A few days ago I ate two Western meals, using knife and fork, and thinking of chopsticks; I always felt that something was missing, and I was also very unaccustomed to it.
So, am I addicted to chopsticks? Is a life in which one depends on chopsticks every day a kind of obsession? This way of putting it seems a bit absurd; I’m afraid no one would seriously reflect on a symptom like “chopstick addiction.”
Besides chopsticks, there are things like showers, flush toilets, and so on: many things in our lives on which we depend even more, and without which we feel uncomfortable all over. They are fully embedded in our habits of living, making them hard to let go of. But why are there no expressions like chopstick addiction or toilet addiction? If chopstick addiction is a nonsensical concept, then in what sense is the concept of “internet addiction” meaningful?
If a person who takes drugs once every three days can be said to have a drug addiction, then why doesn’t using chopsticks three times a day count as addiction? Perhaps someone will say that using chopsticks is a normal necessity of life, whereas taking drugs disrupts normal life. But there is no eternally fixed standard template for human ways of living. To ancient people, many ways of life today were not merely unnecessary, but might even have seemed deviant or incomprehensible. It is difficult to find a transcendent standard by which to judge what is a necessity of life and what is a disruption of life. Perhaps some people who value “science” will produce certain physiological or neuropathological evidence to show the destructiveness of drugs, but judgments about what is healthy and what is pathological are not always so clear either. Of course, taking drugs changes a person’s constitution and even the brain, just as running, weightlifting, diet, reading and writing, manual labor, sitting in an office, and so on all change a person’s constitution and even the brain; and these changes always stimulate some aspects while suppressing others. For example, the habit of reading has produced vast numbers of people with myopia, and has also profoundly changed people’s ways of life (from the standpoint of oral cultures, the way of life of a reader may not be any more normal than that of a drunkard). But what degree of change in constitution or habit should be regarded as a novel or distinctive way of life, and what degree of change should be regarded as addiction, obsession, or depravity?
Of course, we can once and for all take refuge in a relativist strategy and acknowledge that the concept of addiction is socially constructed. That is correct, but it does not mean that we cannot make a deeper analysis of the concept. The preceding analysis was too “objective” and did not first distinguish, in an ontological sense, the objects of addiction.
The key difference between chopsticks and drugs is this: the former is a medium, the latter is content; the former is a tool, the latter is an object.
This is not to say that chopsticks can only be a medium, or that drugs can only be content. For a chopstick collector, chopsticks are the object of collection; while for a doctor, marijuana is a tool of anesthesia. Of course, in many cases a thing’s “identity” is more ambiguous—for example, in the eyes of a peasant, marijuana is both an object of cultivation and a tool for making money, and at the same time it can also be an object of consumption. The distinction between medium and content, tool and object, is not an essential distinction in the traditional ontological sense, but a contextual and historical one; nevertheless, it is indeed a crucial distinction.
To say that we cannot do without “using chopsticks” and to say that we cannot do without “taking drugs” is precisely to draw such a crucial distinction—“using chopsticks” is an open activity, one that spreads outward; it points to the scene of “eating,” and chopsticks are depended upon precisely as a tool for eating, just as a toilet is depended upon as a tool for excretion. That is to say, chopsticks or toilets are not the endpoint of intention. When we use them, our intentionality does not remain within them, but is always open toward other things.
On the other hand, drugs are some kind of “pure content”: what the addict needs is not some other thing presented through the drug, but the drug itself. This is not to say that when using drugs, the addict always has a clear intention directed at the drug; on the contrary, drugs make one lose oneself within them, forget everything else, and enter a world of fantasy. This is precisely the difference between a wine connoisseur and a drunkard: the connoisseur always takes wine as a clear object of appraisal, whereas the drunkard is merely immersed in the activity of drinking.
In other words, the thing of addiction has a subtle mode of presentation, somewhere between tool and object. Someone who merely takes wine as a means of socializing, or merely takes wine as an object of appraisal, does not count as a drunkard. A person addicted to drinking may also very likely be both a social drinker and a wine taster, but when he is immersed in drinking, wine is for him something that is neither a tool nor an object—or, more precisely, addiction causes a certain splitting apart of tool and object, form and matter, medium and content.
We can still say that the object of addiction is some kind of tool—a tool for using wine to dispel sorrow, a tool for obtaining pleasure, a tool for numbing the nerves, and so on. But as addiction deepens, these “objects” become increasingly vague and unclear, increasingly stripped of richness, and turn into something utterly monotonous and pure—for example, sheer pleasure, rather than concrete enjoyment. If I simply drink heavily once in a while in a targeted way, in order to relieve some specific, definite sorrow or a particular pain, then I still cannot be considered a drunkard. But if the purpose of “dispelling sorrow” is completely swallowed up by the desire to drink, so that what was originally a purpose becomes instead a pretext for drinking, then that counts as drink addiction. Similarly, if drinking originally for social reasons becomes socializing for the sake of drinking, then that is also a symptom of worsening alcoholism. However, if one still has to make every effort to create social occasions in order to drink, then at least this addiction is still controlled and conditional. If one likes drinking to the point of doing it regardless of occasion or means, then that really can be called obsession or intoxication.
Of course, objectively speaking, whether drinking or taking drugs, both require some kind of occasion and some specific manner. For example, drugs can be smoked, swallowed, or injected, but if you smear them on your face, they are useless. What is called “by any means necessary” does not mean that one can truly bypass the medium and directly encounter the content itself; rather, it means that one cares less and less about the means, and the means increasingly loses its limitations and specificity.
“Means” refers to the path by which a goal is achieved; a medium exists in order to reach its content. But this “path” is also a kind of barrier, creating some restriction or interval through which we deal with the object. For example, eating with chopsticks seems to introduce more mediation than grabbing food directly with one’s hands, while grabbing with one’s hands may in turn seem less “direct” than a beast pouncing and tearing with its teeth. Frying and stir-frying over an iron pan is not as good as placing something directly in a fire to roast; roasting is not as good as eating it raw directly… Yet when we say “direct,” we often mean some rougher, more primitive mode of presentation. Does this “primitive” mode necessarily come closer to the “truth” of things? Not necessarily. At times we are willing to believe that more refined cooking and ways of eating will more fully present the texture of the ingredients. Or take a precious piece of jade and an ordinary stone: in their “primitive” state they may look not very different at all; only after a craftsman’s meticulous carving, and after being placed in a proper viewing environment, do they reveal a dramatic difference. This difference is contained within the primitive “matter,” but it also depends on the creation of an added “form.”
Rather than saying that a medium seeks “directness,” it is better to say that a medium seeks indirectness. Indirectness makes the lifeworld rich and diverse, whereas directness leads to immersion and obsession. That is the difference between a penchant and an addiction. If someone cherishes wine, can identify the fragrance of various fine wines, knows them intimately, and is very particular about the occasion and even the glass when drinking, then we would describe his relation to wine as a fondness for fine wine, as loving wine as though it were his life—but we would not say that he is trapped in alcoholism and unable to extricate himself.
The more a thing is addictive, the more it can immerse people, the more “pure” it becomes—from poppy husks to opium to heroin, from smoking to swallowing to injection, the medium becomes ever more “direct,” the content becomes ever more “pure,” and people become ever more addicted. Rather than saying that it is the purification of drugs that makes people more easily addicted, it is better to say that people’s addiction has driven drugs to be purified.
So, let us turn back to the so-called “internet addiction.” If “internet addiction” means a strong dependence on the internet as a tool, then this is like chopstick addiction or toilet addiction: it is not an appropriate concept. In particular, some people emphasize that the internet “separates” people from real-life communication, but what they have not noticed is that so-called “communication” is precisely a variety of ways of “separating apart”—only with barriers can there be open space and rich room for maneuver. Is raw meat necessarily more “essential” than steak? Is tearing and biting necessarily more proper than using knife and fork or chopsticks? Is stone from a mountain ravine necessarily more truthful than jade after carving? Is communicating through the internet necessarily more real than communicating by letter or face to face? Of course, raw meat is more “primitive” than steak, and face-to-face communication is more “primitive” than going online, but does primitive necessarily mean more original? Is the most primitive way necessarily the best path of revelation or communication?
So, is there still such a thing as “internet addiction”? Perhaps there is. Real internet addiction is probably a state like this: whether I have anything to do or not, aimlessly, I just want to browse a few webpages, click on a few news items, update my Weibo, post a few water posts, casually find someone to curse at for a couple of sentences… In short, anything will do; I just want to “refresh.” If, no matter when or where, I cannot resist the urge to go online, while being indifferent to the manner and content of going online, then in that case “internet addiction” has probably appeared. Just as the drunkard and the wine connoisseur can at any time turn into each other, anyone who depends on the internet can at any time give rise to internet addiction. But just as anything capable of pleasing us inevitably carries elements that can make us addicted, this is nothing to fear.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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