#thrownness

[recursive-rupture]

. . . and she can't really use the word hurled - as in hurled into this place on her own - because to be hurled is to be thrown in a certain direction, but there's no direction in this, and no momentum, it's more like she's been let go of. Something, whatever it may be - life? - has let go of her, like a hand that was holding her tight and then just opened.

Stay with Me, Hanne Ørstavik

[dontgetattached]

Martin Heidegger has a rather dramatic notion, which he calls 'thrownness.' And the image is that we each get thrown into the world. We don't choose the century that we're born. We don't choose our parents. We don't choose the language we first learn to speak. We don't choose our early friends. And, in fact, if you look at a good deal of your life, you realize it's not something you choose but something that you're thrown into. All this is going to be weighed against this notion of existence - the idea of passionate commitment, the idea of personal choice. And what we'll find in all the existentialists is a very delicate balance - or I think better you might say a dialectic, a kind of active tension - between on the one hand this sense of contingency and you are what you are because of things that you had no control over and on the other hand you are what you are or you become what you become because of your personal commitments and choices. And that theme is going to run all the way through.

Lecture 2: Albert Camus--The Stranger, Part I

from No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life (The Great Courses)

[perception-de-ambiguity]

[protoslacker]

I expect to be called 'he', because it is into he-ness that I have been thrown, but no, I insist, I do not 'prefer' to be called 'he'. I have a strong preference, in fact, that I not be expected to expect others to use my preferred pronouns, and it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith. My Preferred Pronouns?

[loveandknowledge]

[Martin] Heidegger is philosophy's great reverser. In 'Being and Time', it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most 'ontological'. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand, Being-in-the-world and Being with others before Being alone. We do not hover above the rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it we are 'thrown' here. And thrownness' must be our starting point.

Sarah Bakewell, 'At the Existentialist Café'

[teachanarchy]

[teachanarchy]