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A review by danielad
The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind by Simone Weil
3.0
Simone Weil begins The Need for Roots with a list of our obligations towards other human beings. Against Jacques Maritain, she claims that while rights exist only insofar as there are people who recognize them, obligations are unconditioned: "An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much" (3). Among the obligations that each person has are the need for order, liberty, obedience, and responsibility. Chief among them, however, is the need for roots, that is, the need for each person to belong, whether this is an industrial worker's need to belong in a town, a farmer's need to belong in the countryside, or any given person's need to have a homeland: "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul" (41). The majority of the text contains Weil's attempt to work out the meaning of roots and the meaning of belonging. And, since it was written in the early part of 1943, the work is especially interesting for having been composed in the middle of World War II.
The need for roots arises when we are uprooted during a military invasion, through monetary greed, or through the social divisions brought about by education ("[t]he Renaissance everywhere brought about a break between people of culture and the mass of the population" (43)). When such breaks or divisions occur, our relation to our history changes and we no longer fit in where we once did. Industrial workers are uprooted when when their employers treat them as mere labourers and when their full character as human beings is ignored. They are considered valuable only as producers and not as thinking, feeling, and worshipping beings. As Weil clarifies, "the abolition of the proletarian lot, chiefly characterized by uprootedness, depends upon the creation of forms of industrial production and culture of the mind in which workmen can be, and be made to feel themselves to be, at home" (69).
Similarly, peasants and farmers are uprooted when they fail to enjoy their work: "the young man starts to spend the week dreaming about what he is going to do on Sunday. From that moment he is lost" (80). Both industrial and agricultural workers should be educated in a holistic way that leads them to enjoy their labour while seeing beauty in it. Like Gandhi, Weil demands that large factories be shut down and smaller, less centralized ones set up. Farmers ought to be encouraged to travel while industrial workers should be given their own plots of land to tend. In each case, we must consider the labourer as being a human being with value extending beyond productivity.
In the next section, Weil deals with uprootedness and nationhood. Totalitarianism begins, she argues, with Cardinal Richelieu's insistence on making the French population loyal to a more centralized state: "Richelieu wanted to enslave people's very minds; not for his own benefit . . . but for that of the State he represented. His conception of the State was already totalitarian" (111). Hence, the nation should not identify itself with a state to the extent that its religious and imaginative interests are subordinated to it. Patriotism must never be confused with total allegiance to a particular state or with imperialism - the mission of imposing a culture on those to whom it does not belong.
The final section, The Growing of Roots, concludes the book with a plan for re-rooting the French nation. While Greece (excluding Alexander the Great) and pre-12th century Christianity serve as positive models to follow, Rome and Judaism are historical failures (Weil reveals herself in this text in particular to be a modern Manichaean). Simply put, for Weil, insofar as a civilization is Roman or Jewish, it is bad, insofar as it is Greek or Christian, it is good. And so an imperialistic nation is not a rooted nation, filled with spiritual inspiration; an imperialistic nation, on the contrary, has a distorted notion of greatness. It has the same notion of greatness that empowers dictators like Hitler: "Our conception of greatness is the very one which has inspired Hitler's whole life" (210). We must replace this notion of greatness - a notion that is built on aggrandizing oneself or one's own nation at the expense of others - with a notion that recognizes 'the void' as well as the dignity of work. By 'the void' (for more on 'the void' see Gravity and Grace) Weil means the space in which an action is done or something is suffered without any thought of compensation. Hence, only once the people of France learn to see greatness in work done without any thought of compensation will they be able to re-grow the roots they have lost: "It is not difficult to define the place that physical labour should occupy in a well-ordered social life. It should be its spiritual core" (288).
So why did I give the book only three stars? I suppose it's because much of her thought seems utopian. Though I agree, for instance, that farmers should be encouraged to travel and that large factories should be demolished with smaller ones built in their stead, it seems that Weil is too optimistic. Or maybe I'm just too pessimistic. She rightly identifies many of the failures of modern European society. But these failures . . . I don't know if they can be corrected in the way she suggests. Yes, I agree that we need a spiritual revival, but I believe that only with the return of Christ will we ever be able to hope to achieve the society she pictures here. Moreover, I find her polarities between Rome and Greece, Judaism and Christianity to be a bit simplistic, especially when she characterizes particular artists as being wholly pure (Homer and Bach) in opposition to those who are less pure (Virgil and Victor Hugo). This being said, I do believe that her thought, combined with Gandhi's and others, can provide a much needed alternative to the disgusting Capitalist/Marxist polarity branded about in so many philosophy departments. If you'll allow me to digress here, Marxism is not the only alternative to Capitalism. Yes, I believe Weil's thought is too utopian. But it is much, much less utopian and ridiculous than Marxist and neo-Marxist thought. I was once mocked for suggesting that Gandhi offers a viable alternative to Marxism . . . . Who is right? Not Marx.
The need for roots arises when we are uprooted during a military invasion, through monetary greed, or through the social divisions brought about by education ("[t]he Renaissance everywhere brought about a break between people of culture and the mass of the population" (43)). When such breaks or divisions occur, our relation to our history changes and we no longer fit in where we once did. Industrial workers are uprooted when when their employers treat them as mere labourers and when their full character as human beings is ignored. They are considered valuable only as producers and not as thinking, feeling, and worshipping beings. As Weil clarifies, "the abolition of the proletarian lot, chiefly characterized by uprootedness, depends upon the creation of forms of industrial production and culture of the mind in which workmen can be, and be made to feel themselves to be, at home" (69).
Similarly, peasants and farmers are uprooted when they fail to enjoy their work: "the young man starts to spend the week dreaming about what he is going to do on Sunday. From that moment he is lost" (80). Both industrial and agricultural workers should be educated in a holistic way that leads them to enjoy their labour while seeing beauty in it. Like Gandhi, Weil demands that large factories be shut down and smaller, less centralized ones set up. Farmers ought to be encouraged to travel while industrial workers should be given their own plots of land to tend. In each case, we must consider the labourer as being a human being with value extending beyond productivity.
In the next section, Weil deals with uprootedness and nationhood. Totalitarianism begins, she argues, with Cardinal Richelieu's insistence on making the French population loyal to a more centralized state: "Richelieu wanted to enslave people's very minds; not for his own benefit . . . but for that of the State he represented. His conception of the State was already totalitarian" (111). Hence, the nation should not identify itself with a state to the extent that its religious and imaginative interests are subordinated to it. Patriotism must never be confused with total allegiance to a particular state or with imperialism - the mission of imposing a culture on those to whom it does not belong.
The final section, The Growing of Roots, concludes the book with a plan for re-rooting the French nation. While Greece (excluding Alexander the Great) and pre-12th century Christianity serve as positive models to follow, Rome and Judaism are historical failures (Weil reveals herself in this text in particular to be a modern Manichaean). Simply put, for Weil, insofar as a civilization is Roman or Jewish, it is bad, insofar as it is Greek or Christian, it is good. And so an imperialistic nation is not a rooted nation, filled with spiritual inspiration; an imperialistic nation, on the contrary, has a distorted notion of greatness. It has the same notion of greatness that empowers dictators like Hitler: "Our conception of greatness is the very one which has inspired Hitler's whole life" (210). We must replace this notion of greatness - a notion that is built on aggrandizing oneself or one's own nation at the expense of others - with a notion that recognizes 'the void' as well as the dignity of work. By 'the void' (for more on 'the void' see Gravity and Grace) Weil means the space in which an action is done or something is suffered without any thought of compensation. Hence, only once the people of France learn to see greatness in work done without any thought of compensation will they be able to re-grow the roots they have lost: "It is not difficult to define the place that physical labour should occupy in a well-ordered social life. It should be its spiritual core" (288).
So why did I give the book only three stars? I suppose it's because much of her thought seems utopian. Though I agree, for instance, that farmers should be encouraged to travel and that large factories should be demolished with smaller ones built in their stead, it seems that Weil is too optimistic. Or maybe I'm just too pessimistic. She rightly identifies many of the failures of modern European society. But these failures . . . I don't know if they can be corrected in the way she suggests. Yes, I agree that we need a spiritual revival, but I believe that only with the return of Christ will we ever be able to hope to achieve the society she pictures here. Moreover, I find her polarities between Rome and Greece, Judaism and Christianity to be a bit simplistic, especially when she characterizes particular artists as being wholly pure (Homer and Bach) in opposition to those who are less pure (Virgil and Victor Hugo). This being said, I do believe that her thought, combined with Gandhi's and others, can provide a much needed alternative to the disgusting Capitalist/Marxist polarity branded about in so many philosophy departments. If you'll allow me to digress here, Marxism is not the only alternative to Capitalism. Yes, I believe Weil's thought is too utopian. But it is much, much less utopian and ridiculous than Marxist and neo-Marxist thought. I was once mocked for suggesting that Gandhi offers a viable alternative to Marxism . . . . Who is right? Not Marx.