Facticity

Short description: Philosophical concept with multiple meanings

In philosophy, facticity (French: facticité, German: Faktizität)[1] has multiple meanings — from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.[2]

## Contents

* 1 Early usage
* 2 Heidegger
* 3 Sartre and de Beauvoir
* 4 Recent usage
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading

## 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"[1] as the "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which is to say we are "thrown into the world." By this, he does not only refer 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

Facticity 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, Byung-Chul Han and François Raffoul have taken up the notion of facticity in new ways.[citation needed]

Facticity plays a key part in Quentin Meillassoux's philosophical project to challenge the thought-world relationship of correlationism. Meillassoux defines it as “the absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.”[3]

## See also

* Being for itself

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Dahlstrom, Daniel O. (2013). The Heidegger Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 71–2. ISBN 978-1-847-06514-8. https://books.google.com/books?id=lUtMAQAAQBAJ.
2. ↑ Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness.
3. ↑ Meillassoux, Quentin (8 May 2008). "Time Without Becoming". https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0uhYxWi1vLoJ:https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.pdf+&hl=en.

## Further reading

* J. Van Buren (Trans.), Martin Heidegger. Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity.
* Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being And Time. New York, Harper. ISBN 9780060638504. https://archive.org/details/beingtime00heid.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul. Essays in Existentialism.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is A Humanism.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956). Being and Nothingness. New York, Philosophical Library. https://archive.org/details/beingnothingness00sartrich.
* Raffoul, François, ed. Rethinking Facticity.
* Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.

* v
* t
* e

Continental philosophy

Philosophers|

* Theodor W. Adorno
* Giorgio Agamben
* Louis Althusser
* Hannah Arendt
* Raymond Aron
* Gaston Bachelard
* Alain Badiou
* Roland Barthes
* Georges Bataille
* Jean Baudrillard
* Zygmunt Bauman
* Walter Benjamin
* Simone de Beauvoir
* Henri Bergson
* Maurice Blanchot
* Pierre Bourdieu
* Martin Buber
* Judith Butler
* Albert Camus
* Ernst Cassirer
* Cornelius Castoriadis
* Emil Cioran
* Benedetto Croce
* Paul de Man
* Guy Debord
* Gilles Deleuze
* Jacques Derrida
* Wilhelm Dilthey
* Hubert Dreyfus
* Umberto Eco
* Terry Eagleton
* Friedrich Engels
* Frantz Fanon
* Johann Gottlieb Fichte
* Michel Foucault
* Hans-Georg Gadamer
* Giovanni Gentile
* Félix Guattari
* Antonio Gramsci
* Jürgen Habermas
* G. W. F. Hegel
* Martin Heidegger
* Edmund Husserl
* Roman Ingarden
* Luce Irigaray
* Fredric Jameson
* Karl Jaspers
* Walter Kaufmann
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Ludwig Klages
* Pierre Klossowski
* Alexandre Kojève
* Alexandre Koyré
* Leszek Kołakowski
* Julia Kristeva
* Jacques Lacan
* Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
* François Laruelle
* Bruno Latour
* Henri Lefebvre
* Claude Lévi-Strauss
* Emmanuel Levinas
* Niklas Luhmann
* György Lukács
* Jean-François Lyotard
* Gabriel Marcel
* Herbert Marcuse
* Karl Marx
* Quentin Meillassoux
* Maurice Merleau-Ponty
* Jean-Luc Nancy
* Antonio Negri
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* José Ortega y Gasset
* Jacques Rancière
* Paul Ricœur
* Edward Said
* Jean-Paul Sartre
* F. W. J. Schelling
* Carl Schmitt
* Arthur Schopenhauer
* Michel Serres
* Gilbert Simondon
* Peter Sloterdijk
* Edith Stein
* Leo Strauss
* Raymond Williams
* Slavoj Žižek

Theories|

* Absurdism
* Critical theory
* Deconstruction
* Existentialism
* Frankfurt School
* German idealism
* Hegelianism
* Hermeneutics
* Marxism
* Neo-Kantianism
* New Philosophers
* Non-philosophy
* Phenomenology
* Postmodernism
* Post-structuralism
* Psychoanalytic theory
* Romanticism
* Social constructionism
* Speculative realism
* Structuralism
* Western Marxism

Concepts|

* Alterity
* Angst
* Apollonian and Dionysian
* Authenticity
* Being in itself
* Boredom
* Class struggle
* Dasein
* Death of God
* Death drive
* Différance
* Difference
* Existence precedes essence
* Existential crisis
* Facticity
* Genealogy
* Habitus
* Historical materialism
* Ideology
* Intersubjectivity
* Leap of faith
* Master–slave dialectic
* Master–slave morality
* Oedipus complex
* Ontic
* Other
* Power
* Ressentiment
* Self-deception
* Totalitarianism
* Trace
* Transvaluation of values
* Will to power

* Category
* Index

* v
* t
* e

Existentialism

Concepts|

* Abandonment
* Absurdism
* Angst
* Authenticity
* Bad faith
* Being in itself
* Existence precedes essence
* Existential crisis
* Facticity
* Meaning
* Nihilism
* Other

Thinkers|

* Nicola Abbagnano
* Hannah Arendt
* Abdel Rahman Badawi
* Hazel Barnes
* Karl Barth
* Nikolai Berdyaev
* Steve Biko
* Martin Buber
* Rudolf Bultmann
* Dino Buzzati
* Albert Camus
* Jane Welsh Carlyle
* Thomas Carlyle
* Emil Cioran
* Walter A. Davis
* Simone de Beauvoir
* Fyodor Dostoevsky
* William A. Earle
* Ralph Ellison
* Frantz Fanon
* Vilém Flusser
* Benjamin Fondane
* James Anthony Froude
* Alberto Giacometti
* Juozas Girnius
* Lewis Gordon
* Martin Heidegger
* Edmund Husserl
* Eugène Ionesco
* Nae Ionescu
* William James
* Karl Jaspers
* Franz Kafka
* Walter Kaufmann
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Ladislav Klíma
* Emmanuel Levinas
* Ash Lieb
* John Macquarrie
* Naguib Mahfouz
* Gabriel Marcel
* Vytautas Mačernis
* Maurice Merleau-Ponty
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* José Ortega y Gasset
* Viktor Petrov
* Franz Rosenzweig
* Jean-Paul Sartre
* Aous Shakra
* Lev Shestov
* Joseph B. Soloveitchik
* Paul Tillich
* Rick Turner
* Miguel de Unamuno
* John Daniel Wild
* Colin Wilson
* Richard Wright
* Peter Wessel Zapffe

Related|

* Phenomenology (philosophy)
* Continental philosophy
* Transcendentalism
* German idealism
* Western Marxism
* Existentialist anarchism
* Existential nihilism
* Atheistic existentialism

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