The Heart Cannot Reach the Spring: A Normative Case for an Irreducible Ayin and Yesh

Neither Answered Nor Absorbed: The Irreducible Antinomy of Personal Address and Impersonal Ground in the Theology of Recovery

A previous study argued that the spiritual trajectory of the Twelve Steps, read alongside the Hasidic recovery of relational address, resolves the ancient quarrel between a personal God who is addressed as Thou and an impersonal Infinite into which the self is absorbed; it proposed that Hasidism reorients mystical depth toward relational responsibility rather than dissolution.¹ The present essay revisits and partly recants that conclusion. It argues that the resolution was premature, and that the deepest honesty available to the theology of recovery is not synthesis but the steady inhabitation of an antinomy that cannot be closed. Drawing on William James’s account of the wider self through which saving experiences arrive, Martin Buber’s insistence on the irreducibility of encounter, Elliot R. Wolfson’s apophatic phenomenology of identity-in-difference, and the Chabad doctrine that the divine Essence transcends the categories of being and non-being, the essay reads Step Eleven’s movement from a transcendent Higher Power toward ‘conscious contact’ not as a passage from transcendence to immanence but as the moment at which the two grammars—address and ground, Thou and depth—become simultaneously unavoidable and mutually irreducible. The recovering self does not discover that it is God, nor that God is merely the floor of its own interiority; it discovers that it cannot say which, and that its sobriety, and its capacity to remain present at the bedside of another’s suffering, depend on not deciding. The argument is developed through the author’s framework of hermeneutic medicine and therapeutic tzimtzum and is offered as a contribution to philosophy of religion, Jewish mystical studies, consciousness studies, and the still-unwritten theology of recovery.

Beter leren leven met verwijten

The article takes as its starting point a recent book by the Flemish philosopher Farah Focquaert, in which she questions the idea that agents can be blamed for their unlawful actions. In line with other free will skeptics, Focquaert argues that a scientific (deterministic) worldview implies that individuals lack the kind of control over their actions required to be genuinely ‘guilty’ or ‘blameworthy’. She seeks to draw out the far-reaching implications of this view for the organization of criminal justice systems, and maintains that her position is compatible with, and even supportive of, restorative justice. This article challenges that claim. It argues that free will–skeptical attempts to eliminate blame from public responses to crime risk undermining the moral dimension of wrongdoing – and of our responses to it – which restorative justice seeks to rehabilitate. First, the article shows that, although there is some convergence between free will skeptics and the restorative justice movement in their critique of the destructive aspects of current criminal justice systems, the one-sided emphasis of free will skeptics on abandoning retribution may erode important safeguards against excessive state control. Second, it argues that free will skeptics fail to articulate a meaningful concept of human responsibility that aligns with the central concerns of restorative justice. Third, it contends that the anti-retributive rhetoric of free will skepticism is at odds with the participatory nature of restorative justice and the cultural diversity it aims to respect.

Burdens of Human Reason and Metaphysical Illusion: A Dialectical Essay on Immanuel Kant and Advaita Vedānta

Kant once described reason as a wanderer that finds, in the end, no permanent resting place, only a vantage from which to survey its own limits. This essay begins from that unsettled image and follows it into a second tradition that reaches a strikingly similar impasse from the opposite direction. Reading Kant's account of transcendental illusion alongside Advaita Vedānta, and drawing on K. C. Bhattacharyya and A. C. Mukerji as careful Indian interlocutors of the first Critique, the essay argues that both traditions diagnose reason's demand for the unconditioned as self-defeating, whether directed at the self, the world, or the absolute. The two paths diverge, however, in what follows from this shared limit. Kant converts the impasse into a postulate of practical faith securing moral freedom, while Advaita Vedānta converts it into a soteriological opening toward mokṣa. In both cases, reason must finally stand on faith to climb beyond itself.

O luto como limite da akrasía na ética aristotélica

This article examines whether grief, understood as stérēsis resulting from the loss of the héteros autós, can be interpreted in light of akrasia in Aristotle’s ethics. Drawing on the definition of akrasia as a conflict between rational judgment and a competing desire (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII), it argues that grief constitutes a form of practical ineffectiveness without cognitive error, and is therefore irreducible to this model. Pain (lýpē) does not imply opposition to logos nor the presence of a competing desiderative principle; rather, it affects the conditions under which deliberation is actualized in the particular, impacting the transition from bouleusis to praxis. Phronesis retains its normative validity, although its practical realization is weakened. The analysis thus shifts from motivational conflict to the conditions of effectiveness of practical judgment. Finally, the paper proposes a distinct form of practical failure, irreducible to both akrasia and virtue, in which mnēmē preserves the continuity of ethos by sustaining the orientation of logos under conditions of absence. 

Two truths and one aporia: a Madhyamaka model of agency in dialogue with Western philosophy of action

Whatever Happened to the Weltgeist?

The present paper advances a reading of contemporary political apathy by rejecting its reduction to contingent sociological factors, and instead situating it within a transformation of the conditions of belief. Drawing on a Hegelian–Marxian lineage, it reinterprets the notion of Weltgeist as a secularized, ‘infra-material’ structure of shared intelligibility that conditions political participation. The argument contends that late capitalism has not merely commodified social relations but has attenuated the horizon within which belief acquires binding force, thereby producing a diffuse disaffection that manifests most acutely among younger cohorts in the ‘Western’ block. Against empiricist accounts of abstentionism, the paper proposes that disengagement is symptomatic of a deeper exhaustion of symbolic efficacy: political forms persist, but their capacity to command conviction has waned. Through a combination of philosophical analysis and cultural exempla – including Mark Fisher-style pop-cultural analysis – the study traces how ideological structures are both reproduced and hollowed out in everyday experience. The result is the loss of a shared grammar of belief. The emerging paradox is one whereby individuals continue to be addressed as political subjects, yet no longer experience that address as either ideologically compelling or existentially binding. Methodologically, this study adopts an interdisciplinary philosophical approach which combines phenomenological analysis, ideological critique, and selective sociological case studies, and that deliberately avoids exhaustive empirical explanations, in order to articulate, in a more ‘contemporaneous’ manner, the structural conditions of political intelligibility. By rearticulating political apathy as a structural and infra-material phenomenon, the paper seeks to reopen the epistemic question of political agency beyond the limits of both liberal institutionalism and orthodox materialism.