Simone Weil

Simone Weil (b. 1909) was a French writer, thinker, and activist who left a corpus of disparate writings that collectively present a sophisticated challenge to contemporary politics and philosophy. She died, aged thirty-four, in 1943. She was born into an affluent life in Paris. As a schoolgirl, she declared her solidarity with the Communist Left. Weil was high-achieving while receiving the best education France could offer in languages, classics, and philosophy. She taught philosophy in French secondary schools for a few years while also active in labor movements and political events, such as the Spanish Civil War. She left France in 1942 after the German occupation. Weil was known in some intellectual circles through essays she published in magazines. When notes on Christian spirituality written toward the end of her life were posthumously published, her profile rose. Her writings influenced those within the church, e.g., Pope Paul VI, and those outside the church, such as T. S. Eliot and Albert Camus. Interest in her spiritual writings has remained constant. Weil trained as a philosopher and her thinking never fails to betray a philosopher’s pursuit of clarity. Her philosophical writing elicited a modest but steady interest among intellectuals and philosophers, notably Iris Murdoch. Weil’s thinking, once distinguished from her biography, is powerful because it is at odds with prevailing culture—academic, political, and mainstream—and offers original concepts to organize human nature. Weil is a Platonist about the intellect, the good, and metaphysics. Weil was not a Marxist, but she valued the unique insights into social materialism she attributed to Marx in relation to social materialism. She was against the elevation of rights as ultimate recognitions of human dignity or an ethical emphasis on the unique individuality of each person. Weil is notable for offering philosophies of work, suffering, and love. Her philosophical elaboration of the ideas of attention, affliction, gravity (as opposed to grace), force, and “decreation” are novel and disruptive of existing accounts of human nature and action. Weil’s philosophical work is deceptively systematic because Weil integrates three levels: the individual human thinker; the social and political context; and a higher level beyond the natural. Her later work is distinctive for combining abstract philosophical analysis with practical consideration of the political and social orders required to support the best expressions of human nature. The unity in Weil’s thinking is obscured by the disorder in the large, written output from her short life.