It is not enough to free oneself from conditioning to be truly free

What do we mean when we talk about freedom? We could offer a wide variety of answers: freedom can be a political and economic programme or the assertion of a fundamental human right; it can denote an ideal of individual self-realisation in the face of social constraints or the banner of a collective revolution; it can signify the nobility of the ‘spirit’ in the face of material constraints or liberation from any sense of superiority over our own mortality.

But what really interests us about this word? Perhaps the very thing that always troubles us about it: whether freedom is, or can be, a real experience for each of us, or whether it remains merely an illusion destined to shatter against forces beyond our control. This dilemma naturally concerns not (only) philosophical theories, but the consciousness and sense of existence that always accompany us, more often than not in a tacit manner. Like a thread that unravels and often becomes tangled in the folds of everyday life. We have all experienced how everything changes in life – encounters, events, actions and reactions, desires and constructs – through the eyes of a ‘free’ person, that is, someone open to the unexpected, unhindered by the fear of making mistakes, and ready to take risks. Herein lies the unsettling truth: freedom cannot be reduced to a strategy, and no one can say, upon waking in the morning: ‘Today I have decided to be free!’ Just as no one can say: ‘Today I decide to be happy!’

The evidence is striking. I may have freed myself from dependencies and conditioning (though never entirely), and this would undoubtedly be the first step towards freedom: doing and being what I want. At the same time, we know full well that this necessary condition is not, in itself, sufficient to feel truly free. Just as in the experience of love: it is not enough to have a strong emotional need, nor even to have full freedom to choose the ideal person to fall in love with, in order to truly fall in love. To be truly free, I must ‘fall in love’, as the English would say; that is, I must connect with or respond to someone or something that attracts me and which proves to be a desirable good for me. There you have it: freedom is the discovery that there is, in fact, something that can satisfy my desire.

It is true, as is often said, that one can never be free on one’s own: but not because one must dilute libertarian individualism with an inclusive communitarianism, or temper the desire of the ‘I’ with the moral norms of the social ‘we’. Rather, it is precisely when we feel free that we discover we are not ‘alone’. To return to the analogy with emotional experience, I may be free to choose whoever I want, whenever I want, but the experience of feeling free when the person I love reciprocates my desire is beyond compare.

This analogy can also be extended to the political sphere, where freedom would seem to be of an entirely different nature. Here too, ensuring the formal and legal conditions for the exercise of people’s rights, actions and undertakings (subject only to the constraint of not interfering with the freedom of others) is still not enough for a truly free society to emerge. In fact, one must discover and pursue a purpose or meaning greater than one’s own individual self-interest in order to finally become free to simply be, and to build, together with others (who are different from oneself), a shared endeavour.

Whatever the perspective – whether we are free or not – it is even more the feeling of being free or constrained that makes the difference to our experience of the world. And even when constraints and limitations seem truly insurmountable, even then – or perhaps precisely then – the significance of ‘freedom’ for the human experience emerges in all its weight.

On the one hand, it is the most sought-after and cherished value or asset today, incomparably more so than in other eras; on the other hand, however, it is often called into question, if not outright denied, in the face of the claim that we are always and entirely ‘determined’ by natural factors or social conditioning. This can be seen both in the field of the cognitive sciences, with the hypothesis of a strict biological or functional reductionism of human experience, and in the field of so-called artificial intelligence, whose method is to ‘datafie’ our lived experiences by processing and predetermining them through a symbolic-statistical calculation.

In short, calls for freedom come from all sides, and at the same time, it is decreed from all sides that freedom is perhaps an illusion, or at best an irrational notion. How can we navigate this dilemma? By what method? One thing is clear: before anyone can ‘explain’ to us what freedom is or teach us techniques to achieve it, we know full well when we feel free and when we do not. Experience does not deceive: we might even deceive others, but we cannot deceive ourselves. Here we are faced with the very core of what it means to be human.