DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00471.x

Situation and Limitation: Making Sense ofHeidegger on Thrownness

Katherine Withy

Abstract: As Heidegger acknowledges, our understanding isessentially situated and so limited by the context and traditioninto which it is thrown. But this ‘situatedness’ does not exhaustHeidegger’s concept of ‘thrownness’. By examining this conceptand its grammar, I develop a more complete interpretation. Iidentify several different kinds of finitude or limitation in ourunderstanding, and touch on ways in which we confront and carrydifferent dimensions of our past.

I. Thrownness and Situatedness

Human existence is finite—not only because we are each going to die, but alsobecause there are limitations on what we can know and control. We do notdetermine the shape of reality, but must respond to it and work with it. We do notchoose the time, place or culture into which we are born, but must start from thisin everything that we do. Most importantly, there are limitations on what we canknow or understand—as Kant knew well. I will suggest that there are limitationson our ability to understand ourselves, that these are necessary for us tounderstand anything at all, and that this finitude is the cash value of Heidegger’stalk of thrownness. I do this by arguing that Heidegger’s concept of ‘thrownness’does more than name the situated character of our understanding.

Heidegger thinks the human being as the entity that makes sense of things ormakes things intelligible.1 We are each cases of Dasein, the entity thatunderstands being. This means, at the very least, that we live in an intelligibleworld (disclosure), and that we make sense of the entities that we encounter, thelives that we lead, and the entities that we ourselves are (discovery). Makingsense of entities may be as explicit and high-order as philosophizing or scientificinquiry, as everyday as figuring out how to be a good friend or what to do whenyou get home, or as implicit as working out how to walk in those new shoes orget through the revolving door at the bank. According to Heidegger, sense-making has a unified, two-part structure: thrown projection (Heidegger 1962:148, 199, 223, 285).2 Projection and thrownness are Siamese twins: projection isalways thrown, and thrownness is always projective. Initially, we can see thatprojection and thrownness correspond to two fundamental dimensions of humanexistence: our freedom and our finitude. To be human is to be both free,

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spontaneous, transcendent, and limited, constrained or finite. As thrownprojection, human existence qua sense-making is free yet constrained, or finitelytranscendent.

If we say that we are thrown, we normally mean that we are thrown bysomething. We are mentally or emotionally knocked off balance or tripped up, aswhen we are thrown by an unexpected event. Heidegger’s claim that humanexistence is thrown does not mean that it is constitutionally off-kilter in this way.Rather, the claim is (initially, at least) that we are thrown into something,delivered over to something, given over to something from which we have tostart and with which we must deal. (‘Being delivered over to . . .’ is Heidegger’sstandard gloss on ‘being thrown’ in SZ (see especially SZ 134–5).) To be thrown isto have a starting-point, somewhere we are located. To say that we are thrown intosuch a starting-point is not to suggest that this is necessarily sudden orsurprising, or that it did not involve choice or deliberate action. The thought isthat a starting-point is always something that we already have, and so somethingthat we find ourselves ‘stuck with’ (as Haugeland is wont to put it). A human lifeis never neutral or undetermined but always has some definite content already.Talking about ‘thrownness’ is a way of talking about the ways in which we arealready determined, and the fact that we are delivered over to these as ourstarting-points.

What exactly are these starting-points? Since these determine and constrain us,this question asks: What is this finitude? Given his interest in finitude, Heideggersays surprisingly little about thrownness.3 What he does say is scattered, denseand enigmatic. It may thus be tempting to approach thrownness starting not withwhat Heidegger does say, but with the schematic relationship of thrownness to itssister concept, projection. If thrown projection is the structure of making sense ofthings, then perhaps ‘projection’ names ‘making sense’, and thrownness captures‘of things’. On this view, projection would be thrown, and so finite, because wealways make sense of particular things (and not others) in particular ways (andnot others). Our sense-making is always limited by the particular things that arethere to be made sense of, and by the particular ways of making sense of themthat are available to us. This kind of reading takes thrownness to amount to whatI will call ‘situatedness’ (Section II).

There is surely something right about understanding thrownness in terms ofsituatedness. But I will argue that this reading does not capture all thatHeidegger means by ‘thrownness’. Thrownness must be more, and perhapsdeeper, than mere situatedness. What do we need to add to situatedness in orderto approach thrownness? First, we need to add the sense of passivity implied bythe term ‘thrown’, as well as the dimension of the past: our situation is alwayssomething that already determines us. Thus Dreyfus and Rubin: ‘Thrownnessmeans that Dasein always finds itself already having some given content andconcerns’ (Dreyfus and Rubin 1991: 299). We should also draw out and developthe idea that we are situated in our lives and our particular way of being asDasein. Thus Blattner: ‘[W]e are ‘subject to’ life, . . . it ‘burdens’ us in the sensethat we cannot extricate ourselves from caring about it’ (Blattner 2006: 78); and

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Carman: ‘I am constantly thrown into taking on responsibility for my being’(Carman 2003: 289). But do these extensions of situatedness get us all the way towhat Heidegger means by ‘thrownness’? How can we be sure?

If we suspect that situatedness is a partial and superficial interpretation ofthrownness, then we can take this as a starting-point for building up a fullunderstanding of thrownness—one that captures the depth and scope of thefinitude at issue. To do this confidently, we need to be guided by the cluesHeidegger provides when he defines ‘thrownness’. Thrownness is introduced inBeing and Time’s discussion of moods, which are one of the primary ways inwhich we encounter our finitude. Heidegger says:

This characteristic of Dasein’s Being—this ‘that it is’—is veiled in its‘whence’ and ‘whither’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; wecall it the ‘thrownness’ of this entity into its ‘there’. (SZ 135)

Thrownness is the ‘that it is’, it has a whence and a whither, and these are veiled.I will argue that the notion of situatedness is an incomplete interpretation ofthrownness because it grasps only the whither of thrownness. We need to add the‘that it is’ and the whence, as well as the obscurity of both the whither and thewhence. Adding the whence of thrownness, or that from which we are thrown,extends situatedness ‘horizontally’ or widens its scope, and the obscurity of thewhence and whither introduces a new dimension of finitude (Section III).Including the fact that we are rather than not extends situatedness ‘vertically’ ordeepens it; it shifts our attention to a more basic feature of our existence (SectionIV). Finally, when we combine this ‘that it is’ with the idea of the obscurity of thewhence and whither, we approach a fundamental finitude in our ability to makesense of things: an inability to make full sense of ourselves as the kind of entitythat we are (Section V). These moves reveal the register at which Heidegger’s talkof thrownness is to be understood, indicate an original human finitude, andproduce a sketch of the full concept of thrownness. But let me begin with theconcept of situatedness that I want to expand.

II. Situatedness

As entities who make sense of things, we are delivered over to the things that wemake sense of and to specific ways of making sense of them. We are thrown intoparticular situations, and this means that we are given over to particular things tomake sense of (and not others), and particular ways of doing so (and not others).We are always in some situation that provides the content or material for oursense-making and in doing so limits or constrains it. This situatedness can bespecified at different levels or scopes, depending on how broadly we characterizethe situation into which we are thrown. Three of these are perhaps most salient:we must make sense of the particular things that confront us, and so are givenover to and constrained by what is there; we do this as definite individuals, andso are given over to and constrained by our lives; and we do this from out of our

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cultural context, and so are given over to and constrained by the tradition inwhich we live. Sense-making is always situated in a context of particular things, aparticular life and a particular culture or tradition. Let me briefly sketch thesedimensions of our situatedness.

First, we are always situated in a particular ‘here and now’. The range of ‘here’and ‘now’ can be more or less broad. However we set this range, the point is thatthere are particular things confronting us that we have to make sense of—adefinite set of entities with which we need to deal. Correspondingly, there arethings that are not here now, and so things with which we do not have to dealright now. There is always some particular set of things, rather than another,confronting us. We are thrown into a definite corner of the world, and this meansthat our sense-making is constrained by what is there. Further, the particularthings that confront us determine the ways in which we can make sense of them.Making sense of things, for Heidegger, is always a matter of allowing things tomake sense to us. We cannot make sense of an entity in any way that we like, butare constrained by and beholden to what it is. Try as you might, you cannot makesense of this paper as a sea creature; it just does not admit of that kind ofintelligibility. So we are delivered over to, and determined or constrained by,what is there and what it is.

Second, we are always situated in our particular lives. This is why we findourselves in certain kinds of local situations or corners of the world, dealing withcertain things. People that lead lives quite different from ours do not have to dealwith things like academic papers, and may not be able to make good sense ofwhat kind of thing they are. (Learning to do this is part of being initiated into theacademic life.) This is the punch line of stories in which an ordinary personbecomes president, or of life- and career-swapping reality shows. The particularsof our lives, and especially our membership in certain kinds of communities,mean that we can and have to make sense of certain things and not others, and incertain ways and not others. But my life does not only determine the localsituations into which I am thrown, it itself is also a situation into which I amthrown or to which I am delivered over. In having a particular life, I have adefinite history, a definite body and gender, a particular set of values andpreferences, a specific personality, and so on. Making sense of things alwaystakes place from out of the context of a particular life, and this determines bothwhat there is to make sense of and how I can make sense of it. Further, I amalways situated at a particular point in my life. Life is lived in the midst of it,episode by episode, and never all at once. I always have a history of things doneand decisions made, as well as a future of goals and projects. I occupy some spaceat the intersection or in the interplay of these, and I can never skip forward orjump back. This too determines both what there is for me to make sense of andhow I make sense of it. This is why the same things can strike me quite differentlyat different points in my life.

Third, we are always situated in a particular culture or tradition, and this givesus particular ways of making sense of things and means that certain things areand are not available to be made sense of. This is also exploited comically in

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literature and film, this time in stories that introduce foreigners, aliens or timetravellers into the modern world. In our world, we have to make sense of thingslike traffic, HDTV, obesity and financial markets. These are things that people indifferent times or cultures do or did not have to make sense of. Our culture andtradition also provide us with particular ways of making sense of things. We donot understand cats as divine representatives, but as mousers or household pets.We do not understand illness in terms of humours, or the body in terms of energyflow, but make sense of each in terms of a chemical-biological medical para-digm. (We may, of course, have an intellectual grasp of alternative ways ofunderstanding things, but this is always ultimately in our own terms and almostcertainly never reaches the point at which those things show up to us differentlyfrom the get-go). Both the options for making sense of things and the things thatare there to be made sense of are constrained by the particular tradition or culturein which we are situated, or into which we are thrown.

These are three broad dimensions of our situatedness, or three ways in whichwe are thrown, and so three ways in which our sense-making is delivered over to,and constrained by, a situation. We are thrown into dealing with a particular setof entities, into a particular life, and into a particular culture or tradition. To bethrown, on this reading, is for our sense-making to be situated in these kinds ofways. While we can add to or subtract from this sketch, or tease apart therelationships between the different levels, the overall point is that we are alwayslocated somewhere and, as located, our sense-making is constrained. We are thusfinite in that our sense-making is situated. To be situated is to already havecontent, and to already have content is for our sense-making to be determinate—determined, and so limited, by particular contexts rather than others.

This constraint is a material constraint, and the finitude of thrownnessaccordingly a material finitude. ‘Material’ here means at least two things: first,the things that are there are the material for sense-making qua what we makesense of; and second, the ways of making sense of things that are available to usare the material that we use in sense-making—that with which, or in terms ofwhich, we make sense of things. We find the same kind of finitude in the fact thatthe contents of my pantry constrain what I can cook by providing me withparticular, determinate ingredients—and the nature of these ingredients, alongwith my personal tastes and culinary heritage, determine the ways in which I putthe ingredients together. Just as this material constrains my cooking, so too mysituatedness constrains my sense-making. That we must make sense of particularthings in particular ways means that our sense-making always has a particularcontent, and so a determinate material to work with. Finally, this finitude isenabling, or constitutive for sense-making. Like cooking, sense-making is notpossible without material determination—without particular things to makesense of and particular ways of doing so. Sense-making must be situated and somaterially finite.

Is being situated, as this material finitude, what Heidegger means by ‘beingthrown’? Is this the finitude of human sense-making? It is certainly part of thestory. Heidegger acknowledges this in SZ: ‘In thrownness is revealed that in each

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case Dasein, as my Dasein and this Dasein, is already in a definite world andalongside a definite range of definite entities within-the-world’ (SZ 221).However, Heidegger unambiguously glosses thrownness in this way only oncein SZ. He almost always speaks of thrownness in different terms,4 and thissuggests that being thrown is properly something other or more than beingthrown into a situation. To show what this is, I will expand this interpretation ofthrownness in two directions—first by arguing that being thrown is not just beingthrown into something but also being thrown from somewhere, and then byarguing that what we are thrown into is not just a situation understood in thissense. This dual extension will point towards a finitude in our sense-making thatis quite different from a material finitude.

III. The Whence (and Whither), as Obscure

The interpretation of thrownness as situatedness seizes on the fact that to bethrown is to be thrown into some situation. But consider the grammar of the term‘thrownness’ or ‘being thrown’. When a ball is thrown, it is not only thrown tosomewhere, it is also thrown from somewhere. So too, the concept of thrownnessincludes not only that into which we are thrown, but also that from which we arethrown. Accordingly, Heidegger describes our thrownness as having both aninto-which, or whither, and a from which, or whence (e.g. SZ 134). I am going toargue that adding the whence of thrownness, or that from which we are thrown,extends the concept of thrownness beyond that of mere situatedness. Further, thiswhence—along with the whither—is obscure, and this will mean that beingthrown involves a finitude that is different from the material finitude ofsituatedness.

We might worry that the notion of being thrown from somewhere does notmean anything when it is applied to human existence as a sense-makingenterprise, but is merely a product of the ordinary grammar of the term. Thegrammar of ‘being thrown’ requires that a throw be to somewhere and fromsomewhere because being thrown is paradigmatically a kind of motion: a changeof place. A throw occurs through space, and for this reason has both a destination(to-which) and an origin (from-which). Saying that sense-making is throwncannot mean that it moves through space, because sense-making is not spatial inthis way.5 But if this is so, why should we think that it is legitimate to say that weare not only thrown into situations, but thrown into them from somewhere?

Heidegger never makes clear what he means by the whence of thrownness—what it is from which we are thrown. But consider that for any situation in whichwe find ourselves, it makes sense to wonder: How did I get here? Where was Ibefore, such that this is now where I am? (I discuss the equivalence of these, andthe significance of this equivalence, below). This is much like asking from wherea thrown ball or other object comes—what was its point of origin, and what wasits trajectory? But unlike the ball’s origin and trajectory, this whence is not anexternal, indifferent fact about me. There is an origin and trajectory for my

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coming-to-be situated only because this is something to which I am open. How Icame to be situated in the way that I am may be a matter of my history, mypsychology, the decisions I have made, decisions that other people have made,various twists of chance and luck, and/or facts about the world. Which of thesecounts as the right kind of origin and trajectory depends on how we specify thesituation in question. Which of these counts as my origin and trajectory at alldepends not on causal relationships, but on whether it figures into my ownmaking sense of myself. The whence of thrownness belongs to sense-making as areflexive phenomenon: it is a product of sense-making’s making sense of its ownbeing-situated. That is, there is something from which I am thrown, or a story to betold about how I got where I am, only insofar as I have some familiarity withmyself as having ‘travelled’ this course. A thrown ball does not have a whence inthis sense because a ball cannot make sense of itself. It does not find itself in itssituation, and it is not open to its origin and trajectory. But we always have someimplicit sense for, or working grasp of, the origin and trajectory of our coming-to-be-situated (even if this self-grasp is deficient—more on this below). What wegrasp in this self-grasp is, as thus grasped, the whence of thrownness.

If this is right, then the thought that there is something from which we arethrown is not a grammatical illusion but captures something very significant abouthuman life: we not only find ourselves where we are, as located in some definitesituation, but also make sense of this in terms of a trajectory of ‘having-got-there-from-somewhere-else’. This is part of what it is for us to find ourselves in somesituation—part of what it is for sense-making to be thrown. Having a grasp of theorigin and trajectory of my coming-to-be-situated may be as simple and as literalas having a sense for how I travelled to my destination. But it also includes, forexample, having an implicit, working familiarity with my self-development up tothis point in my life: a sense of who I have been and how this feeds into who I am.This openness to the past is part of my competence in being me, and it contributessignificantly to the coherence or unity of my life. The point is that we do not startall over again with each of the starting-points into which we are thrown, butalways make sense of ourselves as coming into these from somewhere else.

I have called the whence an addition to the concept of situatedness, and itshould be clear that the whence is not inconsistent with being situated or even intension with this idea. It is perfectly possible to speak of being situated insomething, and on the basis of something, just as we speak of being thrown intosomething from somewhere. But it remains the case that the grammar of the term‘situated’, which takes the preposition ‘in’, primarily orients us towards that intowhich we are thrown. Interpreting thrownness in terms of situatedness divertsour attention from that from which we are thrown. Recovering this whence, and sothe idea that sense-making not only is situated but also reflexively makes sense ofits own situatedness, widens the notion of situatedness beyond its usual scope.This move is important because the ‘whence’ of thrownness is the locus for acrucial dimension of our finitude. Heidegger flags this finitude by saying that thewhence is obscure to us or in darkness (e.g., SZ 134); it is veiled (e.g., SZ 135). Ourthrownness is ‘closed off’ in its ‘whence’ and ‘how’ (SZ 348).

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The claim is that there is a finitude in our ability to grasp our origin points andprior trajectories. Once again, Heidegger leaves this to his readers to figure out.Initially, talk of the obscure whence calls to mind those times when we don’tknow how we got where we are—as when we are so preoccupied whiletravelling that we arrive at our destination surprised, lacking a sense of havingtravelled there. It might also put us in mind of trauma, which renders us unableto make sense of how we came to be who we are or where we are at in life. This ishow trauma fragments, disorients and disrupts. In these cases, we are open to theorigin and trajectory of our being-situated, and so have the kind of reflexive self-grasp that a ball lacks. We have a whence, but in a deficient way: we cannot get aclear sense of what this whence is. This shows that the whence is sometimesobscure to us. However, Heidegger’s claim is unqualified: the whence is obscure.If this means that the whence is always obscure, then it is false. Even if human lifeis perpetually traumatic in various ways, such that a deficient grasp of thewhence is common, there are surely straightforward cases where we do have anadequate sense for how we got where we are (even if these are mundane cases ofmoving around in space). If our grasp of the whence is not always deficient, thenperhaps the thought is that it is ultimately such.

Imagine: a new acquaintance asks me how I came to be living in this particularcity. This question calls me to make my grasp of my whence explicit by telling thestory of how I got where I am. I am not always able to do this, but when I do I amgiving an explanation of, or reasons for, my being-situated. Perhaps I am living inthis city because I was offered, and accepted, employment in the area. Thus Iidentify the whence of my thrownness into this situation as the job offer: ‘I wasoffered a job here, so I moved here.’ But this is not necessarily the end of the story,and a particularly chatty person can push further—Why were you offeredemployment here? Why did you say ‘yes’? Were you looking for employmenthere? Why do you work in the field in which you do?—and so on. These kinds ofquestions show that the starting-point that I identified is not entirely original, butopens up on to other dimensions of my situatedness, other aspects of my life andthe world I inhabit that go into explaining why I am situated in this way. My new(and now irritating) acquaintance can keep following my trajectory back throughfurther questions about how I came to be situated in these other ways. At somepoint, s/he will be satisfied, having heard enough to make sense of my situation.The questioning and explaining will stop. But in principle, and in conversationswith toddlers and exceedingly curious people, the questioning can continue. Itwill eventually reach dimensions of my situation that are foundational for me:this is what we do in my culture; this is what I happen to care about; this is whathuman nature is; this is reality! There is nothing more, or nothing new, to tell myacquaintance—or myself—about how I came to be in these situations. These arethe bedrock situations into which I am thrown, for which I cannot give anexplanation and for which I cannot grasp the whence. ‘That’s just the way it is;that’s just the situation in which I find myself’.

Now consider an issue that I deferred earlier. It may seem that we need todistinguish (1) the trajectory that I travelled to reach where I am (‘How did I get

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here?’) from (2) the origin of this (‘From what prior starting-point did I come tothis starting-point?’). It looks like the latter is the whence or that from which I amthrown, while the former is the throw of thrownness. I do not want to deny this,but notice that in the case of human life as sense-making, all of our starting-points will be part of, and none can be prior to, some trajectory. At every point,we are already thrown. We never begin our lives, take up a first way of makingsense, or encounter entities for the first time. We do not adopt a culture, or enter aworld, from any outside position. We are always already in the midst of ourlives—always already in mid-air and in motion. Sense-making is always alreadysituated. Since sense-making never precedes its situatedness, its thrownness isimportantly unlike that of a ball that is stationary and then thrown. For such anobject, we can identify a distinct initial point from which the trajectory of motionbegins, and so distinguish the starting-point from the trajectory. For sense-making, this initial point will always be a point on, or segment of, some priortrajectory. While we will almost always treat ourselves as more like the ball—andso take ourselves to have fresh starts, turning-points and new beginnings—itremains the case that any such origin is itself part of a trajectory that pointsfurther back. There is no whence outside of the throw.

This helps us to understand what is happening in my conversation with mynew acquaintance, who was pushing me further and further back along thetrajectory of my thrownness. Pushing to the limit, s/he is calling me to explainwhy my world is the way it is and why I make sense of things in the ways that Ido. But because I can only make sense of the things that are there, and only interms of my sense-making framework, I cannot get back behind these to givefurther grounds or reasons. Dasein ‘never comes back behind its thrownness’ (SZ284). Sense-making presupposes, and so cannot get underneath, that in which itis situated. That is, to make sense of our being-situated in the ways that we are,we must ultimately appeal to the fact that we are situated in the ways that we are.In tracing our trajectory back, we reach a point where we must either stop orcircle back around again. This is why I find that I have nothing more, or nothingnew, to say to my acquaintance. I have not provided a full account of why I am inthe way that I am, but have instead reached the point where my ability to makesense of my being-situated runs out. At this point, I am trying to fill out a priortrajectory—to fill in the whence of thrownness—but cannot. I am open to thiswhence, but in a deficient way. Ultimately, then, the whence is obscure. While wedo not reach this limit often, it is constitutive for sense-making (as reflexive andsituated) that it be finite in this way. So encountering this finitude is a constantand necessary possibility for a sense-maker.

Because this is a constitutive finitude, there is something misleading about theterms ‘obscure’ and ‘veiled’. It is not that we happen to be unable to make senseof that in which we are ultimately situated, as if we could do so were we bettersense-makers. Rather, we cannot make sense of this because we are sense-makers,because this is the way that sense-making works: it is always, necessarily,situated in ways of making sense and things to make sense of, and so can neverget out from behind these to ground them. This finitude is thus more like the fact

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that we cannot see our own eyeballs than the fact that we cannot look directly atthe sun. The whence is veiled in such a way that it could never be unveiled to asense-maker. As Heidegger puts it, the fact that that from which we are thrown isultimately obscure to us or closed off from us ‘is by no means just a kind ofignorance factually subsisting: it is constitutive for Dasein’s facticity’ (SZ 348).6

This means that saying that the whence of thrownness is obscure (that we cannotmake sense of it) is the same as saying that the whence is empty (that there is nosense to be made of it).

The whither of thrownness is also obscure in this way. The whither, or to-which of the throw, is that into which we are thrown, or that in which we aresituated. As such, it does not add anything new to the concept of situatedness.We might think that this dative adds an element of pressing forward into thefuture, and so that the to-which of thrownness is that into which we are movingon the basis of our situation. But that into-which we are moving is a possibilitytaken up (future, projection). The into-which of thrownness—the situation and itsmaterial constraint—is what first opens up the determinate range of possibilities,or ways of going on, available to us (past, thrownness).7 That having certainpossibilities (rather than others) belongs to being situated is not new. But noticethat like the whence, the whither is a reflexive phenomenon—there is somewherewe are situated only insofar as we find ourselves as thus situated. If there is anobscurity in the whither, then this reflexive finitude, like that of the whence,would be additional to the finitude that talk of situatedness captures.

For the whither to be obscure is for us to not be clear on where it is that we are(and so on what options for going on our current situation does and does not giveus). We might think of the lost tourist who does not know which part of town heis in, and so does not know where to find the nearest coffee shop or that there is amuseum around the corner. We might also think of the recently married (ordivorced) person who cannot yet see what it is to be leading his new life and howto move forward in it. In both cases, we find ourselves in a situation, and so havea whither, but we do not fully grasp what the situation is. The whither is opaque;we are open to it in a deficient mode. But as before, these cases show that thewhither is sometimes obscure and so cannot be what Heidegger has in mind whenhe says that the whither is obscure. Perhaps, once again, he means that thewhither is ultimately obscure.

Consider what it takes to properly grasp the situation that you are in. A clearview of where you are and how it allows you to go on requires a sense of where itis that you are not and what possibilities are not open to you. That is, if to besituated is to be here rather than there—to be determined in this way rather thanthat—then transparently finding yourself in a situation involves seeing thesealternatives. We get at something like this when we say that you do notunderstand your own city, country or culture until you spend time in another. Tofind ourselves ‘here’ (or ‘in this way’) is in part to find ourselves as ‘not there’ (or‘not in this other way’). This is why I have stressed that, as situated, we aredetermined in some particular way rather than another. For most of the ways inwhich we are situated, having some sense for this ‘rather than another’ is not

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problematic, and to the extent that we have this sense we have a grasp of thewhither. But when it comes to the most fundamental ways in which we aresituated—say, the basic terms in which we make sense of things, or the ground-level way that things are—we cannot get a sense for what this is rather than. (Thusin science fiction, aliens always resemble Earthly creatures). The reason is thatthese rock-bottom situations are those that first establish the range of possibilitiesand alternatives. Precisely by allowing us to make sense of things, thesefundamental situations do not allow us to get outside of them so as to get a clearview of them. This is the ultimate obscurity of the whither: we cannot grasp oursituation as this if we cannot see that it is ‘rather than that’, and when it comes tothe most basic ways in which we are situated, we necessarily cannot see these as‘rather than that’. The obscurity here is once again a reflexive finitude in sense-making, a finitude in our self-finding. Like the obscurity of the whence, it isconstitutive for sense-making.

The difference between the obscurity of the whence and that of the whither isthat the whither is obscure because we cannot get outside of our mostfundamental situations to see what they are rather than, while the whence isobscure because we cannot get underneath or behind these to see why we are inthem. But both have the same character as reflexive finitudes, and both rely onthe same fact: that we cannot stand apart from that in which we are mostfundamentally situated, our ground-level material determinations. So this kindof reflexive finitude differs from, but rests on, the material finitude insituatedness. The material finitude in situatedness is the fact that we must makesense of particular things (and not others) in particular ways (and not others). Asalways thrown into something in particular, sense-making always has somedeterminate material content. It is because of this that sense-making ultimatelycannot make sense of its own whence and whither. That is, because it is alwaysmaterially constrained, sense-making cannot get behind or underneath itssituation to make sense of itself as materially constrained in the ways that it is.This is a finitude in what sense-making can reflexively accomplish in findingitself in some situation. Sense-making is thus finite in its ability to make sense ofitself (as situated).

The claim is that it belongs to us that we can attempt to make sense of oursituation beyond the point at which the sense to be made of it runs out. When weencounter this limit in sense-making, we encounter unintelligibility. We find thewhence and/or the whither as obscure. These obscurities capture the ideas thatwe run up against the finitude of explanation, that we cannot tell a completestory of our lives, that we cannot get outside our own culture, and similar. To thisextent, this reflexive finitude is not a new insight—either in general, or inreadings of Heidegger. The full significance of it becomes clear only when wecombine it with the second move that I want to make. I have extended theconcept of being situated ‘horizontally’ by introducing the whence of thrown-ness, and with it the obscurity of both the whence and the whither. Now I want toextend the picture ‘vertically’ by arguing that thrownness is not only, and not firstof all, a thrownness into particular situations like my life and my culture.

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IV. Thrownness as the That It Is

Recall that in his definition of thrownness, Heidegger gives us several clues aboutwhat thrownness is: it has a whence and a whither, and it is that characteristic ofhuman existence that can be described as ‘that it is’ (SZ 134, 284). Heideggerglosses this latter more fully as the fact that we are and have to be (SZ 134). I willargue that thrownness is accordingly something more original or more basic thanthe fact that we are always in particular situations.

Let me provide an initial orientation to the idea that we are and have to be bytalking about it in terms of that in which we are situated. If to be thrown is to besituated, then the fact that we are means that we are always already something inparticular. As situated in the ways that we are, we are (for example) English-speakers, or twenty-first-century Americans. We are men or women, young orold, brown-eyed or blue, in a good mood or a bad one, tired or alert. We are herenow, in this place, at this time, with these entities. To be situated in something isto be something—to already be in some particular way and not another. Further,to be situated in something is to have that to be. Our ‘have to be’ does not primarilyrefer to a necessity, but to what we have available to be, including the possibilitiesfor going on given by our situation. That we are in the twenty-first century meansthat we have a twenty-first-century kind of way to be, and so that only twenty-first-century possibilities are open to us—from embracing the latest technologyand watching the latest reality show, to being twenty-first-century Amishfarmers. Even the options for ‘opting out’ are twenty-first-century ways of optingout. A twenty-first-century kind of life is the (only) kind of life that we haveavailable to us to live.

A sense of necessity can be seen to follow from this: insofar as thesedeterminations are what we have been given to be, we must live with them. Tosay that we must be what we are is not to say that it is predetermined or that itcannot be changed. The necessity is located in the fact that we have to start fromwhere we are, or that into which we are thrown, in everything that we do. Atevery point, our lives are already determined in various ways—I am already in atwenty-first-century kind of life, or in a particular body, or in this particularroom. Things might have been different, but they are always in some way oranother. And although we might go on to change our situation (changing ourbodies through cosmetic surgery, changing our physical location by leaving theroom), we always make these changes from a particular starting-point. That thisis, or was, our starting-point can no longer be changed; we are stuck with it. Thisstarting-point or prior determination is what we are and have to be.

If being thrown is being situated, then our that we are and have to be consists inwhat we are and have to be. This is determined by that into which we are thrownor in which we are situated. That we are means that we are x, y or z (rather than m, nor p). But that we are always something in particular is not all that we mean whenwe talk about the fact that we are. Heidegger indicates this on those oddoccasions when he speaks of the ‘naked’ or ‘pure’ that we are or that I am (SZ 134,343).8 The fact that I am is ‘naked’ or ‘pure’ when everything that belongs to my

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situatedness—everything that makes up what I am—is bracketed out. More basicthan what I am (the fact that I am x, y or z) is the fact that I am (the kind of thingthat could be x, y or z) at all, rather than not. But that we are (rather than not) is notsimply a brute fact about us that makes our lives possible without otherwisebearing on them. It is not the bare fact of instantiation or presence, common to allthings that are—what Heidegger calls ‘factuality’ (in contrast to our ‘facticity’9)(SZ 56). Consider that the fact that we are is significant to human beings in a waythat it is not to a stone or a frog. Although it is not something to which wefrequently pay much mind, we are always in some way open to this fact. That Iam, or that we are, is constantly illuminated for human beings. This is traditionallydiscussed under the heading of ‘self-consciousness’, and it is often held to be thedistinguishing mark of the human being. It is tied to other unique things aboutus—not only our awareness of our mortality, but also the philosophy-provokingrealization and awe that there is something rather than nothing.

If that I am or that we are is always lit up for us, what is it that is lit up? What isthe content of this fact? Notice that I have been using two formulations: that I am,and that we are. These are equivalent, since the fact in question is not about meand the particulars of my life. It is not the fact that I am, rather than someone else(although we can be aware of this too), for that I am is always a matter of what Iam and so belongs to my situatedness rather than ‘pure’ or ‘naked’ thrownness.Naked thrownness is instead the fact that I am. This ‘am’ refers to our specificway of being—being Dasein (care), or being a sense-maker. This is of coursemine, but it is also ours. Each of us is a case or instance of this way of being. Thefact that I am, as a fact about the am, is the fact that there is this ‘being a sense-maker’ rather than not—that there is human existence at all, that there are thingslike me or us. Although being a case of Dasein is always a first-personphenomenon (which Heidegger calls ‘mineness’), it is in itself anonymous and soindifferent to a singular or plural formulation. At this level of formality, that I amis equivalent to the fact that we are. It is the fact that there is sense-making. This isour most basic starting-point, the most fundamental dimension of ourthrownness.

Since being a sense-maker is what we are, sense-making is the way of beingthat we have been given, and so the only way of being that is available to us, tobe. As Heidegger puts it, ‘[t]o this entity it has been delivered over, and as such itcan exist solely as the entity which it is’ (SZ 284). Being a sense-maker is alsowhat we must be—or, what is the same, there must be sense-making (SZ 228).Heidegger calls this the ‘burden’ of being thrown (SZ 135, 284). To say that it is aburden to be as we are is not to say that it is difficult or depressing. Once again,this thrownness is not about me per se, and so the burden of having to be a sense-maker is not a personal burden. Rather, it is an essential or existential burden inthe sense that we are stuck with it. We are bound to make sense of things becausewe are bound to sense-making. We cannot not make sense of things. Even if webecome Zen Buddhist monks and spend our days meditating on paradoxicalkoans, we are still making sense of ourselves as monks, our lives as directedtowards enlightenment, and the minimal set of entities with which we interact as

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things that support or hinder our activity in various ways. Even if we choose toend our lives, this remains an act (albeit the final, desperate act) of an entitytrying to make things make sense. We are all, always, already in the business ofmaking sense of things. That human life is such a business is the naked fact thatwe are and have to be.

We might think that ‘being Dasein’ or ‘being a sense-maker’ is not only the amof the fact that I am, but also the most basic ‘what’ of what I am. That is, purethrownness can be described not only as that we are, but also in terms of what weare. This is correct. ‘Being a sense-maker’ can thus be grasped as something intowhich we are thrown, or in which we are situated. In fact, this is how Heideggertalks about our thrownness.10 We might say that we are thrown into the ‘humansituation’. But that we are thrown into the human situation does not make purethrownness a dimension of our situatedness, as I have described it. The force ofthe vocabulary of situatedness is that we are situated in this particular way ratherthan another. But, for the fact that we are, there is no alternative situation—theonly alternative is there not being sense-making at all. (More on this later.) Atstake in pure thrownness is not the particularity or material content thatsituatedness grasps, but the very fact of sense-making. To say that we are throwninto the human situation is to say that the human situation is thrown into being.This is not an aspect of our situatedness because it is not a being situated ofhuman beings in some situation rather than another, but a being situated in beinghuman rather than not.

As the fact that there is sense-making at all, pure thrownness underlies the factthat sense-making is always as situated. It is prior to, because presupposed by,situatedness. We can put this by saying that while to be situated is to make senseof particular things, in a particular life and on the basis of a particular culture,pure thrownness is the fact that we are entities that encounter (particular) things,lead (particular) lives, and have (particular) cultures, at all. I am the kind of entitythat makes sense of particular things in particular ways (situatedness) onlybecause I am first the kind of entity that makes sense of things (pure thrownness).Or again, I lead a particular life only because I am the kind of entity that leads alife. It is only because we are in the way that we are, that we are the kinds ofentities who are situated. Pure thrownness is more fundamental, or deeper, thanour situatedness.

Recall that I motivated the interpretation of thrownness as situatedness byhypothesizing that since ‘thrown projection’ is the structure of making sense ofthings, projection must correspond to ‘making sense’ and ‘thrownness’ to ‘ofthings’. We can now see why this is mistaken: if thrownness is also the fact thatthere is sense-making rather than not, then thrownness does not merely follow‘making sense’ as a qualification of or constraint on its objects and operation.Thrownness must characterize the entire phenomenon, ‘making sense of things’.If this is right, then making sense of things can be said to be thrown in tworespects, or thrownness can be said to come both ‘before’ and ‘after’ sense-making. It comes ‘after’ sense-making in that it qualifies sense-makingby limiting it to particular situations—a material finitude. It comes ‘before’

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sense-making in that it is the fact that sense-making is rather than not. The secondsense of thrownness is ‘deeper’ or more fundamental than the first because whatit captures is ontologically prior or more basic. Since ‘situatedness’ expresses onlythe first sense of thrownness, it is a superficial interpretation of the concept.

But by what warrant can we call this that we are and have to be, ‘thrownness’?What do we get at when we say that making sense of things is thrown into being,or that we are thrown into it? Is this just a way of saying that sense-making is? Itis not clear how this thrownness amounts to a finitude in our sense-making. If tobe thrown is to be delivered over to something, then it must be that sense-makingis delivered over to itself. We need to determine what kind of claim this is andwhat it is trying to express about sense-making. Minimally, the claim is that thereis something that it takes to make sense of things, and that this is something bywhich sense-making is constrained. Sense-making is determined by its ownessence, and so is and has to be what it is. But this is not a finitude that is peculiarto us: only as determined by its essence can anything be (as it is). What is peculiarto us is that we can grasp or try to make sense of our being delivered over to whatwe are. To do this is to try to make sense of the whence and whither of ourthrownness into being. I want to suggest that it is to capture this reflexivity—andits finitude—that Heidegger uses the vocabulary of ‘thrownness’ to talk about thefact of sense-making.

V. The Obscure Whence and Whither of the That It Is

Pure thrownness is the fact that there is and has to be sense-making, rather thannot. The whither (into which) of pure thrownness, as the situation in which I findmyself, must be ‘being a sense-maker (rather than not)’. The whence of purethrownness must be the origin and trajectory of coming-to-be a sense-maker.Explicitly formulated, the reflexive question that seeks the whither is, ‘What is itto be a sense-maker (rather than not)?’. The question of the whence is, ‘How doesthere come to be, or why is there, sense-making at all?’. We can combine thesequestions, and so seek the whence and whither together: ‘Why is there sense-making at all, rather than not?’. This question does not ask, ‘Why am I (or whyare you) situated in this way rather than another?’. We are not trying to grasp thewhence and whither of our situation. We are not trying to see where our ways ofmaking sense of things come from (what grounds, for example, the concepts andvalues of our culture), or why we have to make sense of these particular thingsand not others. To ask after the whence and whither of the fact that we are is to aska different kind of question entirely. Consider one (derivative) kind of sense-making: reason-giving. In these terms, the question is: ‘How is it possible to be inthe space of reasons, rather than not? What about us makes us responsive tothings like reasons, rather than not?’. Of course, Heidegger does not discussreason-giving, because he is interested in broader and more fundamental kinds ofsense-making.11 The point is that the whence and whither of pure thrownnessconcern what it takes to be responsive to the sense that things make for us, in the

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manifold ways in which they do. What accounts for the fact that sense-making isand has to be, rather than not? What exactly is it, how is it possible, and why mustit be this way? To ask after this whence and whither is to ask after our veryopenness to intelligibility—to what Heidegger calls ‘being’. In Heidegger’slanguage, this is a question about how there can be an understanding of being, orabout what ‘gives’ being. And since for Heidegger ‘entities’ means ‘intelligibleentities’ (entities in their being), this amounts to the question, ‘Why are thereentities at all, rather than nothing?’. For Heidegger, this is the first question ofphilosophizing (Heidegger 2000: 1).

Asking after the whence and whither of pure thrownness seems to be apeculiarly philosophical, and rather highfalutin, endeavour. This is partiallycorrect: when explicitly performed, it is a philosophical or metaphysicalquestioning. But it is not thereby foreign to or removed from everyday peopleand everyday life, since philosophizing develops out of ordinary humanreflection on being human. The explicit questioning of the whence and whitheris possible because we have a pre-reflective, non-thematic openness to thewhence and whither of pure thrownness. This openness is part of what it is to behuman, and that to which we are open in it is what we attempt to thematize inexplicit philosophizing. This is not much different from saying that the question,‘Why are we here?’ is a fundamental human question. Asking such questionsmay not be ordinary in the sense of common or frequent, but it is ordinary in thesense that it is always possible for any human being. Trying to understandourselves in this kind of way belongs to the human condition, whether or not weeach formulate such questions—and indeed, whether or not we consider suchquestions to be mistakes. We are capable of asking such questions because we aresense-makers, and it belongs to being a sense-maker that we try to make sense ofour own sense-making. Sense-making has the structural possibility of turningback on itself in this way. In this reflexive act of trying to make sense of itself,sense-making is seeking the whence and whither of its thrownness.

For Heidegger, pure thrownness, and so its whence and whither, is clearly litup for us only in certain limit-experiences like the mood of Angst. Angst is amood in which we are opened to what we are, and particularly to ourthrownness. It achieves this because it is a rare experience of crisis—one thatsuspends our ordinary lives and brings into salience what it takes to be us. It is insuch moods (whether Angst, boredom, awe or joy) that we are driven to questionor to make sense of the fact that we are, and so to engage in philosophizing (in thebroadest sense). The effort to identify the whence and whither of purethrownness is tied up with such experiences, and can only properly beunderstood from out of them. So anyone who has not experienced such a moodwill not be gripped by the questions opened up in it. But rather than attempt toevoke the mood of Angst, let me just gesture towards our openness to the whenceand whither of pure thrownness.

If being thrown into human existence arises as an issue for us in our lives, itlikely does so in the thought that being human is not up to us. We did not chooseto be. This is often the stuff of teenage angst, expressed perhaps by protesting, ‘I

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didn’t ask to be born!’ As Heidegger puts it, rhetorically and in italics, ‘[h]asDasein as itself ever decided freely whether it wants to come into ‘‘Dasein’’ ornot, and will it ever be able to make such a decision?’ (SZ 228). We did not chooseto be instances or cases of human being, and so did not choose to be in the humansituation. This was thrust upon us, without our consent. If this is what is at stakein pure thrownness, then the finitude at issue is a lack of control. First, there wasno moment of choice: we came into being ‘not of our own accord’, did not ‘lead’ourselves to our existence, did not ‘lay our own basis’, do not have ‘power’ overthe ground of our being (SZ 284). Second, we were not given alternatives:perhaps there is some other way of being that we might have taken up, which wenow cannot. The former concerns the whence of pure thrownness, and the latterthe whither. Let me explain.

In saying that we did not choose to be, we are attempting to make sense of thefact that we are. Facts about us can be categorized as ‘things that we choose forourselves’ or ‘things that we do not choose’. This is a fundamental distinction inhuman life. Making a choice is one way in which we come to be situated in theways that we are. Talk about choice, then, is a way of getting at the whence ofthrownness, or that from which we are thrown. Similarly, talk of the alternativesbetween which we choose is a way of grasping what it is that our situation israther than—where it is that we are not, if we are here; what other situations wehave forgone by coming into this one. This is a way of making sense of thewhither of thrownness, or that into which we are thrown. The problem is that talkof choice and alternatives applies only to situatedness, and as I have argued, thefact that we are is not a dimension of our situatedness. But the failure of thisvocabulary is illuminating.

First, to make sense of the whither of pure thrownness in terms of alternativesnot chosen is to imply that we are thrown into the human way of being asopposed to some other way of being. But it does not make sense to say that weare Dasein or sense-makers rather than frogs or stones. The reason is that there isno independent or prior ‘I’ or ‘we’ that could be a frog or a stone instead of asense-maker. If there is an ‘I’ or ‘we’, then there is already a human being, alreadya sense-maker. Thus there is strictly no ‘subject’ of the throw into the humansituation, and so no alternative destination for this throw. Put differently, wecannot in this way think ourselves outside of ‘being a sense-maker’. The onlyalternative here is the absence of alternatives: ‘rather than not’. It follows that anappeal to alternatives fails to illuminate the whither of pure thrownness. Thewhither shows up to us as obscure.

We find a similar—and similarly revealing—problem in using the concept ofchoice to grasp the whence of pure thrownness. This concept assumes thatsomething was denied to us that might have been offered; it assumes that it iscoherent or intelligible to think that we could have chosen to be or not to be—thatthis could have been in our power. Yet anything that can choose already is, and infact is already human. So if the human situation can be chosen or not, then it hasalready been chosen. We are already in it. Grasping pure thrownness in terms ofchoice is thus incoherent. The problem is that what we are thrown into here is

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‘being a chooser’. We cannot understand how we first come to be choosers byappealing to an exercise of our capacity of choice, just as we cannot explain why ourculture has the concepts that it does by appealing to those concepts (the obscurewhence of situatedness). We cannot in this way get behind being a sense-maker tosay how it arises. The whence of pure thrownness shows up to us as obscure.

Why, then, do we speak this way? We must mean something else by our talk of‘choice’, and I think that this is Heidegger’s point. We turn to talk of choice, andother vocabularies appropriate to situatedness, in order to make sense of purethrownness because we do not have any other way to fill out the pure whenceand whither. This suggests that these are necessarily obscure to us. Thus whenHeidegger points out that we do not choose to come into human existence, thecontext makes clear that what is at stake in this is not choice per se, but ourinability to see why there is, or how there ‘comes to be’, sense-making. Thepassage goes on: ‘‘‘[i]n itself’’ it is quite incomprehensible why entities are to beuncovered, why truth and Dasein must be’ (SZ 228). Since ‘uncovered’, ‘truth’ and‘Dasein’ all point to our sense-making character, the claim is that we cannotadequately grasp the fact that sense-making is and has to be. The whence andwhither of this thrownness are obscure to us. This finitude is marked by ourpersistence in using the concepts of choice (and other concepts appropriate tosituatedness), despite the fact that they fail at this register. Further, I suggest thatHeidegger’s way of marking this finitude is to use the vocabulary of thrownnessto talk about the fact that we are. We are open to the fact that sense-making is, andopen in such a way that we are able to wonder about what it is (whither) andhow it came to be (whence). But this whence and whither are obscure to us, justas they are in the case of our situatedness.

What would it take to grasp the pure whence and whither? What kind ofphenomenon is sense-making, what kind of vocabulary is appropriate to it, andwhat kind of explanation would serve to account for the fact that it is?Determining exactly what kind of phenomenon sense-making is is no small task,and Heidegger struggles to do this throughout his career. His attempts to win anappropriate vocabulary for it are notoriously difficult to understand and eitherneologistic or poetic. But he does try to make clear that making sense of things isnot a natural, psychological or social phenomenon (although it may havemanifestations or substrata that are) (cf. SZ §10). This is because sense (i.e.,meaning, intelligibility) is not a natural, psychological or social phenomenon.This is not to deny that the natural and social sciences have important things tosay about what it is to be us, or that they illuminate phenomena closely related tosense-making. But they do not provide ways of making sense of sense-makingitself. To try to grasp the fact of sense-making in causal or social terms is to makea category mistake.

This suggests, in the direction of the third part of the question, that when wetry to explain how sense-making comes to be, we are seeking an origin andtrajectory of a very specific kind—not one that is temporally or even logicallyprior, but one that is ontologically prior. That is, the origin from which sense-making ‘comes to be’ is not prior on a timeline or in a conceptual order, but has a

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certain a priority. It is a transcendental condition. The trajectory at issue isaccordingly ‘coming to be’ in the sense of ‘being made possible’. Put simply, whatfills out the whence of pure thrownness is a special sort of origin: atranscendental ground. We make sense of the fact of sense-making by identifyingthe a priori conditions of possibility of being a sense-maker. This amounts tospelling out what it takes for there to be sense-making—and that means, forHeidegger, the most basic terms in which sense-making itself makes sense.

So to say that the whence and whither of pure thrownness are obscure is to saythat the reflexive questions of the essence and transcendental ground of sense-making are ones which human beings are constitutionally bound to ask, but alsoones which we necessarily cannot answer. It must be part of being a sense-makerthat we are unable to make sense of what it is, and what it takes, to be a sense-maker. This, of course, in some ultimate sense—there is still much that we can sayon this topic, as Heidegger does in his own transcendental philosophizing. Butthe claim is that, as with identifying the whence and whither of situatedness, wewill eventually reach a point beyond which there is nothing more or new to say,and that we will not have thereby reached any final ground or original conditionof possibility. We will be left facing the ultimate unintelligibility of sense-makingto itself.

Heidegger appears to mention the obscurity of the pure whence and whitherseveral times in SZ. He says, first, that ‘[t]hat it is factically [is . . .] obscure andhidden as regards the ‘why’ of it’ (SZ 276). We do not and cannot fully understandwhy sense-making is and has to be as it is. Also: ‘Even if Dasein is ‘‘assured’’ inits belief about its ‘‘whither’’, or if, in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself toknow about its ‘‘whence’’, all this counts for nothing’ because ‘the that-it-is of its‘‘there’’ [. . .] stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma’ (SZ 136).Despite whatever we may have discovered about what it takes to be us and howwe come to be, we still cannot explain what it is and what it takes to be a sense-maker. This must remain enigmatic.

It remains to be determined why this must be so. If it is so, then sense-makingwill be finite in a very particular way. As Heidegger says, ‘[b]eing delivered overto Dasein in this way’—that is, I take it, being delivered over to sense-makingitself—‘is the index of an intrinsic finitude’ (Heidegger 1995: 281). The finitude liesin the fact that sense-making cannot make sense of its own essence and ground,that it cannot grasp its own that it is and has to be. This is not the material finitudethat belongs to being situated (see Section II), or the reflexive, material finitude thatbelongs to asking after the whence and whither of situatedness (see Section III). Itis a finitude that is independent of the situatedness of sense-making, and so onewhich is non-material. It belongs to sense-making solely by virtue of its reflexiveoperation. It is thus a reflexive, non-material finitude that is part of the verystructure of making sense of things. This is the most fundamental finitude of thebunch because it is built into the operation of sense-making in a unique way.Presumably, this ‘broader’ and ‘deeper’ finitude will underlie the other kinds offinitude—including the fact that sense-making is situated (and so materiallyconstrained) in certain ways rather than others, and situated at all rather than not.

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My suggestion is that, although thrownness covers a variety of kinds offinitude, it is this finitude that Heidegger is primarily seeking to capture with theterm ‘thrownness’. If this is right, then to say that projection is thrown is not firstof all to say that we make sense of things, but to say that making sense of things isin a way and on a ground that is ultimately opaque to it. To be thrown is not firstof all to be in a world and amidst things, but to be necessarily self-obscure.12

Katherine WithyDepartment of PhilosophyGeorgetown UniversityUSAkaw84@georgetown.edu

NOTES

1 In speaking of ‘sense-making’, I follow John Haugeland: ‘When taken with sufficientgenerality, a pretty good colloquial paraphrase for ‘disclosing the being of’ is making senseof’ (Haugeland 2000: 48). However, I use the term in a broader sense than Haugeland does.

2 Hereafter, SZ (Sein und Zeit). Page references are to the German (Niemeyer) editions,the pagination of which is included in the margins of the English translations.

3 Commentators follow suit. Most discuss thrownness only in passing; explicitconsiderations of it, and clear statements about it, are rare.

4 See note 10.5 Heidegger does, however, think of thrownness as having ‘the character of throwing

and of movement’ (SZ 179). I take this metaphor of ‘movement’ to express the dativestructure of being thrown into something from somewhere, and so the fact that to bethrown is to have a whence and whither.

6 In the vocabulary of guilt: ‘This nullity, moreover, is thus not something whichemerges in Dasein occasionally, attaching itself to it as an obscure quality which Daseinmight eliminate if it made sufficient progress’ (SZ 285).

7 It is because the whither gives us determinate ways of going on that thrownness‘does not lie behind it as some event which has happened to Dasein’ (SZ 284), and is ‘notsomething which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it’(SZ 20). Put differently, ‘Dasein remains in the throw’ (SZ 179).

8 Heidegger does not regularly use this vocabulary of ‘pure’ thrownness, although thepassages I cite in note 10 are good evidence that he usually thinks thrownness at this register.

9 Facticity is intimately tied to thrownness, and especially to the determinateness ofbeing situated. Since Heidegger says so little about facticity in SZ, I believe that thisconcept requires a separate investigation.

10 Heidegger almost always specifies that into which we are thrown as some version of‘being a sense-maker’, saying that we are thrown into, or delivered over to: our own being(SZ 42, 189), ourselves (in our being) (SZ 144, 192, 383), the entity that we are (SZ 284), thethere (SZ 135, 148, 284, 297), existence (SZ 276), our ability to be (SZ 383), projection (SZ145), or being-guilty (SZ 291). (And since we are the kinds of entities that are thrown, weare even delivered over to, or thrown into, our thrownness (SZ 148, 396)). This not onlyshows that being a sense-maker is something into which we are thrown, but also confirmsmy thesis that thrownness must be understood at this register.

20 Katherine Withy

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11 We do make sense of actions and beliefs by giving reasons, and we make sense ofevents and states of affairs by giving causal accounts. But we also make sense of events inour lives by responding appropriately to them, we make sense of who we are by beingourselves, we make sense of physical entities by subsuming them under natural laws, andwe make sense of tools by using them. This is not an exhaustive list, but it indicates thesize of the domain.

12 Early versions of this paper were presented to the Philosophy Department atGeorgetown University and (informally) to the Philosophy Department at The Universityof Chicago. I thank the audience at each for their comments, questions and suggestions. Iam especially grateful to William Blattner, John Haugeland, Jonathan Lear, NateZuckerman and several anonymous referees for their extensive feedback on variousversions of this paper. In addition, I must acknowledge—but could never discharge—theenormous debt of gratitude that I owe to the late John Haugeland.

REFERENCES

Blattner, W. (2006), Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum.Carman, T. (2003), Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in ‘Being

and Time’. New York: Cambridge University Press.Dreyfus, H. and Rubin, J. (1991), ‘Appendix: Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later

Heidegger’, in H. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being andTime’, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Haugeland, J. (2000), ‘Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism’, inM. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds), Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honorof Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York:Harper & Row.

—— (1995), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. trans.W. McNeill and N. Walker. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

—— (2000), Introduction to Metaphysics. trans. G. Fried and R. Polt. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.

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