'Guilty!'1 All experiences and interpretations of the conscience are at one in that they make the 'voice' of conscience speak somehow of 'guilt'.
¶ 58. Understanding the Appeal, and Guilt
To grasp phenomenally what one hears in understanding the appeal, we must go back to the appeal anew. The appeal to the they-self signifies summoning one's ownmost Self to its potentiality-for-Being, and of course as Dasein—that is, as concernful Being-in-the-world and Being with Others. Thus in Interpreting existentially that towards which the call summons us, we cannot seek to delimit any concrete single possibility of existence as long as we correctly understand the methodological possibilities and tasks which such an Interpretation implies. That which can be established, and which seeks to be established, is not what gets called in and to each particular Dasein from an existentiell standpoint, but is rather what belongs to the existential condition for the possibility of its factical-existentiell potentiality-for-Being.2
When the call is understood with an existentiell kind of hearing, such understanding is more authentic the more non-relationally Dasein hears and understands its own Being-appealed-to, and the less the meaning of the call gets perverted by what one says or by what is fitting and accepted [was sich gehOrt und gilt]. But what is it that is essentially implied when the appeal is understood authentically? What is it that has been essentially given us to understand in the call at any particular time, even if factically it has not always been understood?
We have already answered this question, however, in our thesis that the call 'says' nothing which might be talked about, gives no information about events. The call points forward to Dasein's potentiality-for-Being, and it does this as a call which comes from uncanniness.3 The caller is, to be sure, indefinite; but the "whence" from which it calls does not remain a matter of indifference for the calling. This "whence"—the uncanniness of thrown individualization—gets called too [mitgerufen] in the calling; that is, it too gets disclosed [miterschlossen] . In calling forth
1 '... das im Gewissen gerufene "schuldig" existenzial zu begreifen.' As Heidegger will point out, the words 'schuldig', 'Schuld' and their derivatives have many different meanings, corresponding not only to 'indebtedness', as we have seen on H. 242 above, but also to 'guilt' and 'responsibility'. In the present chapter we shall translate them by 'guilty' and 'guilt' whenever possible, even though these expressions will not always be entirely appropriate.
2 'Nicht das je existenziell im jeweiligen Dasein in dieses Gerufene kann und will fuxiert werden, sondem das, was zur existenzialen Bedingung der Möglichkeit des je faktisch-existenziellen Seinkönnens gehört.' In the older editions we find 'an dieses' rather than 'in dieses', and 'zur' appears in spaced type.
3 'Der Ruf weist das Dasein vor auf sein Seinkönnen und das als Ruf aus der Unheimlichkeit.'