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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