to something, the "whence" of the calling is the "whither" to which we are called back. When the call gives us a potentiality-for-Being to understand, it does not give us one which is ideal and universal; it discloses it as that which has been currently individualized and which belongs to that particular Dasein. We have not fully determined the character of the call as disclosure until we understand it as one which calls us back in calling us forth [als vorrufender Rückruf]. If we take the call this way and orient ourselves by it, we must first ask what it gives us to understand.
But is not the question of what the call says answered more easily and surely if we 'simply' allude to what we generally hear or fail to hear in [281] any experience of conscience: namely, that the call either addresses Dasein as 'Guilty!', or, as in the case when the conscience gives warning, refers to a possible 'Guilty!', or affirms, as a 'good' conscience, that one is 'conscious of no guilt'? Whatever the ways in which conscience is experienced or interpreted, all our experiences 'agree' on this 'Guilty!'. If only it were not defined in such wholly different ways! And even if the meaning of this 'Guilty!' should let itself be taken in a way upon which everyone is agreed, the existential conception of this Being-guilty would still remain obscure. Yet if Dasein addresses itself as 'Guilty!', whence could it draw its idea of guilt except from the Interpretation of its own Being? All the same, the question arises anew: who says how we are guilty and what "guilt" signifies? On the other hand, the idea of guilt is not one which could be thought up arbitrarily and forced upon Dasein. If any understanding of the essence of guilt is possible at all, then this possibility must have been sketched out in Dasein beforehand. How are we to find the trail which can lead to revealing this phenomenon? All ontological investigations of such phenomena as guilt, conscience, and death, must start with what the everyday interpretation of Dasein 'says' about them. Because Dasein has falling as its kind of Being, the way Dasein gets interpreted is for the most part inauthentically 'oriented' and does not reach the 'essence'; for to Dasein the primordially appropriate ontological way of formulating questions remains alien. But whenever we see something wrongly, some injunction as to the primordial 'idea' of the phenomenon is revealed along with it. Where, however, shall we get our criterion for the primordial existential meaning of the 'Guilty!'? From the fact that this 'Guilty!' turns up as a predicate for the 'I am'. Is it possible that what is understood as 'guilt' in our inauthentic interpretation lies in Dasein's Being as such, and that it does so in such a way that so far as any Dasein factically exists, it is also guilty?
Thus by invoking the 'Guilty!' which everyone agrees that he hears, one has not yet answered the question of the existential meaning of what