This Year, I Became A Fan Of Simon Weil

I recently bought her book Waiting for God but yet to read it. 

I heard of Simon Weil only this year (never too late) and I am already a big fan. 

Wolfram Eilenberger has a wonderful introduction to her philosophy: 

“It is plainly easier to kill and even to die,” she wrote, “than to ask the only genuinely simple questions such as this: do the laws, the conventions that govern economic life at present form a system?” This remains a vital question. What would become of the credibility of the texts written by activists – left or right – denouncing “the system” if they were subjected to the same serious self-examination that Weil brought to her own work and those of her comrades?

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Weil was convinced that in the depths of our existence, it is not concepts and arguments that define us as moral beings, but concrete experiences. This is what explains her commitment as an anti-Stalinist trade unionist, a factory worker in Paris, a refugee aid worker in Marseille, a volunteer in Spain, a fiery anti-colonialist, and then a member of the French Resistance. More significantly, for Weil, we are beings moved to action not, in the first instance, by concepts but by forces beyond ourselves: experiences of suffering, love, profound insight or disturbance, whose origins Weil did not shy away from calling transcendent, even divine.

Weil believed that true awakening can be achieved only when we find within ourselves the necessary stillness, the necessary weakness, to move on from the world of conceptual thought.

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Under the oppressive totalitarian conditions of the 1930s and 1940s in which Weil honed her thinking, she warned against the use of the word “we”, as well as any discourse in which the interests of “society” (which Weil also called the “Great Beast”) are mobilised for the ultimate legitimation of any kind of political measures. Weil saw this as just one more form of infantilising idolatry:

“For in society the individual is infinitely small… The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only substitute for God, the only imitation of an object which is infinitely far from me and which is myself.”

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It was simply that for Weil the path of philosophy was one of clarifying self-transformation and everyday presence of mind. That she most impressively embodied what the specialist industry of academic philosophy, revolving in ever-decreasing, ever more reproachful circles, is not, and plainly has no intention of being in future: a courageous and uncompromising pursuit of wisdom; feeling for a way out of self-induced immaturity in a dark time.

It is all still true: Simone Weil is the embodiment of a philosophical awakening whose full effects remain to be assessed.