Formative Writings (Routledge Revivals)

Simone Weil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415567978
• eBook ISBN: 9781135175993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume, first published in English in 1987 makes available an important part of Weil's early writings. Although primarily known as a religious thinker, she devoted enormous energy in her formative years to her work as a political activist and as a philosopher/teacher. This book reveals these other sides of Weil and demonstrates the lines of continuity underlying her whole thought.

Written between 1929 and 1941 the book covers a crucial and transitional period in Weil's life. Taken together they represent invaluable primary source material on the evolution of Weil's life and on her chosen method of abstracting elements from her personal experience and transmuting that experience into considered thought. Even when highly theoretical, her writing was always concerned with the application of her intelligence to concrete problems of human existence.

Factory Journal

Introduction

In 1933–34 Simone Weil became increasingly convinced that there was little likelihood of revolutionary change through political activity; moreover, she began to perceive that the real enemy was not the capitalist economic system per se but the bureaucratic, centralized apparatus of the modern state, whose power was consolidated through war. She clearly foresaw that the European states were on a trajectory toward war—very likely, she thought, toward “another conflagration” involving “the whole of Europe and beyond”—and she feared that the efforts of the Left on behalf of “liberty, the proletariat, etc.,” would, in reality, only serve the interests of the Russian state and the Franco-Prussian military alliance and consequently spur war preparations. For this reason, she decided in mid-1934 to “take no further part in any political or social activities, with two exceptions: anticolonialism and the campaign against civil defense exercises.” Still, her consuming desire to liberate the oppressed remained. She had been coming more and more to believe “that the liberation (relative) of the workers must be brought about before all else in the workshop.”¹ She turned, then, to the workplace itself, the factory.

Having applied for a leave of absence from teaching for the 1934–35 school year, Weil made arrangements with Auguste Detoeuf, the managing director of the company that owned the Alsthom factory (a plant that made electrical equipment for subway cars and streetcars), to be hired as an unskilled worker. She used connections in order to get only this first of the three jobs she held between December 1934 and August 1935, and once employed, she lived as fully as possible the life of an ordinary, anonymous unskilled worker. She rented a room in the neighborhood of the factory and lived on her skimpy earnings, going as far as to insist on paying her parents the price she would have had to pay for a meal when she dined with them, and going hungry when she ran low on money during a month-long period of unemployment. She became a member of what was perhaps the most despised class in the French factory system—the class of unskilled women workers. The jobs that she and the other women did, under the supervision of male foremen of varying degrees of technical ability and human decency, were tedious, extremely repetitive, often dangerous, and physically exhausting. Maladroit and not physically strong, subject to frequent migraine headaches that the noise of the factory made excruciating, Weil found the experience almost unbearable; “I came near to being broken,” she wrote of it. Her “Factory Journal,” the notebook in which she entered an almost daily record of her eight and a half months as a factory worker, is larded with the actual pointless, mindless detail of this life; it is full of computations of pieces made, rates of speed achieved, attempts (sometimes incorrect) to calculate her hours and meager earnings; it boils over with her frustration with the timekeeping system, with her anxiety at failing to make the rate, and with her impotent rage at the way she was treated. It also conveys a sense of the intense psychological reality of factory life that is largely missing from her later letters and essays on the subject.

Weil had long felt, she wrote early in 1935, that in a factory one should make a hard but joyous contact with “real life.”² Ideally, a factory would be an environment in which one did the sort of work she described in “Science and Perception in Descartes”—work through which the workers exercised their minds correctly and came to know both the world and their own true natures as thinking and active beings. Though obviously she did not expect to find this ideal when she entered the factory, what she found was far worse than anything she had imagined. In order to make the minimum rate and not be fired she had to turn herself into an automaton who neither thought nor felt, who mindlessly and rapidly produced so-and-so many hundreds of pieces per hour. She found the experience not only morally and physically painful but also completely dehumanizing. Everything conspired to turn the worker into nothing more than a beast of burden. To remain conscious—a thinking being—in those circumstances was unbearably painful.

Weil had been aware before she entered the factory that the organization of production was by its very structure oppressive. In her 1934 essay “Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” she had argued that if the proletarian revolution is to have any meaning, it is the system of relations in production that must be changed—the system in which one group gives orders and another carries them out—and not simply the capitalist ownership of the means of production. But what had been an intellectual awareness was given a more profound dimension by her actual experience in the factory; what she had not known before—and what marked her, she said, for life—was the experience of being treated as a slave, of being submerged in an environment in which she did not count, was given no respect, was regarded as having no rights at all, and as a result of which she came, finally, to feel that she was not entitled to be treated otherwise. Intellectually, she concluded from this experience that working conditions that constantly humiliate and degrade workers and destroy their sense of having any value will never produce a working class capable of revolution. There were, she observed in the factory, no revolutionary feelings at all among the workers; the idea of resistance, she wrote, “never occurs to anyone.” She also saw that economic inequality alone was an inadequate explanation of the problem of oppression; the factory gave her the first glimpse of the fact that, however much economic inequality was a contributing factor, oppression was essentially maintained by the systematic humiliation and the instilling of a sense of inferiority in the oppressed. What she learned in the factory contributed to her later understanding that, as she would write in her 1943 essay “Human Personality,” a truly nonoppressive political system would have to start from a real recognition of the respect due every human soul.

Perhaps even more important than the intellectual conclusions she drew from her factory experience were its psychological effects on her. When she attempted to describe it in letters to friends, she found it inexpressible; she became almost inarticulate and could only sum it up in such generalities as “it’s inhuman.” She obviously tried very hard—in her letters the following year to the manager of the Rosières foundry at Bourges and in her 1942 essay “Factory Work”—to convey the profound and important psychological effects of working conditions upon the worker. To judge from the general response to these writings, she did not succeed; most of those who have commented on her experience have tended to explain her response as completely atypical, due to her temperament, her awkwardness, her oversensitivity, and so on, and to see her description of herself as a slave, as someone permanently marked with the brand of slavery, as a romantic and perhaps slightly hysterical exaggeration. In short, the truth of her experience has tended to be dismissed.

Although what she is trying to say comes across more clearly in her “Factory Journal” than elsewhere, it is, indeed, very hard to hear, because it describes an experience of deep psychological wounding against which one habitually and instinctively protects oneself, an experience that it is impossible to fully appreciate on an intellectual level alone. The psychological suffering Weil underwent in the factory—a suffering that she made every effort to remain conscious of and not to flee from—unquestionably affected her very soul and brought about her real entry into the community of human suffering. From being a dedicated worker on behalf of the oppressed she became one of them and one with them.

The factory experience was a watershed in Weil’s life. It was her first profound contact with affliction (a central concept in her later religious writing), especially with the aspect of social degradation that she considered such an important part of the totality of affliction. It led directly to her understanding, later expressed in her moving essay on the Iliad, that “the sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love.”³ It was, finally, of major importance in her receptivity to Christianity. Having been brought to a condition in which she considered herself a slave, while traveling in Portugal a month or so after leaving the factory she came upon a group of Portuguese fishermen’s wives carrying candles in a religious procession and singing “ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness.” Describing this incident later, she wrote, “the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”⁴

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¹ Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 1976), pp. 211, 212, 227.

² Simone Weil, Seventy Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 20.

³ The Iliad, or The Poem of Force (Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill, 1956), p. 34.

⁴ Waiting for God (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1973), p. 67.

Factory Journal

¹

Not only should man know what he is making, but if possible he should used—see how nature is changed by him. Every man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him.

FIRST WEEK

Started work Tuesday December 4, 1934.

Tuesday. 3 hrs. of work in the course of the day. Beginning of the morning, 1 hr. of drilling (Catsous).

End of the morning, 1 hr. at the stamping press with Jacquot (that’s where I met the warehouse keeper). End of the afternoon: ¾ hr. turning a crank to help make cardboards (with Dubois).

Wednesday morning. Fly-press the whole morning, with some periods of no work. Done without hurrying, consequently without fatigue. Didn’t make the rate!²

From 3 to 4, easy work at the stamping press; .70 per hundred. Still didn’t make the rate.

To 4:45: machine with buttons.

Thursday morning. Machine with buttons; .56 per hundred (should be .72). 1,160 in the whole morning—very difficult.

Afternoon. Power failure. Waited from 1:15 to 3 o’clock. Left at 3.

Friday. Right-angle pieces, at the stamping press (tool only supposed to accentuate the right angle). 100 pieces botched (crushed, because the screw came loose).

From 11 A.M. on, handwork: removing cardboards from an assembly that t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Science and Perception in Descartes
• Science and Perception in Descartes
• The Situation in Germany
• Factory Journal
• War and Peace
• Philosophy