Category: Soul, Psyche, and History

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…

“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada “This essay proceeds from the assumption that addiction is not a personal failure or clinical anomaly, but a historically intelligible response to modern forms of consciousness”. To say this is not to deny…

by Brenton L. Delp When people hear the word unity, they usually imagine peace, harmony, and the absence of conflict. When they hear difference, they imagine division, tension, and the threat of breakup. On that ordinary view, unity and difference are opposites: the more one increases, the more the other must decrease. Hegel changes that…

by Brenton L. Delp After Hegel, reflexivity can no longer mean merely that a subject turns inward and observes itself. That older meaning remains, but it is no longer decisive. Hegel transforms reflexivity from a psychological act into a logical and ontological structure. What matters is not simply that consciousness reflects upon itself, but that…

by Brenton L. Delp Carl G. Jung did not emerge in a world still secure in the old image of man. He became possible only after a long weakening of inherited unity had already taken place. What had once been assumed with relative confidence—that the human being formed a legible whole, that consciousness stood in…

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…

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…

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…

4 To ask whether Frank Zappa speaks to modernity is to ask what modernity demands from an artist. Does it demand ecstasy? Does it demand rebellion? Or does it demand consciousness that knows it is living inside systems that have already absorbed rebellion as style? The comparison with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix clarifies the…

4 To ask whether Jimi Hendrix is the soul of rock ’n’ roll is not to rank guitarists. It is to define rock itself. “Soul” implies condensation rather than origin. It asks not who began the genre, nor who sold the most records, nor even who wrote the finest songs, but who most purely embodied…

4 To call any song the greatest pop song ever is to risk absurdity. Pop music resists coronation. It multiplies rather than culminates. It thrives on immediacy, fashion, mood. Yet every so often a composition emerges that does not merely succeed within the form but stretches it to structural extremity without breaking it. If one…