Facticity

Facticity (French: facticité, German: Faktizität) 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, but comes to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation in Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism. The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with ideality, as does Jürgen Habermas in Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung). 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, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 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.”