This Day in Philosophy — 24 August: the death of Simone Weil

Simone Weil died on 24 August 1943 at the Grosvenor Sanatorium in Ashford, in the English county of Kent. She was thirty-four. The cause of death was heart failure, aggravated by the undernourishment she had imposed upon herself.

She had been born in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her only sibling, André Weil, would become one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century.

The shape of a life#

It is hard to separate Weil's thought from her biography, because she refused to separate them herself.

She took her degree at the École Normale Supérieure and became a teacher of philosophy. Then she gave up teaching and went to work as a hand in a factory — because she did not wish to judge exhaustion and subordination from the outside. She joined the Spanish Civil War. After the occupation of Paris she escaped to America in 1942, and moved on to London to work with the French Resistance.

In London she refused to eat more than the ration allotted to people in occupied France. The choice brought about her death.

Should a life of that kind form part of the reading of a philosophy? Weil's own answer is unambiguous: a thought that is not tested in the thinker's life is not yet a thought.

Attention#

The most original concept Weil left to philosophy is attention.

In its everyday sense, attention is the effort spent on concentrating upon something. Weil turns this round: real attention has less to do with effort than with suspension. It is a matter of laying aside our expectations, our judgements and our representations, and letting the object show itself.

“Attention, in its purest form, is generosity,” she writes.

The concept has two extensions. The first is epistemological: to understand a thing is not to make it fit our own categories. The second is moral: really to see another person — his suffering, his need, his being — takes attention. The essence of love of one's neighbour, for Weil, lies in being able to ask: “What are you going through?”

By way of Iris Murdoch the concept passed into contemporary moral philosophy, and it is used today in debates in virtue ethics.

Gravity and grace#

Gravity and Grace, compiled from Weil's notebooks, sets out the opposition at the centre of her thinking.

Gravity is the natural inclination of the soul: to preserve itself, to fill itself, to have the upper hand, to compensate for emptiness. Like physical gravity it operates with necessity, and it can be foreseen.

Grace is the one thing that comes in the other direction, upward, and it cannot be calculated. If grace is to enter, Weil holds, an emptiness must be left within us — which is why waiting matters more than the satisfaction of desire.

The scheme is built in theological language, yet Weil entered no church. She drew close to Catholicism and refused baptism. Her reason was a mistrust of institutional belonging.

Force and uprootedness#

Weil's political philosophy is gathered in two texts.

The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940) reads Homer's epic through the way force turns a human being into a thing. The greatness of the Iliad, on Weil's account, lies in its neither exalting force nor concealing it: it shows force impartially, as a mechanism that deforms the one who wields it as much as the one who suffers it.

The Need for Roots (1943) is a report written for the Resistance leadership in London. In it Weil discusses the rebuilding of postwar France, and puts obligations before rights. The notion of a right, she argues, is a language of demand, and left to itself it produces conflict; what matters is that the real needs of human beings — for rootedness, for order, for responsibility, for honour — should be met.

Why she is read today#

The notebooks published after her death were read in a wide circle running from Camus to Murdoch, from Susan Sontag to Giorgio Agamben. Camus called her “the only great spirit of our times”.

The present interest is owed largely to the concept of attention. The now familiar diagnosis that we live under a regime of divided attention lends the lines Weil wrote in the 1940s an unexpected currency.

Her own sentence runs: “Attention is the most difficult and the truest effort of the soul.”

In Turkish#

Yerçekimi ve Lütuf (Gravity and Grace), Köklenmek (The Need for Roots), Tanrı Aşkına Dair Düzensiz Düşünceler (Unsystematic Thoughts Concerning the Love of God) and İlyada, ya da Kuvvetin Şiiri (The Iliad, or the Poem of Force) are among the texts of hers translated into Turkish.