7 Indeed Heidegger experimented with the term ‘expressive concepts’ {GPP 240) to reflect this Diltheyan interdependence o f experience, understanding, and expression. - Even in SZ ‘ausdriicklich’ might be construed in terms o f such expressiveness (cf. footnote 28).
formal indication is a use of signs through which phenomena are addressed in a provisional, tentative, and hence corrigible manner. Understanding the functioning of signs in this way meant that phenomenological enquiry can be understood as an ongoing cycle of interpreting phenomena - with signs formally indicating phenomena and phenomena prefiguring the forms of symbolic indication.98 Formal indication is the ‘method of outset of phenomenological interpretation in each stage of its execution’, with ‘the interpretation’s preconception’ each time ‘stem[ming] from the respective stage of appropriation’ {PIA 141, 87).
Before returning to consider its relevance to SZ, I want briefly to highlight three features of Heidegger’s notion of formal indication that are relevant to assessing not only this notion, but also a phenomenological conception of language more generally. The first is that Heidegger’s discussions seem to invoke an ideal of full actual presentation of sense, the kind of ‘presence of sense to a full and original intention’ that Derrida (1993, 3) has portrayed as a dubious metaphysical assumption underlying Husserl’s phenomenology. For in grounding experiences, the basis of ‘concrete work’, the ‘(ultimate) structural sense of the full object’ is to be possessed in its full determination; a ‘phenomenon’ is simply the ‘being present of an object’
{PIA 28; Ont 69). However, whether or not Heidegger was assuming such an idealized presence of sense, it is important to realize that his view of the function of formal indication as approximative or schematic could survive without it. Although his picture involves some kind of actualization of understanding, that role might be understood in relation to aspectual or partial presentations such as Husserl’s ‘adumbrations’ or Merleau-Ponty’s corresponding view of the indirectness of intentional objects.
The second feature to highlight is that on Heidegger’s model the function of signs is what might be called ‘simple preservation’: i.e. actual or performed understanding is laid down in language such that it can later be reactualized in just the same way. Formal indications thus function, or fail to function, as deposition and reactivation, in much the same way as a long-playing record. Underlying this is Heidegger’s assumption that there is an internal link between formal indications and determinate grounding experiences, between signs and their ‘origins’. This implies 98 This process, which Heidegger once aptly termed ‘diahermeneutics’ {GPP 262), features in SZ (153, 314 f.) as the ‘hermeneutic circle’.
that the relationship between expressions and their sense-genetic origins is essentially atemporal: Actualized understanding may deteriorate into ‘empty’ use of indications and so stand in need of ‘reappropriation’, but there is no allowance for the ravages of time or the internal workings of language eroding the internal link between expressions and the grounding experiences proper to them. Rather, on this model, language would be a pseudo-temporal phenomenon, a ‘process’ with no intrinsic temporality."
Finally, a major source of obscurity in Heidegger’s idea of formal indication is the idea of ‘form’ it relies on. In being contrasted with ‘deformalizing’ situations of ‘evidence’, it is clearly supposed to function as one pole of something like a form- content distinction, or more precisely a form-fulfilment distinction. Unfortunately, the one passage where Heidegger undertakes to explain the sense of ‘formal’ in formal indication is of limited use. He there compares and contrasts his use of the term
‘formal’ with Husserl’s distinction between (eidetic) formalization and
(classificatory) generalization (cf. Husserl 1992c, 31 [§13]). As Heidegger sees it, generalization is ordering within a framework of genres and species that entails reference to the subject matter being classified, whereas formalization is to be subject-matter independent and pertain to ‘formal ontological’ categories such as thing, experience, object {Rel 58 f.). He attempts to link this with formal indication by claiming that the latter should ‘indicate the relation to the phenomenon in advance’ or what he called ‘relational sense’ {Rel 63). This claim relies on a distinction Heidegger standardly made during his early phenomenological period between three ‘directions of sense’ found in any phenomenon: (a) content sense (Gehaltssinn): ‘what’ is ‘originally experienced in it’; (b) relational sense {Bezugssinn): the ‘original manner in which it is experienced’; and (c) performative sense (Vollzugssinn): the ‘original manner in which the relational sense is performed’ or actualized.100 However, it seems to me that Heidegger is here in a tangle: First, he fails to offer any reason as to why the ‘formal’ should not convey all three kinds of sense he distinguishes. Second, it is far from clear that a formal indication could serve its purpose without some determination of ‘what’ is involved. Third, the restriction to relational sense is 99 Not surprisingly therefore §68d o f SZ - on the ‘temporality o f Articulacy [Rede]' - is conspicuously brief. Though Heidegger reassures us that ‘Articulacy is in itself temporal’ and ‘grounded in the ecstatic unity o f temporality’, he has nothing specific to say about the temporality o f language (either Rede or Sprache) as such. For Heidegger, on his own gloss, ‘temporality o f Articulacy, that is, o f Dasein altogether’ (SZ 349).
inconsistent with Heidegger’s own subsequent discussions of formal indication which routinely treat them as having ‘content’.101
Nonetheless, quite independently of the question of what exactly it conveys, Heidegger does not explicate what he means by ‘form’. To the extent that language is to be construed as formal indication - which is clearly implied by Heidegger’s discussions (e.g. by construing definition as formal indications) - the relevant notion of form can be taken to be that of linguistic form at all syntactic levels, i.e. definitions, sentences, words, etc. But this leaves open important questions as to what aspects of linguistic form are relevant in directing us to features of the world: Are the inferential properties of sentences or expressions ‘formal’ in Heidegger’s sense? Do letters, words, and sentences all ‘point’ to phenomena in the same way? Are we supposed to agree with the view half-heartedly proposed by Socrates that individual letters have their own expressive or representational properties? And, finally, how might Heidegger have responded to the obvious difficulty posed by the ‘arbitrariness’ of linguistic signs? To answer such questions clearly requires a more detailed view about the ‘formal’ qualities in virtue of which linguistic signs ‘point out’ features of the world.