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.
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 abt justice today we
almost always find ourselves talking
abt rights we believe are entrenched in nature & have been enshrined in our founding documents: language
that reflects a liberal conception of human action & interaction, casting us as rational agents who reach agreements with one
another through calculation/negotiation.
Charles Taylor has argued
while each of us “has a
conception of the worth-while good 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, w/ the
liberal conception of rights — & the laws that codify them is 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.
Edward Andrew suggests a rights-based society;“is the consensual society. Everything is
vendible at constitutional conventions or the marketplace.”
This reveals what Weil, like Thomas Hobbes, believes
the sole universal truth concerning human affairs: certain groups will always wield greater clout than other groups.
“Rights talk” deals with the relative
& alienable not w/
the 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
- clothing,
- medical care
- housing, as well as
- protection against violence. (Though opposed to capital punishment, Weil made an exception for rape.)
With a knack for striking
illustrations Weil confronts us
w/ the limits of rights claims.
“If someone tries to browbeat
a farmer to sell his eggs at a moderate price he can say‘I have the right to keep my eggs
if I don’t get a good price.’ But if
a girl is forced into a brothel
she won't talk abt her rights.
In this context the word
is 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 b/c the girl is not being cheated
of a profit. Instead, she is being cheated of her
very humanity. There isn't true resolve for
of a profit. Instead, she is being cheated of her
very humanity. There isn't true resolve for
such acts.
And yet, by confusing personal rights w/ impersonal (or universally shared) needs, we burden ourselves w/ language deflecting us from what's truly at stake.
Weil was responding to the crisis of
Western democracies
challenged/fascism.
Her essays also help us think abt our own crisis of governance and legitimacy.
While the first response would ignite Weil's “spirit of contention,” (the law/letter), the
latter response touches & awakens
latter response touches & awakens
it's source spirit of attention
attention.” (core/spirit).
Such a reply asks us to
forget abt ourselves and attend to other's lives.
wrote: Moral situations require,
- “unsentimental,
- detached,
- unselfish
- objective perspective.”
Such attentiveness
allows political &
moral clarity “rights language” can't.
For Weil, paying attention is the most fundamental of our obligations. It forces
us to recognize that what she calls “le malheur,”/suffering,
is in store for all of us.
“I may lose at any
moment,” she wrote,
“through the play
of circumstances
I haven't control.
Anything I possess
including things
so intimately mine
I consider them
as myself.” This covers a sense of
my autonomy re-
flected in so banal an act as groceries
buying & in
much more dramatic acts.
Philosopher
Andrea Nye
suggests that Weil throws a bracing light on the debate over abortion.
The related notions of
obligation/attention offer a third way b/t those who
claim the fetus’s right to life/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
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.
France’s on the
eve of World War II:
“incredible barrage of
- lies, of
- demagogy, of
- boasting admixed with
- panic,”
one of “disarray,
in sum, a totally
intolerable atmosphere.”
Simone Weil’s insights
might oblige us to consider how politics
would change if we made room for obligation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/opinion/simone-weil-human-rights-obligations.html
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