But human beings are not merely characterized by facticity and transcendence; they are also seen as embodying a deep and irreconcilable tension between facticity and transcendence. This tension comes to the fore in Sartre’s account of “bad faith”. Bad faith, a kind of self-deception, involves believing or taking oneself to be an X while all along one is (and knows oneself to be) actually a Y. The most familiar form of bad faith is acting as if one were a mere thing—solely facticity—and thereby denying one’s own freedom to make oneself into something very different. Thus, the person who thinks she is a coward “just as a matter of fact” is excluding from view the ability to transform her existence through changed ways of behaving. Such bad faith is a denial of transcendence or freedom.