The Need for Roots

by Simone Weil

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1952

About the author

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simone Weil was smart - but gosh had to read 5 other books at the same time to power through it [2/3 so boring, last 1/3 5 stars]

The last 1/3 of the book had some food for thought though:

“Someone who writes poetry with the desire to create poems as beautiful as those of Racine will never write a beautiful line. Even less if they do not even have that hope” - will stay hopeful.

“Just as human language is far from divine beauty, so humans’ sense and intellectual faculties are far from the truth, and so the necessities of social life are far from Justice. It is therefore not possible that politics should not require just as much creative inventiveness as art and science”.

And ok LOVED THIS:

“That is why nearly all conflicts of political opinions and arguments are as alien to politics as the clash of aesthetic opinion in the cafés of Montparnasse is to art”.