Phenomenology of the intoxicated body

Marcela Venebra Muñoz^[2]

Abstract

The central thesis of this paper is that the phenomenological concept of the lived body (Leib-Körper, as one’s own body) provides biomedical sciences with a wide descriptive frame of addictive processes and intoxication states. This tool of analysis and description starts at a level prior to the polarization of corporeality between simple materiality and the purely spiritual dimension. Husserlian phenomenology begins with the intuitive consideration of the ego as embodied and the body as egoic. Husserl’s theory of constitution gives us access to the experiential levels that allow us to describe the genesis of an addictive impulse, through the phenomenological comprehension of the body as spiritual flesh. The final goal of this brief reflection is to show the contribution of Husserl’s phenomenology of corporeality to the scientific analysis of addictive processes: the denaturalization of the flesh, and therefore, the denaturalization of consciousness in these fields of scientific research.

    

Key words: addiction; corporeality; phenomenology.

Resumen

La tesis central de este artículo es que el concepto fenomenológico de “cuerpo vivido” (Leib-Körper, como cuerpo propio) provee a las ciencias biomédicas un marco descriptivo amplio de los procesos de adicción y los estados de intoxicación. Esta herramienta de análisis y descripción tiene su origen en un plano experiencial previo a la polarización entre la simple materialidad y la pura espiritualidad del cuerpo propio. La fenomenología husserliana de la corporalidad comienza con la consideración intuitiva de lo egoico como encarnado y de lo corporal como egoico. La teoría fenomenológica de la constitución nos da acceso a niveles de la experiencia desde los cuales es posible describir los modos y procesos de instauración del impulso adictivo, a través de la comprensión del cuerpo como carne espiritual. El alcance último de esta breve reflexión consiste en mostrar lo que la fenomenología husserliana de la corporalidad puede aportar a los análisis científicos de la adicción: desnaturalizar la carne y, por lo tanto, desnaturalizar la conciencia, en estos campos de investigación científica.

    

Palabras clave: corporalidad; adicción; fenomenología.

Of the whole inquiry into the Ends of Goods and Evils and the question which among them is ultimate and final, the fountain-head is to be found in the earliest instincts of nature; discover these and you have the source of the stream, the starting-point of the debate as to the Chief Good and Evil.

   

Cicero, De Finibus, V, VI, 17 [409]

§ 1. Introduction

I am deeply honored for having the opportunity to participate in this homage to Lester Embree, one of the most important voices in contemporary phenomenology. Thus, in an attempt to carry out a phenomenological reflective exercise regarding a concrete problem in the world, in our own lives, I will analyze, within the larger horizon of our bodily constitution (of our own embodied experience), a specific mode of relation and experience of our own body: the constitution of the intoxicated body. The main aim of this reflection (almost a reflexive analysis) is to explore the possibilities of a phenomenological description of addiction as a sort of experiential relation to our own body. The complexity of this field justifies the possibility of a scientific description within the first-person perspective. My aim is to describe the disturbance in one’s own bodily levels of experience as a spiritual-psychical unity. Based on Husserl’s descriptions in Ideas II (Hua IV),^[3] I start by justifying the pertinence of the concept of corporeality as a tool that allows us to magnify and delve deeper into the scientific descriptions of addictive processes.

This paper’s thesis is that the human animal is more than just its physical body: it has a body, nuancing Merleau-Ponty’s or Michel Henry’s views. In this context, belonging to the body is the most relevant feature in explaining the addictive experience, allowing for a preliminary definition of drug addiction as a concrete type of experience and relationship between the ego and its own body. Specifically, a connection characterized by an alienation or alteration of the self’s own body (becoming “other” for itself) (Svenaeus 2017: 18).

In the second section, I will discuss the specifics of the many scientific perspectives on the addiction process, as well as their limitations. Indeed, the conditions overlooked by these scientific disciplines justify the intervention of the phenomenological perspective, not as a supplement but as a fundamental clarification of the philosophical concept of one’s own living body, as the living body’s final significance in biomedical sciences (Varela 2011: 21). The main goal of this exploration is to apply the conceptual framework provided by phenomenology (transcendental, or Husserlian phenomenology) to these historically circumscribed fields within the domain of the natural sciences, neurosciences, and behavioral sciences in general. In contrast to these approaches, the phenomenological perspective on the addiction process places the living body’s constitution at the heart of scientific or primordial reflection.

First, I will outline the key tendencies in naturalistic and cultural approaches to the addiction process, taking into account its—explicit or implicit—understanding of the body. Second, I will contrast the key advantages of the phenomenological theory of the body’s constitution with the lacking prerequisites of the aforementioned approaches regarding the concept of one’s own body. I will focus on the specific context of the distinctions between the levels of the living body’s constitutive sensibility; between primal and secondary sensibility; and the notion of “value apprehension” (Wertnehmung) (Hua IV: 9 [11]) in relation to this major distinction. I suggest that including this idea into addiction behavioral analysis enables the description of specific differences within pharmacological effects that the naturalistic point of view fails to capture. On the other hand, the introduction of the Husserlian concept of “hyperaesthetic” sensations can magnify the phenomenological achievements in this field. Said notion overcomes the limitations of both the naturalistic and certain phenomenological approaches to the addiction process; in other words, it allows us to describe the “widespread welfare state” or sense pleasure that is the naturalistic perspective’s main assumption.

What scientific profit can we gather from the phenomenology of the addicted body? The phenomenological conception of the body as an experiencing field, in its different levels, offers an analytical framework and conceptual tools that enable us to properly distinguish between the precise levels of conscious life and variables that affect the addiction process. My description of the broad trends in this phenomenology of addiction is based primarily on the constitution of my own body in its various stages as expounded in Ideas II, but it also takes into account other recent perspectives, such as those of Natalie Depraz (2001) or Matthew Ratcliffe’s phenomenology of moods (2010).

§ 2. Three different perspectives about addiction

Current scientific research on addictive experiences and intoxication states unfolds in three main directions: (1) biomedical or naturalistic (neurosciences); (2) cultural constructivism, and (3) a specific branch of contemporary phenomenology of corporeality. This latter direction has mostly been used on a Heideggerian basis (Kemp 2009: 2). Although there are some differences between the studies of this new tradition (in the context of biomedical research), particularly in how they understand and use phenomenology as a method, practically all of them argue that the first-person perspective is necessary as a scientific criterion. Nevertheless, the description of the passive stages involved in the addiction process is limited within this particular phenomenological perspective.

As we shall see, the biomedical and the ethnomethodological perspectives are both blind to the concrete personal aspects, the incidence of valuation processes in the production of addictive states, and the intoxication experiences. Although it is true that the cultural perspective makes new factors—or ones that were not previously considered—visible in the biomedical analysis, specifically social motivations, it falls short of accurately describing the structure of this incidence within the meaningful social matrix that envelops the natural biological processes. However, biomedical research hasn’t yet found an answer to this problem either. Clarifying the insufficiencies of these analytic paths is therefore required. By making this change, we will be able to justify the introduction of the theory of constitution as an alternative route.

2.1. The hedonistic or biomedical perspective

The three main postures that open directions or reflective paths, as well as the emphasis I use as starting point, form the critical framework of this definition. The hedonistic perspective is the wider perspective about addictive behavior, which includes the analysis of neurosciences, ethology, and biological sciences (Juárez 2007: 15). According to this perspective, drug-addiction is characterized as a biochemical disruption of the dopaminergic or reward system (Venebra A. 2014: 3). It claims that the primary driver and trigger of addictive behavior is the pursuit of pleasure. One of this approach’s main flaws and risks is that it reduces pleasure to a biochemical process that may be explained as a dopaminergic download that causes a general welfare state, even though the same explanation does not apply to define this form of welfare. The phenomenology of the body in the stage described, for example, by Natalie Depraz (2001), is the most accurate approach, in my opinion, to understand the meaning of this “welfare state,” this all-encompassing pleasure that defies any neuroethological explanation.

On the other hand, the hedonistic perspective pretends to naturalize consciousness and will because the concept of the own body is constructed from a naturalistic attitude as a biological organ causally explicable. Insofar as consciousness and will are merely labels for biochemical reactions or biological locations in the nervous system, such as the prefrontal cortex or limbic system, this is precisely its main risk—the consideration of addiction processes without any action or subject decision, in an entirely passive level. The ego is only a slave to its own passions and its desire for pleasure. In fact, the hedonistic approach deals with a sort of abducted ego (Juárez 2007: 25), because the subject’s will is dissolved (or resolved) in the addictive process.

One of the most evident and unnoticed deficiencies of the biomedical perspective is its concept of pleasure, which is essential to our analysis. The definition of pain as the absence of pleasure, or in a similar vein, the definition of pleasure or sensible delight as the absence of pain, is very inadequate because it says nothing about either pain or pleasure. The entire hedonistic perspective unfolds within the said notion, which is a simplification of the structure of incentives pertaining to the addictive processes. Cicero criticizes Epicurus for using a similar redundancy in his definition of pleasure (Cicero III: VII 20).^[4] The fundamental concept of the hedonistic perspective remains obscure, a condition that determines the narrow scope of the biomedical descriptions of ecstasy as a generalized welfare state. However, the main problem with this orientation is the ego’s marginal role in the entire addictive process, not only during the ecstasy stage. The naturalistic reduction of addiction—to purely causal biochemical processes—in fact conceals the reasons underlying or at least entwined with the biochemical processes that have a bearing on them. This perspective ignores the constitutive significance of substances and reactions, namely, of the addicted body. Therefore, this reductionism is a naturalization of both consciousness and the body.

Without considering subjectivity as part of the addictive experience, there is no possibility for a therapeutic recovery for everything would depend on a set of biochemical alterations. Thus, the will has been reduced to the body’s materiality. But does this reduction adequately explain addictions? Addiction can cause bodily damage, but can it also affect one’s entire personality and subjective life? Can we consider addiction to be the experience of a person in pain?

This possibility requires an approach that views suffering and pain as decisive factors of the description. In direct opposition to the hedonistic perspective, Husserlian phenomenology allows us to define pain and pleasure in terms of the ego’s specific position or role in each sensible dimension. Pain is not only the lack of pleasure, but it is also the ego’s experience of being in conflict with its own body. It describes the ego’s antagonistic bond with its body (Svenaeus 2015: 108). During a pain trance, the ego is present and its will does not disappear, but the imposition of the body is lived as a form of resistance or toleration. Therefore, the difference between pain and pleasure is founded on how the ego views the self-conscious body: we surrender to pleasure, and we resist pain. In an ecstatic experience, the ego gives in to the sensible enthrall of its own body (Leneghan 2011: 21), but the will retains a margin of action and some control over its experience, something that does not happen in a pain trance. The phenomenological advances regarding the body allow for an accurate description of addiction since they consider the person within its surrounding world as a unified totality affected by addiction. Notwithstanding, there is a clear limit to these perspectives as well: the differences between constitutive experiential fields—the will—, and a passive ego that is transformed by the addictive experience but not dissolved by an intoxicated trance. The ontological distinction between consciousness and the corporeal emerges from our awareness of possessing a body, in other words, of our body as a thing. This appropriation of the body should be explained in relation to the role played by the ego beyond the mute bounds of passivity, which set the limits for phenomenological explorations.

The genetic or historical perspective allows for a description of the constitutive levels of one’s own body regarding the constitution of the ego as a personal, spiritual, and self-conscious life (Copoeru 2014: 346). According to Husserl, it is possible to give an account of the passive layer of consciousness as an impulsive and natural field: a pre-egoic activity with different structural levels that we can describe in its “internal” dynamic. The constitutive theory gives us access to pre-egoic structural layers displayed in the addictive processes, in non-causal terms, but through the motivations that trigger bodily impulses and prefigure the addictive experience. We refer to valuations, convictions, and rational motivations about the meaning of pleasure, and the value of all those sensuous and spiritual sentiments exalted by the toxic trance. The positive valuation of intoxicated pleasure has an impact on intoxication’s sensitive effects. Each experience produces new strata of meaning, which confirm or suppress the consumer’s expectations. The phenomenologist’s scientific interest is focused on the constitutive structure of such valuations. Those values ​​are rooted in the ego’s identity and are independent of the organic reactions. Neither values ​​nor valuations are based on physical conditions. To state the latter would be equivalent to a denaturalization of addiction, because valuation of sensitive feelings is the most significant component of addictive behavior. Phenomenologically, we can see the difference between bodily sentiments—in an ultra-passive stratum—and the “value apprehension” (Wertnehmung) of these feelings or bodily states (Hua IV: B. XII, 339 [350–351]). This distinction, inaccessible to everyday experience, is made possible by the body’s dual dimensions as “being-in-itself” and “being-for-me,” and its dual and singular determination as both an object and as a self-sensitive life.

2.2. The cultural constructivism perspective

The cultural constructivism approach comes second after the biomedical analysis. According to Antonio Escohotado (2004), addiction is an historical construction founded on several factors: socio-historical circumstances, which include the legal frame; biography; mood; and, socio-symbolic contexts.

The most important result of Escohotado’s research is that addictive behavior is a social construction that mainly depends on a legal framework and on the specific paraphernalia and devices available, such as the junkie figure with its own administration methods and environments (Escohotado 2004: 1225). One of Escohotado’s most interesting findings is the analysis of pleasure as a feeling influenced by social factors and the addict’s mood. He holds, for example, that people who suffer some kinds of chronic pain are more prone to acquire an addiction to heroin or some opiate substance. According to Escohotado, the effects of consuming (the flash or ecstasy) are directly determined by the addict’s mood, while the addict’s behavior is determined by the substance’s social label:

The knife is what hooks you. Heroine is a substance among many others, sometimes as wine. But you build an entire life around it […]. Maybe there is no need to explain that the junky role never fascinated me, not minimally. And without this fascination it seems difficult that anybody can display the indispensable efforts to acquire real physical dependence (Escohotado 2004: 1220).

The main risk in Escohotado’s explanation is cultural reductionism, because if it is true that addictive behavior is cultural in its deepest sense, it is also true that any social behavior or individual belief has a cultural or spiritual root. Therefore, it is necessary to be more precise when clarifying the cultural meaning and different stages at which culture has an impact, or the concrete ways in which this takes place at a bodily level. From a phenomenological point of view and description, one’s own body is the first culturally constructed object. This means that addiction’s social construction is rooted in the body’s spiritual constitution. The main limitation of cultural constructivism is the same as for any other relativistic excess, namely, the totalization of a single dimension as ruling all other fields of human experience and life. It is possible, in fact, that human life is absolutely, and even primarily, cultural, interpersonal, and historical. But this says nothing about the specific way in which these patterns of behavior—or meaningful webs—are instituted in their different levels regarding the concrete structure of embodied consciousness. In fact, this model does not explain any specific detail about the corporeal process of addiction. However, its scientific value lies in revealing the experiential differentiation itself. Phenomenological research focuses on the universal or essential features of this relativity as an intrinsic condition of all human or spiritual life.

Accepting the spiritual and material determination of human existence is a primal condition for the analysis of any existential dimension. However, do we need to know what guides the subject’s preference for one substance over another? What causes this specific effect and not another? What orients the election? From a phenomenological point of view, we can ask for the motivation and the sedimented meaning at the basis of this specific type of alienation or self-destruction (in a physical sense)—and not of any other—. Both the addictive process and the flash—or ecstasy—are relative to the person’s individual determinations, specifically through the valuing acts that trigger the hook of addiction. The performative framework of the addictive experience’s meaning is that it is strongly supported by a lack of value. The phenomenological perspective focuses on the specific modes of value-grasping that guide the addictive experience. We can accept the central thesis of the hedonistic view, but behind the search for pleasure lies a positive valuation of pleasure itself—namely, the embodied spiritual dimension—that phenomenology posits as the central issue.

The theory of one’s own bodily constitution is an enriched analysis of sensibility, a complex dynamic of experiential layers. Though those strata appear to be intertwined with the ego’s development, the ability to distinguish them clearly makes any reductionist attempt inadequate.

2.3. Different studies with a phenomenological approach.

There are many phenomenological studies about addictive processes. I start with Ryan Kemp’s analyses (2009) about temporal experiences of addicts. On a Heideggerian basis, this perspective considers that the main feature of addiction is the ego’s imprisonment in a current experience, determined by the expectation of the drug’s next doses, without any possibility of projecting itself to a further future, or of remembering the past before the inception of its addictive behavior. This experiential dimension isolates the ego and causes it to lose social references, i.e., its sense of belonging to a community.

Ryan Kemp analyzes the experience of a sort of broken time, always present, and unfolding within the limits of an immediate future: only the next shot. In a more ethno-methodological direction,^[5] Sean Leneghan’s research on The Varieties of Ecstasy Experience: An Exploration of Person, Mind and Body in Sydney’s Night Club Culture (2011), considers ecstasy the phenomenological visible moment, for it is liable to be described in a first-person perspective. However, his approach is more in line with an ethnographic view than with a strictly phenomenological one. His interest focuses on the social construction of the ecstasy context, but it is a deficient explanation of ecstasy’s effect as an embodied process, an aspect that I want to explore in Natalie Depraz’s concept of hyperaesthetic body.

One of the most accomplished researchers in this field is Copoeru (2014), who has set up a very precise path to the analysis and phenomenological explanation of addictive behavior. He starts by assuming that addiction is an entirely passive experience, similar to an impulse, and that it emerges during the same stages of basic impulsive or pre-egoic life. In this sense, the genetic perspective seems the most adequate tool for this kind of study. However, despite Copoeru’s interest in showing how the ego has an effective participation in addictive behavior, his genetic explanation neglects the ego’s real activity as the core of its willful decision, because the set-up of addictive behavior is not limited to only one sphere.

I choose an example very close to Husserl (Hua IV: B XII § 3, 338 [349]): the “urge to smoke” (he himself was addicted to tobacco, so this case appears in Ideas II in relation to the distinction between the active and the passive ego). In his example, described as a first-person experience, he is an addicted smoker, he is working at his desk, reading or writing something with a deeply focused attitude. At a certain moment, he feels the urge to smoke, so he searches the cigarettes on his desk and finds them. He opens the box and takes one; then, he puts the cigarette between his lips and lights it on. He takes the first puff and exhales the smoke, but he does all this without reflecting or losing his attention to what he reads or writes. This whole set of acts was developed in a passive way or in an an-egoic mode of action. In another situation, if he does not find the cigarettes or the ashtray on his desk, maybe the attention to his work just ceases. He counts the stubs and decides to postpone his urge, then he makes his decision and acts as an awakened ego. But the real question about this first distinction (and the question that allows communication with other scientists) is: where does this impulse emerge from? Where does the urge to smoke emerge from, or the urge to consume heroin, cocaine, or coffee? If—and this is a very important feature of addiction—the urge for tobacco differs from other biological urges like thirst, sleep, or hunger, then where does it originate?

This type of impulse is the result of reflection. According to Ideas II, all reflective acts are sedimented and have an impact on the passive sphere (Hua IV: 337–338 [349]). I make decisions that remain as convictions, habitualities, and certain sorts of beliefs that determine further actions and valuations. The genesis of all addictive impulses implies a valuation of the substance and a “value apprehension”^[6] of its effects (with all the circumstantial elements pointed out by Escohotado: the legal frame, paraphernalia devices, and so on), because the smoking addict, at any or many moments, decides to smoke and its decision is founded on a valuation. The horizon of personal experience is the framework for a value apprehension that functions as the primal motivation of addictive behavior. Again, if the addictive urge is in fact an impulse, it is not similar to being thirsty or hungry. Addiction is a sensuous impulse determined by a spiritual content. Then, the question is how to explain this spiritual content at the stage of the addict’s impulse?

We can phenomenologically distinguish between primal sensibility and secondary or improper sensibility. According to Husserl, secondary sensibility covers spiritual feelings and the emotional sphere. Also called improper sensibility, this sphere has an intellective character articulated with the spiritual dimension of existence; simultaneously, it is the basis of moods that represent the widest dimension of subjective life. “Perhaps,” says Husserl, “a better terminology would result from distinguishing between proper and improper sensibility and by speaking as regards the latter of intellective or spiritual sensibility and as regards the former of spiritless sensibility” (Hua IV: B XII § 2, 334 [346]). An embodied feeling as the pleasure felt under intoxication entails a positive valuation of sensations. But, can we really distinguish between the stream of pleasure that floods the addict’s body and a fleshing grasp as liking itself? Spiritual feelings have their ground in mood, as well as all spiritual matters, and correspond to the level of secondary sensibility: “in sensual pleasure,” says Zirión, “we cannot speak of sense, nonsense, or reason: there is no constitution of an axiological objectivity; however, in spiritual pleasure, there is” (2016: 11). A spiritual feeling is not only a sensation but entails a value apprehension (Wertnehmung). Spiritual pleasure has an object considered as valuable, beautiful, or desirable: an object of will.^[7] In drug consumption, both the substance and the valuation of its effects have an impact, and this valuation determines the “welfare state,” technically called “flash.”

§ 3. The flash of the flesh

The flash—technical name of the intoxication trance—is the farthest moment of the wakefulness of the ego regarding its own body. The ego sinks in a dreamless dream. In this situation, the body is not, as in chronic pain, an enemy and an obstacle for the ego; rather, the free ego is only a distant spectator facing its experience, not reflective but passive. The flash or ecstasy could be analyzed under the light of the concept “hyperaesthetic,” proposed by Depraz. “Hyperaesthetic” refers to the hypersensibility of the body neither focused by reflection nor pre-egoic. This hypersensibility refers to the post-reflective stage as a free fall into passivity. According to Depraz, the level of flesh implies an an-egoic, impulsive and passive stage. It is a field whose access is not reflective but requires the ego to abandon itself and sink into opacity, or impulse. “The flesh flow” says Depraz “is de-reflective” (2001: 9). This amounts, first, to the ego’s surrendering to impulse, and second, to its sinking into a dreamless dream-state. From this point of view, we can say that while the living body is not yet apperceptive, the intoxicated body has ceased to be apperceptive. The former, the living body, is anonymous; the latter, as intoxicated flesh, has alienated itself (altered, in the sense of becoming “other”) from its ego.

During the flash, the free ego has been suspended along with the world, and thus presents no resistance to the impulse. Furthermore, also during the flash, the altered flesh is not reduced to the body, nor to a merely bodily element belonging to it; the “welfare state” consists rather in the ego’s concealment due to a widespread sensibility. A hypersensible flow drags the ego into the flash experience. This sensible diffusivity is not a bodily property. The center of the flash is a sensitive stream that floods the self-apperceiving. Phenomenologically speaking, the diffusive sensation of pleasure in the flash is an alteration of the flesh, i.e. The flesh emerges in its original alterity—in its irreducibility to simple extended materiality—; the otherness of the flesh is rooted in the distinction between the ego and its own body. Ownership is the bodily feature dissolved by the flash. It is not somebody’s body anymore, there is no ego in the flash experience, but rather a sensible stream. The ego becomes invisible to itself. To understand this distinction, we must recognize the previous difference between the lived body and the body as an objective possession.

It is this secondary knowledge, this self-knowledge that gives us access to a transcendental level: in contrast with the lived body, corporeal flesh is self-apperceptive consciousness as corporeal flesh. Within it resides, in the making, an internal alterity that corresponds to the inner movement of self-awareness, namely, to the subject’s alteration that supposes the dynamic of apperception (Depraz 2001: 6).

The ego plays different positions regarding its bodily feelings when in painful abstinence, in addictive impulse, and in flash. All these dispositions are involved in a particular mood that also determines the entire addictive experience. The intoxication of the flesh opens a sphere of sensibility that can only be revealed when the ego is displaced from its central position. Ecstasy is, in this case, the discovery of a new dimension of sensibility in which the ego paradoxically remains within the shadows of passivity. Flash is an objectless experience: the body is not the object of ecstasy. It is indeed somebody’s experience, but this someone is only a witness because the trance itself consists in the dissolution of the active ego in dreamless-sleeping. At this level of mere sensations, the distant ego, sleeping in pleasure, has no intention, instance, or localization. The flash expands a sensibility that envelops the entire body, and overflows it. Sensations in their diffusivity possess the body; the ego does not possess them. The flesh does not appear; it does not give itself to us, but it is nevertheless describable as a pulsational immanent continuum.

The intoxication—the flash—reduces the egoic experience to a pure corporeal flow, but this flow is not an intentional mode of experience among other possible ones. It is an alteration that reveals the flesh, after the body ceases to be apperceived as the ego’s possession. This posteriority is related to the “decentralization” of the ego. Depraz describes this movement as de-reflective (2001: 6). The most basic level of sensibility, the sensitive substratum shown by Husserl, is pre-reflective or pre-egoic, but this sensitive dimension—magnified as hypersensibility—is de-reflective, because the ego is considered (as an addict) from its constituted position. The genetic level described as the sensitive substratum includes drives and instincts. Thirst or fatigue do not depend upon a willful-ego, even though the ego can control those basic impulses to a certain level. In the hunger drive, for example, bodily impulses command the action. However, as aforementioned, thirst does not resemble the urge pertaining to the flash experience. Hence, addiction cannot be reduced to a corporeal impulse. The genetic perspective compels us to descend from the personal-spiritual-ego to deeper layers of its genesis (Copoeru 2014: 345). The flash represents a dominant perspective regarding the awakened-ego—a concrete person, lost in pleasure, searching for itself. The intoxicated flesh is not the opposite of the ego, nor its necessary correlate; it is rather one of its moments. The flesh is an ego substratum unattainable by the awakened-ego; it remains opaque throughout the flash.

Within the pain of addiction, the ego becomes segregated from its own body. We can discern this alienation through two structural moments: first, the hook based on a particular positive valuation of the substance and its effects; second, the continuity of the pattern nourished by the pain—and the fear of additional pain (Svenaeus 2015: 116)—produced by the experience of abstinence. These two kinds of motivations act on different levels; however, the latter type of trigger is also involved in a specific type of pain valuation. Regarding the second level (pain and the fear of pain), Escohotado suggests that the abstinence crises provoked by highly addictive substances—such as heroin—are also part of a social construction of the meaning of addiction, and its demonized discourse (2004: 1225). We should convene other aspects, such as the personal mood of the consumer. In a depressive mood, for example, abstinence pain can prevent rehabilitation or require certain kinds of psychological compensations. On the contrary, in anxious moods, abstinence can be positive for the subject. The way a drug addict experiences either abstinence or the flash, includes as a primal factor its mood; nevertheless, neither sadness nor happiness is organic in any sense.

The intoxicated flesh expresses a sensible experience, basic but necessarily intertwined with a motivational plexus that, from within, prefigures the direction and meaning of experience, notwithstanding the fading ego. The ego’s corrosion in the addictive process irradiates from the valuing core of the flash experience. What is there in the flash that could lead someone to its self-annihilation? To assess this, both the user’s cultural frame and the sensible content are needed, not merely added to one another but as an original unity—for its components (the sensible substratum involved in secondary sensibility)—can be distinguished with the analysis. Hence, it is not only sensation and flash feelings that trigger addiction; the valuation of sensations and sentiments—moods—are also determinant factors in the flash experience’s meaning.

The addictive process is not reducible to only one determination. The different levels of this experience are distinguishable with the analysis of the body’s two phenomenological dimensions: physical and spiritual, transcendent and transcendental. The hyperaesthetic flash experience is intertwined and prefigured by the spiritual content of life, not incrusted but co-originarily grafted into corporeal materiality. Flash experience exposes the body’s materiality as not merely reducible to viscera and blood. The human body has a cultural dimension. Thus, flesh is as spiritual as it is transcendental, and the addictive experience shows the influx—or incidence—of both in one’s own bodily constitution.

§ 4. Conclusion

Flash experience is an alienation of the ego’s own body in both feelings of pain and pleasure. Pain and fear of pain are two different kinds of motivations that are not considered in the hedonistic approach but that are implicit in the inception of addictive behavior, and its continuity. Abstinence pain is a motivation that surrounds the search for pleasure. However, there are two phenomenologically distinguishable levels of pain: the sensible sentiment and the fear of pain as an element of mood. Pain and depression are mood (not physical) conditions that orient the constitution of flash meaning as much as the valuation of illness and pain circumstances. The valuing activity intertwines with all constitutive levels of the embodied ego. All value apprehensions and valuative acts are involved from sedimented “enactivity” (to use Varela’s expression), to rational motivations, convictions, and sedimented meanings of our body as our possession. The original ego/body de-identification allows us to understand the meaning of alienation, pleasure, and pain as levels of the ego’s constitution, its positions or its self-dispositions, and the gradation of the ego’s activity and passivity.

The human ego is its body, but it also has a body. This distinction refers to the ego’s mode of positioning itself with regards to its own body; and this, in turn, supports the possible distinction between lived feelings (sensible sentiments) and the valuation of those feelings—an essential distinction for the analysis of addiction and intoxication. The flash is not only a biochemical disruption. The hyperaesthetic sensation is intertwined and performed not by a material-spiritual content, but rather by an embodied one. The flash is an embodied experience unfolded at a level that shows materiality as something else than an organic unity.

The main distinction between sensations and value apprehensions of sensation is an essential phenomenological tool in the analysis of addiction and intoxication, because it allows us to see the extra-corporeal or non-material factors of our own embodied experience. The human body has a spiritual dimension. The flesh is material as much as transcendental, and the addictive experience shows the determination of this dimension in the constitution of our own body: this body as mine and as my property, useful or useless, tool or obstacle, mine or alien.

The ego has a body as an object of use and abuse, a tool, and an instrument for other goals, and all of this is possible from the ego’s embodied determination. Regarding the body’s alienating experiences, the theory of constitution is an efficient explicative basis for two reasons. First, because it reinstates the constitutive spiritual dimension of the flesh; second, because this theory of corporeality has its touchstone in the genetic difference between the egoic-spiritual and the constituted, physical dimension of one’s own body.

References

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. 1931. De finibus bonorum et malorum, with an English trans. by H. Rackman, M.A. London / New York: William Heinemann/G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Copoeru, Ion. 2014. Understanding Addiction: A Threefold Phenomenological Approach. Human Studies 37: 335–349.

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