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.