The idea of incarnation is one of the Christian theological concepts that has exerted the strongest influence on philosophical thought in Europe and which was repeatedly referred to in the twentieth century. The paper presents three reinterpretations of this biblical category. Carl Gustav Jung interprets incarnation in the spirit of Gnosticism, as a process of the psychological individuation of God and man; Hans‑Georg Gadamer employs the idea of the inner Word, Verbum interius, to analyse the dogmas of incarnation and the (...) Trinity: seeking in them a solution to the mystery of language; while Michel Henry reaches for the Bible and theology to face anew the issue of human corporeality. These attempts to rethink the theological aspects of the Incarnation of the Son of God reveal the role of this notion in the development of modern psychology, the hermeneutic philosophy of language as well as in anthropology. At the same time, a philosophical reinterpretation of incarnation provides an impulse to rephrase the questions about the relationship between philosophy and theology, as well as faith and reason, good and evil, the relationship between God and man, the mind and the body, as well as speech and thinking. On the other hand, provisional answers to these questions may rekindle theological thought and contribute to the revival of reflection on issues such as the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate and Virgin Conception, or a privation theory of evil. The article provides a starting point for just such a multi‑faceted analysis. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to test how far the concepts of depth psychology can be used to further understanding of religiously motivated acts of violence that occurred in another age and another cultural environment. The particular behaviour studied is the violence exhibited in the lives of the Tamil Saiva saints of Southern India who lived in the sixth to eighth centuries CE. The relevant historical evidence is the account of their lives recorded in the hagiographical epic known as (...) the Periya Purānam of Cēkkilār . The term “depth psychology” is here taken to denote both the psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and their successors, and the analytical psychology of the Jungian school. It will be shown that in spite of the methodological difficulties, psychological concepts drawn from these sources can be used to throw light on the religiously motivated behaviour here considered. (shrink)

Nietzsche's notion of the Übermensch is one of his most famous. While he himself never defined or explained what he meant by it, many philosophical interpretations have been offered in secondary literature. None of these, however, has examined the significance of the notion for Nietzsche the man, and this essay therefore attempts to address this gap.The idea of the Übermensch occurred to Nietzsche rather suddenly in the winter of 1882-1883, when his life was in turmoil after yet another deep personal (...) setback. The early loss of his father had deprived Nietzsche of a meaningful “mirroring” and a chance to experience realistic, age appropriate disappointment. This left him with a lifelong tendency towards idealisation. It became his proverbial Achilles’ heel and the source of repeated disillusionments and sorrow. The Übermensch may thus have been a culmination of his impulse to create altars and worlds before which he could kneel. Trying to cope with his own vulnerability, Nietzsche evoked an ideal of the Übermensch, a mask of hardness that was designed, if unconsciously, to ward off any future assaults on his fragile self.The double aspect of Nietzsche's personality is explored in this essay. While a highly provocative, belligerent and uncompromising Nietzsche often emerges from his published works, a vulnerable, lonely and sometimes self-pitying Nietzsche lurks in his letters and the accounts of his friends and acquaintances. But could an “ideal of strength”, such as the Übermensch, serve as a protective mask for someone with a sensitive, passionate interior? Nietzsche's descent into madness would suggest that no ideal can be a substitute for human, all too human, compassion. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s name has become almost synonymous with militant atheism. Born into a pious Christian family, this son of a Lutheran pastor declared himself the Antichrist. But could this have been yet another of his masks of hardness? Nietzsche rarely revealed his innermost self in the published writings, and this can be gleaned mainly from his private letters and the accounts of friends. These sources bring to light the philosopher’s inner struggle with his own, deeply religious nature.Losing his father at a (...) young age was a calamity from which Nietzsche never recovered, and I argue that his famous thought-image “God is dead” was a transfiguration of the painful memory of this loss. In this essay, I trace Nietzsche’s tortuous path from an ardent devotee of God to a vociferous critic of Christianity, a path that was punctuated with veiled longings for a loving deity. Deep in his heart, he remained faithful to Christian ideals. Rather like Cordelia, the only truly loving daughter of King Lear, Nietzsche refused to utter words of intense affection and reverence, as these had been blatantly devalued and corrupted. Instead, he adopted a mask of a wrongdoer and a blasphemer who took not the punishment but the guilt.Nietzsche’s attitude to religion is discussed from the perspective of his life, his personality, and his mental condition. The discussion draws on psychoanalytical concepts of Freud, Erikson, Winnicott and Kohut. This is not an exclusive reading, but complementary to other studies in this field. (shrink)

This essay is an interpretation of Nietzsche’s enigmatic idea of the Eternal Return of the Same in the context of his life rather than of his philosophy. Nietzsche never explained his ‘abysmal thought’ and referred to it directly only in a few passages of his published writings, but numerous interpretations have been made in secondary literature. None of these, however, has examined the significance of this thought for Nietzsche, the man. The idea belongs to a moment of ecstasy which Nietzsche (...) experienced during the summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria, in the Swiss Alps. Like Dante, in ‘the middle of life’, he walked down the wooded Alpine slope and entered his own Inferno. On the anniversary of long-buried loss and pain, his psyche was temporarily flooded by archetypal imagery. This event is interpreted in the light of Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion, the uncanny, and the oedipal confrontation with the unconscious. From the turbulent and frightful experience, a symbol of transfiguration emerged in the shape of Eternal Return. Its likeness to Mandala, a Jungian archetype of wholeness and the self, is striking. In the years that followed, Nietzsche produced his greatest works that assured him an unassailable place in Western philosophy. And yet, there was something disturbing about this dream-thought, and Nietzsche shuddered at any mention of the thought. Linking it with the head of Medusa in his unpublished notes, he hinted at its petrifying quality. The beguiling beauty of Medusa makes her an ambiguous symbol of exhilaration, as well as terror. Under her captivating gaze, a hero’s journey towards selfhood becomes a journey into the night of madness. (shrink)

I provide critical discussion of conception of and talk of psychic integration which I take to be both excessive and deficient; these viciously extreme positions are championed by the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine, and by Jacques Lacan and María Lugones, respectively. I suggest that we must negotiate a Buddhist-inspired understanding located between these extremes in endorsing any acceptable conception of the self, generally speaking—a conception which, contra the strong antirealist about selves, allows for the continued use of selfhood in (...) everyday discourse, but which, contra the strong realist about selves, does not fall into an unhealthy idealization of anything approximating perfect psychic wholeness. (shrink)

Maupassant’s short horror story Horla (1887) contains a treatment of anxiety that can be analyzed in the context of Existentialist philosophy: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas or Cioran all observed the anticipatory trait of this affect. From a psychological point of view, anxiety leads to neurosis and/or psychosis, to the splitting of the principle of identity. This inner duality is famously expressed in the short story’s scene of the “empty mirror”, where the main character fails to see his own reflection. The descent (...) into madness of Horla’s diarist makes us think that he experiences the possession of the monster in terms of radical alterity, something that Cioran has called the not-man. I argue that through the lenses of this category of (psychological and theological) inhumanity we can understand Horla as a Nietzschean evolutionary tale that cautions against the end of mankind as we know it. (shrink)

Physicalism as a worldview and framework for a mechanistic and materialist science seems not to have integrated the tectonic shift created by the rise of quantum physics with its notion of the personal equation of the observer. Psyche had been deliberately removed from a post-Enlightenment science. This paper explores a post-materialist science within a dual-aspect monist conception of nature in which both the mental and the physical exist in a relationship of complementarity so that they mutually exclude one another and (...) yet are together necessary to explain Reality while being irreducible to one another. Both mind and matter emerge from an underlying holistic domain known as the unus mundus in the Jung-Pauli formulation or as the analogous implicate order in the framing of physicist David Bohm and his colleagues. Kuhnian anomalies such as the role of reflective consciousness in evolution, and phenomena including so-called “near death experiences” (NDEs), are considered from the perspective of dual-aspect monism in conjunction with an emerging evolutionary panentheism. (shrink)

The fact that social welfare professions including social work, youth work and community work deal with the lives and relationships of human beings is far from controversial. What is contentious is that in light of increasing intellectual work on the nature of social practices there is a failure in the human services literature to adequately examine the interdependencies and entanglements between conceptualisations of the stuff that the helping professions deals with and understandings of practice. This article examines the nexus and (...) mediations between the phenomena and practice of social service work. The case is made that human services and the human beings they deal with are often imagined and represented in one-dimensional, unambiguous, calculable and orderable ways that align with neo-liberal inspired and technical approaches to practice. I argue that these accounts are inadequate and I suggest that practices of care and the people engaged in such practices should be constituted as complex, unpredictable, wicked and emergent. A key to good practice in the people professions is acknowledging and attending to this complexity and aporia. (shrink)

This thesis regards the ancient Pythagorean-Platonic idea of heavenly harmony as a philosophical paradox: stars are silent, music is not. The idea of ‘star music’ contains several potential opposites, including imagination and sense perception, the temporal and the eternal, transcendence and theophany, and others. The idea of ‘star music’ as a paradox can become a gateway to a different understanding of the universe, and a vehicle for a shift to a new – and yet very ancient – form of consciousness. (...) The ancient Greeks had a holistic form of consciousness, which was continually intermingling with a transpersonal dimension. This ancient state of consciousness was related to a musical understanding of the world, the Pythagorean-Platonic experience of the universe as an ordered cosmos. My research is approached from two angles, namely from the history of ideas and from musicianship, exploring how music is reflected in the world of thought. By reflexive re-reading of the sources, new insights into the nature of musical consciousness are explored. The idea of ‘star music’ can be found throughout the history of music and thought in the West, including Plato’s works and that of other ancient philosophers, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic era and the twentieth century up to contemporary New Age music. As a conclusion, the paradox of ‘star music’ is connected to an experience of a shared transcendent meaning of music, which can be present in the moment of a musical performance. ‘Star music’ is a living paradox. (shrink)

Objective – is to formulate a methodological discourse regarding the place and role of the language interconnected with the process of socialization of a person and develop a systemic idea of the corresponding functional features. -/- Materials & Methods – this discourse is formulated on the basis of a systemic idea of the personality socialization, which, in turn, is realized using the structural-ontological method of studying the subject matter field in interdisciplinary researches. This method involves the construction of special visual-graphic (...) matrices that reflect the interaction of the primary process and the material of the studied system. -/- Results. The work with the structural-ontological matrix made it possible to analyze the functions of the language in the context of such significant factors of socialization as complex psychodynamics, civilization space and the function of reflection. At the same time, reflection is considered at the level of two plans – primary (reflection-bond) and secondary (reflection-splitting). This made it possible to deduce the idea of the role of language beyond the traditional framework of working with text and analyze the place of the language in the context of activities to establish a connection between individuals, which is realized in a specific cooperative situation (Shchedrovitsky). In particular, the look at language as a specific tool of civilizational rationing, the mechanism of which is provided through reflection-communication. Thus, the language is examined through the prism of its systemic influence on the morphology of the psyche. -/- Conclusions – a structural-ontological analysis of the place and role of language in the process of personality socialization has led us to construction of a hypothesis about the phenomenon of language discontentment, as a tendency to distance away ego-consciousness in the process of individuation from linguistic ontology. The arguments were also advanced in favor of the assumption regarding the peculiarities of the influence of language discontentment on cultural activities and the psychodynamic contribution of this phenomenon in the midlife crisis (Jung). (shrink)

This article is devoted to describing results of conceptualization of the idea of mind at the stage of maturity. Delineated the acquisition by the energy system (mind) of stable morphological characteristics, which associated with such a pivotal formation as the discourse. A qualitative structural and ontological sign of the system transition to this stage is the transformation of the verbal morphology of the mind into a discursive one. The analysis of the poststructuralist understanding of discourse in the context of the (...) dispersion of meanings (Foucault) made it possible to formulate a notion of it as a meaning that is constituted by the relation between the discursive practice and the worldview, regarded as a meta-discourse or a global discursive formation. In consequence of this relationship, a discrete and simultaneous scattering of meanings arises, the procedural side of which is a concrete discourse, and its productive aspect is linked with the creation of a local discursive formation. Based on this view it is proposed a logical formula of discourse, which takes into account the entropy of the language and the entropy of the worldview, as a particular manifestation of the mind entropy. Using this formula and considering the reactive nature of discourse, it was developed a classification, which included such types of discourses as reactive, suggestive, synthetic and creative. In turn, the proposed types of discourses are correlated with the specific characteristics of certain activities, as a psychological category. Also, it was considered the translation of the structure of discourse dissipation from the cognitive plan into the affective sphere because of which it is formed a hierarchy of significances, which performs the sense-forming function. It was analyzed the inverse influence of the hierarchy of significances on the structure of meanings dispersion and for respective account it was introduced a conditional coefficient of the value deviation of the significance of the meanings. This parameter reflects the sense correction of the meaning that occurs in the process of the emergence of discourse from discursive practice. Thus, the discourse is presented as a complex dynamic formation of the mind arising at the maturity stage of the system as a result of the combined effect of entropic dispersion of meanings and the value deviation of their significances. (shrink)