Dasein - Monoskop

176 PART III
eted", the transcendental ego (as subject) is clearly set apart from
everything empirical (as object), be it the world, or be it the natural;
attitude as part of the world.
The key to the whole enterprise is thus a certain interpretation
of the natural attitude: only if its relation to the world is one of
'positing a world and oneself as real', only if Being is reduced to 'being
posited', does Husserl's project succeed. But, Heidegger asks, is
the natural attitude thus adequately described? Does consciousness
originally posit a world of physical and psychological entities, and
does it posit itself as a part of this world?
Is this attitude a natural attitude or is it not?
It is an attitude which is totally unnatural. For it includes a
well-defined theoretical position, in which every entity is taken
a priori as a lawfully regulated flow of occurrences in the spatiotemporal
exteriority of the world. ... Man's natural manner of
experience, by contrast, cannot be called an attitude. 164
To make use of the interpretational framework of this study, we
can perhaps put this point in the following way: an absolute science
as envisaged by Husserl demands that we can take a stand outside of
those meaning-relations that we usually live in. An absolute science
does not allow for any hermeneutical circle that results from our having
to make use of those very networks of meaning that we are trying
to describe. In other words, Husserlian phenomenology adopts and
presupposes, without further argument and defense, the calculusconception
concerning meaning. Yet the price of this adoption is
high. The phenomenon of Dasein 9 s living within a universal medium
of meaning is obscured in a subject-world distinction modelled upon
the traditional subject-object split. Being is reduced to presence-athand
(the Being of the explicitly identified object), while Being as
readiness-to-hand (the Being of the implicitly identified equipment
or world), and Being as existence (the self-identification of Dasein
as its self-determination), are ignored and distorted.
The distortions caused by Husserl's methodology reach a peak,
according to Heidegger, when the eidetic reduction is implemented
together with the transcendental one, for the eidetic reduction aims
at the essence of objects, events, and worlds, and hence rules