The argument from facticity: reassessing realism in Sartre’s early philosophy

Abstract This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s early philosophy—above all Being and Nothingness —advances a distinctive and insufficiently examined form of realism. Although Sartre rejects both classical metaphysical realism and idealism, his phenomenological ontology nevertheless commits him to a realist position that speaks directly to contemporary debates associated with “speculative” or “new” realism. At the centre of this position lies what I reconstruct as Sartre’s “argument from facticity,” which exhibits a structural parallel with recent arguments for basic or absolute facts in contemporary realism debates. Sartre anticipates these approaches while avoiding their characteristic dogmatisms—most notably, their reliance on mathematical or naturalized absolutes. His realism is neutral in that it eschews privileging domain-specific ontologies and instead treats facts as inherently temporal and indexical: they depend on temporal becoming and yet obtain universally across time. This conception is clarified by Sartre’s appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics of facticity, through which he develops an image of reality as internally incomplete yet intelligible, and of transphenomenal facts as manifestable only through the temporalisation of subjectivity. I conclude by arguing that Sartre’s realism offers a compelling alternative to contemporary realist programs—such as those of Quentin Meillassoux, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Boghossian—by maintaining the independence of reality while acknowledging the partially constitutive role of finite subjects in its manifestation.