Formal Indication as a Methodological Principle in Hermeneutical Thinking of Martin Heidegger

Abstract

Formal indication is one of the central concepts of Heidegger’s hermeneutics. Formal means that something is to be fulfilled. Indication indicates the direction of fulfilling. Heidegger developed the so-called by him, „formal indication”, respectively „formally indicative concepts” as a methodological justification of the philosophical terminology. The term „formal indication” aroses in the context of the phenomenology of life, where Heidegger introduces his „hermeneutics of facticity”, which is also referred to as „formally indicative hermeneutics“. This is about something crucial for Heidegger’s thinking. The epistemological and transcendental tradition of viewing finds here a turn into the existential and historical. The indication always remains at the distance of pointing, that is, someone to whom something is shown, must see for himself. Formal indication indicates the direction for seeing. What can be seen, one must learn to say, to say in the own words. The old problem of the concretization and the conceptualization, which runs through German idealism, gets here a new expression.