Simone Weil
French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil is a complex and captivating figure. She believed that we are called to a place of emptiness in which the self is transcended; that the purest form of prayer is to be found in attention in which thought is suspended; and that through suffering we could encounter the core of reality, stripped of falsehood and illusion. Author Michael McGirr* reflects on someone he says who, for 30 years, has left his mind ‘gasping for air.’
Few philosophers have got under my skin to the same extent as Simone Weil (1909-1943). In just 34 years she moved to a place of eerie depth, filling case-loads of lined exercise books using cheap pens. Her writing is exquisite and whenever I have gone back to it over the past thirty years, it leaves my mind gasping for air, wanting to return to something safer and perhaps more shallow. At the same time I am intoxicated by the sheer beauty of both her vision and her blindness.
She reminds me in one respect of the Canadian film maker, James Cameron, the director of Titanic. Cameron must have an affinity for the bottom of the ocean. In 2012, he used a special submersible capsule called Deepsea Challenger to descend to the bottom of a valley in the Mariana trench, part of the north Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines, the deepest place so far discovered anywhere on earth. He descended to a depth of almost 11 km where the water pressure was over 1,000 times as great as that air pressure at the surface. Deepsea Challenger must have been made of sturdy stuff. The presence of our rubbish in places that we ourselves can’t reach is crazy.
Cameron came across living creatures to a depth of about 8,000 metres, some of it never sighted before. But as he reached the level of 10,000 m, there was very little, if anything, to excite the pilgrim. There may be microbes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench but they are not visible to the naked eye. At the bottom, there appears nothing but sand. It is such an emptiness that you might wonder if it was worth all the bother to get there. Yet the emptiness is somehow replete simply because it is beyond the reach of normal life. It is a place of such stillness that human powers of attention become, if anything, more sharply focused.
Simone went to this place as a philosopher, a place she called decreation, one in which nothingness becomes everything. For her, this was the opposite of destruction because destruction led to nothingness and no further. Decreation was ‘to make something created pass into the uncreated’, a call to self-transcendence in which we ‘participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.’ A tragic bus accident is destruction. Putting your personal needs aside to help when you only want to vomit is decreation because, in Weil’s words, by ‘uprooting oneself one seeks greater reality’.
Weil’s whole physical life could be summed up in that last phrase. She was endlessly uprooting herself. Simone was perplexing, to say the least. She never liked to be touched. She lived with constant migraines and headaches, pushing herself through one barrier of pain after another to be the kind of person her mind required her to be. She had few social graces and people found her abrasive until they got to know her and discovered her fragile tenderness. She so often chose the more difficult path that reading her life story becomes hard work. You long for her to show kindness to herself but she never seems to have done that although she did have moments of serenity. There was no doubt that she became a mystic. But all of us have to live in a body and Weil found that less comfortable than pure thought.
Simone Weil was one of only two children. Her brother, Andre, three years older than her, was a genius and became one of the most versatile mathematicians of the 20th century. It is possible that Simone felt that she lived in his shadow but she was no slouch. When she was nineteen, she came first in the entrance examination for the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. The runner up was none other than Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), a philosopher whose feminist work was no less important than Weil’s but very different. Beauvoir wanted to save humanity from narrow-minded prejudice; Weil wanted to save it from narrow self-focus.
Heaven knows how these two got on with each other. There is a clue in Beauvoir’s ironically titled Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) where the author recalls suggesting to Weil that the greatest need of human beings was to find meaning in their lives. Weil retorted, in her usual acerbic manner, that Beauvoir had clearly never been hungry. They didn’t speak much after that.
Weil had been hungry but not because of any shortage of food. From her earliest years, her middle-class Jewish parents found it difficult to get her to eat properly. At least one of her biographers, Francine du Plessix Gray, is adamant that she suffered all her life from anorexia nervosa, but others are not so sure. Once her mind was made up about food or anything else, even from childhood, she was immovable. Making up her mind, however, could be a painstaking business.
Weil went to great lengths to share the conditions of the afflicted, starting with vigorous support for left wing political causes. Affliction is a word which, like attention, came to carry a great burden within her philosophy. Du Plessix Gray says that, for Weil, affliction was ‘a notion that blends physical pain, spiritual distress and social degradation.’
Her thinking about the nature of suffering is rich and complex. She does not glorify suffering; she believes it is inevitable and that inevitability leads to an encounter with the core of reality. It becomes a ladder which can take us out of falsehood and illusion. ‘There is a point in affliction where we are no longer able to bear either that it should go on or that we should be delivered from it.’ In other words, you can’t bear to be at the scene of an accident but you can’t bear to leave either. For Weil, the worst kind of hell was a mistaken belief that you were in paradise.
She regularly abandoned comfortable accommodation to find worse lodgings. She left teaching in schools in middle class areas to find more demanding places to work. When she found manual work on a farm, she refused to sleep in a bed and moved onto the floor of a barn. She abandoned the classroom to take up blue-collar jobs in a list of horrendous factories where she was often injured by machines and furnaces; unskilled women were ‘slaves.’
She found it hard to keep up the unrelenting pace expected of her, but she stuck at it to the point of utter exhaustion. The conditions of factory work left her, after a year, broken in pieces, body and soul. ‘That contact with affliction killed my youth.’ She wrote to a priest ‘As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others branded my flesh and my soul.’ She came to see that the worst causality of habitual exhaustion was the inability to think.
Her parents followed their Simonette around, trying to save her from what they saw as a tendency to self-annihilation. They did all they could to help but when she went to their place, she insisted on paying for her food from her meagre wages. When she enlisted in the Spanish Civil War, a form of idealism that grabbed hold of people as different as Orwell and Hemingway, they took a hotel as close to the fighting as they could, trying to find her. This was just as well. Simone was badly injured when she mistakenly put her foot in boiling oil. In her depleted condition, an infection may have killed her.
During World War II, they managed to get her out of Europe to the United States, where Andre was teaching at university, seeking refugee from Hitler’s madness. But then Simone wanted to be parachuted into the front line. She returned to England within a matter of weeks to pursue this plan and worked for the French Resistance under de Gaulle.
Weil’s death encapsulates so much of her living. In April 1943, she collapsed on the floor of her room and was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with tuberculosis. Here again she refused to eat. She wanted to fight an entire war but she was unable to allow her body to fight this one intruder. She wrote cheerful letters to her parents to put them off the scent.
On August 24, she died. The coroner’s report read ‘cardiac failure due to myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis … the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.’
Maybe was she like a monk or nun in the highest echelons of the Jain tradition who practice ‘sallekhana’, the triumph over personal desire that could be manifested in relinquishing life through self-starvation. It marks freedom from karma. I’m not sure. The issue worries me, a person who has always been more inclined to practice a different kind of self-starvation through over-eating.
Simone Weil’s philosophy was to become anchored to an experience that took place after she left the Renault factory in 1935 and her parents took her to Portugal for respite:
It was evening and there was a full moon. It was by the sea. The wives of the fishermen were going in procession to make a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must have been very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give you any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly born in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.
Weil never became a Christian in a formal sense because she was never a joiner, never comfortable with collective identity. But this experience of beauty in the midst of suffering took her mind to a mystical place that she explored in countless ways for the rest of her life. Her pen never rested. Her exercise books kept filling.
In her understanding, the counterbalance to affliction was attention.
One of the most striking of her essays is called ‘Human Personality’, a wonderful exploration of the way in which our dignity has little to do with the ways we shape our lives, and our identity has little to do with ourselves as individuals. To think of a person as an individual is, for Weil, to limit them. Despite what many believe, individuality tends to put people in boxes. She claims that you can say ‘my person does not count’ but never ‘I do not count.’ The ‘I’ is more than my current sense of myself:
There is something sacred in every person, but it is not their person. Nor yet is it human personality. It is this man or woman, no more and no less. I see a passer-by in the street. They have long arms, blue eyes and a mind whose thoughts I do not know, but perhaps they are commonplace. It is neither their person, nor the human personality in them, which is sacred to me. It is he or she. The whole of him or her. The arms, the eyes, the thoughts, everything.
What does she mean by ‘I’ if it is not related to a person or personality? Her answer relies on Descartes about whom she wrote her first work of philosophy. She says that we have nothing in the world except the power to say ‘I’. The ‘I’ is the being that no loss of personality or degradation of personhood can erase. In other words, the thing that most constitutes our dignity is not personal but actually impersonal. It is above and beyond any personal understanding we might lay claim to. If I lose an arm, I am still myself. If I change my gender or nationality, I am still myself. If I lose my job, status and even sense of humour, I am still myself. Likewise, if I lose my wallet, glasses or temper. Descartes said that the only thing we can’t doubt is the existence of the ‘I’ who doubts.
This is where her understanding of attention is powerful. It is the bridge across which the ‘I’ has to walk.
Weil says, ‘we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.’ Many people have a DIY approach to identity, including the creation of our values and character. In her life, Weil seems to have been a DIY person herself. In conversation, she spent more time speaking than listening. Her decisions, however inexplicable to those who loved her, were immovable. Even so, she believed that effort of the will does not make us anything. Our values, character and even identity are not our own craft projects. They are done to us, not by us. Our place is to attend to the world and discover where we belong in an act of surrender. ‘Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in us.’
The essay written the year before her death, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies’ (1942), should be put in the hands of aspiring teachers. Every classroom has been confronted by attention seeking students. It can be difficult to know what to do without seeing this as a problem and therefore devoting more time to a challenging student and thus inadvertently rewarding poor behaviour.
How do you turn attention seekers into attention givers? A way forward is the idea of an attention span and, like many others, I have been concerned by a sense that the attention span of young people is crumbling. Simone Weil had an almost unbelievable attention span, often spreading her books out on the floor and kneeling before them in rapt wonder for hours on end. This idea of attention as an effort, however, is not quite what she meant. She doesn’t want students taught to batten down and chain themselves to work. She wants them to be captivated, not captured. An attention span is like the span of a bridge. It is a means to escape from here. It takes us over water and valley into another country, the non-self:
Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies … Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort … Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object … Our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it … Prayer consists of attention.
Michael McGirr is a writer and author, and also the mission facilitator at Caritas Australia. He has also been an editor, teacher, and Jesuit priest. His many books include Ideas to Save your Life – Philosophy for Wisdom, Solace and Pleasure, which includes a chapter on Simone Weil, from which this extract is taken.
This extract is also the basis for an online talk Michael gave at The Well on Sunday 27 April. You can view the recording here (Use passcode: 5vH$^68!): https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/b6yHQ8BQ30AuiWkD3MwfF6_VipZCwfKa2o1L5hTSrBJsPGd6Ap04k0b6o-DNtUdW.3_WH81h8GKoBhAJJ
The next talk at The Well will be given by Dr Cath Connelly on
St Gobnait of Ireland on Sunday 25 May at 7.30pm via zoom.
For more details and the zoom link, see: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/events
The Well provides an online opportunity to drink deeply from the Well of Living Water offered by the mystics and poets. These monthly Sunday night sessions consist of a reading, a 20-minute meditation, and a talk in which the speaker reflects on how a mystic or poet has been life-giving, a source of Living Water, in their lives.