The political ethos I articulate over the course of this book is inspired by the narratives of conversion from calculable responsibility I identify in Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger. Understanding the aptness of conversion – as a description of a departure from calculable responsibility – helps bring to light my worries about recent efforts by ethos theorists and political realists to articulate nonmoralized approaches to politics and political theory. These efforts show signs of, or vulnerabilities to, the calculative thinking that sustains moralism. I contrast my candidate political ethos with its attention to calculative thinking, indirect approach to ethics, and modesty in the face of moralism with these prevailing approaches. Ethos theorists and political realists, perhaps inadvertently, suggest that departures from moralism are much more amenable to our mastery than do the thinkers I survey. In effect, the former understate the difficulty of the task they have set themselves.

So far in the studies of Nietzsche and Heidegger we have seen that calculable responsibility is not simply an approach to responsibility; it is a persistent and insistent way of seeing ourselves, our world, and our place in the world. And so both thinkers say that if I am to move beyond calculable responsibility (as far as it is possible to get “beyond” it) I must experience a kind of “transfiguration” or basic alteration in my orientation toward my existence. “Conversion,” from the Latin convers (“turned around”), is an apt word for the kind of “transfiguration” Nietzsche and Heidegger point to. “Conversion” always brings to mind what is being turned away from (here, calculable responsibility), and suggests that the new orientation is in some way marked by what came before. Thus Heidegger emphasizes that authentic existence arising from a proper response to the call of conscience is a modification of our ordinary way of being; it is not an ex nihilo mode of being (SZ §54 [267–8]). And although Nietzsche is ever wary of reactive modes of being, he too is clear that any going beyond morality is also a response to morality (and must be so if we are not to rage against the past). Any movement beyond morality is a possibility opened for us by morality itself; morality is the bridge between animal man and overman.