The Paradoxes of the Person

The monograph addresses the traditional problem of the paradoxes of the person: being and becoming, incommunicability and communicability, being part and being a whole, as well as being open and being covered. Rejecting extreme interpretations that regard these paradoxes as expressions of logical-epistemological errors or man’s contradictions and absurdities, Mazur treats them as anthropological facts in need of systemic explanation. The paradoxes of the person, like other ontic paradoxes, are expressions of oppositional properties of the person that are also present in beings other than man. However, why do the oppositional properties present in various beings lead to paradoxes only in man? Referring to classical metaphysics, the author argues that the paradoxicality of the opposition between the properties of the person stems from something superadded to the analogous properties of other beings. The extreme opposition of the properties of the person manifests in him not only the presence of something superadded and thus transcendent in relation to other beings, but above all the extraordinary richness and multifacetedness of his existence.