Category: The History of Negativity
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Alchemy, Resurrection, and the Long Unfolding of Modernity
by Brenton L. Delp Our project has argued that modern addiction is not merely a medical contingency but a historically intelligible answer to a specific spiritual condition: the completion of transcendence and the relocation of “the Absolute” into operational systems (technique, administration, pharmacology, optimization). In that condition, obligation remains, but its traditional guarantees do not.…
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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…
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Sophia
The Soul of History Sophia was not born when the world was whole. She arrived only after the first fracture—after certainty had learned to speak too loudly, after order had begun to mistake itself for truth. She did not appear as a rival to Logos, but as what remained when Logos had said everything it…
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Logos
How Logos Appears Today Logos was once confident. He trusted clarity. He trusted distinction. He trusted that if something could be named, ordered, explained, it could be mastered—and if mastered, it could be trusted. When doubt appeared, he sharpened himself. When the world resisted, he refined his methods. When fear arose, he demanded proof. Then…
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Spirit
What Is Spirituality? The word spirit appears deceptively simple, yet its ambiguity conceals several fundamentally different ways of thinking. I will therefore avoid asking what the word means and instead ask what it refers to, since reference situates the term within a logical context rather than a private definition. The most immediate use of spirit…
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Spiritual Malady
Revised “There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada Addiction cannot be adequately understood when it is treated solely as a problem belonging to isolated individuals. What is commonly referred to as spiritual malady should not be conceived as a private…
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Spiritual Malady Cont’d
Bad Infinity (Hegel) Russell Brand captures something essential when he describes modern life as a carousel—perpetual motion without arrival, distraction masquerading as vitality, activity substituting for homecoming. The image is not merely poetic; it is diagnostic. What haunts the modern subject is not simply suffering, but the suspicion that beneath the noise there is nothing—no…