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Simone Weil
Born	Simone Adolphine Weil 3 February 1909 Paris, France
Died	24 August 1943 (aged 34) Ashford, Kent, England
Nationality	French
Education	École Normale Supérieure, University of Paris[1] (B.A., M.A.)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophyFrench philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Marxism (early) Christian anarchism[2] Christian socialism[3] (late) Christian Mysticism Individualism[4] Modern Platonism[5]
Main interests	Political philosophy, moral philosophy,[6] philosophy of religion, philosophy of science
Notable ideas	Decreation (renouncing the gift of free will as a form of acceptance of everything that is independent of one’s particular desires;[7] making “something created pass into the uncreated”),[8] uprootedness (déracinement), patriotism of compassion,[9] abolition of political parties, the unjust character of affliction (malheur), compassion must act in the area of metaxy[10]
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Simone Adolphine Weil (/ˈveɪ/ VAY,^[14] French: [simɔn vɛj] (listen); 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Over 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work, since 1995.^[15]

After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism. Such work saw her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in car factories, so she could better understand the working class.

Taking a path that was unusual among 20th-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed.^[16] Weil wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields.^[17] The mathematician André Weil was her brother.^[18][19]

Biography

Weil with her father

Weil at age 13. The photograph was taken during a family holiday to Belgium, where she was laughing with her brother André.

Early life

Weil was born in her parents’ apartment in Paris on 3 February 1909, the daughter of Bernard Weil (1872–1955), a medical doctor from an agnostic Alsatian Jewish background, who moved to Paris after the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. Her mother, Salomea “Selma” Reinherz (1879–1965), was born into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don and raised in Belgium.^[20] According to Osmo Pekonen, “the family name Weil came to be when many Levis in the Napoleonic era changed their names this way, by anagram.”^[21] Weil was a healthy baby for her first six months, but then suffered a severe attack of appendicitis; thereafter, she struggled with poor health throughout her life. She was the younger of her parents’ two children: her brother was mathematician André Weil (1906–1998), with whom she would always enjoy a close relationship.^[22] Their parents were fairly affluent and raised their children in an attentive and supportive atmosphere.^[23]

Weil was distressed by her father having to leave home for several years after being drafted to serve in the First World War. Eva Fogelman, Robert Coles, and several other scholars believe that this experience may have contributed to the exceptionally strong altruism which Weil displayed throughout her life.^[24][25][26] From her childhood home, Weil acquired an obsession with cleanliness; in her later life she would sometimes speak of her “disgustingness” and think that others would see her this way, even though in her youth she had been considered highly attractive.^[27] Weil was generally highly affectionate, but she almost always avoided any form of physical contact, even with female friends.^[28]

According to her friend and biographer, Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities for love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her “fragile beauty” by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men’s clothes.^[29][30]

Intellectual life

Weil was a precocious student, proficient in Ancient Greek by age 12. She later learned Sanskrit so that she could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original.^[16] Like the Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola, her interests in other religions were universal and she attempted to understand each religious tradition as an expression of transcendent wisdom.

As a teenager, Weil studied at the Lycée Henri IV under the tutelage of her admired teacher Émile Chartier, more commonly known as “Alain”.^[31] Her first attempt at the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in June 1927 ended in failure, due to her low marks in history. In 1928 she was successful in gaining admission. She finished first in the exam for the certificate of “General Philosophy and Logic”; Simone de Beauvoir finished second.^[32] During these years, Weil attracted much attention with her radical opinions. She was called the “Red virgin”,^[32] and even “The Martian” by her admired mentor.^[33]

At the École Normale Supérieure, she studied philosophy, earning her DES (diplôme d’études supérieures [fr], roughly equivalent to an MA) in 1931 with a thesis under the title “Science et perfection dans Descartes” (“Science and Perfection in Descartes”).^[34] She received her agrégation that same year.^[35] Weil taught philosophy at a secondary school for girls in Le Puy and teaching was her primary employment during her short life.

Political activism

Leon Trotsky, for whom Weil arranged to stay at her parents’ apartment in December 1933 while he was in Paris for secret meetings. She had argued against Trotsky both in print and in person, suggesting that élite communist bureaucrats could be just as oppressive as the worst capitalists. Weil was one of the rare few who appeared to hold her own with the Red Army founder in a face-to-face debate.^[36]

She often became involved in political action out of sympathy with the working class. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers’ movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations, and advocated workers’ rights. At this time, she was a Marxist, pacifist, and trade unionist. While teaching in Le Puy, she became involved in local political activity, supporting the unemployed and striking workers despite criticism. Weil had never formally joined the French Communist Party, and in her twenties she became increasingly critical of Marxism. According to Pétrement, she was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists.^[37]

In 1932, Weil visited Germany to help Marxist activists who were at the time considered to be the strongest and best organised communists in Western Europe, but Weil considered them no match for the then up-and-coming fascists. When she returned to France, her political friends in France dismissed her fears, thinking Germany would continue to be controlled by the centrists or those to the left. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Weil spent much of her time trying to help German communists fleeing his regime.^[37] Weil would sometimes publish articles about social and economic issues, including “Oppression and Liberty” and numerous short articles for trade union journals. This work criticised popular Marxist thought and gave a pessimistic account of the limits of both capitalism and socialism. Leon Trotsky himself personally responded to several of her articles, attacking both her ideas and her as a person. However, according to Pétrement, he was influenced by some of Weil’s ideas.^[38]

Weil participated in the French general strike of 1933, called to protest against unemployment and wage cuts. The following year, she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to work incognito as a labourer in two factories, one owned by Renault, believing that this experience would allow her to connect with the working class. In 1935, she resumed teaching and donated most of her income to political causes and charitable endeavours.

In 1936, despite her professed pacifism, she travelled to the Spanish Civil War to join the Republican faction. She identified as an anarchist,^[39] and sought out the anti-fascist commander Julián Gorkin, asking to be sent on a mission as a covert agent, to rescue the prisoner Joaquín Maurín. Gorkin refused, saying she would almost certainly be sacrificing herself for nothing, as it would be most unlikely she could pass as a Spaniard. Weil replied that she had “every right”^[40] to sacrifice herself if she chose, but after arguing for more than an hour, she was unable to convince Gorkin to give her the assignment. Instead she joined the anarchist Durruti Column of the French-speaking Sébastien Faure Century, which specialised in high-risk “commando”-style engagements.^[41] As she was extremely short-sighted, Weil was a very poor shot, and her comrades tried to avoid taking her on missions, though she did sometimes insist. Her only direct participation in combat was to shoot with her rifle at a bomber during an air raid; in a second raid, she tried to man the group’s heavy machine gun, but her comrades prevented her, as they thought it would be best for someone less clumsy and near-sighted to use the weapon. After being with the group for a few weeks, she burnt herself over a cooking fire. She was forced to leave the unit, and was met by her parents who had followed her to Spain. They helped her leave the country, to recuperate in Assisi. About a month after her departure, Weil’s unit was nearly wiped out at an engagement in Perdiguera in October 1936, with every woman in the group being killed.^[42]

Weil was distressed by the Republican killings in eastern Spain, particularly when a fifteen-year old Falangist was executed after he had been taken prisoner and Durruti had spent an hour trying to get him to change his political position before giving him until the next day to decide.^[43]

During her stay in the Aragon front, Weil sent some chronicles to the French publication Le Libertaire, and on returning to Paris Weil continued to write essays on labour, on management, war and peace.^[44]

Encounter with mysticism

The Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi where Simone had one of three spiritual “encounters that really counted,” leading to her conversion to Christianity.^[45]

Weil was born into a secular household and raised in “complete agnosticism”.^[46][47] As a teenager, she considered the existence of God for herself and decided nothing could be known either way. In her Spiritual Autobiography however, Weil records that she always had a Christian outlook, taking to heart from her earliest childhood the idea of loving one’s neighbour. Weil became attracted to the Christian faith beginning in 1935, the first of three pivotal experiences for her being when she was moved by the beauty of villagers singing hymns in a procession she stumbled across while on holiday to Portugal (in Póvoa de Varzim).^[48][49] While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, Weil experienced a religious ecstasy in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli—the same church in which Saint Francis of Assisi had prayed. She was led to pray for the first time in her life as Lawrence A. Cunningham relates:

Below the town is the beautiful church and convent of San Damiano where Saint Clare once lived. Near that spot is the place purported to be where Saint Francis composed the larger part of his “Canticle of Brother Sun”. Below the town in the valley is the ugliest church in the entire environs: the massive baroque basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, finished in the seventeenth century and rebuilt in the nineteenth century, which houses a rare treasure: a tiny Romanesque chapel that stood in the days of Saint Francis—the “Little Portion” where he would gather his brethren. It was in that tiny chapel that the great mystic Simone Weil first felt compelled to kneel down and pray.^[50]

Weil had another, more powerful, revelation a year later while reciting George Herbert‘s poem Love III, after which “Christ himself came down and took possession of me”,^[51] and, from 1938 on, her writings became more mystical and spiritual, while retaining their focus on social and political issues. She was attracted to Catholicism, but declined to be baptized at that time, preferring to remain outside due to “the love of those things that are outside Christianity”.^[52][53][54] During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from Joseph-Marie Perrin,^[55] a Dominican Friar. Around this time, she met the French Catholic author Gustave Thibon, who later edited some of her work.

Weil did not limit her curiosity to Christianity. She was interested in other religious traditions—especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries; Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita); and Mahayana Buddhism. She believed that all these and other traditions contained elements of genuine revelation,^[56] writing:

Greece, Egypt, ancient India, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflection of this beauty in art and science…these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ’s hands as his captive. I think I might even say more.^[57]

Nevertheless, Weil 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.^[58]

Later years

A commemorative plaque on the exterior of the apartment building on Riverside Drive in New York City, where Weil lived in 1942

In 1942, Weil travelled to the United States with her family. She had been reluctant to leave France, but agreed to do so as she wanted to see her parents to safety and knew they would not leave without her. She was also encouraged by the fact that it would be relatively easy for her to reach Britain from the United States, where she could join the French Resistance. She had hopes of being sent back to France as a covert agent.^[59]

Older biographies suggest Weil made no further progress in achieving her desire to return to France as an agent—she was limited to desk work in London, although this did give her time to write one of her largest and best known works: The Need for Roots.^[60] Yet there is now evidence that Weil was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, with a view to sending her back to France as a clandestine wireless operator. In May 1943, plans were underway to send her to Thame Park in Oxfordshire for training, but were cancelled soon after, as her failing health became known.^[61][62]

Weil’s grave in Bybrook Cemetery, Ashford, Kent, August 2012

The rigorous work routine she assumed soon took a heavy toll. In 1943, Weil was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. However, she refused special treatment because of her long-standing political idealism and her detachment from material things. Instead, she limited her food intake to what she believed residents of German-occupied France ate. She most likely ate even less, as she refused food on most occasions. It is probable that she was baptized during this period.^[63] Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent.^[26]

After a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, Weil died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34. The coroner’s report said that “the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed”.^[64]

The exact cause of her death remains a subject of debate. Some claim that her refusal to eat came from her desire to express some form of solidarity toward the victims of the war. Others think that Weil’s self-starvation occurred after her study of Arthur Schopenhauer.^[65] In his chapters on Christian saintly asceticism and salvation, Schopenhauer had described self-starvation as a preferred method of self-denial. However, Simone Pétrement,^[66] one of Weil’s first and most significant biographers, regards the coroner’s report as simply mistaken. Basing her opinion on letters written by the personnel of the sanatorium at which Simone Weil was treated, Pétrement affirms that Weil asked for food on different occasions while she was hospitalized and even ate a little bit a few days before her death; according to her, it is in fact Weil’s poor health condition that eventually made her unable to eat.^[67]

Weil’s first English biographer, Richard Rees, offers several possible explanations for her death, citing her compassion for the suffering of her countrymen in occupied France and her love for and close imitation of Christ. Rees sums 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.”^[68]

Philosophy

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Absence

Absence is the key image for her metaphysics, cosmology, cosmogony, and theodicy. She believed that God created by an act of self-delimitation—in other words, she argued that because God is conceived as utter fullness, a perfect being, no creature can exist except where God is not. Thus, creation occurred only when God withdrew in part. This idea mirrors tzimtzum, a central notion in the Jewish Kabbalah creation narrative.

This is, for Weil, an original kenosis (“emptiness”) preceding the corrective kenosis of Christ’s incarnation. Thus, according to her, humans are born in a damned position, not because of original sin, but because to be created at all they must be what God is not; in other words, they must be inherently “unholy” in some sense. This idea fits more broadly into apophatic theology.

This notion of creation is a cornerstone of her theodicy, for if creation is conceived this way—as necessarily entailing evil—then there is no problem of the entrance of evil into a perfect world. Nor does the presence of evil constitute a limitation of God’s omnipotence under Weil’s notion; according to her, evil is present not because God could not create a perfect world, but because the act of “creation” in its very essence implies the impossibility of perfection.

However, this explanation of the essentiality of evil does not imply that humans are simply, originally, and continually doomed; on the contrary, Weil claims that “evil is the form which God’s mercy takes in this world”.^[69] Weil believed that evil, and its consequent affliction, serve the role of driving humans towards God, writing, “The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.”^[70]

Affliction

Weil’s concept of “affliction” (French: malheur) goes beyond simple suffering, though it certainly includes it. According to her, only some souls are capable of experiencing the full depth of affliction—the same souls that are also most able to experience spiritual joy. Weil’s notion of affliction is a sort of suffering “plus” which transcends both body and mind, a physical and mental anguish that scourges the very soul.^[71]

War and oppression were the most intense cases of affliction within her reach; to experience it, she turned to the life of a factory worker, while to understand it she turned to Homer‘s Iliad. (Her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force“, first translated by Mary McCarthy, is a piece of Homeric literary criticism.) Affliction was associated both with necessity and with chance—it was fraught with necessity because it was hard-wired 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 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. …

Suffering and enjoyment as sources of knowledge. The serpent offered knowledge to Adam and Eve. The sirens offered knowledge to Ulysses. These stories teach that the soul is lost through seeking knowledge in pleasure. Why? Pleasure is perhaps innocent on condition that we do not seek knowledge in it. It is permissible to seek that only in suffering.

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (chpt 16 ‘Affliction’)

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil