## 1. Philosophical Development



Simone Weil was born in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her parents, both of
whom came from Jewish families, provided her with an assimilated,
secular, bourgeois French childhood that was cultured and comfortable.
Weil and her older brother Andre--himself a math prodigy,
founder of the Bourbaki group, and a distinguished mathematician at
the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study--studied at
prestigious Parisian schools. Weil's first philosophy teacher,
at the Lycee Victor-Duruy, was Rene Le Senne; it was he
who introduced her to the thesis--which she would
maintain--that contradiction is a theoretical obstacle generative
of nuanced, alert thinking. Beginning in October 1925, Weil studied at
Henri IV Lycee in preparation for the entrance exams of the
Ecole Normale Superieure. At Henri IV she studied under
the philosopher and essayist Emile-Auguste Chartier (known
pseudonymously as Alain), whose teacher was Jules Lagneau. Like Weil
at this time, Alain was agnostic. In his classes he emphasized
intellectual history: in philosophy this included Plato, Marcus
Aurelius, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, and in literature, Homer,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Already sympathetic with the
downtrodden and critical of French society, she gained the theoretical
tools to levy critiques against her country and philosophical
tradition in Alain's class. There, employing paradox and
attention through the form of the essay (it is important to note that
none of her writings was published as a book in her lifetime), she
began intentionally developing what would become her distinct mode of
philosophizing. It is therefore arguable that she is part of the
Alain/Lagneau line of voluntarist, *spiritueliste* philosophy
in France.



In 1928 Weil began her studies at the Ecole Normale. She was
the only woman in her class, the first woman having been first
admitted in 1917. In 1929-1930 she worked on her dissertation on
knowledge and perception in Descartes, and having received her
*agregation* diploma, she served from late 1931 to
mid-1934 as a teacher at *lycees*. Throughout this
period, outside of her duties at each *lycee* where she
instructed professionally, Weil taught philosophy to, lobbied for, and
wrote on behalf of workers' groups; at times, moreover, she
herself joined in manual labor. In her early thinking she prized at
once the first-person perspective and radical skepticism of Descartes,
the class-based solidarity and materialist analysis of Marx, and the
moral absolutism and respect for the individual of Kant. Drawing from
each, her early work can be read as an attempt to provide, with a view
toward liberty, her own analysis of the fundamental causes of
oppression in society.



In early August 1932, Weil travelled to Germany in order to understand
better the conditions fostering Nazism. German trade unions, she wrote
to friends upon her return to France, were the single force in Germany
able to generate a revolution, but they were fully reformist. Long
periods of unemployment left many Germans without energy or esteem. At
best, she observed frankly, they could serve as a kind of dead weight
in a revolution. More specifically, by early 1933 she criticized the
tendency of social organizations to engender bureaucracy, which
elevated management and collective thinking over and against the
individual worker. Against this tendency, she advocated for
workers' understanding the physical labor they performed within
the context of the whole organizational apparatus. In
"Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social
Oppression" (1934), Weil presented both a summation of her early
thought and a prefiguring of central elements in her thematic
trajectory. The essay employs a Marxian method of analysis that pays
attention to the oppressed, critiques her own position as an
intellectual, privileges manual labor, and demands precise and
unorthodox individual thinking that unites theory and practice against
collective cliches, propaganda, obfuscation, and
hyper-specialization. These ideas would provide a theoretical
framework for her idiosyncratic practice of philosophy. Near the end
of her life she wrote in a notebook: "Philosophy (including
problems of cognition, etc.) is *exclusively* an affair of
action and practice" (FLN 362).



On 20 June, 1934, Weil applied for a sabbatical from teaching. She was
to spend a year working in Parisian factories as part of its most
oppressed group, unskilled female laborers. Weil's "year
of factory work" (which amounted, in actuality, to around 24
weeks of laboring) was not only important in the development of her
political philosophy but can also be seen as a turning point in her
slow religious evolution.



In Paris's factories, Weil began to see and to comprehend
firsthand the normalization of brutality in modern industry. There,
she wrote in her "Factory Journal", "[t]ime was an
intolerable burden" (FW 225) as modern factory work comprised
two elements principally: orders from superiors and, relatedly,
increased speeds of production. While the factory managers continued
to demand more, both fatigue and thinking (itself less likely under
such conditions) slowed work. As a result, Weil felt dehumanized.
Phenomenologically, her factory experience was less one of physical
suffering *per se*, and more one of humiliation. Weil was
surprised that this humiliation produced not rebellion but rather
fatigue and docility. She described her experience in factories as a
kind of "slavery". On a trip to Portugal in August 1935,
upon watching a procession to honor the patron saint of fishing
villagers, she had her first major contact with Christianity and wrote
that



> 
> 
> the conviction was suddenly borne in upon [her] that Christianity is
> pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help
> belonging to it, and [she] among others. (1942 "Spiritual
> Autobiography" in WFG 21-38, 26)
> 
> 
> 



In comparison with her pre-factory "Testament", we see
that in her "Factory Journal" Weil maintains the language
of liberty, but she moves terminologically from
"oppression" to "humiliation" and
"affliction". Thus her conception and description of
suffering thickened and became more personal at this time.



Weil participated in the 1936 Paris factory occupations and, moreover,
planned on returning to factory work. Her trajectory shifted, however,
with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. On the level of geopolitics,
she was critical of both civil and international war, and she approved
of France's decision not to intervene on the Republican side. On
the level of individual commitment, however, she obtained
journalist's credentials and joined an international anarchist
brigade. On 20 August, 1936, Weil, clumsy and nearsighted, stepped in
a pot of boiling oil, severely burning her lower left leg and instep.
Only her parents could persuade her not to return to combat. By late
1936 Weil wrote against French colonization of Indochina, and by early
1937 she argued against French claims to Morocco and Tunisia. In April
1937 she travelled to Italy. Within the basilica Santa Maria degli
Angeli, inside the small twelfth-century Romanesque chapel where St.
Francis prayed, Weil had her second significant contact with
Christianity. As she would later describe in a letter,
"[S]omething stronger than I compelled me for the first time to
go down on my knees" (WFG 26).



From 1937-1938 Weil revisited her Marxian commitments, arguing
that there is a central contradiction in Marx's thought:
although she adhered to his method of analysis and demonstration that
the modern state is inherently oppressive--being that it is
composed of the army, police, and bureaucracy--she continued to
reject any positing of revolution as immanent or determined. Indeed,
in Weil's middle period, Marx's confidence in history
seemed to her a worse ground for judgment than Machiavelli's
emphasis on contingency.



During the week of Easter 1938, Weil visited the Benedictine abbey of
Solesmes from Palm Sunday to the following Tuesday. At Solesmes she
had her third contact with Christianity: suffering from headaches,
Weil found a joy so pure in Gregorian chant that, by analogy, she
gained an understanding



> 
> 
> of the possibility of living divine love in the midst of affliction.
> It goes without saying that in the course of these services the
> thought of the passion of Christ entered into [her] being once and for
> all. (WFG 26)
> 
> 
> 



At Solesmes, she was also introduced to the seventeenth century poet
George Herbert by a young Englishman she met there. She claimed to
feel Christ's presence while reciting Herbert's poem
"Love". As she fixed her full attention on the poem while
suffering from her most intense headache, Weil came to see that her
recitation had the virtue of prayer, saying, "Christ himself
came down and took possession of me" (WFG 27). Importantly, she
thought God "in his mercy" had prevented her from reading
the mystics until that point; therefore, she could not say that she
invented her unexpected contact with Christ (WFG 27). These events and
writings in 1936-1938 exemplify the mutually informing nature of
solidarity and spirituality in Weil's thought that began in
August 1935.



After the military alliance of Germany and Italy in May 1939, Weil
renounced her pacifism. It was not that she felt she was wrong in
holding such a position before, but rather that now, she argued,
France was no longer strong enough to remain generous or merely
defensive. Following the German Western offensive, she left Paris with
her family in June 1940, on the last train. They settled eventually
but temporarily in Marseilles, at the time the main gathering point
for those attempting to flee France, and where Weil would work with
the Resistance.



In Vichy France Weil took up a practice she had long sought, namely,
to apprentice herself to the life of agricultural laborers. In
addition, in Marseilles she was introduced to the Dominican priest
Joseph-Marie Perrin, who became a close friend as well as a spiritual
interlocutor, and through whom she began to consider the question of
baptism. In an effort to help Weil find a job as an agricultural
laborer, Perrin turned to his friend Gustave Thibon, a Catholic writer
who owned a farm in the Ardeche region. Thus in Fall 1941 Weil
worked in the grape harvest. Importantly, however, she was not treated
like the rest of the laborers; although she worked a full eight hours
per day, she resided and ate at the house of her employers. She
reportedly carried Plato's *Symposium* with her in the
vineyards and attempted to teach the text to her fellow laborers.



In 1942 Weil agreed to leave France in part so her parents would be in
a safe place (they would not leave without her, she knew), but
principally because she thought she might be more useful for
France's war effort if she were in another country. Thus she
went to New York via Morocco. In New York, as in Marseilles, she
filled notebook after notebook with philosophical, theological, and
mathematical considerations. New York, however, felt removed from the
sufferings of her native France; the Free French movement in London
felt one step closer to returning to France. In 1943 Weil was given a
small office at 19 Hill Street in London. From this room she would
write day and night for the next four months, sleeping around three
hours each night. Her output in this period totaled around 800 printed
pages, but she resigned from the Free French movement in late July
(Petrement 1973 [1976: xx]).



Weil died Tuesday, 24 August 1943. Three days later, the coroner
pronounced her death a suicide--cardiac failure from
self-starvation and tuberculosis. The accounts provided by her
biographers tell a more complex story: Weil was aware that her fellow
country-men and women in the occupied territory had to live on minimal
food rations at this time, and she had insisted on the same for
herself, which exacerbated her physical illness to the point of death
(Von der Ruhr 2006: 18). On 30 August she was buried at
Ashford's New Cemetery between the Jewish and the Catholic
sections. Her grave was originally anonymous. For fifteen years
Ashford residents thought it was a pauper's.


## 2. Social-Political Philosophy



Always writing from the left, Weil continually revised her
social-political philosophy in light of the rapidly changing material
conditions in which she lived. However, she was consistent in her
acute attention to and theorizing from the situation of the oppressed
and marginalized in society.



Her early essays on politics, a number of which were posthumously
collected by Albert Camus in *Oppression et liberte*
(OL), include "Capital and the Worker" (1932),
"Prospects: Are We Heading for the Proletarian
Revolution?" (1933), "Reflections concerning Technology,
National Socialism, the U.S.S.R., and certain other matters"
(1933) and, most importantly, "Reflections concerning the Causes
of Liberty and Social Oppression" (1934 in OL 36-117). In
her early writings, Weil attempted to provide an analysis of the real
causes of oppression so as to inform militants in revolutionary
action. Her concern was that, without this analysis, a socially
enticing movement would lead only to superficial changes in the
appearance of the means of production, not to new and freer forms of
structural organization.



The division of labor or the existence of material privilege alone is
not a sufficient condition for Weil's concept of
"oppression". That is, she recognized that there are some
forms of social relations involving deference, hierarchy, and order
that are not necessarily oppressive. However, the intervention of the
struggle for power--which she, following Hobbes, sees as an
inexorable feature of human society--generates oppression.



> 
> 
> [P]ower [*puissance*] contains a sort of fatality which weighs
> as pitilessly on those who command as on those who obey; nay more, it
> is in so far as it enslaves the former that, through their agency, it
> presses down upon the latter ("Reflections concerning the Causes
> of Liberty and Social Oppression", OL 62).
> 
> 
> 



Oppression, then, is a specific social organization that, as a
consequence of the essentially unstable struggle for power, and
principally the structure of labor, limits the individual from
experiencing the world to the full extent of her or his full
capability, a capability Weil describes as "methodical
thinking" (*pensee methodique*). By
divorcing the understanding from the application of a method,
oppression, exercised through force, denies human beings direct
contact with reality. Also informing her sense of oppression is her
notion of "privilege", which includes not only money or
arms, but also a corpus of knowledge closed to the working masses
that, thereby, engenders a culture of specialists. Privilege thus
exacerbates oppression in modern societies, which are held together
not by shared goals, meaningful relations, or organically developing
communities, but through a "religion of power" (OL 69). In
this way, both power and prestige contribute to a modern reversal of
means and ends. That is, elements like money, technology, and
war--all properly speaking "means"--are, through
the workings of power, treated as "ends" worthy of
furtherance, enhancement, and multiplication without limit.



In her early social-political thought Weil testified to what she
called "a new species of oppression"
("Prospects", OL 9), namely, the bureaucracy of modern
industry. Both her anarchism and Marxian method of analysis influenced
how she problematized revolutionary struggle: the problem lies in
forming a social organization that does not engender bureaucracy, an
anonymous and institutionalized manifestation of force. The
oppressiveness of modern bureaucracy, to which she responded through
analysis and critique, includes cliched, official and
obscurantist language--the "caste privileges" of
intellectuals ("Technology, National Socialism, the
U.S.S.R", OL 34)-- and a division of labor such that, in
the case of most workers, labor does not involve, but in fact
precludes, engaged thinking. Out of balance in this way, modern humans
live as cogs in a machine: less like thinking individuals, and more
like instruments crushed by "collectivities".
Collectivity--a concept that centrally comprises industry,
bureaucracy, and the state (the "bureaucratic organization
*par excellence*" [OL 109]), but that also includes
political parties, churches, and unions--by definition quashes
individual subjectivity.



Despite her critiques of oppression, prestige, and collectivity, in a
polemical argument Weil is also critical of "revolution",
which for her refers to an inversion of forces, the victory of the
weak over the powerful. This, she says, is "the equivalent of a
balance whose lighter scale were to go down" (OL 74).
"Revolution" in its colloquial or deterministic sense,
then, has itself become an "opiate", a word for which the
laboring masses die, but which lies empty. For Weil, real revolution
is precisely the re-organization of labor such that it subordinates
the laborers neither to management (as in bureaucracy) nor to
oppressive conditions (as in factory work). As she sees it, if
revolution is to have meaning, it is only as a regulative, and not a
positive, ideal (OL 53). In Weil's adaptation of this Kantian
notion, such a regulative ideal involves an attention to reality,
e.g., to the present political and working conditions, to human
conditions such as the struggle for power. Only in this way can it
provide a standard of analysis for action: the ideal allows for a
dialectical relation between a revolutionary alternative and present
praxis, which is always grounded in material conditions. Freedom,
then, is a unity of thought and action. It is, moreover--and not
unlike in Hegel's conceptualization--a condition of
balanced relations to and interdependence with others (who check our
sovereignty) and the world (which is limited and limiting). A freeing
mode of production, as opposed to an alienating and oppressing one,
would involve a meaningful relation to thinking and to others
throughout the course of labor. When workers understand both the
mechanical procedures and the efforts of other members of the
collectivity, the collectivity itself becomes subject to individuals,
i.e., means and ends are rightfully in a relation of equilibrium.



The ontology behind Weil's notion of free labor draws on the
Kantian emphasis on the individual as an end--especially, for
Weil, in her or his capacity for thinking (with Plato, for whom
knowing and doing are united). In addition, the teleology of labor in
Weil's philosophy corresponds with the thought of Hegel and
Marx, and is in opposition to Locke: in the individual's mixing
with the material world, her interest lies in how this promotes
liberty, rather than property. The uprooting Weil experienced in
factory work introduced a shift in her conception of freedom: as she
began to see the human condition as not just one of inexorable
struggle, but of slavery, her notion of freedom shifted from a
negative freedom from constraints to a positive freedom to obey. She
referred to the latter, a particular kind of relational freedom, as
"consent". She concluded her "inventory of modern
civilization" (OL 116) with a call to introduce play into the
bureaucratic machine and a call to think as individuals, denying the
"social idol" by "refusing to subordinate
one's own destiny to the course of history" and by taking
up "critical analysis" (OL 117). In sum, by 1934 Weil
pictured an ideal society, which she conceptualized as a regulative
impossibility in which manual labor, understood and performed by
thinking individuals, was a "pivot" toward liberty.



Weil's "Factory Journal" from 1934-1935
suggests a broader shift in her social-political philosophy. During
this period, her political pessimism deepened. In light of the
humiliating work she conducted in the factories, her post-factory
writings feature a terminological intensification: from
"humiliation" and "oppression" to
"affliction" (*malheur*), a concept informed by her
factory experience of embodied pain combined with psychological agony
and social degradation--and to which she would later add
spiritual distress.



In 1936 Weil advanced her political commitments in ways that
foreshadowed her later social-political thought. She continued to
eschew revolution and instead to work toward reform, namely, greater
equality in the factory through a shift from a structure of
subordination to one of collaboration. In addition, in response to the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she argued against fascism while
favoring--against the Communist position--French
non-intervention. She was opposed to authoritarian logic, and she saw
going to war as a kind of surrender to the logic of power and prestige
inherent in fascism.



> 
> 
> One must choose between prestige and peace. And whether one claims to
> believe in the fatherland, democracy, or revolution, the policy of
> prestige means war. (1936 "Do We Have to Grease Our Combat
> Boots", FW 258)
> 
> 
> 



Weil's development of the concepts of power and prestige
continued in her article "Let Us Not Start Another Trojan
War" (1936, subtitled, and translated into English as,
"The Power of Words" in SWA 238-258). Her thesis is
that a war's destruction is inversely proportional to the
official pretexts given for fighting it. Wars are absurd, she argued
(against Clausewitz), because "*they are conflicts with no
definable objective*" (SWA 239). Like the phantom of Helen
that inspired ten years of fighting, ideologies (e.g., capitalism,
socialism, fascism), as well as capitalized words such as
"Nation" and "State", have taken on the role
of the phantom in the modern world. Power relies on
prestige--itself illusory and without limit because no nation
thinks it has enough or is sure of maintaining its imagined glory, and
therefore ever increases its means to wage war--so as to appear
absolute and invincible. In response to these forces, Weil prescribed
distinguishing between the imaginary and the real and, relatedly,
defining words properly and precisely. Taken together, these
prescriptions amount to a critique of ideology with its bloated
political rhetoric.



> 
> 
> [W]hen a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and can
> no longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomes
> simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete
> objective, or method of activity. 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 human lives. (SWA 242)
> 
> 
> 



Further, Weil desired a kind of equilibrium between forces instead of
an endless pursuit of an illusion of absolute stability and security.
Following Heraclitus, she saw struggle as a condition of life. What is
required of the thinking individual, in turn, is to distinguish
between worthwhile conflict, such as class struggle, and illusions of
prestige, which often serve as the foundation of war. In her middle
period, then, Weil maintained the contrariety between reality, limit,
and equilibrium on the one hand and imagination, limitlessness, and
collectivity on the other. In her 1937 "Note on Social
Democracy", she defined politics as follows:



> 
> 
> The material of the political art is the double perspective, ever
> shifting between the real conditions of social equilibrium and the
> movements of collective imagination. Collective imagination, whether
> of mass meetings or of meetings in evening dress, is never correctly
> related to the really decisive factors of a given social situation; it
> is always beside the point, or ahead of it, or behind it. (SE 152)
> 
> 
> 



In her late period Weil provided an explication of the all-pervasive
and indiscriminate concept of "force" in the essay
"The *Iliad* or the Poem of Force" (1940 in SWA
182-215). It is important to note Weil's locus of
enunciation for this concept, temporally after the fall of France and
spatially from a position of exile, including antisemitic
marginalization, which is why the essay appeared in the December 1940
and January 1941 *Cahiers du Sud* under the anagrammatic
pseudonym Emile Novis, taken up by Weil to avoid antisemitic
confrontation and censorship. This essay was not only the most widely
read of Weil's pieces during her lifetime, but it was also her
first essay to appear in English, translated by Mary McCarthy and
published in Dwight Macdonald's magazine *Politics* in
1945 (November, pp. 321-330).



In her essay on the *Iliad*--a text Roberto Esposito calls
"a phenomenology of force" (Esposito 1996 [2017:
46])--Weil further develops an understanding of force initially
presented in her earlier, unfinished essay "Reflections on
Barbarism" (1939): "I believe that the concept of force
must be made central in any attempt to think clearly about human
relations" (quoted in Petrement 1973 [1976: 361]). The
protagonist of the *Iliad*, Weil writes in an original reading,
is not Achilles or Hector, but force itself. Like her concept of
"power" in her early writings, "force" reifies
and dehumanizes no matter if one wields or undergoes it. Further,
force includes not only coercion, but also prestige, which is to say
that it has a social element. Two important implications follow.
First, on the level of the individual, each "personality"
(*la personne*) is informed by social values and thereby
features the operations of force through accidental characteristics,
such as the name of the family into which one is born or the embodied
features that are considered physically attractive at a certain place,
in a certain society, at a certain time. Second, on the level of the
collectivity, force can destroy not only bodies, but also values and
cultures, as is the case, Weil is at pains to point out, in French
colonialism. In her mid-to-late writings, then, she saw neither
Marx's notion of class nor Hegel's self-development of
*Geist,* but force itself, as the key to history. She presents
this concept as "the force that kills" and as a specific
kind of violence "that does not kill just yet", though



> 
> 
> [i]t will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely
> hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it *can*
> kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. (SWA
> 184-185)
> 
> 
> 



Weil's concept of force, then, is also a development from Hobbes
and Hegel: it names that which renders the individual a slave.



It was in London (1942-1943), during her work for the Free
French, that Weil articulated her most robust late social-political
philosophy. Her concepts of "labor" and
"justice" thickened as she moved further toward
Christianity and--against her early emphasis on the
individual--toward the social. Weil's *pieces
d'occasion* from this time period include "Draft for a
Statement of Human Obligations" (1943), written in response to
de Gaulle's State Reform Commission in its drafting of a new
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, as well as "Note
on the General Suppression of Political Parties" (1943), written
because the Free French was considering recognizing political parties.
In this piece Weil argues for the complete abolition of political
parties. Drawing on Rousseau's concept of the general will, Weil
contends that political parties subdue the independent, individual
wills of which the general will is derivative and on which democracy
depends. Most important from this period was her major work *The
Need for Roots* (*L'enracinement*), which Weil called
her second "magnum opus" (SL 186), and which Albert Camus
published posthumously in 1949, with Gallimard, as the first of 11
volumes of Weil's he would promote.



Weil wrote additional essays in London, the most conceptually
important of which was "*La Personne et le
sacre*" (1942-1943, translated into English as
"Human Personality"), in which she critiques
"rights" as reliant on force and poses as counter-terms
"obligation" and "justice". She distinguishes
between two conceptions of justice: natural (hence social and
contingent) and supernatural (hence impersonal and eternal). *The
Need for Roots* (1943 NR) adds "needs of the soul" as
another counter-balance to rights. Overall, Weil presents not a
law-based or rights-based, but a compassion-based morality, involving
obligations to another that are discernible through attention,
centered on and evolving toward a supernatural justice that is not of
the world, but that can be in it. As a departure from Kant, and
through Plato, whom Weil "came to feel... was a
mystic" ("Spiritual Autobiography", WFG 28), the
basis of her sense of (supernatural) justice was not human
rationality, but a desire for the Good, which she believed all humans
share, even if at times they forget or deny this. Importantly, given
her critique of French colonialism, and despite her claim that
obligations to another must be indiscriminate, i.e., universal, she
did not want to universalize law in a Kantian fashion. Rather, her aim
was for cultures to continue their own traditions, for the goal of
rootedness (*l'enracinement*) is not to change cultural
values *per se*, but more precisely, to change how individuals
in those cultures read and orient themselves toward those values.



Weil's concept of "roots" is crucial to her late
political thought. With connotations of both vitality and
vulnerability, "roots" conceptualizes human society as
dynamic and living while attesting to the necessity of stability and
security if growth and flourishing are to occur on the level of the
individual. Beyond the organic metaphor on the level of the natural,
her concept of roots serves as a kind of bridge between the reality of
society and the ideal of supernatural justice. Roots do this by
manifesting human subjection to material and historical conditions,
including the need to participate in the life of a community, to feel
a sense of connection to a place, and to maintain temporal links,
e.g., to cultural history and to hopes for the future. In turn, a
rooted community allows for the development of the individual with a
view toward God or eternal values. As such, and *contra* her
early and middle maintenance of a critical distance from any
collectivity (or Great Beast, to use the Platonic metaphor she
frequently employs), in her late thought Weil sees roots as allowing
for a "new patriotism" based on compassion. The
establishing of roots (*l'enracinement*) enables multiple
relations to the world (e.g., on the level of the nation, the
organically developing community, the school) that at once nourish the
individual and the community.



In addition to war and colonization, in *The Need for Roots*
Weil points to money and to contemporary education as
self-perpetuating forces that uproot human life. The longest section
of the text describes modern uprootedness
(*deracinement*), occurring when the imagined modern
nation and money are the only binding forces in society, and she
characterizes this condition as a threat to the human soul. Modern
education is corrupted both by capitalism--such that it is
nothing except "a machine for producing diplomas, in other
words, jobs" (NR 118)--and by a Roman inheritance for
cultivating prestige with respect to the nation: "It is this
idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of
patriotism" (NR 137). As an alternative to modern uprootedness,
Weil outlines a civilization based not on force, which turns a person
into a thing, but on free labor, which in its engagement with and
consent to necessary forces at play in the world, including time and
death, allows for direct contact with reality. Moreover, Weil's
writing in *The Need for Roots* is refracted through her
religious experience. In this later period, then, she no longer
conceptualizes labor in the mechanical terms of a "pivot"
as she did in her early writings; it is now the "spiritual
core" of "a well-ordered social life" (NR 295). (In
her late social-political philosophy, in fact, a spiritual revolution
is more important than an economic one.) *Contra* the Greeks,
who devalued physical work, her conception of labor serves to mediate
between the natural and the supernatural. In her late writings, labor
is fully inflected by her experiences with Christianity. As such,
labor's consent to and, moreover, working through natural forces
(e.g., gravity) is in fact consent to God, who created the natural
world. Labor's kenotic activity, as energy is expended daily, is
a kind of *imitatio Christi*.



Her social-political writings in London are markedly different from
her early writings as an anarchist informed principally by Descartes,
Marx, and Kant. While those influences remain, her later writings must
be read through the lens of her Christian Platonism. She suggests that
we must draw our spiritual life from our social environment. That is,
while spirituality is individual *vis-a-vis* God, this
spirituality occurs within a social context, namely, the collectivity,
and principally, the nation. This is a reversal from the critical
distance she had maintained from the collectivity, especially in her
early emphasis on the individual's methodical thinking.


## 3. Epistemology



Throughout her life, Weil argued that knowledge in and of the world
demanded rigorous, balanced thinking, even if that difficulty and
measurement led the thinker to near-impossible tasks. For her these
tasks of thinking included, for instance, her attempt to synthesize
perspectives of intricate Catholic doctrine on the threshold of the
Church with wisdom from various traditions such as ancient Greek
philosophy and tragedies, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Following
Aeschylus, she believed knowledge was gained through suffering. Shaped
by her social-political and religious thought, Weil's
epistemology would change over time, especially in light of her
mystical experiences.



In her dissertation, Weil attempts to think with Descartes in order to
find foundational knowledge. Like Descartes, she argues for the
existence of self, God, and world. Her *cogito*, however, was a
decisive break from his: "I can, therefore I am" (*Je
puis, donc je suis*) (1929-1930 "Science and
Perception in Descartes", FW 59). The self has the power of
freedom, Weil argues, but something else--the omnipotent,
God--makes the self realize that it is not all-powerful.
Self-knowledge, then, is capability always qualified by the
acknowledgment that one is not God. She maintained a kind of Cartesian
epistemology during her time as a teacher, early in her academic life.
In *Lectures on Philosophy* (1978 LP), a collection of lecture
notes taken by one of her students during the academic year
1933-1934 at a girl's *lycee* in Roanne, we
find that Weil is initially critical of sensations as grounds for
knowledge, and thereby critical of empiricist epistemology (LP
43-47).



From her early writings onward she was to problematize the imagination
as the "*folle imagination*", a barrier between
mind and reality, meaning that the human knower is kept from
things-in-themselves. Weil's epistemology, then, informed by her
initial studies of Descartes, would take on inflections of Kant and
Plato while positioning her against Aristotle. She was critical of any
sensation that universalizes one's reading of the world, and she
saw the imagination as thus extending the self, because it could not
help but filter phenomena through its own categories, wishes, and
desires, thereby reading the world on its own terms. Relatedly, Weil
would develop an intersubjective epistemology. Knowing the truth
requires not extending one's own limited perspective, but
suspending or abandoning it such that reality--including the
reality of the existence of others--could appear on its own
terms. This suspension involves a practice of epistemic humility and
openness to all ideas; intelligence for Weil demands the qualified use
of language, acknowledgement of degrees, proportions, contingencies,
and relations, as well as an ability to call the self into question.
These epistemic practices are part of a broader recognition that the
individual knower is limited.



The progression of Weil's epistemology can be seen first in her
conceptualization of contradiction. By *Lectures on
Philosophy*, she affirmed a sense of contradiction beyond the
logical conjunction "*a* is *b*" and
"*a* is not-*b*". Indeed, she argues that
contradiction can be a generative obstacle in that it requires the
mind to expand its thinking in order to transcend the obstacle.
Drawing on the mathematics of Eudoxus, she elaborates on this notion
to claim that incommensurables can be reconciled when set on a kind of
"higher plane". This is not, however, a type of Hegelian
synthesis that can be intellectually apprehended. Instead, the
contemplation of contradictions can lead the knower to a higher
contemplation of truth-as-mystery. Thus, in her late epistemology Weil
presents this concept of "mystery" as a certain kind of
contradiction in which incommensurables appear linked in an
incomprehensible unity.



Mystery, as a conceptualization of contradiction, carries theological,
or at least supernatural, implications. For instance, if contradiction
is understood through formal logic, then the existence of affliction
would seemingly prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent, wholly
benevolent God; however, contradiction, understood as mystery, can
itself serve as a mediation, allowing for the coexistence of
affliction and God, seen most prominently on the Cross. Indeed, Christ
is the religious solution to Weil's principal contradiction,
that between the necessary and the good. Moreover, through incarnation
that opens onto universality, Christ also manifests and solves the
contradiction of the individual and the collectivity. Thus, in a
modification of the Pythagorean idea of harmony, she claims that
Christ allows for "the just balance of contraries"
("Spiritual Autobiography", WFG 33). More broadly, in her
1941 "The Pythagorean Doctrine", she argues that
mathematics are a bridge between the natural and eternal (or between
humans and God). That is, the Pythagoreans held an intellectual
solution to apparent natural contradictions. Inspired by Pythagoras,
she claimed that the very study of mathematics can be a means of
purification in light of the principles of proportion and the
necessary balancing of contraries--especially in geometry. She
saw in the Pythagorean legacy and spirit a link between their
mathematical insights and their distinctly religious project to
penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos.



As opposed to the suppression or dissolution of contradictions, as in
systematic philosophy, in Weil's value-centered philosophy
contradictions are to be presented honestly and tested on different
levels; for her, they are "the criterion of the real" and
correspond with the orientation of detachment (GG 98). For example,
Christ's imperative to "love your enemies" contains
a contradiction in value: love those who are detestable and who
threaten the vulnerability of loving. For Weil, submitting to this
union of contraries loosens one's attachments to particular,
ego-driven perspectives and enables a "well-developed
intellectual pluralism" (Springsted 2010: 97). She writes,
"An attachment to a particular thing can only be destroyed by an
attachment which is incompatible with it" (GG 101). With these
philosophical moves in mind, Robert Chenavier argues that she has not
a philosophy of perception, a phenomenology, but rather, borrowing
Gaston Bachelard's phrase, a "dynamology of
contradiction" (Chenavier 2009 [2012: 25]).



Overall, Weil's presentation of contradiction is more
Pythagorean or Platonic than it is Marxian: it takes up contradiction
not through resolution on the level of things, but through dialectics
on the level of thought, where mystery is the beginning and end-point
of thought (Springsted 2010: 97). In her unfinished essay "Is
There a Marxist Doctrine?", from her time in London, Weil
writes,



> 
> 
> Contradiction in matter is imaged by the clash of forces coming from
> different directions. Marx purely and simply attributed to social
> matter this movement towards the good through contradictions, which
> Plato described as being that of the thinking creature drawn upwards
> by the supernatural operation of grace. (OL 180)
> 
> 
> 



She follows the Greek usage of "dialectics" to consider
"the virtue of contradiction as support for the soul drawn
upwards by grace" (or the good); Marx errs, she thought, in
coupling such a movement with "materialism" (OL 181).



A second central epistemological concept for Weil is
"reading" (*lecture*)*.* Reading is a kind
of interpretation of what is presented to knowers by both their
physical sensations and their social conditions; therefore,
reading--as the reception and attribution of certain meanings in
the world--is always mediated. In turn, readings are mediated
through other readings, since our perception of meaning is undoubtedly
involved in and affected by an intersubjective web of interpretations.
Weil explains this through the metaphor, borrowed from Descartes, of a
blind man's stick. We can read a situation through attention to
another in order to expand our awareness and sensitivity, just as the
blind man enlarges his sensibility through the use of his stick. But
our readings of the world can also become more narrow and simplistic,
as for instance, when a context of violence and force tempts us to see
everyone we encounter as a potential threat. Moreover, readings are
not free from power dynamics and can become projects of imposition and
intervention; here her epistemology connects to her social-political
philosophy, specifically to her concept of force.



> 
> 
> We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these
> readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery).
> Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). (NB 43)
> 
> 
> 



She connects reading to war and imagination: "War is a way of
imposing another reading of sensations, a pressure upon the
imagination of others" (NB 24). In her 1941 "Essay on the
Concept of Reading" (LPW 21-27) Weil elaborates,
"War, politics, eloquence, art, teaching, all action on others
essentially consists in changing what they read" (LPW 26). In
the same essay she develops "reading" in relation to the
aforementioned epistemological concepts of appearance, the empirical
world, and contradiction:



> 
> 
> [A]t each instant of our life we are gripped from the outside, as it
> were, by meanings that we ourselves read in appearances. That is why
> we can argue endlessly about the reality of the external world, since
> what we call the world are the meanings that we read; they are not
> real. But they seize us as if they were external; that is real. Why
> should we try to resolve this contradiction when the more important
> task of thought in this world is to define and contemplate insoluble
> contradictions, which, as Plato said, draw us upwards? (LPW 22)
> 
> 
> 



It is important to note that for Weil, we are not simply passive in
our readings. That is, we can learn to change our readings of the
world or of others. An elevated transformation in reading, however,
demands an apprenticeship in loving God through the things of this
world--a kind of attentiveness that will also entail certain
bodily involvements, labors, postures, and experiences. Particular
readings result from particular ways of living. Ideally for her, we
would read the natural as illuminated by the supernatural. This
conceptualization of reading involves recognition on hierarchical
levels, as she explains in her notebooks:



> 
> 
> To read necessity behind sensation, to read order behind necessity, to
> read God behind order. We must love all facts, not for their
> consequences, but because in each fact God is there present. But that
> is tautological. To love all facts is nothing else than to read God in
> them. (NB 267)
> 
> 
> 



Thus the world is known as a kind of text featuring several
significations on several stages, levels, or domains.



Weil's epistemology grounds her critique of modern science. In
*The Need for Roots* she advocates for a science conducted
"according to methods of mathematical precision, and at the same
time maintained in close relationship with religious faith" (NR
288). Through contemplation of the natural world via this kind of
science, the world could be read on multiple levels. The knower,
reading thus, would understand that the order of the world is the same
as a unity, but different on its myriad levels:



> 
> 
> with respect to God [it] is eternal Wisdom; with respect to the
> universe, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; with
> respect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; with
> respect to our flesh, brute force. (NR 288-289)
> 
> 
> 



As in her social-political thought, in her epistemology Weil is a kind
of anti-modern. She sees modern science and epistemology as a project
of self-expansion that forgets limit and thinks the world should be
subject to human power and autonomy. Labor (especially physical labor,
such as farming), then, also assumes an epistemological role for her.
By heteronomously subjecting the individual to necessity on a daily
basis, it at once contradicts self-aggrandizement and allows for a
more balanced reading: the intelligence qualifies itself as it reads
necessary relations simultaneously on multiple levels. This reading on
different levels, and inflected through faith, amounts to a kind of
non-reading, in that it is detached, impersonal and impartial. Through
these predicates "reading" is connected to her social
thought, aesthetics, and religious philosophy. That is, in her later
thought Weil's epistemology relies on a time-out-of-mind
metaphysics for justification. Analogous to aesthetic taste, spiritual
discernment--God-given and graceful--allows the abdicated
self to read from a universal perspective at its most developed stage.
Thus, she argued, one can love equally and indiscriminately, just as
the sun shines or the rain falls without preference.


## 4. Ethics



Weil's central ethical concept is "attention"
(*l'attention*), which, though thematically and
practically present in her early writings, reached its robust
theoretical expression while she was in Marseilles in 1942. Attention
is a particular kind of ethical "turn" in her
conceptualization. Fundamentally, it is less a moral position or
specific practice and more an orientation that nevertheless requires
an arduous apprenticeship leading to a capacity of discernment on
multiple levels. Attention includes discerning what someone is going
through in her or his suffering, the particular protest made by
someone harmed, the social conditions that engender a climate for
suffering, and the fact that one is, by chance (*hazard*) at a
different moment, equally a subject of affliction.



Attention is directed not by will but by a particular kind of desire
without an object. It is not a "muscular effort" but a
"negative effort" (WFG 61), involving release of egoistic
projects and desires and a growing receptivity of the mind. For Weil,
as a Christian Platonist, the desire motivating attention is oriented
toward the mysterious good that "draws God down" (WFG 61).
In her essay "Reflections on the Right use of School Studies
with a View to the Love of God" (1942 in WFG 57-65), Weil
takes prayer, defined as "the orientation of all the attention
of which the soul is capable toward God", as her point of
departure (WFG 57). She then describes a kind of vigilance in her
definition of attention:



> 
> 
> Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached
> [*disponible*], empty [*vide*], and ready to be
> penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within the
> reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with
> it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make
> use of. ... Above all our thought should be empty
> [*vide*], waiting [*en attente*], not seeking anything
> [*ne rien chercher*], but ready to receive in its naked truth
> the object that is to penetrate it. (WFG 62)
> 
> 
> 



The French makes more clear the connection between attention
(*l'attention*) and waiting (*attente*). For Weil
the problem with searching, instead of waiting *en hupomene*
(di upomones),
is precisely that one is eager to fill the void characterizing
*attente*. As a result, one settles too quickly on some-thing:
a counterfeit, falsity, idol. Because in searching or willing the
imagination fills the void (*le vide*), it is crucial that
attention be characterized by suspension and detachment. Indeed, the
void by definition is empty (*vide*)--of idols, futural
self-projections, consolations that compensate un-thinking, and
attachments of collective and personal prestige. As such, its
acceptance marks individual fragility and destructibility, that is,
mortality. But this acceptance of death is the condition for the
possibility of the reception of grace. (As explained below in regard
to her religious philosophy, Weil's concept for the disposition
characterized by these features of attention, with obvious theological
resonances, is "decreation".)



In attention one renounces one's ego in order to receive the
world without the interference of one's limited and consumptive
perspective. This posture of self-emptying, a stripping away of the
"I" (*depouillement*)--ultimately for
Weil an *imitatio Christi* in its kenosis--allows for an
impersonal but intersubjective ethics. Indeed, if the primary
orientation of attention is toward a mysterious and unknown God (often
experienced as a desire for the Good), the secondary disposition is
toward another person or persons, especially toward those going
through affliction.



> 
> 
> The soul empties itself [*se vide*] of all its own contents in
> order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he
> is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.
> (WFG 65)
> 
> 
> 



Weil recognizes and problematizes the fact that the autonomous self
naturally imposes itself in its projects, as opposed to disposing
itself to the other; for this reason, attention is rare but is
required of any ethical disposition. The exemplary story of attention
for Weil is the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which, on her
reading, compassion is exchanged when one individual "turns his
attention toward" another individual, anonymous and afflicted
(WFG 90).



> 
> 
> The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment
> of attention. The attention is creative. But at the moment when it is
> engaged it is a renunciation. This is true, at least, if it is pure.
> The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of
> energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give
> existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently
> of him. (1942 "Forms of the Implicit Love of God" in WFG
> 83-142, 90)
> 
> 
> 



As such, attention not only gives human recognition and therefore
meaningful existence to another, but it also allows the individual
engaged in renunciation to take up a moral stance in response to her
or his desire for good.



It is important to distinguish Weil's ethics of attention from
canonical conceptualizations of ethics. Attention is not motivated by
a duty (although Weil thinks we are obligated to respond to
others' needs, whether of soul or body [see "Draft for a
Statement of Human Obligations" in SWA, esp. 224-225]) or
assessed by its consequences. In addition, through its sense of
*phronesis* (practical wisdom), which Weil assumed from
Aristotle through Marx, attention is arguably closer to virtue ethics
than it is to deontology or consequentialism. However, it is separated
from the tradition of virtue ethics in important ways: it often
emerges more spontaneously than virtue, which, for Aristotle, is
cultivated through habituation as it develops into a *hexis*;
Weil's emphasis on a "negative effort" suggests an
active-passive orientation that militates against Aristotle's
emphasis on activity (it is more a "turning" than a
"doing", more orientation than achievement); it is
*excessive* in its generosity, as opposed to being a mean,
e.g., liberality; its supernatural inspiration contrasts with
Aristotle's naturalism; it does not imply a teleology of
realizing one's own virtuous projects--in fact, it is a
suspension of one's own projects; finally, for Weil, Aristotle
lacks a sense of the impersonal good toward which attention is
oriented (and in this respect she is, again, inspired by Plato).



Weil treats the connections among attention, void, and love, relying
on her supernatural (Christian Platonic) metaphysics, in "Forms
of the Implicit Love of God".



> 
> 
> To empty ourselves [*Se vider*] of our false divinity, to deny
> ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to
> discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the
> true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of
> mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of
> each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is
> turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor. (WFG
> 100)
> 
> 
> 



Attention can be seen as love, for just as attention consents to the
existence of another, love requires the recognition of a reality
outside of the self, and thus de-centers the self and its
particularity. *Contra* the colloquial sense of love, it is
because we do not love personally, but "it is God in us who
loves them [*les malheureux*]" (WFG 93-94), that
our love for others is "quite impersonal" and thereby
universal (WFG 130). Weil allows, however, "one legitimate
exception to the duty of loving universally", namely, friendship
("Last Thoughts", WFG 51). Friendship is "a personal
and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a
reflection of divine love" (WFG 131), a "supernatural
harmony, a union of opposites" (WFG 126). The opposites that
form the miraculous harmony are necessity/subordination (i.e., drawing
from Thucydides' Melian dialogue, she sees it as an
impossibility for one to want to preserve autonomy in both oneself and
another; in the world the stronger exerts force through will) and
liberty/equality (which is maintained through the desire of each
friend to preserve the consent of oneself and of the other, a consent
to be "two and not one" [WFG 135]). In other words, in
friendship a particular, self-founded reading of the other is not
forced. Distance is maintained, and in this way Weil's concept
of friendship advances her previous critiques of the *ethos* of
capitalism, bureaucracy, and colonialism--i.e., free consent of
all parties is the essential ingredient of all human relations that
are not degraded or abusive. Hence friendship is a model for ethics
more generally--even, *contra* her claim, universally.



> 
> 
> Friendship has something universal about it. It consists of loving a
> human being as we should like to be able to love each soul in
> particular of all those who go to make up the human race. (WFG
> 135)
> 
> 
> 



Weil's ethics of attention informs her later social-political
philosophy and epistemology. In relation to her social-political
thought, attention suspends the centrality of the self to allow for
supernatural justice, which involves simultaneously turning attention
to God and to affliction. Justice and the love of the neighbor are not
distinct, for her.



> 
> 
> Only the absolute identification of justice and love makes the
> coexistence possible of compassion and gratitude on the one hand, and
> on the other, of respect for the dignity of affliction
> [*malheur*] in the afflicted--a respect felt by the
> sufferer himself [*les malheureux par lui-meme*] and the
> others. (WFG 85)
> 
> 
> 



Additionally, attention, in its consent to the autonomy of the other,
is an antidote to force. Important to Weil's epistemology,
attention militates against readings that are based on imagination,
unexamined perceptions, or functions of the collectivity (e.g.,
prestige). Attention here manifests as independent, detached thought.
In its religious valence involving obedience and consent, attention
also bears on Weil's epistemology in an additional way: it
suggests that knowing the reality of the world is less an individual
achievement or attainment of mastery and more a gift of grace. That
is, attention is openness to what cannot be predicted and to what
often takes us by surprise. In this way, attention resists the natural
tendency of humans to seek control and dominance over others. At stake
in this ethical mode, then, is the prevention of injustices that
result from projects of self-expansion, including the French
colonialism Weil criticized in her time.


## 5. Metaphysical and Religious Philosophy



Although the metaphysics of Weil's later thought was both
Christian and Platonic, and therefore graceful and supernatural, her
turn to God occurred not despite but, rather, because of her attention
to reality and contact with the world. It is not the case, then, that
her spiritual turn and "theological commitment"
(Springsted 2015: 1-2) severed her contact with her early
materialism, solidarities, or Marxian considerations; rather, her
spiritual turn occurred within this context, which would ground the
religious philosophy she would subsequently articulate.



In her late thought Weil presents an original creation theology. God,
as purely good, infinite, and eternal, withdrew (or reduced Godself)
so that something else (something less than fully good, finite, and
spatio-temporally determinate) could exist, namely, the universe.
Implicit in this outside-of-God universe is a contingency of forces.
She calls this principle of contingency, the "web of
determinations" (McCullough 2014: 124) contrary to God,
"necessity". Necessity is "the screen"
(*l'ecran*) placed between God and creatures. Here
her creation metaphysics echoes Plato's distinction between the
necessary and the good in the *Timaeus*. Her Christian
inflection translates this to the "supreme contradiction"
between creature and creator; "it is Christ who represents the
unity of these contradictories" (NB 386).



Weil is clear that God and the world is less than God alone, yet that
only heightens the meaning of God's abdication. That is, out of
love (for what would be the world and the creatures therein), God
decided to be lesser. Because existence--God's very denial
of Godself--is itself a mark of God's love, providence is
therefore not found in particular interventions of God, but understood
by recognizing the universe in all its contingency as the sum of
God's intentions. In this theology rests an implication for
creatures. If humans are to imitate God, then they must also renounce
their autonomy (including imagined "centeredness" in the
universe) and power out of love for God and therefore the world; she
calls this "decreation"
(*decreation*), which she describes paradoxically
by "passive activity" (WFG 126) and, drawing on her
readings of the *Bhagavad Gita*, "non-active
action" (NB 124).



Weil articulates her religious philosophy through a series of
distinctions--of oppositions or contradictions. It is important
to read the distinctions she makes not as positing dualisms, but as
suggesting contraries that are, unsynthesized, themselves mediations
through which the soul is drawn upward. Her concept of
"intermediaries"--or *metaxu*
(metaxu), the Greek term she employs in
her notebooks--becomes explicit beginning in 1939. Through
*metaxu* God is indirectly present in the world--for
example, in beauty, cultural traditions, law, and labor--all of
which place us into contact with reality. In terms of her
periodization, her concept of mediation moved from relations of mind
and matter on the level of the natural (found in the early Weil) to a
mediation relating the natural intelligence to attention and love on
the level of the supernatural (at work in the late Weil), thus
encompassing her early view through a universal perspective.



Given that reality is itself *metaxu*, Weil's late
concept of mediation is more universal than the aforementioned
specific examples suggest. For her the real (*le reel*)
itself is an obstacle that represents contradiction, an obstacle felt,
say, in a difficult idea, in the presence of another, or in physical
labor; thus thought comes into contact with necessity and must
transform contradiction into correlation or mysterious and crucifying
relation, resulting in spiritual edification. Her explanation of this
mediation is based on her idiosyncratic cosmology, especially its
paradoxical claim that what is often painful reality, as distance from
God, is also, as intermediate, connection to God. She illustrates this
claim with the following metaphor:



> 
> 
> Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by
> knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but
> it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and
> God. Every separation is a link. (GG 145)
> 
> 
> 



When developing her concept of the real, Weil is especially interested
in distinguishing it from the imaginary. The
imagination--problematized on epistemological grounds in her
early thought--is criticized once again in her religious
philosophy for its insidious tendency to pose false consolations that
at once invite idolatry or self-satisfaction, both of which obviate
real contemplation. This is why decreation, in which the individual
withdraws her or his "I" and personal perspective so as to
allow the real and others to give themselves, is crucial not only
spiritually, but also epistemologically and ethically. It is,
additionally and more radically, why Weil suggests that atheism can be
a kind of purification insofar as it negates religious consolation
that fills the void. For those for whom religion amounts to an
imagined "God who smiles on [them]" (GG 9), atheism
represents a necessary detachment. Crucially, for her, love is pure
not in the name of a personal God or its particular image, but only
when it is anonymous and universal.



The real leads us back to the aforementioned concept of
"necessity", for reality--essentially determinate,
limited, contingent, and conditional--is itself a "network
of necessity" (Veto 1971 [1994: 90]), such that necessity
is a reflection of reality. Moreover, like "power" in her
early period and "force" in her middle period,
Weil's concept of necessity includes not only the physical
forces of the created world, but also the social forces of human life.
Through necessity a sense of slavery remains in her thought, for
humans are ineluctably subject to necessity. In this way, enslavement
to forces outside our control is essentially woven into the human
condition.



Time, contrary to God as eternal, along with space and matter, is
first of all the most basic form of necessity. In its constant
reminder of distance from God, and in the experiences of enduring and
waiting, time is also painful. Weil's Christian Platonism comes
to light in the two most poignant metaphors she uses to refer to time,
namely, the (Platonic) Cave and the (Christian) Cross. In both cases,
time is the weight or the pull of necessity, through which the soul,
in any effort of the self, feels vulnerable, contingent, and
unavoidably subject to necessity's mediation here below
(*ici-bas*). Time, then, is both the Cave where the self
pursues its illusory goals of expansion into the future and the Cross
where necessity, a sign of God's love, pins the self, suffering
and mortal, to the world.



Importantly, by 1942 in New York, Weil's concept of time aligns
with Plato's against what she sees as Christian emphasis on
progress:



> 
> 
> Christianity was responsible for bringing this notion of progress,
> previously unknown, into the world; and this notion, become the bane
> of the modern world, has de-Christianized it. We must abandon the
> notion. We must get rid of our superstition of chronology in order to
> find Eternity. (LPr 29)
> 
> 
> 



For Weil progress does not carry normative implications of
improvement, for the Good is eternal and non-existent (in that it is
neither spatial nor temporal); time must be consented to and suffered,
not fled. As for Christ on the cross, for creatures there is
redemption not from but through suffering. She thus presents a
supernatural use of, not a remedy for, affliction. One form of sin,
then, is an attempt to escape time, for only God is time-out-of-mind.
However, time, paradoxically, can also serve as *metaxu*. While
monotony is dreadful and fatiguing when it is in the form of a
pendulum's swinging or a factory's work, it is beautiful
as a reflection of eternity, in the form of a circle (which unites
being and becoming) or the sound of Gregorian chant. This beauty of
the world suggests, when read from the detached perspective, order
behind necessity, and God behind order.



A second form of necessity is "gravity"
(*pesanteur*), as distinct from supernatural
"grace". Gravity signifies the forces of the natural world
that subject all created beings physically, materially,
psychologically, and socially, and thus functions as a downward
"pull" on the attention, away from God and the afflicted.
"Grace", on the other hand, is a counter-balance, the
motivation by and goodness of God. Grace pierces the world of
necessity and serves to orient, harmonize, and balance, thus providing
a kind of "supernatural bread" for satiating the human
void. Grace, entering the empirical world, disposes one to be purified
by leaving the void open, waiting for a good that is real but that
could never "exist" in a material sense (i.e., as subject
to time, change, force, etc.). For Weil, natural/necessary gravity
(force) and supernatural/spiritual grace (justice) are the two
fundamental aspects of the created world, coming together most
prominently in the crucifixion. The shape of the cross itself reflects
this intersection of the horizontal (necessity) and the vertical
(grace).



Weil's concept of necessity bears on her late conceptualization
of the subject. She connects seeing oneself as central to the world to
seeing oneself as exempt from necessity. From this perspective, if
something were to befall oneself, then the world would cease to have
importance; therefore, the assertive and willful self concludes,
nothing could befall oneself. Affliction contradicts this perspective
and thus forcefully de-centers the self. Unlike her existentialist
contemporaries such as Sartre, Weil did not think human freedom
principally through agency; for her, humans are free not ontologically
as a presence-to-self but supernaturally through obedience and
consent. More than obedience, consent is the unity of necessity in
matter with freedom in creatures. A creature cannot *not* obey;
the only choice for the intelligent creature is to desire or not to
desire the good. To desire the good--and here her stoicism
through Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza emerges in her own appeal to
*amor fati*--is a disposition that implies a consent to
necessity and a love of the order of the world, both of which mean
accepting divine will. Consent, therefore, is a kind of reconciliation
in her dialectic between the necessary and the good. Consent does not
follow from effort or will; rather, it expresses an ontological
status, namely, decreation. In supernatural compassion one loves
*through* evil: through distance (space) and through monotony
(time), attending in a void and through the abdication of God. Thus,
in regard to contradiction and mediation, just as the intelligence
must grapple with mystery in Weil's epistemology, so too love
must be vulnerable and defenseless in the face of evil in her
metaphysical and religious philosophy.


## 6. Aesthetics



Weil's metaphysic sheds light on her aesthetic philosophy, which
is primarily Kantian and Platonic. For Weil beauty is a snare
(*a la* Homer) set by God, trapping the soul so that God
might enter it. Necessity presents itself not only in gravity, time,
and affliction, but also in beauty. The contact of impersonal good
with the faculty of sense is beauty; contact of evil with the faculty
of sense is ugliness and suffering--both are contact with the
real, necessary, and providential.



Weil is a realist in regard to aesthetics in that she uses the
language of being gripped or grasped by beauty, which weaves, as it
were, a link among mind, body, world, and universe. Woven through the
world, but beyond relying simply on the individual's mind or
senses, beauty, in this linking, lures and engenders awareness of
something outside of the self. In paradoxical terms, for Weil,
following Kant, the aesthetic experience can be characterized as a
disinterested interestedness; against Kant, her *telos* of such
experience is Platonic, namely, to orient the soul to the
contemplation of the good. Moreover, for Weil beauty is purposive only
because it is derivative of the good, i.e., the order of the world is
a function of God. In a revision of Kant's line that beauty is a
finality without finality, then, she sees beauty not only as a kind of
feeling or presence of finality, but also as a gesture toward,
inclination to, or promise of supernatural, transcendental
goodness.



At the same time, Weil's concept of beauty is not only informed
by her Platonism and thus marked by eternity, but it is also inspired
by her experiences with Christ and hence features a kind of
incarnation: the ideal can become a reality in the world. As such,
beauty is a testament to and manifestation of the network of
inflexible necessity that is the natural world--a network that,
in some sense, the intelligence can grasp. It is in this way--not
as an ontological category but, rather, as a sensible
experience--that through beauty necessity becomes the object of
love (i.e., in Kantian terms, beauty is regulative, not constitutive).
Thus beauty is *metaxu* (an intermediary) attracting the soul
to God, and as *metaxu*, beauty serves as a "locus of
incommensurability" (Winch 1989: 173) between the fragile
contingency of time (change, becoming, death) and an eternal
reality.



Because beauty is the order of the world as necessity, strictly
speaking, "beauty" applies principally to the world as a
whole, and therefore consent to beauty must be total. Thus the love of
beauty functions as an "implicit love of God" [see WFG
99]. More specifically, on the level of the particular there are,
secondarily, types of beauty that nevertheless demonstrate balance,
order, proportion, and thus their divine provenance (e.g., those found
in nature, art, and science).



One's recognition of the beauty/order of the world has
implications, once again, for the subject. Because beauty is to be
contemplated at a distance and not consumed through the greedy will,
it trains the soul to be detached in the face of something
irreducible, and in this sense it is similar to affliction. Both
de-center the self and demand a posture of waiting (*attente*).
Contemplating beauty, then, means transcending the perspective of
one's own project. Because beauty, as external to self, is to be
consented to, it implies both that one's reality is limited and
that one does not want to change the object of her/his mode of
engagement. Furthermore, beauty has an element of the impersonal
coming into contact with a person. Real interaction with beauty is
decreative. True to this idea, Weil's aesthetic commitments are
reflected in her style: in her sharp prose she scrutinizes her own
thought while tending to exclude her own voice and avoid personal
references; thus she performs "the linguistic decreation of the
self" (Dargan 1999: 7).


## 7. Reception and Influence



Although the French post-structuralists who succeeded Weil did not
engage extensively with her thought, her concepts carry a legacy
through her contemporaries domestically and her heirs internationally
(see Rozelle-Stone 2017). In regard to her generation of French
thinkers, the influence of "attention" can be seen in the
writings of Maurice Blanchot; her Platonic sense of good, order, and
clarity was taken up--and rejected--by both Georges Bataille
and Emmanuel Levinas. Following Weil's generation, in his
younger years Jacques Derrida took interest in her mysticism and,
specifically, her purifying atheism, only to leave her behind almost
entirely in his later references (Baring 2011). It is possible that
Weil's limited influence on post-structuralists is derived not
only from the fact that she was not influenced by Nietzsche and
Heidegger to the extent of the four aforementioned French thinkers,
but also, quite simply, because she did not survive World War II and
hence did not write thereafter. It is also important to note that
throughout her life, Weil's position as a woman philosopher
contributed to *ad hominem* attacks against her person, not her
thought; she was often perceived as "psychologically cold"
as opposed to being engaged in "an ethical project with
different assumptions" (Nelson 2017: 9).



Across Europe and more recently, Weil's "negative
politics"--that is, turning away from institutions and
ideology and toward religious reflection--, in conjunction with
Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, has been taken up by
the political philosophies of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito
(Ricciardi 2009). In doing so, Agamben (who wrote his dissertation on
Weil's political thought and critique of personhood, ideas of
which went on to shape *Homo Sacer* [see Agamben 2017]) and
Esposito rely on Weil's concepts of decreation, impersonality,
and force. Beyond the Continental scene, her Christian
Platonism--especially her concepts of the good, justice, void,
and attention--influenced Iris Murdoch's emphasis on the
good, metaphysics, and morality, and was thereby part of a recent
revival in virtue ethics (Crisp & Slote 1997). In addition, many
have noted the "spiritual kinship" that is apparent between the
religious and ethical philosophies of Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
For example, the view that belief in God is not a matter of evidence,
logic, or proof is shared by these thinkers (Von der Ruhr 2006). The
legacy of Weil's writings on affliction and beauty in relation
to justice is also felt in Elaine Scarry's writings on
aesthetics (Scarry 1999). T. S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction to
*The Need for Roots*, cites Weil as an inspiration of his
literature, as do W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Flannery
O'Connor, Susan Sontag, and Anne Carson.



The Anglo-American secondary literature on Weil has emphasized her
concept of supernatural justice, including the philosophical tensions
that inform her materialism and mysticism (Winch 1989; Dietz 1988;
Bell 1993, 1998; Rhees 2000). Additional considerations treat her
Christian Platonism (Springsted 1983; Doering & Springsted 2004).
Recent English-language scholarship on Weil has included texts on her
concept of force (Doering 2010), her radicalism (Rozelle-Stone &
Stone 2010), and the relationship in her thought between science and
divinity (Morgan 2005), between suffering and trauma (Nelson 2017),
and between decreation and ethics (Cha 2017). Furthermore, her
concepts have influenced recent contributions to questions of identity
(Cameron 2007), political theology (Lloyd 2011), animality (Pick
2011), and international relations (Kinsella 2021).