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13 Ereignis
- Indiana University Press
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13 Ereignis UNTIL RECENTLY WE had always thought that the terms it-worlds, Es gibt (there is/it gives), and Ereignis (event/enownment) belonged only to the lexicon of Heidegger's later thought. Here, I discuss how the young Heidegger already described the temporalizing-sense of the being-question as Es gibt and Ereignis. Though the term Ereignis disappeared after 1919 and resurfaced again only in the 1930S, I show that, like the term it-worlds, it continued to be operative in Heidegger's early Freiburg period when he began to speak of temporalizing -sense as kairological time (1920-21) and as kinesis (1921-23). The present chapter thus pursues the following course of analysis. I begin by focusing on the nonpersonal depth-dimension of Ereignis and showing how, in continuity with Heidegger's earlier concepts of haecceity and analogy in the heterology of his qualifying dissertation, this Ereignis is conceived of as an an-archie differentiation of being into the alterity of historical periods, societies , and individual personalities. I then examine how after 1919 Heidegger continued to explore and deepen this basic insight under the new rubrics of kairological time and kinesis, which stress how the absent, nonobjectiflcable, noncalculable depth-dimension of the futurity of being is temporalized and individuated in unique situations. Finally, I emphasize the profoundly personal aspect of Ereignis, show how this continues to be operative in the development of Heidegger's early Freiburg period, and argue that it entails both a personalist thoughtpath and a fundamental critique of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity . I illustrate these points by again taking up Heidegger's own phenomenological exercises of describing concrete phenomena such as the lectern, sunrises in the Black Forest and in Sophocles's Antigone, and the table in his own home. It Events/Enowns In WS 1921-22, Heidegger defined the sense of the enactment of the person /world relation as follows: "Comporting oneself is also definable as a how of formal happening, proceeding-in view of how it acts, i.e., is enacted, as enactment, according to its enactment-sense." Vollzug, enactment, means the Ereignis 27I way that the intentional relation literally pulls or draws (zieht) from the source of possibility into full (voll) actuality, and can therefore also be translated as fulfillment, carrying out, or performance. " 'Life' and 'world' are not two objects subsisting in themselves like a table to which the chair standing before it is spatially related. The relationality is that of a relation, Le., is enacted, lived." Enactment is the transitive sense of the verb "to live," where the object here is life itself in relation to world: "To live in the transitive sense: 'to live life,' 'to live one's work'; here mostly in compounds: 'to live through this and that'; 'to live out one's years.' " Enactment is, however, dependent upon its deeper historical sense as temporalizing. Heidegger's notes read, "But, furthermore, this [comportment] particularly as to how the enactment as enactment becomes in and for a situation, how it 'temporalizes' itself. Temporalizing is to be interpreted on the basis of temporalizing-sense." "The how of being-related-toworld and the world itself are in factical temporalizing." By showing that "temporality" is "the basic phenomenon of facticity," Heidegger endeavored to revive ontology from "the old metaphysics" that was fixated naively on being as unchanging presence (Priisenz): "It shall be shown 'in time' precisely that fundamental tasks also lie in ontology!" (G61 53, 86, 82, 97, 176; G63 31, 65, 43, 79, 3)ยท Beginning with his courses in 1919, Heidegger thus took up the third requirement for rethinking the question about being that he had put forward in his qualifying dissertation, namely, "history ... must become a meaning-determining element for the problem of the categories" of being in the sense of the "something in any sense." He also continued the analysis of historical time initiated in his 1915-16 essay on history, which defined time as the "effective context" of a unique historical Ereignis that involves a circular movement of past, future, and present. Similarly, his KNS 1919 lecture course explored the "Ereignis-character" of the primal something (being) that worlds and e-vents/en-owns (er-eignet) for me, and in which I e-vent/en-own it to myself. Life, he explained, is always a "situation in the context of life" and "the I is itself a situation-I; the I is histor'ical,' " a "historical I." Intentionality is not only horizontally directed to the worlding...