One's Ownmost

For millennia, 'Conscience' has been construed as a 'voice' that is both deeply private, and, yet, impersonal. In some theological traditions, its source is divine, while starting with Plato, one main Philosophical school has interpreted it as universal a priori knowledge that sometimes manages to cut through the clamor of everday personal experience. For example, for Kant, it is the command of Pure Practical Reason. In contrast, for Heidegger, its privacy, not its content, is the most telling characteristic of Conscience, indicating that it has a profoundly personal origin, and, so, is a 'call' by one's 'Ownmost', as he puts it. In his system, one's Ownmost is one's death, because, as he argues, one undergoes it entirely alone, so it functions as a corrective to experiences in which one is losing oneself in the external world of others. Sartre challenges Heidegger's judgement that a 'memento mori' qualifies as one's Ownmost, because, as he argues, death is the most impersonal of events, something that befalls everybody equally. Instead, because at every moment one's choices are absolutely free, in his view, what is one's Ownmost, for which one has inalienable responsibility, are those choices. However, he himself later concedes that need, notably hunger, can be such a powerful motivator that it can deprive one of one's freedom of choice, which implicitly undercuts his prior designation of the latter as one's Ownmost. Now, if Heidegger's Ownmost is a Future event, and Sartre's, at least at one stage, is in the Present, what is one's Ownmost for the Formaterial Individual is one's Past. One's Past is completely private and inviolable, and 'Conscience' is first and foremost a reminder of who one has hitherto been, i. e. of what one has hitherto been doing.