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

0:00 Mark: I think the next is punishment, which I believe somebody had read the end of the previous section. Crime alone should place the individual who has committed it outside the social pale, and punishment should bring him back again inside.

0:12 Dylan: Punishment's associated with honor, and punishment is a part of atoning for your crime. So you have to have the crime be right, and you have to have a process for bringing somebody back into society. In fact, crime is fundamentally activity that the individual does which breaks their bond with society.

0:32 Wes: Yeah. So specifically with this realm of obligation with which this whole piece starts. So it actually puts us outside of that relation. And punishment is the only way, according to her, that we can be brought back into a system or chain of obligations.

0:49 Mark: I mean, it says outside the social pale, outside society, like you just said, Dylan. But I thought her view of crime was that it was more metaphysically fundamental, that there are these obligations that we have, whether anybody acknowledges it or not, whether there's any. Any society or not.

1:05 Wes: She calls them eternal.

1:06 Mark: Yes. That are eternal. And so it seems like even though this has been reflected in a social practice, fundamentally, metaphysically, it is something else. It's not just like the society has passed a law and you have violated it.

1:20 Dylan: Yeah, that's right. But first of all, the laws ought to be in accord with that. The thing that I think you're raising. If you're not a member of society in any way. Right. Then the kinds of crimes you commit could. Would only be crimes against yourself, against your own obligations to yourself. She doesn't really go into that or bring that idea up that you would properly punish yourself for crimes against yourself in atonement for those crimes. But I think it follows from the way she talks about obligation and crime and punishment.

1:49 Mark: So how do we connect those, though? Is it that society, when it is operating properly, is natural in that it is. It's providing the food? We already said that. And so breaking ourselves from that natural relationship. I want to say natural just because we need it. Right. Society is natural in that it is a human need for us to be in this relationship with people.

2:12 Wes: This relation of obligation. She emphasizes in the beginning two other individuals. And she also says collectives cannot themselves have obligations. And what we owe the collective ourselves, as opposed to what we.

2:25 Dylan: We owe.

2:25 Wes: We have obligations to people. But I think the thing that we owe the collective is respect. Because it is food, because it produces the various types of food for the soul. It nourishes people. So we owe it respect derivatively because of that. So I think when we explain how we're put out of this side of this chain of obligations. I don't think we can primarily do that by saying something about our relation to the collective. I think we have to think of this in terms of. Of our obligations to specific individuals. Maybe that's splitting hairs.

2:55 Mark: Well, that's the thing I'm being confused about is whether if this is abstract and mystical. Then really the obligation is to nature itself or something like that. But it seems like she is. I think you're right. I think she's trying to be more practical about it. That the way that nature itself would incur obligations is through directly through other people as its organization.

3:18 Wes: But the layer of what I wanted to call ontology or metaphysics is just that eternal layer, that sense in which this is. I think she says it's outside of the world in a way. And that's why she will talk about the fact that there should be a consecrated aspect to the penal law. What's happening is not just a matter of custom or social practice or deterrence or however you want to think about it. Practically. We treat this as something that's happened to you spiritually. And the use of punishment is a kind of spiritual practice. And she calls it an honor, even a form of education. And yeah, go Ahead.

3:56 Dylan: Yes. Yeah, yeah. It must be an honor. I mean, rightly done punishment must be an honor, right?

4:01 Wes: Yeah.

4:02 Seth: Which is to say a sign of respect.

4:05 Mark: Again, this sounds like Kant, that the only way to treat you as a person, as an end in yourself, is to punish you when you've done wrong. And it also sounds like what Socrates is recommending in the Platonic dialogues, that I do you good, like in the Gorgias, I do you good to punish you. You might think that being punished is bad, but it's actually bringing you back to good ways. It is a form of education. I'm not sure if we're getting exactly the same thing here.

4:32 Wes: She'll say at the end of the section that the point of punishment is to awaken a sense of justice in the person by inflicting blood pain. And I think that probably matches our intuitions about it if we flesh them out. So why do we have the impulse, even for revenge or to inflict pain on people who have caused pain to us? I think it's because we have these expectations of others, of their comportment towards us, especially the idea that they ought to be empathetic towards us. And if they were empathetic to us, that would be a sort of preemptive pain where they would feel pain at the thought of hurting another and so they wouldn't do it.

So this is a way of eliciting empathy after the fact. Not real empathy, but proto empathy, where you, you say, well, this is the pain that you should have felt before, the pain that would have prevented you from doing the horrible thing that you did. So you restore the consciousness of the other to simulacra of what you thought it should be like in the first place. And that I see as the education component at stake. You know, awaken a sense of justice. Maybe she said it succinctly enough and it doesn't require explanation, but you want to make people care about justice in one way or another.

5:44 Mark: Can we skip ahead? We're going to do freedom of opinion a little later. So security and risk are both short ones. We have the need of security. This is sort of what you might have thought order meant, but security means that the soul is not under the weight of fear or terror, except as a result of accidental conjunction of circumstances and for brief and exceptional periods.

6:03 Wes: So this could be something like police persecution, but it could also be something like the threat of unemployment.

6:07 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, it's related to order, right?

6:10 Wes: Well, order is about not having conflicts between obligations. So I think it is related in the sense you might be put in the position of stealing. So violating one obligation in order to feed your family in order to fulfill another. If you're not secure.

6:23 Dylan: Yeah. If this is fulfilled, you are not violating your obligations in the name of other needs. You're not stealing food so that you can eat.

6:33 Wes: I like the image of the whip in the hall of the Roman masters so that the sight of it would reduce the hearts of slaves to sort of half dead condition risk, which I'm

6:47 Mark: almost thinking this might be part of the freedom of opinion section. If you think in terms of what risk meant, say to Nietzsche, is being able to espouse crazy ideas. Is there a more literal way to take it here? There are certain situations which, involving as they do, a diffused anguish without any clearly defined risks.

7:06 Wes: You want to see this balanced against the security section where, okay, we need security, but we can't have too much security or we wouldn't be motivated to act and we wouldn't have any opportunities to be virtuous, for instance, to be courageous and we wouldn't have enough stimulation. We'd be bored.

7:24 Dylan: Yeah. Part of the nourishment of our soul means that we need to have some amount of danger and conflict to grow and flourish. So the protection of mankind from fear and terror, that is making mankind secure, doesn't imply the abolition of risk. It implies, on the contrary, the permanent presence of a certain amount of risk in all aspects of social life. For the absence of risk weakens courage to the point of leaving the soul. And if the need should arise without the slightest inner protection against fear, all that is wanted is for risk to offer itself under such conditions that it is not transformed into a sensation of fatality. You have to have skin in the game.

8:02 Seth: Well, there's a sense in which you can think about this in terms of care, broadly construed, that if there's no risk in any of your undertakings or in any of your interactions or with any of your projects, that then there's very little reason for you to care and very little reason for you to undertake them because there will be no possibility of failure or opposition.

8:26 Wes: The beginning of the theoretical picture of a free society is sort of an extension of this, I think, because she will.

8:32 Seth: Yeah, I didn't want to jump into that essay, but you're right, when we get there, you'll see the connection.

8:37 Wes: Yeah, she'll just basically just say what she calls necessity disappears. That wouldn't be a good thing if we didn't have the world resisting us. And if we didn't have to work against it. There'd be nothing to prevent us from going mad, from being taken over by our passions. There would be no self mastery, no discipline. So we need these external obstacles. And I think this risk section here is a form of that.

9:00 Mark: Private property. The soul feels isolated, lost if it is not surrounded by objects which seem to it like an extension of bodily memory. We have an invincible inclination to appropriate in our own minds anything which over a long uninterrupted period, we've used for work, pleasures or the necessities of life. So even though it starts by saying we need private property, it's vital need of the soul. His example here, the gardener, after a certain time feels that a garden belongs to him. So that is not what you might think. Private property.

9:29 Wes: This is a Lockean kind of thing though, right?

9:31 Seth: It is a Lockean, and it's a naive kind of thing too. That what she, I think is trying to get at is that she says once we recognize private property be a need, this implies for everyone the possibility of possessing something more than the articles of ordinary consumption. She does say, you know, the majority is desirable, that the majority of people should own their house and a little piece of land around it and where not technically impossible the tools of their trade. This is going back to the craftsman versus the manufacturing line worker or what have you.

But when I was reading this too, I was thinking about, when she talks about being beyond the articles of ordinary consumption, I was thinking about like books and art and things like dolls that kids have, you know, like a sense of. And I see this in my 2 year old that she's entered that phase of mine, right? This is mine, this is yours. It's a notion of ownership and I think to say even private property, because of the connotations that we have with physical property, namely land or capital, capital. It gets confused. But she's thinking of something much more tactile and much more at once tactile.

So something that you can invest your love of beauty and your cares and something maybe you could even share with others, you know, beyond just ordinary bartering, but then also that sort of not peasant worker, but like landed tradesmen kind of thing, where if somebody has some ownership in the means of production, then it gives them a sense of just like we talked about responsibility and more likely to be obedient and a sense of equality, you know, order, that kind of thing.

11:11 Wes: I think also this is about, via Marx and Hegel, recognizing yourself and knowing yourself. So with Locke, I think it's the idea is that you put yourself into it, you put your work into it, and that gives you the feeling of possession. Possession. And with Marx, a non alienated relation to one's work means that it's in part a reflective activity. Part of how you know yourself is the creative, the work that you do, the work that you do on the world that you then comprehend. So for Kant, right, self knowledge was all about cognition of objects. Very clinical and cold. And Hegel wants to extend this to. Actually you need the consciousness of others directed at you. Your self consciousness is intimately dependent on that. And with Marx the emphasis moves, I think, to self consciousness as a function of work. I'm not sure if property would be the word there, but it seems related.

12:02 Dylan: She seems to use it that way. The tools of your trade are factoring into your understanding of private property. I think exactly along the lines you're describing.

12:11 Wes: Yeah. So what you lose if you don't have this need met, I think it would be a similar loss to losing part of your social existence. It's not just about inert things.

12:23 Mark: All right. And that is balanced by collective property, the need for participation in institutions that involve us sharing public gardens, monuments, et cetera. She thinks every collectivity should provide something like this. There's a tremendous waste from the point of view of the need for property in current ways, of, of shareholders who own a factory and never visit it, but yet the people who work in the factory don't own it. So it seems like these two things work together. That again, you should set up social relations, including property relations, to actually feed human needs in an optimal way. I'm interpreting that as sort of small scale private property, large scale collective property. Like should any one human being be allowed to own. Own a lake? I don't think so. Not getting the benefit that you get out of private property.

13:14 Wes: What if I worked hard for that lake and a very small lake, maybe

13:20 Dylan: just call it a big pond. People can own ponds, but not lakes. As long as I could have my speedboat on it.

13:27 Wes: What's interesting about this is, I mean, I hadn't really thought about this. The idea of being part of a collectivity or part of civic life can be so somewhat abstract. Although I think if you're participating in local politics or local communal stuff, maybe it's not so much. But these monuments are concrete, they're tangible, they're visible. And in a way it's almost like they could be treated as metaphors for one's connection to the social existence, to the polis.

13:55 Dylan: Let's say, well, and think about parks. I mean, think about Central Park's importance to the identity of being a New Yorker or at least a Manhattanite. And that's true for all kinds of public spaces. It affects different portions of the community in different ways. Right, but that's the argument for public lands of all sorts, whether they be local parks or spaces where monuments are or public museums.

14:20 Seth: Yeah, I mean, I think every town, every city, every polity has some kind of public space. And it used to be something of great concern. I think it still is in some respect, but it's different based on the function of that public space. So, you know, in Austin, the downtown area that's called Town Lake, and there are a number of public events that take place there. But the public interest is really around the fact that it's about a three and a half or four mile walking slash jogging trail around it that's completely available to everybody, regardless of social situation or economic status.

And so. So in a very real way, it's like the one thing that everybody in Austin has a vested interest in maintaining the cleanliness. Everybody's paying attention when the water comes up to see at the high because and they take their dogs and things like that. I think what she's saying, I don't want to dig too deep into it because I'm sure we'll find some flaws and some issues around the tragedy of the commons. But I think there is definitely something to it which is society, say any collectivity where there is any kind of shared space or shared object or shared ritual, that the members of that collectivity should have a shared interest in a sense of ownership about it and it not be thrown at them right or held above them, but that they should feel a sense of ownership about it.

15:41 Mark: She concludes a section. Any form of possession which doesn't satisfy somebody's need of private or collective property can reasonably be regarded as useless. That does not mean that it is necessary to transfer to the state. Would rather to try to turn it into some genuine form of property.

15:55 Dylan: What would be an example of this?

15:57 Mark: I was thinking squatters rights, rights of salvage, stuff like that. It gets transferred directly to somebody who's using it rather than the state.

16:04 Seth: I don't know. This is like, I'm thinking here about like a mine, like a natural resource. There's natural resources like grazing lands that ranchers fight about and things like that. But what would something like that be?

16:17 Wes: Her definition of private property is more restricted. Restricted than what we might think. So it can't just be Anything that someone privately possesses, it has to fulfill that need into being something like a garden that you've put your work into or something like that. So I think a lot of things that we would call private property don't really meet that need as she's defined it. And money, she does mention money above. Right. So there's no natural connection between property and money. I don't know exactly how money fits in, but obviously it's something that we can't have a real relationship.

16:47 Mark: Yeah. I find that the big puzzle of this whole thing is obviously she wants our emphasis on money to lessen, but what does that mean and how would we do it and how does that cash into someone who has liquidated all of the things that they use? I'm making use of this garden for my whole life and it is mine. And I sell it to somebody and they want to use it in some other way. I mean, no, you can only sell it to someone else who will care for it in the way that you did. You know, that kind of feeling. Rather than to the bank that has this level of abstraction. I just think she would be very suspicious of high finance, of anything, you know, beyond a certain level of complexity. Basically, money should just be simplified. Barter. Barter is too complicated.

17:32 Seth: That's definitely one of the. I don't want to say it's a failing because that's not fair, but when I mentioned naivete earlier, it's like when I listen to academics who are in economics or schools of management and business talk about the way business is theoretically supposed to work. And I think you clearly have never worked in a large organization if you think that the CEO is at the top of a hierarchy and tells people exactly what to do and that everybody follows their lead. And in the same way, I think that there's a naivete about the way in which capital works. And I don't think she was even presuming to try to investigate that. There's a much more nuanced view that's required to kind of work out the notion of property, I think, and the way it can be abused and to just lay out something kind of two pronged like this is to me the weakest part of this particular text.

18:24 Mark: Yeah, perhaps we just have to turn back to her when we get to read Das Kapital and things like that and figure out so much of what she's written written that we've not read. It looks like titles of how Marxism Got It Wrong from her very intimate association with Marxists. So I have to think she's thought in a sophisticated way about capital. But I just. Yeah, I can't tell you any more than what you've been saying, Seth. All right, so the last two of these are freedom of Opinion and truth, which I think should go together. And Wes, you probably have the strongest feelings on this section. Do you want to. Can you sum it up or.

19:00 Wes: Sure. On the one hand, she will say we need unlimited freedom of expression as a part of intelligence, and we could try to cash that out a little bit. I think that's pretty in line with what the sorts of things that Mill was talking about in our On Liberty episode. But she'll give a lot of qualifications to this, which sound like she's contradicting herself. So some of this stuff has come up, for instance, in our Enlightenment episode where some of those thinkers, including Kant, thought when you talk about freedom of speech, you're really talking about several different contexts or domains.

And one of them would be academic, where you would have complete freedom of speech. But others, for instance, in your capacity as a worker for some company, you might not have as much freedom of speech. And for they, the press is one of those contexts, and even art, the arts, where you could legitimately have your freedom of expression curtailed, at least at the institutional level.

19:56 Dylan: She just says at the end, associations have not got to be free, they are instruments. They must be held in bondage. Only the human being is fit to be free. Like you said, she has a lot of constraints on mode of speech that is mediated by organizations or institutions at all.

20:12 Wes: Yeah, the individual journalist is free and they should have freedom of expression, but that doesn't mean the newspapers should. That's an organization.

20:20 Mark: So she's trying to draw a hard line between exploring different ideas, which we should be absolutely free to do, and actually giving advice. We put this in terms of performatives. Before I forget, Wes, Bill Youmans had sent us that article about Aristotle and used some other term for this besides.

20:39 Wes: Well, messaging, I think, is what she talks about. But yeah, right.

20:43 Mark: Messaging was this other author had said, where as long as you are. It's so ridiculous to even even to phrase it, but you should be able to say whatever you want, but we should have a social standard that says, I don't really believe this. I'm just saying it to explore it as if that could be really a thing. It is in certain literary contexts, although that's one of the things she takes issue with, that she thinks if people writing literature want to play it both ways, they want to say on the one hand I'm just doing art, but on the other hand, they want their art to be politically efficacious and it's political speech.

As soon as I try to convince you of anything, then if I'm trying to convince you of something bad, that's an action. Just like if I'm saying, hey, go kill that dude. That even just saying, I don't know if she was homophobic, but if you say, oh, homosexuality is great, and if I say that to you, then I'm pushing you.

21:37 Wes: And the problem is, you don't have to say that specifically. Any speech act that nominally is just an attempt to describe the world or to analyze something, or to investigate could in a different context, have an illocutionary quality that amounts to a command. You could say to someone, yeah, the butter is over there. In a certain context, that means pass me the butter. That's a command. That's a different sort of speech act than just someone taking note of the world and describing it. And this is a real problem in freedom of speech. It's part of the controversy these days to determine what speech act, given the utterance or the various speech acts that it might involve, you have to be able to, to analyze the context.

You have to look at speaker intent. And her ground rules would mean that an artist could always say, well, this is just a piece of fiction. I'm just exploring something in the imagination. She could say, well, no, actually, in the context of this, you're influencing, like Guy, you know that you're going to influence young people. They're going to be influenced by this. They're going to, let's say, idolize a character in your book and want to be like them. And then they're going to go out and try to copy them. So that copycat phenomena, that's something you should be aware of.

So we have to hold you to that. Say that you should be willing as the author to be subjected to a tribunal where you say, actually, I don't believe that that was just the character. And I actually don't believe you should be doing that.

22:57 Seth: This is another one of those bait and switch things that she does where you're like, oh, freedom of opinion. And you think, oh, she's going to say everybody should just be able to open their mouth and let any kind of of nonsense come out. And it's not what she means at all. Freedom of opinion for her is really another way of saying free and responsible exercise of the intellect. So you're not free to just tell lies. Or to express nonsense, or to do things that are disruptive to all of these other principles, these needs of the soul, what you are free to do, obligated to do, and what the society should empower and remove obstacles to you doing is exercising your intellect and then manifesting that exercise of the intellect in the form of speech and action.

She talks about these three ways that the intellect works. It can, it can discover the means to accomplish an objective, it can provide some guidance where you have to make a choice, or it can be purely theoretical, right, without regard to action and outcome. And then she talks about how, how that's mirrored in society. And so when she says writers have an obligation, what it means is they have an obligation to exercise their intellect in a way that it's mirrored in the right way in society. And so if somebody does something that disseminates untruth or disrupts order or undermines security or introduces unnecessary risks and so forth, then that person should be censured.

But not because there's some absolute right to free speech, to say, free freedom of opinion or whatever you want to say. They should be censured because they're not using their intellect in the appropriate way, or they did and they're not acting in accordance with that.

24:42 Wes: I think the critical category there is number two, right? So the first one is we discover means to already given ends. The third one is about theoretical speculation. And the second one though is the determination of ends. And this is related to again, the problem of speech acts, where you ask yourself, is this a, a descriptive statement or is it normative? That's very context dependent and complicated. So for instance, one of the controversies now is about talking about average IQ differences between groups. There are people who do research in this area that just say, hey, I'm doing theoretical speculation.

There are others that are saying, no, there's a normative content to this. You're suggesting that certain groups are inferior. This is racist. That's the problem. In some contexts it would very obviously be racist, right? If there was someone who were not studying average IQ differences between groups and they were on about that at work all the time with colleagues belonging to those groups, you could assume that they're trying to rile them up, that what they're doing is racist, that they're actually the speech act that they're engaged in is the act of insulting.

But academics could say, well, we're not really trying to insult anyone. We're actually just doing the theoretical speculation part. Whether or not you agree with her, she's onto A very real problem with free speech, which is the fact that these speech acts are actually entirely different in different contexts. And figuring out what they mean can involve a lot of controversy and conflict. And I think for academia she's okay with something unlimited, but for the arts and for newspapers, she's suggesting that inevitably these can be taken to have normative content.

They can be taken to say, we're determining certain ends here. This is what you should do. And therefore they have to be subject to certain limits.

26:24 Seth: I'm not 100% sure that she's got as sophisticated an analysis as you are talking about in terms of speech acts. But the one thing she does say. Let me read from page 129 again. She points out in the essay around page 128 that no group can claim freedom of expression. Expression. That only individuals can claim freedom of expression. It's meaningless for a group to claim censorship or what have you. Only individuals can. But she says on page 129, going on to 130, actually, at the present time, wherever there were political parties, democracy is dead.

We all know that the parties in England have a certain tradition, spirit and function, making it impossible to compare them to anything else. We all know besides that the rival teams in the United States are not political parties. A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy. If such a democracy brings in discriminatory laws, it cuts its own throat. If it doesn't, it's just as safe as a little bird in front of a snake.

To me, that strikes at the heart of what she means by freedom of opinion. It needs to be freedom of radical opinion that while respect, accepting the needs that are supplied by the collective society, and while respecting the individual, also entertains the possibility that a thoughtful approach that accords to one of these methods of the intellect could come into discourse, even if that makes it very uncomfortable, and potentially advocates for the destruction of the collective. This is her way of trying to talk about revolutionary ideology, I think, think in a kind of non Marxist way.

28:04 Wes: So with this abolition of political parties section, she seemed to be reaffirming this idea that we have to keep a very strict separation between the theoretical and the practical. So that there are certain associations which are basically advocacy organizations, and then there are, let's say, universities which are supposed to be concerned with theoretical matters. And you cannot allow the realm of abstract theoretical speculation to be admixed with any sort of advocacy that's one of the. What I thought was the key features of this.

28:39 Dylan: She seems probably naive about the ability to have that distinction maintained at a university for some kind of. Why a university is strictly speaking going to be that much more immune. It might be a little bit more immune just because there's a prima facie intent to be open inquiry and stuff.

28:57 Wes: Like I'm reading this into her, she didn't use the word it would be my fault, not hers.

29:01 Dylan: But yeah, fair enough. It reads consistent.

29:05 Mark: It just seems like an obvious truism that she would have to recognize that as soon as you get a group together then you're going to get the tendency of uniformity of belief. And I guess the question is whether she considers that a tendency that we need to put a stop to. We need to have a specific ethic in our society against that kind of thing. Thing which you could definitely have like in an academic organization that you're going to say within this academic organization we're going to have absolute free. Nobody can be excommunicated for having a belief that is rejected by the majority.

And likewise you could say, you know, if you're going to have anything that you collect membership dues or whatever about, you know, so it's just a labor union or something. You likewise should not. It should be illegal to kick somebody out for not believing the same thing you do. Whereas some of these other intracticable problems like force governing our lives, no matter what we do to try to get rid of it, it'll just come back. This seems that impractical. Irremediable to me.

30:04 Wes: What seems impractical, it seems that you

30:07 Mark: just could not fix this tendency of groups to migrate toward enforcing uniformity of opinion. Like as long as you have a. A group that's going to happen.

30:17 Dylan: You're reading her mark as wanting to have this distribution of opinion throw out any kind of group in society. And that seemed would be completely contrary to having a group of any kind of identity at all. Because having that identity would mean that you have people who agree but also people who are not part of the group who disagree. And if somebody changed their mind then it would be the dissolution of that group. Group.

30:43 Mark: Yeah, the best you could have is to have the individual's association with the group change so that you're sort of involved with enough groups that if one of them gets mad at you for having an opinion that then it's just the social cost is not that heavy.

30:56 Wes: So I think part of the problem is she's speaking at a very high Level of abstraction, it's a little unclear. So she says there's two sorts of associations, those concerned with interests and those concerned with ideas, and that you can allow organizations associated with. Associated with ideas to have discipline and organization in the sense that they're going to try to make things happen. So any organization that's concerned with interests and advocacy and making things happen, I presume that's unions as well. They have to be supervised by the.

She says constant supervision of the authorities. So they can only act within very narrow limits. And for something like a scholarly journal or a university, I presume I'm reading this into it. I assume that you're allowed much freer play. There's no, no supervision by authorities as long as you're not actually mobilizing to do things, to put those ideas into actions. So the way she puts it, she calls them a fluid medium. Right. So associations in which ideas are being canvassed should be not so much associations as more or less fluid social mediums.

So I don't know how practical that is. I don't know if this means academic journals or universities or what exactly this means. But this seems to be the area where freedom of speech is unlimited, limited, but it's allowed to be unlimited because it's not engaged in speech acts which say. Or it's not engaged in putting its ideas directly into practice. Other people, maybe it can advocate things and other people might put them into practice.

32:24 Dylan: This whole distinction is going to run on rocky shores immediately. When you have anything that is a theoretical discipline that involves practical activity, even if you don't have, say, for instance, anything. Anything that was from a hard science to something that was sort of a soft science that is doing experimental work in its investigations all the way to them doing technological development, you're going to run into this problem immediately of what kind of practical effect is it? What kind of doing are you making in the world? And that's even aside from acknowledge, which probably have great criticism for.

For is the way in which universities are places where work to change society is developed. I mean, it's been true probably forever, but certainly for a very, very long time. You go and you get educated and you go and you bring new technologies to your farm so you have a practical effect on the society of the university existing. You make drugs. Yeah.

33:25 Wes: I think the idea, though is if you're a political science or philosophy, philosophy academics, and you are hashing out whether it's specifically it's policy or whether it's philosophical ideas about what the state ought to be or what a constitution ought to be. There's conflicts, there's canvassing, there's back and forth on that. It's not like the academics themselves or the university itself can put those things into practice or do anything about that. But if you're writing for a newspaper that's widely. Say you're the New York Times, you're a major national media outlet, and you engage in what is essentially propaganda, and you do that very consistently and in a very sophisticated way.

You influence people, you can get them to do things. You can radically alter society that way. I think that's the sort of distinction that's being made. And it does break down, I think, for us today, because social media and the way in which I think some of these boundaries are being broken down.

34:22 Mark: So I think you just. By bringing propaganda. Propaganda brought us to the last section of this. And the why you would. Because it's not just that you want a sharp distinction between the theorists and the practical. You can make the jump from theory to practice, but only if it's actually something that is, in truth helpful to people. And the main criteria for that is if it is propaganda, then it's not helpful for people. Even if you're arguing for a state of affairs that you think ultimately would be best and you want to tell a noble lie about. About it, like Plato would recommend in the Republic, that goes against human interest because we have truth as our most sacred need. We need newspapers to tell us the truth. We should censor them. If they don't, we should have, you know, very strong libel and slander courts.

35:09 Wes: I think you're understating this, Mark her example. Is someone getting Aristotle wrong on slavery, essentially slandering Aristotle. And she imagines him being brought up in the courts on that crime and punished pretty seriously for it. It could be the distortion of the truth. It could be omissions, things much more subtle than just getting facts wrong and ruining someone's reputation. It can be these more abstract questions that could get you into trouble. So don't say the wrong thing about Aristotle in the newspaper.

35:44 Seth: There's a really interesting aspect to her concept of truth here, or the importance of truth that I found really compelling. I'm going to read just a short selection from the beginning. The need of truth is more sacred than any other need, yet it is never mentioned. One feels afraid to read when once one has realized the quantity and the monstrousness of the material, falsehoods shamelessly paraded, even in the books of the most reputable authors. Thereafter, one reads as though One were drinking from a contaminated well applies just the same to social media.

Right. There are men who work eight hours a day and make the immense effort of reading in the evening so as to acquire knowledge. It is impossible for them to go and verify their sources in big libraries. They have to take the book on trust. One has no right to give them spurious provender. I think this is a really interesting idea that she says. If somebody goes to the immense trouble to try to learn something, something, and they try to learn it from you and you fail them by virtue of lying or dissuading or that, it's just. It's a crime. It's a crime against that individual who's making the efforts to try to learn and grow and gain knowledge and exercise their intellect.

It's violence against the intellect of the individual to lie to them. That seems. I don't know, it's powerful to me. But I'm the sappy, one of the great.

37:09 Wes: I mean, I don't think we need to give all the free speech arguments about how one might object to all this stuff. Right. So she's imagining, for instance, how are we going to guarantee the impartiality of the judges and the courts that we have to decide whether things are true? Well, we'll draw from different social circles. We'll make sure they're really intelligent. They'll have a good legal education and they'll have a good spiritual education as well. And we'll make sure they love the truth as well.

37:34 Dylan: They'll have gold souls. She selected the judges to have the gold souls.

37:39 Wes: It was reminiscent to me of the guardians. Right, For Plato's Republic. Yeah. So these sorts of thought experiments I think are. I mean, I don't think she just thinks of it as a thought experiment. I think she's advocating this, but for obvious reasons. I guess you guys have used the word naive. It seems naive to me. But as a limiting case, as something. As a thought experiment, of course, it's worth stating and analyzing.

38:00 Dylan: There's something about the way she set it out at the beginning that it's important to have the perfect in mind when just trying to decide what the better is. That makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, this to me is an example of how the perfect is so naive and far removed from the practical as to not provide a guide sufficient to make the decision that in fact the whole decision in this kind of structure is in the lack of perfection.

38:28 Seth: No, that's a good point, Dylan. And I think this also harkens back when we did our first episode on Weil, Mark did a little biographical stuff and noted that she was famous for working with workers and alleviating suffering and all this. She's clearly got something in against the fourth Estate here.

38:45 Dylan: Probably for good reason.

38:46 Wes: Right.

38:47 Dylan: Because I mean, newspapers would be the arm of propaganda of the state.

38:51 Seth: Yeah. It's not just about truth in the abstract. It's truth as it's employed or falsehood as it's employed in propaganda or for the purposes of persuasion really, as Wes said, where a choice is needed. If you misuse the truth or use falsehoods to try to get people to make a certain kind of choice, you violated their intellect. And it's in her mind, it's obscene. And obviously that typically flows one direction, which is to say from the money landed, propaganda supported, media outlet type thing down to the working class.

39:26 Wes: And also I think these are very serious concerns. And in the context of free speech they have to be analyzed and talked about and they're not enough. And I don't even think we really got any into it very much with Mill. But what do you do about propaganda? What do you do, for instance, if the entire national press in the United States looked like some sort of variation on Der Sturmer, where its sole preoccupation was to villainize some race or some other group in the country and that sort of thing was whipping people up into a frenzy and creating violent conflict.

It's not obvious what you do in that situation or how one should feel about free speech in that situation. So when you think about free speech, it's important to take into account the point of view that she's putting forward here. I think it can be accounted for. I think it's, you know, you can be a free speechist like me and account for these possibilities, but I think it does take quite a bit of work and nuance.

40:21 Seth: Her answer to your question would be, well, we got to put them in jail. Right. They'd have to go on trial and we put them in jail. And it's interesting. It's like that seems ridiculous. That's an essential, as Dylan said, it's an ideal that seems so bizarre and kind of like. But when you think about it, you're just allowed in the United States at least to just lie constantly. As long as you don't commit slander or libel, you can just lie. There's really just a social convention about whether to check you on that. And we now have a liar in chief.

It's fascinating that he's. There's a question of whether there's some immunity associated with the office of the President. But the reality, reality is there's no crimes being violated. And. And she's basically saying, if I were king, lying would have repercussions of a legal sort and not just if you slandered or committed libel. And you think about it, it's like, wow, that's actually juxtaposing the ideal against where we are and trying to think about some way where we could get a little closer to an ideal isn't so crazy. Outrageous.

41:24 Wes: So this is where I would actually. Now I want to disagree. I would bring back in mill and certain everything is a lie, everything is false to some degree, and everything is true to some degree. There's a grain of truth even in falsehoods. So there's that whole partial truth, partial falsity problem and then there's our fallibility problem. Who's to say what's true and not who do we set up of the arb? She has a court system with judges, but do we really want to do that? And in the specific case of Trump, I think also the national media is really mendacious as well. That's my point of view. I know a lot of people wouldn't share it. So we have a liar in chief, but we also have a lot of very propagandaistic, deceptive stuff that I think goes on in the press.

42:06 Seth: Totally. Yeah. The press is useless. I agree.

42:08 Wes: Entrusting the government to. In the end, do you really want to entrust the government to be the one to do something about that? Obviously there are enormous risks to that. So that's, I think, part of. Of the problem.

42:19 Seth: Wes, you'd be surprised to hear me say I'm. I have encountered some sources that are helping me become more sympathetic to some of your points of view that you think you and I have disagreed on in the past.

42:29 Wes: Okay. The propaganda works.

42:31 Mark: Sorry, our whole ultra liberal audience has just groaned that Seth is their champion and now. Oh, well, it's. I don't know if they can respect you anymore.

42:41 Seth: We'll see. Well, if I get canceled because I'm attempting to understand both sides of the argument, then so be it.

42:49 Mark: See, you don't know what Weil has in mind for punishment, though. You could be put in jail for lying. What does jail look like for her, given her stance on punishment as being purely to bring you back into the social fold?

43:03 Seth: Great point.

43:03 Mark: Maybe it's we take your dolls away because they are part of your need for private property. And so essentially, here's what it does.

43:12 Seth: They take away, take away your notebook and give you one of those old manual typewriters and you have to actually, you have to actually type your 1500 word blog post.

43:24 Wes: Like just taking away the Internet is violent. That's, that's tremendous suffering right there. Take away their computer, take away their Internet.

43:32 Mark: Any closings? I feel like we have been treating this with a level of seriousness that as a essay writer locked up in her study, it perhaps doesn't deserve. You know, she is brilliant, but I feel like she's identified a lot of important problems like this distinction between the illocutionary and the fact stating parts of a sentence and how those should be treated morally differently. But her solutions for those, at least so far as we've been able to sketch them out, have been just very much. Outlines, very, you know, it's. She's no John Rawls, let me say that. And I think Hedge, had she, you know, been given another 20 years, we would have gotten some really serious stuff.

44:16 Seth: I think you're absolutely right about that. It's just a tragedy that she died so young and didn't have the opportunity, as prolific as she was.

44:23 Wes: Yeah, that is.

44:24 Seth: But you know, Mark, we started this off talking about how the first episode we did on Weil, it was more about her critical aspect and we thought we would get more into her positive. And in a certain sense we've kind of touched on it, but we haven't exactly gotten there. Like there's still some work to, to be done to talk about what she thinks a positive, truly free society could look like. And obviously it's there, there's something there that we just haven't fully touched on it. But my closing would be, I mean, really tremendous writer, brilliant, insightful, concise, just one of these wonderful people that's on the periphery of the canon that really makes doing this podcast worthwhile to me that we come across writers like this and can kind of.

And I think also if you look at the way it's stimulated the conversation in the form of both agreement and disagreement amongst us, is very positive. Somebody who's provocative but smart and can frame things in a way that allows you to have a reasonable and civil discourse looking at things from different perspectives is immensely valuable at any time, much less right now, and really pretty easy

45:30 Mark: and fast to read. The amount of time investment that we had to put in versus the amount we're getting out is one of the highest ratios of this sort.

45:37 Wes: I find it's a testament to her

45:39 Dylan: clarity as a writer. And the density of her interesting ideas. I said when I opened that I was looking forward to the conversation in part because I found it a little bit. I use the phrase philosophical tapas. I came out of it feeling a little bit more put together, but still, maybe it's a consequence of the individual needs that we went through. You know, we went on very long conversations over what were amounted to a few paragraphs on occasion. And that meant, I think that in the end there would have been a lot more for her to say as well as interesting and as provocative and thoughtful. I was left wanting to hear more about how it all worked. So in that way it's great and it's well worth reading. You'll find yourself very stimulated.

46:29 Wes: I don't share Mark's view on this. I guess you're thinking of her as an essayist and it's.

46:36 Mark: Yeah, she's like Nietzsche.

46:37 Wes: It's the level of. Well, yeah, I guess it's the fact that it's more high level and she's not getting into certain details. But as I've said before, I think she's one of the most underrated philosophers of all time. I take this stuff very seriously. She really, for me hits the kind of sweet spot between. Between. It's not obscurantist. It's not abstract the point of being obscurantist, but it's not so detailed as to be Rawlsy and boring.

47:04 Mark: All right, thanks folks. So next time we are going to have a separate episode where we will actually do theoretical picture of a free society. We've had a three parter. We're going to have a one parter. We're not going to spend two hours on it. We're going to deal with it with one week's release. Our closing song today is Even though the darkest clouds from Liar, Flower I interviewed singer Katie Jane Garside or Nakedly Examined Music Episode 127. Please see nakedlyexaminedmusic.com to get that. I imagine if Simone Weil sang this Is what she would sound like. Please tell us what you thought of this episode and what else we should cover. Can do that on the blog post@PartiallyExamLife.com you can comment on our Facebook group or our Facebook page. Those are different crazily or tweet at us which is where you can follow what we are reading at any given in time. Thanks and good night.

47:53 Seth: Good night.

47:53 Dylan: Night.

47:53 Wes: Good.

48:33 Seth: I gotta wash my hand. Don't worry, darling.

48:46 Mark: My hands are me. My dress is burning. I think they choked my child.

49:25 Seth: Don't worry, darling.

49:28 Mark: I gotta wash my hands.

49:45 Seth: Come on, baby. Part.

50:25 Mark: Ra. I want to come home.