Man is literally “being there, it denotes the way of being of human beings. Being there call for a way of being. Man more than a being man is becoming. Man faces every moment as call to respond to a possibility, and it inevitably involves guilt. Every time I always lag behind my possibilities. The primordial being-guilty cannot be determined by morality, since morality already presupposes this primordial guilt. My primordial guilt is also my freedom. My existential condition is the primordial guilt; an inexhaustible responsibility to respond to my possibilities. The call simply calls man to his own most capacity-to-be-its-self. The call of conscience proper, then, discloses a responsibility that cannot be identified in advance, reckoned-up and discharged. The call of conscience proper is somehow issuing from oneself. In the call, I call myself back to myself from my being lost in the crowd or herd. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me. The call of conscience is an alien power by which man is dominated. The call is indeed precisely never by ourselves planned nor prepared for, nor deliberately performed. It calls contrary to expectations and against one’s will. The caller is only involved in the call that it is heard only as such.

The call of conscience can be replaced by the call of the herd or the crowd, it is the temptation to fall in line or to shun responsibility and follow the crowd. It could also be replaced by the call of the will to power. The ego’s quest for domination and power will be the call of calculation, a thought that is objectifying. We have the illusion of mastery; everything is transparent to us and appears as our own doing. There is nothing that refuses to the look of reason which is reckoning. This is mathematical thinking in all levels of life. Technique is the will to order for the sake of ordering. In such calculative thought man neglects the incalculable and abandons the wonder of being. It is unable to foresee what belongs to the incalculable. Authentic thinking looks for the slow signs of the incalculable and sees in this the unforeseeable coming of the ineluctable. Nothing counts for calculation save for what can be calculated. In this way of thought, values are related to a numerical and measurable scale; values get reduced to instruments of calculable worth. They do not allow anything to have incalculable worth: nothing is inviolable, and hence nothing truly binding. To think against values is not to maintain that everything interpreted as “a value” – “culture,” “art,” “science,” “human dignity,” “world,” and “God” – is valueless. On the other hand every value is degraded; the highest value is degradation of God’s essence.

It would, lead to a secularized theology in which the abused name “God” signifies glory and dignity. The glory of ethics alludes to a normative glory that “fills the whole earth” (Isa. 6:3). Ethics of thought reaches beyond the scale of man’s ego. The human other can dis-appear, be de-faced, leaving one under the sway of a criterion that has no proper name. “It comes from I know not where…” Heidegger calls the call of conscience “as the ‘not-as-home’ …like an alien voice.” The alien is never in the domain of calculation, hence God is not dead in the calculative word of the market, but reduced to an idol that calculative culture had created. And so C.S. Lewis asks, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

As Adorno writes, “The human subject is bewitched by the idea of its own freedom as if by a magic spell.” Freedom was celebrated the self-initiated responsibility and generosity of the individual, and presented solitude as a condition of a deeper sociability and solidarity. But contemporary politics does not recognise this free generosity of noble souls, or acknowledge community as a desired consequence of liberty, but rather locates the primary virtues of liberty in the fear and distrust of others which is the politics of mass resentment. The total effect of the market, which produces culture industry, is one of anti-enlightenment. It is the progressive domination of nature by mass deception used as means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. It creates a mass culture of calculative thinking, which is the slumber of critical thinking, breeding fundamentalism and violence promoted by herd mentality.