facticity
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: human-sciences
philosophy
sciences
Etymology: From fact + -icity, possibly modelled on German Faktizität which first appeared in the writings of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).
Base: fact
Affixes: -icity
Inflected forms:
form: facticities
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: The quality or state of being a fact.
pos: noun
tags: uncountable
usually
examples: [F]rom the earliest times down to the middle of the last century the writers of the Jewish and Christian Churches, with the exception of the Deists in England and of some isolated views, unanimously held fast the facticity of the events recorded in this book [the Book of Jonah in the Bible].
gloss: In existentialism, the state of being in the world without any knowable reason for such existence, or of being in a particular state of affairs which one has no control over.
pos: noun
tags: specifically
uncountable
usually
examples: For as sure as the absolute knowledge (in the infinite facticity—actual existence—of each single knowledge) is only in the absolute form of the For-itself, so sure each knowledge goes also beyond itself; or, viewed from another point, is in its own Being absolutely outside of itself, and encircles itself entire.
In particular, we cannot choose the circumstances of our birth and our entire bodily condition. These "facticities" appear to us as having no foundation or justification. Why is one person born blind and another born with perfect vision? Facticities are thus contingent, they present themselves as simply "there."
The dynamics of affective motivation change the immanently given fact (Tatsache) into a processional facticity which originally contains within itself its own temporalizing dynamics. If, as [Friedrich] Nietzsche contended early on, there are no facts but only interpretations of them, facticity is inhabited by an originary plasticity.
The ownmost possibility of be-ing itself which Dasein (facticity) is, and indeed without this possibility being "there" for it, may be designated as existence. It is with respect to this authentic be-ing itself that facticity is placed into our forehaving when initially engaging it and bringing it into play in our hermeneutical questioning.
[Martin] Heidegger replaces spirit—the principle of subjectivity—with the principle of facticity, which binds the activity of philosophizing to factical life, that is to say, to Dasein.
gloss: A fact that is not changeable or that is assumed to be true without further evaluation.
pos: noun
tags: countable
usually
examples: Near-synonyms: given, axiom, postulate
It is important for those to ascribe to [Jean-Paul] Sartre a crude theory of "absolute freedom" to notice that he does acknowledge the existence of facticities which I did not originate and which I cannot change (e.g., the date of my birth). [...] [W]hile I can change some of my facticities (e.g., I can move to another city, I can get glasses, I can even, perhaps, get a sex-change operation), it is nonetheless true that these acts are all possible for me only insofar as I now, in fact, live in Chicago, have certain abilities and disabilities of eyesight, and am male. Freedom, then, always presupposes facticity, and a free act cannot occur, nor can the idea of a free act even be rendered intelligible, except against a background of facticity.
[O]nce institutionalized, patterns of responses and the symbolic representations take on the qualities of objective facts, that is, "facticities" that appear to be naturally occurring objects but which in fact are precarious dramatic effects of human interaction. As facticities, these meanings can be internalized by members of the community and shape their experience and self-interpretation.
Because we are abandoned a priori to preestablished factors that constitute our social, psychological, and biogenetic ontogeny, we have no control over our racial facticities. Simply put, we have no choice about our race.
Related words: fact
factic
factically
factiness
factness
factual
factualism
factualist
factuality
factualization
factualize
factually
factualness
Derived words: nonfacticity
Translations: