The later Heidegger's ontology revolves around another untranslatable German word: Ereignis. Approximated as "the event," "enowning," or "appropriating," Ereignis is an overdetermined word. It connotes the happening — the rupture or opening — that holds within itself the secret of its happening and makes possible both Dasein and the appearance of beings dependent upon its "disclosedness" or openness (Erschlocsenheit). It also connotes the appropriation of facticity or owning of one's time, a task that belongs uniquely to Dasein. The difficulty with the term Ereignis is that it references two seemingly incompatible ideas: the notion of an event and the notion of appropriation. The former appears to be an objective happening, the latter a subjective act, something one does. The ambiguity is of course deliberate. Dasein's owning of itself, which is the task for thinking and the only experience of truth available to us, is the event of history. The later Heidegger clarifies that the thinking that begins with Being and Time is neither directed to being in a metaphysical sense (the whatness or thatness of things) nor directed to the human being in an existential-phenomenological sense. Its theme is the coincidence of Dasein with the appearance of beings, whose self-showing is only for Dasein. The human being is the shepherd of being called by being itself into the preservation of being's truth" [P. 260]. This leads Heidegger to ask what makes possible both the showing of beings and the being for whom beings are shown? The question strikes us as extraordinarily abstract because it is no longer working within any of the received philosophical narratives: being is no longer out there (realism), nor in here (idealism); the human being is no longer one among many things subject to physical or metaphysical conditions, nor is the human being the ground of the world. The later Heidegger expends all his energies on breaking the presuppositions operating in these narratives. Physis is not the prehuman appearance of things, even for the early Greeks. Rather physis is the spontaneous emergence of things for Dasein: being and appearance of being to Dasein coincide.

The mystery of this convergence raises two further questions: What kind of being is Dasein that it can be the site for the appearance of beings? (This is the question of Being and Time.) Secondly, what is the condition of the possibility of the interdependence of beings and human being? what opens up Dasein as the site of the appearance of beings? The answer to the last question is Ereignis: the "event" simultaneously opens the clearing (the not) that is Dasein and makes possible the appearance or beings. We can now see more clearly where Heidegger is heading with his notion of ontological guilt in Being and Time: only insofar as the human being is defined by a lack of being, insofar as it is not coincident with its being (in that its being is always an issue for it), is the temporal space secured for the appearance of beings. Without presuming to have found the formula of the later Heidegger (there is no formula), we can make a few thematic observations. Inasmuch as aletheia is the unveiling or beings that is preceded and succeeded by a return into darkness and physis remains horizoned by the nothing that shows itself as the spontaneous and contingent emergence of things from out of themselves. Ereignis is Dasein's irruption into being in its sheer unmasterable eventfulness, the incalculable happening of Dasein's disclosedness. The experience of Ereignis pulsates with the vital threefold relationship of Dasein, being, and temporality, a relationship that Heidegger so laboriously tries to retrieve in Being and Time. Ereignis names that which is never unveiled to calculation, that which is repeatedly suppressed by the metaphysics of presence, namely, the unthinkable upsurge in the nothing that renders Dasein free and available for the showing of being.

P. 71-3

¶ 9:14 PM