that every "not" signifies something negative in the sense of a lack? Is its positivity exhausted by the fact that it constitutes 'passing over' something? Why does all dialectic take refuge in negation, though it cannot provide dialectical grounds for this sort of thing itself, or even just establish it as a problem? Has anyone ever made a problem of the ontological source of notness, or, prior to that, even sought the mere conditions on the basis of which the problem of the "not" and its notness and the possibility of that notness can be raised? And how else are these conditions to be found except by taking the meaning of Being in general as a theme and clarifying it?
The concepts of privation and lack—which, moreover, are not very transparent—are already insufficient for the ontological Interpretation of the phenomenon of guilt, though if we take them formally enough, we can put them to considerable use. Least of all can we come any closer to the existential phenomenon of guilt by taking our orientation from the idea of evil, the malum as privatio boni. Just as the bonum and its privatio have the same ontological origin in the ontology of the present-at-hand, this ontology also applies to the idea of 'value', which has been 'abstracted' from these.
Not only can entities whose Being is care load themselves with factical guilt, but they are guilty in the very basis of their Being; and this Beingguilty is what provides, above all, the ontological condition for Dasein's ability to come to o w e anything in factically existing. This essential Beingguilty is, equiprimordially, the existential condition for the possibility of the 'morally' good and for that of the 'morally' evil—that is, for morality in general and for the possible forms which this may take factically. The primordial "Being-guilty" cannot be defined by morality, since morality already presupposes it for itself.
But what kind of experience speaks for this primordial Being-guilty which belongs to Dasein? Nor may we forget the counter-question: 'is' guilt 'there' only if a consciousness of guilt gets awakened, or does not the primordial Being-guilty1 make itself known rather in the very fact that guilt is 'asleep'? That this primordial Being-guilty remains proximally and for the most part undisclosed, that it is kept closed off by Dasein's falling Being, reveals only the aforesaid nullity. Being-guilty is more primordial than any knowledge about it. And only because Dasein is guilty in the basis of its Being, and closes itself off from itself as something thrown and falling, is conscience possible, if indeed the call gives us this Being-guilty as something which at bottom we are to understand.
The call is the call of care. Being-guilty constitutes the Being to which
1 'Schuldigsein'. In the earlier editions the 'sein' is emphasized by having the type spaced out.