Simone Weil (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

On August 24, 1943, Simone Weil, French philosopher and social activist, died (b. 1909). From the article:

"Simone Weil (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Simone Weil
First published Sat Mar 10, 2018
Simone Weil (1909–1943) philosophized on thresholds and across borders. Her persistent desire for truth and justice led her to both elite academies and factory floors, political praxis and spiritual solitude. At different times she was an activist, a pacifist, a militant, a mystic, and an exile; but throughout, in her inquiry into reality and orientation to the good, she remained a philosopher. Her oeuvre features deliberate contradiction yet demonstrates remarkable clarity. It is value centered and integrated but not systematic. It contains scattered notes of her translations of and commentaries on several ancient Greek texts, Pythagorean geometry formulae, and detailed accounts of her daily tasks within a factory; but her oeuvre is also composed of addresses to political, industrial, and religious leaders as well as pieces intended for university students, radical militants, industrial workers, and farm laborers. In both her life and her thought—itself an unstable distinction with respect to Weil—she is a philosopher of margins and paradoxes. In part because Weil’s thought defies categorization, the ways in which her ideas are taken up often say as much about her commentator as they do about her. She was taken as a prototype for Albert Camus’s révoltés and praised by André Gide as “the patron saint of all outsiders”. Giorgio Agamben described her conscience as “the most lucid of our times”, and Hannah Arendt claimed that perhaps only Weil treated the subject of labor “without prejudice and sentimentality”. Maurice Blanchot described Weil as an “exceptional figure” who offers “an example of certitude” in the modern world, and Iris Murdoch wrote of “a profoundly disciplined life behind her writings” that gave “an authority which cannot be imitated”. But Weil was also criticized by Leon Trotsky as a “melancholy revolutionary” and disparaged as “crazy” by Charles de Gaulle. These remarks, however, betray an irony of which Weil was well aware and about which she was deeply concerned near the end of her life, namely, that her person would be considered more than her thought. By categorically focusing on the philosophical concepts Weil articulated and developed, this entry attempts to present her philosophy while speaking to her concern.

Following Weil’s philosophical development, her central concepts are addressed under five categories: social-political philosophy, epistemology, ethics, metaphysical and religious philosophy, and aesthetics. The periodization employed is as follows: 1925–1934 (early), 1935–1939 (middle), 1939–1943 (late). It is important to note that, given Weil’s rejection of systematicity and development of concepts, these categories and periods introduce a degree of artifice into her thought. The conclusion of this entry reports on her reception among the Continental and Anglo-American traditions of philosophy.

1. Philosophical Development
Simone Weil was born in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her parents, both of whom came from Jewish families, provided her with an assimilated, secular, bourgeois French childhood both cultured and comfortable. Both Weil and her older brother André—himself a math prodigy, founder of the Bourbaki group, and a distinguished mathematician at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study—studied at prestigious Parisian schools. Weil’s first philosophy teacher, at the Lycée Victor-Duruy, was René Le Senne; it was he who introduced her to the thesis—which she would maintain—that contradiction is a theoretical obstacle generative of nuanced, alert thinking. Beginning in October 1925, Weil studied at Henri IV Lycée in preparation for the entrance exams of the École Normale Supérieure. At Henri IV she studied under the philosopher and essayist Émile-Auguste Chartier (known pseudonymously as Alain), whose teacher was Jules Lageneau. Like Weil at this time, Alain was agnostic. In his classes he emphasized intellectual history: in philosophy this included Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, and in literature, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Already sympathetic with the downtrodden and critical of French society, she gained the theoretical tools to levy critiques against her country and philosophical tradition in Alain’s class. There, employing paradox and attention through the form of the essay (it is important to note that none of her writings was published as a book in her lifetime), she began intentionally developing what would become her distinct mode of philosophizing. It is therefore arguable that she is part of the Alain/Lagneau line of voluntarist, spiritueliste philosophy in France.

In 1928 Weil began her studies at the École Normale. She was the only woman in her class, the first woman having been first admitted in 1917. In 1929–1930 she worked on her dissertation on knowledge and perception in Descartes, and having received her agrégation diploma, she served from late 1931 to mid-1934 as a teacher at lycées. Throughout this period, outside of her duties at each lycée where she instructed professionally, Weil taught philosophy to, lobbied for, and wrote on behalf of workers’ groups; at times, moreover, she herself joined in manual labor. In her early thinking she prized at once the first-person perspective and radical skepticism of Descartes, the class-based solidarity and materialist analysis of Marx, and the moral absolutism and respect for the individual of Kant. Drawing from each, her early work can be read as an attempt to provide, with a view toward liberty, her own analysis of the fundamental causes of oppression in society.

In early August 1932, Weil travelled to Germany in order to understand better the conditions fostering Nazism. German trade unions, she wrote to friends upon her return to France, were the single force in Germany able to generate a revolution, but they were fully reformist. Long periods of unemployment left many Germans without energy or esteem. At best, she observed frankly, they could serve as a kind of dead weight in a revolution. More specifically, by early 1933 Weil criticized the tendency of social organizations to engender bureaucracy, which elevated management and collective thinking over and against the individual worker. Against this tendency, she advocated for workers’ understanding the physical labor they performed within the context of the whole organizational apparatus. In “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934), Weil presented both a summation of her early thought and a prefiguring of central elements in her thematic trajectory. The essay employs a Marxian method of analysis that pays attention to the oppressed, critiques her own position as an intellectual, privileges manual labor, and demands precise and unorthodox individual thinking that unites theory and practice against collective clichés, propaganda, obfuscation, and hyper-specialization. These ideas would provide a theoretical framework for her idiosyncratic practice of philosophy. Near the end of her life she wrote in a notebook: “Philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) is exclusively an affair of action and practice” (FLN 362).

On 20 June, 1934, Weil applied for a sabbatical from teaching. She was to spend a year working in Parisian factories as part of its most oppressed group, unskilled female laborers. Weil’s “year of factory work” (which amounted, in actuality, to around 24 weeks of laboring) was not only important in the development of her political philosophy but can also be seen as a turning point in her slow religious evolution.

In Paris’s factories, Weil began to see and to comprehend firsthand the normalization of brutality in modern industry. There, she wrote in her “Factory Journal”, “[t]ime was an intolerable burden” (FW 225) as modern factory work comprised two elements principally: orders from superiors and, relatedly, increased speeds of production. While the factory managers continued to demand more, both fatigue and thinking (itself less likely under such conditions) slowed work. As a result, Weil felt dehumanized. Phenomenologically, her factory experience was less one of physical suffering per se, and more one of humiliation. Weil was surprised that this humiliation produced not rebellion but rather fatigue, docility. She described her experience in factories as a kind of “slavery”. On a trip to Portugal in August 1935, upon watching a procession to honor the patron saint of fishing villagers, she had her first major contact with Christianity and wrote that

the conviction was suddenly borne in upon [her] that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and [she] among others. (1942 “Spiritual Autobiography” in WFG 21–38, 26)

In comparison with her pre-factory “Testament”, we see that in her “Factory Journal” Weil maintains the language of liberty, but she moves terminologically from “oppression” to “humiliation” and “affliction”. Thus her conception and description of suffering thickened and became more personal at this time.

Weil participated in the 1936 Paris factory occupations and, moreover, planned on returning to factory work. Her trajectory shifted, however, with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. Critical of both civil and international war, on the level of geopolitics, she approved of France’s decision not to intervene on the Republican side. On the level of individual commitment, however, she obtained journalist’s credentials and joined an international anarchist brigade. On 20 August, 1936, Weil, clumsy and nearsighted, stepped in a pot of boiling oil, severely burning her lower left leg and instep. Only her parents could persuade her not to return to combat. By late 1936 Weil wrote against French colonization of Indochina, and by early 1937 she argued against French claims to Morocco and Tunisia. In April 1937 she travelled to Italy. Within the basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli, inside the small twelfth-century Romanesque chapel where St. Francis prayed, Weil had her second significant contact with Christianity. As she would later describe in a letter, “[S]omething stronger than I compelled me for the first time to go down on my knees” (WFG 26).

From 1937–1938 Weil revisited her Marxian commitments, arguing that there is a central contradiction in Marx’s thought: although she adhered to his method of analysis and demonstration that the modern state is inherently oppressive—being that it is composed of the army, police, and bureaucracy—she continued to reject any positing of revolution as immanent or determined. Indeed, in Weil’s middle period, Marx’s confidence in history seemed to her a worse ground for judgment than Machiavelli’s emphasis on contingency.

During the week of Easter 1938, Weil visited the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes from Palm Sunday to the following Tuesday. At Solesmes she had her third contact with Christianity: suffering from headaches, Weil found a joy so pure in Gregorian chant that, by analogy, she gained an understanding

of the possibility of living divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the passion of Christ entered into [her] being once and for all. (WFG 26)

At Solesmes, she was also introduced to the seventeenth century poet George Herbert by a young Englishman she met there. She claimed to feel Christ’s presence while reciting Herbert’s poem “Love”. As she fixed her full attention on the poem while suffering from her most intense headache, Weil came to see that her recitation had the virtue of prayer, saying, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me” (WFG 27). Importantly, she thought God “in his mercy” had prevented her from reading the mystics until that point; therefore, she could not say that she invented her unexpected contact with Christ (WFG 27). These events and writings in 1936–1938 exemplify the mutually informing nature of solidarity and spirituality in Weil’s thought that began in August 1935.

After the military alliance of Germany and Italy in May 1939, Weil renounced her pacifism. It was not that she felt she was wrong in holding such a position before, but now, she argued, France was no longer strong enough to remain generous or merely defensive. Following the German Western offensive, she left Paris with her family in June 1940, on the last train. They settled eventually but temporarily in Marseilles, at the time the main gathering point for those attempting to flee France, and where Weil would work with the Resistance.

In Vichy France Weil took up a practice she had long sought, namely, to apprentice herself to the life of agricultural laborers. In addition, in Marseilles she was introduced to the Dominican priest Joseph-Marie Perrin, who became a close friend as well as a spiritual interlocutor, and through whom she began to consider the question of baptism. In an effort to help Weil find a job as an agricultural laborer, Perrin turned to his friend Gustave Thibon, a Catholic writer who owned a farm in the Ardéche region. Thus in Fall 1941 Weil worked in the grape harvest. Importantly, however, she was not treated like the rest of the laborers; although she worked a full eight hours per day, she resided and ate at the house of her employers. It is said that she carried Plato’s Symposium with her in the vineyards and attempted to teach the text to her fellow laborers.

In 1942 Weil agreed to leave France in part so her parents would be in a safe place (they would not leave without her, she knew), but principally because she thought she might be more useful for France’s war effort if she were in another country. Thus she went to New York via Morocco. In New York, as in Marseilles, she filled notebook after notebook with philosophical, theological, and mathematical considerations. New York, however, felt removed from the sufferings of her native France; the Free French movement in London felt one step closer to returning to France. In 1943 Weil was given a small office at 19 Hill Street in London. From this room she would write day and night for the next four months, sleeping around three hours each night. Her output in this period totaled around 800 printed pages, but she resigned from the Free French movement in late July (Pétrement 1973 [1976: xx]).

Weil died Tuesday, 24 August 1943. Three days later, the coroner pronounced her death a suicide—cardiac failure from self-starvation and tuberculosis. The accounts provided by her biographers tell a more complex story: Weil was aware that her fellow country-men and women in the occupied territory had to live on minimal food rations at this time, and she had insisted on the same for herself, which exacerbated her physical illness (Von der Ruhr 2006: 18). On 30 August she was buried at Ashford’s New Cemetery between the Jewish and the Catholic sections. Her grave was originally anonymous. For fifteen years Ashford residents thought it was a pauper’s."