Introducing the Mystic Simone Weil.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is above all that is sacred in every human being. Simone Weil

Simone Weil is one of the important thinkers of the modern era. She was a brilliant philosopher and mathematician who died in relative obscurity of TB in 1943 aged only 34.   The impetus for a complete publication of all Weil's writings was largely the result of Nobel laureate Albert Camus' discovery of Weil's writings.

Weil had great influence on his philosophy, since he saw her writings as an "antidote" to nihilism. Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times”. Others to follow were such notable scholars as John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Both John Dewey (1859 - 1952) and Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) were philosophers in the original sense: in their writings can be found a genuine love for wisdom. She was a scholar and inspired activist who believed one’s thoughts must be put into action.  

For Veil wanted to discover the truth about why there is evil in the world. In Weil’s view creation could only take place by the withdrawal of the ONE to make way for that creation.

Put another way, in the beginning there was only GOD who was everything so that creation could only take place from a withdrawal not an expansion. You might say it began from a renouncement. So that Weil doesn’t want to make a distinction between Good and Evil but only to offer a reason why all that is GOOD cannot flourish in the world as a fait accompli of creation.   She believed if she pursued the truth she would discover Jesus who enters into the world of suffering just as she experienced that visit in her suffering. So that it is important to understand this underpinning to her thinking before examining her philosophy.     

In a nutshell that spark of divinity is in everyone but is overshadowed by our will to satisfy our desires rather than the good.  That sense of obligation to ensure she put action to overcome evil was to dominate her thinking.               

Introducing her early life and thought  

Raised as a secularized Jew, Weil was in effect a Christian Platonist who critiqued the foundations of modernity of her native France and championed a radically different social order. She was a moral idealist whose philosophy was based on caring for others, especially those who were suffering.  True liberty is found in the relationship between thought and action. This is achieved by paying attention to the subject matter to the extent one avoids engaging purely on one’s egoistic intentions. Pragmatically She accepted the fact that societies do need rules for the common good, but they must not diminish liberty and their purpose must be clear. An intelligent application to existence isn’t simply about fulfilling our desires but rather about being mentally engaged in the production of one's life.

The getting of wisdom requires our attention seen through the eyes of Weil   

For Weil, wisdom was centered on a love of truth that involved a certain way of applying one's attention to a concrete or theoretical problem.  She believed nature was subject to a divine wisdom and that a truly democratic society had supernatural roots which lay in the reverent interaction within the environment. It was difficult, if not impossible, to conceive a self-separate from our interaction which defined it. The surrounding conditions were the backdrop that brought a self into relief, and without the environmental backdrop which sustained it, the self would disappear. The interaction was a composite of the self within its environment–each acting on the other. Nevertheless, this composite self was divided, craving to be unified, to be whole, to have integrity:
I am always a dual being, on the one hand a passive being who is subject to the world, and on the other an active being who has a grasp on it; .... Can I not attain perfect wisdom, wisdom in action, that would reunite the two parts of myself? 
Hence, Weil saw wisdom developing thought through action. One’s actions not only revealed the degree to which one possessed wisdom as a force that unified the self–that tied the habits together so that these actions created that very self. Weil was emphatic about it: “...my existence as I know it is not a feeling but my creation”. Activity which exhibited a grasp on the world might look passive to someone looking from the outside, just as passivity which exhibited the world’s grasp on the self might appear as activity to the same observer. Thus, the term, “acting out,” denotes such a passive state where anarchic desires are given “freedom.” 

We cannot change habits directly: that notion is magic. But we can change it indirectly by modifying conditions, by an intelligent selection and weighting of the objects which engage attention and which influence the fulfillment of desires. 
this was her expression of the wisdom of the Socratic dictum: to know oneself was to reveal and to re-fashion oneself through the indirect action of work.
“Science and Perception in Descartes” is divided in two sections: the first part is a third-person commentary on Descartes; the second part, Weil’s own Cartesian journey of doubt, is appropriately–given the nature of her task–written in the first person

And so outside of effective action, when the body, in which past perceptions are inscribed, is re- lived from the necessity of exploration, human thought is given over to the passions, to the kind of imagination that conjures up God, to be receptive to reasonable-sounding arguments. Science, then is more helpful in the manner prescribed. Instead of imposing its proofs it is taught in the way that Descartes called analytic. In other words, for each student to follow the same order he would follow if he were methodically making discoveries himself. That is to be less inclined to receive instruction than to teach himself.

Weil believed she was being faithful to the spirit of Descartes by undertaking her own journey of self-instruction.

To be a Cartesian, according to Weil, is to doubt everything, and then to examine everything in order; without believing in anything except one’s own thought insofar as it is clear and distinct, and without trusting the authority of anyone.

Wisdom and the Divided Self
Weil examines her own thinking from the inside and cannot allow her “self” to disappear because she is more explicitly both spectator and participant. Her “self” is a dual seeking unity through self-mastery

That unity is a painful struggle where her active part–the being which can affect a grasp on the world through work–seeks to diminish the weight of the passive part in so far as it is subject to the world. Weil’s quest is identified her “true self” with the active part

She maintains, there is something “sacred” within each- within a human being, and it has nothing to do with personality or personhood:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.

Wisdom and Thinking Clearly
She doubts every- thing at the outset except one thing–her own thought “insofar as it is clear and distinct”. The important issue for her was not whether the thoughts belonged to her as a form of intellectual property, but whether the thoughts were true. For her, clarity was the initial–though not necessarily the final–criterion of truth. Clarity impelled her to examine the truth of an idea in her existential experience.

She involved herself first hand with trade unions aimed at ensuring   workers were educated in being able to achieve steps towards liberation. In Addition to her duties as a high school teacher, she instructed railway workers to examine this notion. Why were the Communist unions unable to challenge Nazism? – she demanded a visit to Germany. Was the Soviet Union simply another form of oppression for the working class? She tested her hypothesis in a long argument with one of the Russian Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky.

Convinced that the Republican militia were fighting for Spain’s “famished peasants against landed proprietors and their clerical supporters” , Weil joined up and soon discovered how the justice of one’s cause can quickly be obscured in war and how the initial noble objectives disintegrate into cruelty. The end result becomes a wanton disregard for the value of human life: “People get carried away by a sort of intoxication which is irresistible without a fortitude of soul which I am bound to consider exceptional since I have met with it nowhere”.  In asking the question “Is manual labour a path to wisdom? She elected to work in a factory and in a vineyard to experience this for herself.
Her whole intellectual journey, prior to her 1930 student dissertation until her death only 13 years later, was based on a trust of clear and distinct thoughts. They were tested in the furnace of existence, purified, modified, or discarded from her experience.
She exhibited a confidence born of her mystical experiences which she articulated in a Christian idiom, and, far from being threatened by religious superstition, her early confidence in clear thinking was connected to her developing view of supernatural truth.

The overriding underpinnings to her thinking was the ability to pay attention as her preferred method of discerning clear ideas– whether or not provoked by the imposition of a problem or contemplating an object of beauty.
She rejected the is idea that thinking is explained as a natural product issuing forth from a progressively sophisticated pattern of material forces.

As a platonic philosopher she maintained that “the imperfect cannot give rise to the perfect or the less good to the better”  Rather she believed that the connection between thought and action would remain an unfathomable mystery despite advances in neuroscience or psychology: “The extreme complexity of vital phenomena can perhaps be progressively unravelled, at any rate to a certain extent; but the immediate relationship linking our thoughts to our movements will always remain wrapped in impenetrable obscurity”.  

Weil agrees on what wisdom is from a psychological point of view. Wisdom begins to take root in mindful work–when activity is diverted from immediate outward expression through inward deliberation towards mediated, indirect action. For both, the test of experience is essential in verifying or modifying ideas and developing wisdom.

Weil however experiences a binary tension within interactions where the self and its environment are linked in a wrestling match: her active self seeks to increase its grasp on the environment while her passive self allows the environment to encroach. Impelled to achieve mastery of oneself the active part overcoming the passive part. Weil maintains that clear thoughts (the only thing she trusts at the outset) are secured through the active work of attention.

Weil loves experiential wisdom as it reveals clear thoughts that act as stepping stones on the way to truth.

How Is Wisdom Connected to the Social Dimension of Experience?

Weil maintains that humans are social beings, and that the wisdom of moral deliberation entails taking into account connections that bind a self to others.

Weil believed that wise deliberation kept the social dimension constantly in view. Weil followed Marx in emphasizing that society was the fundamental human fact. Although debunking the Marxist formula that “social existence determines consciousness,” she appreciated his attempt to analyse the relation- ships of force in reference to human society in the manner of a physicist who analysed these relationships in reference to inert matter.  

She re-framed Marx’s position to keep the relationships of social forces intact while maintaining that humans understood as individuals were relatively free as active beings although constrained by the structure of the society. The social structure can never be modified except indirectly. The structure of society, analogous to the structure of the moral self, could only be transformed indirectly through work, which from a social perspective meant conjoint activity channelled through the means of production.

How could it be mastered? Weil answered:
... to gain mastery over it means to subject it to the human mind, that is to the individual. In the subordination of society to the individual lies the definition of true democracy and that of socialism as well. The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labour which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

This union between manual and intellectual labour had to begin at a very young age in a school system where abstract thinking was grounded and tested in existential experience.

Weil was wary of the social dimension. This was part of the reason she never joined the Communist party nor the Catholic church: “As soon as a party finds itself cemented not only by the coordination of activities, but also by unity of doctrine, it becomes impossible for a good militant to think otherwise than in the manner of a slave”. But she found the spirit of the resurrected Christ in her suffering and her quest for truth. I did not seek Christ but he came to me in my suffering.     

She saw how a community of relatively free individuals could become unthinking cogs in a collective machine. Nevertheless, her notion of freedom was not the romanticised ideal of individualism. All that an individual owned–even her sense of worth, self-esteem–was derived from the social element as her experience as an anonymous factory worker removed all doubt on that score. Therin the individual could think in a way a collective never could. “A collective is much stronger than a single man; but every collectivity depends for its existence upon operations, of which simple addition is the elementary example, which can only be performed by a mind in a state of solitude”.

She pointed out that when thinking clearly and effectively, a person had to focus on an issue or problem without being intimidated by the presence of others or what others might think.

Weil’s methodology for measuring freedom and democracy in a society was the extent to which the patterns of relationships among individuals could be understood by each thinking individual: a society in which collective existence would be subject to men as individuals instead of subjecting them to itself. A form of existence wherein only efforts exclusively directed by a clear intelligence would take place to imply each worker had control, without reference to any external rule, not only the adaptation of his efforts to the piece of work to be produced, but also their coordination with the efforts of all other members of the collective. That then became her idea of the  sacred nature of work according to those ideals.  

In The Need for Roots, Weil’s blueprint for a democratic society was built on a startling assumption that challenged the principles of the French Revolution: rights were from a social phenomenon and existed only when obligations were exercised by humans toward each other. Hence, obligations were prior to rights: A right can only be construed in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation toward him. 

For the Christian Platonist Weil, keeping an obligation was a duty whose roots lay in a supernatural realm beyond the immediate and changing context of a specific situation. The sacred nature of existence which creates the obligation for good.

Weil argued, “we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind–country, family, or any other–not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls”

Concluding remarks. 

We must recognise each human being as having that capacity to goodness. But it also has the capacity to become the guiding light to existence according to Weil. That reflection is analogous to the same thinking of Albert Schweitzer who talked about the renunciation of the self to live a life of service.  

Weil considers the superiority of attention over the will as the ultimate tool of self-transformation:

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

Put another way, in the beginning there was only GOD who was everything so that creation could only take place from a withdrawal not an expansion. You might say it began from a renouncement. So that Weil doesn’t want to make a distinction between Good and Evil but only to offer a reason why all that is GOOD cannot flourish in the world as a fait accompli of creation.   She believed if she pursued the truth she would discover Jesus who enters into the world of suffering just as she experienced that visit in her suffering.