Thrownness

Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is a concept introduced by German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to describe humans' individual existences as being 'thrown' (geworfen) into the world. Geworfen denotes the arbitrary character of Dasein'''s experience in the sense of its having been born into a specific family in a particular culture at a given moment of human history. The past, through Being-toward-death, becomes a part of Dasein. Awareness and acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of Dasein is characterized as a state of "thrown-ness" in the present with all its attendant frustrations, sufferings, and demands that one does not choose, such as social conventions or ties of kinship and duty. The very fact of one's own existence is a manifestation of thrown-ness. The idea of the past as a matrix not chosen, but at the same time not utterly binding or deterministic, results in the notion of Geworfenheit—a kind of alienation that human beings struggle against, and that leaves a paradoxical opening for freedom: The thrower of the project is thrown in his own throw. How can we account for this freedom? We cannot. It is simply a fact, not caused or grounded, but the condition of all causation and grounding. For William J. Richardson, Geworfenheit "must be understood in a purely ontological sense as wishing to signify the matter-of-fact character of human finitude". That's why "thrownness" is the best English word for Geworfenheit. Richardson: "[Other] attractive translations such as 'abandon,' 'dereliction,' 'dejection,' etc. [...] are [dangerous because they are] too rich with ontic, anthropological connotations. We retain 'thrown-ness' as closest to the original and, perhaps, least misleading." In his main work The Principle of Hope (1954–1959), the anti-Heideggerian author Ernst Bloch has correlated the thrownness into the world with a dog's life: hope "will not tolerate a dog's life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is, which is not seen through, even wretchedly recognized.