Ismail, Tasnim; (2025) Dimensions of 'Facticity': A Thesis on Our Relationship with Reality. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

According to this thesis, ‘facticity' emerges from a trajectory in the history of Western philosophy as a multifaceted symbol for how we are related to reality. Our metaphysical relationship with reality is a theme that is reflected throughout the etymology of ‘facticity’, motivating its inception in the eighteenth-century idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). On my reading, Fichte recognises how the ‘facticity’ of sensation always ‘feels’ as though it is contingent on the empirical world, thereby committing us - in the context of everyday life at least - to the realist principle that reality is mind-independent. Arguably continuing this thread, ’facticity’ later arises in the idealism of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), where the contingency of ‘facticity’ is juxtaposed against the necessity of ‘essence’, and the ‘natural attitude’ is supposed to mark a pre-philosophical embrace of realism. Additional philosophical dimensions of our relationship with reality are salient in the rest of the trajectory of ‘facticity’ that is chronicled over the course of this thesis. In the hermeneutic movement that spans over nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) laments the ‘facticity’ of everything that is irresistibly given to us in the experience of life as ultimately ‘unfathomable’, thereby throwing into question our expressive powers over reality. ‘Facticity’ is swept up in the twentieth-century existentialist systems of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), where it encompasses the sheer contingency of being human, and it is analytically tied to our power to constitute meaning. Completing the trajectory of ‘facticity’ that is relevant to this thesis, ‘facticity’ flowers into what is ontologically ultimate for Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) in his unfinished, posthumously published manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible (1968): in the style of a philosopher-poet, Merleau-Ponty articulates a ‘hyper-reflective’ encounter with the all-encompassing ‘flesh’ of ‘facticity'. At every stage of the historical trajectory that is in focus, this thesis gleans phenomenological insights about ‘facticity’ that arguably prompt the use of symbolism in philosophy. Guided by that meta-philosophy, this thesis compiles ‘facticity’ as a multifaceted symbol for our relationship with reality by incorporating layers of symbolic meaning from its historical trajectory.

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