A close reading of what Weil wrote: “What is Freedom?”
What follows is a short, thought-provoking, piece (the first of others) I invited my friend David Levy (a Weil translator and commentator) to draft for this issue of Attention. It is intended to encourage authentic engagement with some tenets of Weil’s philosophy. To that end, two passages from Weil are presented, followed by Levy’s reading of them. The larger plan is to invite yet others to participate in exploring the details of Weil’s thought, by way of more close readings, online replies, or an online panel discussion. In short, what does it mean to take Weil seriously as a philosophical thinker? Stay tuned!-– rklc
A tendency exists among many to think that Simone Weil writes only in gnomic aphorisms or conjures ideas that are opaque and mysterious, veiled by a vocabulary peculiar to her. Very often, and especially for her most important ideas, this is not so. A bit of careful reading will reveal the contrary, that often Weil sets out clear definitions. Consider her account of freedom as consented obedience in two passages from her 1943 essay, “Are we fighting for justice?”
Weil’s words on freedom
“Obedience being in fact the imprescriptible law of human life, there is only to establish the difference between consenting obedience and non-consenting obedience. Where there is consented obedience, there is freedom, and nowhere else.
Freedom cannot reside in a parliament, a press or any institution. It resides in obedience. Where obedience does not everywhere have a daily and permanent savour of freedom, there is no freedom. Freedom is the savour of true obedience.” (Simone Weil: Basic Writings, 174; Œuvres complètes V.1, 245)
“For obedience to be consented, there must first of all be something to love, something for the love of which men consent to obey.
Something to love, not through hatred of its opposite but in itself. The spirit of consented obedience stems from love, not from hatred.
Hatred, it is true, provides an imitation of it at times very dazzling, but still mediocre, low quality, not lasting, and soon depleted.
Something to love not for its glory, its prestige, its sparkle, its conquests, its radiance, its future prospects, but in itself, in its nakedness and its reality, as a mother whose son came first in the Polytechnique entrance exam loves something else in him. Without it the feeling is not profound enough to be a permanent source of obedience.
What is needed is something that a people can love naturally, from the depth of their hearts, from the depth of their own past, from their traditional aspirations and not through suggestion, propaganda or foreign import.
What is needed is a love drunk quite naturally with mother’s milk, a love that leads young people to enter once and for all, in the innermost secrecy of their heart, into a pact of fidelity of which a lifetime of obedience is only its continuation.
What is needed are forms of social life designed in such a way as to remind the people ceaselessly, in the symbolic language most intelligible to them, most in keeping with their customs, their traditions, and their attachments, of the sacred character of this fidelity, the free consent from which it arose and the stringent obligations proceeding from it.” (Simone Weil: Basic Writings, 176-7; Œuvres complètes V.1, 247)
Commentary
Weil begins by observing that what human beings will do is determined of necessity by the mechanisms in nature that work upon us. The word “obedience” is here apt to mislead, because to obey is an intentional act undertaken on the recognition of an authority to command. She might have been better, in this context, to write “comply,” or even better that our behavior “conforms” to necessity. What remains to individuals is whether they will consent to the necessity that operates upon them. Whether they consent or not, they will obey in Weil’s sense in that they will behave as necessity dictates. The movements they undertake will not vary according to whether they have consented. But the difference consent makes could not be greater; for consent must be freely given, else it is not consent. Thus, obedience with consent is a free obedience, and just that is freedom, by Weil’s lights. It feels like freedom, it tastes like freedom, even if it is not the pursuit of one’s own ends or whims. Nothing else—no parliament, no rights, no laws, no social arrangements—can give the savor of freedom except consent, which no one else can give on anyone else’s behalf.
It is notable that freedom and obedience are unified by consent, not balanced against each other. It makes a whole of two apparent opposites, a Pythagorean idea to which Weil often turned (cf., Simone Weil: Basic Writings, 64).
Weil continues by giving the singular condition under which consented obedience arises. It emerges as a response to something loved. When someone consents to do what they must, they do so from love for something (though hatred can move us in a way that is a wan imitation of love). Weil, with the repetitive language of a formula, then gives five essential characteristics of the object of this love for which one consents to obey.
First, it must be something that is loved for itself, not because it opposes something else.
Second, it must be loved not for the prospects it might bring, but in itself. (This is a good general definition of pure love.)
Third, this love comes naturally for someone with their history, their culture; what is loved will be something familiar, rather than novel.
Fourth, the love must go deep, so deep that to give up on it would be tantamount to becoming someone else altogether, because the love and its object have been bound together within for so long that their loss is a partial loss of self.
And the fifth requirement is not essential to this love itself or its object, but a requirement for sustaining it through a form of life in which love’s object is continually brought to mind as deserving of love, and under aspects that obviate confusion about faith and faithlessness towards one’s love. This fifth condition is important for giving a worldly object to one’s love and reflects Weil’s abiding conviction that no person can love what is wholly abstract, remote, or unearthly.
Thus, we see that Weil’s freedom is not only obedience transformed by consent, but that free obedience is known to someone by the impetus felt from a pure love for that which is most essential to them.
David Levy is a Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His areas of interest include the nature of understanding, particularly of morals, ethics and people. His most recent book is Simone Weil: Basic Writings (edited and translated with Marina Barabas).
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