Still, in our restricted investigation into conscience, we must neither exaggerate its importance nor make distorted claims about it, thereby diminishing it. As a phenomenon of being-there, conscience is not a fact that occurs and is occasionally on hand. It “is” only in the manner being-there is, and makes itself known as a factum only in factical ex-sistence. The demand for an “inductive empirical proof” of the “factuality” of conscience, and of the legitimacy of its “voice,” is based on an ontological distortion of the phenomenon. But this distortion is also shared by every aloof critique of conscience that considers it as something occurring only now and then rather than as a “universally established and ascertainable fact.” The factum of conscience cannot be coupled with such proofs and counter-proofs at all. This is not a deficiency, but a sign that it differs ontologically from beings on hand in the circum-world.
Conscience offers “something” to understand, it discloses. From this formal characteristic arises the directive to take this phenomenon back into the disclosedness of being-there. This fundamental constitution of the being that we ourselves in each case are is constituted by attunement, understanding, collapsing, and talk. A more penetrating analysis of conscience reveals it as a call. Calling is a mode of talk. The call of conscience has the character of summoning being-there to its ownmost ability-to-be-itself — by summoning it to its ownmost being-guilty.
This existential interpretation necessarily departs from everyday, ontic intelligibility, although it exposes the ontological foundations of what the ordinary interpretation of conscience has always understood within certain limits and has conceptualized as a “theory” of conscience. Thus our existential interpretation needs to be confirmed by a critique of the ordinary interpretation of conscience. When this phenomenon has been exhibited, we can bring out to what extent it bears witness to an authentic ability-to-be of being-there. To the call of conscience there corresponds a possible hearing. Understanding the summons reveals [270] itself as wanting-to-have-conscience. But in this phenomenon lies that existentiell choosing of the choice of being-itself that we are looking for and that we call resoluteness in accordance with its existential structure.
Thus we have the divisions of the analysis of this Chapter: the existential-ontological foundations of conscience (§55); the character of conscience as a call (§56); conscience as the call of care (§57);