Addiction, Recovery, Truth and Lies

How do the concepts of Heideggerian unhiddenness and Sartrean bad faith relate to addiction and lend themselves to support recovery from addiction?

‘I wear this crown of thorns, Upon my liar’s chair’

- ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash

INTRODUCTION

This paper explores Heidegger’s concept of hiddenness (Heidegger, 1962) and Sartre’s concept of bad faith (Sartre, 1958) and develops a synthesis of the two in explaining the role of truth in life and, more specifically, addiction. I have selected these two concepts as I hold that Heideggerian hiddenness proposes a fundamental way-of-being for Dasein (Heidegger, 1962) and the world, while Sartrean bad faith relates to a choice of how to approach the world – I suggest that understanding both and how they relate to each other is helpful in making sense of how we navigate the world, ourselves and the predicament in which addicts find themselves. I shall explore this question from two perspectives: first, as a practising therapist providing primary care for people suffering from addiction; and second, as an abstinent alcoholic. Pearson (1987) describes addiction as significantly impacting the poor and socially marginalised while Boss tells us that ‘Addiction, whatever its form, has always been a desperate search, on a false and hopeless path, for the fulfilment of a human freedom’ (Boss, 1994, p. 283).?While Boss’ search for freedom can be found in all human life, it is likely to be found in preponderance amongst those who find their freedoms particularly curtailed by the facticity (Heidegger, 1962)?into which they are thrown outside of cultural normativity.

I shall first list prevalent addiction models, before offering the characterisation that this paper uses. I shall then outline Sartre’s concept of bad faith and its inherent paradox before discussing how addiction resolves this paradox and laying out Heidegger’s ideas of unhiddenness as ontologically foundational to this resolution.?Therefrom, the psychotherapeutic use of truth in support of addiction recovery shall be proposed and findings are summarised in the conclusion alongside questions for further exploration. The purpose of this essay is to consider how the titular concepts might be effective in psychotherapeutically supporting addiction recovery and not to attempt an in-depth philosophical analysis of addiction, truth, or bad faith.

CONCEPTUALISING ADDICTION

There are multiple competing theories of addiction.?O’Shiel (2022) lays out a variety of addiction theories, West and Brown (2014) list eighteen separate theories and there are significant variations between neurobiological, transpersonal, twelve-step, psychological, psychoanalytical, cognitive-behavioural, and existential conceptualisations of addiction. The fifth re-write of the DSM removes reference to addiction in relation to drugs and alcohol, preferring the term substance use disorders; it refers to internet gaming disorder as requiring further study and to gambling as an addiction (Lewis, 2016, p. 165). This essay uses the following conception of addiction drawing from personal experience and various thinkers’ ideas - leaning heavily on O’Shiel’s Sartrean conceptualisation (2022), and Kemp’s (2018) more Heideggerian ideas.

1. Addiction is a way of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger, 1962). I agree with Kemp’s (2018, p. 28) interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking on addiction in Being and Time suggesting that addiction is ontologically likely in humanity, arising as it does from care, rooted in the pursuit of meaning and linked to falling and thrownness.
2. Addiction can manifest through both consumption of substances as well as pursuit of behaviours. Becker and Murphy tell us that ‘people get addicted not only to alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes but also to work, eating, music, television, their standard of living, other people, religion and many other activities’?(1988, pp. 675–676).
3. Addiction is characterised by craving and dependence, meaning that lack of the substance or activity results in psychophysiological desire to increase the dose and the addict cannot feel at peace without the focus of the addiction (O’Shiel, 2022).?
4. The pathway to addiction begins with either aspiration to pleasure, avoidance and numbing of pain, or both (Kemp, 2018, p. 48). This corresponds with my own thinking developed from personal reflections during my addiction recovery and my clinical work which led me to conceptualise what I call PAN behaviour - pleasure seeking, avoidance and numbing of unwanted or intolerable emotion.
5. Addiction is a self-objectifying way of being, grounded in a change in embodied experience. A key agreement of Lewis and Goldstein’s opposing non-brain disease/brain disease theories is the existence of a physical component to addiction (Lewis, 2016, p.33; Goldstein, 2001, p.21). Kemp devotes a chapter of his book to the embodiment of addiction (Kemp, R., 2018 'The lived body of drug addiction' in Kemp Transcending Addiction, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, p.48-57) in which a key observation is that the body morphs from an embodied self to an object for the addict. The nature of addiction means it becomes a painful object-body that asserts upon the self through the experience of craving and withdrawal and as such can also become a disliked or hated object-self.
6. The addict experiences ambivalence towards their addictive way of being-in-the-world (O’Shiel, 2022). I have both experienced and observed ambivalence as a desire to stop the addictive pattern alongside a resistance to change resulting from comfort taken in the addictive process.
7. Addiction is ubiquitous and involves a spectrum.?O’Shiel suggests that for ‘…any person there is at least one activity or product on which they are hooked; on which they feel like they need, and from which abstinence will raise some kind of withdrawal’ (2022, p.6). I agree that this is the case and that, for most, the level of their addiction is such that, in and of itself, it does not materially obstruct a life experienced as truthful, open to love and meaningful. As O’Shiel (p.6) posits, the difference between daily habit and destructive addiction is one of degree rather than ontology. We see this reflected in point 1 above and shall see it again later in Heidegger’s conceptualisation of unhiddenness.
8. The addictive way of being-in-the-world is characterised by untruth. Kemp tells us that ‘Addiction is untruth: the path to recovery is truth’ (2018, p. 48).?He explicates this as involving untruth both with self and others and proposes addiction as a false-narrative of affect to ‘…change the way the addict feels and alter the emotional texture of existence’ (p. 63).?This is not to say that the troubling underlying issues, the real affects, or actual ‘texture of existence’ are no longer there, rather that they are covered with falsehoods facilitated by the addiction. The longer that this process continues, the longer that the addict hides and denies his or her self - ‘We can also recall that Sartre noted that the prototypical lie is the one told to the self, referring to this as bad faith’ (Kemp, 2018, p. 65).?At some point, the pain that the addict was covering can be superseded by the existential pain of denying self, and ever-increasing efforts to sustain this denial spiral into more extreme addiction until the addict can become psychologically and spiritually lost and lose access to self. I can best exemplify this using my sister’s tearful description of me towards the end of my active addiction as ‘… breathing, but no longer alive’. I had succeeded in my self-deceptive, addictive way-of-being – in some sense I had become my addiction so as not to be me.

SARTRE’S BAD FAITH IN RELATION TO ADDICTION

In this section addiction is discussed as a third resolution of Sartre’s bad faith paradox. Due to space constraints, Sartre’s two resolutions (the psychoanalytic unconscious and the contradictions between transcendence/facticity) are not going to be explored. I also contend that the following conceptualisation differs from the idea that the addict is living in Sartrean bad faith through the denial of freedom of choice through lack of will (‘Heading into Battle: Addiction, the Will, and the Fight for Autonomy’, 2015). The way in which it differs shall, I hope, become clear.

Sartre tells us that the ‘… lie is a phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the “Mitsein”’ (Sartre, 1958, pp. 48–49) with Mitsein described as “being-with” others in the world, essentially suggesting Theory of Mind (Lewis and Mitchell, 2014) as a prerequisite for lying to others. He differentiates bad faith as a means of lying to self, in which case the duality of Theory of Mind is absent (Sartre, 1958, p.49) and a set of seemingly contradictory premises arise, in which perpetrator and receiver of the falsehood are the same – therefore in the act of lying the perpetrator must be aware of the underlying truth to conceal it. He suggests that in such a paradox, this ‘…whole psychic system is annihilated’ (p.49) and the falsehood ‘collapses beneath my (the self’s) look’ (p.49, my brackets). He proposes bad faith phenomena as a series of evanescent experiences, with the person oscillating between good faith, cynicism, and bad faith in ‘… a constant and particular style of life’ (p. 50). Sartre resolves this paradox using first, the psychoanalytic unconscious for those who subscribe to this psychic structure; and second, the misunderstanding or misuse of his ontological contradiction of humanity as apprehended through his lens of transcendence and facticity.

I propose addiction as a third means of resolving the paradox in the following way. Kemp (2018) conceptualises the twelve-steps’ ‘rock bottom’ as a moment of clarity in which the addict’s predicament is revealed in its stark truth and he or she is temporarily unable to ‘believe their own lies’ (2018, p. 66). I describe this as a moment of ambivalence in which the addict is faced with the reality that the addiction is masking shameful/guilt-ridden/anxious/depressive truths and would like to stop the addictive process – or at a minimum to be able to stop – and yet is drawn back into the comforting awfulness of avoiding the truth of themselves (note, they are not necessarily avoiding the truth of their addiction as well). This may last for a moment, or may endure intermittently, but it will end if not acted upon, and the window of opportunity to choose a different way-of-being will close (Kemp, 2018). If the addict chooses to re-engage with the addictive process, then the very nature of the addictive substance or behaviour alters/masks/hides the perception of self; thus, the self-deceiving addict becomes temporarily unaware of the nature of self and associated painful affect. My own experience of alcoholic relapse confirms the reaction to this moment as critical – the addict can allow the scales to fall from their eyes and seek change, or they can pursue their addictive way-of-being with renewed vigour and erect another layer of scales against the hidden truth they have now glimpsed. Sartre describes a bad faith lifestyle as ‘precarious’ yet ‘autonomous and durable’ (1958, p. 50). A part of his reasoning behind this is the evanescence of bad faith experiences that ‘vacillates… between good faith and cynicism’ (1958, p.50). I posit that the addict’s enactment of the addictive process (bad faith/lying), engagement with moments of sobriety/abstinence/rock bottom (good faith/truth) and rejection/avoidance of the awfulness of the truth of sobriety/ rock bottom (cynicism) are a means of facilitating Sartre’s precarious, bad faith lifestyle. However, in this addiction-oriented version of bad faith, the evanescent moments are not those of the bad faith phenomena, but rather those of good faith moments of clarity and truth. The addict has resolved Sartre’s bad faith paradox – but at the terrible price of a blindness to self.

In his exploration of Sartre’s bad faith, McCulloch describes self-deceivers as being:

?‘...well aware of the true state of affairs, or are at least capable of becoming so, but they simply avoid thinking about it too much, or at all. They are not so much self-deceived as lazy and forgetful, insincere, and muddled, fond of a drink’ (2012, p.54).

I do not agree with most of this somewhat unkind assessment and believe fear and shame play a significant part in self-deception, however, I relate the description here to draw attention to his implicit association of alcoholism (addiction) with Sartrean self-deceit.

HEIDEGGER, TRUTH AND UNHIDDENNESS

‘The existential and ontological condition for the fact that being-in-the-world is determined by “truth” and “untruth” lies in the constitution of being of Dasein..’ (Heidegger, 1962, (2010) p. 214)

This section explores Heidegger’s ontological premises of truth and hiddenness to support the conception of addiction resolving the Sartrean bad faith paradox. Van Deurzen (2006, p. 192) suggests that in Being and Time Heidegger did not fully explain the links between truth and deception or truth and authenticity, and he took the opportunity in his work The Essence of Truth to address this, in which he questions the analytic philosophical understanding of truth as being limited to the propositional, whereby truth is defined:

?‘…either as?correspondence of the propositional entity with a fact, or a coherence of a proposition with a held set of propositions, or, finally… saying that a proposition is true doesn’t really do anything more than simply asserting the proposition’ (Wrathall, 2004, p. 446)

and posits that ‘Truth as unhiddenness and truth as correctness are quite different things; they arise from quite different fundamental experiences and cannot at all be equated’ (Heidegger, 2002, p. 8). It is this idea of truth as unhiddenness rather than correctness that I suggest is of particular importance to the addictive process and informs Sartrean bad faith.

Heidegger’s conceptualisation of unhiddenness is complex and I summarise below Sheehan’s (Craig, 2005, pp. 359-364) explanation.?Dasein (Heidegger, 1962) is the human mode of being that in-its-being is disclosive of itself and/or another entity, yet since to be human is to be finite, so is disclosure finite. Heidegger (2002) cites the Greek word aletheia for disclosure, which more literally translates as un-hiddenness, and he suggests that the finitude of disclosure is found in the privative nature of the word – disclosure is to un-hide from an a priori position of hiddenness.?According to Heidegger there are three levels of truthfulness; first, disclosure-as-such, which is the opening up of a field-of-meaning that only occurs through the being-of Dasein - yet there is an innate hiddenness to this level of truth that makes it more or less ubiquitously unseen by Dasein; second, the truth of the meaning of an entity’s being as disclosed to the individual Dasein, so a stone may disclose itself as-such to be a weapon or a paperweight, meaning it may disclose itself as either of these things depending on Dasein’s field-of-meaning; third is the predicative, or propositional, truth that analytic philosophy engages in, derived from the realm of language whereby a proposition may be made and tested for correctness. Heidegger argues that the third level of truth is conditional on the first two levels. He refers to the above mentioned innate hiddenness of the first level of truth as mystery and conceives of errancy as being similar to the concept of falling (Heidegger, 1962) as a result of mystery, whereby ‘Dasein is distracted by the entities themselves and fails to acknowledge the positivity (of revelation) or the negativity (of hiddenness) of truth’ (Kemp, 2018, p. 62).?

LINKING HEIDEGGER, SARTRE, AND ADDICTION

So how do these notions of truth support the conceptualisation of the addictive-way-of-being as Sartrean bad faith? Kemp (2018, p.62) explains Heidegger’s structure of truth as being a process that never results in ‘…full disclosure, but rather a gradual movement towards a greater revelation’ that requires an attitude of openness rather than closedness. This process is effectively the subject of Heidegger’s exploration of Plato’s Cave Allegory in The Essence of Truth.?The Allegory of the Cave (Plato, 1888) speaks to individuals freeing themselves from shackles holding them in ignorance of truth, so as Heidegger (2002, p.29) tells us ‘It is clear, therefore, that the essence of truth as unhiddenness belongs in the context of freedom, … more precisely in the being-free of man…’. However, in addictive falling Dasein ‘has become blind, and puts all possibilities into the service of the addiction’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 240). It is here that I suggest Sartre’s bad faith way of life comes into play, whereby Dasein (the addict) chooses blindness (of self) by putting all possibilities into the service of the addiction (the means of blindness). Under Heidegger’s ontological structure of truth, all humanity must accept a degree of hiddenness and can choose to adopt an open attitude in a lifelong attempt to reveal and unhide truth – or not. The addict’s adoption of the Sartrean bad faith addictive lifestyle is a choice to spurn this opportunity and to pour their resources into a psychophysiologically damaging form of self-deceptive hiddenness.

TRUTH IN SUPPORT OF ADDICTION RECOVERY

It is not the purpose or place of this essay to propose how to work with addiction, or to arrive at a complete conceptualisation of addiction. Rather the core aim is to demonstrate an innate connection between addiction and untruth as bad faith hiddenness. I further suggest that relapse is all but inevitable without facing this – resorting again to my experience of alcohol relapse and observations of clients. Truth is certainly not the only issue to address in supporting addiction recovery - love, fear, and shame and others are of huge significance to many, possibly most, addicts and often may actually be the cause of addiction. However, if self-deception is the individual’s paradigmatic way-of-life, then facilitating love, addressing fear and shame, and identifying other individual difficulties will be deeply challenging until the addict is willing to engage in the process of unconcealment. It is because of this that ‘..psychotherapists must be servants of truth, allowing their clients to come home to themselves in a letting be (Gelassenheit) of what is’ (Van Deurzen, 2010, p. 67). Kemp (2018) suggests that letting-be may not be enough alone and that a more pro-active thought process may be required – but alongside Gelassenheit. I agree with Kemp’s assertion that the psychotherapist’s role is ?‘… to foster honesty…. in relation to self, and then in relation to myself and others’ (2018, p. 120). The addict’s honesty with self is fundamental and foundational – for if Heidegger’s (1962, p. 238) contention that understanding addiction is to understand the meaning that it holds for each addict, then only the addicted individual holds that key.

I close with Sartre’s evocative description of bad faith:

‘But the first act of bad faith is to flee what it cannot flee, to flee what it is. The very project of flight reveals to bad faith an inner disintegration which bad faith wishes to be’ (Sartre, 2003, p. 70).

He could replace the words ‘bad faith’ with addiction here. Indeed, reading these words calls back to mind my sister’s description of me as ‘…breathing, but no longer alive’. Attempting to unhide the truth of myself, and how I am from moment to moment has come to form a significant part of my motivation for living - and my family assure me they are happy to have me back.

CONCLUSION

This essay started by explaining the implicit cultural lens through which addiction has been explored, before laying out the characteristics of addiction used herein. I then proposed addiction as a solution to Sartre’s bad faith paradox and explored Heidegger’s ontological theory of truth as unhiddenness, which was then used to support the proposition, and the link between unhiddenness and bad faith was then developed. Finally, the importance of addressing truth in psychotherapeutically supporting addiction recovery was established. There are considerable questions unaddressed and/or raised in this essay. How does Plato’s concept of the Philosopher King (Plato, 1888) and Heidegger’s Nazi-oriented interpretation of this, i.e. that not all are deserving or worthy of the truth (Heidegger, 2002) sit with the importance/necessity of truth in addiction recovery? Can gelassenheit be applied to addiction itself? Or, to borrow from the Matrix Trilogy, who is to say that the red pill of unhiddenness (sober unhiding) is preferable to the blue pill of hiddenness (addictive self-deceiving)? The core differences between Heideggerian embeddedness in the world and Sartrean individual primacy may give rise to significant disagreement with this essay, provide scope for challenge and be important in further developing the ideas herein.

REFERENCE LIST

Becker, G.S. and Murphy, K.M. (1988) ‘A Theory of Rational Addiction’, Journal of Political Economy, 96(4), pp. 675–700.

Boss, M. (1994) Existential foundations of medicine and psychology. 1. softcover ed. Northvale: Aronson (The master work series).

Craig, E. (ed.) (2005) The shorter Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy. London: Routledge.

‘Heading into Battle: Addiction, the Will, and the Fight for Autonomy’ (2015) The Stamford Freedom Project. Available at: https://stanfordfreedomproject.com/what-is-freedom-new-essays-fall-2015/heading-into-battle-addiction-the-will-and-the-fight-for-autonomy/ (Accessed: 22 March 2023).

Heidegger, M. (2002) The essence of truth: on Plato’s cave allegory and Theaetetus. (2013) London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Heidegger, M., (1962) Being and time. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. (2007) Malden (Mass.): Blackwell publ.

Heidegger, (1962) Being and time. M., Stambaugh, J. and Schmidt, D.J. (2010) Albany: State University of New York Press (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy).

Kemp, R. (2018) Transcending addiction: an existential pathway to recovery. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Lewis, C. and Mitchell, P. (2014) Children’s Early Understanding of Mind. 0 edn. Psychology Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315804668.

Lewis, M.D. (2016) The biology of desire: why addiction is not a disease. Melbourne: Scribe.

O’Shiel, D. (2022) ‘Lack, Escape, and Hypervirtuality: On the Existential and Phenomenological Conditions for Addiction’, Philosophies, 7(5), p. 12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7050112.

Pearson, G. (1987) ‘Social deprivation, unemployment and patterns of heroin use’, in N. Dorn and N. South (eds) A Land Fit for Heroin? London: Macmillan Education UK, pp. 62–94. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18892-5_4.

Plato (1888) The Allegory of the Cave. Los Angeles, CA.: Enhanced Media Publishing (2017).

Plato, (1955) Lee, H.D.P. and Lane, M.S. (2007) The Republic. 2nd ed. London: Penguin.

Sartre, J.-P. (1958) Being and nothingness: a phenomenological essay on ontology. Barnes, H.E. (2003) London: Routledge Classics.

Van Deurzen, E. (2006) ‘Essay Review: The Essence of Truth’, Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 17 (1), pp. 192–200.

Van Deurzen, E. (2010) Everyday mysteries: a handbook of existential psychotherapy. 2. ed. London: Routledge.

West, R. and Brown, J. (2014) Theory of addiction. Second edition. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell/Addiction Press.

Wrathall, M. (2004) ‘Heidegger on Plato, truth, and unconcealment: The 1931–32 lecture on The Essence of Truth’, Inquiry, 47(5), pp. 443–463. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00201740410004250.