The Philosopher is a category that encapsulates a number of different types. There's
the theoretical masterminds like Aristotle, Kant and Hegel; there's the unsystematic
lightning rods like Nietzsche, Plato and Wittgenstein but there's another type that
we've explored in a few episodes of this channel. This is the type whose philosophy is
embodied more in their living than in their writing. Socrates is one of these as is Cato
the Younger. This is the category that Simone Weil belongs in.
Before dying at the age of 34 Weil lived a life that shares with Socrates and Cato an
eccentric and almost asinine integrity. Weil could not help but live her philosophy. For
an introverted gentle soul she lived more of life than the most jaded rockstar. From
working in factories to serving in wars, from academic studies to religious experiences,
Simone Weil lived a life in her 34 years that encompassed the breadth of an era. In this
episode we are going to explore this illustrious life and the philosophy that
underpinned it; why Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times";
T.S. Eliot described her as the greatest saint of the 20th century and why Charles de
Gaulle called her insane. Intellectual Development and Factory Work
On the 3rd of February 1909, Simone Weil was born into an agnostic French Jewish
family in Paris. She was close her whole life to her older brother Andr Weil who
became a prominent mathematician and founder of the Bourbaki group of
mathematicians. In 1928 Weil went to study General
Philosophy and Logic at the prestigious Parisian university the cole Normale Sup rieure.
She finished first in the entrance examination with Simone de Beauvoir finishing
second. de Beauvoir later wrote of her saying?
"I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world."
During this time Weil's radical views attracted much attention earning her the
nickname of "The Red Virgin" among her peers while her teacher called her "The
Martian". She is unusual among her intellectual
peers. She lived in a sort of golden age of the public philosopher with many of her peers like
de Beauvoir and Sartre and Camus becoming celebrities whose views were
widely discussed. Despite coming from the same social milieu, Weil made no intimations
of becoming a public philosopher. She just doesn't seem to have paid attention to
it and in tracking the moves she makes in her life and her philosophy
we see a philosopher unfettered by any imposed boundaries. Ultimately she fit into no mould other
than the one that was crafted by the dictates of her spirit.
After graduating she spent a number of years teaching philosophy in the early 1930's
and writing articles for socialist and communist periodicals. But more than this it was
at this time that the larger than life Weil begins to emerge.
In 1932 she visited Germany to help Marxist activists there but from what she saw she
believed they were no match for the fascist national socialists. On returning to France
her fears were dismissed by her political friends but it was less than a year later that
Hitler rose to power and banished the Communists from the political arena. After
Hitler's rise Weil spent much of her time helping communists escape from Germany.
In this minor incident we see all the seeds of Weil's philosophy. She wasn't content to
look on the well-organised communist movement of Germany from a distance; she
had to go see it for herself. And when things failed Weil could not wash her hands of
the situation; her heart that beat right across the world as de Beauvoir described was
compelled to help others where there was need. On the 20th of June 1934, Weil applied for
another break from her teaching work so that she could spend a year working in Parisian
factories as part of its most oppressed group-unskilled female labourers.
Once again Weil was not content to theoretically know about something that deeply concerned her;
she had to go and experience it as much as possible.
Ultimately she spent 28 weeks working in a number of Parisian factories and it was a
time that developed not just her political philosophy but it also sowed a critical seed in
her religious unfoldment. In this time her philosophy of
oppression and slavery developed. She understood firsthand the normalisation of brutality in
modern industry. In a journal from the time she wrote that "time was an intolerable burden".
Factory work consisted of two aspects: orders from superiors, and
consequently, increased speeds of production. She found that the increased demands and
workload led to incredible fatigue and the death of all thinking. Her experience was
less of a physical suffering but a soul- crushing humiliation. She was surprised
to find that this humiliation didn't produce rebellion but instead fatigue and docility. She
described the whole experience as a kind of slavery.
In the autumn of the year after, she was in Portugal watching a procession to honour
the patron saint of fishing villagers and she had her first major contact with
Christianity. She wrote that: the conviction was suddenly
borne in upon me that Christianity is pre- eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves
cannot help belonging to it, and I among others. (1942 "Spiritual
Autobiography" in WFG 21-38, 26) The Spanish Civil War and Christian Awakening
In 1936, she took part in the Paris factory occupations and planned on returning to
factory work but her attention was directed Southward.
She reneged on her pacifism and went to take up arms in the Spanish Civil War. She
sought out the anarchist faction and joined the French-speaking Durruti Column. Her
time in Spain during the war while showing her courage and integrity, nevertheless
reads like a comedy and more than explains George Bataille's description of her as a
Don Quixote. Being extremely short-sighted, Weil
was not the best shot and her comrades tried to avoid taking her with them on expeditions
though she did sometimes insist. Her only experience of combat was to shoot her rifle at
a bomber during an air raid. In a second raid she tried to man the group's heavy
machine gun but mercifully her comrades prevented her. Her time in the War came to an
end when the clumsy and near sighted philosopher stepped in a pot of boiling oil
severely burning her arm and instep. She was forced to leave her unit and was
convinced by her parents not to return but to take time to recover. And with that they departed
for Assisi in Italy where she was to convalesce and have her second significant
Christian experience. As she describes it in her Spiritual Autobiography:
"There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria
degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used
to pray, something stronger than I compelled me for the first time in my life to
go down on my knees." (pp.67-8) The following year she spent 10 days
over the Easter period at a Benedictine community south west of Paris. She was
suffering from crippling headaches at the time and the only succour she could find
was in the Gregorian chanting of the monks. Despite the pain she found:
"a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the
words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of
the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without
saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ
entered into my being once and for all." The final pivotal experience in Weil's draw
to Christianity came with her reading of George Herbert's poem Love which she would
repeat to herself over and over in the most disabling moments of her headaches.
She believed at first that she was merely reciting the poem:
"but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was
during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and
took possession of me." With that Weil's conversion
to Christianity was complete. There was always something in her that leaned in this spiritual
direction. She had studied Plato and the Neoplatonists as well as learning the India's
ancient sacred language Sanskrit so she could read the Bhagavat Gita in its original
tongue. It was this affinity with a broader revelation of God that kept her from baptism
but it was Christianity that spoke into the depths of her soul and permeated her life
and thought from this time in 1938 until her death five years later.
For Weil, this baptism in the waters of mystical thinking was not an abandonment of
her intellectual philosophical project but an extension of it. In her bookWaiting on
God we see the importance of Attention which she sees as the critical part of
experiencing a mystical communion with god. She writes that:
"The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer.
Warmth of heart cannot make up for it." And so for Weil, the cultivation of a religious
life is not separate to the philosophical life but the culmination of it. The rigours
of intellectual study provide the foundation for the relationship with God. She says that:
"School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I
like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all
these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which,
directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer."
For Weil this faculty of attention is key not just to prayer but to our ability to be live in
solidarity and compassion with the suffering of our neighbours.
In her encounter with philosophy we see the crystallisation of Simone Weil the
philosopher and Simone Weil the saintly lover of her fellow humans.
Christianity bolstered and emphasised
her native temperament. The Resistant and Her Death
When France was occupied by the Germans and Weil, who was Jewish by birth,
escaped to the UK via the USA, she requested that she be parachuted into France as
part of a squad of frontline nurses to help the R sistance. It was this plan of Weil's that
prompted the French leader in exile, General Charles de Gaulle to say "mais...elle est
folle" - but she is insane. The inertia that most of us experience
that makes it difficult to live according to our higher values seems to be completely absent in
Weil's case; in fact the opposite seems true. She seems to have been incapable of
not living out of her values. As she herself wrote in a notebook near the end of her life:
"Philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) is exclusively an affair of
action and practice" (FLN 362). This pattern is one that runs like a red
thread through Weil's whole life. She reminds me of other eccentrics in the history of
philosophy like Henry David Thoreau and Ancient Rome's Stoic senator Cato the Younger. To
paraphrase Thoreau, we could say that
"If the woman does not keep pace with her companions, perhaps it is because
she hears a different drummer. Let her step to the music which she hears,
however measured or far away." And step to the music she heard she did.
Weil like so many of the great philosophers was idiosyncratic enough that she was naturally
separated from the herd of humanity. She wasn't so effortlessly dissolved in the
collective that she would end up marching to the same drummer as everyone else.
When her heart called her to war she went to war; when her heart called her to religion
when everyone else was talking about atheism, existentialism and nihilism,
she loved God she breathed God and she lived God.
And as with many other great philosophers, her death at the young age of 34 has
become mythologised in the same way as the death of Socrates, the death of Cato and
the madness of Nietzsche. On Tuesday the 24th of August 1943, Weil died in a hospital
in Kent, England; three days later, the coroner pronounced the death a suicide-
cardiac failure from self-starvation and tuberculosis.
The legend of her death says that Weil, aware that her fellow-countrymen in occupied
territory had to live on minimal food rations at the time, insisted that she do the same.
It was an act of solidarity and love that had no point to prove, it was not an attempt to
wring a transformation from the world; it was Weil's compulsion to suffer with her
compatriots. This philosophy of suffering and compassion goes all the way to the core
of her philosophy. In her book she writes that "The better we are able to conceive of
the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction
and our compassion for others." - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
(chpt 16 'Affliction') This compassion ultimately
exacerbated her own physical ailments and by the
coroner's account amounted to suicide. Her first English biographer Richard Rees
summed it up by saying: "As for her death, whatever explanation
one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love."
Of course not all sources are so taken in by this account. Others have argued that she
didn't die of starvation but that an inability to eat was a side effect of her illness.
Others have said that her starvation was not in solidarity with those in occupied
France but it was her following the ascetic advice of Arthur Schopenhauer who
described self-starvation as the preferred method of self-denial. Whatever the case her
death has become woven into her legend. Conclusion
The life of Simone Weil illustrates the intricate and apparently contradictory
dynamics of development. She grew up in an affluent bourgeoise family and yet she
became an advocate for working class rights and wrote for socialist and communist
periodicals; she was originally a pacifist but then she became a solider on the
frontlines of the Spanish Civil War; she was from a Jewish background and raised
agnostic yet she became in the eyes of many a Christian mystic and saint. All of these
developments might seem erratic and point to a changeable personality but Weil is
one of those authentic originals that Ralph Waldo Emerson encourages us all to be in
his essay Self-Reliance where he says that: "The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it
straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will
explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing."