An essay arguing that the true hero of a Greek epic is force itself, which turns everyone who handles it into a thing (1940)
"L'Iliade ou le poème de la force" — The Iliad, or the Poem of Force
Philosophy
Simone Weil
1909–1943 · French
Christian mysticism; political and moral philosophy
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, factory worker, teacher and mystic whose short life was a series of deliberate self-exposures to affliction. Trained in the elite French system, she left teaching to work on assembly lines, went to Spain with an anarchist column, and in her last years worked for the Free French in London while refusing to eat more than those under occupation. Almost all her writing was published after her death at thirty-four, and made her one of the most admired moral voices of the century.
How to spot them
- ▸Attention, affliction (malheur), decreation, gravity and grace
- ▸The essay treating force, not any warrior, as the true subject of a Greek epic
- ▸The Renault assembly line in 1934–35; the anarchist column in Spain in 1936
- ▸Nicknamed "the Red Virgin"; called by Camus the only great spirit of our times
- ▸Died at Ashford, Kent, in 1943, aged 34; refused baptism and stayed on the threshold of the Church
Key works
A posthumous arrangement of notebook aphorisms on attention, affliction and self-effacement, put into order by a Catholic farmer-philosopher to whom she had left her papers (1947)
La Pesanteur et la grâce, Gravity and Grace, edited by Gustave Thibon
A report written in London for the Free French on the obligations a liberated country would owe its people, beginning from the human need to belong to a place (1949)
L'Enracinement, published in English as The Need for Roots, with a preface by T. S. Eliot
Letters and essays entrusted to a Dominican priest, explaining why their author would remain on the threshold of the Church and refuse baptism (1950)
Attente de Dieu, Waiting for God — the letters were written to Father Jean-Marie Perrin
A 1934 essay on the causes of liberty and oppression that compares the modern factory hand to a cog, and criticises revolutionary socialism from the left (1934)
Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l'oppression sociale
A diary of eight months on assembly lines at Alsthom and Renault, kept by a graduate philosopher passing as an unskilled hand (1951)
La Condition ouvrière, the factory journal, published posthumously
Key ideas
- Attention: the rarest and purest form of generosity is the capacity to give one's full, unselfish attention to another, and prayer is attention in its highest form
- Affliction (malheur) is distinct from mere suffering: it combines physical pain, social degradation and self-hatred, and destroys the sufferer's sense of being a person
- Gravity and grace: human motives fall like weights, and only grace, which is not earned, moves the other way
- Decreation: we should undo in ourselves the self that God created us capable of renouncing, so as to leave room for God
- Force turns whoever it touches into a thing — the dead man, but also the man who wields it
- Obligations come before rights: what a human being needs, not what they may claim, is the foundation of politics
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Paris to an agnostic Jewish family; her brother André Weil was one of the great mathematicians of the century and a founder of Bourbaki
- •Placed first in the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure in 1928, ahead of Simone de Beauvoir
- •As a teacher and union activist she was nicknamed "la Vierge rouge", the Red Virgin
- •Took a year's leave from teaching in 1934–35 to work as an unskilled machine operator, including at Renault
- •Went to Spain in 1936 with an anarchist column, but stepped into a pan of hot oil and was taken home by her parents
- •Had mystical experiences at Solesmes in 1938 and while reciting George Herbert's poem "Love (III)"
- •Reached New York in 1942 and then London, where she worked for the Free French and drafted plans to be parachuted into France
- •Died on 24 August 1943 at Ashford, Kent, of tuberculosis aggravated by refusal to eat more than the French ration; the inquest recorded suicide
- •Albert Camus edited her posthumous works at Gallimard and called her the only great spirit of our times
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Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Simone Weil
- Simone Pétrement — Simone Weil: A Life