Rootedness
The Need for Roots
Ros Schwartz, trans., Knopf (forthcoming 2022).
A Declaration of Duties Toward Humankind: A Critical Companion to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots
Contributors
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Robert Chenavier
- Ronald KL Collins
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Julie Daigle
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Emmanuel Gabellieri
- Simone Kotva
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Lissa McCullough
- Mario von der Ruhr
- Lawrence Schmidt
- Eric Springsted
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press (2023)
Weil’s Single-Minded Commitment to Truth: A Q & A Interview with J. P. Little
Social Capital versus Roots: A Review of Bowling Alone
The Politics of Rootedness: On Simone Weil and George Orwell
Simone Weil and George Orwell both reflected—at a time when liberalism and Christianity were being challenged—on how to provide rootedness to societies and how to provide a moral anchoring and collective inspiration. The chapter considers the extent to which religion plays an important role in these authors’ politics of rootedness. A comparison between them suggests that rather than worrying first about whether or not we need a religious revival, we should worry about whether individuals have the opportunity to enter into contact with beauty. For both Weil and Orwell, a society is well-rooted when there is a continuity between natural beauty and social life. As such, a politics of rootedness entails, in their view, a genuine search for the recognition of all members of a collectivity and, above all, the search for a way of learning again how to find nourishment in the beauty of the world.
in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-123.
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 Nature of Narrative in Simone Weil’s Vision of History: The Need for New Historical Roots”
in Dunaway, John M. & Springsted, Eric. O., The Beauty that Saves: Essays on Aesthetics and Language in Simone Weil, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, pp. 55-68
“Rootedness: Culture and Value”
in Richard H. Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward Divine Humanity, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161-188
