Being and Time pt. 7
“Finitude gets a grip on the self through the experience of conscience.”
“For me, the discussion of conscience contains the most exciting and challenging pages in Being and Time.”
“Conscience is a call. It is something that calls one away from one’s inauthentic immersion in the homely familiarity of everyday life.”
“The uncanny call of conscience – the pang and pain of its sudden appearance – feels like an alien voice, but is, Heidegger insists, Dasein calling to itself.”
“What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. The call of conscience is silent. It contains no instructions or advice. In order to understand this, it is important to grasp that, for Heidegger, inauthentic life is characterised by chatter – for example, the ever-ambiguous hubbub of the blogosphere. Conscience calls Dasein back from this chatter silently.”
“So, conscience is the experience of the human being calling itself back to its mortality, a little like Hamlet in the grave with Yorick’s skull.”
“Conscience’s call can be reduced to one word: Guilty! But what does Dasein’s guilt really mean?”
“human existence is a lack, it is something due to Dasein, a debt that it strives to make up or repay. This is the ontological meaning of guilt as Schuld, which can also mean debt.”
“Heidegger goes on to show that this ontological meaning of guilt as indebtedness is the basis for any traditional moral understanding of guilt.”
“Heidegger’s phenomenology of guilt, and here he is close to Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, claims to uncover the deep structure of ethical selfhood which cannot be defined by morality, since morality already presupposes it. Rejecting any Christian notion of evil as the privation of good (privatio boni), Heidegger’s claim is that guilt is the pre-moral source for any morality. As such, it is beyond good or evil. Is guilt bad? No. but neither is it good. It is simply what we are, for Heidegger. We are guilty. Such is Kafka’s share of eternal truth.”
“What changes in being authentic is that the human being understands the call of conscience and takes it into itself. Authentic Dasein comes to understand itself as guilty. In doing this, Dasein has chosen itself, as Heidegger writes.”
“I choose to want the want that I am.”
“Only in this way, Heidegger adds, can the human being be answerable or responsible (verantwortlich). Thus, responsibility – which would be the key to any conception of ethics in relation to Heidegger’s work, which is, to say the least, a moot point – consists in understanding the call, in wanting to have a conscience.”
“To make this choice, Heidegger insists, is to become resolute.”