While human beings share their “facticity” with other entities in the world, they are unique among the totality of entities insofar as they are capable of distancing themselves from what is “in itself” through reflection and self-awareness. Rather than being an item in the world with relatively fixed attributes, what is distinctive about me as a human being is that I am capable of putting my own being in question by asking myself, for example, whether I want to be a person of a particular sort. This capacity for gaining distance inserts a “not” or a “nonbeing” into the totality of what is, which allows me to organize what surrounds me into a meaningfully differentiated whole. In addition, human consciousness is the source of the “not” because it is itself a “nothingness”. In other words, a human being is not just an “in itself” but also a “for itself (pour soi), thus characterized by what Sartre calls “transcendence”. As transcendence, I am always more than I am as facticity because, as surpassing my brute being, I stand before an open range of possibilities for self-definition in the future.