We Thrown: Unto Life
I have over the years been a fan of James K.A. Smith’s writing, having first read his Introducing Radical Orthodoxy and then moving onto this Cultural Liturgies Trilogy of books. I have been particularly impressed by his ability to explain in clear and concise language incredibly dense philosophical ideas from the sometimes opaque concepts within Radical Orthodoxy to the philosophy of Charles Taylor.
It was no different when recently, at the recommendation of a friend, I purchased a copy of his latest book How to Inhabit Time. There, I found Smith at his most personal and moving. Again, Smith was using the language of philosophy to look at the implications of our contingent, historical existence. While this overall topic is looked at from a number of angles, a theme that kept coming back was Martin Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness”.
Contrary to the modern liberal idea of life being what we make of it, Heidegger’s “thrownness” considers a life where the parameters, as the term suggests, are not of our making. Rather than creating a life as a completely unencumbered agent, wherein our present is the result of our careful curating a selectin from an endless number of options, Smith likens this condition to suddenly waking up and asking ourselves “How did I get here? How did this become my life”. (32)
Thrownness, Smith says, is Heidegger’s way of taking seriously the fact that we are creatures born into history, with certain conditions already pre-determined and into which we are made to fit. This can encompass things like the country one is born in, the family one has, the social implications of one’s skin colour, the seemingly random assembly of habits we have that really are the inheritence of habits from generations before, the list goes on. It considers the way in which our lives are less engineered and more inherited.
A number of implications flow from this idea of thrownness. The first is that, contrary to the liberal (and consumerist) idea of a completely free floating agent with no historical baggage, we need to take seriously that, as historical beings, we take our history with us into the present. Smith uses the language of our “human being” as a “human been”, in which a series of indentations of history already impressed upon us by circumstances and persons in the past, end up shaping who we are now. Our life, then, is less the result of consumer choice then it is of a set of circumstances that pre-existed my own.
Second, while thrownness may seem at first glance highly hemmed in and deterministic, Smith is keen to point out that to be thrown into history means that we can say two things at once, namely “this is the way it is” and, more importantly, “it did not have to be this way”. There is a strange liberation that comes with thrownness when one realises that, even if our history is shaped by forces and circumstances that came before me, the given set of circumstance that I have been given are the sedimentations of a whole array of possible actions, decisions, words and choices that could at any given point been otherwise. The upshot of realising this is that within the history into which I am thrown, lie another set of myriad possibilities that my own life can turn into actualities. In Smith’s words:
Thrownness is not a negative thing. Because I’ve been thrown into the life and time in which I find myself, I have a future that calls for me to realise possibilities latent in what has been handed down. (33)
These possibilities are not endless, but are unique to that given set of circumstance which make up my own point in history. But myriad they still are, and it still falls to us to be able to discern the difference between a history that binds us to the ground, and a history in which we are able to “live forward” whilst bearing those possibilities within us.
Advent is a particularly opportune season to consider our thrownness, for Advent, more than any other seaon, is a time within history in which we are reminded that time within history is not simply ours to make however we will. Advent marks a time, as the name suggests, of the Lord’s coming into our history. For the Christian, our task as historical beings is being able to discern a divine calling into the history into which we are thrown and assist in God’s work in redeeming those histories.
