Simone Weil should not be confused with Simone Veil, a French politician.

Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) was a French philosopher and mystic.

Contents

1 Life 2 Thought 2.1 Weil's critique of secular metaphysics in Lectures on Philosophy 2.2 Weil's mystical theology in Gravity and Grace, etc. 2.2.1 Absence 2.2.2 Affliction 2.2.3 Metaxu: "Every separation is a link." 2.2.4 Beauty 2.3 World religions 3 Works 4 Further Reading

Life

Born in Paris, the younger sister of mathematician André Weil. Her ancestry was Jewish, but Simone and André were raised agnostic. Weil excelled from a young age, proficient at Ancient Greek at 12. She came second in her class at the École Normale Supérieure. Simone de Beauvoir followed in third place - first class honours went to a young woman who later pursued an undistinguished career in the French public service and was never heard of again.

In 1931 Weil became a school teacher, a profession she practiced in between punishing stints at factories and farms designed to increase empathy with the working class. Though she considered herself a pacifist, in 1936 she joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. However, her clumsiness repeatedly put her corps at risk; finally she suffered serious burns which caused her to leave Spain and travel to Assisi to recuperate. Here Weil experienced a series of mystical encounters with Jesus. She was attracted to Roman Catholicism but refused baptism, fearing that the consolations of organised religion would impair her faith.

During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving instruction from a Dominican father. In 1942, she travelled to the USA and afterwards to the UK. In London, England, she became a French Resistance worker. Her health had always been frail, and the punishing work regime she assumed for the Resistance soon took its toll. In 1943 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and maintain a generous diet. However, the idealism which had always informed Weil's political activism and material detachment did not permit her to accept special treatment. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she swore off sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. Twenty-eight years later, Weil limited herself to the rations she imagined her compatriots were subjected to in the occupied territories of France. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England. She died in August 1943, surrounded by a few devoted friends. Her death certificate declared the cause of death was suicide.

Most of her work was published posthumously.

Thought

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.

Weil's critique of secular metaphysics in Lectures on Philosophy

In Lectures on Philosophy (hereafter LP), Weil attempts, among other things, to set forth for her lycee students a coherent version of the materialist philosophical project. (She might say: "What a coherent materialism would look like, if it existed.") It is sometimes difficult to discern what methods are operating, and particularly what her truth- or validity-criteria are, and whence she derived authority for her varied claims. This is, in fact, a concern throughout her work.

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; for her, the problem of truth is always a deeply personal one, to be approached through introspection. She is caught between her own yearning for traditional, idealist philosophy and her own appreciation of the limits of foundationalism. Thus we find statements like:

Any proof of the syllogism would be absurd. The syllogism is, to put it briefly, nothing but a rule of language to avoid contradiction: at bottom the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of grammar.--LP, p. 78

and

We are forced to accept the postulates and axioms precisely because we are unable to give an account of them. What one can do is try to explain why the seem obvious to us.

alongside the most strident and unforgiving proclamations of this or that specific truth. When pressed, her final appeals take forms like, "It's based on what is beautiful, and if it's beautiful, it must be true." This is not quite a child's naïve clinging to fancy or an absurd extension of the Keatsian axiom, though it is kin to both; it is expression of how personally Weil took truth: she counted as true not that which she could prove but that upon which she dependend, that which she could not do without. In LP she tells us:

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. 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; it has no other source than ourselves: it is when we really employ method that we really begin to exist. As long as one employs method only on symbols one remains within the limits of a sort of game. In action that has method about it, we ourselves act, since it is we ourselves who found the method; we really act because what is unforeseen presents itself to us.--LP, p. 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.

Weil's mystical theology in Gravity and Grace, etc.

Weil's theology is interesting and complex both in itself and in the factors which encouraged its genesis in her psyche. Some have suggested that she should be regarded as a modern-day Marcionite, due to her virtually wholesale rejection of the Old Testament and her overall distaste for the Judaism which was technically hers by birth; others have identified her as a gnostic for similar reasons, and also for her mystical theologization of geometry, Platonic philosophy, and so forth. 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. This juxtaposition leads her to produce an unusual form of Christian theodicy.

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. However, it is possible to make certain generalizations.

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. Thus creation occurred only when God withdrew a part of himself.

This is, for Weil, an original kenosis preceding the corrective kenosis of Christ's incarnation. (One might compare this with Christologies like that of Athanasius, which emphasize the incarnation as a natural extension of creation rather than as a break from the original created order.) We are thus born in a sort of damned position not owing to original sin as such, but because to be created at all we had to be precisely what God is not, i.e., we had to be the opposite of what is holy.

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 goes beyond simple suffering, though it certainly includes it. Only some souls are capable of truly experiencing affliction; these are precisely those souls which are least deserving of it--that are most prone or open to spiritual realization. Affliction was a sort of suffering plus, which inclusively transcended both the body and mind; they were physical and mental anguish that went beyond to scourge the very soul.

War and oppression were the most intense cases of affliction; to experience it she turned to the life of a factory worker, while to understand it she turned to Homer's Iliad. Affliction was associated both with necessity and with chance--it was frought with necessity because it was hardwired into existence itself, and thus imposed itself upon the sufferer with the full force of the inescapable, but it was also subject to chance inasmuch as chance, too, is an inescapable part of the nature of existence. The element of chance was essential to the unjust character of affliction; in other words, my affliction should not usually--let alone always--follow from my sin, as per traditional Christian theodicy, but should be visited upon me for no special reason.

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment...is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God. (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. They do not afford direct insight, but can be used experimentally to bring the mind into practical contact with reality. 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; it establishes the essentially telic character of all that exists.

Beauty also served a soteriological function for Weil: "Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul." It constitutes, then, another way in which the divine reality behind the world invades our lives. Where affliction conquers us with brute force (literally), beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.

World religions

While Weil's primary religious identification was Christian, Weil did not limit herself to the Christian religious tradition. She was keenly interested in other traditions—especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita), and Mahāyāna Buddhism. She believed that all these and others were valid paths to God, and much of her reluctance to join the Catholic Church can be ascribed to that body's reluctance to recognize non-Christian traditions.

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.

Works

• La Pesanteur et la Grace (Gravity and Grace) (1947)
• L'Enracinement (The Need for Roots) (1949)
• Attente de Dieu (Waiting for God) (1950)
• Oppression et Liberté (Oppression and Liberty) (1955)

Further Reading

• McLellan, David. Utopian Pessimist. New York: Poseidon Press, 1990