Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the Heideggerian conception of authentic human existence is properly understood only when read as paradox. Because the human being is understood by Heidegger as the site of the disclosure of entities, it is, like the work of art, an appropriation of the primal conflict between clearing and concealing that engenders all truth. By showing that the truth-disclosive structure of conflict belonging to the work of art takes-place in the human being as well, it is revealed that to exist authentically is to enter into the confrontation with one's own paradoxical nature: to be human, that is, to care, is to be conflicted. Reading authenticity in this way vindicates the concept from charges of contradiction levied against it in the secondary literature. Just as the primal conflict enters the work of art as strife between "world" and "earth," so too does it enter human "Dasein" as strife between "existence" and "facticity." Failure to recognize that this tension is essential to human existence leads the phenomenologist to inconsistency, and the individual person to despair. To be fully human is to exact of oneself the courage to endure the realization that what one shall be one is already. Freedom, and therefore, the possibility of joy, comes only in assuming responsibility for a life, and death, that one did not solicit. This is the paradox of authenticity