Seventy-five years ago, on August 26, the coroner at
Grosvenor Sanatorium, a sprawling Victorian pile located in the town of
Ashford, about 60 miles southeast of London, ended his examination of a patient
who had died two days earlier. The cause of death, he wrote, was “cardiac
failure due to myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation
and pulmonary tuberculosis.” But the clinical assessment then gives way to what
appears to be an ethical judgment: “The deceased did kill and slay herself by
refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
The deceased was buried in Bybrook Cemetery in
Ashford; a flat marker laid across her grave was engraved with her name and
relevant dates:
Simone
Weil
3
février 1909
24 août 1943
Weil’s grave, its location highlighted on the cemetery
map, has since become one of Ashford’s most visited tourist sites. By way of
acknowledging the constant stream of visitors, a second marble slab explains
that Weil had “joined the Provisional French government in London” and that her
“writings have established her as one of the foremost modern philosophers.”
But one can fit only so much on a grave marker. In
January, Weil arrived in London in order to work for Charles de Gaulle’s Les
Français libres. Yet as was so often the case in her life, she eventually
refused to belong to any club that would accept her as a member. Four months
after she joined the Gaullist movement, Weil announced her resignation. She
gave as her reason the fact that her superiors had repeatedly refused her
request to be sent on mission to occupied France.
Such a mission, Gaullist headquarters believed, would
end in Weil’s capture and death. The odd thing is that Weil didn’t disagree.
She tried to persuade Maurice Schumann, an old friend who had become one of de
Gaulle’s advisors, that any assignment “not requiring technical expertise but
involving a high degree of hardship and danger, would suit me perfectly.” Even
more improbably, Weil declared that should she be arrested, her feeble health
guaranteed she would die “without giving anything away.”
But there is an even odder aspect to all of this, one
that reflects the gravestone’s claim that Weil is “one of the foremost modern
philosophers.” During her short life, Weil published very little. A graduate of
France’s elite institution of higher learning, the École normale supèrieure,
Weil worked hard at avoiding the sort of work expected of her. Though she
taught in several different lycées, Weil grasped, as she told one student, that
teaching kept her away from “real life.” To the dismay of school administrators
— one of whom dubbed her the “Red Virgin” — she demonstrated with striking
workers, participated in labor union debates, taught adult education classes,
and wrote for a variety of newspapers. Like George Orwell and Albert Camus,
while Weil was very much on the political left, she distrusted revolutionaries
no less than she did reactionaries. Certain that a Marxist regime, even more so
than a monarchist regime, would lead to totalitarian rule, Weil threw her
support to anarchist and syndicalist organizations.
Even these activities, though, were not real enough.
For Weil, reality was rooted in the world of manual labor. Often, a morbid
romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one
baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly
useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same
confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want
is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat
at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian
bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they
disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never
stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a
meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”
But something else — something that shrinks or
skeptics cannot explain away — was at work in Weil’s pursuit of work. “So far
as one has only an idea, one has nothing that’s real,” she insisted. “The great
human error is to reason in place of finding out.” The task of finding out meant
stepping outside the laboratory or library, the cafe or classroom. Philosophy,
she reminded herself in her journal, “is exclusively an affair of action and
practice.” She might have added that it is also an affair of truth, but as she
told her students, truth must “always be a truth about something.” Something
lived, something experienced, something pounded into one’s bones. This truth,
she sensed, eluded her fellow intellectuals, even though they pretended to
speak for workers. How could they wax theoretical on the alienation of workers
when “they themselves have never been cogs in the machinery of factory”?
Weil’s quest to match her words with the world led her
not just to fishing trawlers and farms, but also, and most famously, to
factories. In late 1934, Weil took a leave of absence from teaching and spent
the next year working at three different factories in Paris. It was within the
walls of these deafening and dreary buildings, yoked to a machine where she was
condemned to repeat the same motions countless times, that Weil made one of her
most disturbing discoveries: le malheur. Best translated as affliction, this
inhuman state resulted less from physical suffering than from psychological
degradation. Reduced to a machine-like existence by their relentless and
repetitive physical labor, harried by time clocks and hounded by foremen, the
workers were quite simply unable to think at all, much less think about
resistance or rebellion. This apprenticeship in alienation forced upon Weil the
realization that the factory makes it “almost impossible for me to overcome the
strongest temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking anymore,
which is the one and only way of not suffering from it.”
But Weil was cursed by the inability to stop thinking,
even in the most dire of circumstances. How could it be otherwise? If she had
stopped thinking, she would have stopped being Simone Weil. Chain-smoking
cigarettes, adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses, and wearing the same dress she
had the day before (and would wear again the next day), Weil repeated a core
conviction to her students: “If one stops oneself from thinking of all this,
one makes oneself an accomplice of what is happening. One has to do something
quite different: take one’s place in this system of things and do something
about it.” If philosophy didn’t lead to such a conclusion, it wasn’t worth the
paper it was written on.
Come France’s defeat and occupation by the Nazis, the
imperative to “do something about it” grew unbearable. In part, what Weil did
was write. The last three years of her life were, at least from a literary
perspective, the most productive. She wrote under a pseudonym while living in
Marseille — a necessity, since the Vichy regime prohibited Jews from all
white-collar professions — and continued to write when she reached New York. It
was as a writer and thinker that Weil caught the attention of Les Français
libres, who brought her to London in late 1942 to assist in making plans for
the reestablishment of republican government and law after France’s liberation.
During the few months that she spent there, Weil wrote several hundred pages,
ranging from terse analyses to what is perhaps her magnum opus, L’Enracinement,
or On the Need for Roots.
But for Weil, none of these works, despite their
compelling and often unsettling insights, qualified as doing something about
it. Writing was not enough. As Weil told Schumann, “The suffering all over the
world obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties and
the only way I can revive them and release myself from the obsession is by
getting for myself a large share of danger and hardship.” What better way, Weil
thought, to get this share of danger and hardship than as a nurse? Not the
usual sort of nurse, like those treating her in Ashford and to whom she was
quite kind. (The doctors, on the other hand, lived in white-knuckled terror of
visits to her room.)
Instead, Weil had in mind a different vocation for
nurses, one she described in painstaking detail in a series of drafts. In the
title to one she wrote in English — “A plan for a group of volunteer fire-line
[sic] nurses” — the spelling mistake is all too telling. The nurses’ mission
was less to save the lives of wounded soldiers than to offer up their own
lives. Parachuted onto the front lines, the nurses would serve by applying
dressings and tying tourniquets on the injured. More important, though, the
women, whose white uniforms were tantamount to the wearing of bull’s-eyes,
would serve themselves up as targets for German soldiers. As Weil explained
matter-of-factly, “They would need to offer their lives as a sacrifice.”
General de Gaulle possibly read no further than this
line when he famously blurted: “Mais elle est folle!” Perhaps Weil was a bit
mad, but as the rest of the plan reveals, there was a method to her madness.
She observes, rightly, that German military successes were not just a matter of
strategy and material, but also spirit and men. This was particularly the case
for the SS, who were prepared “not only for risking their lives but for death.”
The trick was not to copy Nazism’s brutal idolatry, Weil noted, but instead to
create its opposite. Embodying compassion and solicitude, not cruelty and
savagery, the nurses would be sent “wherever there is the most brutal carnage
something which evokes the homes [our soldiers] have been obliged to leave.”
Not surprisingly, Weil wished to lead the first wave
of nurses to be airdropped onto the battlefield, and took a first aid course in
hopeful preparation for her assignment. But when her plan elicited nothing more
than silence or shock, Weil despaired of doing something about the war. Or, at
least, doing something beyond what she had been doing for months: eating no
more than those living in occupied France, who were subject to extreme
rationing, were able to eat. Given her tubercular lungs, paralyzing migraines,
and weak heart, this act of “doing something” proved no less fatal than
parachuting onto the front lines.
Yet her dashed hopes remained with her till her dying
day. The last entry she wrote in her journal was just one word: “Nurses.”
Did Weil, as the coroner concluded, kill herself? We
will never know the answer, of course. But I cannot help but quote a coroner’s
report on a Jesuit priest from The Plague, a novel by one of Weil’s great
admirers, Albert Camus: hers is a “doubtful case.” For Weil, death was neither
the means nor the end to philosophy. Instead, it was a possible consequence of
doing philosophy — at least if we understand philosophy not as an academic
discipline, but as a way of life. As the contemporary philosopher Costica
Bradatan observes in his brilliant study Dying for Ideas, “philosophizing is
not about thinking, speaking or writing […] but about something else: deciding
to put your body on the line.”
This is too much to ask of nearly all of us, at least
to the fatal degree Weil asked it of herself. But as with Socrates and Seneca,
Weil obliges us to recall not just the price of the philosophical life, but
also its purpose.
Remembering Simone Weil: The Price and the Purpose of
Philosophy. By Robert Zaretsky. Los Angeles Review of Books , August 24, 2018
In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt, German-Jewish émigré and political theorist extraordinaire,
chillingly wrote: “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of
totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up
whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery
in a manner worthy of man.” (p.459, Harvest edition 1979). Totalitarianism is
decidedly different from garden-variety authoritarianism. But the cascading
environmental, economic, and political crises we face as a species, and the
rising tide of fascism and authoritarianism around the globe, make it clear
that, although the present is grim enough, the future has the potential to be
very dark indeed. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history may not repeat
itself, but it does rhyme. So we must urgently answer the question of how to
humanize modernity “in a manner worthy of man.” How can we create a world where
all people feel grounded and truly at home? Arendt, and her French contemporary
Simone Weil, may offer us answers.
One of the key characteristics of capitalist
modernity, Hannah Arendt thought, was that people live as “isolated individuals
in an atomized society,” in a world premised on the infinite expansion of
profit and power and the ruthless marginalization of anyone considered
disposable or superfluous (Origins p.235). Arendt noted that as a result, the
first half of the twentieth century spawned “homelessness on an unprecedented
scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth” (p.vii).
Warnings about the tremendous danger of rootlessness
run throughout The Origins of Totalitarianism’s nearly five hundred pages.
Arendt argued that people who feel themselves to be rootless or homeless will
seek a home at any price, with possibly horrific results. For this reason, the
“competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual” (p.317) in
capitalist mass society can pave the way for authoritarianism and
totalitarianism. Indeed, the atomized and individualized mass is a necessary
precondition for totalitarianism (p.318). Languishing in a “situation of
spiritual and social homelessness” (p.352), shorn of sustaining social bonds
and ties, individuals are forced to live in a world where they cannot exist
meaningfully and fruitfully. They try to escape this agonizing limbo and, in
the absence of powerful inclusive left-wing alternatives, they look to
exclusivist reactionary movements for succour. In this way, tribalism and
racism are the bitter fruit of territorial rootlessness. They are wrongheaded
attempts to secure roots. But rather than securing roots for the rootless
masses, they simply create ‘metaphysical rootlessness’. Totalitarian and
proto-totalitarian movements represent what Arendt calls a ‘fictitious home’
for people to “escape from disintegration and disorientation.” (p.381) Their
ideology provides a psychic haven for the resentful, the enraged, and the
fearful: “Before they seize power and establish a world according to their
doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency… in which,
through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home…” (p.353). But as
with tribalism and racism, totalitarianism intensifies the very rootlessness,
isolation, and alienation that many people sought to flee in the first place.
As Arendt wrote, loneliness constitutes “the essence of totalitarian
government” (p.475), and the “isolation of atomized individuals provides not
only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very
top of the whole structure” (p.407). She observes that “What prepares men for
totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that
loneliness… has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our
century.” (p.478)
Arendt also says that up rootedness and
superfluousness have been “the curse of modern masses since the beginning of
the industrial revolution” (p.475). Up rootedness is often the preliminary
condition for superfluousness, and superfluousness leads to ‘the genocide of
the superfluous’. The genocidal nightmare that destroyed Europe and culminated
in the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuclear incineration of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was fundamentally caused by a psychological and
spiritual crisis. This crisis was itself caused by a host of factors, primarily
economic, but also philosophical, cultural, and social. The fabric of
capitalist modernity was unsuited to human life, and the result of this
maladjustment of social systems to the basic human need for rootedness, was
death on an immense scale. For, according to Arendt, the principle of endless
accumulation at the heart of capitalism, the principle which causes up
rootedness and superfluity in the first place, is deadly: “its logical
consequence is the destruction of all living communities” (p.137). This is
because communities require boundaries and demarcation. Against the
perpetual-motion mania of capitalism and its rejection of any limits, Arendt
advocates stability, order, and borders – to be achieved through principles
that ground, delimit, and root people physically and psychically.
Simone Weil, writing at the height of World War II in
some of the darkest hours of the struggle against fascism, arrived at a similar
conclusion in her oft-neglected but magnificent book, The Need for Roots
(1943). The book was about the reconstruction of France and, by implication,
all of Western civilization. In it she wrote that: “To be rooted is perhaps the
most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” (p.41)
Weil’s method for rerooting humanity is to identify
fundamental human needs and devise ways of fulfilling each of them, detailing
necessary social reforms. Arendt defined rootedness as having a “place in the
world, recognized and guaranteed by others” (Origins, p.475). Weil defines
rootedness similarly, albeit in more depth, saying that it is “real, active,
and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living
shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular
expectations for the future” (The Need for Roots, Routledge & Kegan Paul
1952 edition, p.41).
Weil is candid in admitting that it’s difficult to
derive a general principle which tells us when we’ve discovered a need; but she
quite rightly says that the needs of the body are obvious, that the needs of
the soul are identifiable by introspection and careful thought, and that one
hallmark of all needs is that they have limits (p.11). She takes it as morally
axiomatic that biological needs generate obligations and social rights. It’s
evident that all people need shelter, food, water, heat, clothing, healthcare,
and other essentials to maintain themselves, and Weil says this creates a duty
for society to provide them. Where her thought is more surprising is when she
talks about non-biological needs, or what she calls ‘the needs of the soul’.
Gently pushing back against materialists who might neglect such needs, she
reminds us that “Everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can
injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of
a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul” (p.7).
The analogy Weil draws between food for the soul and
food for the body is instructive, as it underscores the thought that bodily and
spiritual needs are equally important for human thriving. This isn’t to suggest
that suffering an empty stomach is acceptable so long as the hungry person’s
need for freedom of expression is met, for example. But it is a useful reminder
for an age that, under the influence of utilitarianism and neoliberal
economics, thinks about politics in strictly material terms. Politics must
nurture body and soul.
The primary spiritual need is for order. But Weil uses
the word ‘order’ in a rather unorthodox sense. Conventionally, a politics centred
on order would be authoritarian and hierarchical. She does speak elsewhere of a
spiritual need for ‘hierarchism’ – that is, a sense of being fitted into a
definite position in a harmoniously ordered social mechanism; but her idea of
order is more aesthetic and philosophical than it is explicitly political. Weil
defines order as beauty, harmony, and the reduction of contradiction between an
individual’s various moral duties. She believes that one measure of a society’s
sickness is the level of dissonance that an individual confronts in trying to
fulfill all her moral duties.
The second spiritual need is for liberty, which Weil
defines as true, genuine, substantive freedom of choice. Anticipating behavioural
psychology and existentialist philosophy, echoing classical critiques of luxury
and license, and harmonizing with Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), she
writes, “When the possibilities of choice are so wide as to injure the
commonweal, men cease to enjoy liberty. For they must either seek refuge in
irresponsibility, puerility, and indifference – a refuge where the most they
can find is boredom – or feel themselves weighed down by responsibility at all
times for fear of causing harm to others. Under such circumstances, men
believing wrongly that they are in possession of liberty, and feeling that they
get no enjoyment out of it, end up thinking that liberty is not a good thing”
(p.13). We live in an age of apparently unparalleled latitude of choice; but
many of these choices are artificial, manufactured, and, to use Sigmund Freud’s
term, based on the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. So here the tyranny of
choice is undeniable; and as Weil’s discussion of excessive choice and its
antagonism towards liberty itself suggests, the word ‘tyranny’ is more than a
mere rhetorical flourish. A rooted society would instead restrict choice
somewhat, in order to make our choices real. (She elsewhere advocates absolute
freedom of expression.)
Many of our spiritual needs are paired and opposite.
This reflects Weil’s understanding that the soul has different needs at
different times and that it may have contradictory needs at the same time.
First, Weil thinks that the human soul has both the
need to obey – that is, to freely bestow one’s consent to legitimate authority
– and the need to exercise responsibility, which she links to the desire to
“feel oneself useful and even indispensable” (p.14). This is reminiscent of the
classical Athenian ideal that every citizen rule and be ruled in turn. Making
decisions is tiring. After a while it can be quite a relief to delegate one’s
decisions to a person or institution that you trust, secure in the belief that
they will do the right thing. To dip into psychoanalysis a bit, for people
fortunate enough to have loving parents, this hearkens back to infancy and
youth, when you entrusted your parents with the task of looking after your
needs. However, over-reliance on others can give rise to indolence and
decadence, and having others trust and rely on you to a certain extent can be
tremendously empowering. It is vital for human health and wellbeing to have the
power to make a difference to another person or to the world at large. There’s
a reason psychologists discuss people’s loci of control and their sense of
self-efficacy: people who have autonomy and responsibility are happier. To take
a simple example, elderly patients in nursing homes who care for plants have
better health than those who don’t. Weil herself notes that unemployment
confounds the need to feel useful, and consequently, she thinks unemployment
must be abolished.
Another duality Weil identifies is the need for
equality on one hand and the need for social prestige on the other. She isn’t a
communist or socialist, so she doesn’t seem to believe in economic equality;
but she does advocate the absolute equality of respect for all people
regardless of their social station, and she deplores the pernicious influence
on society of capitalism’s money-worship: “By making money the sole, or almost
the sole, motive of all actions… the poison of inequality has been introduced
everywhere” (p.17). Yet in addition to the need to be treated equally, people
need to distinguish themselves, benignly, from their fellow citizens. We are
all individuals, and our individuality demands respect.
Social recognition is one of our most fundamental
needs as social beings, as Hegel famously recognized with his formulation of
the master-slave dialectic. Weil also asserts that people have an innate
longing for social prestige, the desire to belong to a “noble tradition enshrined
in past history and given public acknowledgment” (p.19). Cultural and religious
traditions, professional lore, and other forms of collective memory, must be
preserved and transmitted, so we can enjoy a direct connection to our forebears
and root ourselves in time. Donald Trump’s stunning election victory has
illuminated the fraught relationship between equality and social prestige. The
grotesque level of economic inequality in America, coupled with simmering
cultural resentments towards political elites who are separated from
working-class Americans of all races by immense social and economic chasms, has
propelled both left- and right-wing populism. Part of what lifted Trump to the
White House was undoubtedly fear of immigration and a reaction against progress
towards equality for minority groups. (Unfortunately, such progress had been
more symbolic and cultural than substantive anyway.) But these regressive
elements of voters’ motivations cannot be easily disentangled from economic
elements, partially because economic inequality aggravates racism and
xenophobia by stoking anxieties about jobs and security.
Several other ideas Weil mentions are extremely
relevant for present-day politics. She thinks human beings crave security,
which she defines as freedom from fear and terror, most notably liberation from
the threat of unemployment and ‘police persecution’ (p.32).
Fearful animals lash out; insecure people do the same.
Weil wisely observes that “Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever
is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others” (p.45). Arendt agrees, writing that
“rootlessness as a conscious aim was based primarily upon hatred of a world
that had no place for ‘superfluous’ men, so that its destruction could become a
supreme political goal” (Origins, pp.196-197). Weil calls unemployment “up
rootedness raised to the second power” (p.43): it doubly destabilizes people’s
lives, cutting them off from both money and social connections. Its spectre
constantly haunts the most vulnerable members of society. Weil identifies
money-power and economic domination as two of the biggest causes of
destabilization, declaring: “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to
penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive” (p.42). Capitalism
injects instability and fear into every nook and cranny of social life. People
rendered superfluous by the churning mechanism of an inhuman economic order
want others to feel the sting they felt feel from ostracism and dehumanization.
Insecurity breeds resentment; resentment breeds outright hostility. Weil
opines, probably correctly, that risk is an ineradicable element of the human
condition and the human soul in fact desires some level of risk; but she is
adamant that knowing one’s basic material needs will be met is essential if
people are to feel securely rooted in society.
Weil’s final pairing of needs is very
thought-provoking: private property and collective property.
First, she thinks that every person or family should
own their own house, land, and tools. That is, to be independent, every person
should control their own means of subsistence. Moreover, psychological research
attests to the fundamental importance we attach to objects. The objects we own
aren’t simply things we use: we invest beloved objects with spiritual and
symbolic value; they become parts of the self. Ensuring that every person owns
certain goods that they can call their own makes good psychological sense.
However, in isolation, this might feed into a false sense of social
independence. On the contrary, we are all dependent on other people throughout
our lives. Our interdependence is an inescapable, if sometimes irritating,
aspect of what it means to be human. People might be tempted to deny this if
the economy is entirely structured around the ideal of independence. Yet some
recognition of the importance of private property is perfectly compatible with
an economy that acknowledges the irreducibly social nature of our communal
life.
While not calling for nationalization or
collectivization as some might well do, Weil balances the need for private
property with the need for collective property. In her view, individuals
require a sense of genuine ownership of public and communal goods in order to
identify with the collectivity. The alienation and dehumanization that comes
with modern workplace conditions make this sense of identification impossible
for workers in large factories and corporations. So Weil calls for the
abolition of large industrial enterprises and the “dispersion of industrial activity”
(p.74). She recommends a return to small-scale industry, artisanal production,
and craftsmanship. Working to realize Weil’s ideal of everyone having private
ownership of their means of production would require a massive, yet massively
beneficial, redistribution of wealth and power from Wall Street to the working
class and the poor. Indeed, in our age of mostly unchecked global warming and
colossally concentrated corporations, such a non-reformist reform is crucial.
The Need for Roots isn’t beyond criticism. Weil’s
heavy emphasis on Christianity is somewhat unsuited to the spirit of our
pluralist age (and probably wasn’t entirely in tune with the spirit of the age
in 1943, either). Secularism may indeed need some rethinking: part of the
problem of modernity is excessive rationalization. The disenchantment of the
world is unhealthy, and modern life needs to be respiritualized. But most of us
can no longer take Christian principles as given. Weil’s elevation of physical labour
to the pinnacle of civilized values is related to her social Catholicism, and
seems dated today. It has a reactionary flavour and poses distinct problems for
those of us who wish to champion increased leisure as we think about
reconstructing our society for an age whose technological possibilities are
incomparably greater than in the 1940s. But, setting such minor difficulties
aside, Weil’s book is a masterpiece, and her thought is refreshingly clear and
free from modern cant.
Weil’s analyses of the human soul’s many needs are united
by two essential motifs: spirituality and connectedness. She wants to
reintroduce spirituality to modernity, enabling the earthly realm of politics
to at least partially reflect the “realm situated high above all men” (p.18).
People exist in space and time, and Weil dwells on the
importance of rooting ourselves temporally as well as physically. We need to
feel connected to the past and its resources; the sense of continuity in time
we derive from history is an essential nutrient for the soul (p.96). Cautioning
us against facile progressivism, Weil notes: “It would be useless to turn one’s
back on the past in order to simply concentrate on the future. It is a
dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible” (p.48). She
also movingly comments: “Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or
individually, is the supreme human tragedy” (p.114). The uprooting of culture
is a problem that must be combated via educational reforms if we are to
establish ourselves securely on the planet. We must learn to see ideas and
concepts as living nodes in a grand interconnected web of knowledge and wisdom.
In this context, the disjointed jumble of disconnected facts and desiccated
data that these days often passes for education is itself a threat to rootedness.
Weil wrote prophetically that “Four obstacles above
all separate us from a form of civilization likely to be worth something: our
false conception of greatness; the degradation of the sentiment of justice; our
idolization of money; and our lack of religious inspiration” (p.209). If we
read the word ‘religious’ generally, or substitute the word ‘spiritual’, she is
absolutely right. She also wrote that the task facing the Western world was
“transforming society in such a way that the working-class may be given roots
in it” (p.46). More than seventy-five years later, our task has not changed.
A Radical Cure: Hannah Arendt & Simone Weil on the
Need for Roots. By Scott Remer. Philosophy Now, August / September 2018.
Seventy-five years ago, the French philosopher and mystic
Simone Weil joined Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement in London. We do
not know if the Catholic and conservative general, who never met Weil, knew she
had left her post as a professor of philosophy in order to work on assembly
lines, left her family to fight alongside anarchists in Spain and left her
country to escape the anti-Semitic Vichy regime. All we do know is that de
Gaulle read Weil’s plan to parachute white-uniformed nurses onto battlefields,
armed only with the obligation to succor the injured and sacrifice their own lives.
Setting down the paper, de Gaulle blurted: “But, she’s crazy!”
De Gaulle was right about the plan, but not the person.
In fact, Weil’s reflections on the nature of obligation offer a bracing dose of
sanity in our perplexing and polarizing times. During the final months of her
life — she died in the summer of 1943 — Weil wrote of several of her most
subversive and seminal texts. (That they were essentially position papers for
the Free French makes them all the more extraordinary.) This is particularly
true for “Human Personality” and “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,”
both of which are devoted to distinctions Weil insists upon personal rights and
impersonal duties.
When we talk about justice today, we almost always find
ourselves talking about rights we believe are entrenched in nature and have
been enshrined in our founding documents. This language reflects a liberal
conception of human action and interaction, casting us as rational agents who
reach agreements with one another through calculation and negotiation.
Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, while each of us “has a
conception of the good or worthwhile life,” none of us accepts “a socially
endorsed conception of the good.” In essence, the ideal of right has ceded to
the ideal of rights.
The problem, for Weil, with the liberal conception of
rights — and the laws that codify them — is that it is rooted in the personal,
not the impersonal. Our society, she insists, is one where personal rights are
tied at the hip to private property. Taking his cue from Weil, political
theorist Edward Andrew suggests that a rights-based society “is the consensual
society where everything is vendible at constitutional conventions or the
marketplace.” This reveals what Weil, like Thomas Hobbes, believes to be the
sole universal truth concerning human affairs: certain groups will always wield
greater clout than other groups. “Rights talk” deals with the relative and
alienable, not absolute and inalienable. For Weil, the old joke about our legal
system — “How much justice can you afford?” — takes on a tragic immediacy.
Moreover, the emphasis on “inalienable human rights”— a
phrase, Weil declares, history has shown to be meaningless — blinds us to the
only true good, one rooted in what Weil calls the “impersonal.” This term,
paradoxically, describes what is most essential to our flesh and blood lives:
the needs shared by all human beings and the obligations (and not rights) to
one another that they entail. These needs, listed in her “Draft for a Statement
of Human Obligations,” include nourishment and clothing, medical care and
housing, as well as protection against violence. (Though opposed to capital
punishment, Weil made an exception for rape.)
With her knack for striking illustrations, Weil confronts
us with the limits of rights claims. “If someone tries to browbeat a farmer to
sell his eggs at a moderate price, the farmer can say: ‘I have the right to
keep my eggs if I don’t get a good enough price.’ But if a young girl is being
forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation,
the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”
This is why, when we ask why we have less than others, we
are getting personal, but when we ask why we are being hurt, we are getting
impersonal. And for Weil, the impersonal is good in every sense of the word. In
the case of her illustration, Weil finds the notion of rights ludicrous because
the girl is not being cheated of a profit. Instead, she is being cheated of her
very humanity. There is no true compensation for such acts. And yet, by
confusing personal rights with impersonal (or universally shared) needs, we
burden ourselves with a language that deflects us from what is truly at stake.
As Weil declares: “There is something sacred in every human being, but it is
not their person. It is this human being; no more and no less.”
While Weil was responding to the crisis of Western
democracies confronting the challenge of fascism, her essays can also help us
think about our own crisis of political governance and legitimacy. Take the
current debate over the Trump administration’s proposal to cut funding for the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, or food stamps.
Rather than receiving cash installments on their electronic benefit-transfer
cards, those enrolled in the program will instead receive boxes of tinned and
canned food.
Fortunately, the proposal seems fated for the shredding
machine, but it still serves as a useful example. Those using rights language
would reply that the government hasn’t the right to cut their money payments
because they have the right to do their own shopping. But we can also frame the
criticism in obligation language: “It is unjust to replace financial assistance
with box meals, which will punish both our physical and emotional well-being.”
While the first response would ignite what Weil calls the “spirit of
contention,” the latter response might “touch and awaken at its source the
spirit of attention.”
In other words, such a reply asks us to forget about
ourselves and instead attend to other lives. Moral situations require, as one
of Weil’s great fans, Iris Murdoch, wrote, an “unsentimental, detached,
unselfish and objective perspective.” Such attentiveness allows a moral and
political clarity that “rights language” simply cannot. Paying attention, for
Weil, is the most fundamental of our obligations. It forces us to recognize
that what she calls “le malheur,” or suffering, lies in store for all of us. “I
may lose at any moment,” she wrote, “through the play of circumstances over
which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including things that
are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself.”
This includes my sense of autonomy, reflected in so banal
an act as buying groceries, but also in much more dramatic acts. The
contemporary philosopher Andrea Nye suggests that Weil also throws a bracing
light on the debate over abortion. In effect, the related notions of obligation
and attention offer a third way between those who claim the fetus’s right to
life and those who insist upon a woman’s right to choose. Rejecting these
rights-based claims, Nye writes, a “Weilian feminist might listen to the women
themselves as they attempt to make sense of their lives in order to come to a
binding sense of what must be done to restore social balance and create a
society in which obligations do not conflict.” Such an approach might invite a
woman seeking an abortion to fully attend to a situation which does not
implicate her alone.
I do not mean to present all this as a panacea to our
current political predicament, one that Weil would surely dismiss, as she did
France’s on the eve of World War II, as an “incredible barrage of lies, of
demagogy, of boasting admixed with panic,” one of “disarray, in sum a totally
intolerable atmosphere.” Yet, even if her insights into what she called the
“social drama” do not always lead to clarity, they do oblige us to consider how
politics would change if we made room for obligation.
What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical Reminder. By
Robert Zaretsky. The New York Times, February 20, 2018.
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization
are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive,
obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of
personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute
personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers
of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time
in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give
credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain
eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and
intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes
compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health,
and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are
those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer
in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a
writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.
What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who
submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of
his heart”—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous
indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is
just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a
duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky,
Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us
because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness,
and is what carries conviction.
Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as
much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the
imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the
true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not
constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion
may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the
needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of
truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore
the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought.
All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we
read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a
handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous
publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it
necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love
affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine
absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently
unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace
their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal
authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness
to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.”
As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his
own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader
pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be
his own.
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary
lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we
regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is,
roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the
latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life,
absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like
Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of
Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and
ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless
courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical
clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish
to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor
for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as
life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives,
we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what
the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense,
all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some
(but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all)
denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and
life-enhancing.
This new volume of translations from Simone Weil’s work,
Selected Essays 1934-43, displays her somewhat marginally. It contains one
great essay, the opening essay here titled “Human Personality” which was
written in 1943, the year of her death in England at the age of thirty-four.
(This essay, by the way, was first published in two parts under the title “The
Fallacy of Human Rights” in the British magazine The Twentieth Century in May
and June 1959. There it suffered the curious and instructive fate of requiring
a defensive editorial in June, when the second part of the essay appeared,
replying to criticism of the magazine’s decision to publish the essay “on the
grounds that it involves heavy going for some readers.” It certainly speaks
volumes about the philistine level of English intellectual life, if even as
good a magazine as The Twentieth Century cannot muster an enthusiastic,
grateful audience for such a piece.) Another essay, placed last in the book,
called “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” also written the year of
her death, contains matter central to Simone Weil’s ideas. The remaining essays
are on specific historical and political subjects—two on the civilization of
Languedoc, one on a proletarian uprising in Renaissance Florence, several long
essays on the Roman Empire which draw an extensive parallel between imperial
Rome and Hitler’s Germany, and various reflections on the Second World War, the
colonial problem, and the post-war future. There is also an interesting and
sensitive letter to George Bernanos. The longest argument of the book, spanning
several essays, develops the parallel between Rome (and the ancient Hebrew
theocracy!) and Nazi Germany. According to Simone Weil, who displays an
unpleasant silence on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler is no worse than
Napoleon, than Richelieu, than Caesar. Hitler’s racialism, she says, is nothing
more than “a rather more romantic name for nationalism.” Her fascination with
the psychological effects of wielding power and submitting to coercion,
combined with her strict denial of any idea of historical progress, led her to
equate all forms of state authority as manifestations of what she calls “the
great beast.”
Readers of Simone Weil’s Notebooks (two volumes,
published in 1959) and her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks
(1958) will be familiar with her attempt to derive everything distinctively
Christian from Greek spirituality as well as to deny entirely Christianity’s
Hebraic origins. This fundamental argument—along with her admiration for
Provençal civilization, for the Manichean and Catharist heresies—colors all her
historical essays. I cannot accept Simone Weil’s gnostic reading of
Christianity as historically sound (its religious truth is another matter); nor
can I fail to be offended by the vindictive parallels she draws between Nazism,
Rome, and Israel. Impartiality, no more than a sense of humor, is not the
virtue of a writer like Simone Weil. Like Gibbon (whose view of the Roman
Empire she absolutely contradicts), Simone Weil as a historical writer is
tendentious, exhaustive, and infuriatingly certain. As a historian she is
simply not at her best; no one who disbelieves so fundamentally in the
phenomena of historical change and innovation can be wholly satisfying as a
historian. This is not to deny that there are subtle historical insights in
these essays: as for example, when she points out that Hitlerism consists in
the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race
generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. (Immediately after,
of course, she says that these—both Hitler’s methods and the “normal colonial
ones”—are derived from the Roman model.)
The principal value of the collection is simply that
anything from Simone Weil’s pen is worth reading. It is perhaps not the book to
start one’s acquaintance with this writer—Waiting for God, I think, is the best
for that. The originality of her psychological insight, the passion and
subtlety of her theological imagination , the fecundity of her exegetical
talents are unevenly displayed here. Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as
surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical
with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most
uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.
Simone Weil. By Susan Sontag. The New York Review of Books.
Simone Weil. February 1, 1963
Also of interest :
Simone Weil. By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Benjamin
P. Davis. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published March 10, 2018
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