 Human existence, then, cannot be thought through categories appropriate to things: substance, event, process. There is something of an internal distinction in existence that undermines such attempts, a distinction that existential philosophers try to capture in the categories of “facticity” and “transcendence.” To be is to co-ordinate these opposed moments in some way, and who I am, my essence, is nothing but my manner of co-ordinating them. In this sense, human beings make themselves in situation: what I am cannot be separated from what I take myself to be. In Charles Taylor’s phrase, human beings are “self-interpreting animals” (Taylor 1985: 45), where the interpretation is constitutive of the interpreter. If such a view is not to collapse into contradiction, the notions of facticity and transcendence must be elucidated. Risking some oversimplification, they can be approached as the correlates of the two attitudes I can take toward myself: the attitude of third-person theoretical observer and the attitude of first-person practical agent.