Heidegger first used the term Ereignis, with his special nuances (the dictionary translation is event), in one of his earliest lectures, along with hints of many other themes he would develop through the rest of his career. Ereignis would not appear again until the mid-1930s.

In his book on the young Heidegger, Van Buren describes the first appearance of some of his themes. This extract comments on temporality's early role.

In WS 1921-22, Heidegger defined the sense of the enactment of the person/world relation as follows: "Comporting oneself is also definable as a how of formal happening, proceeding--in view of how it acts, i.e., is enacted, as enactment, accroding to it enactment-sense." Vollzug, enactment , means the Way that the intentional relation literally pulls or draws (zieht) from the source of possibility into full (voll) actuality, and can therefore also be translated as fullfillment, carrying out, or performance. "'Life' and 'world' are not two objects subsisting in themselves like a table to which the chair standing before it is spatially related. The relationality is that of a relation, i.e. is enacted, lived." Enactment is the transitive sense of the verb "to live," where the object here is life itself in relation to the world: "To live in the transitive sense: 'to live life,' 'to live one's work'; here mostly in compounds: 'to live through this and that'; 'to live out one's years.'" Enactment is, however, dependent upon its deeper historical sense as temporalizing. Heidegger's notes read, "But, furthermore, this [comportment] particularly as to how the enactment as enactment becomes in and for a situation, how it 'temporalizes' itself. Temporalizing is to be interpreted on the basis of temporalizing-sense." "The how of being-related-to-world and the world itself are in factical temporalizing." By showing that "temporality" is "the basic phenomenon of facticity," Heidegger endeavored to revive ontology from "the old metaphysics" that was fixated naively on being as unchanging presence (Präsenz): "It hsall be shown 'in tim' precisely that fundamental tasks also lie in ontology!"

P. 270-271

Continued.  ¶ 3:11 PM