Simone Weil, the French mystic and anarchist who starved herself to death in 1943, retains a powerful hold on the imaginations of many intellectuals. It was Albert Camus who arranged the publication of her posthumous works, just after the war, and according to wikipedia she has been the subject of more than 2,500 scholarly publications since 1995.
Part of the fascination stems from her purity of purpose: indifferent to money, power, fame, comfort, and, in the end, even survival, she gives us a glimpse of what a life without ego might mean. She called this "decreation," and meant exactly the opposite of what God did when he made the universe. Susan Sontag wrote of her,
No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. But insofar as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.
That, I think, is at the root of the fascination with Weil: she went where spiritually-minded intellectuals feel their thought trending, but dare not go themselves.
Another intellectual obsessed with Weil was Iris Murdoch, who wrote a series of essays about Weil in the 1950s. Robert Zaretsky:
Any ethics worth its salt, Murdoch contended, must be founded on seeing the world as it really is. This is no easy task for a simple reason: what Murdoch called our “fat, lazy ego”—the Weilian “I”—is always in the way. The great obstacle to knowing, and thus acting on the Good, Murdoch declared, is “personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one.” When I see the world as it is, not as I wish it to be, I lose sight of my own self and win insight into others.
Citing Weil, Murdoch insisted that morality is nothing more, and nothing less, “than a matter of attention.” This ideal required what Murdoch called “unselfing,” a prerequisite to turning fully to others while leaving oneself behind. To wait, patiently and fully, for the world and others to reveal themselves. The consequences, for both Weil and Murdoch, are so obvious yet so startling; when we transform how we see the world, we also transform how we relate to the world and those who inhabit it. To paraphrase John Kennedy’s famous phrase, it is not what the world can do for us, but instead what we can do for the world. The first step is to make my own self smaller. It is a relationship in which the other is always the focus. “The more the separateness and differentness of other people is realized, and the fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing.”
Like Sontag, Murdoch was incapable of devoting her life to the martyrdom embraced by Weil. But also like Sontag, Murdoch grasped the reasons why that life holds our attention. As she wrote in an early review of the English translation of Weil’s notebooks, Murdoch affirmed that “to read her is to be reminded of a standard.” On the anniversary of Weil’s death, it is a reminder well worth recalling.
I'd never heard of Weil, so I went and skimmed her wikipedia article.
ReplyDeleteI assumed from her French nationality and the date of death that there was some connection with her demise to World War II, but I expected it to be something more like the White Rose Society (whom I can respect for their conviction, but whom I ultimately find foolish because they made empty symbolic gestures instead of doing anything meaningful to actually help oppose the Nazis).
But Weil's behavior (and subsequent 'martyrdom') is even more inexplicable to me - I can only make sense of it as either deeply irrational, or the product of already being condemned to death by the combination of tuberculosis and a lifelong weak constitution, or both.
What a very odd person. And what a very odd philosophy. And how very odd that she has apparently had such a wide-reaching and long-lasting impact, despite it all.