‘Eignen’

A difficult notion. What Heidegger seems to be hinting at with his use of ‘owning’ and ‘propriation’ and ‘appropriation’ is not the everyday meaning of those terms, in which they denote two-place relations between entities that are, in principle, independent of each other. Rather, the relations that are at stake here are reflexive, hence more like properties than ordinary two-place relations.
What property is that? In English there is the phrase `to come into one’s own’ that seems cognate: it is the property of a being showing itself, revealing itself in or through something. Such a state is not a result in the sense of an achievement, because the essence that shows itself is always already there. Neither is it an event with a beginning and an end.
Rather what Heidegger seems to indicate it is the kind of situation in which we are in harmony, e.g., with our language, or with a place where we life, and in which we cannot really distinguish between ourselves and that ‘other’ thing (the language, the place): we feel no distinction, or distance, or difference.

Martin Stokhof
from: Radical Discussion Board
date: fall 2006