74 The Emergency of Being
form our words and concepts in accordance with it, not to subject it to some prior conceptual scheme. We cannot grasp Ereignis simply by subsuming it under some everyday concept expressed in the word event. Everyday concepts are shallow, because they are suited only for everyday transactions with entities. Thinking about be-ing has to deepen and transform our concepts, not dismiss the problems by labeling them with ordinary words. However, if we let the word Ereignis (or “appropriation,” or “enowning”) stand by itself, without contact with other words, then it will lose all meaning for us, because we will have no perspective on it. And even though Ereignis is not an everyday event, perhaps we can start to build a bridge to Ereignis by paying unusually close attention to phenomena that we usually call “events.”
Foremost among those who have claimed that appropriation is not an event—and this might seem to settle the question as soon as it has been raised—is Heidegger himself. In several postwar essays, he emphatically distinguishes appropriation from an “occurrence” (Vorkommnis) or “happening” (Geschehen or Geschehnis).93 The ordinary concept of event fails to think “in terms of Appropriating as the extending and sending which opens and preserves.”94 Is this enough for us to conclude that appropriation does not “happen” as a particular event at all, but is a constant? Not necessarily. Heidegger may be implying that the ordinary way of thinking about events is too shallow; maybe we should ultimately think of eventfulness in terms of appropriating. Ordinary concepts of the event may miss appropriating not because appropriation has nothing to do with events, but because these ordinary concepts are tied to an ontology of present beings. In support of this hypothesis, we could point to the fact that, in the passage we just cited, Heidegger characterizes Ereignis by way of a series of verbs. Can extending, sending, opening, and preserving be anything other than events? Maybe so; maybe the verbs mislead us into picturing “something which is not temporal” as an event that takes place within time.95 Yet Heidegger is still willing to say that “being takes place [geschieht].”96 So perhaps even when he speaks in noneventful language, he is insinuating a radically eventful thinking.97 And even if the late essays definitively
93. “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, 127; “Summary of a Seminar,” in On Time and Being, 20; “The Principle of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, 36. Along similar lines, Heidegger proposes in a seminar that appropriation is not caught up in historical destiny, precisely because it is the sending of this destiny. “There is no destinal epoch of enowning. Sending is from enowning”: “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” in Four Seminars, 61.
94. “Summary of a Seminar,” in On Time and Being, 20.
95. Ibid., 47.
96. “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, 8.
97. Heidegger says that, with the exception of “The Thing,” his published work is nothing but “a first attempt to make my thought understandable on the basis of the tradition . . . [this work] always still speaks the language of metaphysics to some extent, or uses its language with a different meaning”: letter to Dieter Sinn, August 24, 1964, cited in Sinn, Ereignis und Nirwana, 172.