A Civilizational Diagnosis of Modern Consciousness
Essays (Articles)
Introductory reflections that develop the project’s central claims in conceptual, philosophical, and historical form.
Bloodletting, Psychic Relief, and a Historical Reflection into Symptom Management
by Brenton L. Delp The modern act of cutting is usually approached through the language of pathology, crisis, and psychiatric risk. Those dimensions are real and should never be minimized. Yet history permits another perspective. For much of antiquity and the medieval world, the deliberate release of blood was not regarded as mutilation but as…
When Modern Consciousness Reveals Itself
by Brenton L. Delp Batman, Daredevil, the Joker and Kingpin The compulsive return — to the substance, to the screen, to the myth — is not weakness. It is the soul’s attempt to fill a structural void that the age itself has opened and cannot close. To understand why we rage, we must first understand…
Addiction as Micro-Absolute
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is usually described as excess, dependency, compulsion, pathology, or maladaptive habit. Each of these descriptions captures something real. Yet none reaches the peculiar dignity the addictive object acquires within the life of the addict. Addiction does not merely bind. It enthrones. The substance, act, or ritual becomes more than a…
Jung After the War: Soul and the Devastation of Europe
by Brenton L. Delp Jung matters after the war not because he floated above history as a timeless sage, and not because he merely reacted to catastrophe after the fact. He matters because the catastrophe of Europe made certain psychic and symbolic problems impossible to avoid, and his later work is one of the most…
The Absolute After Transcendence
by Brenton L. Delp Modernity did not abolish the Absolute. It relocated it. That is the governing claim of this essay. The familiar story says that the modern world is what remains after transcendence has collapsed: a secular order of technical reason, empirical procedure, private preference, and institutional management. On this telling, the old metaphysical…
Toward a Therapy After the End of Miracles
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction treatment now stands under the immense prestige of medical science, and it should. Medicine has earned authority where death, withdrawal, craving, overdose, and recurrent relapse are concerned. It has corrected the cruelty of moralism, clarified the bodily realities of dependence, and supplied interventions that save lives. A serious account of…
Why Metaphysics Did Not Disappear
by Brenton L. Delp Modernity likes to tell a simple story about itself. The old world believed in God, cosmic hierarchy, fixed essences, and final causes. The modern world, by contrast, is supposed to have outgrown these things. It is empirical, technical, secular, and sober. On this telling, metaphysics has been left behind. What remains…
What Is Addiction? A Philosophical Definition
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is often defined today under the authority of medical science, and not without reason. The medical model did not become dominant by accident. It became dominant because it corrected older brutalities. It helped displace the view that addiction is simply vice, weakness, or bad character. It named dependence, craving, relapse,…
To Be or Not to Be
By Brenton L. Delp Avicenna, Shakespeare and the Modern Condition “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,And thou no breath at all?” King Lear (5.3.306–307) Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and William Shakespeare do not belong to the same world, and that fact must be stated clearly at the outset if the connection between them…
Jung and the Archetype
by Brenton L. Delp Jung’s notion of the archetype becomes weakest when it is made too clear. The temptation is always the same: one wants a stable object, a symbolic inventory, a small theology of psychic figures. One wants to say that the archetype is this image, this motif, this mythic personage, this recurring pattern,…
More About Alcoholism
by Brenton L. Delp Margo’s Got Money Troubles ”There would be no one to perform sanity for.” When Margo’s father says that if he got his own place he would surely relapse, the statement sounds at first like simple fear. But it is more revealing than fear. It is a confession about structure. He is…
The First Noble Truth
by Brenton L. Delp The Birth of Consciousness The first noble truth is usually weakened at precisely the point where it becomes difficult. One is told that Buddhism does not really say life is suffering, only that life contains some suffering, or that certain experiences are unpleasant, or that attachment occasionally makes us unhappy. All…