Facticity

First employed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), the word can be used to refer to factsand factuality, but as used by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and Neo-Kantian philosophers,has come to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) used the term to describe the “thrownness” of individual existence—that is, factualityof certain facts of a person or a historical situation that are unalterably part of existence, evenif unnoticed or unattended. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) used facticity to signify all concrete facts that form the background against whichhuman freedom both exits and is limited at a particular point in history. For instance, beforemedicine advanced to the point of making highly advanced artificial limbs, a person bornwithout legs was not free to stroll on the beach.