A Civilizational Diagnosis.
Essays (Articles)
Introductory reflections that develop the project’s central claims in conceptual, philosophical, and historical form.
Spirit, Spiritual Malady, and the Logic of Addiction
“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada “This essay proceeds from the assumption that addiction is not a personal failure or clinical anomaly, but a historically intelligible response to modern forms of consciousness”. To say this is not to deny…
Hegel: Unity After Division (One Last Consideration)
by Brenton L. Delp Most people think unity means peace, sameness, and the absence of conflict. If something is unified, it must be calm, whole, and undivided. And if difference appears—tension, contradiction, inner conflict—then unity seems to have failed. Hegel changes that picture. And Giegerich, drawing Hegel into psychology, helps us see why this matters…
Unity, Difference, and the Unity of Unity and Difference (Hegel pt.II)
by Brenton L. Delp When people hear the word unity, they usually imagine peace, harmony, and the absence of conflict. When they hear difference, they imagine division, tension, and the threat of breakup. On that ordinary view, unity and difference are opposites: the more one increases, the more the other must decrease. Hegel changes that…
Reflexivity after G.W.F.Hegel (Hegel pt. I)
by Brenton L. Delp After Hegel, reflexivity can no longer mean merely that a subject turns inward and observes itself. That older meaning remains, but it is no longer decisive. Hegel transforms reflexivity from a psychological act into a logical and ontological structure. What matters is not simply that consciousness reflects upon itself, but that…
A History of Depth Psychology: Crisis of the Subject
by Brenton L. Delp Carl G. Jung did not emerge in a world still secure in the old image of man. He became possible only after a long weakening of inherited unity had already taken place. What had once been assumed with relative confidence—that the human being formed a legible whole, that consciousness stood in…
Toward a Philosophical Definition of Addiction (Revised)
by Brenton L. Delp Most definitions of addiction begin too late. They begin with what can be seen: repeated use despite consequences, loss of control, craving, withdrawal, tolerance, relapse. These descriptions are not false. They are clinically necessary and often diagnostically precise. They allow institutions to classify, practitioners to intervene, and sufferers to be recognized…
Consciousness, the DSM, and the Somatic Turn
by Brenton L. Delp The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 and later revised as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (2022), represents the most systematic effort of modern psychiatry to classify disturbances of thought, mood, and behavior. Organized into roughly twenty diagnostic…
Toward a Philosophy of Addiction?
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is most commonly interpreted within two explanatory frameworks: the medical and the moral. Contemporary neuroscience describes addiction in terms of dopaminergic reinforcement, neural plasticity, and behavioral conditioning. Moral or spiritual traditions, by contrast, have historically interpreted addiction as a disorder of the will, a failure of character, or a form…
“The Man in the High Castle” and the Historical Consciousness of Modernity
by Brenton L. Delp The Man in the High Castle appears, at first glance, as a work of alternate history. The narrative imagines a world in which the Axis powers prevailed in the World War II and divided the United States into rival imperial territories governed by the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Pacific…
Pursuing the Absolute: From Cosmic Eternity to Infinite Interiority
by Brenton L. Delp When the history of Western thought is examined from a sufficiently reflective standpoint, a remarkable pattern becomes visible. Concepts that earlier thinkers regarded as timeless metaphysical truths begin to reveal themselves as historically situated forms through which the Absolute appeared to consciousness at different moments. What once seemed permanent discloses itself…
Truth in the Psychology of Wolfgang Giegerich: Addiction, Analysis, and Consciousness
by Brenton L. Delp The question of how addiction might be treated within the psychological framework developed by Wolfgang Giegerich cannot be approached in the same manner as clinical models derived from psychiatry, behavioral therapy, or contemporary neuroscience. Within those frameworks addiction appears primarily as pathology: a dysfunction of reward circuitry, a maladaptive coping strategy,…
Addiction, Modern Consciousness, and Interiorized Infinity. Interpretations on the Psychology of W. Giegerich
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction has generally been approached within two explanatory frameworks: the medical and the moral. Contemporary neuroscience explains addiction in terms of dopaminergic reinforcement, neural plasticity, and behavioral conditioning, while moral or spiritual models interpret it as a disorder of will, meaning, or character. Both perspectives illuminate important dimensions of the phenomenon….