Category: Essays
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Longsuffering and the Burden of Time
Makrothymia, ’Erekh Appayim, and the Ethical Legacy of Endurance Among the ethical terms inherited by Christianity from the ancient world, few are as easily misunderstood—and as historically consequential—as μακροθυμία (makrothymia), commonly translated as “longsuffering” or “patience.” In modern usage the term is often reduced to emotional calm or passive waiting. In its original Greek, Jewish,…
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Obligation After Transcendence
The Ethical Condition of Born Man If Born Man cannot return to religion without falsification, the ethical question becomes unavoidable: what, if anything, obligates him? The disappearance of transcendence does not abolish ethical demand; it abolishes only the forms by which obligation was once justified. What replaces religion ethically within our current situation is therefore…
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Why I Use the Term Born Man
The term Born Man is not chosen casually, nostalgically, or provocatively for its own sake. It is chosen because language itself has become part of the battlefield of appearance, and any serious attempt to think modern self-consciousness must reckon with that fact rather than evade it. The word man in Born Man is not a…
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Why There is No Return to Religion Without Falsification
Religion as a Historical Form, Not an Eternal Option The contemporary call for a return to religion, or spirituality, is often framed as a corrective to modern nihilism, addiction, violence, and technological abstraction. Such appeals assume that religion represents a lost resource that might be recovered if belief were renewed, practice reinstated, or transcendence re-affirmed….
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The Absolute After Transcendence
Technology, Born Man, and the Logic of Addiction Modern addiction cannot be adequately understood within moral, medical, or therapeutic frameworks alone, because it does not originate at the level those frameworks presuppose. Addiction is not a contingent pathology that happens to proliferate in modern society; it is a historically intelligible response to the completion of…
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Addiction After Meaning: The End of Addiction (Revisited)
From Depth Psychology to Civilizational Logic The original thesis The End of Addiction: A Depth Psychological View of Alcoholism was written at a historical threshold. It belongs to a moment when the inherited explanatory frameworks surrounding addiction—disease, sin, morality, spirituality—were still in active competition, still capable of organizing intelligibility. The work’s ambition was not merely…
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Nervous System, Archetype, and Meaning at Birth
Reframing Astrology Beyond Causation Contemporary discussions of temperament and personality increasingly emphasize neurobiological organization at birth, while astrology is typically dismissed as pre-scientific superstition. This essay argues that such dismissal rests on a category error. Drawing on Richard Tarnas’ theory of archetypal coherence and Liz Greene’s depth-psychological approach to astrology, the paper reframes astrology not…
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Mary Shelly
Frankenstein and the Collapse of the Unus Mundus before Modernity Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a decisive cultural drama in which an older symbolic vision of unity—articulated by figures such as Gerhard Dorn and later psychologized by C. G. Jung—breaks down under the pressure of modern, implicitly Hegelian consciousness. The novel stages the…
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The Placebo Effect and the Crisis of Meaning in Modernity
When situated within the broader horizon of modernity, the placebo effect ceases to appear as a marginal curiosity of clinical medicine and instead emerges as a symptom of a deeper anthropological tension: the persistence of meaning as a causal force within a civilization that officially denies its legitimacy. Modernity’s self-understanding depends upon the purification of…
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The Placebo Effect
Meaning, Expectation, and the Biology of Healing Within medical science, the placebo effect refers to genuine physiological and psychological changes that arise not from the pharmacological properties of a treatment, but from the meanings, expectations, and contexts surrounding it. Long dismissed as a confounding variable or a methodological nuisance, the placebo effect is now recognized…