What mattered to him, he insisted, was “the question about Being.” Heidegger underscored that remark by adding to that essay quite a number of footnotes that relate what he had to say to his thinking of the Ereignis, or event or happening of the truth of being, i.e. the emergence of beings, which by 1936 had come to preoccupy him. He thus glosses his question: “What is truth that it can happen as, or even must happen as art?” with “truth from the Ereignis!” (G5, 25/57); “World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being (G5, 30–31/44) with Ereignis; “The work lets the earth be an earth” (G5, 32/46) again with Ereignis. Ever since 1936, as Heidegger tells us, Ereignis had become the guiding motto of his thinking. That he should have chosen it for the subtitle for what has been called his main or at least his second main work, the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) is significant. With that work Heidegger pushes self-consciously against the limits of language in a finally not successful attempt to say the truth of Being now understood as the Ereignis. As the later footnotes make clear, “The Origin of the Work of Art” is underway towards the Beiträge. The two works illuminate one another and given the hermetic character of the Beiträge, “The Origin of the Work of Art” may well offer the best access to the central thought of this enigmatic later work. Even the three footnoted passages I just cited give us a first understanding of what Heidegger has in mind when he speaks of the Ereignis: it names the counterplay of world and earth, which is the happening or event of truth.

The Ereignis does not make its first appearance in the Beiträge. Already in his early Freiburg lecture Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (1919) Heidegger had distinguished a mere event from an Ereignis, a happening to which I belong and that belongs and therefore matters to me (G56/57, 186). Heidegger contrasts an astronomer considering the rising of the sun objectively as a natural phenomenon and the chorus of the Theban elders in Sophocles’ Antigone, who, after a successful battle, greet the rising sun. They are engaged with what they see in a way that is very different from the astronomer’s distanced beholding. That it is art—here three lines from a Greek tragedy, cited in a translation by Hölderlin—that gives us a first insight into the nature of what Heidegger calls Ereignis is significant. The same work will be mentioned in “The Origin of the Wok of art” as an example of works that have been “torn out of their native sphere.”

In Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie an experience is said to be an Ereignis when it is truly one’s own, while the experiencing individual is open to what so beautifully manifests itself in its own splendor, here the rising sun (G56/57, 74–75). Here already Er-eignis names what comes to be understood as authentic experience. Ereignis and Eigentlichkeit belong together. In Being and Time Dasein is said to be essentially “in the truth” (G2, 293). And, as we saw, Heidegger understands, resolve (Entschlossenheit) as “the most primordial, because authentic truth of Dasein” (die ursprünglichste, weil eigentliche Wahrheit des Daseins) (G2, 394). But as Heidegger recognizes when he makes Being (Sein), but not beings dependent on Dasein, there is a sense in which Being understood as the transcendent ground of experience (Seyn) transcends Being understood transcendentally (Sein). This demands that we think of Being (Sein) not just as dependent on Dasein, but as belonging to Seyn. The happening of truth thus comes to be understood as the presencing (das Wesen) of Seyn. That the attempt to think this happening, however, inevitably will become entangled in some version of the antinomy with which I began this chapter is suggested by this explanation: “Seyn needs the human being for it to be (wese), and the human being belongs to Seyn, so that he fulfill his ultimate vocation as Da-sein” (G65, 251). For Seyn “to be,” it must disclose itself as Sein.

Pp. 111-1

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