Silent or Talkative? Conscience, Mortality, and Natality in the Early Heidegger and in the Work of Hannah Arendt

While Hannah Arendt discusses the notion of “conscience” in many of her works, it has received little attention in the literature. To contribute to the development of the understanding of this notion in her work, I investigate the difference between Martin Heidegger’s view that conscience is silent, and Arendt’s view that it is not. In Being and Time Heidegger writes that Dasein wants to have a conscience. By this he means that Dasein wants to project itself against the horizon of its condition of being, which for Heidegger is Dasein’s own mortality. Heidegger claims that this call of conscience is silent. In contrast, Arendt writes in Thinking that the voice of conscience—which she says is the by-product of thinking—is not silent. By establishing that for Arendt, conscience is talkative, not silent, this paper investigates an important difference between Heidegger and Arendt. I show that while Arendt develops her own understanding of conscience out of Heidegger’s understanding of conscience, agreeing that conscience is the pre-condition of morality, Arendt transforms it from a silent call into a talkative one. I argue that this stems from Arendt’s insistence that human beings are not just conditioned by their own mortality, as is the case for Heidegger, but also by their natality. Ultimately, I demonstrate that what separates Heidegger and Arendt on conscience is their respective focus on “being-toward-death” (Heidegger) and “being-toward-natality” (Arendt).