Weil in the present and future

Abstract The final chapter in this short book focuses on the continuing legacy of Simone Weil, both in terms of thinkers whose ideas have been shaped by her writings (highlighting Emmanuel Levinas, Iris Murdoch, Susan Sontag, and Anne Carson) and some of the contemporary crises which could benefit from reflection on her work. Some of the current global challenges raised and indirectly addressed by Weil’s philosophy include: growing authoritarianism, political and personal violence, pseudo-religious ideologies like the prosperity gospel, neoliberal values, the mechanization and technologization of everyday life, and deepening social-economic asymmetries. These crises find their roots in an admixture of late capitalist values tinged with nationalist-religious fervour alongside a sweeping (if unconscious) nihilism that prepares the path for tyrants, violence, and destruction of communities and the world at large. In her own time, Weil diagnosed many of these present ills and identified their root causes, noting our resentment of necessary limits, our propensity towards self-centredness and void-filling, and the ways in which we create dangerously powerful idols by conferring absolute values onto what is merely relative and temporal.