Being-Guilty and the Space of Reasons

As a “predicate for the ‘I am,’” being-guilty as “being the ground of a nul-lity” 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 (330/284). What does “ground” mean here? Formally, as Gethmann ob-served, it is simply what is out of reach (unverfügbar), that which the tran-scendental subject must posit itself as being posited by. Less formally, how-ever, 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 concep-tion.⁴¹Gadamer suggests that this dimension of Dasein’s ground is language and tradition, which is always “mehr Sein als Bewußtsein.”⁴²Dreyfus glosses the notion by appeal to background practices belonging to one’s sociocul-tural milieu.⁴³We 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 nature, for to say that I am grounded in nature is to say that I find myself within a causal nexus over which I have no control: the forces of nature that cooperate in ensuring that I do what I do cannot be confused with the reasons why I do it. Nature in this sense lies outside the space of reasons because its constraint on me is not normatively assessable; it simply is or is not.

Something similar holds if the ground is conceived either as history, tra-dition, or social practices—so long as we insist, with Heidegger, that it func-tions as factic ground precisely to the extent that it is out of reach. For though we can see that social practices, for instance, must be understood 56 Steven Crowell

normatively—that is, that they involve reasons in the sense of an in-order-to and a for-the-sake-of and so are assessable in terms of success or failure—it is not from the point of view of one’s everyday coping that we make this judgment. The agent functions within the nexus of such practices in much the way that she functions within the constraints of nature: she acts in ac-cord with norms but not in light of them; hence such behavior is largely predictable from a third-person point of view. This is the picture of the functioning of norms within social practices we get from Division One of Being and Time, where it is difficult to distinguish human from animal teleo-logical action.⁴⁴Though we might be willing to describe animal behavior as being based on reasons, such reasons would be external: there are reasons for what Larry Bird does on the court, just as there are reasons for what the wasp does, but neither does them for those reasons, in light of them. In Angst—which is possible for Bird but not for the wasp—this difference comes to awareness: that in whose grip I was when geared into the world now confronts me as an inert fact, something without normative force.

Robert Pippin is surely right to object that this strikes a false note as a picture of human meaningful activity, but this is not an objection to Hei-degger. For the latter, we are never simply grounded by the sort of thrown ground disclosed in mood; instead, though Dasein “can never get that ground into its power,” it “has to take over being the ground existingly”

(330/284). In the structure of my being as care, my facticity is always rami-fied by my existentiality—that is, my “projection of possibilities for being a self.” What does “ground” mean when it is ramified by existentiality? The answer must be given at an appropriately formalized level. Recall that in Angst the concern is not for a “definite kind of being for Dasein or a definite possibility for it,” but rather for “being-possible as such” (232/187). Thus, taking over the ground existingly may be described formally as a “possibi-lizing” of the factic ground: what the call of conscience gives to understand is that that which I can never get into my power—what grounds me be-yond my reach—is nevertheless my possibility. This, I suggest, can only mean that factic grounds become subject to a choice for which I am accountable;

they are thereby taken up into the normative space of reasons.

The argument for this remains largely implicit in Being and Time. However, in the 1929 essay “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (“On the Essence of Ground”), Heidegger provides a crucial clarification of how factic grounds enter the space of reasons when Dasein takes over being-a-ground.⁴⁵The essay follows Being and Time in arguing that the in-order-to relations informing Dasein’s practical dealings with things are anchored in Dasein’s self-awareness as that

“for-the-sake-of-which” (Umwillen) it is so engaged. This possibility for being (or ability-to-be) discloses a totality of significance (“world”) in terms of Conscience and Reason 57

which entities can “gain entry into world”—show themselves in their possi-bilities—and thereby “come to be ‘more in being’” (EG, 123). We should understand this “more” as entities’ being held up to constitutive standards, and the essay makes clear what Being and Time did not, namely, that the worldhood that makes such standards possible is grounded in the normative orientation of Dasein’s first-person self-awareness. Heidegger here calls this orientation “sovereignty.”

In 1929 Heidegger glossed the care structure—transcendence of beings toward their being—with the Platonic notion of an epekeina tes ousias: a “be-yond beings.”This suggests that transcendence is connected with the Good, so Heidegger asks: “May we interpret the agathon as the transcendence of Dasein” (EG, 124)? According to Heidegger, Plato’s agathon is “that hexis (sovereign power) that is sovereign with respect to the possibility (in the sense of the enabling) of truth, understanding, and even being.” Such “sover-eignty,” however, also describes the Umwillen of resolute, individuated Dasein.

Thus the “essence of the agathon lies in [Dasein’s] sovereignty over itself as hou heneka—as the ‘for the sake of . . . ’, it is the source of possibility as such”

(EG, 124). By thus equating authentic Umwillen with the ancient hou heneka and its orientation toward the good or what is “best,” Heidegger lets us see that to “possibilize” factic grounds by taking over being-a-ground is to act in light of a normative distinction between better and worse. By grasping my sit-uation in the normative light of what is best, the factic grounds into which I am thrown become reasons for which I am responsible.⁴⁶

To take over being-a-ground, then—that is, to possibilize what grounds me—is to transform the claims of nature or society (what “one” simply does) into first-person terms, into my reasons for doing what I do. Con-science discloses that I am a being for whom thrown grounds can never function simply as causes: because Dasein has been “released from the ground, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this [ground]” (330/285), grounds take on the character of reasons for which I am accountable. My natural impulses are not within my power, but it is I who make them nor-mative for me, make them reasons for what I do. My gearing into the world must take place in terms of social practices whose rules are not within my power and so function essentially as grounds in the sense of causes. How-ever, it is I who transform such functional effectuation into reasons for be-ing—namely, by answering for them as possibilities. If conscience articulates the intelligibility of the first-person stance that emerges in the collapse of the one-self, Heidegger’s gloss of the call in terms of schuldig-sein identifies the ontological condition whereby one’s (factic) grounds become my (nor-mative) reasons and thus explains how Dasein can act not only in accord with norms but also in light of them.

58 Steven Crowell