By an act of imagination man can shrink himself to a self that is "condemned to be free". To this shrunken or contracted self, as we call it, God is dead, the past is dead, the present is the flight from the self's non-essential facticity toward being what it is not, the future is the field of possibles among which the self must choose its project of being beyond mere facticity, and freedom is the necessity of making a choice that will determine the self's own being. The freedom of the contracted self is the self's damnation not to be able not to be free.