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The Early Heidegger on Formal Indication:
‘Properizing’ the Event or Fine-Tuning Phenomenology? “For us here, the task is to see philosophically the genuine situation, without recourse to propheticism…”1
Much of the scholarship devoted to Heidegger’s early writings has been divided
over the following question: Does this early work foreshadow Heidegger’s eventual
rejection of phenomenology in favor of a putatively more primordial approach to the
‘sendings’ of Being, or does it reflect a commitment to “the phenomenological method of
investigation” (BT, §7) employed in Being and Time? Scholars have sought to answer
these questions by analyzing the young Heidegger’s philosophical method, i.e., what he
called “formal indication.”2 Two major approaches have emerged: some argue that
formal indication is Heidegger’s first pass at a non-reflective approach to what he would
later call the ‘Event of Being’; others contend that the method is Heidegger’s refinement
of Husserlian phenomenology. The most developed version of the former claim is found
in Theodore Kisiel’s work3, while Steven Crowell offers the best defense of the latter
thesis.4
1 Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Richard Rojcewicz, trans. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 52 [Henceforth cited as PIA]. 2 Heidegger’s major discussion of formal indication can be found in his WS 1921-1922 lectures [PIA]. However, there are other important discussions of the method in the following: 1) the WS 1921-1922 lectures, Heidegger, Martin. The Phenomenology of Religious Life; trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004 [Henceforth cited as PRL], 2) the SS 1923 lectures, Heidegger, Martin. Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity. John van Buren, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, and 3) “Comments on Karl Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews,” in Pathmarks. William McNeill, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 1-38 [Henceforth cited as ‘CKJ’]. 3 Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being & Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. [Henceforth cited as GH] 4 Crowell, Steven. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2001 [Henceforth cited as HH].
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Kisiel and Crowell squared off on this issue at the 2008 Western APA during a
session dedicated to the release of Becoming Heidegger.5 This encounter deserves more
attention than it has received—for it is emblematic of a defining conflict of contemporary
Heidegger studies. Kisiel represents those who see Heidegger as a philosopher who
dedicated his career to the ‘Event of Being’, with the exception of a notable, errant
voyage into the metaphysics of subjectivity. Crowell, on the other hand, represents those
who see Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations as the highpoint of his career and
the Beiträge as, more or less, a wrong turn. The conflict, then, is not just about formal
indication. The future direction Heidegger studies is also at stake.
In what follows, I begin with a review of the main differences between Kisiel and
Crowell’s respective interpretations of formal indication. I then dedicate the rest of the
paper to adducing further considerations in favor of Crowell’s position. Crowell argues
that Heidegger developed formal indication 1) to resolve some apparent problems with
the phenomenological method and 2) to reveal the method’s existential sources.6 My
contribution builds on this argument in two respects: First, I identify an additional
phenomenological problem that Heidegger dealt with using formal indication. Second, I
show that Heidegger’s solution to this problem yields further insights into the
phenomenological method and the existential motives that give rise to it.
I. A Tale of Two Heideggers I.i. Kisiel
5 Heidegger, Martin. Becoming Heidegger. Eds. Thomas Sheehan and Theodore Kisiel. (Evanston; Northwestern University Press, 2007). 6 By the expression ‘existential sources’ I mean to refer to what Heidegger calls the motives endemic to factical life: “factical life experience contains motives of a purely philosophical posture which can be isolated only through a peculiar turning around of philosophical comportment” (PRL, 11).
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As Kisiel tells it, the story of phenomenology reads like a Greek tragedy: the son
(Heidegger) kills the father (Husserl) and burns the ancestral home (phenomenology) to
the ground. Like the Oedipus Cycle, however, the tragic hero is redeemed—for
Heidegger rises from the ashes of phenomenology in the bright apotheosis of the
Beiträge. Kisiel began telling this story in Genesis, where he argues that Being and Time
was built to fail, because it clings to a phenomenological ideal of evidence even though
Heidegger already sensed that this ideal was inimical to the study of his “lifelong topic”,
i.e., the “primal something” (GH 10), or what he would later call the ‘Event of Being’.
Heidegger began to realize this, Kisiel continues, in the face of two well-known
criticisms of phenomenology raised by his neo-Kantian contemporary, Paul Natorp.
Natorp argued that phenomenology was in principle incapable of gaining immediate
intuitive access to experience, because 1) it relies on reflection that stills, reifies and
therefore falsifies the stream of lived experience and 2) its descriptions rely on language,
a system of symbols that must artificially break up – and so is inadequate to capture – the
sensory continuum of phenomenal consciousness. Kisiel argues that Heidegger saw these
criticisms as devastating for the phenomenological goal of clarifying the pretheoretical
sources of meaning; thus, he rejected phenomenology and developed the method of
formal indication—a form of understanding that “follows life in familiar accompaniment
without reflective intrusion” (GH, 376), striving not to capture the primal something in
language but merely to point in its direction.7 For Kisiel, then, Heidegger’s response to
Natorp was not to improve phenomenology but rather to develop an altogether new
7 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann also argues that Heidegger accepts Natorp’s criticisms and therefore attempts to develop a hermeneutic alternative that rejects the use of reflection in Hermeneutic und Reflexion. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000.
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method—a philosophy that rejects theoretical reflection and becomes phronesis. But how
could philosophy become phronesis?
Kisiel clarified this point somewhat at the 2008 Western APA. There he argued
that for Heidegger the topic of philosophy – the ‘Event of Being’ – is really nothing other
than “our very own temporally particular situation of being”8; and, he continued,
Heidegger used formal indications as “indexicals” to point out our “temporally particular
situation” in order to direct us “to the proper task of taking over our very own situation”
and to bring about “Dasein’s ultimate actualization” (OP, 4-5). In other words, formal
indications prompt us “to transform ourselves into the ownmost (eigenstes) Da-sein
within ourselves, which in turn draws us more or less directly into the Event of
enownmnet, propriation, properizing, das Er-eignis” (OP, 6). Philosophy becomes
phronesis, then, in the sense that it serves as an exhortation to each of us to become our
ownmost selves in the ‘properizing’ ‘Event of enownment.’ Thus, Kisiel uses formal
indication to forge a link between the early Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s ownmost
possibility and the theme of enownment in the Beiträge.
As Kisiel tells it, then, Heidegger’s response to Natorp is reminiscent of
Alexander’s solution to the Gordian Knot—instead of untangling its difficulties,
Heidegger simply excises reflection from philosophy altogether. Crowell disagrees; for
the young Heidegger, he contends, philosophy without reflection is no philosophy at all.
I.ii. Crowell
Crowell tones down the Oedipal drama in his telling of the Husserl-Heidegger
narrative. Heidegger may have taken some petulant swipes at Husserl in his letters, but
8 Kisiel, Theodore. “On the Operative Role of Occasion, Situation, and Context in Heidegger’s Works,” p. 4, presented at the Western APA, Pasadena, California, USA in the session devoted to Kisiel and Sheehan, eds., Becoming Heidegger (Evanston; Northwestern University Press, 2007) [Henceforth cited as ‘OP’].
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there is no reason to take these epistolary outbursts as the key to his early writings. Some
ordinary father-son tension notwithstanding, Heidegger inherited the ancestral home and
started making improvements. Thus, Crowell argues that Kisiel exaggerates the
discontinuity between Husserl and Heidegger by construing the latter’s topic in an overly
“metaphysical or mystical” (HH, 120) vein. Properly construed, formal indication is
Heidegger’s attempt to fine-tune Husserl’s phenomenology; in Heidegger’s words, it
belongs to “phenomenological explication itself as a methodical moment” (PRL, 44).
So Crowell objects to the claim that the young Heidegger jettisoned
phenomenology in favor of a non-reflective phronesis. He argues, rather, that Heidegger
agreed with another neo-Kantian contemporary – Heinrich Rickert – that a non-reflective
approach to life was ultimately incoherent. If philosophy merely went along with life
instead of explicitly grasping it in reflection, then there would be no real distinction
between living life and clarifying it (HH, 125). Though the two agreed on this point,
however, Heidegger rejected Rickert’s claim that phenomenology was itself an uncritical
repetition of life.9 In fact, as Crowell shows in HH, Heidegger’s discussion of formal
indication defends phenomenology against the neo-Kantian criticisms of both Rickert and
Natorp.
The young Heidegger responds to these criticisms, Crowell argues, in the context
of clarifying his philosophical topic, which, pace Kisiel, was not the ‘Event of Being’ but
rather the ‘ontological difference’—the difference between entities and the meaning of
9 Heidegger also addresses Rickert’s criticism that in phenomenology “the concept of the immediate still seems to be left largely unclarified and the train of thought of most phenomenologists seems steeped in traditional metaphysical dogmas” in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 29 [Henceforth HCT].
6
entities (HH, 120).10 The very choice of this topic attests to Heidegger’s disagreement
with Rickert. Setting his sights on the ontological difference makes reflection
indispensable—for access to this difference presupposes the ability to move from a naïve
encounter with worldly entities to an explicit-reflective grasp of the meaning-structures
that make those entities intelligible. In other words, the ontological difference is a pivot
point between merely living in the world and reflecting on the meaning conditions that
make such life possible (HH, 131).
Crowell argues – again, pace Kisiel – that this account of the ontological
difference has an unambiguous Husserlian lineage—for the move from ontic-factical life
to ontological knowledge of it mirrors Husserl’s account of the transition from the
naturalistic attitude to the transcendental standpoint. It is not, however, a mere repetition
of Husserl’s position; as Crowell explains, Heidegger attempts to develop Husserl’s
account in at least three ways: he identifies 1) what motivates this move 2) what makes it
possible and 3) what makes it necessary:
1. What motivates Dasein’s striving towards self-clarification is its own peculiar self-concern as “an entity…that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (BT 12/32). In other words, the ontic fact that Dasein’s existence matters to it gives rise to the philosophical impulse to clarify the meaning of that existence by explicitly reflecting upon it. Philosophy “arises from factical life experience” (PRL, 7) because such experience possesses “a general tendency towards clarification and even demands such clarification” (PIA, 113). As Crowell puts it, “phenomenological method is seen to be a radicalization of a tendency inherent in a truthful life” (HH, 140).
2. What makes the move from naïve life to the explicit reflection on the conditions of that life possible is Dasein’s “understanding of being”—the fact that it “stands originally within a pre-possession…of the factical” (PRL, 4), i.e., it dwells in a meaningful, articulated world in which it always already understands itself. As Heidegger puts it in the summer semester of 1925, our comportments are
10 In HH Crowell argues that this view of the ontological difference – which is largely shared by Husserl and Heidegger – has its clearest point of origin in the thought of Emil Lask who distinguished between empiricism – which looks at entities, that which primarily exists – and transcendental inquiry – which investigates meaning, that which holds or is valid.
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expressed “in a definite articulation by an understanding that I have of them as I simply live in them without regarding them thematically” (HCT, 48). So Dasein is familiar with the structure of its own being even though aspects of it remain opaque, and this original self-understanding provides the material that phenomenological reflection strives to clarify, i.e., the categories of Dasein’s own being which are the pretheoretical sources of meaning. Since phenomenology only clarifies that with which Dasein is always already familiar, Heidegger claims that philosophy never aims “to say what is new” but rather it strives to appropriate “what is old…in its proper sense” (PIA, 145).
3. Finally, what makes the move necessary is the fact that Dasein’s impulse towards self-clarification is also ‘ruinant’, i.e., it is marked by a tendency to fall back on taken-for-granted, facile self-understandings rather than authentically – or self-responsibly – coming to terms with itself. Phenomenology is necessary if one hopes to bring “life back from its downward fall into decadence” (PIA, 62).
This is the meaning of Heidegger’s claim that “Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is
ontological” (BT 12/32). Built into the very fabric of Dasein’s being are the motive to
pursue ontological knowledge, the possibility of doing so, and the necessity of engaging
in self-responsible reflection if one hopes to attain such knowledge (HH, 150). Since
everything in Dasein’s existence “stands in some implicit interpretation, there then reside
in this life the possibility and factical necessity…of formal indication” (PIA, 100). Thus,
through an immanent development Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger reveals three
existential sources of genuine phenomenological inquiry.
As Crowell tells it, this is where Natorp’s criticisms become germane. Heidegger
agrees with Natorp regarding one thing: an objectifying reflection invariably distorts
factic life. For Dasein is not primarily an occurrent object extended in space and time; it
is rather a way of being-in-the-world. Study Dasein as an object, then, and you will never
see it for what it is. So philosophy is “not theoretical science” (PRL, 43). However,
granting the inappropriateness of theoretical reflection to the study of Dasein is a far cry
from dispensing with reflection altogether, which Heidegger never does. Instead, he
develops a form of reflection that is appropriate to Dasein’s being by drawing on two of
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the claims mentioned above, i.e., that 1) Dasein possesses a pretheoretical understanding
of its being and that 2) the motive for phenomenological reflection lies in Dasein’s own
self-concern. These claims enable Heidegger to show that phenomenological reflection
does not reify Dasein’s first-person experience; instead, it clarifies the pretheoretical self-
understanding that Dasein already has by mobilizing and refining its own tendency
towards self-illumination. This allows Heidegger to deal with Natorp’s worries about a)
reflection and b) language.
Reflection. For Heidegger, formal indication need not rely on a reifying reflection,
since Dasein always already possesses a self-understanding and a motive to clarify that
self-understanding. Thus, it only needs to take up this motive and to cultivate its pre-
existing familiarity with the inner differentiation of its own being. So formal indication is
not a theoretical attitude towards oneself as an object; it is rather the intensification of
Dasein’s own mode of self-awareness. As Heidegger puts it in his review of Jaspers’
work, “…we have this (I) ‘am’ in a genuine sense, not through thinking about it in a
theoretical manner, but rather by enacting the ‘am,’ which is a way of being that belongs
to the being of the ‘I’” (‘CKJ’, 25). Prior to any philosophical inquiry, Dasein possesses a
pretheoretical familiarity with its being and a motive to clarify that being, and formal
indication merely cultivates these features of pretheoretical life in order to clarify
Dasein’s everyday self-awareness.
This is why Heidegger insists that formal indication is categorial research: it
articulates the inner differentiation – or categorial structure – of life itself: “The
categories are not inventions or a group of logical schemata as such, ‘lattices’; on the
contrary, they are alive in life itself in an original way: alive in order to ‘form’ life on
9
themselves” (PIA, 66).11 In other words, the categories are not a hypothetical conceptual
framework that reason deems ‘adequate’ to account for experience. Though they are
transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, they are also structural
features of that experience. For example, consider Heidegger’s existential category of
‘mineness’. Mineness is a condition for the intelligibility of experience: an experience
would not be intelligible as a human experience if it were not characterized by first-
person ownership—for the concept of an experience that belongs to no one is nonsense.
However, in addition to making experience intelligible, mineness is at the same time a
feature of experience itself that is always accessible from the first-person perspective—I
experience every moment of my existence (tacitly or explicitly) as mine. It is to this kind
of existential category that formal indication gains reflective access in order to grasp
them in their unique mode of evidential fulfillment and to capture the deliverances of this
reflection in language.
Language. That Dasein’s pretheoretical life is not a Heraclitean flux but rather a
categorially structured meaningful whole also undermines Natorp’s second critique.
Language is only too general and brutish to grasp pretheoretical life if we presuppose, as
Natorp clearly does, that life ‘in-itself’ is an undifferentiated sensuous continuum. But
this assumption is unwarranted. Pretheoretical life has its own inner differentiation –
which is what Dasein grasps in its everyday understanding of being – and so it is far from
artificial to suggest that this structure might be grasped in language. Since experience is
11That they understand the categories that make experience intelligible as accessible from the first-person perspective distinguishes the transcendental approach of Husserl and Heidegger form that of the neo-Kantians. Crowell clarifies this point through recourse to a distinction drawn by J.N. Mohanty between Prinzipientheoretisch transcendental philosophy – which attempts to justify categorial frameworks through argument – Evidenztheoretisch transcendental philosophy – which attempts to clarify the meaning structures that make intelligible experience possible through reflection on the field of first-person evidence (HH, 168).
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articulated – in the sense that it has structure – we can articulate that experience – in the
sense of putting it into language.
Doing so, however, is difficult due to the existential source of the necessity of
philosophical reflection, i.e., the fact that Dasein’s tendency towards self-illumination is
itself ‘ruinant’. Ruinance – a conceptual precursor to fallenness – denotes Dasein’s
tendency to understand itself in terms of readymade terms handed down by the onto-
theological tradition. Thus, while Dasein has a motive to clarify its being, this impulse
must always wrestle with the coeval tendency to evade the self-responsible work that
authentic self-clarification requires. Formal indication, then, is the “counter-ruinant”
(PIA, 121), nonobjectifying, reflective method that accentuates life’s own mode of self-
awareness in order to articulate the meaning structures that make everyday experience
possible. It is “the constant struggle of factical, philosophical interpretation against its
own factical ruinance, a struggle that always accompanies the process of the actualization
of philosophizing”, which “arises from motives that have been clarified in the respective
factical situation and that receive direction from factical life” (PIA, 114).
So, according to Crowell, the young Heidegger does not abandon phenomenology
in favor of a non-reflective phronesis. With formal indication, Heidegger does not break
with but rather refines Husserl’s project by tackling a number of its apparent problems
and shedding light on its existential sources. In what remains of this paper I will identify
one more apparent problem with the phenomenological method that Heidegger’s account
of formal indication aims to resolve, i.e., the problem of phenomenological
communication. Moreover, I will show that just as Heidegger’s solution to the problem of
reflection revealed the pretheoretical origin of phenomenological reflection – i.e.,
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Dasein’s self-concern – so does his solution to the problem of communication uncover its
existential sources.
The Problem of Phenomenological Communication
In addition to the problem of reflection, then, the young Heidegger was seriously
exercised by the problem of phenomenological communication, i.e., the question of how
to best communicate the insights of first-person intuition in a way that brings about the
same insights in one’s reader. That Heidegger was so preoccupied with this problem is
one of the great ironies of his legacy—for although he dedicated so much work to saying
what he saw in a manner that would allow his reader to see the same thing for herself,
many view him as the most willful obscurantist of the 20th century. This (mostly) unfair
assessment stems from a failure to appreciate the problem of communication that he
inherited from Husserl.
In the Logical Investigations Husserl argues that the bedrock of ‘authentic
thinking’ is intuitive fulfillment, and the ideal of such fulfillment is an instance of inward
evidence in which a meaning-intention is “saturated with the fullness of exemplary
intuition.”12 This ‘saturation’ is an experience of the ‘primal givenness’ of a thing, a first-
person “experience of the agreement between meaning and what is itself present, meant”
(LI, Part I, Section 51, p. 121). Thus Husserl uses the language of optimal visual
perception to indicate the invariant structure of all forms of fulfilled intuition, claiming
that all experiences of “inner evidence” are a kind of “seeing, a grasping of the self-
given” (ibid.).
12 Husserl, E. (2001). Logical Investigations. New York: Routeledge [Translated by J.N. Findlay], Part I, Section 6, p. 18. [Henceforth cited as LI].
12
This is where the problem of communication emerges: since there is no
phenomenological insight without intuition, every phenomenological expression, whether
written or oral, is empty – it refers to “a presumed being, to which no truth corresponds at
all” (LI, Part I, Section 7, p. 107) – until the meaning of that expression is appropriated
from the first-person perspective by the one who utters, reads or hears the expression. So
phenomenological communication is not complete until the inquirer and his reader (or
interlocutor) both achieve first-person access to the matter under discussion. The art of
communication, then, is not merely to say what one sees but to do so in way that allows
the reader to see the same thing for herself. And in phenomenology one is not merely
pointing to something ‘out there’ in the world that is available from the third-person
perspective; rather, one identifies a feature of first-person experience and then attempts to
draw the reader’s attention to that feature of her own subjectivity.
For the young Heidegger, communication – “calling something to the attention of
others” (‘CKJ’, 5) – is intrinsic to the practice of phenomenology. As he writes in Being
and Time, the logos of phenomenology simply means “to make manifest what one is
‘talking about’” (32/56). Thus Heidegger describes authentic discourse in terms
remarkably similar to Husserl’s account: in such discourse “what is said is drawn from
what the talk is about” in such a way that “makes manifest what it is talking about, and
thus makes this accessible to the other party” (32/56). And this is done not through
recourse to empirically verifiable claims, nor to deductive argumentation that terminates
in universally valid judgments, but rather by offering an interpretation whose “intended
binding force…is a living one” (PIA, 125), i.e., an interpretation that puts the other in a
13
position to see the bindingness of the claim for herself. His discussion of formal
indication is in part an account of how such communication is accomplished.
Before discussing the details of that account, however, I need to highlight
precisely why Heidegger’s insights into the existential sources of phenomenology made
communication an especially important methodological issue for him. As we’ve already
seen, when Heidegger set his sights on the being of the inquirer, he turned away from any
“naturalistic objectifying regard” (HCT, 117) that would treat the person as a “distinctive
way of being an object for an objective science of consciousness” (HCT, 119), and he
sought to articulate the categories that make up pretheoretical life, which “does not have
an objective character but a character of significance” (PRL, 10). Taking pretheoretical
life as his theme left him with three communicative difficulties:
First of all, if one hopes to elucidate the non-objective texture of pretheoretical
life in a way that brings the other to see it as it is experienced from the first-person
perspective, then one must overcome the limitations of a language whose subject-
predicate structure lends itself to the traditional metaphysical subject-object dichotomy
rather than the self-world interdependence characteristic of lived experience. In factical
life my being as a self is always given to me in a way that is inseparable from the world
in which I find myself; and, likewise, the world is always disclosed in terms of my self-
understanding. The subject-object dichotomy is artificial, then, because the subject of
pretheoretical life only has its being in terms of the world – it is not a point in space-time
standing over against an array of objects but is essentially in-the-world and of it – and the
language one uses must reflect this fact.
14
Though this poses a difficulty, even if pretheoretical life doesn’t break up cleanly
into subjects and objects, it is still differentiated and so, as I said earlier, it should in
principle be possible to articulate its inner structure. The attempt to do so in the
traditional idiom of the assertion, however, runs the risk of allowing any concept “drawn
from primordial [or pretheoretical] sources” to degenerate, such that it is “understood in
an empty way”, “becoming a free-floating thesis” (BT, 36/61) that falsifies first-person
experience rather than making it manifest. To avoid such degeneration, Heidegger found
it necessary to use innovative language that eschews the subject-object dichotomy, which
accounts for his claim in Being and Time that the “awkwardness and ‘inelegance’” of his
expressions are due to a lack not only of the “words” but “above all, the ‘grammar’”
appropriate to his task (BT, 38/63).13
The second communicative difficulty Heidegger sets for himself by taking
pretheoretical life as his theme is this: his task is to make the reader explicitly come to
terms with that which she is ordinarily only tacitly aware of. In other words, he has to
render explicit the “non-explicit, non-objective” (PIA, 67) essence of lived experience in
such a way that the reader sees it as the non-explicit and non-objective texture of her
mundane life. Ordinary life functions smoothly because these non-explicit structures are
at work in the background, unnoticed and unobtrusive; thus, in order to make the reader
aware of these structures, Heidegger has to somehow disrupt her everyday self-
understanding—he must evoke a kind of breakdown in her mundane existence.14
The third – and perhaps most difficult – problem with the communication of
claims about pretheoretical experience is the fact that such experience is characterized by
13 It is also useful to think in these terms about Heidegger’s later interest in poetic or ‘poetizing’ language. 14 Only then will she be able to grasp the non-explicit as the non-explicit—to see that “the non-explicit” is “itself a specifically phenomenological character, one that…co-constitutes facticity” (PIA, 67)
15
ruinance. Ruinance – from the Latin ruina (PIA, 98) – indicates a kind of ‘collapse’ in
which “Life abandons itself to a certain pressure exerted by its world” (PIA, 76). It is the
tendency to give oneself over to the “seductive” and “pull-like” current of the world in
which one is always absorbed and in terms of which one has a mundane sense of self
(PIA, 78). This is easy to do because “life…exists always in the form of its world, its
surrounding world, its shared world, its own world” (PIA, 76). Everyday life is
characterized by a tendency to understand everything – including ourselves – in terms of
what is easiest or most readily accessible in our particular worldly milieu and to resist
that which is difficult or novel.15 Thus, since phenomenology is an intrinsically
communicative enterprise, it must be counter-ruinant in two senses: i.) the
phenomenologist must not only be vigilant against his own ruinant tendencies in his
striving towards self-clarification but ii.) in communicating his insights he must bear in
mind that the default starting point of his interlocutors is also ruinant.
The fact that these interlocutors tend to be philosophers – whose very charge is to
uproot prejudice – doesn’t mitigate this at all. Philosophers, like everyone else, tend
towards the easy. They get by on the official terminology of the day, they take traditional
norms as self-evident starting points, they assume that some foundational starting point
has already won the day, or they simply say what they know the members of their group
want to hear—in sum, the ruinant philosopher readily takes a matter under discussion to
be understood without having seen it for himself. The phenomenologist has to root out
15 This tendency – under the heading of “processing fluency” – is a major topic in contemporary psychological research. In a nutshell, researchers have found that the easier it is to process something, the more likely people are to judge that thing to be true, morally right, beautiful, admirable and so on. Correlatively, as things become more difficult to process, the less likely people are to ascribe these positive attributes to them. For a summary of this research see Alter, Adam L. and Oppenheimer, Daniel M. “Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation” Pers Soc Psychol Rev 2009; 13; 219.
16
this tendency in himself and combat it in the other. Heidegger’s discussion of formal
indication is his endeavor to do both.
SK To deal with these communicative difficulties Heidegger found some inspiration
in Kierkegaard. Though many commentators have explored Kierkegaard’s influence on
the content of Heidegger’s work, few have discussed the methodological impact of this
influence. Heidegger mentions this influence in two of his most in depth discussions of
formal indication. In his review of Jaspers’ work, he writes, “Concerning Kierkegaard,
we should point out that such a heightened consciousness of methodological rigor as his
has rarely been achieved in philosophy or theology” (‘CKJ’, 27). And in PIA, Heidegger
refers to the following passage as the work’s ‘motto’: “philosophy, as abstract, floats in
the indeterminateness of the metaphysical. Instead of admitting this to itself and then
pointing people (individuals) to the ethical, the religious, and the existential, philosophy
has given rise to the pretence that humans could, as is said prosaically, speculate
themselves out of their own skin and into pure appearance” (PIA, 137).16 Like
Kierkegaard, Heidegger wants to bring his reader face to face with her existence rather
than serving up free-floating speculation that allows her to avoid it.
Kierkegaard’s interest in method, of course, is always subordinated to his project
as a Christian writer—that is, his primary interest is to bring his readers face to face with
a fundamental religious decision. And Kierkegaard thinks that speculative writing is
worthless for this project because “Christianity pertains to existence, to existing” and
16 S. Kierkegaard, Einübung im Christentum [Exercises in Christianity] (Diederichs IX, 1912), p. 70, n. 1.
17
“existence and existing are the very opposite of speculation.”17 Existence and speculation
are opposites because the former is a first-person and the latter a third-person affair.
Since Christianity pertains to existence – that is, it is primarily a matter of striving to be a
Christian – the third-person perspective cannot get a purchase on its core concern. The
task of Christian writing, then, is to call the reader not to understand Christianity but to
become a Christian. With this goal in mind, Kierkegaard developed the method of
“indirect communication” – a way of writing that strives to meet the reader on the level
of existence, to invite her to consider faith strictly from within the constraints of that
existence, and to present her with the task of faith—not to understand Christianity but to
become a Christian. To learn something from this method, then, is to move beyond the
repetition of third-personal descriptions to a repetition of a first-person appropriation of
the matter at hand. Kierkegaard sums up the essence of his method with the following
metaphor:
“To stop a man in the street and to stand still in order to speak with him is not as difficult as having to say something to a passerby in passing, without standing still oneself or delaying the other, without wanting to induce him to go the same way, but just urging him to go his own way—and such is the relation between an existing person and an existing person…” (CUP, 277) Heidegger – for the most part – had no interest in the religious dimension of
Kierkegaard’s project. However, in his approach to phenomenological communication,
he did benefit from Kierkegaard’s insight that it is impossible to “approach the problem
of existence directly” (‘CKJ’, 24)—that one cannot simply report one’s findings but
rather one must strive to put the other in a condition to appropriate those findings for
17 Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical fragments. trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 380. Henceforth referred to as CUP.
18
herself. “For,” as Heidegger puts it in PIA, “with regard to ‘what is at issue,’…even if I
had been given the greatest capacity for research, I could not carry out for someone else
the disclosure of ‘what is at issue’” (144).18 Thus, like Kierkegaard, Heidegger claims
that the “essential characteristic” of the proper method “is expressed precisely in the
‘how’ of our persisting in it” (‘CKJ’, 4). The reader must be “relentlessly compelled to
engage in reflection” (‘CKJ’, 36) until she achieves the appropriate point of access on the
matter independently.
Heidegger’s Method
Heidegger’s strategy for dealing with the problem of communication is reminiscent of
Kierkegaard: he does not present a category – or a phenomenological concept – as a
content to be grasped immediately but rather he presents it as a task to be accomplished
by the reader. A formally indicative concept, he writes, “is essentially a task and cannot
simply hand over…easy knowledge” (PIA, 50). Easy knowledge is precisely what the
ruinant interlocutor wants, a content that can be taken up immediately without further
ado; instead, Heidegger presents her with a challenge, an empty indication that she has to
fill out herself—“a peculiarly constituted task of actualization” (PIA 26). The account
“occasions a pre-‘turning’ to the object” by offering “a bond that is indeterminate as to
content but determinate as to the way of actualization” (PIA, 17)—it is nothing more than
18 It is worth noting that in PRL Heidegger also finds these impulses towards indirect communication in Paul’s letters and Augustine’s Confessions. For example, of Paul he writes, “It is noticeable how little Paul alleges [vorgibt] theoretically or dogmatically; even in the letter to the Romans. The situation is not of the sort of theoretical proof. The dogma as detached content of doctrine in an objective, epistemological emphasis could never have been guiding for Christian religiosity. On the contrary, the genesis of dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of Christian life experience” (PIA, 79). His reading of Augustine follows a similar trajectory: in his Confessions Augustine does not try to communicate some propositional content but rather attempts to characterize his own striving for continency against an intrinsic tendency towards self-dispersion in order to serve as a kind of exemplar for his reader.
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a “direction of sense” (PIA, 25), a call to the reader to take up the task of self-responsible
seeing with respect to the matter at hand.
Of course Heidegger doesn’t think this is enough to fend off the “tempting and facile
attitudinal decline” characteristic of the ruinant reader (PIA, 26). To fend off such a
decline, formal indication must accomplish the following three things: it must a) secure
itself against theoretical ruinance, b) uproot the ruinance of everydayness, and thereby c)
compel the reader to make a self-responsible interpretation.
Securing Against Theoretical Ruinance. Formal indication offers “a preliminary
securing” against theoretical ruinance by indicating that the appropriate relation to the
matter at hand is not “originally theoretical” (PRL, 44) but rather an intensification of
one’s everyday mode of self-awareness (which is clearly not theoretical). This is done by
explicitly rejecting the theoretical attitude at the outset – by refusing all “autonomous,
blind, dogmatic attempts to fix the categorial sense” (PIA, 105) – and by eschewing the
language of theory throughout the account. By providing a sustained critical attack on the
inappropriateness of the theoretical attitude to everyday life and by philosophizing
without recourse to theoretical language, Heidegger signals to the reader that a non-
objectifying attitude must be taken to the matter at hand.
Uprooting Everyday Ruinance. Since he refuses to rely on the language of theory,
Heidegger must turn elsewhere for his formally indicative concepts. And though he is
infamous for his neologisms, readers familiar with his prose know that he draws most of
his central concepts – e.g., world, idle talk, death, guilt, conscience – from the language
of everyday life. Though this tactic helps him fend off the theoretical attitude, it still
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seems problematic—for everyday life is itself ruinant and therefore shot through with
facile – and utterly distorting – self-interpretations.
As it turns out, however, everyday language is a key part of Heidegger’s
method—for it gets the reader to explore her own ruinant self-understanding and thereby
brings her into a confrontation with factical life. No theoretical term can do this, because
terms like ‘cogito’ and ‘sense data’ are more apt to refer us to the history of philosophy
than existence. But terms like death, guilt, and conscience bring you immediately into the
orbit of the life you actually live, calling to mind the concerns most central to who you
are. They are evocative in a way that points you in the right direction, i.e., towards
factical life itself and not some artificial conceptual stand-in for that life.
However, even as Heidegger uses these terms to draw the reader in and to appeal
to her affective dimension, he does not simply give her over to their ruinant meanings.
Instead, he insists that they are not being used in their ordinary sense but rather that they
must be grasped in terms of a phenomenological approach to human existence. His initial
use of an everyday term only gives the reader a “direction of sense” (PIA, 65), a “bond”
that “points out the only way of arriving at what is proper, namely, by exhausting and
fulfilling what is improperly indicated” (PIA, 26). Thus, though he begins with a term
loaded with ruinant meanings, he gradually takes these meanings away, leaving the
reader only with a formal sense of the term that points her in the direction of factical life
itself.
Compelling the Self-Responsible Interpretation. As I’ve already discussed, in
everyday life Dasein’s tendency towards self-illumination is compromised by the
countervailing tendency of ruinance—Dasein at once craves illumination and obscurity,
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striving after the former and giving in to the latter. So to compel his reader to make a
self-responsible interpretation, Heidegger must take both of these tendencies into
account: he must simultaneously draw out her tendency toward self-illumination while he
eliminates the ruinant interpretations that she ordinarily falls back on to avoid
authentically coming to terms with herself.
To do this, Heidegger does what I just described above: he first rules out
theoretical ruinance and then he selects an everyday term that is charged with existential
significance. This term piques the reader’s interest – because it matters to her – and at the
same time it makes her feel safe – because it is a term that she knows all too well. So,
initially, she feels no need to strive anxiously towards self-illumination, because everyone
knows exactly what words like world, death and guilt mean.
However, bit-by-bit, Heidegger chips away at her complacent sense that she
already knows what these things mean, and as each tranquilizing readymade self-
interpretation is taken away, her anxiety – the self-concern that is the basis of her
tendency towards self-illumination – increases. The less she has to hold onto, the more
anxious she becomes, the less she has to fall back on, the more responsibility she must
take. The goal, then, is to get the reader in a condition in which she no longer has a
ruinant self-interpretation to cling to, leaving her with nothing but her tendency towards
self-illumination and bare factical life. In doing so, one brings her anxious self-concern to
such a pitch that it actually evokes a break with her everyday self-understanding and
forces her to come to terms with it anew. This is what Heidegger is getting at when he
claims, “Categories can be understood only insofar as factical life itself is compelled to
interpretation” (PIA, 66). By taking away all ruinant self-interpretations, the
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phenomenologist brings the reader’s self-concern to the point that she is compelled to
make a self-responsible interpretation regarding the element of factical life under
consideration.
This strategy comes to terms with the various communicative difficulties discussed
above. By warding off all theoretical approaches to factical life and relying on the
language of everydayness, Heidegger manages to eschew language and attitudes oriented
towards the metaphysics of subjectivity. Moreover, he manages to get his reader to come
face-to-face with the structures of her pretheoretical life – even though she is ordinarily
only tacitly aware of these structures – by so disrupting her everyday self-understanding
that she is compelled to come to terms with them. Finally, the entire strategy from start to
finish is designed to enhance the reader’s feeling of self-responsibility and to take away
her ruinant strategies designed to cope with the anxiety associated with that self-
responsibility.
The Existential Sources of Phenomenology Just as Heidegger’s discussion of the problem of reflection sheds light on the
existential sources of phenomenology, so does his account of phenomenological
communication. As I mentioned above, it is clear from the very meaning of the term that
phenomenology is an intrinsically communicative enterprise. Its practice always involves
a logos, an account that attempts to make the theme of its reflection manifest. As
Heidegger puts it, phenomenology always involves calling something to the attention of
others, encouraging the other to see something for herself. This suggests that although
Dasein’s tendency towards self-illumination is an essential motive for phenomenological
discourse, it is not a sufficient one. A tendency towards self-illumination might be all it
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takes to motivate a certain kind of meditation or an attempt to comes to terms with
oneself, but it would not compel one to engage in phenomenological discourse, i.e., in the
endeavor to get others to see what you have seen. Another motive is required to break
philosophy out of its solipsistic bubble.
Heidegger never explicitly makes this claim, but it seems to me that the logic of
his position and his emphasis on the intrinsically communicative nature of
phenomenology indicates an ethical motive that lies at its basis. Now this, of course,
places us in the terrain where Heidegger’s critics tend to gather – usually under the
banner of Levinas – to accuse Heidegger of having overlooked the ethical origin of the
self. Dasein’s self-concern, these critics argue, is not an intrinsic tendency towards self-
illumination at all; rather, Dasein experiences the meaning of its own being as
questionable in the first place only because it has always already been called into
question by the other. This seems true enough to me, but it’s not something I want to take
a stance on here. For it also seems plausible that Dasein’s self-concern could be intrinsic
to its own way of being – a function of being characterized by care – and that the call of
the other therefore does not engender but merely galvanizes a pre-existing self-concern.
However, I would like to take a stance on a related point: even if an anxious self-concern
is antecedent to the other’s call, that self-concern is not enough to motivate me to engage
in phenomenological discourse. Rather, the impulse to engage the other in such discourse
– i.e., discourse that discloses what one has seen and challenges the other to see it self-
responsibly for herself – must have an ethical origin, because an individual could in
principle satisfy a tendency towards self-illumination without ever engaging in such
discourse. Going outside myself in communication presupposes a motive beyond
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myself—a claim that the other has made on me to make myself known, to given an
account of myself. What makes this motive ethical is the fact this it is a response to the
other’s challenge to my right to frame the world as I see it – a challenge that compels me
to go beyond myself, putting my hard won insight at stake before the other’s judgment.
But even with the motives of Dasein’s self-concern and the ethical claim that the
other makes on me, we still do not have an adequate account of the existential motives of
phenomenological communication. Self-concern furnishes me with a philosophical
impulse and the claim of the other motivates me to engage in philosophical discourse, but
these motives prescribe no specific method for doing so. In other words, phenomenology
is not the only means of communication available to the philosopher. In fact, the method
of communication most commonly evoked by the other’s claim is not the sort that strives
for non-interference by encouraging the other to see something self-responsibly for
herself. Instead, the preferred method is most often argument, and “An argument,” as
Feyerabend famously put it, “is not a confession, it is an instrument designed to make an
opponent change his mind.”19 It doesn’t permit the reader to “infer what the author
thinks is true” but only “what the author regards as effective persuasion” (ibid). In
phenomenological discourse, however, what the reader encounters is precisely what the
author thinks is true – it is what he claims to have seen for himself – and it is given to the
reader in such a way that she might see the same thing for herself. It presupposes the
intention to be truthful, and so it is closer to confession than persuasion—it merely
strives to make something manifest without obscuring any essential details. What other
motive do we need to understand the existential sources of this type of communication?
19 Feyerabend, Paul K. Science in a Free Society (London, 1978), p. 156.
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This final motive is a desire for authentic community—i.e., a desire to share the
project of self-illumination with another. This desire places the other two motives in
concert in such a way that calls for phenomenological discourse. The desire for authentic
community first arises from my recognition of the fact that my drive towards self-
illumination will be best fulfilled with the help of others who will no doubt see many
things more clearly than I can. Moreover, my recognition of this fact – the fact that I need
the other to satisfy my own tendency towards self-illumination – places me in a condition
of ethical reciprocity vis-à-vis the other such that I am motivated to furnish not just any
claim but a truthful one. In other words, since I recognize my own dependence on the
other’s truthfulness to fulfill my own tendency towards self-illumination, I am compelled
to speak truthfully myself on the pain of losing those upon whom I depend. Speaking
truthfully and respecting the other’s right to decide for herself – as all phenomenological
communication requires – is the only way to put myself in a position to expect the other
to return the favor. This condition being reciprocal, her failure to do so runs precisely the
same risks.
Thus, I contend that Heidegger’s discussion of formal indication yields insights into
three existential sources of phenomenological inquiry: 1) the tendency towards self-
illumination discussed by Crowell in HH, 2) the other’s demand that I give an account of
myself and 3) a desire to share the project of self-illumination with another. In simpler
terms, one might say that the origins of phenomenology are self-concern, the ethical
encounter, and a desire for friendship. If we call this final motive friendship though, we
must note that we use the term in a Kierkegaardian sense: It is not “the chummy
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inwardness with which two bosom friends walk arm in arm with each other but is the
separation in which each person for himself is existing in what is true” (CUP, 249).