After BT Ereignis becomes important again and jostles with Geschehen for Heidegger's favor. Both are contrasted with Vorgang and Vorkommnis. Sometimes they amount to Begebenheit, as a historical event (XXXI, 196, 231). But later they are distinguished from it: Begebenheiten are visible, dramatic, but superficial public events, while Geschehen and Ereignis may be inconspicuous but are profoundly important (LXV, 28). Nihilism is not just one historical Begebenheit among others, but a long, drawn-out Ereignis in which the truth about beings as a whole slowly changes and advances towards an end determined by nihilism (NIV, 4f.). '[O]nly the greatest Geschehen, the profoundest Ereignis, can still save us from lostness in the bustle of mere Begebenheiten and machinations. Something must happen [sich ereignen] to open up being for us and put us back in it...' (LXV, 57). Geschehen is often interchangeable with Ereignis. But Geschehen is verbal, and having no plural, cannot refer to distinct events. 'Metaphysics is the basic happening [Grundgeschehen] in Dasein', but it is not a distinct event in Dasein's career: 'It is Dasein itself' (What Is Metaphysics?, 109). 'What happens [geschieht] is the history of being' (NIV, 243), but the 'history of beyng knows rare Ereignisse at long intervals which are for it only moments', events such as 'the assignment of truth to beyng, the collapse of truth, the consolidation of its unessence (correctness)', etc. (LXV, 227f.). But das Ereignis often refers to the supreme event that constitutes the Anfang, the 'beginning', the essencing of beyng, the initial revelation of being that first enables us to identify beings. Here Heidegger exploits to the full its supposed kinship with eigen, etc: 'it is no longer a matter of dealing "with" something and displaying it as an object, but of being handed over [übereignet] to the Er-eignis, which amounts to a change of man's essence from "rational animal" [...] to Da-sein' (LXV, 3). Being appropriates man and makes him Da-sein, the site of being's revelation: 'Beyng as Er-eignis. The Er-eignung makes man the property [Eigentum, lit. 'owndom'] of beyng. [...] property is belongingness to the Er-eignung and this is beyng' (LXV, 263). Beyng as Ereignis is not 'becoming, 'life', or 'movement' in Nietzsche's sense. To view beyng in these terms -- which depend on being as beingness -- makes it an object. We must not make assertions about it, but 'say it in a saying that belongs to what the saying brings forth and rejects all objectification and falsification into a state (or a "flux")[...]' (LXV, 472).

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