Ereignis: the thought
Ereignis is a way to understand technology and our everyday world, an approach
to life, and a distinct philosophy. We begin by unpacking the multiple meanings
of the word; we then go on to identify a vision, an obstacle, and a new
reality. In the end we ask to what service Ereignis
can be put to enable us to become who we are.
An event
is an experience or a happening that fundamentally reconfigures the coordinates
of our lives, as a trauma or as a thoroughly exhilarating moment, strictly dividing
the “before” from the “after”.
Ereignis is a complex and intriguing word, even in the German. As a noun (an Ereignis) it basically means an unusual or special event, or, simply, something that has happened. However, when we investigate further we realise that there are vast arrays of potential meanings to this term. Synonyms suggested by the dictionary include occasion, interlude, opportunity, experience, happening, thing, and an event. At the etymological root of Ereignis we find that this is an event that is derived from the verb ereignen, designating something that plays itself out, as if by destiny.
One influential interpreter sought to distinguish the prefix er- from the stem eignen. It is when we consider eignen as a cognate of Augen that we get a sense in which ereignen is intimately connected to our vision, to what we see or have in our view. In German, the derived zueignen and aneignen means to acquire and appropriate respectively, and the verb eigen simply means to own. If an event only truly occurs when it is seen or observed, then what has happened can only be determined with by referring to what observers have called it to themselves, their interpretation, or appropriation, of the event.
To er-eignen, then, seems to mean to make something one’s own, in by appropriating it, acquiring it’s key meaning, or giving voice to its sense. This is important, because at the core of the eigen lies eigentlich, designating an event’s underlying cause, or its reality. In other words, what something really is, or what actually happens, can only come out through appropriation, of by distinguishing what it was that we experienced. This event, then, does not only refer to the happening itself, but crucially also to the act of making the event one’s own.
2. Philosophies of Ereignis: Heidegger, Schirmacher, Badiou
Ereignis is an experience and an approach to life. Our technological
understanding of the world can bar us from this experience. Opening up for the
multiplicity of reality we can rediscover the world as a sacred place.
A clearing
is the sense we get when we approach a moment of serenity and profound insight.
There is no doubt
that it was the game-changing philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) that
brought the term Ereignis onto the
stage of modern thought. In an essay on the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin
Heidegger described how it feels to descend from the mountainous Alps, the
returning and homecoming, and in this essay he associates this descent with a
mystical experience of Ereignis.
Heidegger gave the
term Ereignis the task of connecting
Being, or the divine, with our lives. To Heidegger Being reveals itself as a
light which enables it to become visible to itself. Being, or the divinity,
gives, sends, or destines beings, such as ourselves, in an ongoing unfolding of
self-awareness. Heidegger thought of this double movement as Being alternately
disclosing or refusing itself, or, in a word, as a “clearing-concealing.” Ereignis is a term to describe this
sense in which Being is self-giving or self-refusing, or what Heidegger
mystically referred to as the “Ereignis
of presencing.”
The “It” of Being, or the Divine, is
inaccessible to ordinary thinking; however we can come into its nearness through recollective, poetic
thought.
To be present, then,
or to experience a presencing, is in Heidegger’s terminology to be in the
nearness of Being. When Heidegger held that this nearness nevertheless can
never be fully present he began from the assertion that the German phrase Es gibt, there is, not merely points to
an empty placeholder “Es,” it/there, but that it serves to highlight the giving
of the Es, rendering the phrase as
literally “It gives.” In so far as the “It” here refers to Being, the giving
that is provided by it is its own presence. However, even Heidegger
acknowledges that this “It” is inaccessible to ordinary thinking; therefore we
should turn to the poets, and particularly the recollective verse of Hölderlin,
to be brought into “Its” nearness.
2.2 Schirmacher: metaphysical technique
Now, what is the
reason that we find ourselves removed from Being, at a distance from our own
existence, in our daily lives? Heidegger was quite clear on this, referring to
the reduction of the world from a place of transport and enchantment to an
experience where we are oblivious to the things themselves as Gestell. Rather than a world revealing
itself as a holy place, and the things within it as radiant, sacred beings, Gestell reduces things to mere resources
that can only serve as means to ends. Wolfgang Schirmacher, a philosopher of
technology, continues Heidegger’s thought to name this blockage “metaphysical
technique,” a complex expression of attempts to dominate life by technical
mastery, a technological fix which we often think of as either technological
optimist, or utopianism.
Metaphysical
technique reduces our world
and other people to means to an end, making us oblivious to the things in
themselves, seeking instead to dominate them by bringing the exterior world
under our complete control.
Governed by an
“instrumental prejudice,” Schirmacher writes, the metaphysical technique is an
“ingenious expression of a technology of survival” where all objects,
everything we encounter, are regarded with suspicion, as “potentially hostile.”
This is why the dominant metaphysical technique seeks to bring the entirety of
our external world “under control under all circumstances and by all means.” It
is this naïve belief in technological supremacy which leads to the present
explanation of all our shortcomings as a “lack of technology:” when our world
is gradually brought to an end and destroyed with the aid of modern technology
the often misunderstood response is to claim that it is not modern technology,
or, rather metaphysical technique, that has brought this upon us, but the wrong
use of instruments or an insufficient determination of their purpose; in this
view our current fix is due to an incorrect application of technology. When
metaphysical technique encounters failure its answer is to stubbornly pursue
the same path with even more determination, and to explore and exploit further
its beaten path of domination by technical knowledge.
Against this
Schirmacher holds that the destructive effects of metaphysical technique cannot
be defeated on its own ground, i.e. by further pursuing an accumulation of
data, or positive knowledge. Technology, or, more precisely metaphysical
technology, serves to conceal the world to us, and more knowledge of this kind
will not reveal the world anew. In the words of Schirmacher:
If the concealment of technology is not revealed by knowledge, but paradoxically rather strengthened, only ignorance can help. Ignorance does not only mean the absence of knowledge, but indicates the Socratic admission of ignorance, which is to say a knowledge that deprives knowledge of its self-evident right.
What Schirmacher
prescribes is the ancient philosophical cure: truth telling, but not as a
simple mechanism to verify positive knowledge, but, rather, the Socratic model
as an approach to life. Truth of this kind cannot ultimately be found by
testing hypotheses but emerges from a technique in which “facts are shown as
they are conceived by us.” Against metaphysical technique with its “emptiness
artfully filled with an abstract language of evidence and justifications,”
truth technique makes the world in its entirety appear in a glimpse, and yet as
if eternally.
To overcome
metaphysical technique it is required of us to pose an entirely different subject,
or I, so that we again can enter into
an essential and poetic relation to the world. Overcoming metaphysical
technique does not mean that we leave modern technology behind, but that we
abandon its use as “denizens of the night-time,” and instead treat machines and
practice the sciences behind them as “dwellers of the radiant world of the Ereignis.”
Somewhere along this
path we join in with others who have abandoned the cage of metaphysical
technique, fellow travellers who seek to give up on exploitation and abuse so
as to become guardians, custodians, and nurturers of beings, and, by
implication of the Event itself. Our question is how we are going to conceive
of Ereignis in this sense.
The void
is at the core of our existence, an empty space around which our experiences
evolve.
One way to approach
this seminal Event is suggested by the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Here, the
event is a way to understand how reality intrudes into our everyday experience.
To Badiou reality is a void grounded in an inconsistent multiplicity, a
structure which cannot ultimately be upheld in any social or personal totality.
Therefore, countless elements of this reality are excluded from the totality we
perceive as our everyday existence, and it is when any of these elements
imposes itself upon us, engendering a complete shift in our structure of
perception, that we truly can talk about an Event in Badiou’s sense.
To Badiou the event
opens up our everyday appearance of normality, enabling a sudden opportunity to
rethink our lives as a whole. Since the event can be compared to a ripping open
in the fabric of established reality it offers exhilarating possibilities for
participants that can nevertheless be experienced as demanding for those who
are tasked with assimilating the event. In Badiou’s view a real event generates
not only new ways of thinking about the world, but also new truths. What
previously didn’t count, Badiou writes, comes to interrupt the continuity of
determinism, thereby generating something completely new.
An inconsistent multiplicity lies at the core of reality
and is generally hidden and concealed.
An utter
reformulation of prevalent prejudices and assumptions cannot be programmed in
advance. Rather, Badiou holds that a true event can only be grasped
retrospectively and that it cannot have a presence. The event, in effect,
suspends the chronology of time, becoming ubiquitous: at the moment of the
event it is everywhere and nowhere. In other words, we cannot really realise an
event until after it has passed, when we try our best to assimilate it into an
opportunity we couldn’t have lived without.
Ereignis is about approaching the clearing, letting things stand out as they
are, and the festive experience, i.e. the sense in which we let the world
reveal itself as a sacred place. When we overcome metaphysical technology, an
approach to life that only allows the world and others to appear as instruments
or means to an end, we can again be brought into the nearness of a Being that
gives and reveals itself. By returning to telling the truth we can experience
the void of an inconsistent multiplicity that constitutes reality, and out of
this void we can begin to rethink our lives and generate an entirely new
reality.
It is when we regain
this new ground we can begin to realise and become who we truly are. Thus is the experience of Ereignis.
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