Daniela Vallega-Neu
Ereignis becomes a – if not, indeed, the – fundamental concept in Heidegger’s philosophy in the 1930s. Heidegger works out the thought of Ereignis between 1936 and 1938 in what is often called his second major work (after Being and Time), namely Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis).1 From this time on, Ereignis comes to name how being occurs in its truth. Despite the centrality of the concept of Ereignis for Heidegger, the writings in which he actually develops this concept were not meant for “the public ear”; they were texts written without didactic considerations in an attempt at an originary (poietic) language, a language one may call “experimental” or “esoteric” (in the literal sense) and that is certainly strange with respect to common discourses in philosophy. Following Heidegger’s wishes, these texts started appearing as volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition) only in 1989, the year that Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) was published.2
Since Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy; hereafter Contributions) is the work in which Heidegger for the first time lays out his thought of Ereignis, we shall need to consider especially this work and how Ereignis is thought in it. In fact, the fundamental articulation of Ereignis in this work gives access to the entire corpus of Heidegger’s work, up to his last writings. But since in his last period Heidegger’s thinking undergoes another shift (although a less radical one than the one designated as his “turn”), it makes sense to give the articulation of Ereignis in this last period some special consideration as well.
Ereignis in German usually means “event”, but, as in many other instances, Heidegger likes to play with a wider semantic field that opens up once we hear the word more literally by breaking it up into its two semantic components er- and -eignis. The prefix er- carries the sense of a beginning motion or of an achievement, whereas -eignis refers to the word eigen, which in German usually means “own”, but which is also at play in a word that is familiar to us from Heidegger’s Being and Time, namely eigentlich, in English “proper” or “authentic”. This has led scholars to translate Ereignis not only as “event” but also with the neologism “enowning”, or as “appropriation”, or as “the event of appropriation”.
Before proceeding to present Heidegger’s thought of Ereignis in Contributions, it may be useful to note that the word Ereignis appears as a main concept (although not exactly in the sense that it will have for Heidegger after 1936) in a lecture course Heidegger gave at the very end of the First World War, that is, even before he wrote Being and Time (which was published in 1927). In this lecture course of 1919, Heidegger already begins elaborating a difference between a scientific-theoretical approach to things, and a – more genuine – pre-theoretical approach to things. He points out that in a scientific-theoretical approach to things the peculiar involvement of the one who questions and deals with things is lost. We posit a subject and an object and describe their relation in terms of a Vorgang, an objective occurrence. This is, however, not the way things occur if we pay close attention to the way we experience our surroundings (Umwelterlebnis).3 In the latter case, we find that there is neither a subject nor an object, yet at the same time we find ourselves involved with whatever we encounter. Our peculiar involvement when experiencing our surroundings is what Heidegger calls, in this early lecture, Ereignis, in contrast to objectively described occurrences (Vorgang). Just as in his later work, Contributions, in this lecture course from fifteen years earlier, Heidegger hyphenates the word and draws attention to the root meaning “own” in it. He writes:
Er-leben [“lived experience”] does not pass by me, like a thing that I would posit as object; rather I er-eigne [“en-own” or “appropriate”] it to myself and it er-eignet sich [this would commonly be translated as “it happens”; if we attempted to render the literal sense, we may render it as “appropriates itself”, or it “en-owns itself”] according to its essence. And if, looking at it, I understand lived experience in that way, then I understand it not as process [Vor-gang], as thing, object, but rather as something totally new, as Ereignis.
(TDF 63 = GA 56/57: 75, trans. mod.)
This lecture course from 1919 foreshadows themes that Heidegger will elaborate in Being and Time (1927), although in the latter he uses neither the word Vorgang nor the word Ereignis in his analysis of our (pre-theoretical) being-in-the-world.4 He also avoids the words Leben (life) and Erleben (lived experience) because of his critique of a subjectively based “life-philosophy”. When he again picks up the concept Ereignis as he begins planning Contributions in 1932,5 it no longer refers merely to the way we experience our surrounding world. By this time, Heidegger’s thinking and conceptual articulation of the question of being will have undergone several changes. These shifts take place during the course of his attempt to think the event of being as such beyond subjectivism and scientific-theoretical objectivism, while at the same time articulating in increasingly original ways the peculiar manner in which we humans find ourselves originarily in our being and within being as such.
In order to understand the fundamental concept of Ereignis, we need to understand especially one aspect of the turn6 in Heidegger’s thought in the early 1930s, namely the abandonment of the transcendental-horizonal approach to the question of being in the attempt to speak more inceptually, more originally, from within an authentic experience of being.
In the project of Being and Time, being as such is questioned by means of the transcendence of the being of the questioner, namely Dasein. Dasein – our being or existence, we in how we are in the world – always already transcends (steps beyond) our own particular being such that in our being-in-the-world the being of other beings and thus being as such is also disclosed. After the publication of the first two divisions of part one of Being and Time, Heidegger realized that this approach still invites readers to think in a representational manner: we are tempted to think that there is an entity (Dasein) that transcends into the open horizon of being (and world), a horizon we also tend to represent to ourselves in a quasi-objectifying way. The task, then, for Heidegger, becomes not to think and speak towards the open horizon of being, but from out of it. In §132 of Contributions, he writes: “What counts is not to step beyond (transcendence) but to leap over this difference [between beings and being] and with it over transcendence and to question in an inceptive way from out of beyng and truth” (GA 65: 250–51).7
This is possible only if thinking attempts to stay attuned to an authentic mode of being in which the thinker finds himself/herself displaced (Heidegger speaks of a “leap”) from both everyday and theoretical modes of being and thrown into the (abyssal) openness of being as such. This openness is what Heidegger calls the truth of beyng. (In Being and Time this is thought as the temporal horizon into which Dasein always already transcends.) The truth of beyng needs to be sustained in order to occur as truth, and this is why thinking needs to be (-sein) there (da-) in that openness. It is then that thinking may find itself ereignet, “appropriated”, by beyng and beyng in its truth can be experienced and thought as Ereignis, as appropriating event. In other words, the notion of Ereignis arises out of an experience of being in which Dasein finds itself thrown into the openness of being and appropriated in its being.
To explain this further (yet still in a preliminary way): out of the experience of being thrown into the abyssal openness of being we experience a disclosing event in which we also first find our own being; we experience our being as er-eignet (en-owned) or “appropriated” in that event. This appropriation does not occur simply passively but requires a response from the one who will first through this response find herself coming to “herself” in this event.
This is why Heidegger says that the disclosure (truth) of beyng needs Da-sein as the site of its occurrence and Da-sein is appropriated by this disclosure. Heidegger speaks in this context of the Kehre im Ereignis, the turn in the appropriating event.8 The truth (disclosure) of beyng occurs only through Da-sein (and thus human being – not human beings), and Da-sein – in turn – occurs only through the truth of beyng.9 The responsiveness of the one who finds himself thrown into and appropriated in the disclosure of beyng is what constitutes the -sein of the Da-, the -being of the there10 (the disclosure of truth), and thus Da-sein, being- there, that is, being in the disclosure of truth.
Part of the difficulty of this thought of Ereignis is that we cannot wilfully subject ourselves to the experience of being as appropriating event, and, without at least some sense of this experience what Heidegger attempts to think and say can simply sound hollow and absurd. However, Heidegger believes that there is a fundamental attunement latent in our epoch that makes it possible for at least a few of us to find themselves exposed to that abyssal openness of beyng out of which we may experience beyng occurring as Ereignis. In Being and Time it was the fundamental attunement of anxiety that was shown to displace us from our familiar dealings with things such that our being emerged authentically in its finitude, that is, in its being towards death. In Contributions, the basic disposition that transposes us into the disclosing event of the truth of beyng is both manifold and also historical (in the sense of geschichtlich); it is the disposition of an epoch rather than that of an individual human being.
Heidegger names the basic dispositions that in their unity displace us into the abyssal openness of beyng: “shock” (Erschrecken), “restraint” (Verhaltenheit) and “diffidence” (Scheu). Shock entails the experience of the abandonment of beings by being in the domination of machination (Machenschaft) and adventure (Erlebnis; often translated as “lived experience”) such that beings are reduced to mere variables for calculation and to means for adventures. As a consequence, even the need for questioning being does not arise. In order to find the question of being again, the abandonment by being and forgottenness of being first need to be experienced as a plight. What thinking then realizes, attuned by shock, is that in our epoch being does not occur as an appropriating event but rather as a refusal (Verweigerung or Versagung).11 Thus beyng, at first, is experienced as withdrawal, that is, not as appropriation but as ex-propriation, as Ent-eignis. Heidegger writes: “In this epoch ‘beings’ are … expropriated by beyng [des Seynsenteignet]” (GA 65: 120). Thus the truth of beyng, disclosed in shock, reveals itself as lacking ground such that t ruth has the character of an abyssal opening. Heidegger believes that this abyssal truth needs to be sustained if beyng is to find a site (Da-sein) and if the possibility of the appropriating event (Ereignis) is to be preserved. The sustaining of the abyssal opening of beyng as withdrawal is made possible by the dispositions of restraint and diffidence that dispose Dasein together with shock.
Ent-eignis, expropriation in the sense indicated above, thus has a “negative” connotation: it indicates that in our epoch Er-eignis does not (yet) occur and the truth of beyng remains concealed. This implies what Heidegger calls, in Being and Time, the fallenness of Dasein. It also refers to what, in his essay “The Essence of Truth”, he calls untruth in the sense of errancy (Irre; BW 132–3). But Heidegger speaks of Ent-eignis also in a “positive” sense, namely in terms of the originary concealment that belongs to the truth of beyng even when it holds sway as Er-eignis.12 Although Heidegger does not use the term Ent-eignis in that sense in Contributions, he does so in his later essay of 1962, “Time and Being”, where he speaks of “die Enteignis”: “Expropriation [Ent-eignis] belongs to Appropriation as such. By this expropriation, appropriation does not abandon itself – rather, it preserves what is proper to it [sein Eigentum]” (TB 22−3 = ZSD 23). Even if, as Heidegger still seems to hope when he writes Contributions, another beginning of history were to be granted to humanity such that beings were no longer abandoned by beyng and the truth of beyng were to hold sway as Ereignis, beyng would not simply “give itself completely” and be “fully present”, but there would remain an essential concealment, a reserve that belongs to the holding sway of the truth of beyng. This essential reserve bears within it essential possibilities of beyng, possibilities of epochal “beginnings”, and therefore needs to be preserved in its concealedness.
Contributions is, in Heidegger’s understanding, a work of transition that first attempts to prepare the site, namely Da-sein, that would allow for the truth of beyng to hold sway as Ereignis. That moment (Augenblick) would be the moment of the grounding of another beginning of history. In that moment, beings would not be expropriated by beyng but instead would shelter the truth of beyng. In terms of this historical occurrence, then, Ereignis remains an event of which one can have only a presentiment.(Ahnung, presentiment, is another basic disposition of the thinking of Ereignis; see GA 65: §§5, 6, 128.) This presentiment arises in being displaced in shock into the disclosure of beyng as withdrawal, as well as in meditating on what Heidegger calls the first beginning of Western thinking. In the first beginning, the truth of beyng is experienced – disclosed in wonder – as coming to presence (Anwesenheit) such that the concealed dimension of being withdraws “behind” what comes to presence in this coming to presence. Eventually the coming to presence itself is not experienced any more and being is thought just in reference to presented things. Being then becomes the most general, empty concept, instead of being experienced as a temporal event through which beings come into presence: being withdraws and is forgotten and beings remain abandoned by being.
The presentiment of the truth of beyng as event (a presentiment that arises once thinking, attuned by shock, experiences the abandonment of being) does not simply place Ereignis in a distant future; Heidegger understands the basic disposition of presentiment to arise out of Ereignis: “Man has a presentiment of beyng … because beyng appropriates him to itself [das Seyn er-eignet ihn sich]” (GA 65: 245). There are, Heidegger suggests, a few untimely poets and thinkers who already find themselves appropriated, although Ereignis does not yet hold sway such that it determines the way beyng discloses itself in an epochal way. Heidegger calls these few die Zukünftigen, the ones to come.
We may, then, distinguish three ways of speaking of Ereignis:
1. Ereignis names a historical occurrence that is the Augenblick, the moment that would mark the other beginning of history. In this moment beings are no longer abandoned by beyng and the truth of beyng holds sway as appropriating event. To Ereignis in this sense also belongs die Enteignis as the originary withdrawal and concealment out of which all appropriation occurs. Ereignis in this sense does not yet hold sway and first needs to be prepared through the grounding of Da-sein.
2. Ereignis in the first sense is a “possibility” that already calls out to a few poets and thinkers. Heidegger’s own attempt to articulate Ereignis – by listening to the words especially of the poet Hölderlin – is an attempt to speak out of such a preliminary and transitional presentiment of it. Those who find themselves responding to this more originary call of beyng no longer live in the oblivion of beyng that holds sway in machination and adventure (which is rooted in the withdrawal of the truth of beyng), but rather experience the withdrawal of beyng as such.
3. Ereignis holds sway as Ent-eignis, that is, as the withdrawal of beyng and the abandonment of beings by being in the present era of machination and adventure. Ent-eignis (expropriation) is a form of Ereignis, although a “negative” one. Whereas Ereignis is analogous to the authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) of resolutely facing up to one’s own mortality, Ent-eignis is analogous to the inauthen-ticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of fleeing from the possibility of one’s own death (see Chapter 4). It is crucial to see that expropriation is a form of appropriation in order to understand how, for Heidegger, the era of machination – later he speaks of technology in terms of the Ge-stell or “framework” (see Chapter 13) – bears in itself the possibility of a turning to the event of appropriation in a more originary sense.
Up to this point, this chapter has focused on introducing the notion of Ereignis by paying particular attention to the relation between the truth of beyng, being-there (Da-sein) and humans. However, Ereignis has other essential dimensions, namely those of the gods, world, earth and beings. Being-there is not simply the turning point between the truth of beyng and humans such that we may picture to ourselves some “beyng” that relates to humans through being-there. If we wanted to look for some element “counter-posed” to humans in the appropriating event, we would have to find it in the gods. In §191 of Contributions, Heidegger writes: “Being-there is the in-between between humans (as the ones grounding history) and gods (in their history)” (GA 65: 311). Our being is appropriated in relation to the gods such that we are assigned (Zueignung) to the gods and the gods are consigned (Übereignung) to us.
In §267 of Contributions, Heidegger speaks of the gods as the ones who need beyng (which means that Heidegger does not think the gods as supreme beings).13 That need resonates in the need that humans experience when, attuned by shock and restraint, they realize the abandonment of beings by beyng and the forgottenness of beyng in our epoch. For Heidegger, this abandonment and forgottenness, the withdrawal of being, goes along with what the poet Hölderlin speaks of as the flight of the gods. Accordingly, if Ereignis is to occur historically such that a new beginning of history is founded, the gods are required; more specifically, what Heidegger calls “the passing of the l ast god” [Vorbeigang des letzten Gottes] is required. Just as Ereignis holds itself in reserve even when it occurs historically, the gods (and the last god) also keep themselves in a hidden dimension. Heidegger thinks that for the appropriating event to occur, we need to attend to that hidden dimension; and if we find ourselves appropriated in the event, if in shock, restraint and diffidence we endure the abyssal opening of beyng, then we find ourselves “assigned” (zugeeignet) to that hidden dimension. Thus gods and humans emerge in Ereignis both in their separation (Geschiedenheit) as well as in their assigned/appropriated encounter.
It is within this encounter, that is, in the in-between of being-there opened up in the deciding encounter between gods and humans, that the strife of world and earth and the relation to beings are situated in the thought of Contributions.14 Once being-there is appropriated, the truth of beyng finds a locale (namely being-there, Da-sein). With this locale is disclosed the “strife of world and earth” that Heidegger developed more in detail in the essay “The Origin of the Work if Art” (BW 143–212; see Chapter 9). The strife of world and earth is related to what Heidegger calls the “sheltering” (Bergung) of the truth of beyng into beings (especially words, but also works and deeds). The truth of beyng occurs as Ereignis only when it is sheltered into beings, which implies for Heidegger above all a sheltering into words.15 (Otherwise beings remain ent-eignet, “expropriated” by beyng, as discussed above.) That is why the passing of the last god (which would mark the grounding of the other beginning of history) occurs at the same time as the sheltering of truth in beings. In this grounding of the truth of beyng in being-there, beyng and beings are transformed into their simultaneity (GA 65: 14).
But this simultaneity does not abolish all difference (it should be kept in mind that difference does not mean separation) between beyng and beings. According to what Heidegger thinks during the time he is writing Contributions, the strife of earth and world functions as a kind of medium between the truth of beyng and beings. He says that the truth of beyng cannot be “directly” sheltered in beings but first needs to be transformed into the strife of world and earth (GA 65: 391).
What follow are some brief indications of how and where the notion of Ereignis appears and also undergoes some changes in Heidegger’s later thought.
The account of the relations between “gods and humans” and “world and earth” in Contributions foreshadows his later thinking of the “fourfold” (Geviert) of divinities and humans, sky and earth (see Chapter 15). The essays “The Thing” from 1950 (PLT 161−84 = VA 157−80) and “Building Dwelling Thinking” from 1951 (BW 347−63 = VA 139−56), in which Heidegger exposes the fourfold are – viewed from the horizon of Contributions – essays in which Heidegger thinks ahead into modes of sheltering wherein beyng and beings are transformed into their simultaneity. In these essays, two of the four terms of the fourfold change slightly with respect to Contributions: In Contributions, Heidegger speaks of the “strife of world and earth”; in the later writings, the relation between sky and earth, together with the relation between mortals and divinities, is said to constitute the “worlding” (Welten) of the world. What changes is also a certain “foundational” relation that Heidegger maintains in Contributions when he says that the strife of world and earth occurs within the deciding encounter of gods and humans. When speaking of the fourfold in the essay “The Thing”, Heidegger says that Ereignis occurs through the appropriating mirror-play of the fourfold such that “each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the other. Each therewith reflects itself in its own way into is own, within the unity of the four” (PLT 177 = VA 172, trans. mod.). In this context, Heidegger uses the term Vereignung: “The mirroring appropriates [ereignet] – by clearing each of the four – their own essence into the simple appropriation [Vereignung] to each other” (PLT 177 = VA 172, trans. mod.). The prefix “ver” has (in this context) the sense of an achievement; we may thus literally translate Vereignung as “achieving appropriation”. The essay “The Thing” also contains a different use of the term “enteignen” (expropriate) than in Contributions. When speaking of the fourfold, Heidegger plays with a different (more positive) meaning of the prefix ent-; now he stresses the sense of “letting go” or “letting free” that the term contains (whereas in Contributions he emphasized the sense of privation). He writes: “Each is expropriated, within their mutual appropriation [Vereignung], into its own being [zu seinem Eigenen enteignet]”. Heidegger sums up: “This expropriative appropriating [dieses enteignende Ereignen] is the mirror-play of the fourfold” (PLT 177 = VA 172).16
In a seminar on Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being” (1962), Heidegger mentions, as I have noted, a number of texts that constitute different “ways into Ereignis” (TB 36 = ZSD 38−9), among which is included the above-mentioned essay “The Thing”. Accordingly, we may say that Heidegger’s meditations on the mirror-play of the fourfold are one way into the event of appropriation. Another one is his meditations on Gestell, translated as “framework” or “enframing” (see QCT and Chapter 13). Ge-stell names for Heidegger the relation between humans and beyng in our epoch, an epoch marked by a “technological” relation to things. Through the notion of Ge-stell, Heidegger reflects further on what in Contributions he speaks of in terms of machination, calculation and adventure. An experience of the truth of beyng as appropriating event first requires that we experience and acknowledge the abandonment of beings by beyng and the occurrence of appropriation in terms of an expropriation (withdrawal). This requires a meditation on the essence of technology and the way it determines our relation to things. It is by turning towards machination (not by turning away from it) that we may experience and think the truth of beyng as Ereignis. After Contributions Heidegger continues to hold on to that necessity and also pushes this thought a little further such that he increasingly understands the way beyng occurs in the epoch of technology as a preliminary form of Ereignis (and not just as the end of the way in which Ereignis occurs as expropriation in the first beginning, that is, in the epochs of metaphysics). In Identity and Difference (1957, i.e. twenty years after he wrote Contributions) Heidegger writes that we need to pay attention to the claim that speaks in the essence of technology:
Our whole being [Dasein] everywhere finds itself challenged – sometimes playfully, sometimes urgently, sometimes rushed, sometimes pushed – to devote itself to planning and calculating everything. … The name for the gathering of this challenge which places man and being towards each other [einander zu-stellt] in such a way that they challenge each other is “the framework” [das Ge-stell].
(IDS 34−5 = ID 22−3, trans. mod.)
The belonging together of man and beyng through this mutual challenging reveals “that and how man is appropriated over [vereignet] to being, and being is appropriated [zugeeignet] to human being” (IDS 36 = ID 24). Thus, realizing how we are challenged into the planning and calculating of everything reveals a certain (that is, expropriative) manner of how our relation to beyng occurs through the event of appropriation. This is why Heidegger speaks of Ge-stell as a “preliminary form” of Ereignis also in the seminar on “Time and Being” (1962) (ZSD 57 = TB 53).
Shortly after the above quoted passage from Identity and Difference, Heidegger points out an etymology of Ereignis that traces it back to Er-äugnis (Auge means “eye”), which relates to “ er-äugen, meaning to catch sight of something, to call something through the gaze, to appropriate [an-eignen]”.17 Although Heidegger does not explicitly make the connection in Identity and Difference, one can easily relate Er-äugnis to Augenblick, which is the “moment” (literally translated: “glance of the eye”) in which the truth of beyng holds sway as appropriating event.18
The moment of the grounding of the truth of beyng in Da-sein marks, according to Contributions, the moment of the beginning of the other beginning of history. In Contributions it remains somewhat ambiguous whether Ereignis only names how beyng occurs initially, in the moment of decision of the other beginning, or whether Heidegger thinks of the possibility of a whole epoch in which appropriation occurs more fully than in metaphysics and humans find a renewed originary relation to the divine, to earth, to sky, and to beings disclosed within a historical world.19
It is only later, in “Time and Being” (1962), that Heidegger makes a clearer differentiation between Ereignis and the history of being in its epochal forms.20 Here, Heidegger thinks of Ereignis in terms of the sending of epochs. He calls the history of being that is sent Geschick. Geschick can be translated as “destiny” and is related to the word schicken, “to send”. He writes:
In the sending of the destiny of being, in the extending of time, there becomes manifest a dedication [Zueignen], a delivering over [Übereignen] into what is their own [Eigenes], namely of being as presence and of time as the realm of the open. What determines both, time and being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of appropriation.
(TB 19 = ZSD 20, trans. mod.)
The event of appropriation is nothing “behind” being and time but rather names their appropriation, the event of their coming into their own and in relation to each other.
Heidegger points out that the appropriating (Ereignen) conceals itself as “it gives” time and “it gives” being, that is to say, the giving withdraws “behind” or “underneath” what is given. In the German sentence, Es gibt Zeit (which would usually be translated as “there is time” but which literally means “it gives time”), the es has a similar function as in the sentence “it rains”. There is no thing that rains. Similarly, there is no thing that gives time or gives being. Appropriation occurs as the giving, but in such a way that as “it” gives, “it” conceals itself. As the sending of time and being, the event of appropriation is not itself a form of being but rather determines the history (or histories) of being: “This, however, what is sending as appropriation, is itself unhistorical [ungeschichtlich], or more precisely without destiny” (TB 41 = ZSD 44, trans. mod.). Accordingly, for a thinking that turns into the event of appropriation as a sending that withdraws or conceals itself (here is where Heidegger speaks of die Enteignis or expropriation in the more original sense), “the history of being as what is to be thought is at an end” (TB 41 = ZSD 44, trans. mod.). Heidegger discusses these thoughts again in one of the seminars held in Le Thor in 1969. Once again the differentiation between Ereignis (the translators here translate it as “enowning”) and the history of being is drawn: “There is no destinal epoch of enowning. Sending is from enowning [Das Schicken ist aus dem Ereignen]” (FS 61). Heidegger also specifies that “in enowning, the history of being has not so much reached its end, as that it now appears as history of being”.
We may summarize, then, that in his later thought Heidegger understood Ereignis to be the event of appropriation out of which epochs of being occur.21 These epochs of being are fundamental ways in which being occurs and humans relate to this occurrence (for instance, by being challenged to calculate and plan everything as in our current epoch of technology). The event of appropriation itself remains concealed in the way being discloses in each period. When thinking enters the event of appropriation, these epochs appear as such and can be thought as such; at the same time, thinking finds itself appropriated by this “untimely” event called Ereignis.
1. See Heidegger’s indication of this in TB 43 = ZSD 46. The full title of the currently available English translation of Beiträge zur Philosophy(Vom Ereignis) (GA 65) is Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (CP). A new translation, by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, is forthcoming with Indiana University Press.
2. Beiträge zur Philosophy is followed by Besinnung (written 1938–9, published as GA 66 in 1997), Die Geschichte des Seyns (written 1938–40, published as GA 69 in 1998), Über den Anfang (written in 1941, published as GA 70 in 2005), and works that remain to be published:Das Ereignis (written in 1941–2, forthcoming as GA 71), Die Stege des Anfangs (written in 1944, forthcoming as GA 72), and Zum Ereignis-Denken (forthcoming as GA 73). Only a few texts (lectures) published during Heidegger’s lifetime explicitly deal with Ereignis. In On Time and Being (TB 36) Heidegger names the “Letter on Humanism”, four lectures given in 1949 (“The Thing”, “The Enframing”, “The Danger” and “The Turning”; in GA 79), “The Question Concerning Technology”, and “Identity and Difference” (IDS). We should add to these texts the lecture and seminar on “Time and Being” (in TB) as well as “Four Seminars” (FS).
3. Here Heidegger uses the word erleben in a positive sense. Much later, in Contributions, Heidegger uses “Erlebnis” to designate a mode of lived experiencing that is oblivious to a more originary sense of being.
4. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (1994: 5–26) outlines Heidegger’s path from the early lecture course of 1919 to the elaboration of the thought of Ereignis in Wege ins Ereignis.
5. Although Heidegger began writing Contributions in 1936, according to von Herrmann (1994: 1), the plan for the work was there already in spring 1932.
6. See Chapter 6. See also Vallega-Neu (2003: pt 1). A further discussion of Heidegger’s way to Ereignis can be found in Pöggeler (1998: 4–36).
7. All translations of passages from Contributions are my own. For the context of the passages, see CP, which provides the German pagination of GA 65. Note that “beyng” renders Heidegger’s archaic way of writing Sein (being) as Seyn. With the “y” Heidegger intends to indicate that being should be understood in terms of an occurrence and not as a being or entity of some kind that we may represent.
8. This is what Heidegger addresses in the “Letter on Humanism” as the more original meaning of Kehre (BW 231–2 = GA 9: 328).
9. See GA 65: 311. Note that Da-sein (written with a hyphen) becomes in Contributions the site of disclosure for both the truth of beyng and our own being, which means that the notion of Da-sein is further displaced from its subjective connotations.
10. “Da” in German means both “here” and “there”.
11. See Contributions, the part or “fugue” titled Anklang (translated as “Resonating”, or “Echo”), §50, and following sections (GA 65: 107ff.).
12. Heidegger also develops this sense of truth in “The Essence of Truth” (BW 130–31).
13. “ Appropriation [die Er-eignung], that in the plight out of which the gods need beyng, beyng necessitates being-there in order to ground its own truth, such that it lets hold sway the in-between – the appropriation [Er-eignung] of Dasein through the gods and the assignment [Zueignung] of the gods to themselves” (GA 65: 470). On the question of god/s in Heidegger’s thought, see Chapters 16 and 17.
14. See §190 of Contributions (GA 65: 310), where Heidegger even diagrams this relation.
15. See “The Origin of the Work of Art”, where Heidegger speaks of poetry in a larger sense as encompassing all creation and preserving of a work (BW 199). For the relation between language and Ereignis, see Vallega-Neu (2002) and Dastur (1993).
16. For the relation between Ereignis as the mirror-play of the fourfold and Heidegger’s thought of Gelassenheit, see Davis (2007: 231–8).
17. ID 24; this passage is missing in the English translation. Heidegger speaks briefly of Er-äugnis also in an essay of 1959 titled “Der Weg zur Sprache” (“The Way to Language”) in Unterwegs zur Sprache (BW 417 = GA 12: 246).
18. See McNeill (1999: esp. 217).
19. See in this context §45 of Contributions, where Heidegger suggests that the grounding of the truth of beyng may finally determine a people.
20. Heidegger’s meditations, especially in Über den Anfang (GA 70), one of the texts following Contributions, pave the way towards that differentiation.
21. These epochs are usually equated with the epochs of Western thought, namely the Greeks, the Middle Ages, modern thought and the current epoch of technology. But all these epochs belong to metaphysics, and metaphysics may be seen as one large epoch in relation to which Heidegger thinks the possibility of another beginning of history. (On Heidegger’s conception of the history of being, see Chapter 11.)
Dastur, F. 1993. “Language and Ereignis”. In Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, J. Sallis (ed.), 355–69. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Davis, B. W 2007. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
von Herrmann, F. W 1994. Wege ins Ereignis. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann.
McNeill, W 1999. The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Pöggeler, O. 1998. The Paths of Heidegger’s Life and Thought, J. Bailiff (trans.). Amherst, New York: Humanity Books.
Vallega-Neu, D. 2002. “Poetic Saying”. In Companion to Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy”, C. E. Scott, S. Schoenbohm, D. Vallega-Neu & A. Vallega (eds), 66–80. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Vallega-Neu, D. 2003. Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy”: An Introduction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
See Heidegger’s Identity and Difference; On Time and Being; “Letter on Humanism”, in Basic Writings, 217–65; Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning); “The Thing”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 161–84.
See R. Polt, “Ereignis”, in Dreyfus & Wrathall (2007), 375–91 Scott et al. (2002) “Being as Appropriation”, Philosophy Today 19(2) (1975), 152–78. Vallega-Neu (2003). See also O. Pöggeler, “Being as Appropriation”, Philosophy Today 19(2) (1975), 152–78.