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Man and World 30: 413–430, 1997. 413c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Heidegger’s formal indication: A question of method in Being andTime

RYAN STREETERDepartment of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA

Abstract. For Heidegger, phenomenological investigation is carried out by “formal indica-tion,” the name given to the methodical approach he assumes in Being and Time. This paperattempts to draw attention to the nature of formal indication in light of the fact that it has beenlargely lost upon American scholarship (mainly due to its inconsistent translation). The rootsof the concept of “formal indication” are shown in two ways. First, its thematic treatment inHeidegger’s 1921/22 Winter Semester course, “Phenomenological Investigations into Aristo-tle,” is examined to make clear what Heidegger silently assumes in Being and Time. Second,Heidegger’s adaptation of Husserl’s use of the term, “indication,” is outlined to clarify theconcept even more. The enhanced understanding of formal indication granted by these twopoints leads to a better grasp of Heidegger’s concept of truth, for formal indication and truthare mutually implied for Heidegger. Finally, it is suggested that the reader of Being and Time,on the basis of what formal indication demands, approach the work not as a doctrine to belearned but as a task always requiring further completion.

We must be content, then, in speaking ofsuch subjects and with such premisses toindicate the truth roughly and in outline.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b 19–211

1.

It is by now well known that for Heidegger the main problem with theoccidental philosophical tradition is that it has forgotten Being itself and evenhow to ask about Being. In the sense of the Greeks’ usage of the word, lethe,forgetfulness is the vice that has bound us to constant misappropriations ofthe philosophical project. For in our inability or unwillingness to take upthe question of Being, we contaminate the project of thinking from the startif we do not clarify what “to be” means. Thus, getting at the question ofBeing requires an uncovering and a destruction of those accrued layers ofphilosophic misappropriation: lethe needs to be deprived of its hegemony.And in this very deprivation, there is the privative a-letheia, the action ofgetting to the truth of the matter about Being by uncovering what has beenforgotten.2

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Therefore, right at the outset, Heidegger isolates hiddenness as the pre-condition for his investigation into the meaning of Being, an investigationthat must be phenomenological if it is to be ontological (SZ 35). More thanthat, this phenomenological investigation that goes back to the matter (Sache)of Being itself, in obedience to Husserl’s battle cry, must also be, as PaulRicoeur notes, hermeneutical in character. Because the matter of Being hasbeen covered up, phenomenology does not have simple ocular access to it andthus “becomes part of the struggle against dissimulation.”3 In an attempt tosuccessfully uncover what has been covered up, Heidegger situates himselfcloser to the original sources of Western thought, approaching ontologicalclues in a “hermeneutic of the logos” after the fashion of Aristotle’s disman-tling of the Platonic dialectic (SZ 25). A hermeneutical phenomenology iswary of the solidification of original experiences of factic life into assertionsthat can be handed down (uberliefert) as something present-at-hand, suchthat access to those experiences gets blurred or even completely shrouded inobliquity.4 Thus the problem of trying to raise Being to the level of a phenom-enon, given that ‘covered-up-ness’ is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’(SZ 36): how does one gain access to the question of the meaning of Beingwithout also engaging in the corruption of covering it up, especially since onemust put into words – and thus flirt with the possible corruption that attendsthe mere recitation of assertions – the very investigation that seeks to do theuncovering?

Any how-question is a question of method. Heidegger has never beenlauded for an explicit and clear usage of method, and rightfully so. For, as hismost illustrious pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer – taking cues from Heidegger –has evinced, method is contraposed to any successful approach to the truth.5

Nevertheless, Heidegger is acutely aware, on the one hand, that he needs amethod – at least for a way to structure the approach to his problematic –but, on the other hand, that his project requires, in the very employment ofmethod, that our eyes not be diverted away from our fundamental topic tomethodical conclusions – in short, that we do not cover up what we are tryingto uncover. He developed a method to suit this dual complexity.

This method has a name: formal indication (formale Anzeige). In comingto terms with Heidegger’s use of formal indication (Section II), we shall seeits relation to his notion of truth (by way of the assertion) as well as theimplications that it conveys to the reader of Being and Time (Section III).

2.

In recent American scholarship the notion of formal indication has begun toreceive attention, the reason being that it sheds significant light on just how

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Heidegger was proceeding in Being and Time and what he expected the bookto accomplish.6 Interest in Heidegger’s development throughout the 1920shas stemmed largely from the awareness that the hastiness of the compositionof Being and Time resulted in certain conceptual and methodological gaps.This awareness has required familiarity with Heidegger’s lecture coursesin order to fill in the gaps.7 One such gap is Heidegger’s usage of formalindication without ever explaining what it is. This problem is not helpedby the fact that the English translators of Sein und Zeit have obscured theinfrequent appearances of formale Anzeige and its variants by translating itinconsistently.

In the laborious effort to “say Being” in its immediacy, Heidegger begins byclarifying the Being of that being for whom Being is a matter of importanceat all, human being: Dasein, Being-here/there. Beginning this project onthe correct footing is of utmost importance (SZ 43). And it is the formalindication of Dasein that is to get us started properly, by approaching thematter of human Being-in-the-world in a philosophically appropriate way. Thewestern tradition has, according to Heidegger, been plagued by the tendencyto characterize human Being as a thing instead of a modality, and has becometoo preoccupied with what a human is at the expense of focusing upon howa human is. Heidegger thus characterizes Descartes, who is the paradigmaticculprit of this tendency, as having become lost in the analysis of the cogitowhile forgetting to consider the sum, the “I am,” namely the Being of thehuman. It is the task of formal indication to point to (an-zeigen) the directionwe should follow in our taking up the question of what it means to be.Heidegger’s broadest formulation of how Dasein is to be characterized is tosay that Dasein is that very being that goes about (geht. . .um) its Being insuch a way that it “comports itself understandingly towards that Being” (SZ53) and has a “relationship towards that Being” (SZ 12): its Being is an issuefor it.8 By this, he is “indicating [anzeigen] the formal concept of existence,”9

and he tells us at the beginning of x12 that that is what he was doing back inx9. Two fundamental features emerge as important in indicating human Beingin this way, namely as a being who is in the mode of going about its very ownBeing, care-fully comported to that Being. First, because the emphasis is noton what a human is in terms of substances or particles or mere mental acts,but on the way that a human gets around in life, the “essence” of being humanis to be found in human existence (Existenz). Thus, for perhaps the first timein the western tradition, existence can be said to precede essence (SZ 42, 53).Second, and perhaps not a point as popularized as the “existence-maxim,”10

this Being around which and toward which Dasein comports itself is “in eachcase mine” (ibid). This latter point, in-each-case-mineness (Jemeinigkeit),becomes increasingly important as we move through the analytic of Dasein,

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because not only is it the precondition for whether or not we are authentic(another well-known discussion), but also because it employs the personalpronoun, thus taking forms like “I am,” “you are,” “we are” (SZ 42–43, 53).There is a uniqueness and context-dependent character to the indication ofDasein much like Husserl’s use of “essentially occasional expressions,” towhich we shall return below. For now it is important to see that this latter partof the second feature (the contextually-significant aspect of Jemeinigkeit)belongs essentially with the former part (Jemeinigkeit as precondition ofBeing-authentic/inauthentic) of the second feature and with the first feature(existence as preceding essence). Reading Being and Time without graspingthis essential notion leads to a misappropriation of the content of the book, forwithout understanding the implications of this indexical nature of the formalindication, Being and Time can easily become thematized into a manualfor existential action, which it was not supposed to be. Thus, the followingexamination of formal indication will emphasize this aspect.

In a disposition remarkably close to Aristotle’s exhortation to move fromwhat is clearer to us to what is clearer in itself, Heidegger’s project in Beingand Time is to move from our common but mistaken grasp of what Dasein isto grasping it ontologically (SZ 15, 43).11 It could be said that Dasein is tooclose to us, and for this reason we cannot see it enough to grasp it in an origi-nal way. We must come back to ourselves by laying bare the basic structuresby which we are in each case every day. For instance, we tend to think thatself-understanding is relatively complete if we have a comprehensive con-ceptual delineation of “human,” but the radicality of Dasein that is sketchedin this return to its ontological foundations lies in its ever-incompleteness,its projection onto possibilities that it is not-yet. It is this aspect of Daseinthat is difficult to grasp. It can therefore only be comprehended in a formalway. Dasein cannot be “presented thematically” like other objects with whichwe cross paths in our daily experience. We must therefore be vigilant in ourattempt to present it in the right way, which must be a way that accounts forthis incompleteness of Dasein (SZ 43). Heidegger makes this point in thecontext of just having laid down the two general features of formal indicationstated above, and it is no doubt the formal indication of existence that mustaccount for Dasein’s incompleteness without completing Dasein once and forall. In short, the formal indication is itself marked by this incompleteness,and it must remain incomplete.

We learn at the beginning of Division Two that “existence” formally indi-cates the Being of Dasein as understanding potentiality-for-Being (SZ 231).Dasein is essentially incomplete, for it always finds itself in a context in whichit seeks possibilities for itself, and never does it have all its possibilities ful-filled such that it can rest comfortably in them and thus cease to project. This


much can be indicated, but no more, precisely for the same reason as Dasein’sincompleteness: any formally indicating Dasein (in this case, Heidegger) cannever hope to correctly and comprehensively project all of what needs to beprojected in any investigation so as to settle an issue once and for all, the issuehere being the constitution of that which each of us in each case is. That iswhy Heidegger claims at the outset in x25 that he is only formally indicatingDasein’s ontologically constitutive state (SZ 114), and that in considering the“I” in order to establish the “who” of Dasein, he is employing a “non-bindingformal indicator” that is general enough to account for various forms of “I-hood,” even when the “I” has lost itself (SZ 116). Later, he reiterates whathe has formally indicated so as to tempt one to “try the fit” and see if theexistentials in Being and Time do not at least point one in a direction that heor she can take up in an existential way that completes them (SZ 313).12 Whatexistence is can only be “said” in certain ways that call for interpretation: theexplication of existence in formally indicative (formalanzeigend) terms is theputting into words for the first time that Being which we are and are alwaystrying to interpret, namely Dasein. Accordingly, we must decide on the basisof the Being that we find ourselves to be whether or not that interpretationfruitfully renders that Being (SZ 314–315). Any attempt to secure a founda-tion outside the circle of understanding itself springs from within the circle,for each such attempt to set forth something – whether it is a “worldless‘I’,” “life,” or a “theoretical subject” – is an interpretive response to facticexperience, even if it does not show itself clearly within that experience (SZ315–316).13

The employment of formal indication in Being and Time is sparse. Butfrom the foregoing discussion, what emerges is that it is a matter of startingpoints, not ending points, and that those starting points point at a directionto be taken.14 The direction indicated must be done in an empty and mostgeneral way. This direction, following from the character of the method, isincomplete, wanting completion in a concrete context although there is notenough in this direction itself to satisfy that want. That want must be satisfiedby those who appropriate the text in an existential way. Such an appropriationwill serve not only to fill in what is wanting but will also serve to confirmor disconfirm the path that Being and Time has sketched out. It is to this endthat the text ends: by questioning his own way of having sketched out ananalytic of Dasein, Heidegger concludes that one may only decide as to thefruitfulness of this way after having gone along it. In fact, he does not reallyconclude anything, for he states that the entire text has been nothing otherthan an attempt to stir up the question of Being anew, and such a stirring hasserved only as a point of departure and is far from the destination (SZ 437).15

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However, lest we think that these reflections on incompletion are noth-ing other than wistful intimations of an approaching deconstructionism thatemphasizes the impossibility of closure, Heidegger’s final words in Beingand Time are consistent with that method that was borne out of genuinephilosophical concerns and problems that occupied him in the years priorto the publication of the work, most notably in the Winter Semester courseof 1921–1922, which is an introduction to phenomenological research andmethod.16 The central concern of the lecture course is how to properly gainaccess to the object of philosophical inquiry. The reason it is of central con-cern is because of the variety of problems within which we ensnare ourselveswhen we begin to try to deal with “objects.” Moving in a disciplined phe-nomenological vein, Heidegger states that the object of philosophy, like allobjects, has a specific mode of access. It is precisely the mode that must be ofmoment in any philosophical inquiry. For the naive assumption that we canmerely start running with “clear and distinct objects” is the source of a host ofphilosophical perversions: beginning our thought there is beginning to thinktoo late. Thus our central concern must not be with objects per se but withhow they come to be had (Gehabtwerden) – how we have them – that is, howwe hold them in our grasp in advance (PIA 18).17 What he calls “having”(Haben) is the unthematic mode in which we entertain objects of our thoughtand of our doings. Thus, by attempting to make it a philosophical object, weare concerning ourselves with the Being-what-how (Was-Wie-Sein) of anyobject that we hold, grasp, conceive (ibid). Theodore Kisiel calls “having”the “assumption of the conditions that structure the decision to philosophize:having the situation of understanding and the passion for questioning, tobegin with.”18 This “having” is of monumental importance, for how we holdobjects in a pre-reflective way – whether they are concrete objects that we useeveryday or abstract objects employed in thinking through, say, mathematicalproblems – will determine in large part onto which shore our boat arrivesat the end of the investigation of whatever object is in question. Philosophymust try to have the how-it-has/holds.

Such a task, namely the analysis of the “how” of the apprehension ofan object rather than the “what” of the object itself, is difficult. In such ananalysis, we do not have any concrete objects that give us content from whichwe can universalize and form general conclusions. Any such investigation,however helpful in the study of natural objects, will always fall short of itsaims in the study of the being of philosophical thinking. It is, therefore, thetask of philosophy to do what other disciplines – preoccupied, as it were,with the “thingness” of the objects of their research – cannot do, namelyto take up the object of its investigation by enacting it so as to come tocomprehend it more fully. Philosophy is not a thing or object (Sache), but


rather a situation, a Habenssituation (PIA 19). This “having-situation” mustbe indicated (anzeigend, PIA 19–20). What results from Heidegger’s formingof the philosophical approach in this indicative manner is twofold: first, theexploration into the character of its object does not look into the content ofthat which is in question, and yet it yields something determinate and positive(PIA 20, 33); second, as an analysis of the how of the “having,” it is not justenough to analyze this modality at a distance. This “having” must be takenup in a comportment without which the questioning could not take place:philosophy is an ongoing philosophizing (PIA 43, 52).

What does it mean to say that formal indication does not recognize contentand yet does recognize a positive yield on the object under consideration?Any “content” that comes to the fore in a philosophical investigation mustnot be heeded as central. What is more important is the way that gets pointedout and the point from which one begins. In the direction given, there is thepotentiality for the fulfillment of that direction. For this reason Heideggersays that “having” is indeterminately bound with respect to content but isdeterminately bound with respect to fulfillment (PIA 19–20).19 Philosophymust take the path it sketches out for itself in its effort to make itself the objectof itself. No content can be securely delivered up for speculation, and thus noobject can be held in its grasp in an authentic or complete way, but the objectof philosophy can be “genuinely indicated.” Any definitive content that getspresented in this indication must itself be understood “as indicated” (PIA 32).The direction given by the direction of approach (Ansatzrichtung) is a definiteone, and by being situated in it, I “savor to the full and fulfill” (auskosten underfullen) the inauthentic indication by coming to the authentic fulfillment thatonly the way indicated can give.20 In such a savoring and fulfillment, thatwhich is indicated is set off from its background (PIA 33). In this giving ofa definite direction, there is more than just a lack of content; there is also apositive yield in this formality and attendant emptiness because every formalindication leads to the concrete. “The more radical the understanding of thatwhich is empty as formal, the richer it becomes, because it is such that itleads into the concrete” (PIA 33). As definite, completion will follow, andthus this indication is not of a static universal that maintains its dignity as aclassificatory genus, but of a way that always must be completed if it is tobe a way at all. Also, the “formal” of formal indication is more than just theopposite of “material” and the equivalent to the eidetic. In its leading to theconcrete, the formal “gives the ‘approach-character’ [Ansatzcharakter] of theenactment of the temporalization [Zeitigung] of the original fulfillment of thatwhich is indicated” (ibid.). Formal indication is certain in its direction andsure to lead directly into the concrete experience of that to which it points,if one follows its cue. Gadamer summarizes well the positive yield of this

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method: “The ‘formal indication’ points us in the direction in which we are tolook. We must learn to say what shows up there and learn to say it in our ownwords. For only our own words, not repetitions of someone else’s, awaken inus the vision of the thing that we ourselves were trying to say.”21

The second resulting aspect of Heidegger’s formulation of formal indica-tion, following in large part from the first formulation, is that philosophy mustbe a kind of comportment. Reading philosophy and then repeating “deep”thoughts learned during that reading, or getting caught up in metaphysicalarguments that are sufficiently logical but have forgotten whatever it was theyset out to understand, or formulating theories based on an inadequate grasp ofthe Being of that about which one theorizes – each of these several instancesfails to get at the object of philosophy in the original way that Heidegger seesas vital. He stresses that the “logic of the comprehension of the object” mustbe created out of the mode in which the object originally becomes accessible(PIA 20). Philosophical pontificating never fails to miss out on what is phe-nomenologically most important: getting at the thing itself, which can onlybe accomplished by finding the most original way to the object. “Philosophyis (formally indicated) a comportment” (PIA 53). Comportment is not justrandom behaving or acting, but rather is always a comporting of oneself to. . . (sich verhalten zu . . .), in keeping with Husserl’s fundamental thesis ofintentionality, namely that all consciousness is consciousness of something(PIA 52).22 Heidegger is here radicalizing this a step further by isolating foursenses of this comportment to . . . (PIA 53). In being comported to . . ., one issituated in a sense of relation (Bezugssinn), which gives the unique way thatone comports oneself to something. There is also a sense in which the contentbecomes important (Gehaltssinn), in that something is “held” by the one whocomports; but one is also “held by” that something because one must interpretan object out of its “full sense,” which is the phenomenon.23 A third senseis that of enactment or actualization (Vollzugsinn), that sense of fulfillment,in which, as remarked above, one “savors to the full” the object as it standsout in the shapeliness of its contours from its background. A final sense, notfound in previous course texts, is a temporalizing sense (Zeitigungssinn) thatembraces the “how” of the entire movement to fulfillment or enactment.24 Itcaptures the way in which the fulfillment process temporalizes itself (wie ersich ‘zeitigt’)25 out of factical life and existence, the situation, and the precon-ceptions one holds (PIA 53). A temporal process structures any comportmentto . . ., embracing the other three senses, and in its general, middle-voicedsense it lingers between the “time of the soul” and the “time of the world,” toborrow Ricoeur’s terms.26

These two resultant aspects of Heidegger’s development of formal indi-cation, namely that it yields something positive – i.e., a firm direction – in


its empty indicating and that it is a definite comporting to something, leavethe philosopher in the position of needing to do more than mere theorizing:philosophical indicating (which is the only way to get at the philosophicalobject, namely, Being) is radically incomplete, and if it is to be completed,it must be done by the one for whom the indicating is done. Philosophyhas as its object, through the analysis of “having” and “comporting to . . .”,an understanding comportment to beings as they are in their Being. Thus,in order to “have” this object in its original accessibility, philosophy mustbecome a fundamental way of life – a way that retrieves the fundamentalexperiences of comportment to objects of all sorts so as to guard againstfalling into the irresponsible repetition of statements not undergirded by theexperiences that gave rise to them (PIA 58, 80). Formal indication leads towhat Daniel Dahlstrom calls “a reversing-transforming function,” which isthe transformation of the individual who philosophizes through the originalcalling of oneself into question in the rigorous push to uncover what it is thatone is.27 Thus, formal indication is a process of gaining clarity, but not ina way satisfactory to those who wish to gain a total grasp on the content inquestion. Its logic is not like that of strict deduction or induction, but ratherperhaps finds an analogy in the logic of Aristotle’s second kind of persua-sion, that of putting the audience in the right frame of mind, but less forciblyso.28 Heidegger has aroused through indication a specific realm closest to ourimmediate Being-here/there, but that realm remains an empty construct untilthe reader comes to know it in a re-freshing way.

Philosophizing in terms of formal indication is intimately related to Hei-degger’s conception of truth, to which I will draw attention below. But inorder to come to the question of truth appropriately equipped, we shall brieflyexamine the role of the assertion, which by the very demand of writing hasto be what Heidegger employs (like any writer) to formally indicate, and yetwhich runs the risk of blinding readers to the truth. Before examining thesematters, however, it is helpful to briefly consider the extent of the Husserlianinfluence on Heidegger with respect to what Husserl called “essentially occa-sional expressions,” because Husserl’s formulation of the character of theseexpressions holds significance for Heidegger’s development of his stance withregard to assertions, formal indications, and even truth.

3.

Heidegger held seminars in the early twenties on Husserl’s First Investigation,“Expression and Meaning,” from which he gleaned the term “indication”(Anzeige).29 In the third chapter of this First Investigation, Husserl concernshimself with essentially occasional expressions, which are different from

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objective expressions, the latter referring to those expressions upon whichtheories can be built and which do not depend on any particular circumstancefor their meaning. Occasional (okkasionell) expressions, however, constitutea conceptually unified group of expressions that require an orientation oftheir meanings to the speaker’s situation and the occasion (Gelegenheit) inwhich they are uttered.30 These expressions take several forms: they occuras pronouns (“I am”, “you are”), demonstratives (“this”, “that”), and whatanalytical philosophy generally terms “indexicals” (“here”, “now”, “above”,“tomorrow”, etc.) (LU 87–90, x26, First Investigation). One can grant anobjective and universal meaning to such expressions, but whenever they areused, they cannot fully be understood unless we look to the occasion of theirutterance. Thus, when a speaker says “I. . .”, the hearer gathers what thatspeaker means only by looking to that speaker and the situation in which thespeaker says, “I. . .” To be sure, the use of “I” has a universal function, namely“pointing out [Anzeichen] whatever speaker is designating himself,” but inits use it can only serve as an indication (Anzeige) (LU 87, 88, x26, FirstInvestigation). Whenever I use this indication, my hearers do not understanda universal semantic definition of “I” but understand me to be taking myselfas my immediate object. Thus the word “I” has no power in itself, as doesthe word, say, “lion”, whose objective meaning is fixed in its utterance. “I”is only fixed with respect to the context of its utterance (LU 88, x26, FirstInvestigation).

In the use of occasional expressions, then, there are actually two meaningsto each expression: there is the indicating (anzeigend) meaning and the indi-cated (angezeigt) meaning, the former employed to draw one to the latter, inwhich the intuitive fulfillment of what is indicated occurs. In saying “I”, thespeaker draws the hearer to his or her unique situation (LU 88-89, x26, FirstInvestigation).31 Occasional expressions are essentially ambiguous in thatthey incompletely express the speaker’s meaning and can imply an index-ical character without using the indexical expression: one may say, “Thereis cake” (Es gibt Kuchen), or “It is raining” (Es regnet), and yet be sayingnothing about the nature of cake or rain in general; rather one means that cakeis being served right here and now, or that it is currently raining here and now(LU 92, x27, First Investigation).

In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl revisits the notion of indication as exer-cised in occasional expressions, clarifying the reasons as to why these expres-sions are ambiguous. The ambiguity stems from the fact that the sequence ofindication is not the same for the speaker and the hearer. In saying “this” or“I”, the speaker knows in advance what is being indicated. But for the hearer,the situation is different, for in the absence of whatever is being pointed to, heor she has access only to a general thought. A “full and authentic meaning”


comes to be only when a presentation is added (LU 556–557, x5, Sixth Inves-tigation). This makes sense at the level of presenting a tangible object (e.g.,this paper), but what about at the conceptual level? The same applies, but theremust be an actual re-establishment or recovery (Wiederherstellung) of a pastthought that fulfills the indication, which is also the empty intention in theform of an occasional expression. Thus the goal of all occasional-expressivediscourse is not the general indicating meaning, but the intuitive fulfillmentin the indicated meaning (LU 557, 558, x5, Sixth Investigation).

Two basic factors in Husserl’s use of “indication” are notably present inHeidegger’s use of the same. First, the indicating meaning (formal indication)is “pointless” if it does not direct one to a fulfillment of what it says. In thisway the indicating meaning, strong in its direction but unable in itself to fulfillitself, depends on the fulfillment to truly have meaning. Second, the hearer(reader) occupies the role of the “re-enacter”, the one upon whom fulfillmentdepends if there is to be fulfillment at all.

In Being and Time, Heidegger betrays a definite Husserlian streak when hesays, “The word ‘I’ is to be understood only in the sense of a non-committalformal indicator” (SZ 116). The best way to understand this assertion is tocast it in Heidegger’s familiar terms: an assertion is a derivative mode ofunderstanding (SZ x33). Understanding is – equiprimordially with disposi-tion (Befindlichkeit) and talk (Rede)32 – a fundamental mode of Being-in-the-world, and it is characterized by its future-directedness, which it makesmanifest as Dasein constantly projects possibilities for itself (SZ 145, 160).This is a pretheoretical aspect of Dasein’s Being and is something that eachof us in each case is doing. This projecting involves two important aspectsthat involve our present purpose. First, Dasein’s basic preoccupations are inthe mode of possibility, not actuality, for it is constantly stretched out intowhat it can-be (Seinkonnen) but is not yet. In this way, understanding involvesdisclosedness, which is the “laying-open” of what is possible for Dasein. Todisclose is to bring forth possibilities as a whole into the open from whatis otherwise not seen as possible (SZ 144–145; cf. 75). A second aspect isthat understanding involves meaning, and meaning is said to be “had” byDasein when, according to its presuppositional framework, Dasein projectstoward and upon something and makes it “understandable” (verstandlich) assomething (SZ 151). We are not here concerned with the “correctness” ofthe projection but rather how meaning happens in each case. Understandingis the unthematic ordering of a framework within which certain things getcomprehended, and then they are taken as something: with all understanding,interpretation follows (SZ x32).

The assertion, then, articulates this interpretation. In articulating it, theassertion points out something, makes something definite, and communicates

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something, each of these three features deriving from our pretheoretical pre-suppositional framework that consists of having, seeing, and conceiving in acertain way in advance (SZ 154–155; 157). Thus the assertion is existentiallygrounded in Being-in-the-world. However, because of its derivative charac-ter it becomes subjected to abuse, and this is because with the assertion, itbecomes all too easy to bring our projection onto possibilities to a halt, soto speak. Although Dasein is always projecting, in its use of the assertionit can cover over the two basic aspects of projecting highlighted above: in“capturing” a subject matter by pointing it out, making it definite, and commu-nicating it, that subject matter can be taken to mean something present-at-handand can be passed along like a tangible object. Thus the original “as” of aninterpretation of a pretheoretic understanding gets lost because what was aninterpretation gets hypostatized into a mere “what.” With this move from thesense of meaning as directional and contextual to meaning something present,the projection into a totality of possibilities also gets obscured or lost, and theassertion then loses the disclosiveness of the original understanding and inter-pretation (SZ 158).33 Talking (Rede) is a fundamental mode of disclosiveness,but if the assertion merely gets passed along without regard for what has beenoriginally disclosed in it, then one cannot be said to “truly” understand theassertion (SZ 161, 224). For this reason, the assertion is, as John Caputo hasremarked, “dangerous.34

So how does one “truly” understand the assertion of Heidegger’s that theuse of “I” is a non-committal formal indicator? The obvious answer, whichHeidegger himself gives, is: by grasping it in the fullness of the totality ofpossible significations that it discloses (SZ 116). The assertions that Heideggermust employ in formally indicating his topic follow the same rules as allassertions. It seems that the attempt to disclose the totality of implicationsout of which his assertions indicating human existence emerge is subject toconstant misappropriation, and thus getting to the truth of the matter regardingDasein is doomed to fail.

However, Heidegger does not say that every employment of an assertionautomatically damns to hopelessness the possibility of coming to the truththrough language. In fact, the role of the assertion is given a central role incoming to truth. But, whereas the western tradition has made the assertionthe locus of truth (SZ 154), for Heidegger truth becomes the locus of theassertion, which means that one traverses via the assertion into the realm ofthe original disclosedness where a phenomenon comes to light in its truth. DasAussagen ist ein Sein zum seienden Ding selbst (SZ 218). Truth, in the senseof the Greek aletheia, is first and foremost the uncoveredness of somethingbrought out of the dark – its disclosure of it as it is. The assertion playsa central role in this moment of uncovering. Dasein expresses itself about


entities in the form of an assertion, and the entities uncovered by Dasein in itsunderstanding interpretation get pointed out (SZ 218, 220). The function theassertion serves is to show the “how,” or mode of Being, of the entities that itpoints out (SZ 224). If we, along with the tradition, become preoccupied withthe “Being-uncovered” aspect of the assertion, then we only see the subjectmatter as it shows itself in the assertion and perhaps in the context (text athand, conversation at hand) in which it is used. But if, against the tradition,we focus on the “Being-uncovering” aspect of the assertion, we becomeacquainted with the more primordial realm in which the subject matter wasfirst experienced and brought forth in the disclosedness of a multiplicity ofpossibilities (SZ 220). Without the retrievability of the rich experience that“Being-uncovering” indicates, the “Being-uncovered” will not be grasped asit truly is.

Truth is what must be “wrested” from entities (SZ 222). We are not interest-ed in showing entities merely from some restricted viewpoint. We want to seethem as they are. In other words the aletheuein must be distinguished fromthe apophainesthai. Just because an assertion points out something does notguarantee its truth, for even false assertions point this way. An entity’s show-ing itself as it is in itself is an entity’s showing the “how” of its uncoveredness(SZ 219). This requires, as Ernst Tugendhat argues, more than the assertion’smerely pointing out the givenness of some entity, more than just bringingsomething at hand out of concealment to unconcealment. There is also thedirection the assertion provides that takes us from the subject matter to itsself-manifestation.35 That is, assertions concern more than objects we find intheir immediate givenness, in that they concern the subject matter of whateverthe assertion is drawing our attention to. The assertion directs us from thesubject matter to the self-manifestation of that subject matter in the spaceopened up by the assertion. Tugendhat calls this the “functional-apophantic”character of the assertion. It is unique because it not only gives us insight intoa conclusive assertion but also to the one that bears a truth-relation and leadsalong the way to truth.36

What, then, is the relation between the formal indication and truth? Formallyindicative assertions are “functional-apophantic” assertions in Tugendhat’ssense, because they point the way to truth without making conclusive theirclaims about truth. In the movement from the subject matter to its self-manifestation, formally indicative assertions can only start the movement thatmust be fulfilled by the one for whom the assertions are made. The distinctionthat Heidegger makes between “Being-uncovering” and “Being-uncovered”plays a central role here (SZ 220). The “Being-uncovered” performed bythe assertion corresponds to the indicating meaning in Husserl’s sense: in anassertion our attention is drawn to whatever is expressed. But only when, by

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looking to that (context, totality of implications) from which the assertionarose and seeing the subject matter in its “how,” can we get a grasp of it asit is and thus experience it as the indicated meaning. In Heidegger’s terms,we grasp the subject matter in its “Being-uncovering,” the original mode inwhich something is disclosed as something, which in this case is as it is. Inthe Wiederherstellung – to use another of Husserl’s terms – of that mode of“Being-uncovering,” there is the primordial experience of truth.

All that has been said until now has given rather solid clues to the mannerin which one is to read Being and Time, but we are now in a position togive those clues some solidity. The implications for reading Being and Timeare such that they make the work much more modest in its task than somehave taken it to be. Because Heidegger’s method is formal indication and notmetaphysical theorization understood as the attempt to give a comprehensiveaccount of the basic “attributes” of a human being, it is an “empty” book.This, of course, sounds odd given the immensity and technicalities of thework itself, but given the method Heidegger is employing, the work cannotbe much more than, analogously speaking, an empty intention “awaiting”intuitive fulfillment.

In encouraging the appropriation of the matter of the text through formalindication, Heidegger is operating on the basis of a kind of wager. This wager,as I see it, depends upon two presuppositions. The first one is that we mustpresuppose truth, understood as the disclosedness of Dasein, in anything wedo. Truth, in turn, makes possible any presupposing at all, and it cannot be“proved.” Insofar as we are beings that uncover matters, we are in such a waythat not believing that there is truth makes living impossible (SZ 227–229).The second presupposition is that of temporality and its basis for repetition.It is repetition that brings one to remember what one has forgotten: thefundamental character of one’s own existence in which one operates everyday with an ontic familiarity while remaining ontologically distant (SZ 339,385–386). On the basis of these two presuppositions, Heidegger wagers thathis readers will accept the urge given by his analysis to take up the formallyindicating concepts and appropriate them in their basic experience. As humanbeings, they will presuppose with Heidegger that there is something basic tobe uncovered, and they will through his analysis come to see what theyhave-been in such a way that the re-appropriation of past possibilities andaccomplishments will yield confirmation of the structures he has outlined.Husserl’s Wiederherstellung of a “past thought” becomes temporalized suchthat in each re-appropriation of something that I have been, something newhappens that discloses a matter in its Being in a way more unique than thebare retrieval of something past (cf. SZ 386).


It might be objected here that it does not make any sense to say thaton the basis of certain structures in Heidegger’s analysis (e.g., truth andtemporality/repetition) one will come to see the analysis as yielding somethingpositive, for it is precisely those structures that are in question. But, Heideggermight respond, that is just what a wager is. The wager bets that some one willassume the same presuppositions in order to “try out” the subsequent claims.For someone to reject, say, Heidegger’s analysis of truth and temporality, onemust be able to give another account that does not presuppose what he hassaid; and Heidegger is wagering that that will be difficult, if not impossible.

Even though Heidegger may be wagering that one will find his analysiscompelling, he can only remain modest with respect to what his project inBeing and Time can accomplish. Formal indication can only point and exhortothers to carry out the direction in which it points.37 This is what Heideggermeant when he said that all statements about Dasein have a formally indicativecharacter and that they “at first mean something present-at-hand . . . but theyindicate the possible understanding of the structures of Dasein and the possibleconceptualizing of them that is accessible in such an understanding.”38 Thusthe present-at-hand meanings (content) of what has been said in Being andTime must be read and considered with respect to the possibilities they openup, and such possibilities can really only be opened up if they are left enoughformal space.39 Hence the method of formal indication. It serves to enkindlean interest in the question of Being and yet lends clarity to the lack ofphilosophical hubris in the line near the end of the text: “One must seek away of casting light on the fundamental question of ontology, and this is theway one must go. Whether this is the only way or even the right one at all,can be decided only after one has gone along it” (SZ 437).

Notes

1. Ross’ translation in The Basic Works of Aristotle. ed. Richard McKeon. New York: RandomHouse, 1941. “Such subjects” is referring to those of political nature, those having to dowith action in interpersonal contexts.

2. The forgotten status of the question is introduced by the written “frontispiece” on pageone of Sein und Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927. 7th ed., 1953 [hereafter SZ]), and it is takenup immediately at the beginning in x1, pp. 2–4 References to the English edition are toBeing and Time, trans. John Macquarrie, Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper andRow, 1962.

3. Paul Ricoeur. Time and Narrative. vol. 3., trans. Blamey, Kathleen and David Pellauer.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. p. 62.

4. I am referring here largely to Heidegger’s treatment of the assertion in x33, which I willexamine more closely below.

5. As best evidenced by the disjunctive role of the “and” in the title of Gadamer’s Truth andMethod, his magnum opus.

6. For extensive treatment, see Theodore Kisiel. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 (GH). Formal indication appears frequently

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as a topic in several essays in Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, eds. Reading Heideggerfrom he Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994 (RHS). John vanBuren makes frequent reference to formal indication in his The Young Heidegger: Rumorof the Hidden King. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 (YH). See also DanielDahlstrom. Das Logische Vorurteil. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994 (LV). For two helpfularticle-length treatments, see Theodore Kisiel’s “The Genetic Difference in Reading Beingand Time”. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. v. 64, no. 2, 1995. pp. 171–187(GD), and Daniel Dahlstrom’s “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as FormalIndications”. Review of Metaphysics. 47. June, 1994. pp. 775–797 (HM). German scholarsseem to have been familiar with the significance of formal indication from the beginning.For instance, see Otto Poggeler’s Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers. 3rd ed., Pfullingen:Neske Verlag, 1990, esp. chap. 10 (DMH), and his “Heideggers Logische Untersuchungen”in Martin Heidegger: Innen- und Außenansichten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989(HLU); and see, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Heideggers Ways. trans. John Stanley. Albany:SUNY Press, 1994 (HW).

7. Heidegger composed Sein und Zeit in one month, March 1926, under – as Kisiel puts it –“publish or perish” conditions (GD 184, 185).

8. Even though Macquarrie and Robinson rightly translate umgehen as “is an issue for”, it isimportant not to lose the sense that comes with the German verb, viz. a sense of modalityand activity, not just a sense of thoughtful reflection. Note the related usage of Umgang atSZ 66–67.

9. Macquarrie and Robinson have “calling attention to” for anzeigen.10. Famous largely because of Sartre’s popularization of the thesis See L’Etre et le neant.

Paris: Gallimard, 1943. p. 61 and L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris, 1946. p. 17.11. See Aristotle’s Physics, 184a 17–18.12. The beginning of the paragraph in question would be better rendered in the English edition

as “The formal indication of the idea of existence was guided. . . .” “Die formale Anzeigeder Existenzidee war geleitet. . .”

13. Implicit in these claims seems to be a critique of Descartes, Dilthey (and perhaps Nietzscheand even Bergson), and Kant, respectively.

14. John van Buren makes this point: “Formal indication . . . indicates or points to what is stillabsent in die Sache selbst, what is still to be thought and is on the way to language” (YH42).

15. Van Buren has shown how this theme of the need for others to take up the question of Beingin their own way continues into the later Heidegger and was of constant concern for him,as evidenced by his exhortation to his seminar students: “There will be no heideggerizinghere! We want to get at the topic” (YH 45).

16. Phanomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einfuhrung in die PhanomenologischeForschung. volume 61 (PIA) in the Gesamtausgabe. Despite the title, the lecture coursehas little to do with Aristotle but is perhaps one of Heidegger’s best treatments of thenature of phenomenology and its way of approaching philosophical problematics. Anytranslations from this text are my own. It should be noted that volume 60 of Heidegger’sGesamtausgabe, that of the Winter Semester 1920–1921, has recently appeared, in whichHeidegger also treats the notion of formal indication at length. I will not, however, treatthat text in this essay.

17. Heidegger is speaking generally here of what becomes well-known in Being and Timeas fore-having (Vorhabe), fore-seeing (Vorsicht), and fore-grasping/-conceiving (Vorgriff).The present lecture course helps to understand these latter terms more fully, becauseHeidegger treats here much more comprehensively and thematically what he gives minimalattention to in Being and Time. See SZ 150–151.

18. Kisiel, GH 233–234.19. “With respect to fulfillment” refers here to vollzugshaft: the idea is that the direction always

leads to an enactment of the way indicated, an idea to which I will turn below.


20. Heidegger has eigentlich and uneigentlich for what I have termed “authentic” and “inau-thentic.” It might be better to translate these terms as “actual” and “non-actual,” for thepoint at hand here has more to do with the non-actuality of what is indicated and theactuality of its fulfillment, following the Husserlian schema of intentionality.

21. Hans-Georg Gadamer. “Martin Heidegger’s One Way”, trans. P. Christopher Smith, inRHS, 33. Otto Poggeler makes a similar point when he says that formal indication pointsone to the happening of truth but not to its concrete fulfillment; it has a provocativecharacter with the tendency to awaken (DMH 272).

22. See the Logische Untersuchungen, V.2. x13; and the Ideen, II.2. x36.23. Kisiel notes that this “containment sense” is formally broad enough to include all realms

of activity and passivity, from those realms in which we “have” meaningful objects tothose realms in which the objects seem to “have us” in their grasp, as in addictions andpreoccupations (GH 234).

24. Kisiel, ibid, states that Heidegger had already developed the three basic senses of inten-tionality in the War Emergency Semester of 1919, and that the temporalizing sense isadded here in the Winter Semester of 1921–22.

25. Contained in sich zeitigen is the sense of becoming ripe, of coming to fruition, as winegrapes come of season.

26. Ricocur, p. 14, does use more technical terms for these phenomena, namely “psychologi-cal” and “cosmological” time.

27. See PIA 153, 168–169. Dahlstrom, HM 782–790, treats well this function as well as the“referring-prohibiting” function of formal indication, both of which serve to reinforcethe incompleteness of formal indication and its offer to the philosopher to take up thequestion of Being in fresh and new ways. For related remarks by Heidegger, see his, DieGrundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit. Winter Semester 1929-30,volumes 29/30 in the Gesamtausgabe, pp. 428–430.

28. Aristotle relies not only on the speaker’s character and the content of a speech itself inpersuasion but also on the speaker’s ability to arouse the right frame of mind in the audienceby understanding how to bring about certain emotions at the right time (Rhetoric, 1356a1ff.).

29. Van Buren, YH 328; 406n.5. Van Buren notes that a student of Heidegger’s, Gunther Stern,took up Heidegger’s reading of Husserl’s use of “indication” in a dissertation, which thusprovides some documentation for this Husserl-Heidegger relation.

30. Edmund Husserl. Logische Untersuchungen vv XIX/I and XIX/2 The Hague: MartinusNijhoff, 1984 (LU) p. 87 x26, First Investigation.

31. For a treatment of meaning indications in occasional expressions, see Aaron Gurwitsch.“Outlines of a Theory of ‘Essentially Occasional Expressions’,” in Readings on EdmundHusserl’s Logical Investigations. ed J.N. Mohanty The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977 pp.112–127.

32. Macquarrie and Robinson’s “state-of-mind” and “discourse,” respectively.33. This process is what Jean Grondin calls the “propositional fallout of an existential relation-

ship to the world whereby the proposition levels everything to the language of the given(‘S is P’).” “Gadamer and Augustine: On the Origin of the Hermeneutical Claim to Uni-versality,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice Wachterhauser, Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1994. p. 140.

34. For an insightful treatment of the notion of the assertion, see Caputo’s Radical Hermeneu-tics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. especially pp. 73–76.

35. Ernst Tugendhat. “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, p. 87.36. Ibid., pp. 91–92.37. Kisiel captures this exhortational aspect well: “[Formal] indications, like life itself, are

never final, are always tentative and provisional. As intrinsically shifting distributiveuniversals, they ultimately perform a hortatory function in philosophy, exhorting eachindividual to assume the orienting comportment suggested by such non-generic universalsthat call for a proximating re-turn to the ineffable immediacy of our being, in order to

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intensify the inexhaustible sense of the immediate in which we already and always findourselves.” (GD 186).

38. Logik Die Frage nach der Wahrheit in Gesamtausgabe, volume 21, WS 1925–26. p. 410.39. As an example of the possibilities that can be opened up by such a method, one might

consider the ways to which Heidegger’s way of proceeding has given rise to, in a sense, the“three Heideggers”: the existentialist Heidegger found in the work of Sartre, the hermeneu-tical Heidegger found in the work of Gadamer, and the deconstructionist Heidegger foundin the work of Derrida.