A Place for the Soul in Law and Politics: Simone Weil on the Sacredness of Humanity
In German there is a saying that translates roughly to: You can’t see the forest because of all the trees. Gaining a holistic perspective on something that you spend your days contemplating sometimes adds the necessary anchor in order to not lose orientation. Even better, if said perspective is slightly removed from the tone of the everyday-approaches you encounter.
To me, Simone Weil’s essays did just that for the law. This text is an attempt of mine to deliver to you why Simone Weil rejuvenated my perspective on law and the state as a third year Legal Studies and Political Science undergraduate student.
I first discovered the essays that I now wish to discuss in a local bookstore in Cairo. It was my second or third visit, I had returned after just having completed ‘The Yacoubian Building’ and ‘Zeina’ (it was a literature-heavy January). Amongst Egyptian classic novels and self-help literature, I found a tiny book, or what looked more like a pamphlet. Simone Weil’s essays, collected under the title ‘The Power of Words’. I sure believe in the power of words, I thought, and left a few minutes later with my new companion.
Indeed, Weil’s essays prompted an awareness for the power of words, their distinct meanings, and the ways in which their application shapes our world.
She writes about the community and the self, the Good within the human, and the systematic restraints that produce evil. She also writes about our conception of law, and the relationship between the state and the being. Her optimism is by no means tainted by her intelligent social critique.
Living and writing at a time that is, unfortunately, not completely unlike ours, Simone believes in the Good, but allows for the complexity to take up as much space as it does. In her essay ‘Human Personality’, she describes the human as a being with intrinsic Goodness. In everyone’s soul, there is an element that she calls the Sacred. It exists without any need to grow or be born. When injustice occurs, it cries out from deep within: “Why am I being hurt?”. It exists within “in the most corrupt men”, and will never cease. The cry, however, is inarticulate, and has no voice.
Whoever is not trained to receive the cries from within him, will not register their existence. The cry has no frequency, unless we become attuned to understanding it. That is the problem we are facing: an untrained organ, a silenced soul, and far too many corrupt men. Simone’s social critique and her proposed ideas of social organization are founded on this understanding of the individual in its simplicity.
Why have we lost our ability to listen to the purest part of ourselves? Have the individual and their soul always been deaf to one another? What cure is there for fostering a sensitivity for the Good within ourselves?
The collective and the self, the tensions, the ambiguity, and the symbiosis are the core themes of philosophy. Despite the cyclical nature of these concepts, Weil finds the root in the Self.
In order to be attuned to the Sacred, the outcry against injustice within oneself, one must be in tune with the Self. What sounds like the mission of the century to Weil is simple and instinctive.
The Good is already there, it need not be cultivated. We just need time, space, and freedom to become in tune with your Self. While reading this, I closed the book and looked at the skyline by the Nile. I enjoy philosophers that return to the single subject, and I like applying their theories to my direct experience. Of course, I thought, I feel ‘in tune with myself’ whenever I have time, space, and freedom for myself. I feel like a better, more balanced version.
In alignment with the instinctiveness of her theory, she calls these three elements the necessary tools to “feed” your soul. Without these resources, the soul becomes miserable and hungry- and in turn, allows cruel traits to flourish. Semantically, her writing demonstrates the simplicity of her argument. A hungry soul will never be seen or heard in its cry “Why am I being hurt?”.
Like anything that reeks of neglect, a soul can also wilt.
According to Simone, every person’s attentiveness for their Sacredness within is the only hope for the good in humanity to overpower all the evil.
So far, I have demonstrated Simone’s work as individual-centered, and perhaps given you a slightly esoteric impression. In reality, her conception of the individual is essential for the community and for social structure.
Rights, perhaps, are the epitome of the relationship between the state and the person, between the collective and the individual. John Locke’s social contract determines the exchange of absolute liberty for rights and protection.
Let us consider the human right to feed one’s soul. For Simone, it is meant to be the most essential right. Her formulation stimulates us to envision, if just for a brief moment, a conception of a human right that is different from those of the UN Charter.
“Every human needs time, space, and freedom, to feed his soul.”
In its simplicity it is demanding, comprehensive, and truly universal. It is immune to critiques of cultural relativism. Last but not least, it engages an anti-capitalist wink.
Written in 1943, five years before the publication of the Declaration of Human Rights, the absolutist notion of a right as such deserves a closer look.
In its expression, it acknowledges the existence of something supernatural, an entity higher or holier than the individual itself, the soul, to which, in the optimal case, the human should report. Without attaching itself to a religion, it carries an element of humbleness, and a reminder of the simplicity of humanity that is oftentimes needed in a world of self-professed holiness.
The verb to feed channels the same groundedness. All organisms need food to survive, and so the wording creates a feeling of nature and necessity.
The fuel, the nurture is introduced through three elements, of which two are familiar within the sphere of contemporary rights. The idea of freedom, physically and intellectually, is one professed around the world. It is a staple article for constitutions and a chant against government oppression.
The idea of space, although slightly less consistently applied, resembles ideas of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’, and the minimal requirements for decent living- clean water, sanitation, and housing.
Finally, the idea of time for oneself is one that, to my knowledge, is never once discussed in human rights. However, as the first element of the list, Simone Weil awards it importance, and rightfully so. Upon reading the phrase, I remembered a story I read often as a child. ‘Momo’, the fiction novel by Michael Ende, that playfully but powerfully conveys the currency of time and its value. In the story, the protagonist, Momo, opposes the “grey men” that steal people’s time by pressuring them to be efficient and making money their sole objective. Momo, the child, has the gift of listening and by making people tell their stories, reminds them of the worth of their time. Ende’s story carries more truth in it than would be desirable. Weil’s argument cooperates with Momo’s gift– that listening (to oneself and to others, or to the soul) is powerful.
The element of time becomes crucial because there is no Momo in the real world to save all people from their miseries.
In a contention slightly reminiscent of Karl Marx, Weil criticizes the structure of society in which work becomes the thief of time and connection.
The grey men of Michael Ende exist in today’s world, and they are the impersonation of capitalism, a construct that Weil criticizes because of its estrangement with the Self and the Sacred. She is not a Marxist, yet her argument approaches his– because isn’t the antidote to attunement alienation?
Weil asserts that under the current conditions of our society and given the design that we have implemented onto our shared lives, the soul is left unattended. Through our days filled with work, chasing achievement, monetary gain, and overstimulation from one task to the next, the soul is emaciated and dire. Marx’s alienation of the worker and their product criticizes this, when their creative passion to work and the relationship to the good they create is replaced by a machine-like production in which the worker loses complete ownership and purpose. To Weil, the estrangement that occurs is in fact even deeper or more spiritual, since she reflects that the sacred is lost, and the soul, which holds the only intrinsically good part of the human, is silenced.
On a different level, there are parallels to the lifestyle trends of the 21st century as well. Her argument that time alone to develop a relationship with one’s soul is essential before being able to contribute meaningfully and mindfully to the collective one is a part of. This, in essence, is an idea that has continuously resurfaced in many different branches of intellect– from religion to exercise, to science, and philosophy. Weil insists: In solitude lies the access to the sacred, the blooming of the soul.
When bringing together the single elements, the product is the collective. Despite many other philosophers spending intensive thought on the collective, to Weil, it is mostly that: the assortment of the individuals.
The collective, to Simone, is not as holy as it may be considered today. Its power is overestimated, she argues in other writings, and in Human Personality she writes that the collective has no place for the soul. It is not that the collective is not needed, it has qualities of belonging, identity, and warmth. In contemporary times, especially, the desire for third spaces and community have become central.
In Weil’s conception, however, the collective simply complements the solitude by offering warmth and in its own way, “feeding the soul” as well. It does not offer any substitute for the true solitude in which a human must dwell for a considerable amount of time that is of his free disposal in order to be in tune with the soulful voice inside themselves.
In progressing from the relationship between the individual and their soul, Weil thematizes the relationships within a collective. Rather than centering her ideas around the relationship between the state as an abstract, and the individual as an entity, she focuses on the relationship between humans.
Whereas traditionally, relationships within the collective are defined through rights which are granted by the state to the people, Weil redefines relationships within the collective in terms that are less self-centered. Rather than every individual demanding something, her approach requests a willingness to give something.
To her, rights are created situationally, based on conditions and situations, and alone, they mean nothing. Obligation, however, is born alone and applies to every human towards every human. There is a universal, eternal, and unconditional obligation for every human being towards any other human being. She defines it as respect. In ancient literature, it has often been named the helping of the hungry, not letting a starving human die. Here, again, the ideal of the Good arises. It manifests itself through this everlasting obligation.
Progress of humanity, she correctly asserts, is, or should be, measured by the presence of this obligation in concrete action. “Everyone looks on progress as being, in the first place, a transition to a state of human society in which people will not suffer from hunger.” *CITATION)
I read five research papers a week that introduce a new variable to measure the progress or decline of a state. Usually, the measurements are income per capita, the Equality Index, ‘state capacity’, road density, education levels. Just as she does with the redefinition of a universal right, her definition of progress strikes in its simplicity. Not to be overlooked, the right is to feed one’s soul, and the progress is not to be hungry (despite their differentiation being spiritual and physical).
Her determination of progress is not misled. One must only look to the slogans of the Arab Spring revolutions and the French Revolution in their chant for bread: the stilling of hunger. In these situations, the request was unto the leadership. Bread was symbolic for economic capability, a capability with standards as basic as enabling the feeding of one’s family. Perhaps the link between Simone’s respect and the human obligation not to let someone starve is exogenous of an economic cause. A request for bread is just as well a request for respect, and in Simone’s logic, it is not mainly the state as an apparatus that holds the obligation to meet these requests. Rather, its chant is one for humanity and for decency from all, especially a leader.
Drawing back in on the collective, Weil asserts that the collective has no obligations. As an abstract entity, it consists of elements (humans) that all have the very same and essential obligations. The collective itself, however, has no such ‘burden’ to provide. What may seem provocative of Weil at first, can be read as a directive to no longer seek accountability in the abstract sphere of a ‘system’, but the people within it. The cruelty and evil that exists in the world then exists between humans, and manifests in their disregard of their interpersonal obligation. The argument links to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the Banality of Evil, a bold argument that deconstructs the evil committed by the Nazis not as a monster of fear-invoking dominance, but as the product of abiding, functioning men and women that lacked any conviction of morality.
When considering the human rights violations of the world, Weil invites us to see these also as a human’s (conscious) decision to dishonor their obligation of respect. In doing so, they have let go of the good, and buried the soul.
Here, the ideas of Simone Weil return in a full circle. The Sacred, the element that houses the Good within every human, exists within even “the most corrupt men”. Yet, it is those corrupt men that rule, that violate dignity, and that disregard their obligation that exists foremost as a human, not as the head of a hierarchy.
When analysing the current state of the world, measuring development in economic terms, and designing institutional reforms that enable growth, Weil seems to suggest a specific, powerful adjustment: to train our ability to listen to the voice within that rears up against injustice.
My hope, and dare I say, perhaps Simone Weil’s too, is that a piece of writing on the silenced voice within may stir readers to give their inner life a thought. Becoming attuned to oneself and one’s soul is not an absolute task– and there are many different means to the end. If one is familiar enough with oneself to know what works for them, much of the heavy lifting is already done. It can be meditation, it can be boredom, painting, cooking, running, pottery. The possibilities are endless.
I was eager to share my encounter with Simone Weil’s ‘Power of Words’, because it allowed me to see the forest in all its might. Her unique, pragmatic, and individualistic conceptualization of the world manages to bring together spirituality, politics, and law, in harmony. Viewing the state of international politics and domestic crises today, begs the question whether a presence of the soul, an awareness for inter-human obligation, and the right to have time for oneself are perhaps long overdue?
