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Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction

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This is one of those books you should read with a pen and notebook at your side. Ideas and connections burst into my mind as I read it. You, too, may find that questions hardly formed in your mind are suddenly being answered as you follow Wilshire's careful explorations. Addressing subjects as diverse as the city person's obsession with sex (as the only wild thing left in city life), and the psychological effects of rapid changes in technology, Wilshire seems almost to have taken the ideas for many books and listed them in one, leaving the reader to expand upon them in his own mind, in my case with great excitement. His quotations, too, from Van Gogh to Yeats to Cather to an African shaman are extraordinarily well chosen and thought-provoking. If I have a criticism, it is that he writes like a person telling you something complex very urgently: he goes rapidly from one idea to another without wrapping it in the repetition and graceful prose to which readers of less technical books are accustomed. Some readers, however, are likely to see that as a virtue rather than a fault. Caution: if you're like me, you'll want to carry this book around and quote it to friends and family, who may not be as receptive as you'd wish. However, if you're interested in issues such as the human-nature connection, ecstasy deprivation (love that term, but he does not claim to be its originator), or addictions of any kind, the kindling it causes in your synapses will be well worth the risk.

Think carefully: does a vague spiritual or emotional deficit sometimes gnaw at you? Are you hungry to get more out of life? If you are intrigued by the notion that modern life is not everything that it is cracked up to be and wonder about the philosophical derangement that underlies and reinforces our social and individual ills, then Bruce Wilshire's fascinating new study of modern addiction and its primal roots is the book for you.

Wilshire, a professor in Rutgers University's philosophy department, takes the phenomenon of addiction as his point of entry into the body-self of modern man. He intends to get us to see beyond addiction as simply a chemical dependency or physical sickness that can be objectively quantified and treated. Rather, he argues, addiction is a gross and inadequate attempt to fill the void formed when our irrepressible primal needs (such as security, ecstasy and coherence) go unfulfilled. Ideally, these needs would be satisfied by "consensual solidarity with other humans," and attunement with the regenerative cycles and rhythms of Nature that nourished our ancestors. "If primal needs have not been satisfied at an early age," he writes, "we have no clear idea of what they are and what could satisfy them." Bewildered, we flail for whatever is immediately at hand and becomes addicted.

There is enough substance in Wild Hunger to overwhelm even the most patient and earnest readers. This book is best digested slowly, with each sentence provoking a private tangential train of thought that leaves you hungry for more. And why shouldn't it? The power of Wild Hunger is that it incites and exposes the very same voracious hunger that it is designed to help us counterbalance and subdue. The first step towards achieving genuine gratification, as Wilshire writes often, is consciously recognizing that a cavity exists. Reading Wild Hunger may not satisfy your deepest hungers: after all, ecstasy is to be found in the wild world itself and not in the substitute gratifications of sex, drugs or exciting prose. But it will be a definite step in the right direction.

Review by Jeff Genauer, The Daily Targum.

An earlier reviewer scoffed at Wilshire's lack of analytical reasoning within his "Wild Hunger"... Wilshire is more of a dialectical thinker. This means that he rejects cartisian thinking and the logic of analysis. In addition to this. he takes a wide range of ideas from many authors; Sartre, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Aristotle, Pierce, and William James (to name but a small portion). His method of reasoning is to synthesize ideas for the purpose of creating meaning, rather than create vast structures of meaningless logical argumentation. In my opinion, his books are a good place for anyone to begin their own authentic quest for understanding human life as it is experienced, and not as some crazy elite intellectual pretends.

This is a preliminary review and will be expanded.

I came to this manuscript with great expectations. Here, finally, I thought I would find a rigorous analysis of the concept of "ecstasy deprivation" by a senior philosopher, someone who might take all of Nietzsche's jumbled though essentially correct speculations about ecstasy as a natural human condition (Birth of Tragedy, Twilight of the Idols, and elsewhere), plug it into recent empirical studies of intoxication as a basic drive in man (everything from McGovern's work on the pharmacology of ancient wine to Siegel's "fourth drive" arguments which have been around for decades), and form linkages with the now rather extensive criticisms of "addiction" (everything from Derrida's interview "The Rhetoric of Drugs" to Davies' book The Myth of Addiction).

What I got instead was a series of rambling, often off-topic and badly out of focus arguments that make Terrence McKenna (Food of the Gods, etc.) sound rigorous by comparison. Leaving to one side that the author largely takes as given the standard formulations of addiction in medico-therapeutic discourse (such definitions are easily contested), what it boils down to is a very unpersuasive "hey, man, we gotta get back to the forest, you know, that goddess culture thing" that doesn't make a case for drug use at all (because the argument seems to think recreational drug use originated in the highly refined man-made drugs created since the beginning of the 19th Century, whereas drug use goes back 10,000 years or more) and a equally tepid "solution" that boils down to something between advocating we all become joggers to get that "runner's high" and just urging us to "hey, man, groove on that freaky sunrise." Rarely have I put a book aside with such disgust as reading this.

A scientific age which becomes too aware of the limitations of its sciences because complex organizations which fail to perform an essential function cease to exist can turn to philosophy for a clearer picture of our great lack.

I quote:

I think we must redraw the conceptual map
of the human condition.
We must take James's pure experience seriously:
the world experienced irradiates and engulfs the organism.
Tracing linear causation between relatively isolated elements
or factors has its limits.
The disturbed brain is engulfed immediately
in a disturbed society and Earth.
We need new models of causation.
The whole situation
must be reconceived
so that our ecstatic hunger
for reality can be grasped. (p. 103).

Wilshire taught a philosophy class when I was at Rutgers, about 6 years ago, so I'm not completely un-biased. But with a little distance from this now, I still think this is just a tremendous book. It gives you A LOT to think about, and I found his conclusions to be very reasonable. I remember approaching him after finishing it and telling him "I was glad that your ending wasn't just that we should all go live in trees."

Yes, it is a difficult read. It's a philosophy book by a college professor. But well worth it. Definitely in my top 5 list of favorite books.

Startling! Writing with passion and honesty, Wilshire shows that in addiction we participate in degenerative vicious circles that substitute for the regenerative cycles of nature. --Parabola

Perhaps, one way to review the thesis of Wilshire's "Wild Hunger" is to etymologically zoom in on the word "wild" itself.

Wilshire explains: "the roots fo the word wilderness convey its attractive/frightening ambivalence, its uncanny power to excite frightened desire. At first glance they simply mean "wild place." But wild and self-willed or willful are connected. In this reconstruction, the roots of wilderness are wil, plus der (of the) and the Middle English ness which means place. Most revealingly, "wil-der-ness" connotes "the will of the place." Cultures since the advent of agriculture nine thousand years ago have striven to conquer the will-of-the-place. Yet we have continued, apparently, to long for the excitement of will-of-the-place..."

Paraphrasing: we can look at the word "wild" as being semantically equivalent to a state of being willed by something external, i.e. by the will of the place. Indeed, we can imagine a pre-scientific human being entering the unknown of the forest and feeling dethroned by its mystery and its hidden dangers. Entering "the wild" then meant a risk, a surrender of control, being at the mercy of "the will of the place." As such, the word "wild" then becomes a state of being controlled, driven, led, guided by the invisible winds of the external. This risk of the unknown, this encounter with the "will-of-the-place" must have been both frightening and exciting, offering a human mind an intriguing, adrenaline-spiced state of altered consciousness, the ecstatic thrill of fear.

These are, as I understand Wilshire's thesis, are "the primal roots of modern addiction."

Wilshire offers a much needed humanistic and normalizing perspective on the human drive for ecstasy, for getting "wild," for getting lost in the forrests of experiential and chemical spontaneity, both as natural experimentation with one's consciousness and a coping-style striptease of willful self-determination. Wilshire's thesis - for me - ran a close parallel with Eric Fromm's writings about the burden of freedom (if we think of existential freedom as being dependent on self-willing), as well as with Andrew Weil's ("From Chocolate to Morphine") de-pathologizing of the human desire to play with one's consciousness.

In scope, Wilshire's work struck me as having the encyclopedic complexity and the monumentalism of Alvin Toffler works ("Future Shock," "Third Wave").

Wilshire bristles with existentialism (reminding us that ecstasy derives from Greek ek-stasis, standing out, and thus represents a perfectly normal drive for differentiation and individuation on the backdrop of the external wilderness).

At times the book reads like a pagan manifesto. At times - like a highly accessible compendium of human neurophysiology. And, lastly, it elevates the discourse of the topic of addiction to the highly humanistic plane of our universal "hunger for connectedness."

A must for substance use/drug and alcohol/addiction counselors looking for an in-depth understanding of the phenomenology of behavioral and chemical wilderness into which our clients plunge.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008) and "Recovery Equation"

www.eatingthemoment.com
www.drsomov.com

Bruce Wilshire is a [...]. Wilshire has long been senile and this work is the crowning achievement of his senility. Rather than make a philosophical argument, Wilshire uses this study as a template for various autobiographical snippets, various tangents, and vast improvable speculations.

Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction reads more like some of L. Ron Hubbard's [...] scientology than it does a serious work of philosophy. His various 'arguments', unsound speculations with no empirical evidence or analytical validity, sound like the rambling of a burnt out hippie; the entire work offers no evidence to support his thesis and consists mainly of various snapshots into the mind of a delusional old man. Also, the book stands as a testament to Wilshire's hostility for the rules and conventions of syntax; the entire work is penned with the grammatical sensibilities of a four-year old- commas are misused, fragments abound, and paragraphs lack coherence and structure.

More than anything else, Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction is evidence that some professors will publish anything for tenure and some publishers will accept any manuscript emanating from a professor from a respected department. However, the Rutgers philosophy department is excellent and renowned despite Bruce Wilshire, not because of Bruce Wilshire.

This book lacks credibility, sound methodology, and convincing argument; more akin to quackery than philosophy, this book belongs in the [...] and not on the bookshelf of a philosopher, student, human, or book retailer. Wild Hunger is naught but the product of Bruce Wilshire's wild imagination; it offers no insight into the problem of addiction and no novel take on the world or humanity.