Facticity neither determines who we are nor resists us independently of consciousness

Evidence

Without facticity consciousness could choose its attachments to the world in the same way as the souls in Plato’s Republic choose their condition. I could determine myself to “be born a worker” or to “be born a bourgeois.” But on the other hand facticity can not constitute me as being a bourgeois or being a worker. It is not even strictly speaking a resistance of fact since it is only by recovering it in the substructure of the pre-reflective cogito that I confer on it its meaning and its resistance. Facticity is only one indication which I give myself of the being to which I must reunite myself in order to be what I am. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 343

Categorization

• XREF: The Plato’s Republic souls metaphor contrasts with how Beauvoir and later Sartre handle situated choice — a useful touchstone. — connects to: Desire is consciousness troubled by its own inapprehensible facticity; Facticity is only ever graspable as already recovered and freely constructed — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 345; Neither objective facts nor subjective associations capture an object as it is experienced — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 139 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Crystallizes facticity as an indication given to oneself, not a brute resistance — a precise negative definition.

Broader Connections

• Desire is consciousness troubled by its own inapprehensible facticity #complicates (0.75)