Existential nothingness by no means has the character of a privation, of a lack as compared with an ideal set up but not attained in being-there; rather, as projection, the being of this being is already null before anything it can project and even attain. Thus this nothingness does not just occur occasionally in being-there, attached to it as a dark quality that it could get rid of if it made sufficient progress.
Still, the ontological meaning of the not-ness of this existential nothingness remains obscure. But that is true also of the ontological essence of the not in general. To be sure, ontology and logic have made much of the not, and thereby at times made its possibilities visible, without revealing the not itself ontologically. Ontology found the not [286] and used it. But is it then so self-evident that every not means a negation in the sense of a lack? Is its positivity exhausted by its constituting the “transition” [to a filling]? Why does every dialectic take refuge in negation, without itself grounding it dialectically, without even being able to locate it as a problem? Has anyone ever made the ontological origin of not-ness a problem at all — or, prior to that, even looked for the conditions on the basis of which the problem of the not and its not-ness, and the possibility of this not-ness, could be raised? And where else could they ever be found than in a thematic clarification of the meaning of being in general?
The concepts of privation and lack (hardly transparent in themselves) are not sufficient for the ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of guilt — even though, if we take them formally enough, we can put them to considerable use. Least of all can we get nearer to the existential phenomenon of guilt by taking our orientation from the idea of evil, the malum as privatio boni. Then too, the bonum and the privatio have the same ontological provenance in the ontology of on-hand beings as does the idea of “value” drawn from this ontology.
Beings whose being is care not only can burden themselves with factical guilt, they are guilty in the ground of their being. This beingguilty first locates the ontological condition allowing being-there to become guilty in factically ex-sisting. This essential being-guilty is, equiprimordially, the existential condition for the possibility of the “morally” good and evil, i.e., for morality in general and its possible factical formations. Primordial being-guilty cannot be determined by morality because morality already presupposes it.