Irony as a Phenomenological Technique

Abstract

The goal of philosophy is to reveal to the human being the essence of its existence. The ways are historically different, but all of them aim to bring being into the modus of understanding and then maintain and keep it in that status. The tricky thing is that in philosophy, knowing can’t be acquired once, and every time after that the new knowing is just added to the beginning. Knowing isn’t just knowledge, it requires full existential involvement, keeping this mood present, like an aura, like a light, like a tune. Those are things that can indicate a status of being-on, attuned, disclosed to itself. As Heidegger indicates, the most difficult problem for philosophy is to be able to stay on and not to be switched off. This has always been a very delicate situation when philosophy has to distinguish “ons” from “offs”. If philosophy isn’t attuned by being, the philosophizing heads in the wrong direction. This is not what usually happens to laymen; in most cases, those are misinterpretations done by very knowledgeable and experienced professionals. Let’s listen to Heidegger: “The misinterpretations with which philosophy is perpetually beset are promoted most of all by people of our kind, that is, by professors of philosophy. It is our customary business — which may be said to be justified and even useful — to transmit a certain knowledge of the philosophy of the past, as part of a general education. Many people suppose that this is philosophy itself, whereas at best it is the technique of philosophy” (Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics. In: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Random House, N.Y., 1962, pp. 225–226). Heidegger here points to the same problem as Hegel — the alienation of spirit from being. Hegel himself wasn’t aware of a large scale problem because his own thinking arose in the religious tradition, where thought was always given as a feeling, as an emotional status, as this miraculous connectedness, attunement. Probably, Hegel was the last one who didn’t take the possibility of total reduction of spirit to plain intelligence seriously.