Bad Infinity (Hegel)
Russell Brand captures something essential when he describes modern life as a carousel—perpetual motion without arrival, distraction masquerading as vitality, activity substituting for homecoming. The image is not merely poetic; it is diagnostic. What haunts the modern subject is not simply suffering, but the suspicion that beneath the noise there is nothing—no center, no tether, no meaning substantial enough to arrest the motion. One is therefore excused, even encouraged, to keep moving: through relationships, through work, through stimulation, through substances. Stillness would require confrontation. And confrontation would require truth.
When we speak of chemical addiction, the language itself directs our attention first to biology. The term “chemical” quite naturally invokes neurochemistry, physiology, and the measurable processes of the brain. In this sense, addiction does indeed belong to the body. Mood- and mind-altering substances interact with neural systems in predictable ways. Desire, reward, and reinforcement are biologically grounded. No serious account of addiction can ignore this.
Yet the word addiction cannot be exhausted by biology alone. All biological organisms are, in a fundamental sense, “addicted” to what sustains them. Hunger and thirst are not pathologies; they are imperatives. Life binds itself to what preserves it. The drive to eat, drink, and survive is built into the organism. Addiction, at this level, appears continuous with nature itself.
And yet—this imperative can be resisted. Human beings can refuse food and water. They can act contra naturam, against biological demand. This possibility, strange and unsettling, already signals that something more than biology is at work. Addiction, as a human phenomenon, emerges precisely at the point where biological necessity and reflective consciousness collide.
Thomas Aquinas, working long before the discovery of neural circuitry, attempted to articulate this collision in philosophical terms. For Aquinas, the will is always oriented toward the good—or what appears to be the good. When passion draws the will toward something genuinely good, reason remains intact. When passion draws the will toward something only apparently good, reason itself is altered. The will does not knowingly choose evil; it chooses under a changed appearance of the good.
In Aquinas’ formulation, the will is not overpowered by passion against its knowledge; rather, knowledge itself is reshaped by passion. The good appears where it is not. Desire does not violate reason; it reconfigures it.
Modern neuroscience reframes this dynamic in a different vocabulary. What Aquinas understood philosophically, neuroscience describes anatomically. We speak now of distinct neural systems: the prefrontal cortex, associated with planning, judgment, and self-regulation, and subcortical systems associated with desire, reward, and affect. In addiction, these systems fall out of coordination. The rational, deliberative functions of the brain are increasingly subordinated to circuits of craving and reinforcement.
From this perspective, addiction appears as a power struggle within the organism. The ego—understood here as the center of conscious judgment and volitional control—finds itself opposed by another force, one rooted in biochemistry and repetition. Over time, this struggle exhausts the ego. What neuroscientists call “ego fatigue” names the wearing down of regulatory capacity under sustained pressure. Eventually, the will yields. Behavior follows desire, even against explicit judgment.
At this level, the picture seems clear and almost sufficient. Two systems in conflict. Desire overcomes restraint. The organism chooses what it knows to be harmful. A tragic but intelligible scenario.
And yet this is only the initial condition of addiction.
What this account does not yet explain is why such struggles have become so widespread, so persistent, and so culturally normalized. It does not explain why desire seeks such intensity, nor why the ego is so fragile to begin with. It explains the mechanism, but not the meaning. It gives us facts, but not truth.
The deeper issue lies not solely in the brain, nor even in the individual psyche, but in the world in which both are situated. The ego does not confront desire in a vacuum. It does so within a cultural field already stripped of symbolic orientation, already deprived of a center that could give limits meaning. In such a world, biological desire is no longer mediated by shared forms of significance. It becomes absolute.
Addiction, then, is not simply a failure of will, nor merely a neurochemical hijacking. It is the point at which biological imperative meets a culture unable to contain it. The struggle between reason and desire is real—but it unfolds within a spiritual malady that precedes the individual and exceeds him.
These, then, are the initial conditions of addiction:
a biological organism capable of reflection,
a will that can act against nature,
and a cultural world no longer able to tell the difference between fulfillment and escape.
Brenton L. Delp