by Anton Cebalo
In the past decade, the writer Simone Weil has grown in popularity and continues to provoke conversation some 80 years after her death. She was a writer mainly preoccupied with what she called “the needs of the soul.” One of these needs, almost prophetic in its relevance today, is the capacity for attention toward the world which she likened to prayer. Another is the need to be rooted in a community and place, discussed at length in her last book On the Need for Roots written in 1943.
The question of “rootedness” was a pressing problem, particularly for the first half of the 20th century. In the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that the two world wars had produced “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” As empires and homelands collapsed after WWI, so many were uprooted from the only worlds they had known. And their newfound superfluous condition led many of them toward “fictitious homes” in the postwar years to disastrous results. Indeed, abstract loneliness had become “an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century,” wrote Arendt, which had rendered them vulnerable to totalitarianism. Uprootedness, it seemed, was partly to blame for Europe’s destruction.
Writing earlier than Arendt in 1943, Weil arrived at a similar conclusion in asserting that “rootedness” was a fundamental need of the soul. In On the Need for Roots, she begins her re-rooting of humanity by outlining a few vital ingredients that are required for healthy nourishment. Yet, the key to her idea of rootedness lies in it establishing linkages to the past and future, forming an assemblage of parts that together provide one with necessary meaning. Such relational thinking often appears in Weil’s writing, as does the Greek word “metaxy” which means an “intermediary” or an “in-between place.” Of course, roots can so often be distorted, manipulated for nefarious ends, and imagined as myth. But given that we are intrinsically social beings, the need for roots as a fundamental fact of life remains sacrosanct.
In our own time, such affirmations are worth revisiting for their own sake. After all, the trend today is not much in dispute: sociality, trust, and community life have nothing short of fallen off a cliff in the past few decades. It is a secular decline visible across many different national-cultural contexts. The unifying accelerant across all of them has been the internet and its infosphere, which has entered with such speed as to have no precedent or time for comprehension. Who knows what “fictitious homes” may be conjured up in our frayed context? When the roots that would give one meaning close, what so often enters is nostalgia, exaggerated hatred, and the desire to be saved. Such desires will inevitably find their way into politics and the everyday, if they haven’t already.
Amid the last great uprooting of peoples in the first half of the 20th century, writer Robert Musil speculated that perhaps the problem was that “we were lacking the concepts with which to absorb that which we experienced.” Then, too, was a time of upheaval in many spheres of life which lacked precedent. Maybe it can be said that such confusion confronts us again if we are honest enough to admit it. As Weil would undoubtedly argue, developing a language for speaking of this fact starts by reexamining the social roots that tether us to the world.