Geworfen denotes the arbitrary or inscrutable nature of Dasein that connectsthe past with the present. 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: " attractive translations such as 'abandon,' 'dereliction,' 'dejection,' etc. are too rich with ontic, anthropological connotations. We retain 'thrown-ness' as closest to the original and, perhaps, least misleading." In his main workThe Principle of Hope, 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". Such a connection had been picked up by The Doors in a verse of their song "Riders on the Storm" : "Into this world we're thrown / Like a dog without a bone". Speaking with Krieger and Manzarek, the German philosopher tells how this verse recalls Heidegger's concept of thrownness: in 1963 at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Jim Morrison attended a whole lecture in which philosophers who had examined the philosophical tradition, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, were discussed. In 2009, Simon Critchley dedicated his column on The Guardian to Heidegger's concept of thrownness and explained it using the aforementioned verse of The Doors. In their 1986 book Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design, authors Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores applied Heidegger's concept of thrownness to the field of software design.
