Facticity

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Facticity (French: facticité, German: faktizität) is the contingent conditions of an individual human life. It is a term used in 20th century continental philosophy, especially in the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialists.

[edit] Heidegger and Sartre

In the works of Heidegger and Sartre, facticity is all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited. For example, these may include the particular time and place of birth of an individual, as well as the prospect of their death. One cannot, factically, become a genuine samurai warrior in the twenty first century.

Heidegger also refers to each person's facticity, as our having been "delivered over", of our throwness. Yet he is not only referring to some brute fact, some concrete historical situation, eg, "born in the 50s", it is something that has already always been taken up into our existence, even if this fact has, temporarily, been cast aside. Our facticity is not something we come across and can behold, it has an enigmatic appearance, as a mood, facticity, involves also a turning away or toward it. There is a mood there before volition or cognition, this facticity of moods disclose Dasein's throwness.