Abstract

The formal indication is a key concept in Heidegger’s thought. But Heidegger’s discussion of the formal indication in the period after the “Kehre” has always received little attention, with the result that Heidegger’s late self-reflection on this method has not been brought into scholarly focus. Recent publications – especially volume 91 of the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, Ergänzungen und Denksplitter (published in 2022) and volume 102, Vorläufiges I-IV – now provide relatively accurate testimony to this self-reflection. For the first time, they help resolve the long-standing dilemma: Why did Heidegger renounce the concept of the formal indication in his later thought, and what does this renunciation mean? With the appearance of these newer texts, it becomes possible to take a full look at Heidegger’s conception of formally indicating concepts and to reconsider the most important elements of this conception – the ontological difference and the relation of Being to human – in the light of the key-texts of the early and late Heidegger. Heidegger’s final position on the formal indication is thus revealed: The formal indication is the anticipation of the “truth of Being” in which concealment and unconcealment become one. This position strongly indicates a continuity and identity of the early and late Heidegger. In this sense, the disappearance of the concept of formal indication in the late Heidegger does not mean that its core ideas are abandoned, but that they are transformed into a more original form: from the “ontological difference” to the “origin of difference” (Unterschied – Austrag); from the “relation of Being to human” (qua Seinsverständnis), which is not yet freed from the entanglement with elements of transcendental philosophy, to a more original relation that contains the concealment and unconcealment within itself (Seinsgeschichte – Ereignis – Geviert).