Human freedom is achieved socially, not through nature

Evidence

It is also worth saying that the passage from necessity to freedom takes place through the society of men and not through nature (although it may have effects on our intuition of nature, on scientific opinions, etc.). One can go so far as to affirm that, whereas the whole system of the philosophy of praxis may fall away in a unified world, many idealist conceptions, or at least certain aspects of them which are Utopian during the reign of necessity, could become “truth” after the passage. One cannot talk of the “spirit” when society is divided into groups without necessarily concluding that this “spirit” is just “esprit de corps ”! — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1445

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the necessity-to-freedom passage as a social process and clarifies why ideals like ‘spirit’ reduce to group interest under division.
• XREF: Connects to later Frankfurt School critiques of idealism and to Marx’s historical materialism as a scaffold in the critical-theory vocabulary. — connects to: Freedom is a social status conferring security and standing among others — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 30