We can now join the components of our analysis of being in the world into a coherent whole. Our characterizations of default human beingness as thrown projection, care, being towards death and being guilty are complementary views of the same ontological structure from different angles. But one of our goals remains unfulfilled: we still require existential proof that a person stuck in inauthentic being is capable of attaining integrity. If our analysis is accurate, the Voice of Conscience articulates the Call. The Call is a hint within our everyday existential inauthenticity that we are anxious about our potential for authentic existence. It is the voice of our repressed but still existing capacity for genuine selfhood. But if that capacity is genuinely repressed, how can it speak out? If we can hear the Call, its repression must already have been lifted. We must have already discovered our possibility of authentic being, no matter how minutely.

1. The Esoteric Teaching
Call of the Friend 3: Authenticity

2. We can now join the components of our analysis of being
in the world into a coherent whole. Our characterizations
of default human beingness as thrown projection, care,
being towards death and being guilty are complementary
views of the same ontological structure from different
angles. But one of our goals remains unfulfilled: we still
require existential proof that a person stuck in
inauthentic being is capable of attaining
integrity.
Attaining Authenticity

3. If our analysis is accurate, theVoice of Conscience articulates
the Call.The Call is a hint within our everyday existential
inauthenticity that we are anxious about our potential for
authentic existence. It is the voice of our repressed but still
existing capacity for genuine selfhood. But if that capacity is
genuinely repressed, how can it speak out? If we can hear the
Call, its repression must already have been lifted.We must have
already discovered our possibility of authentic being, no matter
how minutely.
Attaining Authenticity

4. The central difficulty is that we conceive of our default being as
inherently split. Human beings are capable of living authentically
or inauthentically. Either we are lost in the distractions of the
Other while retaining the capacity for wrenching ourselves away
from it, or we have realized the existential possibilities
expressing our real individuality, while still remaining vulnerable
to falling back into the world.We retain this dual nature as long
as we are in the world—that is, as long as we are alive.
Attaining Authenticity

5. The transition from inauthentic to authentic being therefore
involves an internal shift in emphasis.The urge for genuine
individuality must come to eclipse the habits of inauthentic
being.Without some help, this transition can only be brought
about by our own resources. But overcoming our self-
imposed darkness by ourselves seems impossible. Indeed,
our experience does not confirm this possibility.
Attaining Authenticity

6. The Call must come from outside ourselves—from someone
who is with us in the world, but is not lost in the world.The
Call of conscience must be articulated externally by someone
else; someone who diagnoses us as lost, and has an interest
in our overcoming inauthenticity and freeing our capacity to live
a genuinely individual life.This external intervention disrupts
our self-reinforcing dispersal in the Other, recalling us to
our own authentic possibilities.
Attaining Authenticity

7. The Call of Conscience, though it may actually come from within, is
perceived to be external.The Caller’s aim is to help us recover our
capacity for selfhood, our autonomy. He does not wish to impose
upon us a specific blueprint for living, or replace our present
servitude to the Other with servitude to himself. His only aim is to
remind us of our capacity for individuality, to urge us to listen to
the demands of our authenticity. In so doing, he functions as an
external representative of an aspect of ourselves, his Call being
proxy for our potential for authenticity.This Call is now repressed,
but it nonetheless constitutes our most true self; in that sense, the
Caller speaks from within us, echoing the voice of our conscience.
Attaining Authenticity

8. The voice of another person, whose reticent tone
acknowledges our own inner voice, would be perceived
by us as possessing exactly the phenomenological
characteristics defining the Call of Conscience.We
perceive that the Call comes from within us, and yet
from beyond us. It seems like the voice of a dear, familiar
Friend we carry within our hearts.
Attaining Authenticity

9. But if our inauthentic state renders us incapable of hearing the
Call of Conscience, how can we hear the same Call made by
another? If part of our lostness is loss of any conception of
ourselves as capable of any being other than being in the world,
how could the Call of the Friend penetrate our repression of
our authenticity? If it could, then surely we must already have
begun the very transition that the reception of the Call is
supposed to initiate. Clearly, if the Friend is to be heard, he
must first create the conditions for his own audibility. But how?
Attaining Authenticity

10. Our selfhood is lost in the Other.There is no ontological
differentiation in the impersonal Other between self and other,
and so no internal self-differentiation in its members. Lacking
any conception of authentic being, we conflate our existential
potential with our existential actuality, and repress our feeling of
uncanniness. However, when we encounter an authentic Friend,
his authentic mode of existence disrupts the undifferentiated
mass of the Other.The selfhood of the Friend is not lost in
slavish, mechanical identification with (or slavish
differentiation from) others.
Attaining Authenticity

11. The Friend does not mirror our impersonality, for that
would confirm it; he simply prevents us from relating to
him inauthentically.We can mirror another who exists as
individual and self-determining, and who relates to us
genuinely, only by relating to him as Other, and to
ourselves as other to that Other.That is, the authentic
Friend allows us to relate to him only as a separate, self-
determining individual.
Attaining Authenticity

12. An encounter with a genuine Other disrupts our lostness by
awakening otherness in ourselves. Our relation to that Other
overcomes our habitual assumptions of self-identity and
instantiates a mode of self-relation as other. It induces an anxious
realization of ourself as a separate, self-responsible being with a life
of our own, that we must lead.And so we realize our existence as
our own, non-relational and inevitable.This amounts to anxious
acknowledgement of our mortality, the existential pivot from self-
dispersal to self-integrity.The fact of the Friend’s existence creates
in us the precise conditions for hearing his Call to real individuality
as an echo or reflection of our ownVoice of Conscience.
Attaining Authenticity

13. Our conception of our default being as split, with its
capacity for authenticity eclipsing or being eclipsed
by its capacity for inauthenticity, applies to almost
everyone in the world. People everywhere are
immersed in the prevailing inauthentic modes of
everyday life, of being in the world. Everyone we
meet in ordinary life is inauthentic, although capable
of authenticity.
Attaining Authenticity

14. However, outlining an insightful fundamental ontology of our
being necessarily is an act of authentic being. Such a thing can be
done only by someone who, while not being immune to the
temptations of inauthenticity, has achieved an authentic mode of
human existence. Providing such a fundamental ontology to you
is an attempt to facilitate your transition from inauthentic to
authentic being.Thus, our relation to you precisely matches the
model of theVoice of Conscience, the Call of the Friend as we
have termed it.
Attaining Authenticity

15. We attempt to echo theVoice of Conscience to you, acting as a
representative of your own capacity for authentic Being.We do not
want to present you with blueprints for living. Rather, we confront
you with a portrait of yourself as mired in inauthenticity, Call you
to knowledge of yourself as capable of authentic thought, and
encourage you to overcome your repression of that capacity and
to think for yourself. Our presentation offers the Call of the Friend
as a pivot for self-transformation, as a mirror that reflects your
present inauthenticity, and as a medium through which you might
attain authenticity.
Attaining Authenticity

16. It is practically impossible for anyone to originate their own rebirth. Of
course, in claiming the capacity to present a fundamental ontology of
being, we claim a position of authenticity, implicitly declaring ourselves as
having transitioned from an inauthentic to an authentic mode of
existence.Yet we cannot present ourselves as having done so entirely on
our own resources.We have not single-handedly created this
fundamental ontology and this deconstruction of the way of being in the
world that we inherited.We cannot misrepresent our achievement as
solely and exclusively our own. In particular, we cannot ignore the role
our teachers played in the origination of our thinking and investigations.
For they in turn represented theVoice of Conscience and originated the
Call to us.
Attaining Authenticity

17. Let us recall how our analysis of conscience and guilt confirms
the implication of our analysis of death. In the act of being, we are
internally related to nothingness, nonexistence and negation.To
say that we are being guilty is to say that we are the basis of a
nullity—the absence of something—and hence that the ground of
our projections will always exceed our grasp.TheVoice of
Conscience is our discourse with the Friend of the Heart in the
mode of silence. It reveals that discourse as a dimension of
significance beyond the possibilities of any speech act.
Attaining Authenticity

18. Authentic listening doesn’t demand anything specific to happen in
the world; and so there is nothing specific that could constitute
its satisfaction.Any specific existential demands we think we hear
from the Voice of Conscience are solely our misinterpretation of
its silence.The silentVoice of Conscience actually condemns our
subjection to demand as unredeemable through satisfying any
specific demand.Authentic being is not to respond to any
particular demand made by the Other, but to choose a
possibility in any situation that is distinctively ours alone.
Attaining Authenticity

19. TheVoice of Conscience speaks against our habitual tendency
to conflate our existential potential with our existential
actuality. It silently opens up our internal otherness, our relation
to ourselves as other.This means we are not self-identical, but
rather transitional or self-transcending.This implies that
inauthenticity is a matter of our enacting an understanding of
ourself as essentially self-identical, as capable of coinciding with
ourselves and fulfilling our nature.Thus our being is perpetually
incomplete, always already projecting into future possibilities.
Attaining Authenticity

20. This internal split between our present and future self can be
resolved only by attaining integrity, where each choice we
make is in the consciousness of the realization of impending
death that we explored in Being in the World.We must find
the Friend of the Heart and submit our impulses, ideas and
desires to His advocacy, and the judgement of Conscience,
before actualizing them.That is the clear path to ontological
integrity and complete authenticity. However, this is impossible
without the help of the external Friend, a person who has
realized his own authentic Being.
Attaining Authenticity