Simone Weil
1) Her Life:
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, political activist, teacher, and mystic who worked for social justice and education throughout her life. Weil was born into a Jewish family, but she grew up in a hostile environment. However, she had multiple religious experiences throughout her life that led her to Christianity and inspired her political and social activity. Plato, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx, Thomas More, and Voltaire were her major influences.
Weil’s work looks at philosophy through the lens of the human situation, stressing the importance of morality as a cornerstone of humanity. Many of her most famous philosophical views are contradictory; for example, her notion of decreation describes an individual’s purpose as the act of giving up one’s life. Scholars such as Robert Zaretsky and Simon Leys are still delving through Simone Weil’s notes to decipher her views on religion, colonialism, class, and ethics. Simone Weil: An Anthology, Seventy Letters, First and Last Notebooks, and Awaiting God are recent volumes featuring fresh translations of her works.
Simone Weil was born on February 3, 1909, in Paris, France, to Salomea Reinherz and Bernard Weil. Weil, like her mathematician brother André, was academically interested and gifted as a kid. She began quoting lines from French poet Jean Racine at the age of six, and by the age of twelve, she was proficient in ancient Greek. She had a strong sense of social justice from an early age, having seen and been shocked by the atrocities of World War I. As a teenager, Weil concentrated on her schooling and social activities, dressing in men’s attire and avoiding romantic relationships.
Weil was fond of her philosophy instructor, Émile Chartier, often known as Alain, during lycée (secondary school), who introduced her to pacifist ideals. She enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure in 1928 to study General Philosophy and Logic. Weil completed her philosophical studies at the same institution, earning a diplôme d’études supérieures (DES). She taught in a secondary school for girls after passing the agrégation, a French test for exceptional educators. Her philosophical teachings are collected in Lectures on Philosophy.
Weil began her advocacy at an early age. She gave up sugar when she was six years old since the troops on the Western Front didn’t have any. Weil spent a year working at an auto industry to have a deeper understanding of working-class concerns. After leaving the business in 1936, she joined an anarchist organization to prepare for the Spanish Civil War, which was sparked by the Republican assassinations. Her time working in Spain came to an end, however, when she was gravely wounded in an accident and had to go to Portugal to heal. She was a Bolshevik, Marxist, pacifist, and trade unionist throughout her life. Weil was often chastised for her political engagement while teaching at a girls’ high school.
Weil’s religious experiences informed her political writing and activity in subsequent years. Weil saw her social work for the first time as a manifestation of the divine after experiencing religious
ecstasy—a sublime spiritual experience—at the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Italy and other mystical experiences while reading the poem “Love III.” She fled Marseille and evacuated France with her parents during World War II, finally settling in London to join the Free French cause. Weil composed one of her most renowned poems, The Need for Roots, while in London, and resumed rationing to honor the French soldiers; nevertheless, she died soon after from hunger and illness. Her ultimate resting site is in the English town of Ashford.
During her lifetime, many academics considered Simone as a radical, and only a small number of individuals studied her work. She did, however, become well-known after her death. Her religious work attracted the greatest attention, but her political and social ideas had a global impact. T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir were among those who saw her as a saint and great soul. Despite her success and acclaim, she was chastised by academics and influential leaders like as Leon Trotsky and Charles de Gaulle. Weil’s legacy is commemorated with plaques in both Paris and New York.
2) Main works:
Awaiting God (2012) , Formative Writings: 1929–1941. (1987), The Iliad or the Poem of Force, Intimations of Christianity Among the Greeks(1957), Letter to a Priest (2002), The Need for Roots(1952), Gravity and Grace(1952), La Condition ouvrière (1937), La Pesanteur et la grâce (1947), L’Enracinement (1949), Attente de Dieu (1950) and Lettre à un religieux (1951).
3) Main Themes in her Works:
Mysticism in Gravity and Grace:
While Gravity and Grace is one of Simone Weil’s most well-known works, it was not written with the intention of being published. Rather, the work is made up of numerous portions from Weil’s notebooks that Gustave Thibon, who knew and liked her, assembled thematically. Weil had handed Thibon some of her notes from before May 1942, but without any intention of publishing them. As a consequence, Mr. Thibon, a devoted Catholic, has a strong impact on the work’s choices, arrangement, and editing. Thibon’s Introduction to Gravity and Grace (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952) is a good place to start.
Due to her practically entire rejection of the Old Testament and her general hatred for the Judaism that was nominally hers by birth, T. S. Eliot’s foreword to The Need for Roots implies that Weil should be considered a modern-day Marcionite. On the contrary, her niece, Sylvie Weil, and biographer Thomas R. Nevin have attempted to show that Weil did not forsake Judaism and was greatly inspired by its teachings.
Absence:
Her metaphysics, cosmology, cosmogony, and theodicy all revolve around the concept of absence. She thought that God created through self-delimitation—that is, since God is viewed as a type of total completeness, a flawless being, no creation could exist except where God did not exist. As a result, creation took place only after God departed in part. This concept is similar to tzimtzum, a major concept in the Jewish mystical creation story.
This is a primordial kenosis (“emptiness”), according to Weil, that precedes the corrected kenosis of Christ’s incarnation (cf. Athanasius). We are therefore born in a state of damnation, not because of original sin, but because we had to be exactly what God is not, i.e., the polar opposite of what is holy, in order to be formed at all.
This conception of creation is central to her theodicy, since if creation is regarded in this manner (as inherently including evil), there is no issue with evil entering a flawless world. This isn’t a delimitation of God’s omnipotence if the point isn’t that God couldn’t create a flawless world, but rather the act we allude to when we say “create” indicates the impossibility of perfection in its very character.
However, this view of evil’s inevitability does not indicate that we are doomed from the start; on the contrary, Weil claims that “bad is the shape that God’s kindness takes in this world.” “The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it,” Weil believed that evil and its result, affliction, served to drive us out of ourselves and towards God.
Affliction:
Weil’s idea of affliction (malheur) encompasses more than only pain, but it does contain it. Only a select few souls are capable of feeling the full extent of pain; these are the same souls that are most capable of experiencing spiritual bliss. Affliction is a kind of misery that extends beyond the body and intellect; such physical and mental agony afflicts the entire soul.
The most acute examples of suffering within her grasp were war and tyranny; to feel it, she resorted to the life of a factory worker, while to comprehend it, she looked to Homer’s Iliad. (Her Homeric literary criticism article “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” was originally translated by Mary McCarthy.) Affliction was associated with both necessity and chance—it was fraught with necessity because it was hard-wired into existence itself, and thus imposed itself on the sufferer with the full force of the inescapable; however, it was also subject to chance because chance is an inescapable part of the nature of existence. The element of chance was important to the unjust nature of misfortune; in other words, my pain should not always—let alone always—follow from my sin, as per conventional Christian theodicy, but should befall me for no apparent reason. “The better and more intense our comprehension of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense our suffering in affliction and compassion for others will be.” … Suffering and pleasure as sources of information. Adam and Eve were promised wisdom by the snake. Ulysses was promised information by the sirens. These fables show that pursuing knowledge for the sake of pleasure leads to the loss of the soul. Why? Pleasure may be harmless if we do not seek information from
it. Only through pain is it allowed to seek that.” — Gravity and Grace (chapter 16, ‘Affliction’) by Simone Weil.
Metaxu:
Weil used Plato’s notion of metaxu, which is defined as that which both divides and joins (e.g., as a wall separates two prisoners but can be used to tap messages). For Weil’s notion of the created sphere, the concept of connecting distance was crucial. The universe as a whole, as well as any of its components, including our physical bodies, should be considered as serving the same purpose for us in connection to God that a blind man’s stick does for him in respect to the world around him. They don’t provide immediate insight, but they may be utilized to bring the mind into practical touch with reality via experimentation. This metaphor, which also appears in Weil’s theodicy, permits any absence to be construed as a presence.
Beauty:
“The beautiful is the experiential proof that incarnation is possible,” Weil writes. The intrinsic beauty of the universe’s shape (which she proves in mathematics and expresses in all excellent art) is evidence that the world points to something greater than itself; it demonstrates the basically telic quality of everything that exists. Her vision of beauty encompasses the whole cosmos: “[W]e must believe the universe is beautiful on all levels…and that it has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of all thinking beings that exist and those that are possible. It is the agreement of an infinite number of perfect beauties that gives the world’s beauty a transcendent personality (Christ) is really present in the universal beauty. The love for this beauty emanates from God, who is in our heart, and goes out to God, who is present throughout the universe “.. “The beauty of this world is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter,” she wrote.
Weil saw beauty as having a soteriological purpose: “Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass straight to the soul.” As a result, it represents another manner in which the divine truth that underpins the universe enters our lives. Beauty slips in and topples the dominion of the ego from inside, where sorrow conquers us with sheer power.
Attention:
According to Simone Weil’s book Waiting for God, attention entails pausing or emptying one’s thoughts so that one is ready to receive—to be pierced by—the object to which one directs one’s sight, whether that object be one’s neighbor or, ultimately, God. As Weil says, one may love God by praying to Him, and the “substance of prayer” is attention: when one prays, one empties oneself, sets one’s whole sight on God, and prepares to accept God. Similarly, according to Weil, individuals may love their neighbors by emptying themselves, preparing to embrace their neighbor in all of his or her naked reality, and asking, “What are you going through?”
Three Forms of the Implicit Love of God:
The three manifestations of implicit love of God, according to Simone Weil in Waiting for God, are (1) love of neighbor, (2) love of the beauty of the world, and (3) love of religious rites. According to Weil, loving these three things (neighbor, world’s beauty, and religious rituals) indirectly loves God before “God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride,” since one’s soul cannot yet love God as the object directly before God’s entrance. Love of neighbor occurs when (1) the powerful treat the weak as equals, (2) when people pay personal attention to those who are otherwise invisible, anonymous, or non-existent, and (3) when we look at and listen to the afflicted as they are, without explicitly thinking about God—that is, when “God in us” loves the afflicted, rather than us loving them in God, according to Weil. Second, Weil explains that humans imitate God’s love for the cosmos when they love the world’s beauty: just as God creatively renounced his command over the world, allowing it to be ruled by human autonomy and matter’s “blind necessity,” humans give up their imaginary command over the world, no longer seeing the world as if they were the world’s center. Finally, when religious practices are pure, Weil adds, love of religious rites manifests itself as an implicit love of God. Weil says that religious purity is evident when “faith and love do not fail,” and this is most clearly demonstrated in the Eucharist.
4) Importance of her works in our times:
Simone Weil was a revolutionary philosopher and mystic who affected the twentieth century and beyond with her revolutionary beliefs. She adds, “The need to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least realized need of the human soul.” “A human person has roots as a result of his genuine, active, and natural engagement in the life of a society that maintains in live form certain specific riches from the past and certain aspirations for the future.” Weil adopts a metaphor that was deeply ingrained in French political discourse with this opening proclamation. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was difficult to talk about French identity without mentioning origins.
Weil placed human obligations at the core of nationalism, displacing the country from its traditional standing as the ultimate source of value for nationalists. She says, “The country is a reality, yet a fact is not an absolute value.” Unlike national pride, which cannot be sold to other countries, compassion is a global drive by its very nature. Cultivating this emotion is not only admirable, but also practical, since it strengthens the links of brotherhood inside and across countries.
Weil recognized that the French resistance’s “terrible responsibility” extended beyond the defeat of Nazi Germany. The old notion of the nation and nationalism must also be overcome, a process she sees as “nothing less than refashioning the country’s soul.” She warned that the miasma of deception that had descended over France was exacerbating the problem: “Our age is so poisoned by lies that it converts everything it touches into a lie.” This was not just the product of
the Vichy dictatorship, but also the Third Republic before it. Weil used the education of the nation’s young as an example. “Things concerning the country… have a degree of importance which sets them apart from other things,” she said, adding that children have been educated. But here’s the catch: “Justice, care for others, and duties imposing limitations on desires and appetites are never discussed in relation to those things.”
That was not the case then, and it is not the case today. On both sides of the Atlantic, nothing has changed in school curriculum and political discourse after more than a half-century. Despite the abundance of works on human rights, there is a dearth of books on human responsibilities. While we get correspondence from groups such as Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Without Frontiers, and the Human Rights League, we never receive correspondence from a Human Obligations Watch, for the simple fact that one does not exist.
However, as historian Samuel Moyn points out, this omission is a historical aberration. Until the twentieth century, legal and philosophical disputes focused primarily on the issue of responsibility and duty, with rights serving as a sideshow. He says that now that these positions have been reversed, the ramifications are substantial. “When advocates fail to cross the border into the language of duty, human rights wither; insofar as compliance with standards on paper is sought, responsibility bearers must be recognized and made to shoulder their load.” This is a reality we should remember on the 70th anniversary of Weil’s frustrating but necessary work.
