Creating a group, with its infrastructure and customs and functions, is a real achievement, and most groups do their members some good, so we should usually try to reform rather than destroy them, but they also exhibit pernicious tendencies like making their members conform in their opinions. They are only valuable insofar as they are food for individuals. Her conception of societies, or really groups at any size and level of complexity, is that they should serve individual human needs. What we instead require is to have each need fulfilled completely, but in alternation, so maybe we lead in one role that we play, but obey in another. So what social configurations would optimally allow for these contrasting experiences? She denies Aristotle's "golden mean" as not actually fulfilling either need.
We also have the need for leadership, at least some of the time. We have a need for private property, but also communal property, so what sorts of social situations would optimize our opportunities for both kinds of experiences? We have a need to be obedient, but only to obey with consent: A dictator robs ironically robs us of the ability to obey in this way. If a society declares, however, that one of the lives is not grieveable (to use Butler's term), like I'm only obligated to help my fellow countrymen, then it's doing damage.Ī lot of the elaboration of these needs likewise turns into some specifications of optimal political circumstances, or more often present puzzles as to what society could possibly serve these extensive and complicated needs. A society can help here by clarifying my duties so that I know which to help, and can also work to make it rare that I'd be faced with such a dilemma. If someone is in trouble to my right and to my left, and I can only help one of them, that doesn't remove my obligation to the one I wasn't able to help. It's not a matter of social convention but of something "eternal" (think Kant's categorical imperative, but she has a largely unstated religious basis for this insistence) that we owe each other consideration. and none of these words mean quite what you'd think.įor one, we need "order," and by this she doesn't mean a government exerting an iron fist, but a clear ordering of our obligations with a minimum of conflict between them. What are human needs that should drive what kind of society would be best for us? Weil says we need liberty yet obedience, equality yet hierarchy, security yet risk. On "The Needs of the Soul" from The Need for Roots (1943) and "Meditation on Obedience and Liberty" (1937).
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