Technology, Born Man, and the Logic of Addiction
Modern addiction cannot be adequately understood within moral, medical, or therapeutic frameworks alone, because it does not originate at the level those frameworks presuppose. Addiction is not a contingent pathology that happens to proliferate in modern society; it is a historically intelligible response to the completion of Western metaphysics. To grasp addiction in its necessity, it must be situated genealogically within the development by which Christianity internalized the Absolute, thereby preparing the conditions for technological civilization and a new form of subjectivity—what may be termed Born Man.
Christianity effects a decisive ontological transformation by withdrawing transcendence from the world and relocating it within interiority. Unlike mythic or pagan cosmologies, in which spirit inhabits nature and meaning is distributed across symbolic forms, Christianity demands the evacuation of divine presence from the cosmos. The Incarnation, far from preserving symbolic mediation, exhausts it. As Giegerich insists, Christian truth is inseparable from the historical claim that “in the empirical-historical man Jesus of Nazareth God himself has entered the world,” a claim that establishes Christianity as an absolute religion precisely because it abolishes any remaining metaphysical distance between God and history. W. Giegerich – Technology and the Soul.
Once this movement begins, the world can no longer bear meaning. Nature becomes matter; matter becomes available; availability becomes mastery. Giegerich is explicit that this process does not represent Christianity’s failure but its success. “Technology is not saeculum,” he writes, “but precisely the realized civitas dei, merely unacknowledged as such” W. Giegerich – Technology and the Soul. Secularization, in this sense, is a misnomer. What modern consciousness experiences as godlessness is in fact the historical fulfillment of Christian logic: the Absolute has become operational.
Technology, therefore, must not be understood as a neutral instrument or as the antithesis of spirit. It is spirit objectified as system. Giegerich insists that “the objective psyche has left myth and nature and has settled in technology,” such that technological reality is now “our nature, our new earth, our drive, our body, our spiritual, symbolic life” W. Giegerich – Technology and the Soul. The rationalism of technology is not opposed to soul but reveals its mode of expression. What appears soulless is merely soul without image, consolation, or symbolic mediation.
This historical completion produces a new form of subjectivity. Born Man is not modern man in the sociological sense, nor neurotic man in the therapeutic sense. He is consciousness born after transcendence has completed itself. Born Man does not lose God; he is born after God has “changed his shape or locus.” As Giegerich states with stark clarity, “The only difference is that [God] has his place not, like the mythic gods, in nature, but in the artificial world of technological civilization. As this technological civilization he is the Risen” W. Giegerich – Technology and the Soul.
For Born Man, the Absolute persists, but no longer as meaning, symbol, or relation. It persists as system, necessity, and function. Technology assumes the structural position once occupied by God: it is total, autonomous, inevitable, and impersonal. Yet unlike the theological Absolute, technology does not speak, forgive, or interpret suffering. It does not console. It operates.
This produces a decisive psychological consequence. The psyche remains structured by the need for certainty and relief from reflexive exposure, but the Absolute can no longer be related to symbolically. The result is not disbelief but substitution. Addiction emerges here not as rebellion or regression, but as adaptation.
Addiction functions as a micro-absolute. It replicates at the level of the body what technology realizes at the level of civilization. Like the Absolute, the addictive substance makes a total claim. It abolishes delay, suspends interpretation, and overrides choice. It delivers certainty without meaning. As Giegerich observes, technological reality itself has become addictive: technology operates as “absolute presence,” exerting a compulsive force that mirrors the structure of addiction W. Giegerich – Technology and the Soul.
What addiction provides is not pleasure but ontological relief. It temporarily releases the subject from the burden of consciousness in a world that no longer interprets itself. This is why addiction proliferates not at the margins of technological society but at its center. It is not anti-modern; it is hyper-modern. Addiction internalizes the logic of technology and reproduces it chemically. Where technology eliminates mediation systemically, addiction eliminates mediation experientially.
Born Man thus stands between two absolutes: a civilizational system that governs without regard and a chemical certainty that delivers immediacy without meaning. He does not worship either. He submits to the first and uses the second. This configuration explains why addiction cannot be resolved through moral exhortation, medical management, or spiritual revival alone. Each of these approaches attempts to restore symbolic or transcendental structures that history has already dissolved.
Recovery, therefore, cannot mean return—to belief, innocence, or wholeness. It must be understood as the acquisition of a new capacity: the capacity to endure life without an Absolute that answers, without transcendence that consoles, and without chemical certainty that collapses time. Addiction is not the failure of modernity but its most faithful symptom. It reveals, with brutal clarity, what it means to live after transcendence has completed itself.
To treat addiction without acknowledging this genealogy is not only ineffective; it is evasive. Addiction is the private echo of a civilizational condition for which no private solution exists.
References
- Giegerich, W. Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web. Routledge, 2020.
- Giegerich, W. Soul-Violence: Collected English Papers, Vol. 3. Spring Journal Books / Routledge, 2008.
Brenton L. Delp
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