I´m suffering in ecstasy
Slowly dying inside my body
Locked away with no escape
Finding pleasure within the pain
Six Feet Under, Suffering in Ecstasy
The Lausiac History, written by Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis, in 419 – 420 AD, gives worthwhile testimony of the peculiar lives of monks, hermits and holy (wo)men in early Christianity. Particularly it offers reports and biographies of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt and Palestine, a specific culture of religious hermetism of that time and in that place. About Adolius for instance it says that he chose a way of life alien to ours. His asceticism was beyond human limits, so that even demons were afraid of his austereness and did not dare to approach him. Because of his refusal to sleep one could have considered him a ghost himself. The Lausiac History also reports about a woman named Alexandra who chose to live inside a tomb as she was afraid that her beauty could upset men and despiritualise them. When asked how she could stand the boredom of such a life she responded: In the morning until 9 I pray every hour and I spin linen, afterwards all my thoughts are dedicated to the holy prophets, patriarchs, apostles and martyrs. When I have eaten my bread I rest and think about my own end. Centuries later Islam developed a mystic strain, Sufism. Sufism developed its own particular culture and it produced mystics, holy men, poets, scholars and sages of the highest order. It is a very intelligent and sublime religion. Schopenhauer called Sufism “something very beautiful”. Ibn Arabi (died 1240) was a towering figure of Sufism. In his writings he also reports about the Sufi eccentrics of his time. About Abu Ali Hasan al-Sakkaz for instance he writes: He had a supreme intellect, a pure heart and he did not hold grudges against anyone. He did not understand humans very well and he could not imagine that there could be anyone in this world disobedient to God. And about Abu Abd Allah al-Hayyat he tells us: He wept easily and often, he remained silent for a long time and was always filled with sadness, he ruminated a lot and he would utter sighs at any time. I have never seen anyone more humble … He bantered with nobody and he socialized with no one. He was free from hypocrisy and he would offer good advices. He did not flatter anyone and he did not quarrel … I have never seen that he approached anyone, and when someone approached him, he would only respond in case of absolute necessity … Of all the men I have seen I never wished more dearly to be like anyone than I wished to be like him. As it may seem, in ancient, primitive times there were more uncommon personalities around than in our today´s sophisticated “individualistic” age. Of course we do not know how much in these reports are exaggerations, since they likely not only want to offer testimony but also want to make propaganda for their religion. The point is to illustrate that there are cultures that produce life models and personality types very unfamiliar to those we are used to today and that they may produce radical social outcasts that are nevertheless part of the culture, ingrained in the greater cultural context, and revered and respected by the common population. In our contemporary spirit of (pseudo) acclamation of diversity, we might still be astonished of how diverse and different from us humans may actually get.
All men are peculiar. Some men are more peculiar. Simone Weil was among the most peculiar of men. Was she a genius or an oddball? A saint or an egocentric? A philosopher or did she not care for systematic philosophy? Was she deep-rooted or did she try to erroneously align herself to phantasmas? Did she hunger for salvation and liberation or did she indulge in suffering and pain? She was a wanderer between worlds, a “nomadic thinker”, yet in a much more radical and practical sense than in the Deleuzian sense, who would appear, like most of the other radical intellectuals of France like Sartre, Foucault, Baudrillard or Derrida, like a saturated, ponderous university professor when compared to Simone Weil. Simone Weil did not fit into any kind of society. Due to her radical intelligence, or due to some kind of sophisticated, morbid stupidity and obstinateness that was inside her despite her intelligence? She died early, at 34. That could have been different, of course, but also seems somehow logical and consequential to her impossible lifestyle – and even some sort of grace coming down on the tortured soul. By the time of her death, she was, as a quasi-mystic, already enraptured and taken away by the “supernatural” and the otherworldly, yet at the same time she wrote her (unfinished) main oeuvre The Need for Roots: which is about living the correct life in this world. Heck, we do not even know whether her body of work has to be considered a torso at best or a philosophy that has, in its basic premises at least, managed to more or less fully mature, so that everything that would have followed would have been Parerga and Paralipomena. Was Simone Weil not convoluted at all but, in its plain simplicity, a true messenger of the absolute? She remains an enigma. The absolute is enigmatic as well. Well, that coincidence should make you think for a moment. But now, let´s go.
Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris into a sophisticated, secular, liberal Jewish family. Her elder brother, André, would later become one of the most important mathematicians of the century (and died many decades later, in 1998). At some point in her youth, she desperately envied the talents of André, considering him one of the very few of men able to enter that transcendent kingdom where ultimate truth resides; a kingdom of ideals that she considered inaccessible to herself and most other men at that time (although later she would relax and consider the realm of ideals accessible to anyone who strives for access). Yet her own intellect was sophisticated as well. Her IQ was likely above 170, creating that rare intelligence that is actually free-floating and more or less detached from anything else. She and her brother became well-educated, and educated themselves, in literature and science early on. Her relationship with her family was actually close and warm-hearted, but there were also conflicting tendencies on her own behalf, and she ultimately lived and died mostly alone. As a prodigious student, she got educated by Emile Chartier aka “Alain”, one of the most charismatic intellectual figures in France at that time (Alain was very fond of her and (respectfully) considered her a “woman from Mars”). Like Sartre a generation after him, Alain was dedicated to the full liberation of man from the obstructions of society. Simone Weil would follow him, yet what she rather aimed at was liberating man from suffering and injustice. At first, she despised the colonial system – and any kind of nationalism all along. She would then become attracted to anarcho-syndicalism. Yet although the French anarcho-syndicalists were surprisingly educated and sophisticated people, their understanding of society was inadequate, and their economic base, a national economy being dominated by small scale business, finally eroded away. Big capital went in. So Simone Weil became attracted to Marxism. At that time she was a teacher for students at the Lycée, but increasingly came into trouble due to her pronounced nonconformism and her political radicalism. She would then give up her position and go to work in factories, to get to know the true living conditions of the working class at first hand. In the factories she would encounter an inhuman, mind-destroying environment (later she would also work as an agricultural worker in the countryside and make similar experiences). When the civil war broke out in Spain, she volunteered and joined the republican forces. There she would make traumatic experiences as well, as she witnessed how the republican left, supposedly fighting for the good, degenerated into exercising violence and cruelty all the same. Her observations on how such degenerative behaviour can spread like a disease, and how people mimic other people in general, are important observations on social mimesis. They would later be hugely influential for the philosophy of her compatriot René Girard. On these occasions Simone Weil would lose faith in humanity. Those who seemingly, or actually, fight for the good and for liberation, might degenerate into something sinister, power-hungry and evil; the workers she encountered in the factories she described as surprisingly nice and friendly, but they were no revolutionaries or idealists, in a way, they were just mundane egoists of their own kind. Moreover, the great experiment in the liberation of a people, the Soviet revolution, had long turned into a nightmare and into one the most brutal dictatorships in history. When she personally encountered Leo Trotsky in her parent´s apartment in Paris, she confronted him with her criticism, something that the intellectually intimidating and rhetorically brilliant Trotsky would not experience very often in personal encounters. But Simone stood her ground (to her luck, she did not actually live in the Soviet Union at that time, as she surely would have openly criticized and challenged Stalin as well). She also became critical of the great structural, theoretical approach of human liberation, Marxism. She sorted out that many of the claims Marxism makes and claims to be scientific are in fact ideologically motivated expressions of wishful thinking at best.
Yet at the same time Simone Weil made very different, opposing experiences: she would encounter the beauty of the world, which she would soon acknowledge as something divine. When she made journeys to Italy she was struck by the beauty of nature and culture, notably when associated with religion. She went to Rome, Florence or Assisi; as manifestation of pure beauty she found Umbria. Contrary to what she seemed to experience all her life long – that the empirical world and the human realm was “irrepairably” broken – it seemed to come as a relief to her that the world – at least from a transcendent perspective – was indeed not broken, but in harmony. Enthusiastically as ever, when she encountered something new and promising, she equated beauty to truth: We love the beauty of the world, because in beauty we sense the presence of something that is close to truth, which we want to possess to satisfy our need for the good. Substantiated in this way, beauty and truth almost naturally become something sacred: What beauty is for things, sacredness is for the soul. The sacred and the divine is otherworldly, and soon Simone Weil concludes that the beauty in this world refers to the existence of an absolute good, which is, nevertheless, outside of this world. There is a truth that is transcendent to this world, transcendent to space and time, transcendent to the intellectual world of man, transcendent to the realm of human capabilities. This truth equates in the innermost heart of humans the demand and requirement for the absolute good, which lives in the human heart, but never finds its destination in the human realm. Without actually being a mystic, Simone Weil became something close to a mystic, and without being religious, she came close to religion. She began communicating and sharing her thoughts with men from the church, notably with the intellectually outstanding Padre Perrin, who became her intellectual and spiritual man of confidence in her later years. Yet at the same time her turbulent life became shaken in the ultimate way: when World War II broke out and France got defeated quickly. Simone Weil had been in Germany already in 1932 when she wanted to witness the uprise of the Nazi party with her own eyes. As a Jew, she now had to flee to the unoccupied part of France in the South. After a while this deemed too insecure as well, and so she settled for London, where she joined the France Combattantes, a kind of Resistance in exile. Her strong desire became leaping from the sky with a parachute and joining the Resistance or the fighting French soldiers on the front as a front nurse or as a clandestine wireless operator. Yet she was dismissed, General de Gaulle, who oversaw the operations, considered her a “lunatic”. When the commanders finally became more open towards her, her health declined. She suffered from tuberculosis. As her condition went downhill, she refused to eat more than the daily dose granted to the people in war, which aggravated her situation once again. In August 1943 she died in a hospital in London.
She published little during her lifetime and remained unknown. Most of her writing was written for the purpose of reflection and she kept it to herself. After her death her work became gradually published. Her influence rose and she even became fashionable and trendy. While she was ultimately on her own and belonging to a social group that solely consisted of herself during her lifetime, she radiated in multiple directions posthumously. She was a philosopher – or at least a philosophical writer – and an intellectual, and specifically in the post-war era there was a desire for intellectuals. She was inspiring for religious people, even for Pope Paul VI, who considered Simone Weil as one his three greatest influences. She was a tragic genius, and the more tragic and solidary the life of a genius, the more charismatic and interesting he usually becomes in the afterlife to the public. She was extreme, and that naturally attracts attention and curiosity. She was an existential figure, she had truly lived and experienced the horrors of her especially turbulent lifetime – and deliberately exposed herself to them. There is also a fascination for the dark, the morbid, the insane, and she radiated into these directions as well. She is a somehow gothic figure. A social revolutionary, even an heroic one. She was not a mere theorist but deeply dived into the muddy waters of practice. She was brave, strong and uncompromising. While some intellectuals, like Susan Sontag or Jean Amery, were dismissive of her, others, like Heinrich Böll, had such a high respect and felt intimidated by her even after her death, that they barely dared to write about her. Others, like Gabriel Marcel, (respectfully) admit that the more you dive into her work and biography, the more she seems to withdraw into mystery. That naturally exercises an undertow that attracts and sucks in (although, because of this, she might also eventually frustrate). After all however, Simone Weil has remained a matter for specialists up to that day. She has not achieved the status of a major female intellectual like Hannah Arendt (yet also her work is more dispersed and fragmentary). But more than Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil continues to haunt as an overall enigma.
I feel that it is necessary for me, that it is imposed on me, to remain solitary, a stranger and an outcast to any kind of human society and milieu, she confessed.Indeed, this is the most defining and most undisputed characteristic of Simone Weil. Her radical intelligence set her apart from almost anyone else. But her equally intelligent brother became a well-established academic and he led a long happy marriage. He died at age 92. Simone Weil was a radical nonconformist already as a child and in her youth. Yet not only in a flamboyant way. Despite her great admiration for beauty at least later in her life, she dressed herself distinctly unfashionable and it seemed that she even wanted to make herself look unattractive. At least in her youth she wanted to be masculine, and maybe therefore developed the habit of chain-smoking. She also wanted to play Rugby (which did not work out, as she was far too petite for that). Smoking was however the only luxury and vice she granted to herself. All her life she lived a spartanic life. She did not even eat very much and was borderline anorectic. An explanation for anorexia claims that refusing to eat is rooted in the desire to become independent from the parents, notably from the mothers that feeds (especially if they claim too much space in one way or the other in their offspring´s life). Simone had a good relationship with her mother, but her mother could also be dominant, although in a sweet and caring way. Would it be an overreaction to develop anorexia because of this? On the other hand, her “anorexia” might just have been a thing in itself. Maybe she did not have great appetite and she did not enjoy to eat: and that was that, with no further substance beneath the surface. In general, one is prone to ask whether her lifestyle – and her altruism – stemmed from self-negation: and that self-negation from self-hatred? The old story of the ascetic person that is driven not by love, but by ressentiment? Self-negating Simone Weil truly was, but there are no signs that she despised herself. When she was 3 years old, she refused to take a ring as a gift from a cousin with the explanation: Luxury is something I don´t like. So obviously this self-negation, or (maybe better) retraction of herself and modesty was deeply rooted in herself and some kind of basic hardware in the wiring of her brain. While Simone Weil made grand gestures to embrace humanity, she remained dismissive about her own group, the Jewish people. In line with antisemitic verdicts she considered them vulgar and materialistic, qualities she naturally abhorred. One of the more astonishing, actually outrageous elements of her writings and biography is how she remained accusatory against the Jews when the persecution of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany was already in full bloom. Simone Weil was a frail and not a very healthy person. From the days of her youth she suffered from a chronic headache. To Padre Perrin she confessed: It is my innermost wish not only to lose any will but any sort of egoity. This, and the desire to become “objective” (and, therefore, “true”), is part of the intense intellectual, spiritual or artistic experience. You need to be the right person to come to eccentric ideas like this though.
The astounding feature of Simone Weil is her deliberate exposure to pain and suffering. In her school days, when she heard the news of an earthquake hitting in China, she broke out into tears. That is a very unusual behaviour. But it obviously is for real. All men are, more or less, empathetic. Some are more empathetic (it says 2 percent of humans are super empaths). Simone Weil likely was very on top of empaths in this world. Her empathy would also explain best why she actively sought to share the same experiences like workers, combatants in war, victims of war and all kinds of the oppressed and the unfortunate. Some intellectuals like Susan Sontag suspect a pronounced masochism in Simone Weil. And indeed, there seems to be something morbid in her strong self-exposure to human suffering. Lust and pain form a pair that is inseparable, Simone Weil herself once noticed. However, this does not mean that Simone Weil was a masochist, or that masochism was at the core of her respective behaviour and sensation-seeking (she also obviously was not a sadist, which is a characteristic that masochists usually also possess (although, upon reflection, her persistent negative remarks on humanity might have been some kind of intellectual sadism)). At best, her “masochism” was an emergent quality. Indeed, she seemed to enjoy her hardship and her self-inflicted suffering. But she did so because that brought her in line with the unfortunate and it gave meaning to her existence. It fed her empathy for them. And it fed her natural desire for self-negation/retraction, in order to give space and room to the other. Empathy however is not the same thing as sympathy (and Nietzsche, for instance, wanted to do away with his pronounced disposition for empathy and compassion, because, in a way, he did not have so much sympathy for humans). Some observers doubt how much altruism and sympathy there was actually behind and a strong motive behind Simone Weil´s apparently selfless behaviour. To some it seems that the mysticism of her later years was egocentric. When she became frustrated that she could not “save” mankind, she withdrew from the human realm and wanted to save her own soul. And, to think this further: that might just have been the way it always had been with her and her altruistic engagements. However, this negates that the Simone Weil turned mystic was a also Simone Weil desiring to go to the ground and fight in the World War until she did her last breath (yet maybe: this might also have been only, or mostly, a quest for giving her own life meaning…). A central concept to her moral philosophy and practice is that of “attention” (Attention/Awareness/Achtsamkeit happens to be quite a popular concept today). Attention is the faculty with which we can truly connect to others and actually listen to others and develop an understanding for them (without making them a projection of our own moral fantasies). She thinks highly and, in a way, elitist of it: The ability to show attention to a sufferer is something very rare and very difficult; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Almost all of those who think they possess this faculty do indeed not possess it. The warmth of the emotion, the readiness of the heart, compassion do not suffice. Attention however is quite the same as empathy; and as super-super empath it would appear somehow natural to her that practically no one in this world can rival her in this domain. However, is attention/empathy actually (or always) what it seems to be? Only attention is required from me, an attention that is so consuming that the ego disappears. This is what empaths like to think and how they tend to flatter themselves with their “egolessness”. But what if empathy is also some kind of sensation-seeking to feed specific needs of the ego – and therefore an instrumentalization of others Simone Weil so carefully tries to avoid? We cannot tell – and how much empathy is egoistic or altruistic will vary from person to person of course. Yet empathy and trying to truly listen to others does not require that you like the other. Empathy might not be the universal and all-encompassing moral faculty (if such a thing even exists, since moral and ethics eventually seem to require a bundle of faculties, and not just a singular categorial imperative or anything of that sort). Simone Weil at least was only partially fond of other people. Your qualities might indeed isolate you and set you apart from others. But it is finally you yourself who chooses to be a loner, as was the case with Simone Weil. With her family she was both close and distant. Her proximity to figures like Alain or Padre Perrin mainly was based on intellectual resonance. There have not been serious romantic involvements in her life. Apparently she did not even have friends. She did not consider herself likeable and reacted with astonishment when somebody happened to like her. She spoke in a monotonous voice and tried to drag anyone she would conversate with into merciless intellectual discussions. (Also her writing style is of that monotony. Therefore it is sometimes difficult to follow her with attention. Her writing style is not exactly that of a genius.) She obviously was not a funny or a casual person to be with. However, when she was a teacher at the Lycée she was remembered as a teacher who took great care of her students and who managed to bring the contents of instruction to life. For this however, empathy is needed (not necessarily sympathy).
Since my childhood I sympathized with those who tried to help the oppressed and the despised in the hierarchy of a society, until I had to acknowledge that their behaviour was as such as to destroy all my sympathies for them. Extremely sensitive to oppression and injustice, Simone Weil would dedicate her life fighting oppression and injustice and try to create a world free from it. Yet the many left-wing political movements she flirted with she finally found to be grossly inadequate to achieve such ends. She has a point in there, and more than just one. Revolutions produce horrors of revolutions, and horrors of a new order that might be just equal or even worse than that of what they intended to overcome. Already in theory (and in practice) many revolutionaries´ attempts might not be the liberation of “mankind” (although they might think so, deluded by their feelings of grandiosity), yet just the exchange of one power principle (e.g. the bourgeoisie) with another (the proletariat). Yet beyond that Simone Weil did never show a great understanding for social and political realities. Somehow you have to organise a collective and try to conduct and align people´s behaviour. The bigger and more heterogeneous the collective gets, the less fine-tuned to individual needs, the more oppressive the organisation against the individual will likely become. This would also, and specifically, go for a “completely new society”, starting from scratch. This is the dream of any revolutionary. Yet in their dreamy state it rarely occurs to them that the less (well-established, experienced, socially accepted) institutions there are, the higher is the need for installing new ones (that might easily lack any of these qualities). And so, the higher the attempts of actual revolutionaries were to start a new society from scratch or via cultural revolutions, the greater were usually the horrors they inflicted on the population (with the bottom of it all being the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia). In a way however, Simone Weil saw this well. In her ruminations on Marxism and on the nature of oppression she refuted a basic Marxist idea (or sentiment): that the further the advances in science, technology and “productive forces” will get, i.e. the more liberated man will get from the oppression through nature, the more liberated and transparent society will become. Instead, she argued, the more liberated man will become from nature, the greater will be the need for organisation and institutions that will be oppressive and alienating in other ways (the Marxist idea that the development of the “productive forces” will smash or transform capitalism into socialism she considered unscientific). These other ways also include that technology and the need for organisation will become such a big thing that no one will be able to oversee, understand and control it: another insight where she proved ahead of her time (Marxists would argue that in socialism technology will be in the hands of the workers and not only of the capitalists, and therefore technology will become transparent and a mere tool to humanity). It is astonishing to see how detailed and insightful she dived into new developments in society and industry, in the world of labour and work, and how, in a way, she anticipated and pre-empted the cultural, sociological and civilisational criticism of the Frankfurt School and critical theory more broadly that would only surface in later decades. However, she anticipated also the Frankfurt School´s own hermetic totalitarianism of the perspective: by refuting practically everything that exists, and organisation per se, as “oppressive” and “alienating”. When man liberates himself from nature, he will do so via culture. And like the Frankfurt School Simone Weil becomes prone to see culture predominantly as an oppressive and alienating force (so at least you have it in some chapters of the Dialectic of Enlightenment). In The Need for Roots she outlines her approach via illustrating the oppressive nature of the historical expansion and deepening of the French state over the centuries. Due to its vast territory, the century-long creation of the French state was indeed cruel and oppressive (like in many other places as well). Local traditions, in which people were (supposedly happily) “rooted” often had to be eradicated. People got uprooted and alienated – or got extinct. Or at least their culture and cultural breathing space got extinct. Though not in a universal and one-dimensional manner, yet overally Simone Weil mourns these developments, and sees a somehow anthropological crime in them (yet also a crime rooted in anthropology). She is not equally open to the notion that such an expansion of culture, institution and organisation is also enriching, empowering and productive – or will produce new possibilities for roots. In a way she shares the specific arrogance of Adorno et al. in all too easily condemning the living conditions of ordinary people as dull and oppressive and being guided by “false consciousness”. She also advocates that the only progress by overcoming oppression and alienation will be when organisation allows for greater individual space, for greater space for manoeuvre for the individual. What we know in advance is that life will be less inhuman the greater the capability for individual action and thinking will become. Yes. But this also is the desire of the competent individual, of the intellectual individual. (Further) Emancipation is the usual desire of those who already reside securely and safely on a higher plane and social stratum than that of mere mediocrity or inferiority. Those less fortunate and well-equipped will rather desire security, stability and predictability. This is something left-wing intellectuals use to struggle a lot to understand up to that day. In The Need for Roots, one might say so, Simone Weil however actually understood that very well. But she missed the point on other occasions. One of her later political ideas was to do away with political parties, as they are alienating and prone to corruption as well. However the political process and collective decision-making will always require for parties, for the organization of political wills into collective parties. Implicitly Simone Weil politically turned into an anarchist (and actually has been one all her life long). It was her quasi-dichotomous perspective on the world between a pole of “oppression” and one of “liberation” that made her somehow blind that in reality there are many nuances and that there is a continuum between these two qualities, an interplay and dialectics between them, so as that at times both may become virtually indistinguishable. Simone Weil was a very political person, but she did not see the world from a political perspective, but from a (lofty) moral one. Because of her frustration with politics, as it might be assumed, she tried to find refuge in the realm of “pure” morals, and, therein, in some kind of religion. The more of a theist she became as a person, the more she became a political atheist.
Life never had any other meaning for me than the expectation and the prospect for truth (…) I always carried the fear in me not to miss the mark of my life but to miss the mark of my death… Indeed, Simone Weil cared a lot for truth. Yet even more she cared for virtue and moral. Her personal tragedy was that she could not stand the truth that the world was not a moral phenomenon. So she became otherworldly, as it appears. She discovered the absolute truth of the Cross. „Give me a fulcrum on which to stand and I shall move the world.” This fulcrum is the Cross. There cannot be any other. The standing point needs to be where the world and where that what is not the world, intersect. This standing point is the Cross. The Cross is where the natural world and the supernatural world meet. As she could not find the absolute good in the empirical world, Simone Weil transferred to locus of the absolute good in a supernatural world and in a transcendent sphere. She even insisted that the absolute good solely resides there, beyond the reach of man, and that it actually also does not interact with man and the empirical world. In substance, this must be all true. Since the “absolute good” is not an empirical but a theoretical and eschatological term, and therefore solely inhabitates the realm of ideals. Simone Weil however, like many other melancholic or depressed idealists, shunned herself from the notion that the ideal sphere of morals is not impotent in the empirical world but massively penetrates into the empirical world. In the empirical world we are quite obsessed with morality and making moral claims and judgements. In fact, it is the empirical world where moral alone is situated. The supernatural quality of morals is a hoax. However, as true morals constantly seeks transcendence over itself at any given state, it is not a meaningless hoax, but something that makes “true” moral reside above the mundane world and mundane humanity. True morality IS an ideal, an imperative that exercises a calling. And as such a calling it is also understood by Simone Weil. The only mediation through which the Good can step down to the human world are those humans whose attention and love are firmly directed to this transcendent reality. Although the supreme good cannot be reached by any faculty of man, man has the power to dedicate his attention and his love to it. Again, it is “attention” (empathy) that makes man fit for receiving the calling of the absolute good. In this way it should be apparent that the absolute good is merely a projection of empathy and the desire for moral. Simone Weil understood this as well, nevertheless she was more interested in and enthusiastic about substantiating the absolute good as something real, and as something divine. She equated the absolute good with God and finally took God as something that exists. Either way, be it a projection or be it something that exists for real as a transcendent force, she understood the Cross as a symbol and bearer of (moral and existential) truth, respectively truthfulness in man. The only source of illumination bright enough to shed light upon human misery is the Cross of Christ. Regardless of era, regardless of place and country, anywhere where there is misery, the Cross of Christ is the truth to misery. Any human who loves the truth to such an extent that he does not try to find refuge against misery in lies, takes part in the truth of the Cross, regardless of religious confession. As such, it is an ethics of devotion (to the Cross) and of virtue she proclaims. With our moral judgments and expectations we may, time and again, and despite our best intentions, be in error (as she experienced it herself). Only devotion to the Cross will ensure at least moral and existential truthfulness (with devotion to the Cross however being a somehow open and elusive concept all the same…). (This resonates with my own idea of why it makes sense to “always be in the wrong against God”: to think of an instance vastly superior to you, against which you can only always be in the wrong, but to which you have to morally and intellectually compare yourself nevertheless.) Simone Weil also makes some observations on the qualities of good and evil that I like to share (as they resonate with mine): The good is something inherently different to evil. Evil is diverse and split up; the good is One; whereas evil is obvious, the good is mysterious (…) Evil, as we like to think, is romantic, phantastic, multi-faceted; yet in reality evil is miserable, colourless, drab, boring. The good, as one likes to think, is boring, yet in reality is always new and fresh, wonderful, addictive … Why did Simone Weil, a sober philosophical mind, become religiously enchanted? It is easy to think it happened because she had become disillusioned by man and the empirical world: therefore she tried to find refuge in a transcendent world. Yes, of course. But if it was that easy she would have been some sort of superficial idiot as well who makes ideological U-turns with ease. This was obviously not the case with her. Some observers suggest that her turn towards mysticism and religion was motivated by disillusionment and resentment. As she could not help and save people in the empirical world (or they refused her help), she would turn inwards and be furthermore only concerned with her own salvation. And maybe this is how it always had been with her altruistic engagement? Well, altruism and egoism can go along, and altruism and taking care for others does not rule out that you take care of yourself as well. And the case of Simone Weil, first and foremost, does not appear much different to that. And it isn´t that astonishing after all. In fact, Simone Weil was a „religious“ figure all along, given her extreme sensitivity to human suffering and her need for the overall concealment and protection of all humans. For a person like her, who is diving that deep into the human experience and into the riddles of existence, it will easily come along the way to become religious, either in an abstract way (via embracing the values of religion) or in the most concrete fashion (via becoming a follower of a religion and a true believer in the supernatural). In her religiosity Simone Weil would operate on both of these planes. Embracing religion in an abstract way would still mean employing critical thinking and a philosophical stance towards religion; being religious in a concrete way would mean devotion, affirmation and uncritical acceptance. Yet this oxymoronic union between enthusiastic blindness and sober super penetrative insightfulness had always been present in Simone Weil. I can tell you that never in my life, not at any moment, I have searched for God; she would confess to Padre Perrin. Instead, it was God, who “found her” (and she was “struck” that he had found her). Obviously Simone Weil did encounter intense religious experiences when she was in Italy. Such experiences are mysterious and can be powerful enough to rewire even confident and firm-standing minds. Yet after all, Simone Weil´s personal religiousness remained to a considerable degree abstract. Like most religious people, she was not enraptured by the idea of a personal god. Her God is equal to truth, to beauty, to the absolute good, and her God manifests in truth, in beauty, in the absolute good. All of these are transcendent qualities, but they radiate into the empirical world. By becoming immersed in them, man becomes finally aware of God. So her God becomes quite indistinguishable from a man-made god, from a hallucination or a projection of capabilities inside man to deal with realities that are found outside man, in the living world. Truth, Beauty, Absolute Good are abstract qualities and theoretical terms; they refer to ideals, and so the God of Simone Weil becomes a conclusion of ideals. Nothing that exists is necessarily loveable. But we must love that which does not exist. It is a religion of voluntarism for ideals Simone Weil proposes. It is about trying to become one with those ideals (since, in a way, you cannot become one with ideals, you might think of God as a mediator). Indeed, Simone´s God is virtually silent. He does not directly reveal himself (only indirectly via truth, beauty, the good). He is silently waiting to be discovered by man. God solely is the good. Therefore he stands in silence and in wait. Anyone who enters a domain or who speaks uses a little bit of violence. The good, that is nothing less than the good, can only exist.
Simone Weil was a Christian who never got baptised and became member of the church (she thought the truth of an ideology can only be found and lived outside of institutions created by this ideology); a theist who never searched for God; a Marxist who did not believe in the revolution and in the working class; an anarchist who was deeply aware of the human Need for Roots; a philosopher who refrained from systematisation and abstract theories; an eager combatant in war who was physically unfit for any combat; a woman who undermined her feminity; an appreciator of beauty who lived a spartanic life and who did not like luxury and extravagance already as a three-year-old; a nonconformist who claimed to have been very prone to social mimesis (If they put twenty young Germans in front of me singing their Nazi songs, I know that a part of my soul would get infected by Nazism as well… she claimed in her observations on herd behaviour and social mimesis – however this might have been due to her pronounced empathy, and not due to mimesis); she was a Jew who did not like Jews; the somehow morbid child of a medical doctor; the sister of a sober, happily married mathematician who outlived her for many decades. Finally she was an adherent of the Absolute although she had to experience herself how often, despite our best intentions, we are in error and our judgements are erroneous and relative. She was both mentally very flexible and very obstinate and apodictic. A protean personality that nevertheless seemed to move in certain repetitive circles. How can you come to be like Simone Weil? Let us assume that an enormous sensibility and empathy, a capacity to feel with others is needed in the first place. This is a priceless gift. The downside of it is that you might become overly sensitive to grief, pain and suffering in this world and for the instability in this world. Our flesh is fragile, any piece of matter in motion can run through it, tear it, grind it or forever disrupt one of its inner elements and bring it out of tune. Our soul is vulnerable, subject to meaningless sorrows, in pathetic dependency of things that are themselves frail and unstable. Our social existence, which is responsible for practically all our experience of our existence, is exposed to chance and misfortune all the time. In addition, because of your super empathy there will come a sense for duty and responsibility (for which, to a good deal, nobody ever asked for). You feel responsible for others, you finally feel responsible for mankind. Not much will happen in this world and not much of your sense of duty will be rewarded though. You will get seriously miserable and depressed and plunge into crisis. You might think that you are yourself to blame, as you cannot live up to what you think is your duty in life. The fear to remain an unusable fig tree for Christ tears my heart. You will also – and accurately – sense that practically all people around you are not as empathetic and attentive as you are. You will then condemn them and think they are no good (which might be true and might be not: it is just that they are not like you; but your empathy is not the only technique of how to be moral and virtuous, or at least ok). You might then drown and indulge into a negative worldview at all. History is a web of visciousness and cruelties, in which, from time to time, some sparks of purity happen to shine through. This is so because there is little purity among humans, and additionally the greatest part of the few who are pure remains unknown. It is actually also unknown whether Simone Weil went a lot into depression when she experienced that her lofty ideals are not of this world. She seemed relatively quick in moving on and dismissing a certain cause she had initially fought for when she found the cause to be inadequate. Some observers even think that it came as a sort of relief to her when she witnessed something bad coming along the way: as if it confirmed her miserable notions on the world. At any rate she quite deliberately fell prey to her dystopian worldviews and they seemed to come easy to her. Grandiose were her hopes and plans for “saving” the world and she was thinking in huge dimensions; and grandiosely the pendulum swung into the other direction when these hopes failed to unfold. In a way she seemed to step into the trap of the philosopher who is thinking and who understands the world in (quasi) eschatological terms and thinks they apply for practical reasons or within practical perspectives. However, where the philosopher will be able to correct his mistakes and switch to a more appropriate and sober perspective, Simone Weil did not. Since the Christians witness how central sorrow and misfortune is to their faith, they should sense that misfortune and sorrow are the true essence of all creation. Being a creature does not necessarily bring about misfortune, but it means becoming exposed to it. Solely things that have not been created are indestructible. If you ask God why he does not prevent misfortune and sorrow, you can equally ask him why he has created. And so, in a way, Simone Weil tried to evade the empirical world, the world of creation all the like, and ascend to the heavenly realm of indestructible truths; searching for ABSOLUTE good, ABSOLUTE truth, ABSOLUTE beauty. Not that she was deluded and simple-minded about the absolute. In fact, she deliberately struggled for perfection and voluntarily asked for nothing less than perfection. Why should she meddle with the muddy empirical world when she could also ascend to the ideal? If there are geniuses of such purity that it equates to ultimate sacredness, why losing one´s time with the admiration of others? One can make use of the others, extract knowledge and enjoyment out of them, but why should we love them? Why dedicate the heart to anything less than the Good? It was a lifelong characteristic of Simone Weil though that she always went to the ultimate and the “absolute” within any undertaking or chain of argumentation. Being an “absolutist” and a maximalist obviously was how her brain was basically wired, a thing in itself about her. Although she did not become truly irrational on these accounts – all her endeavours were in fact logical – she became prone to evading the mediation process of a rational discussion. Time and again she would defend her views and decisions and stick to them up to the point of delusion and infatuation. She had a poor understanding of mediation between concepts, and so she had a poor understanding of society and politics and even of the connection between mind and body, the interplay of the psychosomatic (naturally she favored mind and spirit as something pure and detached from the mundane body, which is maybe why she neglected her body so much or actively mistreated it: her deliberate exposure to pain and hardship might also have been directed against the body). Time and again she employed Manichean and dichotomic heuristics. And then again – and maybe because of this – she had numerous lucid insights into exactly those interplays (concerning politics or concerning the human condition and psyche) that were original and ahead of her time. It was just that she did not like such interplays and meddlings between pure concepts very much, as it seems. If we had to nail the core of the strangeness of Simone Weil then it likely was that she was a very subversive thinker and personality who underwent numerous metamorphoses on the one hand, while being apodictic, obstinate and overly consequential in her argumentations and judgements on the other hand, leaving little room for maneuver and for flexibility of the mind and for heart and soul. Within this limited space she came to dead ends – which she then had to blow up in a spectacular fashion and set up new concepts, argumentations and strivings which, in character, were alike. In always driving her thinking and feeling to the unmediated extreme, it seems apparent that she had to end up becoming entangled in phantasy products like the Absolute or the Supreme Good.
Simone Weil, as it appears on the surface, was both a strong thinker and a strong feeler. And it seems that her strong emotions caused her otherwise perfectly sober thinking to lead into deluded ends (or quasi-deluded ends, since they usually did not lack internal consistency; their external consistency and relatedness to the wider world was often shaky). One would like to know whether, behind this surface, there is a “deep structure” that would offer revelation to the enigma of her personality. Simone Weil surely was a proud (maybe even arrogant?) nonconformist. Did pride/arrogance cause hubris in her, and therefore her bizarre and over-the-top claims and behaviour? We do not know whether Simone Weil was proud and arrogant per se, or her pride was but a (harmless) epiphenomenon of her undisbutable achievements. Rather the latter seems to be the adequate guess. Her modesty and proneness for self-negation was the most obvious that was real about her, manifesting itself very early on in her, as a basic, archaic trait in her that is not the result of anything else but that will be formative principle for her further character development. She also loved truth, up to the level of greatest purity. The aspiration of the scientist is the coalescence of his mind with the mysterious wisdom that is forever ingrained in the universe. That will produce a rational and ethically considerate personality, however striving too much for purity might blur the perspective that truth, and ethics, often is not “pure” but something more differentiated, diverse and situational and being of a more complicated texture already in its composition. Simone Weil also loved beauty, and it was the observation of exceptional beauty (during her journey to Italy) that made her receptive to the otherworldly and the divine. Very few scientists penetrate that deep into their science that their heart will be enraptured by the science´s inner beauty. An arrogant claim (that might be correct nevertheless). To pay no attention to beauty probably is the most enormous crime of ingratitude, it deserves the punishment of unhappiness. Of course, it does not always follow in such a way, yet then the punishment is a mediocre life; and in what way a mediocre life would be more preferable than unhappiness? Yet in her own life Simone Weil did not surround herself with beauty and she rather desired making herself ugly. So, as we might wonder, what would Simone Weil ever would have to teach others about beauty? Yet also Beethoven would compose his sublime music in filthy and stinky pigsty apartments (just as well as other “paradoxical” examples could come to mind). It is however legitimate to ask how Simone Weil did personally experience beauty (and other things)? This is, of course, a finally unsolvable question that refers to the problems of qualia. How do others truly and personally experience something, what is the distinct quality of their experience, and how is that actually comparable to our own inner experiences when we use the same words to describe a feeling? This is something we can ultimately never know. Private inner experiences of others are only accessible to us through signs, i.e. expressions of qualias but not the qualias themselves. Beauty can have many aspects, and maybe Simone Weil was primarily receptive for intellectual beauty. In general, Simone Weil refused to do systematic philosophy because she thought that overly relying on theoretical abstractions would not do justice to the phenomena. Yet to what degree Simone Weil was able to experience “pure” phenomena? In fact she was quite handy and quick in translating her experiences into something theoretical and abstract. That is, of course, what intellectual people use to do and how their mind and their information processing works. Yet Simone Weil may have had a particular short fuse on this account (as she acknowledged however, her permanent thinking helped to ease her chronic headache, so she would naturally rely on it). And so, maybe, she did come up with theoretical abstractions that seem premature and not adequately thought through. It was however also her enthusiasm for these concepts that prevented to work out on them in a more critical fashion. Highly gifted people are usually very receptive, intense and restless. But emotional intelligence would also include that you are able to relax, lay back and enjoy things; open up space for other things. Simone Weil was, as it seems, very open to let the world in and minimise herself. But maybe she actually was not, and she was not very good at actually enjoying things and leave them be. She was overly restless and maybe therefore longed for emotions that are stronger than the positive emotions associated with beauty, love, enjoyment: and those are the negative emotions revolving around pain, which is so prominent in her work and worldview.
All men are inconclusive in their overall personality. A personality is the result of countless wirings and circuits in the brain and of a psychosomatic entirety. These wirings are adaptions to certain problems and they do not need to be in harmony with each other. Moreover, these wirings interact, and specific interactions may create new wirings. You finally are a (lose) combination of spheres. Some men are however more inconclusive than others. And Simone Weil appears as strikingly inconclusive. What appears as inconclusive to our maybe limited perspective might however be just a harmony when viewed from a higher dimension (or another dimension: when regarding what a person wants to be for herself, and not for others, and unrespective of what kind of “meaning” the person wants to make in the world). I used to speak of “ultracomplex people” when characterising the likes like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Beethoven or Kleist. But I have not used this heuristic in recent years. Maybe one´s “ultracomplexity” is based on quite a simple inner conflict. Simone Weil would qualify as an ultracomplex person. Yet with an ultracomplex person I was originally thinking of a person whose ultracomplexity makes sense and the person is actually well-rounded and in control of herself and her complexities. I do not know how much this has been the case with Simone Weil. She rather seemed haunted by her complexities. But she died early, and we do not know what would have happened to her had she grown older. While some people (stubbornly and frustratingly) remain the same all their life, other people change considerably over the years. Simone Weil was both a protean personality as she seemed to be stuck in certain mechanisms. What would have triumphed over the other finally? She also seemed simply too young to elegantly integrate all the countless spheres she inhabitated and all the experiences she made. She was a vaster personality and exposed herself to vaster experiences than most other men (including philosophers) do, and dare to do. How should you digest all of this in time? This article may have the shortcoming that it overly investigates Simone Weil as a rational philosopher (and, therefore, how she somehow failed to live up to this life model respectively failed to accommodate her with the living world). Yet you may also consider Simone Weil as a religious figure, or an existential figure. As such, she might seem considerably more conclusive and consequential. Maybe we are just too stupid to understand her, as she might have been a true messenger of the Absolute. And who ever understands the Absolute? As she lay dying, she wrote to her parents that she feels convinced to carry a treasure of pure gold inside me … Yet my experience and observations of my contemporaries suggest that there is nobody there to welcome and receive this treasure. Yet that would not be pitiful as the writings of our time would vanish anyway rather sooner than later. The goldmine however is exhaustible. Obviously she thought of herself as being one of the few sparkles of the good that appear in the human world from time to time, yet mostly remain unknown. Most of her works were not published at that time and were not even designed to become published. Obviously she did not anticipate the fame and recognition that she would receive soon after her death, nor desire for it. Also in her final days she would discover the Shakespearean fools – and identify with them. The fools are the only individuals who tell the truth (…) In this world only those of men who have reached the ultimate degree of humiliation, beneath the status of beggars, who not only are deprived of social reputation but also of the faculty admired by all, the faculty of reason, only such individuals can speak the truth. All the others lie (…) The priest is a guardian of the absolute, serving the cult of that which is ultimate and definitive and of the evidences rooted in tradition. The fool casts doubt on everything… Alas, poor Yorick. Or, as we might say: Alas, poor Simone.
Listen to this, asshole. Complexities are difficult to decipher and you should refrain from thinking you can do such a thing all to easily. They are like a mosaic, and when one piece only is missing, you might come up with interesting thoughts about it; but the final piece that illuminates it all and will finally give sense to the entity may still be missing. Therefore what you might consider as the conclusion is still only premature. Maybe this final piece is but a single sentence somewhere in the oeuvre of Simone Weil you did not read or where, so far, you have missed the point. Maybe it stands in those parts of the oeuvre that have not yet been published or translated into your language. Maybe this sentence would have come in the future, had Simone Weil lived longer – and therefore only exists as some odd virtuality. Simone Weil is a very inviting figure to analyse her and trying to discover her “secret”, i.e. to probe your intellect and maybe show the world how clever you are. But we should also remain at some respectful distance to her and leave her be.
