Thrownness

Thrownness (German: 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 or inscrutable nature of Dasein that connects the past with the present. 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:

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 (1954-9), 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". Such a connection had been picked up by The Doors in a verse of their song "Riders on the Storm" (1971): "Into this world we're thrown / Like a dog without a bone". Speaking with Krieger and Manzarek, the philosopher Thomas Vollmer tells how this verse recalls Heidegger's concept of thrownness: in 1963 at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Jim Morrison heard an influential lesson for him, where were discussed philosophers who had a critical look at the philosophical tradition, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. In 2009, Simon Critchley dedicated his column on The Guardian to Heidegger's concept of thrownness and explained it using the aforementioned verse of The Doors.

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