Political Philosophy
The Language of Limitation as the Key to Simone Weil’s Understanding of Beauty and Justice
Review: The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in First Ideas
New Political Science, July 22, 2021
Simone Weil’s Conservatism
The 20th-century anarchist philosopher and mystic could point the way forward for today’s right
Slate, May 25, 2021
From Innate Morality Towards a New Political Ethos: Simone Weil with Carol Gilligan and Judith Butler
In 1943, Simone Weil proposed to supersede the declaration of human rights with a declaration of obligations towards every human being’s balancing pairs of body and soul’s needs, for engaging and inspiring more effectively against autocratic and populist currents in times of crisis. We claim that Weil’s proposal, which remains pertinent today, may have been sidestepped because her notion of needs lacked a fundamental dimension of relationality, prominent in the ‘philosophical anthropology’ underlying the (different) visions for a new political ethos of both Judith Butler and Carol Gilligan. From the radical starting point of innate morality common to all three thinkers, we, therefore, indicate how an enriched notion of interlaced needs, encompassing both balance and relationality, may restore the viability of a declaration of human obligations as a robust source of inspiration. In this combination of balance and relationality, Butler’s notion of aggressive nonviolence is key.
Ethics, Politics & Society. A Journal in Moral and Political Philosophy, no. 4 (2021), pp. 175-188.
Václav Havel, Simone Weil and Our Desire for Totalitarianism
Abstract: “Given our troubled history in the 20th century, how is it that nationalism and populism have come to raise their heads again in Europe over the past 20 years? What have we lost? What is it about our liberal, democratic political structures that create the current atmosphere of mistrust, xenophobia, and shortsightedness? How has this development come about, and what is driving it? How should we understand this de- sire for authoritarianism?
In this paper, I will address these questions through a reading of two essays that can be considered to have been written as warning signs regarding a very common tendency within social psychology that entails the development of communities towards authoritarian structures. Simone Weil’s essay “Human Personality”, written in 1943 during her wartime exile in London, and Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”, written in 1978 during his house arrest in Czechoslovakia, both address the potential relapse of Europe into authoritarianism. Neither of these essays should be read as developed theories within political philosophy. They are notes from a dire predicament of crisis, on both a personal and a macro-political level, that investigate the relationship between the subject and society in order to understand the dynamics of totalitarianism. Their strength lies exactly in that they address a present unfolding situation that the authors perceive to have potentially unbearable consequences. This tone of urgency, their way of addressing us from a positionality void of any real power or privilege, and their bold demands for envisioning change beyond given political ideologies, make these essays into unique backdrops for thinking about our current political questions.
Both Weil and Havel advocate an open society that permits the subject to cultivate a form of life beyond collective ideology. Both essays address the sensibilities of the subject that do not appeal to identity, common ideology or collectivity in order to thrive. The aim of this paper is to outline this redefinition of the relation between the individual and society in Weil and Havel, as a remedy for our desire for authoritarianism.”
Publication: Filosofický časopis (no 4, 2021, p. 83)
Antony Fredriksson, University of Pardubice, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
e-mail: Antony.Fredriksson@upce.cz
Panel Discussion: Theo-Politics, Tragedy and Memory
Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy
Immigration and the Desire for Rootedness
National conservatives need to help create an America that knows who she is, one that can give immigrants more than just a place to get a job—an America that can draw them in, giving them a sense of belonging. This essay is based on remarks delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, on July 15, 2019.
Excerpt: Simone Weil said in The Need for Roots, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul . . . Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.” I see rootedness as something due to every human being, as part of their human dignity. Without it, man is cut off from the very elements that make him who he is.
Public Discourse, July 22, 2019.
See also Luma Simms, “Rootedness and National Identity in the Twenty-First Century,” in Ann Ward, ed., Polis, Nation, Global Community The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship, New York: Routledge (2022), chapter 9.
Luma Simms, a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies the life and thought of immigrants.
Simone Weil’s Radical Ontology of Rootedness: Natural and Supernatural Justices
This paper argues that Simone Weil developed an anthropology of the human condition that is a radical ontology of the human spirit rooted in reality. Weil begins her account from the real, but this real is not only the historical or social reality. It is also what is true about the human person as a created being in connection with the transcendent reality. She believes that affliction reveals the human condition and provides an openness to transcendence in which the individual finds the meaning of the human operation of the spirit. Therefore, Weil’s radical ontology is based on a philosophy of the human being as an agent rooted in the world. In order to be rooted, a human being needs decreation (the creation of a new human) and incarnation (cross and love in the world). In her radical ontology derived from attention to the real, Weil argues for an active incarnation in social reality that recognizes others, especially the unfortunates, for the purpose of empowering them and promoting their dignity. Her radical ontology incarnates the human in the world between necessity and good, that is, between the natural and the supernatural.
Considering Emmanuel Gabellieri’s characterization of Simone Weil’s anthropological philosophy as a radical ontology, I examine Weil’s account on natural and supernatural justices. According to Gabellieri, Weil’s ontology is radical because it is “a metaphysics of the human spirit oriented towards a full contact with reality.” Full contact with the reality of the world is the starting point of Simone Weil’s philosophy. This contact is radical because the supernatural is present in reality, and a deep experience of reality opens the individual for the illumination of the supernatural, an experience of grace that reveals the truth of human existence and condition in the world. Therefore, Simone Weil develops an anthropology of the human condition that is a “radical ontology” of the human spirit rooted in the reality of the world. The experience of rootedness occurs in reality, but it is the supernatural that roots the human being.
Weil suggests an anthropology of radical ontology following the Platonic tradition of a transcendental spirit that contemplates the nous. This generates a noetic knowledge that impacts reality. It is in this mediation between reality and the supernatural that the need for justice occurs, as a natural reality illuminated and guided by supernatural justice. In this account, she is also inside the Christian mystic tradition, in which the experience of grace impacts the ethical life leading to seek for justice. To understand Weil’s radical ontology, this paper will discuss three points of her account: her starting point from the real, the movement of decreation and openness of the working of grace, and the supernatural justice that illuminates the natural justice in a rooted people. {full text in “Read” link above}
Theology Faculty Research and Publications, Marquette University (Spring, 2019)
The Critical Spirit: The Pessimistic Heterodoxy of Simone Weil
PhD, New School for Social Research
