Just the Facts - Facticity

I’ve run across a term in philosophy that I want to explore with you: “facticity”. It apparently means slightly different things depending on what kind of philosophy we’re talking about, but we’re obviously talking about an existential approach to this word, specifically that of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

So what is “facticity”? In short, it just means the facts of a situation. Or in other words, the givens of our situation.

Facticity is a way of describing the situation in which I find myself. It’s my environment, my upbringing, my culture, my genetics, my language, my temperament, my past choices. It’s everything that I can describe that makes up my current situation as it is. Just the facts.

When I first start working with clients, I believe that a lot of the initial work we do together is describing this “facticity”. We look at the givens of the client’s situation. We describe, give voice to, acknowledge, validate, and begin to accept the situation in which the client finds themselves, including all the barriers they experience in that situation.

I see it as my job at that point to aid this discovery and description of facticity, as well as to empathize with what it must be like for the client to live in their situation.

Just this first step is often very helpful for clients. I believe it’s important for us to be able to see our situation clearly, as well as to have our situation heard by a caring and nonjudgmental ear.

But this isn’t the whole story. From an existential perspective, we are not simply stuck with the givens of our situation. In fact, one of the givens is that we have freedom, that we have choices to make. We have the question of what to do with these givens. 

Sartre used another term for this second aspect of our situation: “transcendence”. But that is a topic for another post.

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