Philosophical writer and mystic, born in Paris, France, the sister of André Weil. She taught philosophy in several schools, interspersing this with periods of manual labour to experience the working-class life. In 1936 she served in the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. In 1941 she settled in Marseille, where she developed a deep mystical feeling for the Catholic faith, yet a profound reluctance to join an organized religion. She escaped to the USA in 1942 and worked for the Free French in London, before dying from voluntary starvation in an attempt to identify with her compatriots suffering in France. Her posthumously published works include La Pesanteur et la grâce (1946, Gravity and Grace) and Attente de Dieu (1950, Waiting for God).
Simone Weil (February 3, 1909 – August 24, 1943) was a French philosopher and mystic.
Life
Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Her ancestry was Jewish, but Simone and her older brother, the mathematician André Weil, were raised as agnostics.
Intellectual life
Weil excelled from a young age, reading advanced books and becoming proficient in ancient Greek at the age of twelve. (First class honours went to a young woman who pursued an undistinguished career in the French public service.)
She received her teaching diploma in 1931, and became a teacher of philosophy at a girls’ school named Le Puy. While teaching, Weil became involved in the local political activity, supporting unemployed and striking workers. Although members of the middle class criticized her involvement with the workers, Weil was undeterred. During this time, Weil wrote Oppression and Liberty and numerous short articles for trade union journals. In these works Weil critiques popular Marxist thought and provides a pessimistic account of the limits of capitalism and socialism. Factory work was very satisfying for Weil as she believed that her experience was allowing her to connect with the working class.
Political activism
In 1919, when she was ten, she declared herself a Bolshevik.
Weil often took actions that would allow her to empathize with the working class.
Though she considered herself a pacifist, in 1936 she joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
Conversion
In 1937, she continued to write essays on labor and management issues, and war and peace. From that time on, her writings took on a more mystical and spiritual content, while retaining their focus on social and political issues.
During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from a Dominican friar.
Late life
In 1942, she travelled to the USA and afterwards to the UK. However, the idealism which had always informed Weil's political activism and material detachment did not permit her to accept special treatment.
Although her health was rapidly deteriorating, Weil limited herself to the rations she imagined her compatriots were subjected to in the occupied territories of France.
She died in August 1943, aged 34, of cardiac failure.
Most of her work was published posthumously.
Philosophy
Weil's philosophy can be roughly divided between her secular thinking and her spiritual thinking. This is a rough division because, for Weil, the world is the stage both for spirituality and for politics, but it must still be recognized, because Weil's spiritual drive is an essentially personal one, while her public philosophy emphasizes relationships that hold between groups and individuals, and is interested in healing social rifts and providing for physical and psychological needs of the mass of humanity.
Critique of secular metaphysics in Lectures on Philosophy
In Lectures on Philosophy (hereafter LP), Weil attempts, among other things, to set forth for her lycée students a coherent version of the materialist philosophical project.
Implicitly, her method seems to be something like that of William James, in that she deals with truth not so much logically or scientifically but psychologically or phenomenologically--she is concerned in LP with disclosing what she believes to be the conditions necessary for an experience of truth or reality to emerge for the human subject, or for an object, concept, etc. to emerge as real within human experience.
However, she does not argue, as does James, for a general theory of human truth-production justified by recourse to empirical observation; Thus we find statements like:
Any proof of the syllogism would be absurd. 78
and
We are forced to accept the postulates and axioms precisely because we are unable to give an account of them.
alongside the most strident and unforgiving proclamations of this or that specific truth. it is expression of how personally Weil took truth: she counted as true not that which she could prove but that upon which she depended, that which she could not do without. In LP she tells us:
One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action...--LP, 72-3
Weil is pointing here to the disjunction between planning and execution which is brought about by the division of labor between designer (architect, for example) and worker (bricklayer, for example), a division which holds the place almost of original sin for both Weil and for John Dewey, and which also reflects Weil's encounters with the philosophy of Marx.
That connection becomes even stronger when we read,
What marks off the "self" is method; 72-3
In other words, for Weil, both self and world are constituted precisely in and only through informed action upon the world. This resembles pragmatic arguments forwarded by Dewey and James about the key role of observation and above all experimentation in creating human knowledge.
Mystical theology in Gravity and Grace
Weil's theology is interesting and complex both in itself and in the factors which encouraged its genesis in her psyche. However, it has been pointed out that this analysis falls apart when it comes to the creation of the world, for Weil does not regard the world as a debased creation of a demiurge, but as a direct expression of God's love--despite the fact that she also recognizes it as a place of evil, affliction, and the brutal mixture of chance and necessity.
It is difficult to speak conclusively of Weil's theology, since it exists only in the form of scattered aphoristic scribblings in her notebooks and as an influence on her more secular writings that were intended for publication, and also in a few letters. None of these formats provides a very direct path to understanding her beliefs, since the first is only semi-formed, the second only enables us to see the secondary effects, and the third is subject to being skewed according to Weil's desire to present herself differently to different interlocutors.
Absence
Absence is the key image for her metaphysics, cosmology, cosmogeny, and theodicy. She believed that God created by an act of self-delimitation--in other words, because God is conceived as a kind of utter fulness, a perfect being, no creature could exist except where he was not.
This is, for Weil, an original kenosis preceding the corrective kenosis of Christ's incarnation.
This notion of creation is a cornerstone of her theodicy, for if creation is conceived this way (as necessarily containing evil within itself), then there is no problem of the entrance of evil into a perfect world. Nor does this constitute a delimitation of God's omnipotence, if it is not that God could not create a perfect world, but that the act which we refer towards by saying "create" in its very essence implies the impossibility of perfection.
However, this notion of the necessity of evil does not mean that we are simply, originally, and continually doomed; on the contrary, Weil tells us that "Evil is the form which God's mercy takes in this world." Weil believed that evil, and its consequence, affliction, served the role of driving us out of ourselves and towards God--"The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it."
More specifically, affliction drives us to what Weil referred to as "decreation"--which is not death, but rather closer to "extinction" (nirvana) in the Buddhist tradition--the willed dissolution of the subjective ego in attaining realization of the true nature of the universe.
(Of course, Weil's concept of that true nature was a Platonistic or Vedantic one of metaphysical fulness, while the Buddhist concept is one of metaphysical emptiness, but the soteriological strategies and metaphors suffer considerable overlap.)
Affliction
Weil's concept of affliction ("malheur") goes beyond simple suffering, though it certainly includes it.
War and oppression were the most intense cases of affliction;
The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment...is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. (Gravity and Grace)
Metaxu: "Every separation is a link."
The concept of metaxu, which Weil borrowed from Plato, is that which both separates and connects. (e.g., as a wall separates two prisoners but can be used to tap messages) This idea of connecting distance was of the first importance for Weil's understanding of the created realm. The world as a whole, along with any of its components, including our physical bodies, are to be regarded as serving the same function for us in relation to God that a blind man's stick serves for him in relation to the world about him. This metaphor allows any absence to be interpreted as a presence, and is a further component in Weil's theodicy.
Beauty
For Weil, "The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible." For Weil, the beauty which is inherent in the form of the world (this inherency is proven, for her, in geometry, and expressed in all good art) is the proof that the world points to something beyond itself;
Beauty also served a soteriological function for Weil: "Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul."
Work in The Need for Roots
Written during WWII, Simone Weil’s book The Need for Roots was written right before her death.
The Need for Roots has an ambitious plan.
What marks her work is the concreteness of her plans and analysis. This means that she does not clothe her plan in theoretical language, but puts it a concrete form—for Weil, the concreteness of the plan would assure its implementation.
Obligations versus rights
There are several key themes in the work. For Weil, unless a person understands that they have certain obligations in life, towards themselves, towards others, and towards society, the notion of right will have no power or value.
At the same time, obligations have a transcendental origin. They come from a realm that imposes an imperative—this must is a light from the other world which shines on this world and provides it with direction and order. For Weil, this is a spiritual concept—this means that it transcends the world of competing interests and power games.
Obligation has its analogy to the “Thou Shalt not…” of the Ten Commandments.
For Weil, there is one obligation that supersedes all others.
For Weil, without this supernatural world, we are left to a human world where power and force hold sway. The struggle for power is the motor of human history, she believes. It is the source of human suffering and injustice. In her analysis, there is no human answer to this struggle for power, nor is it possible to stop the struggle with any form of ideology, such as Marxism or capitalism or any other form of man-made political system.
The world of spirit, for Weil, confronts this struggle for power. Spirituality is not a way out, an unearthly and utopian dream—instead, she believes that there are techniques that enable humans to become spiritual. For Weil, they are manuals of dealing with the pain and suffering of concrete life while maintaining a link to the transcendent world of God.
Obligations, therefore, provide a link to the spiritual realities that give life meaning and sustain the oppressed and sufferer with its healing power. For Weil, this aspect of the other is that which is inviolable in each and every human being.
Rights, on the other hand, are those relative ends which we strive for. That is, unless we have an obligation to respect the human in people, rights will not be given any legitimacy.
Why is spirituality necessary for politics?
Another aspect of this question is the awareness that Weil brings to social and political problems of why spirituality is necessary.
For Weil, on the social level, this is true of societies as well. This is why she believed that for true change, a spiritual awakening must occur in individual conscience.
Take an example: why, with all the money thrown at poverty in the US, is there still poverty? For Weil, the answer to this question is that the programs and money were directed at the wrong problems.
Perhaps this in and of itself justifies the notion that living with the poor and oppressed changes one’s consciousness.
Perhaps this is why Weil commends the mystical practices of the saints—this rigorous and methodical emptying of oneself does not come easily—it is too easy to believe that one is there while still holding on to the escape route in the back of one’s mind. Weil never says that it is simply a matter of living with the poor—there is a constant reminder in her writings that this experience must permeate one’s entire spirit and being.
Can we guarantee obligations?
How does a social organization guarantee that the obligations that individual members owe to each other are carried out?
These are some of the problems that Weil realizes she must answer if she is to provide a realistic and workable solution to the problem of injustice in the world. The answer is that you do not, instead you must provide a social structure that meets certain needs and anchors them in a fertile and nurturing soil.
Based on her analysis of obligation, Weil therefore posits that there are certain spiritual needs of the human soul. Without these, a human society will die and its dying will crush and destroy human souls. The flowering of human souls—past, present, and future—depends in many ways on a socio-cultural entity to thrive and grow.
She uses the analogy of a garden. This is not hyperbole—in a very real way, Weil believes, the human soul is like a plant that thrives or dies, depending on the type of environment in which it grows. Like a plant that responds to good soil, sunshine and nutrients, the human soul responds to a nurturing social structure, the light of the spirit, and the elements of the state. For Weil, the nutrients of the soul, what she calls its food, when present in a society reflect overall health for both the individual soul and the society.
It is important to note Weil’s emphasis at the start on the individual. Weil does not buy into the notion that man is only a soul or only a body. Both aspects of a human have needs and these needs must be met or the individual is in jeopardy of dying.
Even though Weil talks about societies and nations, she is emphatic in her denunciation of the notion that society or the nation is the most important entity in the spiritual life of an individual.
The spiritual needs of the soul
The soul needs food just as the body needs food, according to Weil.
Order
The need for order reflects Weil’s overall belief that the universe follows a rigid course of cause and effect. This order, however, relates to the ability of all members of a society to keep the obligations that they must observe for a free and just society to exist.
Unlike things in the natural world, however, where there are opposites and extremes one must maintain a mean, the true nature of order allows all spiritual needs to be met and satisfied. With natural needs and desires, there are polar opposites, but with spiritual needs, they all need to be present for true freedom and justice to exist.
Liberty
Liberty relates to the ability and freedom to make choices. The need for individual choice is weighed against the rules of society, thereby limiting our choices. Liberty and choice relate to maturity—mature individuals grow up understanding their own liberty depends on the liberty of others and the ability of society to control the negative actions of others.
Obedience
Obedience comes about through the free consent of all members of the society that are affected.
Responsibility
For Weil, responsibility is what each person needs to feel useful and indispensable in their social life.
Equality
This notion relates to the respect that each individual deserves simply as a human being.
Note also her emphasis on how many can affect equality.
Hierarchism
Veneration of superiors as symbols, of what? “The effect of true hierarchism is to bring each one to fit himself morally into he place he occupies.”
Honour
This has to do with the respect due to each human being as part of his social environment.
Oppression rubs out true honor and the traditions and past accomplishments of men and women are extinguished.
Modern societies have a warped sense of honor—while they honor certain types of heroes such as aviators, millionaires, and others like them.
Punishment
There are two types of punishment: disciplinary and penal.
Penal punishment welds a man back into society again after he or she makes commits a crime of their own accord. This is best done with consent on his part—“the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by the law.”
But punishment as fear is wrong. The severity of the punishment must be in keeping with the kind of obligation which has been violated, and not with the interests of public security.”
This last comment shows Weil’s concern that crimes committed by those with more public authority and power should be punished more severely in many cases than those committing “lesser” crimes.
Freedom of opinion
The big thing to note here is her emphasis on the individual.
Weil also asserts that individuals should be responsible for their words.
Truth
For Weil, truth is one of the most important needs of the soul. For Weil, the dissemination of lies and falsehoods is a crime as dangerous as any other, if not worse than others because it attacks the human soul’s “most sacred need—protection against suggestion and falsehood.”
Uprootedness
Obviously, the concept of uprootedness and the need for roots is basic to Weil’s entire book.
As the title of the book suggests, there is a need for roots—that is, humans need roots to grow.
So let’s become clear about what the soil is and what the plant here is. The soil, for Weil, is the social structure that humans create to protect themselves from harm, catastrophes such as starvation, protection from animals, from the elements, and finally protection from each other.
Just as plants need good roots and soil to root in, they also need sun. For Weil, the sun to humans is the world of the spirit.
Now, let’s explain the logic of this metaphor. The plants in the soil, are human beings. The soil is the social and cultural structures that human beings have built up over the millennia. The laws that govern the actions of humans in society mirror the laws of the natural world. That is, just as we find a struggle for existence and survival in nature, so also we find a similar struggle within human social structures. This, for Weil is the struggle for power.
In outline, this struggle is unique to human beings. It rests on the necessity of wrestling from the natural world a place that humans can survive in—a human environment which humans have created. At a certain level of human social organization, humans are at peace with other.
As societies become more structured and humans begin to develop technical skills and more control of their natural environment, a division of labor occurs—That is, the work that is needed to build cities, grow food for larger populations, pave roads, carry out religious rites--this division of labor means that you must have those who give orders and those who follow orders.
The struggle for power is not, Weil asserts, between the workers and the managers, as Marx and others had theorized. They fight and vie with each other for more and more power, more and more control of the undertakings and the direction that a society will take, as well as all the material and psychological rewards that come from power.
For Weil, this struggle is inevitable. There is no way to get around it, since human beings must continue—for their survival—to provide for themselves and to maintenance the social structure that is the main instrument of their continued existence. Weil sounds a very pessimistic note on this state of affairs—at the end of one of her essays, she notes that we are born slaves.
This pessimism is only brightened for Weil by the illumination provided by the spiritual reality that she came more and more to experience in her life. It is the spiritual world, with its revelation of obligations and ethical insights that enables societies to soften and re-route the immense pain and suffering caused by the struggle for power. Through the power of the spiritual, human beings can see that their final destiny does not merely end on earth, and that perhaps there will be a final reckoning for the actions that one has performed in this life in a life after death.
Societies embed these spiritual insights and beliefs into their practices, rituals, and symbols. As generation follows generation, individuals in the present can communicate with the past and the past communicate with the present through this accumulated spiritual wealth.
We have already seen what spiritual needs the individual has to have to remain free and just. A society that meets and provides these needs is a spiritually rooted one. This society will provide the material and spiritual needs of each member of the society. Weil finds these societies as part of the natural development of human life on earth. They are precious and should be honored and venerated for their beauty, but above for their ability to sustain human life in its material needs, if not more so with their spiritual journeys and desires.
Once a society begins to lose the ability to provide and meet these needs, it starts to die.
Why or how does this happen? But for now, we can say that for Weil, most societies do not die natural deaths.
This is an immense crime in Weil’s eyes. Yet, her moral outrage emanated more from a deep despair for she knew that as beautiful as art, architecture, poetry, and religion are, they are nothing compared to the beauty of a human being. Above the death of every civilization she heard a mournful dirge of immense pain and affliction which was the combined voices of each individual who had been hacked, burned, raped, and sodomized—whose human dignity and beauty had been profaned by the merciless and bloody boot of empire and desire for power.
It was this affliction which was caused by a human being treating another human like a piece of garbage which she ultimately saw as her own spiritual vocation in life. But above that, it was the vision of a world wherein humans have the responsibility and mission to alleviate as much of this affliction as possible—to create just and free societies where the cries of the orphans and the widows would be heard that drove her to use all of her spiritual and intellectual and physical resources to bring to birth a manifesto that would lay out the blueprint for rebirth and regeneration. This rebirth would serve as the basis for the rise of a civilization to equal those great ones of history…
In one of her essays, Weil says that the oppressed cannot voice their affliction, cannot dry out due to the weight of the pain they suffer. I want to suggest that this aspect of her work puts it on the level of the ancient Jewish prophets, those men and women who stood up against injustice in the name of God and gave voice to the widows and the orphans, those who are crushed beneath the unending struggle for power.
As a side note, I would note the eccentricity of several of the prophets—Ezekiel is said to have used dung to bake his bread, Isaiah to have lain on his side for months at a time.
Causes of uprootedness
So the question becomes what causes uprootedness in the modern world. In her analysis of uprootedness, she begins with the alienation of the workers from their work and societies, goes on to discuss farmers, and finally takes on nations as a whole.
For Weil, there are several main causes for uprootedness.
Education can cause uprootedness by severing the culture of the elite from the rest of the people. For Weil, the Renaissance brought to birth the cult of technical science, which brings with it pragmatism and specialization, and severs the mind and soul from any relationship with the world of spirit.
Uprootedness is a disease that causes further uprootedness wherever it goes.
World religions
While Weil's primary religious identification was Christian, she did not limit herself to the Christian religious tradition.
However, she was opposed to religious syncretism, claiming that it effaced the particularity of the individual traditions:
Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else...A "synthesis" of religion implies a lower quality of attention.
Weil was an avid classicist, schooled in Greek and, after discovering the Gita, in Sanskrit.
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