Heidegger stressed that there is an "indifference lying in the something in any sense over against every genuine worldishness," such that the Ereignis of this something is precisely an anarchic differentiation into the alterity of lifeworlds and worldish beings. In the following passages on the "there is/it gives something," we can hear distinctive echoes of Heidegger's earlier idea that being is an analogical identity-in-difference.

What does this mean: "es gibt," "there is/it gives"? Es gibt numbers, es gibt triangles, es gibt the painting of Rembrandt, es gibt U-boats; I say: Es gibt rain again today, es gibt roast veal tomorrow. Manifold "there is/it give[s]," and at each particular time it has a different sense and yet again each also has an identical moment of signification that is found in each. Precisely because of its simplicity, even this completely dimmed, mere "es gibt" empties, as it were, of specific significations has its manifold enigmas.

Heidegger called this necessary differentiation of the "index" of the primal something its Angewiesensein, its "being-assigned" in the sense of being always already and continually "submitted" or "allotted" to a differentiated concretion. "When we try to apprehend the sense of the something in any sense, we reach back to individual objects with specific concrete content.... Ultimately, there indeed lies in the something in any sense the fact that it is somehow assigned to a concretion." We always find the "there is/it gives something" differentiated into "there is/it gives tables and chairs, houses and tress, Mozart's sonatas and religious powers." "Every worldish being (be it of, e.g., an aesthetic or religious or social type) is something. Everything experienceable in any sense is a possible something, regardless of its genuine world-character." All these "somethings" are the effects of the differentiating Ereignis of the primal something. As Heidegger already suggested in his 1915-16 essay on history, the very term Ereignis means an "event" or "happening," which is unique, unrepeatable, special. For example, das ist wirklich ein Ereignis, it's quite an event; in Belfast ereignien sich Dinge, things are happening in Belfast. Every Ereignis is an Er-eignis in that it "lives ans dem Eigenen," out of the own, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic. Every experience of something is in some sense a "special event," a "special time." Like the demonstrative "it" in "it worlds," the term Ereignis is what Husserl called an "occasional expression," since its meaning is specified only within the unique occasions in which it is employed.

P. 275-6

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