“I was trapped in the feeling that philosophy was all important and that anything and everything—including my well being—can be sacrificed for it. This is the core of my addiction to philosophy. I couldn’t stop doing philosophy.”

Those are the words of Bharath Vallabha, a former assistant professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr.

In a post at his blog, The Radiant Path, Dr. Vallabha talks about what he calls his “addiction” to philosophy, and how it affected his life.

Here’s an excerpt:

My philosophy education helped me grow and open my horizons. Sure, academic philosophy has problems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Of course, it is good!

But what I felt I couldn’t say when I was an academic was, “I know philosophy is good, but I seem to be addicted to it.” I was depending on philosophy to submerge personal pain and trauma, and the very thing – philosophy – which helped me personally and which is important socially was also the thing which was blocking aspects of my personal growth given how I was depending on it.

I wasn’t just being a philosopher in the grand, mythical sense of Socrates, Plato, Kant and Russell. I was also snorting philosophy – using it as a numbing device to push away personal pain and insecurity. I was using my identity as an academic philosopher to convince myself and others I was thinking critically about life in general, when in fact I was also using philosophy the way one might use ice cream or alcohol or drugs – as a way to escape into a fantasy world in which the euphoria and the high of a good argument, or the thrill of intellectual combat became substitutes for taking care of myself physically and emotionally.

The more I was drawn into philosophy, the less I exercised. The more captivated I became with the importance of philosophy, I more told myself I don’t need relationships – that I don’t have time for a girlfriend or to relax with friends. The more I was drawn into philosophy, the more I lived into a world in which my main friends were the great authors I read and with whom I identified. Wittgenstein came to seem to me more real as a friend than any living person next to me. When I was fixated on Kant’s racism, Kant seemed to me more real as someone to be “defeated” than anybody still alive.

This is a familiar issue in our world of celebrity, social media and isolation. For many people the celebrities they admire feel more real and more of their friend than people they see everyday. An opponent on X or Facebook comes to seem the epitome of what all is wrong with the world, and who has to be put in their place. The continual paradox for me as an academic philosopher was the more I entered into academic philosophy, the more I felt isolated. And the more isolated I felt, the more I depended on the celebrities of academic philosophy – the great thinkers of the past and the prominent members of the current time who I didn’t really know – to be my sense of community. Something was off. As I went from being an undergrad to graduate student to being a professor, I didn’t feel I was entering into a world of real people and cultivating living relationships with those around me. It felt instead like the more I entered academic philosophy, the more I was drifting into a parallel, fantasy world in which I felt disconnected from my students and colleagues, and where I was hanging out more with Wittgenstein and Kant in my mind.

It is easy to miss this, or not take it seriously, because all academic philosophers necessarily have deep relations with the philosophers, dead and alive, with whom they engage. One can’t be a Kant scholar without in some sense living with Kant in one’s head. Academic disagreements are also personal in some sense. The disagreement between defenders of Fodor and Wittgenstein can have the flavor of a battle between the Montagues and the Capulets. For people devoted to a life of ideas, the boundaries between ideas and emotions are often blurred and not easily demarcated.

But it’s one thing for the boundaries to be blurred, and another for them to be completely erased. And that is how it became for me. Philosophy wasn’t just an activity or a job – it became my whole life…

I was trapped in the feeling that philosophy was all important and that anything and everything – including my well being – can be sacrificed for it.

This is the core of my addiction to philosophy. I couldn’t stop doing philosophy. After I left academia, the addiction grew deeper and more frenzied, mixed as it was now with a sense of frightened anxiety that perhaps I made a mistake in leaving. I pushed my wife away who had to bear the brunt of my addiction to philosophy, and we almost got divorced. I assumed I couldn’t have time to be a parent because I was afraid of the mundane life that might imply – and which I felt I couldn’t really function in. I told myself I couldn’t be a parent because I need time to focus on my philosophy. But behind the issue of time was the deeper issue that I was afraid of entering again into the normal social relations that parenthood involves. I had built philosophy as a bubble between myself and those around me, and I didn’t know how to step out of it.

I don’t think Vallabha is unique in feeling something like an addiction to philosophy, nor in letting such feelings impact the rest of one’s life.

Such feelings may prompt questions: What should I do? To whom can I talk about this? What help is available? How will other philosophers react?

Vallabha says:

I wish when I was in academic I could have recognized my addiction to philosophy as an addiction and sought help. But even if I had recognized that my particular dependence on philosophy was an addiction, where could I turned to for help? Who in academic philosophy could I have turned to for help?… I felt it was my own personal problem if I am addicted to philosophy, that I need to deal with it on my own…

It would be good if it didn’t have to be this way. If it could be talked about how addiction to philosophy is fairly common. I suspect many of the “idiosyncracies” of philosophy professors would be better understood if they are seen in the light of addiction to philosophy.

You can read the full post here.

Discussion welcome.

The post Addicted to Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.