The Great Invisible Beauty
Commentary on the Concept of Responsibility in Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots.
The greatest gift in the universe is these seven words: the mind of great bliss seeing singularity. These are the greatest and the least disappointing words. In a sense you will find no others. No other futurism. No other high. No other beauty.
Rather, said again, the greatest gift in the universe is these words: the mind of great bliss seeing obligation. The angelicist clone, sexed quantumly by the Universe as imaginary number, finds themself courted only by a porous concept of extreme responsibility.
In a striking image from a 1941 letter to Cahiers du Sud that was never published during her lifetime, Simone Weil writes that the ‘easiness of literary habits, this tolerance of lowness, gives to our most eminent writers a responsibility for demoralizing country girls who have never left their villages and who have never heard of these famous names’. Who is this country girl?
In the comical and insinuating image, the need to criticise the credentialed belongs not just to the pure outlier, but to one who does not even know the person who has disappointed them. Clones of great bliss seeing unconstructed union count through the variations, from angelicism01 to angelicism099, and vary unrelenting and equidistant conspiracy itself.
Disappointment is valid, only in its universality. This distantial and yet distance-shattering movement of extreme responsibility is something like the single note of mystical or Universal obligation in everything Weil wrote. In order to deal with the unlikelihood of this thought, we need only wager with the number of writers who have let us down in the present. Are they not an All? Has not everyone let you down?
The need to acknowledge obligations as a mystical, universal domain is also the need to hold responsible those who neglect to think obligations even in a very distantial way—the country girl who has never even heard of the great name which has, in fact, badly gone on without her and without relevance.
When it comes to the girl from the country, distant but disappointed, we are indeed taking seriously an internal and automated criticism of ubiquitous relapse in nearly all writers and makers, and without fear of any tiresome structure of hypocrisy holding us back.1 For, within each of us, there is a Universal part that is always the exception to absolutely everyone else. In angelicist unconstructed unction, each says, ‘everyone has sold out but me’.
The Commentary
Weil’s hyperbolic sense of intellectual responsibility arises from an equally hyperbolic sense of obligation and a coeval rejection of the language of rights, two concepts (obligation and rights) that are distinct but related. The realm of obligations precedes and makes possible the realm of rights. The domain of obligations is mystical where the realm of rights is not.
Weil says that the revolutionaries of 1789, precisely because they insisted on the absolute in the realm of rights and not in the realm of obligations, are responsible for ‘present political and social confusion’. It is this very strong sense of causalist responsibility—what Mitchell Heisman called ‘implication’—that is unfolded here, and turned as much as possible, even if silently, towards the present—a present in which a roll call of prestigious writers and thinkers have let down the specific divinity of obligation all the way to the strange question, who is left, if anyone?
In Weil’s account, there is an obligation to think obligation. Ancient obligation means universal responsibility:
The men of 1789 did not recognize the existence of such a realm. All they recognized was the obligation on the human plane. That is why they started off with the idea of rights. But at the same time they wanted to postulate absolute principles. This contradiction caused them to tumble into a confusion of language and ideas which is largely responsible for the present political and social confusion.
Weil goes even further and says that the refusal to recognise obligations is, yes, a crime. Which is to say, and on the plane of obligation, these activants or writers are to be blamed. Neglect of specifically intellectual obligations will also in time be thought as a crime. In the unpublished letter from 1941, Weil begins by speaking of
a way of looking at it that is contrary to the view of this journal, and contrary to nearly everyone to whom I am sympathetic, and that appears, unfortunately, like the views of those with whom I do not have any sympathy.
This is her courage, and her spiritual cheek. Developing the thought of obligation and responsibility against all comers comes to resemble the views of those with whom we have no sympathy, which is to say ‘the fascists’. But the affirmation of what will in fact be a divine obligation is obviously more important than any fear that one will be confused with one’s enemies, especially when that resemblance is precisely what has to be turned back against the eminent.
No human being, whoever he may be, under whatever circumstances, can escape them without being guilty of crime; save where there are two genuine obligations which are in fact incompatible, and a man is forced to sacrifice one of them.
Weil is talking about obligation as a matter of divine matter and not law. Therefore, we can imagine that insofar as neglect of obligation is criminal, it is so only from the point of view of the divine. A divine jurisprudence.
This obligation is not based upon any de facto situation, nor upon jurisprudence, customs, social structure, relative state of forces, the production of a historical heritage, or presumed historical unity of orientation; for no de facto situation is able to create an obligation.
The only ultimate right one has in Weil’s vision of things is the right to obligations which by their very nature are eternal, that is, non-dependent on laws or human time. The only right is a right to an obligation to human nature’s nature as divine. That one right is the matter of divine law.
This obligation is an unconditional one. If it is founded on something, that something, whatever it is, does not form part of our world. In our world, it is not founded on anything at all. It is the one and only obligation in connexion with human affairs that is not subject to any condition.
If it forms part of our world, it is not of the domain of obligation (the mystical) that alone makes this world meaningful. Only grounding obligation in what Weil calls ‘the whole universe’ allows us to make sense of it and live from it.
Analogously, if one reads, one does not read. If one loves, one loves nothing. Why? Because both these acts must come from the entire universe, otherwise they are superfluous.
The divine obligation is therefore an element that is part of the human set that does not belong to it, just like the faraway country girls.
The Last Humanity
Weil uses the phrase ‘universal conscience’:
This obligation has no foundation, but only a verification in the common consent accorded by the universal conscience.
Won’t it be necessary today to connect Weil’s account of obligation as Universal to Laruelle’s recent work on the shift from the dimension of the World to the dimension of the Universe? Laruelle speaks in The Last Humanity of defending ourselves from the confusion of the World with the Universe. Without using the same language at all, such a defence is present in Weil, just as it is present in the obligatory task of what is now a quantumly defined new ecological science according to the dimension of the Universe.
Weil is, simply put, already moving in this element and direction, despite the fact that Laruelle might prohibit her a place, or rather leave ‘mysticism’ as such outside his definition of ‘the universe’.
With regard to the writers who have let us down, do we then name names? Yes and no. It doesn’t really matter. Since we are devoted to the dimension of the Universe and not the World, and clone ourselves according to the divine obligation within—the secret within the universe—then both are valid.
There is in fact no need to name names, and no need not to. Weil simply writes what we can now repeat in the same form:
But writers used to be the guardians par excellence of the treasure that has been lost, and a number of them are now proud of the loss.
Weil’s thought of censorship also comes out of this thought of a unique divine obligation, the obligation to and for humanity qua humanity, which is to say obligation according to the dimension of the Universe and not the World.
To the extent to which positive rights are in contradiction with it, to that precise extent is their origin an illegitimate one.
That is, to the extent to which social or any other rights contradict the guiding obligation of ‘universal conscience’, they are illegitimate rights, and may be, as she argues later on, faced with a type of mystical prohibition. It is as if Weil says there are ways in which we really may (must here disclosed superlatively in permission?) stop wasting our time, and this amounts to real freedom (which will be the second need she names in her overall description). In essence, an ‘eternal obligation is coextensive with the eternal destiny of the human being’, and it is this obligation which gives a measure, a value arbiter out beyond reading and art, neither of which can secure the movement of divine delegitimation and obligation. Whatever does not source itself in eternal obligation is a form of relapse, and the relapser is to be radically rejected.
Following on from this, Weil gives what may appear to be an unusual definition of the soul’s main needs, but this appearance is only created by the habit of relapse which takes us away from an actual thought of eternal obligation.
The first of the soul’s needs, the one which touches most nearly its eternal destiny, is order; that is to say, a texture of social relationships such that no one is compelled to violate imperative obligations in order to carry out other ones.
Order comes first here because it names the creation of a situation in which distraction is in effect outlawed, or rather minimised according to the mystical axioms we have been outlining. Order is not state order or democratic stability but a spiritual texture that allows us not to give in to competing obligations which are really secondary—confusing World with Universe.
And this gives us her primary definition of violence, what she calls ‘spiritual violence’. The worst and most primary violence is the infringement on our right to stick by the eternal obligation which is defined as sexing ourselves as clones according to the Dimension of the Universe. Order, in this specific sense, is our primary need, the need that touches most closely the soul’s eternal destiny:
It is only where this, in fact, occurs that external circumstances have any power to inflict spiritual violence on the soul. Again, the mistake is to confuse rights with obligations.
This confusion, which matches confusion of world and universe in the eternal horizon of Universe’s additionalist end, would be the wellspring of ‘spiritual violence’, the primary form of possible violence against the quality of the soul. We are more than ever in this moment:
At the present time, a very considerable amount of confusion and incompatibility exists between obligations.
Far from being licentious, Weil verges on something like a mystical authoritarianism when it comes to the priority of obligations over rights—and how could any country girl be any different?
What we call, but she does not, ‘human rights’ would be much less important here than the right to maintain and clarify an eternal obligation, which right is nothing other than the main form of obligation to the secret within the universe.
The relapse away from this is criminal before any other state definition of crime:
Whoever acts in such a way as to increase this incompatibility is a trouble-maker. Whoever acts in such away as to diminish it is an agent of order. Whoever, so as to simplify problems, denies the existence of certain obligations has, in his heart, made a compact with crime.
Invisible Beauty
Unlike other system builders, Weil is totally realistic about how this does not map onto any currently visible world, except the world of art and absolute beauty.
Unfortunately, we possess no method for diminishing this incompatibility. We cannot even be sure that the idea of an order in which all obligations would be compatible with one another isn’t itself a fiction. When duty descends to the level of facts, so many independent relationships are brought into play that incompatibility seems far more likely than compatibility.
It is this lack of method that Weil criticises Marx for being incapable of admitting. The idea I am proposing may be a fiction, she admits. Except that, in the world of art and its corresponding beauty as seen quantumly in singularity’s emptiness and mind, we already find an arranging of needs in divine ordinance and well-ordered totality that does in fact match the eternal jurisprudence here being described. It is only the entire universe that is beautiful, and this entire universe, in its great invisible beauty, already provides and guides a well-ordered arrangement of human needs, responsibilities and obligations.
On the idea of ‘internal critique’, see for example ‘Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land’: ‘So, with the internet, formulated in terms of critique, you make a metaphysical error if you misidentify the system with any node or group of nodes in the system. That’s the isomorphism, the relation between objectivity and the object, or the media system and the nodes in that system. The internet is already a materialisation, a technological instantiation, of critique, and Bitcoin then builds on that and takes it to the next stage.’