Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existênciaHeidegger was inspired and convinced that the phenomenological project was a crucial new attempt to delineate what philosophical research should be trying to achieve. Nevertheless, he was not content with the idea that what distinguishes the way that we engage with phenomenology from everyday and theoretical discourse should be understood as a shift in attitude. This idea itself, he argued, makes unwarranted assumptions about the conditions under which things usually appear to us. The idea of a shift in attitude implies that we begin with a certain kind of attitude towards the world which was not phenomenological, that is, the natural attitude. The condition for the appearance of phenomena, how things show up, is that we take up an attitude towards them. In everyday life, according to Husserl ’s analysis, we have already done this. The task of phenomenology is to shift our attitude, so that we can take a critical distance from our natural attitude. It is above all the idea of a natural attitude that Heidegger took issue with:
Is this natural attitude perhaps only the semblance of one? This kind of comportment and experience is of course rightly [9] called an attitude [Einstellung ], inasmuch as it must first be derived from natural comportment, from the natural way of experience; one must so to speak “place oneself into” [hineinstellen] this way of considering things [and so assume an attitude towards them] in order to be able to experience in this manner. Man’s natural manner of experience, by contrast, cannot be called an attitude. [1]
It is essential for phenomenology to begin with the characterization of our everyday understanding of the world and the things we encounter in it, if it is to see its own attempt to transform that understanding in the right way. However, the idea that the appearance of things is always the result of an attitude implies a position taken up in the face of the phenomena under investigation, moreover, a position which the investigator has put herself in, even if not as a matter of mere choice. The German word Einstellung, here translated as attitude, reflects this as it contains the root stellen, positing or setting in place. It is the word which today is used to mean the settings, for example, on a computer program. Settings are the basic framework which we lay down, within which particular things appear and can be manipulated. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Heidegger’s philosophical struggle was always an attempt to free us from the positions, theses, sets of principles and dogmas that we lay down for ourselves both in encountering things in the world and thinking about those encounters. Years later he would identify setting as the essential feature of the technological age, which affects the way we understand thinking, production and nature itself […]. If we want to understand how human beings naturally encounter the world and consequently how our way of seeing things changes when it becomes phenomenological, this will not be achieved in terms that understand us as already positioned over and against the world and the things in it. Furthermore, the attitude that Husserl thought we take up towards the world, even before theoretical and scientific investigation, seems to be geared towards the project of knowing about the things in that world. The subject encountering the world is understood as taking up a certain attitude and its primary concern is to develop the correct method for knowing about the phenomena that show up. According to Heidegger, on the other hand , it is the project of [10] gaining theoretical knowledge that involves taking up a position vis-a-vis the world and cannot legitimately be read back into our natural or everyday existence. It is because Husserl always had scientific knowledge in view, even if he claimed that phenomenological science differed from positive science, that Heidegger argued he was led into a misunderstanding of natural ‘pre-scientific’ existence. It is possible to have a phenomenology of theoretical knowledge, because this is one way in which things appear to us. Still, we should not assume or allow ourselves to be guided by the prejudice that we can adequately characterize how we are primarily engaged with things in terms that involve our taking up a position towards them and thus positing them as objects of investigation.
