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89 PIA 32; PG Z 112. This idea is retained in SZ, where ‘indication’ is described as the basic structure o f the appearance o f ‘all indications, representations, symptoms and symbols’ (29).

content, a determinate bind on performance is given in advance’. The ‘“formal” is such content as refers the indication in the [right] direction, prefigures the way’.90 Thus in broad outline the function of philosophical concepts on Heidegger’s account is as follows: formal indication is a use of signs the content of which is indeterminate, but which comprise a constraint serving to bring about the state of understanding from which they issue. In this sense, formal indications are to function as a pointer, a signpost, or a path to the corresponding grounding experience.

When compared with Husserl’s conception of signs, a feature corresponding to meaning-conferring acts is conspicuously absent from Heidegger’s discussions of formal indication. Along with Heidegger’s general eschewal of psychological concepts, this can be explained by seeing formal indication as combining Husserl’s contrast between indication and fulfilment with Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of expression, which centres on the mutual interdependence of experience, understanding and expression.91 According to Dilthey, the lifeworld is permeated with ordered objective structures and practices that result from, and continue to shape human purposes and understanding. Such ‘objectifications of spirit’ or ‘expressions of life’ range from ‘morals, law, the state, religion, art, science and philosophy’ through to ‘every square planted with trees, every room in which chairs are arranged’, and includes linguistic expressions (Dilthey 1990, 252, 177, 256). Because they result from processes of understanding and determinate possibilities of experience, and are hence literally expressions of these, Dilthey reasoned that such objectifications allow those same possibilities to be relived or reactualized. So on this view - which I am suggesting Heidegger adopts - the expressiveness, or meaningfulness, of signs is due not to meaning-conferring intentions, but to their embodying and standing in a determinate relationship to particular situations of actualized understanding. Moreover, forms of expression that emerge from acts of understanding are to be

90 PIA 20 ( ‘“/orm a/” anzeigend’ means ‘der “Weg”, im “Ansatz”. Es ist eine gehaltlich unbestimmte, vollzugshaft bestimmte Bindung vorgegeben’), 34.

91 Dilthey 1990, 235 ff. (cf. 157, 176). Heidegger refers to this triad - Erlebnis, Verstehen, Ausdruck — explicitly at PAA 169. - Many o f Heidegger’s key notions (e.g. existentiales, significance, temporality, historicity) are prefigured in Dilthey. For a good survey o f such themes cf. Guignon 1983, 45-59. 92 Dilthey 1990, 263-7. This idea was later relied on by Collingwood’s (1958, cf. 150; 1994, e.g. 115,

intrinsically conducive to reattaining that same understanding, and it is in this sense that they ‘point to’ their grounding experience.

Heidegger’s notion of formal indication goes beyond Dilthey’s view, however, by intimating in virtue of what expressions point to their grounding experiences. As already hinted, the qualification ‘formal’ means for Heidegger that the ‘sense structure’ of the ‘empty’ content ‘provides the direction of performance’

(PIA 33). In other words, the structuredness and interrelatedness of the signs used are taken to ‘point’ the way to, and so enable, experiences of understanding. The determining sense-structure of linguistic forms thus comprises a clue to the link between the indication and indicated that distinguishes formal indication from arbitrary or unstructured indications. Nevertheless, to preserve the distinction between indication and performed apprehension, and corresponding to Husserl’s stipulation that indications are not ‘insightive’, the clue provided by the sense- structure cannot suffice to induce immediate understanding.94 Rather, Heidegger explains, in ‘order to grasp the complete sense’ of a formal indication, to follow where it points, ‘radical interpretation of the “formal” itself is required’ (PIA 33). This interpretation of ‘empty’ symbolic forms is a means to the end of ‘performed understanding of the formally indicating definition’; it is part of a process of ‘working forth to the situation’ in which formally indicating ‘characteristics’ become ‘deformalized’ by ‘receiving the concrete factual categorial determination from the respective direction of experience and interpretation’.95 So put simply, ‘formal’ or ‘empty’ signification and actualized or performed understanding are two extremes between which interpretation mediates. In ideally actualized understanding, one would appreciate how each of the various features of one’s symbolic representation are motivated by corresponding features of the phenomenon in question.

Against this background Heidegger’s view of concepts can be seen to epitomize commitment to phenomenological accountability in being guided by the idea that concepts are somehow proper to their respective phenomenal origin, the grounding experience in which they arise and to which they remain internally related. For formal indications are to be characterized by what might be called the twin 93 Thus grounding experience, as performed understanding, plays the same role as Dilthey’s notion o f Erlebnis (experience). See Gadamer’s (1990, 70 ff.) insightful discussion o f this role as attempting to model methodology in the humanities on that o f empirical natural science.

94 Heidegger repeatedly opposes the ‘prejudice’ that phenomenology’s emphasis on direct insight means grasping things ‘in a flash’ without interpretative effort (PGZ, 36 f.; cf. SZ 36 f.).