Facticity (
French: facticité,
German: Faktizität) refers to the contingent yet 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 and interesting ways.
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