thrownness

Thrownness, or Geworfenheit, is a concept in Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology describing a fundamental aspect of Dasein’s being. It denotes that individuals find themselves already situated in a world they did not choose—into a particular historical era, culture, language, family, and bodily condition. This facticity conditions the possibilities available to a person and situates each life within a given horizon of meaning.

In Being and Time, thrownness is presented as a basic dimension of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, alongside structures such as care, mood, and understanding. It expresses the contingency of existence: we are “thrown” into circumstances that shape our aims and projects, yet we are not deterministically fixed by them. We respond to thrownness in ways that can either affirm or hinder freedom. An authentic attitude acknowledges the givenness of one’s situation and takes responsibility for how one lives within it; an inauthentic stance withdraws from this responsibility by conforming to conventions or the crowd.

Thrownness is closely linked to facticity and historicity, and to temporality, since the conditions into which we are thrown are historically situated and finite. It helps explain feelings of anxiety or limited possibility as one confronts constraints, contingency, and mortality. The concept has influenced later existential and phenomenological thought, though it remains a topic of interpretation and debate regarding the nature of freedom and agency.

In summary, thrownness denotes the non-chosen, givens of human existence that ground Dasein’s openness to possibilities and its ongoing project of self-understanding.