Simone Weil facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Simone Weil
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| Born |
Simone Adolphine Weil
3 February 1909 Paris, France
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| Died | 24 August 1943 (aged 34) |
| Nationality | French |
| Education | École Normale Supérieure, University of Paris (B.A., M.A.) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy
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| School | Continental philosophy Marxism (early) Christian anarchism Christian socialism (late) Christian Mysticism Individualism Modern Platonism |
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Main interests
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Political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science |
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Notable ideas
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Decreation (renouncing the gift of free will as a form of acceptance of everything that is independent of one's particular desires; making "something created pass into the uncreated"), uprootedness (déracinement), patriotism of compassion, abolition of political parties, the unjust character of affliction (malheur), compassion must act in the area of metaxy |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Simone Adolphine Weil (/ˈveɪ/ vay, French: [simɔn adɔlfin vɛj]; 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work.
After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks because of poor health and in order 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 that she could better understand the working class.
Weil became increasingly religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. She 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. The mathematician André Weil was her brother.
Biography
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, and Salomea "Selma" Reinherz (1879–1965), who was born into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don and raised in Belgium. 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." 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. Their parents were fairly affluent and raised their children in an attentive and supportive atmosphere.
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. 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. Weil was generally highly affectionate, but she almost always avoided any form of physical contact, even with female friends.
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.
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. 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". 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. During these years, Weil attracted much attention with her radical opinions. She was called the "Red virgin", and even "The Martian" by her admired mentor.
At the École Normale Supérieure, she studied philosophy, earning her DES (diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly equivalent to an M.A.) in 1931 with a thesis under the title "Science et perception dans Descartes" ("Science and Perception in Descartes"). She received her agrégation that same year. Weil taught philosophy at a secondary school for girls in Le Puy and teaching was her primary employment during her short life.
Political activism
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.
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 there dismissed her fears, thinking Germany would continue to be controlled by the centrists or by 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. Weil would sometimes publish articles about social and economic issues, including "Oppression and Liberty," as well as 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 thought.
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, 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 Weil would be sacrificing herself for nothing since it was highly unlikely that she could pass as a Spaniard. Weil replied that she had "every right" 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. 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 operate 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.
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 persuade him to change his political position before giving him until the next day to decide.
During her stay in the Aragon front, Weil sent some chronicles to the French publication Le Libertaire, and on returning to Paris, she continued to write essays on labour, on management, war, and peace.
Encounter with mysticism
Weil was born into a secular household and raised in "complete agnosticism". 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 was attracted to the Christian faith beginning in 1935, when she had the first of three pivotal religious experiences: being moved by the beauty of villagers singing hymns in a procession she stumbled across while on holiday to Portugal (in Póvoa de Varzim). Then, while in Assisi during 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.
Weil had a third, 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", 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". During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from Joseph-Marie Perrin, 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.
Later years
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.
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. 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, preparations were underway to send her to Thame Park in Oxfordshire for training, but the plan was cancelled soon after, as her failing health became known.
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. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent.
After a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, Weil died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34.
Philosophy
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". 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."
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.
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.
Metaxu: "Every separation is a link"
metaxu, a concept 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, is 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 experiential proof that the incarnation is possible". The beauty that 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. She also wrote that "The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter".
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, beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.
Philosophy in Waiting for God
Attention
As Weil explains in her book Waiting for God, attention consists of suspending or emptying one's thought, such that one is ready to receive—to be penetrated by—the object to which one turns one's gaze, be that object one's neighbour, or ultimately, God. As Weil explains, one can love God by praying to God, and attention is the very "substance of prayer": when one prays, one empties oneself, fixes one's whole gaze towards God, and becomes ready to receive God. Similarly, for Weil, people can love their neighbours by emptying themselves, becoming ready to receive one's neighbour in all their naked truth, asking one's neighbour: "What are you going through?"
Three Forms of the Implicit Love of God
In Waiting for God, Weil explains that the three forms of implicit love of God are (1) love of neighbour (2) love of the beauty of the world and (3) love of religious ceremonies. As Weil writes, by loving these three objects (neighbour, world's beauty and religious ceremonies), one indirectly loves God before "God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride," since prior to God's arrival, one's soul cannot yet directly love God as the object. Love of neighbour occurs (i) when the strong treat the weak as equals, (ii) when people give personal attention to those that otherwise seem invisible, anonymous, or non-existent, and (iii) when we look at and listen to the afflicted as they are, without explicitly thinking about God—i.e., Weil writes, when "God in us" loves the afflicted, rather than we loving them in God. Second, Weil explains, love of the world's beauty occurs when humans imitate God's love for the cosmos: just as God creatively renounced his command over the world—letting it be ruled by human autonomy and matter's "blind necessity"—humans give up their imaginary command over the world, seeing the world no longer as if they were the world's center. Finally, Weil explains, love of religious ceremonies occurs as an implicit love of God, when religious practices are pure. Weil writes that purity in religion is seen when "faith and love do not fail," and most absolutely, in the Eucharist.
Works
According to Lissa McCullough, Weil would likely have been "intensely displeased" by the attention paid to her life rather than her works. She believed it was her writings that embodied the best of her, not her actions and definitely not her personality. Weil had similar views about others, saying that if one looks at the lives of great figures in separation from their works, it "necessarily ends up revealing their pettiness above all", as it's in their works that they have put the best of themselves.
Weil's most famous works were published posthumously.
The Need for Roots
Weil's book The Need for Roots was written in early 1943, immediately before her death later that year. She was in London working for the French Resistance and trying to convince its leader, Charles de Gaulle, to form a contingent of nurses who would serve at the front lines.
The Need for Roots has an ambitious plan. It sets out to address the past and to propose a road map for the future of France after World War II. She painstakingly analyzes the spiritual and ethical milieu that led to France's defeat by the German army, and then addresses these issues with the prospect of eventual French victory.
Gravity and Grace
While Gravity and Grace (French: La Pesanteur et la Grâce) is one of the books most associated with Simone Weil, the work was not intended to be a book at all. Rather, the work consists of various passages selected from Weil's notebooks and arranged topically by her friend Gustave Thibon. Weil had given Thibon some of her notebooks written before May 1942, but not with any intent to publish them. Hence, the resulting selections, organization and editing of Gravity and Grace were much influenced by Thibon, a devout Catholic (see Thibon's introduction to Gravity and Grace (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952) for more details).
Legacy
During her lifetime, Weil was known only in relatively narrow circles and even in France her essays were mostly read only by those interested in radical politics. During the first decade after her death, Weil rapidly became famous, attracting attention throughout the West. For the third quarter of the 20th century, she was widely regarded as the most influential person in the world on new work concerning religious and spiritual matters. Her philosophical, Weil's social and political thought also became popular, although not to the same degree as her religious work.
Aside from influencing various fields of study, Weil deeply affected the personal lives of numerous individuals. Pope Paul VI said that Weil was one of his three greatest influences. Weil's popularity began to decline in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, more of her work was gradually published, leading to many thousands of new secondary works by Weil scholars, some of whom focused on achieving a deeper understanding of her religious, philosophical and political work. Others broadened the scope of Weil scholarship to investigate her applicability to fields like classical studies, cultural studies, education, and even technical fields like ergonomics.
A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her.
Portrayal in film and onstage
"Approaching Simone" is a play created by Megan Terry. Dramatizing the life, philosophy and death of Simone Weil, Terry's play won the 1969/1970 Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play.
Weil was the subject of a 2010 documentary by Julia Haslett, An encounter with Simone Weil. Haslett noted that Weil had become "a little-known figure, practically forgotten in her native France, and rarely taught in universities or secondary schools".
Weil was also the subject of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's La Passion de Simone (2008), written with librettist Amin Maalouf.
See also
In Spanish: Simone Weil para niños
