Heidegger, fenomenologia, hermenêutica, existênciaWelt ist, was begegnet. Whereas in English we would say “the world is something we encounter,” in Heidegger’s German sentence, which employs the verb begegnen (“to encounter”) according to normal usage, the subject and object of the verb are reversed and the sentence literally says “the world is what en-counters (us)” in the sense of “happens (to us).” Moreover, here and often elsewhere Heidegger does not state the object of the verb (e.g., “us,” “one”), so that the above sentence reads, even more literally, simply as “the world is what en-counters” or “happens.” Thus, in Heidegger’s use of it here, the German verb begegnen is far less “subjective” than the English verb “to encounter,” since the world is performing an action on the human subject and the latter is in fact sometimes not even mentioned directly. It is also far more dynamic, since it has the indicative meaning of “to happen (to me for a while at the particular time)” and is thus connected to Heidegger’s term “be-ing” (see endnote 5) and to what he says in §§3 and 25 about the “temporality of the world’s being-encountered” and of Dasein ’s “being-encountered” in their “unpredictability,” “incalculability,” and “strange” character. In fact, all the above points should be kept in mind when in §§3ff. Heidegger deals with “Dasein’s self-encounter [Selbstbegegnung] and the “fundamental experience” in which das Dasein ihm selbst begegnet (p. 14), a phrase which, like the one discussed above, has the literal dynamic and non-subjective meaning of “Dasein happens to itself,” even though it has been rendered more fully as “Dasein is encountering itself.”
Heidegger understands begegnen (“to happen,” “encounter”) in the “middle voice,” such that it means both (1) the passivity of having our factical historical “being-there” and that of the world “happen to” us and (2) our activity of “encountering” our “being-there” and that of the world (regarding the latter meaning, see endnote 16 on Heidegger’s theme that hermeneutics involves a “wakefulness” for facticity and an “initial engagement and bringing into play” [Einsatz] of it). In his first lecture course of 1919, he had used the terms “it worlds” (es weitet) and “it happens” (es ereignet sich) to express this dynamic middle-voice sense of our immediate encounter with the world. See Gesamtausgabe, Vols. 56-57 [GA56-57 ]: Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987), pp. 70-76. In place of these earlier terms from 1919, including the noun Ereignis (“happening,” “event”) which resurfaced as a central concept in his later writings, Heidegger began using begegnen and Begegnis (“happening,” “event”) as technical terms in the early twenties. Where he had spoken earlier of Ereignischarakter (“the character of a happening”), the present course speaks in §§18 and 26 of Begegnischarakter (“the character of being-encountered”).
It is in order to express something of the dynamic middle-voice meaning of begegnen that the German sentence at the start of this endnote is translated as “The world is something being encountered” and that elsewhere begegnen is likewise usually translated as “is (are) (something) being encountered.” “(Which is [are]) being encountered” is generally used for the adjective begegnend, “what is (something) being encountered” for Begegnendes, and “being-encountered” for Begegnen, Begegnis, and Begegnung. “Happens to be encountered’ has sometimes been employed for begegnen since it expresses not only the dynamic middle-voice meaning of the German term but also the “unpredictability” and “incalculability” of Dasein’s and the world’s “being-encountered” (§§3 and 25).
