Resoluteness & Reticence (BT296/297) (2025) Schilderij door Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT296/297

In hearing the call understandingly, one denies oneself any counter-discourse, not because one has been assailed by some 'obscure power', which suppresses one's hearing, but because this hearing has appropriated the content of the call unconcealedly. In the call one's constant Being-guilty is represented, and in this way the Self is brought back from the loud idle talk which goes with the common sense of the “they”. Thus the mode of Articulative discourse which belongs to wanting to have a conscience, is one of reticence. Keeping silent has been characterized as an essential possibility of discourse. Anyone who keeps silent when he wants to give us to understand something, must 'have something to say'. In the appeal Dasein gives itself to understand its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This calling is therefore a keeping-silent. The discourse of the conscience never comes to utterance. Only in keeping silent does the conscience call; that is to say, the call comes from the soundlessness of uncanniness, and the Dasein which it summons is called back into the stillness of itself, and called back as something that is to become still. Only in the reticence, therefore, is this silent discourse understood appropriately in wanting to have a conscience. It takes the words away from the common-sense idle talk of the “they”.
The common-sense way of interpreting the conscience, which 'sticks rigorously to the facts', takes the silent discourse of the conscience as an occasion for passing it off as something which is not at all ascertainable or present-at-hand. The fact that “they”, who hear and understand nothing but loud idle talk, cannot 'report' any call, is held against the conscience on the subterfuge that it is 'dumb' and manifestly not present-at-hand. With this kind of interpretation the “they” merely covers up its own failure to hear the call and the fact that its 'hearing' does not reach very far.
The disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a conscience, is thus constituted by anxiety as state-of-mind, by understanding as a projection of oneself upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, and by discourse as reticence. This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience – this reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety – we call “resoluteness”.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

Verwante thema's

Martin Heidegger