I'm a Catholic woman: my knowledge comes to me through the hard study of Descartes (and God), and thankfully with a full stomach. Grub before ethics, but also grub creates ethics ❤️
To understand how the concept of "the other" is rooted in Catholicism, it is necessary to first translate Heidigger’s philosophy into his specific terminology, and then look at the theological scaffolding he built his early thought upon.
In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger does not use "the Other" in the ethical, face-to-face sense that philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas later would. Instead, he uses two primary concepts: Mitsein (Being-with) and das Man (the "They" or the "One"). He argues that human existence (Dasein) is never an isolated subject; it is fundamentally always already alongside others in a shared world. However, this shared existence usually devolves into das Man—an anonymous, conformist mass where we lose our authentic selves to public opinion.
This ontological structure—a primal connection to others that is inherently prone to a "fallen" state—was deeply informed by his early Catholic education, his training as a Jesuit novice, and his intense study of medieval theology.
Here is how Catholic theology provided the structural blueprint for Heidegger’s philosophy of the other.
The Augustinian Influence: "Fallenness" and Original Sin
Before writing Being and Time, Heidegger delivered a profound series of lectures on St. Augustine (1921). Augustine’s theology of human nature heavily influenced how Heidegger conceptualized our relationship with others.
* Verfallenheit (Fallenness): In Heidegger’s philosophy, humans are constantly "falling" away from their authentic, individual confrontation with their own mortality, seeking comfort in the idle chatter and conformity of das Man (the "They"). This is a direct philosophical translation of the Catholic, Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin and the fallen state of the world.
* Concupiscence vs. Care: Augustine wrote about how the human soul is scattered and distracted by worldly desires (concupiscence), pulling it away from God. Heidegger secularized this. In his view, Dasein is scattered and distracted by the everyday world of "the They," pulling it away from authentic Being. Heidegger’s foundational concept of Sorge (Care) is an ontological repurposing of Augustinian caritas (love/care), stripped of its divine target.
Scholasticism and the Communal World
Heidegger was raised in a strictly Catholic environment and his university studies were initially funded by the Church with the expectation that he would become a theologian. His habilitation thesis was on the medieval scholastic thinker Duns Scotus (specifically on texts that were attributed to Scotus at the time).
Catholic theology, unlike the Protestantism of Luther or Kierkegaard (which emphasized the isolated, terrified individual standing naked before God), is heavily institutional, communal, and traditional. The Catholic concepts of the Communion of Saints and the Mystical Body of Christ posit that a person is integrated into a vast, inherited network of spiritual meaning that precedes them.
Heidegger translated this communal embeddedness into Mitsein (Being-with) and Geschichtlichkeit (Historicality). For Heidegger, you do not encounter the other as an alien object across a void; you share a world of pre-existing meaning, language, and tools with them. Your very understanding of a hammer, a church, or a word is inherited from the communal "They."
The Break and the Secular Translation
In 1919, Heidegger wrote a famous letter to his colleague Engelbert Krebs, declaring that "epistemological insights" had made the "system of Catholicism" unacceptable to him. He formally broke with the Church.
However, Heidegger did not abandon the structures of Catholic thought; he secularized them. He took the Catholic theological framework—a soul embedded in a rich tradition but fallen into worldly distraction—and removed God from the center.
* The soul became Dasein.
* The fallenness into sin became Verfallenheit into das Man (the "They").
* The awakening to God became the authentic confrontation with one's own death (Sein-zum-Tode).
* The Communion of Saints became Mitsein and the shared historical destiny of a people.
Ultimately, Heidegger's understanding of others is a secularized theology of the Fall. We are structurally bound to others from the moment we are thrown into the world, but the "other" is also the very mechanism of our spiritual distraction and inauthenticity.
If Heidegger’s concept of the shared world (Mitsein) is a secularized translation of the Catholic communion, then pure Idealism—the belief that the isolated human mind (ego cogito) is the center and creator of reality—is an ontological rebellion. For Heidegger, madness is the catastrophic psychological endpoint of this rebellion. It is what happens when the illusion of the supreme, isolated subject collapses under its own weight.
In his later work, particularly during his Zollikon Seminars with the psychiatrist Medard Boss, Heidegger argued against the medicalization of madness as a mere biological glitch. Instead, he framed it as a profound failure of Being-in-the-world. Idealism assumes that the subject can independently constitute reality. When an individual attempts to live out this extreme idealism, withdrawing entirely into a subjectively generated universe and severing ties with the communal Mitsein, the shared scaffolding of meaning disintegrates. Much like the terror expressed in early modern metaphysical poetry when the unified cosmos shatters and "all coherence is gone," the Heideggerian subject goes mad when the isolated self attempts, and inevitably fails, to sustain the world's meaning alone. Madness is the void left when the idealistic fantasy of total self-reliance breaks.
Furthermore, Heidegger’s extensive writings on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin frame madness as the crushing consequence of trying to bridge the gap between a lost ideal and a fallen world. In Heidegger's view, the modern era is destitute. The idealist attempts to generate the divine or the absolute from within the human spirit to fill this void. However, the human subject is too frail to bear the ontological weight of being the sole source of the ideal. Madness, as seen in Hölderlin's tragic mental collapse, becomes the cost of this failed idealism: it is the mind shattering under the impossible burden of trying to replace the absent divine with the self.
Ultimately, if the Catholic framework insists that salvation and meaning are inherently communal and historical, Heidegger’s view of madness serves as a dark warning against the modern idealist project. When the individual attempts to transcend their "thrownness" in the shared world by retreating into the absolute authority of their own mind, they do not achieve transcendence. They achieve the absolute isolation of insanity.
The physical body is the absolute, undeniable origin of "the other," serving as the primal boundary that prevents the self from dissolving into the universe. To have a body is to be spatially limited; where one physical form ends, an external world of distinct, separate entities immediately begins. The very physiological architecture of human perception—from the tactile resistance of skin against an object to the chemical receptors of taste buds parsing foreign elements—requires an encounter with what is "not-me." Otherness, therefore, is not merely an abstract ontological puzzle or a theological consequence of a fallen world, but a biological and physical inevitability. The body’s hunger, its vulnerability to pain, and its reliance on external sustenance prove that the self cannot be an isolated, self-sustaining universe.
Because the physical body constantly forces the mind to confront a world outside of its control, the philosophical focus on "otherness" was a natural, unavoidable progression from the dead-ends of pure Idealism. If Idealism failed—and resulted in the madness of a shattered, isolated mind—philosophy had to return to the flesh. The progression from the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" to the phenomenological "I am a body in a world of other bodies" represents philosophy self-correcting. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that we do not encounter the other as an abstract concept of a rival mind, but as physical flesh intertwined with our own. Philosophy naturally evolved to recognize that our most profound ethical and existential realities arise from the friction, distance, and proximity between physical bodies occupying the same space.
Korean Roots
This grounding of otherness in physical existence is not exclusively a Western phenomenological development; it is deeply embedded in the natural progression of Korean philosophy, particularly within its rich Neo-Confucian tradition. In the metaphysics of the Joseon Dynasty, the universe is understood through the interplay of Li (universal principle or pattern) and Ki (material force or vital energy). While Li is the shared, unifying principle of all things, it is Ki that gives physical shape, distinctness, and weight to the body. Korean philosophers like Yi Hwang (Toegye) and Yi I (Yulgok) engaged in intense debates about how the physical endowment of Ki creates the distinct individual. Because our bodies are formed by different densities and purities of Ki, we are physically individuated. The body, composed of material force, is precisely what creates the boundary between self and other, giving rise to distinct physical needs, desires, and the necessity of navigating a world of separate physical beings.
However, where Western philosophy often views the physical "other" as an alien subject or an insurmountable ethical gap, Korean philosophy views the physical body as a permeable site of profound connection. This is embodied in the concept of Jeong (정/情)—a sticky, affective, and deeply embodied relational bond that accumulates between people, objects, and places over time. Jeong does not erase the physical otherness created by the body’s Ki; rather, it relies on it. It is the physiological and emotional resonance that occurs because we share physical space, break bread together, and endure bodily vulnerabilities in proximity. In this tradition, the physical reality of the other is not a limit that traps the self, but the very medium through which human beings achieve their ultimate relational nature.
If the physical body necessitates the boundary between self and other, then hospitality is the universal, embodied practice of navigating that boundary safely. Because the "other" is housed in a fragile, physically vulnerable body requiring sustenance and shelter, the act of offering food and the warmth of a hearth is the most direct way to bridge the existential gap. Across global traditions—from the ancient Greek concept of xenia found in classical epics, where the stranger at the door must be welcomed lest they be a god in disguise, to the ancient Near Eastern laws of sanctuary—hospitality is fundamentally about physical preservation. It is the practical, culinary manifestation of Mitsein (Being-with). By meeting the most basic physiological needs of the stranger, we acknowledge their physical reality and transform the potential threat of the unknown "other" into an honored guest.In the Korean cultural framework, the concept of the stranger is defined by a stark ontological boundary: the division between uri (us) and nam (others or strangers). Unlike the Western tradition, where a stranger is often viewed merely as an autonomous individual you have not yet met, nam represents someone who exists completely outside the shared web of social, familial, and relational obligations. To be a stranger in this context is to be momentarily invisible to the collective uri. This creates a specific social friction when bodies cross paths in public spaces; the physical body of the stranger is undeniably present, but their social existence is effectively suspended until a formal introduction or shared context bridges the gap.
To navigate this tense space of "otherness," Korean culture relies heavily on nunchi (눈치), which translates roughly to "eye measure." Nunchi is an acute, almost physiological sensory awareness of the other's mood, hierarchical status, and physical boundaries within a given space. If the Western concept of navigating strangers relies on verbal communication and explicit social contracts, nunchi is a silent, hyper-vigilant reading of the shared atmosphere. It is the social equivalent of a taste bud instantaneously discerning the complex flavor profile of an unfamiliar ingredient—a continuous, unspoken calculation of how to adjust one's own physical and social presence to maintain harmony with an unknown "other."
Yet, the stranger is never completely alienated, due to the deeply rooted Buddhist concept of inyeon (인연), or karmic providence. In this metaphysical framework, an encounter with a stranger is never truly random or meaningless. A common cultural adage suggests that even the brief brushing of sleeves between two strangers walking down a street is the result of thousands of layers of inyeon accumulating over past lives. This infuses the mundane act of passing an unknown person with a quiet, poetic gravity—reminiscent of the profound, fated encounters found in classical epic poetry. The "other" is not a void or an existential threat, but a knot of invisible, historical ties waiting to be recognized.
The ultimate resolution of this tension—the mechanism that transforms the stranger (nam) into the ingroup (uri)—is rooted in profound hospitality and the physical sharing of food. Just as culinary preservation relies on a careful alchemy of elements over time to transform a raw ingredient into something enduring, Korean hospitality relies on the communal table to cultivate jeong and dissolve otherness. When a stranger is invited to sit and share bubbling stews and an array of banchan (side dishes), the rigid physical boundary between self and other is symbolically relaxed. Pouring a drink for the guest, ensuring their bowl is full, and eating from shared communal vessels is an active, culinary un-making of the stranger. Through the intimate warmth of this hospitality, the isolated "other" is absorbed into the collective, turning the once-alien presence into an extension of the self.
The Concept of Saving Face
This dynamic of navigating the "other" is deeply tied to social currency and reputation, a phenomenon universally understood through the concept of "face." While often associated predominantly with East Asian societies, the need to project and protect a socially viable identity exists powerfully in the West as well—historically seen in the aristocratic obsession with honor, duel culture, or the modern imperative to maintain a curated public and professional image. In Chinese culture, this is intricately codified in the concepts of mianzi (social prestige and status) and lian (moral integrity). Face is not an isolated, internal psychological state; it is a relational commodity that only exists in the eyes of the "other." Because human beings are structurally bound to a shared world, our identity is inherently vulnerable to the judgment of the community. To lose face is to experience a rupture in this shared social fabric.
Consequently, one of the most powerful mechanisms for preserving and elevating one's face is the generous treatment of the stranger. In Chinese cultural practice, extending elaborate hospitality—such as offering the seat of honor, preparing an abundance of meticulously crafted food, or ensuring a guest's comfort above one's own—is a highly ritualized performance of status and moral character. By treating the "other" well, the host projects abundance, refinement, and adherence to social harmony. This generosity "gives face" to the guest, acknowledging their worth, while simultaneously augmenting the host's own mianzi. If madness is the collapse of the isolated mind trying to sustain its own meaning, hospitality is its ultimate cure: a deeply physical, deeply social act where the self and the other mutually validate each other's existence, dignity, and humanity across a shared table.
If Heideggerian madness is the collapse of the isolated idealist mind failing to sustain its own universe, the traditional Korean concept of madness is fundamentally relational. In a culture where identity is inextricably bound to the collective uri (us) and sustained through the sticky bonds of jeong, madness is not a cognitive glitch of an isolated brain. Rather, it is a fatal rupture in the social fabric. It is the tragic, irreversible state of becoming nam (the stranger) to one's own world. When a person's relational web shatters, they are exiled into the socially suspended, disconnected void of nam. To lose one's place in the collective is to lose one's mind, because the mind only possesses meaning, sanity, and structure within that shared network.
This relational breakdown is profoundly embodied in culture-specific psychological phenomena like hwabyung (fire illness) and the deep, historically accumulated sorrow known as han. These are not sicknesses of a detached Cartesian ego, but diseases of blocked communal connection. They frequently occur when a person suffers profound injustice or trauma within their own uri—often within the strict, inescapable hierarchies of the family—but cannot express the pain without destroying the collective harmony. The sufferer becomes trapped: physically located inside the intimate "us," but treated with the cold indifference of the alien "other." The madness of hwabyung erupts when this unbearable dissonance—being forced to live as nam within the shell of uri—boils over into physical illness, chest pain, and mental collapse.
At a more metaphysical level, Korean shamanism (Muism) frames the most extreme form of madness as shinbyeong, or "spirit sickness." This represents the ultimate, violent invasion of nam. In shinbyeong, an external, wandering spirit—a literal, supernatural stranger—breaches the physical boundary of the body and possesses the individual. The afflicted person loses their sovereign identity, speaks with the voice of the "other," and acts completely outside the bounds of social nunchi. The boundary between the self and the external universe has not just failed; it has been hijacked by the absolute nam.
However, where Western idealism views madness as a tragic, isolating dead end, Korean culture offers a deeply communal resolution to this ontological breach. The cure for shinbyeong is not to lock the sufferer away, but to perform a kut (shamanic ritual) that actively engages with the invading spirit. The community gathers, offers elaborate hospitality and food to the possessing spirit, and formally socializes the alien presence. By welcoming and appeasing the supernatural nam, the madness is transformed into a divine calling, turning the afflicted individual into a mudang (shaman). The broken mind is healed not by retreating into the self, but by radically expanding the boundaries of the community to include the stranger.
