Our ontological analysis in the Being in the World series shows that authentic Being is ontologically possible within our default mode of being in the world. But merely to theorize the possibility of such a state of complete integrity and mature individuality is insufficient. Call of the Friend shows how to actualize the possibility of being integrity in our everyday life, despite the fact that in being in the world, our individuality is always already lost in the Other. Here we identify the ontological roots of the ontic possibility of integrity as wholeness. We also identify existential evidence for practically realizing our possibility for authenticity.

1. The Esoteric Teaching
Call of the Friend 2: Conscience

2. Our ontological analysis in the Being in the World series shows
that authentic Being is ontologically possible within our
default mode of being in the world. But merely to theorize the
possibility of such a state of complete integrity and mature
individuality is insufficient.
Call of the Friend shows how to actualize the possibility
of being integrity in our everyday life, despite the fact that in
being in the world, our individuality is always already lost in the
Other. Here we identify the ontological roots of the ontic possibility
of integrity as wholeness.We also identify existential evidence
for practically realizing our possibility for authenticity.
The Voice of Conscience

3. In our average everyday state of inauthentic being we are
lost to ourselves.We must find ourselves to achieve
authenticity. But first we have to overcome our habitual
repression of our potential for authentic selfhood, and see
that we have an authentic self to find. Something must
break through our average everyday inauthenticity to reveal
our capacity for authentic being. Our phenomenological
analysis shows that the Voice of Conscience reveals
this possibility for us.
The Voice of Conscience

4. The existential phenomenon of conscience has many
interpretations: religious, psychoanalytical, socio-biological.We
neither endorse nor reject those. Our interest is exploring the
ontological and experiential qualities of theVoice of
Conscience.We want to examine the ontic possibility of the
experience those other interpretations reference: the
mysterious change in heart from inauthentic to authentic
being.We are most interested in how to approach the
existential realization of our capacity to disclose ourselves
as lost, and how to call ourselves to regain our personal
potentiality for complete, authentic selfhood.
The Voice of Conscience

5. The Call of conscience is a form of communication that
disrupts the idle talk of the Other to which we are
ordinarily attuned. It elicits us to oppose every aspect of
inauthentic discourse. It eschews novelty and ambiguity, and
provides no foothold for curiosity.
But we must be careful not to misidentify theVoice of
Conscience as endless self-analysis or fascinated narcissistic
soliloquies, or the authentic voice can become lost in the idle
talk of the Other.
The Voice of Conscience

6. TheVoice of Conscience calls us to authentic Being. It cares not how
we appear in the eyes of others, our public role and value, or what we may
have accepted as the ‘correct’ way to live our life. It addresses us purely as a
being for whom genuine individuality is a real possibility.
Thus, the Call is devoid of content: it asserts nothing, gives no information
about worldly events, no moral guidelines for living. It merely summons us
before itself, holding up every facet of our existence, each of our life
choices, for trial before our capacity to be truly ourselves. It calls us forth
to those possibilities that are most our own. It does not dictate what
those possibilities should be; that would only further repress our capacity
to take over our own life. Conscience discourses with us always and only in
the mode of authentic hearing.
The Voice of Conscience

7. Who addresses us with this strange voice, that pulls
instead of pushes, that listens instead of speaking? Whose
voice is theVoice of Conscience? This is the greatest
mystery of life, and this inquiry is the greatest adventure,
the highest cause to which a human being can be called.
Being in the World described the first step of this
adventure, and the second step is developed herein.
The Voice of Conscience

8. We cannot identify the Caller’s specific features, for at first he
seems to have no identity other than ‘the one who Calls’.
The summoner exists only as ‘He who summons us to
Himself’.
We all hear this voice within ourselves, so perhaps it is an
aspect of ourselves calling to us. However, conscience is more
phenomenologically complex.We agree that theVoice of
Conscience is not a voice of someone outside the person
whom the Call addresses. But neither are we and the Caller
identical.
The Voice of Conscience

9. The person to whom the Call is made is lost in the Other, but the Caller is
not lost or fallen. He could not be, if His silent voice can disrupt the
inauthentic discourse of the Other.The key feature of our lostness in the
inauthentic self is being unaware any conception of ourselves as lost. We do
not know that we possess the capacity for authentic individuality.
Our everyday experience of conscience is a voice that speaks against our
expectations, even against our will.We have no plans or desire to accept
His demands.Yet something about the Call is compelling.TheVoice of
Conscience is a paradox: it both is and is not our voice—it seemingly comes
from ourselves, and yet from beyond us. How can we understand our
relation to this Call? How is it possible for theVoice of Conscience to be
experienced as a Call made upon us, rather than by ourselves?
The Voice of Conscience

10. Our passivity toward theVoice of Conscience suggests that it exposes
the fact that we are completely absorbed in being in the world.We find
ourselves thrown into a situation that we did not choose, but in which
we must nevertheless decide how to go on with our life.This is the
fundamental uncanniness of being in the world.The state in which we
find ourselves is never all that we feel that we are or could be. Nor
can we be reduced to mere being in the world, so we can never fully
identify with our life the way it is.Thus we never regard ourselves as
fully at home in the life and world we find ourselves inhabiting.This
feeling of uncanniness gives rise to the objectless anxiety of being
in the world.
The Voice of Conscience

11. We do not want to acknowledge this thrownness into unchosen existential
responsibility. Indeed, we flee from it. But theVoice of Conscience recalls this
fact about ourselves, throwing us into an anxious confrontation with our
potential for genuine individuality.TheVoice of Conscience tries to make us
find ourselves, even in the depths of being in the world.
This is why the Caller who speaks through theVoice of Conscience is definable
only by the fact of His calling.The Call reminds us that we are not at home in the
world. It speaks from the nothingness that remains when we are wrenched from
our familiar absorption in being in the world. Nothing could be more alien to
our default being than confronting our potential for authentic existence.The Call
of Conscience summons us to confront our inescapably personal abandonment
of our own authentic Being.The Call of Conscience is ontologically possible only
because the very basis of our Being is care.
The Voice of Conscience

12. The Call of Conscience is often heard as accusing us, identifying us as being
guilty. Guilt is conceptually connected with indebtedness and responsibility.A
guilty person is responsible for making amends for some deprivation or loss.
This presupposes that we are responsible for our deficiency.This guilt is
for being responsible for a nullity: the absence of something valuable.
The ontic phenomenon of guilt reflects the fundamental ontological structure
of our existence as thrown projection.We can realize only one of the
existential possibilities the situation makes available.We choose on the basis
of the particular state of self and world in which we find ourselves.We never
have complete control over our situation or the restrictions it imposes; our
capacity for projective commitment must always originate from within a
particular context, so we can never fully determine its structure.
The Voice of Conscience

13. In existing as thrown, we constantly lag behind our possibilities.
We never have complete power over our own being in the
world.This is the existential meaning of thrownness.
However, nullity is integral to our capacity for projection. For by
projecting upon one particular possibility, we thereby negate all
other possibilities; choosing to realize any existential choice
determines the non-realization of all others.The nature of our
Being as care means being the cause of the destruction of the
possibilities we choose not to actualize.
The Voice of Conscience

14. The authenticity to which conscience Calls us is thus an existential mode
of being guilty:“Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” Alibis, making
amends or reform might eradicate the ontic guilt of one specific action;
but ontological guilt, being an inescapable condition of existence, is the
primal and ineradicable ‘original sin’.
Authenticity, then, first reveals that being guilty is the ontological
condition that is most our own.The aim is not to overcome or
transcend guilt, since that would amount to transcending one’s
thrownness.The Call summons us to take responsibility for the
situation into which we are thrown, and the particular projections and
choices we make in it. It leads us to make our necessarily guilty existence
our own, rather than project responsibility on ‘them’.
The Voice of Conscience

15. Accepting the Call means readiness to take responsibility for our
existential choices, to be indebted to oneself.The Call of
Conscience demands making existential decisions in the light of one’s
authentic potential for being guilty. Our only authentic response to the
Call of Conscience is to choose whether to accept the Call or repress it.
TheVoice of Conscience is not seeking the adoption of some particular
standard of moral right and wrong, some karmic calculus of debt and
credit.The response the Call seeks is our desire to have a conscience.To
cultivate this desire is to engage oneself in the service of one’s capacity
for authentic individuality; it is the essence of choosing for oneself.
The Voice of Conscience

16. In the triple ontological structure of our Being
as care, as we discussed in Being in the
World, a particular state of mind and mode of
discourse belong to every mode of
understanding. For example, our feeling of
uncanniness in being in the world elicits
anxiety. Similarly, the mode of discourse
corresponding to anxiety is one of reticence:
keeping silent.The particular form of self-
disclosure that the Call of Conscience elicits in
us is a reticent self-projection upon our own
being guilty, in which we are ready for anxiety.
This ontic state is ‘resoluteness’.
The Voice of Conscience
Being Guilty
Reticence
Ready for
Anxiety
Resoluteness

17. Resoluteness does not isolate us or
detach us entirely from being in the world.
Rather, it returns us to our place and
specific caring relations with entities and
others, to discover our authentic
possibilities and grasp them in the way most
genuinely our own.
The Voice of Conscience
Being Guilty
Reticence
Ready for
Anxiety
Resoluteness

18. Resoluteness is inherently indefinite: no
existential blueprints for authenticity arise
from this ontology.The disclosures and
projections of our resoluteness must
respond to the particulars of our situation.
Our view of the situation into which we are
thrown by life is volatilized by the Other’s
ambiguity, curiosity and insatiable hunger for
novelty. It is only through the disclosure of a
concrete act of resolution that a particular
context is given existential definition at all.
The Voice of Conscience
Being Guilty
Reticence
Ready for
Anxiety
Resoluteness

19. Our place in the world as a locus of
authentic existential choice is thus not
something resoluteness presupposes, but
rather something it allows or creates.
Resoluteness means projecting upon our
existential possibilities from the range of
choices most authentically our own. It also
means projecting our context as a definite
range of existential possibilities: those
possibilities we own as ‘mine’.Thus when we
heed the Call of Conscience, resoluteness
becomes the context of our life.
The Voice of Conscience
Being Guilty
Reticence
Ready for
Anxiety
Resoluteness