Knowing himself as unfree was to know himself as determined by constraints that he might have been able to change but hadn't. The unfreedom was not in regard to things believed to be entirely out of his control, but precisely to those which ought to have been freely determinable. It seemed as though any instance of what he referred to as heteronomy, if looked at closely enough, would reveal a deliberate handing over of his freedom to something he believed to be more powerful. This something, which was was never in view, was both an idol and a tormentor, but its power was shown in the fact that he didn't dare take back what he had once given. He was overborne not by threats but by by sheer charisma. What remained was just a fantasy of freedom which he was able to experience only via the treacherous mediations of art or by identification with fictional characters. The experience of heteronomy when sharp and painful enough should have been a goad to wake him up to the mechanism which maintained its effects, but it been turned into something else, a perverse kind of enjoyment, and therefore a kind of negative freedom, something to stamp with the mark of identity and insist upon.