315 II. 2
Being and Time

logical foundations of conscience (Section 55); the character of conscience as a call (Section 56); conscience as the call of care (Section 57); understanding the appeal, and guilt (Section 58); the existential Interpretation of conscience and the way conscience is ordinarily interpreted (Section 59); the existential structure of the authentic potentiality-for-Being which is attested in the conscience (Section 60).


55. The Existential-ontological Foundations of Conscience

In the phenomenon of conscience we find, without further differentiation, that in some way it gives us something to understand. Our analysis of it takes its departure from this finding. Conscience discloses, and thus belongs within the range of those existential phenomena which constitute the Being of the "there" as disclosedness.iv We have analysed the most universal structures of state-of-mind, understanding, discourse and falling. If we now bring conscience into this phenomenal context, this is not a matter of applying these structures schematically to a special 'case' of Dasein's disclosure. On the contrary, our Interpretation of conscience not only will carry further our earlier analysis of the disclosedness of the "there", but it will also grasp it more primordially with regard to Dasein's authentic Being.

Through disclosedness, that entity which we call "Dasein" is in the possibility of being its "there". With its world, it is there for itself, and indeed—proximally and for the most part—in such a way that it has disclosed to itself its potentiality-for-Being in terms of the 'world' of its concern. Dasein exists as a potentiality-for-Being which has, in each case, already abandoned itself to definite possibilities.1 And it has abandoned itself to these possibilities because it is an entity which has been thrown, and an entity whose thrownness gets disclosed more or less plainly and impressively by its having a mood. To any state-of-mind or mood, understanding belongs equiprimordially. In this way Dasein 'knows' what it is itself capable of [woran es mit ihm selbst ist], inasmuch as it has either projected itself upon possibilities of its own or has been so absorbed in the "they" that it has let such possibilities be presented to it by the way in which the "they" has publicly interpreted things. The presenting of these possibilities, however, is made possible existentially through the fact that Dasein, as a Being-with which understands, can listen to Others. [271] Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the "they", it fails to hear [überhört] its own Self in listening to the they-self. If Dasein is to be able to get brought back from this lostness of failing to hear itself, and if this is to be done through itself, then it must first be able to find itself-to find


1 'Das Seinkönnen, als welches das Dasein existiert, hat sich je schon bestimmten Möglichkeiten überlassen.'


Being and Time (M&R) by Martin Heidegger