Here's Clancy Martin's recent Chronicle of Higher Education review of Michael Clune's White Out.
When googling that for the link I found an earlier London Review of Book essay by Martin that's about as raw as the Neal Young song that he quotes in the Clune review.
For some of the reasons Martin suggests, I find much of the philosophical debates surrounding action theory, autonomy, and akrasia to be nearly inscrutable. I just don't end up having enough of the intuitions that participants in the debates seem to take as shared. . .* but mostly (beyond what can be gleaned from the Neal Young lyrics and melody)** I just find people basically incomprehensible.
As Martin does in his essay and Steve O does in the documentary to right, every person I've known who has navigated addiction/recovery successfully(i.e. (1) without dying, while (2) managing to recover/sustain a state of basic decency to others) has ended up embracing pretty paradoxical views about volition. At one point in the documentary someone congratulates Steve O for staying clean for over a year, and he just good naturedly deflects the compliment by saying that for all he knows he might get high tomorrow.
I don't get this at all, because accepting that one has so little control over one's own actions strikes me as absolutely terrifying, but it does seem to be part of the healing process for so many people. I realize that this is all pretty standard AA boilerplate, and that AA should be thought about critically (as Martin begins to explore in the essay). Still, I think there's something true and paradoxical that the AA boilerplate is attempting to give voice to.
I do know that Martin's own experiences in the international jewelry business profoundly informs his fiction and his philosophical work on deception. Maybe there are some new (over and above the standard higher order belief/desire stuff) philosophical theses to be discovered about autonomy, etc. from the experience of addiction and recovery.
If I remember right, Nietzsche likens philosophy to alchemy, trying to turn a bunch of garbage into gold. And Heidegger picks up Novalis' romantic view that philosophy starts with feeling out of place, homesick. I worry that such views romanticize unhappiness too much, but there is some truth to them. . . Maybe the problematic part is that the unhappiness is viewed as a kind of currency to purchase wisdom (or, more probably, a clever simulacrum thereof), and then we are as a result actually less sympathetic to one another about our various dysfunctions.*** I don't know. I think I've seen it go both ways in the biz.
[Notes:
*My incomprehension isn't entirely unprincipled: (1) Some of Daniel Dennett's deepest writings comes from his meditations on how his "instrumentalist" model of belief fits with debates about Davidson's principle of charity. To my mind, Dennett argues persuasively that in even pretty simple cases of practical irrationality our ability to attribute beliefs and desires (even to ourselves) constitutively breaks down. None of the work in the autonomy/action theory/akrasia tradition that I've been exposed to strikes me as even consistent with this basic insight, one which was in any case largely misplaced into metaphysical debates about error-theory/eliminativism instead and not take up into debates with more empirical and practical friction. (2) With James Rocha, I think that it has been a disaster to misplace the original tie between autonomy and issues concerning human well-being. Not only do many autonomy theorists act as if there are little sentences in our head from which one can unproblematically read off our first and second order beliefs and desires, but they also act as if the debate just concerns whether those beliefs and desires and the actions they give rise to get a capital A next to them or not. In the earlier tradition which tied autonomy to ethics more tightly (so that a non-autnomous action could not be morally praiseworthy or so that an action that decreased well being could not be autonomous) there is at least some friction so that I know what people are attempting to talk about. (3) Possibly in tension with Rocha's point (I don't know if there's an antinomy here, there might be), Alisdair MacIntyre's late period masterpiece, Dependent Rational Animals, should make us all very worried about valorizing autonomy too much. So the whole issue is confusing and confused. I haven't kept up in recent work though, so if action theorists are taking (1)-(3) on in a systematic way, I'd love to read the resulting debates.
**With "You Can't Always Get What You Want" The Rolling Stones became the anti-Neil Young, the kind of band you are supposed to hate as a fan of punk rock. It's not only the vapid, hypocritical Baby Boomer preachiness that makes the song so horrible. How could Mick Jagger possibly have any idea what I want or need? Do human beings really know this about themselves as a rule? If Jagger had any special wisodm here, would would he really go around singing that song?
***Evangelical Christians can often be like this. You might need a story of wretched unhappiness that brought you to God, but then you better wear a smile after that, because if you are still unhappy after accepting Him, then you haven't really let Him into your heart.
In my experience, lots of evangelical Christians really didn't actually start out wretchedly unhappy. But how many philosophy professors do you know that had anything approaching a happy adolescence? At least the original promise of philosophy was that wisdom would allow you to align yourself with reality in some way to address the original unhappiness.
But I'm now haunted by the thought that Epicurean and Stoic communities were as moronically uncharitable as the churchgoers of my youth. I remember a woman whose husband's terminal brain cancer had made him so violent that he had to be institutionalized being asked if she'd "given it up to Lord." As if it were that simple. And her fault. Again, this is (Weberian) boilerplate, but distressing to think that secular models of salvation might repeat the sin.]
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