciled as an individual. In Lévinas, the other cannot be reduced to the same as me,24 and each face reveals its own revelation. But in a move that Lévinas does not seem to consider in his critique of Kierkegaard’s existentialism, Kierkegaard (under his own name) advocates a response towards the human other that also seems to bring in the possibility of suffering for the other. Matustík calls it the ‘ethicoexistential responsibility’ that ‘exceeds the ordinary morality and justice by a higher obligation to act first, yet … is lived out in finite concretion’ (512008: 251). More simply understood, this is the relation of love. For Kierkegaard, this capacity for suffering, both as a self and for the other, is understood in terms of the human experience of becoming oneself. For Lévinas, it is the call of subjectivity, as relation played out towards the concrete other. For both, the suffering human face reveals a movement beyond the person’s own solipsistic relation, and contains a relation towards the infinite other. This is the hopeful relationality of love. While the Twelve Steps orient the subject towards the other, through peer support and establishing relations of forgiveness and reconciliation, a comparison with Kierkegaard and Lévinas reveals a particular difference in this relation. The Twelve Steps provide a framework of relation, but it is still contained within the subject–object relation. The subject is still an addict. A subject that still defines itself as limit approaches the other. The other is approached, but is received based on the preconditions of this totalizing human experience.

III  God as Higher Power One of the particular elements of the Twelve Steps Program that appealed to me when I first started this thesis was how it engages relationally. Though I have suggested that elements of this relation can be problematic in terms

172

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

of understanding subjectivity, it still uniquely situates the subject in a group of peers. One of the other reasons for why I chose to use the Twelve Steps is because of how it gives permission to develop a relation towards an infinite other (God-relation) in the context of addiction. I have suggested that how Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps view suffering ties into their understanding of the relation to the infinite. It is particularly interesting to see how Lévinas and Kierkegaard centralize the human capacity to respond, which contrasts with elements of helplessness in the Higher Power-relation developed in the Twelve Steps.25 In both Kierkegaard and Lévinas, the infinite other (God)-relation is a relation established between the singular subject and the other. While at times Kierkegaard and Lévinas seem to invoke ontological language to explain it (see, for instance, Totality and Infinity), the relation is lived out in experience. The infinite other is not a being who can be broken down and thematized by the understanding, but a reality confronted in the life of the existing and acting person. The infinite other is encountered both as the subject relates to itself, and relates to the other. Similar to his resistance to theodicy, I showed in the last chapter how Kierkegaard is not interested in justifying God’s existence through reason alone. He links this to his understanding of faith, mirrored as the paradoxical human experience. Critiquing the formalizing structures of the God-relation (the established church), he argues that ‘the singular relationship with God can never be encapsulated in a particular socio-historical community’ (Simmons and Wood 2008: 3).26 So there is always a tension between ‘obligation and its implementation’ (Simmons and Wood 2008), or, I would suggest, the subjective eternal-relation as a qualitative relation, and what it looks like in practice. In the last chapter I examined how Kierkegaard and Lévinas utilize the concept of the infinite other (God). For Lévinas, God limits himself by his withdrawal and can only be encountered through the human other. The holy is separate, and a trace of transcendence is revealed in the face of the other. In turning to the infinite, we necessarily turn to welcome the neighbour, who, like us, also senses, enjoys and lives from the contents of life. Acting towards the infinite, the ‘here I am’ (hineni), is therefore experienced through acting towards the neighbour. This responsibility is universalized as first philosophy. It is the human ethical experience, the ability to respond to the other human face.

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

173

Kierkegaard also relies on a God-relation that is part of his understanding of human experience. For him, God is variously revealed as the possibility for the paradox of human experience to find its articulation as an individual life that freely chooses him- or herself. The individual is ‘elected’27 insofar as he or she is, like all others, both part of a general humanity, and able to become an individual subject.28 Haufniensis has shown that the human as a relational spirit, psyche and body relate as an individual that chooses itself before God. This is the paradoxical possibility of the moment, where the infinite enters finite time and reconciles the paradox of experience. God is invoked in Sickness Unto Death, as ‘the resting’ place of subjectivity, and faith is the free choice of this relation that is somehow both willed by the self and something else. The individual chooses this subject-relation, but the spirit-change (the ‘non-volitional qualitative transition’) seems to be done by God. So for Kierkegaard, God invokes the eternal in time, the impossible made possible, through the moment. This is the moment where the individual becomes herself through the choice of faith, that exerts a change at once both paradoxically chosen and asserted on them. Kierkegaard’s God gives of Godself and acts as if on the person’s behalf. Yet this God is also the one whose relation towards the subject is shown through love. Kierkegaard shows this in Works of Love when he writes that the eternal is not [‘seen’ in the individual] merely by virtue of its characteristics but in itself is in its characteristics; it does not merely have characteristics but exists in itself in having the characteristics. (261)

This is where the eternal moment is brought into human experience. This ‘double mode’ is ‘in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself ’ (WL 261). The qualitative change of spirit, or this self that becomes itself in relation, is enacted in self-love and love towards the other.29 For Kierkegaard, the God-relation is not so much about us having an effect on God, as God affecting us. However, this ‘non-volative transition’ is not a passive relation, because it involves our freedom to choose and enact it. So Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s God require the person’s response. For both thinkers, the relation involves activity towards the other human being. For Lévinas, God is accessed through the relation to the other as responsibility. The hineni towards the holy is a turn towards the human other. In Kierkegaard,

174

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

the ‘non-volative’ transition of spirit is done by God, but also chosen by the person and enacted in love. In the Twelve Steps, the concept of God is understood through the Higher Power.30 The Program seems to assume that addiction is not something that is good for the person,31 and what is more, it has become main relation of his or her experience. The addicted person appeals to the Higher Power out of a state of helplessness. This is outlined in the Twelve Steps, which are recited at every meeting (AA 1981: 5–13). There are specific Steps that reflect how the relation to the Higher Power is construed. For instance, the following show the reliance on the Higher Power ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Step 1: ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol.’ Step 2: ‘Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’ Step 3: ‘Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.’ Step 6: ‘Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.’ Step 7: ‘Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.’

Looking at these Steps, I would suggest that the Higher Power contains some primary characteristics. First of all, the Higher Power has the capacity to intervene in a human behaviour, to end a habit of addiction.32 So the Higher Power displays an active role. The person passively admits powerlessness over addiction, and turns to the Higher Power to receive the possibility of an exit from the addictive behaviours. The Higher Power thus has the capacity to ‘remove defects of character’ and ‘shortcomings’ that the person could not have managed alone. The person’s active engagement in choosing behaviours other than addiction then happens after this. The Big Book says that ‘[n]othing short of continuous action … as a way of life can bring the much-desired result’ (1953/2002: 40). So the subject has a responsibility to choose, but this responsibility is based on the understanding of helplessness and an active Higher Power. Let us look at how this understanding of God (as Higher Power) might compare to Lévinas. It has been previously clarified that Lévinas establishes God as one who withdraws as separate from humanity. The subject is elected to respond to the other, and it is in this infinite relation that the trace of the

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

175

infinite God is experienced. For Lévinas, the subject is always responsible. No one can substitute this responsibility. 33 In this way, I think that Lévinas would struggle to reconcile his concept of God with the Twelve Steps concept of God, as one who removes our shortcomings. Responsibility cannot be removed or mediated. Though in the Twelve Steps there seems to be a way in which the Higher Power can reorient the subject towards others, the Higher Power does not seem to fully align with Lévinas’s understanding of the subject’s unmediated responsibility. Kierkegaard’s God may be more similar to the Higher Power. For Kierkegaard, the ‘non-volitional transition’ of the individual is both chosen and not chosen. The God-relation is chosen, but God also acts on the individual to bring about the paradoxical self-synthesis of subjectivity. This could liken the Higher Power’s capacity to ‘restore’ the individual ‘to sanity’ (Step 2). Kierkegaard’s individual must freely choose this relation to the eternal. Surrendering to the Higher Power could be seen as is a kind of self-choosing, except that the Twelve Steps notes at this point that the addict is not free to choose (‘We admitted helplessness’). This contrasts with Kierkegaard’s (or, the pseudonyms’) subject who is free. The freedom may be entangled and limited, but it is there, and the relation towards God is approached from freedom. The subject chooses the self-synthesis, and in the midst of this God acts. The ‘transparent resting’ in God is framed within the larger movement of a subjective self-choosing. It is also explored as a relation of self-love that reflects a concept of hope (see Lippitt 2013: 147–55). God does not seem to act independently of humanity, and when God acts, God brings a hopeful possibility of experience ‘beyond’ suffering.34 So I would suggest that in alignment with this interpretation, the task that God enables is not to remain ‘an addict’, i.e. one in despair/anxiety. Rather it would be realized more fully in a person’s choosing him or herself freely. This is the relation of hope and self-love that I have previously described. This individual subject therefore experiences his- or herself in a relation of self-love that is simultaneously expressed as love for the other. In the Twelve Steps, the Higher Power has no definite form,35 and acts as a conglomerate of agential abilities. In looking at these comparisons, then, it seems that though the Twelve Steps concept of the Higher Power provides interesting parallels to Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s understanding of God, this relational concept is invoked in a different way. This is particularly expressed in how Lévinas and Kierkegaard understand the experience of a relational

176

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

subjectivity, which I will look at with reference to what may be understood as a human experience beyond addiction.

IV  Beyond addiction? When trying to understand the addictive experience, the Twelve Steps provided a framework that could helpfully construct addiction in terms of an experience of relation. However, contemporary research and anecdotal evidence suggests that, contrary to Twelve Steps literature, ‘once an addict, always an addict’ is not necessarily true. For some people who have been addicted, the future is very different to the past.36 Addiction presents us with complex experiences. There are difficult biological, social, psychological and moral forces at work on people that affect how they see themselves and how they interact with others. The Twelve Steps provides practical ways of reorienting the person away from addictive behaviours and towards social integration. However, the Twelve Steps seems to suggest that addiction is an all-encompassing human experience. That is, the object-relation of the addiction is the relation that frames all other relations, human and God-relations included. Using Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s existential phenomenology, I have suggested that this is not the case. A person may be addicted, but he or she is still engaged in the common human experience. Though the experience of choosing and responding is complicated by a particularly salient object-relation,37 the human being still has the capacity to become him- or herself in relation to others. For instance, an example of this is seen in recent addiction research on choice, which suggests that because addiction always involves action, ‘action can always be morally evaluated’ (Morse 2011: 161). Put more simply, the subject is always capable of some form of response or choice, assuming there are not other mental illnesses at play. Furthermore, as Lévinas and Kierkegaard both show us, the individuality of experience means that we need more than one theory to understand what is going on. Worked out in the pluralism of each face, rather than in comprehensive systems, each engagement with the other is unique. As a result, one enters into a unique experience of suffering for the other, as well as particular relational experiences of love that reorient the isolated self towards the subjectivity of encounter.

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

177

Reframing the human experience beyond addiction requires looking at how a relation of love orients the subject hopefully towards the future. To become oneself in relation, and in the complication of addiction, requires the disentanglement that is the concrete realization of hope. This is at a propositional level, and something I hope to develop more robustly in future work, but it explains how I have been able to unify the experiences of Kierkegaard and Lévinas with the concept of experience beyond addiction, and what questions still remain to be asked. Here I am referring to hope as the capacity to experience an exit from oneself, from the overwhelming of our own experience, from suffering. This is also understood as the simultaneous relation towards the other, experienced as an exit from suffering or totality. The Twelve Steps seems to mention hope a few times, but mostly indirectly through its narrative accounts. Glen Mathis et al. suggest that hope addresses the psychology of agency (‘goal-directed energy’) and pathways to a goal (2009: 42). Applied to addiction, a person recognizes a change in behaviour is needed, and is able to engage with these changes through recovery work. Addiction psychiatrist Adam Miller suggests that ‘underlying premise of recovery is that of hope – hope that a person with a potentially fatal illness can avoid a catastrophic outcome’ (2015: 1). He points to the Twelve Steps as providing practical ways of engaging with this hopeful process, though he frames addiction as an illness. It seems that it is the experience of recovery from addiction, rather than addiction experiences themselves, that are motivated by hope. In the Twelve Steps, a person recognizes her addiction, admits ‘to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs’, as a direct consequence of acknowledging that ‘all of the Twelve Steps ask us to let go of control to our natural desires … they all deflate our egos’ (AA 1953/2002: 53). As a result of this acknowledged helplessness, a connection can be re-established between the subject and others, and, working the Steps, the addicted person can choose abstinent behaviour. However, there are other psychological definitions of hope that inform this discussion on addiction. Erik Erikson suggested that hope is a part of ‘healthy cognitive development’, and includes the ‘enduring belief in the attainability of primal wishes in spite of … dependency’, and Averill et al. concluded that people are ‘more likely to experience hope’ when the goals desired are ‘realistically within reach’ (Mathis et al. 2009: 43). Parts of these definitions

178

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

seem to intersect with discussions of hope in Kierkegaard and Lévinas. For instance, Kierkegaard writes that ‘Hope is to relate oneself expectantly to the good’ (WL 249, qr. in Lippitt 2013: 147). It is both an expectation for others and for oneself, which is an aspect of love (147). Roberts interprets this as envisioning ‘a future holding good prospects’, and Lippitt wants to include the earthly life among this possibility (149). This seems to be similar to Erikson’s ‘enduring belief ’ in attaining a psychological state that has not yet been achieved, ‘in spite of … dependency’ (qt. in Mathis et al. 2009: 43). Hope seems to bring a particular content into human experience; namely, an expectation and opening up towards the future and the possible. But Kangas and Kavka note that this expectancy of hope differs from wishful thinking. It is not ‘wish fulfillment’; it ‘does not refer to a particular, representable content, but toward the future as a whole’ (2008: 130). So Kierkegaard’s hope breaks with Erikson’s definition of attaining ‘primal wishes’, and it seems that tying this hope to a particular content, as we may want to do with addiction, might be problematic. But what Kierkegaard’s definition of hope also does is challenge the concept of human experience that underlies ‘the addict’. Whereas the ‘addict’ concept suggests a future that is known, for Kierkegaard, the future is always open, even if we may not exactly know what it is we are hoping for. Kangas and Kavka write that for Kierkegaard, hope requires a new kind of seeing: ‘it is rather to discover a new relation [of particular experience] to time as a whole’ (131). So it could be that what Kierkegaard’s hope offers to addiction is a rupturing of our definitions of permanence and the staticity of illness and addiction classifiers. As noted before, Kierkegaard sees hope as a particular quality of relating to oneself and the other in love. In Kierkegaard, hope is mapped out between human beings. For instance, this can be seen in Works of Love, when Kierkegaard writes ‘Love hopes all things’, by an expectant relating (WL 249, qt. in Lippitt 2013: 147). Love is asserted subjectively, as the inward state of transparent resting that characterizes the bringing together of paradox. As anxiety increases with the awareness of spirit and sin separation, the consciousness of sin forgiven is the condition for rest, which grounds this hope (Lippitt 2014: 2). Despair over the mis-relation, abiding in anxiety rather than rest, is not the aim. The individual truly chooses subjective unity. The qualitative change is an act of love that is both received and given, like the transition of spirit (CD 266,

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

179

qt. in Lippitt 2014: 2). Like in The Concept of Anxiety, the change that does not erase what had happened (or the anxiety experienced). Rather it establishes a relation between the subject and the other, that is both for-itself (self-love) and for the other (selfless love). Love, as a way of relation, ‘takes upon itself the work of hope’ (WL 248). Lippitt reminds us that hope is the opposite of despair. It is ‘to relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good’, and to ‘hope all things’ is the same as ‘to hope always’ (WL 248–9, qt. in Lippitt 2014: 147). This hopeful orientation towards the future, as one of relational expectancy, is the way in which the subject grasps ‘the eternal in time’ (149). It is the future as possibility, not the future of predictability. Rather than being merely eschatologically far off, this hope provides the exit from totality, and establishes the relationality of the subject. It is therefore that Kierkegaard’s enacted love as hopeful relation provides insight into the limitations of the construction of the human experience in the Twelve Steps. A diseased (or dis-eased) relation to an object defines the human experience. There is no exit, as it is predicated on a permanent experience. Murphy suggests that the program’s38 adherence to a disease model of addiction is used more metaphorically. For instance, she shows how the Big Book ‘describes alcohol as “but a symptom of a spiritual disease stemming from resentment”’ (O’Halloran 2008, qt. in Murphy 2015: 28). This resentment towards the subject and the other manifests itself in the relation towards the object of addiction. Identifying addiction as a spiritual malady that manifests itself physically sounds similar to Kierkegaard’s concepts of anxiety and despair, if we are thinking about the spirit as understood as the inward subject–other relation. However, treating the physical aspects of addiction as merely spiritual seems problematic.39 Kierkegaard seems to want to say that the spirit-relation affects the physical, but he is also concerned with treating each concept according to its proper discipline,40 and is not interested in a general theory that explains everything. Lévinas’s reading of human experience provides a further challenge to these psychological definitions of hope. For him, phenomenology is not about what is ‘realistically within reach’ (Mathis et al. 2009: 43), but rather about ‘an obligation that breeches human capability’ (Kangas and Kavka 2008: 134). It is this ‘dedication to an obligation that is unfulfillable’ that frames the content of experience (Kangas and Kavka 2008). This is seen, for instance, in Lévinas’s

180

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

writing about suffering. Here, the subject welcomes the other and assumes another’s suffering as a way of providing an exit from the experience. It is this concept of relation as exit that is reflected in the relation of responsibility. For him, we are obliged to suffer on behalf of the other. This is the only way in which suffering has meaning. In relation to addiction, enacted love as an instance of hopeful exit may be seen in different ways. For the carer, it may require41 continuing to bring the addicted person to the hospital. For the family member, it could be continuing to engage, despite continuous relapse. So working out this hopeful relation of love in experience is demanding.42 For instance, the subject may feel that the other has done little to deserve an exit. However, Lévinas suggests that we are only responsible for our own response, and that we cannot cut off or try to comprehend the other. We are merely to respond to the call directed at us. Lévinas suggests that this responsibility for the other turns the relation of symmetry and reciprocity on its head. It is asymmetrical and undeserved, and ‘represents an inversion of the order of things’ (TI 283). In this way, Lévinas suggests, ‘it permits the subject who had committed himself in the past to be as though that instant had not past on, to be as though he had not committed himself ’ (TI 283). It is this exit from the past experience that has been referred to as the hopeful relation. This concept of relationality as hopeful is, I think, key to understanding this self and other relation. For Lévinas, we are responsible for the other. What I have termed this ‘hopeful’ responsibility does not mean that the past did not happen. What it means is that, through the subject’s response, the suffering experience does not have to be permanent.43 I would argue that Lévinas’s response provides an ‘exit’ for the addicted person, in what he terms ‘a purified present’ (TI 283). In Totality and Infinity, he writes that ‘[a]ctive in a stronger sense than forgetting, which does not concern the reality of the event forgotten, … [it] acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it’ (TI 283). Bernet suggests that it is the ‘ethical content’ of a ‘substitution’ (2002: 90). The substitution permits a ‘purified present’ that is lacking in the concept of relation in the Twelve Steps. In the addictive experience there is a breakdown in relation. This is what I think the Twelve Step process of asking for forgiveness picks up on. However, Lévinas seems to suggest that the concept of relation releases the conditions of the past action from being the permanent state of future action. The subject–other relation is re-established (without forgetting), which, I would argue, affects

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

181

how we contextualize the subject–object relation. The self–other relation is reasserted as the defining human experience. This hopeful relation opens a person to receive from beyond the capacity of the ego; the transcendence of consciousness as a relation to the other (92). Lévinas explains that this reorientation of relation is an ethical encounter with the other. Response, enacted as love, does not seem to erase, but rather restores, or reorients the relation (TI 283). Lévinas writes that this relation ‘permits the discerning … of a surplus of happiness, the strange happiness of reconciliation, the felix culpa, given in an everyday experience which no longer astonishes us’ (TI 283). The relation towards the other, as desire, designates a surplus. The possibility of relation towards the other comes from a being that is content. The self exists in ‘a surplus of happiness’ (ibid.). In reasserting the ‘welcoming’ of the other, the subject–other relation is restored, and the subject–object relation is placed in its original pattern of relation. It becomes an object to be enjoyed, as a condition lived from, but not as a source of desire or something that divorces the face from the other. So it seems that Lévinas and Kierkegaard both sympathize with, and rupture, current discourses on hope in addiction. Research on the Twelve Steps has suggested that an element of hopefulness is important in the relational development of the addicted person. For example, clinical studies have documented the ‘ability to decrease some of the personal self-blame and selfhatred about drinking’ (McCrady 1985, qt. in Bristow-Braitman 1995: 417). This conflicts with other research on the Twelve Steps that suggests it increases the presence of self-blame.44 Perhaps because the experience of addiction is individualized, it is difficult to know how each person will respond. However, what distinguishes it from Kierkegaard’s enacted love is whether or not each person engages with the relation hopefully. Engaging hopefully in the reconstruction of relation is not the same as ‘[sticking] with the winners’ or believing that ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result’ (Dodes and Dodes 2014: 140, 144).45 Neither is it enacting experience defined according to ‘character defects’ (Step 6). I think that Kierkegaard’s distinction is his emphasis of freedom, and the hopeful possibility of the present that is brought into human experience. It is the possibility of the paradox, which is that the past does not have to be the same as the future, due to the chosen relation to the present. The Twelve Steps acknowledge that the person can

182

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

become free from addictive behaviours, while still being an addict. However, for Kierkegaard, love is established on what is hoped for. This seems to free the human experience from the limitation of past relational definitions, such as anxiety, despair, aestheticism or ethics. The subject, hopefully engaged in this relation that I think Kierkegaard is articulating, is a subject that is fully itself (self-love), and consequently, is fully itself for others (selfless love) as well. In this experience, there is no need for mantras or repeating narratives of the past, group meetings into the future or a continuous acknowledgement of one’s faults. The subject would define his or herself through the expression of a loving hopeful relation towards the future.

Conclusion In the last few chapters, I have explored how Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s existential phenomenology of the human experience can benefit an analysis of addiction. I chose to focus on the Twelve Steps approach in particular, as it is one of the most popular ways of treating addiction.46 Due to its widespread use, how the program constructs the subject and other-relation is significant in terms of how we engage with addiction. The previous chapter has shown that, while the Twelve Steps provide a framework that re-establishes relation in addiction, experience is developed according to the totalizing human experience of addiction. The Twelve Steps enable a person to confront his or her behaviour and to reconnect with others through the Higher Power and peer support. However, Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s existential phenomenology bring out important concerns in this understanding of addiction. For both Lévinas and Kierkegaard, the subject is individualized. This experience of being human cannot be understood under broad categories of being, but only wrestled with individually. The subject exists in relation to others, and it is this relation that establishes how we live out who we are. This subject has the capacity for a freedom chosen, not arbitrarily, but in relation. Lévinas and Kierkegaard make demands on the human experience. The subject is able to respond. The subject is able to choose and to love. But this situates the subject in a relational subjectivity of hope. The demands invoke the possibility that there is something beyond the present, an exit from the experiences of suffering or totality. The Twelve Steps also makes demands on the person, but often it

A Hopeful Dialogue of Addiction: Lévinas, Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps

183

reasserts the limit and a definition of experience. The addict’s relation towards its object somehow distinguishes it from other human experiences, lacking specific capacities for free choice, etc. The experience of addiction can only be half-exited; the subject remains an addict even despite sobriety. What I wanted to do in this work was not to disregard the effort done by the Twelve Steps, or suggest a comprehensive definition of addiction. I wanted to re-situate the conversation of addiction as one of relation. Rather than understanding addiction as a specific kind of relation that totalizes the human experience, this book examines the unique challenges that it poses to the relational subject. Addiction is often experienced as suffering, and in the midst of this experience, it seems as if there will never be an exit. However, as Lévinas and Kierkegaard show us, the human experience, engaged with through relational subjectivity offers a possibility of exit.

Conclusion

Both Kierkegaard and Lévinas offer remarkable existential phenomenologies of experience. Kierkegaard, in Repetition, ushers us into the anxiety of possibility, of choosing the variety of experiences that constitute who we are. But, he says, ‘the potential of the individual does not simply want to be heard, it is not simply passing through like the weather. It is gestaltende [creative], thus it always wants to be seen’ (25). This creative self, the self of freedom choosing itself before the infinite, presses at the boundaries of our static selfconcepts. A similarly haut experience of subjectivity is offered by Lévinas when he writes that ‘the identity of the subject comes from the impossibility of escaping responsibility’ (OB 14). But these existential phenomenologies of experience are not for a select few. Somehow wrestling with this height of the infinite constitutes the very core of human subjectivity. This book has sought to examine experiences of addiction through the lens of philosophy. Chapter 1 suggested that scientific and moral accounts provide insight into elements of the addictive experience. But each of these theories seems to be interested in defining addiction in a particular way, and looking at it as problem to be solved. Subsequently, it was argued that it is possible to attempt an understanding of the subjective experience of addiction, where the main focus is not on solving a problem. I was interested in looking at the role that addiction can have in a person’s life, and how the suffering of addiction can be transformed ‘from the heavy burden into the light burden’ (UD 235), through an understanding of hope and love. I explored how Kierkegaard and Lévinas’s existential phenomenology of human experience can illuminate this reading of addiction. I have argued that exploring the experiences of addiction requires looking at the subject as an individual in relation with others. I used the example of the Twelve Steps Program to illustrate this, concluding that addiction can be understood as an experience of suffering, without negating the wider experiential relation of the subject, as human. Addiction can therefore

Conclusion

185

encompass a variety of experiences that present particular challenges. However, this does not disrupt the insights that Kierkegaard and Lévinas offer, which is that the subject remains in a free and responsible relation with others. This conclusion will show how the initial literature research developed into this discourse on human experience, and what the implications of this research may be on understanding addiction.

I  Background and methodology I started this investigation by looking at what contemporary literature is saying about addiction. Using Orford’s language of excessive appetites, I looked at how addiction can be considered in relation to general questions of human experience and appetite, rather than as a separate kind of human experience. I argued that the experience of addiction could be understood through the experience of appetite, rather than as a distinct kind of experience. So, being addicted to something involves engaging with more usual issues that we have as part of the human experience. This reflects Orford’s notion that addiction exists along a continuum of appetites rather than as a distinct experience unto itself. It also fits well into understanding addiction as a kind of suffering. Suffering is a part of human experience, but it still presents particular challenges that are not a part of other experiences. Given the large number of addiction theories, I needed to narrow the discourse to a particular way of understanding addiction. For this I chose to focus on the Twelve Steps approach for a few reasons. The popular Twelve Steps help people to confront addictive behaviour and to reconnect with others through peer support and reconciliation work. Its widespread use means that how the program constructs the self and other-relation is significant in terms of how addiction is viewed. In its treatment of addiction it frames human experience: the person is an addict. Who the person is, is tied to addiction. Taking this understanding of addiction, I showed that the Twelve Steps provide a framework that re-establishes relation in addiction. However, the experience is developed according to the totalizing of identity as addicted. I found this problematic because it suggests that the objectrelation of addiction frames the human experience, rather than the otherrelation.

186

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

The literature on addiction, and the Twelve Steps in particular, offer insights into what happens when a person is addicted. They also show how the behaviour can shape our interactions with others. What I felt was lacking when reading these accounts was an exploration of the subjectivity of addictive experiences, and understanding addiction in relation to general human experience. I found that Havi Carel’s method of existential phenomenology provided an important framework for a discussion that situates illness within a wider conversation of embodied experience. I particularly found her understanding of illness to be an effective means of engaging with the individuality of embodied experience. However, I differed from Carel in that I used the concept of addiction, rather than illness, which brought out the complex discourse on whether addiction actually can be seen as a disease. Of course, what I realized was how easy it is to try and frame addiction as a problem, and I found it difficult to distance myself from trying to ‘solve’ it as a ‘problem’. Another challenge that I found was that after researching and conversing with experts I also realized that the Twelve Steps Program is approached in a variety of ways, which means that having a definitive opinion on its construction is challenging. Literature may highlight particular features of the experience, but how each person uses it to understand herself can be very different. For instance, Ringwald speaks of how the concept of the Higher Power can look different in each personal context, and shows how the Program has been adopted in different ways to allow for alternative experiential constructions (2002). As a result of this, I realized that I needed to immerse myself in the Twelve Steps as best I could, through engaging with the literature (such as the Big Book). I therefore became aware that my conclusions offer a suggestion that may be more suited to the human experience interpretation found in the Twelve Steps literature, rather than each person’s individualized implementation of the Steps.1

II  Understanding addiction through Kierkegaard and Lévinas Since the key theories of addiction, including Orford’s excessive appetite and the Twelve Steps’s relational structure, drew on specific themes of desire, freedom and relation, the writings of Kierkegaard and Lévinas was able to provide concepts to look at these experiences philosophically. Both Kierkegaard and

Conclusion

187

Lévinas engage with the subject and how it exists alongside others. Lévinas frames the relation in terms of response and desire. Kierkegaard looks at it as an individual choosing to become herself in freedom. In both instances, the subject relates to herself, the other and the infinite in a way that develops the philosophical themes of freedom (Do I choose to become addicted? Am I ever in control of my behaviour?) and relation (Do I have a responsibility towards others when addicted? how do I relate to others differently than to an object?) that I found in the addiction literature. I hope to have shown that Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s engagement with the subject brings out important concerns relating to addiction. For both Lévinas and Kierkegaard, the subject is separate and distinct. Humans can engage with one another because we are each conscious and able to communicate. However, this does not mean that we can completely understand others, and we need them to represent themselves, to ‘reveal’ themselves to us. The subject exists in relation to others, and it is this relation that establishes how we live out who we are. This subject has the capacity for a freedom that is chosen not arbitrarily, but in relation. Lévinas and Kierkegaard make demands on the human experience. The subject is able to respond. The subject is able to choose and to love. But in this, the subject is also hopeful. So each person engages with the general concepts of human experience, but it is in her own way, and we need each person to reveal what that looks like. The Twelve Steps also makes demands of the person, but reasserts one particular kind of experience (addiction) as the way in which all other relations are understood. Addiction is the main relation, and the object of addiction determines the relation towards the other and how the self is defined. For instance, whereas others are free to choose how much alcohol they drink, a person’s addiction is involuntary, or unchosen. But what I wanted to do in this work was not to disregard the effort done by the Twelve Steps, or suggest that I could provide a comprehensive definition of addiction. Rather, what I wanted to do was to re-situate the conversation of addiction as one of relation. Addiction, I argued, does not completely define a human’s experience. Addiction often provides significant challenges to how a person relates to themselves and to others. Yet as Orford suggests in his understanding of excessive appetites, these challenges are a part of human experience. This means that the features of human experience are also features of the addictive experience. The human experience is one of relation, with the ability

188

An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction

to respond, to hope and choose as a part of this. According to Kierkegaard, the person always has the possibility of choosing her- or himself. Lévinas writes that ‘the identity of the subject comes from the impossibility of escaping responsibility’ (OB 14). Of course, each person wrestles this out individually. Addiction poses significant challenges to engaging with the details of life. The physiological effects of alcohol can impair judgement. The salience of a substance can make it difficult not to choose it. But despite the particular challenges of addiction, the person is still living as a subject. These experiences of addiction can be read through how Lévinas and Kierkegaard interpret experience. Understanding addiction in terms of love, freedom and choice, revelation and language, that is, addiction as relation, does not bracket the individual as an addict, but rather situates addiction within the experience of being human.

III  Final thoughts on addiction and experience Finishing this book has left me with a few unanswered questions. I would have liked to have time to explore more about the relation of self and self-love, and how this connection between Lévinas and Kierkegaard could be developed. I would also have wished to engage further with Lévinas’s concept of time and Kierkegaard’s understanding of repetition, because I think this could develop some of the subtleties of why hope is such an important way of relating to the other. As I wrote, I also found myself frustrated by my own misunderstandings of Twelve Steps interpretations, and found myself continuously confronting my own generalized assumptions about addiction rather than listening to what was being revealed through individual accounts. However, despite these potential shortcomings, this work is intended to extend the discourse of addiction further through engaging with the existential phenomenology of two key thinkers in the discipline. Their understanding of the self as a subject-in-relation, and the way in which they interrogate freedom, responsibility and choice develops a rich discourse that can nourish contemporary conversations in addiction studies as well as existential phenomenology more broadly. Engaging with addiction literature and the philosophy of Lévinas and Kierkegaard, the discussion began to challenge specific definitions of addiction. While literature such as the DSM provide

Conclusion

189

concrete guidelines for defining experiences of addition, developing an existential phenomenological approach shows how addiction reflects specific questions of what it means to be a human being existing more generally. Exploring addiction philosophically in this way can therefore be helpful because it broadens the discourse to include all different, but human, experiences of it. What I think challenged me particularly was the demand invoked in the conclusions that the thinkers such as Lévinas and Kierkegaard presented. The person with addiction is not exempt from the human challenges of forgiving, of relating and self-becoming. It may become challenging in specific situations and difficult to even imagine that it is possible. But addicted or not, the subject always exists as a freely choosing and relating subject, alongside others. Contemporary philosopher Wendell Berry writes that ‘healing … complicates the system by opening and restoring connections among the various parts – in this way restoring the ultimate simplicity of their union’ (2002: 106). In this exploration, I have tried to show how Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s understanding of human experience, as embodied consciousness lived through and in relation, reveals a complexity to particular assumptions of relation in addiction. Through this engagement, I have then reasserted the simplicity of a hopeful relational subject, as the face engaged with addiction. The specific experiences of addiction can seem overwhelming. However, I have argued that, despite these difficulties, addiction cannot eclipse the experience of subjectivity. In reasserting the response-able subject that continuously exists in relation, Lévinas and Kierkegaard teach us that the addicted person can still reach beyond the isolation of suffering. Thus the subject can live through the challenges of experience, in the hope that relation brings.

190

Notes Introduction 1 The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Psychology, first published in 1952 is the authoritative evidence-based guide on mental disorders. It does not refer to addiction as an illness, but rather as ‘substance dependence’ and ‘substance abuse’ (DSM-V). As such, we can see the multi-faceted experience of addiction, which has contributed to the difficulty in treating addiction based on a unanimous consensus of its primary causes. It is important to consider what edition is being used, as the definition and classifications of mental disorders have changed with the development in research (APA 2013). 2 In conversation, Dr. Pia Matthews thoughtfully noted that people do not always experience addiction as suffering (2016). I realize, therefore, that suggesting that addiction can be understood as an existential phenomenon of suffering is conceptualizing it in a particular way. However, given interpretations of addiction as experiences of ‘helplessness’ and disease, I will explore how Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s understanding of suffering gives an alternative interpretation. 3 I want to distinguish addiction from illness, as I will discuss further in the next chapter. 4 I will look at some of the diverse concepts that are used to understand the experiences of the human subject. For instance, is addiction an illness of the mind? Is it a brain disease? Does it engage with the ‘physiological disease process’ that underlies other physical illnesses (Carel 2016: 19)? Or is it just a bad habit? These are challenging questions that the interdisciplinary discourse on mental health is currently trying to address in terms of understanding and applying diagnoses, and determining the limits of psychological and psychiatric categories. However, much of this discourse lies outside of the limitations of this thesis. For more on mental health diagnosis and illness, see ‘The Potentiality of a Healthy Self: Evaluating Progressively Empowered Internalisation and Diagnosis through the Lens of Existential Epistemology’ (Westin 2016). 5 Lévinas says that ‘when one wants to define this famous love of the neighbour … I think one must return to the relation with the face … and the impossibility of leaving him to his solitude’, in ‘The Philosopher and Death (1982)’ (2001e: 127).

Notes

192

6 As John Lippitt develops in Kierkegaard and the Problems of Self-Love (2013), contrasting what Westphal claims as Kierkegaard’s philosophy of ‘a radical renunciation of self ’ (2008a: 29). 7 This contrasts with, for instance, Hilary Putnam who writes that love for oneself ‘is utterly alien to Lévinas, for whom, it seems, I can at best see myself as one loved by those I love’ (2002: 57). 8 At times, due to the language that other scholars use, self will be interchanged with subject. However, I will try to keep this differentiation as clear as possible. 9 Because I am using existential phenomenology to interpret the experiences of addiction, and come to this project as a philosopher, I will be reading the concept of God philosophically rather than theologically. This will also be reflected in how I read the religious in Lévinas and Kierkegaard. I will explain this further in the chapters that follow. 10 There is significant discussion in Lévinasian scholarship as to whether Lévinas’ ethics can be reduced to a normative relation. In my interpretation, I will be agreeing with MacAvoy who suggests that it is difficult to point to a clear normative application. However, the ‘ethical expression’ can be applied normatively in some way without reducing it to moral theory. For more on this, see Chapters 2 and 3. See also MacAvoy on the priority of ethics (2009) for further reading. 11 For instance, Putnam writes that ‘[Lévinas’s] intended audience … is not just Jews but humanity as a whole’ (2002: 47). In Kierkegaard, this can be seen through how Haufniensis develops The Concept of Anxiety, as the experience of humanity (‘man’) in general, yet engaged with individually (34). 12 For example, addiction could be understood as particular experiences of suffering. 13 Westphal writes that ‘the responsible self is under unconditional obligation to and for the neighbour’, which can also be applied to his interpretation of Lévinas’s responsibility (2008a: 27).

Chapter 1 1 I made this threefold distinction as a result of what I saw as themes emerging through the literature, though I am aware that there is considerable overlap between distinguishers. For instance, Kent Dunnington, in Addiction and Virtue, classifies addiction neurologically, genetically, medically, philosophically

Notes

193

and theologically (2011: 14–30). I wanted to include more of the sociological contributions, and to merge the scientific explanations under broader categories.

2 Most of my emphasis is on food and alcohol addiction, but I found it problematic to limit the concept too specifically, so have included a spectrum of experiences under this classifier. 3 See, for instance, David DeGrazia who shows how the modern definition of personhood ‘defines persons as beings with the capacity for certain complex forms of consciousness, such as rationality a self-awareness over time’ (2005: 3). I find this a useful definition of personhood, even though DeGrazia ends up questioning it later on in his book. He contrasts this with a definition of species (Homo Sapiens), suggesting that ‘the concept of personhood … [extends] beyond humanity’, which ‘suggests that person does not mean human being’ (4). For more on this discourse, see Human Identity and Bioethics. 4 Cook notes that alcohol misuse takes a ‘variety of different terms’, however, discussions on the ‘ethical concerns about drunkenness appear in Judeo-Christian literature and recur throughout … history up to and including the present day’ (2006: 9). 5 The concept of blame is still prominent in philosophical discourses on addiction. See, for instance, Jeffrey Poland and George Graham’s edition of Addiction and Responsibility (2011). 6 Orford notes that the disease model was developed because ‘“crime” and “sin” were the only alternatives’, but that Seeley (1962), who coined the phrase, ‘recommend acceptance of the disease view only on a trial basis’ (1995: 2). 7 The proliferation of Twelve Step programs now contain bloggers anonymous, spenders anonymous, sex and love addicts anonymous, and food addicts anonymous, to name a few (AA 2016). 8 Where I understand paternalism as an expression of moralism. 9 This could be similar to Orford’s classification of ‘biological response’ (1995: 12). However, I wanted to bring in recent neurobiological research and keep it as living structures (physiology), as a different category from, though often overlapping, psychology. 10 Orford mentions this relational element in his more recent works. See, for example, Power, Powerlessness and Addiction (2013). The threefold distinction is also similar to Alexandra Katehakis’ (2016) suggestion that neurophysiology, psychology and cultural experience affect sex addiction. 11 While there are 20.4 million illicit drug users in the United States, only 34.3 per cent of these are considered addicted (Muller and Schumann 2011: 294).

Notes

194

12 Muller and Schumann classify three distinct practices of drug consumption behaviours:

(1) Certain people consume illicit drugs experimentally.



(2) Others consume for the sake of instrumentalization (i.e. towards a certain end, as seen in the list above).



(3) A minority of those who take drugs engage in compulsive consumption (2011: 308). Note here that Muller and Schumann reference addiction as pertaining to specifically drug-related behaviours.

13 I would argue that these are both still instances of physiological dependence, which is why I have included this discussion here instead of later on in the chapter. 14 Where medication is a substance used in distinction from the causative substance of addiction, though it may work in a similar manner. The challenge of replacing one ‘drug’ with another suggests that this approach ought to be used with caution and in conjunction with other treatments, lest it become another form of the ‘same dependence’. 15 The results of research show that pharmacological treatments do not necessarily restore underlying physical and chemical imbalances within the individual, but rather try to counteract the effects of the addiction on behaviours, often through conditioning responses (see, for instance, McKim and Hancock 2013). 16 More specific treatments are available, tailored to the specific characteristics of the person’s physical dependence. For example, amphetamine-like stimulates have been given to people with excessive appetitive behaviours to suppress the appetite (Orford 1995: 87). Antabuse is often given to people addicted to alcohol, acting to block the action of the acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. This causes a build-up of acetaldehyde in the body when combined with alcohol consumption. This build-up results in feeling very nauseated (McKim and Hancock 2013: 155). Research has, however, shown limited effectiveness when compared to placebo drugs. Placebo drugs are used to chart the presence of expected drug effect, independent of consumption of actual drug compound (54). 17 For example, administrating amphetamine-like substances may put the individual at risk of developing more anorexic-like symptoms (Orford 1995: 87). 18 Some researchers suggest that users ought also to be wary about the lucrative market propelled by pharmaceutical companies, and with medication deemed ‘fashionable’ and administered generally on a broad scale (e.g. fluoxetine

Notes

195

antidepressant) (Bruch 1974, qt. in Orford 1995: 87). I have not engaged further with this particular discourse, as it is not directly relevant to my thesis. 19 Orford adds excessive sex to his list, which suggests that the object of excessive relation can actually be a human subject (2001: 15). While I think that more discussion is required surrounding excessive sex behaviours and sexual addiction, I will limit this discourse to inanimate objects of addiction. Further discourse on sexual addictions can be found in the literature of Hall (2013), Rosenberg et al. (2014), and Goodman (1998). 20 Katehakis makes a further distinction between love addiction and sex addiction (2016). 21 In the above-mentioned instance of excessive eating, self-control treatment would include modifying a person’s eating, controlling their external environment to reduce cues that may lead to excessive eating, encouraging the person to chew in smaller bites, and suggesting new food shopping strategies (shop for food when full, etc.) (Orford 1995: 88). 22 For more on this, see the work of Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohns on ‘ego depletion’ (2007). Further studies on ego depletion suggest that a constant strain on the person’s ‘self-control reserves’ results in a subject persisting ‘a significantly shorter time at [a] self-control task than [other] subjects’ (Levy 2011: 98). 23 There is also the complex psychological factor: ‘an increasing preoccupation with the “addicting” substance which [occurs] … when a person had once had control and had then lost it’ (Reinert 1968, qt. in Orford 1995: 190). 24 In order for behavioural modification to work, the treatment needs to be specifically tailored to each person’s circumstance. This suggests that, although behavioural modification plans are ‘pursued vigorously and optimistically’ (Orford 1995: 249), the modest results of long-term success suggest that behaviour is difficult to change in a sustained and effective manner. Recent research on CBT has suggested that integrated approaches that develop goal setting outside of the addictive behaviour can be a more effective approach. However, even in these situations, this form of treatment may be ineffective (Wiers, et. al. 2016: 223–224). 25 Where consumption is chosen as a means to a desired end (i.e. alleviation of ‘intense negative emotions’) (Pickard and Pearce 2012: 41). 26 Orford notes this by suggesting that it is difficult to generalize addiction as one specific form of behaviour, as the variety of causes create an untenably general definition (1995: 77). Pickard and Pearce suggest that a difficulty in controlling specific behaviour (here referring to an addictive behaviour) does not necessarily imply that a behaviour is irresistible (10).

Notes

196

27 UK health advocate Suzy Chapman highlights how the inclusive criteria of the DSM-V will greatly increase the rates of diagnosis of mental disorders in the medically ill – whether they have established diseases (like diabetes … or cancer) or have unexplained medical conditions that so far have presented with somatic symptoms of unclear aetiology. (Frances 2012) For more on the DSM, see the Introduction. 28 According to the World Health Organisation, there seems to be no basic difference between mental illnesses and mental disorders, just as there is no fundamental difference between mental and physical illnesses and physical disorders: ‘both [mental and physical illness] are subsets of illness or disorder in general’ (Kendell 2002: 112). 29 The category of ‘Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders’ classifies the specific substances as ‘separate use’ disorders, along with behaviours that can be classified as addictive (APA 2013: 1). 30 Keane highlights that the DSM relies on ‘a hybrid combination of ethical and medical judgement, which is at odds with its definition of mental disorder’ (2012: 353). 31 For Pickard and Pearce, support and help groups ought to be coupled with understanding the addicted individual’s own responsibility for their health (see ‘How Therapeutic Communities Work: Specific Factors Related to Positive Outcome’, 2012). 32 This is based on the premise of psychoanalysis ‘which states that ego development and drive regulation take place in relation to significant others’ (Fonagy et al. 2002, Green 1972, and Verhaeghe 2004, qt. in De Rick et al., p. 100). Often this is linked with the ability to emotionally regulate behaviour. 33 Orford’s most recent work on addiction, Power, Powerlessness and Addiction, also takes into account the importance of social relations (2013). 34 I want to call this the God-relation rather than a spiritual relation to mirror the language later used by Lévinas. Lévinas wishes to distinguish between a purely subjective and felt sacred encounter and the transcendent and separate otherness of the religious encounter (see, for instance, Nine Talmudic Writings and Difficult Freedom). 35 This especially pertains to Murphy’s research on the American ‘War on Drugs’ and the establishment of drug courts (2015). 36 See also Carole Murphy’s work on stigma and addiction in ‘Negotiating Stigma: Constructing and Performing a “Normal” Identity’ (2014).

Notes

197

37 Some have suggested that it is the most successful and popular treatment for addiction (see, for instance, McKim and Hancock 2013: 157). 38 Other psychosocial interventions also treat this ‘compromise of will’. The SMART empowerment and self-management treatment program is designed to shift the locus of control from the external object (exerting an external force on the individual) to the internal self (where the individual serves as a regulator of behaviour) (De Miranda 2006: 5). 39 Much research has been conducted on the Twelve Steps, but I will generally be engaging with the primary texts written by members themselves. 40 See, for instance, Dunnington on Addiction and Virtue (2011), and May on Addiction and Grace (1988) and The Dark Night of the Soul (2005). 41 They cite the effectiveness of Twelve Step Programs at 5–10 per cent, which is significantly lower than other measures of the program (Dodes and Dodes 2014: 2). 42 Further discourse on addiction and the distortion of desire as found in Protestant theology is also seen in Batho (2016). 43 This is a view closely aligned with classical virtue ethics where the golden means between extremes is the path of tolerance, leading to individual happiness. Goodman highlights that the consumptive behaviour corresponds to positive and negative reinforcements (1990: 1406), and Orford expands on this in suggesting that the appetitive behaviours that govern addiction are served to modify mood states. He quotes Kaplan and Kaplan in stating that ‘emotional tensions are conditioned by associations with feelings of hunger’ (Kaplan and Kaplan 1957, qt. in Orford 1995: 77). 44 Again, this is illustrated well in the quote from Knapp: There is something almost childlike about the need, and about the language we use to describe it: wanting our bottles, waiting to crawl into that dark room in our minds and curl up and be alone with our object of security (106). 45 Though recent Public Health England research suggests that alcohol benefits to health are negligible, and drinking alcohol can be linked to increased risks of ‘some types of cancer’ (Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs 2015: ii).

Chapter 2 1 In an interview with Salomon Malka, Lévinas explains this relation, saying: ‘Recall, in relation to this quotation of Pascal, the war of 1939, which broke out

Notes

198

because Nazi Germany demanded a vital space, its “place in the sun,” the order where being strove to persevere in being’ (2001a: 99). 2 Bernstein goes as far as to say that ‘Lévinas’s entire philosophical project can be best understood as an ethical response to evil’, which Tzvi Langermann agrees with (2002: 115). 3 For more on the attribution behind this phrase, see Peperzak’s Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion (1995). 4 As this is a general overview, further information on the interrelation between religious language, phenomenology and Lévinas can be found through reading Katz’ book entitled Lévinas and the Crisis of Humanism (2012) and Critchley’s ‘Introduction’ in The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas (2002). 5 Critchley is citing the language used by Lévinas in Totality and Infinity. 6 Lévinas shows, for instance, the importance of the physical face, which is ‘not only enclosed in its form and offered to the hand, [but] is also open … presenting itself somehow in a personal way’ (Difficult Freedom 8). 7 The exchange mirrors the philosophical emphasis on the other as also seen in the Jewish philosophy of Buber, Fackenheim and Rosenzweig. 8 He writes: ‘What interests me when all is said and done is not ethics, not only ethics; it’s the holy, the holiness of the holy’ (qt. in Derrida 1999: 4). 9 In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas explains the concept of transcendence as ‘the passing over to being’s other, otherwise than being’ (OB 3). Transcendence is the ethical relation between the subject and the other, in which I cannot reduce the other to the same as me. 10 This also reflects Rosenzweig’s Jewish philosophy. Katz writes Judaism is not grasped in religious literature, it is not entered as a creed on a civil document (e.g. marriage license), it is not something undergone. Judaism is lived – it is part of one’s very being, in the way one comports oneself. One is it. (2012: 106) 11 An example of this cross-disciplinary influence is Tina Chanter’s collection on Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas (2001). 12 This concept of holiness as distinct relation emerges, in part, out of a reflection on the Torah, the Jewish sacred text. The Torah text commands the Jew to be holy, as God is holy. The subject reflects and yet is distinct from God, who remains apart. The Torah states: ‘You people are to be holy for me; because I, Adonai, am holy; and have set you apart from the other peoples, so that you can belong to me’ (Lev. 20.26). This distinction between God and humanity is reflected in the separation between other and subject and permeates Lévinas’s ethics.

Notes

199

13 Westphal looks at how the relation of the holy is further understood through the religious language of revelation, which poses questions central to the human experience concerning who we are (2008a: 5). More on the concept of revelation in Lévinas will be explored in the next chapter. 14 In a similar conceptualization, Bernstein highlights how Lévinas uses the ‘Jewish catastrophe’ of Auschwitz as a paradigm for a more general understanding of evil, suggesting ‘the subtle interweaving of Greek and Jewish elements in Lévinas’s thinking’ (2002: 257). 15 He writes that: Les textes des grands philosophes … me parurent plus proches de la Bible qu’opposés a elle, même si la concrétude des thèmes bibliques ne se reflétait pas immédiatement dans les pages philosophiques (‘The texts of the great philosophers … seem to me to be closer rather than opposed to the Bible, even though the concreteness of the biblical themes are not immediately reflected in the philosophical pages’, Entre Nous 14, Westin, trans.). 16 What Putnam will refer to as a human’s ‘dignity’ (2002: 39). 17 This is expressed in the Hebrew phrase lekh lekha, which means to ‘go’ or ‘leave’, as spoken by God to Abram (Gen. 12:1). 18 Llewelyn, in writing on Lévinas and Language, shows how Lévinas’ use of responsibility emerges out of the primary ‘response’ (response-able) (2002: 132–3). 19 It is worth noting that Lévinas’s reading of scripture is not specific to him, but is similarly found in other prophetic Jewish ethical reading of the Bible. In this reading, ‘to know God is to know what must be done’, and knowledge of God is experienced through engagement with commandment (Mitzvah) (DF 17; Urbano 2012: 73). 20 Lévinas’s understanding of language and knowledge will be developed in the next chapter. 21 Lévinas writes: ‘I do not preach the Jewish religion. I always speak of the Bible, not the Jewish religion. The Bible, including the Old Testament, is for me a human fact, of the human order, and entirely universal’ (PM 177, qt. in Bernstein 2002: 257). 22 ‘The basic intuition of moral growing up perhaps consists in perceiving that I am not the equal of the Other. … This ‘position outside the nations’ of which the Pentateuch speaks is realized in the concept of Israel and its particularism. It is a particularism that conditions universality, and it is a moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel’ (DF 21-22). 23 According to Lévinas, the Bible situates the human relation to the other in an on-going responsive narrative. It is not a static text of past events. Reading the

Notes

200

Bible requires engaging with immediate experience that is in process. Lévinas is arguing that if the Bible has something to say about the living history and order of the Jewish people, then it can also bring insight into a general pattern of human relation. He therefore applies the Bible as a universal text that is addressed to all human beings. 24 In Emmanuel Lévinas’ Conceptual Affinities with Liberation Theology, Alain Mayama writes: Lévinas universalises the traditional Jewish teaching that argues that obedience to the divine command is the election of the Jewish people. He applies it to all humans, arguing that humans find their dignity by observing God’s original ethical command to say hineni to the other. (2010: 39) 25 This is Lévinas’s challenge to Heidegger’s concept of Being (HO 18). 26 This distinction between slave and servant is important in Totality and Infinity. Lévinas is clear that individuals maintain their separate distinction while engaging in the me voici, open to responding to the other. However it becomes more complicated as his writings develop and the welcome of the other is replaced with the other that takes the self hostage (GP 164-171; Westphal 2000: 214). 27 This particular wording is a reference to the Torah (Deut. 10:18). 28 In his interview with Malka, Lévinas states that he is not wanting to empty the divinity of God from his philosophy, but rather that he wants to describe ‘the circumstances in which the word God comes to mind’ (2001a: 101). For him, God ‘is a nonthematisable God’, who is not objectively known but is experienced ‘when I am turned towards the other man and when I am not called to leave him alone’ (2001a). 29 The thematic nuances lend themselves to different emphases. Each ‘branch’ needs to be developed so that the ‘central ethical vision’ becomes clear. For instance, the early texts Existence and Existents, Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity use more ontological language, setting the stage for the separation between the subject and the other. Otherwise than Being then highlights the ‘asymmetrical repercussion’ of this relation, that leads to ethical claims such as: ‘I am my brother’s keeper all the way’ (Cohen 1998: xii). If we are going to break down the ethical relation, the first step in understanding this other-relation the other lies in analysing Lévinas’s subject. This requires looking at who the preethical self is. 30 Lévinas writes that ‘[t]he there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is “being in general”’ (TO 52).

Notes

201

31 Where, according to Llewelyn, the il refers to the pronoun ça or it (GCM 69, ref. in 2002: 131). 32 Lévinas uses the term ipseity in Totality and Infinity as the enjoyment of the ego, the ‘withdrawal into oneself ’ (p118). 33 ‘The order of Desire, the relation between strangers who are not wanting to one another – desire in its positivity – is affirmed across the idea of creation ex nihilo. Then the plane of a needy being, avid for its compliments, vanishes, and the possibility of a sabbatical existence where existence suspends the necessity of existing, is inaugurated’ (TI 104). 34 Lévinas separates this part of his philosophy from that of Kant and Plato, where the self in engaging with the world through need and ‘living from’ need, is not ‘lacking’, as Plato articulates in the Phaedrus (TI 114-116), nor is it Kant’s pure passivity (TI 133). More on the distinction between need and desire will be explored further on in this chapter. 35 The happiness that Lévinas refers to is a pre-ethical happiness. Unlike Aristotle, who suggests that happiness is the culmination of virtue, Lévinas seems to think that we willingly give up our happiness for responsibility and the pursuit of holiness. But this is only if happiness is a spontaneous and autonomous freedom (Davies 2002: 161). Happiness is not holiness, and not a product of ethical relation. 36 This is similar to what Putnam says when he writes that ‘as a Jew finds dignity in hineni to God, so the human being finds dignity in obeying the fundamental ethical command’, namely, the infinite response in opening to meet the other (2002: 39). 37 For a full account of suffering in Lévinas, see ‘Useless Suffering’ (1988). 38 Goodhart writes that suffering, in other words, within the Jewish perspective [of Lévinas], is not a mystical purgation or substitution for the sins of the world, but a reading from the position of the victim, which is to say, from the position of one who is in the midst of struggle. (1996: 181) The assumption of the response, as suffering for the other, is a specific way of engaging with consciousness. 39 Fackenheim says that Judaism focuses on action: ‘Like Aristotle’s philosopher, [the] Jew is to “imitate” God. He is to do so, however, not by contemplating a God who, on His part, is lost in self-contemplation … God … delights’ in lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness; and one can imitate Him only if one so lives as to cause lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness to increase on earth. In Judaism not contemplation but action has the last word’ (1999: 157).

Notes

202

40 Lévinas refers to illeity in Otherwise than Being as ‘outside the “thou” and the thematisation of objects’ (12). Formally distinguishing it from Buber’s relation, he writes, ‘formed with il (he) or ille, it indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me’ (OB 158). It is the capacity for relation despite differences. 41 Lévinas’s definition of knowledge will be discussed in the next chapter. 42 This differs from a food addiction, where the individual consumes food (as it would do a ‘content of life’), but does not follow the cues of satiety. The person experiences a ‘need’ to eat, but does not finish eating when the body has received its nutrients. 43 Though there is some evidence to suggest that in the initial stages of addiction the person does ‘enjoy’ and derive pleasure from consuming the object. 44 I realize that I have previously included behaviours as well as objects as a part of the addictive experience. This means that when I refer to the objects of addiction (for example, alcohol or food), I could also replace it with a behaviour (for example, gambling or sex). 45 I put the term ‘object’ in quotation marks to distinguish the problematic definition of this term. For Lévinas, objects are consumable and become a part of us, enjoyed in egoism. However, here the human other is related to as an object that is to be enjoyed and consumed, to satisfy, rather than towards a relational encounter with a transcendentally other human face. 46 It is ethical in this sense because it invokes a response. The question of responsibility and whether the person is actually free to choose has been discussed in the preceding chapter, and will be developed further in reference to Kierkegaard’s concept of entangled freedom in Chapter 6. 47 This reflects a common rabbinical interpretation. 48 See, for instance, the reference to Knapp’s autobiography in the last chapter. 49 Lévinas also uses ‘substitution’ to indicate the ethical responsibility for the other (OB 160).

Chapter 3 1 This kind of freedom is found in Sartre, for instance, where ‘Man is condemned to be free … because once thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does’ (2007: 29). 2 Referencing Lévinas’s text of the same name. 3 I think that Cohen presents a reductive account of some of the more subtle other-oriented movements in Sartre’s philosophy, but I use him here to show how Lévinas wants to prioritize the other-relation.

Notes

203

4 See, for instance, Addiction and Responsibility by Poland and Graham (2011). 5 Some research suggests that a ‘substantial genetic contribution has … been confirmed by twin and adoption studies that estimate the heritability of AD [alcohol dependence] to range from 50 to 60%’ (Agrawal and Lynskey 2008, ct. in Mathews, et al. 2012: 16). 6 This is assuming that someone is able to choose the action in the first place. 7 The consciousness of failure is already theoretical, according to Lévinas (TI 83). 8 Like I showed in Lévinas’s use of religious language in the last chapter, he defines revelation according to the subject–other relation. In Totality and Infinity, he says that ‘The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the privileged manifestation of the Other, the manifestation of a face over and beyond form’ (66). More on revelation will be discussed further on in the chapter. 9 I will discuss this further in the last two chapters. 10 Lévinas seems to explain language as a form of ethics (Shuster 2015: 241). To distinguish this from conversations of structuralism and other forms of language philosophy, I will therefore refer to his use of language through the ethical engagement of communication. 11 Lévinas suggests that ‘the subordination of the saying to the said … to ontology’, reduces the other to a theme (OB 6). He writes that ‘in language qua said everything is conveyed before us, be it at the price of betrayal’, whereas ‘saying’ does not reduce but only ‘mediates’ the self–other relation (OB 6). 12 Here referencing Heidegger’s ontology in particular. 13 To emphasize this, Lévinas writes, ‘Here what is essential is a refusal to allow oneself to be tamed or domesticated by a theme’ (OB 100). 14 In the ‘Introduction’ to Totality and Infinity, Lingis writes that for Lévinas, ‘if communication and community is to be achieved, a real response, a responsible answer must be given’ (14). 15 Lévinas makes a careful distinction between Plato’s knowledge as recollection, and revelation as discourse (Westphal 2008: 21). 16 He writes that ‘works signify their author, but indirectly, in the third person’ (TI 66-67). 17 Murphy writes about this in her sociological exposition on addiction in Illness or Deviance? Drug Courts, Drug Treatment, and the Ambiguity of Addiction. She shows how labeling a person as addict can be tied to identity formation, selflimitation and a particular kind of self-understanding (2015: 16). 18 Lévinas distinguishes between the face on one hand, and knowledge on the other. He writes that ‘the object of knowledge is always a fact, already happened and

Notes

204

passed through’ (TI 69). The experience of dialogue, however, is continuously unfolding. 19 Lévinas writes that ‘the absolutely foreign alone can instruct us. And it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me – refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification – and consequently the term of a “knowledge” finally penetrating beyond the object. The strangeness of the Other, his very freedom! Free beings alone can be strangers to one another’ (TI 73). 20 Lévinas writes, ‘Metaphysics is enacted in ethical relations. Without the signification they draw from ethics, theological concepts remains empty and formal frameworks’ (TI 79). 21 Bergo also writes that Lévinas uses psychological concepts to develop his phenomenology of consciousness, much like I have argued he does with religious language (2005: 143). 22 For more on this, see Westphal’s discussion on ‘Revelation as Immediacy’ (2008a: 21). 23 Lévinas distinguishes the saying from the said, because it is in the continuous present tense. It is a continuous relation of revelation (OB 5–7). 24 For more on the nuances of reflective practice in psychology, see Binks, Jones and Knight’s article ‘Facilitating Reflective Practice Groups in Clinical Psychology Training: A Phenomenological Study’ (2013). 25 As mentioned previously, Twelve Step programs have been linked with a diseasemodel of addiction (Taub 2011), though they state that they do not themselves ‘take any particular medical point of view’ (AA 2001: xx). 26 Kerns-Zucco’s sociological study looks at how narrative is constructed in addiction treatment. He suggests that recovery is a social process and the group narrative hermeneutically shapes the personal narrative, presenting a contrast to the isolation of the disease-model (1998: 41). For more, see ‘Critical Theory, Hermeneutics, and Addiction Theory’ (1998). 27 It is worth noting here that while I am giving a broad interpretation of Lévinas’s God-concept, current scholarship suggests that the Lévinasian God changes considerably from his initial to final writings (see Bertman 2016). For this thesis, I will therefore suggest engaging with the God concept as predominantly developed in Totality and Infinity. More on the God-concept in Lévinas will be explored further on in comparison with Kierkegaard. 28 This is ‘to bear testimony to his goodness by serving and caring for one’s neighbour, the stranger, the orphan and the poor’ (Urbano 2012: 76). 29 Where God can also be understood as a person’s Higher Power. I realise that contemporary Twelve Steps literature refers to God as the Higher Power, and sees

Notes

205

it as anything external to the self (see for instance Cook 2006: 29, and Bacon et al. 2015). However, for the limitations of this thesis, as well as what I see to be the key philosophical characteristics of this concept, I will generally use the term God. 30 This will be developed further in Chapter 6, through the comparison of Lévinas and Kierkegaard.

Chapter 4 1 He uses a similar relation to explain suffering. The subject, answering the other, provides the exit from the overwhelming totality of pain. I will explain this further in Chapter Seven. 2 I have earlier premised this definition of hope on the infinite other-relation that ruptures the self-containment of totalizing experience, including experiences of suffering. This requires further development in conversation with Kierkegaard. 3 Though it is important to reach beyond personal interpretations, Kierkegaard’s work has often been understood partly in relation to his own existential and psychological struggles, as highlighted in Grøn’s suggestion of the personability of authorship in The Concept of Anxiety (2008a: 1). 4 Another example of this use of language is found further along in the same chapter: ‘What is it that binds me? … I am bound by a fetter formed of dark fancies, of disturbing dreams, of restless thoughts, of dire misgivings, of inexplicable anxieties’ (EO 51–52). 5 Writing on Kierkegaard’s treatment of despair in Sickness Unto Death. 6 This is highlighted in Grøn’s suggestion of the personability of authorship in CA (2008a: 1). For example, when Kierkegaard writes about the poet’s psychological turmoil, some scholars have understood it as a partial self-reflection. 7 This is a similar reading to Saez Tajafuerce (Toulouse, July 2016) who suggests that Kierkegaard’s stages are not simply hierarchically progressive; rather, elements of each can be found in each individual moment simultaneously (we both are and are constantly becoming individuals; we have laid hold of salvation and are continuously reaffirming it in successive moments of time). 8 In Philosophical Crumbs, he writes that ‘the understanding has made [the other] like that with respect to which it was supposed to be different’ (118). 9 Grøn points to Kierkegaard’s emphases of the inward self-choosing of subjectivity, whereas Lévinas is more concerned with the subject’s external relation. However, both philosophers want to defend the subject, and both

Notes

206

engage with what the conditions of self are demanding of us (Grøn, qt. in Welz and Verstryne 2008: 12). 10 Hannay suggests that the complexity of this statement is meant as a ‘parody of German idealism’ (1985: 23), but I would agree with Davenport that it is actually an explanation of what Kierkegaard means by the subjective relation (1985: 234). 11 A reflection of this kind of active choosing is reflected in personal statements that Kierkegaard attributes to himself. He is constantly ‘becoming’ a Christian, which concerns process rather than the arrival. Who we are is linked to this process of becoming, through internally relating to ourselves. For more on Kierkegaard’s understanding of human transformation and becoming as a Christian, see Torrance (2016). 12 The relation towards the other as human other, as neighbour, will be further explored in the next chapter. 13 Written before the psychologization of this psychological concept, Kierkegaard’s study attempts to reconcile psychology to the ‘leap’, the free act, of sin (Grøn 2008a: 2). It is a part of the wider task of subjectivity and includes the ‘profound controversial theological study of the concept of sin’ (158). Grøn suggests that Kierkegaard provides one of the first analyses of anxiety (1-3). 14 Haufniensis writes that sin is chosen individually, which means that ‘every individual becomes guilty only through himself ’ (CA 53). 15 Welz suggests that Kierkegaard’s subject can be read phenomnologically because it offers ‘an overall view of the physical and metaphysical aspects of reality’ (2013: 456). See Welz (2013) for further reasons on reading Kierkegaard’s existentialism phenomenologically. 16 Haufniensis thinks the tricky thing is that people can be unaware of anxiety, while still existing anxiously (CA 49). 17 The increased awareness of spirit clarifies the subjective polarity. We recognize more of our immense freedom and possibility, and our anxiety increases. Or, as Grøn writes, ‘anxiety is the possibility of freedom’ (2008a: 65). Yet as it increases, anxiety is not any ‘thing’ concretely. Anxiety exists as the ‘selfish infinity of possibility, which no longer tempts like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets (angster) with its sweet anxiousness (Beangstelse)’ (61). 18 Haufniensis writes that ‘only in the moment that salvation is actually posited is this anxiety overcome’ (CA 53). 19 The human therefore exists as a synthesis of psyche and body, and a synthesis of eternal and temporal, articulated in the presence of the moment. This moment is over in a second: ‘Nothing is as swift as the blink of an eye, and yet is commensurable with the content of the eternal’ (CA 87).

Notes

207

20 While Adam does not differ from successive humanity qualitatively (i.e. as spirit, sustaining body and psyche), the past patterns of entangled freedom seem as if they anticipate future patterns of choosing. So then: ’The highest difference in relation to Adam is that the future seems to be anticipated by the past’ (CA 91). 21 I am assuming here that the freedom to choose is a ‘good thing’. Of course, reflection on human experience reveals that people can also choose harmful things that would problematize this a bit. For the sake of the word restrictions on this thesis, however, I will assume that the choice that differs from the past is a choice that is for the benefit of the person, while leaving it open to interpretation as to what that ‘benefit’ might be. 22 In order to maintain consistency with how I have described Lévinas, I have tried to use the term ‘subject’ to describe Kierkegaard’s individual self. However, because the self is used extensively in scholarship, I will also use this concept to indicate the subject. 23 Although in his ‘Interview with François Poirié’, Lévinas clearly wants to distinguish his ‘nonindifference’ towards the other from ‘all the literature [love] evokes’ (2001d: 50). He states that responsibility makes precise something grave in the consciousness of alterity. Love goes farther; it is the relation to the unique. It is proper to the principle of love that the other, loved, is for me the unique in the world. Not because in being in love I have the illusion that the other is unique. It is because there is the possibility of thinking someone as unique that there is love. (2001d) I will unpack more of the relation between Lévinas and Kierkegaard’s concepts of love in subsequent chapters. 24 This could also be in reference to Kierkegaard’s engagement with Lutheranism. However, I have outlined that I will be reading the religious language through existential phenomenology rather than through theology. I realize that this limits the perspective, but it also develops a particular reading of Kierkegaard that can be interpreted through the context with which I approach the text (in reference to Poole’s quote at the beginning of the chapter). 25 Like anxiety, understanding love requires engaging with passion (pathos). This means that ‘emotion is not vilified; it is considered an indispensable means for arriving at “existential” truths about … oneself not available to reason alone’ (Jackson 1998: 247). Jackson writes that Kierkegaard ‘denies the hegemony of reason’ (Jackson 1998). 26 Self-love, Lippitt suggests, also involves elements of trust and forgiveness (2013: 154), which I would like to consider further in relation to addiction at another

Notes

208

time. However, for the sake of brevity, and in order to connect this concept with anxiety and the moment, I have chosen to focus on hope as future possibility. 27 See, for instance, the discourse on Addiction Neuroethics offered by Carter and Hall (2012). 28 More on this in the next chapter. 29 The Twelve Steps also use the concept of ‘quality’, stating that the ability to ‘try hard’ does not always produce sobriety. Step Two suggests that this ‘has to do with the quality of faith rather than its quantity’ (AA 1981: 32). 30 The addict is sober, but it is a delicate relation, that still revolves around the addiction. For instance, to illustrate this, Step Ten states that [n]ow that we’re in A.A. and sober, and winning back the esteem of our friends and business associates, we find that we still need to exercise special vigilance … we can often check ourselves by remembering that we are today sober only by the grace of God. (1981: 92) 31 It is important to note that for many this might seem a hopeful response, because it recognises the reality and the frailty of the human experience. As I explored in the chapter on addiction, I think that one of the great strengths of the Twelve Steps is this ability to break down the stigma of moralizing addiction. It acknowledges the difficulty of the experience, and the complexity of sobriety. Here, therefore, I recognize the importance of this contribution, while offering another alternative for those who do not subjectively experience addiction in this way. 32 As outlined in the Twelve Steps ‘practicing these 12 steps, we had a spiritual awakening’ (1981: 109), though it is perhaps a stretch to assume that it is the same existential paradoxical spirit synthesis that Haufniensis has in mind.

Chapter 5 1 Paul Ricoeur shows that the relation between Kierkegaard’s philosophical task and the voices he employs is complex, but that ‘we cannot exclude him from philosophy on account of his genius for exceptionality. His terrifying power of argumentation will simply return him to us’ (1998: 15). Yet Kierkegaard ‘not only produced arguments; he also worked out concepts’ (1998). 2 This means that the aesthetic and ethical selves are not annihilated, but given back in some way through the God-relation. 3 As explored in Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love (2013).

Notes

209

4 In this analysis, I will use Shakespeare’s explanation of language in Kierkegaard, developed in Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (2013). 5 Similar to what Grøn expresses as despair (2013: 287). 6 So, for instance, the greatness of the individual could be seen as very ordinary on the outside, whereas a celebrated hero in society may not have the internal greatness of love that di Silentio is referring to. 7 In Sickness Unto Death, di Silentio writes that ‘faith is that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God’ (82). Sagi writes that ‘faith … endows freedom with new sense and new meaning, anchoring it in God’ (2000: 37). 8 In reflecting on the aesthete, the narrator suspects ‘that the outward was not, after all, the inward’ (EO 28). 9 This disillusionment is particularly reflected in the French poem that starts the first section of Either/Or’s ‘Diapsalmata’ Grandeur, savoir, renommé, Amitié, plaisir et bien, Tout n’est que vent, que fumée: Pour mieux dire, tout n’est rien (Pelisson, qt. in EO 42). 10 That she is a woman, Celine Léon, suggests is significant because of how the aesthete regards her within the ‘mind/body opposition’ (2008: 18), where ‘[w]oman is substance, man is reflection’ (EO 43). Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantin Constantius ascribes the woman with ‘incomplete reflection’, and ‘declares silence to be the proper way to deal with this nonentity’ (R, qt. in Léon 2008: 18). This contrasts with what Kierkegaard will say about females and males as equal before God in spirit in Works of Love. 11 Here it may be worth noting that the ‘spiritual’ experience described differs from Kierkegaard’s other accounts of spirit as relation. The spiritual here refers to an aesthetic experience of self. 12 In Works of Love Kierkegaard writes that men and women are absolutely equal before God as individuals because both are equal in/as spirit (139). Concerning marital relations, he states that ‘[t]he wife shall first and foremost be your neighbour’ (141), and further that ‘what is eternally basic [the relation of each individual as spirit before God] must also be the basis of every expression of what is special’ (WL 139). 13 Kierkegaard states that the love-relation is extended to all human beings (WL 128). 14 Yet Ferreira suggests that it is important to distinguish what Kierkegaard means here about the ‘other’ loves, contra Hannay’s account in which the other

Notes

210

‘discriminating loves’ of friendship and erotic love are not ‘non-moral’ or lacking in any ‘positive value’. Ferreira suggests that Kierkegaard ‘affirms that there is no hierarchy in love’ (95), and he further adds that erotic love is ’undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness and friendship the greatest temporal good’ (WL 150, 267). 15 Sickness Unto Death even suggests that defining oneself according to external objects is a form of despair where the person has not actually fully claimed himor herself individual. Love is chosen freely. 16 For a detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s interaction with Copenhagen, see Pattison (2013). 17 This focus on the subject–other relation is reclaimed in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, under Religiousness B. 18 Shakespeare further clarifies that ‘This model of truth presupposes that it is timeless, universally valid and accessible to intellectual contemplation’ (2013: 23), which places the emphasis on its acquisition squarely on the shoulders of reason. 19 Expressed most evidently in Hegel’s world-historical system. 20 Shakespeare notes the challenge of relation, stating that ‘we are relating to an otherness which we cannot rationally comprehend’ (2013: 54). 21 Which I am distinguishing from the religious ethical as works of love. 22 Hannay suggests that despair, while essential to the individual becoming her or himself, is not something that emerges as a result of embracing the truth of the human condition. It is ‘avoiding the path to truth’ (1998: 335). 23 Westphal suggests that Judge Vilhelm is ultimately a Hegelian: ‘in which the self has no immediate relation to the Good, but only one mediated through the laws and customs of one’s people [as Family, Civil Society and State]’ (Westphal 1998: 106). In this way the subject is constantly confronted with an inability ‘to fulfill the ethical social standard in their own “natural” power’ (SUD 76, qt. in Hannay 1998: 343). 24 For instance, Derrida writes that ‘Kierkegaard sees acting ‘out of duty’, in the universalizable [Kantian] sense of the law, as a dereliction of one’s absolute duty’ (1998: 159), which is towards God. 25 Spiritlessness, then, is the ‘state of being dead while yet alive’, but it is also directly connected to assuming the responsibility of choosing oneself (Kirmmse 1998: 19). 26 But this is not as straightforward as this quick recap may suggest. Most of the time we are still lost in some way, and life seems to be a process of continually becoming ourselves and trying to discover how and why we are still lost. Arbaugh and Arbaugh note that for Kierkegaard, ‘existence is never simply

Notes

211

secure. It calls for a ‘repetition’ or a continual re-acquirement of responsible selfhood’ (1968: 25). 27 This is what Lévinas will later criticize as Kierkegaard’s attempt to convert all ‘relations and exteriority into inward dramas’. He writes here that for Kierkegaard, ‘the suffering truth does not open us up’ to the other human but to an interior relation to God (1998b: 29–30). 28 This possibility of seeing God everywhere is understood as the eternal moment. 29 Kierkegaard’s subject is a ‘messy interaction’ of ’relational syntheses’ (Tietjen and Evans 2011: 274). 30 In Sickness Unto Death, he claims that the philosophical work is ‘concerned for the well-being of the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ (Kirmmse 1998: 19), and seems to here use the two terms interchangeably. 31 In the introduction to Sickness Unto Death, Hannay notes how the ‘choice of oneself ’ is actually ‘a decision to resort to a deep intuition about the true nature of selfhood’ (2004: 26). This ‘true nature of selfhood’ differs from the ‘arbitrary selection from a cafeteria of alternatives’ (2004). Hannay writes that ‘the whole point of Kierkegaard’s authorship’ is for Kierkegaard ‘to impress on his reader that in matters of this kind there can be no such justification, yet that this in turn is no reason for abstaining from choice’ (26). This self-choosing synthesis reveals itself as love. That love is not just revealed inwardly; Kierkegaard writes that to exclude outward relations is to ‘fail to be human’ (WL 275). So becoming an individual changes how we relate to other people. 32 See Ferreira’s article on ‘The Problematic Agapeistic Ideal— Again’ (2008) for more on subjective intentionality and love. 33 Some scholars such as Llewelyn refer to this as the ‘ethico-religious love’ (Simmons 2008: 8). This looks at how God commands love, and how it is a participation in the Good. I find this wording cumbersome, and so for the sake of clarity will continue to refer to it as selfless love. 34 I find this a puzzling idea in Kierkegaard that I will take up again in the next chapter when comparing Lévinas’ concept of responsibility with Kierkegaard’s concept of love. 35 In ‘Kierkegaard and Lévinas on the Elements of the Love Commandment’, Ferreira writes that Kierkegaard’s love ‘as yourself ’ (1) serves ‘to ‘open the lock of self-love’, (2) to teach a person ‘proper self-love’, (3) to be a standard for our love of others so that it is not less than love for ourselves, (4) to be a standard for our love for others so that it is not more than love for ourselves, and (5) to remind us that we have been loved by God’ (2008: 88). This will be looked at further in the next chapter.

Notes

212

36 Lopez, Dreyfus and Rubin all use Kierkegaard to engage with questions surrounding the experience of addiction. However, rather than establishing a generalized understanding of addiction, I want to look at how each relation is represented, and can be understood through Kierkegaaard, and in conjunction with contemporary discourse on addiction. 37 As seen in Works of Love when Kierkegaard writes that man very often finds escapes in order to avert this happiness [of full relatedness to the other as love]; therefore they manufacture deceptions – in order to deceive themselves … to grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one’s breast and groan over oneself. (WL 155) 38 Lopez uses O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night as a foil to show how the addictive experience can form problematic love-relations between others. 39 I would argue this is very closely connected with Lévinas’s own language, which I will discuss in the next chapter. 40 Referencing the quote: ‘I seem destined to suffer every possible mood, to gain experience in all directions’ (EO 49). 41 In Either/Or, the writer says: ‘I have only one friend, Echo. And why is Echo my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and Echo does not take it away from me’ (51). 42 This is quite a general list of characteristics that is arguably present in populations without addiction; however, I use it here to show the link between Kierkegaard’s psychological language and addiction experiences. 43 In Either/Or, Cordelia’s internal conflict is described as a ‘divergent’ tossing between ‘at one moment reproaching herself, forgiving him, at another reproaching him’ (250–1). 44 He suggests that, in the case of O’Neill’s characters, this ends up with each person in the family lapsing ‘into a destructive submersion of independent miseries and sorrows’ (74–5), similar to the emotionally engaged, yet ethically detached aesthete. 45 See Bridge’s work on resilience in The Significance Delusion (2016) and the study on depression and language use in Chung and Pennebaker’s article on ‘The Psychological Functions of Function Words’ (2007). 46 Kierkegaard writes that ‘one in whom the spirit is awakened does not therefore leave the visible world … likewise he also remains in the language, except that it is transferred … [to] edify or build up’ (WL 199–200). 47 Potentially here the addicted individual is also exhibiting a key characteristic of despair, or ‘in despair not wanting to be oneself ’, which contrasts with the

Notes

213

experience of subjective inwardness, and may also highlight the poignancy of new research into comorbidity of substance use and mental disorders (Torrens, Mestre-Pinto and Domingo-Salvany 2015), if we are to look at psychological/ psychiatric descriptors. 48 Interestingly, this could be a point where Kierkegaard and Lévinas may differ in a discourse on addiction. I can, according to Lévinas in Useless Suffering, provide an exit for the other’s suffering; this is even where my suffering has meaning. But at the same time, I cannot attach responsibility to anyone outside of myself. No one has my ability to respond. Kierkegaard could arguably echo Knapp’s sentiments: nothing, no object or person or finite hope, save the leap to faith before God has the capacity to enable us to become ourselves, and to ensure our freedom and the security of the infinite. 49 An interesting popular article that examines this relation between addicted people and their parents is narrated by Seaneen Molloy-Vaughan, in ‘7 Things that Happen when you’re the Child of an Alcoholic’ (2016). 50 Ringwald shows how similar Kierkegaard and the Twelve Steps can be when he writes that the Twelve Step Program offers ‘[a] spiritual solution to addiction [that] follows the classic pattern of fall and resurrection, sin and redemption’ (2002: 26). However, I would suggest that how the ‘solution’ (2002) is constructed varies, in terms of the subject-relation.

Chapter 6 1 Simmons writes that ‘whereas Martin Heidegger is at his best when he is reading other philosophers, Emmanuel Lévinas is not’ (2008: 41), and yet paradoxically, ‘even at moments when he appears to [read Kierkegaard superficially], Lévinas often makes a deeply significant point about a thinker that illuminates a strikingly ‘good’ reading’ (2008). I would suggest that Lévinas’ reading of Kierkegaard, while perhaps incomplete, does pull out significant points of tension that require further analysis in understanding the self ’s relation with the other. 2 In Chapter Three, Lévinas calls this ipseity (see, for example, TI 117–120). 3 However, subjectivity is not defined according to consciousness but according to response. 4 Ferreira suggests that there may be logical reasons why Lévinas does not emphasize the concept of self-love: Perhaps after the Shoah (and Freud) it is callous or dangerous to remind people to love themselves. Or perhaps we could say that Lévinas did not

Notes

214

necessarily think it was illegitimate to love our self, but rather that the audience to whom he saw himself speaking did not seem to him to need a reminder about love of self. Perhaps a Jewish sense of worth and self-esteem are so natural that Lévinas assumes them, does not need to argue for them, whereas Lutheran (or Pietistic) Christianity’s message of abjectness and depravity impels Kierkegaard’s sad recognition of the need for a corrective message. (2001: 92) 5 This is primarily seen through Works of Love. 6 This takes on a practical dimension in therapeutic practice. In Spirit and Psyche, psychologist Victor Schermer notes the therapeutic benefits of a therapist’s ability to engage with a patient with ’unconditional positive regard’ (2003: 215). Coined by Carl Rogers (1951), this refers to a therapist’s ability to accept the patient as a ‘whole self ’, rather than some kind of idealized being. The therapist does not ’need’ anything from the patient. Neither is the patient required to fit a thematic or tidy definition before presenting themselves to the therapist. According to Schermer, this ‘unconditional positive regard’ not only develops a positive rapport with the patient, but it also creates within the patient a ’self-acceptance’ and increased self-esteem (216). 7 Insofar as it is the opposite of the inclosing reserve (what Climacus in CA coins the demonic), it is communication and openness towards the world. 8 So this does not mean ‘that fullest selfhood is in isolated individuals rather than in community’ (Taylor 1975, qt. in Wells 2012: 72). 9 See, for instance, Westphal (2008a), Simmons and Wood (2008). 10 See, for instance, Haufniensis’s definition of the demonic in Concept of Anxiety. 11 Mooney cites Kierkegaard’s focus on the present world in Fear and Trembling, Repetition and Book of Job. 12 It ‘returns the worldly life’ to the individual (Mooney 1998: 284). 13 See, for example, ‘Useless Suffering’ (1988). 14 A fuller understanding of suffering can be found in both Kierkegaard’s and Lévinas’ accounts of the Book of Job. 15 To understand this aversion to sense-making in suffering, it is helpful to look at Elaine Scarry, who explains that [t]he very temptation to invoke analogies of remote cosmologies (and there is a long tradition of such analogies [theodicies]) is itself a sign of pain’s triumph, for it achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about … this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and of the other person. (1985: 4)

Notes

215

16 Mooney suggests that is an extension of the engaged individual that involves a ‘stepping back from common currents’ to a position of evaluation and free choosing (1998: 295).

Chapter 7 1 The previous chapter looked at the God-relation through the relation to the other, rather than developing it as a separate discussion. This chapter separates the God-relation in order to properly examine its relation to the Higher Power in the Twelve Steps. 2 Likewise, definitions of addiction as a ‘brain disease’ and that addictive behaviours can ‘change the brain in fundamental and long-lasting ways’ (Murphy 2015: 77), seems to highlight the lack of freedom in the self ’s relation to itself. However, even if constructing addiction as a brain disease, it is still possible to suggest that this relation, while problematic in terms of freely choosing behaviours, can still define the human experience based on relations other than addiction and the object-relation. For instance, you can have a disease, rather than be the disease (as explored in earlier chapters). Detailed analytical philosophical accounts have looked at interactions between freedom, choice and responsibility, particularly in Poland and Graham’s collection Addiction and Responsibility (2011). 3 Ringwald writes that it is easy to caricature or distort Twelve Step philosophy. For instance, he writes that ‘even a casual reading of AA … literature, or a talk with members, or attendance at a meeting, reveals a focus on personal responsibility’ (2002: 21). 4 It is hard to figure out the precise word to use here, because in saying ‘progress’, I do not want to assume a hierarchy of being, which seems ontological and in conflict with Kierkegaard’s nuanced existentialism. However, I am also aware of Hannay’s critique of ‘process’, when he writes that in Kierkegaard, ‘the creation is still in progress, but not by the way of process’ (2013: 391). This subtle difference is something that I am still trying to understand, but the use of ‘progress’, I think, reflects more of Kierkegaard’s understanding of time and the moment than does his concept of ‘process’, which seems too theoretical and abstract. 5 Kierkegaard writes, through his pseudonym, ‘that the self in being itself … rests transparently in God’ (SUD 39). 6 Orford writes that ‘the alliance of medicine and temperance … resurfaced [after the prohibition period] in a new form with Alcoholics Anonymous

Notes

216

(AA) and a renewed medical interest in the 1930s and 1940s’ (1995: 19). He links temperance with the ‘religious, non-scientific’ moral framework of understanding addiction. 7 For instance, in CA Haufniensis suggests that anxiety ‘is seldom found among altogether corrupt natures, but generally only among the deeper’ (CA 116). He uses an example of its ‘connection to the sensuous in man’ which he directly relates to ‘addiction to drink, to opium, or to debauchery, etc.). But rather than freely turning from this (‘repentance’), ‘The moment comes; wrath conquers’ (Davenport 2016: 239). 8 However, Cook notes that ‘It has long been recognised that some patients spontaneously recover from patterns of addictive or dependent drinking, without the help of either professional treatment or self-help programmes’ (2006: 29). Dodes and Dodes (2014) and Lewis (2015) note similar behavioural phenomenon. 9 May writes about the addictive experience that ‘addiction splits the will in two, one part desiring freedom and the other desiring only to continue the addictive behaviour’ (1988/2007: 42). 10 The Twelve Steps gives the person permission to recount their experience of addiction. The group is needed to facilitate the shared experience, and to enable a new narrative construction to occur, but within the self-definition that the Twelve Steps provides. 11 For more on the Higher Power construct in Alcoholics Anonymous, see, for instance, Kurtz and White (2015). 12 The Big Book writes of overcoming this loneliness of the addictive experience through the group, in conjunction with Step 5, that ‘we all felt that we didn’t quite belong. … There was always that mysterious barrier we could neither surmount nor understand … [a] terrified loneliness’ (1953/2002: 57). The Twelve Steps initiate ‘the beginning of true kinship with man and God’ (1953/2002). 13 The Big Book states that the sponsor helps the addict ‘by talking freely and easily and without exhibitionism, about his own defects, past and present’ (1953/2002: 46). 14 In the ‘Forward’ to Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the author writes that ‘the stories [and] case histories in which the alcoholics [describe] their drinking experiences and recoveries … [establish] Identification with alcoholic readers and [prove] to them that the virtually impossible had now become possible’ (AA 1981: 17). 15 This is further reflected in the statement of ‘Tradition Seven’ that ‘anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place

Notes

217

principles before personalities’, prescribing ‘[o]ne-hundred percent anonymity at the public level’ (AA 1981: 13). This anonymity may reflect a similar method of engagement as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. However, Kierkegaard does identify himself with his work in specific instances (see, for instance, Works of Love). 16 Katz develops more of Lévinas’ philosophy of teaching in her excellent book Lévinas and the Crisis of Humanism (2012). She argues that Lévinas’ pedagogical philosophy wants to challenge the individualized notion of self in humanism and the priority of individual rights, through using teaching as a means of establishing ethical inter-human connection. 17 This sounds similar to the enclosing reserve of the demonic, pronounced as problematic in The Concept of Anxiety. 18 Perhaps a good example of Kierkegaard’s insistence of individuality over universality is his critique of the institutional state church. I would suggest that similar comparisons could be made between this explicit critique and the current hypothetical critique of the Twelve Step Program. 19 Both she and Trevor Stammers (April 2017) noted that the disease model often associated with the Twelve Steps indicates more a dis-ease of the person, than disease biologically speaking. This distinction is not always reflected theoretically in the literature, which is where I have based my critique, but I think provides an important understanding of how the Program is normatively understood. 20 For more on this, see Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (AA 1981). 21 In terms of being with the other person in the experience of addiction, and sharing stories of sobriety, etc. 22 See also Matustík’s essay on ‘More than all the Others’ (2008) for more on suffering and redemption in Lévinas and Kierkegaard. 23 I would suggest that this links to Welz’s comparison of counter-theodicy. For both Kierkegaard and Lévinas, there are not rational accounts for suffering. The experience of suffering does not have meaning in and of itself (2007). However, it can enable an other-relation. 24 I think this reflects both Kierkegaard and Lévinas’ resistance to identifying the human as being in general. Simmons and Wood suggest that both thinkers ‘share a suspicion of the Western ontological tradition’ (2008: 2). The problems Kierkegaard sees in Hegel are similar to those that Lévinas sees in Heidegger. So ‘[e]ven though Lévinas claimed that Kierkegaard asserted the singularity of the I while he, Lévinas, asserted the singularity of the Other, they sing with one voice when it comes to resistance to totality, thematization, and systematicity’ (ibid.). I think this is why the Twelve Steps also conflicts at points with this understanding of subjective experience, favouring a generalized approach

Notes

218

to addiction. For instance Dodes and Dodes recount narratives in which the person ‘just wanted to be a good father’, thinking that ‘maybe I have to quit smoking in order to be a better person’ (2014: 98). However, contrary to the Twelve Steps model of complete abstinence, this person ‘was able to accept moderation’ (2014). 25 This notion of personal responsibility and ability to choose in addiction is further supported by current research in addiction and brain plasticity (see Lewis 2015), and can be summarized succinctly in the quote from Morse, that ‘[a]ddicts are not automatons’ (2011: 161). 26 Simmons and Wood add, ‘even though participation in such a community is the only way in which such a relationship can be lived’ (2011: 3). 27 To show the parallel with Lévinas, I would argue that like Lévinas, Kierkegaard uses this term universally. Jackson, for instance, writes that Kierkegaard avoids a ‘narrow’ use of election to a specific people group (1998: 238). 28 Haufniensis writes that ‘as soon as the relationship of generation [in creation] is posited, no man is superfluous, because every individual is himself and the race’ (CA iv). Furthermore, in Sickness Unto Death, his pseudonym writes that ‘every single individual human being … exists before God’ (85). 29 Kierkegaard clarifies this love-relation to the reader through the Christian scripture: ‘If you cannot love your brother whom you do see, how can you love God who you cannot see?’ (1 Jn 4.20). 30 Cook shows that, while having ‘historical roots in the Christian tradition’, the Twelve Steps ‘emphasise a secular form of spirituality’ (2006: 29). However, as I have shown in previous chapters, Taub (2011) suggests that this Higher Power still contains specific attributes. 31 For instance, Cook writes that addiction is defined according to a habit of behaviour that is somehow recognized as ‘undesirable’ (2006: 17), though he cites Schaler who suggests that is actually deliberately chosen because of their ‘fondness for, or orientation toward, some thing or activity’ (2002, qt. in Cook 2006: 17). 32 The Higher Power, while enabling abstinence and sobriety, does not, however, have the ability to remove the addiction permanently. For instance, in the Big Book’s ‘Bill’s Story’ even after Bill’s friend refuses drink because he ‘got religion’ (2001: 9), Bill still employs the concept of continuous addict. 33 A contrasting example to this conceptualization can be found in the Big Book which states that when we encountered AA, the fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God’s will was for us; instead we had been telling

Notes

219

Him what it ought to be. No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too. Belief meant reliance, not defiance. (1953/2002: 25) While Lévinas seems to echo this concept of response towards God, his response centres on the ethical command. We are not reliant on God to act, because God calls us to act (as if on his behalf). 34 This is a conclusion that I have been wrestling with more as I have finished the book. It is easy to oversimplify the concept of a ‘beyond’ in addiction, both in terms of having a life free of addiction, and the suggestion that Kierkegaard’s subject becomes completely free. He says that this is the task of a lifetime, which, in later deliberations on addictive experience might actually be more in line with the Twelve Steps continuous struggle than I had originally thought. 35 See, for instance, Dossett, Bacon and Knowles on Alternative Salvations: Engaging the Sacred and the Secular (2017). 36 As seen, for example, in accounts of ‘maturing out of addiction’ (Lewis 2015), and the documented presence of spontaneous recovery. Cook cites various examples in his chapter ‘An Addiction in Context’ (2006: 29). 37 To use learning theory as outlined in Lewis’ account of addiction (2015). 38 She references AA specifically, though I will include this in the general conceptualization of Twelve Steps (Murphy 2015: 28). 39 I have earlier suggested that it is similarly problematic to treat addiction just as the physical symptoms ‘using pharmacological treatment’ (Murphy 2015: 28). 40 In The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis writes that ‘every concept must be dealt with by the science to which it belongs’ (35). 41 The subject here defined as carer or family member. 42 The relation between addicted people and carers is strongly akin to Lévinas, if they are as Bernet describes them to be: ‘a present that imposes itself from the outside and in an unpredictable manner, by exhibiting its discontinuity with what precedes it or comes after it’ (2002: 90). 43 Lévinas develops this in Totality and Infinity through the concept of pardon. I have limited the discourse to a hopeful relational subjectivity for the sake of cohesion and simplicity. 44 Dodes and Dodes note that ‘women especially are conditioned in AA to be very hard on themselves. … A person learns to tell their story in the way that others will find acceptable’ (2014: 118). 45 Common mantras found in the Twelve Steps, as cited by Dodes and Dodes (2014: 140, 144).

Notes

220

46 Bristow-Braitman, citing Brown et al., documented that in 1995 ‘Ninetyfive percent of inpatient addiction treatment programs in the United States incorporate AA and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) at some level’ (1995: 414). These figures seem to generally correspond with current data, as seen in, for example, Murphy (2015).

Conclusion 1 This was particularly developed through exposure and engagement with Dr. Wendy Dossett’s ‘Higher Power Project’, based at the University of Chester (2015, 2017).

Bibliography Adam, M. B. (2012). ‘A Hope Diminished: Limitations of a Moltmannian Theology of Hope’. Pro Ecclesia, XXI (4), 351–74. Adams, R. M. (1990). ‘The Knight of Faith’. Faith and Philosophy, 7 (4), 383–95. Alcoholics Anonymous. (1981). Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. Alcoholics Anonymous. (2001). Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book. 4th ed. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. (1953/2002). Alcoholics Anonymous – Big Book. Center City, MN: Hazelden Distributed Titles. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association. Arbaugh, G. E. and Arbaugh, G. B. (1968). Kierkegaard’s Authorship. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Bacon, H., Knowles, S. and Dosset, W. (2015). Alternative Salvations: Engaging the Sacred and the Secular. London: Bloomsbury. Barrett, L. (1985). ‘Kierkegaard’s “Anxiety” and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety, 35–62. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Baumeister, R. F. and Vohns, K. D. (2007). ‘Self-Regulation, Ego Depletion, and Motivation’. In Social and Personality Psychology Compass [Online], 1 (1), 115–28. Bègue, L. (2016). The Psychology of Good and Evil. J. Andri (trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Bergo, B. G. (1999). Lévinas Between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty That Adorns the Earth. Dordecht: Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. Bergo, B. (2005). ‘Ontology, Transcendence, and Immanence in Emmanuel Levinas’ Philosophy’. Research in Phenomenology, 35, 141–80. Bernard-Donals, M. (2005). ‘Difficult Freedom. Lévinas, Language and Politics’. Diacritics. [Online], 3, 62–77. Bernet, R. (2002). ‘Lévinas’s Critique of Husserl’. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82–99. Bernstein, R. (2002). ‘Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy’. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 252–67.

222

Bibliography

Berry, W. (2002). The Art of the Commonplace. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Berthold, D. (2009). ‘Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness’. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology. [Online], 16 (4), 299–311. Bertman, B. (2016). ‘The Meaning of the Word “God” in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas: A Chronological Perspective. Conference Paper, Tolouse, France. The Neighbour and the Stranger, 4–8 July 2016. Binks, C., Jones, F. W. and Knight, K. (2013). ‘Facilitating Reflective Practice Groups in Clinical Psychology Training: A Phenomenological Study’. International Multidisciplinary Perspectives. [Online], 14 (3), 305–18. Black, D. W. (2007). ‘A Review of Compulsive Buying Disorder’. World Psychiatry. [Online] 6 (1), 14–18. Blanchard, B. (1969). ‘Kierkegaard on Faith’. In Essays on Kierkegaard. J. H. Gill (ed.). Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing. Bloningen, D. M., Timko, C., Finney, J. W., Moos, B. S. and Moos, R. H. (2011). ‘Alcoholics Anonymous Attendance, Decreases in Impulsivity and Psychosocial Outcomes over 16 Years: Moderated-Mediation from a Developmental Perspective’. Addiction. [Online], 106 (12), 2167–77. Borkowski, R. (2016). ‘Correspondence on Hypostasis and Levinas’. [Email]. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Volume 1. Attachment. London: Pimlico. Bridge, G. (2016). The Significance Delusion: Unlocking our Thinking for our Children’s Future. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing. Bristow-Braitman, A. (1995). ‘Addiction Recovery: 12-Step Programs and CognitiveBehavioural Psychology’. Journal of Counseling & Development. [Online], 73 (4), 414–8. Brown, B. (March 2012). Brené Brown: Listening to Shame. TED Talks. [Video file] Available at: https​://ww​w.ted​.com/​talks​/bren​e_bro​wn_li​steni​ng_to​_sham​e (Accessed 4 May 2017). Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou. W. Kaufman (trans.). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Carel, H. (2008). Illness: The Art of Living. Stocksfield: Acumen. Carel, H. (2016). Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carel, H. and Macnaughton, J. (2016). ‘Breathing and Breathlessness in Clinic and Culture: Using Critical Medical Humanities to Bridge an Epistemic Gap’. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. A. Whitehead, A. Woods, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton and J. Richards (eds). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 294–309. Carter, A. and Hall, W. (2012). Addiction Neuroethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

223

Caruana, J. (2006). ‘Not Ethics, Not Ethics Alone, but the Holy’. Journal of Religious Ethics. [Online], 34 (4), 561–83. Caruso, G. and Flanagan, O. (2018). Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalier, C. (2002). ‘Lévinas and the Talmud’. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 100–18. Chanter, T. (2001). Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Chapman, A. (2012). Ethics, the Law, and Public Health. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chen, G. (2010). ‘Addiction and Recovering from the Perspective of Existentialism, Buddhism and the 12-Step Program’. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. [Online], 42 (3), 363–75. Chung, C. and Pennebaker, J. (2007). ‘The Psychological Functions of Function Words’. In Social Communication. New York: Psychology Press, 343–59. Cohen, R. (1994). Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Lévinas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, R. (1998). ‘Forward’. In Otherwise Than Being. A. Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Cohen, R. A. (2003). ‘Introduction’. In N. Poller (trans.), Humanism of the Other. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Cohen, R. (2006). ‘Introduction’. In Humanism of the Other. N. Poller (trans.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Cohen, R. (2010). Lévinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy and Religion. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Cohen-Lévinas, D. (2015). Être Juif: Suivi d’une Lettre à Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Rivages. Cohn Eskenazi, T., Philips, G. and Jobling, D. (2003). Lévinas and Biblical Studies. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Collins, J. (1953). The Mind of Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cook, C. C. H. (2006). Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, S. (2002). ‘Introduction’. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, S. (2014). Ethics of Deconstuction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cross, A. (1997). ‘Neither Either Nor Or: The Perils of Reflexive Irony’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, pp. 125–53). A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

224

Bibliography

Cross, A. (1998). ‘Neither Either Nor Or: The Perils of Reflexive Irony’. In Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 125–53. Crown of England. (2015). ‘Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Dependence’. Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. [Online] Dalton, D. (2006). ‘The Pains of Contraction: Understanding Creation in Levinas through Schelling’. Studia Phaenomenologica, VI, 215–60. Davenport, J. (2008). ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling’. In Ethics, Love and Faith in Kierkegaard. E. F. Mooney (ed.). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 196–233. Davenport, J. (2013). ‘Selfhood and “Spirit”’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 230–51. Davenport, J. (2016). ‘Selfhood and Spirit’. In J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 231–51. Davies, P. (2002). ‘Sincerity and the End of Theodicy: Three Remarks on Lévinas and Kant’. The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 161–87. DeGrazia, D. (2005). Human Identity and Bioethics. New York: Cambridge University Press. De Miranda, J. (2006). ‘Recovery Inside San Quentin Prison, Training Inmate Counselors’. Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly, 18 (39), 5. deQuincey, T. (2009). Confessions of an Opium-Eater. London: Wordsworth Editions. DeRick, A., Vanheule, S. and Verhaegue, P. (2009). ‘Alcohol Addiction and the Attachment System: An Empirical Study of Attachment Style, Alexithymia, and Psychiatric Disorders in Alcoholic Inpatients’. Substance Use and Misuse, 44 (1), 99–114. Derrida, J. (1998). ‘Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)’Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. J. Rée and J. Chamberlain (eds). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 151–74. Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu. P. A. Brault and M. Nass (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Deuser, H. (1998). ‘Religious Dialectics and Christology’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 376–96. Dodes, L. and Dodes, Z. (2014). The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind the 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry. Boston: Beacon Press. Dreyfus, H. and Rubin, J. (1994). ‘Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age: The Case of Commitment as Addiction’. Synthese. [Online], 98 (1), 3–19. Dunning, S. (1985). ‘Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 7–34.

Bibliography

225

Dunnington, K. (2011). Addiction and Virtue. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Dupré, L. (1985). ‘Of Time and Eternity’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 111–32. Evans, C. S. and Roberts, R. C. (2013). ‘Ethics’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press 211–29. Eliot, T. S. (1969). The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Fackenheim, E. (1999). What is Judaism? New York: First Syracuse University Press. Ferreira, J. M. (1998). ‘Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap’. In Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207–34. Ferreira, J. M. (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferreira, J. M. (2008). ‘The Problematic Agapeistic Ideal — Again’. In Ethics, Love and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements. Mooney, E. F. (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 93–110. Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of Moral Personality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Frances, A. (2012). ‘Mislabelling Medical Illness as Mental Disorder’. Psychology Today [Online]. Fotuhi, O. and Cohen, G. L. (2016). ‘Self-Affirmation Intervention’. In Addictions: A Social Psychological Perspective. C. E. Kopetz and C. W. Lejuez (eds). London: Routledge, 235–56. Giordano, S. (2005). Understanding Eating Disorders. New York City: Oxford University Press. Goodhart, S. (1996). Sacrificing Commentary. Baltimore, MA: The John Hopkins University Press. Goodman, A. (1990). ‘Addiction: Definition and Implications’. British Journal of Addiction. 85, 1403–8. Goodman, A. (1998). Sexual Addiction: An Integrated Approach. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Green, R. M. (1985). ‘The Limits of the Ethical in Kierkegaard’s the Concept of Anxiety and Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 69–88. Groman, S., Morales A., Lee, B., London, E. D. and Jentsch, J. D. (2013). ‘Methamphetamine-induced Increases in Putamen Gray Matter Associate with Inhibitory Control’. Psychopharmacology, 229 (3), 527–38. Gross, J. (2012). The Ongoing Creation of Humanity: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethical Sense of ‘Chosen People’ [Thesis]. Washington, DC: Georgetown University.

226

Bibliography

Grøn, A. (2008a). The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Grøn, A. (2008b). ‘Subjectivity, Interiority and Exteriority: Kierkegaard and Lévinas’. In Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Lévinas. C. Welz and K. Verstrynge (eds). London: Turnshare Ltd, 11–30. Grøn, A. (2013). ‘Time and History’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 271–91. Hall, A. L. (2002). Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love. London: Cambridge University Press. Hall, P. (2013). ‘Sex Addiction — An Extraordinarily Contentious Problem’. In Sexual and Relationship Therapy. [Online] 29 (1), 68–75. Hall, R. L. (1985). ‘Language and Freedom: Kierkegaard’s Analysis of the Demonic’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. R. L. Perkins (ed.). Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 153–66. Hand, S. (ed.). (1989). The Lévinas Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Hannay, A. (1982). Kierkegaard. London: Routledge. Hannay, A. (1985). ‘Introduction’. In S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. New York: Penguin. Hannay, A. (1998). ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 329–48. Hannay, A. (2003). Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays. Abingdon: Routledge. Hannay, A. (2004). ‘Introduction’. In The Sickness Unto Death. London: Penguin Books. Hannay, A. (2013). ‘Translating Kierkegaard’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 385–401. Hari, J. (2015). ‘Everything You Think You Know about Addiction Is Wrong’. TED Talk. [online]. Hari, J. (2016). ‘The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think’. The Huffington Post. [Online] Hirschman, E. (1992). ‘Recovering from Drug Addiction: A Phenomenological Account’. Advances in Consumer Research [Online], 19, 542–9. Holton, R. (2009). Willing, Wanting, Waiting. New York: Oxford University Press. Humphreys, K. (2004). Circles of Recovery: Self-Help Organisations for Addictions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Humphreys, K. and Bickel, W. K. (2018). ‘Toward a Neuroscience of Long-Term Recovery from Addiction’. JAMA Psychiatry, 75 (9), 875–6. Hänninen, V. and Koski-Jännes, A. (1999). ‘Narratives of Recovery from Addictive Behaviours’. Addiction. [Online], 94 (12), 1837–48.

Bibliography

227

Hühn, L. and Schwabb, P. (2013). ‘Kierkegaard and German Idealism’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). London: Oxford University Press, 62–93. Inouye, D. (2003). ‘Levinas’ Hypostasis: Three Implications for Psychology’. Paper Presented to the International Conference on Psychology for the Other, Seattle University, Washington. Jaarsma, A. (2012, Fall) ‘Invited Review Essays’. Hypatia. [Online], 27 (4), 922–8. Jackson, T. (1998). ‘Arminian Edification: Kierkegaard on Grace and Free Will’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 235–56. Jaspers, K. (1997/1959). General Psychopathology. J. Hoenig (trans.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kangas, D. and Kavka, M. (2008). ‘Hearing, Patiently: Time and Salvation in Kierkegaard and Levinas’. In Kierkegaard and Lévinas: Ethics, Politiccs and Religion. J. A. Simmons and D. Wood (eds). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 125–52. Katehakis, A. (2016). Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation. New York: Norton & Co., Inc. Katz, C. E. (2012). Lévinas and the Crisis of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaufman, W. (1992). Basic Writings on Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library. Keane, H. (2012). ‘Editorial: Diagnosing Drug Problems and the DSM’. Contemporary Drug Problems. [Online], 39, 353–70. Kearney, R. (2009). ‘Returning to God after God: Lévinas, Derrida, Ricoeur’. Research in Phenomenology, 39, 167–83. Kendell, R. E. (2002). ‘The Distinction Between Personality Disorder and Mental Illness’. The British Journal of Psychiatry. [Online], 180 (2), 110–15. Kendall, P. C. and Braswell, L. (1993). Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Impulsive Children, Second Edition. New York: Guildford Press. Kerns-Zucco, R. (1998). ‘Critical Theory, Hermeneutics, and Addiction Recovery’. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 18 (1), 40–53. Kierkegaard, S. (1962). The Present Age. A. Dru (trans.). NYC: Harper & Row, Publishers. Kierkegaard, S. (1968). Concluding Unscientific Postscript. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie (trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The Concept of Anxiety. R. Thomte (trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Either/Or. A. Hannay (trans.). London: Penguin. Kierkegaard, S. (1993). Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. H. Hong (trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

228

Bibliography

Kierkegaard, S. (1995A). Fruktan och Bävan. R. Hejll (trans.). Reboda: Nimrod. Kierkegaard, S. (1995B). Upprepningen. S. Borg (trans.). Reboda: Nimrod. Kierkegaard, S. (2004). The Sickness Unto Death. A. Hannay (trans.). London: Penguin. Kierkegaard, S. (2009a). Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. M. G. Piety (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (2009b). Works of Love. H. and E. Hong (trans.) New York: HarperCollins. Kierkegaard, S. (2010). Spiritual Writings. G. Pattison (trans.). New York: HarperCollins. Kirmmse, B. H. (1998). ‘“Out with It!”: The Modern Breakthrough, Kierkegaard and Denmark’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–14. Kirmmse, B. H. (2013). ‘Kierkegaard and the End of the Danish Golden Age’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 28–43. Knapp, C. (1996). Drinking: A Love Story. New York: Random House. Kopetz, C. E. and Lejuez, C. W. (2015). Addictions: A Social Psychological Perspective. London: Routledge. Kurtz, E. and White, W. L. (2015). ‘Recovery Spirituality’. Religions. [Online], 6, 58–81. Elisabeth, L.. (1993). Twelve Steps for Overeaters: A Interpretation of the Twelve Steps of Overeaters Anonymous. Center City, MN: Hazelden Foundation. Langermann, Y. T. (2011). Monotheism and Ethics: Historical and Contemporary Intersections. Leiden: Brill. Large, W. (2015). Lévinas’ ‘Totality and Infinity’: A Reader’s Guide. London: Bloomsbury. Léon, C. (2008). The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Lévinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. A. Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lévinas, E. (1978). Autrement Qu’être ou Au-delà de L’essence. P. J. Enthoven, (ed.). Paris: Kluwer Academic. Lévinas, E. (1982a). Entre Nous. J. P. Enthoven (ed.). Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle. Lévinas, E. (1982b). Éthique et Infini. Paris: Librarie Artheme Fayard. Lévinas, E. (1983). Le Temps et L’Autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lévinas, E. (1988). ‘Useless Suffering’. In Entre Nous. R. Cohen (trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 156–67.

Bibliography

229

Lévinas, E. (1990). Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. S. Hand (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lévinas, E. (1993). Dieu, la Mort et le Temps. J. P. Enthoven (ed.). Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle. Lévinas, E. (1994). Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. G. Mole (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lévinas, E. (1995). Alterité et Transcendence. J. P. Enthoven (ed.). Paris: Fata Morgana. Lévinas, E. (1996a). ‘God and Philosophy’. In Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. R. Bernasconi (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lévinas, E. (1996b). Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. R. Bernasconi (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lévinas, E. (1997). Difficult Freedom. Hand, S. (trans.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lévinas, E. (1998a). ‘Existence and Ethics’. In Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. J. Rée and J. Chamberlain (eds). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 26–38. Lévinas, E. (1998b). Otherwise than Being. A. Lingis (trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lévinas, E. (1998c). Of God Who Comes to Mind. B. Bergo (trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lévinas, E. (2001). Existence and Existents. A. Lingis (trans.). Duquesne: Duquesnen University Press. Lévinas, E. (2001a). ‘Interview with Salomon Malka (1984)’. In Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. J. Robbins (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 93–104. Lévinas, E. (2001b). ‘Being-for-the-Other (1989)’. In Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. J. Robbins (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 114–20. Lévinas, E. (2001c). ‘Interview with Myriam Anissimonv (1985)’. In Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas. J. Robbins (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 84–93. Lévinas, E. (2001d). ‘Interview with François Poirié (1986)’. In Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas. J. Robbins (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 23–83. Lévinas, E. (2001e). ‘The Philosopher and Death (1982)’. In Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas. J. Robbins (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 121–9. Lévinas, E. (2003). Humanism of the Other. N. Poller (trans.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

230

Bibliography

Levy, N. (2011). ‘Addiction, Responsibility and Ego Depletion’. In Addiction and Responsibility. London: MIT Press, 89–111. Lewis, M. (2015). The Biology of Desire. Philadelphia: PublicAffairs. Lingis, A. (1969). ‘Introduction’. In Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Dusquesne University Press. Lippitt, J. (2013). Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippitt, J. (2014). ‘Forgiveness’. In Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 15: Kierkegaard’s Concepts. S. Emmanuel,, W. McDonald and J. Steward (eds). Farnham: Ashgate, 81–8. Llewelyn, J. (2002). ‘Lévinas and Language’. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 119–38. Llewelyn, J. (2008). ‘Who or What or Whot?’ In Kierkegaard and Lévinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion. J. A. Simmons and D. Wood (eds). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 69–81. Lopez, M. B. (2009). ‘Issues of Community in O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and Kierkegaard’s “Works of Love”’. The Eugene O’Neill Review. [Online], 31, 67–78. MacAvoy, L. (2009). ‘Review: Emmanuel Lévinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First’. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews [Online], 1. Magurshak, D. (1985). ‘The Keystone of the Kierkegaard-Heidegger Relationship’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. Perkins, R. L. (ed.) Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 167–96. Maté, G. (2008). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Toronto: Random House. Mathews, R., Carter, A. and Hall, W. (2012). ‘The Implications of Genetic Research on Alcohol Dependence for Prevention and Treatment’. In Genetic Research on Addiction: Ethics, the Law and Public Health. Chapman, A. (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2. Mathis, G. M., Ferrari, J. R., Groh, D. R. and Jason, L. A. (2009). ‘Hope and Substance Abuse Recovery: The Impact of Agency and Pathways within an Abstinent Communal-Living Setting’. Journal of Groups in Addiction and Recovery. [Online] 4 (1), 42–50. Matustík, M. B. (2008). ‘More Than All the Others’. In Kierkegaard and Lévinas: Ethics, Politics and Religion. J. A. Simmons and D. Wood (eds) Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 244–56. May, G. G. (1988/2007). Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions. Bravo Ltd. May, G. G. (2005). The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth. New York: HarperOne.

Bibliography

231

Mayama, A. (2010). Emmanuel Lévinas’ Conceptual Affinities with Liberation Theology. Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing. McCarthy, V. A. (1985). ‘Schelling and Kierkegaard on Freedom and Fall’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 89–111. McKim, W. A. and Hancock, S. (2013). Drugs and Behaviour: And Introduction to Behavioural Pharmacology. Toronto: Pearson. McLachlan, J. M. (1986). ‘Shestov’s Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard’. Canadian Slavonic Papers. [Online] 28 (2), 174–86. Miller, M. (February 2015). ‘The Relevance of Twelve-Step Recovery in 21st Century Medicine’. American Society of Addiction Medicine [Online], 1. Molloy-Vaughan, S. (2016). ‘7 Things That Happen When You’re the Child of an Alcoholic’. [Online] Buzzfeed. Mooney, E. F. (1998). ‘Repetition: Getting the World Back’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 282–307. Morse, S. J. (2011). ‘Addiction and Criminal Responsibility’. In Addiction and Responsibility. J. Poland and G. Graham (eds) London: MIT Press, 159–200. Muller, C. P. and Schumann, G. (2011). ‘Drugs as Instruments: A New Framework for Non-addictive Psychoactive Drug Use’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences. [Online] 34 (6), 293–310. Murphy, C. (2014). ‘Negotiating Stigma: Constructing and Performing a “Normal” Identity’. In Addiction and Performance. J. Reynolds and Z. Zontou (eds) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 100–15. Murphy, J. (2015). Illness or Deviance? Drug Courts, Drug Treatment, and the Ambiguity of Addiction. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Nealon, J. (1995). ‘“Junk” and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs’. Postmodern Culture. 6 (1), 1–39. Neff, C. (2016). ‘Local Officials Bring for The Cradle Act to Help Babies Born Addicted to Opioid Drugs’. The Register Herald. 15 February. [Online]. Neiman, S. (2002). Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nietszche, F. (1990). Beyond Good and Evil. R. J. Hollingdale (trans.) London: Penguin. Norris, C. (2006). ‘Fictions of Authority: Narrative and Viewpoint in Kierkegaard’s Writing’ [Online]. Wayne State University Press, 87–107. Nouwen, H. (1999). The Only Necessary Thing. W. W. Greer (ed.) New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Nutt, D. J. (2010). ‘Antagonist-Agonist Combinations as Therapies for Heroin Addiction: Back to the Future?’. Journal of Psychopharmacology. [Online] 42 (2), 141–5.

232

Bibliography

Orford, J. (1995). Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of Addiction. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Orford, J. (2001). ‘Addiction as Excessive Appetite’. Addiction. [Online] 96 (1), 15–31. Orford, J. (2013). Power, Powerlessness and Addiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orford, J. (2015). ‘Jim Orford on Beyond Excessive Appetites: A Power and Powerlessness Theory of Everything in Addiction’. Film Exchange on Alcohol & Drugs. [Online]. Osolsobe, P. (1992). ‘Kierkegaard’s Aesthetics of Music: A Concept of the Musical Erotic’. Sbornik praci Filozofcke Fakulty Brnenske Univerzity. [Online] 27–8, 97–106. Pattison, G. (2013). ‘Kierkegaard and Copenhagen’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 44–62. Peperzak, A. T. (1995). Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. London: Routledge. Perez, F. (2001). D’une Sensibilité a L’autre dans a Pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: L’Harmattan. Perez, M., Kroon Van Diest, A. and Cutts, S. (2014). ‘Preliminary Examination of a Program for Eating Disorders’. Journal of Eating Disorders. [Online] 2 (24). Pickard, H. (2012). ‘The Purpose in Chronic Addiction’. AJOB Neuroscience. [Online] 3(2), 40–9. Pickard, H. and Pearce, S. (2012). ‘How Therapeutic Communities Work: Specific Factors Related to Positive Outcome’. International Journal of Social Psychiatry. [Online] 59 (7), 636–45. Podmore, S. D. (2009). ‘Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-Forgiveness and Despair’. Journal of Psychology and Theology. [Online] 37 (3), 174–85. Podmore, S. D. (2011). Kierkegaard and the Self Before God. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Poland, J. and Graham, G. (2011). Addiction and Responsibility. London: MIT Press. Poleshchuk, I. (2014). ‘The Ethics of Futurity: Messianish and Intersubjectivity’. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. [Online] 4, 5 (1), 56–66. Poole, R. (1998). ‘The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions’. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino (eds) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 48–75. Public Health England (2015). Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs. [Online]. Available at: https​://ww​w.gov​.uk/g​overn​ment/​publi​catio​ns?de​partm​ents%​5B%5D​= advi​sory-​counc​il-on​-the-​misus​e-of-​drugs​(Accessed 27 May 2017).

Bibliography

233

Putnam, H. (2002). ‘Lévinas and Judaism’. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33–62. Quinn, P. L. (1998). ‘Kierkegaard’s Christian Ethics’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. D. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 349–75. Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raz, J. (2007). ‘Human Rights without Foundations’. Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper. 14. Rée, J. and Chamberlain, J. (1998). Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Reinert, R. (1968). ‘The Concept of Alcoholism as Bad Habit’. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. 32, 35–46. Ricoeur, P. (1998). ‘Philosophy after Kierkegaard’. In Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Rée, J. and Chamberlain, J. (eds). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 9–25. Ricoeur, P. (2012). On Psychoanalysis. P. Pellauer (trans.) Cambridge: Polity Press. Ringwald, C. (2002). The Soul of Recovery: Uncovering the Spiritual Dimension in the Treatment of Addictions. Oxford; Oxford University Press. Roberts, D. (2014). ‘In Defense of the Defenseless: Kierkegaard’s Critique of an Accepted Narcissism’. Heythrop Journal. 55 (5), 827–44. Roberts, R. C. (1985). ‘The Socratic Knowledge of God’. In IKC: The Concept of Anxiety. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 133–53. Roberts, R. C. (1998). ‘Existence, Emotion, and Virtue: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 155–77 Rogers, C. (1951). Client-Centred Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Rosenberg, K. P., Carnes, P. and O’Connor, S. (2014) ‘Evaluation and Treatment of Sex Addiction’. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. [Online] 40 (2), 77–91. Sagi, A. (2000). Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self. B. Stein, trans. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V. Sartre, J. P. (2007). Existentialism Is a Humanism. London: Yale University Press. Satel, S. and Lilienfield, S. O. (2013). ‘Addiction and the Brain-Disease Fallacy’. Front Psychiatry. [Online] 4, 141–4. Scarry, E. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schalow, F. (2017). Toward a Phenomenology of Addiction: Embodiment, Technology, Transcendence. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

234

Bibliography

Schermer, V. (2003). Spirit & Psyche. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd. Sebbah, F-D. (2000). Lévinas: Ambiguïtés de L’altérité. Paris: Société d’édition les Belles Lettres. Sellman, J., Baker, M., Adamson, S. and Geering, L. (2007). ‘Future of God in Recovery from Drug Addiction’. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. [Online] 41, 800–8. Shakespeare, S. (2013). Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God. [no city]: The Educational Publisher Inc. Shakespeare, W. (2008) The Complete Sonnets and Poems: The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shestov, L. (1969). Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. E. Hewitt (trans.) [Online]. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Shorter, E. (2015). What Psychiatry Left Out of the DSM-5: Historical Mental Disorders Today. New York: Taylor and Francis. Schuster, M. (2015). ‘On the Ethical Basis of Language’. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. [Online] 14 (2): 241–67. Simon, J. (2009). ‘Making Ethical Sense of Useless Suffering with Levinas’. In The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust. J. L. Geddes J. K. Roth and J. Simon (eds). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 133–54. Simmons, J. A. (2008). ‘Existential Appropriations: The Influence of Jean Wahl on Levinas’ Reading of Kierkegaard’. In Kierkegaard and Lévinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 41–68. Simmons, J. A., and Wood, D. (2008). ‘Introduction: Good Fences May Not Make Good Neighbours After All’. In Kierkegaard and Lévinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1–20 Sisti, D., Young, M. and Caplan, A. (2013). ‘Defining Mental Illness: Can Values and Objectivity Get Along?’ BMC Psychiatry. [Online] 13, 346. Smith, M. (2005). ‘Chalier’s Lévinas’. In Emmanuel Lévinas. C. Katz and L. Trout (eds). London: Routledge Press, 22–30. Stanghellini, G. (2004). Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The Psychopathology of Common Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, D. J., Phillips, K. A., Bolton, D., Fulford, K. W. M., Sadler, J. Z. and Kendler, K. S. (2010). ‘What is a Mental/Psychiatric Disorder? From DSM-IV to DSM-V’. Psychology Medicine [Online] 40 (11), 1759–65. Stern, D. (ed.) (1998). Complete Jewish Bible. Clarksville, MD: Messianic Jewish Publishers and London: Routledge. Stimmel, B. (2015). Opiate Receptors, Neurotransmitters, and Drug Dependence: Basic Science-Clinical Correlates. Strhan, A. (2012). Lévinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. [Online]. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bibliography

235

Svenaeus, F. (2001). ‘The Phenomenology of Health and Illness’. Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine. Dordrecht: Springer, 87–108. Svenaeus, F. (2016). ‘What Is Phenomenology of Medicine? Embodiment, Illness and Being-in-the-World’. In H. Carel and R. Cooper (eds), Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays. New York: Acumen Publishing, 97–111. Tajafuerce, B. S. (2016). ‘The Neighbour as a Figure of Radical Alterity: On Kierkegaard’s Account of Christian Love. [Conference Paper, Tolouse, France. The Neighbour and the Stranger, 4–8 July 2016]. Taub, S. (2011). God of Our Understanding. Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House. Timko, C. (2006). ‘Intensive Referral to 12-Step Self-Help Groups and 6-Month Substance Use Disorder Outcomes’. Addiction. [Online] 101, 678–88. Timmons, S. (2012). ‘A Christian Faith-Based Recovery Theory: Understanding God as Sponsor’. Journal of Religious Health. London: Springer Press, 1152–64. Tietjen, A. and Evans, S. (2011). ‘Kierkegaard as a Christian Psychologist’. Journal of Psychology and Christianity. 30 (4), 274–83. Torrance, A. B. (2016). The Freedom to Become a Christian. London: Bloomsbury. Torrens, M., Mestre-Pinto, J. I. and Domingo-Salvany, A. (2015). Comorbidity of Substance Use and Mental Disorders in Europe. [Online] Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Trainspotting 2. (2017). Danny Boyle (dir.) GB: DNA Films, TriStar Pictures. Tullberg, S. (2013). ‘The Textual Inheritance’. In The Oxford Handbook to Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 11–27. Urbano, R. (2012). ‘Lévinas on God, Religion, Idolatry and Atheism’. Logos 15 (1), 50–81. Waldenfels, B. (2002). ‘Lévinas and the Face of the Other’. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82–99. Waldenfels, B. (2005). ‘Levinas on the Saying and the Said’. In Addressing Lévinas. E. Nelson, A. Kapust and K. Still (eds). [Online] Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 86–97. Walsh, S. (2013). ‘Kierkegaard’s Theology’. In The Oxford Handbook to Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 292–308. Wells, A. (2012). ‘On Ethics and ChristEianity: KierkEegaard and Lévinas’. In Heythrop Journal, 53 (1), 71–80. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00670.x Welz, C. (2007). ‘Reasons for Having no Reason to Defend God: Kant, Kierkegaard, Levinas and their Alternatives to Theodicy’. In Wrestling with God and with Evil. Philosophical Reflections. Vroom, H. M. (ed.) New York: Rodopi, 167–87. Welz, C. (2013). ‘Kierkegaard and Phenomenology’. In The Oxford Handbook to Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 440–63. Welz, C. and Verstryne, K., eds (2008). Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas. London: Turnshare Ltd.

236

Bibliography

Welz, C. (2012). ‘Human Perfection: Overcoming Oneself: A Discussion of Kierkegaard’s Four Upbuilding Discourses from 1844 with Reference to Luther, Heidegger, and Simone Weil’. In Kierkegaard in Lisbon: Contemporary Readings of Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments and the 1843 and 1844 Upbuilding Discourses. [Online]. Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa e Autores, 97–116. Westin, A. (2016). ‘The Potentiality of a Healthy Self: Evaluating Progressively Empowered Internalisation and Diagnosis through the Lens of Existential Epistemology’. The New Bioethics. [Online] 22 (3), 229–36. Westphal, M. (1998). ‘Kierkegaard and Hegel’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds) 101–24. Westphal, M. (2000). ‘Commanded Love and Divine Transcendence in Lévinas and Kierkegaard’. In The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Levinas. J. Bloechl (ed.) New York City: Fordham University Press, 200–23. Westphal, M. (2008a). Lévinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Westphal, M. (2008b). ‘The Many Faces of Levinas as a Reader of Kierkegaard’. In Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics and Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 22–40. Westphal, M. (2013). ‘Society, Politics, and Modernity’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 309–27. Wiers, R. W., Becker, D., Holland, R., Moggi, F., Lejuez, C. W. and Yield, A. (2016). ‘Cognitive Motivational Processes Underlying Addiction Treatment’. In Addiction. C. E. Kopetz and C. W. Lejuez (eds). New York: Psychology Press, 201–36. Wild, J. (1969). ‘Introduction’. In Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 11–20. Wood, D. (1998). ‘Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard’. In Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. J. Rée and J. Chamberlain (eds) Oxford: Blackwell, 53–74. Wyschogrod, E. (2000). The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press. Wyschogrod, E. (2002). ‘Language and Alterity in the Thought of Lévinas’. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. S. D. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 188–205.

Index abstinence  81, 90, 93, 94, 114, 115, 117, 142, 143, 164, 165, 170, 171, 218 nn.24, 32 addiction, see also subtopics sex  64, 193 n.10, 195 nn.19, 20, 202 n.44 alcohol  31, 193 n.2 drug  62 alcohol  1, 12, 15, 22, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 44, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 90, 114, 116, 136, 138, 142, 160, 165, 174, 179, 187, 188, 193 nn.2, 4, 194 n.16, 197 n.45, 202 n.44, 203 n.5, 213 n.49, 215 n.6, 216 n.11 alcoholic, see alcoholism Alcoholics Anonymous  21, 22, 35, 36, 37, 68, 215 n.6, 216 n.11 alcoholism  26, 30, 36, 138, 142, 164 anxiety  13, 14, 30, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 131, 137, 138, 143, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 171, 175, 178, 179, 182, 184, 206 nn.13, 16, 17, 18, 207 n.25, 208 n.26, 216 n.7 behaviour  6, 8, 10, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 45, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 85, 86, 88, 104, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 135, 139, 142, 160, 161, 162, 166, 174, 176, 177, 182, 185, 186, 187, 194 nn.12, 15, 16, 195 nn.19, 23, 24, 196 nn.29, 32, 197 nn.38, 43, 202 nn.43, 44, 215 n.2, 216 nn.8, 9, 218 n.31 behavioural, see behaviour Bible  4, 32, 49, 53, 54, 199 nn.15, 19, 21, 23, 200 n.23

body  4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 47, 60, 82, 107, 108, 109, 110, 130, 136, 141, 149, 151, 163, 166, 173, 194 n.16, 202 n.42, 206 n.19, 207 n.20, 209 n.10 capacity  20, 24, 26, 48, 64, 76, 80, 86, 100, 108, 111, 114, 141, 153, 160, 164, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182, 187, 193 n.3, 202 n.40, 213 n.48 Carel  6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 46, 47, 186, 191 n.4 Christian  5, 35, 38, 92, 193 n.4, 206 n.11, 218 nn.29, 30, see also Christianity Christianity  126, 151, 153, 214 n.4 The Concept of Anxiety  103, 105–6, 108, 111–12, 115–16, 119, 127, 130, 150, 179, 192 n.11, 205 n.3, 214 n.10, 217 n.17, 219 n.40 counselling  1 Critchley  5, 44, 46, 47, 52, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 83, 198 nn.4, 5 Derrida, J.  48, 198 n.8, 210 n.24 desire  2, 12, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 81, 83, 87, 91, 120, 124, 137, 141, 147, 150, 153, 154, 167, 170, 174, 177, 181, 186, 187, 195 n.24, 197 n.42, 201 nn.33, 34 despair  10, 13, 14, 31, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 112, 115, 118, 126, 129, 130, 131, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 147, 148, 150, 154, 156, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 175, 178, 179, 182, 205 n.5, 209 n.4, 210 nn.15, 22, 212 n.47 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)  4, 31, 32, 188, 191 n.1, 196 nn.27, 30

238

Index

dialogue  36, 43, 54, 69, 70, 83, 84, 87, 88, 124, 159, 168, 204 n.18 Difficult Freedom  53, 54, 58, 73, 196 n.34, 206 n.6 disease  4, 6, 7, 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 76, 164, 179, 184, 191 nn.2, 4, 193 n.6, 196 n.27, 204 nn.25, 26, 215 n.2, 217 n.19, 233 drink  21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 40, 58, 61, 63, 64, 67, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 109, 116, 135, 140, 142, 161, 167, 181, 187, 197 n.45, 216 nn.7, 8, 14, 218 n.32 drinking, see drink drugs  19, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 44, 62, 63, 142, 194 nn.12, 16, 196 n.35, 197 n.45 ego  12, 14, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 88, 99, 147, 148, 153, 154, 155, 163, 165, 169, 170, 177, 181, 195 n.4, 196 n.1, 201 n.32, 202 n.45 esse  49, 55, 92 Ethics and Infinity  46 excessive appetites  6, 29, 62, 185, 187 Existence and Existents  56, 150, 200 existentialism  6, 13, 47, 74, 99, 101, 102, 113, 148, 171, 206, 215 existential phenomenology  46, 47, 108, 109, 143, 147, 148, 149, 151, 159, 160, 162, 176, 182, 184, 186, 188, 192 n.9, 207 n.24 experience, see subtopics fear  60, 111, 125, 130 Fear and Trembling  122, 127, 130, 214 n.11 Ferreira, J. M.  107, 124, 130, 131, 151, 209 n.14, 210 n.14, 211 nn.32, 35, 213 n.4 freedom  2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 37–40, 43, 48, 51, 69, 70–3, 75–82, 87, 89, 93, 95, 99, 100, 103–5, 108–12, 114–21, 124, 125, 129, 135, 137, 140, 147, 150, 154, 156, 159, 160, 165, 169, 170, 173, 175, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 201 n.35, 202 nn.1, 46, 204 n.19, 206 n.17, 207 nn.20, 21, 209 n.7, 213 n.48, 215 n.2, 216 n.9

entangled  105–8, 111, 115, 207 n.20 existential  164 spontaneous  75, 76, 78, 79 God  11, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 60, 80, 81, 88, 91–5, 101, 102, 105–7, 109, 113, 117, 120, 121, 128–34, 136, 141, 153–5, 157, 159, 166, 171–7, 192 n.9, 196 n.34, 198 n.12, 199 nn.17, 19, 200 nn.24, 28, 201 nn.36, 39, 204 nn.27, 29, 205 n.29, 208 nn.30, 2, 209 nn.4, 7, 10, 12, 210 n.24, 211 nn.27, 28, 33, 213 n.48, 215 nn.1, 5, 216 n.12, 218 nn.28, 29, 33, 219 n.33 Goffman  35 habit  36, 38, 39, 78, 85, 86, 174, 191, 218 health  20, 28, 37, 76, 81, 102, 115, 116, 129, 137, 162, 177, 191 n.4, 196 nn.27, 28, 31, 197 n.45 Hegel  105, 139, 140, 210 n.23, 217 n.24 Heidegger  8, 9, 47, 49, 51, 73, 213 n.1, 217 n.217 heroin  26, 27, 83, 107 Higher Power  14, 23, 34, 37, 38, 40, 76, 77, 80, 81, 91, 92–4, 114, 115, 140, 141, 159, 164, 166, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 182, 186, 204 n.29, 215 n.1, 216 n.11, 218 nn.30, 32, 220 n.1 hineni  52, 54, 55, 92, 99, 153, 157, 169, 172, 173, 200 n.24, 201 n.36 history  20, 23, 54, 107, 193 n.4, 200 n.23 historical  45, 107, 109, 110, 111, 128, 172, 199 n.22, 210 n.18, 218 n.30 holiness  48, 50, 52, 53, 55, 101, 198 nn.8, 12, 201 n.35 holy  48–50, 52, 53, 55, 60, 61, 91, 95, 102, 103, 172, 173, 198 nn.8, 12, 199 n.13 hope  3, 5, 8–15, 34, 36, 40, 43, 70, 77, 95, 103, 104, 111, 113–17, 119, 129, 130, 138, 147, 153, 155, 156, 159, 166, 170, 171, 175, 177–9, 181, 182, 184, 187, 188, 189, 205 n.2, 208 nn.26, 31, 213 n.48 hopeful  70, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 100, 109, 110, 113, 120, 123, 143, 147–9, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 166, 169, 171, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 189, 208 n.31, 219 n.43

Index illeity  52, 61–2, 65, 68, 71, 202 n.40 illness  6–9, 15, 29, 30, 33, 46, 47, 89, 176–8, 186, 191 nn.1, 2, 3, 4, 196 n.28, 203 n.17 individual  2, 5, 8, 13, 19, 22, 24, 25, 30, 32–5, 39, 40, 45, 56, 60, 66, 67, 72, 73, 76, 82, 85, 87, 91, 93, 94, 101, 103–10, 112–20, 124–32, 134, 135, 137–43, 147–9, 154, 155, 161, 163, 165–7, 169–71, 173, 175, 176, 178, 181, 182, 184, 186–8, 192, 194, 196 n.31, 197 nn.38, 43, 200 n.26, 202 n.41, 205 n.7, 206 n.14, 207 n.22, 209 nn.6, 12, 210 nn.15, 21, 211 n.31, 212 n.47, 214 nn.8, 12, 215 n.16, 217 nn.16, 18, 218 n.28 infinite  3, 9, 11–14, 34, 40, 43, 44, 46–50, 53–5, 59, 61–5, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77, 79, 88, 91–3, 99, 100, 104, 107–10, 113, 115–17, 119, 120, 124, 129–31, 142, 152–5, 165, 170–3, 175, 184, 187, 201 n.36, 205 n.1, 213 n.48 Jewish  43, 45, 48, 49, 51–4, 56, 79, 198 nn.7, 10, 12, 199 nn.14, 19, 21, 200 nn.23, 24, 201 n.38, 214 n.4 Judaism  12, 47, 48, 53, 54, 198 n.10, 201 n.39 Kierkegaard, S., see subtopics and titles language  2, 7, 8, 12, 14, 20, 22, 36, 38, 40, 44, 46–51, 53–5, 57, 67–71, 73, 82–4, 87, 88, 91, 99, 100, 101–3, 106, 109, 112, 114, 120, 121, 124, 125, 128, 131, 133, 134, 137, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169, 170, 172, 185, 188, 192 n.8, 196 n.34, 197 n.44, 198 n.4, 5, 199 nn.13, 18, 20, 200 n.29, 203 nn.8, 10, 11, 204 n.21, 205 n.4, 207 n.4, 209 n.4, 212 nn.38, 42, 45, 46 learning  24, 28, 102, 103, 168, 169, 219 n.37 Lévinas, E., see subtopics and titles limit  6, 8, 13, 14, 22, 27, 30, 44, 53, 58, 61, 70–2, 75–9, 89, 92, 100, 110, 115–18, 121, 124, 126, 132, 133, 138, 140, 141, 150, 165, 166, 169–71, 172, 175, 179, 182, 183, 191 n.4, 193 n.2, 194 n.16, 195 n.19,

239

203 n.17, 205 n.29, 207 n.24, 219 n.43 Lippitt, J.  15, 113, 124, 132, 175, 178, 179, 192 n.6, 207 n.26 love addiction  193 n.7, 195 n.20 beloved  123, 130, 136, desire  76, 81, 87, 167, 170 ethico-religious  121, 132, 134, 141, 211 n.33 neighbour (see stranger) other-relation  11, 13, 14, 37, 38, 44, 52, 53, 56, 70, 73, 92, 100, 107, 112, 120, 122–9, 131–5, 138, 141, 142, 147, 152–5, 157–9, 170–1, 173–82, 184, 187, 188, 192 nn.6, 7, 207 n.23, 209 nn.6, 13, 14, 211 nn.32, 33, 34, 35, 212 nn.37, 38, 41, 218 n.29 selfish  120, 121, 125, 135–7, 137, 147, 148, 167, 169 self-love  11, 13, 99, 100, 104, 112–15, 117, 119, 120, 121, 130–3, 136–7, 148–9, 151, 153, 163, 164, 173, 175, 182, 188, 207 n.26, 210 nn.15, 21, 211 n.35, 213 n.4 stranger  53, 113, 129, 151, 157, 163, 191 n.5, 218 n.29 mental health  137, 162, 191 n.4 Merleau-Ponty, M.  8, 47 moral  2, 4, 5, 20–4, 34, 37, 47, 73, 82, 117, 153, 164, 171, 176, 184, 192 n.10, 193 n.7, 199 n.22, 208 n.31, 210 n.14, 216 n.6 immoral  21 morality, see moral neurobiology  28, 39 neuroplasticity  24, 28 nicotine  27 object  3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29–31, 34, 39, 40, 43, 44, 57–70, 77, 80, 84, 116, 118, 122–5, 135, 138, 139, 160, 161, 163, 170, 171, 176, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 195 n.19, 197 n.38, 197 n.44, 202 nn.40, 43, 44, 45, 203 n.18, 204 n.19, 210 n.15, 213 n.48, 215 n.2 objectivity  7, 47, 86, 109, 117, 121, 127, 128, 163, 169, 200 n.28

240

Index

Of God Who Comes to Mind  44, 92 ontology  47, 55, 60, 71, 74, 99, 203 nn.11, 12 Orford, J.  2, 6, 11, 21–3, 28–31, 35, 37–9, 62, 76, 185–7, 193 n.6, 193nn.9, 10, 194 n.16, 194 n.17, 195 nn.18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 196 n.33, 197 n.43, 215 n.6 other, see, God; love; object otherness  60, 83, 87, 93, 156, 196 n.34, 210 n.20 Otherwise than Being  45, 49, 52, 65, 72, 73, 198 n.9, 200 n.29, 202 n.40 person  1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13–5, 19, 20, 21, 23–5, 27–41, 44–7, 50, 52, 53, 55, 61, 62–71, 73–81, 83–91, 93–4, 100–1, 103–8, 111–19, 122–7, 129–40, 142, 150–2, 154, 159–68, 171–7, 180–2, 184–9, 194 n.16, 195 n.21, 195 nn.22, 23, 24, 202 nn.42, 43, 46, 203 n.16, 17, 204 n.29, 207 n.21, 211 n.35, 212 n.44, 213 n.48, 214 n.15, 215 n.3, 216 n.10, 217 n.19, 217 n.21, 218 n.24, 219 n.44, 200 n.30 personhood  193 n.3 personal  1, 80, 101, 102–3, 105, 140, 143, 157, 161, 218 n.25, 181, 185, 198 n.6, 204 n.26, 205 n.3, 206 n.10 impersonal  57 interpersonal  139, 142 personality  111, 163, 217 phenomenology  2, 5–8, 10, 12, 43–4, 46–51, 53, 55, 70, 73, 82, 88, 99, 101, 108, 112, 151–2, 157, 179, 198 n.4, 204 n.21 Plato  84, 153, 201 n.34, 203 n.15 possibility  3, 10, 15, 57, 73, 76, 88–9, 104–8, 110–11, 115–17, 119, 129, 131–2, 137, 149–50, 155–6, 158, 165, 169, 171, 173–5, 178–9, 181–4, 188, 208 n.26, 211 n.28 impossibility  191 n.5, 201 n.33, 206 n.17, 207 n.23 pseudonym  103–5, 113, 209 n.10, 215 n.5, 218 n.28 psychiatric  33, 191 n.4, 213 n.47 psychiatry, see psychiatric

psychology  4, 6, 10, 21, 23, 28, 33, 39, 43, 88, 177, 191 n.1, 193 n.9, 193 n.10, 204 n.23, 204 n.24, 206 n.13 Ratcliffe, M.  7 relation, see God; other; self religion  12, 37, 43, 45, 48, 54, 113, 198 n.3, 199 n.21, 218 n.32 religious  13, 37, 44–51, 53, 55, 56, 70, 91, 99–103, 105–6, 109, 120–1, 130–2, 134–5, 141–2, 154, 192 n.9, 196 n.34, 198 nn.4, 10, 199 n.13, 203 n.8, 204 n.21, 207 n.24, 210 nn.17, 21, 211 n.33, 216 n.6, see also love responsibility  2, 3, 7, 10–5, 19, 22, 24, 34, 38, 40–6, 50–1, 54–5, 58–9, 62, 64–7, 69, 71–6, 79, 80, 82, 85, 90–1, 93–4, 99, 104, 123, 126, 147, 150–4, 157–8, 167, 171–5, 180, 184, 187–8, 193 n.13, 196 n.31, 199 n.18, 201 n.35, 202 n.46, 203 n.4, 207 n.23, 210 n.25, 211 n.34, 213 n.48, 215 nn.2, 3, 218 n.24 revelation  12, 48, 50–1, 70, 82–3, 85–6, 88, 90–3, 95, 99, 131–2, 168, 170–1, 188, 199 n.13, 203 n.8, 203 n.15, 204 n.23 Ricoeur, P.  208 n.1 Sartre, J. P.  73–4, 101, 202 n.1, 202 n.3 self prior to subjectivity (see ego) self control  20, 30, 195 nn.21, 22 selfhood  3, 109, 113, 121, 150, 152, 165, 211 n.26, 211 n.31, 214 n.7 self-love (see love) shame  31 Sickness Unto Death  100, 103–4, 107, 115, 127, 129, 173, 205 n.5, 209 n.7, 210 n.15, 211 nn.30, 31, 218 n.28 sin  4, 38–9, 102, 105–8, 111, 117, 178, 193 n.6, 201 n.38, 206 nn.13, 14, 213 n.50 sinfulness  155 situation(s)  19, 24, 27, 31, 32, 57, 60, 77, 116, 119, 122, 137, 150, 189, 195 n.24 situational  4 sociological, see sociology sociology  22, 23, 34, 37–9, 193 n.1, 203 n.17, 204 n.26

Index speak  44, 56, 85–8, 90, 133, 135, 165, 199 n.21 speech  84, 86 subject, see also subtopics pre-subjective  60 subjectivity  5, 7–9, 11, 14, 28, 32, 34, 39, 43–4, 48, 52–3, 60, 68, 70, 74, 78, 80, 83, 85–6, 88, 100–2, 104–5, 109, 113, 117, 120, 121, 124, 127–8, 131, 135, 138, 143, 148, 155, 162, 169, 172, 175, 178, 184, 196 n.34, 206 n.10, 206 n.17, 208 n.31, 211 n.32, 213 n.47, 217 n.24 suffering  1, 3, 6, 9–11, 14, 34, 45–6, 50, 59–60, 64, 81, 95, 99, 107–8, 130, 140, 148–9, 153, 155–9, 163, 170–2, 175–7, 180, 182–5, 189, 191 n.2, 192 n.12, 201 nn.37, 38, 205 nn.1, 2, 211 n.27, 213 n.48, 214 nn.14, 15, 217 nn.22, 23 Svenaeus, F.  7, 8, 9 theory addiction  21, 24–7, 29, 33, 38–9, 77–8, 86, 89, 204 n.26, 219 n.37

241

Kierkegaard  101, 112, 126, 143, 153, 156, 176, 179 Lévinas  45, 47, 52, 71–3, 75–8, 82, 156, 176, 192 n.10 therapy  29–30, 37–8, 76–7, 91, 139 Time and the Other  56, 200 n.29 Totality and Infinity  45, 48, 56, 71, 76, 80, 86, 112, 149, 154, 168, 172, 180, 198 n.4, 200 n.26, 200 n.29, 201 n.32, 203 nn.8, 14, 204 n.27, 219 n.43 Twelve Steps  2, 11, 14, 21, 22, 32, 34–9, 66–9, 76–7, 79–82, 86, 89–90, 92–5, 114–18, 120, 137–41, 143, 59–61, 163–88, 197 n.39, 204 n.29, 208 n.29, 208 n.31, 208 n.32, 213 n.50, 215 n.1, 216 nn.10, 12, 14, 217 nn.19, 20, 24, 218 n.30, 219 nn.34, 38, 45 ‘Useless Suffering’  80–1, 88, 201 n.37, 213 n.48, 214 n.13 victim  38, 137, 142, 201 n.38

242