Heidegger's notion of Geworfenheit, of "being-thrown" into a concrete historical situation, could be of some help here. Geworfenheit is to be opposed both to the standard humanism and to the Gnostic tradition. In the humanist vision, a human being belongs to this earth: he should be fully at home on its surface, able to realize his potential through the active, productive exchange with it. As the young Marx put it, earth is man's "anorganic body." Any notion that we do not belong to this earth, that Earth is a fallen universe, a prison for our soul striving to liberate itself from the material inertia, is dismissed as life-denying alienation. For the Gnostic tradition, on the other hand, the human Self is not created, it is a preexisting Soul thrown into a foreign inhospitable environment. The pain of our daily lives is not the result of our sin (of Adam's Fall), but of the fundamental glitch in the structure of the material universe itself which was created by defective demons; consequently, the path of salvation does not reside in overcoming our sins, but in overcoming our ignorance, in transcending the world of material appearances by way of achieving the true knowledge.

What both these positions share is the notion that there is a home, a "natural" place for man: either this world of the "noosphere" from which we fell into this world and for which our souls long, or Earth itself. Heidegger points the way out of this predicament: what is we effectively are "thrown" into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated, "out of joint," and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no previous "home" out of which we were thrown into this world, what if this very dislocation grounds man's ex-static opening to the world?

As Heidegger emphasizes in Sein und Zeit, the fact that there is no Sein (being) without Dasein (being-there) does NOT mean that, if the Dasein were to disappear, no things would remain. Entities would continue to be, but they would not be disclosed within a horizon of meaning -- there would have been no world. This is why Heidegger speaks of Dasein and not of man or subject: subject is OUTSIDE the world and then relates to it, generating the pseudo-problems of the correspondence of our representations to the external world, of the world's existence, etc.; man is an entity INSIDE the world. Dasein, in contrast to both of them, is the ex-static relating to the entities within a horizon of meaning, which is in advance "thrown" into the world, in the midst of disclosed entities.

P. 8-10

¶ 9:26 PM