“Everyone
knows what attention is,” William James famously declared in his Principles of
Psychology. For those who are not “everyone,” James goes on to explain that
attention is the “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of
one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of
thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness is of its essence. It
implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”
Though
she agrees with James’s insistence that attention both engages the mind and
entails a kind of withdrawal, Weil would have taken issue with the claim that
attention requires the mind’s concentration—tensing, really—on a specific
issue. For Weil, this kind of mental tautness is, in fact, inimical to true
attention. In Weil’s role as a teacher, we catch glimpses of what she
understood by attention. For example, Anne Reynaud, one of her students at
Roanne in 1933, recalled that Weil would take the class outdoors and gather
them under a tall cedar tree where they would together “seek problems in
geometry.” The phrase is telling: rather than “finding the answer,” the
students instead looked for problems. Reflecting upon a problem, rather than
resolving it, was Weil’s goal. No less telling is Reynaud’s recollection that
Weil never dictated to the students during her lectures, just as she always
refused to give them grades. These habits were bred not from indifference, but
instead from a radically different conception of attention.
While
waiting with her parents in Marseille for their visas to the United States,
Weil presented her ideas about the teaching of attention to Joseph-Marie
Perrin. In the late spring of 1941, Weil had contacted this nearly blind
Dominican priest in order to discuss the possibility of converting to
Catholicism. Perrin readily agreed to a meeting, which took place on June 7,
1941, at the Dominican convent in Marseille. Between then and the following
May, when she left with her parents for New York, Weil met several more times
with Perrin, mostly discussing the theological and dogmatic issues that, for
Weil, stood in the way of her conversion. (They almost certainly never
discussed their respective participation in Resistance activities.
Under
Perrin’s guidance, the convent became a safe house for Resistance fighters and
French and foreign Jews, while at the same time he oversaw the dissemination of
the clandestine journal Les Cahiers du témoignage chrétien.) The
conversations between these two friends also unfolded, in sporadic fashion,
through the exchange of letters before and after Weil’s departure. In the
opening lines of her first letter, Weil set the tone: “I am tired of talking to
you about myself, for it is a wretched subject, but I am obliged to do so by
the interest you take in me as a result of your charity.”
Shortly
before leaving Marseille, Weil sent Perrin an essay titled “Réflexions sur le
bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l’amour de Dieu” (“Reflections on the
Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”). By “view,” Weil
means attention—the one skill all schools should cultivate in their students.
But we need to attend to her understanding of the term. Normally, when we pay
attention to someone or something, we undertake what Weil calls a “muscular
effort”: our eyes lock on another’s eyes, our expressions reflect the proper
response, and our bodies shift in relation to the object to which we are paying
attention. This kind of attention flourishes in therapists’ offices, business
schools, and funeral homes. It is a performative rather than reflective act,
one that displays rather than truly pays attention. This sort of attention is
usually accompanied by a kind of frowning application—the very same sort, as
Weil notes, that leads us to a self-congratulatory “I have worked well!”
For
Weil, attention is a “negative effort,” one that requires that we stand still
rather than lean in. The object of this kind of attention could be mathematical
or textual, a matter of grasping a puzzle posed by Euclid or one posed by
Racine. Whether we do solve the problem, argues Weil, is secondary. The going
is as important as the getting there, if not even more so. “It does not even
matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the
proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case
whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted.” Scorning practices like
memorization and dictation that impose the “right answers” upon students, she
acknowledges that the practices she wished to instill in students were alien to
schools in her own day (and they remain alien to most schools in our own day).
“Although people seem to be unaware of it today,” she declares, “the
development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the
sole interest of studies… All tasks that call upon the power of attention are interesting
for the same reasons and to an almost equal degree.”
Is it
really as simple, though, as saying that it is the going, and not the getting
there, that counts? For Weil this could be deeply misleading. First, she gives
this notion a particular twist: by embracing the going and not the getting
there, we will ultimately get to somewhere more important than the original
destination. Even should we fail to solve a geometry problem at the end of an
hour, we will nevertheless have penetrated into what Weil calls “another more
mysterious dimension.” This dimension is moral: it is the space where, by our
act of attention, we grasp what has always been the real mystery—the lives of
our fellow human beings.
Weil
argues that this activity has little to do with the sort of effort most of us
make when we think we are paying attention. Rather than the contracting of our
muscles, attention involves the canceling of our desires; by turning toward
another, we turn away from our blinding and bulimic self. The suspension of our
thought, Weil declares, leaves us “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated
by the object.” To attend means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate,
but instead to dilate our minds. We do not gain insights, Weil claims, by going
in search of them, but instead by waiting for them: “In every school exercise
there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet
not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it… There is a way of waiting,
when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our
pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.”
This is
a supremely difficult stance to grasp. As Weil notes, “the capacity to give
one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost
a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity
do not possess it.” I, for one, know I do not possess it, not only because it
collides with the way I think about thought, but also because it collides with
the fact that I can rarely, if ever, think about anything or anyone else without
also thinking about myself. To attend to a fellow human being entails far more
than thinking about or even feeling for that person. Pity, like cognition,
involves reaching toward another by acknowledging her suffering. In this
respect, my faculty of sympathy fixes on someone else just as my faculty of
thought does. And once it does, it most often compartmentalizes and forgets
that person. As Weil notes, pity is unlike compassion in that “it consists in
helping someone in misfortune so as not to be obliged to think about him
anymore, or for the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself.”
Compassion,
in contrast, means that I identify with the afflicted individual so fully that
I feed him for the same reason I feed myself: because we are both hungry. In
other words, I have paid him attention. It is a faculty that does not latch
onto the other, but instead remains still and open. We do not fully understand
a hammer, Martin Heidegger observed, simply by staring at it. Instead,
understanding comes when we pick it up and use it. Weil gives this observation
an unusual wrinkle: we do not fully understand a fellow human being by staring,
thinking, or even commiserating with her. Instead, understanding comes only
when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In
order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first
divest ourselves of our own selves.
It is
tempting to see this faculty as thinking about thinking, or what psychologists
call metacognition. This approach, at first glance, bears a resemblance to the
meditation and mindfulness courses that are now multiplying at colleges and
universities. One institution of higher learning, Lesley University, now offers
a master’s degree in mindfulness studies, while academics can join professional
organizations like the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which seeks
“to transform higher education by supporting and encouraging the use of
contemplative/ introspective practices and perspectives.” These programs seek
to develop what the psychologist Tobin Hart describes as “knowing through
silence, looking inward, pondering deeply, beholding, witnessing the contents
of our consciousness.”
At first
glance, this seems to be what Weil meant. Citing Descartes, she told Anne
Reynaud and her fellow students that it “is one thing to be conscious, quite
another to be conscious that one is.” But the resemblance ends here. Weil’s
philosophical stance does not call upon her students to look inward and
consider the contents of their consciousness. To the contrary, Weil urges them
to look outward and away from the contents of their consciousness. Being
conscious of our consciousness is a starting point, not an end point, meta- or
otherwise. “Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As
such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but
instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world. In
a beautifully evocative phrase, Weil writes that when we translate a text from
a foreign language into our own, we rightly do not seek to add anything to it.
Ideally, this is how the student must approach the world. She must see and
write about it as if she is translating “a text that is not written down.” In
an age where students cannot escape their social media shadows, this is less a
Zen riddle than a pedagogical urgency.
Such a
state is difficult to reach, much less to grade. Reynaud would not have been
surprised to learn of her former teacher’s exhortation, made several years
later, that students must “work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass
examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural
abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the
idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention.” One might
as well flunk a new student of basketball who, though absorbed by the exercise,
fails to hit the rim with his shots. “Every time that a human being succeeds in
making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of
truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort
produces no visible fruit.”
Weil’s
portrayal of attention has been said to resemble the vita contemplative
traditionally associated with ancient thinkers from Plato to Augustine. But the
resemblance is potentially misleading, if only because we usually assume the
contemplative life is the same as a passive life—a life in which the highest
good seems to entail the abandonment of practical engagement in the world. But
Weilian attention leads its practitioner precisely back into the thick of the
world. Paying attention to others means that I must acknowledge and respect
their reality. As we belong to the same world and are equally vulnerable to the
crushing reality of force, I reorient my attention to them and away from
myself. Peter Winch memorably captured this condition: “I cannot understand the
other’s affliction from the point of view of my own privileged position; I have
rather to understand myself from the standpoint of the other’s affliction, to
understand that my privileged position is not part of my essential nature, but
an accident of fate.”
From The
Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky, published by
the University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Simone
Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention. By Robert Zaretsky. LitHub, March 9,
2021.
It’s May
1942 in the city of Marseilles, in what was then Vichy France, and
thirty-three-year-old Simone Weil has for the past year been engaged in work
for the French Resistance. Though physically frail and wracked by migraines,
she has among other things helped distribute the underground journal Cahiers du
témoignage chrétien, launched by three clergymen in early 1941, delivering
three hundred copies of each of its first three issues. The personal risk is
considerable. As Robert Zaretsky tells us in his absorbing new book, The
Subversive Simone Weil, one of her fellow couriers was arrested and deported,
and Weil herself was twice hauled in and interrogated by the police. But the
calm, formidable philosopher and activist was released both times. When she was
sent home, Zaretsky notes, “the sense of relief at the station must have been
palpable.”
Now, as
she reluctantly prepares to leave for the United States with her parents (for
their safety, not her own), Weil writes a series of long letters to an
anti-fascist, philo-Semitic Catholic priest named Joseph-Marie Perrin. The
young Father Perrin, about the same age as Weil, has become her friend and de
facto confessor, though she has not accepted baptism into the Church—and never
will—and thus, according to Catholic dogma, cannot receive the sacraments. In
her intensely intellectual, profoundly personal letters to Perrin, published
posthumously in Waiting for God (1951), Weil relates her rather unusual
“spiritual autobiography.” Raised, as Zaretsky puts it, in a “fiercely
nonobservant” haute-bourgeois Jewish family in Paris, having never entered a
synagogue, Weil was attracted early to Catholicism, its liturgy, music, and
art. But it was only in her late twenties—first while visiting an impoverished
fishing village in Portugal, then a Romanesque church in Assisi, and finally,
climactically, the Abbey of Solesmes in northern France, famed for its monks’
Gregorian chant—that she experienced a spiritual, what many have called
mystical, awakening to Christian faith.
Most
important, though, in these letters she wants to explain to Perrin why she has
chosen to refuse baptism and remain outside the Catholic Church, whatever the
consequences for her soul. Pointing to “an absolutely insurmountable obstacle”
that stands in her way, Weil writes to Perrin, “It is the use of the two little
words anathema sit. . . . I remain beside all those things that cannot enter
the Church . . . on account of those two little words. I remain beside them all
the more because my own intelligence is numbered among them.” For Weil, what
that Latin phrase represents—the sentence of excommunication, banishment, and
even, historically, torture and death imposed upon those deemed heretics—carried
more than religious significance. A few pages later, she writes, “After the
fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that
was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarism in Europe. . . .
This tree bore much fruit. And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the
use of those two little words: anathema sit.” It was by that same kind of
power, transposed into secular use, Weil tells the priest, “that all the
parties which in our own day have founded totalitarian regimes were shaped.”
Weil had
little more than a year to live when she handed down that judgment—she died in
August 1943 of tuberculosis (and her own refusal to eat) in a sanatorium
outside London, where she had gone to work with de Gaulle’s Free French. And
while she’s remembered as much today for her secular political and moral
philosophy—not to mention the sheer force of her indomitable personality—as she
is for her deeply, weirdly Christian theological writings, the letters to
Father Perrin seem to hold a key to her life and thought. And what she meant by
that word totalitarian—whether referring to the Roman Catholic Church, Nazism
and Stalinism, or the tendencies of political parties and organizations in
general—hangs over it all. Like others in her own time and since, Weil not only
used totalitarian in a literal sense, to refer to specific all-powerful and
controlling state systems. She also used it in a more figurative or cultural
sense, as a repressive mindset, a coercive social and institutional tendency,
an intrinsic characteristic of the all-devouring “collective passions,” what
she sometimes called the “social Beast.”
And
Weil’s use of this charged term, in particular what she called the
“totalitarian spirituality” of the medieval Church, feels uniquely relevant to
our own moment, with our contemporary plagues of white “Christian” nationalism
and colonialism (which Weil fought against in her own day), Big Tech hegemony,
and even, ultimately, our planetary environmental catastrophe. It has to do
with how Weil saw both theology and ideology, combined with power, as
dehumanizing forces—in the way they treat human beings as abstractions
(something our social media take to a whole new level), and then turn them into
things, cogs in the machinery, mindless slaves, and finally, corpses.
Zaretsky’s book reminds us that not just Weil’s ideas but her life as well
offer a bracing, often unsettling challenge to any of us who would resist our
own totalitarian tendencies, individual and collective, today.
It’s
hard if not impossible to imagine a figure of Weil’s stature in the
intellectual and political culture of today’s left, the only region of the
political spectrum where she might possibly fit. And not just because of her
religiosity, which would of course instantly ghettoize her. It’s also because
she’s so hard to pin down with any neat, easy label—or rather, because the
labels are too many and apparently conflicting. (She’d be eaten alive on
Twitter from all sides—or, worse, simply shunned and ignored.) “An anarchist
who espoused conservative ideals,” Zaretsky writes in his opening pages, “a
pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a saint who refused baptism, a
mystic who was a labor militant, a French Jew who was buried in the Catholic
section of an English cemetery, a teacher who dismissed the importance of
solving a problem, the most willful of individuals who advocated the extinction
of the self: here are but a few of the paradoxes Weil embodied.”
The key
word there is embodied. As Zaretsky succinctly puts it, “Simone Weil fully
inhabited her philosophy.” To understand Weil one has to see her whole, in
three dimensions, as a full and fully engaged human being, even if she at times
comes off as incoherent—a lot like life itself. Then again, a little
incoherence may not be such a bad thing, especially when the alternative is the
enforced false coherence of a totalizing theological or ideological
system.
Much as
he did for Camus in 2013’s A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning,
Zaretsky guides us through Weil’s complexities with impressive lucidity,
keeping it lively and accessible, which is no small feat. Because as much as
there is to admire about Weil, she can be confoundingly difficult and, as
Zaretsky admits, irritating, even insufferable, in her uncompromising
judgments. No one, herself included, could live up to her standards. She was a
philosopher and mystic who revolted against any merely abstract ideology or
theology. For Weil, it was always about the actual person, the actual
experience, the immediate world, whether a classroom, a factory, or a farm; a
battlefield or a church. Philosophy, ethics, and religion had to be lived in
order to be worth anything—and she tried to put this exacting ethos into
practice, which often led her to extremes (she rationed her own meals in
solidarity with the malnourished). When it came to resistance, for Weil,
mouthing slogans was never enough—it required rigorous thought, moral clarity,
and action. Fitting, then, that it was Camus who championed and published her
posthumously when he was at Gallimard in Paris following the war. When he was
asked upon receiving the Nobel, in 1957, to name the writers to whom he felt
closest personally, Weil was one of only two (the other was René Char). Though
he’d never met her in life, he considered her a friend.
And it
was from Weil’s own experience that her most distinctive and perhaps most
important concept—malheur (affliction)—emerged, without which we can’t grasp
what she meant by totalitarian in the fullest sense. In the early 1930s, after
graduating from the elite École Normale Supérieure, where she was flamboyantly
absorbed in revolutionary politics (with strong anarcho-syndicalist sympathies,
she never joined the Communist Party), Weil taught philosophy to lycée students
in provincial towns and tirelessly kept up her engagement in the labor
movement, teaching night classes for workers in small industrial cities. And as
she deepened her contact with the workers, she began to lose faith in revolution.
While she admired Marx’s analysis of capitalism, she found the Marxist theory
of history a sort of fable, or as Zaretsky aptly puts it, an abstract
“millenarian eschatology,” detached from the realities of working-class life.
By late
1934, coming to see that an effective working-class politics would need to be
rooted in the actual experience of working-class people, she took a fateful and
characteristically drastic step: she got a job on the floor of the Alsthom
electronic equipment factory in Paris, working long hours operating a stamping
press and other heavy machinery under brutal and demeaning conditions. Always
physically awkward and weak, eating little and prone to searing headaches, Weil
pushed herself to exhaustion and despair alongside her fellow women workers.
Inevitably, the job didn’t last (whether she was fired or just physically worn
out is unclear), yet she managed to get work in two more factories over the
course of a year, seriously compromising her health. She emerged a changed person
and thinker. She believed that she had gained insight into the dehumanized
condition of a slave, and she called this condition malheur.
There’s
no word in English that truly captures the meaning of Weil’s malheur, but
translators have settled on “affliction.” In a lengthy essay she left with
Father Perrin, Weil offers her best description. “In the realm of suffering,”
she writes, “affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. . . . It
takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own
particular mark, the mark of slavery.” While affliction always involves pain or
the fear of pain (including mental or emotional), she goes on to clarify,
“There is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life
attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological,
and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction
unless there is social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another.”
By the
time she wrote that essay, with the Nazi Wehrmacht bearing down, Weil believed
“affliction is hanging over us all.” And affliction for Weil in the deepest
sense, unsurprisingly given her mystic turn, is somehow more than the sum of
its identifiable parts: its effect is also inescapably spiritual. Affliction,
she writes, “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into
things. It is indifferent; and it is the coldness of this indifference—a
metallic coldness—that freezes all those it touches right to the depths of
their souls. . . . They will never believe any more that they are anyone.” When
Christ on the cross cried out to God, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, Weil
tells us, he was afflicted. “Extreme affliction . . . is a nail whose point is
applied at the very center of the soul. . . . [Affliction] introduces into the
soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. . .
. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through all the
horror he can continue to want to love.” Love itself, which for Weil means love
of God and neighbor, is the only thing that can still reach the afflicted, if
they can only hold on to it themselves.
Affliction
is the consequence of all-consuming, soul-crushing external force. It is what
dehumanizing power—physical, psychological, spiritual—does to a person, whether
that power is wielded by a church, a state, a corporation, a political party or
movement, or an entire political and economic system. The force that
afflicts—that which enslaves, literally or figuratively—is totalitarian.
It seems
safe to suggest that there are many today who would recognize what Weil was
talking about, or who at least have some inkling of how it feels. Indeed, it’s
frightening how closely her concept of affliction fits what our
techno-capitalist, social-media saturated existence is doing to us politically
and culturally. When a person is reduced, by outside forces beyond their
control, to an abstract category—a race, a gender, a sexual orientation, a class,
a religion, a nationality, a political label, a demographic—they begin to feel
the cold steel of affliction. Whatever our various identities, wherever we may
fall on the ideological spectrum, we’re in the grip of a dehumanizing force.
When
American churches—largely white evangelical Protestant— and other religious
institutions, preach a form of religion, so-called “Christian” or otherwise,
that defines human beings in abstract theological terms as worthy and unworthy,
included and excluded, they effectively employ those two little words, anathema
sit. And when those same churches and religious institutions align with a
political party that defines itself in terms of racial and religious
nationalism, affliction is the result—whether it looks like caged migrant
children; or incarcerated, pandemic-stricken bodies; or members of Congress
hunted by neo-fascists in the hallways of the Capitol.
When a
political and economic system degrades and dehumanizes workers, the unemployed,
and the unhoused, regardless of race or gender or religion, there is
affliction. When large segments of a society are abandoned to “deaths of
despair,” there is affliction.
When
technology companies design all-pervasive social media platforms to prey
algorithmically upon human weakness, neurological and emotional and moral—and
to profit from the exponential amplification of institutionalized mendacity
through ever-multiplying echo chambers of mindless collective abuse of the
abstract other, so that no one, of any identity or ideology, is spared the
coercive pressure of conformity and fear of punishment—something very like
affliction becomes the general condition of a society.
It even
begins to look as though affliction is now our planetary condition. When the
prevailing technocratic carbon-industrial regime that runs the global economy
pursues a nihilistic course of limitless fossil-fueled growth, or a greenwashed
version of the same, so that entire populations of human beings—first and
foremost across the Global South—are rendered superfluous (Hannah Arendt’s
term) for the sake of profit and power, then we see that the climate
catastrophe itself is driven by a kind of totalitarian force. Weil, who was a
fierce anti-colonialist, argued in her final work, The Need for Roots, that the
uprooting of peoples, the destruction of cultures and traditions and entire
histories—as the colonizing powers of white Christendom had been doing for
centuries—counted as crimes of the largest magnitude. Historical and cultural
rootedness, Weil firmly believed, is a fundamental human need. In our time,
fossil-fueled capital turns indigenous homelands into wastelands or drowns them
under the waves.
It was
those uprooted and afflicted global masses, both far and near, with whom Weil
stood in solidarity to the end of her short, subversive, and tragic life—a
life, as Zaretsky suggests, that was a fully embodied act of resistance. Weil’s
whole purpose, philosophically and morally, was to know her fellow human beings
as human beings, not abstractions—to understand what they experienced and
suffered by living and working alongside them in farm fields, factories, and
fishing boats; devoting her time to tutoring those she came in contact with,
opening their minds; risking her life alongside them in Spain and with the French
Resistance. In both the literal and the broadest sense, she lived an
anti-totalitarian life.
But we
can’t leave it there, tempting as it may be. That’s because Weil’s most
unsettling contradiction was her attitude toward her own Jewish heritage, as
seen in several of her comments on Israel and Judaism that are widely read as
anti-Semitic. Zaretsky, who is Jewish and has written movingly of his own
struggle to speak about the Holocaust, squarely confronts this disturbing
aspect of Weil’s thought. What’s clear is that Weil saw the ancient Hebrew
religion as a form of oppressive and at times genocidal religious nationalism,
based on the core dogma of Israel as “chosen people”—a concept Weil abhorred in
any context. (“There is no such thing as a holy nation,” she writes in The Need
for Roots.) She considered both ancient Israel and her other great enemy, the
Roman Empire, as precursors to twentieth-century totalitarianism. But it also
seems clear—given Weil’s staunch opposition to Nazism and its oppression of
Jews—that her horror was directed at the theology and national ideology of
ancient Israel, not at Jews as people, which would obviously negate everything
she wrote about the sanctity of each human being. Zaretsky tells us that Father
Perrin tried to convince her that she was mistaken in her readings of Hebrew
scripture, but whatever the case, there’s little doubt she was deeply alienated
from Judaism.
All of
which leaves a bad taste—and can’t help but color Weil’s attraction to
Christianity. And yet this is also why her inner struggle with Roman Catholic
dogma and the Church as an institution is crucial. Because as we know, it
wasn’t just Israel and Rome that she saw as totalitarian precursors, it was
every bit as much the medieval Church, with its persecution and extermination
of heretics and infidels. “What frightens me is the Church as a social
structure,” she wrote to Perrin. “I am afraid of the Church patriotism existing
in Catholic circles. . . . I am afraid of it because I fear to catch it. . . .
There were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. . . .
they were blinded by something very powerful.”
Zaretsky
notes that Weil’s theological turn in her later years “marked a rupture” for
many readers. “But for others,” he writes, “it is less a break than a
broadening of the same concerns that had always driven her thought.” So it’s
surprising that Zaretsky makes little of Weil’s decision to remain outside the
Church—even though, for a Christian believer, no decision could be weightier.
Alan Jacobs, in a moving portrait of Weil in his recent book The Year of Our
Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, sees greater significance in
Weil’s refusal of baptism, framing it as central to her life and moral
commitments. Indeed, it was perhaps her ultimate and most profound act of human
solidarity—and perhaps her most subversive. In one of her letters to Father
Perrin before leaving Marseilles with her parents, Weil makes the astoundingly
bold confession: “It seems to me that the will of God is that I should not
enter the Church at present.” In fact, she tells the priest, when she thinks of
baptism and entering the Church, “nothing gives me more pain than the idea of
separating myself from the immense and unfortunate multitude of unbelievers.”
“I have
the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation,” Weil continues, in
what could be a summation of her faith and philosophy, “to move among men of
every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and
outlook, so far that is to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and
disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off
all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them so as to love them
just as they are. For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they
whom I love, and my love will be unreal.”
The
Social Beast : On the anti-totalitarianism of Simone Weil. By Wen Stephenson.
The Baffler April 14, 2021.
The
French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) had a precocious gift for
sympathy—and more than a hint of masochism. She sought out the darkness to
escape the comfortable bourgeois life—the very model of assimilated Third
Republic French-Jewish success—into which she was born. When she was ten years
old, in 1919, she disappeared from her Paris apartment only to be found
marching down the Boulevard Saint Michel with striking workers, singing The
Internationale. On holiday before her last year at the École Normale
Superièure—where she would graduate first in her cohort, ahead of Simone de
Beauvoir—she toiled on a fishing trawler in Normandy. In 1932, she went down a
coal mine and was nearly shaken to pieces when she tried the pneumatic drill.
Weil
definitively left her privilege behind in 1934, when she took a leave of
absence from teaching philosophy at a provincial lycée in Roanneto work at different
factories in Paris. There she learned first-hand how “not thinking anymore… is
the one and only way of not suffering.” Weil’s clumsiness made her factory
career difficult—though it also probably saved her life. Her brief stint with
the French-speaking Internationals in the Spanish Civil War (“Happily, I am so
myopic that there’s no risk of my killing others,” she wrote, “even when I am
aiming at them”) was cut short when she stepped in a pot of cooking oil and was
forced back to Paris.
After
her family fled the Nazi invasion of France, Weil became obsessed by the idea
of parachuting behind enemy lines with a brigade of nurses. Her suicidal
proposal was rebuffed be de Gaulle; instead, she was tasked with preparing
reports on the political and spiritual reconstruction of France. In 1943, she
died of tuberculosis aggravated, the coroner found, by her self-imposed
malnutrition: she insisted on never eating more than was permitted in her
occupied homeland. Her family called her Antigone; her classmates, the
“Categorical Imperative in Skirts.”
In her
brief life, Weil was more of a teacher than a writer—at the lycée, at workers’
reading groups, and with the fishermen and farmers whom she tutored in
languages and literature when the day’s work was done. Yet Weil still wrote
intensely. Virtually none of her writings appeared in her lifetime, with the
exception of her justly famous essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” which
was published in Vichy France in 1940, and which remains her most accessible
work.
Her
books were all compiled by others, stitched from the essays, letters, and notes
she left behind into Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace on her mystic
theology, and The Need for Roots on her political theory. Thinkers as diverse
as Albert Camus, Pope Paul VI, Iris Murdoch, Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag and
Franz Fanon cite Weil as an influence. Her posthumous productivity—as a thinker
and as a myth—makes her hard to pin down.
“To a
rare degree in the modern age—or, indeed, any age—Simone Weil fully inhabited
her philosophy,” writes Robert Zaretsky, in his welcome new book, The
Subversive Simone Weil. Drawing on Simone Petrément’s still-unequalled 1973
vie, Zaretsky approaches Weil by essaying “a small number of core themes in her
thought that still resonate today”—affliction, attention, rootedness,
resistance and the divine. These themes give a sense of the remarkable scope of
the work she packed into a mere 33 years. In clear, accessible prose, Zaretsky
gives some coherence to Weil’s largely fragmentary oeuvre. What emerges is a
portrait of a politically unclassifiable thinker who in her life and writings
committed herself to be open to the unbearable reality around her.
Weil’s
year-long apprenticeship in Paris factories transformed her early Marxist
tendencies into something more sophisticated—and arguably more radical. “Every
man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him,” Weil wrote,
anticipating Hannah Arendt’s later distinction between meaningful work and mere
labour. This spiritual approach to oppression led Weil to develop, as Zaretsky
writes, “a fundamentally conservative, if not reactionary, conception of
‘revolution’ and ‘resistance’.” Weil believed not so much in creating a new
form of life, but in restoring many aspects of the one industrialisation had
swept away. As TS Eliot observed, Weil was “at the same time more truly a lover
of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and
more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves
Socialist.”
Ideology
was, for Weil, less important than suffering. Modern factory work—endlessly
repetitive, frantically rushed—induces what she termed le malheur, often
translated as affliction: a condition as “hideous as life in its nakedness
always is, like an amputated stump, like the swarming of insects.” We look away
instinctively from the hollow stare of an exhausted worker, just as we look
away from the bloody workings of war—two sorts of dehumanising violence, in
Weil’s view. Force, as Weil writes in her essay on the Iliad, “turns anyone who
is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a
thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” War and work
destroy the complex sensibility that makes us human.
Weil
thought that educating workers to read the classics and to express themselves
clearly was more important than fomenting revolution. Education fosters
attention, which for Weil is a life-expanding “negative effort,” a kind of
negative capability with which we approach the world as though translating a
“text that is not written down.” Whether for a worker or an intellectual, as
Zaretsky writes, for Weil the “epistemological is the ethical”; being open and
available to others is the only way to fully respect them, and the only way to
be fully human.
Human
beings also need to be enmeshed in a community—to have the roots that modernity
and war were pulling up. To be rooted means to preserve, Weil writes, “certain
particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the
future”—the ultimate function of the nation, in her Burkean view. (Notably,
Roger Scruton included Weil in his Great Tradition.) The distinctive condition
of modern life is déracinement, or uprootedness—“a sort of inner vertigo”
deeper and more elusive than alienation. Uprootedness comes with the physical
displacement forced upon her and her family by the Nazi aggression—a kind of
physical and spiritual colonisation which she boldly asserted was identical to
what the French were perpetrating in trying to Gallicise their colonial
subjects.
Weil’s
worldview became progressively more religious, and in the ‘30s she drifted
further from her upbringing as a “fiercely nonobservant” assimilated Jew and
drew closer to Christianity. Although she refused allegiance to any church,
Zaretsky relates how Weil “engaged in a brilliant and often bruising dialogue
with Christianity” from her first experience of grace in a Romanesque chapel in
Assisi in 1937, when she felt a divine force drive her to her knees to pray.
Like so
much else in her life, Weil’s Christianity took the form of self-denial—not
just of her ties to Judaism, which she relentlessly denigrated as a brutal,
ungodly force in history, but also of her own ego. “Relentless necessity,
wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labor which wears
us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these
constitute divine love,” Weil wrote, describing her version of what the
Gnostics call kenosis. “It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can
love him.” In order to approach the divine, we must undergo a process of
décréation, an undoing of the fundamental separation that occurred when God
created the world. We must overcome the separation by overcoming ourselves.
One need
not be a Christian to see the value in Weil’s attempt to, in Iris Murdoch’s
words, “pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it
really is.” Nor does one need to be a philosopher to see that, despite her sometimes
esoteric worldview, Weil’s serious commitment put her in the company of
Socrates as one of the great practitioners of philosophy as a way of life.
Weil’s example—if not her creed—is a reminder in a secular and individualistic
age what it means to live for what you believe.
The
Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky (Chicago)
The
subversive philosophy of Simone Weil. By Max Norman. Prospect, April 11, 2021.
In
December 1934, Auguste Detoeuf interviewed an applicant for a job at one of his
factories. Ordinarily, Detoeuf did not make hiring decisions—he was, after all,
the director of Alsthom, France’s largest maker of electric equipment. Yet
Detoeuf was hardly an ordinary businessman. A graduate of France’s elite
engineering school, the École polytechnique, Detoeuf neither talked the talk or
walked the walk of French industrialists. He dressed, as one friend sighed, like
a romantic violin virtuoso, and confessed to being an intellectual manqué.
Detoeuf
no more belonged behind this particular desk than the job applicant belonged in
front of it. It was not that she was a she—legions of women, after all, labored
in French factories. Instead, it was because she was a graduate of France’s
other elite school, the École normale supérieure—which, like the École
polytechnique, had been founded by Napoleon—and had, until recently, taught
philosophy to lycée students. Yet, the applicant—who, having long theorized
about assembly line labor, now wanted to experience it at firsthand—was
hell-bent on finding factory work with or without Detoeuf’s help. Given the
applicant’s bad eyesight, crippling migraines, and manual dexterity—she had
none—he decided it was better if he helped.
And so,
on a frigid December day in 1934, Simone Weil began work at the Alsthom factory
on the Rue Lecourbe, the clanking of her stamping press adding to the din of
this industrial neighborhood in southwest Paris. That night, on the first page
of her “factory journal,” Weil inscribed two epigrams. The first is hers: “Not
only should man know what he is making, but if possible he should see how it is
used—see how nature is changed by him. Every man’s work should be an object of
contemplation for him.” The second, in Greek, is Homer’s: “Much against your
will, under pressure of harsh necessity.”
This
year marks the 75th anniversary of Simone Weil’s death. Her life was raw and
short—she died at the age of 34, perhaps of willed starvation to mark her
solidarity with her fellow citizens in occupied France—but her legacy is rich
and long. With the posthumous publication of her writings, ranging from her
reflections on politics and ethics to theology and faith, Weil now towers as
one of the 20th century’s most influential and subversive thinkers. In
particular, Weil’s conceptions of necessity and contemplation—couched in her
journal’s epigrams but also grounded in her real experiences—remind us why the
unique way her thought and life meshed matters more than ever.
The very
act of thinking, Weil discovered, was the first casualty of factory work. A few
days into her job, she was already reeling from fatigue. Her weariness stemmed
less from the physical demands of her job—though they were great—than the
unrelenting pressure to meet quotas and the numbing repetitiveness of the work.
“The effect of exhaustion,” she wrote, “makes it almost impossible for me to
overcome the strongest temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking
anymore, which is the one and only way of not suffering from it.”
But
despite near-constant migraines and bone-deep exhaustion, Weil did think about
this kind of working life. How could she not? As a 10-year-old, she slipped out
of her family’s spacious apartment in Paris to join a labor protest she had
glimpsed from the window. As a university student, she earned the nickname “the
Categorical Imperative in skirts” by way of acknowledging her fierce sense of
moral duty. As a lycée teacher in the provincial city of Le Puy, she angered
the authorities by protesting on behalf of the shabbily treated workers in the
local stone quarry.
Weil’s
engagement with the world spilled into her classroom, where she would confront
her students with questions like “How many workers’ homes could be built for
the price of a luxury liner?” These queries were not distractions from her role
as teacher—the great majority of her students passed the baccalaureate, the
feared final exam—but its very raison d’être. Weil insisted that humans will be
free only when we have “understood the causes of oppression as clearly as we
understand the gravity which causes a stone to fall.”
The
gravitational pull of factories was as strong as that of dark matter for her.
Within the walls of the Alsthom plant—along with two other factories where she
subsequently worked—Weil discovered the nature of le malheur, or affliction.
The factory distilled the hierarchy and its train of harrowing inequities that
structured French society. Her coworkers were, with few exceptions, women.
During her first week, Weil knew the names of some like Madame Forestier (whose
earned her title by her imperious demeanor), but also identified the nameless
ones: the “Tolstoy fan,” the “Woman who gave me a roll,” and the “Mother of the
burned kid.”
Even
when she failed to learn the names of her coworkers, Weil captured the tragic
nature of their lives. There was the drill operator who brought her 9-year-old
son to work. When Weil found the boy fending for himself in the changing room,
she asked the mother if he was also coming to work. “I wish he were old
enough,” the woman replied matter-of-factly. One metal shearer suffering from
inflammation in her pelvis could not get a transfer from the presses—work that,
Weil wrote, “irrevocably and completely destroyed her reproductive organs.”
The
women, Weil quickly found, were subject to the whims of the “big shots”—namely,
the foremen. Days after she began at the factory, which made electronic
components, Weil was unable to fully control a fly press designed to punch
holes into metal boxes. As a result, she botched a full quota of metal
components. Mouquet, her foreman, ordered her to redo all the pieces, but in a
way that forced her to repeatedly duck her head to avoid the machine’s heavy
counterweight. By the time she emptied her box of components, Weil also felt
emptied. “I had the idiotic feeling that it wasn’t worth the effort to pay
attention to protecting myself.”
On this
occasion, Weil’s coworkers signaled their “pity and mute indignation” at what
had been done to her. More often, though, the working conditions bred distrust
and despair. “In this kind of life,” Weil realized, “those who suffer aren’t
able to complain. Others would misunderstand them, perhaps laughed at by others
who are not suffering, or thought of as tiresome by yet others who, suffering
themselves, have quite enough suffering of their own. Everywhere the same
callousness, with few exceptions.” To complain to a supervisor was an
invitation for further degradation. “It’s humiliating, since she has no rights
at all and is at the mercy of the good will of the foremen, who decide
according to her worth as a worker, and in large measure capriciously.”
In
effect, the foreman decided Weil’s worth not just as a worker, but also as a
human being. Le malheur resulted less from physical suffering than
psychological degradation. Ground down by relentless and repetitive physical
labor, workers were also shorn of human dignity. Harried by time clocks and hounded
by foremen, serving a machine and severed from a real purpose, the workers were
quite simply unable to think at all, much less think about resistance or
rebellion. Horrified, Weil realized that the factory “makes me forget my real
reasons for spending time in the factory.”
Rarely
at a loss for words, Weil struggled to explain her state of mind to friends. In
her letters, she was often reduced to describing her experience as “inhuman.”
But in her journal, she increasingly depicts the condition of workers as
“slavery.” You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for
it … that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really
feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.” Before she
entered the factory, even the Categorical Imperative in skirts might have
raised her eyebrows at such a claim. Once she left the factory, a shaken woman
in work clothes had come to see servitude as a near-universal condition.
Affliction,
it turns out, is an equal opportunity employer. It is too easy, she warns, to
comfort women as victims and condemn men as victimizers. Men no less than
women, managers no less than workers, even employers no less than employees are
all subject to necessity. All of us are driven, at varying speeds, by physical
needs and political creeds, economic imperatives and social interests. None of
us, as a consequence, escapes necessity’s gravitational pull. “Human history is
simply the history of the servitude which makes men—oppressors and oppressed
alike—the playthings of the instruments of domination they themselves have
manufactured.”
Oddly,
Weil had to be reminded of this point by Detoeuf. In 1936, more than a year
after her factory experience, she related to Detoeuf a conversation between two
employers she had overheard in a train. Complaining about the strikes then
sweeping France, these two “well fed and well dressed” men believed they had
everything to lose should the strikers succeed. That workers should demand
their rights, Weil marveled, was seen as a “monstrous injustice” by these
comfortable owners.
In his
reply, Detoeuf agreed that many employers lacked a sense of civic duty and
social obligation. Yet, he also suggested that Weil failed to show these
employers the same attention she gave to the workers. Leave aside, he asked
with restrained irony, “whatever may be rather grotesque and odious in the fact
of being portly and well-nourished.” He suggested that if Weil put herself in
their place, she would discover that “unless these men were more than human
they could hardly think and feel otherwise.” Convinced their material
well-being was at risk, they responded as Weil would respond if her mental
well-being was threatened. They truly believed that the end of their
world—which, for them, was the only world—was nigh. “You must really use your
own imagination to try to grasp that these men have not so much imagination as
you credit them with. For them, to have nothing more to lose means to have to
give up everything that makes up their existence.”
Did Weil
concede Detoeuf’s point? Her reply isn’t recorded, but it would be odd had she
not, because it happens to be her point, too. The exercise of our imagination
or attention is our one defense against the onslaught of necessity. Allowing us
to peel back the layers of meaning we impose on the world, attention trains us
to see others not as white or black, woman or man, worker or manager, but
instead as us. In a word, we come to see the true nature of affliction. To
acknowledge the reality of affliction, Weil observed a few years later, “means
saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances
over which I’ve no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those
things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself.’”
Seventy-five
years after Weil’s death, how better to measure her life than by recalling her
conception of the world as subjected to necessity, marked by affliction, and
starved for our attention. That even Weil could fall short in the work of
attention is a happy reminder that few activities are more difficult—or more
important—than coming to see someone else as real.
Why One
of France’s ‘’Most Subversive””Philosophers Chose to Work in a Factoy . By
Robert Zaretsky. Zocalo, June 28, 2018.
