To address the question of human existence, Sartre scrutinizes our everyday lives, focusing on two particular aspects. He notes that human beings, like other entities in the world, have certain concrete characteristics that make up what he calls their “facticity” or what they are “in themselves” (en soi). Facticity makes up the element of “givenness” we must work with: I find myself with a past, a body and a social situation that constrains me in what I can do. This “just being there” is above all contingent: there is no prior justification or reason for the existence of my being. On Sartre’s view, the “in itself” does not even have any determinate characteristics, since every determination (every “this, not that”) is first introduced into the totality of being by our specific interpretations of things.