Philosophical dialogue
The soul in times of dissolution
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Philosophy can do what psychology cannot: it listens to the undertone of an era. It doesn't merely ask how the human being functions, but who they have become and what they have forgotten to be.
We live in an age in which the self disintegrates into mirror images. Where the modern human once wrestled with guilt, the contemporary one struggles with emptiness. They are no longer trapped in a system that oppresses them, but in a network that endlessly reflects them. The narcissism of our time is not merely an individual disorder, but a collective derangement: the human being who endlessly projects and consumes themselves, without ever touching a center that truly lives.
The empty middle that arises from this is not merely moral or psychological, but existential. It’s the place where the soul, once a source of meaning and orientation, has been replaced by an identity that must constantly prove itself. The human being has become transparent to themselves: visible, measurable, comparable, but no longer moved.
The six thinkers who gather in this dialogue each listen, in their own way, to this silent disappearance of inwardness. They don't speak of symptoms, but of the ground tone of our time: the dissolution of the soul in a world of functions, images, performances and representations.
Byung-Chul Han hears in the tired human the echo of self-exploitation. Jean Baudrillard sees how reality itself evaporates into simulacra. Erich Fromm reminds us that love cannot be possessed. Martin Buber points to the sacredness of encounter. Hannah Arendt warns against the banality of untruth. And Carl Gustav Jung, finally, calls upon humanity to rediscover the Self — beyond the mask of the persona.
Their voices together form a philosophical diagnosis of our time — a polyphony of concern and hope. In their words, it becomes clear that the crisis of modern humanity is not a crisis of knowledge, but of meaning. What’s missing is not information, but inner orientation: the connection between thinking, feeling and being.
That’s why this dialogue doesn't aim to restore the ego, but to restore the soul. For where the human being learns again to listen to what lives within and between them, there begins the ethics of inwardness — the only counterforce against the emptiness of narcissism.
Byung-Chul Han — The exhaustion of the transparent Self
Byung-Chul Han is perhaps the most subtle diagnostician of our century: a quiet chronicler of the weary soul. In his analysis of the achievement society, he describes not a human suffering under external coercion, but one crushed by the weight of their own freedom. The modern individual is no longer enslaved by commands, but by ideals of ceaseless productivity, visibility and positivity.
His famous line, “Today everyone is an entrepreneur of themselves,” captures this paradox perfectly: the neoliberal logic has taken over the inner voice. Where power once operated from the outside, it now acts from within. The individual exploits themselves in the name of autonomy and calls it freedom.
Han speaks of a fatigue that is not physical, but existential. It arises when the soul no longer knows a space untouched by performance or display. In the world of transparency there is no secret, no silence, nor inner soil where something can ripen; everything must be visible in order to exist.
In this transparent world, the depth of experience disappears; the inner life is translated into data and the ineffable into measurable signals. The human being grows exhausted because nothing may remain hidden. Han calls this the positivity of the self — a form of tyranny in which even rest must be productive and silence is instrumentalized into mindfulness.
It’s precisely here that the seed of modern narcissism becomes visible. The narcissist of our time is not the grandiose figure of classical psychology, but the weary person who constantly reflects upon their own reflection. Their identity is a project, not a presence. They seek validation in visibility, not in being. The transparent human is the ultimate mirror of a culture that wants to see everything, but can no longer feel.
Where love as the connective principle disappears, only the economy of attention remains — a loveless lightness that hollows the human being from within. The cure, according to Han, doesn’t lie in more authenticity, but in the restoration of negativity: the courage to be unseen, to withdraw from the gaze and to listen again to what is unproductive.
The human rediscovers their soul only where they cease to produce and begin to be present, still and contemplative. For only in that unseen realm does the truly human begin to breathe again.
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Jean Baudrillard — The disappearance of reality
Where Han speaks of transparency, Jean Baudrillard speaks of evaporation. His thinking unfolds as an unmasking of the seemingly real world we live in, a world in which meaning itself has dissolved into its own representation.
In his theory of simulacra, Baudrillard describes how signs have become detached from what they once signified. Images no longer refer to something real, but only to other images. Reality becomes a hall of mirrors: hyperreality. In this world, nothing is truly false or true, only functionally convincing.
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The human being no longer lives in reality, but as its reproduction. Identity becomes branding, experience becomes content and truth becomes strategy. The media, once carriers of meaning, have turned into producers of illusion. What remains is a world without resistance, where even rebellion is absorbed into performance.
Baudrillard writes that we no longer suffer from alienation, but from disappearance. We are not cut off from reality — we have become its substitute. The human being vanishes behind the screen of their own representations.
Within this context, narcissism takes on a new dimension. It is not merely a disorder of the self, but a structure of reality itself. The narcissism of our time is not the love of one’s own image, but captivity within it. The individual recognizes themselves only through their (digital) reflection, in likes, echoes, the algorithmic resonance of their own presence. Their being dissolves in the circle of self-reference.
What Baudrillard reveals is that this is not a moral failure, but an ontological phenomenon: the soul has no place to root itself, because reality itself has become fluid. Where the image once pointed toward the real, it now only refers back to itself.
From my perspective, this means that love as a connective principle can only exist where something real still resists. Love presupposes resistance, the ability of reality to speak back. In a culture of simulation, the other becomes a mirror, not a presence. Love demands the courage to break that illusion: not to reflect, but to encounter.
Where simulation turns the world into a mirror, love reopens it as a space of genuine meeting. It restores resonance between image and essence, between seeing and truly beholding.
Erich Fromm — The transition from having to being
Erich Fromm already foresaw what was coming in the middle of the last century: a society in which human beings prefer to have rather than to be. In The Art of Loving and To Have or to Be, he painted the portrait of a culture that no longer feels its own emptiness, but possesses it. Love, knowledge, spirituality — everything became something to acquire, preserve and exchange.
For Fromm, love is not an emotion that happens to us, but an act of being: a moral discipline rooted in attention, responsibility, respect and knowledge. Love requires inner maturity, the willingness to give without possessing. It’s not a sentiment, but a form of moral labor.
Fromm doesn't see narcissism merely as pathological self-centeredness, but as the logical consequence of a culture that turns everything into an object — including humans. In a society where value equals ownership, even the inner life becomes merchandise: authenticity turns into brand identity and freedom into lifestyle. The human no longer knows themselves from within, but through what they have, display and produce.
The narcissism of our time, then, is not an excess of self-love, but a deficit of being. The human clings to whatever defines them, because they've forgotten that their essence cannot be owned. Identity becomes inventory; relationships become transactions. Even love is reduced to reciprocal need satisfaction: I give you what you want so that you give me what I need.
Fromm described this as the shift from the mode of being to the mode of having: a spiritual mutation that has hollowed out the inner life. In the having mode, the human is unfree, because everything that can be owned can also be lost. In the being mode, by contrast, freedom does not arise from autonomy, but from connection — from the experience that life gives itself.
Love, in Fromm’s sense, is the counter-movement to narcissism. Where narcissism seeks to possess the world, love opens it as relationship. Where narcissism feeds on lack, love grows from abundance. Love restores the direction of the gaze: from within to outward, from possession to presence.
Empathy, in this light, is not merely a psychological ability or skill, but a moral stance. It presupposes the recognition that the other is not a mirror, but a subject that exists in freedom. Thus, the transition from having to being is not only a moral ideal, but a necessary path out of the collective soullessness of our time.
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Martin Buber — The rediscovery of the I–Thou
Martin Buber offers perhaps the language that comes closest to what I mean by love as a connective principle. In his seminal work I and Thou, he distinguishes between two fundamental modes of being: the I–It and the I–Thou. In the I–It relation, the human stands before the world as an object — something to know, use, classify or organize. In the I–Thou relation, by contrast, the world is not observed, but encountered. Here there's no distance, no separation between subject and object, but a living field of mutual presence.
For Buber, this is not a moral command, but an existential reality: when one truly says Thou, one becomes I. The encounter with the other reveals who we are, because it places us within the pulsating space of reciprocity. In that relational space lies the sacredness of existence itself: the mystery of the between.
The narcissism of our age can be understood as a collective shift from I–Thou to I–It. The other no longer appears as presence, but as means, mirror or backdrop. The space in which something new can arise — where truth, love and meaning are born — has collapsed. We no longer meet the world; we process it.
In digital culture this transformation has become almost tangible: relationships are formatted, emotions streamed and attention optimized. The other is always there, but never truly present. The conversation becomes algorithm, touch becomes emoji and human beings find themselves in a form of communication without communion. It is a paradox that nourishes narcissism, for where there is no true Thou, only I and It remain.
Buber would say that in losing the I–Thou relation, humanity has also lost its most essential relationship: the one with the Eternal Thou. When we approach the world solely as object, we also lose the sense of something greater than ourselves. God, in that sense, is not denied but rendered unnecessary.
Love, in my own language, is the experience of that Eternal Thou in the everyday; the recognition that everything lives in relation and that existence itself is reciprocal. Narcissism breaks this flow; it traps the human being within the boundaries of their own reflection. But where one learns again to live in the I–Thou relation, the lost resonance of the inner world begins to return.
Love, then, is the rediscovery of encounter. It opens the closed system of the ego and makes it permeable to what’s greater than the self. In that reciprocity begins the movement of healing — not through self-improvement or optimization, but through presence. Love restores the sacred dimension of the between, where the human being, the other and the world breathe together once more.
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Hannah Arendt — Truth, responsibility and the banality of untruth
Hannah Arendt was perhaps the sharpest observer of what happens when human beings cease to think. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, she analyzed how modernity erodes the space of the common world. For Arendt, truth is not an abstract concept but a worldly reality — something that exists between people and binds them in a shared world.
When facts are replaced by opinions and responsibility by opportunism, a void emerges in which anything becomes possible. In that void, reality itself becomes fluid: it can be rewritten, manipulated or simply denied. Arendt did not call this malice, but thoughtlessness — the absence of the inner dialogue that allows moral judgment to arise. This is what she meant by the banality of evil: evil that stems not from demonic intent, but from the failure to think, from the unwillingness to bear witness inwardly to reality.
In our time, Arendt might have spoken of the banality of untruth. We live in a culture where truth has become negotiable and authenticity performative. What matters is not whether something is true, but whether it works. This pragmatic attitude makes us susceptible to self-deception: to using truth strategically in the service of our own image.
The narcissism of our time is rooted precisely in this moral vacuum. The narcissistic person does not necessarily lie out of malice, but because truth has become secondary to self-preservation. Where no inner witness speaks, truth becomes an instrument. The human being lives in a permanent strategy of self-presentation — in a world that increasingly resembles marketing.
Arendt would not interpret this merely psychologically, but existentially. The untruth that pervades our culture is not an incidental lie, but a loss of world: the disappearance of a shared framework within which meaning can hold. When truth dissolves, empathy vanishes with it, for empathy presupposes that there is something shared: a reality in which the other truly exists.
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My own idea of truth as an act of love speaks directly to this. To preserve truth is not simply an intellectual task, but a moral one: to remain faithful to what is, even when it’s painful. Truth is a form of love because it acknowledges reality instead of manipulating it.
In a culture of untruth, the loving person is the one who refuses distortion — who stays present with reality as it is, with open eyes and an open heart. That’s the responsibility Arendt reminds us of: thinking as a moral act, truth as relationship and love as the only force capable of breaking through the banality of evil.
Carl Gustav Jung — The call of the Self
Carl Gustav Jung already saw in the first half of the twentieth century what we are only now beginning to understand: that the greatest danger of the future would not be political or technological, but psychological — the loss of inwardness. He warned that modern humanity had lost its soul to the masses, to ideology and to rationalism. What troubled him most was not progress itself, but the disappearance of symbolic thinking: the language through which human beings understand their inner reality and give meaning to existence.
In Jung’s concept of individuation lies a key to restoration. Individuation doesn’t mean the pursuit of personal self-realization, but the process of bringing the totality of the psyche into consciousness: light and shadow, reason and imagination, the conscious and the unconscious. Only those who recognize their own shadow can become truly free. The person who lives from their persona — the social mask worn to gain recognition — becomes cut off from their inner source. They live in adaptation rather than in truth. As Jung wrote:
“The persona is that which one is not, but which one and others believe one to be.”
Here Jung’s diagnosis resonates deeply with the narcissism of our age. Our culture has become collectively fixated at the stage of the persona: the world itself has turned into a mask. Modern humans no longer live from the Self, but from the image of the self. They display emotions instead of feeling them; they speak of consciousness without the inner experience of it.
The psyche has ceased to be a mystery that reveals itself and has become an instrument expected to perform. This explains why so many feel inwardly empty amidst abundance: the self that constantly wants to be seen becomes invisible through its own exposure. The soul vanishes in the glitter of its own representation.
Jung would say that healing doesn’t require more knowledge, but re-symbolization. Modern humanity does not lack information; it lacks myth. Only by learning to dream again — literally and figuratively — can we reconnect with the Self. Dream, art and imagination are not escapes from reality, but bridges to its depth.
From that perspective, I see my own work — the synthesis of psychology, philosophy and art — as a form of collective individuation: an attempt to dream the soul of our culture anew, to remind it of what it has forgotten: that meaning is not made, but received.
In Jung’s vision, love is the inner movement that brings the Self to life. It’s the force that binds the separated parts of the psyche together — love as the bridge between conscious and unconscious. Where narcissism divides, love unites. Where the persona conceals, love reveals. The call of the Self is the call toward wholeness. It asks for courage, surrender and the willingness to release the image. Only those who dare to remove the mask can hear the voice of the soul again. And only those who have embraced their own shadow can truly see the other.
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Epilogue — Love as a connective principle
Opposite the centrifugal forces of our time — acceleration, fragmentation, spectacle, alienation — there stands one counterforce: Love. Not as an emotion or a romantic ideal, but as the fundamental energy that binds and animates all things.
When we read the insights of these six thinkers together, a polyphonic portrait of the modern soul begins to emerge. Han shows how the human being exhausts themselves in an endless cycle of self-exploitation. Baudrillard reveals how reality dissolves into its own representations. Fromm reminds us that existence becomes truly human only when we dare to be instead of have. Buber restores the space of encounter, where I and Thou can truly meet. Arendt teaches that truth is a moral act — a fidelity to reality that makes empathy possible. And Jung calls us back to inner wholeness, to the rediscovery of the Self beyond the mask of persona.
Their insights illuminate different facets of the same process: the disappearance of the soul in a world that has become its own mirror. The narcissism that pervades our age is therefore not merely an individual disorder, but a collective symptom, an expression of humanity’s loss of contact with its inner world. We live in constant reflection, but seldom in resonance.
Against this empty middle, love stands as the only sustaining ground. Love is not the solution to the crisis, but it is the soil from which restoration can grow. It heals the broken relationships, between inner and outer, between I and Thou, between human and world. In the language of these six thinkers:
Love is….
the counterforce to exhaustion (Han),
the reality that resists simulation (Baudrillard),
the movement from possession to presence (Fromm),
the rediscovery of the between (Buber),
the truth-act of responsibility (Arendt)
and the path to the wholeness of the Self (Jung).
Together they outline what I call the ethics of inwardness: a worldview in which empathy, truth and responsibility are not isolated virtues, but expressions of one and the same field of love. In that field, the human being loses the illusion of autonomy, but regains their freedom through encounter. For only those who no longer wish to be the center, can truly belong to the whole.
The path out of narcissism does not lead through greater self-knowledge, but through deeper relation: the willingness to meet the other, the world and life itself anew. Love, in this sense, is not a feeling but a form of knowing: the awareness that everything lives through reciprocity. Those who live from love restore the equilibrium that modern humanity has lost. Love opens the closed system of the ego and makes room for resonance. It binds where time divides and reminds us that we do not exist apart from the world, but within its fabric.
Thus this dialogue ends not in an answer, but in an invitation: to listen again to the silence of the empty middle where everything converges.
There, where the soul no longer possesses but belongs.
Where thought breathes again and truth learns to love.
Where love — simple, unseen and yet all-pervading — reminds being of its essence.
