Abstract

The concept of “natural attitude” as it was developed by Husserl in the Ideas I plays a key role in the phenomenological methodology. But was it in and for itself enough investigated? Heidegger’s critics and radical transformation of it is well known, unlike its treatment by the first generation of Husserl’s student. Adolf Reinach, for a short time leader of the realist phenomenology faithful to Husserl’s breakthroughs in the Logical Investigations, is one of the latter. Within a veiled debate with Husserl about possibilities and limits of transcendental idealism (e. g. a critical reception of Ideas I) he attempts a kind of rehabilitation of natural attitude by way of an original and thorough description of it. Still in a strictly phenomenological manner, it though privileges for strategic reasons the “variation” process over the “reduction” one. The result is a subtle reflection that helps us thinking lived experience exactly as we lived it and not how philosophy would have it.