Thrownness

• 1. Introduction

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  Thrownness, known in German as Geworfenheit, is a concept from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who lived from 1889 to 1976. It describes each human existence as something thrown into the world. Nobody is asked first. Nobody picks the family, the culture, or the moment in history. What does it mean to start life this way, and why did an English translator fuss so much over a single word? The idea also traveled far from philosophy. A rival thinker turned it into an image of a dog's life, a rock band may have echoed it in a song lyric, and two authors carried it into the design of software.

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• 2. Born Into Circumstance

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  Heidegger used the word Dasein for the kind of being that humans have, and thrownness describes its arbitrary side. Each person is born into one particular family, one particular culture, and one particular stretch of human history. None of it was chosen. The past becomes part of Dasein through what Heidegger calls Being-toward-death. Becoming aware of this arbitrariness is itself a state of thrown-ness, and it brings frustrations, sufferings, and demands. Social conventions and the ties of kinship and duty are examples. Even the plain fact of existing counts as a sign of being thrown. Yet the past is described as a matrix that is not chosen but also not fully binding or deterministic. That produces a kind of alienation that people struggle against, and it leaves a paradoxical opening for freedom. One passage puts the paradox in a single image: "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." English readers still had to decide what to call this condition.

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• 3. A Word for Thrownness

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  William J. Richardson, a scholar of Heidegger, argued that Geworfenheit has to be read in a purely ontological sense. In his view it points to the matter-of-fact character of human finitude, the plain fact that human life has limits. That is why he considered thrownness the best English word for it. Richardson listed other attractive options, including abandon, dereliction, and dejection. He warned that these carry too many ontic, anthropological overtones, meaning they sound like claims about human feelings or human nature instead of about the structure of existence. He kept thrown-ness because it stays closest to the original and is, in his words, perhaps the least misleading. Not every thinker accepted the picture of a being passively tossed into existence, and one of them answered with an animal.

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• 4. A Dog's Life

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  Ernst Bloch, an author who stood against Heidegger, wrote The Principle of Hope between 1954 and 1959. In it he linked thrownness to the life of a dog. Hope, he wrote, "will not tolerate a dog's life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is, which is not seen through, even wretchedly recognized." His target was passivity. A creature that accepts being thrown into reality, without examining it or even grudgingly understanding it, is living like a dog. Hope refuses that stance. The comparison was an insult aimed at a philosophy, but it was vivid enough to travel, and the dog may have wandered well outside the library.

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• 5. Echoes in Culture and Design

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  In 1971 The Doors released the song "Riders on the Storm", which contains the lines "Into this world we're thrown / Like a dog without a bone." The verse may have been picked up from Bloch's dog. In 2009 the philosopher Simon Critchley devoted a column in The Guardian to thrownness and used that verse to explain it. The link to the band runs through Jim Morrison, who in 1963 at Florida State University in Tallahassee attended a whole lecture covering philosophers who had examined the philosophical tradition, among them Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The concept also reached a very different field. In 1986 Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores published a book titled Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. In it they applied Heidegger's concept of thrownness to software design, so a word coined to describe human existence now shapes how designers think about the programs people use.

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