Category: The Loneliness of Man (Complete Collection of Essays)
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power is not Nietzsche’s doctrine — it is Nietzsche’s laboratory. The Will to Power must not be approached as Nietzsche’s philosophical system. It is not a finished doctrine, nor even a unified book in the conventional sense. It is, rather, a laboratory of thinking in extremis—a record of concepts under pressure, written…
-
When Evil Becomes Necessary
Thunderbolts (2025) functions less as a conventional superhero film than as a cultural dream in which unresolved moral structures are staged rather than resolved. Beneath its surface narrative of antiheroes and state-sanctioned violence, the film quietly incorporates multiple historical and symbolic layers: a Dantean stratification of moral culpability, a post–World War II logic of “necessary…
-
Se7en and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals
Ressentiment, Bad Conscience, and the Addictive Superego David Fincher’s Se7en can be read as a cinematic enactment of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: a world in which morality has lost its life-affirming function and survives only as punishment, guilt, and compulsive cruelty. The film does not depict sin in a theological sense, but sin…
-
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
Dracula and the Cultural Logic of Addiction Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read as one of the earliest and most coherent cultural articulations of addiction—not as a pathology located in an individual brain, but as a systemic logic that reorganizes desire, identity, and social order. Long before addiction was framed in pharmacological or behavioral…
-
Grace, Law, and the Fear of Power
New Testament Logic in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Introduction The New Testament is less a moral code than a crisis text. It emerges at a moment when authority has lost credibility, law has become punitive rather than redemptive, and inherited structures can no longer secure meaning. Its central question is not whether power…
-
Watchmen: Salvation After God and After Man.
Watchmen begins where both Christianity and humanism have already failed. God is absent. Meaning is exhausted. History no longer believes in progress. What remains is power—naked, ironic, technologically amplified—and the question the New Testament and Nietzsche each pose in opposite ways: Who bears responsibility for the world when transcendence is gone? The film does not answer…