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May 22, 2007
I'm picking up on an older post here on Ereignis, which I translated as appropriation or enowning. In the introduction to Heidegger's On Time and Being Joan Stambaugh,
the translator, says the following about the term Ereignis/Appropriation:
Being. Terminologically speaking, this term begins to recede in favor of Heidegger's Appropriation, a term which has never before had a philosophical significance. The word Being is simply too bogged down with metaphysical connotations. But Heidegger still retains it in order to maintain the relation to his earlier formulation of the question of Being. In other words, the question is the same, but in "Time and Being" Heidegger is groping his way out of metaphysics. Appropriation does not designate a "realm" as does Being, but rather a relation, that of man and Being. What is radically new and non-Metaphysical about Appropriation is not only that it is an "activity"--a non-static process--Appropriation is non-metaphysical because in the relationship between man and Being as appropriated to each other, the relation is more fundamental than what is related.
Ereignis is often translated as event---the event of appropriation. If philosophy used to think in terms of idea, as energeia, as actualitas, does it now think in terms of appropriation? I've always suspected the background to all this is Aristotle and a metaphysics of becoming. Heidegger’s concern is as not “being” (the givenness or availability of entities for human engagement) of classical metaphysics, but rather what brings about being, namely Ereignis, the opening of clearing within which entities can appear as this or that. It is an enabling power.
Ereignis often means enowning"; that in connection with things that arise and appear, they arise into their own.
The inner movement of Ereignis is one whereby (a) finitude opens a clearing in human being (b) in which entities
can appear as this or that.
This is quite different to what Thomas Sheehan calls the popular “Big Being” story, according to which Being Itself, lying hidden somewhere beyond our ken, occasionally pulls back the veil and reveals Itself to properly disposed human beings---Heideggerians
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