A Civilizational Diagnosis of Modern Consciousness
Essays (Articles)
Introductory reflections that develop the project’s central claims in conceptual, philosophical, and historical form.
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.…
The Modern Tragic Condition and the Daimōn of Shakespeare
by Brenton L. Delp Shakespeare and the Tragic Condition (Revised Analyses) PDF Abstract This essay reads Shakespeare and modern cinema as witnesses to metaphysical instability after symbolic certainty begins to fail. Through Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and later films such as Blade Runner, Se7en, and 12 Monkeys, it argues that modern life is marked by…
The Absolute After Transcendence
by Brenton L. Delp Abstract: This paper develops a genealogical account of addiction, ethics, and subjectivity in the wake of the historical completion of transcendence. Drawing on Hegel, Jung, Wolfgang Giegerich, biblical ethics, and clinical psychology, it argues that modern addiction is not a contingent pathology but a structurally necessary response to technological civilization, in…
Why Metaphysics Did Not Disappear
Western Metaphysics Part I Brenton L. Delp (2026) Abstract This essay offers a historical–diagnostic genealogy of metaphysics understood not as a sequence of superseded doctrines, but as a transforming logic that repeatedly relocates its site of operation. Beginning with Aristotle’s articulation of metaphysics as first philosophy, the argument traces the progressive internalization, abstraction, and displacement…
After the Fall of Substance
Western Metaphysics Part II by Brenton L. Delp Abstract: After the Fall of Substance argues that modern addiction cannot be adequately understood as a purely clinical, moral, or neurochemical phenomenon, but must be interpreted as the historical afterlife of completed Western metaphysics. Building upon the ontological stabilization traced in History of Western Metaphysics, this essay…
From Dionysus to Diagnosis
Substance Use Disorders and the Historical Formation of the Modern Self To ask whether addiction is a timeless human weakness or a uniquely modern crisis is to ask a deeper question: has the structure of the self changed? Alcohol, opium, cannabis, and stimulants are not inventions of the industrial age. Fermentation predates writing. Opium circulated…