Studia Philosophica

Volume 62, Issue 1, 2015

Rorty's Ironic Reading of Heidegger

The goal of this study is to analyse Rorty’s classification of Heidegger as an ironical theoretic. Rorty claims that the main task of philosophy is its critique of its tradition, whereas Heidegger is his inspiration in this role. But the problem is that Heidegger is not concerned with historical-philosophical interpretation of history of philosophy but only with philosophical one and that he conforms to his own philosophical interests. For an accountable research of our main problem it is necessary to know Rorty’s definition and demarcation of theoretical ironic who has doubts about function, directivity and privileged status of vocabularies and about the existence of final vocabulary, too. It is necessary to show an anthropological and moral-axiological dimension of Neopragmatic thinking, which is far away from Heidegger after the turn, as well as the problem of Socratic justice, which is far away from rortyan ironic too. The important characteristic of a theoretical ironic is his rejection of traditional metaphysics and his concentration on metaphysics in different sense, thus comprehend the metaphysical (theoretical) urge so much that one eliminates it. But this does not hold for Heidegger, either. Rorty’s challenge to philosophy as fulfilment of humanity is in absolute contradiction to Heidegger’s Letter about humanism, in which he reduces humanism to the history of Being and he does not care about the man or human dignity, but only about the thought of Being.