We like to think of the world as ultimately fully intelligible, a place that we will one day be able to make complete sense of, emotionally and rationally, a place where we might feel at home. But while this dream has seduced philosophers and scientists alike, it's ultimately a fantasy, argues G. Anthony Bruno. Whenever we try to make sense of the world—through experience, reason, art, or anything else—we find that our activity is shaped by certain brute conditions that are simply given, without reason. Philosophy’s task is not to dispel this strangeness, but to find how to live productively within it.

1. Is reality fully explicable?

We experience the world as a place we can make sense of—as intelligible. But what conditions make this possible? Kant argued that the world’s intelligibility conditions cannot themselves be given in experience without pushing back the question. But are these conditions given to us without any reason? Can intelligibility conditions be brute facts or must there be reasons for them? This question has divided philosophers since Kant’s Copernican revolution.

According to Kant, the intelligibility conditions of experience include space and time, the forms of judgment, the categories of the understanding, and ideas of reason. He does not think that these conditions are entirely derivable from reason itself. They seem rather to be brute facts about our standpoint, arising neither from worldly matters nor from first principles. As I show in a new book, the question of whether there are limits on what we can know about the conditions of intelligibility divides post-Kantian philosophy. Are these conditions brute facts that lie beyond explanation? Two major philosophical traditions flow from this question.

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Reality is not ultimately explicable insofar as the conditions of intelligibility are, as Kant saw, uniquely brute.

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On the one hand, there are those who aim to eliminate bruteness entirely, so that everything is explicable. Thus, German Idealists like Fichte and Hegel claim that intelligibility conditions are absolutely necessary, since, when properly deduced from pure thought, no contrary conditions are thinkable. By deducing conditions from pure thought, a science of the intelligibility of experience can remove the false appearance that such conditions are brute facts.

On the other hand, those who deem bruteness unavoidable regard it as making all meaningful endeavours, including a science of the intelligibility of experience, possible at all. Thus, phenomenologists like Heidegger claim that intelligibility conditions, although they can be philosophically interpreted, are nevertheless brute, for they are not deducible from pure thought. And yet, as Kant showed, they are also not given to us in experience.

Phenomenologists use the term “facticity” to denote such intelligibility conditions as embodiment, historicity, sociality, mortality, and temporality. For example, experience cannot ultimately explain temporality, for, insofar as it is intelligible, experience is always already temporally structured. Facticity is thus the character of the bruteness or groundlessness of intelligibility conditions. The concept of facticity is typically associated with Heidegger, as well as Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty. However, what is often overlooked is the concept’s origins in one of German Idealism’s founding figures, Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Fichte coins “facticity” to denote what he regards as intolerable bruteness in Kant’s philosophy, in which intelligibility conditions, particularly space and time, seem to be groundlessly forced onto our thinking. According to Fichte, a genuine science of intelligibility must show that such conditions are not imposed on pure thought, lest thought be just another causally determined effect in a mechanistic universe. Intelligibility conditions must rather be generated by the absolute freedom of thought—a first principle that he calls “the I”.

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