Category: The Absolute After Transcendence
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Born Man (Revised)
by Brenton L. Delp Consciousness and the Modern Burden of Soul “The whole natural world is over.” — Wolfgang Giegerich, *What Is Soul?*¹ Modern humanity has not merely lost certain beliefs. Something more fundamental has happened: consciousness has acquired the ability to stand outside the worlds that once contained it and to recognize them as…
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The Modern Burden of Soul: The Unconscious Theology of Moral Relativity
by Brenton L. Delp The X-Files – I Want to Believe The cultural and philosophical landscape of our era is defined not by the recovery of old truths, but by the profound exhaustion of living without them. As we shift our analytical focus from isolated clinical pathologies—such as the clinical logic of addiction—to the broader…
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Women and the Afterlife of Metaphysical Hierarchy
by Brenton L. Delp Subordination, Emancipation, and the Burdens That Survive Their Explanation Modernity did not simply free women from an old metaphysical order. It weakened the authority of an order that had made their subordination appear natural, providential, or necessary, while leaving much of the social architecture built under that order in place. This…
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Jung, Psychedelic Therapy, and the Desire for Transcendence
by Brenton L. Delp The renewed interest in psychedelic and ketamine therapy should not be dismissed as mere fashion, nor should it be welcomed as a new miracle. It belongs to something much deeper in the modern soul. It arises at the point where ordinary therapeutic language often fails, where insight no longer moves the…
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Mediation and Reflexivity: How Consciousness Becomes Known to Itself (Condensed Essay)
By Brenton L. Delp Many of the central problems of modern life—identity, meaning, addiction, anxiety, alienation, and the search for purpose—cannot be understood without understanding two philosophical ideas that are often overlooked: mediation and reflexivity. Though these terms sound abstract, they describe some of the most fundamental structures of human existence. Together they help explain…
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Mediation and Reflexivity: The Between and the Return of Consciousness
By Brenton L. Delp Two of the most important words for understanding philosophy, religion, psychology, and the modern condition are also two of the easiest to pass over too quickly: mediation and reflexivity. Both words name movements of consciousness. Both describe the way human beings come into relation with reality, with meaning, with themselves, and…
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The Absolute After Transcendence and the History of Negativity
by Brenton L. Delp Modern people often experience themselves as free, but also strangely unsupported. Older worlds gave human life a place within a larger order. The cosmos, God, church, law, ritual, family, community, and inherited moral language all helped tell the individual who he was, why he suffered, what he owed, what he could…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…