Temporality occupies a structural rather than merely thematic position across the depth-psychology corpus: it names not a property that beings happen to possess but the constitutive ground of human existence itself. The most sustained and architecturally central treatment belongs to Heidegger, for whom Zeitlichkeit is the ontological meaning of care, the tripartite ecstatic unity of future, having-been, and present through which Dasein projects, retrieves, and encounters. Primordial temporality is finite, futural in its priority, and sharply distinguished from the vulgar, levelled-off sequence of ‘nows’ that ordinary time-consciousness produces. McGilchrist draws Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty together to argue that time is not an external constraint on consciousness but its very substance, while also attending to hemispheric differences in how lived and objectified time are experienced. Hillman and Casey press further, insisting that the psyche demands a polyform, discontinuous temporality irreducible to linear sequence, and that the soul’s time is purposeful yet imaginal. Von Franz extends the inquiry cross-culturally and archetypally, contrasting clock-time as a late civilisational abstraction with Chinese qualitative time, Judaeo-Christian irreversible historicity, and the concentric temporal strata — from ego-time through archetypal aeonic time to the timeless centre — that Jung’s model of the psyche implies. Derrida interrogates the very opposition between authentic and inauthentic temporality in Heidegger, questioning whether the evaluative charge of ‘fall’ can be sustained without covert ethical or metaphysical commitments. Plato’s Timaeus, cited as a countertradition, frames time as moving image of eternity, inseparable from circular celestial motion. The tension between temporality as existential ground and temporality as archetypal, mythic, or cyclical phenomenon is the generative fault-line running through the corpus.
According to Heidegger, the sense, the point, the very meaning of Dasein (each existing human being) is temporality… time is right at the core of our being: not an incidental, perhaps lamentable, aspect of the human condition.
McGilchrist synthesises Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to argue that temporality is not an external constraint but the constitutive centre of human existence and consciousness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time’, where, by ‘the subject’, Merleau-Ponty means human consciousness. Our consciousness depends on time, and we humans have no meaning, and can find no meaning, outsid
Aligning Heidegger’s Zeitlichkeit with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological equation of subject and time, McGilchrist establishes temporality as the irreducible horizon of human meaning.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care… we must hold ourselves aloof from all those significations of ‘future’, ‘past’, and ‘Present’ which thrust themselves upon us from the ordinary conception of time.
Heidegger establishes temporality as the ontological ground of authentic care, distinguished categorically from the ordinary, levelled understanding of time.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality, and as such it makes possible the Constitution of the structure of care. Temporality is essentially ecstatical. Temporality temporalizes itself primordially out of the future. Primordial time is finite.
Heidegger’s four summary theses — temporality as ecstatical, futural, finite, and constitutive of care — define the term’s technical core in Being and Time.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Temporality is the primordial ‘out-… The future, the character of having been, and the Present, show the phenomenal characteristics of the ‘towards-oneself’, the ‘back-to’, and the ‘letting-oneself-be-encountered’.
Heidegger identifies the three ecstatic moments of temporality — futural, retentive, and presentive — as the unified phenomenal structure grounding Dasein’s being.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future… Care is Being-towards-death… the finitude of primordial and authentic future and therefore the finitude of temporality.
Heidegger links the primacy of the future in authentic temporality to Being-towards-death, grounding the finitude of temporality in Dasein’s ownmost possibility.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
The time of soul is not to be presumed continuous … it is discontinuous … as having many avatars, many kinds and modes. The polycentricity of the psyche demands no less than this, namely, a polyform time.
Hillman, citing Casey, argues that the soul’s temporality is irreducibly polyform and discontinuous, resisting the linear model presupposed by a terminus-oriented analysis.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Why determine as fall the passage from one temporality to another? And why qualify temporality as authentic—or proper—and as inauthentic—or improper—when every ethical preoccupation has been suspended?
Derrida interrogates the structural asymmetry of Heidegger’s authentic/inauthentic opposition within temporality, questioning whether covert ethical or metaphysical assumptions underwrite the distinction.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
The horizons which belong to the ‘now’, the ‘then’, and the ‘on that former occasion’, all have their source of ecstatical temporality; by reason of this, these horizons too have the character of datability.
Heidegger derives the datability of ordinary time — ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘on that former occasion’ — from the ecstatical-horizonal structure of primordial temporality.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The unity of the horizonal schemata of future, Present, and having been, is grounded in the ecstatical unity of temporality. The horizon of temporality as a whole determines that whereupon factically existing entities are essentially disclosed.
Heidegger argues that the horizonal schemata unifying future, present, and past are grounded in the ecstatical unity of temporality, which discloses the world to factical Dasein.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
temporality as the ontological meaning of care… temporality and everydayness… temporality and historicality… temporality and within-time-ness as the source of the ordinary conception of time.
The table of contents for Being and Time’s second division maps the systematic unfolding of temporality across authenticity, everydayness, historicality, and ordinary time-consciousness.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The temporality of Being-in-the-world thus emerges, and it turns out, at the same time, to be the foundation for that spatiality which is specific for Dasein.
Heidegger shows that the temporality of Being-in-the-world is also the ontological foundation for Dasein’s distinctive spatiality, linking temporal and spatial structures.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
In temporality, however, the constitutive totality of care has a possible… In temporality, however, the constitutive totalityofcare has a possible present-at-hand ‘in time’… birth and death are ‘connected’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein. As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.
Heidegger articulates Dasein’s stretching-along between birth and death as the temporal between constitutive of the totality of care.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Dasein as temporality does not lie beyond the horizon of the ordinary conception of time. And Hegel has made an explicit attempt to set forth the way in which time as ordinarily understood is connected with spirit.
Heidegger locates the ordinary conception of time — including Hegel’s account of spirit and time — within, rather than beyond, the derivative horizon disclosed by primordial temporality.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The closer we get to the outer ring, the more we come into the realm of time, in that form which is generally known to us. Our clock-time, however, is a specific achievement of our civilization… a mere concept of me
Von Franz presents a concentric model of the psyche in which clock-time governs only the outermost ego-ring, while deeper strata operate in aeonic or timeless dimensions.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Time in China was therefore a concrete continuum containing qualities or fundamental conditions which can be manifested relatively simultaneously in different places… time never became an abstract parameter or empty frame of reference but was always qualified by the coincidence of the events.
Von Franz contrasts the Chinese qualitative, synchronistic conception of time — exemplified by the I Ching — with the Western abstract, quantitative parameter, enriching the concept of temporality with cross-cultural depth.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The most radical of these events, which disrupted time into a completely different Before and After, is the incarnation of Christ… the development of history is governed and oriented by a unique fact which can never be repeated.
Von Franz analyses the Judaeo-Christian conception of irreversible, eschatologically oriented historical time as a specific archetypal configuration that contrasts with cyclical or qualitative models.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
How one can exist both in ordinary time and in aeonic time together can best be illustrated by the story of the death of the great Zen Master Ma… His mortal part lasted only that long, but another, more archetypal part of himself was to last much longer.
Von Franz illustrates through Zen narrative the simultaneous coexistence of ordinary biographical time and archetypal aeonic time within a single human life.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Reckoning with time is constitutive for Being-in-the-world. Concernful circumspective discovering, in reckoning with its time, permits those things which we have discovered… to be encountered in time. Thus entities within-the-world become accessible as ‘being in time’.
Heidegger shows how circumspective concern’s reckoning with time generates the derived sense of entities as ‘being in time’, tracing world-time back to primordial temporality.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
One reason we are pulled to and fro is that we try to combine an objectified image of time seen from the outside, with the experience of time as inhabited. Such an attempt is never completely successful.
McGilchrist, drawing on Bergson and Waismann, diagnoses the irresolvable tension between objectified clock-time and lived, inhabited temporal experience as constitutive of human self-understanding.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
time is a way of precipitating out into infinitely various actuality the undifferentiated oneness from which the universe began… ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.
McGilchrist frames time cosmologically and aesthetically as the differentiating agency through which undifferentiated eternity becomes the plural richness of actual experience.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Time is not a given frame; it is produced by the celestial revolutions… Time is a feature of that order, inherent in its rational structure. Plato’s view of Time as inseparable from periodic motion is no novelty, but a tradition running throughout the whole of Greek thought.
Plato’s Timaeus presents time as cosmologically produced — a feature of rational celestial order rather than a neutral frame — establishing the ancient alternative to Heidegger’s existential account.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Yang… ‘acts in the world of the invisible with Spirit and Time for its field’… Time, seen in this way, is ‘the means of making actual what is potential.’
Von Franz shows how Chinese cosmology assigns time to the masculine Yang principle, understanding temporality as the dynamic agency through which potentiality becomes actuality.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
For ‘limited’ one could here also say ‘timebound,’ for this is one of our many limitations of which we become especially painfully aware when aging.
Von Franz connects the experience of finitude and limitation with timebound existence, linking temporal constraint to the psychological process of ageing and the encounter with the infinite.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside
The sense of lived time is also a right-hemisphere-derived property… ‘Lived time’ is not just an awareness of the fact of time… I am distinguishing this from a sense of the irreparable loss of particular individuals.
McGilchrist attributes the sense of lived, irreversible time to right-hemisphere processing, distinguishing it from abstract temporal awareness and connecting it to historical and personal mourning.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
The temporality of Being-in-the-world… the temporality of circumspective concern… the temporal meaning of the way in which circumspective concern becomes modified into the theoretical discovery of the present-at-hand.
The structural table of contents signals the systematic scope of Heidegger’s temporality analysis, mapping its application across world-involvement, concern, historicality, and ordinary time.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
The ego is moving in time from the past to the future. The dream comes up toward it from the unconscious, like a wave containing a cluster of images… first perceiving the past, being hit by the present, and then seeing ahead the solution.
Von Franz presents a temporal model of dream structure in which unconscious images intersect with the ego’s temporal trajectory, suggesting that the unconscious orients across past, present, and future simultaneously.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside