In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir writes: “Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.”1 But what does ‘facticity’ mean?
Facticity is a philosophical concept used by existentialist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger. Heidegger used the term facticity to describe our way of being in the world as thrown. What he meant was that each of us arrives into this world already with some sort of past – for example, our family history, both in biological and socio-cultural terms. Moreover, we come into a world that itself already has a past. It is as if we were actors coming on stage in the middle of a play without knowing our roles and what sort of play this is. We are thrown into the world, into some conditions that are given to us, that we haven’t chosen. By understanding existential facticity as the always already existing past or givenness into which we are thrown, we can recognise that none of us comes into existence as a blank slate.
Beauvoir and Sartre worked with the insight of facticity as our thrownness, arguing that we are situated beings, but our situations are always ambiguous and never entirely determined. In other words, whatever situation we find ourselves in, there is always an element of facticity (givenness) and an element of freedom to somehow exceed (transcend) that facticity. In his book Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas Flynn explains human existence in-situation as follows: “Situation is an ambiguous mixture of what Sartre calls our ‘facticity’ and our ‘transcendence’. ‘Facticity’ denotes the givens of our situation such as our race and nationality, our talents and limitations, the others with whom we deal as well as our previous choices. ‘Transcendence’ or the reach that our consciousness extends beyond these givens, denotes the takens of our situation, namely how we face up to this facticity.”2
The importance of individual responsibility inextricably linked with freedom is central to existentialist thought. Whatever freedom we have in a given situation, it is our responsibility to acknowledge and decide how to use it. By trying to avoid responsibility for the level of freedom that we have, we are nonetheless making a decision, albeit a self-deceptive one. For existentialists, freedom to transcend one’s facticity is never devoid of responsibility. However, as our existence in-situation shows, we are never entirely free (as if outside any facticity) and never entirely determined (reduced exclusively to facticity). Existentialists admit and embrace the tension between facticity and freedom inherent in each human’s ambiguous situatedness. Referring to the situation of women, Beauvoir writes:
“The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as a given. This is the case of women who inherit a long tradition of submission and of those who are called ‘the humble’. There is often laziness and timidity in their resignation; their honesty is not quite complete, but to the extent that it exists, their freedom remains available, it is not denied.”
Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1948, p. 51)
In the quoted passage, Beauvoir describes an example of facticity – the long tradition of submission that women inherit. Being born a female throws you into the world in a certain way, situating you based on the past that preexists your arrival and that shapes your reality – you ‘become’ a woman. Examples are plentiful. You run and throw ‘like a girl’; you are more ‘naturally fit’ to care for children; your ‘woman’s intuition’ makes you a relationship maintenance expert, and so on. The stage is set, the rules are given. The more this facticity element of the situation restricts the individual’s options to act in and upon the world, the more the situation appears to them as given. This is just how things are.
That is where Beauvoir, as a true existentialist thinker, insists that some level of freedom exists even in such situations of historically inherited submission. Notice how she phrases it: “to the extent that it exists, their freedom remains available”. Therefore, Beauvoir does not deny the facticity of women’s situation or transcendence/freedom. To deny the limitations of facticity would be naive, wishful thinking that ignores the givens of the specific situation. To deny all freedom would be another form of self-deception where one refuses to accept any responsibility for how one engages with the givens of one’s life (and potentially, at least partially, transcending them).
Thus, both facticity as the objective givens of our various situations and transcendence as our subjective freedom to take up and engage with those givens are always ambiguously mixed in our lives. Existentialists urge us to accept this ambiguity as an inevitable part of human existence. Flynn writes: “These subjective and objective factors cannot be weighed and measured with precision. In fact, this ambiguity of the given and the taken pervades our individual and social lives.”3
Although it means we can never reach a state of complete certainty without some form of self-deception, ambiguity also implies an absence of a final, predetermined path we must follow. In other words, although ambiguity is uncomfortable and can be frightening, there would be no freedom without it – only facticity.
These are not entirely unproblematic ideas. We could justifiably question Beauvoir’s implicit assumptions underlying the claims expressed in this passage. For example, does the charge of ‘laziness and timidity in their resignation’ and, therefore, incomplete honesty, really apply to all women, regardless of their socio-economic status? Doesn’t Beauvoir presuppose here the position of white, middle- and upper-class women, without acknowledging it? However, even though such objections are warranted, her points about how facticity influences our options to act are valid.
keep exploring!
P.S. Thank you for visiting the humanfactor.blog! If you enjoyed this post and are interested in more philosophical content, I invite you to explore the blog, comment, like, and subscribe to get notified of new posts.
Featured Image Credit: Image by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 from Pixabay
humanfactor 