Simone Weil

Today, August 24th of 2023, marks 70 years since the death of the remarkable Simone Weil. To start this short biography, I will share an interaction of her and Simone de Beauvoir that I feel is an apt introduction to her character. Simone de Beauvoir, after her first encounter with Simone Weil, wrote in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: 

“She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits… I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started. She said in piercing tones that only one thing mattered these days: the revolution that would feed all the starving people on the earth. I retorted, no less adamantly, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to help them find a meaning in their existence. She glared at me and said, ‘It’s clear you’ve never gone hungry.’ Our relations ended right there. I realized she had classified me as a high-minded little bourgeoise, and I was angry.”

Hunger and starvation was an issue that particularly concerned Simone Weil. At age six, she refused sugar because the soldiers at front lines during the First World War did not have access to any. She was dubbed “The Martian” by her classmates. In her later years, when she taught Philosophy at several schools (in which she received heavy criticism due to political activism), she refused to eat more than those who were on relief. 

Simone Weil was one of the two women who were accepted into the renowned École Normale Supérieure, attended by great thinkers such as Sartre and Bergson. She graduated at the top of her class, and second came the only other woman at the school, Simone de Beauvoir.  “I envied her for her heart,” said Beavoir of Weil. “A heart that could beat right across the world.”   

Activism 

In her late teens, Weil was heavily involved in the workers’ movement, marching for workers’ rights and writing political tracts. In an attempt to better understand the psychological effects of hard labor on the working class, Weil worked at an auto factory in 1936. She then joined an anarchist unit known as the Durutti Column during the Spanish Civil War to fight against the fascists, though her efforts saw a lack of success. Her nearsightedness and clumsiness working against her, she was forced to leave her unit within weeks after she burnt herself while boiling oil. After she escaped the German-occupied Paris to the U.S., she went to London to contribute to the French resistance.

Philosophies and Works 

To preface the following explorations of Weil’s philosophies, it is important to note her ideas are too varied to fairly explore in a short biography, but definitely worth exploring on your own. This biography will explore her views of attention and affliction. 

One of her students recalled that Weil would take her class outside and have them stand under in search of a geometric problem. Through the reflection of questions and problems, rather than merely seeking an answer to problems, Weil believed students could truly learn and pay attention. In the same respect, Weil did not grade her students. 

Weil’s redefinition of attention is one that is revisited by scholars around the world today. In Waiting for God, Weil explains that attention is not mere concentration, but a complete devotion to another. To pay attention, according to Weil, is to be “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” It is to ask one’s neighbor “what are you going through?”  Waiting for God also features what Weil believes to be the three forms of the implicit love of God: the love of one's neighbor, the love of the world’s beauty, and the love of religious ceremonies. 

Additionally, Weil understood affliction as a necessary experience of the soul, and noted that the worst form of suffering is one of war and oppression. She credited her moral Philosophy and her understanding of human beings as sacred to her afflictions. In “The Love of God and Affliction,” Weil reflected “the people they meet, even those who have suffered much, those who have never had contact with affliction (properly defined) have no idea what it is. It is something specific, irreducible to any other thing, like sounds we cannot explain at all to a deaf-mute.”

Legacy 

Despite being on her deathbed after her diagnosis with tuberculosis, Weil remained faithful to her ethics and abstained from eating more than the official ration in occupied France. She then died at age 34 from starvation and malnutrition. One thing that sets Weil apart from many philosophers is that she truly lived her Philosophy rather than merely thought it. Her integrity persevered through the toughest of times, and she found in her heart sympathies for all people. Albert Camus referred to her as “the only great spirit of our times.”