There are many ways of interpreting the behaviours related to substance misuse and addiction, which can be sort out as three basic models: biomedical, legal, and social. They are corresponding to approaches built in different epistemic and professional frameworks, such as medicine, law, and social work. Confronted with the experience of addiction, these models appear as pre-determined by a specific scientific or professional ideology; they presuppose a pre-understanding of the phenomena. I directed, therefore, my investigation on those phenomenological paths that (...) might lead to, and circumscribe the experience of addiction and I propose an analytical framework based on three major phenomenological perspectives: descriptive, genetic, and inter-relational. This paper argues in favour of defining addiction without making reference to a form of failure, psycho-somatic or existential. On the contrary, it concludes that there is a need to adopt a definition of addiction which holds at its core the idea of empowering addicted persons, of re-constructing their capacity to take decisions about their own lives. (shrink)

This paper tries to show that the naturalistic view of addiction is mired in contradictions that stem from reducing the addict to a weak-willed subject who loses control over his or her body. From a phenomenological perspective, addiction reveals itself to be a habit which eventually becomes harmful, but has its primary sources in the embodied needs of a worldly subject. The aim of this paper is to uncover the dimensions of the lived addiction that are neglected in the contemporary (...) naturalistic discourse: the lived-body and the worldly context of the addict. Firstly, we try to do justice to the variety of addictions by underlying that their new and surprising forms are determined by the intersubjective tissue wherein the subject operates. Secondly, the loss of control in addiction, how the subject deals with the tendency to satisfy a need, is experienced as powerlessness, as expressed in the accounts of ecstasy addicts regarding altered states of mind. The last section of this paper will argue that this sense of powerlessness cannot be equated with a weakness of the will because a strong, forceful will engenders the same vertigo of being prey to strange powers. The embodied aspect of addiction and the spontaneous, bodily need it saturates will clarify further this claim. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)