“So far as it is act, rather than fact, moral reality can be defined as liberty. This entails, first, mediation; and, second, universality. The spirit is free inasmuch as it is a process, in which its being is situated neither at the beginning, nor the end, but in the unity of the beginning and end. My will is free only insofar as I do not detach myself from my will as a consequence of my activity and my will does not detach itself from me. By detaching one from the other, we become—to use Kantian language—two phenomena: and, like all phenomena, each is intelligible solely according to the principle of causality. I, personally, cannot be what I am not; and operari sequitur esse (function follows being); so I cannot manifest myself except in certain given actions, each of which will be what it is able to be, given its conditions. Rather, I am only 'I' insofar as I act and want: I am what I do; beyond that act I do not exist; I become a simple presupposition. I find myself to be real when acting, that is, when the act is reaching its conclusion. Not, however, that we should consider the completion of this action in its tangible external crystallization. We should rather consider it in terms of its interior usefulness or spirituality. But if I only exist as a result of my own actions, it no longer makes sense to look for the conditions that pre-existed my actions and that might somehow determine my actions.
This process or mediation is the circle in which spiritual reality is realized as reflexive activity that does not act on or create anything but itself. It expresses itself, fundamentally and immanently, by speaking of self: Ego. This is not the representation of a reality that you might imagine existing prior to the representation; it is a realization, the self-realization of the realizing self.
But what of mediation and universality? Mediation realizes the universality of the subject that arises through the act; and without universality the subject would return to itself without having differentiated itself from its immediate being. In fact, it would not even be able to return, because it would not have sufficiently distanced itself from itself. The function of spirit is to actuate the Ego; it is self-affirmation. But it would not be an affirmation if it did not go beyond the ego that has to be the object of the affirmation. Rather, it would have to arrive at an affirmation in which the affirmation itself absorbs the presumed immediate object of knowledge through the act of idealizing the initial (abstract) object and installing the new concrete object. The idealization is thus a universalization, that is, mediated universality (which is not there initially but presents itself. The thought is always this: the so-called reduction of the particular due to universal categorization. And the act of self-consciousness is the thought that lies at its core and becomes its immanent form. This is its desire or moral act: it affirms itself only by the very act of affirming itself, thereby negating its own abstract or presumed particular subjectivity in order to become a concrete universal subjectivity. Only thus do we earn our freedom.
In fact, we believe ourselves to be naturally free, but all of spiritual experience demonstrates that we must seize our liberty. Indeed, every time we affirm our liberty we implicitly acknowledge that once we were not free. On the one hand, the history of humanity runs from slavery to liberty; and men have always fought, are fighting and will forever fight for liberty. The story of each individual man, regarded as the empirical succession of moments in his particular life, is the progressive release from bonds that the individual comes to consider constraining, and from which he periodically feels the need to break free. Within the intimate dialectic of our personality, what surprises us is how we seek to satisfy the need that hangs over us, that is, the need to make our freedom a reality. It is the realization of a concrete liberty that resolves the determined problem of our concrete personality. On the other hand, our own experience tells us that man's progressive emancipation in history—and the triumph by which, day by day, man manages to carve out his freedom in the natural and social environment in which he strives to live, and the profound liberty that we celebrate deep within our soul—is nothing but subjection to a law that draws us progressively ever higher. It strips us of the egoism that makes the individual appear to be by nature sealed beneath a skin of sensation or within some thought that is particular, relative, ephemeral and arbitrary. In fact, this is an egocentric conception of life, but it raises us to the realm of universal things, values and ideals, to a reality that is not limited by time and space, and is not circumscribed by accidental conditions. In short, it raises us to a reality that is not particular. A slave became aware of liberty and his own need for it, and was therefore spurred in his struggle for liberation by the same obedience that subjected him to the will of his master. It compelled him to act upon a will that was not his innate will, but a will that he considered a law. It is no longer an individual will, but a universal will relative to the basic society in which the slave finds himself bound to the personality of the oppressor. And the slave had to conceive of that law as universal, that is, as greater than his own self in its natural existence. It was in the name of that same law that, over time, he could call for equality of rights for himself and all the other members of society. Man continues along the path of freedom via school, social coexistence and social institutions; via his ideas, his beliefs and his customs. And no one will ever know how to command if he has never learnt to obey: that is, to recognize the ideality of law as absolute, which he will need to use as a norm and title of true authority. Others cannot take authority seriously if they begin to doubt it or if they stop respecting whoever claims to be exercizing it.
But the dawning of self-consciousness, even in the individuals ideal solitude, becomes clear as it brings men together, and drives them to live a common life, in the positive concreteness of spiritual universality. Before that, life's character (which, as I said, experience attests) reveals itself by realizing a universal reality: by uttering a word, again only mentally, that would have no meaning and would not correspond to a real moment of interior life if it did not arise like a flash of universal light. The universal light is swathed in transcendental value because of the narrow limits of the particular subject. It soars before the particular subject like a great being with an absolute sense of its own self-worth.
So liberty is the mediation between self and living universality. It is not presupposed but made real in the generation of itself.” - Giovanni Gentile, ‘Discorsi di religione’ (1920)
