Being the ground, i.e., ex-sisting as thrown, being-there constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never ex-sistent before its ground, but only from it and as it. Thus being-the-ground means never to gain power over one’s ownmost being —from the ground up. This not belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness. Being the ground, it itself is a nothingness of itself. Nothingness by no means signifies not being on hand or not subsisting, but means a not that constitutes this being of being-there, its thrownness. The not-character of this not is determined existentially: being its self, being-there is the thrown being as its self. [285] Being-there is released to itself, from its ground, in order to be as this ground — it does not effect this release. Being-there is itself the ground of its being not because the ground first springs from its own projection; but, by being its self, it is the being of its ground. The ground is always ground only for a being whose being has to take over being-the-ground.
Being-there is its ground ex-sistingly, i.e., in such a way that it understands itself in terms of possibilities and, understanding itself accordingly, is as thrown being. But here included is this: as an ability-to-be, it always stands in one possibility or another; it is constantly not other possibilities; it has relinquished them in its existentiell projection. As thrown, the projection is not only determined by the nothingness of being-the-ground; it is itself, as projection, essentially null. Again, this determination by no means signifies the ontic property of being “unsuccessful” or “unworthy”; it is rather an existential constituent of the essential structure of projecting. This nothingness belongs to the being-free, of being-there, for its existentiell possibilities. But freedom is only in the choice of one possibility, i.e., in bearing its not-having-chosen and not-being-able-also-to-choose the others.
In the structure of thrownness, as well as in that of projection, there essentially lies a nothingness. And this structure of nothingness is the ground for the possibility of the nothingness of inauthentic being-there in the collapsing that in any instance it already is factically. Care itself is in its essence thoroughly permeated with nothingness. Accordingly, care — as the being of being-there — means, as thrown projection: being the (null) ground of a nothingness. And that signifies: being-there as such is guilty, if our formal existential determination of guilt as being-the-ground of a nothingness hits the mark.*
* Heidegger is here dialoguing with Augustine’s Confessions — in the effort to show how the ground of “guilt” (viz., nothingness) lies in being-there itself.