In short, the noun Ereignis is heir to a complex history that offers up two etymons: “to see” and “to own.” Heidegger draws on the first meaning when he hears in Ereignis echoes of “in den Augen fallen . . . erscheinen” (to come into view, to appear),8 whereas he has the second meaning in mind when he speaks of Ereignis as “appropriation” (from the Latin proprius, “one’s own”) and even calls man the “property” (Eigentum) of the clearing.9 As we will see, this usage is quite misleading, not least of all because of the overtones of hypostatization and agency (the clearing as “something” that can “own” something else). We take up each of these two meanings in turn.
First, as regards “appear”: Even though Heidegger explicitly disallows translations of Ereignis as “event” in a temporal sense, it might nonetheless be legitimate to understand it as an “occurrence”—but only if one means that in the non-temporal sense of “to occur” as in “to come to mind” and thus, in the phenomenological-intentional sense of “to appear.” At the root of our word “occur” is the Latin verb occurrere, which describes something as “running towards us” (ob-currere), such that it comes into view, presents itself, and is given—as in the phrase “It occurs to me that . . . ” or “It appears to me that . . .” In Latin literature there are abundant examples of occurrere in the sense of “to appear” rather than “to happen.” At Aeneid V, 8–9, for example, Virgil speaks of Aeneas’ ship as having sailed so far from the shores of Carthage that “land was no more to be seen” (nec iam amplius ulla / occurrit tellus: historical present).10 And Cicero says, “Nothing reasonable occurs to me as to why Pythagoras’ and Plato’s opinion should not be true.”11 In the case of Heidegger’s use of Ereignis, what “occurs” in this sense—or, more accurately, always already has “occurred”—is the thrown-openness of ex-sistence.
Second, as regards “appropriate”: The second branch of the etymology of Ereignis (“own”) can be combined with the first (“appear”) if we think of the word “appropriation” in terms of its own etymology. The Latin proprius refers to what belongs to something as its very own. Thus the Latin proprietas does not first mean someone’s “property” in the sense of what he or she has acquired
8. GA 71: 184.17–19 = 156.20–24.
9. GA 65: 263.14 = 207.16: “Die Er-eignung bestimmt den Menschen zum Eigentum des Seyns.” I say “unfortunately” because this usage can, and in fact does, lead to the reification of the clearing/Seyn and the objectification of ex-sistence.
10. Virgil, at http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/aen5.shtml. In Fagles’ translation: “no land in sight,” The Aeneid, 153 (although he gets the line number wrong).
11. Tusculanae disputationes 1, 21 (49) (ET, 58): “Nec tamen mihi sane quidquam occurrit cur non Pythagorae sit et Platonis vera sententia”; see also De natura deorum, 1, 14 (36) (ET, 38): “si intelligi potest nihil sentiens deus [= aether], qui nunquam nobis occurit necque in precibus neque in optatis neque in votis”: “If something insensate [= the ether] can be understood to be a god even though it never ‘occurs’ [= appears, shows up] to us in our prayers, petitions, or devotion.”