Facticity Quotes

Consciousness does not know its own character
unless in determining itself reflectively from the standpoint of another's point of view. It exists its character in pure distinction non-thematically and non-thetically in the proof which it effects of its own contingency and in the nihilation by which it recognizes and surpasses its facticity. This is why pure introspective self-description does not give us character. Proust's hero 'does not have' a directly apprehensible character; he is presented first as being conscious of himself as an ensemble of general reactions common to all men ... in which each man can recognise himself. This is because these reactions belong to the general 'nature' of the psychic. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If writing with a goal - whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic - implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda ... a work shouldn't be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story? ~ Paul Copan

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression. ~ Rosalind E. Krauss

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. ~ William James

Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity. They do not know that facts are
factitious, as their name suggests. ~ Jean Baudrillard