Martin Heidegger

heidegger

Heidegger occupies a contested yet indispensable position within the depth-psychology corpus. He enters the literature along several distinct vectors: as phenomenologist of Being and Dasein whose existential analytic furnishes Yalom, Ricoeur, and the existential-psychotherapeutic tradition with concepts of care, temporality, resoluteness, and the question ‘who?’; as cultural diagnostician whose ‘forgetting of Being’ and critique of Western technicity resonates with McGilchrist’s hemispheric thesis; as philosopher of language and hiddenness whose thought aligns with right-hemispheric modes of knowing; and as a theorist of inauthenticity whose Verfallen and Vorhandenheit McGilchrist maps directly onto left-hemisphere re-presentation. Jung’s letters provide the sharpest counterpoint, dismissing Heidegger’s modus philosophandi as neurotic and his language as concealing subjective prejudice behind obscurantist inflation. Miller invokes Heidegger’s spatialization critique from Being and Time to diagnose the loss of temporal, narrative thinking in Western philosophy. Derrida conducts an immanent interrogation, pressing Heidegger’s concept of primordial temporality from within while exposing latent ethical assumptions in the authentic/inauthentic distinction. Hillman recruits Heidegger’s poetic ontology of blue and holiness to illuminate Jungian visionary experience. The range of engagements — from reverent appropriation to hostile dismissal — marks Heidegger as one of the most generative and divisive philosophical resources the corpus confronts.

In the library 18 passages

the routine of daily life… can dull things into what Heidegger called inauthenticity (left hemisphere), through the very weight of familiarity, and in my terms its left hemisphere re-presentation comes to take the place of the thing itself

McGilchrist maps Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity directly onto his neurological thesis, identifying left-hemisphere re-presentation as the mechanism of Heideggerian dulling and Vorhandenheit as the shock enabling re-encounter with the real.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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Heidegger saw the disasters of Western materialism as stemming from a ‘forgetting of Being’, and the apparently opposed forces of capitalism and communism as merely variants in a common technicity and exploitation of nature.

McGilchrist presents Heidegger’s ‘forgetting of Being’ as a diagnosis of Western cultural catastrophe, framing capitalism, communism, and the domination of nature as expressions of the same left-hemispheric pathology.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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Heidegger’s entire thrust is away from the clear light of analysis, and this has led to misunderstandings… his influence throughout the humanities has been profound indeed.

McGilchrist defends Heidegger’s anti-analytic orientation as philosophically serious despite its reputation for obscurity, situating his work as a sustained attempt to undermine language’s tendency to undermine understanding.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’).

McGilchrist defends Heidegger’s notoriously difficult formulation ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet’ against analytic derision, arguing that Nothing, like Being, is an active ontological reality rather than a mere logical negation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Heidegger’s somewhat gnomic saying, in der Unverborgenheit waltet die Verbergung (‘in unconcealment dwells hiddenness and safekeeping’) appositely draws attention to the simultaneous hiddenness and radiance of truth in works of art.

McGilchrist aligns Heidegger’s concept of concealment-within-unconcealment with the right hemisphere’s mode of truth — irreducible to analytic extraction and present only within the work itself.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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Heidegger bristles with them, trying in vain to hide behind a blown-up language… Heidegger’s modus philosophandi is neurotic through and through and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness.

Jung delivers a categorical psychological indictment of Heidegger, diagnosing his philosophical style as a neurotic symptom and his celebrated obscurity as the projection of unconscious subjective prejudice.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973thesis

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Heidegger bristles with them, trying in vain to hide behind a blown-up language… Heidegger’s modus philosophandi is neurotic through and through and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness.

Jung’s repeated condemnation of Heidegger across both letter volumes underscores the depth of his antipathy, framing the philosopher’s method as pathological rather than profound.

Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975thesis

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In Heidegger, the investigation of ‘who?’ belongs to the same ontological sphere as that of the self (Selbstheit). Hannah Arendt, echoing Heidegger, links the question ‘who?’ to a specific characteristic of the concept of action.

Ricoeur integrates Heidegger’s ontological investigation of the question ‘who?’ into his own theory of the self, tracing its influence through Arendt into a narrative theory of selfhood and action.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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This kinship finds an important confirmation in the distinction Heidegger makes between two manners of enduring in time, one close to the permanence of substance… the other manifested by the phenomenon of self-constancy (Selbstandigkeit).

Ricoeur draws on Heidegger’s distinction between substance-permanence and self-constancy to ground his own contrast between character (idem-identity) and the moral constancy of promising (ipse-identity).

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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Why determine as fall the passage from one temporality to another? And why qualify temporality as authentic—or proper (eigentlich)—and as inauthentic—or improper—when every ethical preoccupation has been suspended?

Derrida subjects Heidegger’s authentic/inauthentic distinction to immanent critique, questioning whether the value-laden characterisation of temporality conceals an unexamined ethical and metaphysical inheritance.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say… Thus humanitas really does remain the concern of such thinking.

Derrida cites Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism to show that even in its anti-subjectivist mode, Heideggerian thought retains a humanist concern — man’s return to his essence through dwelling in the truth of Being.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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Martin Heidegger has long had a concern for the loss I am indicating. He sees the problem… as linked to the spatialization of thinking that takes place in the first philosophers of Western history.

Miller invokes Heidegger’s diagnosis of spatialized thinking in Being and Time and Time and Being to support his argument that Western philosophy lost contact with the temporal, narrative, and imagistic dimensions of life.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 284… Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 233… Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 393.

Yalom’s footnotes cite Being and Time at multiple points in his discussion of loneliness, isolation, and authentic encounter, demonstrating the foundational role Heidegger’s text plays in existential psychotherapy.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Heidegger writes: ‘Blue is not an image to indicate the sense of the holy. Blueness itself is the holy, in virtue of its gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself.’

Hillman recruits Heidegger’s poetic-ontological claim that blueness is itself the holy to explicate Jung’s visionary experience of inexpressible sanctity, linking depth-psychological imagery to Heideggerian disclosure.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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Is not the immediate comprehension of Being developed entirely from a primordial but self-evident projection of Being relative to time? … The essence of time as it was fixed … for the subsequent history of metaphysics by Aristotle does not provide an answer.

Derrida works through Heidegger’s critique of Aristotle’s concept of time to interrogate the projection of Being as presence, exploring whether primordial temporality can yield the meaning of Being.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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What he found in Heidegger (and in a way in Sartre) was an analysis of the history of Western philosophy and culture that made sense of the polarities, such as Orthodoxy–the West, that he had found himself.

Louth shows that for the Orthodox theologian Yannaras, Heidegger’s analysis of Western philosophical history provided an interpretive framework that illuminated the tension between Eastern Orthodox tradition and Western culture.

Louth, Andrew, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting

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