I sit staring at the crumpled pile of paper advertising events and clubs and societies from the Students’ Union languishing in a pile on my table after a busy fortnight of Fresher’s events. How bizarre, that I should be racking my head over the equally messed up idea of freedom.

Interpretation in our lives is important. Whatever we transmit through language and action carries its meaning within itself. We interpret our own ideas after thinking them through in our minds the split second before we speak them, or act on them. But what of freedom? How do we know we have freedom in our lives? How do we express it? Is it purely about civil liberties? Surely not.

The Oxford English Dictionary has fifteen definitions for the word ‘freedom’. Civil liberty, although fundamentally important in the strict pragmatism of our world, comes in… second. Wittgenstein once wrote, at the end of his Tractatus, that ‘what we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence’. Freedom is in my view one of those things. When we think of it, of course we may immediately look to Shami Chakrabati and aspire to her energy in combating for civil liberties. But surely history has proven time and time again that civil liberty is an often blood-stained conflict between ideologies:

This common Italian nursery song from a generation ago is of Fascist origins. But can we really say that the children to whom it was sung were really free to understand its meaning? Would one not find it politically incorrect now that the diminutive ‘faccetta’ and familiar ‘tu’ are used, and that ‘blacks’ may only ‘hope’ for salvation? ‘No need to understand it to enjoy it,’ one might say. But surely that is the problem. To see the civil liberties debate as an isolated island is to place it out of context.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, the collective threesome that comprises the French state motto, is one social perspective of freedom that stands out altogether due to its historical impact and its origins. It is a social axiom – that the individual is placed at the centre of the state. To anyone with a sense of history, this was clearly a turning point and the First Revolution, although not as glorious as often made out, made ripples in world history. Democracy at its purest, a citizen-driven idea, was thus developed and human rights were a fundamental feature of the 1789 Declaration of Human Rights.

But what of the state? Is it not itself comprised of human beings? Be it in accord with the trias politicas or not, a fundamental conflict is often overlooked: if we are all individuals to be respected in a free society, how are we to do so if the very idea of ‘society’ and ‘state’ implies a sharing, pooling and compromising way of life? Would we not conflict fundamentally with ourselves?

Freedom is such a nebulous concept. And when we delve into the multitude of ideas that swarm around it, we find ourselves struggling to distinguish between them. Essentially, they are all the same. Honi soit qui mal y pense: shame on him who thinks evil of it – the inherently good and noble idea of freedom.