Category: Jung, Soul, and Modernity
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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 Planet of the Apes and the Birth of Modern Consciousness
by Brenton L. Delp If modern consciousness has a cinematic origin point, it is found on the windswept beach at the end of The Planet of the Apes (1968). Adapted from Pierre Boulle’s novella, the film operates not merely as science fiction entertainment, but as a structural dramatization of the death of human exceptionalism. Through…
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What Do We Mean by “Existential”?
by Brenton L. Delp The word “existential” is often used as though everyone already knows what it means. We speak of existential anxiety, existential crisis, existential despair, existential meaning, existential threat, existential therapy, and existential questions. Yet the word is rarely defined clearly. For many readers, it carries a vague atmosphere of seriousness. It suggests…
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The Political Shadow: Jung, the Absolute, and Political Tribalism
by Brenton L. Delp Modern political tribalism is not merely a failure of civility. It is not simply that Americans have become rude, impatient, misinformed, or trapped inside media bubbles. These are symptoms of a deeper psychological and spiritual problem. Political identity has increasingly become a vessel of ultimate meaning. It no longer functions only…
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The Spirit in the Bottle: Consciousness, Alchemy, and the Failure of Perspective
Depth Psychology and Consciousness Studies Pt. III by Brenton L. Delp The modern debate about consciousness often begins too late. It begins with a brain, a machine, a theory, a scan, a model, or a slogan. It asks whether consciousness is present, absent, measurable, reducible, emergent, simulated, universal, or illusory. It asks whether AI is…
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AI and the Laziness of the Consciousness Debate
by Brenton L. Delp The question “Is AI conscious?” is not an age-old question. It may belong to an age-old family of questions, but the distinction matters. Human beings have long imagined statues that come to life, golems animated by sacred letters, mechanical dolls, talking heads, artificial servants, puppets who become real, and creatures made…
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Artificial Intelligence vs. Soul
What Machines Can Simulate, Human Beings Must Suffer by Brenton L. Delp The arrival of artificial intelligence does not merely confront us with a new technology. It confronts us with a new mirror. In that mirror, many of the activities once taken as signs of mind now appear in externalized, machinic form: language, memory, association,…
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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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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…
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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,…
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Jung, Hegel and the Problem of Opposites
by Brenton L. Delp The comparison between Hegel and Jung becomes most interesting precisely at the point where easy comparison fails. At first glance they can seem to be confronting the same fundamental issue. Both are preoccupied with opposition. Both reject one-sidedness. Both believe that truth does not lie on one side of a division…
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Why Did Jung Turn to the Obscure: Was it Madness?
Catastrophe, spiritual poverty, and the necessity of the later works by Brenton L. Delp Jung’s later writings are too often approached in one of two inadequate ways. They are either revered from a distance, as though they belonged to a sacred but inaccessible chamber of his thought, or they are appropriated in fragments, flattened into…