On Formal Indication: Discussion of The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time"

Review: On Formal Indication: Discussion of "The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time""Reviewed Work(s): The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time." by Theodore KisielReview by: CAMERON MCEWENSource: Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 25 (1995), pp. 226-239Published by: BrillStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24658671Accessed: 24-03-2017 20:27 UTC

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On Formal Indication: Discussion of

The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time»

CAMERON MCEWEN

Die Funktion der formalen Anzeiger zu verstehen ist aus der Grundaufgabe der Philosophie.

Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks

The great question posed by Heidegger, a question which applies as much to the consideration of his own work as it does to any thinking and reading, is: how to begin? The specific claim of Sein und Zeit,1 for example, is that two millenia of scholarship on the Greeks have served mainly to cover over and forget, indeed to contradict, the beginning made by them, not to repeat and to deepen it. Now Heidegger schol arship finds itself in a similar situation. Where Heidegger argues that the beginning is the hardest thing of all, we have long ago not only started, but brought to completion, such an array of work on his texts that it is now impossible to oversee it in its entirety. Heidegger meet ings, papers, books, and of course, grants proliferate like mushrooms: but have we yet started to read his texts?

Ted Kisiel's long work on starting ("genesis") contributes to the needed new beginning in Heidegger scholarship in two important ways. First, the overview he provides of Heidegger's development leading up to SZ challenges readers of the text to consider it, not in terms of our

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own preoccupations and needs, but in terms of the intellectual and social conditions in Germany in the 1920s as reflected in Heidegger's early career. Not that the importance of SZ is bound to its historical or individual context, but its undoubted general importance must be exposed by a reading informed by the multiple currents that brought Heidegger to the work and which he attempted to treat in it. The Gen esis of Heidegger's Being and Time"* amply provides this background for those with no need to go further into it; meanwhile, Kisiel's vast store of notes and references provides direction for ongoing study by those who have the occasion to work through the matter for themselves. Second, and yet more importantly, Kisiel stresses a theme through out his book from which the needed new beginning might be made: "formal indication." The "nerve of the undertaking" in SZ, he writes, is "the assessment of the power of 'formal indication' in accessing and expressing the full immediacy of human experience" (K, 455). This is the topic that provides the backbone of Kisiel's "Genesis" story. He finds it already at work in the first post-war lecture course in 1919 and then traces Heidegger's subsequent investigation and application of the notion in his lectures, seminars, and drafts of SZ over the decade

leading to the 1927 text as we have it. Here we find Heidegger repeat edly grappling not only with the textbook problems of contemporary philosophers but also (in a way that seems to have electrified his stu dents and spread his reputation throughout the German university system long before the publication of SZ) with the problems of the great thinkers of the tradition, especially the Greeks.

The theme of "formal indication" is treated in F.-W. von Herrmann's

work in German on Heidegger but has played little role in American Continental philosophy. Kisiel is correct that the time has come to recognize the centrality of this notion in Heidegger's early texts and to consider its implications for him and for philosophy at large. Ex actly because Kisiel is importantly correct in this contention, however, it is incumbent on a review of his book to bring critical focus to bear on his treatment of it. It would have been helpful, for example, given Kisiel's twin focus on "formal indication" and on Heidegger's research (particularly on the Greeks) in the decade before SZ, to learn some thing of the fundamental connection between these themes: in what way did Heidegger think that insight into "formal indication" could contribute to the renaissance of Greek thinking which it was the aim of SZ "once more to ignite" (SZ, 2)? What does the existential analysis of the everyday worlds of Dasein, where "formal indication" plays its role, have to do with the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle?


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"Formal indication" leads directly into the complicated thicket of Heidegger's topic. For if, as Kisiel notes, "formal indication" first gives "access" and "expression" to experience, if formal structure must there fore be given with all experience (including that of its own investiga tion), it must be something that we already know (in some sense), indeed must always have known. But are there matters that we "know" about our own living, even things that we ourselves have "decided" and "elected," that have somehow passed into general obscurity and been utterly "forgotten"? It is Heidegger's contention that this is in deed the case. What he terms (following Husserl) "authentic" exist ence is an existence that would probe this obscurity and take responsibility for the "decisions" made in it.

Now sometimes Kisiel treats "formal indication" in a way that leads in the direction of these obscure problems. He can refer, for example, to "the full identification of the factic and the means to get at it ('for mal indication')" (K, 20) and to "a double play of matter and method, What and How, drawn to a point where they are one and the same: a hermeneutics o/facticity" (K, 21). So seen, facticity and formality are "the same" for Heidegger, not as some bare identity, but in the mu tual implication of the other: no formality (at least no formality that he is interested in) that does not express itself in and as fact; no fact (at least no fact in his sense of the "facticity" of our worlds of con cern) that is not always already shaped by some formal meaning or other. Understood in this way (but without the unnecessary and ulti mately misleading "full immediacy" "drawn to a point" of "full identi fication"), "formal indication" would signal what is always already the case in human experience, meaning, and fact woven together.

The most cursory glance at concrete individual existence reveals, however, that the complexes of fact and meaning which constitute our identity and world are no constant, no singularity. Things "come to gether" and things "fall apart," things seem "hopeful" and things seem "hopeless." In each case, there is no veil of ideas and feelings more or less draped over a background of "fact." Much rather, it is the facts themselves, and ourselves amongst them, which present themselves now with this meaning, now with that.

World and meaning, identity and facticity are bound together glo bally, then, but constitute no constant. An assessment of the possibili ties over which such complexes might range would seem to be necessary in order to make a critical beginning. But it is exactly Heidegger's distinctive difference from the neo-Kantians, on the one hand, and



from Husserl, on the other, to deny the very possibility of a suppos edly "critical" beginning in this sense. As Kisiel properly stresses, Heidegger's Dasein is always already situated in some or other factical world, and through no exercise of supposedly "pure thought" is it able to extricate itself from this condition. Dasein and "world" belong, for Heidegger, ineluctably together. If a fitting beginning of thought is to be possible, it must be possible for factical individuals in their factical worlds of concern.

Necessarily remaining with, indeed in, world, a beginning of thought yet requires an essential transformation, the " Umschlag des Denkens" (cf. especially, GA 65: sec. 41), through which the inquiring Dasein itself first becomes capable of thought. This entails, because there is no Dasein aside from corresponding world and no world aside from cor responding Dasein, that the entire complex of fact and meaning, one's global world of concern, must somehow begin to show itself as fitting context to the consideration of the text or issue before it.

That Dasein, while always already situated in world, is yet also capa ble of an extreme "paradigm switch" into other possible worlds and identities (both together constituting that "being-in-the-world" which is Dasein) is one of the chief and most difficult implications of Heidegger's analyses of anxiety, boredom, and especially, death. The possible im portance of such "radical displacement" (K, 4) is correctly recognized by Kisiel (cf. especially K, 62 and 519 n. 23), without, however, the theme being allowed to rebound on the shape and matter of his own narrative.

If meaning is always already there in the facts, and if such an en compassing complex of meaning and fact is yet no constant, the pre requisite to properly philosophical thinking would be no supposedly critical "position" achievable in pure thought, but a sort of radical somersault through which one's entire factical world and identity would come to show itself as capable of calling for and sustaining such think ing. Heidegger's later concerns with the loss of "Heimat" and with the uncontrollable growth of " Technik" lie close at hand. Thought and life belong together for him; but he is clear that this is no given "state of affairs" and that the global context of fact and meaning in which this may be seen is the most difficult thing of all for us moderns to come to understand and, especially, to live.

Human beings come to exist in different basic moods and, in fact, whole different worlds of concern through an obscure process that is always already implicated in our living but is usually, and indeed neces sarily, "forgotten." Since it is the aim of philosophy to initiate thought once again (the actualized possibility of it being there before us in


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the Greeks), and since thought in turn is possible only in a global factical world which calls for and sustains it, the first business of phi losophy must be to probe that worldless obscurity in and through which worlds first come to be.

At the same time that Heidegger was putting SZ together near Freiburg, Joyce, not far away in Paris, was composing Finnegan's Wake. Here, too, the great question will be: how reconnoiter an obscurity that modern humans live and require, but do not consider? How treat this obscu rity as an obscurity (i.e., without falsely "illuminating" it), while yet refusing to consign it to its usual oblivion? Thinking with Heidegger means no less than allowing oneself to be overcome by the difficulty of what is here demanded.

But just this involuted and necessarily obscure way of questioning is often refused by Kisiel. Despite the great importance he attributes to "formal indication," he seldom allows himself or his readers to be ex

posed to the confusing problems implicated in the topic. Instead of asking if we have any idea what "human experience" really is (if "for mal indication" is somehow inherent to it), instead of asking what sort of peculiar question this is (which can arise only within "human expe rience"), instead of asking if we have any idea who "we" are (if "hu man experience" has become questionable for us), Kisiel all too often proceeds (as American philosophy has nearly always proceeded) as if you and I know very well what "experience" is and the only problem remaining to us is to describe it adequately, to, as one says, get a handle on it. Never mind that not only "human experience" but also the nature of "describing" and the structure of "adequation" are all necessarily put into question in the fitting investigation of "formal in dication."

In this way of treating the topic (which seems utterly at odds with his emphasis elsewhere on the complex interplay of formal indication and facticity), Kisiel can write:

Philosophy is not theory, outstrips any theory or conceptual system it may develop, because it can be only approximate and never really comprehend the immediate experience it wishes to articulate.... Philosophy... is ultimately reduced to maintaining its proximating orientation.... a praxis of striving and a protreptic encouraging such a striving. Its expressions are only "formal indications".... (K, 59)

Supposedly on the track of "human experience" (which it has not yet comprehended, which indeed "it can . .. never really comprehend"), "philosophy" yet knows both that "this" is its task and that "it" cannot be done. Despite this problem, "philosophy" yet finds no trouble, ap parently, in determining the nature of "theory" and of "conceptual



system," even though these, like "philosophy" itself, occur only as modes of exactly that "human experience" which we are said not yet to know because we can never know "it." This poor man's Kantianism seems nonetheless to possess easy access to what is "really" and "ultimately" the case.

There is a multiple confusion at work here which has nothing to do with Heidegger's use of "formal indication." "Formal indication" in Heidegger does not name some "asymptotic" task, for the dedication to which we require some sort of "protrepdc." Much rather, the "indi cation" is a sign showing the direction we must go with our thought for the precise reason that we have always already gone there. The matter to be given thought is essentially past. Such indicators are "for mal" because they are removed from the essential realm they indicate. They are "formal" in another and more important sense in that the realm indicated by them is itself "formal" (in several senses, but espe cially that of Plato). The two implications of "formal" together say that, in one sense, we are far from the essential realm, in another sense, near. Dasein as Dasein is this simultaneous near-far (as Kisiel himself notes in several places, especially K, 549 n. 3).

The question of "formal indication" therefore names the deeper ques tion of that Dasein which we ourselves are. The way to, indeed the way within, SZ lies in allowing ourselves radically to be put into ques tion by these matters such that an essential transformation into thought becomes possible. Heidegger calls such a transformation the "Umschlag des Denkens" and it is with this Umschlag, and with this Umschlag alone, that thinking (including any thought concerning Heidegger's way to wards SZ) can begin.

To follow along this involuted way with Heidegger, two areas must be investigated. The first area concerns "formal indication" and fol lows from Heidegger's arguments that: a) the relation of "form" to the "immediate" is not obvious and singular, as sometimes presented by Kisiel, but rather (as has been central to philosophy since antiquity in the quarrels of idealists and materialists, realists and nominalists, etc.) is highly contested because plural·, b) the concrete Dasein in its global world of concern has "always already" made a "decision" in re gard to this contest such that identity and world cannot be without displaying some or other modality of it; c) the question of the mean ing of being [die Seinsfrage) may therefore be put in terms of the γιγαντομαχία περί της ουσίας from Plato's Sophist or of the competing views of matter and form as treated in Aristotle's Physics (hence the fundamental connection between existential analysis and a renaissance of Greek thinking); d) the question of our ability to pose the Seinsfrage


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today may therefore be put in terms of our ability or disability to en ter once more into such a conceptual battle. Heidegger is referring to this chain of analysis when he says in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik:

The fundamental-ontological founding of metaphysics in SZ must understand itself as a repetition. The passage from Plato's Sophistes which opens the investigation serves as no mere decoratation but as a reference to the fact that the gigantomachia concerning being took flame in classical metaphysics. The way in which being as such is understood here [in the SZ project] is already visible in this battle.3

In sum: the question of being may be put in terms of the question of the relation of "form" to "matter." If the former question must be raised again (for a whole series of political, social, cultural, environ mental and intellectual reasons), so also, and first of all, must the latter.

The second area of investigation concerns such "contesting" ques tioning itself. For if the question of the relation of "form" to "matter" poses the question of being, and if this question has precisely there fore "always already" been "decided" for any sort of "being-in-the-world," it would seem that such a "decision" must have been made, somehow, before all identity and world. But "where" and "when" is a "before" of the world? And "who" is "before" identity?

For any investigation of these difficult matters, as Heidegger unforget tably stresses in the very title of his master work, time becomes the great issue: any (present) attempt thoughtfully to begin implicates the (future) need to get that (past) achievement (the fitting contextual complex of fact and meaning that must already be present as the basis for thought) right. But how to achieve such a "knot in time" (Eliot), where the essential matter—beginning to think—seems to lie before the beginning and after the end? For Heidegger, the key to these questions is to be found in the irre ducible plurality of time itself As he baldly states in the 1924 "Der Begriff der Zeit": "Die Zeit ist sinnlos; Zeit ist Zeitlichkeit."4 Singular time is senseless; time itself exists as the gathering of times. While still in graduate school in Freiburg, Heidegger must have been thunderstruck (in a way that set the course of the remainder of his intellectual life) by Husserl's observation in his 1911 Logos essay ("Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," now in Husserliana xxv): Everything psychical... is ... ordered in an overall connection, in a "monadic" unity of consciousness, a unity which has nothing to do



with nature, with space and time or substantiality and causality, but has its thoroughly peculiar "forms." It is a flow of phenomena, un limited at both ends, traversed by an intentional line that is, as it were, the index of the all-pervading unity. It is the line of an imma nent "time" without beginning or end, a time that no chronometer can measure.5

Husserl differentiates between two times. There is the time of "nature,

space, substantiality and causality"; and there is the time which "no chronometer can measure," which is the time of "everything psychical," of everything which is experienced. These two times are said to have "nothing [at all] to do" with one another, by which Husserl means that the "forms" of the second cannot be derived from the domain of

the first. There is a validity (as one said at the time) to the "forms" of nonchronological time which is independent of historical time and which thus accounts for the possibility of logical and scientific truth.

When Heidegger speaks a decade later of "Zeitlichkeit," the gather ing of times, he has in mind just such an extra-historical "form": time is always essentially times, not because historical times are various, but because any "time" identified as such implicates an essential connec tion to that original gathering through which it can first be a "time" at all. That Heidegger in the intervening decade has initiated his life long study of the great masters of such abysmal ontological and epis temological questions, Plato and Aristotle, should serve to warn against any simplistic conception of such "forms" as mere abstractions. Much rather, Heidegger already discerns by the early 1920s that he will dedicate his life's work to that renaissance of Greek thinking which is announced and urged in SZ. He already sees that this renaissance can occur only if moderns learn once again to attend to the power of such "forms." And to be capable of this, he knows, we must recall from its strange oblivion that other time in which alone these "forms" of being are to be witnessed in their original might: being and time.

Now in the passage from the Logos essay, Husserl does not say that the two sorts of time have nothing at all to do with one another in all respects. Quite the contrary. Although the "forms" of nonchronological time are said to be wholly independent, consciousness ("Bewusst-sein," as Heidegger will come to write) is characterized as "intentional," as if it were the peculiar character of human being ("Da-sein") to be the place where both sorts of time, with the different sorts of phenomena appropriate to each, the intending and the intended, are bound to gether. It is just this "intentional" nature of "Bewusst-sein" which Husserl terms "the index" or standard of "comprehensive unity." Heidegger's 1915 "Probevorlesung will note succinctly and prophetically in regard


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to this "index": "Diese Determination des Begriffs 'Zeit überhaupt' zum Begriff der 'historischen Zeit' gilt es herauszustellen."6 The relation ship of the form of "time itself" to that of "historical time," says the twenty-five-year-old, ought to be worked out. There is a doubling of Heidegger's concerns here which should care fully be noted. With Husserl, he sees that the core problems of philos ophy concerning truth and reality, and our means of coming to know these, implicate a study of time as times. But since what is wanted in such study is just the truth and reality of time and our means of com ing to know these, the whole inquiry becomes circular and self-refer ential. If questions of truth and reality refer us to the question of time(s), so the question of time(s) refers us to questions of truth and reality: being and time. In 1927, Heidegger, now thirty-seven, reportedly destroys his finished manuscript of the third section of the first half of SZ and begins (in his lectures that summer, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie) to work out the theme of "time and being" once more from the beginning. Here we read:

As apriori, being is earlier than beings. The meaning of this apriori, the sense of the earlier and its possibility, has never been cleared up. The question has not even once been raised as to why the determinations of being [i.e., logic] and being itself must have this character of priority, and how such priority is possible. To be ear lier is a determination of time, but it does not pertain to the tempo ral order of the time that we measure by the clock; rather it is an earlier that belongs to the "inverted world" [in die "verkehrte Welt"].''

The unmistakable reference to Hegel in the last line is made explicit in the fifty-year-old Heidegger's 1938/39 Hegel notes:

here [in the thought of Hegel] something occurs, which does not transpire outside of "time," but which certainly does have its own time, in that it originally grounds it. We may never measure the chronological being [das geschichtliche Sein] of a philosophy by the standards of historical chronology [Massstäben der Historie], (GA 68:9)

The contrast of "Geschichte" to "Historie" (the "vertical" history of being [dual genitive] vs. "horizontal" history) then appears everywhere in the texts of the older Heidegger until the end. In his sixties for example, he states:

Historical science may thoroughly investigate some or other period in every possible respect, and yet never explore what history [ Geschichte] is. It cannot do so, scientifically. By way of history [historischen Wege] we will never find out what history [Geschichte] is.®



Heidegger's lifetime topic, as reflected in this string of quotations from 1915 to 1954, is the times of being as the being of times. Much changes between his early work on logic, the existential analysis of his middle years, and his later concerns with nihilism, language and technology (all with the constant background of the history of philosophy, espe cially the Greeks). But the question of how to think and how to teach the fundamental plurality of time(s) remains the fixed pivot of his work. No theme in that work, especially no central theme, can appropri ately be treated without exacting reference to this fixture. "Formal indication" is no exception. Indeed, "formal indication" can be under stood only in this context of times. A formal indicator {"Existenz," for example) is a matter which appears essentially within concrete histori cal time (existence is always "just mine" or "just yours") and yet points or indicates out of the time of its finite concretion to another time

(that of its being) in which it is grounded and gathered (as "Existentialitäf). Such an indicator is "formal" both because its concre tion is situated at a remove from its ground and because the essential reality to which it points is itself a "form," the gathering of its being. Beginning to think with Heidegger means initiating the investigation, once again, of all the complicated problems woven into this topic— especially the question of the relationship (or relationships) between such "forms" and the beings of ordinary experience, including (as the example of "Existenz" and "Existentialität" makes clear) human beings.

It has been shown above that Kisiel sometimes conflates the range (or gigantomachia) of the possible modalities of the relation of "for mality" to "immediate experience" into a single, seemingly unproblematic "given." We may expect that a similar conflation has taken place in regard to the plurality of times. For the "other time" on which Heidegger focuses his lifetime interest is just that of the question of being consid ered as the question inherently posed by the gigantomachia: how decide the apriori plurality of the possible relations of "form" to "matter"? This expectation proves to be the case:

[T]he tendencies of thrust and project are basically and to begin with not contrary movements but a single unitary movement, that of a throwing forward which has already been thrown, which is precipi tating us inexorably toward our own death. It is accordingly Heidegger's conceptualization of "time's arrow."9

"Time's arrow" names the single direction of time; and in The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time" itself, time is called "a solus ipse or singulare tantum" (Κ, 443). Kisiel plainly thinks that time can be thought only as singular and that Heidegger must therefore also have considered it in this way. For only if time is singular, and if singular time is our supposedly


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familiar historical time, will formal collections of any sort, including "formal indication," necessarily have a deficient mode of being. For malities are, as we say, "general"; historical reality, as we think, "par ticular." We will thus be brought to a position regarding "formal indication" where it "can be only approximate and never really com prehend the immediate experience it wishes to articulate" (Κ, 59). But this is not Heidegger's notion of "formal indication"; and its enabling ground, the singularity of time, is exactly what Heidegger spent a lifetime trying to think against. Strangely, Kisiel himself is explicit, in a later context, that far from engaging in "approximation" to "immediate experience," philosophy, according to Heidegger, has its "unheimlich" native land in a region that is definitively "elsewhere" and "elsewhen": In the "battle of the Titans over ουσία" ... he [MH] sees the con quest of the "milieu in which ontological research as such can oper ate." Plato himself deserves the credit for following the inclination to go beyond the ontic toward the ontological, and so for the "un precedented discovery of seeing the difference between being and beings . . . (K, 307, citing GA: 19). It is in this wholly other "milieu," and here alone, that Heidegger sees the opportunity to work once again on "the most fundamental of sci ences, for which 'the nature of being is quite as difficult to compre hend as that of not-being'" (ibid., citing Plato's Sophist 246a). The story of the genesis of SZ might well have been told as begin ning, not only as ending, at just this point. Carl Braig, a decisive influ ence on Heidegger as early as 1907 or 1908, begins his 1896 Vom Sein: Abriss der Ontotogie with a motto taken from Bonaventure (Itinerarium, chap. 5, pt. 4): Thus our mind, accustomed as it is to the opaqueness of beings and the phantasms of visible things, appears to be seeing nothing when it gazes upon the light of the highest being. It does not understand that this very darkness is the supreme illumination of our mind, just as when the eye sees pure light, it seems to be seeing nothing.

The question of being as that of the gigantomachia implicates an ob scurity which is native both to the question as such and its investiga tion. As Heidegger quotes Kant, such thought must go along "wholly unknown ways," which are necessarily characterized above all by their utter "darkness" (GA 3:166). Now in all three of his 1929 publications immediately following SZ ("Was ist Metaphysik?", "Wesen des Grundes,"



and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik), Heidegger emphasizes that such obscurity is fundamental to Dasein. Dasein qua Dasein is said to be essentially involved with that most obscure of all matters, with "nothing." On the basis of the foregoing, it may be seen why this must be so. If Dasein qua Dasein is always already in a world, if "world" (hence also Dasein as "being-in-the-world") is yet no constant, it must be the case that Dasein has the facility somehow to pass between worlds and between selves. But if this "between" of worlds is itself necessarily located in no factical world, where can it be? And if this "between" of times is neces sarily situated in no historical time, when can it be? And if the Dasein somehow "navigating" such a "between" is necessarily no worldly iden tity, who can it be? Heidegger insists both that we are dealing here with a "nobody" in a "nowhere" (hence with a "nothing") and that access to this "nothing" is essential to Dasein as such. It is "here" in this necessarily obscure "region" "before" world that the question of being can first be (and, in fact, "always already" has been) thought. Why Heidegger should have come so to emphasize this obscurity

following upon the initial reception of SZ is an important question to ponder. He seems to have felt that the early readings given to his book (by such distinguished contemporary figures, and friends of his, as R. Bultmann, G. Misch, G. Krüger, etc.) had failed to pay sufficient attention to its depth dimension and therefore needed to be reminded of a verticality that could be overlooked in SZ only at the cost of mis taking the books's deepest intentions. In SZ itself, Heidegger puts the great matter at stake as follows:

Anxiety utterly individualizes Dasein and in this way discloses it as 'solus ipse'. This existential 'solipsism', however, so little transposes an isolated sort of subject thing into meaningless emptiness . .. that it [in fact] brings Dasein in an extreme way directly before [the question of] its world as world and therefore, as being-in-the-world, before [the question of] itself as itself. {SZ, 188).

In and as "nothing" Dasein is said to be brought "before" the question of being and therefore before the decisive question of the fundamental structure of its world and of its own self. The SZ project would begin to map this obscurity, thereby enabling humans to win a new sense of themselves on its most strange basis. But if SZ attempts to describe a matter situated "before" Dasein, it is a matter that is yet accessible only in an analysis of Dasein considered as a palimpsest. Just as Husserl's phenomenology had revealed the unconsidered conditions of a series of human facilities, so also here with Dasein as a whole, with "In-der-Welt-sein": thought was to probe through Dasein taken as figure to its enabling ground. What was to be


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shown could be seen (as Heidegger was convinced at this time) only in Dasein; but the matter to be considered was not itself Dasein, but, rather, that which could faintly and only imperfectly be read under neath Dasein.

In the remaining (never published) section of the. first part of SZ, Heidegger apparently wanted to begin to map this obscure displacement toward ground in terms of the peculiar apriori time which lies before historical time, an apriori time to which Dasein qua Dasein is argued to have essential access. This intention was interrupted in 1929 to emphasize, again and again, the ineradicable obscurity of the "region" of "nothing" calling for thoughtful reconnaissance. His early readers had transposed his intentions into a narrative, not about a nowhere and a nobody somehow "before" world and "before" human existence, but about traditionally understood "human beings" making "decisive" decisions in "the" historical time of "the" world. The forgetfulness of the obscurity that grounds historical times and worlds, a forgetfulness it was exactly Heidegger's aim to recall, in this way became the very basis for the usual interpretation of his work. Heidegger would call such misinterpretation "anthropology." (It was this persistent misread ing which would lead Heidegger to abort the SZ project, to make the subsequent "turn" in his thinking, and to initiate the fateful search in the 1930-1934 period for an extra-academic avenue in which to pur sue his intentions.)

Now just this "anthropological" transposition of figure and ground constantly looms in Kisiel's exposition of Heidegger's texts. On the one hand, he is well aware of "the ontic-ontological bind, the inescap able 'circle' from Dasein to being and back in the 'to-and-fro relatedness' of questioning ..." (K, 431). On the other hand, such wonderful insights are always immediately taken back, as if Heidegger could not possibly have meant to leave things broken and utterly obscure, as if it could not possibly have been his intention to explore the broken figure thus exposed: "There is an obligatory side to the given ... an 'ought' which somehow already bridges and fills the breach of not-being" (Κ, 434 35). In a similar vein, Kisiel thinks Heidegger concerned to find "a nondisruptive [!] access to the very temporality and historicity of the pretheoretical phenomena" (Κ, 219). Such characterizations of Heidegger's intentions lead naturally to Kisiel's rhetorical question: "[DJoes Heidegger ever really give up the Paradise of a simple dwell ing placed in the proximity of truth?" (Κ, 226).

But there is no "given" for Heidegger's Dasein (since some factical "world" is always co-original with it as "being-in-the-world") and nothing could be more foreign to Heidegger's intentions than a "nondisruptive"



analysis which "bridges and fills the breach of not-being." Without a breach, how have a "to-and-fro"? And without a "to-and-fro," how have "relatedness"? And without a "relatedness," how consider a being with an essential relation to its ground?

Kisiel poses many interesting questions about the SZ project and gives us an enormous wealth of information about its "genesis." Students of the early Heidegger will long remain in his debt on both counts. But recourse should be made to this wealth only with the worrying proviso in mind: does Kisiel tell the SZ story only at the extreme cost of a recurrent (though, oddly, by no means constant) fundamental distor tion of its deepest intentions?

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1960). Hereafter cited as SZ.

2. Hereafter cited as Κ followed by page. 3. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann,

19761Γ.), §44. Hereafter cited as GA followed by volume and page. 4. Der Begriff der Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), 26. 5. Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis

of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 107-8. En glish translation modified.

6. Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), 359.

7. GA 24: 27. Translated by Albert Hofstadter under the title The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 20.

8. Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954), 57. Trans lated by F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray under the tide What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 32-33. English translation modified.

9. Theodore Kisiel, "Professor Seigfried's Misreading of My Diagram and Its Source" (Discussion of "Diagrammatic Approach to Heidegger's Schematism of Existence"). Philosophy Today (spring 1986): 75; emphasis added.


On Formal Indication: Discussion of The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time"

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