171 The second function of formal indication is as a response to the charge leveled by Natorp against Husserl. We noted earlier that formal indication is Heidegger’s response to the question, How can
a science of life be truly primordial? This question is in fact a reformulation of Natorp’s critique
of phenomenology cited by Heidegger in his 1919 course “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview.”45 Heidegger’s account of phenomenology as formal indication is intended as a
response to Natorp’s critique, a response that entails a transformation of the Husserlian account of intentionality and intuition.
To set up the conflict Heidegger first cites Husserl’s account of phenomenological reflection:
“‘Only through reflectively experiencing [erfahrende] acts do we know something of the stream of living experience’ (Ideen, 144). Through reflection every living experience can be turned into something looked at. ‘The phenomenological method operates entirely in acts of reflection’ (Ideen, 145). Reflections are themselves in turn lived experience and as such can in turn be reflectively considered, ‘and so on ad infinitum, as a universal principle’ (Ideen, 139)” (TDP 77).
Heidegger glosses Husserl’s account here by suggesting that reflection is not a “second ray of consciousness” directed at the describing consciousness, but rather “reflection itself belongs to the sphere of life-experience as one of its ‘fundamental peculiarities’” (TDP 78). For Husserl in reflection an object becomes “looked at” and in being looked it becomes “an object of reflection”. Thus, in this account of reflection “we are theoretically oriented” (TDP 79).
Though Heidegger is ultimately highly critical of Natorp’s “objectification” of the subject, he presents him here as advancing a substantial, fair, and as-yet unanswered critique of
45 Martin Heidegger. “Der Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschaungsprobleme” in Zur Bestimmung der
Philosophie, GA 56/57 / ET: “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview” in Towards the Definition of Philosophy. 2008. Translated by Ted Sadler. (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). Hereafter TDP.
172 phenomenology. “Until now,” he writes, “Natorp is the only person to bring scientifically noteworthy objections against phenomenology. Husserl himself has not yet commented on these” (TDF 78). That objection is simple enough: phenomenology purports to be a descriptive science of consciousness, which is immediate because immanent; however, to properly describe consciousness one must use concepts and thereby “still the stream”46 of immediacy. Therefore,
either phenomenology is conceptual description and therefore the mediation of immediacy, or it is non-conceptual in which case it is not a science. Summarizing Natorp’s position, Heidegger writes: “If one wishes to make experience into an object of science, it is impossible to avoid theoretization. This means, however, that there is no immediate apprehension of experience” (TDP, 78). In short, there can only be a “mediated apprehension of experiences” (TDP 79).
What Heidegger does in responses to this challenge in these final paragraphs of the course is a matter of some debate and hinges largely on the “tone” in which one hears his comments and how one interprets the ellipses in his presentation. However, the following general observations are clear enough. First, Heidegger does not refute Natorp’s claim on the basis of Husserlian phenomenology. If anything, in using Husserl’s Ideas to provide a definition of phenomenological description that is then unproblematically inserted into Natorp’s claim that all description is conceptual theoretization, Heidegger seems to suggest that Natorp’s objections find a place to land in Husserlian phenomenology. He writes, for example, that
“Phenomenology’s claim to be purely descriptive in its intent changes nothing in regard to its theoretical character. For description also already proceeds via concepts: it is a
circumscription of something into generalities, it is ‘subsumption’ (Natorp); it already
presupposes a certain kind of concept-formation and therefore ‘abstraction’ (Natorp) and theory, i.e., mediation” (TDP 78).
173 The conclusion, therefore, is that description is nothing “immediate and unmediated”, but is concept-formation according to laws and therefore “already objectifying”.
Second, Heidegger points out a problem in Natorp’s general account in general without responding directly to his critique of phenomenology. He argues that for Natorp, the “subject” who is so important to the process of conceptually mediating the immediacy of life is on that account merely a “reconstructed” subject on the basis of the “objectification” she is supposed to provide. According to Natorp, the subject accomplishes in consciousness the absolute objectification of possible experience by which she then mediates immediate experiences: “objectification is determination, the subjective is what determines” (TDP, 79). But, Heidegger argues, it is precisely the determining activity of the subject that distinguishes it from that which is merely determined. Thus, he asks, “how can that which is itself essentially determining be in turn determinable?” (79). While Natorp seems to grant priority to the determining subject, in reality the implicit and operative notion of determining subjectivity is merely subjectivity as a determined object: “This method of ‘subjectification’…is not prior to the method of objectification but subsequent to it” (104/80). Natorp begins, in other words, not from an examination of inquiring intelligence, but from that of objective knowledge. It is only by “reverse argumentation” that he constructs a corresponding notion of subjectivity, which has already been cut to the dimensions of scientific knowledge. On this account, the possibility of a non-theoretical understanding of immediate life experience cannot even be raised, and therefore important dimensions of consciousness (subjectivity) are left out of play from the beginning47. That sort of question-begging is bad
philosophy in general, not merely bad phenomenology.
47 He adds that on Natorp’s account philosophy achieves the “highest degree of consciousness” by achieving “the most
174 Third, Heidegger’s phenomenological “response”, which is at best a tentative gesture of possibility, is based on a reading of Husserl’s “principle of all principles” (ID, §24). Natorp has done us the favor of making clear that the “scientific disclosure of the sphere of lived experience” is the “fundamental methodological problem of phenomenology” (TDP 83). However, Heidegger notes, this “scientific disclosure” stands under the “principles of principles,” which states, in Heidegger’s elliptical citation: “Everything that presents itself…originally in ‘intuition’ is to be
taken simply…as it gives itself” (83-84, italics in original)48. As a principle, this methodological
strategy is not theoretical, but precedes all theory. It merely acknowledges what must be the case for us to have something about which we theorize. One implication of this is that, “If description itself is always necessarily theoretization, that does not exclude the possibility that the founding intuition – I must first see before I describe – would not be of a theoretical nature” (85). In other words, the very possibility of theory presupposes a prior moment in which consciousness is not yet theoretical consciousness. If intuition is already a seeing to which is opposed the “thing” then intuition is already theory. Thus, the heart of phenomenology’s response is to reassert the non- primordiality of theoretical consciousness, which he cannot see on account of his “exclusively theoretical” and “pan-logical” orientation. Because Natorp is focused on the possibility of scientific knowledge “his dispute with phenomenology does not get at its authentic sphere of problems at all” (83). That is, a fuller account of conscious subjectivity that accounts for why it is always in relation to a world and yet distinct from any entity within that world.
Part of the disagreement is over the nature of language. For Natorp language is always objectifying: “all verbal meaning consists in nothing but [the theoretical universality of a genus]”
48 It is worth noting the implicit claim that Natorp misunderstand the principle of principles is of a piece with
Heidegger’s earlier contention that he overlooks “the fundamental demand of phenomenology to bracket all standpoints” (TDP 83).
175 (TDP 85). Therefore, phenomenological description must be theory. Heidegger, in turn, distinguishes “formally objective” from “object-specific” language:
“The formally objective is qualitatively different from the object-specific, and… refers back to a fundamental level of life in and for itself. Signification therefore, linguistic expression, does not need to be theoretical or even object-specific, but is primordially living and experiential, whether pre-worldly or worldly” (TDP 89).
In other words, Heidegger emphasizes both the possibility of a non-objectifying language and its essential priority. He suggests that such a language makes use not of concepts [Be-griff], but of “re-cepts” [Rück-griff] and “pre-cepts” [Vorgriff]. These backward- and forward-moving tendencies of language – motivated tendency and tending motivation, respectively – are meant to suggest that the world is available to us as already significant and even when it admits of scientific description this is always derivative of a prior and perhaps fuller disclosure. The world of immediacy, moreso than that of science, is the truly necessary world the sine qua non of all other discourses.
This defense of a properly phenomenological kind of enactment and signification helps us understand Heidegger’s emphasis on the enactment-dimension of formal indication and its relation to a particular understanding of phenomenology. In the final moments of the course, he suggests that this alternative signifying expresses “the characters of the appropriating event.” This “empowering experiencing of living expressions” is precisely “understanding intuition, the hermeneutical intuition” (117/89). Therefore, and though he does not make it explicit, formal indication is presented as a manner of reflection that is not external to intuition, but integral to it. This ruptures both Natorp’s false dichotomy between intuition and understanding as well as Husserl’s between (theoretical) consciousness and world. This “unoriented and vague
176 preunderstanding”49 is at one and the same time the ground of and subject of formal indication. It
is ground because this basic Vorhaben of factical life is the condition of Dasein in media res that allows for the comportment of formal indication. It is its subject because Verstehen is the given and underdetermined content that we signal in the exercise of formal indication. The price we pay for such access is its claim to theoretical universality and phenomenological “stability”. A small price to pay, Heidegger would contend, for the only sufficient means of securing the initial sense of our experiences, i.e., of our lives, within which various other forms of scientific and aesthetic consciousness may take shape. Yet, this account entails a rethinking of the Husserlian notions of reflection and intuition, since these are what come under fire in Natorp’s two-part critique50.
a. Reflection
For Husserl, of course, reflection is not a univocal term. However, the relevant sense for our discussion here is that in which reflection designates the “shift of focus” within the cogito that creates a new cogitatio that is the apprehending of the manner of apprehending (ID §38). This reflection is always a possibility for us because “experience has the kind of being that in principle can be perceived in the manner of reflection” (§45). This reflection is integral to the shift from the
49 Kisiel, Genesis, 376
50 On the relation between formal indication and the Husserlian account of intuition and reelection the commentary is
far from unanimous. Among those who favor a thesis of continuity are Crowell (2001), Luft (2005), and Westphal who does not see in these early courses an attempt to break away from Husserl, but a radical development of the basic Husserlian impulse. On the other and, Theodore Kisiel in his magisterial The Genesis of Being and Time (GBT) claims that a definitive break with Husserl is achieved in SS1925 with the first fully systematic treatment of Verstehen (GBT 376). (Theodore Kisiel. The Genesis of Being and Time. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Against, this Crowell argues that, “Exclusive emphasis on the sense in which formal indication might be said to replace the Husserlian notions of intuition and reflection, however, obscures the fact that Heidegger’s account of it becomes philosophically compelling only by tacit appeal to a version of those very notions". See: “Heidegger’s Phenomenological Decade” in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. 2001. (Evanston: Northwestern Publishing, 124)
177 natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude, in the phenomenological attitude “we carry out acts of reflection, directed at [the cognitive acts of the natural attitude]” (§50). Robert Sokolowski describes this kind of reflection as a “perch” from which to view the natural attitude51. This is a
helpful image for grasping the sense in which, for Husserl, the phenomenological reduction yields reflection from a higher theoretical viewpoint than any of those constituent of the natural attitude52.
In reaction to this preference for the theoretical, one common interpretation of Heidegger argues that from at least 1925 onward, and indebted to his rereading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics VI, philosophy becomes phronesis in a deliberate contrast to theoreia. While it is surely
that case that Heidegger recovers the comportmental nature of philosophical reflection and contrasts it with a de-worlded and problematic notion of the theoretical, two further considerations ought to mitigate the emphasis we place on this thesis. In the first place, the “kinesthetic” or enactment dimension of meaning as we have shown was not suddenly discovered in toto when Heidegger turned to Aristotle in 1925. Rather the “dynamized facticity of life” had been present in his earlier courses, the 1920-21 course in particular, but the earlier ones as well. In the second place, as Crowell argues, to say that philosophy is phronesis is to make the analogous but opposite error of saying philosophy is theoreia.
Heidegger is aware of the need in arguing that phenomenology is not theory, to say positively how it is something other than unreflective immediacy. In response to Natorp he claims that philosophy is a repetition of life, not a re-living adding that “it is categorial research.”53 Thus,
philosophy involves a “special sort of turning back” that is a kind of non-theoretical reflection on
51 Robert Sokolowksi. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. (Cambridge University Press)
52 Westphal makes a similar claim, “Formal indication is not an attempt to render the What intelligible by moving to
higher and higher levels of abstraction; it rather shifts attention entirely away from the what to the how.” (Westphal, “Jugendschriften,” p. 252)
53 Crowell adds, quoting Heidegger, that in this categorial research “life’s re-collectability (Wieder-holdbarkeit)
178 immediacy54. The burden of proof is now on Heidegger to differentiate his proposal from the kind
of haphazard and unrigorous description of life he (unfairly, perhaps) attributes to certain of the
Lebensphilosophen55.
The wager of formal indication is that it is a mode of reflection that rises above the mere flux of life without claiming to grasp it in a theoretical viewpoint. It is the generation of revisable concepts that spring from the phenomena themselves56. In their original givenness – or affording
intuition – those phenomena are given here and now, and are meaningful in that moment, not only after a first reduction or abstraction. This pluriform givenness thus requires interpretation. Thus, a developed understanding of reflection implies for Heidegger a new understanding of method. In
Being and Time, for example, key terms are “formalized”, which is to say, they are emptied of
their everyday reference (their concrete “what”)57. Yet, they retain reference to their attitudinal
motivation in life (their “how”) such that they can indicate the immediate life situations out of which they arise and toward which the philosophy is directed.58 Thus, for example, the analysis of
tentatio in Augustine’s Confessions Book X is not an analysis of this or that specific temptation,
but of a constant relating that the tempted subject is underdoing. The analysis of this relation tells us something new about the experience of life that would otherwise have remained hidden.
This “how” of the factical self is the point from which Heidegger leverages his distinct understanding of reflection as repetition (Wiederholung) rather than a mediated re-living. The claim is that we already have ourselves in a certain way in factical life and this way admits of a
54 See Crowell: “[For Heidegger,] even if the Gehaltsinn of life and philosophy is in some sense the “same,” their
Bezugsinn and Vollzugsinn must differ” (SM 125).
55 Those (unlike Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey) “who would rather gush with enthusiasm than think” (GA 61: 80). 56 According to Crowell, “‘formal-indicating’ concepts…neither objectify nor describe, but interpret” (SM 123). 57 The analysis of Guilt is a clear example of this.
58 Cf. Crowell, Space of Meaning, 125. To the extent that enactment remains tied to facticity it would appear formal
indications can’t be completely evacuated of their Gehaltsinn. We will examine this possibility in the following chapters.
179 self-reflective or self-referential moment where we, without abstracting from the immediacy of life, attend to its manners of enactment. Such an exercise for Heidegger, argues Crowell, ought to be continuous with life’s immediate self-interpretation and therefore must indicate how the pretheoretical situation is itself “categorically” structured59. Thus, we see that what Heidegger was
first drawn to in his reading of the Logical Investigations remains central to his emerging hermeneutic phenomenology: life in its immediacy is categorially structured.
b. Intuition
Reflection is defined by its relation to immediacy, which is that upon which it reflects. We are in relation to our own immediacy through intuition. Therefore, Heidegger’s modified understanding of phenomenological reflection entails a new account of phenomenological intuition. In Ideas I the original and affording intuition is a matter of “natural experience” and “perception” which occur in the natural attitude. The natural attitude is defined by Husserl principally as a theoretical attitude60 whose primary means of investigation are the natural sciences in which “true being” is
always equivalent to “actual being” (or “real being”). As a result of this quick association of the natural and theoretical-scientific attitudes, intuition is already regionally circumscribed:
“To each science there corresponds a region of objects as the domain of the science's research and to all the knowledge gained in them, i.e., to all the correct assertions here, certain intuitions correspond as original sources of the justification that demonstrates their correctness, intuitions in which objects of the region are themselves given and are given, at least partially, in an originary way” (ID, §1).
59 Ibid., 140
180 Intuitions are first described here as the originary sources of the confirmation of scientific research. This results from the relation obtaining between the originary affording intuition of “natural experience” and “perception”. All this is to say that our experience of the world is the perception of objects that are given as belonging to distinct regions of objects61.
For Heidegger, this is an account of the transition from factical life experience to knowledge; however, it is neither the only account, nor the original account, and therefore ought not to be considered the leading account. The immediacy or givenness of factical life admits of more and different manners of engagement than the leap to the theoretical. For that reason his account of formal indication must reconfront the Husserlian question of access to the pre- theoretical, which requires him to revisit the Husserlian account of intuition. The result is an account of hermeneutical intuition that is structured by re-cepts and pre-cepts, i.e., by traditions of meaning and anticipations of it, “…the originary back-and-forth formation of the recept and precepts…Universality of word meanings primarily indicates something originary: worldliness [Welthaftigkeit] of experienced experiencing” (TDP 89).
Heidegger here suggests that phenomenological activity has access to a “lower level of worldly experience” that is prior to regional demarcations and a matter of the interpretation of phenomena prior to their regional allocation. Factical life is “a determination” of phenomena “prior