Is Addicted Phenomenology Just Human Phenomenology?

The phenomenon of addiction precedes, by millennia, our scientific inquiries into its psychological manifestations and neural bases. We did not need psychiatrists to ‘discover’ it; we have long been aware of its dark shadow lurking in our psyches. The discernable, often troubling behaviors of addicts notwithstanding, addiction is not the kind of phenomenon one observes; addiction is experienced, from the first-person perspective. Its defining features are qualitative: a subjective loss of control, an obsession, a compulsion. The overwhelming phenomenological salience of these features—especially of “compulsion”—has led addicts, philosophers, and psychiatrists alike to imagine that addiction is a discrete (phenomenological, natural, psychological) kind. In my research, I argue that addicted phenomenology is different only in degree from ordinary human experience, and not in kind. This conclusion’s major premise derives from our present-best neuropsychological theories of addiction; together, they successfully explain the defining phenomenological features of addiction while applying, mutatis mutandis, to garden-variety experiences of compulsion. I distinguish between essential and contingent features of addicted phenomenology, which allows for ontological clarity around what it is, exactly, we are talking about when we talk about addiction and demonstrates that the identity-criteria of what we call “addiction” are not phenomenally immanent, so to speak, but are external, contextual and—ultimately—contingent