More from Hans Ruin on the Augenblick cum Ereignis.
Ereignis is a key-word in Heidegger's later thinking, in which the question of the meaning of being is transformed into a question of the essencing and truth of being. It seeks to capture the "happening" or "event" of being in manifestation, while repeatedly insisting that it is not some kind of process-philosophy. Its way of signifying has its roots in what I have spoken of here as a "kairological" mode of thinking and writing, for which the experience of truth is bound and conditioned by a confrontation with the unique situation of which we ourselves are a part; or rather, a situation to which we belong while we are also constantly being deprived of it and to which we can therefore relate only as to an unexpected encounter.
The thought of Ereignis thus elaborates the conception in the eraly writings and lectures of that existential factical situation out of which every general description and designation of beings emerges, including the spatio-temporal structure itself. In Being and Time the name of this qualified situation is the Augenblick. Though seemingly restricted to a temporal singularity, we should not fail to keep in mind that it is modeled on the situation of historical existence and praxis. Factical Dasein is always already thrown into a historical situation, forced to act and to think from out of its given conditions. The Augenblick is what we could perhaps speak of as the metonomy for this incessant, demanding situatedness of human existence. It designates that to which we can access only by means of a certain abandonment. Or to put it differently, it designates that which we have only in losing it, as we devote ourselves to what the situation requires.
