Simone Weil - Eliah Shea H02

Simone Weil

    This is Simone Weil. I chose to do my project about Simone Weil on a whim, honestly. The name just stuck out to me, but I ended up really enjoying learning about her life. I am Jewish as well, so when I found out she was, too, I connected more with her story. I find her ideas about attention interesting, and her activism perhaps even more fascinating.

   

Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris. She was born to an upper class, educated Jewish family, who raised her secularly. Because of her family's wealth, she and her brother, a talented mathematician, attended some of the best schools in Paris (Rozelle-Stone and Davis).

    Weil was an unusual child. She was extremely empathetic from a young age. When she heard that soldiers in World War I would not receive their rations of candy, she abstained from sugar as well (Setiya, 123). She was like this her whole life; as a young adult, she did not heat her apartment in solidarity with workers who could not afford to, and she insisted on sleeping on hard floors (Weiner, 125).

    It should be noted that Weil's family was extremely germaphobic. She and her siblings were taught to wash their hands frequently, open doors with their elbows, and to never kiss anyone. She was afraid of touch into adulthood. She was also said to get sick frequently, and experienced regular headaches her entire life (Weiner, 124).

   Weil was exposed to complex philisophical material around high school age, which is also when she began to develop her own personal philosophy. Her first philosophy teacher was René Le Senne. He introduced her to the idea that "contradiction is a theoretical obstacle generative of nuanced, alert thinking", which became central to her personal philosophy. Weil also studied under Émile-Auguste Chartier, better known as Alain, a prolific philosophical writer. He taught about all the great philosophers before the year 1925, and gave her extensive readings of classic Greek literature like Homer (Rozelle-Stone and Davis).

    When I first read this quote, I was a bit flabberghasted as to its meaning, but after rereading it several times, I think that he meant that when you encounter something that conflicts with your views in some way, that is an obstacle that you can either choose to reject or choose to use to generate a highly attentive and open state of mind. This idea of contradiction generating attentive thinking is interesting to me. I can think of times where I have encountered someone with different views or experiences than me and I rejected them, and I can also think of times where I have tried to understand the person. I think that I agree with Weil and Le Senne in that it is better to immediately approach someone with contradictory beliefs to yours, or even a belief that you have that is contradictory to another, with understanding rather than rejection.

    I chose to do my presentation and this blogpost about Simone Weil completely randomly, but I actually relate somewhat to her upbringing. While I don't come from a rich background, and my family weren't germaphobes, I was solidly upper-middle class for a lot of my childhood, especially my teenage years. Also, I am Jewish--at least a quarter--ancestrally, but I was raised secularly, like Weil. My great grandfather is from Hungary and he came with his family to the United States in the early 1900s. He and his family were Jewish. He died when I was really young, so I don't really remember him, but my mom talks a lot about him. She remembers him very fondly, and seems to view him as a sort of role model. His daughter, my grandma, raised my mom to be assimilated with the wider culture, which, at the time, was rural Mississippi, so she didn't get the full Jewish experience, and my mom raised me and my sister completely agnostically. She did not push any one religion on us, but we still did Hannukah and ate latkes, and I've been to temple a few times, but we also did Christmas. I never considered myself religious, nor do I now. I respect religion, I just didn't grow up with it.

    Weil went to École Normale for her university studies. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, she was the only woman in her class, but Kieren Setiya's "Life Is Hard" claims that she scored first place in her entrance exams, and second place went to Simone de Beauvoir, so I don't know what to believe. Another source, the Internet Encyclopia of Philosophy, even specifies that Weil beat de Beauvoir on the Exam for General Philosophy and Logic.

    Anyway, she studied to become a public school teacher and she acquired her diploma in two years. She did her dissertation on knowledge and perception in Descartes. After she graduated, she taught in the French public school system for three years, from 1931 to 1934. During this time, outside of her teachings, she taught philosophy to and advocated for workers' groups, and did manual labor herself.

    Weil's philosophy focused on finding the causes of oppression in society. She was primarily inspired by Marx, Descartes, and Kant. In 1932, she went to Germany to understand the conditions that fostered Nazism. She observed that economic causes were the predominant reason for the rise and proliferation of Nazism, saying that unemployment weakened Germans' self esteem and bureaucracy disenfranchised the common worker, among other issues (Rozelle-Stone and Davis).

    In 1934, she published an essay called "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression" in which she critiqued marxism, saying that the problem with capitalism is not property ownership but the essence of work, and that the problems with work lie in specialization (Vaquero, 331-332).

    "Work is no longer done with the proud consciousness that one is being useful, but with the humiliating and agonizing feeling of enjoying a privilege bestowed by a temporary stroke of fortune, a privilege from which one excludes several human beings by the mere fact that one enjoys, in short, a job (Weil).

    The same year she published "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression", she applied for a sabbatical from teaching. She planned to work in Parisian factories because she wanted to experience life working with Paris' most oppressed group: unskilled female factory workers. While she planned to work in the factories for a year, she only ended up working in them for 24 months, but her experience in the factories was an impactful one. She kept a "Factory Journal" during her time in them, and she wrote of unrealistic speed expectations from superiors and extreme fatigue. She felt dehumanized and humiliated. She described her experience as "a kind of slavery".

    Her time in the factories can be seen as a turning point in her religious beliefs. The year after, on a trip to Portugal, Weil wrote while witnessing a procession to honor the patron saint of fishing villagers that she had realized that Christianity was "the religion of slaves" and that "slaves cannot thelp belonging to it". Additionally, in her "Factory Journal", a shift to the use of "humiliation" and "affliction" can be seen as opposed to the word "oppression".

    In 1936, Weil participated in a large-scale occupation of Paris' factories by workers. She planned to return to factory work afterwards, but the Spanish Civil War started, which piqued her interest. She was against French participation in the war, but privately she joined the front lines by obtaining journalist's credentials and joining an anarchist brigade. In August of 1936, she accidentally stepped in a pot of hot oil, severely injuring her left leg, forcing her to leave the front lines. Her parents persuaded her not to return, but she kept publishing her writing. In her writing, she argued against French colonization, and she criticized Marx for claiming revolution to be inevitable.

    During Easter week of 1938, Weil visited the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes for several days. If you don't know, as I did not, an abbey is like a community of Catholic monks. There, she found solace from a particularly bad headache in a Gregorian chant. She wrote that in that service, she felt "the passion of Christ [enter] into [her] being once and for all." There, also, she said she felt Christ's presence while reciting George Herbert's poem "Love". Born agnostically Jewish, she now believed in Christ.

    In May 1940, Weil and her family fled France by train as Germany invaded, with WWII already under way. They settled temporarily in Marseilles, a sanctuary city in a part of France yet uncontrolled by Germany. There, she worked with the Resistance and became a farmer's apprentice. She also met there a Dominican priest, Joseph-Marie Perrin, who came her close friend and spiritual advisor.

    Weil started working at a grape vineyard in 1941. In 1942, she and her family went to New York to flee from the Nazis. However, Weil felt disconnected from the struggle of her fellow Frenchmen there, so in 1943 she moved back to Europe, to London, alone. In London, she worked for the Free French movement, a French anti-Nazi group.

    She wrote "night and day" for four months before she resigned from the group. One month later, she died. She was 34. The coroner pronounced her death a suicide: she had died from a combination of self-starvation and tuberculosis. You see, while in London she had been living on the same rations given to the French people in Germany-occupied France in solidarity with her countrymen, and this comined with tubercolosis caused her death in the end (Rozelle-Stone and Davis).

    In conclusion, Simone Weil was a highly eccentric character. She was ethnically Jewish, religiously Catholic, extremely empathetic, and ruthlessly righteous. I see some of myself in her, helped by the fact that I was raised secularly Jewish myself. I find her empathy inspiring, and the lengths that she went to understand disenfranchisement in society are admirable. She was a great activist and philosopher who embodies the spirit of love well.

This is a reading of a poem by Simone Weil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8JEbAIY2ls

This is a presentation about Weil and her life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDBSvigmejo&t=805s

Works Cited:

Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca and Benjamin P. Davis, "Simone Weil", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/simone-weil/>.

Setiya, Kieran. "Life Is Hard." 2022.

Weiner, Eric. "The Socrates Express." 2020.

Weil, Simone. "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression." 1958.

Vaquero, Alberto. G. "Reseñas." 2015.