Facticity has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.

The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings. It can refer to facts and factuality, as in nineteenth-century positivism

Positivism

Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....

, but comes to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation in Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of...

 and Neo-Kantianism

Neo-Kantianism

Neo-Kantianism refers broadly to a revived type of philosophy along the lines of that laid down by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, or more specifically by Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy in his work The World as Will and Representation , as well as by other post-Kantian...

. The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with ideality, as does Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...

 in Between Facts and Norms

Between Facts and Norms

Between Facts and Norms is a book on deliberative politics that was published by the German political philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, in 1996. Originally published in 1992 as Faktizität und Geltung, the book is the culmination of Habermas's project that began with The Structural Transformation of the...

(Faktizität und Geltung). It is a term that takes on a more specialized meaning in 20th century continental philosophy

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

, especially in phenomenology and existentialism

Existentialism

Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...

, including Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

, Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

, Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...

. Recent philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer....

, Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher.Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe...

, and François Raffoul have taken up the notion of facticity in new ways.

Facticity (or Factiality as it is sometimes translated) plays a key part in Quentin Meillassoux

Quentin Meillassoux

Quentin Meillassoux is a French philosopher. He teaches at the École Normale Supérieure, and is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux....

's philosophical project. 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.”
It is held to be that which can be considered absolute, i.e. outside of the relation between thought and being.

Heidegger

Heidegger 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 DeBeauvoir

In the works of Sartre and DeBeauvoir, 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.

See also

• Existence
  Existence
  In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
  
  
• Existentialism
  Existentialism
  Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
  
  
• Hermeneutics
• Phenomenology
• Being for itself
• Martin Heidegger
  Martin Heidegger
  Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
  
  
• Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...