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Abstract

In Being and Time, the philosopher Martin Heidegger portrays the conscience in a different sense from another common, characterization of the conscience, where the conscience acts as a guide to satisfy a moral code. Instead, for Heidegger, the conscience calls the human to ‘take up,’ or accept, the “who” that the human is, without measurement to an external, “ethical,” code. In “The Call,” I affirm Heidegger’s distinctive characterization of the conscience. I adjust Heidegger, however, to argue that we may understand the call of conscience as a call toward the ethical if we both understand Heidegger’s description of the call as different from our own and adjust our understanding of the “ethical” to reflect Heidegger’s different depiction of the call. I believe this adjustment is significant for ethics because it broadens the understanding of “the ethical” to include an acceptance of the internal self.

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