possibly the funniest part of Being and Time

There aren’t that many to choose from, but I love it when he talks about how Dasein chooses its hero, and then notes that some choose das Man as their hero. (If you don’t know Heidegger at all, das Man gets translated as “the they,” in the sense of “so they say,” referring to an indeterminate mediocre average for which no one takes responsibility.)

Over time I’ve warmed quite a bit to the details of Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein. I was hostile to it for many years because of my concern to de-privilege human being within the Heideggerian framework. But the last time I reread Being and Time (fall 2007), what I had changed my mind about most was that I now really liked all the details about newspapers, ambiguity, Dasein choosing its hero, etc. But I’d probably still retain the passage in Tool-Being where I said that Max Scheler is better on these sorts of details. Scheler really is good at these sorts of concrete insights.