Ereignis - othersonia.com

{running text below from LIFE AS ART FROM NIETZSCHE TO FOUCAULT:

LIFE, AESTHETICS, AND THE TASK OF THINKING by

Zachary Simpson (2009)}:

But thinking is an adventure not only as a search and an inquiry into the unthought. Thinking, in its essence as thinking of Being, is claimed by Being. Thinking is related to Being as what arrives. Thinking as such is bound to the advent of Being, to Being as advent. . . .To bring to language ever and again this advent of Being that remains, and its remaining waits for man, is the sole matter of thinking.

Being is related to thinking and is consistently defined by Heidegger as that which “arrives,” as an “advent,” and as that which “remains” in the space cleared by thinking. Similar temporal terms are applied to the relationship between the poetic and Being: “But the poets can compose that which is in advance of their poem only if they utter that which precedes everything real: what is coming. . . The poets are, if they stand in their essence, prophetic.”

Being, again, is evoked as “what is coming,” as something hailed by the prophetic capacities of the poets. Being is related to thinking and poetry insomuch as Being is what appears as an advent, as that which comes and remains in thought and the poem.

As an opening into the question of “how” poetry and thought safeguard the appearance of Being, Heidegger’s temporal metaphors provide a critical key. Insomuch as Being or the fourfold appear and remain, only to fall back into concealment, their arising into the space given by poetic dwelling and meditative thinking can be spoken of as an “event.” And, after Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, he uses the untranslatable term Ereignis (often translated as “event” or “event of appropriation”) to refer to the process whereby Being appears momentarily within a cleared space. Humans

and Being are united in this event. As he states, “thinking sees the constellation of Being and man in terms of that which joins the two–by virtue of the event of appropriation [Ereignis].” To clarify his use of the term, Heidegger gives the following: “Ereignis will be translated as Appropriation or event of Appropriation. One should bear in mind, however, that ‘event’ is not simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible.”

Any thought or saying of Being is predicated upon the event through which Being is allowed to appear in the clearing given by thought and poetry.

And, just as poetry and thinking bear a multitude of meanings as that which withdraws, calls, safeguards, and preserves, Ereignis is revealed throughout Heidegger’s work as a multivalent term signifying the event upon which the experience of Being is founded. Malpas summarizes Heidegger’s use of the term: “Heidegger himself seems to have heard [three elements] as included in ‘Ereignis’: the idea of event/happening, of gathering/belonging, and of disclosing/revealing.” And, in summary, Malpas gives the following: “the Event [Ereignis] seems to refer to something like the experience of this ‘disclosive happening.’”

As a “disclosive happening,” Ereignis signifies the

simultaneous coming-together of clearing/calling/safeguarding and the appearance/ manifestation/withdrawal of Being. Thus Heidegger’s temporal terms have a place within his topology of Ereignis, though Ereignis is not a temporal, but rather a poetic, event. “The event of appropriation [Ereignis] is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach each other in their nature. . . ”

The coming-together of humans and Being in Ereignis signals a dependence not on one another, but on Ereignis itself, wherein each reaches the other in a cleared site of disclosure. Thus, as Heidegger recognizes, thought (and hence poetry as well) is dependent on Ereignis:

The spring is the abrupt entry into the realm from which man and Being have already reached each other in their active nature, since both are mutually appropriated, extended as a gift, one to the other. Only the entry into the realm of this mutual appropriation [Ereignis] determines and defines the experience of thinking.

Heidegger here uses “mutual appropriation” as definitive of Ereignis and determinative of thinking. Thinking, if it is to be authentic, must remain loyal to the experience of Being. Likewise, Being is also dependent on Ereignis for it to “come into its own”: Propriation [Ereignis], espied in the showing of the saying, can be

represented neither as an event nor as a happening; it can only be experienced in the showing of the saying as that which grants. . .

Propriating is not an outcome or a result of something else; it is the

bestowal whose giving reaches out in order to grant for the first time

something like a “There is/It gives,” [es gibt] which “being” too needs

if, as presencing, it is to come into its own.

Ereignis “grants” Being through its being brought-together with humans in a cleared space; yet such a space is not a “space” in the classical sense, nor is it a “happening” in the temporal sense. Ereignis, rather, designates the irrational and non spatio-temporal site where Being and humans meet in mutual dependence upon one another for their very nature as Ground-that-gives and as thinking-being.

If any representational meaning can be given to Ereignis, then, it is the fact that it stands beyond any systematic attempt at definition while still remaining central to our experience of Being and the nature of thinking and poetry. Heidegger summarizes this point well in a footnote: “Yet propriation [Ereignis] is essentially other, other because richer than every possible metaphysical determination of Being. On the contrary, Being lets itself be thought–with a view to its essential provenance–from out of propriation.”

Although Ereignis can only be defined negatively (as the non-spatial space, the nontemporal event), it still signifies the fortuitous happening in which humans and Being are disclosed to one another in poetic dwelling and meditative thinking. Authentic poesy and thinking cannot be thought outside of Ereignis, but only through it. In this stunning move, Heidegger has reversed the anthropocentric triumphalism of the early works and made both thinking and poetry dependent upon an irrational Event in which humans and Being are brought together: Being becomes determinative of poetry and thinking–the “happening” of Being surmounts the subordinate happenings of thinking and poetry.