correctly sees, is Heidegger’s account of responsibility, for which reason Haugeland translates schuldig not as “guilty” but as “responsible” – in the sense both of “at fault/culpable and obliged/indebted/liable” (2000, p. 65). Yet “being the ground of a nullity” signifies responsibility in a further sense not noted by Haugeland: that of being answerable (verantwortlich; GA 2, p. 382/288/334). To see how this discursive sense is already at stake in our passage is to understand how conscience provides an ontological condition on reason.
To make that case I shall argue, first, that conscience accounts for how grounds become reasons in the sense of my reasons – that is, that conscience explains my ability to act not just in accord with, but also in light of, norms; and second, that the notion of resoluteness, as the authentic response to the call of conscience, entails the project of giving reasons to oneself and to others.
6 Being-guilty and the space of reasons
As a “predicate for the ‘I am’,” being-guilty as “being the ground of a nullity” is not the simple state of an occurrent entity but a way of existing, a modification of the care structure. The complexity of Heidegger’s attempt to explain such being-a-ground arises from the fact that the notion of ground itself is twofold, thanks to the two equiprimordial aspects of Dasein’s being: thrownness and projection.
Heidegger first introduces the notion of ground in terms of Dasein’s thrownness: Dasein has “not laid that ground itself” and yet “it reposes in the weight of it, which is made manifest to it as a burden” in its mood (GA 2, p. 377/284/330). What does “ground” mean here? Formally, as Gethmann observed, it is simply what is out of reach, that which the transcendental subject must posit itself as being posited by . Less formally, however, several attempts to specify such a ground have been made. Heidegger sometimes suggests that it be conceived as “nature” (or “cosmos”) – as das Übermächtige – which leads, perhaps, to some form of theological conception (GA 26, p. 13/11). Gadamer suggests that this dimension of Dasein’s ground is language and tradition, which is always “mehr Sein als Bewußtsein.” Dreyfus glosses the notion by appeal to background practices belonging to one’s socio-cultural milieu. We need not decide the merits of any of these suggestions, since our concern is with what it might mean to be grounded in any of these ways, and my claim is that such grounds, to the extent that they remain out of reach, cannot be conceived as reasons. This is clear if the factic ground is conceived as