And another possible parallel with amor fati and ancient religions is the Vedic concept of life as Leela, whereas the self-realized sannyasi will joyfully "play", without entanglement with pain or pleasure.

I've never felt this on for a ride sensation, could you elaborate?

Well, the specific exhortations vary somewhat from thinker to thinker. For Heidegger, it would be about learning to live authentically, and fulfilling our deepest possibilities in life. For Sartre, it would be about recognizing our fundamental freedom, and assuming responsibility for ourselves. For Buber, it would be about learning to say "Thou" to one another, with all that that entails. However, subtending all of those differences, I'd say that existentialism is about awakening to the reality of human existence... and then learning to live accordingly. At the same time, it's about dropping the habit of deferring to our world's prevailing forms of distraction and narcosis. But of course, that's not necessarily an easy sacrifice. P.S. It's not that the work/entertainment paradigm is false. What's false is when we start thinking that that's all there is to life.

(1) Actually throwness is an aspect of facticity, so it belongs in that category. (2) Yes, there is a kind of contradiction in testing students on their knowledge of authenticity, das Man, etc. But on the other hand, if you simply refuse to play the system's game, then students will never get to hear about Heidegger... especially insofar as the system has ways of disposing of people who don't kowtow to its idols. So, then the question becomes: Which is the better of two imperfect alternatives? My own answer is to teach Heidegger even if I have to give tests on it. (3) I'm not so sure that Hitler was such a great role-model for authenticity. Of course, it's almost always impossible to tell definitively what someone else's ownmost potentiality-for-Being is. But ol' Adolf seemed to spend a lot time just surfing on the popular tide of anti-Semitism, especially in combination with people's resentment of the Versailles Treaty. All of that seems a lot more like inauthenticity to me. But, like I said, it's hard to tell in the absolute. And it's probably even harder to tell when we haven't even met the person face-to-face

@@EricDodsonLectures thanks so much for the clarifications and your time. I wasn't attacking you in my comment about students passing tests, needing to earn any job to pay off debts, engage in a world that rejects Being after graduation, etc.... The irony was an existential facticity that Heidegger doesn't really resolve - that the force of non-Being ("nothing itself nothings") appears to be greater than the activity of Being, even though he (inaccurately) insists that both Being and non-Being, truth and its concealedness, are merrily working together for some purposive revelation (God knows what that is). So the irony is within the terms of his own argument. Whilst we can never test the authenticity of the Other, my point about Hitler (perhaps all dictators from Mussolini through to Putin, the insurrectionist Trump or genocidal Netanyahu) is that they are all possessed with the force of futurity which they claim they own, control and materialise. POTENTIALITY however is no guarantee of any future, and certainly not of the appearance of Being. Yet, these individuals are fully convinced (AUTHENTICALLY) of their own Messianic mission to rescue the NATION - a great historical opportunity and potential which only they possess. And here, Heidegger shared the Nazi dream of the superior vocation of the German race that resided in the German language's proximity to Greek antiquity. So if the measure of authenticity is the future and potentiality and being "true" to that, then these individuals display those measures the most - more than you and I whose futurity and potentiality comes nowhere close to theirs in scope, despite the destructive ends they reach. Another problem with the intrinsic measure of authenticity in Heidegger's model? It points to the dimension of ethics that I raised in your video about Heidegger and the Nazis, and his rejections of Kant...