Being the self: Heidegger's concept of autenticity and its critique

The diploma thesis pursuits an answer to the question to the meaning of being oneself. Martin Heidegger's philosophy, as elaborated in Being and Time, underlines the importance of this anthropological question giving it a focal position in the ontological query. For Heidegger, the individuality is identified with an act of acceptance of one's own, typically human way of being, which is the ground for disclosure of Being itself. The work traces this correlation by interpreting Heidegger's concept of human in two steps: the first, meanings hidden in the definition of man as a possibility are qualified, then, the notion of "authentic" existence as a prominent way of revelation of one's own being possibility is put in the centre of interest. I find the core of authenticity, characterized by Heidegger as "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), in the act of acceptance of the burden of existence, which I bring to its consequences for selfunderstanding of the man. This point opens the discussion as I consider the understanding of one's own life aimed towards a possibility which man finds himself or herself in one of the basic ways of orientation in the world. However, this conception is not compatible with Heidegger's notion of authentic existence. In the end, consequences of the confrontation of the both concepts of..