Abstract
In 1943, Simone Weil proposed to supersede the declaration of human rights with a declaration of obligations towards every human being's balancing pairs of body and soul's needs, for engaging and inspiring more effectively against autocratic and populist currents in times of crisis. We claim that Weil's proposal, which remains pertinent today, may have been sidestepped because her notion of needs lacked a fundamental dimension of relationality, prominent in the 'philosophical anthropology' underlying the (different) visions for a new political ethos of both Judith Butler and Carol Gilligan. From the radical starting point of innate morality common to all three thinkers, we therefore indicate how an enriched notion of interlaced needs, encompassing both balance and relationality, may restore the viability of a declaration of human obligations as a robust source of inspiration. In this combination of balance and relationality, Butler's notion of aggressive nonviolence is key.
Highlights
More than 75 years before we have become comfortably numb with ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ as a supposedly inevitable part of our networked-world’s realpolitik, Simone Weil wrote on The need for truth: There are men who work eight hours a day and make the immense effort of reading in the evenings so as to acquire knowledge
We find a similar rejection of external moralizing in Simone Weil
If Weil’s proposed ethos, of obligations towards balancing human needs, fell short of getting adopted because it neglected the relational dimension, incorporating interlaced, synchronized needs that get satiated within relationships may restore the viability of a declaration of human obligations towards these needs as a robust source of inspiration for an engaging ethos
Summary
More than 75 years before we have become comfortably numb with ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ as a supposedly inevitable part of our networked-world’s realpolitik, Simone Weil wrote on The need for truth: There are men who work eight hours a day and make the immense effort of reading in the evenings so as to acquire knowledge. A declaration of obligations towards our own and others’ needs, announced in public but addressed first and foremost to ourselves, expresses an ethos with which we can potentially identify and engage; much more so than we can with an ideal of rights, which rely on power that one all too often lacks Butler says, is “to think about how to live together given our anger and our aggression” (Gessen, 2020, my emphasis) This aggression is, according to Butler, a balancing factor missing in Gilligan's notion of (nonviolent) care. We first turn to this common ground
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