character of the Event is something already glimpsed in the preceding discussion, while Joseph Fell states quite directly that “Heidegger’s terms ‘Event’ (Ereignis) and ‘Place’ (Ort) mean the same.”5 Before we can go any further in the discussion here, however, we need to clarify the term itself—what does “event” mean in Heidegger and how, if at all, should it be translated? Henri Birault points out that the German “Ereignis” contains at least three elements: the idea of event or happening; of being proper to; and the idea of seeing or appearing,6 and a similar tripartite structure is also noted by Thomas Sheehan.7
The idea of Ereignis as event or happening, the first element, is something given in the ordinary German usage of the term (although unlike the English “event,” which normally appears only as a noun, “Ereignis” has an associated verb form, “sich ereignen,” to happen or take place). The dynamic element in Ereignis is important inasmuch as it constitutes a move away from the static idea of being as presence in the present that, according to Heidegger, has dominated the philosophical thinking of the West since the Greeks. It also indicates the way in which the unity that is a key element in Ereignis is a unity that arises through the interaction of elements rather than through their mere “standing near” to one another. The sense of “belonging” or “being proper to” that is the second element in “Ereignis” is the primary focus for the translation of “Ereignis” as “enowning.” Along with those translations that draw on terms such as “appropriation” or “propriation” (“event of appropriation,” “disclosure of appropriation”), this rendering picks up, as noted above, on the way in which “Ereignis” contains within it an echo of the German “eigen,” meaning “own.” Ereignis is thus understood in terms of the “happening of belonging” in the sense of a gathering or bringing of things into what is their own. The emphasis on “own” here immediately connects “Ereignis” with “Eigenlichkeit,” “own-ness,” or “authenticity,” which is such a key notion in Being and Time, but “Ereignis” does not refer to some mode of being that belongs to being-there; instead what is at issue here is a certain sort of unifying of elements in which things are brought into a unity to which they already belong. The third element in “Ereignis” is the idea of “coming to sight,” “being disclosed,” “being made evident.” Etymologically “Ereignis” has its roots in the now somewhat archaic term “eräugnen” meaning to see or to be evident. Once again this is suggestive of a connection back to Being and Time—to the idea of the “moment of vision,” Augenblick, in which being-there grasps its existential situation. It also refers us to the notions of disclosedness and of revealing/concealing that emerged most clearly in