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What's Formal about Formal

Indication? Heidegger's
Method in Sein und Zeit
a
R. Matthew Shockey
a
Indiana University South Bend, USA

Available online: 06 Nov 2010

To cite this article: R. Matthew Shockey (2010): What's Formal about Formal
Indication? Heidegger's Method in Sein und Zeit , Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Philosophy, 53:6, 525-539

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 Inquiry,
Vol. 53, No. 6, 525–539, December 2010

What’s Formal about Formal

Inquiry, Vol. 53, No. 6, Sep 2010: pp. 0–0
1502-3923
0020-174X
SINQ
Inquiry

Indication? Heidegger’s Method in

Sein und Zeit1

R. MATTHEW SHOCKEY
What’s
R. Matthew
Formal
Shockey
about Formal Indication?
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Indiana University South Bend, USA

(Received 4 June 2009)

ABSTRACT Against the background of a recent exchange between Cristina Lafont

and Hubert Dreyfus, I argue that Heidegger’s method of “formal indication” is at the
heart of his attempt in Sein und Zeit to answer “the ontological question of the being of
the ‘sum’” (SZ, p. 46). This method works reflexively, by picking out certain essential
features of one’s first-person singular being at the outset of its investigation that are
implicit in the question “what is it to be the entity I am?” On the basis of these features,
various further a priori, ontological structures (care and temporality) that constitute
one as a first-person singular entity then become accessible. Formal indication is thus
formal in two senses: it officially designates or signals certain first-person singular
phenomena as the topic of investigation, and it picks out features which define the onto-
logical form of the entity in question. It is thereby the method by which a legitimately
transcendental account of our being may be begun to be generated by each of us from
out of our factical, immanent existence.

I.
What is it to be a first-person singular entity, an “I” as such rather than just
the particular one I happen to be? In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger calls this, in a
short passage about Descartes, “the ontological question of the being of the
‘sum,’”2 and he implies that answering it is the chief aim of his analysis of
“Dasein”—his name for the kind of entity I am and you are, the entity who
says ‘sum.’ In order to pursue this analysis, Heidegger offers what he calls
“formal indications [formale Anzeigen]” of those fundamental aspects of
Dasein that we must begin by examining, on the basis of which its deeper

Correspondence Address: Department of Philosophy, Indiana University South Bend, DW

3281, 1700 Mishawaka Ave. South Bend, IN 46634, USA. Email: shockey2@iusb.edu

0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/10/060525–15 © 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2010.526318
 526 R. Matthew Shockey

constitutive structures (care [Sorge] and temporality [Zeitlichkeit]) become

accessible. Despite its crucial role in SZ, however, Heidegger does almost
nothing there to articulate how formal indication is supposed to work, or his
reasons for calling it formal.3 I here make a case for what he should have
said about formal indication, given what we can see him doing with it in the
book. Specifically, I argue that the function of formal indication is to call
attention to fundamental aspects of my being that are revealed in the specific
act of questioning it; and I argue that it is formal in two senses: (a) it offi-
cially designates or signals certain of these aspects of me, the philosophical
inquirer as the initial topic of investigation; and (b) what it indicates are
those aspects of me that make up what we may regard as my ontological
form (that which makes me the kind of entity I am) as opposed to my ontical
or factical matter (what makes me this me and not another). As such, formal
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indication is the method by which, out of my individual, factical existence, I

am able to reflexively generate a transcendental account of my being, i.e., an
account of that which constitutes me as a first-person singular entity as such,
rather than just the particular one I happen to be.4

II.
While of great importance to an understanding of Heidegger, getting clear
on his method of formal indication promises to shed light on a number of
important issues about the first person, the demands it places on philosophi-
cal method, and the nature and possibility of transcendental philosophy. In
order to give some sense of this, and to frame certain possibilities for treating
the notion of formal indication, I begin with a look at part of a recent
exchange between Hubert Dreyfus and Cristina Lafont.5
At the heart of Heidegger’s early work is a distinction between entities
(Seienden) and that which determines entities as entities, being (Sein) – that
“on the basis of which [woraufhin]” entities are understood as what, how,
and whether they are.6 As do many, Lafont reads Heidegger as claiming that
all understanding depends on those conceptual schemes made up of the con-
tingent concepts of whatever natural, historically varying languages we
speak. In her particular version of this reading, she sees him as equating
being with linguistic conceptual schemes, so that “on the basis of which”
entities are understood is just whatever such scheme we happen to possess.7
And this equation entails, she argues, that there is no room in Heidegger’s
account of language and understanding for what has come to be called direct
reference, i.e., ostensive or demonstrative reference that picks out that which
is referred to directly, without being mediated or determined by whatever
linguistic concepts may happen to figure in any attendant or subsequent
descriptions of the referent. Heidegger is thus directly led into a “linguistic
idealism” that has no way of accounting for how the world provides
constraints on our beliefs about it. Lafont also argues that this picture of
 What’s Formal about Formal Indication? 527

linguistically mediated understanding reduces to nonsense Heidegger’s

attempt to articulate a concept of the understanding of being that is akin to
Kant’s necessary and universal synthetic, a priori knowledge, for no conceptual
scheme made up of contingent linguistic concepts could possibly have the
needed necessary, universal, a priori character.
Dreyfus has no real interest in vindicating the stronger Kantian elements
in Heidegger’s thought, but he does think Heidegger can and ought to be
defended against the charge of linguistic idealism. His focus is thus on the
possibility of access to entities that is not wholly determined by linguistic
conceptual schemes, and he claims, against Lafont, that Heidegger’s method
of formal indication involves precisely the sort of direct reference that she
claims he has no room for. Citing a lecture course from several years before SZ,8
Dreyfus describes formal indication as a kind of “non-committal reference”,
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which “starts by referring to some object or class of objects provisionally,

using contingent features, and arrives at the referent’s essential features only
after an investigation”.9 He thus sees it as mirroring Putnam’s account of
direct reference and Kripke’s account of rigid designation. These show how
we are able to demonstratively (and so non-conceptually) single out an
object, thereby fixing reference to whatever makes it (and anything identical
to it in the relevant ways) the thing it is, which further investigation may
then uncover.10 Though Dreyfus himself does not make the connection, we
may see his understanding of formal indication as fitting within his broader
interpretive framework, which asserts that, for Heidegger, linguistic under-
standing always takes place against a background of extra-linguistic social
practices that involve intra-worldly entities.11 Formal indication should
presumably be seen as piggy-backing on this and bringing to linguistic
expression the extra-linguistic connection to entities we always already have.
Dreyfus’s understanding of formal indication would, if right, go a long way
towards getting Heidegger off the descriptivist hook that Lafont has hung him
on. But, as she correctly observes in her response, Heidegger only invokes
formal indication in the case of the investigation of Dasein. It is not, for
Heidegger, a general method that also figures in the investigation of other enti-
ties in the world. And because Dasein is the entity that we who do the investi-
gating ourselves are, its investigation is reflexive in a way that the investigation
of other entities is not. Partly for this reason, Heidegger believes that the
proper philosophical approach to Dasein is at odds with the objectivizing
stance of the empirical sciences, in which rigid designation and direct reference
as canonically understood have their natural place.12 The reflexivity of formal
indication is thus, as Lafont claims, decisive against Dreyfus and has serious
implications for how he understands Heidegger’s larger project.
As I will demonstrate in what follows, however, a proper understanding
of the formal nature of Heidegger’s method and the project it initiates in SZ
shows that it undermines Lafont’s interpretation as well. For, to work
reflexively, formal indication presupposes that what is indicated are fixed,
 528 R. Matthew Shockey

necessary or constitutive aspects of the one who does the indicating, which
aspects must be understood as standing apart from whatever particular
language she happens to speak.13 Since it is these necessary aspects of the
one who is reflexively indicated that, when explicated, are what Heidegger
equates with her being, this means he does not equate being with linguistic
conceptual scheme. Rather, being—the being of the one doing the indicating—is
brought to language without being initially determined by it. Formal indica-
tion, properly understood, is thus a method that presupposes the possibility of
the very sort of non-linguistic transcendentalism that Lafont says is incom-
patible with Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.

III.
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The idea of formal indication was one Heidegger had been developing in his
lecture courses for several years before SZ. The contexts in which it comes
up vary, but most concern questions about how to offer a phenomenology of
life or lived experience or some aspect of it without ossifying or distorting
the phenomena in question—“stilling the stream” in Natorp’s famous
phrase. SZ, however, opens with an apparently different question: what is
the sense or meaning (Sinn) of being (Sein)? Because being is always the
being of that which is, entities, this is the question: what is it for an entity—
any entity—to be? The concern here is not obviously the same as the concern
with lived experience, but the connection may be readily shown. In lived
experience, entities are experienced and understood as being by the one who
is alive, and there are different ways she has of so understanding them. Some
are alive (in the way she is, or in other ways); some are merely physical;
many are useful; a few appear to be eternal; etc.14 To fully account for the
character of lived experience thus requires an account of the unity of the
ways of being of those entities that are experienced. What is perhaps distinctive
about SZ relative to the earlier lecture courses is its reversal of the priority of
questions: the question of being becomes primary, the examination of the
entity who encounters entities as being only a means to answering it. But it is
the means: to seek the meaning of being is to seek the unity of the understanding
of being, hence the unity of the being of the entity who understands.15
Heidegger’s name for the entity that experiences entities as being and
whose self-analysis must be the focus of the inquiry into being is, as noted,
Dasein, but the impersonality of the term (and the pronouns that go with it)
can induce us to forget that it is we, as individuals, who ask the question of
the meaning of being, and whose analysis promises to provide the answer.
The investigation of Dasein is, in other words, always an investigation of me
by me, one in which I inquire into my being, i.e., what it is to be the kind of
entity I am. Heidegger’s focus is, of course, on how to understand “am”
rather than “I”, for he sees focus on “I” as having typically led to it being
treated as an object present to the investigator in the manner of the objects
 What’s Formal about Formal Indication? 529

of natural sciences, thus obscuring the fact of the identity between investigator
and investigated, and the practical (or, better, enactive) form this reflexive
self-relation must take. But this is not to say, as many do, that Heidegger is
trying to displace the “I” or subjectivity from the center of philosophy. He is
only concerned to guard against a particular ontological interpretation of
what it is to be a subject. And so his own investigations remain first-person
singular in form, for that is the form of the verb “am”. The question about
its sense or meaning can only properly be taken up by one who employs it.

IV.
But what exactly is it for me to take up this question of my being, of what I
mean when I say I am? If I ask myself (or someone asks me) what or who I
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am, the most natural answer is that I am (among other things) a philosophy
professor, an amateur cook and gardener, a recent parent, and an American.
I might also note that I am sometimes sad, sometimes happy; that I am par-
tially color blind and less than six feet tall; that I am planning to write a
book on Heidegger, go to the lake, and eat breakfast, though not in that
order or all at the same time; and, that as I set these words down, I am writing
a paper on formal indication. For me “I am” functions normally in all of
these assertions of who I am and what I am doing, feeling, planning etc. And
so, it would seem, I am constantly engaged with my being, in a quite
straightforward sense. Nevertheless, we don’t yet have in view what
Heidegger is after when he refers to our being, for what I have so far
expressed is my understanding of and engagement with my being me, the
particular individual I am.
To take a step towards my being in the sense Heidegger is concerned with,
note that one of the things I may say of myself is that I am able to reflexively
refer to myself and assert the things about myself that I just have. Call assertions
of what I am, am doing, etc., as offered in the previous paragraph first-order
assertions of my being. The assertion that I have an ability to make first-
order assertions is itself an assertion of a different sort than those first-order
assertions themselves, a second-order assertion that points to a common
capacity that I use each time I make a first-order one. This second-order
assertion that I have this capacity to assert is true no matter which particular
first-order assertions I make. Moreover, anyone who can make first-order
assertions can, if her attention were called to it, say she is able to make such
assertions about herself, even though they will be for the most part different
from mine and those of anyone else with the same capacity. In this sense, the
second-order assertion that I am able to make first-order assertions about
my being is a peculiar sort of claim about what constitutes me not just as me
but as a “me”. Unlike the first-order assertions that express what I under-
stand of myself as the particular self I am, the assertion that I have a capacity
for making such assertions expresses (part of) an understanding of myself as
 530 R. Matthew Shockey

a certain general kind of entity, one with a general capacity for expressing its
self-understanding. Given the ontological aims of SZ, specifically the ana-
lytic of Dasein’s goal of saying what it is, in general, to be Dasein, it is obvi-
ously the understanding I have of myself in terms of such second-order,
general, constitutive features or capacities that are of interest. For, as noted
earlier, being is that “on the basis of which” entities are understood as entities,
and what the analytic of Dasein aims at (on its way to answering the Seins-
frage) is the basis of my own understanding of myself as the entity I am qua
understander, i.e., qua Dasein.

V.
The chief methodological question is now,16 how do we begin to get our con-
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stitutive, ontological structures—such as our capacity for making first-order

assertions about ourselves—in view in such a way that we may “thematize
[thematisieren]” them?17 Or, how do we come to see ourselves in such a way
that we may render ourselves “transparent [durchsichtig]” in our being, as
Heidegger puts it, appropriating and recasting the modern period’s domi-
nant visual metaphor of self-knowledge?18 Clearly we need a method that
will not only allow us to bring our being-constitution (Seinsverfassung) into
view and distinguish it from our merely ontical or factical, individual fea-
tures, but also that will make sure that it is not distorted by imported
assumptions about what we are. This latter will be particularly difficult for
the trained philosopher who finds herself asking, “what am I?”, for a
number of precise, if incompatible answers will be readily available to her: I
am a mind, a thinking thing; I am a body and my “I” ultimately only a com-
plex material phenomenon; I am a rational animal; etc. And everyone, non-
philosophers and philosophers alike, will have versions of these or other
answers provided to them by their culture (religious, political, scientific,
etc.). Moreover, if Heidegger is right that we have a tendency to try to assim-
ilate our being to that of other entities because of the very character of our
ontological constitution (the fact that we have our being in a world with
other entities amidst which we find ourselves dispersed), anyone in this situ-
ation of philosophical self-questioning will likely be pulled more or less
strongly to think that the question of what she is, is like any similar-sounding
“what is X?” question about other kinds of entities. She will fail to see that
there is not a univocal sense of “what” that goes with both “am” and “is”.
So, how does one proceed? How do I proceed? How do I make sure that I
ask the question about my being in the right way, where that means not simply
assuming that my way of being is like that of other things (though allowing
that it may turn out to be)? Heidegger’s crucial methodological insight is the
recognition that there is one thing which can’t be gotten around: any answer
to the question “what am I?” or “what does it mean to say I am?” must
include the fact that I am the kind of entity who can ask this question. This
 What’s Formal about Formal Indication? 531

then provides a fundamental condition of adequacy on any answer to it: any

answer that fails to account for the fact that the question can be asked will
be false, for it will entail a pragmatic contradiction in which I am asked to
affirm a theory of what I am that denies the very perspective of questioning
out of which the theory is generated. This may sound trivial, but (though it is
impossible to argue it here) there is no shortage of philosophical theories
that fail to meet this condition, as do, for instance, most (perhaps all) forms
of substance monism, eliminative materialism, and thoroughgoing social
constructivism.19 Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein is, if nothing else, designed
to avoid the pragmatic contradiction involved in such theories.
More important for present purposes than this condition of adequacy is
that the question “what am I?” itself implies a way of beginning to come up
with an answer to it. For without knowing anything else about what I am
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beyond my ability to ask the question of my being, I can still look at the
question itself to see what it shows about me as the one asking it and let that
give a direction to any further analysis of what I am. So what exactly does
the question “what am I?” show about me ontologically? Three things (at
least): first, the question shows that to be the kind of entity I am is to be an
entity who has questioning as one of its possibilities; second, it shows that I
have among my possibilities a question about my being, which shows up in
the question as something that, even as I am unsure of it, I am able to ask
about and that I find myself concerned with; and third, it shows that I can
identify the question of my being as my question.
With this, it is, I hope, obvious where we have gotten to. Looking at the
form of the question “what am I?” (understood as “what is it to say I am?”)
leads to precisely those fundamental aspects of Dasein that Heidegger begins
the analytic of Dasein by formally indicating: mineness (Jemeinigkeit) and
existence (Existenz).20 For to recognize that I have a question about my being
shows that I am oriented towards my being, which orientation is the key
dimension of existence: “Dasein is an entity which, in its being, comports itself
understandingly towards that being. With this, the formal concept of existence
is indicated” (SZ, pp. 52–53). And to recognize the question of my being as
mine, and to see the question as reflecting my concern about my being, is to
recognize the essential mineness of what I am: “that being which is at issue for
[Dasein] in its very being is in each case mine [je meines]” (SZ, p. 42).21 And let
me emphasize: by virtue of the fact that these features are implicit in the question
“what am I?” they are thereby features of any entity who can find itself in a
position of asking that question. For that reason, mineness and existence must
be seen as constitutive, ontological features of any self-questioning entity.22

VI.
Formal indication has thus emerged as the technique for addressing those
aspects of what I am that are implicit in the act of raising the question of
 532 R. Matthew Shockey

what I am.23 And with that we are now in a position to ask, in what sense is
the initial signaling or indicating of these basic, ontological aspects of me
qua Dasein formal? Prior to SZ, Heidegger is occasionally critical of the
unreflective use of, or appeal to, various kinds of formality on the part of
philosophers, and of the role often given to formal logic in metaphysics and
ontology. The choice to identify a key component of his own methodology
as formal may thus seem somewhat surprising. Unfortunately, his occa-
sional explanations of formal indication in his lecture courses mostly do
little to help the matter, for (with one exception I will touch on in a moment)
they are typically frustratingly vague and unsatisfying and do little to moti-
vate that particular choice of terminology.24 In interpreting SZ, this lack of
any truly clear explanation of what makes formal indication formal means
that we can only look to see what Heidegger actually does in that book if we
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want to understand what is formal about it and about the indications of

Dasein’s ontological features that begin its existential analytic.
Based on what I have shown above, there are two ways to hear “formal”
that are relevant. One is that what is indicated is indicated formally in the
sense that it is recognized explicitly and officially. This is the sense of for-
mality in the idea of a formal statement of intent or formal offer of a posi-
tion. Heard with this in mind, formally indicated features of Dasein are
those that are officially being picked out for further analysis, as mineness
and existence clearly are. But it is also the case that Heidegger is holding
on to a sense of formality he associates with those he sometimes criticizes,
namely, the idea of generality and abstraction that is at work when we talk
about formal logic or distinguish form from matter or content. For, as we
have seen, mineness and existence, while aspects of me, the philosophical
inquirer, are ones that pick me out in terms of aspects that will be equally
definitive of any inquirer. They show me not as this or that particular indi-
vidual but as an individual or self engaged in the act of questioning
himself.25 What I formally indicate is thus something reasonably called my
ontological “form”.
This thought gets even stronger legs when we consider the detailed
analysis of Dasein that follows upon the initial formal indications of mine-
ness and existence. This analysis brings to light the basic, constitutive
structures of Dasein, principal among which are, as Heidegger works them
out, being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein), care (Sorge; the being of
Dasein), and temporality (Zeitlichkeit; the meaning [Sinn] of the being of
Dasein). These each have articulated moments, and each is structurally
related to the others (though not entirely consistently in the text): they rep-
resent a progressively deeper exhibition of the phenomenon of Dasein’s
being and, in the case of temporality, that which ultimately gives it its
unity and shows its connection to being as such.26 All of this amounts to an
account of what it is for any entity who is Dasein to be Dasein, an account,
in other words, of what we may regard as the form of Dasein’s being, that
 What’s Formal about Formal Indication? 533

which is the same for all of us even as we instantiate it in our differing

respective ways.
Finally, reflect on the question of the wholeness of Dasein that appears in
Division I, Chapter 5 and then opens Division II. Heidegger observes that, if
I understand wholeness to mean my entirety as this particular individual, I
cannot grasp it, for I am always both no longer and not yet what I am. I can,
nevertheless, elucidate the entirety of my ontological constitution (care) and
the principle of its unity (temporality). The wholeness I have in virtue of
being the ontological kind of entity I am (Dasein) is thus formally accessible,
even if my material or factical wholeness is inaccessible because always
ongoing and incomplete.
Given all of this, one would be hard-pressed to deny the formal character
of the analysis of Dasein, its being an account of something reasonably
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called the form of Dasein, and I doubt any serious reader of Heidegger
would try. But what is crucial, and what I think is not sufficiently recognized
(or at least stressed), is that this formal analysis is a formal analysis that can
only be given by me as I take up the question of my own being and seek to
elucidate the constitution I have as the kind of entity I am. In one of the
more helpful passages on formal indication in his lecture courses, Heidegger
makes essentially this point. He describes what he sees as Descartes’ attempt
to move from the proposition “I exist so long as I am thinking” to one that
purges it of its indexicality in order to make it a ground for the deduction of
various other non-indexical, formal truths that treat the concept of thought
as defining a kind of substance. While Heidegger criticizes Descartes’
“formal-logical” move here, he at the same time suggests that “if, by con-
trast, one takes Descartes’ proposition in the sense of a formal indication, in
such a way that it is not taken directly (where it says nothing), but is related
to the respective [jeweilige], concrete instance of what it precisely means”—
i.e., the one uttering it—“then it has its legitimacy”.27 So the problem isn’t
with the formality per se, i.e., with the fact that Descartes offers a principle
that is necessary or universal (insofar as it holds of any thinker); the problem
is rather with the attempt to eliminate the proposition’s token-reflexivity
(and so the intrinsic self-relatedness of thought). Taking the proposition as a
formal indication thus preserves its formality but also holds on to its inelim-
inable first-personal character. If we take this as instructive for how to read
the many propositions about Dasein in SZ, we can see that what is import-
ant is precisely that we recognize all of these as universally assertable of
Dasein, but as meaningful only when asserted by, and so also derived by,
individual Dasein in reference to themselves.

VII.
The propositions that make up the analytic of Dasein in SZ may thus be seen
as forming an account of the constitutive ontological or transcendental form
 534 R. Matthew Shockey

of first-person singular being, developed from within the first-person

perspective. This returns us to the dispute between Dreyfus and Lafont with
which I began. While Lafont recognizes the reflexivity of formal indication,
she doesn’t follow out the consequences of this method and see that it
implies that, in attending to the form of the question “what am I?” or “what
is it to say I am?”, we may each begin to find those constitutive, a priori,
formal structures of our being that constitute us as the kind of entity we are,
whatever particular way we have of instantiating them.28 This means she
misses the fact that the reflexivity of formal indication both drives the trans-
cendental dimension of Heidegger’s project and frees it from many of the
problems that often are found in transcendental philosophy, particularly (as
in Kant) the splitting of the “I” into two egos, one empirical and one trans-
cendental. Heidegger avoids this doubling by carefully distinguishing the
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being of Dasein (its ontological constitution, that which determines individual

Dasein as the kind of entities they are) from the entities themselves who have
Dasein as their way of being, e.g., you and me.
Perhaps in this narrow sense of denying that the transcendental ego is
itself an entity we may see Heidegger as aiming to “de-transcendentalize”
Kant, as Lafont says.29 But he doesn’t do this, as she claims, by assuming
that our understanding of being is wholly determined by language and so
not an understanding of anything necessary a priori. In fact, his method
shows that it is possible to bring our being to light without this explication
being wholly determined by whatever linguistic conceptualization of it we
may have begun with. The philosophical inquiry I have described is, in prin-
ciple at least, independent of the particularities of the language, and much of
the factical situation, of the philosophical inquirer. It is not, perhaps, pos-
sible for all individuals, or individuals at every point in history, to engage in
it. It may be that only after a certain set of philosophical possibilities has
worked itself out (e.g., Plato–Hegel) does this particular philosophical
account of what we are become available.30 Perhaps it is even the case that
users of some languages will have an easier time pursuing this inquiry than
others, because of contingent features of their languages. But all that is still
compatible with what has become available being understood as truly con-
stitutive of any Dasein, regardless of its factical situation.
The account of formal indication I have offered implies equally that the
constitutive structures of being that define us cannot in any way be identi-
fied with extra-linguistic social practices. Dreyfus is right that our under-
standing of being is not identical with or exhausted by any linguistic
conceptual scheme. But social practices are no more necessary than the
conceptual frameworks of natural languages. What it is to be a social
practice or a language is, however, invariant in the way that no particular
practice or language is. And it is such being that Heidegger sees ontological
investigation as explicating, beginning with the being of the investigator
herself.
 What’s Formal about Formal Indication? 535

Notes
1. A version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American
Philosophical Association in Vancouver on April 11, 2009. I would like to thank my
commentator, Cecily Gonzalez, and the audience at the session there for helpful com-
ments. I would also like to thank Clark Remington, Clinton Tolley, Nate Zuckerman,
and two referees for this journal for their suggestions and criticisms, and Indiana University
South Bend for a Faculty Research Grant that facilitated its initial composition.
2. Heidegger (1993 [1927]), hereafter SZ, p. 46. Translations are based on Macquarrie and
Robinson’s but modified as needed.
3. So unexplicit is the importance of formal indication in SZ that Macquarrie and Robinson
basically missed the fact that it was a technical concept for Heidegger. Only after the earlier
lecture courses came to light did it become clear that this was an idea Heidegger had been
developing for some time. The role of formal indication in these has received a considerable
amount of scholarly attention in recent years; see in particular Kisiel’s landmark work (Kisiel
[1993]), in which may be found extensive references to Heidegger’s early discussions of formal
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indication. These early passages tend to be more suggestive than illuminating, however, thus
my own examination here deals little with the pre-SZ treatments of formal indication, focus-
ing instead on its functional role in SZ. In developing my understanding of formal indication,
I have found Dahlstrom (1994) and Streeter (1997) to be particularly helpful. Dahlstrom,
focusing on work prior to SZ, rightly calls attention to the reflexive and transformative
aspects of Heideggerian phenomenology and links these to the method of formal indication.
Streeter, in part building on Dahlstrom, explores formal indication in SZ in relation to Hus-
serl’s notion of indication and in connection with the general question of how Heidegger
understands truth and assertion. What I offer here may be seen, I believe, as buttressing his
(and Dahlstrom’s) reading. It goes beyond it in, among other ways, trying to offer motivation
for, and clarification of, Heidegger’s method without getting quite so caught up in
Heidegger’s own terminology and the larger issue of truth. I should also mention here the
general influence of Steven Crowell’s work on shaping my views about the place and import-
ance of subjectivity in Heidegger’s thought. The present paper is part of my alternative ver-
sion of how to “locate the first-person” in SZ, as the title of Crowell (2001) puts it.
4. Heidegger writes that “the transcendence of Dasein’s being is distinctive in that in it lies
the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation [Individuation]” (SZ, p. 38).
The method of formal indication as I present it here makes sense of this claim as follows:
it shows how I can understand my ontological constitution as both transcendental, so
constitutive of any entity of the same kind as me, and also how explicating my under-
standing of this constitution requires me to take up my own being, and so see myself as
the individual I am. To fully develop Heidegger’s understanding of individuation, how-
ever, would also require looking at his discussion of death, which I do not do here.
5. I am building here on Shockey (2008). Relevant works of Dreyfus and Lafont are
Dreyfus (1990), hereafter BITW; Dreyfus (2002), hereafter CCL; Lafont (2000), hereaf-
ter HLW; and Lafont (2002), hereafter R.
6. SZ, p. 6. This distinction between entities and the being of entities he came to call the
“ontological difference” (Heidegger (1975 [1927]), and it is the centerpiece of his early
thought.
7. HLW, passim.
8. Heidegger (1978 [1921/22]), p. 33. This text’s description of formal indication doesn’t
square with how the method is ultimately deployed in SZ. In the latter, what are for-
mally indicated are essential or constitutive features of Dasein—in a suitable understand-
ing of “essential”—rather than the “contingent features” Dreyfus describes. The 1921/22
passage, by contrast, describes formal indication as only aiming at, rather than starting
with, the essential, and as requiring an “appreciat[ion] of the non-essential” along the
way. The difficulty with the idea of essentiality here is, I believe, largely verbal, but it
 536 R. Matthew Shockey

remains the case that there is no way of understanding what happens in SZ as fitting
Dreyfus’s account of beginning with the contingent to work towards the essential.
9. CCL, p. 192.
10. It is debatable whether such reference is as unmediated by linguistic concepts as Lafont
and Dreyfus both assume, but for the sake of argument I’ll concede that it is, and so for
that reason represents a serious challenge to conceptualist or descriptivist accounts of
reference.
11. As spelled out in BITW.
12. See R, pp. 231–32.
13. This suggests that there is, after all, a deep connection between Heidegger’s formal indi-
cation and direct reference à la Putnam and Kripke. Given that the latter has its proper
role in explaining what it is to take entities as objects in empirical, scientific contexts, this
connection might be taken as evidence that my reading of Heidegger must be off, given
that, as I have noted, he is quite emphatic that there is a fundamental distinction
between the way we relate to ourselves (even in philosophical theorizing) and the way we
relate to objects when studying them in empirical science. I can’t offer an adequate
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response to this worry here, but I think one can be given along the following lines: what-
ever differences there are between how we understand the relation between determinate
entity and ontological constitution in the case of us Dasein and that of any other entity,
it remains the case that Heidegger thinks all entities, including us, have ontological con-
stitutions. The distinction between entity and its constitution is just how he understands
the “ontological difference” between entity and being at this stage of his thought. But
that means that his question of the meaning (Sinn) of being is a question about just what
our univocal understanding of “ontological constitution” is. To even be able to raise and
pursue this question, however, presupposes that we can, in a single unitary act of under-
standing, grasp all the different ways of being (ontological constitutions) of entities. The
connection between formal indication and direct reference is grounded precisely in this
unity of understanding; it reflects the fact that, even as we understand the ways of being
of Dasein and objects of nature differently, we also understand that they are unified pre-
cisely in being entities with ontological constitutions.
14. This is far from an exhaustive list, nor are these meant to be exclusive of one another
(though they may be). Ultimately Heidegger thinks there are a few basic “regions” of
being (in his use of Husserl’s term), i.e., ways we have of understanding entities, but part
of the work of ontology is showing what these are.
15. Heidegger’s strategy is thus a recognizable descendant of earlier views that seek the
structure of what is in the structure of the understanding of what is. This at least partly
explains his focus in this period of his thought on figures in the rationalist and transcen-
dental traditions, where this approach finds its most obvious proponents, though it is
worth noting that it is also the approach of Locke and Hume, for whom limning the
understanding is as much the focus as for Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.
16. I here ignore what I am increasingly coming to think is a crucial but often neglected
aspect of Heidegger’s methodology, namely the place of mood (Stimmung) in it. At vari-
ous places he indicates that we can only have our ontological structures disclosed to us if
we are in a mood in which our concern with intra-worldly entities fades into the back-
ground. The chief example of such a mood that he offers in SZ is anxiety. So how do we
get into such a mood? And what does it take to cultivate it in a way that will allow us to
do ontology? I touch on these questions in relation to Heidegger’s comments about Des-
cartes’ method of doubt in §4 of Shockey (forthcoming), and I address them at greater
length in Shockey (under review-a).
17. Heidegger fairly consistently reserves the concepts of theme (Thema) and thematization
for that specifically philosophical form of linguistic expression in which the being of enti-
ties (or, at least, Dasein) is explicated. He also uses capital-I “Interpretation” to refer to
the results of philosophical thematization, distinguishing it from “Auslegung”, which
 What’s Formal about Formal Indication? 537

designates any form of taking-as, even that of non-verbal behavior such as the using of
an object as a hammer to pound a nail. Hence the title of the First Part of SZ begins
“The Interpretation [Interpretation] of Dasein...”, and the first section of this, §9, is “The
Theme [Thema] of the Analytic of Dasein.”
18. SZ, p. 7. Note that there is a parallel between modes of care (Sorge) and those of sight
(Sicht): sight of the world is Umsicht, sight of others is Rücksicht and Nachsicht, and
sight of the self is Durchsichtigkeit. Once on the lookout for these terms, they can be seen
to pop up all over the place. As is clear from the present discussion, Durchsichtigkeit is
particularly important: almost from the outset of SZ Heidegger characterizes the task of
philosophy as rendering Dasein durchsichtig to itself. See Raffoul (1998), 187–92, for fur-
ther discussion of this.
19. It’s perhaps worth pointing out that the condition of adequacy I point to here does not
rule out the possibility of explanations of how self-referential entities came into a world
which didn’t once have them, as anyone committed to a naturalistic, Darwinian view of
life must think has happened. Nor does it deny that self-referential entities are shaped
by, or even brought into being by, cultural or linguistic forces. But the understanding of
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what it is to be a singular, self-referential, self-questioning entity is a separate and prior

question from that of how such entities came into being out of a world in which they
didn’t always exist, or how I came into being as the individual I am in a world of imper-
sonal social forces.
20. See SZ §§9, p. 12 for the fullest discussion of these terms and their status as formally
indicated. Note also that Heidegger’s sense of existence is to be distinguished from the
traditional sense of the term, which simply picks out whether an entity is. Here it refers to
the way of being specific to Dasein as distinct from other entities. Heidegger further
twists the traditional ontological terminology, going on to say that Dasein’s “essence
lies...in the fact that in each case it has its own being to be as its own [daß es je sein Sein
als seiniges zu sein hat]” (SZ, p. 12), a claim that is echoed and spelled out further at the
beginning of §9, where he famously says that “[t]he essence of Dasein lies in [liegt in] its
existence” (p. 42). For further discussion of this see my Shockey (under review-b).
21. SZ, p. 12: “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it
is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its being an entity, that being is at issue for it
[Das Dasein ist ein Seiendes, das nicht nur unter anderem Seienden vorkommt. Es ist
vielmehr dadurch ontisch ausgezeichnet, daß es diesem Seienden in seinem Sein um dieses
Sein selbst geht].” (Cf. e.g., pp. 42, 133, 143.)
22. It may be that only humans are such entities; but it may turn out not to be. It may not
even be the case that all humans are such entities. Heidegger doesn’t and needn’t care,
for which entities turn out to be of this kind is irrelevant for the question, what is it to be
this kind of entity? That is Heidegger’s question. It is the question of the being of Dasein,
for that term designates any and all entities who can ask after their own being, thus who
have that being at issue (existence) as their own (mineness).
23. Keep in mind that words like “what” and “aspect” must themselves come to be under-
stood in relation to the form of being we disclose ourselves as having in the investigation
that follows these initial formal indications. That is, we cannot assume that when we talk
about what Dasein is, or what aspects or features it has, that these concepts function the
same way as when we talk about, say, what physical things or living things are, and what
sort of aspects or features they have.
24. E.g., Heidegger (1978 [1928]), p. 64.
25. Cf. Heidegger (1978 [1928]), p. 242: “If we say ‘Dasein is in each case essentially mine’,
and if our task is to define this characteristic of Dasein ontologically, this does not mean
we should investigate the essence of my self, as this factical individual, or of some other
given individual. The object of the inquiry is not the individual essence of my self, but it
is the essence of mineness and selfhood as such.”
 538 R. Matthew Shockey

26. See my Shockey (in progress) for a detailed exploration of these structures and their
interconnections. John Haugeland, the primary influence on my work, has perhaps done
the most to explore them in all their complex interrelations, but his detailed interpretations
are as yet unpublished. See Boedeker (2001) for one of the few interpretations of
Heidegger that offers a detailed presentation of the various formal structures of the work
and their interrelations. I have quibbles with his specifics, but I am very much sympathetic
to his general effort to show the systematicity hidden within Heidegger’s terminological
thicket.
27. Heidegger (1994 [1923/24]), p. 250. See Shockey (forthcoming) §§3c and 4a for more
detailed discussion of this passage.
28. In Shockey (under review-b) I offer an account of how this “instantiation” works.
29. HLW passim.
30. Compare: it was in the nineteenth century when non-Euclidean geometry suddenly
emerged as a topic with a number of major mathematicians tackling it. The kinds of ques-
tions that led to it were, presumably, available at that point in a way they weren’t before.
But the mathematical entities that the new geometries referred to needn’t be understood as
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historically variant just because they only became accessible at a certain point in history.

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