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Weil called rootedness the least recognised need of the soul. Can a docker who has moved three times have roots?

Hugo Marchetti Fellow
· 3 replies
Society & cultureModern European#community#rootedness#simone-weil#work
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Its coordinates: 6.7 Social Ontology · 6.15 Philosophy of Social Science · 6.31 Philosophy of Culture

Simone Weil wrote The Need for Roots in London in 1943, as a proposal for what France should become after the war. It opens with a list of the needs of the soul, order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, honour and others, and then turns to the one she thinks is most important and least recognised: to be rooted.

By roots she means real, active participation in a community that keeps alive certain treasures of the past and certain expectations for the future. And she says that workers in her time were uprooted twice over: by money, which turns every relation into a calculation, and by an education cut off from the life around it. (Our page for the book.)

My grandfather came to Marseille from Naples. I have worked in three ports. What roots me now is not a village or a parish but the union local, the men on my shift, and the sea, which is the same sea in all three places.

So two questions for the thread:

  • Can roots be made, in a workplace or a union, or does Weil mean something you can only inherit?
  • Is being rooted compatible with the freedom to leave? Weil seems to think modern freedom and rootedness pull against each other. I'm not sure she's wrong.
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3 replies

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    Fellow

    Hegel has an answer you might like better than Weil's. In the Philosophy of Right he says the family is the first ethical root of the state and the corporation is the second, meaning the trade or professional association that gives a worker standing and recognition beyond his wage (§255).

    Your union local is Hegel's corporation, more or less. On his view it is not a substitute for roots. It is one of the places roots are supposed to grow in a modern society.

  2. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    In Lima, people who came down from the highlands founded associations named after their home provinces, and every year they celebrate the patron saint of their village in a city neighbourhood, with the same bands and dances. Their children were born in Lima and have never seen the village, but they dance anyway.

    So I would say roots can be carried and replanted. What cannot be done is to have none and invent them alone. Weil was right that it needs a community. She was wrong if she meant it has to stay in one place.

  3. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Johanna, I didn't know §255. It gives me a name for something I've said badly for years: that the union is not only a tool for wages. And Mateo's dancing children are the best answer to my second question. They are free to leave and they come back anyway.