The SPCK Introduction to Simone Weil

STEPHEN PLANT, Stephen Plant

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780281059386
• eBook ISBN: 9780281062874
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Simone Weil was one of the most original philosophers and political thinkers of the twentieth century. During her life her writings were almost unknown beyond a few close friends, only after her death at the age of thirty four did her work reach a wider audience, including Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, Simone de Beauvoir, Leon Trotsky and Iris Murdoch. Weil was born in 1909 to non-practicing Jewish parents and was an agnostic until her late twenties when she became a Christian. She had a refreshing creativity and a rare ability to confront theological complacencies. As well as writing on suffering she also wrote about the nature of God, the nature of work and the importance of improving conditions for factory workers, and about our duty towards our community. She could get to the heart of some key philosophical, theological and ethical issues, many of which are as important today as they were in her own time. Here, Stephen Plant makes Weil's often complex and challenging thought accessible to a wide audience. He sketches a few of the central themes of Weil's thought, gives the reader a feeling for the breadth of her work and provides short extracts from her writings. This revised and expanded edition is an ideal introduction to Weil for both students and the general reader.

1

Simone Weil’s life

A barren fig tree?

Simone Weil was haunted by self-doubt but also by a powerful awareness of the love of God. In 1942, the year before her death, Weil summed up her life in a letter to a friend. Comparing herself with the fig tree Jesus cursed while entering Jerusalem because it did not bear any fruit, she wrote:

I never read the story of the barren fig tree without trembling. I think that it is a portrait of me. In it also, nature was powerless, and yet it was not excused. Christ cursed it …

It is not that I actually do fear [God’s anger]. By a strange twist, the thought of God’s anger only arouses love in me. It is the thought of the possible favour of God and his mercy that makes me tremble with a sort of fear.

On the other hand the sense of being like a barren fig tree for Christ tears my heart.

(WG 64)

Weil’s characterization of her life as barren and fruitless shows her profound lack of self-confidence. Yet taking the facts of her life at face value, her self-assessment is pitifully accurate. During her life most of her writings were almost unknown, even to her closest friends. Those of her essays that were published reached small audiences, and her larger essays became known only after her death. The trade union movement to which she devoted so much of the energy of her early life was riven with disagreement and was never diverted by her campaigning towards the goals she hoped for it. As a factory labourer seeking solidarity with the working classes, she was so exhausted that she was incapable of a full engagement with either her co-workers or with the experience. The injury that forced her exit from the Spanish Civil War was caused not by a fascist bullet or shell, but was the accidental result of her own clumsiness. In the Second World War she yearned for dangerous front-line action, but ended up in a London desk job. She lived to see neither the fall of the ‘Great Beast’ of Nazism, nor the regeneration of France. She longed for love, and lived the life of an outsider.

Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Her only brother, André, was born three years earlier. Weil’s father was a doctor in general practice. Her mother, though not trained in medicine because her father would not give his permission, poured her considerable intellectual energies into supporting her husband’s career and in nurturing their precociously gifted children. She was by all accounts, including Simone’s own, the more dominant of her parents, and some psychoanalytically inclined commentators have traced Simone’s supposed difficulties with forming close relationships to a cloyingly possessive quality in Mme Weil’s relationship with her daughter. Already, at 16 months, Simone found eating a problem, possibly the first indication of a life-long difficulty with food that some have subsequently (and speculatively) diagnosed as anorexia nervosa. A childhood stint in hospital didn’t help, and she disliked hospitals thereafter. Whatever may have been the origin of her attitude to food, it is certainly the case that she persistently neglected her bodily need for a healthy diet. And Mme Weil could be obsessive about hygiene, which also rubbed off on Simone.

Weil’s parents were Jewish, but neither practised their religion. Both Dr Weil’s atheism (a reaction against the zealous piety of his mother), and the family’s desire in all things to identify with middle-class French culture and patriotism, were important factors in Simone’s upbringing. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer falsely imprisoned in 1893 for treason, was released just three years before Simone was born; what the Dreyfus affair made plain was that anti-Semitism was a living issue in early twentieth-century France. Quite apart from any ‘philosophical’ reasons the empirically inclined Dr Weil may have had for breaking off ties with Jewish communities in France, there were good reasons for assimilating. But for Jews who chose to break such ties there were practical as well as psych-ological consequences that affected not only the first, but following generations, who sometimes felt equally alien in the community they had been estranged from and in the (anti-Semitic) community they aspired to be part of. In an uncompromising letter written in 1940, Simone Weil explained her attitude towards her Jewish inheritance to an official in Vichy France tasked with registering Jews as the state had been ‘encouraged’ to do by the Nazis. If by ‘Jew’ one means a follower of a particular religion, Weil wrote, then ‘I have never entered a synagogue and I have never witnessed a Jewish religious ceremony’. If one means by ‘Jew’ a member of a particular race, she continued, then ‘I have no reason to suppose that I have any sort of tie, either through my father or my mother, with the people who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago’.

During the First World War, Weil’s father served as an army doctor: as he moved from garrison to garrison the family moved with him from town to town. André and Simone were par-ticularly close, but the proximity came at a cost. André had a brilliant mind: at 12 he was solving mathematical problems at a doctoral level, and to relax, reading Plato and Homer in Greek. Simone compared herself unfavourably with him, a comparison others unfortunately colluded in. Later she wrote that:

The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal [the French mathematician and philosopher], brought my own inferiority home to me.

(WG 30)

She describes how this led her to fall into a bottomless adolescent despair, since she ‘preferred to die rather than live without the truth’ from which, aged 14, she had convinced herself her ‘mediocrity’ would exclude her. But after some months she

… suddenly had the everlasting conviction that no matter what human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom reserved for geniuses, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment.

(WG 30–31)

This insight, imprinted on her adolescent mind, remained with her vividly throughout her life.

By the time Weil arrived in her mid-teens, she had already decided to choose philosophy rather than mathematics as her future academic speciality. At 16 she enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, where she studied French, English, history and philosophy. Her physical appearance at this age changed little during the rest of her life. One of her fellow students, her friend and later biographer Simone Pétrement, described Weil’s distinctive appearance:

[She had a] small, thin face, which seemed to be devoured by her hair and glasses. A fine-boned delicate nose, dark eyes that looked out boldly, a neck that strained forward and gave the impression of a burning, almost indiscreet curiosity; but her full mouth gave one a feeling of sweetness and good nature. Looking at them carefully her features do not lack charm and even beauty; it was a face at once insolent and tender, bold in asking questions but with a timid smile that seemed to mock itself … Her charm remained hidden from most people, who saw in Simone only a totally intellectual being. Her body was thin, her gestures lively but also clumsy. She wore clothes with a masculine cut, always the same outfit (a kind of suit with a very wide skirt and a long, narrow jacket), and always flat-heeled shoes.

(Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, p. 26)

It is said that one of few women to study with Plato at his Academy, Axiothea, dressed as a man: if Weil knew of her, Axiothea might have made a good role-model.

Weil’s philosophy teacher at the Lycée was the celebrated Emile Chartier, better known as ‘Alain’. From him Weil learned how to express her ideas clearly and succinctly. He also taught her to respect the Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 BC), and reinforced her childhood love of geometry. At the end of her two years at the school she won the philosophy prize. Alain’s final comment on his star pupil was characteristically perceptive. He noted that she was an

… excellent student; unusual strength of mind, broad culture. She will succeed brilliantly if she does not go down obscure paths. In any event she will certainly be noticed.

(Pétrement, p. 542)

In 1927, although she was placed first in examinations for the philosophy degree at the Sorbonne, she failed the broader and highly competitive entrance exams for the École Normale Supérieure, and was forced to study more widely before passing them a year later. Affiliated to the Sorbonne, the École Normale was one of the most respected academic institutions in France, giving its graduates access to teaching posts in France’s best schools and entitling them to a higher salary. Weil studied there from 1928 to 1931, and entered fully into student life. She even joined a rugby team. In 1930, following an attack of viral sinusitis, Weil began experiencing migraine headaches. These were to afflict her with regular and excruciating ferocity for the rest of her life – a fact that should be borne in mind when examining the theme of affliction in Chapter 3. In July 1931, Weil qualified as a teacher and presented an extended dissertation on ‘Science and Perception’ in the work of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650).

To recount Weil’s student days in terms of her academic studies alone, however, is to tell only half the story. The years in Paris from 1925 to 1931 were also for Weil years in which she was deeply engaged in political reflection and action. These were eventful times as the political parties and organizations of the Left battled with one another. Weil was painfully aware of the debilitating effects of the splits in trade unions and political parties representing the interests of working people, and she toiled with little success for unity. In the USA, the Wall Street Crash shattered the illusion of worldwide economic prosperity. The repercussions were felt in France, where working people faced high unemployment and worsening working conditions. In 1927, Weil had worked long hours on a farm in Normandy bringing in the harvest. When she returned to Paris she began a Social Education Group with friends, giving free lessons in philosophy to factory and railway workers.

In this rapidly changing social environment, and with a personal conviction informed by her conversations with rural and industrial workers, Weil became ever more involved with politics. When a petition was drawn up campaigning against the compulsory military instruction given to male students at the École, she was vigorous in gathering signatures to make the training voluntary. She pestered one of her lecturers, M. Bouglé, for a donation to a fund for the unemployed. When the time came for the authorities to place her in a school, she asked to be placed in an industrial centre. Instead, with malicious intent, they posted her to Le Puy, a relatively quiet non-industrial town in south-eastern France. Bouglé, who had a hand in the decision, is reputed to have said: ‘We shall send the Red Virgin as far away as possible so that we shall never hear of her again.’

From 1931 to 1934 Simone Weil taught philosophy in a series of schools. Her students liked her and in return she took a genuine interest in them. In a letter to a former student Weil asked if there was ‘still the same good spirit of comradeship’ among a class that she had taught. Her teaching methods, however, were somewhat unorthodox: she was less interested in her pupils passing exams than in inspiring them with her love of philosophy. From notes taken by her pupils it seems that what she actually taught was a brief history of Western thought. She explored basic philosophical questions like ‘How do we perceive the world?’ and ‘How does language affect the way we come to grips with the world?’ She also taught the basics of ethics, sociology and political science (these lectures are published as Lectures in Philosophy). To those who struggled with what they learned, she taught extra classes free of charge.

If her unconventional teaching practices prejudiced the school authorities against her, then her activities outside school made things even worse. From the point of view of her employers, Weil’s life was inappropriate for a professional person. She disdained spending money on clothes or luxuries, buying books instead, and giving the rest of her salary to workers’ strike funds. She refused to have the heating on in her room because, she believed, the unemployed had to live in the cold, and therefore she should too. In her support for the poor and unemployed of Le Puy she was untiring. She was also prominent in political demonstrations of various kinds and her name appeared in the local papers as a result. Once, Weil led a delegation to the local Mayor to ask for a rise in unemployment benefit. This kind of behaviour in a schoolteacher employed by the state was (not unreasonably) frowned upon by her employers. In consequence, she was moved three times in as many years, passed like a bad penny from Le Puy to Auxerre (1932), and from Auxerre to Roanne (1933). She taught her classes diligently, though without success if measured by examination results. Beyond the school gates she continued to meet local workers, to teach them in her spare time and to campaign for better conditions for workers and the unemployed.

Somehow, Weil also found time and energy to think and to write. In 1932 she spent six weeks in Germany observing the conflict between communists and Nazis at first hand; she wrote several essays reflecting on experiences and evaluating the rise and the political significance of Nazism. Her socialist friends were optimistic that a working-class revolution in Germany was imminent. Weil, however, believed that in spite of the heroism of individuals, the working classes were too disunited to achieve anything. She saw immediately that the Nazis were bad, but she also noted striking resemblances between National Socialism and communism. When published, these essays estranged her from many of her former friends. A number of the most important of Weil’s political essays are collected in Oppression and Liberty.

By 1934 Weil had become convinced that the reason socialist leaders were so out of touch with working people was that none of them knew what it was like to work in a factory. She therefore obtained permission from the Ministry of Education to take a one-year ‘sabbatical’ for ‘personal studies’. She was granted unpaid leave and, after a break to finish working on the key essays in Oppression and Liberty, on 4 December she began work as a factory hand in the Alsthom factory in Paris.

She worked at Alsthom for four months, after which she needed a period of convalescence in Switzerland to recover. In April 1935 she was back at work, this time at the Carnaud factory. In June she was working at the Renault plant. The journal Weil kept throughout her ‘sabbatical’, though dispassionately descriptive, records a painfully difficult year for her. It was, nevertheless, a year that led ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Information
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Date chart
• Introduction
• 1. Simone Weil’s life
• 2. Weil’s understanding of God
• 3. Loving God in a world full of pain
• 4. The need for roots
• 5. Simone Weil: The last Cathar?
• A guide to further reading in English
• Index