The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind Book

A strange, angry book that brings you into contact with a weird, wonderful soul -- that of a deeply intelligent mystic. I know little about Simone Weil (the In Our Time podcast from BBC 4 has an excellent introduction ), but I want to read more of her.

This is a book written in 1943 from a philosophical mind fixed on eternity to address a temporal question: how should France rebuild itself following the end of World War II? The problem at hand, in her diagnosis, is deracination -- the uprootedness of modern life. Some of her suggestions are sound, and some are impractical to the point of eye-rolling, as I imagine Charles de Gaulle's did when this was handed to him. The process of thought behind everything here, though, is startling and fresh -- you feel as if you are in conversation with an original.

Some ideas presented here:

- Obligations trump rights. We have an obligation to respect one another because we are human. Society should be built on the basis of this respect. Further concatenation: we have obligations to meet the needs -- physical and spiritual -- of human beings.

- These obligations have their basis in a platonic, heavenly realm; they are based within a Christian faith heavily drawing on Plato's ideas. Hence, the French Revolution failed because it tried to establish a secular form of society, with rights based in the finite human realm and thus unsupported.

- Punishment is "a vital need of the human soul;" punishment should be motivated by respect for the human being who has transgressed.

- Risk is another "vital need." It provides an essential stimulant for action. Without it, ennui would reign, which is just as crippling as fear is in totalitarian societies.

- Dignity of work is necessary to feel at home in a society. Understanding the place of your work's object, its products, and the role of your vocation within your community is essential, as is education of the spiritual value of your work.

- Concentration, attention, is almost holy.

- Patriotism for one's country is better replaced with compassion for one's country, for compassion affords the best discernment of reality, acknowledging flaws while looking on with love.

- Any pursuit of knowledge that is not also a pursuit of truth is corrupt, including those "savants" whose work is scientific or technical. Truth is knowledge about what you love. The lack of concern for truth in the modern world is one of the obstacles to civilization.

- Another obstacle is a false conception of greatness. By Weil's lights, Napoleon, Alexander, and Caesar are past Hitlers. Greatness, instead, should center on sacrificial love: the unknown nurse working heroics in the army hospital, the master giving up his own life to his enemy so that his slaves will not be tortured, Christ undergoing His Passion.

- Slavery, and its modern forms, colonialism and exploitation, corrupts every other aspect of society.

- The weak who are afflicted are never admired; only the afflicted who have a chance of revenge or remuneration are. She gives Christ at his arrest by Pilate as an example, for all those who loved Him abandoned Him to death.

- It's foolish to look for causality within God's Providence; trying to explain an event by reasoning that it was God's will is silliness to the point of stupidity. Instead, "the sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself."

Teaching at a high school myself, I found this quote on education striking: "Education -- whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself -- consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good -- that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution."

Also, I found an enumeration of the person I would like to become: "[Someone who has] a passionate interest in human beings, whoever they may be, and in their minds and souls; the ability to place oneself in their position and to recognize by signs thoughts which go unexpressed; a certain intuitive sense of history in the process of being enacted; and the faculty of expressing in writing delicate shades of meaning and complex relationships."

I found some things troubling, particularly her equation of the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany. This is an interesting idea, but there is a bitter, personal hate in everything she writes about ancient Rome that makes it suspect. She wrote this in 1943 in London as part of the Free French government, and I wonder how much she would have known about the genocide taking place in the Nazis' concentration camps, which, as Hannah Arendt writes in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (a good tandem read with this book, as is Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt of the Masses"), was something new in human history.

Her denunciation of the Hebrew part within the Christian tradition is also confusing, disturbing. I don't think I've ever read a writer devoted to Christ who so spurned the Old Testament. (Weil was a Jew, though she did not practice Judaism.)

However, the brilliance of the book as a whole, the impracticality of so many suggestions aside, and the curious compassion you come away with for this odd genius so serious in laying out her ideas, make it a worthwhile read. Somehow, Weil's thought engenders respect while simultaneously making her unintentionally endearing.