Jean-Paul Sartre, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Facticity is the given that freedom has to be — not its condition, not its limit in the simple sense, but the brute contingency that haunts the pour-soi without ever being fully graspable by it.1 Consider what this means precisely. The pour-soi — consciousness — is the being that is not what it is. It cannot coincide with itself, cannot become a solid mass of identity the way a stone is simply a stone.
And yet it is not nothing: it exists, it is there, at this table, in this room, in this body, in this class, in this country. That sheer thereness — evanescent, intangible, never fully actualized — is facticity.2 The for-itself apprehends it only by having already reclaimed it, already thrown a project over it that gives it meaning and resistance.
You cannot encounter facticity in its brute nakedness; the moment you turn toward it, you have already constituted it within the infrastructure of your préréflexif cogito.3 This is why the café waiter example cuts so precisely. I can play at being a café waiter and thereby be one in the only mode available to consciousness — the mode of not-being-it.
But however hard I play at being a diplomat or a sailor, I will not be one. That inapprehensible difference, between play-acting that actualizes something and play-acting that does not, is facticity at work.4 It explains why I am wholly responsible for my being as its foundation, and at the same time wholly unjustifiable. Now the objection from "good sense" presents itself immediately: if I am born a worker, French, tubercular, if the history of a life is a history of failure against the coefficient of adversity of things — how can I speak of freedom at all?5
The objection is serious and I do not dismiss it. But it rests on a confusion between facticity as brute fact and facticity as situation. The rock is not difficult or easy in itself; it develops its coefficient of adversity in relation to my body, and my body appears as puny or strong only in relation to a free choice — the choice to climb, to cycle, to do sport, or to stay in town and plead cases beneath a lawyer's robe.6
The lawyer for whom the rock does not exist as obstacle has not escaped facticity; he has chosen a project that leaves the rock undifferentiated within the totality of "the world." This is the paradox I name directly: there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. The minor civil servant in Mont-de-Marsan is not unfree to go to New York because of his location.7
Rather, it is his project — to go to New York, or to become a wealthy farmer where he stands — that constitutes Mont-de-Marsan as obstacle or as point of departure.8 Without facticity, freedom would have nothing to nihilate, nothing to choose against; without freedom, facticity would be undiscovered and meaningless.9 The two are inextricable.
Facticity, then, is not the enemy of freedom. It is what makes freedom real rather than abstract — the given that the pour-soi is obliged to keep company with, in order to be what it is, and which it can never simply discard or simply accept, but must always take up, illuminate, and surpass through the project it chooses to be.
This facticity enables us to say that the for-itself is, that it exists, even though we can never actualize our facticity, and we always apprehend it through the for-itself.Being and Nothingness, pp. 182–183
We may call this constantly evanescent contingency of the in-itself—which haunts the for-itself and ties it to being-in-itself without ever allowing itself to be grasped—the for-itself's facticity.Being and Nothingness, pp. 182–183
It is impossible to grasp it in its brute nakedness, because we only encounter it when we have already reclaimed and freely constructed it.Being and Nothingness, pp. 182–183
This inapprehensible fact of my condition, this intangible difference that sets apart the play-acting that actualizes something from play-acting tout court, explains why the for-itself, even while it chooses the meaning of its situation and constitutes itself in situation as its own foundation, does not choose its position.Being and Nothingness, pp. 182–183
I am born a worker, French, with inherited syphilis or tuberculosis. Whatever it may be, the history of a life is a history of a failure. The coefficient of adversity of things is such that it takes years of patience to obtain the tiniest result.Being and Nothingness, pp. 634–636
It is because I am there, and I have made of myself what I am, that the rock develops a coefficient of adversity in relation to my body. For the lawyer who has stayed in town and pleads his case, his body hidden beneath his lawyer's robe, the rock is neither difficult nor easy to climb.Being and Nothingness, pp. 644–645
there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom.Being and Nothingness, pp. 644–645
My location in the world, Mont-de-Marsan's relationship to New York and to China, would be quite different were my project to become, for example, a wealthy farmer in Mont-de-Marsan.Being and Nothingness, pp. 651–652
without facticity freedom would not exist—as a power to nihilate and to choose—and, without freedom, facticity would not be uncovered and would not even have any meaning.Being and Nothingness, pp. 651–652