Geworfen denotes the arbitrary character of
Dasein 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: 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." ==In popular culture==