8 I 2008
Simone Weil, in her Need for Roots, demonstrates the errors and severity of the problem of uprootedness. To Weil, the tradition of liberalism that started the French revolution and continued to her days has omitted the concept of roots, and hence, neglects the wellbeing of human souls. The liberal spirit of 1789, a product of the enlightenment, is based on the notion of rights; that is, belief on man’s potential to achieve things and to reserve realms of freedom for himself based on his shared identity with others, based on conditions of equality of being—regardless of whether it is universal manhood, common citizenship, or god that grants such equality. However, the notion of obligation is forgotten; rights, in the sense that Weil perceives, is an antithesis of obligation. While rights attempts to reduce boundaries for common grounds, to free oneself from burdens of birth and imposed requirements, obligation reminds oneself of the very fact that he is ultimately limited and has duties to fulfill. Otherwise rights become a fantasy without roots in human reality. Obligation serves as the moral guidance for rights; through its universal ability of limiting and directing man’s action, it is in itself transcendent and crucial to human reality:
The notion of rights, being of an objective order, is inseparable from the notions of existence and reality. This becomes apparent when the obligation descends to the realm of fact; consequently, it always involves to certain conditions. Obligations alone remain independent of conditions. They belong to a realm situated above all conditions, because it is situated above this world (4).
The concept of obligation, too, is universal, as “all human beings are bound by identical obligations, although these are performed in different ways according to particular circumstances” (4). It is one “not based upon any de facto situation… not based upon any convention… [but] an eternal one” (5). Hence, a question arises: since both rights and obligations inevitably draw upon a notion of universality; why is the seemingly more restrictive notion transcendent and the more liberal notion not? Weil attributes the error of the spirit of 1789 to its anthropocentric arrogance and concurrent desire for universality:
All [the men of 1789] recognized was the [realm] on the human plane. That is why they started off with the idea of rights. But at the same time they wanted to postulate absolute principles. This contradiction caused them to tumble into a confusion of language and ideas which is largely responsible for the present political and social confusion (4).
The enlightenment philosophés and their subsequent revolutionary protégés, by contemplating solely upon that which is human, while still upholding an obsession with the notion of progress, by upholding rights without an understanding of obligation, have created a gap between reality and idea, divine inspiration and human achievement. Hence, as Weil sees, “the liberating current of the eighteenth century found itself without historical roots: 1789 really was an open break” (110). Those who subscribe to the roots, patriots of the tradition and country of France, were executed as traitors, while those who prevailed believed in an illusion of national sovereignty, to revolution, to the belief in change. But these illusions are short lived: with the roots severed, those who want to remain patriots have to cling to the state, an unpopular notion. Hence the patriotic switched from the Left to the Right, from the populist to the aristocratic (111). The changing policy of the patriotic spirit demonstrates the contradiction within the fundamental notions of rights behind the French polity. Without a sense of obligation, the French revolutionary and liberal tradition, then, is an example of historical uprootedness.
