About Ananké and anankaia. Need(s) and vulnerability in Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This article discusses Simone Weil’s and Hannah Arendt’s conception of vulnerability based on their approaches to human needs. The two differ on what they understand by need and needs and what follows from them. For Weil, there is a metaphysical need which settles on the needs of body and soul. These needs generate obligations to which one must respond, attending to the sacred that dwells in every human being. For Arendt, this need is circumscribed to nature and translates into the human condition of life; but beyond merely opposition, it is proposed to articulate life and politics in a reading of worldliness and plurality as akin to those needs of the soul pointed out by Weil. Although both Weil and Arendt accept the vulnerability arising from needs as unavoidable, both find it difficult to think it from the body, one fleeing to the sacred, the other to the political.