brute fact

See also: brute-fact

English

Alternative forms

• brute-fact (in attributive use)

Noun

brute fact (plural brute facts)

1. An inscrutable datum of experience; a thing that is undeniably the case, but which is impervious to reasoned explication.
   • 1985: Guy Mansini, OSB, Analecta Gregoriana — “What is a Dogma?”: The Meaning and Truth of Dogma in Edouard le Roy and His Scholastic Opponents, page 166 (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana; →ISBN, 9788876525469)

     The rationalist, Kantian definition of truth, therefore, fails. At the bottom of every fact there is an act of reason, and thus no realist notion of truth serves; at the bottom of every rational necessity there is a choice, the act of invention, and so no critical definition of truth serves.³ ² ⁹ The forms and categories of thought themselves need verification in an experience which does not apply them so much as make them.³ ³ ⁰ That the very conditions of intelligibility change and develope is clear, according to LR, from the history of science.³ ³ ¹ Further, a list of categories given once and for all is nothing but itself a brute fact, an irrational surd, if it cannot itself be explained.³ ³ ²

   • 2008: Charles-Édouard “Le Corbusier” Jeanneret-Gris [aut.] and John Goodman [tr.], Toward an Architecture, pages 101–102 (Frances Lincoln Publishers; →ISBN

     Architecture has graver ends; capable of sublimity, it touches the most brutal instincts through its objectivity; it appeals to the highest of the faculties, through its very abstraction. Architectural abstraction has the distinctive and magnificent quality that, while being rooted in brute fact, it spiritualizes this, because brute fact is nothing other than the materialization, the symbol of a possible idea. Brute fact is amenable to ideas only through an order that is projected onto it. The emotions aroused by architecture emanate from physical conditions that are ineluctable, irrefutable, forgotten today.