27 January 2024
Much of what I may know about addiction has come from facilitating two groups for Self Management and Recovery Training aka SMART Recovery. In SMART Recovery, we accept people into meetings whether they are seeking harm reduction or a life of recovery. We don’t count sober days and we don’t punish lapses or relapses which are both expected behaviours within the stages of change, cf. Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, (1992). What we hope to do is add a few more leaves to the fledgling tree that each newcomer is seeking to grow. But, most importantly, every disciplined non-conformist (cf. Dr. King’s quote, title page) needs to learn, test, and practice the habits necessary to keep her unique leaf exposed to sun, wind, and water—because that’s how we live eudaimonic lives.
The second portion of Part I: People, which we are now entering, has to do with the philosophy beneath the need of others. Be forewarned: this is heavy, detailed writing but the reward for understanding is a more resilient intellectual integrity i.e., you will have a sense of how far down—and how ascendant—these factors are; like the connection between the soil and sky.
Much of what follows comes from my final master’s paper. It was a compulsory assignment that I wanted to make worth my while, so I took a kick at the humble task of defining the human soul. It’s a beginning, not a conclusion, so please see this as today’s iteration of a work likely to be in progress so long as I’m drawing breath.
PART I-ii: People: Proposed Dimensions of the Human Soul
This assessment, of the document-based, theoretical context in which the human soul resides, is necessarily selective. The inclusion criteria were consistently resonant concepts pertaining to the character of human beings. Those dimensions may be biological, psychological, philosophical, social, or spiritual. That is a tremendous quantity of learning and documentation of which this portion is a tiny, limited subset that I believe to be common to human beings I have known. The breadth of selection of that subset was guided thus:
Twenty-first century psychology is sadly ahistorical…writers are encouraged to cite works within the last decade, and references to ideas proposed decades and centuries ago are considered irrelevant and discouraged. […] This state of affairs is the result of more than a century of psychology’s separation from philosophy and the proliferation as an empirical science, which has prioritized method—the collection and statistical analysis of data. (Wertz, 2023, pp. 48-49)
To save the reader any list-making anxiety, there is a summary chart of the essential points taken from the thinkers listed, Table 1, (p. x, below [chart will appear when this section is complete]). Working chronologically, this curated knowledge begins with the roughly translated fragment LXXXI (Patrick, 2013) from Heraclitus (died 5th century BCE), stating that a human being never steps into the same river twice. The concept is perpetual change, described as flux. The essential point is that neither the human being, nor the river, remains the same from one day to the next, and that, therefore, life on earth must account for that flux. That is, from birth to death, we are in changing motion and our context is in changing motion. That stated, flux should not be construed as promoting any sense of the impermanence of the essential uniqueness of each human being or of our planetary environment i.e., reality exists.
The second pertinent fragment introduced a hierarchy of values by stating that the highest of virtues is self-control (Heraclitus LXXXI in Patrick, 2013). This second fragment indicates that flux, as constant change, requires choice and choice requires valuation of priorities. This is one of the foundations of virtue ethics. Chronologically, the term virtue ethics is premature as it came of those reading Aristotle’s two works on ethics (and much more). The essence of virtue ethics is that the best societies are guided by individuals taking responsibility for the cultivation of noble souls—that is, a person ought be valued based on character and actions, and little else. As a term, virtue ethics, when duly considered, is about the noble acculturation (of a family, community, city…) by serving the good through consciously virtuous actions. (Think Donald Trump—sorry, don’t, please don’t.) Interestingly, when the sad laughter subsides, the names that spring to mind are Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Alexei Navalny, Nelson Mandela, and Volodymyr Zelensky.
The relationship between those two fragments works thus: If there is a highest virtue which, according to Heraclitus is self-control, there are necessarily other, lower virtues. As such, Heraclitus’ assignment of self-control, as the topmost, requires that virtues are ordered. This brings to mind the wonderfully parsimonious note ascribed to child psychologist, Dr. Becky Kennedy: regulation first, happiness second (Daily Stoic Emails, 2024). Without self-control, there is no self-regulation. I will pose a more disturbing corollary before continuing with Heraclitus: If a group of people are poorly regulated, what is the impact on their community?
The second Heraclitian premise is that constant change necessitates constant choice making. This feels axiomatic (self-evident). If the things around us are changing e.g., spring fosters new growth, summer heat, fall beautiful decay, and winter a deep freeze, we, at least in Canada, adapt or freeze to death. So we choose to buy winter clothing and central heating, or we choose to ride out the cold season in another adaptive way—but choose we must in such a context. At a more individual level, childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, adulthood to parent, parent to empty-nester, empty-nester to retiree, and retiree to elderly person presents some categories within which most human lives dwell—temporarily.
Finally, prioritization is a fundamental decision we either take or choose, usually through fear-based procrastination, not to take, thus shaping both our occupancy of self and possession of our individual lives. To actively choose is to be highly conscious and consciously participative. To procrastinate in saying, for example, that supporting and attending my child’s soccer game is more important to me than working overtime or grabbing a line and beer at the strip club. In the end, wherever we find our feet, we find our choices—actively—or by default.
If, as above, we are consciously participative in our choice making, we are more self-aware and more Heraclitian in the sense that we are cognizant of time’s fell hand. To be cognizant of the constant motion of time is to be poignantly aware that this too shall pass—this too being an actual absolute as all things do pass. To be too afraid of that absolute to act accordingly is to procrastinate. To procrastinate is to practice avoidance, defined earlier. In this case that avoidance is about steering away from awareness of a thing because it is troubling. That thing is the relative shortness of life and the steering away is driven by a desire to feel better by not thinking about it. That feeling better works in the short term but catches up later.
The upshot of that four-paragraph explanation is that our degree of conscious awareness is perhaps the most fundamental choice human beings make. And possibly the most consequential. We shall return to some implications of this point below.
To be continued next week.
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Daily Stoic. (2024, 20 January). Daily Stoic. https://dailystoic.com/
Patrick, G. T. W. (Tr.) (2013). The Fragments of Heraclitus. Digireads.com.
Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., & Norcross, J. C. (1992). In search of how people change. Applications to addictive behaviors. The American psychologist, 47(9), 1102–1114. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.47.9.1102
Wertz, F. J. (2023). A new look at William Stern’s critical personalism: On the value of philosophical foundations for psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2023, Vol. 43, No. 1, 48-60).
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