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which can be otherwise, but immerses himself in it. His phenomenology is thereforeinescapably provisional. Apodicticity is sacrificed for the sake of remaining true to things.Hermeneutic phenomenology’s ‘results’ are not definitions of essences but formal indications,that is, empty directives for thinking, which remain open to diverse historicalapplications. Formal indications are never set in stone, they are subject to continual revision.Provisionality does not undermine rigor. Rather, it makes phenomenological analysisan act that must be perpetually re-enacted. It is difficult to hold fast to thinking, when thatwhich is thought is as fluid and unstable as thinking itself. Yet in this difficulty, this‘staying with,’ phenomenology finds its only possible justification: to let life show itselfby allowing it to live in our speaking and thinking. The task cannot be completed (tospeak of completion makes no sense here). But its significance does not stand or fall onits completion. Phenomenology’s task is not to “create new knowledge,” but to call to life,to call it to a living appropriation of itself.Heidegger wishes to break the theoretical glass that encases the philosophical thinker,the wall that renders him or her personally invulnerable to the matter in question. Thequestioner must experience a re-direction of inquiry if the hermeneutics of facticity is tosucceed. We, the questioners, are the ones who are put into question. The safe impartialityof a theoretical inspection is no longer possible. To make facticity questionable is to resistthe subtle substitution of general ideas for concrete experience. We are called to think ourown existence. In the interest of staying as close to life as possible, Heidegger works withhistorically situated and provisional expressions (formal indications). The goal is to establishan oblique access to the everyday, to light up the factic from within.While formal indication, so essential to the early Freiburg lectures, all but disappearsfrom Sein und Zeit as an explicit methodological technique, the reasons which ledHeidegger to articulate the notion remain central to his phenomenology. 14 The idea was tofind a non-invasive way into the fore-theoretical, to philosophize, without disturbing “thestream of life.” A formal indication does not dictate the theme in advance (it does notdefine content), but invites the thinker to discover the theme for him or herself. One couldargue that the methodological discussion disappears as Heidegger’s discourse becomeseven more indirect and elliptical. The whole of Sein und Zeit is formally indicative.Formal indication is necessary because of the singularity (Jemeinigkeit) of Dasein. Thebeing of this being is absolutely historical. It is therefore never theoretically thematized.The only way to thematize a being that cannot be named is to formally indicate it, toexhortatively point to it in such a way that we are drawn to perform the act of thinkingwhich will light up the being for ourselves. Read as formally indicative, Sein und Zeit isa practical manual of exhortations which call us to a hermeneutical performance of thinking.It is “an empty book,” as Ryan Streeter puts it. 15Heidegger’s development of the method of formal indication is rooted in his 1915Habilitationsschrift and its examination of the problem of the ineffability of the singular. 1614Heidegger uses the term formale Anzeige in Sein und Zeit when an articulation of an existentialstructure of being-in-the-world is needed without committing to any particular existentiell (ontic) interpretationof its meaning. See SZ 109, 213, 289.15Streeter, “Formal Indication,” 426.16Martin Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, in Gesamtausgabe, vol.1, Frühe Schriften, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978),189-401. On Heidegger’s study of Scotus see Sean J. McGrath, “Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth andLanguage,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 57, no. 2 (December, 2003): 323-343, idem, “The Forgetting ofHaecceitas: Heidegger’s 1915-1916 Habilitationsschrift,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Between the Humanand The Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002),355-377; Kisiel, Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 21-68.271