Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is twofold: to develop an existential theory of addiction, and to demonstrate that Sartre's theory of love is a theory of addiction. ;In Chapter One, I offer both "subjective" and "objective" "definitions" of addiction. I also maintain that love and addiction as modes of being are mutually exclusive. Love is seen as a movement toward freedom, toward more fully appropriating one's freedom, whereas addiction is seen as a movement away from freedom, toward being, a movement in which one's freedom is squandered, evaded, or discharged fruitlessly in endeavors that make one less human. ;In Chapter Two I advance the claim that Sartre has two distinct theories of love, type one and type two, but that only the former can flow from his ontology. The possibility of type two love in Sartre depends wholly upon the realizability and import of the phenomenological reduction and conversion. ;In Chapter Three, an existential theory of addiction is developed utilizing the writings of Kierkegaard and Sartre, in the main, but also de Beauvoir, Camus, Sade, Ortega, and Nietzsche. Addiction is seen as the result of self-absence and the sacrifice of the real in favor of the imaginary. Addiction is a project of the self to evade or truncate its own freedom, and involves the refusal to face one' s own anxiety and despair. ;As a result of addicted consciousness degrading itself to the level of Sartrean impure reflection, addiction is experienced as "undergone" by an "imprisoned" consciousness which takes its own psychic constructs as constraining, a consciousness which experiences its own spontaneity as "beyond freedom." Furthermore, addiction is seen as a habitual way of being emotional and a phenomenon of belief . Finally, addiction is seen as a self-deceptive effort based on the self's fear of its own existence; addiction, therefore, is a project to prepare one's own death. ;In Chapter Four, it is demonstrated subsequent to the demonstration of the impossibility of the conversion in Sartre that Sartre's theory of love is in fact a theory of addiction