Brenton L. Delp
2026
Abstract
The Logic of Addiction: A Civilizational Diagnosis argues that addiction is not adequately understood as a private pathology, a moral failure, or a merely clinical disorder. It must also be understood as a historically intelligible response to modern forms of consciousness. The manuscript begins from the premise that most dominant approaches to addiction start too late: they describe the addict already formed and then seek causal explanation in trauma, family dysfunction, neurochemistry, behavior, or social disorder. While each of these frameworks identifies something real, none sufficiently explains why addiction appears with such persistence, scale, and existential force in modernity.
This work therefore asks a prior question: what kind of world makes addiction structurally intelligible? In response, it develops a historical and philosophical account of modern consciousness in which meaning has migrated inward, transcendence no longer organizes collective life with binding authority, and the individual subject has inherited forms of metaphysical burden once distributed across religious, ritual, and symbolic structures. Within this condition, addiction emerges as one of the clearest and most concentrated expressions of modernity’s inner logic: a search for immediacy, certainty, relief, and necessity under conditions of psychic and civilizational dislocation. The manuscript presents addiction not as an anomaly within modern life, but as one of its most revealing symptoms.