Sobering Wisdom: Philosophical Explorations of Twelve Step Spirituality

Thanks Giving

We would like to thank our contributors for their commitment to the project and the painstaking work they have done to bring it to such a fruitful completion. Collaborating with them has been a privilege and a joy.

We are deeply grateful to Cathie Brettschneider, Humanities Editor, University of Virginia Press, whose vision, judgment, and kindness helped to sustain us. Her receptivity to innovative work is invaluable—and rare. We also thank Ellen Satrom, Mark Mones, Raennah Mitchell, and the staff of the Press; Colleen Romick Clark, our copyeditor; and Tina Melczarek from the Philosophy Department at Salisbury University. All of them helped remedy our inadequacies.

In this, as in all matters, we’ve been blessed by the graceful, abiding love of our spouses, Cathy Miller and Larissa Plants; their patience has been unfailing. We give very special thanks to Zoe Plants, who has been a daily source of brightness.

We dedicate this book to all those participating in Twelve Step programs, in gratitude for their inspiration, and to all those struggling to find a way beyond addiction, in gratitude for their courage.

Jerome A. Miller

Nicholas Plants

THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Source: Alcoholics Anonymous, 59

INTRODUCTION

A Meeting Place for Philosophy and Twelve Step Spirituality

All real living is meeting.

— Martin Buber, I and Thou

Imagine a meeting scheduled for seven o’clock on a wintry Wednesday evening in a small Kansas town. Although some urgent political or economic cause might motivate potential attendees to brave cold weather and bad roads, this meeting has a very different purpose. Those present will be invited to admit their powerlessness, to address deeply personal, painful issues, and to acknowledge their need to be transformed. Given such an agenda, it wouldn’t be surprising if no one came. But, in all likelihood, some people will come—and not just to this meeting in the American heartland. They’ll show up at similar meetings in Tokyo and Paris, Moscow and Calgary, Buenos Aires and Cape Town, even though no celebrity spokespersons publicize them and no newspaper or television station reports on them. People have been showing up at such meetings for over seventy-five years now. This is a documentable historical fact. It is also an unprecedented historical phenomenon.

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded the first Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship in Akron, Ohio, in 1935. As AA has grown in size and geographical breadth, the Twelve Step spirituality on which it is based has been adopted by a wide array of kindred fellowships, including Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon (for relatives and friends of alcoholics), Overeaters Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Gamblers Anonymous, and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Although there is no elaborate institutional structure that sustains these fellowships, the spirituality they practice has profoundly affected millions of people throughout the world. So it is not surprising that a variety of academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and the health sciences, have studied the Twelve Step program of recovery.¹ Philosophers, however, have not as yet paid much attention to it. In fact, we know of no work other than the one you now have in your hands that is primarily devoted to examining this spirituality philosophically.² This lack of dialogue is, we believe, unfortunate. For in a number of crucial respects that we will now try to explain, philosophy and Twelve Step spirituality have a profound affinity for each other, even though professional philosophers have been slow to recognize it.

Begin with the fact that both philosophy and Twelve Step spirituality address fundamental questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. Both focus intently on existential issues that profoundly impact our being as a whole. Indeed, they challenge us to engage in rigorous self-examination—to question deeply ingrained assumptions on which we habitually rely and deeply ingrained habits that we assume cannot be broken. Each can radically enhance our self-awareness and profoundly broaden the horizon of meaning within which we operate. The process of philosophizing and the process of practicing Twelve Step spirituality do not just have the potential to change some part of ourselves or some part of our lives. They have the potential to change how we experience and think about everything.

The issues that philosophy and Twelve Step spirituality address—issues relating to freedom, God, authenticity, morality—cannot be addressed by sciences that use empirical methods and depend on quantitative data. Existential meaning and moral value are not factual matters like the chemistry of alcohol or the diagnosis of liver diseases, and for this reason it is sometimes thought that reason cannot be used to explore questions relating to them. Some would say that we should rely on religious faith and defer to religious authority when considering these matters. But philosophy and Twelve Step spirituality alike insist that human intelligence itself can give us insight into them. Philosophy, unlike theology, does not presuppose acceptance of any religious belief or operate inside the doctrinal framework of any religious tradition. The claims it makes are supposed to be accessible to intelligence and plausible to reason.³ As for Twelve Step spirituality, the founding members of AA who developed it were careful not to wed it to any particular creed, religious institution, or theological system, even though some of them were affiliated with Christian groups. They did not hesitate to draw upon the stories, insights, and linguistic resources of the great religious traditions but did not identify Twelve Step spirituality with any of them. As Twelve Step fellowships have grown and diversified, this independence from religious affiliation has been vigilantly maintained.

In fact, nothing testifies more eloquently to the profound influence that the Twelve Step movement has had on our culture than the now widespread acceptance of the distinction it makes between spirituality and religion. The cultivation of spirituality independent of religion is, of course, not entirely new in the history of American culture. To cite one important example, the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau was saturated with spiritual import even though it was nondenominational and not bound to any traditional doctrinal framework. But the emergence and sustained existence of fellowships committed to practicing spirituality independently of religious institutions is historically unprecedented. Nothing quite like it has happened before. Moreover, the distinction the Twelve Step program makes between spirituality and religion isn’t merely conceptual. It directly informs and shapes the lived experience of the Twelve Step process.⁴

Precisely because it distinguishes spirituality from religion, the Twelve Step enterprise has resonated with the pluralistic, largely secular society in which it has developed. As secularity and pluralism became ascendant in twentieth-century America, culture as a whole became less dependent on, and less deferential to, religious traditions, particularly Christianity. The genius of Twelve Step spirituality lay in its ability to provide those living in this secularized culture a way to address their longing for meaning without having to adhere to a particular religious faith or defined theology. The process of profound personal transformation that the Twelve Steps set in motion suggests that spirituality is a distinctive human capacity with its own unique logic, its own compelling exigencies, its own evolutionary process of growth and maturation.

Participation in this evolutionary process can and sometimes does lead Twelve Step participants to engage in philosophical reflection. We do not infer from this that the practice of the Twelve Steps requires philosophizing. This spirituality itself and the guidance provided by its official literature can be profoundly efficacious without the help of philosophy. But while Twelve Step practice is distinct from and different from philosophical thinking, it does require one to engage in rigorous, often painfully honest self-reflection. It encourages one to become thoughtfully exploratory, to carefully consider basic questions about how one ought to live, and to make a judgment about which values and convictions one should embrace. As performed by the Twelve Step participant, this process of self-reflection is not just deeply personal. It’s vigorously practical. Nevertheless, it has the potential to provoke questions that are relevant not only to oneself but to everyone—a kind of questioning that has universal import. This shift from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, from the practical to the intellectual is the shift to philosophizing.⁵ Some Twelve Step practitioners find themselves making it.

However, in the official literature of Twelve Step spirituality, one does not find much evidence of a shift to philosophical theorizing. This literature does not typically employ philosophical concepts or terms. It relies on commonsense meanings, not theoretical abstractions. It uses ordinary language and avoids intellectual discourse. The history of other spiritual traditions suggests that this is not at all unusual: when it comes to spirituality, the theoretical exercise of intelligence is usually, if not always, a latecomer. When it first emerges, spirituality typically relies on story, proverb, poetry, myth. The great, paradigmatic texts of the wisdom traditions speak in paradox and parable, and never venture far from the concrete particularities of lived experience. So it has been with the Twelve Step enterprise. Its stories and slogans have direct, existential resonance. They make its insights accessible without compromising their profundity. Both the uneducated and the academically trained can find these insights transformative. Twelve Step spirituality is a great leveler, like the addictions to which it responds. Keep it simple, Stupid is now one of its well-established imperatives. Those who have followed it have been led by it to the same inexhaustible simplicities: a recognition of our powerlessness and an openness to what is beyond us.

But precisely because stories, proverbs, and parables are powerful catalysts of spiritual awakening, they can provoke one to ask the kind of question that story, proverb, and parable cannot answer. Intelligence is part of the whole person that Twelve Step spirituality is meant to engage. And there is always latent in intelligence a longing for deeper understanding, richer insight, more profound illumination. In every spiritual tradition, this intellectual exigence sooner or later becomes implacable.⁶ Neither Buddha nor Jesus was an intellectual. But thinkers trying to cultivate Buddhist and Christian wisdom were led to ask intellectual questions, search for intellectual insight, and develop a language for intellectual exchange. Keep it simple is profoundly wise counsel. But the great simplicities of the spirit are not simplistic. All the logical, interpretative, and rhetorical skills of intellect and reason are needed to appreciate and articulate their meaning. For this reason, intellectual exploration can itself become a spiritual exigence. The actual practice of Twelve Step spirituality can spur one to engage in a philosophical exploration of it.

Philosophically exploring Twelve Step spirituality differs fundamentally from other ways of intellectually examining issues related to addiction and recovery. Biochemistry can, of course, help us understand the neurological conditions that may predispose one to addiction. Psychological research, especially by clinicians, can provide insight into the therapeutic usefulness of Twelve Step programs and can help to assess its strengths and weaknesses as a treatment strategy. Sociologists can investigate how social forces lead to addiction and condition recovery. Historians of Twelve Step programs can provide insight into their origins, evolution, and relationship to other spiritual movements.⁷ But these disciplines aren’t equipped to examine the meaning of the Twelve Steps themselves. They can’t explore the intelligibility and rationality of Twelve Step principles or clarify the connections between its various claims. These are tasks that philosophy is uniquely qualified to undertake. By virtue of its capacity to reflect on our lived experience, it can illuminate the meaning the Twelve Steps have for those who perform them. It can unearth the import latent in the commonsense descriptions of the Steps and try to plumb the uncanny paradoxes that lie at the heart of it. It may be able to uncover profundities in it that customary interpretations of it fail to appreciate.

A concern for profundities of meaning is primal to both philosophy and Twelve Step spirituality and gives them a family resemblance. Philosophy tries to rupture our commonsense conceits; Twelve Step spirituality tries to free us from our enslavements. Philosophy encourages us to let go of our presumptions; Twelve Step spirituality encourages us to hit bottom and acknowledge our powerlessness. But both deflate us in order to spring a liberating irony on us: they try to throw us open to the possibility that there is more to reality than our assumptions and addictions allow us to access. The profound affinity between them derives from the conviction, implicit in the practice of both, that our reach for deeper meaning and higher purpose isn’t foolish. It’s the beginning of wisdom.

Given this profound affinity, one can’t help but wonder why Twelve Step spirituality and philosophy have been slow, perhaps even reluctant, to develop a relationship.

From the point of view of Twelve Step spirituality, the pivot from the particular to the universal, the practical to the intellectual, that philosophizing involves can pose a real danger. For as Kierkegaard, himself both a philosopher and a practitioner of spirituality, repeatedly and pointedly reminds us, one may be tempted to make this shift for the purpose of escaping one’s own torturous interiority.⁸ Unlike the kind of self-reflection required by the Twelve Steps, philosophical theorizing can be a subtle—hence an extremely effective—way to disassociate from one’s self. Such disassociation aborts spirituality instead of adding an intellectual dimension to it. To be real, spirituality has to be lived in the first person singular. It has to start with me. One can’t do the Steps in one’s head. One has to allow one’s being as a whole to be moved by them.

The danger that philosophizing might subvert the deeply personal, profoundly existential practice of Twelve Step spirituality is exacerbated by the fact that, today, philosophy is typically practiced as a highly professionalized academic discipline. Written in a technical idiom by and often exclusively for the professorate, academic philosophy tends to be a highly abstract cognitive enterprise. Moreover, spirituality is rarely included in its syllabus of concerns. This is understandable, given the fact that spirituality has long been identified with religious traditions from which philosophy, in its quest for autonomy, had to distance itself. The fact that contemporary culture, under the influence of Twelve Step programs, distinguishes spirituality from religion has not as yet moved many philosophers to alter their conception of it.

Philosophers have, however, become quite attentive to the phenomenon of addiction over the course of the last twenty-five years. This has required them to grapple with the paradoxes of weak will that Aristotle⁹ was the first to consider. The weak-willed individual seems to be both responsible for his or her appetitive habits and helpless in the face of them. Contemporary philosophers tend to pose the issue this way: Is addiction a disease or a moral deficiency? In developing their response to this dilemma, philosophers have adverted—sometimes sympathetically, sometimes critically—to the Twelve Step approach to the issue.¹⁰ But as Ernst Kurtz, the distinguished historian of Alcoholics Anonymous, has documented, the Twelve Step view has always been that if alcoholism—and, by implication, addiction more generally—is a disease, the disease is spiritual in nature.¹¹ Not surprisingly, philosophers such as Francis Seeburger and Kent Dunnington who recognize the impact that addiction has on the whole person¹² have a perspicacious appreciation of this Twelve Step conception of it. Their studies imply that because addiction is a spiritual phenomenon, philosophers will have to develop a philosophy of spirituality to understand it.

Acclimated as we are to thinking of it as an academic discipline, we might find the conjunction of philosophy with spirituality problematic, perhaps even oxymoronic. But philosophy has not always been identified with a scholastic specialty, and there is no reason to assume that philosophizing must have an exclusively academic purpose. Pierre Hadot’s studies¹³ of the ancients have shown that, for them, philosophy was a way of living, a way of being and acting—in short, a kind of spirituality. Philosophical exploration engaged the whole person and opened one to the possibility of living in the world mindfully. Much of what Hadot says of the ancients can also be said of the American Transcendentalists. As Stanley Cavell has explained,¹⁴ the fact that they did not write as academicians does not mean they weren’t philosophers. It means that, for them, philosophy was not merely an academic exercise; it was a way of living in attunement with what ultimately matters. It may be that, if philosophy is to develop an understanding of spirituality, it must reawaken to its own spiritual import.

It seems, then, that a meeting of philosophy and Twelve Step spirituality has the potential to be mutually enriching. Philosophizing can illuminate the profundities of Twelve Step practice by addressing the questions it provokes, exploring the insights on which it is based, and sorting out the confusions it sometimes engenders. It can help us unpack the meaning hidden in Twelve Step paradoxes and latent in Twelve Step stories. It can make more patient and thoughtful the debates we have with ourselves and each other about how best to respond to our impotence and fallibilities, our regrets and despairs, our inescapable griefs and undeniable longings. We don’t mean to imply that philosophy can solve the mysteries of the spirit. But it can lead us deeper into them.

For its part, Twelve Step spirituality can reinvigorate philosophy by encouraging it to return to the kind of deeply personal process of self-examination that Socratic questioning was meant to provoke. The Twelve Step practitioner provides us a model of interiority. When she asks whether there exists a power greater than her compulsions, whether there is a meaning that can fill the void left by her addictions, whether being true to herself requires succumbing to her drives or transcending them, she’s raising issues that are charged with philosophical import. But, in her view, they’re not academic matters. They’re matters of life and death. Appreciating their philosophical significance can enable one to realize their universal relevance, without in any way diminishing their existential resonance. In the ancient world, those willing to explore, both existentially and intellectually, such upsetting, gut-wrenching questions were called lovers of wisdom.

In our epoch of professionalized scholarship, developing wisdom is not often associated with doing philosophy. But only a philosophical exercise of intellect can cultivate it. For, as Aristotle explained, what distinguishes wisdom from other kinds of intellectual excellence is its capacity to integrate—its capacity to see life as a meaningful whole.¹⁵ A dialogue with Twelve Step spirituality can help reawaken in philosophy its original passion for meaningful, mindful wholeness. A dialogue with philosophy can enliven Twelve Step spirituality by integrating intelligence more actively into it. The meeting may begin awkwardly, but it has the potential to engender a conversation that is at once intellectually illuminating and existentially gripping.

In our brief description of a Twelve Step meeting at the beginning of this introduction, we left one of its most significant traits unmentioned. Twelve Step fellowships are deeply democratic in spirit. Anonymity doesn’t just mean that last names aren’t to be used. It means that social, economic, and educational distinctions don’t matter. There are no Twelve Step officers or avenues for advancement. There is instead a shared sense of fallibility and ignorance before inexhaustible mysteries.

Usually, at the beginning of a Twelve Step meeting, a speaker who has volunteered to do so beforehand sounds the issue or theme that will be its focus, and those present are invited (not required) to improvise on it. In this respect, a Twelve Step fellowship is similar to the jazz ensemble, another unprecedented creation of democratic culture. In both, the individual is encouraged to solo—to speak in his or her singular, inimitable voice. But the solo is evoked by and contributes to an ongoing conversation. Each person has the opportunity to add his or her inimitable voice to the whole that the assembled members of the group are creating.

Much the same holds true for this anthology of essays about Twelve Step spirituality. Each of us contributing to it has his or her own distinctive sense of how best to meet the exigencies that move us to philosophize. Indeed, each of us is inclined to define rationality in a way that is inextricably tied to the philosophical positions we have adopted. Among us philosophers, agreement is rare and differences flourish. While scientists also have their serious disputes, they rarely concern the scientific method itself. But in philosophy, where even basic assumptions are questioned, method is itself subject to challenge, and there is no authority, no meta-viewpoint, no recognized principle of adjudication, that can be used to resolve the contention that ensues. This is especially true of philosophy in our pluralistic, post-structural age, where there are many different, but no privileged, conceptions of rationality, and many philosophical methodologies, all of which are historically conditioned and subject to human fallibilities.

This anthology reflects the postmodern historical context in which it has been created. Our contributors draw upon an array of different methodologies and represent a wide range of European, Asian, and American philosophies. Some of our authors proceed analytically, in accord with the mode of philosophizing now dominant in English-speaking countries; they concentrate on a particular concept or conceptual problem in the hope of reaching a more richly nuanced understanding of it than common sense can provide. Others proceed phenomenologically: they attempt to describe the nature of lived experience from the point of view of the person engaged in it. Some contributors find in a particular philosophical tradition or ancient text a perspective that helps shed light on Twelve Step principles and practices. Others are influenced by the insights and viewpoints of recent philosophers whose provocative originality has opened new paths of thought.

As we’ve said, this diversity is similar to what one encounters at a Twelve Step meeting, where each contribution to the conversation reflects the unique experience, history, and attitude of the speaker. Here, as there, one might expect such diversity to produce only a cacophony of voices, each with its own sense of rhythm and reason. In our postmodern age especially, dissonance is often the impression produced by gatherings of philosophers. But we believe the reader will find here something subtly but significantly different—something that is also similar to what one finds at Twelve Step meetings: a unifying passion that animates the diversity. The philosophers who have contributed to this anthology employ different perspectives and speak in a variety of philosophical languages. But all of us are drawn to venture beyond the exclusively academic boundaries that often inhibit philosophizing in order to explore, and perhaps shed some light on, what the spiritual life entails.

In fact, one of the most striking and perhaps surprising features of this anthology is that it demonstrates how thinkers with profoundly different worldviews can come to recognize that spirituality is deeply meaningful and even indispensable to human flourishing. Included among our contributors are not only theists but also naturalists inclined toward agnosticism and atheism; admirers of Stoic, Confucian, and Buddhist sages; and thinkers deeply influenced by Nietzsche, existentialism, and postmodernism. Because of their different methods and metaphysical orientations, our authors develop quite different interpretations of what spirituality means. They offer different paradigms of spiritual excellence and employ different concepts to explore what spiritual development entails. But all of them share the conviction that spirituality is deeply human and profoundly important. That there exists such a consensus among philosophers whose views are otherwise so different and even incompatible is quite remarkable. Their essays can help to free us from a narrow conception of spirituality and from the questionable assumptions we often make about it.

Indeed, the diverse approaches to spirituality collected here suggest that spirituality not only is compatible with but also requires a multiplicity of perspectives. When we address spirituality, diversity of viewpoint may be more than an inescapable feature of our emerging global culture; it may be a prerequisite of philosophical perspicacity. For the wisdom to which philosophy and spirituality both aspire requires insight into human life as a whole—and that whole is a complex unity of many aspects and dimensions to which only a multiplicity of perspectives can give us access. What philosophy and the spiritual life alike require is not a uniform approach but nuance and lucidity, heightened self-awareness and humble probity, careful expression and judicious assessment. What the essays in this anthology have in common is a determination to bring thought to life in both senses of the phrase—a determination to enliven thought by bringing it into relationship with the lived experience of Twelve Step spirituality, and a determination to enrich these experiences by bringing to them a rigorous philosophical thoughtfulness. For the reader, this anthology is meant to be a provocation to wisdom—a catalyst for lively thought and thoughtful living.

As the cumulative effect of the essays in this volume makes clear, the Twelve Steps themselves are distinct but not separate from each other: performed consistently over time, they can reshape one’s life into a dynamic whole. With this whole in mind, we have arranged the essays in a sequence that will, we hope, illuminate the logic of the Steps as it gradually unfolds in and through the practitioner’s performance of them.

We begin, as the Steps do, with the recognition that addiction renders one powerless. Included in this first section are essays that explore the paradox of addiction mentioned above; but they do so from the viewpoint of the Twelve Step experience and Twelve Step insights. Acknowledging powerlessness is the hinge on which the entire Twelve Step program of recovery depends. Given its pivotal and controversial character, we think it especially crucial to shed philosophical light on it. The first two essays in this section address the issue directly. The third and fourth explore the vulnerability that makes us susceptible to addiction—and also capable of recovering from it.

Once addiction is acknowledged, Twelve Step spirituality would have us turn to a higher power. If Step One is its hinge, Steps Two and Three constitute the turning point of Twelve Step spirituality as a whole and probably the most controversial of its recommendations. Our second group of essays tackles the question of what this turn entails. Two of our authors emphasize that this issue is a testing ground for the program’s avowed openness to diverse viewpoints. The essayists in this section themselves represent such diversity. While they don’t all agree about the nature of the higher power to which the Steps would have us turn, they agree that the authenticity of the turn itself is crucial.

It’s appropriate, then, that the third group of essays attempts to plumb the critical role that authenticity plays in recovery. Philosophers have frequently remarked on the uncanny fact that even though we are our selves, knowing our selves and being true to our selves can be exceptionally difficult. Addiction adds to what is already a very arduous task an entirely new layer of daunting complexity and harrowing confusion. The essays in this section don’t pretend to solve the paradoxes of the addictive self. But they do help to deepen our appreciation of these paradoxes. And while there are some serious disagreements among the authors in this section, all of them share the conviction that being one’s self requires entering into a thoughtful relationship with one’s self.

The fourth section of the anthology is devoted to one of the deep paradoxes that govern the Twelve Step approach to selfhood, namely, the conviction that being one’s self requires connecting with others. Twelve Step spirituality insists that recovery isn’t a solitary achievement. The essays in this section attempt to lay out the logic underlying this conviction, and try to show how various Twelve Step traditions, including the sponsor-sponsee relationship, put it into action.

Finally, in the fifth section of the book, we consider the overall impact that the Twelve Steps can have on one’s life. To describe and explain this impact, the first two essayists draw upon traditions of moral philosophy that describe the good life as the practice of virtue and emphasize the importance of practical wisdom. The final essay puts flesh on the skeleton of recovery by showing the crucial role that gratitude plays in it. All the essays in this section breathe new life into the philosophical discourse on character.

Since all of us share