Snorting Philosophy

Every day I viscerally miss academic philosophy. Over the years I studied Western philosophy, the ideas of Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein seeped into my bones and my body, and the desire to talk about them with others who care about it is intense. I don’t normally tell people this in my day to day life. If I do, they get this look of pity on their face, like they feel bad for me. Like I am a lost sheep who wandered away from my herd and they don’t know how to help me find my way back to the herd.

And when they do show sympathy, they are confused because I reject it. I get defiant and say I don’t want to go back. That I can’t go back. That leaving was the best thing for me, and I am growing so much outside academia. At this point, they don’t know what to say, and I don’t know what to say, and the conversation moves on to less confusing issues.

This combination of missing academia while feeling it is better for me to move beyond it often seems strange. If I miss it, why don’t I just go back? The strangeness has to do with assuming that academia must be just a unalloyed good. That philosophy more broadly must be an unalloyed good. That it can’t be harmful to someone. That one can’t use it in a way harmful to oneself.

But in my case I was addicted to philosophy. I had an unhealth relationship to philosophy – such that philosophy was actually hindering my personal growth. This doesn’t mean that philosophy generally, or academic philosophy in particular, are somehow intrinsically bad. No, because one can be addicted to things which are good. One can be addicted to alcohol, though in itself alcohol in moderation is fine. Or one can be addicted to food – even though very obviously we need food and it’s a good thing. Addiction isn’t always a feature of the thing one is addicted to (as with hard drugs), but is often a feature of the way one relates to that thing (as with everyday forms of addiction to food, video games, pleasing people, shopping, sex, and so on).

I have spent the last decade on my blogs highlighting the many problems with academic philosophy: its eurocentrism, its labor problem, its disconnect from the broader cultural situation, the groupthink that can be part of any organization and so on. But none of this of course implies that leaving was the right decision. Problems are problems. One can choose to stay and tackle them from the inside, or choose to leave and address them from the outside. Nothing implies one can’t tackle them from the inside.

The fact that I couldn’t tackle them from the inside says more about how I related to academic philosophy. While I was in it, I was addicted to it. By which I mean that I was using it to mask pain and unhealthy habits. I was using reading and talking about Kant, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the classes I taught as soothing mechanisms – as ways to submerge insecurities rather than facing up to them and living better in a more day to day sense. I was, as it were, snorting philosophy.

What a concept. I love that phrase – snorting philosophy. It just occured to me, and it feels so right to my experience.

Often addictions can be tragic and clearly problematic. Addictions to drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling are like that. When someone says they are addicted to cocaine, the person they are talking to can’t ignore it. They can’t just say, “Ah, too bad. Try better to let it go. Just have greater will power.” We don’t say that because it’s clear that part of the addiction to something like cocaine is it distorts the will and one’s general perspective. When the addict needs the next fix, their sense of priorities get thrown out of whack. They might harm themselves. They might sell their car. They might leave their kids alone in search of the next fix. The addiction seaps into their sense of well being and messes it up. It makes it seem like that next fix is the most important thing in the world, and they lose their sense of priorities. So if someone actually admits to being addicted to cocaine, that is a great achievement in itself. And if the person they say that to ignores it or makes light of it, that person is being an asshole contributing to the problem.

In the case of many other addictions, we do take things more lightly. I have come to realize more and more that I am addicted to … ice cream. What an embarrasing thing to be addicted to. If I say to people that I am addicted to ice cream, I don’t feel their concern for me, as much as their embarassment for me. It feels like they are thinking, “Oh, grow up. Don’t be so silly.” I swallow my words when I try to share about it because it feels like I am making a mountain out of a molehole. That I am fishing for sympathy. As if in this case my will can’t be really distorted by an addiction. After all – the implication hangs in the air – it’s only ice cream. It’s the things kids like. It’s fun, it’s delightful, it’s for pleasant walks on summer evenings. It comes in so many colorful varities. I feel the other person thinking, “Have some self control, man! Get yourself together. Don’t ruin this fun thing for everyone. If you can’t stop eating it, deal with it. But don’t expect me to treat it as some big problem. It’s ice cream! This is not cocaine. It’s not smoking. We have advertisements for it for everyone. It’s a fun activity for people to get ice cream together!”

All of which is true. Ice cream is fun. It is innocent. It speaks of simple times and the purity of childhood. Which is perhaps why I became addicted to it in the first place!

Several of my childhood memories go back to ice cream. When I was about five in India, I got lost and separated from my family on a crowded street. As my parents tell it, they were natrually frantic. They ran everywhere looking for me. They went home in a panic and other family members came looking for me. Eventually they found me. A kind, thoughtful stranger had noticed me, and was holding me in his arms, thinking my family would come looking. And he had given me an ice cream cone to make me feel better.

Later when I was 11, I flew to America with my brother as my father was about to have heart surgery. My father and mother came to America a few months before us, and now my brother and I were coming to join them. One of my uncles picked us up at JFK airport in New York, and drove us into the city where my father’s hospital was. To make us feel better, my uncle bought us ice cream. My first memories of America are of sitting in the back seat, driving into New York City in the evening, being in awe of the tall buildings and gandeur of the city, while eating ice cream, on my way to see my parents in a new country as my father was to have surgery the next morning.

I could go on multiplying stories like this about ice cream in my life. How I often spent afternoons in high school, when my parents were at work and my brother was at college and I felt alienated from American high school culture, going to the nearby McDonalds and getting a coupe of hot fudge sundaes and coming home to eat them while watching Hollywood movies as an entry into American life. How in college I stayed often in the school cafeteria for hours, after I finished my meal, slowly eating ice cream as I did my philosophy homework. How in graduate school I would read philosophy blogs when eating ice cream. How when I was a professor of philosophy, I would drive to the next town over to get just the right flavor of ice cream to break up the monotony of grading. How after I left academia, I would stay up into the night, eating ice cream and watching movies, to live vacariously through the movies a life of adventure and purpose which I seemed to have thrown away in my life. How after I became a parent, I would try to hide from my daughter why I was buying ice cream every other day.

Ice cream is innocent and fun – until it isn’t for someone. Then this perfectly fun thing becomes a space of one’s anxieties and insecurities, weakness and vices, trauma and blame. And the more the addiction creaps into one’s being, the more one feels one has to hide it. Not just because an addiction in open is like walking around naked – the addiction has to be clothed and hidden away for it function properly. But also because in society addiction to ice cream is not a thing to be taken seriously. It is a joke. It is a punch line. The reaction to it isn’t, “We need to help this person detox”, but rather, “This person just needs to grow up!” If you are addicted to ice cream, part of what you use to foster the addiction is exactly this lack of its being taken seriously. One tells oneself, “Of course I don’t have an addiction. Who can be addicted to ice cream? What silliness. I just have a sweet tooth. It’s a fun evening activity. I deserve some fun. I am an adult, not a kid. I can stop anytime. And look, everyone around me thinks so too. They know I am an adult, and so assume I can stop anytime. It’s not a problem. I don’t need an intervention.”

Much the same was true of philosophy for me. I was addicted to philosophy, but in academic philosophy it was nearly impossible for me to express this. In academic philosophy, not only is philosophy fun and cool and an unalloyed good, but it’s also important and crucial and meaningful and helps people become their best selves. As an undergraduate, that was what was communicated to me: study philosophy so you can grow and think criticially. As a professor, that is what I told my students: take philosophy classes so that you can grow and think critically.

Which is all true. I fully believe it. Philosophy is fun. It is cool. It is important and world historical and essential for people to think critically. And academic philosophy is a good thing. Important work to continue the tradition of Plato and Confucius, Kant and Hannah Arendt, Dubois and Aurobindo. Absolutely. My philosophy education helped me grow and open my horizons. Sure, academic philosophy has problems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Of course, it is good!

But what I felt I couldn’t say when I was an academic was, “I know philosophy is good, but I seem to be addicted to it.” I was depending on philosophy to submerge personal pain and trauma, and the very thing – philosophy – which helped me personally and which is important socially was also the thing which was blocking aspects of my personal growth given how I was depending on it.

I wasn’t just being a philosopher in the grand, mythical sense of Socrates, Plato, Kant and Russell. I was also snorting philosophy – using it as a numbing device to push away personal pain and insecurity. I was using my identity as an academic philosopher to convince myself and others I was thinking critically about life in general, when in fact I was also using philosophy the way one might use ice cream or alcohol or drugs – as a way to escape into a fantasy world in which the euphoria and the high of a good argument, or the thrill of intellectual combat became substitutes for taking care of myself physically and emotionally. The more I was drawn into philosophy, the less I exercised. The more captivated I became with the importance of philosophy, the more I told myself I don’t need relationships – that I don’t have time for a girlfriend or to relax with friends. The more I was drawn into philosophy, the more I lived into a world in which my main friends were the great authors I read and with whom I identified. Wittgenstein came to seem to me more real as a friend than any living person next to me. When I was fixated on Kant’s racism, Kant seemed to me more real as someone to be “defeated” than anybody still alive.

This is a familiar issue in our world of celebrity, social media and isolation. For many people the celebrities they admire feel more real and more of their friend than people they see everyday. An opponent on X or Facebook comes to seem the epitome of what all is wrong with the world, and who has to be put in their place. The continual paradox for me as an academic philosopher was the more I entered into academic philosophy, the more I felt isolated. And the more isolated I felt, the more I depended on the celebrities of academic philosophy – the great thinkers of the past and the prominent members of the current time who I didn’t really know – to be my sense of community. Something was off. As I went from being an undergrad to graduate student to being a professor, I didn’t feel I was entering into a world of real people and cultivating living relationships with those around me. It felt instead like the more I entered academic philosophy, the more I was drifiting into a parallel, fantasy world in which I felt disconnected from my students and colleagues, and where I was hanging out more with Wittgenstein and Kant in my mind.

It is easy to miss this, or not take it seriously, because all academic philosophers necessarily have deep relations with the philosophers, dead and alive, with whom they engage. One can’t be a Kant scholar without in some sense living with Kant in one’s head. Academic disagreements are also personal in some sense. The disagreement between defenders of Fodor and Wittgenstein can have the flavor of a battle between the Montagues and the Capulets. For people devoted to a life of ideas, the boundaries between ideas and emotions are often blurred and not easily demarcated.

But it’s one thing for the boundaries to be blurred, and another for them to be completely erased. And that is how it became for me. Philosophy wasn’t just an activity or a job – it became my whole life. Just as the addiction to ice cream became hidden under the cover that it is just a fun thing, so too my addiction to philosophy was hidden under the cover that of course philosophy is meant to be a lived life, not just a job. There wasn’t anything strange in my relation to Wittgenstein – I was just passionate about his ideas and his vision of philosophy. Or so I told myself. But things seemed not as clear when I looked around and found that I was distancing myself from my family and my friends and my colleagues. That somehow the philosophical life I was leading with passion was also from the outside looking like a life which I was living more and more in my head.

As I started to sense this, my first reaction was to deny it. No, that’s just silly. Of course I am living a good life, a full philosophcal life. But as my obsession with philosophy seemed to threaten my friendships and my marriage, the next reaction was anger. This is not my fault. It’s their fault. I am alientated because academic philosophy is alienating. They are – It is – doing this to me. It is taking my love of philosophy away from me and making it into something I can’t share in a healthy way with others. This must be happening because my experiences as a brown man are not recognized. I need to fight it to fight for my right to be a philosopher and not lose it.

This was of course true in a sense. Modern academic philosophy, which arose as a discipline in the time of Kant and Hegel, was founded on the racist assumptions of that time. 200 years later many of those founding assumptions are still implicit in the current structures without their being brought more to light and questioned. But becoming obsessed about this, as I did, didn’t help the overall issue of my addiction to philosophy. I was still addicted to academic philosophy, now not in the guise of continuing it but rather now in the guise of opposing it. I was still mainly living with the philosophers in my head and ignoring my body and my social relationships. I didn’t bother about my addiction to food because I thought of it not as an addiction but as a necessary aid to fighting for the future of philosophy. I didn’t notice as slowly forms of OCD took over my habits, and I would check things constantly – locks, doors, faucets, the wallet in my pocket – to feel that all was ok with the world. The righteous anger which was propelling my reading and contributing to philosophy blogs kept being constantly focused on the big ideas and the world historical issues of our time, and something like the ordinary flourishing of my body and my social self seemed mundane and even selfish to focus on. I was trapped in the feeling that philosophy was all important and that anything and everything – including my well being – can be sacrified for it.

This is the core of my addiction to philosophy. I couldn’t stop doing philosophy. After I left academia, the addiction grew deeper and more frenzied, mixed as it was now with a sense of frighented anxiety that perhaps I made a mistake in leaving. I pushed my wife away who had to bear the brunt of my addiction to philosophy, and we almost got divorced. I assumed I couldn’t have time to be a parent because I was afraid of the mundane life that might imply – and which I felt I couldn’t really function in. I told myself I couldn’t be a parent because I need time to focus on my philosophy. But behind the issue of time was the deeper issue that I was afraid of entering again into the normal social relations that parenthood involves. I had built philosophy as a bubble between myself and those around me, and I didn’t know how to step out of it.

Wittgenstein famously said, “The real discovery is one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace so that it is no longer tormented by questions which brings itself into question.”

One can write hundreds of books on this quote about what must be Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. But that is besides the point. The quote itself is an example of Wittgenstein’s addiction to philosophy. Imagine if instead of the above, Wittgenstein wrote: “The real discovery for me is one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives me peace so that it is I am no longer tormented by questions which bring me into question.”

This alternate sentence makes a lot sense, and is easily understood. One of the reasons I identified so much with Wittgenstein was that he too was addicted to philosophy. It was hard to tell for him where the wonderful things about philosophy ended and where his using philosophy as a way to shield himself from the world and from others began. This was a real continual struggle for him his whole life. He was addicted not just to the fame and power he had as a philosopher, but more essentially, to how he used philosophical ideas and debates as a way to safe guard himself from his traumas and insecurities. Even before he was famous, and since he first was drawn to it, he used philosophy as a soothing mechanism to help him stave off his depression and his instincts for suicide.

A famous story of the Wittgenstein mythology is when Russell asked him whether he was thinking about logic or his sins, and Wittgenstein replied “both”. Most people treat this as just a quirk of Wittgenstein’s personality – as something cute or idiosyncratic, or worse, as something arrogant and obsfucating. The answer “both” seems strange, as it seemed to Russell, when we equate philosophy and logic just with the grandness of the mind. When we think of philosophy as just expanding our horizons and opening our mind to the wonder of the world, what could that possibly have to do with sins? And that too logic! Surely logic is just mathematical. It’s about inferences and arguments, and the nature of “and”, “or” and the conditional – which is probably what Russell and Wittgenstein were talking about. What could any of that have to do with sins or with Wittgenstein’s personal problems?

It’s a telling story because for Wittgenstein as the person that he was the two had become intertwined. Obviously not that logic is somehow intertwined with psychology. Wittgenstein’s whole philosophy was centered on opposing such psychologism. But on a personal level, Wittgenstein felt very acutely that his philosophical work was needed to keep him alive – that without it, he didn’t know why to live and why he shouldn’t be like three of his brothers and commit suicide. That is a lot of psychological pressure on philosophy in his mind. Philosophy is not just a fun thing, or a cute thing for him. Not even something which simply the world needs. Wittgenstein felt actuely his own need for it – and how without it he could feel his self-esteem collapse.

This is why his quote above is a reflection of his addiction to philosophy. Even the framing of the quote doesn’t make any sense. What is it for philosophy to be at peace? Or for philosophy to not be tormented by questions which brings itself into question? Philosophy isn’t a person. There is no question of it being at peace or of being tormented. People can be at peace or tormented. And people can be at peace even if philosophy’s questions never seem to be answered fully.

Wittgenstein’s quote is a confession on his part that he can’t stop doing philosophy when he wants. Even this can be, and is often, interpreted in a grand way – to suggest how passionate philosophers are about their ideas, and how passionate Wittgenstein himself is. But I think that isn’t what Wittgenstein means. Wittgenstein is speaking as someone who is addicted to philosophy for his sense of self-worth. He is not speaking of philosophy as the love of wisdom. He is speaking of philosophy as a life raft he is holding onto so as to not be submerged into depression and self loathing. And he is saying that for someone like him who is addicted to philosophy, the ultimate peace is the same as that of any addict – to be able to step away, and to count each day he doesn’t relapse as a victory.

In the quotation Wittgenstein is half confessing his addiction, but then also half hiding his addiction. He hides it by hiding that he is in fact talking about himself. By making it about philosophy understood in the abstract he makes it seem as if he is talking about something in the general – something about the abstract nature of philosophy rather than about his personal struggles. But once its stated as an abstract nature of philosophy, it immediately raises the question: is this somehow intrinsic to philosophy as such? Do all philosophers want to be at peace by not doing philosophy anymore?

The quote goes off the rails here. It’s absurd to think there is any such generalization. Many philosophers – and even many great philosophers like Spinoza or Hume – don’t have a tortured relationship with philosophy. It doesn’t mean they are better at philosophy, as if they are wiser for having a contended relation with philosophy. Nor does it mean that they are worse at philosophy, as if they are shallow thinkers for not being tortured.

This was the dispute between Russell and Wittgenstein and the difference in their philosophical personalities. Whatever Russell’s personal demons, which were many, those didn’t become connected for him with philosophy the way it did for Wittgenstein. Russell was great at philosophy and he strove for it all his life and thought about it constantly – but he wasn’t addicted to it. When Russell realized he would no longer do great work in philosophy, he fell into a depression. But he had enough normal self-esteem to actually be able to think that someone else – Wittgenstein as it happened – could continue that great work. It takes someone with some emotional grounding to be able to admit to a younger man who is his student that the younger man is the genius. Wittgenstein would never be able to do that, because his sense of self-esteem was too tied up with him being not just a philosopher, but a philosophical genius and the best philosopher in any room.

Wittgenstein knew this about himself, and he was actuely aware of how much he needed it, and how much that alienated him from others. That is, how much his dependence on philosophy was alientating him from life in an ordinary sense. Hence the ordinary free of philosophy becomes the great dream of Wittgenstein’s philosophy – which is its own fantasy in a way, the fantasy of the addict that he will never again touch his addiction and won’t even be tempted to!

I wish when I was in academic I could have recognized my addiction to philosophy as an addiction and sought help. But even if I had recognized that my particular dependence on philosophy was an addiction, where could I have turned to for help? Who in academic philosophy could I have turned to for help?

It’s not a coincidence that Wittgenstein could be a professor of philosophy in England at a time when there was no worry of philosophy departments closing down. But even as academic philosophy grew and departments mushroomed in the last 75 years, they have also had to defend themselves more rigorously and with greater urgency. And especially in the last thirty years as the humanities more generally are attacked, and now as academic philosophy is attacked even from within for its implication in the racism and other ills of its foundation, academic philosophers more generally have had to focus on the positive, happy, noble dimensions of philosophy. How it can make you happier. Can help you get better jobs. Can expand your horizons and make you wiser.

Philosophy in academic philosophy is often treated like ice cream at a kid’s party – as an unalloyed good. If you are addicted to ice cream, a kid’s party is the last place to bring it up. And when I was in academic philosophy, I often felt even in those few moments of clarity when I let myself see I was addicted to philosophy, that I wouldn’t know how to express this to other academic philosophers. I felt too embarrased, too ashamed of my addiction. I felt it was my own personal problem if I am addicted to philosophy, that I need to deal with it on my own. I felt that academic philosophy belonged to people for whom philosophy was a positive joy, so that only such people can and should spread that joy in society. Should I spread my addiction to my students, or to the general public? Should I pull my colleagues into my addiction and have them deal with my personal needs? It seemed easier and more moral to be quiet about it. To not talk about it. To treat it as a personal failing on my part and as a personal misfortune.

It would be good if it didn’t have to be this way. If it could be talked about how addiction to philosophy is fairly common. I suspect many of the “idiosyncracies” of philosophy professors would be better understood if they are seen in the light of addiction to philosophy. And not just philosophy professors. I suspect much of philosophy understood more broadly even outside academia is better seen in this light.