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Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s.

I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis.

No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves.

Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

Susan Sontag "Simone Weil," http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1963/feb/01/simone-weil/?pagination=false

"It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr. "

Susan Sontag, "Simone Weil"

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

What kinds of needs do all people have?

What is an obligation?

What is a right?

"A man left alone in the world would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations." NR 4

Obligations

  • the human as such is the object of obligations
  • not based on circumstances/situations
  • not based on convention
  • eternal
  • unconditional
  • without foundation

"... nobody is of the opinion that any man is innocent if, possessing food himself in abundance and finding some one at his doorstep three parts dead from hunger, he brushes past without giving him anything....this obligation is the most obvious of all." NR 6

Is a society possible where no one ever has to chose between conflicting obligations?

Can rules instill a more robust sense of liberty than anarchy?

What does obedience without fear look like?

What contribution do you want to make through your work? Does it resemble what Weil discusses? Should it?

Weil suggests two kinds of inequality: social class and competition. Are there other kinds of inequalities? What do they do to society/the individual?

What's the process by which every person "Can fit himself morally into the place he occupies"?

What does it feel like to belong to something?

How is punishment an honor?

How is fear a moral poison?

Do we face real risks in our society?

What would be different if people owned land and grew their own food?

Is there any real connection between money and property?

What might Weil say about our current media?

What would the USA look like if the people who ran it loved truth?

Weil's Life

Simone Weil,

"The Need for Roots"

Born February 3 1909, Paris, France – died August 24 1943, Ashford, Kent, England

  • Raised by secular Jewish parents in Paris
  • read Greek by age 12
  • at 5 refused sugar because Fr. soldiers of WWI
  • at 10 told her parents she was a Bolshevik
  • by college she was critiquing Marxism
  • attended the Sorbonne (with de Beauvoir & Sartre)

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

  • taught Secondary School between 1931-38 in Le Puy and Roanne
  • at the same time taught free classes to factory workers and laborers
  • gave much of her salary to aid them in their economic struggles
  • worked as an auto factory laborer between 1934-35

Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:

"She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up.

"A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world.

"I managed to get near her one day. I don't know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: 'It's easy to see you've never been hungry,' she snapped."

Arrested twice for protesting the refusal of the French Govt. to employ Jews

Went to Spain in 1936-7 to fight on the anarchist's side of the Spanish Civil War

  • during training she stepped in boiling oil and had to leave the effort

The Need for Roots

While recovering, Weil had a mystical experience

  • Jewish-Christian-gnostic-humanist-humanitarian-pro-labor-ex-marxist-anti-dogmatic-ascetic-mystic-saint-hero-nut-job?

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”

Simone Weil

  • written at the end of Weil's life
  • she had left France with her family when Hitler took power of France
  • went from US to England to work with de Gaul and the French Resistance
  • written with the war, colonialism, and work/technology issues in mind

The Needs of the Soul

Obligations and Rights

order and liberty

truth and freedom of opinion

The need for consistency and lack of contradiction between obligations vs. the need to be able to choose freely

complete honesty of the press, a sacred need of the intellect v. unlimited freedom of expression that always encourages pursuit of the Good

Are human beings intrinsically valuable?

What's the difference between needs and wants?

obedience and responsibility

consent to obey rules and those who enforce them vs. the need to feel useful, to feel the worth of work, and the possibility of being in authority

private and collective property

surrounded by objects that feel like an extension of oneself v. feeling of ownership of collective possessions

The Needs of the Soul

  • order and liberty
  • obedience and responsibility
  • equality and hierarchism
  • honor and punishment
  • security and risk
  • private and collective property
  • truth and freedom of opinion

equality and hierarchism

Same consideration and respect due every person, equality of opportunity, education and status v. veneration of leaders as symbols that lead to all morally fitting the place s/he is in

Why does Weil create these pairings?

How is it similar to and different from Aristotle?

Why do collectivities deserve respect according to Weil?

Do they deserve the same respect as humans?

What are the physical needs of humans?

What are the needs of the soul?

security and risk

freedom from fear and terror v. danger that instills courage

honor and punishment

belonging to, being part of and contributing to a "tradition" v. bringing a person outside back inside the law

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