HUBERT DREYFUS AND JANE RUBIN

KIERKEGAARD

ON THE NIHILISM

OF THE PRESENT AS A D D I C T I O N

AGE: THE CASE OF COMMITMENT

A trip to a well-known Berkeley bookstore tells the story. Several years ago, the section of the store entitled "Chemical Dependency" did not exist. Now it takes up two large bookcases. More remarkable than the existence of the "Chemical Dependency" section, however, is what is actually on its shelves. Many of the books - perhaps even the majority have nothing, strictly, to do with chemical dependency. Instead, they deal with virtually every human problem - relationships, work, childrearing, politics. The reason that they are in the "Chemical Dependency" section is that they interpret all of these problems as the result of addictive patterns and propose the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as the means of recovery. The books are only one indication of one of the most striking developments in our society over the last several years. This is the enormous growth in popularity of the Twelve Step programs based on Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, groups for sex and love addicts, groups for women who love too much - even a group for former fundamentalists, Fundamentalists Anonymous - and many other Twelve Step groups have all grown tremendously. A recent listing of such groups in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area listed thirty-seven active groups, ranging from A A to Shoplifters Anonymous. What accounts for the enormous increase in popularity of Twelve Step literature and groups? Much of it, no doubt, is a response to the genuine problems of alcohol, drug, and other sorts of substance abuse that plague our society. However, the increase cannot be accounted for simply by an increased presence and awareness of physical addictions. As the titles of books like When Society Becomes an Addict and the use of categories of addiction like co-dependency indicate, physical addictions comprise only one type of behavior that is classified as addictive, Furthermore, when the focus of these groups shifts from the object of addiction - drugs or alcohol, love or work - to the source, addictive behavior comes to be seen as universal. The group Adult Children of Alcoholics is particularly instructive in this regard. Increas-

Synthese 98: 3-19, 1994. 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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DREYFUS

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JANE

RUBIN

ingly, this group is referred to as Adult Children of Alcoholics and Other Dysfunctional Families. The ACA literature describes a number of characteristics that adult children of alcoholics can expect to find in themselves. Two advertisements for groups for adult children of alcoholics in the San Francisco Bay Area describe their potential clients as follows:
They experience feelings of emptiness, inadequacy, isolation and depression, as well as difficulty trusting and being intimate. They are overly responsible or easily manipulated. They often feel alone, vulnerable, confused and frustrated. Many do not understand why they rescue people, feel guilty, are obsessed with others, have trouble with intimacy and trust and put others before themselves.

What is so striking about this list is that it includes characteristics that virtually every person has. Who has not been depressed or felt alone, vulnerable, confused, and frustrated? In moving away from the idea that addiction necessarily has a specific physical component, these groups have moved to the position that everyone is an addict or potential addict of some sort. In this article, we will argue that the current fascination with addiction and the attempt to understand every significant human problem as an addictive pattern is a contemporary response to a problem first described by Kierkegaard - the problem of modern nihilism. Because we know that this claim will not be immediately convincing to everyone, before proceeding to argue for it, we will briefly review the attempts of other critics to account for the universalizing of addiction. Some critics claim that the addiction model is attractive to people because it provides a simple, if not simplistic, account of their problems. While some writers have emphasized the way in which Twelve Step programs simplify psychological problems and others have emphasized the way in which they simplify social problems, their conclusions are the same. Instead of having to delve deeply into their psyches in order to discover the causes of their problems, individuals can simply accept the view that they are addicts and that they have the same problems as other addicts. Likewise, instead of engaging in a difficult attempt to understand and change society, individuals can simply accept the idea that their addiction is the source of their problems. The addiction model makes the hard work of individual and social change seem unnecessary. While these suggestions are compelling and have some truth to them, they are unsatisfactory. They do not explain why addiction, specifically,

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should be called on to simplify people's understanding of their problems. After all, the addiction model is not the only theory about the causes of and solutions to people's psychological problems that universalizes and simplifies them. It is not the only psychological theory that overlooks the role of society in the creation of psychological problems. Thus, the prevailing explanations for the popularity of these views seem to us to be inadequate accounts of this phenomenon. Kierkegaard, however, provides us with an analysis of modern nihilism and of the way individuals attempt to escape it that provides an understanding of the seductiveness of the addiction model, its disadvantages, and the alternatives to it. What, then, is modern nihilism according to Kierkegaard? The simplest answer to this question is that it is a cultural condition in which critical reflection has undermined the possibility of passionate commitment. In his book The Present Age, Kierkegaard gives a description of modern nihilism as it manifests itself in the family and in education:
A father no longer curses his son in anger, using all his parental authority, nor does a son defy his father, a conflict which might end in the inwardness of forgiveness; on the contrary, their relationship is irreproachable, for it is really in [the] process of ceasing to exist since they are no longer related to one a n o t h e r within the relationship; in fact it has become a problem in which the two partners observe each other as in a g a m e . . . . A disobedient youth is no longer in fear of his schoolmaster - the relation is rather one of indifference in which schoolmaster and pupil discuss how a good school should be run. To go to school no longer m e a n s to be in fear of the master, or merely to learn, but rather implies being interested in the problem of education. 1

Anyone who is even moderately aware of developments in contemporary culture should find this description familiar. Who has not recently been a party to a discussion about parenting or read newspaper and magazine articles about what should constitute the core curriculum in our universities? What is so striking about these discussions from a Kierkegaardian perspective is that discussion of these issues seems to increase in inverse proportion to our confidence about what to do about them. Our attendance at seminars on parenting increases as our ability to be mothers and fathers seems to decrease. Agreement about the great books of our culture seems to decrease precisely as discussion of the issue fills the pages of every major periodical. This development reaches its peak in our contemporary attitudes about relationships. As talk about relationships increases, the number

HUBERT DREYFUS AND JANE RUBIN o f c o m m i t t e d r e l a t i o n s h i p s s e e m s to d e c r e a s e . A s K i e r k e g a a r d a l r e a d y saw: More and more people renounce the quiet and modest tasks of life.., in order to achieve something greater; in order to think over the relationships of life in a higher relationship till in the end the whole generation has become a representation, who represent.., it is difficult to say who, and who think about these relationships.., for whose sake it is not easy to discover. 2 K i e r k e g a a r d ' s d e s c r i p t i o n o f o u r c u l t u r a l p r e d i c a m e n t is p r o b a b l y n o t u n f a m i l i a r to t h e r e a d i n g public. C o n s e r v a t i v e critics o f o u r c u l t u r e m o s t r e c e n t l y , A l l a n B l o o m in The Closing o f the American Mind h a v e e m p l o y e d v e r y similar d e s c r i p t i o n s in o r d e r to a r g u e for a c o n s e r v ative p o l i t i c a l a n d social a g e n d a t h a t w o u l d r e s t o r e the t r a d i t i o n a l f a m i l y and the traditional university curriculum. Kierkegaard, however, would find B l o o m ' s a r g u m e n t m i s g u i d e d . N o t o n l y d o e s he t h i n k t h a t it is i m p o s s i b l e to r e c o v e r t h e s e t r a d i t i o n s , in a d d i t i o n , f r o m a K i e r k e g a a r d ian p e r s p e c t i v e , t h e d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n a nihilistic a n d a n o n - n i h i l i s t i c c u l t u r e is n o t t h e d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n a c u l t u r e t h a t g r a n t s e q u a l status to w o m e n a n d has e t h n i c studies r e q u i r e m e n t s in its u n i v e r s i t i e s a n d a p a t r i a r c h a l c u l t u r e d e v o t e d to t h e classics. F o r K i e r k e g a a r d , the differe n c e b e t w e e n a nihilistic a n d a non-nihilistic c u l t u r e is t h a t in a nihilistic c u l t u r e t h e r e a r e n o distinctions b e t w e e n w h a t is i m p o r t a n t a n d w h a t is u n i m p o r t a n t b u t in a non-nihilistic c u l t u r e t h e r e are. T h u s , f r o m Kierkegaard's perspective, a revolutionary culture that overthrew traditional institutions and established a different kind of family and educ a t i o n a l s t r u c t u r e w o u l d n o t be a nihilistic one. It w o u l d b e a c u l t u r e t h a t h a d c o m m i t t e d itself to a p a r t i c u l a r k i n d o f f a m i l y a n d a p a r t i c u l a r k i n d o f schooling. O u r c u l t u r e , o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , w i t h d r a w s its c o m m i t m e n t f r o m its t r a d i t i o n a l institutions, while p u t t i n g n o t h i n g in t h e i r place: A passionate tumultuous age wilt overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless.., leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit, it supplies a secret interpretation - that it does not exist. 3 W h i l e t h i n k e r s such as H e i d e g g e r are p r i m a r i l y c o n c e r n e d w i t h t h e c o n s e q u e n c e s o f m o d e r n nihilism for W e s t e r n c u l t u r e as a w h o l e , K i e r k -

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NIHILISM

egaard is concerned about the implications of this situation for individuals in our culture. If nothing makes any difference to our culture, it is difficult to see how anything can make any difference to the individuals in it. T o say that nothing makes any difference to an individual is to say that his or her life is meaningless. Kierkegaard's interest, and ours in an increasingly nihilistic age, is in how we can recover the sense that our lives are meaningful. This is where addiction comes in. Identifying oneself as an addict may well be an attempt to obtain the meaning once, but no longer, provided by the authentic commitments made possible by a traditional culture. We will argue, however, that, rather than combating nihilism, identifying oneself as an addict actually furthers it. But, before turning to our Kierkegaardian argument against making one's addictions the basis of one's identity, we must first give a Kierkegaardian account of the role both of addictions and of the commitment to recovery from them in constituting the self. What role do addictions play in constituting the ,self? One way of understanding the nature of addictions is to see that they are worlddefining activities. As such, they give addicts a distinction between what is important and what is unimportant in their lives. For a drug addict, the important activities in life are the ones that revolve around his addiction. If he is not 'using', he may, for example, be trying to find the m o n e y to do so. The important people in his life are the people who share or support his habit. Activities or people that do not promote his habit are sacrificed for the sake of the maintenance of his addiction. In many ways, the commitment to recovery resembles the addiction it is intended to replace. Twelve Step groups often speak of abstinence from addiction as the most important commitment in a person's life. Anything that threatens to interfere with this commitment, whether it be a person, a job, or an enjoyable activity, must be given a subordinate place in a recovering addict's life. If this is impossible - as, for example, in the case of a relationship with a 'co-dependent' who refuses to relinquish this role - the relationship must be sacrificed. Abstinence replaces both the addictive behavior and the activities and people which supported it with behavior designed to promote recovery - attendance at meetings, working the Twelve Steps, and so forth - and people who support recovery rather than addiction. Thus, in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the serious from the trivial, both addictions and the commitment to re-

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DREYFUS

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RUBIN

covery provide a person with a clear distinction between what matters and what does not. F r o m a Kierkegaardian point of view, then, addiction and recovery can both be world-defining commitments. Even if we could prove this to be the case, however, we would not have sufficiently explained why addictions, specifically, seem to play a world-defining role for so many people in our culture. It is here, we believe, that the emphasis of the Twelve Step programs on the centrality of the act of admitting addiction becomes so important. When someone says, 'My name is Joe and I am an alcoholic', he is acknowledging an identity - that of an addict. This identity has a feature that sharply distinguishes it from the many roles that are available in our culture, such as the roles of parent or teacher - namely, that it belongs to the very nature of an addiction that it is something that the individual does not choose. This is the meaning of the admission of the first step of the Twelve Steps, that "we are powerless" over whatever the object of our addiction happens to be. We cannot emphasize this point too strongly, for one of the distinguishing features of modern nihilism is that, while it offers individuals an opportunity to make choices about their lives which is unparalleled in the history of our, or any other, culture, modern nihilism also makes it increasingly impossible to make the very choices it makes possible. On the one hand, people in our culture are encouraged to choose their partners, their occupations, their religious beliefs, and their 'lifestyles' to a greater and greater extent. But, as the areas of our lives which are open to choice expand, our ability to make choices seems to contract. If a person does not already identify himself with a religious tradition, how could he ever choose one? How could he ever decide which beliefs to accept or reject if he does not already have some religious beliefs of his own in terms of which to do this? If, as in Kierkegaard's description of the modern family and the modern educational system, modern individuals stand at a critical distance from and take an open-minded stance toward all possible commitments, how could any commitment ever come to have a claim on us? The choice of an occupation looks less and less significant as we lose our conviction that there are any significant differences between occupations or that our occupations make any difference. An occupation that a person chooses has a very different meaning than a calling or vocation that, in some sense, chooses him. As a culture, we seem to have achieved the position of Sartrean

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absurd freedom in which our capacity to choose anything makes no choice compelling. Defining oneself as an addict seems to provide a built-in answer to this problem. To admit one's addiction is to accept an identity that is not a product of one's choice. To return to the issue that we posed at the beginning of this paper, we believe that the reason that addiction has become the preferred mode of psychological and social understanding for so many people in our culture is that it removes their identity from the realm of arbitrary choice and establishes it as an incontrovertible given. Finally, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, the addiction model is attractive in one additional respect. One of the most noticeable features of modern life is that, even when individuals manage to achieve something like a meaningful identity, that identity tends to be fleeting. Families break up and corporations move overseas with increasing regularity. One of the major benefits of identifying oneself with one's addiction is the belief that an addiction is permanent. According to the Twelve Step programs, an addict is always in recovery but never recovered. Thus, an addiction gives a person a kind of stability that is hard to come by in modern life. An individual's addiction will never divorce him or move to a foreign country where labor is cheap. It should go without saying that there is something profoundly unsettling about the idea that addictions have become substitutes for commitments in our culture. It seems intuitively obvious that admitting addiction is not the best way to have meaning, identity, and stability in one's life. Furthermore, the fact that addiction is increasingly playing this role in our culture has consequences even for people who would never think of identifying themselves as addicts. For, when addictions become confused with authentic commitments, two things seem to happen. Some people identify themselves with their addictions instead of making authentic commitments. Other people become afraid to make commitments because commitments look like addictions. If the only way to have a passionate commitment is to identify oneself as an addict, critical detachment may seem the only prudent course. The central argument of this paper is that Kierkegaard's thought provides us with an account of authentic commitments that allow us to distinguish sharply commitments from addictions. It allows us, for example, to recognize the difference between authentic romantic love

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and being a 'woman who loves too much', between an authentic commitment to one's work and being a workaholic. It also gives us a way to understand not only why addictions cannot overcome nihilism, but also how identifying oneself as an addict actually promotes it. To work out a Kierkegaardian account of addictions, we need, first, to introduce the Kierkegaardian concepts and distinctions on which the above analysis is based. We will then use them to explain what is wrong with considering addiction and commitment to be the same phenomenon. We must, therefore, now spell out Kierkegaard's understanding of commitment. The problem of commitment is of particular importance to Kierkegaard because having a commitment and being a self are synonymous for him. Kierkegaard's famous account of the self in The Sickness unto Death defines the self in such a way that to be a self requires commitment. This crucial but dense passage is clearer in English than it has been up to now, thanks to Alastair Hannay's excellent recent translation:
The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself . . . . A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of possibility and necessity, of the eternal and the temporal. In short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. 4

As this passage indicates, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between a human being and a self. While a human being is a relation between infinite and finite, possibility and necessity, and the eternal and the temporal, a self is a relation that relates to itself. This distinction is crucial for Kierkegaard because he wants to claim that human freedom is the freedom of being self-defining. This means that infinite and finite, possibility and necessity, and the eternal and the temporal have no existence independent of my defining them by making a commitment, i.e., taking a stand on how these terms or factors are expressed in my life. What we need to understand at this point, then, is Kierkegaard's claim that commitment involves defining infinite and finite, possibility and necessity, and eternal and temporal factors. When Kierkegaard says that commitments are infinite, he means that they are worlddefining. If I am committed to enjoyment, as in the aesthetic sphere of existence, 5 everything in my world is significant or insignificant accord-

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ing to whether I enjoy it or do not. If I am committed to choice, as in the ethical sphere, everything is significant or insignificant according to whether I choose to give it significance or not to. When Kierkegaard says that commitments are finite, he means that I cannot be committed to the world-defining in general. Rather, I have to be committed to something specific within my world. Thus, I cannot simply be committed to enjoyment. I have to be committed to specific kinds of enjoyment. Similarly, I cannot simply be committed to choice. I have to be committed to specific choices. 6 When Kierkegaard says that commitments involve possibility, he means that it is up to me to determine what counts as satisfying my commitment. A commitment to enjoyment does not tell me what kinds of things to enjoy. A commitment to choice does not tell me what kinds of things to choose. It is up to me to determine what I am going to enjoy, or choose. When Kierkegaard says that commitments involve necessity, he means that they give me my identity. While I do not have to commit myself to the enjoyment of skiing or to the choice of being a lawyer, once I have committed myself to these, I have become a skier or a lawyer. To lose the capacity to ski or to practice law is therefore not only to lose the possibility of these activities; it is also to lose commitments that have become necessary to me. 7 Finally, when Kierkegaard says that commitments are eternal, he means that they are not subject to retroactive reinterpretation, and so establish continuity between my present, my past, and my future. If I am in the aesthetic sphere, I know that it is settled that the significant times in my past were those when I really enjoyed myself. Those times allow me to feel that there is a connection between who I am now and who I was in the past. I also know that my future will involve a commitment to enjoyment. Thus, I know that there is a connection between who I am now and who I will be in the future. If I am in the ethical sphere, I know that the significant times in my past were those that I chose. I know that my future will involve a commitment to choice. Thus, again, I know that there is a connection between who I am now, who I was, and who I will be in the future. When Kierkegaard says that commitments are temporal, he means that they change and that they therefore establish the distinction between my present, my past, and my future. While I am in the aesthetic sphere and committed to enjoyment, the particular kinds of things I

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enjoy may change. Though I once enjoyed skiing, I may now enjoy eating gourmet food, and in the future I may enjoy golf. These changes are significant changes because they are changes in my commitments. Similarly, though I once chose to make my relationship with my family significant and envisioned my future in terms of that commitment, I can now choose to see another aspect of my past as significant and can make that aspect important to me in the future, s The most obvious cost of the addiction model is the one that accompanies the benefit of identity - in Kierkegaardian terms, the relationship between possibility and necessity. While an addiction gives an individual her identity, it does so at the cost of robbing her of her freedom. An addiction is not a commitment that an individual freely accepts, b u t a compulsion over which she has no control. To accept the addiction model is to accept the idea that an individual has no freedom - that she is "powerless" in the words of the first of the Twelve Steps - in relation to that which defines her most decisively. To the reader familiar with Kierkegaard's Edifying Discourses and the Religiousness A sphere of existence that the Discourses describe, the idea that we are powerless over that which defines us should have a familiar ring. Kierkegaard describes Religiousness A as "self-annihilation before God". The most important similarity between Religiousness A and the understanding of what it is to be a human being that one has to accept in joining a Twelve Step group is precisely that one cannot help oneself. According to this view of addiction, addicts are not out of control, rather they are attempting to control every aspect of their lives: Therefore, on entering a self-help group, they have to give up the view that they can control what is most important to them. As Kierkegaard puts it:
[Religiousness A says] "[b]efore this consolation can be yours, you must learn to understand that you are absolutely nothing in yourself. Y o u must cut down the bridge of probabilities which seeks to connect the wish, the impatience, the desire, the expectation, with that which is wished, desired and e x p e c t e d " . . . . Or if some anxious soul had run riot in overmuch deliberation, and had become the prisoner of his m a n y thoughts, so that he could not act because it s e e m e d to him that the considerations on either side balanced each other exactly . . . . [Religiousness A counsels that] "a m a n m u s t retire into himself so as to sink down into his own nothingness, making an absolute and unconditional s u r r e n d e r " . . . . For the highest of h u m a n tasks is for a m a n to allow himself to be completely persuaded that he can of himself do nothing, absolutely nothing. 9

If the giving up of control and thereby overcoming the addiction is

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to work, however, the recovered addict must find in his or her world a source of meaning to replace that which the addiction provided. But the move to powerlessness and self-annihilation has removed, along with the addiction, that possibility. The addict, in effect, throws himself on another power - God, or in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, a "higher power" - whose sole function is to keep him from making the movement that leads from trying to control everything to succumbing to one's addiction. But this other power is only understood as negative; it can take away the addiction but cannot provide any meaningful commitment in its place. There is no mention in the Twelve Steps of the "higher power" providing a more positive role, i.e. providing concrete, world-defining commitments such as love or work. From Kierkegaard's perspective, therefore, Religiousness A introduces a God who levels all meaning:
[F]or God there is nothing significant and nothing insignificant.., in a certain sense the significant is for Him insignificant, and in another sense even the least significant is for Him infinitely significant)

When this implicit nihilism becomes apparent, the response of the person trying to hold onto Religiousness A is to try to make this failure into a virtue. The task of self-annihilation becomes an end in itself:
The way of perfection leads through tribulations; and the subject of this discourse is the joy for a sufferer in this thought. Hence the discourse is not this time the admonishing one of how one must walk on the way of affliction, but the joyful one for the sufferer, that the affliction is the how which indicates the way of p e r f e c t i o n . l l . . When affliction is the way, then is this the joy; that it is hence I M M E D I A T E L Y clear to the sufferer, and that he I M M E D I A T E L Y k n o w s definitively what the task is so he does not need to use any ~irne, or waste his strength, in reflecting whether the task should not be different. 12

Kierkegaard's puzzling assertion that the thought of affliction is joyful ceases to be puzzling when we recognize that it represents an attempt to save Religiousness A from its own despair. The upshot of this assertion is that I will always have significance in my life because I will always be tempted to care about satisfying some particular desire and will have the job of overcoming this temptation. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript refers to the task of continually attempting to overcome this temptation as "dying away from immediacy". Religiousness A, then, is a life devoted to overcoming whatever it is that keeps one attached to the world. Applied to the addict, this means that struggling constantly with one's addiction is the nearest one can come to perfec-

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tion. Since, according to the Twelve Step groups, once one is an addict one is always an addict, one gets as one's identity a life devoted to overcoming one's addiction. But Religiousness A does not succeed in giving a positive interpretation to the three sets of factors. Instead, it gives an interpretation in which one member of a set cancels out the other. Religiousness A has a version of necessity and possibility - my necessity is my identity determined by my dominant desires, and my possibility is my ability to overcome attachment to them. It has a version of the finite and the infinite - particular objects in the world get their meaning in terms of my desires, and my constantly striving to overcome my attachment to them gives meaning to my life as a whole. Finally, while my particular desires are temporal and subject to change. I also have the eternity of struggling to overcome them. As we have just seen, however, "dying away from immediacy" encourages the infinite, possible, and eternal factors to cancel out the finite, necessary, and temporal ones. As long as I am dying away from immediacy, I have not achieved absolute indifference to the objects of my desires. On the other hand, if I did achieve such indifference, as we saw above, I would have arrived at despair and nihilism. We can now use Kierkegaard's account of the failure of Religiousness A to help us clarify our intuitions about why addictions are not authentic commitments. The best way to do this is to recognize that each of the benefits of the addiction model has a considerable cost. A Kierkegaardian analysis of the downside of the addiction model makes it look considerably iess appealing than it might otherwise seem. We suggested earlier that identifying oneself as an addict gives one's life a kind of meaning that often seems unavailable in contemporary culture. One way of understanding this kind of meaning is to recognize that, in a society in which traditional religious commitments are increasingly difficult to sustain, an addiction can give a person a kind of substitute absolute. When a person is in the grips of an addiction, it takes precedence over every other activity in his or her life. Work, relationships, and even ordinary pleasures are often sacrificed to the maintenance of the addiction. When an individual enters a recovery group, recovery is supposed to replace addiction as the absolute commitment in his or her life. While this is undoubtedly an improvement over a life centered on addiction, it seems to make the attempt to have significance in one's life problematic.

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Making the c o m m i t m e n t to recovery unconditional makes every other c o m m i t m e n t conditional. If a relationship or a job interferes with a person's process of recovery, it presumably must be abandoned. But a conditional c o m m i t m e n t to a person or a job is, in essence, no commitment. A romantic relationship cannot be sustained if the partners decide in advance to abandon it as soon as difficulties arise. Such an attitude results in a kind of holding back and hedging one's bets, not in the willingness to take risks for the sake of the relationship. Similarly, it would be foolish to enter into a business partnership with s o m e o n e who had decided in advance that he will dissolve it if it interferes with his recovery. It would be reasonable to suspect that such a person will abandon his work as soon as he has to confront the stresses of the business world. Thus the c o m m i t m e n t to recovery as unconditional and p e r m a n e n t has serious problems. While the subordination of all other concerns m a y be useful or necessary in the initial stages of an attempt to overcome an addiction, as a p e r m a n e n t way of life it blocks all other possible c o m m i t m e n t s and so helps to foster the nihilism of c o n t e m p o r a r y culture. A similar point holds for the kind of stability that addiction and recovery offer to individuals in our culture. Many people have r e m a r k e d on the stability of the life of the addict. The familiarity of an addiction offers a kind of built-in protection against novelty. No matter what else changes in a person's life, addictive behavior remains a constant. Undoubtedly, the stability of a c o m m i t m e n t to recovery is superior to the stability of addiction. For one thing, a c o m m i t m e n t to recovery seems to provide the kind of calm and strength that allows people to confront effectively the turbulence of their everyday lives instead of ignoring it through their addiction. H o w e v e r , the stability offered by a c o m m i t m e n t to recovery seems to us to m a k e a person's life too stable - or, rather, to give it the wrong kind of stability. One of the things that m a k e s us h u m a n is that our life-course isn't fixed; that, at different times in our lives, we can have radically different understandings of who we were and of who we are going to be. Thus, for example, falling in love can radically change a person's understanding of her past and future. W h e n she falls in love, she may come to see her past relationships in a new light - relationships which mysteriously failed, for example, now a p p e a r to have been flawed from the outset. Similarly, she will have a new sense of what her future holds, for it is now inconceivable to

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her without this relationship. It is precisely this kind of radical change in self-understanding that the addiction model leaves out. It encourages a person to interpret her past and future in terms of one fixed principle - that she is an alcoholic, a drug addict, a woman who loves too much. This absolute identity is absolutely unchanging. Like the addict, the recovering addict lives in a closed world. Like Religiousness A, the addiction model, then, seems to give with one hand what it takes with the other. It provides meaning, identity, and stability, but it provides them in a way that seems to undermine the concreteness and flexibility, the freedom, and the historical change that are required for a fully meaningful life. Kierkegaard sees Religiousness A as the end of the line for attempts to overcome the leveling of the present age while achieving invulnerability. Kierkegaard, however, has a notion of commitment that does not fall into the contradictions of Religiousness A. He calls it Religiousness B. Like the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, Religiousness A attempts to become invulnerable by making a formal capacity absolute. Religiousness B, in contrast, will propose that only a commitment to something concrete and specific outside myself can overcome leveling. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the difference between someone in one of the lower spheres and someone in Religiousness B as the difference between a self that relates to itself alone and a self that relates itself to something else:
Such a relation, which relates to itself, a self, must either have established itself or been established by something else . . . . Such a derived, established relation is the human self, a relation which relates to itself, and in relating to itself relates to something else. 13

As the commitment in the aesthetic sphere, the commitment in Religiousness B is to something particular, but, unlike the aesthetic, the commitment is not based on one's desires. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard illustrates such a commitment to another by the love of a young lad for a princess:
A young lad falls in love with a princess, the content of his whole life lies in this love . . . . He first makes sure that this really is the content of his life, and his soul is too healthy and proud to squander the least thing on getting drunk. He is not cowardly, he is not afraid to let his love steal in upon his most secret, most hidden thoughts, to let it twine itself in countless coils around every ligament of his consciousness - if the love becomes unhappy he will never be able to wrench himself out of it. 14

Kierkegaard notes that the other to which I commit myself need not

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ON MODERN

NIHILISM

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be a person. It could be "any other interest whatever in which an individual concentrates the whole of life's reality". ~ It could, thus, be a cause or some sort of artistic creation. The only requirement is that it be something specific. The fact that the lad and the princess may desire each other is irrelevant here, for in becoming an infinite passion for one another the relationship transforms desire into an unconditional commitment. In Kierkegaard's terms, in passing from the aesthetic sphere to Religiousness A to Religiousness B, one passes from lower immediacy to dying away to lower immediacy to a higher immediacy. Since this relationship is not based on desire, it does not have the intermittent, anxious, and driven character of commitments in the immediate aesthetic. Rather, one does justice to both the temporal and the eternal facets of the self, and achieves what Kierkegaard calls eternity in time. The other sets of factors are likewise given a positive and mutually supporting definition. The object of my commitment is finite, but, insofar as it defines my world, it is also infinite. It is necessary to me in the sense that I would not be the individual I am without it. However, it also gives me possibility in my life, insofar as I am free to interpret the meaning of my identity and my commitment. Given Kierkegaard's definition of Religiousness B, we can understand why someone in Religiousness B is vulnerable and why Kierkegaard sees the three lower spheres as refusals to face this vulnerability. If I am in Religiousness B and lose someone I love, I cannot simply substitute another object of fantasy or choice and I cannot be indifferent. Rather, I experience the grief of having lost my world, my identity, and the continuity of my life. A person in Religiousness A senses that she could have a differentiated world of her own only if she commits herself to something specific in such a way that everything in her world gets whatever significance it has by virtue of this specific commitment. But she also knows that the object of her commitment must be vulnerable. Although a differentiated world of my own is the ultimate attraction, the idea of exchanging the suffering of frustrated desires for the grief attendant on the loss of the object of a total commitment seems as if exchanging the miserable for the unbearable. Accepting this risk is what Kierkegaard calls "faith". Life in Religiousness B manifests the famous absurdity of the Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling who knows how "'to live joyfully and h a p p i l y . . , every moment on the strength of the absurd, every moment to see the

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I~:[UBERT D R E Y F U S A N D J A N E R U B I N

sword hanging over the loved one's head and yet find, not repose in the pain of resignation, but joy on the strength of the absurd". 16 But the Knight of Faith achieves bliss only by accepting anguish. "Only one who knows anguish finds rest". 17 Whereas Kierkegaard tried to prevent the confusion of lower with higher immediacy - in effect to deny that every habitual dependence was a case of infinite passion or faith - so to destroy the illusion that everyone in Denmark had become a Christian, we now need to do the contrary - to argue that not everyone who has an unconditional commitment is an addict. We no longer need to emphasize that lower immediacy is not faith, but rather that faith is not a kind of lower immediacy, that commitment is not addiction. Kierkegaard's account of Religiousness B gives us the concepts we need to make these crucial distinctions.

NOTES 1 Kierkegaard (1962, pp. 44-45). z Ibid., p. 45. 3 Ibid., pp. 42, 43. 4 Kierkegaard (1989, p. 43). We have made several changes to Kierkegaard's text in order to make what we believe to be its meaning more clear. We have changed the word "freedom" to "possibility". In other passages in The Sickness unto Death and in The Concept o f Anxiety, Kierkegaard uses the word "freedom" to refer to the self-defining nature of human beings; he uses the word "possibility" to refer to one factor of the synthesis that a human being defines. Though Kierkegaard is inconsistent in his use of terminology, the distinction between the two concepts is clear, Thus, we have changed the terminology in order to preserve the clear distinction between the two concepts. Furthermore, we have reversed the order of the possibility/necessity and the eternal/temporal factors, since Kierkegaard discusses them in this order in the remainder of The Sickness unto Death, and we have changed the order of temporal/eternal to eternal/temporal in order to make it symmetrical with Kierkegaard's presentation of the other sets of factors. 5 The aesthetic sphere is built around desires. Of course, in any age, everyone has desires, and most people suffer some compulsions, but that does not mean that they define their lives in terms of them, The first step out of the present age is precisely to make one's desires the basis of one's world. This is the aesthetic sphere of existence. Being in a sphere for Kierkegaard requires making an unconditional commitment to a certain way of life. Thus, only when one identifies oneself with one's desires does one enter the aesthetic sphere - a way of life Kierkegaard calls "lower immediacy", 6 For his definitions of the finite and the infinite, see Kierkegaard (1989, pp. 59-65). 7 For his definition of possibility and necessity, see Kierkegaard (1989, pp. 65-72). s For his definitions of the eternal and the temporal, see Kierkegaard (1980, pp. 81-93).

K I E R K E G A A R D ON M O D E R N N I H I L I S M 9 Kierkegaard (1958, pp. 150-5i). 10 Ibid., p. 260. 11 Ibid., p. 213. 12 Ibid., p. 214. The emphasis is Kierkegaard's. 13 Kierkegaard (1989, p. 43). 14 Kierkegaard (1986, pp. 70, 71). 15 Ibid., p. 71. 16 Ibid., p. 79. 17 Ibid., p. 57.

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REFERENCES Kierkegaard, Scren: 1958, Edifying Discourses, Harper Torch Books, New York. Kierkegaard, Scren: 1962, The Present Age, Harper & Row', New York. Kierkegaard, Scren: 1980, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Kierkegaard, Scren: 1986, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Kierkegaard, Sren: 1989, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay, Penguin, Harmondsworth. DREYFUS Department of Philosophy University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A. RUBIN Program of Religious Studies University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.