What Matters?

by | 14 Jan 2025

Yet always there is another life,

A life beyond this present knowing,

A life lighter than this present splendor

 – Wallace Stevens, ‘The Sail of Ulysses’

It is the condition of the critical theorist to be constantly attuned to unnecessary suffering and injustice and yet to hold steadfastly to the promise of things being otherwise. Sometimes the weight of the former threatens to crush the latter. But despite the evidence, despite the human pain and ecological degradation, there is a “present splendor” (as Stevens put it) that persists. It takes shape variously, in the perseverence of human dignity, in the suddenness of beauty, and in the incalculable love of family and friends. 

Simone Weil saw such a juxtaposition in universal terms, expressing it in a way we can all recognise:

“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.” (‘Human Personality’, in Miles, p.71; in-text page references are to this collection.)

This juxtaposition – of innocence and experience, we might say – achieves an intensity in perhaps the only mode of expression that succeeds in holding its tension in place. It is, Weil writes, in the experience of art that, “In proportion to the hideousness of affliction is the supreme beauty of its true representation.” Weil observes this especially in the work of the great dramatists – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare – but also in Homer and the Gospels, in each of which, “The radiance of beauty illumines affliction with the light of the spirit of justice and love, which is the only light by which human thought can confront affliction and report the truth of it.”  (p.92)

In a way that is now rare, Weil invokes these terms and the values they give form to, as necessary to a critique of existing social and institutional relations. In their practical bearing they inform an account of action in which human needs and obligations play a central role. Weil argues that obligations correspond to needs, not rights, and that these obligations are universal, strict, and permanent. In the midst of the Second World War, she wrote a “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations” (p.221). Aware of the shortcomings of a rights-based approach to human community, the sense of obligation she describes registers something profound and ineliminable: the “needs of the body and soul” that everyone has equally and in different ways throughout their lives. She enumerates them: material needs, the need for rootedness in nature and place, the needs for liberty, equality, and privacy and their correlates – constraints, hierarchies of responsibility, and the valorization of lives lived in common. Starting from this perspective, Weil argues that each person is bound, “both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever.” (225) The stringency of this obligation endures even where there is a recognition of differing abilities to act, since “No combination of circumstances ever cancels this obligation”. Weil acknowledges that institutionalised distributions of power – “political, administrative, legal, economic, technical, spiritual” – mean that the “equal and universal character of the obligation is to some extent modified by the particular responsibilities attaching to a particular office.” (230) But her account of these is novel in ways that radically upset what has become the routine operation of political and legal institutions.

The unrelenting nature of the “single and permanent obligation” lies in the force of the practical demands it establishes. Weil writes: “This obligation cannot legitimately be held to be limited by the insufficiency of power or the nature of the responsibilities until everything possible has been done to explain the necessity of the limitation to those who will suffer by it; the explanation must be completely truthful and must be such as to make it possible for them to acknowledge the necessity.” (225) This is a demanding standard and one that would be disruptive of current expectations. For it signifies first, that anyone, including (and especially) those in power, must give an account of a kind that would begin, “We cannot – we are genuinely unable – to act to meet your need, because …” That they could so act but have other kinds of reasons not to, would be an inadequate response. Secondly, this account is owed not to oneself, or to one’s government or god, or to the accountant or a court. It is owed directly to the person in need (or their proxy). The third subsidiary obligation demands that the account offered be truthful and, again, it is in the power of the one in need to decide whether any claim of necessary limitation – in failing to meet their need – is persuasive in this regard. 

There are many implications of this approach that subvert common assumptions and practices. One is this: that no court can be assigned this task, for no third party is authorized to assess whether these obligations are being met. That form of accountability might come later. But for Weil, the immediacy of the matter – the immediacy of what matters – is not to be found in claims about rights violations but in what she called elsewhere the infallibility of the cry, “Why am I being hurt?” The primacy of needs and obligations demand that the proximity not be mediated. The question – asked, still, every day – “Why are you people bombing us and killing and starving our children?” will thus never be adequately addressed by referring them to the rights of sovereignty or national security.

We all have experience in face-to-face interactions of the immediate need to act and to give an account of one’s actions, and it is this form that for Weil reproduces itself as a political demand. The move from first and second person dialogue to one that displaces this into a third person register is inadequate and suggests that institutionalised law and politics as they are currently practised are the perfect form of avoiding responsibility. A genuine “duty of care” would, by contrast, remain unmediated by the categories normalised in litigation or by the rationalisations of policy makers, parties, and governments. Where needs have priority, such diversions are intolerable. 

The structure and precedence of obligations mean their power is corrosive of the self-exculpatory sophistries and mediated impunities that have become the norm in what pass for the institutions of justice today. At a more profound level, where beauty, love, and dignity can rightly be thought of as holding a light up to them, institutions such as law, democracy, and rights, will always, argues Weil, appear ‘mediocre’. They are concepts of the middle range, effective in limited ways but not fundamental in the way that obligations are. They fail to respond to the directness of human need and the demands of immediacy, and thus they too become one among many potential modes of deflecting attention from human suffering. For Weil, modes of intellectual enquiry can also fail in this regard, including in the practice of philosophy itself. Emblematically, a discussion between Weil and her classmate Simone de Beauvoir is reported, in which the latter argued that the “the main problem in life was not to make people happy but to discover the reason for their existence.” Weil replied that it was “easy to see she had never been hungry.” (Miles, ‘Introduction’, p.9) 

Weil’s is an acute sensibility that one finds, perhaps more commonly, in literature and spiritual traditions and it cuts through fakery and pretension with the unerring precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. William Blake saw it too: “It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted, To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer.” Such are the ready diversions which moralism, legalism, and the market offer that need to be rejected: “It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity,” Blake concluded: “Thus could I sing, and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.” Nor with a lot of other people. And certainly not with anyone who has read the work of Simone Weil or Emilios Christodoulidis.

Part of the latent power of the values they write so eloquently about – solidarity, grace, the dignity of labour – comes from their irreducibility, their resistance to equivalence and calculation. These values are allergic to commensuration and defy reduction to exchange value. Nonetheless, maintaining them requires constant attention and vigilance, not least since they are daily confronted and attacked by sustained efforts to undermine them: to have these values – or their simulacra – given a market price, to see them seduced by the siren song of exchange value. All the forces of capitalist logic and organisation are focussed on this, and since there is nothing at all natural about the dominance of exchange value, a full range of techniques is loosed in the effort to overcome the integrity of these values and the practices in which they exist: from violent accumulation and unrelenting, underhand tactics, strategies, and propaganda, to the legitimating majesty of the law that is capable of deploying each of these. It is, of course, the latter that the critical legal theorist trains their forensic sights on in what sometimes seems like a Sisyphean task. And there is no better description of why this seems so than the opening line of Emilios’s first book, “Law is the great concealer; and law is everywhere.” (1998, p.xiii)

The struggle to maintain these values in the face of constant onslaught is in one sense an obligation to hold true to the force of incommensurability. There is a politics, a defiance, to resisting the ongoing proliferation of commodification and its latest incarnations: datafication, digitalisation, and financialisation. But it is telling that imposing a metric on everything and counting and ranking the results, requires breaking down people’s genuine disbelief at the eccentricity of applying (and thinking one could apply) an accounting rule to a practice in which it is entirely out of place (the family, education, caring for the elderly) as if the sole and entire purpose of all these humane activities was for someone else to make a profit. There is a politics of depoliticisation that accompanies this; a concerted, coercive attack that seeks to destroy the integrity of values and deliberately or negligently harm the people and practices that are subject to it. Such a cruel politics is now as likely to be found in contemporary competitive communism as it is in the sales pitches of commodity traders, hedge fund managers, and job cutting Vice Chancellors. As Alain Supiot reminds us, none of this involves thinking – about the work and worth of practices in which goods are achieved in common – only counting. For in each new iteration, “human resources” are the same as any other kind of resources: necessary but exchangable, and if they can be replaced by more efficient algorithms, they will be.

One can only hope that there is time remaining – human time, species time – for the metaphorical pendulum in Polanyi’s double movement to swing back and strike out such inhumanity before it swings too far the other way and knocks us irreversibly into ecological bare life. The defences for such work are to be found in the virtues of autonomous practices, in the solidarities of intellectual enquiry, the dignity of labour, and in the personal and professional commitments that resist incursions from the incessantly unimaginative, but cooptive power of mediatised political and corporate mentalities. If all these require permanent and rigorous re-assessments of the organisational landscape, it is because they insist on the worth of human resourcefulness rather than on the brutalised notion that humans are resources. 

Simone Weil’s seriousness – her attention, her critical thought, her ethical relentlessness – was nonetheless always accompanied by a sense of wonder, by the possibility of a “life lighter” than the present. This can be glimpsed, as she said, in the light of beauty and dignity, love and solidarity, a light that continues to be held up for us in the elevating and serious work that Emilios has given us – students, colleagues, friends – for more than thirty years now. If there is, here and now, a sense of a “life beyond this present knowing” it has been intimated by the most wonderful generosity that gifts to us these rare but truly vital things: attention, time, and friendship.

Scott Veitch is Paul KC Chung Professor in Jurisprudence at the University of Hong Kong

Bibliography

Emilios Christodoulidis, 1998, Law and Reflexive Politics, Dordrecht, Kluwer.

Simone Weil, 2005, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed Sian Miles, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

POSTS BY EMAIL

Join 4,804 other subscribers

We respect your privacy.

Fair Access Publisher
(pay what you can, free option available) 

↓ just published

PUBLISH ON CLT

Publish your article with us and get read by the largest community of critical legal scholars, with over 4500 subscribers.