Simone Weil - The Need for Roots

Its subject is politics in the widest Aristotelian understanding of the term, and the treatment is of exceptional originality and breadth of human sympathy. What is required if men and women are to feel at home in society and are to recover their full vitality? Into wrestling with that question, Simone Weil put the very substance of her mind and temperament. The apparently solid edifices of our prepossessions fall down before her onslaught like ninepins.

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Simone
Weil

Translated by Arthur Wills

With a preface by T. S. Eliot

LEnracinement was first published 1949

by Editions Gallimard, Paris

First published in English 1952

by Routledge & Kegan Paul

First published in Routledge Classics 2002

by Routledge

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Translation 1952 Editions Gallimard

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Weil, Simone, 19091943.

[Enracinement, English.]

The need for roots : prelude to a declaration of duties towards mankind / Simone Weil ; preface by T.S. Eliot.

p. cm. (Routledge classics)

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Social ethics. 2. Social psychology. I. Title. II. Series.

HM665.W4513 2001

ISBN 9780415271011 (hbk)

ISBN 9780415271028 (pbk)

BY T. S. ELIOT

The only kind of introduction which could merit permanent association with a book by Simone Weil would belike that provided by M. Gustave Thibon to Gravity and Gracean introduction by someone who knew her. The reader of her work finds himself confronted by a difficult, violent and complex personality; and the assistance of those who had the advantage of long discussions or correspondence with her, especially those who knew her under the peculiar conditions of the last five years of her life, will be of permanent value in the future. I lack these qualifications. My aims in writing this preface are, first, to affirm my belief in the importance of the author and of this particular book; second, to warn the reader against premature judgment and summary classificationto persuade him to hold in check his own prejudices and at the same time to be patient with those of Simone Weil. Once her work is known and accepted, such a preface as this should become superfluous.

All of Simone Weils work is posthumous. Gravity and Gracethe selection from her voluminous notebooks made by M. Thibon, and the first volume to appear in Franceis admirable in its contents, but somewhat deceptive in its form. The comparison with Pascal (a writer of whom Simone Weil sometimes spoke with asperity) may be pressed too far. The fragmentariness of the extracts elicits the profound insights and the startling originality, but suggests that hers was a mind of occasional flashes of inspiration. After reading Waiting on God and the present volume I saw that I must try to understand the personality of the author; and that the reading and re-reading of all of her work was necessary for this slow process of understanding. In trying to understand her, we must not be distractedas is only too likely to happen on a first readingby considering how far, and at what points, we agree or disagree. We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.

Perhaps genius is not the right word. The only priest with whom she ever discussed her belief and her doubts has said: je crois que son me est incomparablement plus haute que son gnie. That is another way of indicating that our first experience of Simone Weil should not be expressible in terms of approval or dissent. I cannot conceive of anybodys agreeing with all of her views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them. But agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul. Simone Weil was one who might have become a saint. Like some who have achieved this state, she had greater obstacles to overcome, as well as greater strength for overcoming them, than the rest of us. A potential saint can be a very difficult person: I suspect that Simone Weil could be at times insupportable. One is struck, here and there, by a contrast between an almost superhuman humility and what appears to be an almost outrageous arrogance. There is a significant sentence by the French priest whom I have already quoted. He reports that he does not remember ever having heard Simone Weil, in spite of her virtuous desire for objectivity, give way in the course of a discussion. This comment throws light on much of her published work. I do not believe that she was ever animated by delight in her own forensic skilla self-indulgence to which I suspect Pascal came dangerously near, in the Lettersthe display of power in overcoming others in controversy. It was rather that all her thought was so intensely lived, that the abandonment of any opinion required modifications in her whole being: a process which could not take place painlessly, or in the course of a conversation. Andespecially in the young, and in those like Simone Weil in whom one detects no sense of humouregotism and selflessness can resemble each other so closely that we may mistake the one for the other.

The statement that Simone Weils soul was incomparably superior to her genius will, however, be misunderstood if it gives the impression of depreciating her intellect. Certainly she could be unfair and intemperate; certainly she committed some astonishing aberrations and exaggerations. But those immoderate affirmations which tax the patience of the reader spring not from any flaw in her intellect but from excess of temperament. She came of a family with no lack of intellectual endowmenther brother is a distinguished mathematician; and as for her own mind, it was worthy of the soul which employed it. But the intellect, especially when bent upon such problems as those which harassed Simone Weil, can come to maturity only slowly; and we must not forget that Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-three. I think that in