323 II. 2
Being and Time

ontological possibility in the fact that Dasein, in the very basis of its Being, is care.

So we need not resort to powers with a character other than that of Dasein; indeed, recourse to these is so far from clarifying the uncanniness of the call that instead it annihilates it. In the end, does not the reason why 'explanations' of the conscience have gone off the track, lie in the fact that we have not looked long enough to establish our phenomenal findings as to the call, and that Dasein has been presupposed as having some kind of ontological definiteness or indefiniteness, whichever it may chance? Why should we look to alien powers for information before we have made sure that in starting our analysis we have not given too low an assessment ofDasein's Being, regarding it as an innocuous subject endowed with personal consciousness, somehow or other occurring?

And yet, if the caller—who is 'nobody', when seen after the manner of the world—is interpreted as a power, this seems to be a dispassionate recognition of something that one can 'come across Objectively'. When seen correctly, however, this interpretation is only a fleeing in the face of the conscience—a way for Dasein to escape by slinking away from that thin wall by which the "they" is separated, as it were, from the uncanniness of its Being. This interpretation of the conscience passes itself off as recognizing the call in the sense of a voice which is 'universally' binding, and which speaks in a way that is 'not just subjective'. Furthermore, the 'universal' conscience becomes exalted to a 'world-conscience', which still has the phenomenal character of an 'it' and 'nobody', yet which speaks—there in the individual 'subject'—as this indefinite something.

But this 'public conscience'—what else is it than the voice of the "they"? A 'world-conscience' is a dubious fabrication, and Dasein can come to this only because conscience, in its basis and its essence, is in each case mine—not only in the sense that in each case the appeal is to one's ownmost potentiality- for-Being, but because the call comes from that entity which in each case I myself am.

With this Interpretation of the caller, which is purely in accord with the phenomenal character of the calling, the 'power' of conscience is not diminished and rendered 'merely subjective'. On the contrary, only in this way do the inexorability and unequivocal character of the call become free. This Interpretation does justice to the 'Objectivity' of the appeal for the first time by leaving it its 'subjectivity', which of course denies the they-self its dominion.

Nevertheless, this Interpretation of the conscience as the call of care [279] will be countered by the question of whether any interpretation of the


Being and Time (M&R) by Martin Heidegger