Thrownness · you did not choose the conditions

Geworfenheit — Heidegger's word for finding yourself already in a situation you did not select: this body, this century, this language, these parents, this mortality. Jonas took it back to the second century and showed the Gnostics had it first, and in a stronger form: the texts say the spark was thrown or cast down, and Theodotus' catechism asks flatly whereinto we have been thrown. Jonas's late and famous argument runs the other direction too — that modern nihilism is a Gnosticism that has lost its God and kept the alienation, leaving the thrownness with nothing on the far side of it. Kept here because it is the honest reason this material still lands: nobody today needs convincing that they were dropped into conditions they did not pick.