Facticity
philosophical concept, used by Fichte, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Heidegger, signifying factuality, contingency, and the intractable conditions of human existence
In philosophy, facticity (French: facticité, German: Faktizität) has multiple meanings — from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.
Early usage
The term was 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 individuals 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 individuals 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Facticity” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.