The concept of ‘ontological condition’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct but interrelated axes. In Heidegger’s Being and Time — the single most concentrated source — it names the structural givenness of Dasein’s existence: thrownness, care, Being-towards-death, and disclosedness constitute not empirical facts but the irreducible furniture of what it means to be human at all. The ontological condition is thus prior to any psychological content; it is the ground from which psychology draws its very possibility. Ricoeur appropriates and expands this Heideggerian inheritance through the lens of narrative selfhood and the polysemic being inherited from Aristotle, arguing that attestation, ipseity, and the act/power distinction are the ontological coordinates within which selfhood becomes intelligible. Simondon radicalizes the question by locating ontological primacy not in the constituted individual but in the pre-individual phase from which individuation proceeds — being, for him, is always already more than unity. Hillman transposes the problematic into archetypal psychology, reading ‘ontological inequality’ as an epiphany embedded in mythological imagery. Hillman’s Spinoza citation — drawn through alchemical psychology — anchors resistance itself as an ontological rather than personal fact. Across these registers, the decisive tension is between ontological condition as fixed structural givenness and ontological condition as dynamic becoming whose phases are never exhausted.
Resistance in the work and to the work is not personal but ontological. Being does not move, said Parmenides, to which Heraclitus replied, all things move.
Hillman, invoking Spinoza, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, asserts that resistance to change is an irreducible ontological condition of being itself, not a psychological or personal failing.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
The Mighty Ones are an epiphany of ontological inequality that gives an archetypal image to the disharmonies we feel as longings.
Hillman identifies ontological inequality — the asymmetric doubleness of archetypal powers — as a structural condition of existence that manifests psychologically as irreducible longing and imbalance.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
This feature defines the terrestrial condition as such and gives to the Earth the existential signification attributed to it in various ways by Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger.
Ricoeur frames corporeality and terrestrial embeddedness as the ontological condition subtending all narrative selfhood and imaginative variation, linking selfhood irreversibly to the world through the body.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
An initial question posed concerns the general ontological commitment of all our studies and can be formulated on the basis of the notion of attestation.
Ricoeur positions attestation — the self’s assurance of its own existence as ipse — as the central ontological commitment organizing his entire hermeneutic of selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Unity and identity merely apply to one of the phases of being, posterior to the operation of individuation; these notions cannot help us discover the principle of individuation; they do not apply to ontogenesis understood in the full sense of the term.
Simondon argues that the ontological condition of being is pre-individual and metastable, such that unity and identity are derivative phases rather than primary ontological givens.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
As compared with this ontical interpretation, the existential-ontological Interpretation is not, let us say, merely an ontical generalization which is theoretical in character.
Heidegger distinguishes the existential-ontological interpretation of care from merely ontic generalizations, grounding care as the fundamental structural condition of Dasein’s being.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Dasein exists factically. We shall inquire whether existentiality and facticity have an ontological unity, or whether facticity belongs essentially to existentiality.
Heidegger poses the question of whether facticity and existentiality form a unified ontological condition in Dasein, framing thrownness as inseparable from projection.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The study of individuation, which grasps the discontinuous qua discontinuous, has a very profound ontological and epistemological value: it invites us to ask how ontogenesis is accomplished based on a system bearing energetic potentials and structural germs.
Simondon asserts that individuating discontinuity carries primary ontological and epistemological weight, displacing substance as the foundational condition of being.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Does not this unity belong to the metacategory of being as act and as power? And does not the ontological significance of this metacategory preserve what we have already termed on several occasions the analogical unity of action.
Ricoeur draws on Aristotle’s act/power distinction as the ontological framework that preserves the analogical unity of human action across its polysemic manifestations.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
This problem must be taken back, as an ontological one, into the existential analytic of Dasein.
Heidegger insists that the problem of Reality is not epistemological but must be returned to the ontological ground of Dasein’s existential analytic.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The ontological argument is neither argument nor proof, but merely the psychological demonstration of the fact that there is a class of men for whom a definite idea has efficacy and reality.
Jung reinterprets the ontological argument psychologically, treating claims about necessary being as evidence of a psychological type for whom ideas possess ontological weight equivalent to perceptual reality.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
To Dasein’s state of Being belongs thrownness; indeed it is constitutive for Dasein’s disclosedness. In thrownness is revealed that in each case Dasein, as my Dasein and this Dasein, is already in a definite world.
Heidegger establishes thrownness as a constitutive ontological condition of Dasein’s disclosedness, underscoring that factical situatedness is not accidental but structural.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The subject being can be conceived as a more or less perfectly coherent system of three successive phases of being: the pre-individual phase, the individuated phase, and the transindividual phase.
Simondon articulates the ontological condition of the subject as inherently polyphasic — never reducible to the individuated moment alone but always carrying pre-individual and transindividual dimensions.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
He no longer lives in a cosmos in the proper sense of the word and is no longer aware that having a body and taking up residence in a house are equivalent to assuming an existential situation in the cosmos.
Eliade describes the desacralization of modernity as a loss of awareness that corporeality and dwelling constitute an ontological condition — an existential situation within a meaningful cosmic order.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
In Heidegger, the investigation of ‘who?’ belongs to the same ontological sphere as that of the self (Selbstheit).
Ricoeur notes that for Heidegger the question ‘who?’ is not merely grammatical but belongs to the ontological sphere of selfhood, linking personal identity to structural conditions of being.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside
It is a question of conferring onto it the vaster characteristic of the ‘becoming of being, that through which the being becomes insofar as it is, qua being.’
Simondon proposes that ontogenesis — being’s becoming qua being — must replace the static ontological condition of substance as the primary philosophical object.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside