What is formal indication supposed to grasp? Hericlitus and Paramenides on the way to Axanimander.

We must review the historical movement in order to see our own ground, the colours or surfaces which 
have lost their strength, since language is no longer able to speak to us (and this means: “the forgetfulness 
of being”).

Scientific investigation ad hominem has fallen into utter disuse. Discussion based on 
the principle that one can not refute he who does not grant the premise. The medieval  
researche colective de la veritas, collective research into the truth, which allowed the 
constellation of various key possibilities for indicating disagreement in discussion to 
have a positive and useful place in research and genuine disputation, where the 
thing under dispute was grasped in the eternal region of science, have in our own 
time become tools for polemicists. For example that it is possible to accuse someone 
of (a) fallacy with the scientifically meaningless aim of discrediting them 
(or “the argument”, as though arguments had some existence outside of speech 
[here we move towards, not sophistry in the modern sense, but in the sense that 
Derrida tried to reinvigorate, the sense where we are as yet prior to a system of 
Laws of Thought, such as contradiction and the rest]), rather than with the aim of 
pointing to the exact place where the understanding of the participants deviates. 
Under the principle that each one strives to understand the same thing in the same way. 
This principle points to the eternal undifferentiated realty of the actual or formal. In 
contradistinction to the differentiation which is made clear by the example that no 
one can eat for another, thus, the body and the region of things alongside or thrown 
into things “ob-jects”, is separate but the research of the spiritual region of science 
searches for what is undivided. Only if we begin to indicate this manner of thinking 
to ourselves can we see the complete reversal affected by the revolution of Galileo, 
the first of the mathematical physicists (mathematical in the new sense of an "Archimedean lever"). 
Galileo broke from the Aristotelian scientific physics which was concerned with natures or forms, or actuality. Newton 
remained ambivalent about the existence of nature in the Galiliain system 
which he took up. Galileo shifted the focus from formal or natural consideration 
to the consideration of movement. Movement became the only nature or form, 
heterogeneous and totalizing. The focus was now on the object, and any unified 
understanding was merely words. Math ceased to name anything scientific, 
but rather named words or rules which could be held in the minds of mathematicians, 
but which mattered only because of their ability to let human minds and hands take 
over the objects. The old science pointed to a region higher than the mineral, the 
plant, and the animal, to the human and towards the gods. This view implies the 
reality of the order of nature. So far as there is no nature, but only essence 
(that which is intuited or perceived) the old science can no longer hold. However, 
the old science pointed towards the gods, or the right judgment about matters of the 
highest concern, the good, true, and beautiful (ergo, the practical as what is worth doing, 
action as such). Indication, nonetheless, still remains in some sense worth noticing in the region of the 
Socratic dialectic, or the ad hominem, where reason or meaning is the primary arbiter.

All discussion tends towards scientific discussion, or towards noise. In scientific 
discussion indication is most alive. The extremest possibility of scientific discussion, 
in or according to the work with the name Heidegger, is that which is according 
to formal indication. Formal can also read actual. The actual is what matters. It is 
accomplishment. The clarity sought in modern discussion 
is a species of indication, but it is not the kind that matters most. Descartes understands 
whatever is clearly understood as indicated. That one has fingernails on one’s hand. 
In formal indication it is not clarity that is at all sought. Rather, it is that we mean to 
indicate within the investigation in such a way as to remain in the investigation even 
when the subject matter is at its most unclear. To keep one’s grip held on what is 
most unclear, but which draws the investigator towards the subject matter. It is in 
thinking with Heraclitus and Parmenides that we want to let formal indication in its 
exercise begin to take hold.

Simple indication, as a indication of the direction of formal indication. Simple indication 
concerns the strict ad hominem, or the human essence, ergo, reason. It is strict in 
that it speaks what is genuinely visible to the one doing the research, and never 
tries to pass off some “argument” as its own investigatory ground or remembrance. 
It is remembrance of the being of beings. But, not of the being of being (of the meaning 
of being). Heidegger, who follows Descartes and Husserl, finds in the summum genus, 
in the “sum” of the Cartesian subject, being with the ready interpretation: object for 
human science (object here not in the sense of Galilean/European science (that is, 
of motion), but in the sense of availability or presence, something for humans). He 
says, why an object or thing available? He investigates the meaning of being, rather 
than practices the science of being. Formal indication is no longer scientific, but it is 
more difficult because it must hold its own without an object. Reason is also called 
logos or speech. Whether it is higher, in the order of nature, than mineral and animal, 
no longer concerns us. We only attempt to describe what can be grasped in indication.

Simple indication. If I draw a line on the sidewalk in white chalk and stand at one terminus 
of that line, and someone at the other, we are opposite. How far is opposite in this case 
exactly as in the case of rest and motion? We indicate the sense in which any talk of the 
literal is strange. Is not motion literally the opposite of rest? Is this where we get the meaning? 
Or, did we get it from standing face to face on either side of the line? How do they come into 
play here, when are they no longer clear? When Kant wants us to adjust the thing to the 
human substance in his “Copernican revolution”, where intuition is a kind of perception, 
does he speak literally of perception? How is there perception without what is to be 
synthesized, namely the concept? Some affair is already a matter of opposition, literally, 
without the synthesized concept, the opposite? Husserl says here, the concept is already 
with the thing intuited, and no “synthesis” is to be effected. This way of indicating is prior 
to simple indication, but, is it only prior from the perspective of, who, ourselves? Historical 
subjects? We must remain aware of the genetic difficulty when we approach Heraclitus 
and Parmenides, who we use in our own fashion.

If said of the ground under foot, it is “at rest” speaks literally. Is it at rest?  by which I ask you, 
is it not that during an earthquake the ground is not at rest? The ground moves or is not at 
rest now, and now there is no earthquake. What if right now we were on the moon? Would 
you still say the earth is at rest? No, I would say it is moving. Such contradiction, when 
elicited ad hominem, is remembrance. Socrates is wrongly understood with respect to 
the Meno example. It is worth mentioning that all of us today are like Meno in that we 
crave false sophistication. What Socrates demonstrates is very simple. He shows that 
mere repetition of the thing the master says is to be distinguished from understanding 
what one says, namely, remembering. Ergo, he shows the way new understanding 
fountains up from the earth as if the liquification of the ground occurred. The slave 
genuinely understands that he was in error, and thought he grasped what he hadn’t. 
Here we indicate something of the subject matter of simple indication. The region of 
daily opinion opens us towards this indication, where opinion is a ground, and it liquifies. 
In such indication, perhaps, we merely go on forever, liquid, at “risk”, nomadic, and so on. 
Formal indication claims not to merely wonder. It strikes at the ground of being.

In a certain sense a genetic difficulty prevents an exhaustive investigation of the approach 
which would summarize (or actually trace) our position vis-à-vis Anaximander. Descartes who speaks of three 
substances, extended, intelligent, and that of deity, is taken up by Spinoza who mostly 
is concerned with the question of clarity. Clarity is itself insufficient with respect to 
ethical considerations though it points towards the inclusion of the earth into philosophy. 
The earth meaning the phenomena. In the Timaeus the question whether everything could 
be a dream is, indeed, considered, but on the basis of a question about the remembrance 
of the genuine ground of knowledge, of truth. So far as the true, the good, justice, love 
and the like are considered, the tradition never comes to a theory of knowledge. Now we 
enter into a peroration or excursus which should serve as an illustration of the degradation 
of scientific speech in the current period. We take here the issue of the dawn of the 
epistemological age, the age when the phenomena come into question with respect 
to their status as it pertains to the human being which is no longer taken as a being, 
but as epistemology itself.

Epistemology, taken merely extrinsically, that is, historically (empirical-clock-chronologicaly), comes along sometime after 
Kant. This is a signal that one who wants to speak scientifically should be anxious not to 
mistakenly project the current thinking onto the past. So far as one does not assume from 
the outset that the current state of human beings is the perfection, or at least the 
unqualified improvement, of the past, this manner of dealing with the discussion is not a 
classicist’s interest in preserving the possibility of correctly constructing a notional construal 
of the mind of the past human, but rather it is the point of snatching back the intellectual vigour of the 
history that is ourselves form the radical decadence, liquidity, “risk”, nomadism, at length, 
in its highest form, living dangerously (and this last seduction is the greatest from the 
scientific perspective of the work with the name Heidegger). Epistemology seems already 
to exist in Kant so far as Kant attempted to fit things to man, and the issue named already 
comes into being. However, Kant himself had no epistemology, but rather produced the 
conditions for it. Indications which would point to this more exactly lay outside our current 
ambit (in this post). Supposing, however, one would merely says, epistemology, and that 
means a “theory of knowledge”. Would it not be the most dogmatic and obdurate stand 
which would refuse the student of the West the possibility to find in Aristotle an
epistemology in this sense, and in Plato? Yet, in Plato and Aristotle theory, theoria, 
names a part of the whole of the cosmos, it names the region where we are to find what 
is unitary rather than what is differentiated. Indeed, Plato carried out investigations into 
knowledge, but he had no theory of knowledge. Theory, in the modern sense, names 
something opposed to, nay, even opposite?, practice. And yet, what does practice 
even mean here, it no longer means the practical, for the practical is the act that is 
useful in some way, acts destructive of ourselves are not practical. The more a discussion 
attempts to set up umbrella terms such as “theory of knowledge” and let all manner of 
things loosely sit under them, the more it becomes inconceivable that it could deserve to 
be scientific. These considerations are never exhausted on the basis of setting out rules 
about what terms can and can not be used, but they are a matter of the sensitivity to the 
matter under question which can never be settled by a cheap recourse to final clarity about 
method. Such matters as are here considered could easily be ramified indefinitely and so 
might comprehend the most unsystematic or empirical heap of reflections, but instead we follow 
the claim to essentiality which leads to Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Heraclitus does not concern himself with the problem of perception or intuition. Therefore in 
Heraclitus we must not think of nature and natures, but can we even think of essences? 
We are already in this respect “prior” to Husserl. Husserl wants the essences to be datum 
about being taken as what is available to man for research (though, never in the crude 
sense of a research into technology, nor even in a moral sense so far as he would identify 
the manner of shaping conscience or phronesis.) Husserl here looks like a giant, wearing a 
silver crown, who would walk from star to star. This walk would perhaps extend for millennia. 
Such is the science of Phenomenology. Against this, as it were, not in opposition to it, but 
as what moves deeper into it, Heidegger claims not to have had his head turned by the 
Milky Way above, but to retain with Da-sein. It is Heidegger in which we find the 
essentialness of Heraclitus in this respect as a guidepost and subject matter.

We understand then, as Heraclitus, a panoceanic current, the ocean river, in which there is 
the conservation of the current which is grasped as being only when the source place and 
the termination are known, such that whoever knows only of the source place, does not yet 
grasp the being of the ocean flow. Parmenides, we understand, in opposition to this, to say 
that one can speak of no past, and of no future of the being which is also not being. That it 
is also not being means that the not being is part of being such that it is not something 
like a being that can be snatched away from being. Being and not being are one. 
Heraclitus can not appeal to the fuel, what stands behind us, namely the future, as what 
if one only knows of it, only of the future, one will not have grasped it. One is supposed to 
also know of what stands ahead, namely the past, in order that one should grasp the 
flame as such. Parmenides says, this future, is it the possible?, dunamis?, but in 
Parmenides such conceptual modifications are not yet, but they are therein prepared, 
can not stand as what is “two”, or what is “three”.

We shall pursue this matter more concretely in what follows, how what flickers and gleams 
on the ocean stream is supposed to stand beside what is one and is nothing and being, 
and how this is supposed to help us grasp formal indication. We are asking about formal 
indication by means of reaching beyond the being of beings, and into the subject matter 
of the being of being which is the question of the meaning of being or truth. Truth, and 
that means the deprivation of concealment. We are supposed to be moving towards
Anaximander.