The Logic of Addiction

State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.

Category: The Loneliness of Man (Complete Collection of Essays)

  • Modernity, Alienation, and Addiction: A Hegelian Genealogy

    Contemporary addiction is typically approached as a medical disorder, a behavioral pathology, or a moral failure. Each of these frames captures a dimension of the phenomenon, yet none explains why addiction emerges with such structural regularity in modern societies, nor why it so often appears precisely where freedom, autonomy, and rationalization are most advanced. To…

  • Why Modern Christian Explanation Is Inadequate

    Faith After Belief, Meaning After God Modern Christianity does not fail because it is false. It fails because it continues to explain where it must now undergo. Its deepest inadequacy is neither moral weakness nor institutional decay, but a fundamental category error: Christianity has come to treat itself as a system of answers in a…

  • Addiction After the Death of Meaning: Part II

    A Critique of the Medicalized Recovery Model Contemporary addiction treatment is dominated by a medicalized framework that defines addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder. According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, addiction is characterized by “compulsive drug seeking and use despite harmful consequences,” and recovery is understood primarily as symptom management: abstinence,…

  • Endurance Without Consolation

    The Epistle of James and the Ethical Prehistory of Born Man The Epistle of James occupies an uneasy position within the New Testament canon. Long perceived as ethically severe, theologically austere, and resistant to systematic integration with Pauline doctrine, James has often been treated as a corrective, an anomaly, or even a regression. Yet when…

  • Longsuffering and the Burden of Time

    Makrothymia, ’Erekh Appayim, and the Ethical Legacy of Endurance Among the ethical terms inherited by Christianity from the ancient world, few are as easily misunderstood—and as historically consequential—as μακροθυμία (makrothymia), commonly translated as “longsuffering” or “patience.” In modern usage the term is often reduced to emotional calm or passive waiting. In its original Greek, Jewish,…

  • Obligation After Transcendence

    The Ethical Condition of Born Man If Born Man cannot return to religion without falsification, the ethical question becomes unavoidable: what, if anything, obligates him? The disappearance of transcendence does not abolish ethical demand; it abolishes only the forms by which obligation was once justified. What replaces religion ethically within our current situation is therefore…

  • Why I Use the Term Born Man

    The term Born Man is not chosen casually, nostalgically, or provocatively for its own sake. It is chosen because language itself has become part of the battlefield of appearance, and any serious attempt to think modern self-consciousness must reckon with that fact rather than evade it. The word man in Born Man is not a…

  • Why There is No Return to Religion Without Falsification

    Religion as a Historical Form, Not an Eternal Option The contemporary call for a return to religion, or spirituality, is often framed as a corrective to modern nihilism, addiction, violence, and technological abstraction. Such appeals assume that religion represents a lost resource that might be recovered if belief were renewed, practice reinstated, or transcendence re-affirmed….

  • The Absolute After Transcendence

    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…

  • Addiction After Meaning: Part I

    From Depth Psychology to Civilizational Logic The original thesis The End of Addiction: A Depth Psychological View of Alcoholism was written at a historical threshold. It belongs to a moment when the inherited explanatory frameworks surrounding addiction—disease, sin, morality, spirituality—were still in active competition, still capable of organizing intelligibility. The work’s ambition was not merely…