Philosophers are like angels. We might believe in them abstractly, but no one really expects to meet one in real life. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya understood that it was easy to be a philosopher on paper. Paper philosophers number in the thousands, but their ideas often die before they do, proven dead by the inconsistency of their lives. Simone Weil, the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this week, was no paper philosopher. Susan Sontag went so far as to describe her as ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’. Within the context of a century in which truth officially became a relative term, a philosopher who actually loved truth more than life appears a rare species of miracle indeed.
Simone Weil was as a philosopher, teacher and activist. She was to die at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis, while working for the Free French in London during the Second World War. Weil refused to eat more than was rationed in France in solidarity with her compatriots in the French underground. This was not enough to sustain her through her illness, and she collapsed at her desk, dying a few months later on the 24th of August 1943. In her last weeks, keeping her grave situation from her parents in America, Weil wrote them a final letter. In it, she described a ‘deposit of pure gold’ which she felt lay undiscovered within her, and which no-one seemed ready to receive. It is perhaps tragic that almost everything we have of her philosophy was published posthumously.
Simone Weil was born to secular Jewish parents in Paris on 3 February, 1909, a precocious child of an intellectual family, and yet one who could only feel inferior to her older brother, André, who was himself a mathematical prodigy and would became one of the foremost mathematicians of the century. Her education began at the age of three when her brother, all of six, decided to teach her to read (surreptitiously, using newspapers) as a surprise for their mother's birthday. By the time she was six, she would often talk with André in nothing but famous literary quotes, which to other children no doubt resembled a foreign language.
She was equally precocious when it came to learning about suffering and beginning to philosophize. During the First World War, she corresponded with a soldier on the frontline whom her family had adopted, being the tradition, and she soon was faced with the harsh reality of death as the soldier was killed shortly before the end of the war. This was to have a deep affect on the future philosopher, who showed from this point a remarkable ability to empathize with the oppressed. Later in Weil’s childhood her family would often holiday around France, and it was here that she first got the chance to observe social inequality first-hand. She was moved at the injustice of the class divide and the busy, downtrodden lives of the staff. Once on seeing their unjust working conditions she urged them to strike. The young radical was ten. Weil experienced suffering too in her own person through her fragile health, the roots of which were in an illness in infancy when she nearly died. Later, from her teenage years, Weil would also suffer almost continually from migraines without significant remission until the end of her life.
After her education, Weil became a professor and taught philosophy at various French lycées. Shortly after beginning her professional career in Le Puy, she learnt of the plight of the unemployed of the town through her involvement in the syndicalist movement of the region, and she led a procession of unemployed workers to a meeting of the council in the town hall demanding aid. Her concern for the plight of the workers grew, and she decided to take a sabbatical from the lycée of Roanne during the academic year of 1934-35, so that she could do what she criticized all other leftist intellectuals of her era for not doing, namely to experience what the lives of the workers were actually like by sharing industrial and peasant working conditions. Without such experiences Weil considered any such political views philosophically suspect.
If the workers experiencing such hardship in France in the thirties were to be helped, their actual experience had to be understood. As Weil commented, ‘When I think that the great Bolchevik leaders claimed to be creating a free working class and probably not one of them - surely not Trotsky, and I don't think Lenin did either - ever set foot in a factory … politics seems a sinister farce indeed.’ She recorded her daily experiences in her Factory Journal and wrote more extensively about what she learnt in Oppression and Liberty. Unfortunately, Weil’s weak constitution meant that the experience was tortuous. She reflected that the factory experience had created in her not the spirit of revolution that might be expected of the oppressed, but rather ‘the docility of a resigned animal’. This helped her understand that the oppressed cannot be expected to free themselves from their constraints, and needed new structures to ensure their freedom.
This led Weil to consider further the notions of necessity and individual freedom. Weil had earlier made a study of Descartes in her university dissertation (Science and Perception in Descartes) largely accepting that the blind mechanism of physical reality was in opposition to the independent reality of mind. She wished to attempt to understand evil within such a mechanistic universe, but in a way which still allowed for the intellectual realities Plato understood. This bore fruit in Weil’s most difficult and most profound book - a collection of aphorisms, posthumously entitled Gravity and Grace. The spiritual reality of the transcendental Forms of Plato, such as Justice and Beauty, which she holds as true and ideal, can be seen here to contrast and even compete with the mechanistic ideas of Descartes on the universe. The book is a paradox-laden search for philosophical harmony between the concepts of deterministic necessity and intellectual and moral freedom. For Weil, the laws of nature, symbolised by gravity, are simply necessary, and yet in a sense absurd without God. At the same time, the platonic forms are for her seemingly impossible and yet really, if mystically, experienced. The result is a dramatic masterpiece of what arguably may be called poetic philosophy. For her, true philosophy requires an ‘effort of detachment which surpasses the intelligence’, and in Gravity and Grace we may often find it surpassing our own, and yet it may still remain strangely persuasive. It is notable that this was written after she had herself a religious experience, which converted her from agnosticism to belief in God a few years before she would die.
By the time of the Second World War, Weil became practically obsessed with the philosophical and practical problems of evil more generally. Philosophically, she wrote the essay ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, to be found in her book Waiting for God, which discusses the problem evil poses for faith, and how only a concept of love as transcendental and yet foundational to reality allows us to accept the mystery of evil.
The practical problem of the evil of the war forced Weil to leave France to escort her parents to America, after which she travelled to England to join De Gaulle’s Free French forces in London at the end of 1942, keen to share in the burden of the war effort. Weil had long wished to lead a force of frontline nurses to more effectively treat the wounded on the battlefield, but her proposal was turned done, considered by De Gaulle as foolhardy to put women in such a perilous situation. Weil’s thinking was of course sound and now seen as indispensable. But Weil had to content herself with reviewing the plans of attack of other resistance fighters, as well as preparing her own thoughts for the rebuilding of the country after its liberation.
Her principal writing of this period and the apotheosis of her political thought is The Need for Roots. The book is in two parts, the first part conceived as a prelude to a bill of obligations and rights, and the second as proposals for the reinvigoration of the French democratic and socio-economic system. Weil insists on a mystical origin not only for human rights, but more fundamentally for human obligations. It is moral obligations that are primary and imperative, while human rights are simply ways of expressing these from the other’s point of view. It is because we have duties to others, that they have a right to expect those duties to be fulfilled by us. Weil’s position then contradicts any relativist approach to human rights, while giving a basic test for the definition of rights. Rights are not possible courses of action an individual may insist upon if they wish, but duties for the state as a whole conscientiously and equitably to provide.
More generally, The Need for Roots proposes an overhaul of the industrial system by putting the needs of the individual at the heart of work in a way which respects his essentially rational nature. She calls for an overhaul of the modes of production which instrumentalize the labour force, and for a re-evaluation of the spiritual value of work. She imagines a return to craft-based enterprises, where skills are developed and the contribution to the common good the paramount concern. The picture painted is nothing less than a country and worldwide rejuvenation, without state monopoly, where each citizen experiences themselves as playing a productive and rational part in the good of all.
It was when writing The Need for Roots that Weil was suffering from her then undiagnosed tuberculosis. But undaunted by her ill-health, Weil forced herself to write literally day and night with little nutrition. While this helped occasion her death sooner than would otherwise have been the case, it would perhaps be more tragic to imagine a world where there was simply nothing worth dying for. Perhaps not all truth is worth that, but Weil decided that the truth of empathic solidarity was. Perhaps at this distance from her tragic death, time has worn away the soil of death enough to expose for us anew the rich vein of her thought, discovered and gleaming.
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