The Possibility of Freedom and The Specter of Nihilism
Richard Polt on G. Anthony Bruno’s Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant
Tracing a debate from Kant to Heidegger, Richard Polt’s review of G. Anthony Bruno’s Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant asks whether freedom comes from mastering the conditions that shape us or acknowledging the contingencies we can never overcome. Its timely challenge is directed at both identity politics and technological utopianism: human agency may depend less on transcending our limits than on confronting and transforming the world into which we are thrown.
Advocates of identity politics on both the left and the right often insist that we are inescapably situated beings, marked by what has been given to us by history, culture, our bodies, and the power relations in which we are enmeshed. We are never free of givens, never purely self-determining. One possible inference is that freedom lies only in a perpetual struggle against our enemies or oppressors. Against these views, old-fashioned Enlightenment liberalism insists that we can rise above such givens in order to establish universal, transhistorical principles or norms—ones based on our essence as self-determining, rational beings who are not defined by our circumstances.
Which stance will prevail in twenty-first-century politics is anyone’s guess. But in another sphere, the Enlightenment marches steadily on: natural science and technology appear, at least, to be based on universally valid methods that can be adopted by anyone, regardless of their background. By digesting mountains of data generated by humans of every variety, AI is now on its way to creating a godlike universal reason that (we are vaguely promised) will liberate us from our limitations, inaugurating a new age of human freedom and power. However, the concrete effects of AI so far have often been disempowering and dispiriting, as the technology seems to show that much of what we do and think can be replicated by machines. Is there any room for human creativity and self-determination anymore?
These very contemporary conundrums are anticipated in the debates within German philosophy of the 18th to 20th centuries that G. Anthony Bruno analyzes in Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant. The issues hinge on what J. G. Fichte dubbed “facticity” in 1799. The term “facticity” refers to anything about us that is sheerly, inexplicably given: it cannot be justified or created by human thought or action, but must simply be accepted as a fact. This includes any conditions that we tend to view as inescapable, such as our entanglement in history and culture, the workings of our brains, or the rules of logic itself. Fichte, along with his fellow German idealist G. W. F. Hegel, set out to eliminate all traces of facticity in the name of freedom. F. W. J. Schelling and Martin Heidegger rejected this project and insisted that some aspects of the human condition are ineluctably factical: they must be accepted as givens.
For Fichte, facticity is intolerable. Any remnant of it is to be expunged, including in the basic categories of thought. Philosophy must generate its fundamental concepts on its own rather than accepting any of them as simply given. His project embodies the spirit of autonomy and the craving for certainty that have driven much of philosophy from its inception, but that especially characterize the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Kant, whose insights Fichte tried to radicalize.
For instance, Kant claims we can know with certainty that any object we can ever understand must conform to Euclidean space, linear time, and causal laws. He aims to identify the universal categories that structure intelligible experience and to demonstrate their necessity. For Kant, fundamental categories should not be gathered haphazardly from some extrarational source—some form of facticity that simply gives them to us—but should be deduced and justified by reason.
But as Fichte complains, Kant fails to follow through on his commendable program. In the end, Kant throws up his hands: no reason, he writes, “can be offered for why we have precisely these and no other functions for judgment or for why space and time are the sole forms of our possible intuition.” In other words, these structures of experience are matters of facticity. But Fichte refuses to capitulate to any such brute facts. Bruno carefully traces Fichte’s repeated attempts to derive every philosophical concept from a primal act of “self-positing” in which consciousness generates itself.
What is at stake in these abstruse philosophical debates is nothing less than the possibility of freedom and the specter of nihilism—a word coined by F. H. Jacobi in 1799, just when Fichte invented “facticity.” By “nihilism,” Jacobi meant the denial of human freedom, purpose, and individuality—phenomena that strike the ordinary mind as obvious, but that are annihilated by rationalism. The principle of sufficient reason, that there must be some ground for the existence and characteristics of every being, ends up obliterating human spontaneity and creativity. For Jacobi, consistent rationalism terminates in Spinoza’s philosophy, where we are only parts of a single “God or nature” that unfolds with strict necessity, devoid of purpose.
Fichte shared Jacobi’s deep aversion to theories that eliminate free will. He thought that by making spontaneous self-consciousness his supreme principle, he was providing the only philosophical salvation from Spinozism. For Fichte, determinists are caught in a performative contradiction: they are people who negate the distinctive existence of people, thinkers who choose to deny the freedom of thought, agents who reject purpose on purpose. It came as a most unwelcome surprise for him, then, to discover that in Jacobi’s view, it was no less nihilistic to derive everything from self-consciousness. Jacobi was against philosophy itself, if philosophy requires eliminating facticity and grounding everything in some necessity, either objective or subjective.
As for Hegel, he will have nothing to do with Jacobi’s anti-rationalism; instead, he tries to develop a higher, “dialectical” form of reason. He intensifies Fichte’s campaign against facticity, insisting that the real is the rational and the rational is the real. Hegel admits that there are contingent and unexplained events, but they are not “real” or “actual” (wirklich) in his sense: they do no work to fulfill rationality in the world. The work of reason involves an intricate logic that culminates in reconciliation, recognition, and homecoming. Nothing crucial to this process is given over to facticity, because all its essential moments emerge with a necessity that is intrinsic to free consciousness itself. Those of us today who still believe in “progress” or “the arc of the moral universe” are indebted to Hegel’s philosophy of history.
After Hegel’s death, Schelling turns the tide by defending facticity: as ingenious as Hegel’s dialectic is, it depends on the given existence of something to which it applies. In Bruno’s words, “that anything at all exists such as to be intelligible is a brute fact.” Schelling struggles to appreciate this fact that there is something instead of nothing and that there is “meaning at all [and] not meaninglessness instead,” without pretending to explain any of this in a rationalist manner.
For Schelling, science of either the empirical or the Hegelian sort is a project that presupposes its own significance and value, and thus presupposes the fact of the knower’s own temporal existence: the knower has already decided to embark upon the project and is aiming toward some future fulfillment. At the origin of science, then, “not the concept but only the deed is decisive”—a factical deed that cannot be derived from abstract principles. The mind alone cannot make meaning, for it depends on the existence of the world and of the knower who minds, who cares about both self and world. Thus, Schelling writes, “it is man himself that is the most incomprehensible …. It is precisely man that drives me to the final desperate question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?”
Heidegger famously takes up that question in his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?” and his 1935 course Introduction to Metaphysics. For Heidegger, instead of beginning with the abstract notion of a self-determining consciousness, we should accept the phenomenon of our finite and “thrown” existence. In other words, as Bruno puts it, the “brute facts that function as conditions of intelligibility are radically contingent,” including “being-in-the-world, being-with-others, being-ahead-of-itself, being-toward-death, and being-time” (temporality, for Heidegger, is the very way in which we exist). We also always find ourselves in some mood by which we feel our thrownness, our sense of having been tossed, like a ball, into a context that we did not create. Like Schelling, then, Heidegger rejects rationalism and insists that we are beholden to meanings that we did not make. By undermining the principle of sufficient reason, he takes up Jacobi’s resistance to rationalist nihilism. Unlike Fichte, he takes freedom as a thrown condition, not pure self-determination.
Bruno is quite right that Heidegger is a defender of facticity, although calling Heideggerian facticity a set of “conditions of intelligibility” makes it sound bloodless, when what is at stake is phenomena such as mortality, anxiety, authenticity, and guilt. As Heidegger dramatically puts it in Being and Time, “The pure ‘that it is’ shows itself, but the ‘whence’ and the ‘whither’ remain in darkness.” More technically: “The concept of ‘facticity’ implies that an entity ‘within-the-world’ [namely, us] has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world.” That is, we do not hover over our surroundings and society and inspect them from some neutral point of view, but are “delivered over” to them, engaged in a particular situation. We do not just happen to be there—we are our own “there.”
In the end, Bruno comes down on Schelling and Heidegger’s side: “We ourselves are radical contingency incarnate.” We can’t “throw” the world to ourselves any more than we can hoist ourselves by our own bootstraps.
This brings us back to our own century, and to the conflict that is playing out between advocates of facticity and defenders of universality. The radical Enlightenment project of complete self-determination seems unrealistic and hubristic. Yet attachment to facticity can also go very wrong. Bruno hardly breathes a word about Heidegger’s politics, but Heidegger notoriously supported Hitler in 1933 and was sympathetic to Nazism for years after (how many years, and just how much sympathy, is still a matter of bitter debate).
Does freedom require liberation from facticity through some combination of intellectual, political, and technological measures? Is freedom a perpetual struggle among factical factions? Or does freedom lie in taking up our facticity, working with it creatively, and transforming it without ever shaking it off? However we may be inclined to answer, the question of facticity is not just a matter for academic debates, but gets fought out, day to day, by millions who will never read a word of philosophy.
Richard Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati. His publications include The Task of Time(SUNY, forthcoming), Heidegger: An Introduction (2nd ed., Cornell University Press, 2025), Heidegger on Presence (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Time and Trauma (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), The Typewriter Revolution(Countryman Press, 2015), and The Emergency of Being (Cornell University Press, 2006).
