Thrownness

There is an interesting German philosopher, Heidegger, who has a theory about what he calls thrownness: that human beings are thrust into a certain environment and they literally take on all of these qualities, not based on their own individual reality, but based on what everybody else has told them. And so we learn about the "them" very quickly. There are certain expectations within the context of the "them", the other — like the expectation that we do not belch in public. We learn quickly that there are certain things we do not breach. And they are not things that we chose; they are things that are imposed on us. Obviously they have a purpose, and we are civilised people; we do not do certain things.

But also there is a type of what Heidegger felt was inauthenticity that went with that, because people really had not reflected about who they were in their essence, or their essential nature. They were really simply only confirming what had been reflected back to them from their culture and their society. People who break these models, in England, would be called eccentrics — and the English actually rather allow for that within their culture, though one has to be rich, that being a prerequisite; because if one is poor, they call it madness.

But Heidegger felt that a person who had never come to terms with this was what he called an undifferentiated person. Such a person has really never thought: the only reason I am the way I am is because I grew up in a certain culture and environment, and this culture and environment has completely imposed upon me a way of viewing the world, a language that involves a worldview. All of these things are literally superimposed upon us, and we submit to them without reflection, by and large. Heidegger's solution to it was that the only authentic act that one could really do, once one realised this, was to die. In other words, nobody is going to teach you how to die. You will do that very authentically. So, he said, you become a being unto death.

But for the Muslim — and the Qurʾān really did this to these people — it forced them to look at what Heidegger would call their thrownness. In other words: why are we worshipping these idols? Why are we burying our baby girls alive? People did not think about it. In certain cultures — and in this culture there is a very serious crisis of this kind — there is reflection on both sides with the abortion issue. There are people who say this is wrong, and we hear that, and we have to think about it. Whereas in that culture, nobody was there saying it was wrong; they were saying it was perfectly acceptable. Now here comes a man who starts saying this is wrong. That is a very strong thing for a people who have not given a lot of reflection to themselves or their culture. So the Qurʾān begins to literally question things very deeply.