Category: Thought

Max Weber against Tolstoy – “Science as Vocation”

Max Weber was a German sociologist who is best known for his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argued that it was the influence of Protestantism which made the great victors of capitalism and industrialism – the US, Great Britain, and Germany – succeed in a way that the major Catholic powers, such as Spain, the Austrian Empire and later Italy, did not. Many of us also read his two lectures, “Science as Vocation” (“Wissenschaft als Beruf”) and “Politics as Vocation”, which are often published together. I first read the former, which is our subject today, at Cambridge as part of a paper on German thought, and must have read it several times since then. In fact, this is not even my first attempt at writing on it here. It is a work that has become more exciting as I have grown.

The translations for quotes come from the NYRB version of the Vocation Lectures, where this essay is translated by Damion Searls as “The Scholar’s Work”. I prefer “Science as Vocation” because of the more religious connotations of “vocation” compared to work, something which is even discussed in the introduction (!); however, I admit that “scholar’s” is more suitable than “science”, given that Weber is talking about all systematic pursuits of knowledge, not just beakers and test tubes. Either way, this is the only complaint I have about the translation.

Context

Weber was invited to give the first of his lectures on November 7th, 1917, by a group of students. By this point Germany’s war effort was beginning to flag. A food shortage was ongoing, and victory already appeared an unlikely outcome. Wars – especially the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries – traditionally offered the warring populations a huge amount of meaning at their outset, as feelings of patriotism swelled. But in defeat the opposite happened, as all meaning was torn away. We might see something of this as an explanation for why Weber deals with meaning, because that is as much the topic of “Science as Vocation” as are the practicalities of being an academic.

An Unexpectedly Practical Introduction

We modern readers mostly read “Science as Vocation” because of the idea of “disenchantment” that Weber first speaks of here, but like Weber’s student audience we will be disappointed by what we hear when we begin to read. The essay starts with a very practical, earthy discussion of the differences between American and German academic systems. In the German system at the time for most academics there was no salary; instead, they received money from the students attending their lectures. At the same time, they had no free choice of lecture topic, because the most popular topics were granted to the more senior staff members – which naturally dampened still further their income.

In the US, meanwhile, one receives a very small salary as an assistant, and is swamped with work while more senior academics spend their time researching or reclining in their armchairs. The American can be fired for failing to secure sufficient attendance, while his German equivalent cannot be – though the latter can starve to death, which is its own problem. Promotion is often through connections, rather than skill, which means that the whole academic world is fairly disheartening to its inhabitants. Weber further reminds us that the skills needed “to be both a good scholar and a good teacher” are often quite discrete and unevenly distributed. As lectures were how universities decided whether an academic was worth keeping, this was not ideal.

Innovation, also, is not a thing that necessarily fills a lecture hall. If anything, it turns people away. Instead, “superficial qualities: the teacher’s personality, even his tone of voice” are what bring people to the lecture halls. Today, perhaps, we have an opposite situation, where the only thing that matters is the number of citations an academic has. This too brings its own problems, and is not necessarily a good metric for judging an academic’s value. Weber finalises his unencouraging tour of academic life by noting the constant and growing specialisation of academia, which is also often unattractive to those in search of knowledge and who wish to compass all knowledge with a spectacular breakthrough.

So, Who Should Be a Scholar?

Weber’s introduction lets him move on to answer the question of who should be a scholar, and who not. Certainly nobody bothered by the above should enter academia. Instead, one must have passion – “this strange intoxication, mocked by all who do not share it”. This is because “nothing is humanly worth doing except what someone can do with passion.” But beyond passion, one needs to work hard, and one needs inspiration too. Without passion, one cannot do the task; without the others, one cannot succeed at it. Weber is keen to emphasise that the importance of passion goes beyond just academic work. “A real personality is nothing other than a capacity to experience life authentically.” In other words, having a personality means being passionate about life.

The scholar must be passionate – “wholly devoted” – to what he or she studies. Only this passion can grant dignity in the face of the inevitable injustices of the world. And only passion for the work can make the work possible, given the next problem, which is the challenge of its limited meaningfulness.

The Meaning of Scholarship

It is a common human longing to wish to make a mark. Yet scholarship, in Weber’s view, will not reward us if that is what is our only motivation. This is because “scholarship, unlike any other cultural endeavour, is subjected to – dedicated to – its own obsolescence.” Each discovery wants to vanish under weight of each subsequent discovery, and even those of us with a background in the humanities will have noticed we read the more recent critics over the older ones, even if the object of the criticism is a thousand years old. If academic scholarship is merely an infinite sequence of discoveries endlessly replacing each other, then the value of an individual discovery is infinitely small – that is to say, it has no value at all.

Weber extends this idea with respect to progress in general, in what is an uncomfortable truth for those of us who have never stopped to consider progress as we strive for it. “In the context of modern civilization, with its theoretically infinite “progress”, an individual’s life necessarily lacks any ultimate purpose. Here is always another step to take on the path of progress; no one dies at the peak or end of his journey, because the path continues into infinity.” Tolstoy, Weber notes, was afflicted with this realisation around the time he was writing Anna Karenina. The thought gradually destroyed the meaning of his existence, and it was only through religion that Tolstoy was able to save himself. More on this later.

Disenchantment

The problem of meaninglessness is where Weber’s famous disenchantment comes in. Our world is rationalised and intellectualised to the extreme. What this means is that anything that we wish to know, we can know it. I may not know how a plane flies, but I know that I can discover it. The world in such an age has no mysteries, because all “can be mastered through calculation.” This idea of solving these mysteries becomes an obsession with us. But because there are an infinite number of mysteries, this obsession quickly comes to destroy us. We cannot meaningfully change the number of remaining mysteries, so we are left only with a kind of disappointment in our lack of impact and in the lack of magic the world has left for us.

Weber contrasts this view of life with a more ancient, cyclical one. Abraham, “or indeed any farmer from a bygone age”, did not search in the same way as we do. When he died, “his life had given him whatever it had to offer, in terms of meaning too.” He could die satisfied, because he accepted the magic of the world, rather than being disappointed by what remained to be done. Abraham’s death “in a good old age, an old man, and full of years” [Genesis 25:8] can be contrasted with Weber’s description of the death that meets us today, a person who might become “tired of life”, but can never be “fulfilled by it”:

“Not only does he get wind of merely a tiny fraction of all the new ideas that intellectual life continuously produces, but even those ideas are merely provisional, never definitive. As a result, death is simply pointless for him. And so too is life as such in our culture, which in its meaningless “progression” stamps death with its own meaninglessness.”

This is rather depressing stuff. The rest of the lecture is Weber trying to understand the full extent of what this disenchantment means, and what scholarship might have to do with solving the problems that it poses.

How Disenchantment Came About

Science did not always lead to disenchantment; the problem is that it can never now lead to anything but disenchantment, for Weber. The great tools of learning – the concept and the controlled experiment, once were trees that showed little signs of producing fruits that might rot. For Renaissance artists, chief among them Leonardo da Vinci, learning and systematic knowledge were “the path to true art”; later religious thinkers saw science as a way of finding traces of God’s presence – the argument of intelligent design, where the complexity of the universe is evidence of a higher creator.

Systematic and rationalistic thinking, however, have now reached a point where the above arguments do not and cannot work. They cannot bring happiness, for the reasons Tolstoy notes. They cannot prove God, because we now know (more than Weber did) about the extent to which our universe is random. In fact, what Weber finds as being the use of science is much less fun – “if science can do anything, it is precisely to uproot and destroy the belief that the world has any such thing as a “meaning””.

Tolstoy’s Questions, Weber’s Answers

“Science is meaningless, because it provides no answer for the only question that matters: “What should we do? How should we live?” Tolstoy could see enough to destroy the false meanings of the world – in money, power, progress. But he longed for something to replace them, and rejected science and such thinking when it could not provide him with this. In the end, he turned to the peasants. He saw in the strength of their religious beliefs a kind of proof of their truthfulness, and used that to help him construct a new vision of Christianity, which worked well enough for him, but which mostly appears a little silly to the rest of us.

Weber does not deny the truth of Tolstoy’s complaint. But he does not consider it important, because it is an attack that is unjust. For Weber, this is because Tolstoy is blind to the assumptions underpinning science and systematic thinking more broadly. Weber notes that without these assumptions, we cannot do science at all. And the assumption that is most important is that science is worthwhile. We cannot be an academic if we do not consider our work meaningful, or certainly not a happy one.

Science does not deal with questions of worth. If we do it, we say that it is worthwhile. If we reject it, it may be because we consider it valueless or wrong. But the questions that natural sciences answer, for example, are “what should we do if we want to use the techniques at our disposal to control life?”, and not “whether we should control life through technology, whether we want to, and whether it’s ultimately meaningful to do so.” The questions of value are out of bounds. This is as true about legal studies or medicine as it is about natural sciences. To question the value of such things is already to do something other than them – it is, if we feel like calling it that, to philosophise.

This distinction is important when we get on to political matters in particular. Studying politics is not the same thing as discussing the value of this or that party or person, in Weber’s view. It is about understanding the structures and realities, without judging them. He takes a harsh view of those professors (and this ties back to the introduction about the practice of teaching) who preach from the lectern. They are abusing their power to talk in an environment where they cannot be talked-back-to, and not sharing their knowledge. They are being – and here is one of Weber’s own values – “irresponsible.”

Questions of Worth

If science cannot tell us how to live, how then are we to live? There are two important answers given by Weber. The first, which we must acknowledge, is that there can be no universal meaning any longer. Once, religion could be that, but no more. It cannot be so again, not after Darwin and the “Death of God.” Weber knew that his listeners, the students, wanted prophets. But “this prophet, so longed for by so many in the younger generation, does not exist and will never come in the full force of his meaning.” The offerings of the National Socialists and the Soviets deserve nothing besides condemnation for trying to delude us into thinking otherwise. They are attractive, because prophets (and ideologues) save us from having to think for ourselves. But to let them lead us is to demonstrate a terrible dereliction of personal duty and awareness.

Where does this leave religion? We might assume that Weber would be as critical towards it as he is towards the nascent ideologies of his age. But for the person of private religious inclination, he is more conciliatory. Everything comes down to a choice. If the religious person chooses to believe in miracles, then this comes from its own assumptions, just as the scientific explanation for things like the parting of the Red Sea rests on its own assumptions. They will contradict each other, but neither can invalidate the other within its own system. Weber’s problem is when such views are designated as universal or exclusively true, when they most manifestly are not. Whether this is done by a religious fundamentalist, a communist, or someone else, all are making a mistake.

Value Pluralism and Choices

With no universal truth, Weber describes the ultimate values of individuals as being “in irresolvable conflict.” The classic example is wanting absolute freedom and absolute security – which we all, in theory, desire. One must compromise, but each person draws their dividing line in a different space. How do we choose? Weber will be no prophet for us. “It is up to the individual to decide which is God and which is the devil for him. And that is how it goes with every other decision about how to conduct one’s life.”

Yet academic knowledge and study absolutely have a role to play in this, even if we do not find our meaning through them. This is because they offer us a toolkit for being responsible with our choices. Logical, rigorous thinking gives us the ability to understand the choices that we make and to follow them properly. If we are rigorous, we know what follows on from a given view. If we do not like it, we cannot lie to ourselves about it, but we can change our view accordingly. Essentially, “we can force, or at least help, an individual to reckon with the ultimate meaning of his own actions.” This ultimate meaning and sense of the consequences of a line of thought forces us to be responsible. It deprives extreme viewpoints of much of the support that they gain by having deliberately vague means and ends.

In this, I am reminded a little of Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”, which I compared with Simone Weil’s thoughts on the topic a few months ago. Orwell saw clearly that many sympathisers of the Soviet regime were willing to use language to avoid the responsibility of saying that they supported its actions. Weber cannot say, within Science as Vocation, that the Gulag system is universally wrong. But if intellectuals were sufficiently honest about what their beliefs meant – locking political opponents away is justified because it serves the great good of the movement – then their ideologies would have fewer supporters in practice, and hence much less power.

Conclusion: Decisions, Decisions

Ultimately, we might say that “Science as Vocation” is quite simple in its argument. We have to decide what is meaningful for us, and the value of scholarship and learning in this context is that it teaches us to clarity and method so that we can make responsible, albeit necessarily conflicting choices, about what to value in our lives. It is a painful work because it denies the possibility of a unifying, general meaning of the sort that prophets and ideologues offer. But it is not so pessimistic as it seems, for it leaves open religious belief and the valuing of enquiry in and of itself, should we choose such paths.

Tolstoy was unable to accept the lack of a universal value. He tried to convince himself that the peasants were the bearers of it and that mere snobbery had kept the philosophers from discovering this truth. Alas, this was just his truth, his choice, which he desperately clung to, but which kept him alive, as all those truths we truly let ourselves believe in do. As for us, we have to live, and live with our choices and our own beliefs. Where Weber shines in this piece, for me, is in three things – the clarity of his destruction of progress or science as sources of meaning, his insistence upon integrity, and in his arguments for the value of rational thinking in making responsibility and responsible choices possible.

It may not be what we want to hear. But it has to be enough.

Simone Weil vs George Orwell on political language

Around the time of the Second World War, both Simone Weil and George Orwell were lamenting the misuse of language. At first glance, this is not altogether remarkable, for criticisms about language’s mistreatment seem constant throughout history. However, both Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” and Weil in “The Power of Words” are writing with a certain heightened seriousness that we can argue is lacking in previous laments over language’s decline. Surrounded by war in a century where possibilities for slaughter were fast proving limitless, understanding how language could contribute to bloodshed was of paramount importance. As a result, the writers go beyond that standard argument we may already be familiar with – that sloppiness in language indicates and produces sloppiness of thought.  

No, their goal was loftier than that. As Weil put it, “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis – to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving lives.”

Orwell

Of the two, it is Orwell whose essay is more practical. Many of us read “Politics and the English Language” today as a kind of guide to decent prose style. That was what prompted me first to glance at it a few years ago. Orwell begins his piece with a series of examples of bad, careless prose. From these he identifies a few common elements – “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” chief among them. He goes into detail, noting problems like pretentious, often Latinate diction; the use of meaningless words in art criticism; needlessly complicated language (generally when we use compounds when a single verb will do); and finally, the dying metaphor – the metaphor which by its familiarity has all the impact of a fish’s flailing upon the whaler’s deck. Orwell then follows up his criticisms by ending with a list of advice that you feel you ought to pin onto your fridge door:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“Politics and the English Language” was published just after the end of the Second World War. It lacks some of the urgency of Weil’s essay, which was written when she returned from the Spanish Civil War, where she had been volunteering with the anarchists. For Weil, that war was obviously a prelude of the horrors to come – horrors she might prevent, if only she reached the right people with her voice. Orwell, meanwhile, has the resignation of an older man – he was already in his forties, while Weil was my age (twenty-five) when she wrote her essay. Though Orwell’s criticism of bad writing listed above is important, there is an attack on political writing in particular that I consider far more crucial than the sloppiness of aged professors and arts critics.

It is this part of Orwell’s piece that we can read fruitfully next to Weil’s. Orwell’s main problem with political writing is that it uses meaningless words, or at the very least words that have been emptied as much of their meaning as possible. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Even “democracy” has no meaning, Orwell notes, except as a thing that is desirable, and hence a thing you use to describe what you personally want.

This meaningless has the result that “words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different”. By saying he acts for democracy, a general launching a coup can gather the support of an unthinking population at large, while his real goal is the consolidation of his own power. I say unthinking, because such actions rely on a reflex – the reflexive view that democracy is good, and hence those who claim to act in its name must deserve our support.

Meaningless words allow for reflexive action, while another tool we often use, consciously or not, is abstract language. By replacing specifics with euphemisms or vague terminology, we numb our listeners to the real content hidden behind the words. For “Purges”, read the systematic arbitrary imprisonment and murder of our enemies without fair trial; for “liquidation,” read “murder”; and to give a more modern example, for “special military operation” read “war”. Orwell notes that the key element of such language is that it lets us to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” In Orwell’s time, most political writing gladly abused this kind of language – and it wasn’t all fascists and communists’ doing. After all, we were still “pacifying” and “bringing civilization” to the colonies at this time in the Allied world, a great hypocrisy Weil is very critical of as well.

For Orwell, “Political writing is bad writing” because political writing demands this kind of numbing language. “Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” The point of most pamphlets is not to persuade, but to set light emotions that have already been charged by a tensed time, while keeping the mind itself dormant. Writers do this by repeating language that identifies the enemy and identifies our own group. Hence “democracy”, or “communism”, or “fascism”, or “dogs”, or “rats” in Orwell’s time. In our own day we might read “woke” or “leftists” or “alt-right” in the same, utterly meaningless way. Such language, emptied of meaning, and packed with group-associations, dehumanises people and also makes concepts unreal. By never defining “woke” or “fascist” seriously, there is no way to understand any associated political programmes in a way that might leave a space open for compromise and finding common ground.

To conclude, we can say that Orwell’s essay argues our goal must be clear language, because clear language is sincere and comprehensible. And because it lacks the evasiveness built into the abstract and the meaningless, it forces us to stay within acceptable moral boundaries in our politics. “We must murder our political opponents to ensure we maintain power” is only rarely a phrase that we can actually say without opposition. If we all actually aimed at sincerity of prose and voice, we would never end up in those rare situations in which such language can go unopposed at all.

Weil

Orwell’s arguments are straightforward and sensible. Clear language is honest language, and honest language keeps our politics in good bounds. Bad language allows for dangerous suggestions, whether we mean for this or not. Weil, however, goes more directly into why meaningless language in particular (words like “fascist” and “communist” and “woke” in their regular usage) is outright dangerous. She is explicit where Orwell only hints at the benefits of clear language, when she says that clear language can potentially save lives.

This is because Weil’s topic, in “The Power of Words”, is language and war. Specifically, it is about the language we use to justify wars. Here we come back to the problem of meaningless language that Orwell spoke of. Weil notes that our modern wars “are conflicts with no definable objective”, a type of conflict that is inevitably most bitter. I imagine many of us would disagree with Weil instinctively. The most obvious example of a war that has a definable objective is Allies’ participation in the Second World War. But now, think of any other war, and the matter becomes much more difficult. We all know that in the case of the Great War the sides “sleepwalked” into the conflict. You can possibly think of some other examples to confirm or deny this, but what is interesting are the arguments Weil makes about the consequences of meaningless war goals.

In any war where the goals are defined, it is possible to “weight the value of the stake against the probable cost of the struggle and decide how great an effort it justifies.” This serves a preventative purpose, as when we define goals in this way, we find that war rarely if ever proves a worthwhile activity. But more important than preventing war, clear goals allow for ending it by making a compromise between the sides’ goals possible. Alternatively, in a meaningless war, “there is no longer any common measure or proportion”, and thus a compromise is impossible – including with ourselves, about the worthiness of fighting at all.

No war can be entirely meaningless but the meaning that fills a meaningless war is an extremely dangerous one. The only possible meaning for a meaningless war is the cost of it, in other words the sacrifices and pains it has demanded. This is unavoidable, except by having a real goal, and it results in wars that are self-perpetuating, and last until both nations are utterly ruined. In such a war, the argument “the dead do not wish it”, cannot be fought against, because there are no real objectives to measure the necessary future sacrifices with. And so, we fight, we die, and we water the grass with our blood.

The Trojan War, over Helen, is an example of a meaningless conflict. Helen was just a symbol, and like a chalice filling with blood she gained her meaning as men died for her. But in Weil’s world, “the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters.” Words like fascist or communist have limited meanings except to identify, as noted above, an in-group and an out-group. This prevents the limited practical differences between the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Hitler’s Germany, for example, from being an obstacle to them declaring each other mortal enemies. The capitalisation of such words takes away any practical meaning to them and thus the concreteness that, again, might allow compromise. 

These meaningless words which serve only to create the conditions for bloodshed are not limited to those hefty ideological words, though. “National interest” and “national security” are other examples of words whose meaning appears neutral, but which under Weil’s gaze reveal themselves to be primarily about securing the resources to succeed in war. Because success in any potential war is based on ensuring that others do not succeed, national interest inevitably leads to national conflict, and compromises are impossible where there can be only success and failure.

A binary choice, victory or defeat, success, or failure, are the rails which these abstract, capitalised words force us to travel along. For Weil, this is insanity. Everything, for her, lies upon a spectrum. This is the way of thinking which she wants us to adopt in our own lives. When there are no absolutes, distinctions can always be drawn, and ground shifted between positions to allow for a compromise.

By contrast, once we think only in isms and absolutes, murder appears permissible. When we cannot kill capitalism, for it is too abstract to wound with blade or bomb, we decide to kill capitalists instead. Everything soon becomes justifiable when the goal is an ill-defined victory. What shocks Weil is the way that human beings seemingly will choose death and violence over actually interrogating the meaning of the words that they are using to justify the most barbarous acts: “apparently it is easier to kill, and even to die, than to ask ourselves a few quite simple questions.” It is disappointing that this really does seem to be the case.

Similarities and Differences

Both Orwell and Weil in these essays take language as their topic, and they follow a well-travelled path in deploring contemporary language’s lack of clarity. Orwell focuses on how abstract and vague language numbs us to potentially horrific facts, ultimately allowing us to tolerate the intolerable – colonialism, totalitarianism, and so on. Weil is less interested in giving writing advice. The words that are her enemies in “The Power of Words” are not just words on the page, or even words in speeches, but words in the mind. Given capital letters and made abstractions, they carry us into conflicts that we cannot end because they brook no compromise by denying common ground or any sense of measurement and limit.

Orwell’s call in “Politics and the English Language” is primarily to write better, so that we might think better and avoid bad positions; Weil demands instead that we interrogate what we believe and set ourselves up to think according to “the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends”. Both writers’ messages are important, but Weil’s one is the more urgent and more lofty.

It will not have escaped readers’ notice that there is a hot war going on at the time of writing, and plenty of internal conflict closer to home for those who live outside the combatants’ lands. These two essays provide guidance about the ways that language plays into creating and sustain such violent divisions, whether they are physical or still as yet merely verbal. That clarity is a virtue is undeniable. And Orwell’s essay is such a joy to read that everyone should study it as a model for effective prose.

But Weil’s essay, to my mind, is the more important at the present time. The ongoing war is for one side utterly meaningless, and for the other in danger of becoming abstracted in the way Weil warns against. It is easy, when suffering greatly, to make sacrifice one’s argument for continuing battle. But this makes compromise impossible and thus anything except a peace reached through exhaustion. That is not to deny that the one side’s stated goals are reasonable and generally moral. But there must be a limit to the cost we are willing to put in for that victory, no matter how moral or even just that victory may be. By losing sight of Weil’s ideas of boundaries and proportion, we can fall into a situation where inertia and the blood already clogging the trenches are preventing the thing that is almost certainly most worthwhile of all: peace.

The Letters of Simone Weil

Simone Weil is probably my favourite thinker, alongside Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. What makes her work so brilliant is the way she manages to combine a real earthiness of focus on real problems and real solutions with an understanding that the reason why we care is because what is at stake is nothing less than the soul. Writing during the Second World War and passing from pacifism to accepting violence in battling Hitler, she has a great deal to teach us as we go through yet another time of suffering and mass slaughter. With her eye on human dignity and the way that humans get caught up in violence, revenge and justifications for murder that cannot handle scrutiny, she is essential reading.

But, as hinted above, Weil was also a thinker who could and did change her mind. One of the most striking things about her is that she had a religious awakening at the beginning of the 1940s with an intensity and results that went far beyond even Tolstoy’s. As a result, there are almost two ideas of Weil in competition with one another. The one I’ve preferred – the heroic woman who in spite of physical frailty and constant headaches (she is almost a mirror of Nietzsche, with an almost diametrically opposed philosophy: “even when he is expressing what I myself think, I find him literally intolerable”) – worked in factories and on fields, and even volunteered with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War to get close to the working class so she could truly understand the struggles they faced.

What best encapsulates this Weil is her riposte to Simone de Beauvoir when the latter once said in conversation that the main thing in life was finding meaning. Weil immediately countered by saying that it was obvious de Beauvoir had never been hungry.

But then there is another Weil, the one after her conversion. She has not abandoned her practical concerns, but the balance has shifted. To a sceptic, this Weil deserves de Gaulle’s remark, made when he came across her while they were both working in London on the war effort – “elle est folle!” (“She is mad!”). The soul is now key, the solutions to our human problems seem considerably less practical, a little less rooted in the world. This is ironic, because her most beautiful book, The Need for Roots, stems from this period. Still. It is this Weil that made the extraordinary choice to die through voluntary starvation mixed with tuberculosis, denying to eat anything more than the rations allowed her had she lived in France. Such a decision certainly would not be compatible with her earlier views and is only dubiously compatible with her later ones. That this happened is amazing, nevertheless.

Reading her Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker translated by Richard Rees is interesting first of all as an encounter with the person behind the thoughts. Do we find more continuities or discontinuities here between the Weils above? Readers hoping for such will be disappointed. Although the letters have a kind of internal coherence between time periods, the lack of annotations is unhelpful given the casual reader’s knowledge (or strictly speaking, lack thereof) of Weil. To give an example, her correspondents are rarely introduced. Some of them, when googled, draw a blank too.

For those trying to create a full picture of Weil, this book is not entirely sufficient. Its subtitle, “windows on a thinker”, is quite apt. We are peering into Weil’s world through various windows, but at no point can we shuffle backwards to get a good view of the house itself. We have biographies for this, of course, but it is still something of a disappointment. The book is short –  just under two hundred pages – so there was certainly scope for adding more missives. One glaring, if certainly deliberate omission, is the Letter to a Priest (Édouard Couturier), which is published separately. Reading the selected letters, we are suddenly thrown from an atheistic, if sympathetic, to an obsessively religious Weil who is mentioning God at every turn, without the key stopping points in between. It’s certainly jarring.

Still, we get our windows. Let’s peer in. We begin with various letters to schoolchildren she had once taught, filled with advice (“suffering doesn’t matter, so long as you experience some vivid joys. What matters is not to bungle one’s life. And for that, one must discipline oneself”) and a deep understanding of the political challenges of 1933-34 when the National Socialists had just gained power in Germany and Soviet influence on French communist agitators was growing. Various letters to trade unionists detail her understanding of the effects of factory life upon the individual, in particular the loss of dignity caused by repetitive work and constant submission.

In the letters describing her factory experiences, what is most impressive is her curiosity. “Because I don’t feel the suffering as mine, I feel it as the workers’ suffering; and whether I personally suffer it or not seems to me a detail of almost no importance. Thus the desire to know and understand easily prevails.” Her curiosity strikes us, as does a certain raw honesty, perhaps naivety. Weil had what today we might call “no filter.” The longest series of letters, to “B”, a factory manager, ends because Weil shares her delight at the victory of the French left in the elections of 1936, which unsurprisingly her correspondent does not.

This incident is quite typical, as far as I can make out for Weil. She puts in real effort in the letters first to make the manager appreciate the suffering of his workers, and how the workers’ lot could be improved without challenging the existing order (Weil was no fan of revolutions but expected revolutionary change to happen through achieving general consent to it): “It is very difficult to judge from above, and it is very difficult to act from below. That, I believe, is in general one of the essential causes of human misery.” She wrote articles for the factory newspaper, was a visitor there, and regularly spoke to B. She asked for such simple, practical things as an anonymous suggestion box for workers. This is what I mean when I describe Weil’s earthiness – real solutions to real problems.

For those of us familiar with Weil’s work on oppression, the letters contain much of the first germs of ideas regarding the effects of the work on people which later made their way into her essays: “my experience taught me two lessons. The first, the bitterest and most unexpected, is that oppression, beyond a certain degree of intensity, does not engender revolt but, on the contrary, an almost irresistible tendency to the most complete submission. … The second lesson is that humanity is divided into two categories – the people who count for something, and the people who count for nothing.” What they also do, quite clearly, is indicate her political leanings, or rather clarify her attitude towards things like revolutions, which are often only implicit in her other writings.

Further letters before the war detail a trip to Italy, where she met some fascists and had discussions with them to understand their views, which she condemned utterly (“if I had any choice in the matter I would prefer hardship and starvation in a salt-mine to living with the narrow and limited horizon of these young people”), and of course saw some old buildings and paintings. We see Weil’s mastery of languages as she quotes Greek, Latin, and Italian poetry to her readers. But one thing that is worth noting is that we get the odd, brief look at a Weil who could possibly be described as happy. For most of the remaining letters Weil is so full of self-loathing and guilt that her joy only comes through almost self-pitying laments: “Why have I not the n existences I need, in order to devote one of them to the theatre!”

By far the most interesting letter of this period was to the French writer Georges Bernanos, where she shares her experience in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer. Fortunately, she was injured in an accident involving cooking oil (passion, seriousness, and a certain awkward incompetence seem to be the hallmarks of Weil), which almost certainly saved her life, given she would pick quarrels with people who, her own letters show, saw very little value in life and would easily and probably gladly have rid her of hers. But this letter, anyway, is a single, tantalising exception beside various reasonings on the war, only some of which are interesting.

The next series of letters concerns algebra, in particular as it was done in ancient cultures. Weil’s brother, André, was a famous mathematician (who lived to 92 – how much of Simone we likely lost…!) and she herself was at ease discussing the theories. It is not my area. But Weil’s interest is infectious, and like with Wittgenstein, maths is for Weil very much a mirror of the soul, or perhaps a key to it, but certainly not some irrelevancy. It made me think of a beautiful moment in her essay “Human Personality” where she says that perfection is impersonal, because a correct equation is always correct and undifferentiable, while an incorrect equation bears the mark of its writer in how exactly it is wrong. Although, again, some footnotes would have been helpful. Weil was not a systematic thinker, and wrote brilliantly on a whole range of subjects, but that means that specialist academics or your blogger are unlikely to be comfortable in every single one of the fields she was.

In 1942 we witness the aftermath of her religious awakening through a letter to a man wounded in the Great War, Joe Bousquet. I had a sense that something was off about Weil here, and sure enough it did not take many paragraphs for her to start discussing “the nuptial consent to God.” The problem is not God, but what comes after for Weil. If she was harsh to herself before, there is little forgiveness now. She talks about how daydreaming is an evil because it distracts us from the pain we need to reach God. And then, for those unaware of more indirect expressions of it, she states “my attitude towards myself… is… a mixture of contempt and hated and repulsion.”

Compare the above to a phrase only two years before: “there are so many modern people … in whom sadness is connected with a loss of the very instinct for happiness; they feel a need to annihilate themselves.” Weil has come to see, as far as I can make out based on the letters and her essays, that annihilation is precisely what we should aim for. I am not, all told, with her. I am not sure her recipients are necessarily either. But in the annihilation of her personality she found God waiting, so how are we to blame her? We must trust to her feelings, and the sense of a task from God that she gained, even if we struggle to follow her in her beliefs. But if we are reading her letters, we are probably at least slightly sympathetic to her.

The final section of the Selected Letters sees Weil go from exile in the United States to living in London. She regretted leaving Marseilles, where she had been after French capitulation, feeling too distant from the war. Unfortunately, she found work in London supporting the Free French unrewarding too: “The work I am doing here will be arrested before long by a triple limit. First, a moral limit; because the ever increasing pain of feeling that I am not in my right place will end in spite of myself, I fear, by crippling my thought. Second, an intellectual limit; obviously my thought will be arrested when it tries to grasp the concrete, for lack of an object. Third, a physical limit; because my fatigue is growing.”

What Weil wanted was “any really useful work, not requiring technical expertise but involving a high degree of hardship and danger.” She wanted to be parachuted into France, perhaps to sabotage something. It is from this period that her famous “Plan for an organization of front-line nurses” originates. This idea of unarmed women airdropped onto the front line to provide first aid, has a reputation for being silly and impractical (it was what prompted de Gaulle to call her mad), so I was interested to read it. The criticism, I think, is somewhat unwarranted. There is symbolic beauty in the idea of a group of angelic carers fighting ideologically against the beasts of the SS, as Weil is keen to emphasise. And as for the impracticality of providing first aid at the front and taking people’s last messages home, I’m not sure that’s entirely without its practical value, and certainly has some moral value. Regardless, she was unable to get it supported.

The war concern fades into the background with the remaining letters, which are for Weil’s family. These are some of the least pleasant to read in the whole collection. What I like about Weil, whether in her essays or in her letters, is her authenticity. She was terribly naïve at times, but always true and earnest.

In April 1943, Weil left her London lodgings to enter a hospital, and was later transferred to a sanatorium. “I cannot eat the bread of the English without taking part in their war effort”, she wrote. But, working with the Free French, she was working. It was just that her self-loathing meant that she couldn’t allow herself to believe that she had done enough.

What would be merely silly had it not killed her, becomes disgusting when we learn, in one of very few notes the editors provide, that Weil still addressed her parents as if she was living at her old lodgings. And the lies go further, with her pretending to a knowledge of the ongoings of London life, which was obviously denied to her in bed, and to a health denied her too. “There’s been a misunderstanding. There’s no change for me, and none in prospect, so far. I still live quietly in my room, with my books distributed between it and the office.” This is extraordinary stuff to read, less than a month before she died, from a woman who it seems was pathologically compelled to tell the truth.

Extraordinary, and utterly, crushingly, depressing. “Au revoir, darlings. Heaps and heaps of love,” her final letter ends. No doubt she lied to her parents out of a desire to conserve their happiness, already challenged by the war. But the whole thing is just too sad for words. Weil’s heroism, her bravery, her desire to help, are all annihilated by a self-loathing that allows her just to float away from the life she had once spent trying to improve for others, as if she had never cared about such things at all.

And so, finishing the Selected Letters, I must be honest and say that if anything they lowered my opinion of one of my few philosophical heroes. If before I had thoughtlessly accepted the hagiographic view of Weil, too angelic to live, accepting a self-imposed starvation out of a magnanimous love of her countryfolk, now I think of her sacrificing honesty, common sense, and her goals for ideas that are either incomprehensible or, when I can understand them, unacceptable. Her intelligence and passion are awe-inspiring, and my respect for them both only grew reading the letters. But it is only the early Weil whom I can anymore say that I like.

For more letters, I read some of Joseph Conrad’s here.