who in astrophysics investigates the phenomenon of sunrise simply as a process in nature before which he is basically indifferent, and on the other hand the experience of the chorus of Theban elders, which in Sophocles' Antigone looks at the rising sun on the first friendly morning after a successful defensive battle:
ἀκτίς ἀελίου, τὸ κάλ-
λιστον ἑπταπύλῳ φανὲν
Θήβᾳ τῶν προτέρων φάος
Thou most beautiful glance of the sun,
That upon seven-gated Thebes
So long shines ...1
[75] This contrast does not solve but only initially poses the problem of the how of different modes of experience. But for the time being it will suffice for our purposes. How do we see the experiences? The questions of how such seeing is possible, of what it itself is, and whether it is not also theory (it is, after all, supposed to become science), will be set aside for the moment. Let us try to understand both experiences and see if we can regard them as processes, as objects which are re-presented, firmly fixed before us. But something does happen. In seeing the lectern I am fully present in my 'I'; it resonates with the experience, as we said. It is an experience proper to me and so do I see it. However, it is not a process but rather an event of appropriation [Ereignis] (non-process, in the experience of the question a residue of this event). Lived experience does not pass in front of me like a thing, but I appropriate [er-eigne] it to myself, and it appropriates itself according to its essence. If I understand it in this way, then I understand it not as process, as thing, as object, but in a quite new way, as an event of appropriation. Just as little as I see
1 Sophocles, Antigone V. 100 ff., in: <ι>Sophoclis Tragoediae, cum praefatione Guilelmi Dindorfii, Leipzig 1825, p. 172. German translation by Friedrich Hblderlin ('O Blik der Sonne, du schonster, der / Dem siebenthorigen Thebe / Seit langem scheint . . .') in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. F. Zinkernagel, Leipzig 1915, Vol. Ill, p. 574 f