Bad translation, continued

The real sense of the the sentence mentioned in my last post is something like this:

In that case what is "not-I" or what is outside the self-conscious "I" is by no means that which would belong only to a being which essentially is "not-I-like" or something other than the "I," but this stuff that is "not-I" is rather a definite kind of Being which the "I" itself possesses...

Let us just take this part. Heidegger is saying that when we say to ourselves "I am," we might in fact be farthest from anything like an immediate grasp of our Self. What is the Self? Well, our being or existing in Being, our being or existing at home in Being, our being or existing in such a way that we are appropriate to that which constitutes what we are, Being. Descartes and the philosophy that stems from him believe that in merely saying "I am" to ourselves, we accomplish this appropriateness, we grasp immediately (that is, without mediation, without anything interposing itself between our grasp and what is grasped) that part of us that is most constitutive for us. If we characterize this grasp this way (and it is here that Heidegger perhaps could be wrong--but that is a different question) it is clear that the link between the grasp of the "I am" and the Self is pretty arbitrary. Just saying "I am" doesn't really necessitate any grasp of the self: in fact, it could be that in that moment in which we say "I am," that moment when we are fully self-conscious, what we grasp is something that is totally not the Self. In other words, self-consciousness indeed grasps something, but there is no guarantee that what it grasps is itself in its most appropriate existence as to that which constitutes what it is.
Thus, that which is not grasped by saying "I am," the "not-I," doesn't necessarily have to be something that lacks self-consciousness. Philosophy stemming from Descartes proceeds as if this is the case naturally. In other words, if I do not grasp my Self necessarily by saying "I am" to myself, well, it does not follow that what is not-me, what is not included in the statement "I am," is something which is not self-conscious.
Usually, we say "I am" and contain this moment in which we say "I am," distinguishing it from all the rest of our moments of relation to ourselves. Furthermore, we say that this self-conscious moment is the moment in which we are most genuinely in relation to ourselves. We even go farther than this: we say that all these other moments that are not this moment of self-consciousness completely lack any relation of ourselves to ourselves.
What Heidegger is saying here is that this is paranoid. We may have other moments in which we relate ourselves to ourselves--that is, moments other than self-consciousness. This moment of self-consciousness is in fact so far from being the sole moment in which we relate ourselves to ourselves that we could hypothesize another moment which is in fact more of a relation of ourselves to ourselves and make this self-conscious moment a mere function of it. Freud in fact does this, and Heidegger eventually will also.
An great example of what might be a moment other than self-consciousness in which we are in relation to ourselves is the body. At any moment I have a body. This body is doing all sorts of things so that I can relate to my surroundings: it is processing nutrients, it is circulating vital fluids, it is keeping itself safe and protecting the organs and tissues and cells that make it up, it is allowing me to stand up. Now, if I am standing in a room, who are we to say that this standing does not constitute a relation of myself to myself in some way? My body stands: it orients me (who it houses in some way) to my surroundings by keeping itself upright and maintaining itself there. It makes me able to relate to what is there before me. In a way, it is a relation of ourselves to ourselves because it is a relation of something that is important to the self (the thing before me) and the self itself (the body standing such that it allows me to be there to grasp the thing, or merely stand towards the thing). I could stand differently: this would constitute a different relation of that which surrounds me to me, and thus would be a different relation of myself to myself. In order for it to be a different relation, I must already have a relation in some way. The body itself therefore effectuates this relation in some way, even in the most simple example of standing. Saying that only the moment in which we declare to ourselves "I am" constitutes a relation of ourselves to ourselves denies this moment this property and this effective ability. Indeed, usually the body is the first thing to go when we say this.
The property of grasping the Self, or of relating ourselves to ourselves that we attribute only to the moment of self-consciousness, then, can be a property of other moments. Thus we understand why we said "that which is not grasped by saying "I am," the "not-I," doesn't necessarily have to be something that lacks self-consciousness." In a way, the body is self-conscious, if we mean by self-consciousness primarily the phenomenon of relating ourselves to ourselves.
When Heidegger says that "the "not-I" is rather a definite kind of Being which the "I" itself possesses," then, we should now be able to undersand him. What is not self-conscious, like the body (if we are not to call it something like "self-consciousness" and retain for that word a distinct moment) can still belong or be possessed by that moment of self-consciousness. By "possessing" Heidegger means that it can be present at the same time as that moment and therefore enter into relation with that moment merely on that basis or even as its presupposition. In other words, if I think "I am," and am self-conscious, I can in that moment and in that thought actually possess a body, actually have another self-relation at the same time and even as something that makes possible my self-consciousness.
(We should note the upshot of all this clearly: we are not digressing into a talk about epiphenomenalism, but instead are outlining a new way of the Self to come into existence, a new way of conceiving the relation of ourselves to ourselves. The body/mind distinction is only the best example to do this with.)
Now, let us add in the last part, what the translators render as "such as having lost itself" and what I suggested should be rendered as "such as having lost the Self." It remains a question what exactly prompted the use of "such as" I'll have to check the German, but it seems that the meaning of this little passage could be clarafied much better if the sense of these two words were made clearer in English. Working with what we have, we can safely bet that Heidegger is giving us a case in which the rest of the sentence is true. This would be a case in which the non-self-conscious still is able to have a relation of itself to itself. More specifically, he is specifying a "kind of Being" that is shared between the self-conscious and the not-self-conscious such that the non-self-conscious can have a relation to itself, and thus so that both possess a Self relating itself to itself. In other words, he is specifying that kind of Being that allows what is not-self-conscious to have a relation to itself along with and even besides the "I" having a relation to itself.
It is at this point that he writes "Selbstverlorenheit:" literally, Self-lost-ness. So let's write the sentence in the following way, with the bit we have above:

In that case what is "not-I" or what is outside the self-conscious "I" is by no means that which would belong only to a being which essentially is "not-I-like" or something other than the "I," but this stuff that is "not-I" is rather a definite kind of Being which the "I" itself possesses, such as when the Self is lost.

"Itself" in the original English translation lends credence to the reading in which that to which "itself" refers is the "I," and thus that what is being lost here is the "I"'s relation to itself. It should be obvious that this is wrong--and I doubt that many make this mistake: the relation to itself of the "I" does not matter here. But just because few make a mistake with this translation doesn't mean what we've outlined here is obvious, nor the suggested change irrelevant. The translation really fails to bring out the fact that we are dealing with a case in which there is a relation of ourselves to ourselves and in fact makes the opposite reading sound plausible: that is, if we read the "itself" in the English translation as referring to the "I," one can then assume that the kind of Being that allows the relation of ourselves to ourselves is due to the "I" merely finding itself in a moment of self-conscious clarity.
But this is all besides the point. The point is that Heidegger is specifying a kind of Being that is indeed "not-I" or not self-conscious and that is also what allows a relation of ourselves to ourselves to be accomplished whether we are self-conscious or not. This has the radical result of essentially declaring that such that when we lose our relation to ourselves this occurs. In other words, we relate ourselves to ourselves precisely when we lose our relation to ourselves, when we lose our Self.
This may seem odd, but this is really the case. Let us step back and see the context of this remark. It is one in which Heidegger is specifying the "I" as a "formal indicator" for his existential analytic. That is, he is specifying how this term "I" will function for him. This function is in opposition to a Cartesian tradition which we ourselves have already looked at. In this sentence, then, he is essentially saying how "not-I" will work. This is why the sentence starts in the following way: "in that case [if we take the 'I' as a formal indicator] the 'not-I' is by no means tantamount to a being which essentially lacks 'I-hood'." Thus, he is stating what he often states throughout Being and Time, that the term "not" works by way of privation and not negation. That is, he is saying that what is "not-I" shall not be what is opposed to the "I," but what is merely another case of something that could be said to also be "I:" a "kind of Being" which the "I" itself as well as what is "not-I" "possesses."
This context clarified, we must ask the following: why is "Selbstverlorenheit" a good case of this term being used? That is the question that prompts us to take this whole passage as more of a reflection of the way Heidegger is conceiving a relation of ourselves to ourselves, rather than as a mere terminological issue regarding the "I" as a "formal indicator."
Well, if the loss of the Self is conceived by us as merely another kind of Being which both the "I" and "not-I," the self-conscious and the not-self-conscious possess, we will be conceiving of the phenomenon of self-consciousness and non-self-consciousness correctly according to Heidegger. In other words, if we see the loss of the Self as the relation to the Self, we are not conceiving of the Self in the wrong way. If we adopt the position of the Cartesian tradition, however, and say that we only consider the "I" the Self, then the loss of the Self will be seen as something that is necessarily "not-I:" it will not be seen as merely another mode of the Self. This is obviously important for Heidegger who does not want to reify the phenomenon of the Self, to reduce it from esti, Being, to something resembling techne, the "objectified."
But there still is the implication in the passage, if we stress its last part by taking it as the loss of Self and not merely any type of "loss" or "losing"--which is what the current English translation effectively does--that the state in which we lose ourselves is in fact the state where we most relate ourselves to ourselves. This is the meaning of the "such as," right? No. He is merely giving a case in which "I" is used correctly. But still there is a reason for him putting "Selbstverlorenheit" there instead of any other word. We are led back to the question as to why this is the best case to prove what Heidegger is talking about, and thus to the following question, that resembles the implication we have just outlined in its general thrust against Heidegger: in what way would the loss of the Self indeed be the way in which we relate ourselves to ourselves the most? Surely there cannot be such a state.
Heidegger contends that there is. He sets up this reflection with regard to how we are to conceive the "I," right? And he has been talking about how it is possible perhaps for the moment of self-consciousness itself to be perhaps the moment in which we are precisely not self-conscious. What is the point here?
That it is indeed precisely when we conceive of ourselves as fully related to ourselves in saying or thinking "I am," in being self-conscious, that we lose that relation of ourselves to ourselves which we attempt to grasp in that moment. The reason for that is it is not something we can grab at all in the first place: it is not a Thing, but Being. Now, this doesn't mean that our sense of "I" is always a loss of Self: Freud, who sees the "I" as a fantasy, doesn't even hold this. However, it means that this "sense" we have, this vague feeling or mood in which we feel at home with ourselves, cannot be captured by an "I." In other words, the Self is a much deeper and much more expansive notion that does justice to this vague sense as vague, as something that is lost most of the time, as something that is self-concealing precisely in its self-relating.
Our question will be answered, then, if we flip this around and see the implication as elaborated by the just-mentioned point. If we are least ourselves when we conceive of ourselves as an "I," how can we be most ourselves when we lose our Self? In the sense that losing our Self is what we do as Selves not merely "most of the time," but most essentially. In other words, it is of the deepest of the essence of the Self to be something that is able to be lost. Thus we find underneath this reorientation of the relationship of ourselves to ourselves being accomplished in this passage an even deeper reflection on the nature of the Self itself. The Self for Heidegger is not something that is supposed to be what we are "most genuinely." The Self is something that has its nature in self-concealment and therefore is nothing like "originalness" or even "propriety." That is, throughout Western philosophy what has been considered the Self has been something like "what we are really," or, "what we are in the most thorough and original (in the sense of independent) way," or, "what is the farthest from being counterfeit" (this is what we mean by "genuine"). Heidegger explodes this notion of the Self and replaces it with something that is less concerned with the counterfeit. The Self is not related to the "genuine," but to Being. The Self as the existing at home in Being of a being could be precisely existence as what is most counterfeit, repeated, unoriginal. This is because the Self is what able to be lost and able to be recovered, and not the moment of losing it nor the moment of recovering it. The Self is the phenomenon that underlies and is pressupposed by any "losing of the Self." As such, we are most ourselves when we inhabit this presupposition, when we lose the self. "Genuineness" has nothing to do with the Self in its essence. More fundamentally, it is not what we are "truly." "True" is not conceived for Heidegger as something that is opposed to falsity, but as that which makes possible falsity, as that which makes possible both the true and the false. For this, however, we should discuss his essay on "The Essence of Truth." But that is for another time.
Indeed, we might conclude by saying that this reflection gives a whole different sense--a proper sense that should be how we take this word--to an oft-used term throughout Being and Time: "authenticity." What is "authentic" is not what is most genuine. What is "authentic" is what is a Self, or what is relating most to itself in the manner of the Self.