Wednesday, 3 February 2021

Simone Weil (3/2/1909 - 24/8/43) - Into the Mystic

 

The French writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil was born in Paris to wealthy agnostic parents of Jewish ancestry on the 3rd of February 1909. She was gifted from the beginning with a thirst for knowledge of other cultures and her own. Fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 12, she taught herself Sanskrit, and took an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. She excelled at the Lycée Henri IV and the École normale supérieure, where she studied philosophy. Plato was a lasting influence, and her interest in political philosophy led her to Karl Marx, whose thought she esteemed but did not blindly assimilate.
Very early, she demonstrated a strident, uncompromising compassion when she gave up sugar in solidarity with French soldiers in the First World War. While still a schoolgirl, she declared her solidarity with the communist left,and was active in workers demonstrations for trade unions, earning the nickname The Red Virgin. 
Though uncompromising in her persona at school, she was also brilliant and had the best education France could offer in languages, classics and philosophy.  While at the École Normale Supérieure, her tutor set her focus on the problem of man as an active being.  To address this she took Plato as her master and Descartes as her antagonist.  These influences remained touchstones in her intellectual life.  Despite the spiritual writings for which she is best known, her training and approach was that of a philosopher.
 After Weil became a teacher of philosophy in secondary schools, she continued her activism both in writing and in the streets.she demonstrated with striking workers, participated in labor union debates, taught adult education classes, and like a latter-day Francis of Assisi, Simone gave away her salary as a teacher to help the unemployed in Le Puy. 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.
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.
At one point she took a year off from teaching to work in factories incognito to help understand the experiences of the working class. Weil’s “year of factory work” (which amounted, in actuality, to around 24 weeks of laboring) was not only important in the development of her political philosophy but can also be seen as a turning point in her slow religious evolution.
In Paris’s factories, Weil began to see and to comprehend firsthand the normalization of brutality in modern industry. There, she wrote in her “Factory Journal”, “Time was an intolerable burden” as modern factory work comprised two elements principally: orders from superiors and, relatedly, increased speeds of production. While the factory managers continued to demand more, both fatigue and thinking (itself less likely under such conditions) slowed work. As a result, Weil felt dehumanized.  Weil was surprised that this humiliation produced not rebellion but rather fatigue, docility. She described her experience in factories as a kind of “slavery”. 
Initially, her interests lay in the labour movement as well as pacifism.  Her judgment of the political weakness of the labour movement and more generally of social causes led to the qualification of her views on pacificism.  Violence, she then thought, could be a defense for human dignity against the Fascism that diminished it. 
 However, her exposure to the Spanish Civil War led her to contradict herself.  Force, she thought, could never be righteous.  Allowing that someone was the legitimate object of force inexorably nurtured tribalism, making murder seem natural.  Force controls those who would use it, an insight she saw in The Iliad which treated Greeks and Trojans alike as victims of force itself.
Her views on force were a singular example of how her developed perspective was at odds with received pieties in Western Culture, both those of the establishment and those who opposed it.  She denied the importance of political rights; of justice by due process; of state or private ownership; private choice in life; and legitimation by collective, public will. Instead she elevated as primary response to affliction; the inestimable significance of a human being; the needs of the soul as the basis for government; meaningful labour; and good and evil. Weil was unafraid of intellectual isolation, nor did she seek fellows,though she did publish her essays in intellectual journals.
On a trip to Portugal in August 1935, upon watching a procession to honor the patron saint of fishing villagers, she had her first major contact with Christianity and wrote that:

"the conviction was suddenly borne in upon [her] that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and [she] among others. (1942 “Spiritual Autobiography” 

In comparison with her pre-factory “Testament, we see that in her “Factory Journal” Weil maintains the language of liberty, but she moves terminologically from “oppression” to “humiliation” and “affliction”. Thus her conception and description of suffering thickened and became more personal at this time.
Weil participated in the 1936 Paris factory occupations and, moreover, planned on returning to factory work. Her trajectory shifted, however, with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. Critical of both civil and international war, on the level of geopolitics, she approved of France’s decision not to intervene on the Republican side. On the level of individual commitment, however, she obtained journalist’s credentials and joined an international anarchist brigade fighting alongside the Durutti column.On 20 August, 1936, Weil, who was known for her clumsiness and near sightedmess, stepped in a pot of boiling oil, severely burning her lower left leg and instep. Only her parents could persuade her not to return to combat and Weil went to Assisi to recover.
By late 1936 Weil wrote against French colonization of Indochina, and by early 1937 she argued against French claims to Morocco and Tunisia. 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.”
In April 1937 she travelled to Italy. Within the basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli, inside the small twelfth-century Romanesque chapel  she prayed for the first time in her life amid an ecstatic experience in the same church where Saint Francis had prayed. As she would later describe in a letter, “Something stronger than I compelled me for the first time to go down on my knees” .She embraced Roman Catholicism, but stopped short of baptism, for she felt the Catholic Church was in too much need of reformation. Finding God’s will for her life became her new passion, not replacing her earlier social passions, but becoming the larger context for them.
 Weil received spiritual direction from a Dominican friar and learned much from the Catholic author Gustave Thibon She was especially rooted in Neoplatonic thinking in her spiritual writings. Yet her spiritual curiosity took her far. She learned Sanskrist to read the Bhagahvad Gita. She studied Mahayana Buddhism and the ancient Greek and Egyptian mystery religions. She believed that each religion, when we are within it, is true. But she was opposed to religious syncretism. She saw a blending of religions as diminishing the particularity of each tradition and the truth of that path to God. Though she learned from other faiths, she plunged deeper into her own Catholicism. For Weil truth was deeply personal and could only be approached through deep introspection. She wrote intensely about spirituality, mysticism, beauty and social struggle.  Her writings sought to develop the intellectual consequences of the religious experiences she was having.
From 1937–1938 Weil revisited her Marxian commitments, arguing that there is a central contradiction in Marx’s thought: although she adhered to his method of analysis and demonstration that the modern state is inherently oppressive,being that it is composed of the army, police, and bureaucracy,she continued to reject any positing of revolution as immanent or determined. Indeed, in Weil’s middle period, Marx’s confidence in history seemed to her a worse ground for judgment than Machiavelli’s emphasis on contingency.
 One of the most intriguing and conflicting aspects of Weil’s thought is her notion of justice, which figures prominently in the book. She certainly wouldn’t be characterized as a “social justice warrior” who promotes sanctimonious moralism. For Weil, justice converges into one aspect of life, encounters with God and other human beings, such as those on the French front. But unlike other mystics, for whom union with Christ was an interior experience of a relation between lover and beloved, Weil is a relational mystic for whom justice is one of the most important aspects of religious and spiritual experience. Her asceticism, so clearly visible at the end of her life, is inextricably connected to the suffering of the other.
According to Weil, everything in life is relational, and human relations are intention. We ought to choose self-denial, but only to help us love our neighbor. Imagining nameless people, stranded in a ditch, forgotten and overlooked by others, Weil writes that these very strangers are our neighbors, and “to treat our neighbor who is in affliction with love is something like baptizing him.
In order to empathize with others, we have to understand that we tend to 

  “live in the world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position at the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

She was not celebrated in her lifetime, and almost all of her writings have been published posthumously and have invited both praise and criticism among disparate groups of people. Weil rejected her class upbringing and Judaism, she embraced working-class people (although she rejected Marxism), and she loved Christ but chose never to be baptized into the Christian church. 
As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. There is nothing moderate about Weil, she lived an extreme life bordering on madness while devoting her life to a rigorous regimen of study and political engagement. She studied with Simone de Beauvoir and debated with Leon Trotsky, and Albert Camus called her, of all the thinkers reckoning with the monumental philosophical crises raised by the world wars, “the only great spirit of our times.” though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived. 
When the Nazis occupied France, Simone Weil joined the French Resistance working in England. While working for the Free French in London on a manifesto for a transformed government in post-war France, her unyielding manner of living overcame her always-fragile health. Her final and most radical act was self-induced starvation in solidarity with French citizens during World War II, she refused to eat more than the French people were allowed under German occupation, despite being afflicted with tuberculosis. As a consequence, her body gave up, and she died at age thirty-four in a sanatorium  in Ashford, Kent at 34. The coroner’s verdict was suicide. 
 She 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. 
Her celebrity came posthumously when her notes on Christian spirituality were published, influencing those within and without the Church.  Subsequently, her philosophical works have invited both praise and criticism among disparate groups of people. Weil rejected her class upbringing and Judaism, she embraced working-class people (although she rejected Marxism), and as a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and debated with Leon Trotsky. Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. There is nothing moderate about Weil, she lived an extreme life bordering on madness while devoting her life to a rigorous regimen of study and political engagement. Though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived.
In her book Devotion (2017), the poet and rock star Patti Smith described Weil as ‘an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets. Brilliant and privileged, she coursed through the great halls of higher learning, forfeiting all to embark on a difficult path of revolution, revelation, public service, and sacrifice." The French politician Charles de Gaulle thought Weil was mad, while Albert Camus, called her, of all the thinkers reckoning with the monumental philosophical crises raised by the world wars, “the only great spirit of our times.
In her brief life she became a bright light for spirituality and social activism. As a teacher and philosopher she never shied away from a fight, and teaches us the art of revolt and rebellion through her philosophical, political, and spiritual work. Living in accordance with her philosophy, she denounced the legacy of colonialism and lived in accordance with her heartfelt beliefs .

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