The Subversive Simone Weil

 

“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.

The University of Chicago Press

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.

 

Remembering Simone Weil: The Price and the Purpose of Philosophy

Seventy-five years ago, on August 26, the coroner at Grosvenor Sanatorium, a sprawling Victorian pile located in the town of Ashford, about 60 miles southeast of London, ended his examination of a patient who had died two days earlier. The cause of death, he wrote, was “cardiac failure due to myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis.” But the clinical assessment then gives way to what appears to be an ethical judgment: “The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”

The deceased was buried in Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford; a flat marker laid across her grave was engraved with her name and relevant dates:

               Simone Weil

               3 février 1909

               24 août 1943

Weil’s grave, its location highlighted on the cemetery map, has since become one of Ashford’s most visited tourist sites. By way of acknowledging the constant stream of visitors, a second marble slab explains that Weil had “joined the Provisional French government in London” and that her “writings have established her as one of the foremost modern philosophers.”

But one can fit only so much on a grave marker. In January, Weil arrived in London in order to work for Charles de Gaulle’s Les Français libres. Yet as was so often the case in her life, she eventually refused to belong to any club that would accept her as a member. Four months after she joined the Gaullist movement, Weil announced her resignation. She gave as her reason the fact that her superiors had repeatedly refused her request to be sent on mission to occupied France.

Such a mission, Gaullist headquarters believed, would end in Weil’s capture and death. The odd thing is that Weil didn’t disagree. She tried to persuade Maurice Schumann, an old friend who had become one of de Gaulle’s advisors, that any assignment “not requiring technical expertise but involving a high degree of hardship and danger, would suit me perfectly.” Even more improbably, Weil declared that should she be arrested, her feeble health guaranteed she would die “without giving anything away.”

But there is an even odder aspect to all of this, one that reflects the gravestone’s claim that Weil is “one of the foremost modern philosophers.” During her short life, Weil published very little. A graduate of France’s elite institution of higher learning, the École normale supèrieure, Weil worked hard at avoiding the sort of work expected of her. Though she taught in several different lycées, Weil grasped, as she told one student, that teaching kept her away from “real life.” To the dismay of school administrators — one of whom dubbed her the “Red Virgin” — she demonstrated with striking workers, participated in labor union debates, taught adult education classes, and wrote for a variety of newspapers. Like George Orwell and Albert Camus, while Weil was very much on the political left, she distrusted revolutionaries no less than she did reactionaries. Certain that a Marxist regime, even more so than a monarchist regime, would lead to totalitarian rule, Weil threw her support to anarchist and syndicalist organizations.

Even these activities, though, were not real enough. For Weil, reality was rooted in the world of manual labor. Often, a morbid romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”

But something else — something that shrinks or skeptics cannot explain away — was at work in Weil’s pursuit of work. “So far as one has only an idea, one has nothing that’s real,” she insisted. “The great human error is to reason in place of finding out.” The task of finding out meant stepping outside the laboratory or library, the cafe or classroom. Philosophy, she reminded herself in her journal, “is exclusively an affair of action and practice.” She might have added that it is also an affair of truth, but as she told her students, truth must “always be a truth about something.” Something lived, something experienced, something pounded into one’s bones. This truth, she sensed, eluded her fellow intellectuals, even though they pretended to speak for workers. How could they wax theoretical on the alienation of workers when “they themselves have never been cogs in the machinery of factory”?

Weil’s quest to match her words with the world led her not just to fishing trawlers and farms, but also, and most famously, to factories. In late 1934, Weil took a leave of absence from teaching and spent the next year working at three different factories in Paris. It was within the walls of these deafening and dreary buildings, yoked to a machine where she was condemned to repeat the same motions countless times, that Weil made one of her most disturbing discoveries: le malheur. Best translated as affliction, this inhuman state resulted less from physical suffering than from psychological degradation. Reduced to a machine-like existence by their relentless and repetitive physical labor, harried by time clocks and hounded by foremen, the workers were quite simply unable to think at all, much less think about resistance or rebellion. This apprenticeship in alienation forced upon Weil the realization that the factory 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 Weil was cursed by the inability to stop thinking, even in the most dire of circumstances. How could it be otherwise? If she had stopped thinking, she would have stopped being Simone Weil. Chain-smoking cigarettes, adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses, and wearing the same dress she had the day before (and would wear again the next day), Weil repeated a core conviction to her students: “If one stops oneself from thinking of all this, one makes oneself an accomplice of what is happening. One has to do something quite different: take one’s place in this system of things and do something about it.” If philosophy didn’t lead to such a conclusion, it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Come France’s defeat and occupation by the Nazis, the imperative to “do something about it” grew unbearable. In part, what Weil did was write. The last three years of her life were, at least from a literary perspective, the most productive. She wrote under a pseudonym while living in Marseille — a necessity, since the Vichy regime prohibited Jews from all white-collar professions — and continued to write when she reached New York. It was as a writer and thinker that Weil caught the attention of Les Français libres, who brought her to London in late 1942 to assist in making plans for the reestablishment of republican government and law after France’s liberation. During the few months that she spent there, Weil wrote several hundred pages, ranging from terse analyses to what is perhaps her magnum opus, L’Enracinement, or On the Need for Roots.

But for Weil, none of these works, despite their compelling and often unsettling insights, qualified as doing something about it. Writing was not enough. As Weil told Schumann, “The suffering all over the world obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties and the only way I can revive them and release myself from the obsession is by getting for myself a large share of danger and hardship.” What better way, Weil thought, to get this share of danger and hardship than as a nurse? Not the usual sort of nurse, like those treating her in Ashford and to whom she was quite kind. (The doctors, on the other hand, lived in white-knuckled terror of visits to her room.)

Instead, Weil had in mind a different vocation for nurses, one she described in painstaking detail in a series of drafts. In the title to one she wrote in English — “A plan for a group of volunteer fire-line [sic] nurses” — the spelling mistake is all too telling. The nurses’ mission was less to save the lives of wounded soldiers than to offer up their own lives. Parachuted onto the front lines, the nurses would serve by applying dressings and tying tourniquets on the injured. More important, though, the women, whose white uniforms were tantamount to the wearing of bull’s-eyes, would serve themselves up as targets for German soldiers. As Weil explained matter-of-factly, “They would need to offer their lives as a sacrifice.”

General de Gaulle possibly read no further than this line when he famously blurted: “Mais elle est folle!” Perhaps Weil was a bit mad, but as the rest of the plan reveals, there was a method to her madness. She observes, rightly, that German military successes were not just a matter of strategy and material, but also spirit and men. This was particularly the case for the SS, who were prepared “not only for risking their lives but for death.” The trick was not to copy Nazism’s brutal idolatry, Weil noted, but instead to create its opposite. Embodying compassion and solicitude, not cruelty and savagery, the nurses would be sent “wherever there is the most brutal carnage something which evokes the homes [our soldiers] have been obliged to leave.”

Not surprisingly, Weil wished to lead the first wave of nurses to be airdropped onto the battlefield, and took a first aid course in hopeful preparation for her assignment. But when her plan elicited nothing more than silence or shock, Weil despaired of doing something about the war. Or, at least, doing something beyond what she had been doing for months: eating no more than those living in occupied France, who were subject to extreme rationing, were able to eat. Given her tubercular lungs, paralyzing migraines, and weak heart, this act of “doing something” proved no less fatal than parachuting onto the front lines.

Yet her dashed hopes remained with her till her dying day. The last entry she wrote in her journal was just one word: “Nurses.”

Did Weil, as the coroner concluded, kill herself? We will never know the answer, of course. But I cannot help but quote a coroner’s report on a Jesuit priest from The Plague, a novel by one of Weil’s great admirers, Albert Camus: hers is a “doubtful case.” For Weil, death was neither the means nor the end to philosophy. Instead, it was a possible consequence of doing philosophy — at least if we understand philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a way of life. As the contemporary philosopher Costica Bradatan observes in his brilliant study Dying for Ideas, “philosophizing is not about thinking, speaking or writing […] but about something else: deciding to put your body on the line.”

This is too much to ask of nearly all of us, at least to the fatal degree Weil asked it of herself. But as with Socrates and Seneca, Weil obliges us to recall not just the price of the philosophical life, but also its purpose.

Remembering Simone Weil: The Price and the Purpose of Philosophy. By Robert Zaretsky. Los Angeles Review of Books , August  24, 2018

In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, German-Jewish émigré and political theorist extraordinaire, chillingly wrote: “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.” (p.459, Harvest edition 1979). Totalitarianism is decidedly different from garden-variety authoritarianism. But the cascading environmental, economic, and political crises we face as a species, and the rising tide of fascism and authoritarianism around the globe, make it clear that, although the present is grim enough, the future has the potential to be very dark indeed. As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. So we must urgently answer the question of how to humanize modernity “in a manner worthy of man.” How can we create a world where all people feel grounded and truly at home? Arendt, and her French contemporary Simone Weil, may offer us answers.

One of the key characteristics of capitalist modernity, Hannah Arendt thought, was that people live as “isolated individuals in an atomized society,” in a world premised on the infinite expansion of profit and power and the ruthless marginalization of anyone considered disposable or superfluous (Origins p.235). Arendt noted that as a result, the first half of the twentieth century spawned “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth” (p.vii).

Warnings about the tremendous danger of rootlessness run throughout The Origins of Totalitarianism’s nearly five hundred pages. Arendt argued that people who feel themselves to be rootless or homeless will seek a home at any price, with possibly horrific results. For this reason, the “competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual” (p.317) in capitalist mass society can pave the way for authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Indeed, the atomized and individualized mass is a necessary precondition for totalitarianism (p.318). Languishing in a “situation of spiritual and social homelessness” (p.352), shorn of sustaining social bonds and ties, individuals are forced to live in a world where they cannot exist meaningfully and fruitfully. They try to escape this agonizing limbo and, in the absence of powerful inclusive left-wing alternatives, they look to exclusivist reactionary movements for succour. In this way, tribalism and racism are the bitter fruit of territorial rootlessness. They are wrongheaded attempts to secure roots. But rather than securing roots for the rootless masses, they simply create ‘metaphysical rootlessness’. Totalitarian and proto-totalitarian movements represent what Arendt calls a ‘fictitious home’ for people to “escape from disintegration and disorientation.” (p.381) Their ideology provides a psychic haven for the resentful, the enraged, and the fearful: “Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency… in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home…” (p.353). But as with tribalism and racism, totalitarianism intensifies the very rootlessness, isolation, and alienation that many people sought to flee in the first place. As Arendt wrote, loneliness constitutes “the essence of totalitarian government” (p.475), and the “isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure” (p.407). She observes that “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness… has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” (p.478)

Arendt also says that up rootedness and superfluousness have been “the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution” (p.475). Up rootedness is often the preliminary condition for superfluousness, and superfluousness leads to ‘the genocide of the superfluous’. The genocidal nightmare that destroyed Europe and culminated in the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was fundamentally caused by a psychological and spiritual crisis. This crisis was itself caused by a host of factors, primarily economic, but also philosophical, cultural, and social. The fabric of capitalist modernity was unsuited to human life, and the result of this maladjustment of social systems to the basic human need for rootedness, was death on an immense scale. For, according to Arendt, the principle of endless accumulation at the heart of capitalism, the principle which causes up rootedness and superfluity in the first place, is deadly: “its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities” (p.137). This is because communities require boundaries and demarcation. Against the perpetual-motion mania of capitalism and its rejection of any limits, Arendt advocates stability, order, and borders – to be achieved through principles that ground, delimit, and root people physically and psychically.

Simone Weil, writing at the height of World War II in some of the darkest hours of the struggle against fascism, arrived at a similar conclusion in her oft-neglected but magnificent book, The Need for Roots (1943). The book was about the reconstruction of France and, by implication, all of Western civilization. In it she wrote that: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” (p.41)

Weil’s method for rerooting humanity is to identify fundamental human needs and devise ways of fulfilling each of them, detailing necessary social reforms. Arendt defined rootedness as having a “place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others” (Origins, p.475). Weil defines rootedness similarly, albeit in more depth, saying that it is “real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future” (The Need for Roots, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1952 edition, p.41).

Weil is candid in admitting that it’s difficult to derive a general principle which tells us when we’ve discovered a need; but she quite rightly says that the needs of the body are obvious, that the needs of the soul are identifiable by introspection and careful thought, and that one hallmark of all needs is that they have limits (p.11). She takes it as morally axiomatic that biological needs generate obligations and social rights. It’s evident that all people need shelter, food, water, heat, clothing, healthcare, and other essentials to maintain themselves, and Weil says this creates a duty for society to provide them. Where her thought is more surprising is when she talks about non-biological needs, or what she calls ‘the needs of the soul’. Gently pushing back against materialists who might neglect such needs, she reminds us that “Everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul” (p.7).

The analogy Weil draws between food for the soul and food for the body is instructive, as it underscores the thought that bodily and spiritual needs are equally important for human thriving. This isn’t to suggest that suffering an empty stomach is acceptable so long as the hungry person’s need for freedom of expression is met, for example. But it is a useful reminder for an age that, under the influence of utilitarianism and neoliberal economics, thinks about politics in strictly material terms. Politics must nurture body and soul.

The primary spiritual need is for order. But Weil uses the word ‘order’ in a rather unorthodox sense. Conventionally, a politics centred on order would be authoritarian and hierarchical. She does speak elsewhere of a spiritual need for ‘hierarchism’ – that is, a sense of being fitted into a definite position in a harmoniously ordered social mechanism; but her idea of order is more aesthetic and philosophical than it is explicitly political. Weil defines order as beauty, harmony, and the reduction of contradiction between an individual’s various moral duties. She believes that one measure of a society’s sickness is the level of dissonance that an individual confronts in trying to fulfill all her moral duties.

The second spiritual need is for liberty, which Weil defines as true, genuine, substantive freedom of choice. Anticipating behavioural psychology and existentialist philosophy, echoing classical critiques of luxury and license, and harmonizing with Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), she writes, “When the possibilities of choice are so wide as to injure the commonweal, men cease to enjoy liberty. For they must either seek refuge in irresponsibility, puerility, and indifference – a refuge where the most they can find is boredom – or feel themselves weighed down by responsibility at all times for fear of causing harm to others. Under such circumstances, men believing wrongly that they are in possession of liberty, and feeling that they get no enjoyment out of it, end up thinking that liberty is not a good thing” (p.13). We live in an age of apparently unparalleled latitude of choice; but many of these choices are artificial, manufactured, and, to use Sigmund Freud’s term, based on the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. So here the tyranny of choice is undeniable; and as Weil’s discussion of excessive choice and its antagonism towards liberty itself suggests, the word ‘tyranny’ is more than a mere rhetorical flourish. A rooted society would instead restrict choice somewhat, in order to make our choices real. (She elsewhere advocates absolute freedom of expression.)

Many of our spiritual needs are paired and opposite. This reflects Weil’s understanding that the soul has different needs at different times and that it may have contradictory needs at the same time.

First, Weil thinks that the human soul has both the need to obey – that is, to freely bestow one’s consent to legitimate authority – and the need to exercise responsibility, which she links to the desire to “feel oneself useful and even indispensable” (p.14). This is reminiscent of the classical Athenian ideal that every citizen rule and be ruled in turn. Making decisions is tiring. After a while it can be quite a relief to delegate one’s decisions to a person or institution that you trust, secure in the belief that they will do the right thing. To dip into psychoanalysis a bit, for people fortunate enough to have loving parents, this hearkens back to infancy and youth, when you entrusted your parents with the task of looking after your needs. However, over-reliance on others can give rise to indolence and decadence, and having others trust and rely on you to a certain extent can be tremendously empowering. It is vital for human health and wellbeing to have the power to make a difference to another person or to the world at large. There’s a reason psychologists discuss people’s loci of control and their sense of self-efficacy: people who have autonomy and responsibility are happier. To take a simple example, elderly patients in nursing homes who care for plants have better health than those who don’t. Weil herself notes that unemployment confounds the need to feel useful, and consequently, she thinks unemployment must be abolished.

Another duality Weil identifies is the need for equality on one hand and the need for social prestige on the other. She isn’t a communist or socialist, so she doesn’t seem to believe in economic equality; but she does advocate the absolute equality of respect for all people regardless of their social station, and she deplores the pernicious influence on society of capitalism’s money-worship: “By making money the sole, or almost the sole, motive of all actions… the poison of inequality has been introduced everywhere” (p.17). Yet in addition to the need to be treated equally, people need to distinguish themselves, benignly, from their fellow citizens. We are all individuals, and our individuality demands respect.

Social recognition is one of our most fundamental needs as social beings, as Hegel famously recognized with his formulation of the master-slave dialectic. Weil also asserts that people have an innate longing for social prestige, the desire to belong to a “noble tradition enshrined in past history and given public acknowledgment” (p.19). Cultural and religious traditions, professional lore, and other forms of collective memory, must be preserved and transmitted, so we can enjoy a direct connection to our forebears and root ourselves in time. Donald Trump’s stunning election victory has illuminated the fraught relationship between equality and social prestige. The grotesque level of economic inequality in America, coupled with simmering cultural resentments towards political elites who are separated from working-class Americans of all races by immense social and economic chasms, has propelled both left- and right-wing populism. Part of what lifted Trump to the White House was undoubtedly fear of immigration and a reaction against progress towards equality for minority groups. (Unfortunately, such progress had been more symbolic and cultural than substantive anyway.) But these regressive elements of voters’ motivations cannot be easily disentangled from economic elements, partially because economic inequality aggravates racism and xenophobia by stoking anxieties about jobs and security.

Several other ideas Weil mentions are extremely relevant for present-day politics. She thinks human beings crave security, which she defines as freedom from fear and terror, most notably liberation from the threat of unemployment and ‘police persecution’ (p.32).

Fearful animals lash out; insecure people do the same. Weil wisely observes that “Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others” (p.45). Arendt agrees, writing that “rootlessness as a conscious aim was based primarily upon hatred of a world that had no place for ‘superfluous’ men, so that its destruction could become a supreme political goal” (Origins, pp.196-197). Weil calls unemployment “up rootedness raised to the second power” (p.43): it doubly destabilizes people’s lives, cutting them off from both money and social connections. Its spectre constantly haunts the most vulnerable members of society. Weil identifies money-power and economic domination as two of the biggest causes of destabilization, declaring: “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive” (p.42). Capitalism injects instability and fear into every nook and cranny of social life. People rendered superfluous by the churning mechanism of an inhuman economic order want others to feel the sting they felt feel from ostracism and dehumanization. Insecurity breeds resentment; resentment breeds outright hostility. Weil opines, probably correctly, that risk is an ineradicable element of the human condition and the human soul in fact desires some level of risk; but she is adamant that knowing one’s basic material needs will be met is essential if people are to feel securely rooted in society.

Weil’s final pairing of needs is very thought-provoking: private property and collective property.

First, she thinks that every person or family should own their own house, land, and tools. That is, to be independent, every person should control their own means of subsistence. Moreover, psychological research attests to the fundamental importance we attach to objects. The objects we own aren’t simply things we use: we invest beloved objects with spiritual and symbolic value; they become parts of the self. Ensuring that every person owns certain goods that they can call their own makes good psychological sense. However, in isolation, this might feed into a false sense of social independence. On the contrary, we are all dependent on other people throughout our lives. Our interdependence is an inescapable, if sometimes irritating, aspect of what it means to be human. People might be tempted to deny this if the economy is entirely structured around the ideal of independence. Yet some recognition of the importance of private property is perfectly compatible with an economy that acknowledges the irreducibly social nature of our communal life.

While not calling for nationalization or collectivization as some might well do, Weil balances the need for private property with the need for collective property. In her view, individuals require a sense of genuine ownership of public and communal goods in order to identify with the collectivity. The alienation and dehumanization that comes with modern workplace conditions make this sense of identification impossible for workers in large factories and corporations. So Weil calls for the abolition of large industrial enterprises and the “dispersion of industrial activity” (p.74). She recommends a return to small-scale industry, artisanal production, and craftsmanship. Working to realize Weil’s ideal of everyone having private ownership of their means of production would require a massive, yet massively beneficial, redistribution of wealth and power from Wall Street to the working class and the poor. Indeed, in our age of mostly unchecked global warming and colossally concentrated corporations, such a non-reformist reform is crucial.

The Need for Roots isn’t beyond criticism. Weil’s heavy emphasis on Christianity is somewhat unsuited to the spirit of our pluralist age (and probably wasn’t entirely in tune with the spirit of the age in 1943, either). Secularism may indeed need some rethinking: part of the problem of modernity is excessive rationalization. The disenchantment of the world is unhealthy, and modern life needs to be respiritualized. But most of us can no longer take Christian principles as given. Weil’s elevation of physical labour to the pinnacle of civilized values is related to her social Catholicism, and seems dated today. It has a reactionary flavour and poses distinct problems for those of us who wish to champion increased leisure as we think about reconstructing our society for an age whose technological possibilities are incomparably greater than in the 1940s. But, setting such minor difficulties aside, Weil’s book is a masterpiece, and her thought is refreshingly clear and free from modern cant.

Weil’s analyses of the human soul’s many needs are united by two essential motifs: spirituality and connectedness. She wants to reintroduce spirituality to modernity, enabling the earthly realm of politics to at least partially reflect the “realm situated high above all men” (p.18).

People exist in space and time, and Weil dwells on the importance of rooting ourselves temporally as well as physically. We need to feel connected to the past and its resources; the sense of continuity in time we derive from history is an essential nutrient for the soul (p.96). Cautioning us against facile progressivism, Weil notes: “It would be useless to turn one’s back on the past in order to simply concentrate on the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible” (p.48). She also movingly comments: “Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy” (p.114). The uprooting of culture is a problem that must be combated via educational reforms if we are to establish ourselves securely on the planet. We must learn to see ideas and concepts as living nodes in a grand interconnected web of knowledge and wisdom. In this context, the disjointed jumble of disconnected facts and desiccated data that these days often passes for education is itself a threat to rootedness.

Weil wrote prophetically that “Four obstacles above all separate us from a form of civilization likely to be worth something: our false conception of greatness; the degradation of the sentiment of justice; our idolization of money; and our lack of religious inspiration” (p.209). If we read the word ‘religious’ generally, or substitute the word ‘spiritual’, she is absolutely right. She also wrote that the task facing the Western world was “transforming society in such a way that the working-class may be given roots in it” (p.46). More than seventy-five years later, our task has not changed.

A Radical Cure: Hannah Arendt & Simone Weil on the Need for Roots. By Scott Remer.  Philosophy Now, August / September 2018.

Seventy-five years ago, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil joined Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement in London. We do not know if the Catholic and conservative general, who never met Weil, knew she had left her post as a professor of philosophy in order to work on assembly lines, left her family to fight alongside anarchists in Spain and left her country to escape the anti-Semitic Vichy regime. All we do know is that de Gaulle read Weil’s plan to parachute white-uniformed nurses onto battlefields, armed only with the obligation to succor the injured and sacrifice their own lives. Setting down the paper, de Gaulle blurted: “But, she’s crazy!”

De Gaulle was right about the plan, but not the person. In fact, Weil’s reflections on the nature of obligation offer a bracing dose of sanity in our perplexing and polarizing times. During the final months of her life — she died in the summer of 1943 — Weil wrote of several of her most subversive and seminal texts. (That they were essentially position papers for the Free French makes them all the more extraordinary.) This is particularly true for “Human Personality” and “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” both of which are devoted to distinctions Weil insists upon personal rights and impersonal duties.

When we talk about justice today, we almost always find ourselves talking about rights we believe are entrenched in nature and have been enshrined in our founding documents. This language reflects a liberal conception of human action and interaction, casting us as rational agents who reach agreements with one another through calculation and negotiation. Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, while each of us “has a conception of the good or worthwhile life,” none of us accepts “a socially endorsed conception of the good.” In essence, the ideal of right has ceded to the ideal of rights.

The problem, for Weil, with the liberal conception of rights — and the laws that codify them — is that it is rooted in the personal, not the impersonal. Our society, she insists, is one where personal rights are tied at the hip to private property. Taking his cue from Weil, political theorist Edward Andrew suggests that a rights-based society “is the consensual society where everything is vendible at constitutional conventions or the marketplace.” This reveals what Weil, like Thomas Hobbes, believes to be the sole universal truth concerning human affairs: certain groups will always wield greater clout than other groups. “Rights talk” deals with the relative and alienable, not absolute and inalienable. For Weil, the old joke about our legal system — “How much justice can you afford?” — takes on a tragic immediacy.

Moreover, the emphasis on “inalienable human rights”— a phrase, Weil declares, history has shown to be meaningless — blinds us to the only true good, one rooted in what Weil calls the “impersonal.” This term, paradoxically, describes what is most essential to our flesh and blood lives: the needs shared by all human beings and the obligations (and not rights) to one another that they entail. These needs, listed in her “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” include nourishment and clothing, medical care and housing, as well as protection against violence. (Though opposed to capital punishment, Weil made an exception for rape.)

With her knack for striking illustrations, Weil confronts us with the limits of rights claims. “If someone tries to browbeat a farmer to sell his eggs at a moderate price, the farmer can say: ‘I have the right to keep my eggs if I don’t get a good enough price.’ But if a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation, the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”

This is why, when we ask why we have less than others, we are getting personal, but when we ask why we are being hurt, we are getting impersonal. And for Weil, the impersonal is good in every sense of the word. In the case of her illustration, Weil finds the notion of rights ludicrous because the girl is not being cheated of a profit. Instead, she is being cheated of her very humanity. There is no true compensation for such acts. And yet, by confusing personal rights with impersonal (or universally shared) needs, we burden ourselves with a language that deflects us from what is truly at stake. As Weil declares: “There is something sacred in every human being, but it is not their person. It is this human being; no more and no less.”

While Weil was responding to the crisis of Western democracies confronting the challenge of fascism, her essays can also help us think about our own crisis of political governance and legitimacy. Take the current debate over the Trump administration’s proposal to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, or food stamps. Rather than receiving cash installments on their electronic benefit-transfer cards, those enrolled in the program will instead receive boxes of tinned and canned food.

Fortunately, the proposal seems fated for the shredding machine, but it still serves as a useful example. Those using rights language would reply that the government hasn’t the right to cut their money payments because they have the right to do their own shopping. But we can also frame the criticism in obligation language: “It is unjust to replace financial assistance with box meals, which will punish both our physical and emotional well-being.” While the first response would ignite what Weil calls the “spirit of contention,” the latter response might “touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention.”

In other words, such a reply asks us to forget about ourselves and instead attend to other lives. Moral situations require, as one of Weil’s great fans, Iris Murdoch, wrote, an “unsentimental, detached, unselfish and objective perspective.” Such attentiveness allows a moral and political clarity that “rights language” simply cannot. Paying attention, for Weil, is the most fundamental of our obligations. It forces us to recognize that what she calls “le malheur,” or suffering, lies in store for all of us. “I may lose at any moment,” she wrote, “through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself.”

This includes my sense of autonomy, reflected in so banal an act as buying groceries, but also in much more dramatic acts. The contemporary philosopher Andrea Nye suggests that Weil also throws a bracing light on the debate over abortion. In effect, the related notions of obligation and attention offer a third way between those who claim the fetus’s right to life and those who insist upon a woman’s right to choose. Rejecting these rights-based claims, Nye writes, a “Weilian feminist might listen to the women themselves as they attempt to make sense of their lives in order to come to a binding sense of what must be done to restore social balance and create a society in which obligations do not conflict.” Such an approach might invite a woman seeking an abortion to fully attend to a situation which does not implicate her alone.

I do not mean to present all this as a panacea to our current political predicament, one that Weil would surely dismiss, as she did France’s on the eve of World War II, as an “incredible barrage of lies, of demagogy, of boasting admixed with panic,” one of “disarray, in sum a totally intolerable atmosphere.” Yet, even if her insights into what she called the “social drama” do not always lead to clarity, they do oblige us to consider how politics would change if we made room for obligation.

What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical Reminder. By Robert Zaretsky. The New York Times, February 20, 2018.

                              Simone Weil  with her brother in her teens

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of his heart”—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.” As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

This new volume of translations from Simone Weil’s work, Selected Essays 1934-43, displays her somewhat marginally. It contains one great essay, the opening essay here titled “Human Personality” which was written in 1943, the year of her death in England at the age of thirty-four. (This essay, by the way, was first published in two parts under the title “The Fallacy of Human Rights” in the British magazine The Twentieth Century in May and June 1959. There it suffered the curious and instructive fate of requiring a defensive editorial in June, when the second part of the essay appeared, replying to criticism of the magazine’s decision to publish the essay “on the grounds that it involves heavy going for some readers.” It certainly speaks volumes about the philistine level of English intellectual life, if even as good a magazine as The Twentieth Century cannot muster an enthusiastic, grateful audience for such a piece.) Another essay, placed last in the book, called “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” also written the year of her death, contains matter central to Simone Weil’s ideas. The remaining essays are on specific historical and political subjects—two on the civilization of Languedoc, one on a proletarian uprising in Renaissance Florence, several long essays on the Roman Empire which draw an extensive parallel between imperial Rome and Hitler’s Germany, and various reflections on the Second World War, the colonial problem, and the post-war future. There is also an interesting and sensitive letter to George Bernanos. The longest argument of the book, spanning several essays, develops the parallel between Rome (and the ancient Hebrew theocracy!) and Nazi Germany. According to Simone Weil, who displays an unpleasant silence on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler is no worse than Napoleon, than Richelieu, than Caesar. Hitler’s racialism, she says, is nothing more than “a rather more romantic name for nationalism.” Her fascination with the psychological effects of wielding power and submitting to coercion, combined with her strict denial of any idea of historical progress, led her to equate all forms of state authority as manifestations of what she calls “the great beast.”

Readers of Simone Weil’s Notebooks (two volumes, published in 1959) and her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (1958) will be familiar with her attempt to derive everything distinctively Christian from Greek spirituality as well as to deny entirely Christianity’s Hebraic origins. This fundamental argument—along with her admiration for Provençal civilization, for the Manichean and Catharist heresies—colors all her historical essays. I cannot accept Simone Weil’s gnostic reading of Christianity as historically sound (its religious truth is another matter); nor can I fail to be offended by the vindictive parallels she draws between Nazism, Rome, and Israel. Impartiality, no more than a sense of humor, is not the virtue of a writer like Simone Weil. Like Gibbon (whose view of the Roman Empire she absolutely contradicts), Simone Weil as a historical writer is tendentious, exhaustive, and infuriatingly certain. As a historian she is simply not at her best; no one who disbelieves so fundamentally in the phenomena of historical change and innovation can be wholly satisfying as a historian. This is not to deny that there are subtle historical insights in these essays: as for example, when she points out that Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. (Immediately after, of course, she says that these—both Hitler’s methods and the “normal colonial ones”—are derived from the Roman model.)

The principal value of the collection is simply that anything from Simone Weil’s pen is worth reading. It is perhaps not the book to start one’s acquaintance with this writer—Waiting for God, I think, is the best for that. The originality of her psychological insight, the passion and subtlety of her theological imagination , the fecundity of her exegetical talents are unevenly displayed here. Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.

Simone Weil. By Susan Sontag. The New York Review of Books. Simone Weil. February 1, 1963

Also of interest : 

Simone Weil. By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Benjamin P. Davis. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published  March 10, 2018