Between 1910 and 1917, Walter Benjamin composed a range of philosophical works and fragmented texts all of which touch upon the concept of youth and its intersection with issues of modernity and theology, faith and political action, religion and secularization, God, and the world. Yet, while scholars have rather extensively discussed Benjamin’s early works on language, literature, and esthetics, less attention has been given to his work on youth. This paper focuses on Benjamin’s writings on youth from these early years. (...) Its aim is to demonstrate how these writings were intended as contributions to the composition of a comprehensive theory of youth, which itself was to combine philosophical discussion with theological imagination. More concretely, by using the example of Meister Eckhart, who is rarely discussed in connection to Benjamin’s thought, the paper shows how Benjamin draws on Christian mystical notions of time, transcendence, and divinity, albeit in a secularized and therefore transformed guise, and how Benjamin’s intellectual endeavor can hence be labeled a modern-mystical theory of youth. (shrink)

Therapeutic practice is based on theories displaying different profiles, which imply philosophical traits. My main concern is to discover these traits, in my eyes a neglected issue. The question of what sort of psychology helps for enhancement also depends on the inherent philosophical approach, including an idea about human nature. I try to identify philosophical features in two main psychological concepts: in the empirically founded psychoanalytic one dealing with psychic mechanisms, which could be observed in patients; and the so-called analytical (...) one based on a philosophy of nature, I call an ontological perspective. For characterising these two features, it seems appropriate to me to go back to the founder figures Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung. It is open for discussion and interests which theory both representatives and their followers developed will be used for practice or research. (shrink)

The relation between truth and violence is explored through the logic of sacrifice presented in the Book of Job. Job, as an arbitrary sacrificial victim, learns the truth of the violence perpetrated against him. Such violence is also shown to be constitutive of Western reasoning, including its practices of the truth.

The article focuses on the eternal theme of human life: suffering and its cause, deeply revealed in the biblical Book of Job. Although from ancient times this problem and its disclosure were interpreted both in philosophy and in religion, it has remained unresolved until nowadays and therefore worries a lot of people. Researchers of the Book of Job focus on two problems: the problem of suffering and the problem of theodicy, which arises from the existence of evil and injustice in (...) the world. However, according to the author of the article, the main idea of the Book of Job is not the problem of God’s justice, but the problem of a person’s spiritual birth. In the text of the article, the author, scrupulously analyzing every image and symbol of the Book of Job, shows and proves that the suffering sent by God to Job through Satan is an initiation through which the transformation of the Job psyche and his spiritual birth takes place. To prove this, the author analyzes the spiritual world-attitude and God-attitude of Job before the trials and after the trial. The main author’s method is searching for images and symbols’ disclosure in the Book of Job, not only verbal, but also numerical ones. The article researches the main symbols of the Book of Job and their significance for understanding of this text. The author focuses on the ideas of numbers 3, 7, 10 and especially on the significance of number 10 as some kind of completeness. The author also analyzes the symbolic meaning of the ashes, images of the Leviathan and the Hippopotamus, and Satan as the messenger of God for human trials. The author reveales some key features of human psychology: the role of fear in the human life, behaviour in an extreme situation, and abandonment of the miserable man. Based on the disclosure of the symbolism of images and numbers, the author concludes that the problem of justice in the Book of Job is removed. God gives to everyone what he deserves, and suffering and deprivation are not a punishment, not ends in themselves, as in asceticism, but a means of spiritual and mental transformation and spiritual development of person. (shrink)

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)