This is a guest post by Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone, the editors of our recent publication on Simone Weil: Relevance of the Radical.
The Roots We Need to Cultivate:
Reflections on The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Year Later
It is more than a little ironic to devote a book of essays to a person who would maintain that the truly great and profound insights and works of beauty we have received from the past are “essentially anonymous.” Simone Weil (1909-1943), the late French philosopher, mystic, and social activist, would no doubt eclipse her personhood on this occasion of her 100th year, were she still alive. It was not uncommon for her to write things like, “May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.”1 However, she never shied from elaborating her thoughts on ethics, religion, politics, force, suffering, work, beauty, and a multitude of other critical issues, and although in our book we reflected on these themes while acknowledging their unity in her life and her writings, the thesis of the collection is the universality – and in that sense, the anonymity – of Weil’s insights.
As we described in our Introduction to the book, the English word “radical” derives from the Latin radicalis, meaning “of or having roots,” and “going to the origin and the essential.” Weil frequently described contemporary, industrialized, and capitalist society as being deracinated (“uprooted”), lacking any clear orientation or sense of hierarchy in values, and thus as permitting complete license and irresponsibility. So if this remains an accurate depiction of our social and moral context (and we think that it does), the antidote to our contemporary crises and what is most relevant to address our problems is the radical.
Simone Weil would not advise becoming rooted in just any way, however. Some soil will be more fertile for the growth of attentiveness and humility, which are all-important for the cultivation of states that will renounce domination, oppressions, violence, and lies. What sort of rootedness can give rise to humility, a word that incidentally has its origins in the Latin humus, meaning “earth,” or “soil”? The answer, as all the essays in our book demonstrate, is a paradoxical and mysterious one. As Weil explained:
It is necessary not to be “myself,” still less to be “ourselves.”
The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
To uproot oneself socially and vegetatively.
To exile oneself from every earthly country.
To do all that to others, from the outside is a substitute [Ersatz] for decreation.
It results in unreality. But by uprooting oneself one seeks greater reality.2
To root oneself in home-lessness and self-lessness is to uproot oneself from that which carries prestige, power, influence, false security (domination), and the personal comforts and conveniences that shield us from the sufferings of others. This is the radical orientation that Weil wrote and spoke about in so many ways, and which is the focal point of discussion for the authors (Jacques Cabaud, Bartomeu Estelrich, A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, Marie Cabaud Meaney, Mario von der Ruhr, Christopher A.P. Nelson, and Eric O. Springsted) in the first part (“Radical Orientation”) of our collection. The second part (“Radical World”) is devoted to the sorts of concrete effects and social/political implications of such paradoxical rootedness; to continue with the metaphor, the authors in this section (Vance G. Morgan, Lawrence E. Schmidt, A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone, E. Jane Doering, Krista E. Duttenhaver and Coy D. Jones, Cynthia Gayman, Sarah K. Pinnock, Inese Radzins, and Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer) addressed what sort of plants grow from the roots just described.
A final point about this collection of essays. The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later felt urgent to us to commence a little over a year ago, not only because 2009 would mark the centennial of Weil’s birth, and it seemed appropriate to commemorate that event by recalling the significance of her radical philosophy to our time. But more importantly, we had found ourselves citizens of a country involved in two wars—arguably unjust, unnecessary, and unending wars—along with a multitude of other crises, whether financial, intellectual, moral, et cetera. We, along with our contributors, were beginning to feel too much “at home” in a deracinated society. We were compelled to bring Weil’s thoughts about ethics, religion, economy, technology, politics, war, and suffering, to bear in a meaningful way on the plethora of these same issues that plague our society in the 21st century. Attending to these “essentially anonymous” ideas has always had a way of sending our facile, illusory, and dangerous feelings for the comforts of home into exile.
1 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 89. Emphasis added.
2 Ibid, p. 86
The Relevance of the Radical is avialable in the United States and will publish in the UK in January.
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