Everydayness takes Dasein as something ready-to-hand to be concerned with-that is, something that gets managed and reckoned up. 'Life' is a 'business', whether or not it covers its costs.
And so with regard to the ordinary kind of Being of Dasein itself, there is no guarantee that the way of interpreting conscience which springs from it or the theories of conscience which are thus oriented, have arrived at the right ontological horizon for its Interpretation. In spite of this, even the ordinary experience of conscience must somehow—pre-ontologically—reach this phenomenon. Two things follow from this: on the one hand, the everyday way of interpreting conscience cannot be accepted as the [290] final criterion for the 'Objectivity' of an ontological analysis. On the other hand, such an analysis has no right to disregard the everyday understanding of conscience and to pass over the anthropological, psychological, and theological theories of conscience which have been based upon it. If existential analysis has laid bare the phenomenon of conscience in its ontological roots, then precisely in terms of this analysis the ordinary interpretations must become intelligible; and they must become intelligible not least in the ways in which they miss the phenomenon and in the reasons why they conceal it. But since in the context of the problems of this treatise the analysis of conscience is merely ancillary to what is ontologically the fundamental question, we must be satisfied with alluding to the essential problems when we characterize the connection between the existential Interpretation of conscience and the way it is ordinarily interpreted.
In this ordinary interpretation there are four objections which might be brought up against our Interpretation of conscience as the summons of care to Being-guilty: (1) that the function of conscience is essentially critical; (2) that conscience always speaks in a way that is relative to some definite deed which has been performed or willed; (3) that when the 'voice' is experienced, it is never so radically related to Dasein's Being; (4) that our Interpretation takes no account of the basic forms of the phenomenon—'evil' conscience and 'good', that which 'reproves' and that which 'warns'.
Let us begin our discussion with the last of these considerations. In all interpretations of conscience, the 'evil' or 'bad' conscience gets the priority: conscience is primarily 'evil'; such a conscience makes known to us that in every experience of conscience something like a 'Guilty!' gets experienced first. But in the idea of bad conscience, how is this making-known of Being-evil understood? The 'Experience of conscience' turns up after the deed has been done or left undone. The voice follows the transgression and points back to that event which has befallen and by which