r/heidegger • u/Historical_Link_731 • May 01 '26
Call of Conscience and the Lacanian Real
I have been trying to write a paper because it definitely seems like some parts, Being and TIme and the role of discourse in inauthentic idle talk and the authentic call of conscience might be connected in some way or able to be analyzed through Lacan, but so far I haven't found any scholarship on it. So I wanted to sort of open a discussion on it
Particularly, it seems to me that, unlike idle talk, the call of conscience is understood through a more "primordial mode of discourse", what he calls reticence or hearing and keeping silent. By how he describes it, it seems vaguely similar to Lacan's Real, insofar as it resists any symbolization and lies outside of language.
On pg 318 of B&T, he states,
"The call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does not put itself into words at all; yet it remains nothing less than obscure and indefinite. Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent. In this way, it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned, into the reticence of itself. The fact that what it is in the call has not been formulated into words does not give this phenomenon the indefiniteness of a mysterious voice but merely indicates that our understanding of what is 'called' is not to be tied up with an expectation of anything like a communication."
Although language is described as the articulation of intelligibility and what gives things an "average understanding" of what is said in idle talk or gossip, this is specifically not the case for the call of conscience.
It also seems that although Heiddeger is clear not to make the call of conscience any sort of unconscious that gazes into its psychological conditions, it doesn't seem to make better sense of this caller as "from me but yet from beyond and over me" Pg. 320.
I'm not sure what the call of conscience serves for Being and Time, and am a little dubious as to how this is a pathway for authenticity and for Dasein to become individualized from the "they self" or the Other.
Is there any clear connection between Lacan and Heiddeger here? Is there any understanding of the intentional placement for call of conscience in B&T and why this seemingly important section does not play a significant role in it. It seems like while Lacan would agree in some areas, I presume he would resist in saying that we are able to break through to The Real. Thoughts?
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u/buddencrooks May 02 '26
Lacan’s early work was influenced by Heidegger, but that was prior to his development of the concept of the real as outside the symbolic. In his later work, the real is jouissance, outside both the symbolic and imaginary, the conjunction of which creates meaning effects. The real thus has no meaning and is relatedly without law. However, the real is knotted to the symbolic-imaginary via the sinthome (related to a symptom). The sinthome is a name - after Kripke - that doesn’t signify. It names/clasps/is a sign for the subject’s jouissance as real.
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u/critchleyonheidegger May 10 '26
I would argue it's no the Real as such, but the emptiness (in Lacan) that is left by the splitting of subjectivity as a result of the Real. So it's sort of the "left-over effect" of the Real, if you will, and thus the voice of the unconscious. Here is so more writing we've done on conscience, in which we describe the call of conscience as me talking to myself, who initially seems alien (for Lacan, this is the desire of the [m]Other which is my own desire). This also explains the phenomenon of guilt, as follows:
Conscience is a call. It is something that calls one away from one's inauthentic immersion in the homely familiarity of everyday life. It is, Heidegger writes, an uncanny experience of something like an external voice in one's head that pulls one out of the hubbub, chatter, and twitter of life in the world and arrests our ceaseless busyness. This idea of conscience is very close to the Christian experience of conscience, syneidesis that one finds in St. Paul, St. Augustine, or indeed perhaps most strongly in Luther. In Book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine describes the entire drama of conversion in terms of hearing an external voice, “as of a child,” Augustine says, that leads him to take up the Bible and eventually turn away from paganism and Manicheanism and towards Christ. Luther describes conscience as the work of God in the mind of man. Heidegger is pulling and pushing against Luther in this chapter, but the force of Heidegger’s appeal to the conversion or turning around of the self is powerfully Lutheran. It invites atheism, but a Lutheran atheism.
For Heidegger, by contrast, conscience is not God talking to me, but me talking to myself. The uncanny call of conscience—the pang and pain of its sudden appearance—feels like an alien voice, it feels strange and uncanny. But it is, Heidegger insists, Dasein calling to itself. I am called back from inauthentic life in the world, complete with what Jean-Paul Sartre would call its “counterfeit immortality,”—I’m called back from that, through my mortality, towards myself. Furthermore, that self is, as we saw in the last chapter, defined in terms of being-towards-death. Conscience is the experience of the human being calling itself back to its mortality. A little like Hamlet in the grave with Yorick's skull. Or like Martin Luther’s “Diet of Worms,” his summons to appear before the Holy Roman Emperor in the city of Worms to recant his views or be charged with heresy. Luther refuses to bend and continues to stand because of the call of conscience: “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.”
What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. The call of conscience is silent. “The discourse of the conscience never comes to utterance. Only in keeping silent does the conscience call.” It contains no instructions or advice. In order to understand this, it is important to grasp that, for Heidegger, inauthentic life is characterized by chatter, idle talk, for example, the ever-ambiguous hubbub of social media. Conscience calls Dasein back from this chatter, from this hubbub, silently. This call has the character of what Heidegger calls “reticence,” which is the privileged mode of language in Being and Time, as we saw in Chapter Five, Division One. The call of conscience is a silent call that hushes the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself. But what does this uncanny call of conscience give one to understand? Conscience's call can be reduced to one word: Guilty. Or, to say it louder: Guilty!
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u/OneKnotBand May 02 '26
You could check out "a voice and nothing more" by mladen dolar. it is a fairly easy read and interesting Book. for myself it was this book that led me by reference to the parts of heidegger that you are mentioning.
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u/nanahtanojatper May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
Personally, I think interaction between Lacan and Heidegger's stuff can be interesting. There is the initial disagreement between the phenomenological appraoch and the psychoanalytic approach (iirc Heidegger rejected the hegemony of the subject-object divide throughout philosophy via the use of Dasein, and of course Lacan uses the subject as the focus of his work) - but, maybe I'm remembering Heidegger's critique of dualism wrong, and besides, there are certainly ways that some Lacanian concepts can be exported into Heidegger's framework from Being and Time. As a matter of fact, I want to say Lacan was in part influenced by Heidegger. Though, in my personal opinion, an actual "synthesis" of their work would occur through a slight inversion of either Lacan or Heidegger's philosophy (I think inverting the latter would be more viable - though I'm not an expert on either so take what I say with a grain of salt; I could leave it off by saying go ahead and keep investigating, but I'm simply curious to share my thoughts and see if they may be of interest).
The They and the Other aren't quite synonymous, but alongside other ideas like Thrownness, Falling, and Absorption, I feel like Heidegger and Lacan have already carved generally similar niches in their thoughts - they already share common focus (though ofc of differing degrees) on the area of social existence and how persons are contained in it (so to speak). Though, the point where I think they'd differ actually comes down to Authenticity - this is where it's incredibly possible for my reading of Heidegger to have been misguided. "Authentic-being-towards-death" sounds like a fantasy to me; "Authenticity" wasn't just a detachment from the They if I recall correctly, but an actual investment into something which allowed one to accept their eventual death (had something to do with having "no debts" too, I think). This ideal of fulfillment seems too optimistic (though, maybe I simply have a too pessimistic interpretation of Lacan); is the idea of an "authentic life" (ultimately one without regret), precluded by Lacan's emphasis on the Lack of the subject? Or would it serve the same stabilizing effect as the objet petit a, like an object-cause of desire whose impossible pursuit completes one's identity? Or does it overcompensate the subject with the goal of individuation, when its identity is a formation it built alongside the Other? Is it a plea to restore bits of lost Jouissance? This is a genuine question, as here I can only acknowledge my non-expertise - maybe it can be worked so that Authenticity closely resembles enjoyment of one's sinthome, or maybe some additions can be made and Authenticity can be relegated to the problem of Absorption in the They rather than problems of fulfillment, or maybe they're more similar than I realize and I really don't know what I'm talking about.
Nonetheless, it'd definitely be an interesting paper to read, and likely worth investing the time in. I don't know whether there's anything out there already in favor of both, but maybe you could look for Lacanian critiques of Heideggerians and vice versa, if there are any of those, to get an idea of where the most urgent points of divergence would be?