But is it at all necessary to keep raising explicitly the question of who does the calling? Is this not answered for Dasein just as unequivocally as the question of to whom the call makes its appeal? In conscience Dasein calls itself. This understanding of the caller may be more or less awake in the factical hearing of the call. Ontologically, however, it is not enough to answer that Dasein is at the same time both the caller and the one to whom the appeal is made. When Dasein is appealed to, is it not 'there' in a different way from that in which it does the calling? Shall we say that its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self functions as the caller?
Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. 'It' calls,1 against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.2
These phenomenal findings are not to be explained away. After all, they have been taken as a starting-point for explaining the voice of conscience as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated. If the interpretation continues in this direction, one supplies a possessor for the power thus posited,3 or one takes the power itself as a person who makes himself known-namely God. On the other hand one may try to reject this explanation in which the caller is taken as an alien manifestation of such a power, and to explain away the conscience 'biologically' at the same time. Both these explanations pass over the phenomenal findings too hastily. Such procedures are facilitated by the unexpressed but ontologically dogmatic guiding thesis that what is (in other words, anything so factual as the call) must be present-at-hand, and that what does not let itself be Objectively demonstrated as present-at-hand, just is not at all.
But methodologically this is too precipitate. We must instead hold fast not only to the phenomenal finding that I receive the call as coming both from me and from beyond me, but also to the implication that this phenomenon is here delineated ontologically as a phenomenon of Dasein. [276] Only the existential constitution of this entity can afford us a clue for Interpreting the kind of Being of the 'it' which does the calling.
Does our previous analysis of Dasein's state of Being show us a way of making ontologically intelligible the kind of Being which belongs to the caller, and, along with it, that which belongs to the calling? The fact that the call is not something which is explicitly performed by me, but that
1 '"Es" ruft ...' Here the pronoun 'es' is used quite impersonally, and docs not refer back to 'the call' itself ('Der Ruf').
2 'Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich.'
3 '... unterlegt man der festgelegten Macht einen Besitzer ...'