Thinking Aloud

0000

Dostoyevsky’s character above is rather an abstract model in our discourse about the addiction. Alcoholism as a conscious and totally will-controlled phenomenon is a rare thing, in my opinion. Although, I think drinking stories suggest an evident analog. We mean John O'Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas , a novel we spoke about earlier. Unlike its film version the novel itself shows two types of addicts: Ben willing to go his woeful way to the end and Sera trying to break with these vicious bonds. As a matter of fact, both the types can be generalized and even named somehow. Let’s find an analog to Ben and go back to Dostoyevsky. The Notes from the Underground main character phenomenon is in Russian tradition an insignificant individual. The society has pressed this individual to unbearable conditions.

If we take a pure philosophic approach to the problem of human control over the liquor amount he or she drinks, we come to an important issue of the free will. What’s more, the will is hereby understood as a part of moral self-perception. Something that helps human become a person. Certainly, any freedom is philosophically comparative. It’s limited by circumstances, for example. In this case, opinions clash with real life, an individual’s moral norms can contradict a public opinion, and sweet dreams face the harsh reality of their realization. The absolute freedom is always a dream. The social control is the prototype of the internal one, as a rule

The addiction makes significant changes to the scheme described before. It adds another element called compulsiveness (the English verb “to compel” comes from the Latin word compello that means “to force”). The original meaning of the compulsiveness is a regular repetition of some simple actions (regular washing hands, multiple comebacks to check whether the entrance door is locked, etc.). Although some authorities like DSM view the addiction as compulsivenes