In philosophy, facticity (French: facticité,
German: Faktizität) has a multiplicity of
meanings from "factuality" and "contingency"
to the intractable conditions of human existence.
== Early usage ==
The term is first used by German philosopher
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and has
a variety of meanings.
It can refer to facts and factuality, as in
nineteenth-century positivism, but comes to
mean that which resists explanation and interpretation
in Wilhelm Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism.
The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with
ideality, as does Jürgen Habermas in Between
Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung).
== Heidegger ==
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
discusses "facticity" as the "thrownness"
(Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which
is to say we are "thrown into the world."
By this, he is not only referring to a brute
fact, or the factuality of a concrete historical
situation, e.g., "born in the '80s."
Facticity is something that already informs
and has been taken up in existence, even if
it is unnoticed or left unattended.
As such, facticity is not something we come
across and directly behold.
In moods, for example, facticity has an enigmatic
appearance, which involves both turning toward
and away from it.
For Heidegger, moods are conditions of thinking
and willing to which they must in some way
respond.
The thrownness of human existence (or Dasein)
is accordingly disclosed through moods.
== Sartre and de Beauvoir ==
In the mid-20th Century works of French existentialists
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, facticity
signifies all of the concrete details against
the background of which human freedom exists
and is limited.
For example, these may include the time and
place of birth, a language, an environment,
an individual's previous choices, as well
as the inevitable prospect of their death.
For example: currently, the situation of a
person who is born without legs precludes
their freedom to walk on the beach; if future
medicine were to develop a method of growing
new legs for that person, their facticity
might no longer exclude this activity.
== Recent usage ==
It is a term that takes on a more specialized
meaning in 20th century continental philosophy,
especially in phenomenology and existentialism,
including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Theodor Adorno.
Recent philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben,
Jean-Luc Nancy, and François Raffoul have
taken up the notion of facticity in new ways.Facticity
plays a key part in Quentin Meillassoux's
philosophical project to challenge the thought-world
relationship of correlationism.
It is defined by him as “the absence of
reason for any reality; in other words, the
impossibility of providing an ultimate ground
for the existence of any being.”
== See also ==
Being for itself
== References ==
== Further reading ==
J. Van Buren (Trans.), Martin Heidegger.
Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity.
Heidegger, Martin.
Being And Time.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.
Essays in Existentialism.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.
Existentialism Is A Humanism.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.
Being and Nothingness.
Raffoul, François and Eric Sean Nelson (eds.).
Rethinking Facticity.CS1 maint: Extra text:
authors list (link)
Meillassoux, Quentin.
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency.
