Antes de prosseguir com a apresentação do pensamento de Heidegger sobre Ereignis em Contribuições, pode ser útil notar que a palavra Ereignis aparece como um conceito principal (embora não exatamente no sentido que terá para Heidegger depois de 1936) num curso que Heidegger deu no final da Primeira Guerra Mundial, ou seja, mesmo antes de escrever Ser e Tempo (que foi publicado em 1927). Neste curso de 1919, Heidegger já começa a elaborar uma diferença entre uma abordagem científica-teórica das coisas e uma abordagem pré-teórica — mais genuína — das coisas. Salienta que, numa abordagem científico-teórica das coisas, se perde o envolvimento peculiar daquele que questiona e lida com as coisas. Colocamos um sujeito e um objeto e descrevemos a sua relação em termos de um Vorgang, uma ocorrência objetiva. No entanto, não é assim que as coisas acontecem se prestarmos muita atenção à forma como experienciamos o nosso meio envolvente (Umwelterlebnis). Neste último caso, verificamos que não existe nem um sujeito nem um objeto, mas ao mesmo tempo encontramo-nos envolvidos com tudo o que encontramos. O nosso envolvimento peculiar na experiência do que nos rodeia é aquilo a que Heidegger chama, nesta primeira conferência, Ereignis, em contraste com as ocorrências descritas objetivamente (Vorgang). Tal como na sua obra posterior, Contribuições, nesta aula de quinze anos antes, Heidegger hifeniza a palavra e chama a atenção para a raiz do significado “próprio”.
Ereignis in German usually means “event”, but, as in many other instances, Heidegger likes to play with a wider semantic field that opens up once we hear the word more literally by breaking it up into its two semantic components er- and -eignis. The prefix er- carries the sense of a beginning motion or of an achievement, whereas -eignis refers to the word eigen, which in German usually means “own”, but which is also at play in a word that is familiar to us from Heidegger’s Being and Time, namely eigentlich, in English “proper” or “authentic”. This has led scholars to translate Ereignis not only as “event” but also with the neologism “enowning”, or as “appropriation”, or as “the event of appropriation”.
Before proceeding to present Heidegger’s thought of Ereignis in Contributions, it may be useful to note that the word Ereignis appears as a main concept (although not exactly in the sense that it will have for Heidegger after 1936) in a lecture course Heidegger gave at the very end of the First World War, that is, even before he wrote Being and Time (which was published in 1927). In this lecture course of 1919, Heidegger already begins elaborating a difference between a scientific-theoretical approach to things, and a – more genuine – pre-theoretical approach to things. He points out that in a scientific-theoretical approach to things the peculiar involvement of the one who questions and deals with things is lost. We posit a subject and an object and describe their relation in terms of a Vorgang, an objective occurrence. This is, however, not the way things occur if we pay close attention to the way we experience our surroundings (Umwelterlebnis). In the latter case, we find that there is neither a subject nor an object, yet at the same time we find ourselves involved with whatever we encounter. Our peculiar involvement when experiencing our surroundings is what Heidegger calls, in this early lecture, Ereignis, in contrast to objectively described occurrences (Vorgang). Just as in his later work, Contributions, in this lecture course from fifteen years earlier, Heidegger hyphenates the word and draws attention to the root meaning “own” in it. He writes:
Er-leben [“lived experience”] does not pass by me, like a thing that I would posit as object; rather I er-eigne [“en-own” or “appropriate”] it to myself and it er-eignet sich [this would commonly be translated as “it happens”; if we attempted to render the literal sense, we may render it as “appropriates itself”, or it “en-owns itself”] according to its essence. And if, looking at it, I understand lived experience in that way, then I understand it not as process (Vor-gang), as thing, object, but rather as something totally new, as Ereignis. (TDF 63 = GA 56/57: 75, trans. mod.)
This lecture course from 1919 foreshadows themes that Heidegger will elaborate in Being and Time (1927), although in the latter he uses neither the word Vorgang nor the word Ereignis in his analysis of our (pre-theoretical) being-in-the-world. He also avoids the words Leben (life) and Erleben (lived experience) because of his critique of a subjectively based “life-philosophy”. When he again picks up the concept Ereignis as he begins planning Contributions in 1932, it no longer refers merely to the way we experience our surrounding world. By this time, Heidegger’s thinking and conceptual articulation of the question of being will have undergone several changes. These shifts take place during the course of his attempt to think the event of being as such beyond subjectivism and scientific-theoretical objectivism, while at the same time articulating in increasingly original ways the peculiar manner in which we humans find ourselves originarily in our being and within being as such.