Simone Weil
1909-1943 · French · Religious Philosophy, Mysticism, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Labour
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
A brilliant young philosophy teacher who took unpaid leave to work the assembly lines at Renault, fought briefly with anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and starved herself in solidarity with occupied France — Simone Weil lived her thought to a degree few thinkers ever have. Born in Paris in 1909 to a secular Jewish family, sister of the great mathematician André Weil, she moved from revolutionary trade-union politics toward a heterodox Christianity she embraced without ever accepting baptism, choosing to remain at the threshold of the Church. She died in England in 1943, age 34, her body…
Topics Simone Weil addresses
- attention
- affliction
- decreation
- gravity and grace
- the void
- necessity
- the impersonal
- the love of God
- the absent God
- waiting on God
- the implicit love of God
- force
- reading
- the sacred in every human being
- critique of rights
- obligations
- the need for roots
- uprootedness
- supernatural
- beauty as the order of the world
- contradiction as method
- mystery
- obedience to necessity
- factory work and the workers' condition
Questions to put to Simone Weil
Attention, Reading, and the Work of the Soul
- What do you mean by attention, and how is it different from concentration?
- How does attention relate to prayer and to intellectual work like mathematics?
- Why do you say attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity?
- What's the spiritual value of school studies if not the knowledge they give us?
- How do I actually practice attention in everyday life?
Affliction, Decreation, and the Void
- What's the difference between affliction and ordinary suffering?
- What do you mean by decreation, and how is it not just self-destruction?
- Why does the soul need to consent to the void instead of filling it?
- How do gravity and grace work as spiritual forces in the soul?
- Isn't decreation just a philosophical name for self-hatred or masochism?
The Absent God and Christ Crucified
- Why do you say God absents Himself from creation?
- How does divine self-withdrawal solve the problem of evil?
- What's at stake for you in the Crucifixion as opposed to the Resurrection?
- Why is Christ's cry of dereliction on the cross so central to your thought?
- How can an absent God still be a loving God?
Force, the Iliad, and the Moral Structure of War
- What do you mean when you say force turns persons into things?
- How does force degrade the one who wields it as much as the one who suffers it?
- Why is the Iliad the great poem of force for you?
- Does your analysis of force mean you're a pacifist?
- How can force ever be used justly if it always degrades those who use it?
The Impersonal Sacred and the Critique of Rights
- What's sacred in every human being if not their personhood or rights?
- Why do you think obligations are more fundamental than rights?
- How is your view different from the human rights tradition that grew out of the war?
- What's wrong with Jacques Maritain's personalism?
- Can the impersonal-and-sacred ground a real politics, or is it too mystical?
Rootedness, Uprootedness, and the Workers' Condition
- What do you mean by the need for roots?
- What did you learn from your year working in the factories?
- How does modern industrial labour uproot workers from genuine community?
- Isn't the call for rootedness just nostalgia for a vanished past?
- What obligations does the state owe to workers and communities?
Converse with Simone Weil on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Simone Weil's own writing, cited to the page.