In the 'need for roots' Simone Weil wrote-
THE NEEDS OF THE SOUL The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.
No. A baby has rights. It has no obligations. An obligation arises where there is a claim right over a person. It may be wholly imaginary- e.g. my saying 'I am obliged to tell you that you are ugly, stupid, & your Mummy hates you.'
A right is not effectual by itself,
yes it is if the person with the right has the power to enforce it- e.g. shooting an assailant in a 'stand your ground' State.
but only in relation to
its 'incentive compatibility' (i.e. there has to be an incentive to provide the remedy. Otherwise the remedy is likely to disappear).
the obligation to which it corresponds,
Fuck off! Madoff's investors have a right to get money from him. He has an obligation to give them money. He can't. Thus the right is ineffectual.
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.
That is merely a manner of speaking. A guy who wants to help another person may have no obligation to do so. Also, if he rapes and kills that other person, it is not a case of noblesse oblige.
Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual.
No. Without the means to fulfil the obligation, it is ineffecual. However, recognising a debt does have the effect of 're-starting'the clock. That is why it is a bad idea to 'recognise' an obligation which would otherwise become 'time-barred'.
An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence.
It has no existence whatsoever.
A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.
It is not a right. It is nonsense.
It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations.
If there is a right under a bond of law, then some particular person or organisation may hold the obligation to fulfil that right. However, obligations are defeasible.
Such words only express differences in point of view.
Not when it comes to the law. Some non-justiciable matters may be subject to norms which are analogous to laws. Thus, though there is no law against farting at the dinner table, a person who habitually does so may be subject to social sanctions. It may be possible to 'appeal' against this- e.g. by revealing you have a medical condition or pretending to be from Newcastle.
The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject.
No. It is legal or quasi-legal. It isn't purely linguistic.
A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself.
No. Considered in isolation, a man is like a beast or God. Aristotle said ' He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god."
Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights.
No. Other people are either sources of pleasure or utility or annoyance or mischief. However, there is such a thing as 'Oikeiosis'- natural affiliation, belonging, appropriation- e.g. people bonding naturally with their babies and feeling connected to siblings even if they quarell with them incessantly.
He, in his turn, has rights, when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him.
We prefer affection to obligation. It is Love, not the Law, which makes the world go round.
A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
Crazy lady says what? The fact is, even if we were wholly alone, we would still feel some things are 'right' and other things are 'wrong'. You have a right to do what is right. You feel you are violating a right (which may belong to an inanimate object) when you do something wrong- e.g. shitting in a pellucid stream.
The notion of rights, being of an objective order, is inseparable from the notions of existence and reality.
No. Rights are not objective. They are subjective. However a court of law may uphold a right and, by stare decisis, it might thus acquire a degree of objectivity. But it would still be defeasible.
This becomes apparent when the obligation descends to the realm of fact; consequently, it always involves to a certain extent the taking into account of actual given states and particular situations.
If there are facts, the thing is justiciable. If not, the thing is incohate.
Rights are always found to be related to certain conditions.
No. They may be abstract or inchoate.
Obligations alone remain independent of conditions.
No. They are status dependent. Babies or people with diminished capacity have rights but may have no obligations.
They belong to a realm situated above all conditions, because it is situated above this world.
No. Abstract rights or obligations belong to the world of theory which is part of this world because theories exist in the brains of beings with physical existence.
The men of 1789 did not recognize the existence of such a realm.
Some did. But all of them were either lawyers or had some knowledge of the law. Moreover, they knew about the English Glorious Revolution as well as the American Constitution.
The men of 1789 were either Catholic or Deist. You don't get any atheist till three or four years later. Weil was utterly ignorant. It's a good thing she stopped teaching High School.
All they recognized was the one on the human plane. That is why they started off with the idea of rights.
In imitation of the Americans. Natural Rights went hand in hand with Deism as a 'natural theology'.
But at the same time they wanted to postulate absolute principles. This contradiction caused them to tumble into a confusion of language and ideas which is largely responsible for the present political and social confusion.
Catholicism wasn't confused at all.
The realm of what is eternal, universal, unconditioned is
unknowable and inaccessible
other than the one conditioned by facts,
We don't know what, if anything, is conditioned by anything else. There are no facts there are merely hypotheses which haven't yet been refuted or 'sublated'.
and different ideas hold sway there, ones which are related to the most secret recesses of the human soul.
What has that to do with politics or the law? Weil didn't get that both exist only so as to enable better solutions to collective action problems. They are not concerned with the secret recesses of your heart or your soul or your anus.
Obligations are only binding on human beings.
& some dogs or other 'working animals'.
There are no obligations for collectivities, as such.
Yes there are. This stupid lady hadn't noticed that the State has obligations as do large enterprises and corporations of various types. If a thing can have legal personality, it can have obligations.
But they exist for all human beings who constitute, serve, command or represent a collectivity,
No. They may have complete immunity or the thing may not be justiciable. This doesn't mean some nutter can't say 'x has an obligation to eat my shit'.
in that part of their existence which is related to the collectivity as in that part which is independent of it.
Nonsense! You can't say 'I don't have an obligation to show up for work because currently I am lying in my own bed'.
All human beings are bound by identical obligations,
Very true. French babies had an obligation to serve in the armed forces.
although these are performed in different ways according to particular circumstances.
Baby is fighting the Bosche by filling up its diaper.
No human being, whoever he may be, under whatever circumstances, can escape them without being guilty of crime;
Everyone escapes stupid shite that a crazy lady comes up with.
You are only guilty of a crime if a court of law says so.
save where there are two genuine obligations which are in fact incompatible, and a man is forced to sacrifice one of them.
Still a crime. If you are obliged to kill kaffirs as well as your cheating wife and you don't get to kill kaffirs because you have been incarcerated for beating your wife to death, you are still a fucking criminal even if some crazy lady says otherwise.
The imperfections of a social order can be measured by the number of situations of this kind it harbours within itself.
No. Its imperfections are measured by its getting conquered & enslaved. France was very fucking imperfect till it got itself an effective offensive doctrine- viz. nukes.
But even in such a case, a crime is committed if the obligation so sacrificed is not merely sacrificed in fact, but its existence denied into the bargain.
If the person doing so stabs you repeatedly, then, and only then, is a crime committed.
The object of any obligation, in the realm of human affairs, is always the human being as such.
Crazy lady didn't know that a lot of people had an obligation to pay tax to the Government.
There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to be fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such obligation on the part of the individual concerned.
This is like the claim 'me love you long time'. The person making it is either a prostitute or fucked in the head.
This obligation is not based upon any de facto situation, nor upon jurisprudence, customs, social structure, relative state of forces, historical heritage, or presumed historical orientation; for no de facto situation is able to create an obligation.
It is shit a crazy lady pulled out of her arse.
This obligation is not based upon any convention;
because it is shit
for all conventions are liable to be modified according to the wishes of the contracting parties, whereas in this case no change in the mind and will of Man can modify anything whatsoever.
because shit is shit. It can't be modified.
This obligation is an eternal one.
Crazy lady doesn't get that nobody has to wipe anybody's bum in Paradise. God takes care of everything.
It is coextensive with the eternal destiny of human beings.
Unless Darwin was right or karma is a real thing.
Only human beings have an eternal destiny.
Her destiny was to go completely crazy and starve to death.
Human collectivities have not got one.
France still exists. Simone doesn't.
... A human being’s eternal destiny cannot be the motive of any obligation, for it is not subordinate to external actions.
Yet priests feel obligated to quit their comfy beds to go administer extreme unction to poor parishoners living in foetid slums.
The fact that a human being possesses an eternal destiny imposes only one obligation: respect.
Peeps want affection, not respect.
The obligation is only performed if the respect is effectively expressed in a real, not a fictitious, way; and this can only be done through the medium of Man’s earthly needs.
I respect the King. No 'earthly need' of his can be supplied by me. That's why I've stopped dropping off a curry for him at Bucking Palace.
On this point, the human conscience has never varied.
No. The human conscience distinguishes between obligatory and supererogatorory actions. True, a megalomaniac or hypocrite may say 'I'm so fucking wonderful that I feel I have an obligation to all the poor suffering shitheads I see around me.'
Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians believed that no soul could justify itself after death unless it could say: ‘I have never let any one suffer from hunger.’
In which case, poor Egyptians were fucked in the afterlife because they had no food to share with the hungry. The good news was that you could buy a 'heart scrab amulet' which would prevent your own heart from giving testimony against you thus causing a demon who was part crocodile and part hippopotamus from eating your heart.
All Christians know they are liable to hear Christ himself
who wasn't part hippopotamus
say to them one day: ‘I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat.’
If you feed the poor you feed Christ. If you crucify Christ, on the other hand, he takes off on your sins. Does he get eaten by a half croc hippo? I'll ask the Pope next time he pops in for a cuppa.
Every one looks on progress as being, in the first place, a transition to a state of human society in which people will not suffer from hunger.
Fuck that. We think progress is about having a robot butler.
To no matter whom the question may be put in general terms, nobody is of the opinion that any man is innocent if, possessing food himself in abundance and finding some one on his doorstep three parts dead from hunger, he brushes past without giving him anything.
Yet this is what happens when Members of Parliament walk past a dude who is on hunger strike. Personally feeding homeless people is an inferior outcome to having well funded Social Services such that people with expertise in helping indigent people who may suffer mental illness.
Sadly, Simone's pals indulged her foolish fantasy that she was a 'philosopher' rather than a stupid shithead. The result was that she starved herself to death because of mental illness.
So it is an eternal obligation towards the human being not to let him suffer from hunger
Should the Brits have put Simone in a psychiatric ward and forcibly fed her?
when one has the chance of coming to his assistance. This obligation being the most obvious of all, it can serve as a model on which to draw up the list of eternal duties towards each human being.
Shitheads who study or teach 'philosophy' should be sent to the lunatic asylum. Encourage them to finger paint with their own feces rather than gluttonously eat it.
In order to be absolutely correctly made out, this list ought to proceed from the example just given by way of analogy. Consequently, the list of obligations towards the human being should correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger. Among such needs, there are some which are physical, like hunger itself.
Simone didn't understand that humans have evolved to get food for themselves. Sadly, because of her mental illness, she starved herself to death.
They are fairly easy to enumerate. They are concerned with protection against violence, housing, clothing, heating, hygiene and medical attention in case of illness. There are others which have no connexion with the physical side of life, but are concerned with its moral side. Like the former, however, they are earthly, and are not directly related, so far as our intelligence is able to perceive, to the eternal destiny of Man.
These things effect our destiny in this life. Either this affects our 'eternal destiny' or nothing does- in which case there is no need for roots or boots or coots or anything else.
They form, like our physical needs, a necessary condition of our life on this earth. Which means to say that if they are not satisfied, we fall little by little into a state more or less resembling death, more or less akin to a purely vegetative existence.
Simone died. Not eating enough will do that to you.
... Every one knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body.
No. Everyone knows that claims of mental cruelty are generally bogus. Little kids quickly learn that 'Sticks and stones may break my bones. Names can never hurt me'.
They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.
For some it is song. For others it is sodomy and involves choirboys. That's where Catholicism scores over Hinduism.
Obligations, whether unconditional or relative, eternal or changing, direct or indirect with regard to human affairs, all stem, without exception, from the vital needs of the human being.
No. They arise under various mechanisms used to solve collective action problems.
Those which do not directly concern this, that or the other specific human being all exist to serve requirements which, with respect to Man, play a rôle analogous to food.
People with eating disorders tend to be obsessed with food. Had Simone suffered constipation she would be talking about the eternal obligation to take a fucking dump already.
We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself, but because it is food for mankind.
We also owe a pig respect because bacon is fucking delicious mate.
In the same way, we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.
We should respect the fuck out of McDonalds & Col. Sanders & Mr. Kipling who makes exceedingly good cakes.
Actually, this obligation makes different attitudes, actions necessary according to different situations. But, taken by itself, it is absolutely identical for everybody. More particularly is this so for all those outside such a collectivity. The degree of respect owing to human collectivities is a very high one, for several reasons. To start with, each is unique, and, if destroyed, cannot be replaced. One sack of corn can always be substituted for another sack of corn. The food which a collectivity supplies for the souls of those who form part of it has no equivalent in the entire universe.
Also the farts which a collectivity supplies to the shadows of those who constitute it has no equivalent in the universe. The same is true of half croc half hippo ancient Egyptian demons.
Secondly, because of its continuity, a collectivity is already moving forward into the future.
Unless it isn't. The Third Reich disappeared.
It contains food,
only in the sense that it contains farts
not only for the souls of the living, but also for the souls of beings yet unborn which are to come into the world during the immediately succeeding centuries. Lastly, due to this same continuity, a collectivity has its roots in the past.
Unless it doesn't. New collectivities- like the UN or NATO or the EU- came into existence after Simone died.
It constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead,
That's God's job- unless karma is a real thing. What is more likely is that there are no spiritual treasures. Souls don't need food or farts or big big pyramids to keep the safe from a half-croc half-hippo.
the sole transmitting agency by means of which the dead can speak to the living.
They can write or videotape a message to future generations.
And the sole earthly reality which is directly connected with the eternal destiny of Man is the irradiating light of those who have managed to become fully conscious of this destiny, transmitted from generation to generation.
i.e. crazy people who might decide to starve themselves to death.
Because of all this, it may happen that the obligation towards a collectivity which is in danger reaches the point of entailing a total sacrifice.
This dim bint starved herself to death because she falsely believed that folks back in France had much smaller rations than was actually the case.
But it does not follow from this that collectivities are superior to human beings.
Nothing follows from nonsense. It is the case that some 'collectivities' are superior to any human being- e.g. the Law is superior to any officer of the court- whereas the reverse is the case for certain other collectivities- e.g. the Iyer fan clab which is inferior to me- its only member.
It sometimes happens, too, that the obligation to go to the help of a human being in distress makes a total sacrifice necessary, without that implying any superiority on the part of the individual so helped.
Some people do indeed get paid to risk their lives in this way.
A peasant may, under certain circumstances, be under the necessity, in order to cultivate his land, of risking exhaustion, illness or even death.
Everybody risks illness or even death all the time.
But all the time he will be conscious of the fact that it is solely a matter of bread.
No. Only somebody with an eating disorder is constantly conscious of bread or cake or whatever. Had Simone been constipiated she would say 'the peasant is always anxious awaiting a fart in the hope that it will turn into a bowel motion.;
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.
Or farts if that is what you are obsessed with.
It very often happens that the rôles are reversed. There are collectivities which, instead of serving as food,
None does except in the sense that they serve as farts or sharts.
do just the opposite: they devour souls.
and fart rainbows.
In such cases, the social body is diseased,
her mind was diseased. Sad.
and the first duty is to attempt a cure; in certain circumstances, it may be necessary to have recourse to surgical methods.
She would have benefitted from psychiatric care. Should she have been 'sectioned' and forcibly fed? Perhaps. But that's not a decision I'd have wanted to make. Still, by oikeiosis, some collectivity whould have decision makers who could decide whether nutters like Simone needed to be saved or could be safely left to do away with themselves without anyone giving much of a fuck.
As Lloyd Jesus said 'man does not live by beard alone. Moustache too is advisable.'
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