When irony hits its mark, the person who is its target has an uncanny experience that the demands of an ideal, value, or identity to which he takes himself to be already committed dramatically transcend the received social understandings. The experience is uncanny in the sense that what had been a familiar demand suddenly feels unfamiliar, calling one to an unfamiliar way of life; and yet the unfamiliarity also has a weird sense of familiarity, as though we can recognize that this is our commitment.

a something that is mine
b is alienated from me (surmounted)
c but then returns to me, as both mine and not mine

We can put it actively by saying that I must be able to transcend received social understandings of an ideal, or passively by saying that the ideal manifests itself to me as exceeding these. The metaphor most appropriate to this experience may thus be not 'inside/outside' but 'depths/surface' or 'background/foreground.' It is not that something external intrudes but that something submerged comes to the surface or that I reach a new height of perspective.

We are essentially erotic creatures whose lives are unstable, risky, and subject to breakdown. The ironic experience depends upon these features of human life and exposes us to them. It seems to me that what the ironic experiences reveals to us is nothing other than the instability that makes it possible. [...] The ironic experience directly reveals crucial features of human nature, including that we are erotic and finite: committed, transcending, and vulnerable.

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Thought misses its object, grasping it only as it is reflected in thought itself and its laws. This self-impeding of thought is revealed in the absurd experience. In the absurd experience, our ways of knowing cease to stick to the world and so show their inadequacy to the world as it is in itself. This is an experience of an essential gap or discrepancy between our ways of making sense of things and the things themselves.
We encounter the world itself in its mute and naked otherness and so directly experience it as escaping any conceptualization.

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The suggestion is that the feature of human life that makes it possible for us to feel uncanny also makes us be uncanny. Insofar as the uncanny feeling reveals to us those features of ourselves that bring it about, the uncanny feeling will reveal an essential uncanniness.

There may be sense to be made of the idea that human beings are essentially uncanny because of some concealment, gap, lack, discrepency, excess, fiitude, or self-disruption. Such uncanniness would belong to the human essence as part of the human project of making things familiar or making sense of things. We may be uncanny because we make things familiar by covering over the gap between known and self-evident.

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From the side (as it were) of entities, the movement of falling is called 'absorption.' Openness gets caught up in or absorbed in that to which it is open: entities.
This absorption requires a correlate covering over of openness itself. Compare ordinary absorption in an activity, which involves a blindness to one's surroundings and especially to the conditions of possibility of the activity. For example, being absorbed in playing the piano involves being blind to the internal mechanism of the instrument, as well as to the motion of one's fingers in relation to the keys and one's feet in relation to the pedals.

Similarly, falling absorption in entities allows entities to show up but in doing so overlooks or looks through the very openness that makes this possible. We lead our lives, we deal with entities; we pay not heed to what it takes to lead a life and to deal with entities. Falling (absorption) is an openness to entities that brings entities into salience and obscures openness. Entities are revealed in their being and this revelation itself withdraws.

Falling, as the backgrounding of our openness so that entities can show up, tends to exacerbate or intensify itself. By concealing our being, it encourages us to understand ourselves not as distinctively open but as just like the entities that are ordinarily in view for us--- as kinds of tools, objects, or natural entities. This is a misunderstanding because such entities, through which we lead human lives, do not themselves lead human lives. They are not similarly open. So in this aggravated mode of falling, our openness is not merely hidden from us by entities showing up to us; it is forgotten or displaced by a self-misunderstanding in terms of entities unlike is. This self-misunderstanding is unownedness or unowned falling, and it is a second impediment to the analysis of openness.

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Most moods are backgrounds. Like soundtracks or climates, they set the stage for our immersion in our lives. Such moods saturate our experiences and typically go unnoticed. But there are also moods that pick us up from the midst of our lives and throw us back on ourselves. These strike us without warning and allow us to strike ourselves in new ways.

If all moods involve both a revelation and withdrawl, each with respect to both self and world, then we can analyze moods in terms of this schema. Of course, these dimensions are not genuinely distinct. Withdrawl and revelation are not separate events but two ways of describing the same thing. (Compare bringing something into focus, which always takes something else out of focus.) Self and world are likewise not opposed but are two ways of describing the same thing: Being-in-the-world. Nonetheless, we can distinguish these four dimensions of the mood and bring each into salience in our analysis: self-withdrawl, self-revelation, world-withdrawl, and world-revelation.