Substance Abuse & Intimate Relations: The Danger of Aristotelian Alienation

The outdated metaphysics of Aristotle posited that the world is composed of "substances" that are self-contained objects definable in isolation. In other words, these objects constitute themselves without any necessary relations to anything else, containing their own essence within themselves. Context and embeddedness are illusions or "accidents," mere appearances and not reality. Reality does not consist of real relations.

This allowed for human beings to view themselves set apart from the world as transcendent subjects standing outside the realm of objects as detached observers. The scientific community initially adopted this view and incorporated it into their protocol, viewing their role as disinterested detectives of an objective world. Both science and philosophy no longer support this paradigm constituted by a subject-object binary.

Both existential/hermeneutic phenomenology and quantum physics support the view that the world/reality is fundamentally constituted by relations. Relationality is now seen everywhere in science from ecosystems to quantum entanglement. The paradox of quantum entanglement involves situations where seemingly separate entities (quantum systems) have direct correlative causality on each other. For example, one particle may be spinning upward in New York while its twin particle is spinning upward in California (or Mars, doesn't matter), and when the scientist reverses the spin on one, the other will automatically reverse its spin to match. Spatial distance renders this situation inexplicable and reveals a hidden connection. Even the measurement and observation of one photon will cause its related partner elsewhere to alter in response. If this seems like science fiction, just know that entanglement is now being used to develop newer ways to transmit information.

In philosophy and the social sciences we can now see that being is always being-in-the-world (Heidegger), being-toward-death (Heidegger), being-interpreted (Ricoeur), and being-created (Sartre). In other words, our singular identity and personhood (ontology) is not inherited from above or given from above. We exist before we are defined. We create and interpret ourselves dialectically, and we are always already constituted by our embeddedness within a social network, our cultural and historical situatedness, and our contextualization in the world. Our relations to the world define us, and we can only work out of that. We are malleable and evolve. But we cannot completely transcend our world or isolate ourselves from it. To attempt this is inauthentic and abusive to our being. By refusing to engage our situation and place in culture and history, we deny something fundamental about ourselves and wander off into a myopic pathology of alienation. The only possible transcendence is one in which we refuse to be totally defined by our situation and act toward self-definition.

We can only authentically, reasonably, and holistically engage our world and ourselves with this awareness. Millennia have been spent engaging in competition and violence, division and strife. We have failed to see our integration and relationality with the world, believing we are "set apart" and holy, justified in slaying the enemy of our independence and freedom. But true emancipation comes not through competition and domination driven by a will-to-power but deliberate relation to the Other, also called love. Love embraces a reverent relation toward the Other that honors her diversity without forcing conformity or reduction to the ego's own will. The same reality constituted by relationality is also constituted by differences. If two things are not differentiated, there can be no relation because dissolution will erase that possibility. Only in difference can there be relationality. This phenomenon lies in between reductive conformity and sharp alienation, both common enemies of love. True love does not focus on the holiness of the "I" but of the "Thou," the Other who intrinsically demands my attention and love.