Monday 1 January 2024

Does Heidegger allow space for free will? Raymond Tallis conducts by Zoom Inner Circle Seminar 296 (15 December 2024)

 


Does Heidegger allow space for free will?


Raymond Tallis

conducts by Zoom
his eleventh Inner Circle Seminar: No. 296
introduced by Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 15 December 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Raymond Tallis

Raymond Tallis is one of our best-loved invited speakers. Today he conducts his eleventh Inner Circle Seminar, twelve years after his first on 2 December 2012. 
Professor Tallis has shown in ten profound Inner Circle Seminars that he is one of the world’s leading demystifiers of what he calls the ‘neuroscience delusion’ (‘neuromania’) and the ‘intellectual plague of biologism’ (‘animalism’). His ruthless, good-humoured exposure of reductive natural-scientism continues the tradition of Heidegger and Szasz, for example, but is utterly his own.  The heart of the thinking, which has informed all his more than thirty books and all the seminars he has conducted for us, is in harmony with the underlying philosophy and raison d'être of the Inner Circle Seminars as a whole. Psychotherapists are free to choose to go on pretending to be ‘validated’ by ‘neuroscience’; but their work, such as it is, sometimes radically transforming and helpful, sometimes best passed over in silence, speaks for, or against, itself, as the case may be; and no pseudo-scientific ‘validation’, or ‘invalidation’, can disguise this.
Raymond Tallis is one of the select few who affirms and advocates human language to depict and describe the human world and human relationships.
In his book Logos Professor Tallis exposes the absurdity of the argument that evolutionary biology or neuroscience show that our thinking is merely a function of our bodies-as-objects-for-science and therefore can have no truth-value of its own unless it is in some way itself derived from evolutionary biology or neuroscience, which are taken to be ‘objectively true. But those sciences are themselves human creations, and therefore, by this argument, not ‘objectively true. Professor Tallis remarks that those who use this argument are worthy successors of the Cretan of old who said all Cretans were liars.

Our enthusiasm for his work in general does not mean that in his Inner Circle Seminars we simply sit at Raymond Talliss feet (as we may imagine them below his friendly Zoomed countenance) and accept his arguments without question. Through dialogue and disagreement we hope to approach a little closer to truth.

Raymond Tallis introduces his seminar today as follows:

Does Heidegger Allow Space for Free Will?

In a previous seminar, I made the case for the reality of agency in the face of the currently dominant naturalist, scientistic philosophy that seemed to demonstrate its impossibility. At the heart of my defence of free will was an appeal to the distinctive nature of actions and that in virtue of which they are put together. Agents engage with the natural world from a virtual outside: their actions are the realisation of prior envisaged possibilities and of the tensed time in which possibilities are located (such that they are occasioned by an envisaged  future informed by a past that is present). Actions are radically different from other material events that are propelled into being by past events which are their causal ancestors.

There is some overlap between this account of the properties of the human agent and Heidegger’s Dasein that is ‘ahead of’ and ‘cares for itself’. However, Heidegger’s resistance to addressing the question of embodiment and his desire to avoid any hint of a Cartesian dualism – so that he marginalises the body-as-object – brings problems for understanding agency. The endeavour to dissolve individuals into “being-in-the-world” makes it difficult to see how Da-sein is individuated and how, consequently, its agency has a point d’appui; in particular how its actions are located in physical space and physical time. 

Heidegger’s failure to deal with embodiment (flagged up by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) is not, I shall argue, adequately addressed by his invoking a distinction between the body-as-object (Körper) and a living body open to the world (Leib). There are many reasons for claiming this but one I shall examine in some detail is the necessity for an ontological democracy between the body and the material world in order that human being should have, and pursue, an agenda that serves specific needs. 

While I shall shrink from the blasphemy of accusing the Heidegger of Being and Time of even a hint of idealism, the ‘world’ in which being-in-the-world has its being seems to lack those intrinsic properties that a) transcend the human subject and b) have come into being prior to the emergence of such subjects. The permission Heidegger gives himself to start from, and remain within, a realm outside the natural world, while it may seem to deal with the challenge of determinism undermines, even empties, the very idea of an agency on account of removing any ultimate basis for Dasein to have a particular agenda. It is not surprising that his notion of freedom weakened in his later writing to Gelassenheit or authentic non-willing.


The heart of these seminars is dialogue. It will of course be possible to argue in depth with Professor Tallis if you disagree with any of his points or positions, or indeed if you think, as some authorities on Heidegger do, that his argument as a whole today is based on a serious misreading of Heidegger.

Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic, and a retired physician and clinical neuroscientist. He ran a large clinical service in Hope Hospital Salford and an academic department in the University of Manchester. His research focussed on epilepsy, stroke, and neurological rehabilitation.
He trained in medicine at Oxford University and at St Thomas’s Hospital in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician. He was an editor and major contributor to two key textbooks in the field, The Clinical Neurology of Old Age and Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, and author of over 200 original scientific articles, mainly in clinical neuroscience, including papers in Nature MedicineBrain, Lancet. In 2000, he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research. Among many prizes, he was awarded the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing. He played a key part in developing guidelines for the care of stroke patients in the UK. From 2011-14 he was Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD). He was a member of the Council of Royal College of Physicians between 2016 and 2019. He is a member of the criteria-setting group for the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021 in philosophy.
He has published fiction, poetry, and 30 books on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and literary and cultural criticism. Aping Mankind (2010) was reissued in 2016 as a Routledge Classic. Of Time and Lamentation. Reflections on Transience (2017; 2019) a comprehensive inquiry into the nature of time was widely praised. NHS SOS (2012), co-edited with Jacky Davis, examined the destructive impact of Tory policies on the NHS. Logos. An Essay on the Mystery of the Sense-Making Animal was published in Spring 2018. His most recent volume of verse – Sunburst – was published in November 2019.
A series of eight seminars on Humanism given in the philosophy department of Charles University Prague, formed the basis of his book, published in 2020, Seeing Ourselves. Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science. A defence of free will – Freedom. An Impossible Reality – was published in May 2021 and an issue of the philosophy journal Human Affairs was devoted to it. Professor Tallis has based a number of Inner Circle Seminars on these books.
His most recent books are Prague 22. A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City’ (Philosophy Now Publications, forthcoming 2024) and Circling Round Explicitness. The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (Acumen, 2025).
In 2009, the Economist Intelligent Life Magazine described him as one of the world’s leading polymaths. The critic Stuart Kelly said of him in Scotland on Sunday in 2016 that he is one of the very few contemporary thinkers whom I would unequivocally call a genius. He has four honorary degrees: DLitt (Hull, 1997) and Litt.D. (Manchester, 2001) for contributions to the humanities; and DSc (St George’s Hospital Medical School, 2015; University of East Anglia, 2017) for contributions to research in medicine.

For an account of how Raymond Tallis writes his extraordinary books, see his article ‘My writing day: In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’, in The Guardian Review of 29 April 2017:
Nicholas Fearn wrote in The Independent:
When Kirsty Young was asked to name her favourite guest on Desert Island Discs, the rock star Paul Weller was beaten into second place, for her own luxury item would be the writer Raymond Tallis.
Raymond Tallis, whose eleventh Inner Circle Seminar this will be, kindly confirms that our seminar structure, in which dialogue is of the essence, enables him to communicate and reflect on his ideas. He wrote, after his first Inner Circle Seminar, The Intellectual Plague of Biologism, on 2 December 2012:
The seminar was for me an incredible experience. I have never previously had the opportunity to discuss the topics we covered in such depth with a group of people who came at it from such different angles but in a way that I found illuminating. I learned a lot. It was a tremendous privilege.


This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.


Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250  

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools, and universities.

Maya Abbott and the Abbotts. The third seminar of the third (60th anniversary) subseries on Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (1964). Anthony Stadlen and Yaara Sumeruk conduct Inner Circle Seminar 295 (17 November 2024)

 

R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson

Sanity, Madness and the Family:

Families of Schizophrenics

(April 1964)

Sixtieth anniversary reflections


A third subseries (fifteen seminars) on Laing and Esterson’s eleven families

Historically researched by Anthony Stadlen

Explored in film by Yaara Sumeruk


In memoriam Hilary Mantel:

The simple words the people speak


3. Maya Abbott and the Abbotts


Anthony Stadlen  Yaara Sumeruk

conduct by Zoom

Inner Circle Seminar No. 295

Sunday 17 November 2024

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.


[To be continued]


For earlier seminars in this series , which explain the context, see

https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/60-years-since-laing-esterson-sanity.html

and

https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/karl-marxs-concept-of-mystification.html


This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.


Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250  

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools, and universities.

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars. No. 3 (2 and 5 November 1964). A 60th-anniversary revaluation. Inner Circle Seminar 294 (3 November 2024)

 


Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars
A 60th-anniversary revaluation
Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964)
‘Socrates: The hardest is to say the same about the same

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 294 
Sunday 3 November 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
 
Martin Heidegger  Medard Boss
Feldweg, Messkirch

Martin Heidegger  Medard Boss
Boss’s home, Zollikon

Anthony Stadlen writes:

Between 1959 and 1969 the German philosopher Martin Heidegger conducted seminars for psychiatrists and a few other professionals at the invitation of the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss, mostly in Boss’s house in Zollikon near Zürich. 

The first seminar, in November 1959 (on 4 November 1959, according to Erna Hochwas in the Bürghölzli mental hospital in Zürich. The second was in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in Boss’s house in Zollikon on 5 February 1960. The two men also discussed the daseinsanalytic foundations of psychoanalysis during their holiday together in Taormina, Sicily, in the summer of 1963. There were then ten seminars in Boss’s house between 1964 and 1969. 

Boss, with Heidegger’s collaboration and consent, published in 1987 a book containing reports of the seminars, and of his own conversations and correspondence with Heidegger (Heidegger, M., 1994 [1987], Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle – Zwiegespräche – Briefe, herausgegeben von M. Boss, second edition, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann).

Fourteen years later, in 2001, an authorised American translation of the second edition was published (Heidegger, M., 2001 [1994], Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by M. Boss, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press).

I showed in detail (Existential Analysis, 14.2, July 2003) that this American translation is not trustworthy. While some passages are tolerably translated, others are highly incompetent and give a grossly distorted picture of what Heidegger is saying.

A simple but telling example: Heidegger says the title of a congress of psychologists is ‘reichlich komisch’. Even if you know no German you will probably guess this means ‘richly comic’, and indeed it does; but these (to put it mildly) rather humourless translators render it as ‘rather humorous’, thereby misrepresenting Heidegger’s biting humour, and no doubt justified contempt, as bland praise.

Another example: According to the American translation, a Zollikon seminar participant on 9 July 1964 mentions ‘the burgher prince’. I have heard this read aloud by a lecturer who was trying to appear to know what it means. Nobody dared ask. Is the burgher prince’ a figure in a German or Austrian or Swiss Novelle or fairy-tale? Actually, the original just reads Bürger-Prinz’. No article, definite or indefinite. Prof. Dr. Hans Bürger-Prinz (1897-1976) was a Nazi psychiatrist and judge, who at the Hereditary Health Court in Hamburg decided which people with a hereditary disease should be forcibly sterilised. Still alive at the time, he was referred to by the participant in the Zollikon seminar on 9 July 1964 as an eminent authority.

Ten years ago, a subseries of our Inner Circle Seminars sought to explore the Zollikon seminars, at a distance of fifty years, as nearly as possible to the day, and  among other things – to remedy these and similar farcical mistranslations together with others much more serious, based on a failure to understand what Heidegger actually means.

We are now (since November 2019) engaged on a second series, sixty years after Heidegger’s original seminars. In Inner Circle Seminar No. 253 on 10 November 2019 we discussed the first seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 4 November 1959; and in Inner Circle Seminar No. 257 on 3 May 2020 we discussed the second, lost, seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in BossZollikon home on 5 February 1960.

In Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 on Sunday 6 October 2024 we made a start on the first two Zollikon seminars proper’ – that is, the first seminars recorded as held entirely in Bosss Zollikon home, both in the original book Zollikoner Seminare (1987) and in the more recent volume Zollikoner Seminare (2018), Volume 89 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. We shall call them No. 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and No. 2 (6 and 9 July 1964).

We have the advantage now that the 2018 Zollikoner Seminare, the Gesamtausgabe, the largest volume in the 102-volume edition of his collected works, contains an extraordinary quantity of very detailed notes to himself by Heidegger for his Zollikon seminars, including 53 pages for these two seminars of January and July 1964.

The seminar No. 2, on 6 and 9 July 1964 in Boss’s house, is remarkable as the only seminar where the awkward and fascinating dialogue between Heidegger and the baffled participating psychiatrists, including Boss, was taken down in shorthand and reported in full verbatim – by Dr Erna Hoch, a person of great honesty and integrity. This takes us to the heart of Heidegger’s amazing seminars.

Today, 3 November 2024, we shall explore what we are calling Zollikon seminar No. 3, of 2 and 5 November 1964; but we shall also recapitulate some of the fundamental points Heidegger tries to convey in that year’s earlier seminars.  

1965 was Heidegger’s most active year in relation to the Zollikon seminars. He made no fewer than five visits. In 2025, as we did in 2015, we devote one seminar to each of his five seminars of 1965, on their 50th anniversaries almost to the day. These five seminars of ours thus have the same structure and time-scale as his: two three-hour sessions (with coffee and tea breaks) separated in our case by a lunch break and in his by a day or two.

Our seminar on 6 March 2026 examines seminar No. 9 of 1 and 3 March 1966.

Subsequent seminars, to be announced in due course, will continue to explore the important Boss-Heidegger conversations and correspondence reported in the book, including their fundamental Taormina conversations of 1963 to which we have already devoted many seminars.

Finally, on 18 March 2029, we shall discuss the last Zollikon seminar, No. 10, held on 18 and 21 March 1969.

Whatever else Heidegger did in his long life, his Zollikon seminars seem an act of decency and piety – even if he and Boss were naive in thinking that clinical psychiatrists, of all people, would be receptive to his radical questioning of the foundations of psychotherapy. Heidegger travelled from Freiburg in Germany to Zollikon in Switzerland, took no payment (according to his trusted assistant, the late Professor Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann – personal communication) and put an enormous amount of work and thought into preparing and conducting these seminars. He collaborated with Boss explicitly because he hoped to help troubled people. The protocols of, and Heideggers notes for, the seminars can be a force for great good if we are prepared to take them slowly and seriously, and open ourselves to their profound simplicity. They are revolutionary in their return to beginnings, saying ‘the same thing in the same way’ – which, as Heidegger points out and we shall discuss today, Socrates said was the hardest of all.

This does not mean there is nothing to criticise in Heideggers or Bosss approach to, or in, the Zollikon seminars. Boss limited the participation to medical doctors with only a few non-medical professionals. As I showed in my paper Medical Daseinsanalysis (Existential Analysis 16.1, January 2005: 169-177), Heidegger colluded with Bosss aspiration for, and teaching and practice of, Daseinsanalysis as a medical discipline. We have explored the implications of this in many recent Inner Circle Seminars, including Inner Circle Seminar, No. 293, on 15 September: Is the madman mentally ill? No. – Heidegger 1953. 

Moreover, if we confine ourselves to one exchange in one seminar, we can see that the issues raised are very complex. Heidegger mentions in the seminar on 1 March 1966 , which we shall explore on 1 March 2026, that Boss, at the start of the seminar, has compared the seminars to a kind of group therapy, in which participants, ‘as in a Freudian analysis develop resistance to the Heideggerian cure.

Boss used to recall his analytic sessions with Sigmund Freud as a young student in Vienna in 1925, although (as Gion Condrau and I have shown) he exaggerated their number. Aleš Wotruba, who with his wife Sarka participated as young students in the final Zollikon seminars, has told us that Boss insisted that daseinsanalytic trainees should study, even more than HeideggerFreuds papers on technique. If Boss really believed the seminars were a form of therapy, should he not have been true to Freudfundamental rule that one should communicate without criticism all that comes to mind’? But Condrau, who was in turn Bosss army comrade, colleague, deputy, and successor, reported that Boss told participants in the Zollikon seminars that they must not ask Heidegger about his Nazism. Are we to presume that, as a result of Bosss prohibition, they were able to ensure that during the seminars this question never once crossed any of their minds? (See p. 167 of my review of Condraus book Martin Heideggers Impact on Psychotherapy (Existential Analysis 14.1, January 2003: 162-178.))

However, Boss is making a serious point in speaking of group therapy and resistance. He says that resistance has arisen, in the form of the objection that Daseinsanalysis is anti-scientific: first, because Heideggers discussion of natural science is (allegedly) valid only for classical, not nuclear, physics; second, because psychotherapy is in any case not a procedure like physics.

Heidegger questions whether the seminars are a cure. He recalls that semen’ means a seed, and hopes these evenings may succeed in strewing a seed that will come up here and there. He says a philosophical seminar is always in the situation of Socrates, who said that what is most difficult is always to say the same thing about the same thing.

He now repeats his explanation that physics objectifies nature, and argues that this is even more so for nuclear than for classical physics. Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle does not change this.

Heidegger demonstrates how a discussion of stress in a journal of psychosomatic medicine is couched in the objectifying language of physics. He discusses how this negative critique can become a positive one by showing how the language of his own Being and Time can open up the discourse on stress in a way appropriate to human science. He quotes Hölderlin... we are a conversation.’ ‘Stress’, he stresses, makes sense only as part of this conversation, whether as a 
burdening or an unburdening.

On 3 March 1966, the second evening of the same seminar, Heidegger reiterates that stress’ belongs to the constitution of human existence determined by thrownness, understanding, and language. He discusses Plügges account in the psychosomatic journal of being stressed by the sound of his neighbours children but not his own. Heidegger summarises his paradigmatic daseinsanalytic opening up of the concept of stress’ in the sentence: ‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’

While we have discussed in many seminars this and similar revelatory elucidations by Heideggerwe have also acknowledged what the Finnish psychotherapist Martti Siirala called the 
‘violent elements in the absolutist claims for Daseinsanalysis to a direct access to the phenomena in an adequate, undistorted way
to be taught to the unfortunately defective client, who supposedly lacks this vision. Many have been seduced not only by scientism (technological tinkering) but also by this daseinsanalytic absolutism (patronising preaching). In these seminars we strive through our dialogue to do justice to Heideggers clarifying vision but also to transcend its avoidance of dialectic. Here we can draw on his own early, abandoned notion of diahermeneutics.

You can attend any or all of these seminars. Each is self-contained, but it would be advantageous to attend them all. And, of course, if you came to the previous cycle of Inner Circle Seminars on these Zollikon seminars ten years ago, this is an opportunity to deepen your thinking on, and through, them. Like any serious subject, they are inexhaustible.

6 October 2024
(Inner Circle Seminar 293)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and 2 (26 and 9 July 1964)
‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’

3 November 2024
(Inner Circle Seminar 294)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964)
‘Socrates: The hardest is to say the same about the same.’

19 January 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 297)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)
‘Can we disregard the human being altogether?’

9 March 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 299)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 5 (10 and 12 March 1965)
‘In making-present the Zürich main railway station, we are directed not to a picture of it, not to a representation ...’

11 May 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 301)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 6 (11 and 14 May 1965)
‘We now make a leap to the body-problem.’

6 July 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 303)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 7 (6 and 8 July 1965)
‘Is the body and its bodying ... something somatic or something psychic or neither of the two?’

23 November 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 308)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 8 (23 and 26 November 1965)
‘Whence comes the insight that ... the Sein of the Da is ecstatic ... ?’

1 March 2026
(Inner Circle Seminar 312?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 9 (1 and 3 March 1966)
‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’

18 March 2029
(Inner Circle Seminar 347?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 10 (18 and 21 March 1969)
‘The book lies here next to the glass. But how are two human beings, standing together, together?’

These will be online seminars, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140 per seminar or £875 the subseries of the next seven seminars (discussing Heidegger’s seminars 3-9), others £175 per seminar or £1,095 the subseries of seven; some bursaries; payable in advance

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857     E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.

Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars. A 60th-anniversary revaluation. Seminars 1 and 2 (January and July 1964). Inner Circle Seminar 293 (6 October 2024)

 


Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars
A 60th-anniversary revaluation
Seminars 1 and 2  (January and July 1964)
‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’

Anthony Stadlen
conducts by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 
Sunday 6 October 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
 
Martin Heidegger  Medard Boss
Feldweg, Messkirch

Martin Heidegger  Medard Boss
Boss’s home, Zollikon

Anthony Stadlen writes:

Between 1959 and 1969 the German philosopher Martin Heidegger conducted seminars for psychiatrists and a few other professionals at the invitation of the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss, mostly in Boss’s house in Zollikon near Zürich. 

The first seminar, in November 1959 (on 4 November 1959, according to Erna Hochwas in the Bürghölzli mental hospital in Zürich. The second was in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in Boss’s house in Zollikon on 5 February 1960. The two men also discussed the daseinsanalytic foundations of psychoanalysis during their holiday together in Taormina, Sicily, in the summer of 1963. There were then ten seminars in Boss’s house between 1964 and 1969. 

Boss, with Heidegger’s collaboration and consent, published in 1987 a book containing reports of the seminars, and of his own conversations and correspondence with Heidegger (Heidegger, M., 1994 [1987], Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle – Zwiegespräche – Briefe, herausgegeben von M. Boss, second edition, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann).

Fourteen years later, in 2001, an authorised American translation of the second edition was published (Heidegger, M., 2001 [1994], Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by M. Boss, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press).

I showed in detail (Existential Analysis, 14.2, July 2003) that this American translation is not trustworthy. While some passages are tolerably translated, others are highly incompetent and give a grossly distorted picture of what Heidegger is saying.

A simple but telling example: Heidegger says the title of a congress of psychologists is ‘reichlich komisch’. Even if you know no German you will probably guess this means ‘richly comic’, and indeed it does; but these (to put it mildly) rather humourless translators render it as ‘rather humorous’, thereby misrepresenting Heidegger’s biting humour and no doubt justified contempt as bland praise.

Another example: According to the American translation, a Zollikon seminar participant on 9 July 1964 mentions ‘the burgher prince’. I have heard this read aloud by a lecturer who was trying to appear to know what it means. Nobody dared ask. Is the burgher prince’ a figure in a German or Austrian or Swiss Novelle or fairy-tale? Actually, the original just reads: Bürger-Prinz’. No article, definite or indefinite. Prof. Dr. Hans Bürger-Prinz (1897-1976) was a Nazi psychiatrist and judge, who at the Hereditary Health Court in Hamburg decided which people with a hereditary disease should be forcibly sterilised. Still alive at the time, he was referred to by the participant in the Zollikon seminar on 9 July 1964 as an eminent authority.

Ten years ago, a subseries of our Inner Circle Seminars sought to explore the Zollikon seminars, at a distance of fifty years, as nearly as possible to the day, and  among other things – to remedy these and similar farcical mistranslations together with others much more serious, based on a failure to understand what Heidegger actually means.

We are now (since November 2019) engaged on a second series, sixty years after Heidegger’s original seminars. In Inner Circle Seminar No. 253 on 10 November 2019 we discussed the first seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 4 November 1959; and in Inner Circle Seminar No. 257 on 3 May 2020 we discussed the second, lost, seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in BossZollikon home on 5 February 1960.

In Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 on Sunday 6 October 2024 we explore the first two Zollikon seminars proper’ – that is, the first seminars recorded as held entirely in Bosss Zollikon home, both in the original book Zollikoner Seminare (1987) and in the more recent volume Zollikoner Seminare (2018), Volume 89 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. We shall call them No. 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and No. 2 (6 and 9 July 1964).

We have the advantage now that the 2018 Zollikoner Seminare, the Gesamtausgabe, the largest volume in the 102-volume edition of his collected works, contains an extraordinary quantity of very detailed notes to himself by Heidegger for his Zollikon seminars, including 53 pages for these two seminars of January and July 1964.

The seminar No. 2, on 6 and 9 July 1964 in Boss’s house, is remarkable as the only seminar where the awkward and fascinating dialogue between Heidegger and the baffled participating psychiatrists, including Boss, was taken down in shorthand and reported in full verbatim – by Dr Erna Hoch, a person of great honesty and integrity. Our seminar today thus takes us to the heart of Heidegger’s amazing seminars.

On 3 November 2024 we shall revisit Heidegger’s seminar, which we are calling No. 3, of 2 and 5 November 1964.

1965 was Heidegger’s most active year in relation to the Zollikon seminars. He made no fewer than five visits. In 2025, as we did in 2015, we shall devote one seminar to each of his five seminars of 1965, on their 50th anniversaries almost to the day. These five seminars of ours will thus have the same structure and time-scale as his: two three-hour sessions (with coffee and tea breaks) separated in our case by a lunch break and in his by a day or two.

Our seminar on 1 March 2026 will examine the seminar (No. 9) of 1 and 3 March 1966.

Subsequent seminars, to be announced in due course, will continue to explore the important Boss-Heidegger conversations and correspondence reported in the book, including their fundamental Taormina conversations of 1963 to which we have already devoted many seminars.

Finally, on 18 March 2029, we shall discuss the last Zollikon seminar, No. 10, held on 18 and 21 March 1969.

Whatever else Heidegger did in his long life, his Zollikon seminars were an act of decency and piety – even if he and Boss were naive in thinking that clinical psychiatrists, of all people, would be receptive to his radical questioning of the foundations of psychotherapy. Heidegger travelled from Freiburg in Germany to Zollikon in Switzerland, took no payment (according to his trusted assistant, the late Prof. Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann – personal communication), and put an enormous amount of work and thought into preparing and conducting these seminars. He collaborated with Boss explicitly because he hoped to help troubled people. The protocols of, and Heideggers notes for, the seminars can be a force for great good if we are prepared to take them slowly and seriously, and open ourselves to their profound simplicity. They are revolutionary in their return to beginnings, saying ‘the same thing in the same way’ – which, as Heidegger points out and we shall discuss on 3 November, Socrates said was the hardest of all.

This does not mean there is nothing to criticise in Heideggers or Bosss approach to, or in, the Zollikon seminars. Boss limited the participation to medical doctors with only a few non-medical professionals. As I showed in my paper Medical Daseinsanalysis (Existential Analysis 16.1, January 2005: 169-177), Heidegger colluded with Bosss aspiration for, and teaching and practice of, Daseinsanalysis as a medical discipline. We have explored the implications of this in many recent Inner Circle Seminars, including Inner Circle Seminar No. 292, on 15 September: Is the madman mentally ill? No. – Heidegger 1953. 

Moreover, if we confine ourselves to one exchange in one seminar, we can see that the issues raised are very complex. Heidegger mentions in the seminar No. 9 on 1 March 1966 , which we shall explore on 1 March 2026, that Boss, at the start of the seminar, has compared the seminars to a kind of group therapy, in which participants, ‘as in a Freudian analysis develop resistance to the Heideggerian cure.

Boss used to recall his analytic sessions with Sigmund Freud as a young student in Vienna in 1925, although (as Gion Condrau and I have shown) he exaggerated their number. Aleš Wotruba, who with his wife Sarka participated as young students in the final Zollikon seminars, has told us that Boss insisted that daseinsanalytic trainees should study, even more than HeideggerFreuds papers on technique. If Boss believed the seminars were a form of therapy, should he not have been true to Freudfundamental rule that one should communicate without criticism all that comes to mind’? But Condrau, who was in turn Bosss army comrade, colleague, deputy, and successor, reported that Boss told participants in the Zollikon seminars that they must not ask Heidegger about his Nazism. Are we to presume that, as a result of Bosss prohibition, they were able to ensure that during the seminars this question never once crossed any of their minds? (See p. 167 of my review of Condraus book Martin Heideggers Impact on Psychotherapy (Existential Analysis 14.1, January 2003: 162-178.))

However, Boss is making a serious point in speaking of group therapy and resistance. He says that resistance has arisen, in the form of the objection that Daseinsanalysis is anti-scientific: first, because Heideggers discussion of natural science is (allegedly) valid only for classical, not nuclear, physics; second, because psychotherapy is in any case not a procedure like physics.

Heidegger questions whether the seminars are a cure. He recalls that semen’ means a seed, and hopes these evenings may succeed in strewing a seed that will come up here and there. He says a philosophical seminar is always in the situation of Socrates, who said that what is most difficult is always to say the same thing about the same thing.

He now repeats his explanation that physics 
– completely reasonably for its specific purposes – objectifies nature, and argues that this is even more so for nuclear than for classical physics. Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle does not change this.

Heidegger then demonstrates how a discussion of stress in a journal of psychosomatic medicine is couched in the objectifying language of physics. He discusses how this negative critique can become a positive one by showing how the language of his own Being and Time can open up the discourse on stress in a way appropriate to human science. He quotes Hölderlin... we are a conversation.’ ‘Stress’, he stresses, makes sense only as part of this conversation, whether as a 
burdening or an unburdening.

On 3 March 1966, the second evening of the same seminar, Heidegger reiterates that stress’ belongs to the constitution of human existence determined by thrownness, understanding, and language. He discusses Plügges account in the psychosomatic journal of being stressed by the sound of his neighbours children but not his own. Heidegger summarises his paradigmatic daseinsanalytic opening up of the concept of stress’ in the sentence: ‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’

While we have discussed in many seminars this and similar revelatory elucidations by Heidegger, we have also acknowledged what the Finnish psychotherapist Martti Siirala called the 
‘violent elements in the absolutist claims for Daseinsanalysis to a direct access to the phenomena in an adequate, undistorted way
to be taught to the unfortunately defective client, who supposedly lacks this vision. Many have been seduced not only by scientism (technological tinkering) but also by this daseinsanalytic absolutism (patronising preaching). In these seminars we strive through our dialogue to do justice to Heideggers clarifying vision but also to transcend its medicalism and avoidance of dialectic. Here we can draw not only on work contemporary with the Zollikon seminars, though neglected by Heidegger and Boss, such as Jean-Paul Sartres Critique de la Raison Dialectique (1960), Thomas SzaszThe Myth of Mental Illness (1961), and R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), but also on Heidegger’s own early (1920), long abandoned notion of diahermeneutics.


You can attend any or all of these seminars. Each is self-contained, but it would be advantageous to attend them all. And, of course, if you came to the previous cycle of Inner Circle Seminars on these Zollikon seminars ten years ago, this is an opportunity to deepen your thinking on, and through, them. Like any serious subject, they are inexhaustible.

6 October 2024
(Inner Circle Seminar 293)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and 2 (26 and 9 July 1964)
‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’

3 November 2024
(Inner Circle Seminar 295)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964)
‘Socrates said: The hardest is to say the same about the same.’

19 January 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 297)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)
‘Can we disregard the human being altogether?’

9 March 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 299)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 5 (10 and 12 March 1965)
‘In making-present the Zürich main railway station, we are directed not to a picture of it, not to a representation ...’

11 May 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 301)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 6 (11 and 14 May 1965)
‘We now make a leap to the body-problem.’

6 July 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 303)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 7 (6 and 8 July 1965)
‘Is the body and its bodying ... something somatic or something psychic or neither of the two?’

23 November 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 308)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 8 (23 and 26 November 1965)
‘Whence comes the insight that ... the Sein of the Da is ecstatic ... ?’

1 March 2026
(Inner Circle Seminar 312?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 9 (1 and 3 March 1966)
‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’

18 March 2029
(Inner Circle Seminar 347?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 10 (18 and 21 March 1969)
‘The book lies here next to the glass. But how are two human beings, standing together, together?’

These will be online seminars, using Zoom.

Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140 per seminar or £1,000 the subseries of the first eight seminars (discussing Heideggers Zollikon seminars 1-9, excluding 10 which we shall not discuss until March 2029), others £175 per seminar or £1,250 the subseries of eight; some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled

Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra AvenueLondon N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857     E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.