Ep. 250: Simone Weil on Human Needs (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 250 is what exactly are humanity's non physical needs? Our texts for today are essays by Simone Weil, the Needs of the Soul, written around 1943, and Meditation on Obedience and Liberty from 1937. For more information and links to these texts, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. And like Simone Weil, my kink is order and obedience.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin retaining the right to complete, unlimited and unrestricted freedom of opinion. In Austin, Texas.

0:39 Wes: This is Wes Alwan proactively recanting everything I'm about to say in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:46 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey feasting on the indispensable foods of the human soul in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:52 Wes: When you put it that way, sounds kind of gross. My middle name's Hannibal, but only a spiritual. Hannibal.

1:03 Mark: So this is a recording that was specifically commissioned by one of our listeners who reached out to us and gave us a lot of money. His name is Charles. He's dedicating it to Temple Grandin, whose work he says is in the spirit of Simone Weil.

1:17 Wes: That's interesting.

1:18 Mark: Yeah. So he didn't specify what we should read by her, but I found an online syllabus that suggested some things and re listening to our previous episode, which year it was very negative. It's really hard to make social change. The world is run by force. Human oppression is nearly inevitable just by the nature of things, that we're oppressed by nature. And then people just walk in and sort of take the place of nature and oppress us instead. But we're seemingly inevitably oppressed. So given all that bleakness, what does she have positively to say?

And I'd been told that her the need for Roots, which is this long book that was published after she was dead that she wrote near the end of her life. Again, she died at 34. Specifically, the section the Needs of the Soul would be really helpful in. Here's her positive project. And this is something that really impressed Camus. I know. And this meditation on obedience and liberty is, I think, an unfinished work. It's only about eight pages from 1937. And then I'm inserting this little announcement after the fact. We also read an essay called Theoretical Picture of a Free Society, which we're going to refer to a few times in this discussion.

But we actually didn't get around to discussing it. We're going to do that in episode 251. So you've got four weeks of Simone Weil ahead of you. What'd you guys think?

2:28 Dylan: I found her, on the one hand, kind of invigorating to read. Her way of writing is capturing, and she has a. Just an intensity that comes through on the page. And so reading some of her biography about how intense of a person she was, I think that just comes through. And it reminded me a bit of the experience of reading the Force and the Iliad essay. I confess that I found it felt like a lot of different. It's like philosophy, tapas. It was like a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And it felt. Maybe through this conversation I'll sort of get it pulled together a little bit more. But lots of interesting ideas and things that resonate with ways of talking about freedom and liberty and maybe even topical of things we've been talking about lately, about how we're free or oppressed in a society.

3:14 Wes: I was thinking I was going to tweet that I don't know of any more underrated philosopher that. The most underrated philosopher of all time.

3:22 Seth: Totally agree.

3:22 Wes: Because when I mention her name, no one knows who she is. And it's always such a joy to read her because she's not obscure, but she's thinking through really interesting and difficult ideas. She's not writing as an analytic philosopher with perfect clarity, but she's also not obscure. So, for instance, in the. I guess it's the theoretical picture of a free society essay, when she starts talking about mathematics, she has some really interesting and as far as I perhaps, you know, original ideas about that stuff.

3:54 Seth: She's super clear and is able to carry a theme through her essays in a very tight way. It's not argumentative in the sense where she's laying out premises and arguments. It's almost observational. But she does something that I have to say I have not yet seen. Connecting the personal to the political in a way that only Hannah Arendt, where she talked about public and private life and all. Not seen any other philosopher. Everybody else we've studied, when we've studied political philosophy or social theory or whatever, maybe Butler a little bit too.

But if you read something like Society of the Spectacle or Some of the Nozick and those sorts of things that we read, they don't connect the personal sense of responsibility and freedom and all that along with a collective notion. She has this very interesting way of talking about a collectivity of individuals and society in a frame of the individual that I think is unique. And it was fascinating. And these last essays were just delicious. I ate them up.

4:55 Mark: I think there is a disconnect somewhat between. You're saying, Seth, that there's a connection between the personal and the political. But I think there's a disconnect that she sees in the world between our personal needs and the political means available for us to satisfy those. So in that sense she's dealing with the tragedy of that. That was a lot of the point of the Iliad is that it is presented as this unvarnished picture of how force actually works. And that this is supposed to illustrate to some extent in this little meditation on obedience and liberty.

She says the notion of force discovered by physics was just totally revolutionary. It enabled industry and we need to understand social force. Who's the Galileo of social force that would let us understand how these things works? And then she argues that actually it was not Marx. You might think it was Karl Marx, but he got so many things wrong about it. You want to start with that little thing, meditation on obedience and Liberty. To have 15 minutes still about how difficult everything is before then we get to her positive picture.

5:52 Wes: It's 132, right?

5:54 Mark: Yep. Bottom of 132 or PDF page 139.

5:58 Seth: So she poses this question at the beginning. This is the first sentence. The submission of the greater number to the smaller, that fundamental characteristic of nearly every form of social organization still continues to astonish all who reflect a little in nature. We see how what is heavier triumphs over what is lighter. How the more prolific species overwhelm the rest. In the case of men, these so clearly marked relations seem to be reversed. Certainly we know from experience that man is not just a fragment of nature, that every day there are kinds of miracles being produced by what is highest in man.

Will, intelligence and faith. But that's not what we're dealing with here. There is nothing spiritual about that pitiless necessity which has kept and goes on keeping the masses of slaves, the masses of poverty stricken creatures, the masses of underlings on their knees. It corresponds to everything that is brutal in nature. And yet it is apparently exercised in virtue of laws which are contrary to those of nature, as if in the social balance the gram were heavier than the kilogram. And what she means is that social organization, historically and currently there's a small number who rule the larger number.

That the organization of governmental power and of power structures are always that the masses are submissive to and oppressed by the smaller number. And so that's the first phenomenon that she identifies. And then the second phenomenon is to ask, well, why do people willingly submit to these small numbers of people?

7:23 Mark: And her answer that she gives on just the next page is basically because the masses can't organize.

7:28 Dylan: They don't form a whole. In fact, she makes the point that you think that the masses are bigger, but they're actually not, because they don't form a whole. And that the rulers form a whole that's bigger than an individual, whereas the masses effectively form a heap that is no stronger than any one individual. Except on transient occasions, when a whole develops amongst large groups of people, that is acknowledged as being insurmountable.

7:55 Seth: This is just. I mean, it's a brilliant five pages. But the mechanism that unites the masses into a whole is emotion. And she says emotion is just not sufficient. It's sufficient to institute change, usually violent change, but it's transient, it can't last. And it's not compatible, as she says, with methodical action. The masses come together as a whole in revolutions when they reach the breaking point. But then all that happens is they exercise violence to kind of change or overthrow the existing order, and then they fragment apart and they can't form a new order. And the people who are successful in forming orders and ruling, obviously they form a whole by virtue of being a smaller group, probably by virtue of having some kind of homogeneity. Right. But also anchoring around an ideology or an idea, which she's extremely suspicious of.

8:46 Wes: But also they're capable of methodical action.

8:48 Seth: Right.

8:48 Wes: What they do is not coming just from passion.

8:52 Seth: No, exactly.

8:52 Wes: So it's something that can be prolonged. It's something that has staying power.

8:56 Seth: Yeah. What happens is after a revolutionary emotional outburst by the masses, then there will be smaller groups, wholes, that compete against each other for control, and eventually one of them will get it. And I think she had in mind, obviously, the French Revolution. She refers to that a number of times, not just in this essay, but also she was writing this. Was this 1949?

9:17 Mark: 37.

9:18 Seth: This is 37. Okay.

9:20 Mark: 43 is. Yeah, 43. She died in August. She wrote the whole book that contains the needs of the soul in the early months of that year.

9:28 Seth: Yeah. As far as this mechanism, she has in mind the French Revolution. But she also explicitly refers to Stalin. And she's just astonished at how Stalin can basically keep hundreds of millions of people and a sixth of the globe under his rule, and that they willingly submit to it, even with all of the violence that he perpetrates and the destruction.

9:47 Mark: So is she pointing out the fact that in practice you need something like a republic, you need something, or is she just denying that any government is actually going to be representative, that as soon as you have the small number of people that just by virtue of practical necessity. Right, they're the ones who understand how to use the machinery, who have the legal ownership of whatever mechanisms that you need to actually get things enacted on a mass scale by necessity. It's just impossible for every or even most people to understand those things. And so whoever has the keys is going to oppress inevitably.

10:24 Dylan: She's not quite that bleak. I think she acknowledges something like that, but she frames it in the context of the perfect will always be short of the attainable, and that you have to understand what the perfect's going to be in order to try to strive towards the better. So while she will acknowledge what you said, that there's a kind of inevitability of the actuality of the world falling short, she does frame it in the sense of, well, we can understand what the proper relationship between an individual and the community and our obligations and our liberties would be such that we flourish as free human beings, which is sort of her preeminent virtue.

11:03 Wes: Yeah, I think this is not some accident of history that things are like this. This is sort of a spontaneous way that social structures organize themselves. To be organized is to have some segment of the structure which takes on the. Of the brain or the leadership or whatever. And that must of necessity be a much smaller part in order to play that methodological role. It just must be the few, it can't be the mass. And then there's the psychology of that. So she thought this is reminiscent of Nietzsche and the pathos of distance and the idea that political superiority always resolves itself into psychological superiority.

But the people on top begin to rationalize that, and they say they're morally or naturally superior to those on the bottom, and those on the bottom feel naturally inferior to those on top. And so this is also reminiscent of ideology in Marx, right, Where what keeps the class disparities in place is not just the relations of production, but there's this ideological factor where the masses are told, you know, this is the natural state of things. You were born into this class, and that's just the way you are as a person. So part of Weil's solution to resisting that is to change the way people value themselves and their position in society.

12:26 Seth: That notion of individual value is, for her, critical because. And remember, you Know, just like you started off the conversation, Mark talking about. She thinks there needs to be an analysis of force. Like there needs to be an analysis of this phenomenon to understand the mechanism. But she brings up the idea that collectivity by itself is corrosive and destructive to the individual. In the sense that she says, if you preface anything by we, like W E in quotes, like the word we. Then you're essentially excluding the possibility of using your human intellect, your mind, in a way that can be fulfilling and transformative.

And so identification of any sort with a collective immediately debases you as an individual to some extent. So when she tries to answer the question of, okay, well, how could we have a sketch of a free society? It's got to be a free society where the individuals have value. And they believe that they have value. And they have the ability to exercise what is highest in them, which is the intellect, according to her. And so this mechanism of social order, it's not just oppression of the many by the few, but it's an erasure of the individuality and the value of the many by the few.

And she says at the end of that meditation essay, you know that anything that gives the individual the idea that they have value is subversive. And the mechanism of the ruling group is to try to push the boundaries of exploiting and oppressing the masses. Just up to the point where they aren't so pissed that the emotional wave takes place and they have the unification. So it's like you put your foot on their neck. And you let up just enough every once in a while. To make sure that they don't get angry enough to have an emotional outburst and a revolution.

But they still don't feel like they have any value.

14:16 Dylan: It seems to me a little more complicated than that. Maybe it's coming out of the other essays. I agree with the way you characterized it. That there's this huge theme of, effectively, individualism in it. And the value of the individual is she's constantly defending it against the constraints of the collective. But it's complicated by the idea of obedience. And she resolves some of this tension by there being basically not just a need for obedience, but a right way in which that works. So resolving the tension between the collective and the individual.

And in the end, part of that conversation is not just saying that there's a right way for the collective to be in its own terms. That leads to the property valuing of the individual. But it's not that the individual is absent obligation to the collective. In the end, there's such a strong current in her of obligation. At first, when I was reading her, I would think, well, she just wants to have individuals in free motion. She's, you know, borderline anarchist. But reading this, she's really far from that.

15:24 Seth: Absolutely. I completely agree with what you said, and I'd clarify the point just to say that in the sketch of a view of a free society, we can talk about what she thinks, what sort of principles must be in place. But I think she's talking about the mechanics of force as it exists right now and has existed historically, is that the ruling class needs to make sure that the masses don't feel their power. They feel impotent. And the way that they do that is by enforcing measures that turn the masses into a collective that doesn't have a sense of their own individual value, which would mean they don't have a sense of their political agency. And then in the essay you're talking about, she sketches out how we might reconceive of the social order so that those things weren't in place. And we'll get into that.

16:07 Wes: Yeah. For the purposes of this essay, we don't really get much of a solution.

16:11 Dylan: That's true.

16:11 Wes: She'll talk about balance in the other essays, and I don't even think it's conscious, but that there's a sense of lack of value on the part of the. The masses. And that's why something like Christianity is so subversive. You know, it says you're just as valuable, or maybe even more so, than the wealthier people or the people in power. The same thing goes for thinking for the intellectual forces within society. They can have a subversive effect as well. But that doesn't mean that the simple solution is to get rid of this particular social structure, because it seems like it's inevitable. So the last paragraph, which I think is worth reading.

16:51 Dylan: Yeah.

16:52 Wes: The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be. You cannot reproach those whom it crushes for undermining it as much as they can. When they resign themselves to it, it is not through strength of character, but, on the contrary, as a result of a humiliation which extinguishes the virile qualities in them. Neither can you reproach those who organize it for defending it, or make them out to be forming a conspiracy against the general welfare. The struggles between fellow citizens do not spring from a lack of understanding or goodwill.

They belong to the nature of things and cannot be appeased, but can only be smothered by coercion. For Anyone who loves liberty. It is not desirable that they should disappear. But only that they should remain short of a certain limit of violence. So this idea of remaining short of a certain limit of violence. Is the hint that we get at a solution that I think will be spelled out more in these other essays.

17:45 Mark: This reminded me a lot of the Walter Benjamin that we read that also seemed. Societies based fundamentally on force, on any law is essentially just forcing us. Whether it's a matter of establishing a new government or keeping a government in place. And so it just seems like it's all evil. Well, what do we do with that? Is the alternative just anarchism? Is it worldwide permanent revolution? It just seems very daunting. But I think there's probably a similarly more subtle solution here.

18:14 Dylan: So her characterization is of this force that exists. Which is fundamentally societal. And is a kind of necessity, apart from, I'll call it natural necessity. That exerts tremendous influence on us as individuals and on groups of people together. She draws this picture of human interaction and the course of history as being the story of various kinds of containment of that force. Almost as if it's like its own natural characteristic. And I think she does that like in talking about Galileo, characterizing force between inanimate objects. She's pointing to something that's analogous but distinct in human interaction.

But it's interesting to me that she considers it like there. She says it's fundamentally evil because it's somehow constraining the individual. She is framing it as ultimately always constraining the individual freedom of people. As opposed to. And maybe she comes closer to this later. As in the right measure being fundamental to the actual flourishing of individuals. That without society, without collective work together. We simply couldn't be who we are as human beings as well as we can be. Even in thought, even in our thoughtful actions, even in the things that we would most characterize as coming from within our own souls.

We couldn't do that at all without the collective.

19:41 Mark: So she has a very weird picture of the individual here. Maybe this can be a transition, since Wes read the edge of this selection. To the need for roots, the needs of the soul within the need for roots. Which is her elaboration, really, of human nature. And there was another essay that she wrote even after this. Where she was, I guess, reading a lot of Schopenhauer called the Human Personality. Which I just pointed out four pages of. There was only one point I wanted us to take from that. I didn't want us to read that whole essay because it didn't seem worth it, but that her notion of the individual is not the Western, British, American version of this self contained thing.

It's more like Spinoza's notion of the individual. Or if you remember Spinoza thought, how could we have immortality? Well, basically, as long as we are using our pure reason, according to Spinoza, to participate in, like when somebody does a math problem correctly, it's almost like Plato's ideal world of forms that we can all participate in. So this is just her Christian mysticism coming to bear. And again pointing at Schopenhauer, because Schopenhauer also had this more Buddhist idea that what we conceive of as the individual, a human personality, is nothing to get all worked up about.

That's the thing that the French Revolution pointed at and the Americans pointed at and said, this is the fundamental thing that we're protecting. But no, actually we are spiritual nodes in God's mind or something like that. That would take a lot more work to really elaborate. But I think that's just a filter through which we need to read the needs of the soul. So what are the needs? Somebody want to get us started on that?

21:12 Seth: Sure, I've got the full list.

21:14 Wes: There's the need for speed.

21:16 Seth: There's the need for speed.

21:17 Mark: Before she actually starts listing them though, she talks about this obligations over rights thing.

21:22 Wes: What's interesting here is that she wants to make rights derivative of obligations and obligations, even to have this fundamental ontological priority as really providing a grounding to something that in and of itself, rights, they don't have their own real existence apart from these obligations. So basically, rights involve the recognition of others recognizing their obligations towards us. We only have rights insofar as that happens.

21:55 Seth: This is 106. The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds. The effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. When I read this, I was thinking of Smith and Hume on moral sentiment. The idea that to say, somebody has a right to something if it's not recognized by other people in such a way where they feel obligated to respect and enact that right, it's empty and meaningless. So it had more character for me thinking about it that way than to try to think about it ontologically. Although of course my mind immediately went to Levinas.

22:39 Wes: It's not just that it's empty in the sense that it, for practical purposes, can't be observed. For instance, she says, a man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.

22:51 Seth: That confused me, that statement.

22:53 Wes: This is why I use the word ontology. She's trying to say, this is more than our particular dispositions or something that's going on in our minds. It's just that if we want to pinpoint the thing that is mind independent and real, we have to drill down to obligation. And then we can talk about rights as supervening on that.

23:13 Mark: The thing that Seth was confused about. Another quote on 106. A man considered in isolation only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights.

23:23 Dylan: Rights are always found to be related to certain conditions. Obligations alone remain independent of conditions. And I think that's what gets to sort of the ontological grounding that she's intending for obligations is that they're not contextual in any way.

23:36 Mark: Does she not know the word categorical?

23:39 Dylan: Yes, categorical, sure.

23:41 Wes: She gives them a kind of Platonic cast. Right. They belong to a realm situated above all conditions because it is situated above this world. The realm is of what is eternal, universal, unconditioned. It's other than the one conditioned by facts. Different ideas hold sway. Maybe metaphysics is even a better word than ontology, given the Platonic cast to it.

24:00 Seth: So this is the part that confused me. Then it says, well, you're born into obligation. The mere existence, the mere fact of being a human being puts you in a position of obligation that's prior to any of your material conditions. Should I then understand that if you were in isolation and you come in contact with no other human beings, those obligations manifest in your conditional life or your particular situation as duties. The duties. Duties you have to yourself. But then in social relations, they manifest in what we call rights. Does that sound right?

24:32 Mark: It's just that rights are still, as a semantic point, refer to the target. So you have obligations to respect people's rights, and rights is just a shorthand way of saying everybody has some obligations toward you.

24:47 Wes: Yep, very well put.

24:48 Seth: And the obligations you have towards yourself, we call duties, not rights. Is that fair?

24:53 Wes: I think she's using them synonymously. I don't know that she's trying to make that distinction. Not that it would be a bad one if you wanted to create separate words.

25:01 Mark: But I couldn't help but just read this as Kant with the theology more explicit. Just every point in here. Oh, she's talking about the kingdom of ends here. Oh, she's talking about our obligations being categorical and not empirically based.

25:15 Dylan: Yep.

25:15 Mark: I just was left wondering, what is she adding to this?

25:18 Wes: How would she explain it if it's different than Kant? Right. If we were to talk about derivation of obligations for Kant, I think we'd have to say something about rationality and the sense in which one cannot be a rational animal unless one observes those obligations. And also one cannot be free and autonomous except within the domain of obligation, the domain of one's ethical comportment towards others. I'm trying to think through what it means to say this is grounded in reality because it is in some sense constructivist. Right. It depends on this. We derive it from something about the human subject.

25:58 Mark: So the rights, what we actually recognized are constructivists in that they depend on the situation that we all have obligations toward. You know, if someone is suffering around us, we have the obligation to respond to that. How we respond would depend on what our ability to respond is, what the situation is, what mechanisms are around that would allow us to respond effectively. So I think you could have very different rights recognized in different societies, while there's still the same underlying moral relation that we have to each other.

26:28 Wes: We should say something about the fact that there are no obligations for collectivities, which is something that I've been in the political context saying for a long time.

26:37 Dylan: In that section. She just says that there are no obligations for collectivities as such obligations are only binding on human beings. They exist for all human beings who contribute, serve, command, or represent a collectivity in that part of their existence which is related to the collectivity, as in that part which is independent of it. And she has a very interesting way of defining the health of a collective.

26:58 Wes: Before you do that, I want to say why we might think that there could be no obligations for collectivity is because I think politically, people speak in this way all the time. Such and such a group will have an obligation to such and such a group. But groups are abstractions, right? They're not subjects, they don't have feelings, they don't have minds, and therefore they can't really have those obligations. And it's politically, a lot of pernicious things follow from the idea that groups can have obligations. Like individuals, for instance, can inherit the crimes of the group or the past crimes of the members of the group. And it's bound up with nationalist tendencies and with chauvinist tendencies. So she doesn't say all of this, but this is the way I think about this. So I think it's a really important principle to say that collectivities cannot have obligations. Only individuals can.

27:42 Mark: Right. So this whole thing is going to be an analysis of human psychology. And she wants to separate that a little bit from social conditions in that ultimately we want to get out of this some direction as to how we should shape society. But it's going to be an abstract. Maybe I'm actually imputing things that she says in the theoretical picture of a free society into here. But I definitely saw this as a useful way to read this. As might be that the world is just hard enough that there can be no society that can perfectly satisfy our nature, our needs.

You know, it's not just our wants, it's our needs that could actually be satiated, which, on comparison with people, have the need for food, but they have lots of desires and passions regarding food that could then lead them to be gluttonous. But for something to be a legitimate need, it has to be something finite, something that you could fulfill. So what are the spiritual. It seems like an unquenchable, everlasting, you know, overweening spiritual hunger. Well, she wants to say that spirituality also, we are created in such. Maybe thinking of this in terms of our telos would help that there are things that if we were to fulfill those, then we would be fulfilled human beings.

So let's figure that out before we even turn to can we construct a society that can actually do that? But it should be our guiding light. Figure out the individual psychology first, and then can we construct a society that would accommodate this?

29:06 Dylan: I think it's worth clarifying a little bit about this collectivity business because she clearly says there are no obligations for collectivities as such. There's a kind of qualification that goes in the second sentence. On the one hand, we need to understand that all the individuals within are the ones in a collective who hold the obligation as individuals. But as she says, they exist for all human beings who constitute, serve, command, or represent. A collectivity is in that part of their existence which is related to the collectivity, as in the part which is independent of it. Even if we acknowledge, and she acknowledges, that the collective doesn't exist as a whole that has obligations in the way that the collective doesn't have a soul. There are obligations that come as part of being, let's call it, members of a collective. It seems to me this is why

29:55 Wes: she's clarifying on page 110. She'll say essentially that we do owe collectivities respect we owe them respect in virtue of what they provide to individuals. So not for itself, she says, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls. So whatever grouping we might want to take, a national grouping or an ethnic grouping, and as Orwell said in his Notes on Nationalism, feeling patriotic towards those groups or seeing them as ways of life that ought to be valued and preserved. That's right, respect them. And then she gives a number of reasons for respecting them.

They're unique. It's like a species. Would you want to see a way of life just vanish from the world? They're food for both the living and the unborn. And there are spiritual treasures there, right? There's traditions, there's literature and philosophy and the arts. Everything that goes along with the particular tradition of a collective is a really, really valuable thing. So they can't have obligations, but they do deserve our respect as long as we understand that that respect is derivative of the function that they play in the lives of individuals.

30:57 Mark: Yes, they are our food.

30:59 Seth: Insofar as they play that role of food, they deserve respect. But two things. By the way, that idea that the collectivity is the connection between the past and the future and the transmission of culture ties back to Dewey. That was very much the notion in the Dewey that we just recently read. But she makes a clear point on around 111 where she says, this does not mean, however, that collectivities are superior to individuals and that the collectivity can demand the total sacrifice of the individual, but without any respect being owed to that. Because respect is associated with the fulfillment of needs, those finite needs. So if the collectivity demands something of you that is not a fulfillment of your need, you may be obedient to it, but you don't do it out of respect for the collectivity.

31:46 Wes: Yeah, I think this is an important point, right? Evocative of de Beauvoir's Serious Men. If we think that a collective or an ideal of any sort is so important that it's superior to particular individuals, we might think that we can sacrifice individuals for the sake of the collective or break a few eggs in order to make the omelet right. So we can kill, we can oppress, we can, all sorts of things in the name of the collective or in the name of the ideal. And that, I think, is what she's rejecting here.

32:14 Mark: In the name of a good economy,

32:18 Wes: Right.

32:18 Mark: She compares that to sacrificing yourself for an individual. That clearly our obligation could be, you know, if I die and three other people could live, seems like you should do that. That's just written into what our obligations are. And the same thing. If the society is our food, it is something that people need to survive. And so maybe even dying in a war to defend that society so that other people can survive off of it might be worth doing right.

32:46 Dylan: She presents the analogy of working the land and the kind of necessity that's presented by the constraints of the physical world. She says a peasant may, under certain circumstances, be under the necessity, in order to cultivate his land, of risking exhaustion, illness, or even death, but all the time he will be conscious of the fact that it is solely a matter of breadth. Similarly, even when a total sacrifice is required, no more is owed to any collectivity whatever than a respect analogous to the one owed to food. She clearly means food in the narrow sense and the broad sense to what nourishes our bodies and what nourishes our souls.

33:23 Mark: You will respect those green beans, young man, put on your plate.

33:27 Dylan: I really like the next paragraph. I just want to point it out. She says it very often happens that the roles are reversed. There are collectivities which, instead of serving as food, food for the soul, do just the opposite. They devour souls. In such cases, the social body is diseased, and the first duty is to attempt a cure. In circumstances, it may be necessary to have recourse to surgical methods. What's interesting, though, is she hearkens back to the idea that the collective is a kind of entity, a kind of body, which is a little bit of a mistake on her part. Right, because she's been trying so forcefully to make it clear that the collective is heap, it's not an entity.

34:07 Wes: Oh, really?

34:08 Dylan: She says the social body is diseased.

34:10 Wes: Is the collective a heap? I thought it was a functioning, structured thing.

34:15 Mark: Right. Insofar as it's actually coordinated. It's not a heap. Whereas the masses are a heap because they cannot organize.

34:23 Wes: Okay, I agree with you.

34:24 Dylan: It's not a heap. It's organized and therefore forms a whole greater than the individuals. That's true. And maybe it's just a weak analogy that she's making with a body as diseased.

34:33 Mark: I would resist that. Greater than the individuals, though. I just think that that's the place where you'd want to.

34:38 Dylan: It's greater in magnitude, not in importance or ethical importance.

34:42 Mark: Yes, there you go.

34:43 Wes: And we don't want to personify it. I think that's what the whole. There's no obligations for collectives. It's a matter of. We don't want to treat a collective As a subject, as an individual, And a lot follows from that. It's not a heat, but it's not an individual.

34:57 Dylan: So it may be that it has a body in the sense that forms a whole, but it doesn't have a soul, which is the most important point.

35:05 Seth: Or a mind.

35:06 Mark: Have we clarified that? These collectivities can be at any level. It's not just the state.

35:10 Wes: Yeah.

35:10 Mark: Political parties that she's going to have a big beef with.

35:14 Seth: Families.

35:14 Mark: Yeah, exactly. Families. Professional organizations. Like, she's very much in favor of these because these are basically achievements. To actually develop some coordination at any level with other people to preserve some values or something like that is at least potentially a good thing. It's just that it can so easily be used to squash people. All right, can we get to the list?

35:39 Seth: All right, do you want me to enumerate them?

35:41 Wes: Mark? Strongly needs. Getting to the needs to get to the needs.

35:46 Mark: There's 14 of them, and a lot of them sound like these could be on Jordan Peterson's list. But then there's some that sound like they are arguing against each other. You know, we need order yet we need obedience to obedience, yet. We need liberty, too.

35:58 Seth: Yep. So there's order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honor, punishment, freedom of opinion, not, let's see, security risk, private property and collective property and truth. There's a lot to unpack there.

36:18 Mark: Yeah. And each. Each one of them sort of doesn't mean what you think it means.

36:22 Wes: Yeah. So starting with order, she's focused on an order in which obligations don't conflict. In order to meet one obligation, we don't have to violate another obligation, which

36:34 Mark: is by definition, not actually achievable because obligations are just built into our relations to other people. And if there's somebody that's in need to my left and somebody that's in need to my right, and I have to, through practical means, can only fulfill one of those needs. I have to choose. But the important thing is that we not deny that one of them actually has an obligation, actually has a claim on us, that we say, the person on my left is a member of my family, so I'll help them. The person on my right is not, so screw them. Like, that's the kind of thing that a social order might come down and say, you're an American. You only care about Americans. And if they're foreigners, then, you know, they're not grievable lives.

37:11 Wes: And we can set up society to minimize those conflicts. Right. So if everyone has something to eat, then you don't have to steal to feed your child. So there's lots of injustices that follow. You know, some societies handle this a lot better than others. In the most oppressive societies, you will have a frequent conflict between obligations.

37:31 Dylan: At the beginning, she had framed this as a measure of the health of a society. All human beings are bound by identical obligations, although these are performed in different ways according to particular circumstances. No human being, whoever he may be, under whatever circumstances, can escape them without being guilty of crime, save where there are two genuine obligations which are in fact incompatible, and a man is forced to sacrifice one of them. The imperfections of a social order can be measured by the number of situations of this kind it harbors within itself. So, corollary, the more healthy the society is, the fewer those are. And I guess that's the point of order.

38:07 Seth: There's kind of a little throwaway comment at the end too, that's interesting.

38:11 Wes: Yeah.

38:12 Seth: The first characteristic is she's talking about the difference between needs and desires. That needs are finite and can be satiated, but desires are not. And so she says that applies to the soul foods as well as the physical foods. But the second characteristic, she says the needs are arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance. Man requires food, but also an interval between his meals. He requires warmth and coolness, rest and exercise. Likewise, in the case of the soul's needs, what is called the golden mean actually consists in satisfying neither the one nor the other of two contrary needs. It is a caricature of the genuinely balanced state in which contrary needs are each fully satisfied in turn. She doesn't do anything with that, but I thought that was really interesting.

38:54 Wes: I was trying to think about how this relates to the previous part of the conversation. So she takes this turn by saying that the great instigators of violence have encouraged themselves with the thought of how blind mechanical force is sovereign throughout the whole universe. So reminiscent of her Iliad essay. And she says, no, that's not the case. There are innumerable blind forces that are limited and balance each other out. And so we want to understand order within society based on this concept of balancing, not based on the concept of some, I presume, top down hierarchical force that makes everything else underneath it simply submit.

But then she moves into this whole the balancing involved in the definition of anything as a need. I'm thinking here of the tyrant in Plato, right? So the tyrant is at the whim of his desires because he has no balancing check on him, so that he ends up Being just as much a slave as everyone else.

39:53 Mark: It might clear things up when we get to obedience and stuff. But I was finding it, you say order in society to just not even think of these as primarily social. These are primarily human needs. And who knows if anything out there is going to be able to satisfy them. This idealism on page 114, we want to keep veritable human order as a North Star, a guide for action. Overall, such a traveler's way is lit by a great hope. This is very idealistic. It's not even clear that she knows exactly what an ordered society would be. Just that thinking about this in terms of human needs gives us the chance to say this society is less ordered or more ordered than that one. But not like what an actual well ordered society is.

40:34 Wes: Yeah, this is an ideal limit that she's describing. But I still think it's an ideal social limit or a limit that the subject here specifically is still collectivities.

40:43 Seth: Yeah. She says on page 113, at the present time, a very considerable amount of confusion and incompatibility exists between obligations. Whoever acts in such a way as to increase this incompatibility is a troublemaker. Whoever acts in such a way as to diminish it is an agent of order. Unfortunately, we possess no method for diminishing this incompatibility. We cannot even be sure that the idea of an order in which all obligations would be compatible with one another isn't a fiction. When duty descends to the level of facts, so many independent relationships are brought into play that incompatibility seems far more likely than compatibility.

Nevertheless, we have every day before us the example of a universe in which an infinite number of independent mechanical actions concur so as to produce an order that in the midst of variations, remains fixed. So she makes an aesthetic connection talking about the beauty of the world. And there's a sense in which when you behold something beautiful, there's an element of order in it. Beauty might be a pointer towards orderliness. That may be something that we could use.

41:40 Mark: You don't think that's just religion seeping into this?

41:43 Seth: Oh, she talks about art.

41:44 Wes: Yeah.

41:44 Seth: Really beautiful works of art are examples of ensembles in which independent factors concur in a manner impossible to understand so as to form a unique thing of beauty. Certainly in our aesthetics episodes. But if you just talk about art, the notion of composition and order and balance is present in the way people think about art and what constitutes beauty. I think too. So, yeah.

42:05 Wes: And in our episode on Kant's Critique of Judgment, there's the idea that this all has something to do with the free play of the imagination in which the order is not simply conceptual. Right. So the concepts involved, it's not an application of concepts to particular objects. The unity somehow transcends that. I'm not sure how to apply that exactly here, but it seems to be related.

42:29 Mark: So the thing that was throwing me was the idea in a work of art you might want to argue that there is order because there is a mind behind it. It. Right, the whole Paley watch thing. And likewise, if you're saying the universe is also like that, that sounds like you're bringing in a creationist idea of a single author. But if you think about the beauty of a work of art is not necessarily because the artist had all those different elements in mind, but have sort of a death of the author picture which she, I think actually has, you know, just that notion of individuality that I was saying that we are not individuals because we are this self contained whole, but because we are sort of a node of God or something like that.

Really. When a work of art is the interaction between an agent and a bunch of things about the medium that the agent really doesn't have control of, right? The way that the paint bubbles or that the notes sound in the air or whatever, these are things that can be controlled to some extent, but it's always going to be a bunch of different independent systems coming together and giving us this impression of order. So if that is that accurate description of a work of art, then I have no problem with that also being an accurate description of nature.

That whether it's because of us as perceiving human beings, which I think was the implication of Kant's take, that we sort of create order out of this or that, whatever the source, phenomenologically there really does appear order out of chaos, then sure, I'm willing to accept that being a potential thing we could look for even in a society, in much the way Adam Smith's take on capitalism, it's not planned.

44:04 Wes: So for Kant, beauty evokes the sense that there's a super added order to things that makes the world almost seem to be designed for us, for our ethical aspirations. And for Weil, we would put it somewhat differently. Although maybe if we added the religious stuff, which we don't get directly here, we might, might do something else with it. But here I just think it's evocative of the possibility of a social order that maximizes orderliness in the sense of a minimization of conflict of obligations.

44:40 Seth: I want to take issue, just Mark, with this notion that she's suggesting here, something like intelligent design. I think she talks about mechanical action. So the physical universe. There are an infinite number of physical actions taking place, things interacting with each other according to a small and finite number of fixed laws. And she's using that as kind of a metaphor to say we can imagine that if human beings interacted in this way according to this smaller set of obligations. But just because it's orderly doesn't mean that it's good. For example, she talks about industrial assembly lines all the time.

Right. If you looked at it from above and everybody was doing these coordinated physical actions, you would say, like, wow, there's a lot of order. There's there, but it's not beautiful. There's a separate criteria, as Wes said. Super added on it, where there's a sense in which an aesthetic judgment about the order lets you know whether it's truly removing conflict of obligation or doing something else. And again, so much of this is suggestive. She's just trying to say, like, we have a model. We have an example of what order looks like. That's good.

And so just keep that in the back of your mind as we talk about order in a society. I think that's really all there is

45:53 Wes: to it and something that helps us sustain the aspiration and also to define the aspiration, too, even if it is an ideal, not an unattainable ideal.

46:02 Mark: Well, so, of course, what would be wrong with the industrial model of order is that, yes, you have all these cogs working in a concerted effort, but it's ignoring the individual needs of those cogs to the extent that it ignores some obligations that we have toward each other. Right. If those cogs, those individuals who are working in the assembly line and their supervisors and the owners, if they have obligations toward each other that are being ignored by this one type of order, then it's not order in the sense that she wants.

46:33 Seth: No, no. And the primary obligation that's being conflicted in that order is the individual's obligation to think, to use their intellect. Because there's no thinking going on. It's just dull, mechanical action. They're not figuring anything out. They're not exercising their intellect in any one of the three ways that she describes. And I think the other essay. So that's the primary violation.