Confier le sens à la contingence. La notion de situation

The purpose of the very first phenomenology in Husserl ’s Logische Untersuchungen is the production of an ideal reach of meaning, which is separated from the historical world of contingence. The attention to this world of contingency supposes the revision of phenomenology ’s program into an hermeneutical phenomenology. Hans Lipps, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers ’s thoughts allow such a revision thanks to the concept of situation. When Husserl tries to reveal the meaning of expressions in the representative and ideal content of sense-giving acts, hermeneutic refers the meaning of language to speech ’s situation. The meaning of a proposition can only be analysed and understood when the content of this proposition is transcended into the empirical situation where two speakers meet. To give sense to an expression is to entrust this meaning to an empirical situation. The eidetic reach of meaning must then be deposed in the unstable world of historical experience. Thereby the risk of a confiscation of this meaning. This risk conditions the possibility of all sense-giving acts. Meaning is only possible as a bet. Hermeneutical phenomenology has only to analyse the structure of the situation which allows this bet. Hans Lipps, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers make three different descriptions of the structure of this empirical situation. A common concept of situation can however be found in these descriptions. Our purpose here is to show this structure.