1 Introduction
Simone Weil did not live to see 1945. She died in exile in England in 1943. Many of her writings, however, can be read as a message to the post-war period. This is particularly true of what she produced in 1942â43 while working for the Free French movement under Charles de Gaulle. Weil was asked to review proposals for the reorganization of France after the war. The task apparently fired her own theoretical imagination, and she herself became extraordinarily productive, despite already severe physical exhaustion.
The importance of Weilâs ideas was not lost on Albert Camus, who was responsible for the first edition of her writings published by Gallimard immediately after the war. As he wrote in the preface to Lâenracinement (in English The Need for Roots), Weilâs fragmentary magnum opus, âit seems impossible to me to imagine a rebirth of Europe that does not take into account the demands defined by Simone Weil.â1 In reality, however, none of Weilâs suggestions were put into practice. To a realpolitiker like de Gaulle, they simply seemed crazy.2 But Weilâs eccentricity is not just practical. It is essentially theoretical and has profound conceptual reasons. Indeed, her approach to social and political analysis differs markedly from the mainstream of modern theory in both its liberal and socialist guises. Let me briefly touch on some of the main points that will be explored in this paper. Weilâs later thought centers on the mystical and suggests that the mystical life becomes the norm for everyoneâs life, for the whole social body. This involves a unique approach to a key modern concept, namely the concept of history, which Weil separates from the underlying Judeo-Christian soteriological model.3 As a result, for Weil, the future is no longer a relevant category. Life, whether understood individually or socially, is without expectation or hope. It does not seek salvation or progress. Rather, it is about the present and its relationship to a non-objective Beyond of Being. This ties in with another of Weilâs peculiarities, which is that she gives physical labor a higher status than other activities. In this sense she agrees with Marx, and yet unlike Marx, labor is, for Weil, distinguished by its special mystical qualities. By engaging with the forces of nature, by exposing both body and soul to them, through labor, one establishes a relationship with the Supernatural, or that which gives all beings their existence.
This paper will focus primarily on Weilâs 1943 essay Cette guerre est une guerre de religions.4 In addition, I will look at some revealing passages from The Need for Roots and her notebooks, the Cahiers. Some of Weilâs most illuminating essays from the early 1940s, Human Personality and Condition première dâun travail non servile, will complete the picture.
2 Politics and the Question of Good and Evil
In Cette guerre, Weil succinctly outlines her mystical vision of postwar life and links it to some basic ideas in political philosophy. She discusses three interrelated themes. First, she exposes the political problem in general as ultimately a religious problem. Second, she draws on this for an interpretation of the events of World War II. Finally, she concludes with a vision of an alternative social and political order.
Weil begins by establishing a direct relationship between the religious and the moral. All human beings, she writes, are faced with a religious problem, and that is the moral problem of choosing between good and evil. People cannot bear this choice. They suffer from it and want to get rid of it. This can be done in three ways. All three have their own set of cultural, social, and political implications.
Weil articulates these three options with a view to the 20th century. According to her, the first way is liberal and relativistic, it is the way of the democratic West. The second way is totalitarian, the way of Hitlerâs Germany and the Soviet Union. The third way is Weilâs own mystical way, the way of a âwhole people impregnated by a religion which is entirely oriented toward mysticism.â5 Interestingly, she sees a continuity between the first two ways, or more precisely, the first way, the liberal way, is always in danger of branching off into the second way, the totalitarian way.
Following the first way, one tries to escape the moral choice between good and evil by declaring that what is really important is to live according to oneâs own desires. But as Weil notes, people need orientation in life, even if they reject their own moral responsibility and moral choice. Desire cannot, however, be an end in itself. It is rather something that occurs in the context of our actions. The result of this hedonistic choice is, therefore, nihilistic ennui. Paradoxically, while people cannot endure the reality of their moral choice, neither can they endure a situation in which all of their choices are indifferent or equally valid. They begin to distance themselves internally from the liberal system. In times of crisis, when the general political situation directly affects individual lives, they even feel a horror toward it. Weil seems to have something like a moral horror vacui in mind here. On the one hand, the moral horror vacui paralyzes the liberal system. Thus, when attacked by a totalitarian enemy, it is incapable of offering any substantial resistance. Weil may be thinking specifically of Vichy France.6 On the other hand, and here the contemporary example might be fascist Italy and Germany (to both of which Weil had traveled), moral horror vacui can lead people living under liberal regimes to desire a totalitarian order. That is, a liberal system can transform into totalitarianism from within.
Totalitarianism, for its part, also seeks to evade the moral question, but it takes a different approach. It creates a way of life in which the question of good and evil no longer arises, because the answer is clear. Whatever supports the totalitarian complex is good. People thus surrender their moral agency in favor of the collective totalitarian whole, becoming integrated into it and functioning in accordance with it. Totalitarianism may go by different names. It may be disguised behind the signifier of âthe peopleâ, âthe partyâ, âthe nationâ, or even âthe churchâ (Weil considers the medieval Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church to be totalitarian). Significantly, what unites all of these hegemonic entities is their quasi-religious character. For by suspending the moral question, they acquire absolute authority in their own right. It is as if they were divine in nature, as if they were gods on earth. Accordingly, Weil calls the second way the way of idolatry. Totalitarian power presumes to decide on what is true and what is false, what has value and what does not. It assumes the role of absolute ruler of life and, for that matter, of death.
3 Immanence and Totalization
One might object to Weilâs schematic portrait of the two ways, and especially to her notion of an implicit totalitarian tendency of the liberal way, and argue that she is a typical representative of the 20th century âage of extremesâ as described by Eric Hobsbawm.7 Weil seems only able to move in the element of the absolute. In a kind of negative existentialism, she first assumes that people cannot bear their own freedom of choice, that they seek to escape it.8 Second, Weil seems to deny the possibility that moral orientation can be a matter of social debate, that it can be subject to ongoing social processes and thus constantly renegotiated. This objection in particular has some merit. And yet there are also good reasons to doubt the notion at its heart, namely, the belief in a communicative rationality at work in liberal societies. For even if one were to assume that everyone participates equally in the communicative process (which is doubtful enough), a substantive problem remains. What counts as broad consensus is most likely only a surface effect of the fundamental, inescapable and integral capitalization of life. For one might ask whether there is anything today, any action or situation, that is not capitalized upon. To prove this point, consider the rise of digital capitalism in recent decades, and in particular how commerce, marketing and advertising have been transformed by digital platforms. Capitalism now permeates every aspect of life without exception. There is hardly anything that cannot be turned into economic valueâno thoughts, needs, feelings, or desires. Only a few practices may still escape commodification, and if they do so, it is because they are absolutely useless like, for example, an aimless glance out of the window. Weil suspects something of this when she writes, in Cette guerre, that the anti-fascism of her time could âone day fall to totalitarian state capitalism.â9 I would only add that the State is no longer the totalitarian agent and the grip of totalitarian capitalism on all aspects of life has become more total than the totalitarian systems of the 20th century could have ever dreamed.
Weilâs intuition in her outline of the first two ways thus seems to be that human beings, when given over to themselves and their own immanence, are necessarily subject to totalization. Totalization means that all human relations, that is, relations between humans and relations that humans have with non-human beings, are mediated by a single and comprehensive social structure that has omnipotent and pervasive power over them. This is the case with totalitarianism. But it is also the case of capitalism. Capitalism is not in itself a source of moral values. It does, however, incessantly produce material values, and for a while this is enough to make the moral vacuum (or rather, the constant negotiability of moral values) bearable. Capitalism is, therefore, not characterized by a necessary final crisis and collapse, as Marx argued. Rather, it provides a precarious stability that can prevent a society from sliding into totalitarian or at least authoritarian rule. This is why, in the modern era, economic crisis so often goes hand in hand with an authoritarian turn.
Because of their omnipotence, however, the dominant structures of both the liberal and totalitarian ways outlined by Weil are in a certain sense transcendent. Their transcendence arises out of immanent life itself. It is as if immanent life had split off and hypostasized a particular social reality, so that this reality becomes superior and all-determining. Totalitarian regimes define reality according to a practice that is absolutely consistent with their own worldview, thereby eliminating all alternatives. Capitalism, on the other hand, has no real worldview. However, even within capitalism there is one absolute reality that shapes all other realities, and that is the capitalist economy. Marx went in this direction when he analyzed commodity fetishism as capitalismâs central mode of naturalizing itself in peopleâs lives. Commodity fetishism ultimately means the inescapable (and perverse) compulsion to invest oneâs own life in order to preserve and maintain it. It indicates the transcendence of economic practice over all other practices, its seemingly irreducible and foundational character. In reality, however, it is nothing more than a hypostasis of immanent life, which ultimately suffocates itself.
4 The Way of Mysticism
In contrast, Weilâs third way, the way of mysticism, introduces a genuine transcendence that is irreducible to immanent life. Weil characterizes mysticism as follows: âBy uniting the soul with the absolute good, mysticism is the passage beyond the sphere of the opposition of good and evil,â10 and this is the sphere of immanent life. Note that there may seem to be a Gnostic and antinomian element in Weil. In the opening section of Cette guerre, she refers to an Albigensian tradition according to which moral freedom, the choice between good and evil is a gift of the devil. If mysticism means overcoming the opposition of good and evil, it also means that all worldly orientations and goals become obsolete. There is no longer any relevant worldly value because it has been replaced by the Absolute Good. This is the difference between Weil and Dostoevskyâs Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor believes only in this world. That is why he strives for absolute worldly power and thus for the idolatrous transcendence of immanent life. For Weil, on the other hand, all that is immanent, the world as world, is in itself without any value. While the Grand Inquisitor regards the system of the Church as an absolute good, Weil denies that there can be any kind of worldly good at all. The world as such knows only idols.
But Weil does not reject the world in its entirety. Rather, the world has value insofar as it is connected to the Absolute Good. Weilâs relationship to the world is therefore ambivalent. This has to do with Weilâs main theological or speculative idea. On the one hand, the world is the Other of the Absolute Good or God, the Other that God created by negating Godself. The world must then be correspondingly negated in order to allow God to be fully God again. On the other hand, however, Weil understands Creation, including its undoing, as an act of Godâs love for Godself. The meaning of the world is that it unfolds according to its relationship to God, and mysticism is the human way of achieving this. Thus, everything mundane has meaning and purpose, but not by itself, but because of its relationship to God.
The blemish of the human being is the ego. In the ego, consciousness combines with the instinct of self-preservation. This instinct pervades all of nature. However, in the non-human case, it is neutralized by the relationship between God and nature. The struggle for survival of the individuals comes together to form a self-contained, coherent whole. In the human case, on the other hand, the world has meaning and purpose only in relation to the existential self-assertion of the ego. Unconditional self-interest interferes between the individual and the world. Mysticism counteracts this. In the mystical process, the ego loses its self-will. Its grip on the world loosens. But not only that. The ego itself dissolves. It de-creates itself, as Weil calls it.11 It detaches itself from itself or even empties itself of itself. But the result of this total self-surrender is not nothingness. On the contrary, it is now possible for the relationship between the world, or more precisely each individual being, and God to unfold undisturbed. To speak with Weil, everything is now experienced as love, resonates as love. In the nothingness of the ego, which dissolves in the absolute transcendence of God, there is absolute positivity. Absolute positivity, however, as absolute negativity, because Weilâs God is not substantial. Nothing about this God resembles anything in the world that could be put on a pedestal and worshipped.
Note another ambivalence here. On the one hand, there is certainly a strong apophatic tendency in Weil, for whom there is no greater closeness to God than the abandonment experienced by Christ on the cross. On the other hand, however, Weil uses the notion of Godâs total transcendence to give supernatural meaning to the world. That is, mundane beings have no meaning in themselves, or only a corrupted human meaning, while their true meaning lies in their relationship to God, and God is the Other in the strictest sense, the non-earthly One who is not a thing, the Beyond of Being. To use mysticism as a path to new life, one must follow Weilâs second tendency. In this case, mysticism is not seen as a practice that leads out of the world and into the abyss of God. Rather, it is used to relate to reality in a profoundly different way. Mysticism can thus be called an epistemic method that allows for a comprehensive interpretation of both being as such (to put it more technically) and human practice.12 On its basis, it is possible to transform concrete life in all of its aspects. Weil herself alludes to this when she writes, as quoted earlier, of a âwhole peopleâ that has been âimpregnated by a religion which is entirely oriented toward mysticism.â Mystical experience can lead to a new form of life when it is returned to secular practice, when it literally informs that practice.
5 The Mystical State of Suspension
The gift of mysticism, the new access to being that it opens up, is that everything exists in a constant tension between its natural and supernatural character. Since its central relation is that to the non-objective Good, in being what it is, it is at the same time beyond itself. Or to put it more succinctly, to be is to be while being beyond oneself. That is, both things and actions have not lost their mundane meaning, but mundane meaning is meaningful only in the light of the fact that both things and actions derive their meaning from what is beyond mundane meaning. One might also describe this as a âsublation of natural by supernatural, in which the former is retained but no longer absolute.â13 The following examples will illustrate this.
There are three areas in Weilâs writings that reflect her mystical approach: nature, interpersonal relationships, and physical labor. The first area, nature, gives a first indication of where Weil is heading. From a mundane, egoistic perspective, nature is the realm of blind forces that always threaten to crush the ego. From a mystical perspective, however, the interplay of forces appears to be consistent and necessary because it is related to God in pure obedience. Therefore, it is to be affirmed without qualification. As Weil writes in Gravity and Grace: âThings must be like that [â¦], and, precisely, they are like thatâ,14 a quality that Weil also sees as their beauty. She here shows a love of necessity reminiscent of Spinoza. In fact, Weilâs education rooted her deeply in classical Rationalism. For her, then, nature corresponds to the mechanistic worldview of the early modern period. The main difference, from Weilâs perspective, is only that natureâs mechanism, which proceeds without finality, is more than mere mechanism: it is centered beyond itself. It is pure selflessness, perfect submission to God.
The second area, that of interpersonal relationships, connects well with the first. As Weil writes in one of her last essays La personne et le sacré (Human Personality), âthere is something sacred in every human being.â15 Human sacredness is expressed in each personâs expectation that good rather than bad things will happen to them. According to Weil, every ego is unconditionally obligated to this claim of the Other. She also develops this point with particular emphasis in The Need for Roots, which in its very first sentence places obligation before right: âThe notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.â16 However, as Weil continues in Human Personality, obligation arises not from the personal but from the impersonal aspect of the Other, and the impersonal aspect is the Otherâs relationship to the Absolute Good or God. The ego will therefore provide the Other with everything she needs for mundane life. However, the ego wonât do this for the sake of the otherâs ego, but because by claiming the good the Other is testifying to what is beyond her mundane self. Mundane goodness is always a substitute, but at the same time, it is in practice all that we have, and if we know how to read it, it lets the real Good shine through, by virtue of which it exists. We are dealing here with a vision of a life that is literally never entirely of this earth. Rather, it is in a kind of suspended state. It is not important in itself, but only in relation to that which is beyond, but as such, as that which is beyond, is the innermost reality of life.
Weilâs ideas are particularly challenging, but also potentially groundbreaking, when it comes to the third area, the area of physical labor. The concept of labor, Weil insists, is the only theoretical achievement modernity has added to antiquity. Through labor, human beings relate to necessity and are thus able to integrate themselves into the whole of Being. In other words, the value of physical labor is that it comes as close as possible to de-creation. As Weil writes in The Need for Roots: âPhysical labor willingly consented to is, after death willingly consented to, the most perfect form of obedience.â17 Physical labor is a form of death-in-life. It is the result of physical need and the compulsion to wrest the means of subsistence from the forces of nature, to which one must adopt oneself. It makes the ego disappear. It pushes human beings into matter. It binds them to the monotony of the working process. It subjects them to a time that corresponds to the time of the inanimate.18 But this is precisely what distinguishes physical labor. It is precisely for this reason that âall other human activities [â¦] art, science, philosophy, [â¦] are inferior to physical labor in spiritual significance.â19 And it is precisely for this reason that, according to the final passages of The Need for Roots, âin a well-ordered social life [â¦] physical labor should be its spiritual core.â20 Because physical labor is the clearest experience of human submission to nature, it introduces the meaning of nature as such. It is an exercise in Godâs annihilation of all that is natural, or rather, of all that is creaturely, through which God returns to Godself and in which creation fulfills itself.
6 Labor and Symbolization
Weilâs genealogy of the meaning of physical labor is rather idiosyncratic, but it leads to the core of her thinking. Modern civilization, Weil argues, has forgotten the spiritual aspect of labor. However, there is evidence âthat long ago labor was pre-eminently a religious activity and consequently something sacred.â21 A trace of this can also be found in the biblical book of Genesis, for Adamâs condemnation to work âin the sweat of his faceâ (Gen 3:19) had an atoning character. Physical labor, in all its harshness and inexorability, brings the human being closer to God.
It is significant that physical labor has two levels of meaning in Weilâs conception. On the one hand, it is a profane confrontation with nature. On the other, it has a symbolic status. According to Weil, it is no coincidence that the ancient Greeks associated certain crafts with certain deities. Crafts are not only taught to humans by the gods. Rather, they themselves point to the supernatural. For example, âin Greek symbolism as in the New Testament, fire is the image of the Holy Ghost. [â¦] One can imagine a blacksmithâs religion seeing in fire which renders iron ductile the image of the operation of the Holy Ghost upon human nature.â22 The Holy Ghost, according to the Cahiers, means âthe love of God for God, [which] by means of the disappearance of the individual âIâ, passes through the soul of a man like the light through a piece of glass.â23 The interweaving of profane and symbolic meanings in the work process leads to an astonishing result. Ideally, to stay with the example, the forging work would put the workers into a physical or material state that symbolically refers to what they are experiencing on the spiritual level. In concrete terms, this means: The workerâs ego would dissolve in the work process, and the work process itself refers symbolically to this process of ego dissolution. The work process is both a symbol and an experience of what it symbolizes. It is a living symbol imbued with its own symbolic content.
In her 1941â42 essay Condition première dâun travail non servile, Weil develops the symbolic quality of physical labor in even greater detail than in The Need for Roots. The text places physical labor within the horizon of a nature that possesses a âreflective qualityâ.24 Nature itself refers to the supernatural, so it too has a symbolic character. Therefore, it is necessary to âread the symbols written in matter from all eternity.â25 According to Weil, however, it is not enough to contemplate the meaning of the symbols. Rather, one must immerse oneself in them practically, that is, one must actively enter into processes of physical labor: agricultural work, craftsmanship, factory work. Working with a pendulum, for example, which swings back and forth, allows us to experience in the flesh how the infinity of human desire is broken to the point of exhaustion by the limited capacity to realize itself.26 The oscillating movement of a pulley makes the tension between the finite and the infinite tangible.27
The self-referentiality increases even more in the Christian case of the parables of Jesus, which often originate in the agricultural sphere and thus explicitly unfold the symbolic dimension of nature. The symbolic sense of the parables refers back to the literal and most perfect sense, the practice itself. Thus, the parable of John 12:24, according to which a seed bears fruit only when it falls into the earth and dies, is only truly revealed to someone who is âbusy sowing seed [â¦] turn[ing] his attention to this truth without the aid of any word through his own gestures and the sight of the grain that is being buried in the ground.â28 Only by immersing oneself in the work process of sowing does the meaning of the biblical parable become fully apparent: It points to the de-creation of the ego that takes place in the work process.
As Weil writes, âthere are also some symbols to be found for those who have tasks to perform other than physical labor.â29 For âevery social function has a supernatural purpose.â30 For accountants, for example, the âelementary operations of arithmeticâ31 allow them to connect with the supernatural. Nevertheless, for Weil, physical labor provides the paradigm of human life.
Its static character is obvious. According to Weil, life is not about development, increasing productivity, improving living conditions, increasing prosperity. Rather, it is about existing in relation to the supernatural and remaining in that relation. Improvement is possible, but it is measured by this, not by material growth and progress. Therefore, according to Weil, workers must be nothing but workers. It follows from this that they must not be concerned with the acquisition of money, but only with the preservation of life, and thus with work itself.32 Likewise, work must not lose its character of burden, for only in this way does it lead to the supernatural: âA certain subordination and a certain uniformity are forms of suffering included in the very essence of work and inseparable from the supernatural vocation that corresponds to it. They are not degrading.â33 But the suffering must not be too great. Otherwise, it is a distraction for the workers from their immersion in the work: âEverything that is indissolubly linked to the desire for, or fear of, change, or to the orientation of thought towards the future, should be excluded from an existence that is essentially uniform and must be accepted as it is.â34
In Weilâs society, which can be called mystical socialism,35 working people do not think about the future because it is indifferent to them. They neither fear it nor expect anything from it: ââSecurity should be greater in this social condition than in any other.â36 That is, they know that their situation will not change, for better or worse. But in the best case, if they resolutely take Weilâs third way, they will have stopped thinking about what is good and what is bad. They will have stopped judging. They will just be there, at work. According to Weil, people do not live in a dignified way because they feel free to do this or that, but because they have learned to dwell in the precariousness or even the near-nothingness of their existence.
7 An Epoché of the Future
The previous section may have provoked skepticism, and rightly so. In the self-imposed asceticism of a monastic community, Weilâs vision might work, and it might be possible to use physical labor as a medium of transcendence. But imagine a broader social life, say in a medium-sized city. The brief sketches that Weil herself gives of a community according to her third way are, at best, reminiscent of an idealized pre-modern peasant life with artisanal elements. Less charitably read, they recall fascist work systems like the Chilean-German commune Colonia Dignidad. In his own way, de Gaulle was right. Weilâs ideas are not directly applicable in practice. And yet they should not be discarded altogether. Their relevance is of a principled nature. It lies at the fundamental level of the premises that govern modern lives. Therefore, one should approach Weilâs ideas in a way that is otherwise not recommended, that is, as abstractly as possible.
Of particular importance here is Weilâs treatment of time and temporality.37 To be sure, Weil did not develop an explicit theory of time. However, the question of time is included in her mystical concept of labor. Therefore, one can speak of an implicit theory of time. According to Weil, labor is essentially only for the satisfaction of needs. It has no real finality. It lacks a telos. Therefore, workers are not only indifferent to the future because they are too absorbed in the work process to perceive anything other than the present. Rather, the work process itself knows no real goal and throws the workers back on themselves, that is, on the present. But if labor is understood as a mystical exercise, the present turns out to be more than the present. It turns out to be the gateway to the supernatural presence/absence of God, who sublates time in the beyond of time. Labor, then, suspends not only the future but time itself. It leads to a state of suspension of time in which there is nothing but an intense hyper-presence of the present.
Since labor is the center of human practice for Weil, this leads to an understanding of time that is quite different from the one that fatally shapes contemporary global culture. According to the latter, the future is paramount. The relevant categories are increase, invention, progress, growth, accumulation, maximization, improvement, acceleration, change. Weil breaks with this. Weilâs mystically-informed practice is a practice without a future. There is not even something to hope for in Weil. Her break is not only with modern progressivism, but also with Judeo-Christian soteriology. For Weil, the core of the Christian message is to remain â to remain at the zero point of creation, that is, at the foot of the cross, where Christ is forsaken by God. Again, this vision of life, in which the future is suspended, will rightly cause some discomfort. But it contains an essential and powerful challenge to our way of life, if not to our entire culture. The questions Weil poses to us seem to be the following: What is it that we actually expect from the future? The ideology of the future to which capitalism is attached has proved to be disastrous. How can we replace it with another idea of the future? Or would the solution not perhaps be, following Weil, to subject the future to an epoché, that is, to bracket it, and to find ways of living without a future? In this way we would no longer prepare, plan, invest, hedge, expect, work ahead, take credit, reckon with contingencies, bet on possibilities. The organization of life would then revolve around the present. How can we imagine a life that revolves around the present? What attitudes and actions will determine it? And can we imagine a community life that is not monastic and yet follows these determinants? Could such a life be achieved through a specific practice in time, a specific askesis of time? Further, this would have to become a general cultural form that structures life without people having to explicitly affirm it. Just as the orientation towards the future structures our present reality.
At this point, I will leave these questions open. What seems clear, however, is that an epoché â a bracketing of the future â is only conceivable by separating being from immanence and the time of immanence. From the perspective of immanent life, the present is a prison from which only the future can free us. No one can endure the present if it is nothing but the present, if it is nothing more than it is. But where the present transcends itself, where it charges itself with surplus, everything changes and takes on a supernatural radiance. Weil senses that modern life can only be profoundly transformed if it is oriented toward such phenomena, which occur in rare moments of bliss (and she teaches us that bliss has to do with a particular intensity and not so much a sense of well-being). Beneath the apophatic veneer of her thought, she calls for a different ontology, one that holds that all mundane beings are grounded in transcendence and are therefore themselves essentially transcendent in character, that is, beyond themselves. To be beyond oneself is to be in suspension of oneself. It is to be irreducible to any objective form, neither now nor in the future. It is to be without image, for the truth of God pervades Godâs creation. Think of a life according to this. This life would have freed itself from nature as nature, from things as things. It would satisfy its needs, but no more. It would not need anything more or different. It would enjoy what is without feeling lack. Precisely because this life is simple and elemental, it is more than mere life. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is a self-sufficient life, and it is rich and fulfilled, a floating life that is always a little distant from itself, and for that very reason is attaining a nearness to other entities. Something like this could be the regulating idea that Weil gave to the postwar period.
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Wolin, Richard: The Seduction of Unreason. The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006.
Camus, Essais, p. 1701.
Hence his exclamation, when Weilâs proposals reached him: âMais elle est folle!â Cf. Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil, vol. 2, p. 483.
Cf. Löwith, Meaning in History, published in 1953 in German as Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen.
Hereafter referred to as âCette guerre.â Since the text has not yet been translated into English, all the following translations are my own. I have also consulted the German translation for support.
Weil, Cette guerre, p. 92.
Indeed, the contemporary cultural background requires detailed study. Let me just quote this illuminating passage from Richard Wolin who, himself citing Tony Judtâs Past Imperfect, speaks of a âvacuum at the heart of public ethics in [1930s] France â the marked absence of a concern with public ethics or political morality.â And he continues: âIn France during the 1930s this ethical void reached crisis proportions when anti-republican sentiment proliferated on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum, foreshadowing the nationâs âstrange defeatâ of 1940.â Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, p. 164.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.
This is also the view of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevskyâs The Brothers Karamazov, when accusing Jesus of having rejected earthly power. In figures such as Carl Schmitt, a contemporary of Weilâs, it proves to be a paradigm of the conservative critique of liberalism. Cf. Taubes, Carl Schmitt, p. 7.
Weil, Cette guerre, p. 93.
Weil, Cette querre, p. 92.
Miklos Vetö writes about Weilâs concept of décréation: âSometimes âdecreationâ is a single word, but more often one finds âde-creationâ or the verb âde-createâ. What is certain is that it is the only term that adequately expresses her fundamental intuition: that of the self-annihilating vocation of human beingsâ. Vetö, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, p. 11.
This method can indeed be compared to Husserlâs phenomenological reduction, even if Weil probably never read Husserl.
Marsh, Process, Praxis, and Transcendence, p. 144.
Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 148.
Weil, Human Personality, p. 70.
Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 2.
Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 289.
Cf. Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 294 et seq.
Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 295.
Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 295.
Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 289.
Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 289 et seq.
Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. II, p. 344.
Weil, Condition première, p. 220. All translations of this essay are my own, based on my own German translation. For support, I also used the translation of Lawrence E. Schmidt in Weil, The First Condition for the Work of a Free Person.
Weil, Condition première, p. 220.
Weil, Condition première, p. 221.
Weil, Condition première, p. 222.
Weil, Condition première, p. 220.
Weil, Condition première, p. 222.
Weil, Condition première, p. 224.
Weil, Condition première, p. 222.
Weil, Condition première, p. 218.
Weil, Condition première, p. 224.
Weil, Condition première, p. 224.
Cf. Pornschlegel, Auf der Seite der Unterdrückten.
Weil, Condition première, p. 224.
On the subject of time, temporality, and the future see also Casey Fordâs insightful paper: Ford, Captured Time.