A Civilizational Diagnosis of Modern Consciousness
Essays (Articles)
Introductory reflections that develop the project’s central claims in conceptual, philosophical, and historical form.
Hegel and Jung
by Brenton L. Delp The Difference Between Philosophy and Psychology The comparison between Hegel’s Begriff (The German verb begreifen means “to grasp” or “to comprehend.” Thus Begriff carries the sense of an act of grasping intelligibility). Jung’s Archetype becomes most illuminating precisely at the point where they diverge. Both thinkers reject the modern empiricist assumption…
Mental Illness and the Metaphysical Burden of Modernity
by Brenton L. Delp Neurosis: Mental or Metaphysical Illness? Modern discussions of mental illness are overwhelmingly governed by medical and biological assumptions. Anxiety, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and various forms of psychic suffering are generally interpreted as dysfunctions of the brain, disturbances of neurochemistry, maladaptive cognitive patterns, or evolutionary inheritances from earlier stages of human…
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,…