2.34
Many (perhaps most) of our concepts fit together and they (mostly) fit the world.
We generally don’t see how such things fit because we think we’re at a centre, and don’t see how the position we take up is rounded about by a concurrence of pushes and pulls within our world.
We miss our essential thrownness in the world, which is never just the moment of our birth, but is how we’re constantly thrown into and find ourselves in a world that pre-exists us, including a horizon of meaning.[1] Our thrownness is a constant being-drawn, being-siphoned, and being-propelled onward. Caught in the draw, we think of ourselves as sitting in the midst of calm. We miss that we’re in motion amidst a gathering of past senses of interpretations and understandings that carry forward; we’re thrown into a stream of group meaning (history and tradition), and yet we think we’re acting ‘naturally,’ ‘independently,’ ‘spontaneously,’ or ‘freely.’ Things are always interpreted within this horizon.
You may scoff at what (erroneously) appears as idealism. You may attempt to point to the real, outside of us, allegedly free from this draw. But kicking a stone as Johnson did (“I refute it thus”), albeit in a different context, is no refutation: it’s to miss the point.[2] For this gesture, too, reaffirms our thrownness. (Which doesn’t mean that our thrownness isn’t involved with real entities that exist independently of us.)
This thrownness is part of the gathering of our world. There are, however, possibilities of re-orientation — it’s worth thinking about how this is possible: how the draw isn’t totalizing; how there’s always a gap, a disjunction, an irreparability.
[1] Heidegger, B&T, 179/223, 284/330.
[2] James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL. D., ed. John Wilson Crocker (New York: George Dearborn, 1833), 1763 AETAT. 54, p. 209.