The Call of Conscience – Part 1 (BT 269) (2025) Pintura por Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT 269

As a phenomenon of Dasein, conscience is not just a fact which occurs and is occasionally present-at-hand. It 'is' only in Dasein's kind of Being, and it makes itself known as a Fact only w i t h factical existence and i n it. The demand that an 'inductive empirical proof' should be given for the 'factuality' of conscience and for the legitimacy of its 'voice', rests upon an ontological perversion of the phenomenon. This perversion, however, is one that is shared by every “superior” criticism in which conscience is taken as something just occurring from time rather than as a 'universally established and ascertainable fact'. Among such proofs and conterproofs, the Fact of conscience cannot present itself at all. This is no lack in it, but merely a sign by which we can recognize it as ontologically of a different kind from what is environmentally present-at-hand.
Conscience gives us 'something' to understand; it discloses. By characterizing this phenomenon formally in this way, we find ourselves enjoined to take it back into the disclosedness of Dasein. This disclosedness as abasic state of that entity which we ourselves are, is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, falling, and discourse. If we analyse conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call [Ruf]. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-guilty.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

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Martin Heidegger