Modern Classics Simone Weil An Anthology by Simone Weil

by Simone Weil

Philosopher, theologian, critic, sociologist, political activist -- Simone Weil was among the foremost thinkers of our time. Best known in this country for her theological writing, Weil wrote on a great variety of subjects ranging from classical philosophy and poetry, to modern labor, to the language of political discourse. The present anthology offers a generous collection of her work, including essays never before translated into English and many that have long been out of print. It amply confirms Elizabeth Hardwick's words that Simone Weil was "one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France" and "a woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning." A longtime Weil scholar, Sian Miles has selected essays representative of the wide sweep of Weil's work and provides a superb introduction that places Weil's work in context of her life and times.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays, Religion, Politics, Theology, Spirituality

Paperback Bunko

First published September 1, 1986

About the author

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Mad. reading her is like being confronted by some prophet newly touched by god, at one moment incredible, the next, I want to throw stones at her so she'll go away.

Perhaps she is simply not for me, or more interesting to read about than to read. This anthology consists of a few essays interspersed with selections from Gravity and Grace. No one piece stood out as a whole to me, not even War and the Iliad which I had read before and had found, ahem, interesting, perhaps a sign, that sigh, it was not Weil, but simply me. Through I found great lines and provoking sentences, inspired and fertile, but oddly, throughout I had the feeling that there were paragraphs missing, it did not help me that she had taken from the Iliad the technique of in media res which is not quite the same when applied to an essay, the selections from gravity and grace were, it seemed to me, chunks from her notebooks in preparation for something, reading them was a bit like Pascal's Pensees, except much less interesting and without the adventurous sense of discovering someone else's thought.

In places I thought that she liked the Iliad (I am not sure why, creative misreading maybe I have a nagging feeling that creative misreading might be the key to understanding a lot about her maybe, because her pacifism makes her a very unlikely fan of the Iliad I feel and the Gospels seeing them as conjoined twins, anyway I had the feeling she was trying to yoke all the things that she liked or approved of together, the results can be a bit curious. The only other books that she mentions (repeatedly) are Moliere's L'école des femmes and Racine's Phedre. I am sure that she read other books - certainly Plato, but she does not mention any others in the pieces selected here. If you can imagine those four in a square around Plato - that is were she is coming from.

Everything comes back to religion for her, to Christianity, but I feel a kind of Christianity unique to her, I had the sense reading her that she would have liked Gandhi, she seemed similar to what little I know about him except without his habit of sleeping with naked teen-aged girls or were they younger than that ? to test his own chastity. On the whole I felt that some other religion other than Christianity, maybe Jainism might have suited her better given her dislike though is not strong enough a word of the church - effectively a nation in her view and she did not approve of nations either. She was interested in the Cathars, and perhaps that is what she aspired to be more than a Catholic, or some other tiresome conventional Christian who obeys the laws of their country and conforms and goes to war. But Christian she was - because apparently she had a revelation one day that it was the religion of slaves I don't think that she meant this in the same sense as Neitzsche not a slogan which would win the greatest number of converts I think , by heritage she was Jewish but as she wrote to the Vichy Government once they decreed restrictions on Jews in their territory 'what is a Jew?' - she never got a response. All this I know from the introduction which makes up about a fifth of the book - the editor apparently felt like me that you have to read her in the context of her biography.

I think ideally I would read more Simone Weil alongside reading a biography of her, hers was a brief life on an intense trajectory she never achieved the escape velocity necessary to get past her thirties, student, teacher, worker in a car factory, writer, farm worker, in the service of the Free French Government in London, until she died in Kent possibly of TB, possibly as a result of starving herself to death - indirectly - by refusing to eat more than her ration. She was not the kind of person to be impressed that "normal" people during the war did what they could to get extra food, or that her lifestyle - living on the sum paid out as unemployment benefit while working as teacher and giving the rest of the money away probably left her without the strategic fat reserves that less morally righteous and upstanding people have that assist a person to survive severe illness.

She does not like Human Rights or the spirit of 1789 (and from the enlightenment she seems to have liked only Rousseau, she was not a Diderot fan) because it establishes a legalistic relationship between people: "This bargaining spirit was already implicit in the notion of rights which the men of 1789 so unwisely made the keynote of their deliberate challenge to the world. By so doing they ensured its inefficacy in advance...Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at." ( "Human Personality" (pp80-81) I think this is one reason why she disliked the ancient Romans - too legalistic, and worse still the basis of their law in her opinion was property rights over people . Of course in the absence of law one requires morality, and perhaps the fear of god to ensure a just society. Political parties are bad in her view because like nation states or the church they are primarily about self preservation and self aggrandisement in her view, unions are bad because for her they divert the attention of their members away from their true injustice - the indignity of Fordist, atomised assembly line production, distracting their membership with the simpler but ultimately degrading issue of higher wages.

I imagined while reading what kind of state she might have envisioned - plainly small would be beautiful, economically it would be all about artisan and peasant production. It would be democratic but under a constitutional monarch (because the human soul apparently needs hierarchy and obedience), however there would be no political parties, I see something like Athenian democracy - you can see why she liked Rousseau - (but with a King she only talks about men - whether this is a feature of the translations or of her thought, or shockingly the conventions since she does not come across as a conventional person of the French language I dare not guess there would also be a very special court to hear cases of about non-fiction books in which the author had written something untrue - for such a crime the writer should go to prison in her opinion. She is particularly enraged by a man who wrote that no significant ancient Greek ever spoke out against slavery, this she considers a vile calumny against a civilisation and decides that since Aristotle declared that some people disprove of slavery, that it is conceivable that among those unnamed 'some people' there was at least one significant ancient Greek and therefore such a nasty, horrible man who insulted her beloved ancient Greeks ought to go to prison and be punished, as only through physical chastisement (that one accepts as just) can one, she believes, begin to reintegrate with society: "Whenever a human being, though the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering" ("Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations" (p.229). So she is essentially Dostoevsky but without the Russian nationalism, I could picture her as his grand Inquisitor sentencing people to be burnt to death at the stake for their own good and with tears in her eyes convincing those who were about to die that she was right.

At the same time she feels for the suffering of others, not just physically but the psychological aspect of structural inequalities and it's sociological consequences "The recognition of Human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man in something (p.236), "those who most often have occasion to feel that evil is being done to them are those least trained in speech" ("Human Personality" p.73) , her sense of the joys of work and friendship a manifestation of the mystery of the Trinity, in her view is striking and inspiring.

Noticing that ancient Greek slavery did not trouble her when the slavery of ancient Rome is so offensive to her, I feel that she was a passionate person and her likes and dislikes trumped her system in her thinking, then again, she died young and did not use her time alive to create a system of thought, she was more of an activist.

My impression is that the mainstream of the European centre right moved to be in step with her for thirty or so years after the end of WWII in seeking societies that were hierarchical, but which sought to be more socially inclusive, even though she started out on the political left.

I heard of Freud's 'the narcissism of small differences' and that reminded me of Weil again and her condemnation of war, so she is still here, working away in my imagination.

[Kamili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered about God? Yeah, me neither. But this book is still good.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection that more people on goodreads should read. Weil really deserves to be as popular as the other 19th/20th century moralist-essayist-thinkers who left incomplete or fragmented works behind them (think: Nietzsche, Benjamin), but she has the real disadvantage of just saying what she means in a clear, concise way, rather than leaving thousands of hermeneutical puzzles for us to work through.

Not everything in here is perfect, of course, but the long essays, in particular, are great. 'Human Personality' suggests an alternative to human rights discourse, focusing more on justice and duties; Weil argues that these are more fitting, and I tend to agree with her. "Words like 'I have the right...' or 'you have no right to...'... evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides." "What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium."

The best thing about Weil's thought, beside her ability to deal honestly with the largest themes, is her insistent dialecticising. She doesn't describe anything negatively without putting the argument for the opposite position (except for a slightly odd knee-jerk hatred of ancient Rome). Unlike almost everyone, she balances perfectly between demanding that the material needs of human beings must be met, and demanding that their spiritual (as in Geistlich, not new-age religion) development be attended to, as well.

'The Needs of the Soul' expands on the notion of obligations, and tries to suggest exactly what human beings need in order to be human. In short, Weil thinks: order, liberty (note, again, the dialectic here), obedience ("the men of our time have now for a long time been starved of obedience. But advantage has been taken of the fact to give them slavery"), responsibility, equality, hierarchism, social honour, punishment, freedom of opinion (but also censorship. "There has been a lot of freedom of thought over the past few years, but not thought"), security, risk, private property ("the principle of private property is violated where the land is worked by agricultural labourers and farm-hands under the orders of an estate-manager, and owned by townsmen who receive the profits"), collective property, and truth. Only in the case of truth is her analysis obviously flawed.

'Analysis of Oppression' has a valuable aim--to analyze oppression as concept, rather than the various kinds of oppression--but never even gets started on the task; Weil spends her time describing, e.g., Marx's analysis of capitalist oppression and trying to see how it can be used in a more general account, but that's as far as she gets.

Finally, her essay on the Iliad is solid, though perhaps wish-fulfilling rather than accurate, and 'The Power of Words' is a wonderful analysis of reification in language.

Thought-provoking stuff, clear, and full of great aphoristic turns. Highly recommended, provided you're not a militant atheist.

[muthuvel · Rating 5 out of 5]

When she died of heart failure early at the age of 34 by August 1943, the coroner’s report concluded that she “did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”

Camus got to find the manuscripts of Weil around 1948 and it deeply influenced his ways of thinking and writing ever since until his own untimely death. His Essay Rebel (1951) felt, in a personal way, more like answering to Weil's argument on Justice and Freedom, Oppression, Revolt and Rebellion while reading her essays. He called her, 'the only great spirit of our time.' Many of her writings were indeed copied in his personal notebooks.

She studied with Beauvoir and other french intellectuals and later, taught geometry and philosophy to Uni students, and Greek tragedy to industrial workers. She organized French pacifist movements but also carried a gun alongside republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Despite her rich scholarly knowledge in Greek, Latin, English and German, she toiled herself in the assembly line factories until her death.

I feel that to try to genuinely understand Weil in her own way, one has to see the presence of two realities, similar to Plato's conception, material world and mystical world dominated respectively by science, geometry, and her own ground of metaphysical affliction and suffering, the beauty of justice.

This particular anthology has almost half of his contents from Gravity and Grace (1947), selected excerpts from the Needs for Roots (1949) and other political and metaphysical essays. As much as I enjoyed reading it, I would've enjoyed it better taking up one of her original works since the collections are anachronistically picked and felt a bit harder to reconcile.

Simone Weil is a enigmatic powerful force I write it with a provoked consciousness grateful for the enormous expansion in the possibilities of being in our times despite her contradictions. They say to be whole is to be full of contradiction.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way Simone Weil thinks, which naturally may bias my review. The collection of essays, including one of her most powerful, in my opinion: "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force." Is also included. She was truly a mind ahead of her time, and though and though the anthology spans only 278 pages, it takes quite a bit of time to read on account of the contemplation that is necessary when reading her work. I wish more of her work was available (on a budget) in translation. The topics covered in the book cover almost the full gamut of human existence, love, friendship, chance, personality, oppression, various 'isms' of her time, the dignity of labor, and a few particular topics she continually returns to: affliction, suffering, 'Amor Fati,' and the dignity of labor. She was no mere intellectual in an ivory tower, she explored the working class life herself despite her handicaps, in the process perhaps raising more questions than 'easy answers.' The prose is beautiful and I marked up my copy of the book greatly due to especially compelling passages. It is highly recommended if you are interested in the human condition, the connection to the divine, the unfortunate inevitability of oppression in 'civilized society,' and Weil's formula for supposedly overcoming these harsh facts of life. You won't find much comfort in her theological views if you think belief in God entitles you to a good and painless life, on the contrary, you life will be filled with challenge and obligation impossible to fulfill. I wish I had someone to talk about such things in the area in which I live.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A kind of genius akin to that of a saint." T. S. Eliot
"Weil was the only great spirit of our time." Albert Camus

"One of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France...a woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning." Barbara Hardwick

Selected Contents:

Human Personality
The Self
The Needs of the Soul
The Power of Words
The Iliad or the Poem of Force
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations
Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour

[Abeer · Rating 3 out of 5]

لا قيمة للقانون مجرداً لأن قيمته ترتبط دائماً بالواجب الذي يسعى إلى تحقيقه والغاية من الواجب في مجال الأشياء الإنسانية هي الإنسان في حد ذاته لأن هناك واجباً نحو كل إنسان لمجرد أنه كائن إنساني...
لم تجر العادة على أن تغزو الأفكار العلمية الكبيرة العالم مايحصل في الأعم الأغلب هو أن خصوم فكرة جديدة ينتهي بهم الأمر إلى الموت وأن الجيل الصاعد يتأقلم عليها وهكذا تختفي النظريات العلمية على طريقة الأزياء الرجالية في القرن السابع عشر من يتأمل هذه العبارات جيداً لن يقول أبداً "يؤكد العلم أنّ.." فالعلم صامت والعلماء هم الذين يتكلمون....
إن الإناس الذين ينصب انتباههم و إيمانهم وحبهم بصورة حصرية تقريباً على المظهر اللاشخصي لله ليس إلا يؤمنون بأنفسهم ويقولون عن أنفسهم إنهم ملحدون على الرغم من أن الحب الفائق يسكن أرواحهم هؤلاء يخلصون حقاً يعرفون من موقفهم إزاء الأمور في هذه الدنيا فجميع الذين يمتلكون الحب الصافي للقريب ويقبلون نظام العالم بما في ذلك المصيبة جميع هؤلاء حتى و إن عاشوا ملحدين ظاهرياً يخلصون بالتأكيد إن هؤلاء الذين يمتلكون تماماً هاتين الفضيلتين حتى وإن عاشوا وماتوا ملحدين هم قديسون عندما نلتقي بمثل هؤلاء فلا جدوى من هدايتهم إنهم هداة مهديون وإن لم يكن ذلك مرئياً إنهم مولودون من جديد بالماء والروح حتى وإن لم يشاركوا أبداً في المناولة...
لو افترضنا عبثاً أنني مت دون أن ارتكب أية خطيئة كبيرة وسقطت مع ذلك في الدرك الأسفل من جهنم مباشرة فسأكون مدينه لله مع ذلك بفضل لا حد له وهو رحمته اللانهائية بأن وهبني الحياة الأرضية....
مذهب اللأدرية : مذهب فلسفي يرى أن كل مالايمكن اختياره لاتمكن معرفته فهو لا يعترف بالماورائيات.....
تعمدت اقتراض الفعل الفرنسي فبرك اقتراضاً معرباً نظراً لأنه أولاً ينقل المعنى بأمانة ولجريه على ألسنة العامة وتوافقه مع أوزان الفعل العربي الرباعي المجرد ولانسجامه مع النظام الصوتي للعربية ونظراً لعدم وجود فعل في العربية يجمع في حقله الدلالي معاني الصنع والتزييف والتقليد والوهم معاً والفعل اختلق قريب منه لكنه يحمل معنى الافتراء والكذب فقط (fabriquer)......
البلاء فقط في نظر من عرف الفرح الصرف حتى وإن لم يكن سوى دقيقة واحدة ومن ثم طعم جمال الوجود لأنهما شيء واحد إنه في نظره فقط يكون البلاء شيئاً يتفطر له القلب في الوقت نفسه إنه وحده الذي لم يستحق هذا العقاب ولكن ذلك في نظره ليس عقاباً إن الله ذاته هو الذي يأخذ يده ويصافحها بقوة قليلاً لأنه إذا بقي مؤمناً فسوف يجد درة صمت الله في عمق صيحاته

[baolinh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It felt like I was saying goodbye to a friend when I finished reading this today.

I’ve spent almost two months slowly making my way through this collection of essays. I’ve had to enlist the help of several different people in my life to make sense of some of her writing. And I found myself laughing, moved, confused, in both agreement and disagreement all throughout this time.

Simone Weil is unparalleled; her steadfast devotion to her ideals and unflinching desire to live them is admirable but also confounding.
Her writing felt hard to follow at times — perhaps a testament to her genius or perhaps a reflection of my mental state while reading. But there are moments of clarity: where through the murkiness, one finds something deeply moving and resonant. Those moments felt special to me. Parts of Human Personality, The Illiad or the Poem of Force, and Friendship were my favorites. To me, Weil shines when she draws on the classics and when she explores more of the metaphysical and of religion, God, and the human spirit. I found her writing on worker’s rights and social movements a bit more difficult to get through but that merely is a reflection of my preferences.

This book has been a window into her life. I talked to my mom about this book before starting and her impression of Weil was that she was someone who struggled to make sense of human affliction, and that her life was spent grappling with suffering. I understand what she meant now. I felt like I saw, in much of her writing, attempts to reconcile the perhaps inherent suffering of the human condition with her ideals, be it through social or political movements and changes or through religious or spiritual means.

Some of the weaker points in this anthology were the collection of what seemed to me disjointed thoughts found perhaps in Weil’s journals or pulled from other collections. They’re connected thematically but without direction or much context, I found them much less compelling than some of the longer form work. Overall, an insightful and essential collection of essays. Would recommend as an entryway into reading more about Weil, especially given the well-written introduction.

[A. Redact · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't actually read the whole book, just the essay "Human Personality." The essay is a powerful critique of the evasion at the heart of discursively produced ethical and legal frameworks. She is specifically concerned with articulating the possibility (already present in Ancient Greek society) of a view of justice and injustice that does not necessitate an appeal to rights. Weil is not advocating that we abandon the notion of rights, or that we cease to mediate many of our most important conflicts in the court of law. She is arguing that even when we make a successful appeal to our rights or participate in a just court proceeding, we are missing something deeper and more important about what it means to be the victim of injustice.

Pleading for mercy, asking 'why are you hurting me?' and being met with cold silence is injustice. Injustice is not just getting less than someone else. It is being a vulnerable body subjected to the relentless violence of someone else. According to Weil, we get confused when we try to explain this kind of injustice in the framework of rights and their violation. Rights, according to Weil, come to us from the Romans, and they exist to make sure that we get to use and abuse our own property. For the Romans, a lot of that property, not incidentally, consisted of other human beings. Weil argues that even when the rights language gets some of the way to explaining injustice, it leaves out this core element of recognizing the pain and vulnerability, the malheur, of the other. This is how a Roman can own a slave and talk about rights in the same sentence.

She argues that even in cases of distributive justice, rights do not get us far enough. As a member of trade unions and a labor organizer, Weil's circuitous and esoteric approach to this issue confused and frustrated her allies. However, her point speaks to the same point that Marx insisted upon--if we do not change the relations of production, a higher standard of living will only go so far to ending the exploitation at the heart of our economic lives. When I organize and demand for more, I am not just demanding more money--I am demanding respect, I am demanding a response to my cry 'why are you hurting me? why is my life being stunted and wasted so you can exploit me?' Without attending to the greater injustice of our squandered lives, which a bigger paycheck or a right to equal or fair pay can never fully do, we cannot expect an end to our misery.

In a basic sense, Weil is demanding recognition. To be seen by the other and to see the other. Not as an abstract bearer of rights or an agitating union member, but as a singular, hurting individual. We hide from seeing others in this way because we don't want to see ourselves this way. As she puts it, to see others in this way means that we must admit to ourselves that, like the victim of injustice, "there is nothing that I might not lose." In the face of this statement, we're all too eager to return to the abstract level of rights.

[William West]

Simone Weil was an exceptional literary talent who asked herself foundationally profound questions. Her answers to those questions, especially later in her life, were more mystical than logical or practical. As I am a deeply a-spiritual person, the mystical response is unsatisfying, indeed suspect, to me so I am not an ideal reader of Weil. Having said that, I would characterize Weil as a writer so gifted that the quality of her prose sometimes makes her ideas sound more profound or convincing than they really are.

For someone who became fairly anti-Marxist and devoutly anti-communist, Weil’s thought finds its foundation in the same place as that of Marx: the conditions of the working class. But Weil was a spiritualist who was distrustful of any promise of Earthly succor. She thus takes aim at what I would call the most utopian interpretations of Marx (though one that I acknowledge Marx’s writings don’t actively discourage): that of “natural communism”- the idea that there is a natural, happy state of humanity that has been lost but will inevitably be regained. Rather than a utopian relationship with nature, Weil sees hunter-gatherer societies as those characterized by humanity acting under duress caused by the force of nature.

In her early piece, “Oppression and Liberty”, Weil writes that servitude-in-relation-to-force is the natural and eternal state of humanity-in-the-world. It is the nature of the force acting on humanity, always present, that determines if the force can be said to be oppressive or not. There is oppression where there is privilege. Humans become powerful enough to overcome the force of nature by oppressing it, but this only through social development complex enough to force its members into coordination.

Coordination necessitates a leadership class that by definition expect obedience by other social groups. This obedience is enforced by a monopoly of control of armaments, money, and organized religion. In other words, humanity transcends the force of nature by entering into relations of oppression between groups of different humans.

Like Marx, Weil writes that apparatuses of oppression are constantly evolving. Power must respond to its own limitations through constant expansion, and in the process sometimes creates whole new realms of power that might require the emergence of a new group, or controlling body. This results in ever more complex, diverse societies and power finds itself sometimes creating things that it no longer knows how to control. (Weil’s writings on power and its inevitable invention of apparatuses that it can no longer control leading to excess and chaos reminded me of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus” and made me wonder if Weil was not a surprising influence on that collaboration.)

The resulting chaos every once in a while brings more power to a new group than the old, dominate group, but by the time this happens the new group would have to have long been so important to society that the change in who is most powerful is barely noticeable to most of the oppressed, who consitute the majority under any system. Weil concludes in “Oppression and Liberty” that revolution in the sense used at least since the French is a myth. A true reversal of relations in power between oppressor and oppressed is a utopian impossibility. It would require that less force be more powerful than more force, or that the weak be stronger than the strong.

In her famous essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force”, written during the outbreak of WWII, Weil reiterates that subjection to force is an existential, not sociological state. While in no way a celebration of war like one might find reading Nietzsche or Sorel, Weil does suggest that war is the most naked example of the human condition. “Force” is here identified as the power that can turn a living being into a lifeless thing- a corpse. She writes that no-one, even those who can be called “oppressors” truly wield force. In the end, we are all subject to it by the simple fact that, do what we will, we are all going to die.

For those who participate in war imagining the end of war is impossible. The only imaginable end is death, even to those who live to fight another day. To be outside war, inversely, is to find the afore mentioned conditions of war incomprehensible. Those who live in peace, in other words, live in privileged ignorance. Only by acknowledging our universal subjection to force, can one hope to regard the vanquished, one’s defeated “enemy”, as comrade rather than other.

After the “Iliad” essay, Weil found herself in a transitional stage, turning ever more from questions of freedom, force, and oppression to those of spirituality and mysticism, which would dominate her later writings. She returns to the questions regarding the state of the working class in writings that ultimately see her turn away from such questions once and for all. She writes that for much of the working class labor is distasteful, even disgusting and wonders why this is so. She thinks that this disgust arrises from the ways in which the monotony of mechanized work makes a burden out of time. Weil believes that workers should make use of this disgust, acknowledge and learn from it without being crushed by it.

(It is interesting to compare and contrast Weil’s attitude towards work and necessity with that of her contemporary Hannah Arendt. Weil writes- appropriately or not- from the perspective of the working class. While neither Weil nor Arendt ultimately held out much, if any, hope for the working class to liberate itself, Weil at least felt the need to take the workers’ subjectivity into account. For Arendt, these “slaves of necessity” are the deterministic majority of humanity that drags the thinking minority down with them towards thoughtless totalitarianism.)

Weil writes that humanity, perhaps the working class in particular, have the opportunity of turning their disgust of monotony into a transcendence of the self. To have to work in order to eat, or eat only so one can continue to work is terrible. If the monotony of mechanized labor is merely a reflection of stasis than this is simply the sterilization of time and is thus horrific. However, if working-to-eat and eating-to-work are imagined as a cycle it is simply to acknowledge the Truth that is humanity-subjected-to-force. Monotony becomes beautiful when it is a reflection of eternity. Monotony not only no longer sterilizes time but indeed surpasses it. To acknowledge the cyclical horror of being is to transcend it. Indeed, for Weil, it is to find salvation!

In an uncomfortable passage, Weil writes that workers, even slaves, are in fact the luckiest amongst us for, like those who have experienced war, they have so much less to strip themselves of in order to realize the Truth of humanity-subjected-to-force, which is to say the eternal, which is to say, yes, God/ the Beautiful! Weil reveals the conservative nature of her thinking when she writes that “The Beautiful alone enables us to be satisfied by that which is,” which of course implies that this “is” is all that can ever be.

Weil goes so far as to write that workers need Beauty more even than food and that, “Religion alone can be the source of such poetry (Truth/Beauty)”. Indeed, it is revolution, rather than religion, that is the opiate of the masses. For the promise of revolution implies a (im)possibility beyond this one, Divine Truth.

At this point, I want to reiterate that I am simply not the target audience for Weil’s later writings. She becomes a spiritual mystic in search of an Absolute that I, as an atheistic relativist, simply do not subscribe to. Though even these works of Weil I found quite readable due to the beauty of her prose. While acknowledging that I am not suited to appreciate these later works I do wish to offer my subjective take on them.

Weil’s theism is rather idiosyncratic. Not only does she not believe in an all-powerful God, she goes so far as to write that God is powerless in relation to the world, or at least does not in any way intervene in the world’s affairs. She advises us humans to try to imitate God by performing only those actions which are impelled. Necessity for Weil is Holy. What, then, is absolutely necessary regarding human existence?

For Weil what is necessary, or sacred, about a human is the human-as-such, not the personality or any one aspect of any one individual. One should try to overcome the self and strive for the impersonal as much as possible. Almost all social relations, what Weil terms “the collectivity”, attend to the desires of the personal. While often thought of as having antagonistic relations, particularly in romantic and post-romantic thinking, Weil insists that the personal is ultimately a by-product of the collective. The purest (and most destructive) manifestation of the collective-personal is party politics which tries to usurp the sacred/ human with the ideological/ individual. (In this, Weil is the inversion of Arendt, for whom only the social explicator can truly be called human.) Therefor, Weil asks us to turn away from the social and towards solitude.

Only through solitude is is possible to shed the “I” and pay what Weil terms “attention” to the world, that is to say to allow the object-of-thought to penetrate thought, rather than thinking around the object. “Decreation” is another term Weil uses for the shedding of the self. One who has achieved decreation can be called a mystic, they deal not in opinions but truths. The “truth” of humanity that Weil the Mystic has ascertained is that humanity suffers even though it neither wants nor expects to. The mystic is thus obliged to try to ease the suffering of humans, but they can do so only by pointing them towards the Truth that suffering is inevitable.

Besides my status as an unbeliever in God/ Truth/ Absolute, I am suspicious of any thought that claims to fully “decreate” in Weil’s sense. Weil claims to have (subjectively) seen beyond subjectivity and to have perceived God’s Truth. God’s Truth is therefor what Weil says it is. Those who claim to have transcended the self are not so much different than the Party bosses who claim to be the servants of the natural rules of history, be those “rules” decided by the struggles between races or classes. This also applies to the line of aesthetics that took Weil as an inspiration. Writers such as Susan Sontag decry the “imperialism” of interpretation over a work of art only to insist that their interpretation is the only just or correct one.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Simone's 114th birthday would have been February 3rd. Her radiant, eventful life ended at only 34 when she perished from tuberculosis and restricted food due to a hunger strike. I keep thinking about T.S. Eliot saying Simone Weil was "more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist" (The Need for Roots, ix). It summarizes her approach and heart so succinctly. I am challenged by her statement that truth is contradiction: "Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true" (263). Weil at once exhorts us to seek utter detachment and to attain nearness to the divine through attention as a form of utmost prayer. She claims that God is our supreme reality and nothingness. In her mind, these contradictions prove true on different planes of reality, aligning through a supernatural love outside of ourselves. The crucifixion is the greatest, most powerful contradiction of all.

Her work is challenging and countercultural—fiercely visionary. Weil foresaw that petrol would become the source of wars rather than wheat, the desire for power trumping the desire to meet basic needs for all. Weil makes us contemplate the void, that which God fills. She is simultaneously utterly beyond me, as if narrating on another frequency I have to strain to hear, yet so kindred. I cannot recommend this selection of essays enough, and I have adored having scattered brief conversations with others about her work in recent weeks. Love is not consolation! It is light!

P.S. When I was waiting outside in a queue in London, a kind person asked me what I was reading. It ended up being a French girl named Gigi, and her grandmother loves Simone Weil! She herself had read Weil's essay "The Self," so I made a new friend. :')

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! Although I could not always follow Weil's train of thought in these essays, there was plenty to contemplate. Rather than writing a review, what follows are merely quotes which stood out to me:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. 51

Exactly to the same extent as art and science, though in a different way, physical labour is a certain contact with the reality, the truth, and the beauty of the universe and with the eternal wisdom which is the order of it. 60

It was from Rome that we inherited the notion of rights, and like everything else that comes from ancient Rome, who is the woman full of the names of blasphemy in the Apocalypse, it is pagan and unbaptizable. 61

Just as the notion of rights is alien to the Greek mind, so also it is alien to the Christian inspiration whenever it is pure and uncontaminated by the Roman, Hebraic, or Aristotelian heritage. One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights…. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity of both sides. 63

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell. 69

The radiance of beauty illumines affliction with the light of the spirit of justice and love, which is the only light by which human thought can confront affliction and report the truth of it… [Beauty] cries and points to truth and justice who are dumb, like a dog who barks to bring people to his master lying unconscious in the snow. 73

He... in whom the ‘I’ is quite dead is in no way embarrassed by the love which is shown him. He takes what comes just as dogs and cats receive food, warmth, and caresses, and, like them, he is eager to obtain as much as possible. As the case may be, he either attaches himself like a dog or accepts what comes to him with a certain indifference like a cat. Without the slightest scruple he absorbs all the energy of whoever tries to help him. 82

Humility consists in knowing that in what we call ‘I’ there is no source of energy by which we can rise. 83

Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists in a recognition, at once public, general, effective and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs, that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being because this respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree…. In wartime, if an army is filled with the right spirit, a soldier is proud and happy to be under fire instead of at headquarters; a general is proud and happy to think that the successful outcome of the battle depends on his thought; and at the same time the soldier admires the general and the general the soldier... Such a balance constitutes an equality. 98, 100-101

A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy. If such a democracy brings in discriminatory laws, it cuts its own throat. If it doesn’t, it is just as safe as a little bird in front of a snake. 110

… When journalism becomes indistinguishable from organized lying, it constitutes a crime. .. Circles in which ideas are discussed, and which desire to make them known, would only have a right to publish weekly, fortnightly or monthly journals. There is absolutely no need to appear more frequently in print, if one’s object is to make people think instead of stupefying them. 118, 119

Wherever, in the struggle against men or against nature, efforts need to be multiplied and coordinated to be effective, co-ordination becomes the monopoly of a few leaders as soon as it reaches a certain degree of complexity, and execution’s primary law is then obedience; this is true both for the management of public affairs and for that of private undertakings. 137

Power contains a sort of fatality which weights as pitilessly on those who command as on those who obey; nay more, it is in so far as it enslaves the former that, through their agency, it presses down upon the latter. 137

There is, in the very essence of power, a fundamental contradiction that prevents it from ever existing in the true sense of the word; those who are called the masters, ceaselessly compelled to reinforce their power for fear of seeing it snatched away from them, are forever seeking a dominion essentially impossible to attain… 139

Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men – oppressors and oppressed alike – the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels. 142

… In spite of progress, man has not emerged from the servile condition in which he found himself when he was handed over weak and naked to all the blind forces that make up the universe; it is merely that the power which keeps him on his knees has been as it were transferred from inert matter to the human society of which he is a member. 153-154.

Humanity finds itself as much the plaything of the forces of nature, in the new form that technical progress has given them, as it ever was in primitive times; we have had, are having, and will continue to have bitter experience of this. … It would seem that man is born a slave, and that servitude is his natural condition. 156-7

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry. It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people. Deprivation of this poetry explains all forms of demoralization. 160

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. 171

Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever. 205

The needs of a human being are sacred…. Any place where the needs of human beings are satisfied can be recognized by the fact that there is a flowering of fraternity, joy, beauty, and happiness. Wherever people are lonely and turned in on themselves, wherever there is sadness or ugliness, there are privations that need remedying. 206, 210

The relative security we enjoy in this age, thanks to a technology which gives us a measure of control over nature, is more than cancelled out by the dangers of destruction and massacre in conflicts between groups of men.

Conflicts with no definable objective: The whole of history bears witness that is precisely such conflicts that are the most bitter. It maybe that a clear recognition of this paradox is one of the keys to history; that it is the key to our own period there is no doubt. 219

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make ware; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one’s capacity to make war… What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it. 225

What the relation of opposites can do in the approach to the natural being, the unifying grasp of contradictory ideas can do in the approach to God. 241

The mystery of the cross of Christ lies in a contradiction, for it is both a free-will offering and a punishment which he endured in spite of himself. 243

The phrase ‘opium of the people’ which Marx used appropriately enough to describe religion when it had failed itself, applies essentially to revolution. The hope of a revolution to come satisfies a craving for adventure, of escaping from necessity, which again is a reaction against misery. 247

If a church made by human beings can be full of symbols, how much more full must the universe be. It is infinitely full of them. We must read into them. 250

[Many symbols] could be found. Symbols might also be found for those with routine non-manual jobs. For clerks, these might come from elementary arithmetic, for cashiers, from money and so forth; the stock is inexhaustible… By means of these symbols, men and women could live constantly surrounded by an atmosphere of supernatural poetry, as they did in medieval times, perhaps even better than then, for why limit hope for the good? 252

The only serious aim of schoolwork is to train the attention. Attention is the only faculty of the should which gives access to God… Pure, intuitive attention is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love one’s neighbor. This kind of attention when turned to God is true prayer. Just as symbols can enable one to think of God while one is digging or mowing, so only a method of transforming schoolwork into preparation for this superior attention would allow an adolescent solving a problem in geometry or doing a Latin translation to thin of God. 252

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

In reply to Simone de Beauvoir's suggestion that the main problem in life was not to make people happy but to discover the reason for their existence, Simone Weil said it was easy to see she had never been hungry.

It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

Each collectivity is unique. There is an obligation to preserve its roots in the past to the extent that it provides sustenance for a certain number of people. But if the collectivities themselves are not nourishing, if instead, they devour souls, there is no such obligation.

This is one of the most critically intelligent books I've read this year. The only reason why it didn't earn a fifth star or a favorite is the amount Weil relies on Christian conceptions of ethics and spirituality to forward her points, as it will do no one any good in a world that will ideally continue in its multifarious beliefs to build legal systems on the premise of "God said so". As such, I must take Weil out of context for her to be of an use to me or others, as her world was not one of post-WWII and it shows in her confidence in various proclaimed universalities that would have their confidence and integrity shaken and sometimes sundered during the latter half of the 20th century. As it is with those who riotously create up until the point of an early death, we'll never know how they would have viewed the chronology of their postmortem. Weil could have gone either way between the communists and the fascists she expressed despise for, so perhaps it was better to end it early before she sank into conformity. However, that's the talk of bitterness, and in reality I would pay dear to hear her thoughts on the Holocaust and everything else that came after, and how she would live on to reconcile it.

Human injustice as a general rule produces not martyrs but quasi-damned souls...When we do a service to beings thus uprooted and we receive in exchange discourtesy, ingratitude, betrayal, we are merely enduring a small share of their affliction. It is our duty to expose ourselves to it in a limited measure just as it is our duty to expose ourselves to affliction.

Under these conditions, the liberty of [people] of goodwill, though limited in the sphere of action, is complete in that of conscience. For, having incorporated the rules into their own being, the prohibited possibilities no longer present themselves to the mind, and have not to be rejected. Just as the habit, formed by education, of not eating disgusting or dangerous things is not felt by the normal [person] to be any limitation of [one's] liberty in in the domain of food. Only a child feels such a limitation.

All that is wanted is for risk to offer itself under such conditions that it is not transformed into a sensation of fatality.

People still kowtow to -isms in the name of ignoring the fact that human beings don't stop existing just because it gives you money/security/fame, so despite Weil's claims that she doesn't truck with social justice workers, she has a lot of useful ways of rendering humanizing ideological goals into concrete statements. The plethora of quotes in this review attests to this, as well as the fact that I was motivated enough to make my way through an at times tough slog of Christian doctrine and other unfortunately self absorbed nonsense in order to gather those fragments of potent reasoning and conclusion. However much Weil proclaims to despise intermediaries, she also proclaims a need to develop humanizing structures of government, and that will not happen through any divine creeds instantaneously enforced from on high. Barring her obtusely disrespectful stance towards antifascists and some other facets of typical liberal ignorance, in addition to the dismissal of a capitalist status quo's necessarily inflicted violence beyond the conveyor belt room for the sake of "peace", what she says can be easily adapted into weaponry to be deployed against those who build up their non murderable, non rapeable status on the murder and rape of others. Not my perfect cup of tea, then, but that's what having a brain is for.

For, owing to the fact that there is never power, but only a race for power, and that there is no term, no limit, no proportion set to this race, neither is there any limit or proportion set to the efforts that it exacts; those who give themselves up to it, compelled to do always better than their rivals, who in their turn strive to do better than they, must sacrifice not only the existence of the slaves, but their own also and that of their nearest and dearest; so it is that Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter lives again in the capitalists who, to maintain their privileges, acquiesce lightheartedly in wars that may rob them of their sons.

The [US] Revolution, thanks to a singular conjunction of circumstances, certainly seemed to give rise to something entirely new; but the truth is that the privileges it abolished had not for a long time rested on any social foundation other than tradition; that the institutions arising out of the insurrection did not perhaps effectively function for as long as a single morning; and that the real forces, namely big industry, the police, the army, the bureaucracy, far from being smashed by the Revolution, attained, thanks to it, a power unknown in other countries.

It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to [people] who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation.

I was drawn to Weil at this moment in time due to Flannery O'Connor surprisingly discussing her fervently, and as the behemoth of O'Connor's letters was the last book on my challenge list, I wanted to take full advantage of my regained ability to chase down pertinent names whenever I pleased, barring constraints of ownership and workload. A bonus of the haphazard alignment of my TBR list and my book buying habits is that this edition is a supremely more holistic one than the War and the Iliad I initially planned on acquiring, and indeed, save for the more religiously saturated passages, the Iliad essay was the least focused and one of the less useful of the lot. The selection didn't have a fleshed out version of On the Abolition of All Political Parties that I was somewhat hoping for, or more on Weil's views on colonialism, but her stance on that first matter is less cohesive than it initially came off as in that first reading, and as such I"m glad space was devoted to less centrist discourse. Weil didn't live to witness the Nazis slaughter the people she put effort into distancing herself from, so while her disparaging remarks about antifascists have proved poisonously inaccurate, I can't blame her for our disagreements. The past is a foreign country, and her thinking never witnessed that particular form of that country's destruction.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

All technological problems should be viewed within the context of what will bring about the best working conditions. This is the most important standard to establish; the whole of society should be first constituted so that work does not demean those who perform it. It is not sufficient that they avoid suffering. Their joy must be desired also, not bought treats but the natural delights that do not cheapen the spirit of poverty.

In order to feel true gratitude (the case of friendship being set aside), I have to think that it is not out of pity, sympathy or caprice that I am being treated well, it is not as a favour or privilege, nor as a natural result of temperament, but from a desire to do what justice demands.

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even after reading and reviewing this collection of essays, it is difficult to reconcile the ideas of Weil the political theorist with Weil the christian mystic. And yet, I think there is a way to unite those concerns around the concern for the dignity of the individual.

Man of the political essays in this collection propound ideas about organized society and how this might look, in which the value of collectives are recognized but carefully managed by valuing the individuals that make up those collectives. Part of this project is in shifting attention from the collective to the individual, noting that collectives have no obligations to individuals but individuals have obligations to collectives, which is an imbalance that can engender exploitation, especially when the needs of individuals are subsumed in an over-valuation of the collective. The trick is that the individuals by themselves are not enough to bring about positive change and dignity for all, the organizational force of the collective is needed. However, collectives need to be carefully designed to provide for the needs of individuals. Individuals may need equality and liberty and property but those needs must be harmonized with each other to produce order and social good through obedience and punishment (where needed). These seemingly contradictory "needs of the soul" can bring about the ideal good for all. It is a tantalizing but highly idealized view of politics and equally hard to envision how an idealized vision like this ever gets going. Although perhaps in post WWII Europe the civilized world seemed so pounded into dust that a new order could take shape.

So how to reconcile this with the later work on detachment, beauty, poetry, and aesthetics in an individual connections to God through prayer? I'm honestly not entirely sure, but I think one way may be to recognize that idealized political constructivism does not happen in a vacuum. Our existing systems of civil and political and economic organization are exploitative in part because of our attachments to the world. We see the world and other people in it as means to ends but those ends are often just the effort to secure additional means (e.g., not acquiring money to purchase or do some good but to gain more money) and as long as we see the world through the lens of our attachments to it and through our motives then we never will pay enough attention to everyone else and their motives. Detachment, which we can achieve through education (it's only real purpose according to Weil) is a luxury, however, for those of us who do not work for subsistence, whose work does not allow them to get ahead but only to barely hang on to what they have. However, detachment and attention to the other is not outside of their reach either. It must be focused, though, through the recognition of what is, apart from our motives, and what is because other things are. And this access to the divine is an outlet to some kind of contemplative recognition of how one's work contributes to the world. It is a basic, undeniable dignity, equivalent (I think) to Descartes recognition that the "thinking I" is the foundation of the whole rationalist enterprise. Individual dignity recognized as "my" undeniable participation in the ideal is the moral foundation upon which to build civic order in a non-competitive and non-destructive way.

At first, I was a little disappointed with this collection because it felt that I had just a teasing look at Weil's ideas about politics, God, attachments, and attention. There are so many tantalizing ideas in this selection of essays that you might feel, as I did, that there is not enough there to sustain enough understanding of any one of them. That's probably true, but this hodge-podge of essays is suggestive of a broader coherence worth pursuing with more reading.

[Nora Yoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slow and rewarding, like a night unfolding and the field of stars waking into visibility. I was initially hesitant with Weil's style and the manner in which the introduction described her, but the piercing insight that marked every essay in this anthology has inspired what I am guessing will be a lifelong respect and admiration for their author.

In the earlier essays, though Weil's intelligence was clear, I feel that the conclusions of her essays were often a product of exhaustion and conviction compounded by its reluctance-- essentially, 'this conclusion is difficult to accept, so it must be touching upon something real'. However, the closer in proximity the essays were to God or beauty or virtue (or any other ideals), the more the essays seemed like necessary products of Weil's intelligence rather than an exacted guess. This was first clear when Weil took on "The Iliad"; even writing of the great stupidity of war, because of her recognition of the value beauty imbued into the work, her own writing seemed to accept its capacity for rendering beauty out of thought. Though the ideas were always the centerpiece of Weil's work, the language carrying them was incredibly efficient and exact. There are any number of quotes that demonstrate this, and each, in their respective contexts, gain a complexity difficult to fathom generating as Weil must have.

On writing: she compares the act of writing to translating the essence of thought into language; when we translate from one language to another, we seek to preserve its characteristics and avoid exaggeration as a principle of the act; the same should hold for writing out our thoughts.

It's hard to continue. There's too much to say, and I can only recommend highly. Anything written here seems redundant and flat compared to the wealth of spirited intelligence contained in the book. I'll just conclude with a list of quotes from the essays as I skim through them now;

"May the eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary." (The Mysticism of Work)

"Even in my worst moment I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment." (Void and Compensation)

"What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different." (Attention and Will)

"Words with content and meaning are not murderous... when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing." (The Power of Words)

"Contradiction experienced to the very depths of the being tears us heart and soul: it is the cross."
"Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true." (Contradiction)

"If a church made by human beings can be full of symbols, how much more full must the universe be."
"It is God who imposes limit on all things and by whom the sea is bounded. In God there is but one eternal, unchanging act which, rebounding on itself, has no object outside itself." (Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour)

"To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage - and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light." (Detachment)

"What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being... This is the punishment for having fed love on imagination."
"Friendship cannot be separated from reality any more than the beautiful. It is a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracle consists simply in the fact that it exists." (Love)

"Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity." (Chance)

[Mahmoud Amr · Rating 4 out of 5]

This arabic translation of selected essays of the french philosopher Simone Weil was good in terms of the quality of the translation and a good introduction if you haven't read anything by the late philosopher.
Simone Weil, was/is one these figures that a lot of ppl talk abt her without reading her. In fact, online forums such as tumblr, has completely butchered the poor woman and rendered her to just this stereotypical femcel/angelcore/trad cath/mystic AeSThETiC to the point of caricature, that, without even reading any of of her work, except some fragmented quotes here and there(a similar thing could be said abt Georges Bataille and the literal memefication of his ideas by the retardedcracy of online discourse on twitter et al) . Even her death, is always described as a direct result of her mystical christian devotion. Although the spiritual, voir même christian, aspect of her thought is not to be denied; what needs to be pointed out here, is that Weil was' 1st and 4most a political thinker and activist. Even her demise was a result of a stance she took to stay true to her political convictions.
In this collection, you get a somewhat good idea of her philosophy. The only thing that I didn't like was that the editors focused more on her religious spiritual stuff than the political, which I think does her a great injustice.
Her ideas regarding power, laid out in her essay "The Iliad or the poem of power" is a major text in political philosophy. Her concept should be studied and compared to Arendt's notion of totalitarianism (another female philosopher powerhouse. Tbh I can't understand how thick minded misogynists are really ignoring that basically the only daring and creative writers and philosophers are most of the time women not men, for the simple fact that, when a woman rise to that pedestal, she has earned it despite the obstacles men and their hubris put in her way. While "brilliant" men are not that interesting because its already a man's world we live in so there's nothing new under the sun).
Indeed, Christianity played a major role in her philosophy, but one cannot ignore the fact that her concept of said christianity is totally beyond the pale of any formalism or orthodoxy. Beside being a non denominational christian who fiercely critiqued the cath church, her conception of christianity is borderline leaning more toward the perennial side of things.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

The rating is purely my subjective score. Philosophy is not really my thing and some of thing was either impenetrable, repetitive or a bit too God-infused for my taste. Still, it's been good prep for My Weil

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This tore me apart ! I didn't understand most of it at all! A prophet speaking with such sumptuous certainty! Her vision of god is the most compelling and wild I've ever read.

[Emily Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”

[Patrick Barritt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging for me to follow , I was only able to read a few pages at a time then had to stop to think about it all. Very worthwhile though and i would recommend for the sensitivity and love for her fellow mankind that pervades all the strands of Simone's musings. Although dying a young women during the second world war the relevance and insights are humbling. Especially when you think you are as smart as i like to pretend i am!!

[Simon Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot better the second time I tried to read this. Weil's philosophy is commonsense and beautiful. I love the description of it being both radically free and radically conservative. Someone who had love in their soul for all.

[G.R. Vickers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Touched by God

[Brigitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t get enough of Simone Weil right now. She’s the perfect reading for living through a second Trump admin.

[Ifar De · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly brilliant. Simone Weil is a great teacher and an inspiration for the contemplation of the Good, the True and the Beautiful through the thick veils of our turbulent world.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

What a book.

Simone Weil is a super impressive lady. I'm not going to go into a history because a quick Wikipedia or Google Search with her name will tell you a lot more about her than I can. But one of the outstanding things about her character quite apart from her incredible writing ability and ability to philosophize is the pristineness of her actions. In order to empathize with the suffering that her French countrymen and women were going through under occupation in France under the Germans she essentially starved herself to death in London at around the same time near the end of the Second World War. This book is a collection of some of her philosophies and thoughts on subjects such as human personality, the self, oppression, the mysticism of work, the power of words, friendship, love and chance. Enough from me here and some of the best bits from this stunning stunning little book:

Advanced Nations including especially the UK since the Demise of virtually all its manufacturing sector, exercise control and exploitation over the world economy through the manipulation of information in ways she anticipates with chilling accuracy.

My first attempt was unsuccessful largely because of a low Mark in history. Simon de Beauvoir met her as a student for the first time during this period and was impressed by a capacity to feel the suffering of others. Simone device suggested that the main problem in life was not to make people happy but to discover their reason for the existence, Simone Weil said it was easy to see she never been hungry. The second attempt at entry to the ecole normale was successful. She came top of the list, Simone de Beauvoir came second.

Quantity changes into quality.

What working in a factory meant for me personally was as follows. It meant that all the external reasons upon which my sense of personal dignity, my self-respect, was based were radically destroyed within two or three weeks by the daily experience of brutal constraints. I don't imagine that this provoked in me a rebellious reaction. No, on the contrary: it produced the last thing I expected from myself: docility.

To speak to a superior, even for something indispensable, is always to risk a snub, even though he may be a kindly even the kindest men have spells of bad temper, and one must take the snub in silence.

This was to recount selections of the great works of literature, which she believed the workers were the most appropriate viewers. She believed that this literature would go straight to the hearts of the worker, and said that their true message could be understood by no one better.

I'll believe that none of the main reasons for Hitler's success so far was that his troops from a trained only for so much longer than the French and the allied forces that thought offensive and defensive initiatives and live a kind of ersatz religion. Hitler created special groups like the Young, Fanatic sized SS all ready and eager to demonstrate suicidal daring, the source of which, she believed was extreme brutality.

She shows the intimate connection between various disciplines, the beauty and power of Mathematics, the relevance of the classics, and the absolute necessity of institutional work to be grounded in the physical.

As a child for a joke, hides behind an armchair from his mother god placed that separating himself from God through creation. We are this joke of Gods.

The development of the society in which she found herself living in France in the 1920s and 1930s had come about more with regard for Speed than for meaning. It substituted what she called salaries for realities. A salary is anything by which a person can be made to believe that the future is not made out of exactly the same components as the present.

The object of her efforts she claims ought to be not to seek to do good but throw weight and support behind whichever side has become the lighter or the weaker. The idea of counterbalance is crucial to her thought and underlies all aspects of it.

She believed that those who use language in their professional lives, journalists, writers, politicians and lawyers, have a greater responsibility than most to use language with care and with regard for the truth. And in her plan for the reorganization of the French nation after the war, the proposed penalties for deliberate destruction of language for the purpose of propaganda are severe.

What is dangerous about the imagination is it's power to prevent the mind from encountering headon the notion of limit. Imagination tends to consecrate, sanctify and privatize experience. We speak of capturing the imagination and the idea of possession is always present in it. Reciprocally we say that a work of art has “captured the Spirit” of something. This is because the painter has imposed upon imagination the idea of limit which is provided by work. Left unbridled imagination leads away from the truth. It brings out old thoughts, old grievances to Mull over or new fantasies to play with and in returning to them, desires to dominate them.

Historically political parties always laid greater stress on the Rights of Man than obligations. Simone Weil reverses this position and analyses the extent to which the idea of Rights, including as it does an emphasis on personal, prevents human beings from seeking the impossible and themselves which will enable them to see the needs of others clearly as their own.

Further, the chief danger does not lie in the collective tendencies to circumscribe the person, but in the person's tendency to immolate himself into the Collective – do not get “blackholed” as I would say it to Samar and Roman.

What man need to silence in the warmth, what he is giving is an icy pandemonium.

The Romans, like Hitler, understood that power is not fully efficacious unless clothed in a few ideas.

It is the light falling continuously from heaven which alone gives a tree the energy to send powerful roots deep into the Earth. The tree is really rooted in the sky. It is only what comes from heaven that can make a real impression on us.

At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously presents to it : and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve a combination of a greater number. The thoughts are outside language, they are informulable. Although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although everyone of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truths, which may be larger or smaller without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside. Exactly what the Brave New Words concept tries to address.

Affliction can no longer destroy the i in him for the I in him no longer exists, having completely disappeared and left the place to God. but a friction produces an effect which is equivalent, on the plane of perfection to the exterior destruction of the “I”. it reduces the absence of god.

Plato in his book the Republic book 6 says to adore the great beast is to think and act in conformity with the prejudices and reactions of the multitude to the detriment of all personal search for truth and goodness.

The service of the false God of the social beast under whatever form it may be purifies evil by eliminating its horror. Nothing seems evil to those who serve it except failure in its service.

Attention taken it to the highest degree is the same thing as prayer. it presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Studies in faith. Prayer being only attention in its pure form and studies being a form of gymnastics or the attention, each school exercise should be a refraction of spiritual life. Method for understanding images, symbols etc. Not to try to interpret them but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns. Generally speaking a method for the exercise of the intelligence which consists of looking.

Power of words: to clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to find the use of others by precise analysis: to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving humans lives. Outrage seems almost entirely unfitted for such a task. The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

much of her strictly sociopolitical commentary (the essay "the needs of the soul," for example, or any time she makes unoriginal criticisms of marxism) has no practical value, somewhat like the author herself when she foisted her presence onto charity projects very, very unsuccessfully (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n...)

weil's real genius shines through in interlocking her philosophy with her values: of grace and empathy. she argues that the modern human afflictions we tend to approach in a scientific, systemic way actually come from a neglect of real spiritual need.

favorite essays from this collection: "the illiad: a poem of force," "void and compensation," "the power of words," "friendship," and "chance." would be interested in reading gravity and grace in full, to supplement my understanding of her work & to nourish my soul.

favorite quotes:
"When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy to be preserved both in himself and in the other. It is impossible by virtue of the mechanism of nature. It is, however, made possible by the miraculous intervention of the supernatural. This miracle is friendship."

"As a geometrician looks at a particular figure in order to deduce the universal properties of the triangle, so he who knows how to love directs upon a particular human being a universal love."

"A man exposed to the threat of death...can become more pliable than inert matter."

"The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never sully anything, even though I be utterly transformed into mud. To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then?"

"It is not religion but revolution that is the opium of the people."

"When the 'I' is wounded from the outside it starts by revolting in the most extreme and bitter manner like an animal at bay. But as soon as the 'I' is half dead, it wants to be finished off and allows itself to sink into unconsciousness. If it is then awakened by a touch of love, there is sharp pain which results in anger and sometimes hatred for whoever has provoked this pain. Henc ehte apparently inexplicable vindictiveness of the fallen towards their benefactors."

"At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being."

most interesting quote:
"Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food. It requires the strength of soul that Eve did not have; and yet she had no need of the fruit. If she had been hungry at the moment when she looked at the fruit, and if in spite of that she had remained looking at it indefinitely without taking one step toward it, she would have performed a miracle analogous to that of perfect friendship."

[Whiskey Tango]

Simone Weil's voluminous writing, a generous portion of which is collected in Siân Miles’s superbly edited Simone Weil: An Anthology, engages politics, religion, literature, factory work, and metaphysics in sharp and surprising ways. Weil’s essays, letters, and prose meditations are illuminating, enigmatic, and troubling, for they stir up the questions that haunt our own lives, but that, drowned by the business of our days, seldom break the surface of our attention. Reading her brilliant consideration of Homer’s Iliad, “The Poem of Force,” might just change your conception of life, so revelatory is her vision of how violence distorts the mind and constrains its very notion of reality; its consideration of the epic’s moral dimension is profoundly moving, penetrating the mists of antiquity that enshroud the poem to reveal how human strength and cunning first came face-to-face with the ethical imperatives that entwine mortality and morality.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”

Deeply insightful and enjoyable; a perfect introduction to a radical, refreshing mind. Her observations of her own time (as a French Jew in the heat of WWII) are startlingly relevant to our own, in a number of ways. I want to buy some of her complete works after reading this (namely Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace) and feel a little embarrassed that I had never read her until now.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Weil's essay, "The Power of Words," for a paper I'm I'm writing about the rhetoric of the university. Her idea of words with capital letters is so relevant for us today, politically, socially, anywhere people are speaking really. Words with capital letters are words that have no referent. They're empty and yet we come to believe they mean so much without ever asking for clarification. Words like nation, security, terrorist, freedom, national interests, excellence, culture: these are examples of Weil's idea of capital letter days.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. After the first chapter or two, I was still waiting for the meat. It sounded (or read as) very profound but I knew it was just being asserted without support. It read like a very beautiful person with an almost painful amount of love for the world allowing their love and pain to spill out onto the page. However, I was reading it as a philosophy book, not a confession or as poetry. So each chapter - as lovely as they were - just left me feeling deeply unsatisfied. This book will be perfect for some, but I went in with the wrong expectations, maybe.