Thinking: The hermeneutical-phenomenological work. On the first lines of heidegger’s letter on “Humanism”

Abstract

This paper aims to read line by line the beginning of the Letter on “humanism” in order to defend, on the one hand, the Heideggerian commitment to the phenomenological attitude in spite of the fact that he no longer uses most of the technical term coined by Husserl and that this is, moreover, hermeneutic at all times; and, on the other hand, that the interpretation of this text must be achieved, precisely, by committing oneself to this attitude. In the same way, we will defend that the hermeneutical-phenomenological attitude and exercise appears as a decision regarding how to face the question of our own historical time, why our normal behaviour in our historical situation consist of, that this decision is only understandable from this very exercise and that the term “thinking” shows that, from 1930 onwards, it means this very exercise.