O enraizamento. Preludio a uma declaracao dos deveres para com o ser humano

by Simone Weil

Enraizar-se é entendido como um processo de identificação que acontece na relação com a história e com a cultura. Sem raízes, ao contrário, o ser humano se desconecta dos outros, de seu contexto e de si mesmo.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Religion, History, France, Spirituality

Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay was written in 1943 (it seems to me) during Germany's occupation of France. Simone Weil attempts to understand what was lacking in her country in 1939 that prevented her from overcoming the Nazi war machine. The Third Republic assumes its rank, particularly its attachment to secular values ​​, resulting from the French Revolution and its lack of spiritual education. It, therefore, calls for reconstruction on a new basis based on the principles of the Christian religion. Simone Weil does not avoid political contradictions and absurdities despite the apparent expression of charitable and fraternal feelings. This book was written at the end of her life when the philosopher turned to mysticism and spiritualism. This fact explains these inconsistencies, but the whole remains refreshing and beneficial for humanity in the 21st century. At a time of the accelerated destruction of our planet, it would be well-advised for us to believe that we are no longer above nature. The duties stated by Simone Weil at the beginning of her essay remind us of those we owe to our environment.

[J L · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nthz3), 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.

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preface, by T. S. Eliot
Translator's Foreword

--The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

[G.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An astonishing book that I certainly can't claim to have understood fully. Weil writes at a level of intensity that is both exhilarating and exhausting, and the book is a mixture of statements that struck me as profoundly true, some that might be true, and others that are quite preposterous.

Profoundly true: "Initiative and responsibility, to feel one is useful and even indispensable, are vital needs of the human soul." (Loc 409)
"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." (Loc 804)
"To be able to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul's needs, none is more vital than this one of the past." (Loc 920)
"Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy.... It is above all to avoid this loss that peoples will put up a desperate resistance to being conquered." (Loc 1954)
"The true definition of science is this: the study of the beauty of the world." (Loc 4160)

Maybe true: "We love the beauty of the world, because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good." (Loc 347)
"Japan gives ample proof of the intensity reached there by the active form of this disease [uprootedness]." (Loc 904)

Preposterous: "One may say that, in our age, money and the State have come to replace all other bonds of attachment." (Loc 1651)
"No compassion is felt for things which have been utterly destroyed." (loc 3546)
"No attention is paid to the defeated. It is the scene of a Darwinian process more pitiless still than that which governs animal and vegetable life. The defeated disappear. They become naught." (Loc 3552)
"Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart were beings whose lives were pure even as were their works." (Loc 3762)
"The performance of an obligation is always, unconditionally, a good from every point of view. That is why the men of 1789 made such a disastrous mistake when they chose the notion of right as their chief source of inspiration." (Loc 4418)
"Physical labour is a daily death." (Loc 4759)

By quoting these statements out of context, I'm sure that I've misrepresented Weil's thinking on several points. In the end, there's nothing for it but to read her for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

[Bryan Kibbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no better introduction to Simone Weil's work then T.S. Eliot's preface to the book. I highly recommend reading that preface before embarking on reading through Weil. In particular, I found this point by Eliot especially useful, "I cannot conceive of anybody's agreeing with all of her (Simone Weil) views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them. But agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul." Indeed, Weil holds a number of odd and sometimes disturbing and wrongheaded views, but more frequently she is insightful in exploring the modern condition through the lenses of rootedness and uprootedness. Along the way, she utilizes the metaphor to good effect to lay out a fascinating account of moral development and public education that is tailored to the needs of a particular place and aimed at helping persons to feel at home in a place again. Count me intrigued.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember writing a paper for a medical school ethics class where I contended that many so-called human rights did not really exist in their own right. Instead, the idea of rights was really a short-hand concept for the effect of what does exist—namely, obligations or duties. My neighbor does not have a right to food or clothing, but I do have a moral duty to provide these for him.

I had no idea at the time but it turns out that I was channeling Simone Weil’s thoughts on the matter:

The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. 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.

Part of the reason these duties exist is because all people have needs. Weil here provides a list of the “Needs of the Soul” and expounds on each:
Order
Liberty
Obedience
Responsibility
Equality
Hierarchism
Honour
Punishment
Freedom of Opinion
Security
Risk
Private Property
Collective Property
Truth
Rootedness

The majority of the book consists of her expositions on rootedness, while the other Needs of the Soul are covered concisely in the opening chapter (which I found to be the most interesting part of the book).

As with much of Weil’s other writing, her thinking can be at times difficult to follow. A full appreciation of the value of her opinions and prescriptions likely requires more knowledge and interest in the culture and politics of interwar France than I currently possess.

Nevertheless, as in other works by Weil there are glistening pearls of wisdom buried in the bewildering and slimy pile of mollusks. Sometimes I just wonder whether it’s worth all the shucking. Here’s one of the shiny little pearls I uncovered:

“[W]hen journalism becomes indistinguishable from organized lying, it constitutes a crime.”

Yeah, that’s a pretty good one.

[ladydusk · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean, it's clearly brilliant.

There's a lot of wrestling and trying to figure out what she's saying. Many of her conceptions are so foreign - not only because she's French and draws on French history (therefore reading a survey of French history, too) but because she excoriates the Roman West and its influence on Christianity and our whole conception of work, order, ownership, and more.

I was intrigued because I love her essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies" and then saw a presentation on her regarding The Need for Roots that was a challenge to understand. So I decided to read it. And now I need to rewatch the presentation *and* reread this book now that I have the whole under my belt once.

I'm afraid, though, that I'm not wise enough for this. It's a fascinating book; so many things she discusses as happening in France and occupied France in the early 1900s I see parallels in the early 2000s. I was reading her whole section on politics and rights and needs during the 2024 US Election. And then she gets into Education and goodness vs greatness and what we as a society value and promote. Wow.

Anyway. Worth my time, above my paygrade.

ETA: I need to find TS Eliot's preface.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

With this reading of a fourth book by/on Weil, I'm beginning to understand that her astounding and mystical insights into man and God are not sullied by the almost absurd naivety of her "solutions" to the problems that exist which, when implemented or taken seriously, end ironically in the hellish nightmare of an inhuman bureaucracy, the kind of which we see today sprouting up all over the West. Weil is to be looked at for inner understanding and not for temporal advice.

[Mariona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otro nivel. Todas las partes tienen cosas brillantes, aunque la tercera se me ha hecho cuesta arriba por la magnitud de los temas que aborda y el tono filosófico-místico de S.W. Me quedo, sin duda, con el cambio de paradigma que ofrece Weil con su concepción de 'obligación' que prima sobre la de 'derecho'; su forma de comprender el lugar que debe ocupar el trabajo físico en una vida social bien ordenada (rompedora y utópica a la vez); y esa búsqueda insaciable de la verdad.

"La obediencia es una necesidad del alma humana. Es de dos tipos: obediencia a las reglas establecidas y obediencia a los seres humanos vistos como jefes."

"En este mundo la vida no es más que mentira, y sólo la muerte es verdadera. Pues la vida obliga a creer que se necesita creer para vivir; tal servidumbre se ha convertido en doctrina bajo el nombre de pragmatismo (...). Pero quienes pese a su carne y a su sangre han traspasado interiormente un límite equivalente a la muerte obtienen del más allá otra vida; una vida que en primer lugar no es vida: que en primer lugar es verdad. Verdad vuelta vida. Verdadera como la muerte y viva como la vida."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most rational and profound books I've ever read. Weil was a true mystic, whose intense writing is surprising and clear. She begins by describing the needs of the soul, argues that modern society does not fully meet all these needs, and then ends by describing a spirituality which might heal the breach. I will certainly read this again, hopefully next time in French. It is too full of powerful ideas and moving images of truth to forget.

[suvenka · Rating 5 out of 5]

El trabajo físico es una muerte cotidiana. (!!!!)

Los peligros que encierra leer este libro...
bien, verdad, justicia

S de Sabiduría
I de Igualdad
M de MAESTRA
O de Obediencia
N de Necesidad
E de Espíritu


PD: Leyree, Feer leer esto, en serio, y luego hablamos! :)

[Manuel Cabaleiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bueno, amigos, como voy a estar dos semanas sin daros reviews de calidad dado que me llaman los servicios en forma de campamento voy a explayarme en esta. Veamos.

El libro consta de tres partes: un programa político, el desarraigo y el arraigo.

En cuanto al programa político. Tú cuando lees a Simone Weil por ahí entras un poco en el mood de cristiano místico hippie que tiene citas para dejarte par de semanas rayao, o que te enseña la expresión definitiva que necesitas para definir a quien amas como lo de "cómplice de vida" y esas cosas. Entonces entras esperando eso y encuentras "Solo el crimen debe privar de consideración social a quien lo ha cometido; y el castigo debe devolvérsela" o "Es preciso que el castigo constituya un honor". Vamos, que ni hippie ni leches, en algunos asuntos esta filósofa es una dictadora pero en su máxima expresión. Os dejo otra cita "Así como el músico despierta el sentimiento de belleza a través de los sonidos, de la misma manera el sistema penal debe saber despertar el sentido de la ley en el criminal a través del dolor, e incluso, en el peor caso, con la muerte". NO estoy dispuesto a pasar por ahí. Quien crea que el derecho penal premia al bueno y castiga al malo sencillamente no sabe derecho penal, fin. Lo demás de esta parte es más normalito salvo la grandísima censura que defiende. (y ni de coña la propiedad privada es una necesidad del alma).

La segunda parte que se hace cargo del desarraigo es más potable. Es verdad que nos falta tiempo libre, y que sin este no nace casi nada valioso: lo bello, el amor, la amistad, la curiosidad, etc. son frutos concretos de tener tiempo disponible. Me gusta mucho el papel que le da a la enseñanza, sobre todo a la hora de alejarla de un pretendido derecho de los padres o del estado para imprimir al hijo su ideología. Nada de eso, la educación es la posibilidad de librarse de los prejuicios que el mundo tratará de meter en los chavalitos. Es preciso enseñarles a dudar. Me ha ofendido un poco que diga que "si no se acostumbra a los niños a pensar en Dios, se harán fascistas o comunistas por consagrarse a algo". Fuck my life.

En cuanto al papel de la familia me gusta el énfasis en las líneas temporales. Es verdad que en nuestro momento histórico la gente no tiende a pensar en sus antepasados y en sus futuros herederos a la hora de tomar decisiones vitales. La conclusión que saca Weil es que ello implica que la familia literalmente no existe, lo cual quizá es un poco atrevido, más aún cuando existo yo que estoy ya trabajando para mis nietos Cabaleiro?????

Por último, la tercera parte es, desde mi punto de vista, la mejor. Es propiamente cómo echar raíces. A decir verdad, su idea es muy simple. Para echar raíces se debe comenzar con el bien, y a quienes le acusarían de utópica por decir esto responde "la fe es más realista que la política realista. Quien no tiene esa certidumbre carece de fe.". PUM. Ahora, este bien es exigente y obliga a tomar partido. Si uno se limita a votarse un PSOE cada 4 años estaría cayendo en lo que Kant llama la mancha pútrida del corazón humano. Esto es, pensar que porque uno no hace el mal ya es bueno. Si uno no se mancha las manos pa qué las quiere.

no quiero extenderme mucho más. Solo decir que la visión que tiene de la providencia es muy curiosa, así como del querer. No compro en absoluto su desapego al mundo, que curiosamente siempre fue entremezclado con una profunda práctica vital. Desde luego, Simone Weil es curiosa. ¿Recomendaría leerlo? honest to god creo que se lo recomendaría a dos personas en concreto, pero no es un libro que vaya a pegarle a todo el mundo.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Unless I am mistaken, it has never been suggested that Christ died to save nations" (130).

Roughly 4.5 stars—5 stars for poignance and relevance in today's world, but 4 stars in terms of personal enjoyment after reading so much Weil and connecting with it less than other texts.

What stood out most was Weil's caution against patriotism as a dangerous form of pride which is entirely antithetical to the humility of Christ as servant. Additionally, she notes, "when a lot is talked about patriotism, little is heard about justice" (133). She argues that this breed of patriotism has been bequeathed from the Romans as an "idolatry of self" (140).

She is also against the idolatry of money (yes, queen): "By making money the sole, or almost the sole, motive of all actions, the sole, or almost the sole, measure of all things, the poison of inequality has been introduced everywhere" (18).

Published in 1949, many of the quotes here regarding Germany and Hitler can presciently function in a fill-in-the-blank manner with, uh, certain figures today: "People talk about punishing Hitler. But he cannot be punished. He desired one thing alone, and he has it: to play a part in History. He can be killed, tortured, imprisoned, humiliated... What we inflict on him will be, inevitably, an historical death, an historical suffering—in fact, History... The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and determining little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example, is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness" (224).

Weil is in favor of bringing art and culture to the masses and embracing physical labor as a spiritual core of life. A seeker of beauty as nourishment, she reminds us all to be rooted in community. Anti-Empire, she stands as a prophet and a saint on the margins, testifying to the importance of hope, the reality of truth, and the power of love. A lot of brilliance here. Open the eyes of our heart, God.

Weil writes about a desire to unite science and the spiritual, which are now seen as divided, and points out the error of religion being pigeonholed and dismissed as only a "private matter" in modernity:

"...the proper function of religion, which is to suffuse with its light all secular life, public or private, without ever in any way dominating it" (118).

A selection of miscellaneous Weil quotes that are striking and powerful and memorable:

"Crime alone should place the individual who has committed it outside the social pale, and punishment should bring him back again inside it" (20).

"It goes without saying that the severest restrictions and the hardest punishments should be reserved for those who are, by their nature, the most powerful" (32).

"We possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated, and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul's needs, none is more vital than this one of the past" (51).

"We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of the purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations" (91).

"A terrible responsibility rests with us. For it is nothing less than a question of refashioning the soul of the country, and the temptation is so strong to do this by resorting to lies or half-lies that it requires more than ordinary heroism to remain faithful to the truth" (148).

"One's country is something limited whose demands are unlimited. In times of extreme peril, it demands everything... its preservation cannot be assured at any lesser price" (155).

"Power is not an end... it constitutes exclusively a means. It is to politics what a piano is to musical composition... Fools that we are, we had confused the manufacture of a piano with the composition of a sonata" (216).

Reading Weil is a revelation and yet continually reminds me of how little I actually know, an unrelenting epiphanic and humbling exercise. Finished this one on the train to Glasgow. My phone call with my mother reckoning with the state of the USA last night was peppered with Weil epigrams.

[Selah Curcuruto · Rating 4 out of 5]

she has A LOT of interesting stuff to say and it truly makes me wish that this book had been a bit more finished (it very much reads like a very long journal entry which I do also love). A lot of wisdom and a few things to push back on but I simply LOVE her concept of rootedness and obligation. She also has a lot of incredible perspective on evil that lives within all of us, our false ideals of greatness, and colonization. She also just knows SO much history it’s kind of insane. I love the intensity of Simone Weil

[Nick Klagge · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book definitely came as something of a disappointment for me. I had built up high hopes for it, because of its title and its provenance.

The foreword is by T.S. Eliot, and one of the things he stresses is the importance of seeing Weil as a thinker in the earliest stages of development (she died at the age of 34). When I read the foreword, I thought he was being condescending, but after finishing TNFR I definitely agree with him. Her ideas seem all over the place--at times I was underlining furiously, but other times I was shaking my head in total disagreement. (Apparently Charles de Gaulle didn't finish reading it.)

I think the real drawback of this book for a modern reader is that it is heavily focused on the context of its time--Weil wrote it in expectation of French liberation after WWII. Although it is certainly an interesting "national project," Weil drags on a lot about particular aspects of French history of the early 20th century, which unfortunately didn't keep my interest very much.

There are parts that I liked a lot. In light of recent discussions of corporate personhood, her emphatic argument that organizations shouldn't be allowed to "take positions" (i.e. only individuals should) is worth thinking about, even if of dubious practical application. Her taxonomy of the needs of humans at the outset is Aristotelian in flavor, and contributed to building up my hopes for the book. She discusses what we would now refer to as "appropriate technology", which is something that interests me. But to me, even as a liberal, her view of the state is distressingly invasive, including a great deal of censorship and "guiding" of attitudes. I'm no big fan of public choice theory, but I think that in practice the kind of state Weil proposes would be a nightmare of rent-seeking.

[Josh Pendergrass]

I love Simone Weil and have been thinking back on this book as it becomes more and more apparent that we are living in a time where we are worryingly uprooted from any real sense of community or spirituality. I remember when I read this being put off by the idea that Human Obligations should take precedence over Human Rights. Now it resonates much more with me. What are our obligations to each other? I also love her emphasis on the importance of having spiritual connection to one's work. I think it's essential, though we rarely speak of it. How can we have a healthy economy when our only connection to our work is a paycheck?

[Andrew Wyman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weil is what happens when you combine genius with spirituality. I found the middle of the book tough to work through but the end of the book has enough insights to last a lifetime of contemplation.

[Eyvind Olafsrud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muligens 3,5

God bok fra ei dame som bidro til formuleringer i menneskerettighetene våre. Hun ble kun 34 år gammel, og døde av sykdom i London i 1943.

De første 75 sidene er de jeg satte mest pris på. Mange av formuleringene til Weil ble brukt i utformingen av FNs menneskerettigheter. Videre er det en forfriskende kritikk av hvordan industri og krig rykker opp mennesket fra der de har tilhørighet, og de negative konsekvensene av dette.

Siste del, s. 76-235, er skrevet uten avsnitt og overskrifter. Den bærer preg av å være notater og tanker om Frankrike, religion og hva som bør skje etter krigen.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The very beginning felt very interesting but it slipped precipitously from radical to liberal to a confused, sort of naturalism that supposed people away from their indigenous homes, by choice or by force, were damaged. There's room for an investigation of some of what that implies but in many or most cases it turns, as it does in the text, to a radically anti-immigrant point of view. Once it went down that path I went from a patient reading, to a skimmed one and never found my way back.

This feels, especially in it's anti-Marxian fervor at times, to be an interesting example of a certain radical liberal perspective, which like The New Deal liberalism, offers certain prizes to the working class, in exchange for not challenging the ruling order. In this case, it is a naturalist view of human rights. Elsewhere, however, one can see the shape of a neoliberal modernist perspective, where knowledge work replaces human toil, not to free the human cost but to 'better' them.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I am going to go over this book again in detail to make sure I understand every single one of her arguments. I never reflected on the Roman/Greek difference, and what the end of the Greek civilization meant for the idolatry that Rome engaged in. Read this book if you're into decolonization, mixed race theory, spirituality, revolution, etc. Especially if you dislike science like me.

Update June 7th: Re-reading this book I forgot how important the word "uprootedness" is. I think Weil does more than anyone to introduce this concept. Really love her work.

[booklady]

I'm so excited to have found an on-line copy of this!

[Ella Curcuruto]

I’m not gonna leave a star rating because I’ll just embarrass myself but I’m left feeling so stupid after reading this because I truly did not understand anything. I need more Weil in my life but maybe in smaller form to get used to her style.

[Will Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An historical instruction manual on the philosophy of living in the modern age, expanding into the philosophy of the soul, labour, religion and history. Weil magnifies on the important aspects of the modern world and acknowledges the devastating decline of humanism and human dignity, especially during the scourge of Nazism and the chaos of the French Third Republic. Original in her approach, Weil asked the question: ‘what is the meaning of truth?’ Throughout the book, pursuing the meaning of truth in religion, in Marxist literature and in the sciences, scouring the patterns and themes that have manufactured the story of the world. While radical and often scathing, it is indeed the testimony to Weil’s extraordinary mind and the fascinating insight into her critical thinking.

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably Weil's worst book. I would recommend starting with Gravity and Grace and then reading either her first and last notebooks and/or Waiting for God.

I ended up writing a research paper on Weil that I'm quite happy about. If you're curious to hear my thoughts, DM me and I'll send it your way. In short, I'll say that Weil is a deeply tragic thinker who has not an inkling of hope in history. The hopelessness of history can only be grasped upon being so afflicted that any consolation we have been able to tell ourselves to get by in life no longer sounds convincing. Our ability to recognize that both history and life are deprived of meaning and utility, is, for Weil, derivative of God's gracious destruction of your self.

[Peťo Kochelka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to grasp this one.
It's strongly tied to the French past, making it often difficult to understand Weil's examples without obtaining the proper background first. Nevertheless it contains some powerful moments of beauty and truth delivered with extraordinary clarity here and there.
Overall a tough, yet rewarding read.

[Peter Geddes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkable book by a remarkable woman.

[David Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a fundamental flaw of the Goodreads system that encourages readers like me to leave a star rating for books like this. It’s a bit like asking a habitual eater of microwaved ready-meals to rate the Michelin starred dinner he was just treated to. So, five stars – because I’m not qualified to judge – but please accept a note of caution: it’s only when reading a book from this period that you realise how much hand-holding modern authors and editors provide to their readers. In more modern books, we can expect a degree of sign-posting that guides us through the text. Headings and subheadings point our way, and arguments are formulated towards bringing the reader towards an understanding – a QED moment in which all the threads are tied together. That isn’t going to happen here.

Weil wasn’t writing for the Waterstones 3 for 2 pile. She was contracted to the Free French Army in a time of occupation to draft a report on how France might be rebuilt. She was writing for experts who already knew what to expect from her. There are people who think they might open up a book like this and make sense of it without any struggle. These are probably the same people who think they could give Lewis Hamilton a run for his money. There are hardly any headings outside the first short section, and numerous thoughts and threads ebb and flow without much in the way of introduction or clean break. Reading this book is rather like running a Marathon without the benefit of water stops or marshals. For what it’s worth, I had this book open alongside a window to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, acting as my personal history, philosophy and theology professor. Were it not for the constant dialogue with the AI to help me come to terms with this text, I would have still been working my way through the opening section (please note also that I did NOT use any form of AI to write or edit this review).

I came to Weil (pronounced Veiy) after reading The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times. Before that, I don’t think I’d even heard the name. She struck me as the most interesting of the four women discussed in that book, so here I am. Understanding her life story gave me a bit of an advantage in piecing together how she thinks – here are a couple of examples:

Weil was a woman of action, who joined the war effort against the Fascists in Spain (much like George Orwell). However, she was terribly short sighted and clumsy. She didn’t last long at the front – an accident in the kitchens resulted in her being medivac’d out of theatre due to being covered in boiling oil. While she was safely in hospital, all the other comrades in her all-female battalion were wiped out. With that in mind, it made sense to read:

“One cannot cut out from the continuity of space and time an event as it were like an atom; but the inadequacy of human language obliges one to talk as though one could.

“All the events which go to make up the universe in the total stream of time, each one of these events, each possible assemblage of several events, each connexion between two or more events, between two or more assemblages of events, between one event and an assemblage of events—all that, to the same degree, has been permitted by the will of God.

“All that represents, the particular intentions of God. The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself. Only that which is evil is excluded, and even that must not be wholly excluded, from every single aspect, but solely in so far as it is evil. From every other aspect, it is in conformity to the will of God. A soldier suffering from a very painful wound, and thereby prevented from taking part in a battle in which his entire regiment is wiped out, may think that God has wished, not to make him suffer pain, but to save his life and to produce all the results which, in fact, have been produced; but not one of them more than any other.”

Similarly, towards the end of her short life, Weil was plagued by debilitating migraines and found solace and respite only in listening to Catholic choral music and reflecting on the divine. While in a monastery during one of her worst attacks, she was reciting a 17th century poem as a mantra, over and over, and had an experience of leaving her painful flesh crumpled in the corner of the cell. It was during this moment that a profound spiritual experience brought her into direct contact with Christ. Directly on regaining her senses, she became a Christian (although she was never baptised) so it’s quite understandable that she might include this passage in her text:

”A Buddhist tradition has it that Buddha promised to cause whoever should pronounce his name with the desire to be saved to ascend to heaven and join him there. On this tradition rests the practice known as ‘reciting the name of the Lord’, which consists in repeating a certain number of times a few Sanskrit, Chinese or Japanese syllables meaning: ‘Glory to the Lord of Light’.
“A young monk was anxious about the eternal salvation of his father, an old miser whose every thought was about money. The Prior of the monastery sent for the old man and promised to give him a penny every time he should recite the Lord’s name; he had only to present himself every evening and tell them how many pennies were owing to him, and he would be paid on the spot. The old man, thoroughly delighted, now spent all his leisure moments in this occupation, and used to come to the monastery every evening to be paid. All of a sudden, they missed him. After a week, the Prior sent the young man to find out how his father was. It was then discovered that the old man had now become so absorbed in reciting the name of the Lord that he could no longer keep count of the number of times he did so; which was what had prevented him from coming to claim his money. The Prior advised the young monk not to do anything further and simply to wait. Some little while afterwards, the old man arrived at the monastery with shining eyes, and related how he had had an illumination.
“It is to phenomena of this sort that Christ refers in his precept: ‘Lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven … for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’.
“Which means to say that there are certain actions which have the virtue of transporting from earth to heaven part of the love that lies in a man’s heart.
“A miser is not a miser when he first starts hoarding money. No doubt he is urged on, to begin with, by the thought of all the pleasures which money can buy. But the efforts and privations to which he daily subjects himself come to have an allurement. When the sacrifice surpasses by far the original impulse, the treasure, the object of his sacrifices, becomes for him an end in itself, and he subordinates himself to it. The collector’s mania rests upon a similar mechanism. A host of other examples might be cited.”

There’s so much to unpack in this small book that the whole text feels very much like a zip file. I’m still waiting for the lessons to settle in as my mind decompresses what I’ve encountered. For anyone wondering how relevant this work might be today, I would say that with the coming advent of artificial intelligence in the workplace, we need to be mindful of our roots – our value as creative people – now more than ever. Much of Weil’s book deals with the relevance of meaningful employment and the creative process to help people find their spiritual roots. She hated the mechanical process of the assembly line (she worked at Renault for a couple of years to better understand the lot of factory workers) but hated even more events that caused workers to be made idle. Her book finishes on a salient warning that the developers of AI systems would do well to learn from:

“Immediately next in order after consent to suffer death, consent to the law which makes work indispensable for conserving life represents the most perfect act of obedience which it is given to Man to accomplish.
“It follows that all other human activities, command over men, technical planning, art, science, philosophy and so on, are all inferior to physical labour in spiritual significance.
“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.”

[Bekah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book – the title seemed promising and relevant to current interests of mine, I had read another book by Simone Weil (Waiting on God) last winter that I liked a lot, and of course there were those glowing words from T.S. Eliot’s preface to the book: “This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed…”

Needless to say, my preceding hopes flopped. I didn’t even read the whole thing; I read all of the first part (“The Needs of the Soul”), ended up power-skimming the second (“Uprootedness”) after some extended efforts that weren’t getting me very far, and just glanced through and read the last few pages of the third and final part, “The Growing of Roots.” What I did read yielded some worthwhile ideas – especially from the “Needs of the Soul” section; the concluding two-three pages to the whole book were also worth looking at as they presented some of Weil’s key ideas in a nutshell – her thoughts on obedience, punishment, inert matter, death, and on the centrality of physical labor “in a well-ordered social life. It should be its spiritual core.”

I could see myself liking this book a lot more if I had a vested interest in specifically French history, or was really keen to get more into a great modern mind, and/or if I was a lot more patient with abstract philosophy and deep, profound theoretical expounding and speculating on political/social/religious issues (and more) than I am at the moment. For now, I’m (personally) pretty much fed-up with it – “let’s cut the crap, and just live - start making changes rather than just gabbing about them!” sorta mindset. “Too many words and talk, not enough concrete action. So many words among so many other words that people don’t pay much attention to anyway”…and so on. (And here I am just adding inanely to it all...) Granted, this is not necessarily the best mindset to be in (I don't at all mean to imply that I think philosophy unimportant - just that, like anything else, it has its limits), and it's certainly not the best mindset for tackling a book like this.

So! If you find yourself identifying with the position elaborated on in the previous paragraph, I suggest you steer clear of this book, for now at least. However, if your mindset is more of the opposite (or if you are really into French history or whatever), then I would highly recommend this book to you; Simone Weil’s mind is certainly a great one, and her thoughts, further thought-provoking.

But be prepared for a challenging, somewhat obscure read – as T.S. Eliot also warns in his preface.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been insufficiently studied; as, to be honest, has Weil at large. This is partly true because understanding her position requires a much larger amount of patience than do other authors. She will frequently offer comments that appear reactionary in character: her support of de Gaulle is certainly sincere, and she comes across as a conservative in her defence of culture against its degeneration. However, these comments always have appended to them, sometimes several pages later, a claim which transforms them in perhaps the only way possible into something emancipatory and progressive. This is especially the case in her call for a renewed patriotism which, by the end of the book, has taken on the character, not of any nationalism or chauvinism, but of the French revolutionary 'fraternité', a universal brotherhood of humanity which recognises the greatness of no nation, only the greatness of the people. And 'the people' for Weil naturally has a much more open character than does 'the nation'.
It is also rare to find in the context of modern Marxism theorists who are as adamantly pro-work as is Weil. The contrast between her and Srnicek couldn't be any more drastic, except that for both of them proletarian emancipation forms the ultimate horizon of their thinking. Both perspectives can certainly be found in Marx, because there is something true to both of them. But for the time being, Weil is almost certainly in the right. Work is torture, but it is a torture which we must affirm to receive the only iota of liberty our societies today are capable of providing us.

[Nat Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a rare pleasure to encounter a brilliant mind that thinks so differently from you, whose almost every thought contradicts the assumptions you've made your entire life. Simone Weil is such a mind for me, and I think for many others of my generation. The spiritual anarchist, whose anarchism was founded in spirituality and not incidental to it. The faithful iconoclast. From the first page, Weil upended my worldview, with her elegant reversal of the common conception of human rights, and her emphasis on obligation. Her distaste for the Romans reframes the entirety of Western history. Her closing thesis on the holiness of labor reminded me of Buddhist walking meditation, the willing subordination of self.
One of the most satisfying things about Weil's philosophy is its consistency. So many European philosophers devoted their lives to the theory of human dignity, but went on to condone genocide and colonialism across the world. Weil applies her principles justly and equitably, and sees the same worthiness in Senegalese and Tahitian culture as in French. She condemns her nation's colonialism at every opportunity, and points out its many hypocrisies. Its sadly refreshing to hear a white person so thoroughly recognize the humanity of BIPOC peoples.
It will be years before I fully come to terms with this book. I do not know how much of Weil's beliefs I agree with and how much I don't. To be honest, it feels profane to consider this book in terms of agree/disagree. This book feels above such concerns, I know for certain I am better off for having read it.