conscience can stand up if it removes itself so far from 'natural experience'. How is the conscience to function as that which summons us to our ownmost potentiality-for-Being, when proximally and for the most part it merely warns and reproves? Does the conscience speak in so indefinite and empty a manner about our potentiality-for-Being? Does it not rather speak definitely and concretely in relation to failures and omissions which have already befallen or which we still have before us? Does the alleged appeal stem from a 'bad' conscience or from a 'good' one? Does the conscience give us anything positive at all? Does it not function rather in just a critical fashion?
Such considerations are indisputably within their rights. We can, however, demand that in any Interpretation of conscience 'one' should recognize in it the phenomenon in question as it is experienced in an everyday manner. But satisfying this requirement does not mean in turn that the ordinary ontical way of understanding conscience must be recognized as the first court of appeal [erste Instanz] for an ontological Interpretation. On the other hand, the considerations which we have just marshalled remain premature as long as the analysis of conscience to which they pertain falls short of its goal. Hitherto we have merely tried to trace back conscience as a phenomenon of Dasein to the ontological constitution of that entity. This has served to prepare us for the task of making the conscience intelligible as an attestation of Dasein's ownmost potentiality-for-Being—an attestation which lies in Dasein itself.
But what the conscience attests becomes completely definite only when we have delimited plainly enough the character of the hearing which genuinely corresponds to the calling. The authentic understanding which 'follows' the call is not a mere addition which attaches itself to the phenomenon of conscience by a process which may or may not be forthcoming. Only from an understanding of the appeal and together with such an understanding does the full Experience of conscience let itself be grasped. If in each case the caller and he to whom the appeal is made are at the same time one's own Dasein themselves, then in any failure to hear the call or any incorrect hearing of oneself, there lies a definite kind of Dasein's Being. A free-floating call from which 'nothing ensues' is an impossible fiction when seen existentially. With regard to Dasein, 'that nothing ensues' signifies something positive.
So then, only by analysing the way the appeal is understood can one be led to discuss explicitly what the call gives one to understand. But only with our foregoing general ontological characterization of the conscience does [280] it become possible to conceive existentially the conscience's call of