This part of B&T confounded me for a while, but eventually I completely dropped any preconceptions about what "guilt" and "conscience" meant and it actually made great sense.

Whoever wrote this seems to have simply mused over an excerpt. Although that's not uncommon when Heideggerian authenticity comes up.
 

Terms like authenticity, guilt, and conscience have too much ethical baggage. That makes them difficult to use for ontology. In English, at least.
 

I have a feeling, based on the etymologies presented in B&T, that many of the same misunderstandings exist in German. The general structure of defining a term in a weird way, then ceteris paribus changing being to objective presence and seeing the meaning turn familiar was a regular thing in that work.

It's a shame the red herrings are so very red, but we're talking about a guy who was painted as Hitler's main man and responded by basically just flipping the world the bird and peeling out in his van.

He lived, he thought, he died.
 

I was, in a sense, musing over an excerpt, largely in the hopes of maybe sparking a discussion on living a philosophical life, and using Heidegger as an example. Still, I don't think I was that far off from Heidegger.

Now, I will readily admit that I'm not a Heidegger scholar, so I won't pretend to speak as an authority. But I'm pretty familiar with his writing, particularly his pre-war stuff, and I'm somewhat well read in the secondary literature, so I'm not typing out of my ass when I say that a reasonable interpretation of authenticity (and resoluteness in particular).

That is, while Heidegger clearly wants authenticity to be an existential, non-normative or non-evaluative concept, he clearly slips into a normative version of it, particularly in the second division of BT. And resoluteness in particular, while it means a sort of existential responsibility or awareness, it is also the ground of the normal sense of responsibility. So I don't think using it as a launching point for my purposes in the post was that unfair to Heidegger. And there are probably other ways to use authenticity to contrast it with his behavior (e.g., in his adopting Nazi words and ideas, rather than speaking with his own voice).

Anyway, like I said, I'm not a Heidegger scholar, so I would certainly yield in my interpretation to someone who is, but in the literature, these are not uncommon uses of authenticity and resoluteness, even in those writers who recognize that authenticity is at least primarily an existential concept divorced from its usual evaluative sense.
 

I think its problematic to use Heidegger as a paradigm on how to "live the philosophic life". First off, Heidegger himself criticizes the notion that any philosopher's life has any value for philosophy. Further, Heidegger says he's not doing ethics or saying anything about moral values. He's examining ontology, or what makes ontology possible.

So Heidegger is more like a mathematician than the popular notion of a philosopher figuring out how to live the good or the virtues life. In mathematics a new idea is judged by whether it is correct, does it logically agree with the axioms, can it be derived from axioms by following a series of finite, provably correct steps.

In ontology the issue is similar, does a new explanation do a better job than the previous explanations. And if Heidegger's explanations (or "way of thinking", the popular phrase for what Heidegger does) are better, then there we are. When Heidegger says someone is authentic or someone is thinking resolutely, he's saying that they are thinking consistently with what ontology explains. He's not judging their moral values or whether they are behaving ethically.

Now, there's certainly many people who do try to derive or find ethics in Heidegger, but Heidegger himself doesn't do that. He's certainly got his opinions. He personally doesn't like cosmpolitanism, he doesn't like many items of technology, he likes some poets and not others, but he doesn't use his thinking about ontology to rate his own likes and dislikes. Most of the people studying Heidegger as cosmopolitans and use keyboards (a piece technology Heidegger avoided - he wrote by hand and had his brother and others type up his manuscripts and correspondence), but they are studying his ontology. Heidegger's likes and dislikes aren't on the criticial path of deciding how useful or correct his ontology is, any more than mathematicians care about a mathematicians likes or dislikes when judging his equations.

So, when people write that Heidegger was a nasty man or morally challenged, therefore his ontology must be wrong or burned, they're merely saying that they don't understand what Heidegger was on about. They're like the Athenians who condemned and executed Socrates for sophistry, while in reality Socrates was the greatest enemy of sophistry. And when they say his books should be burned, they are behaving just like the Nazis who also burned books of the people they didn't like, irrespective of whether the contents of the books were right or wrong.
 

OK, I can accept that. Though that would make him an even better example of what Nietzsche's talking about. Particularly with the bit about Germans.