Category: The Modern Burden of Soul
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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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Se7en and the Negative Return of Soul
Depth Psychology and Consciousness Studies by Brenton L. Delp Se7en touches the soul, but it does so negatively. It does not present soul as harmony, wisdom, beauty, redemption, or spiritual depth fulfilled. It presents soul as what returns when a culture has lost the forms through which soul could be consciously understood. The film is…
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The Modern Tragic Condition and the Daimōn of Shakespeare
by Brenton L. Delp Shakespeare and the Tragic Condition (Revised Analyses) PDF Abstract This essay reads Shakespeare and modern cinema as witnesses to metaphysical instability after symbolic certainty begins to fail. Through Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and later films such as Blade Runner, Se7en, and 12 Monkeys, it argues that modern life is marked by…
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Women, Resentment, and the Afterlife of Metaphysics
Subjugation, Endurance, and Modern Pathology To ask whether women are “closer” to modern suffering is not to appeal to mysticism, biological essentialism, or romantic claims about feminine wisdom. It is to pose a historical question that modern thought has rarely been able to ask without distortion: who has been required to live without metaphysical consolation…
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After Metaphysics, the Body Remembers
Millennial Subjugation, Sexual Violence, and the Formation of Modern Female Consciousness For most of Western history, women have not merely suffered injustice; they have been metaphysically diminished. Their inferiority was not explained as social contingency or historical error, but as necessity. Philosophy, theology, and law converged to locate women lower in the order of being—closer to…
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Modernity, Alienation, and Addiction: A Hegelian Genealogy
Contemporary addiction is typically approached as a medical disorder, a behavioral pathology, or a moral failure. Each of these frames captures a dimension of the phenomenon, yet none explains why addiction emerges with such structural regularity in modern societies, nor why it so often appears precisely where freedom, autonomy, and rationalization are most advanced. To…