to Others is possible without breaking the 'public' law. Thus the formal conception of"Being-guilty" in the sense of having come to owe something to an Other, may be defined as follows: "Being-the-basis for a lack of something in the Dasein of an Other, and in such a manner that this very Being-the-basis determines itself as 'lacking in some way' in terms of that for which it is the basis."1 This kind of lacking is a failure to satisfy some requirement which applies to one's existent Being with Others.
We need not consider how such requirements arise and in what way their character as requirements and laws must be conceived by reason of their having such a source. In any case, "Being-guilty" in the sense last mentioned, the breach of a 'moral requirement', is a kind of Being which belongs to Dasein. Of course this holds good also for "Being-guilty" as 'making oneself punishable' and as 'having debts', and for any 'having responsibility for ...'. These too are ways in which Dasein behaves. If one takes 'laden with moral guilt' as a 'quality' of Dasein, one has said very little. On the contrary, this only makes it manifest that such a characterization does not suffice for distinguishing ontologically between this kind of 'attribute of Being' for Dasein and those other ways of behaving which we have just listed. After all, the concept of moral guilt has been so [283] little clarified ontologically that when the idea of deserving punishment, or even of having debts to someone, has also been included in this concept, or when these ideas have been employed in the very defining of it, such interpretations of this phenomenon could become prevalent and have remained so. But therewith the 'Guilty!' gets thrust aside into the domain of concern in the sense of reckoning up claims and balancing them off
The phenomenon of guilt, which is not necessarily related to 'having debts' and law-breaking, can be clarified only if we first inquire in principle into Dasein's Being-guilty—in other words, if we conceive the idea of 'Guilty!' in terms of Dasein's kind of Being.
If this is our goal, the idea of 'Guilty !' must be sufficiently formalized so that those ordinary phenomena of "guilt" which are related to our concernful Being with Others, will drop out. The idea of guilt must not only be raised above the domain of that concern in which we reckon things up, but it must also be detached from relationship to any law or "ought" such that by failing to, comply with it one loads himself with guilt. For here too "guilt" is still necessarily defined as a lack—when something which ought to be and which can be is missing.2 To be missing,
1 '... Grundsein für einen Mangel im Dasein eines Andern, so zwar, dass dieses Grundsein selbst sich aus seinem Wofür als "mangelhaft" bestimmt.
2 '... auf ein Sollen und Gesetz, wogegen sich verfehlend jemand Schuld auf sich lädt. Denn auch bier wird die Schuld notwendig noch als Mangel bestimmt, als Fehlen von etwas, was sein soll und kann.'