Bejinariu, Alexandru, “A Formal-Indicative Response to the Question of the Alien”. Human Studies 48, 299–319 (2025).
One of the central problems of any phenomenological account concerning alienness is that the phenomenon itself seems to constantly avoid both our gaze as well as our theoretical grasp. Characterized by Edmund Husserl as that which is accessible in its fundamental inaccessibility and by Bernhard Waldenfels as that which perpetually surpasses any sense-horizon, alienness (as distinguished from the mere difference of otherness) reveals the limits of our experience and reveals the limits of our theoretical discourse. In this context, I investigate the relation between radical alienness and the universality of meaning from the standpoint of Waldenfels’s account of responsivity and Heidegger’s method of formal indication. While Waldenfels’s project of overcoming intentionality as the basic structure of sense-giving toward a more original dimension of responsivity avoids the pitfalls of logification and egocentrism that lead to the appropriation of the alien, this move beyond intentionality also transgresses the limits of experience. How can we then speak from a phenomenological standpoint about the demand and the basic response that always already precede sense-giving? I contend that a possible way to tackle this issue can be found in Heidegger’s early account of formal indicative conceptuality. By highlighting a series of three central similarities with Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology, I show that a formal indicative rethinking of responsivity is possible and that it manages to avoid the appropriation of the alien, i.e., integrating it into a preestablished order and completely determining it, while it still maintains a connection with the original lived-experience and the world.