For and Against Personality
Reading Simone Weil on a city street.
So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him.
Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.
In our days, when writers and scientists have so oddly usurped the place of priests, the public acknowledges, with a totally unjustified docility, that the artistic and scientific faculties are sacred. This is generally held to be self-evident, though it is very far from being so. If any reason is felt to be called for, people allege that the free play of these faculties is one of the highest manifestations of the human personality.
Often it is, indeed, no more than that.
—Simone Weil
What is liberty for? Do we need it to express ourselves, or is liberty for expressing something beyond us? In a piece written close to the end of her life, Simone Weil advocates for the latter. You should not be yourself, or express yourself. Still less should you subsume yourself in a collective! No, the truly correct option, according to Weil, is to be neither yourself, nor part of the crowd, but rather to draw upon the perfectly impersonal.
What is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty. Truth and beauty are impersonal. All this is too obvious.
If a child is doing a sum and does it wrong, the mistake bears the stamp of his personality. If he does the sum exactly right, his personality does not enter into it at all.
The phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” predates Simone Weil by several centuries. It is not at all obvious that beauty is impersonal. However, it is entirely characteristic of Simone Weil to say exactly what she wants to say without regard for whether it will meet with agreement. She is aiming for the impersonal. Of course.
Me? I’m a good liberal. I couch philosophical statements in personal stories, eliding universal claims.
Last August, I was partway through the essay on Human Personality when I decided to take my copy of Simone Weil: An Anthology down to the wharf. I made it halfway down the hill when I heard an alarm. Directly to my right, a heavily-chained bike lock fell to the ground as a man replaced the seat on a scuffed e-bike. I turned, startled, and asked the obvious question.
“Are you stealing that bike?”
He started wheeling the bike away and I grabbed the back of it.
“It’s my bike,” he said.
“I just saw you take the chain off it. It’s lying right there. The alarm is still ringing.”
“I’m just borrowing it.”
“I’m not going to let you take somebody’s bike! My bike was stolen last year and it was awful—“
For a moment we faced each other across the bike. I wondered if he would try to wrest it from my grip. He did not. He ran off. I let him.
The alarm had fallen silent now that nobody was trying to move the bike. I could see the chain that had held the bike, still coiled around the arched pole to which it had been affixed. Presumably, I could wrap it back around the seat of the bike—as its owner must have mistakenly done—but that did not seem correct. Somebody might take the bike if it wasn’t protected.
It was nearing five. Perhaps the bike’s owner would be off work soon? I pulled out my book and started to read.
Here is a question. Was preventing the bike from being stolen a personal act, or an impersonal one? Because it definitely had some pretty personal elements. I cared about this bike because of the time our e-bike got taken by an obviously-professional thief who neatly sliced through its D-lock in the time my husband took to step into the supermarket for ten minutes. I also cared about the theft because it was happening in my neighbourhood, in broad daylight. I had a quite indignant sense of local pride, even. Not on my street. Not if I can prevent it.
Yet it is no contravention of Simone Weil’s philosophy to be located in, and attached to, a particular place. Nor indeed would my instinctive sympathy with the bike’s owner be disallowed. Perhaps I ought also to sympathise with the thief? Yet I know nothing of him, not really. Impersonally, he ought not to have tried to take the bike.
My husband texted me back like a millennial, with line breaks providing the main punctuation: “what / oh dear / have you called the cops?” I had not. I didn’t see the point. They didn’t do much when our bike got stolen, and presumably they would do less for an unsuccessful theft.
I understand the impulse to call the police. Justice has been violated; justice is meant to be kept by the police. You can’t actually order justice from the justice store, though. What would justice even be, in this case? Could I realistically get closer to it than the bike does not get stolen in the first place? On the whole, I reckoned I was close enough.
My husband sounded, in his texts, like he was glad we weren’t calling the police if only so he could have one less task to think about. I felt a bit bad, honestly. He was out taking our son to ride his child-sized bike around the square, which is quite stressful enough on its own. I waited for my husband to show up in his own time, re-opened the book, and kept reading.
“Although the personal and the impersonal are opposed, there is a way from the one to the other. But there is no way from the collective to the impersonal. A collectivity must dissolve into separate persons before the impersonal can be reached.” Is that true? It appeals to me; I have always needed solitude. Yet I am also part of a dyad, and I suspect I am better for it. The responsibility for that e-bike was shared, as soon as I told my husband about it. All I have I share with you remains our most amusing wedding vow, in hindsight.
“Have you tried asking in all the shops? The owner must be somewhere around here.”
I gestured to the tall buildings, with their rows of windows. “More likely it’s someone in an office.”
My husband conceded the point. “You could—wait, no!” Our son was pedalling away at an alarming rate. “He wants the donut shop. I can’t—sorry, I can’t help you, I have to—”
My husband raced off after our kid. I stayed by the bike. We’d figure something out after the donuts. In the meantime, well, I had come out here to read. So I kept reading. The essay might actually have been making more sense, there by the side of the road, than it would have down on the wharf. Being interrupted was forcing me to read the same passage multiple times. I think perhaps Simone Weil does not write for shimmering harbours with yachts gliding past in the distance. She writes for dusty city streets when you’re doing something you’re not particularly enjoying, with pauses between the paragraphs and other cares on your mind.
One of Weil’s many striking claims is that we should not ground our defence of humanity in the idea of human rights. Instead of rights, Weil suggests we refer to justice, to obligation, and to sympathy with the afflicted.
I agree on the substance; I don’t think our humanity is best described by the rights we have or ought to have. I disagree on the practicalities. I don’t think an appeal to humanity is more politically feasible than an appeal to rights, because actually seeing people in the first place is a very strong demand—still more so when the person in question is experiencing a distress whose full comprehension might ask something of you, as Weil herself acknowledges. Rights are a less demanding simplification.
When my husband returned, we took the small cable lock that we use for our son’s bike, and used it to tether the e-bike. I wrote a note: “Somebody tried to steal your bike! I live just up the street. Call me on [number] and I’ll unlock it.” Then I wedged the note as tightly as I could into the crevice between the seat and the frame. If it blew away, our son’s bike lock could probably be broken through easily enough if you really needed to.
I hoped the note wouldn’t blow away. I hoped nobody would notice the small lock and see another theft chance. I hoped I was doing the right thing.
The right thing to do can vary significantly depending on the situation. Can something be impersonal and specific? I suppose it can. Weil is not advocating undifferentiated sameness. Her impersonal absolutism should not be mistaken for the detachment of managerialism or scientism. She is not trying to exclude our humanity; she is trying to find its essential centre. She can write against “personality” for the same reason that Plato can suggest expelling the poets from his perfect Republic—because it is being discarded in favour of something that includes its important aspects but is more true.
Weil still sees value in the arts, though her standards are high.
When science, art, literature and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.
Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and André Gide come in for a rough dismissal, by this measure. The Iliad, Aeschylus, Sophocles, King Lear, and Phèdre earn her nod.
I think we would probably not have Lear if Shakespeare had not had the experience of writing many prior plays. For that matter, I think we would not have Lear if there were not other playwrights making other plays that we have mostly forgotten. If art has no rights, but truth and beauty are self-justifying, then by what stair shall we ascend to such heights? To include Lear is to include poetry writ large. Contrastingly, the exclusion of poetry in the Republic declares a kind of perfection, in its to-be-achieved philosophy, that is complete enough to need no scaffolding.
Are rights also a kind of scaffolding? There are essential aspects of our humanity that rights will always fail to reach. We might do better to pause, and try to understand, and act justly. Yet this too is a great height. Perhaps the correct technique, here, is to see rights and personality and democratic freedoms as precious not for themselves but for the good that shelters within their expanse.
I got a call a couple of hours later. “Hello,” said a woman on the other end of the connection. “Are you the person who saved me from a nasty surprise?”
The note had not blown away. Nobody had stolen the bike in the interim. I unlocked our cable and returned the bike to its owner.
She left a bottle of wine on our doorstep the next morning.
Should I be braver? Should I make more universal claims? I shelter in the lee of liberal rights. I am free to express my personality. If, within or beyond that personality, there is some essential element that is hard to pinpoint and impossible to do without, then I am simply not obliged to define it.
In some ways, rights enable humility. I need not claim any sort of divine calling, in order to follow what matters to me. I can simply act, according to my own lights.
Rights protect our attempts at truth and beauty and justice, but do they also enable mediocrity? If we eliminate some of the need for justification, we may need to speak less often of higher forms of justice. If we eliminate some of our need for agreement, it becomes possible to strive less for truth. It may not be enough merely to be free to seek beauty; it make take more than that to help us find it.
Coercion cannot be right, though, in the highest things. The self-justifications of justice and truth and beauty ought to be enough lead us on, if only we remind ourselves to follow.