Heidegger writes that the goal of Being and Time is to understand the meaning of Being; a goal that only an authentic Dasein can achieve. Man, Dasein, is an entity that is unique among other entities insofar as that he is defined by the relationship he has with himself; he does not suffer only mere presence but exists by taking a position on „who“ he is. Existence signifies the Daseins orientation toward the future. Every human act is a movement with and towards some goal; the desire to achieve a goal, which is in the future, is the cause of our actions and a man with the establishment of a certain goal already „is“ in the future. Authenticity as a movement achieves its goal through that movement itself, and in this movement we find ourselves in front of an immeasurable amount of possibilities, which, depending on how we connect them, determine who we are as a person. The mode of Dasein's existence, therefore, encompasses a possibility; that which is thrown to us, which includes our Being as a historical being; as well as an actuality; the stance we take over that which is thrown to us. Dasein in his throwness is lost in the anonymous public, he is lost among other people, and participates in the inauthenticity of self-deceptive acts of gossiping and curiosity, until he finds himself as being fallen. In his fallenness, Dasein sees himself as inauthentic and decides to become authentic. Authenticity signifies determination and a reflective view of one's own life in its entirety; which is achievable only when we realize the inevitability of our own death. For Dasein, death represents his ownness, something that is completely our own and that is incomprehensible through the death of others. According to Heidegger, in addition to the phenomenon of death and determination, the phenomenon of conscience is also necessary for authenticity. Conscience is the voice that leads us to become authentic, and it arises from our inertion and from our guilt caused by the ontological fact that man is a contingent being in a constant relationship towards nothingness, to death. Guilt signifies the failure to achieve one's own possibilities, the suppression of authenticity, and the noisiness of an inauthentic life. Only in that noisiness can the voice of conscience appear. In the guilt of avoiding the question of our death, we also create a fear of death as an event, as something that is not our own. Fear arises from the fact of our radical freedom, before the fact that it is us who, for ourselves, have to make a decision among an immeasurable amount of possibilities. Fear thus distances us from our ownness and from authenticity. Overcoming that fear means accepting your mortality, which means looking at our life as a whole. In looking at life as a whole, we transcend the "vulgar" understanding of time as a present presence, and we begin to understand our future and past as a whole story, in which the meanings of past events change depending on what is happening now and what will happen in the future. In comparison to Heidegger, Kierkegaard states that man is a synthesis; that man is a dialectical relationship of conflicting concepts such as eternity and temporality, infinity and temporality, freedom and necessity, as well as the eternal soul and perishable body. In this relationship of extremes, we move freely, and in this freedom, we get lost, we sin, we repent and we flee to one of the extremes that make our being. In our flight we become selfish, resentful, and morally bitter; we move away from the petty-bourgeois life into a negative reflection of the aesthetic life, a life filled with empty pleasures and the false pursuit of beauty. Beauty is not the most sublime, and once it perishes the aesthete remains an empty main in despair. We further escape into ethical constructions and convince ourselves that our passive way of life is the right one, and we satisfy ourselves with different philosophical constructions and systems through which we explain the world around us. The Ethical man, as he himself is a paradoxical being between two extremes, will eventually come to an inexplicable, paradoxical situation where the only solution is to surrender oneself to faith. For Kierkegaard, surrendering includes determination; determination in the rejection of all false identities in the act of "standing naked before the Lord." Everything that is „is“ by itself or by another, and since man is in relation to himself, he could not become by himself, he necessarily must have been created by God. In accepting ourselves as created beings, we can become authentic, we can learn how to love God, and through God's love, we can learn how to love ourselves, to love others, and the world around us. In the movement towards authenticity, man becomes alienated from the world around him, because not all individuals are willing to become authentic, or are aware of their inauthentic state and the inauthenticity of the world in which we find ourselves. Man, who is necessary an interpersonal and social being, and who needs other people to know himself, must, after becoming authentic, return to the non-authentic world with his newly acquired knowledge and with the goal of actively changing the world around him.