Abstract

The meaning of liberty cannot be simply reduced to other traditional categories, such as "capability of choice" or "free will". Human liberty is rather the dialectic, organic unity of all the functions of human acting, so that "freedom" is declined in a triple sense. First, and basically, freedom is self-motivation, that is, decision and choice; secondarily, it is also self-realization or liberation, and, finally, it is the relation to the liberty of the other. Only this plurality of meanings gives reason of the anthropologic significance of liberty as a whole, including its necessary inferences: history, labour and gratuitousness of liberty