Simone Weil’s Conservatism
The 20th-century anarchist philosopher and mystic could point the way forward for today’s right
Slate, May 25, 2021
The 20th-century anarchist philosopher and mystic could point the way forward for today’s right
Slate, May 25, 2021
Excerpt
. . . . Truth is one of the first casualties of deracination. Of course, it was hard not to be driven mad by the assault on truth both before and during the war. Though trained as a philosopher, Weil’s preoccupation with truth was not a professional habit, but an existential imperative. She loathed fascism and communism not simply because they deny the inherent dignity of each and every human being, but also the existence of objective truth and a common reality.
This threat — both political and epistemological — was embodied by the German occupiers, of course, but also by their French collaborators based at Vichy. Inevitably, some were true believers in the reality offered by Nazi ideology — a reality that divided human beings worthy of life from those unworthy of life. Many more collaborators, though, were little more than opportunists for whom truth was as expendable as were the lives of those who depended on seeing and speaking the truth.
Forward, May 17, 2021
Traditional philosophy of religion has tended to focus on the doxastic dimension of religious life, which although a vitally important area of research, has often come at the cost of philosophical engagements with religious practice. Focusing particularly on Christian traditions, this essay offers a sustained reflection on one particular model of embodied Christian practice as presented in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. After a discussion of different notions of practice and perfection, the paper turns to Kierkegaard’s conception of the two churches: the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant. Then, in light of Kierkegaard’s defense of the latter and critique of the former, it is shown that Kierkegaard’s specific account gets appropriated and expanded in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s account of “costly grace” and “religionless Christianity,” and Simone Weil’s conception of “afflicted love.” Ultimately, it is suggested that these three think
Religions, vol.12, no. 5 (May 12, 2021)
The aim of this paper is to show how the work of Simone Weil constitutes a profound search for unity of the real. We propose that this unity is given by a sacramental logic. This means that the relationship which God seeks to establish with His creatures configures the paradigm of every true relationship, which core is given by the sacrifice of the egocentric self. This implies that only a change in society, from a predominant contractual logic —therefore transactional— to a sacramental logic, can constitute the necessary mean —μεταξύ — to a personal encounter with others and with the Creator.
Open Insight, vol XII, no. 25 (May-Aug. 2021), pp. 33-64
What might it mean to engage in an educative struggle with death? Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich helps us to answer that question. Tolstoy’s story depicts the life of a man who, when suddenly faced with the prospect of his own death, is at first unable to comprehend the reality of his situation. He is angry, fearful, and disgusted. As he gradually comes to terms with his mortality, he undergoes a harrowing process of transformation, at the heart of which lies the development of his capacity for attention. Drawing on ideas from the French philosopher and pedagogue Simone Weil, it is argued that Ivan’s experience is consistent with the passage from ‘gravity’, through the void of intense suffering, toward a state of grace.
Roberts, Peter. Education, “Attention and Transformation: Death and Decreation in Tolstoy and Weil.” Studies in Philosophy and Education (2021). Online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09775-8
Epoché, no. 37 (February 2021).
A complicated relationship with Catholicism never hindered Simone Weil’s prayer life.
U.S. Catholic, (January 25, 2021).
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Tony Lynch, University of New England
Australia.
Excerpt
“. . . . In the scholarship on Simone Weil, her emphasis on colonialism is still not yet fully integrated into analyses of the use of force nor, more generally, as another source of her reflections on the concepts which adumbrate her work.6 Processes that she identified as constitutive of colonialism’s brutality – uprooting, loss of the past, degradation of labor, and the pursuit of unlimited profit and power – inform her thought. As Dietz points out, the hallmarks of Weil’s concerns are “the meaning of individual freedom in the modern collectivity, the nature of community in the nation-state, and the political and social possibilities for an end to the affliction and oppression of the human condition,” each of which directly implicates colonialism and empire. In this chapter, I propose to explore the relationship of colonization to her concept of force and her exposition of rights – to draw out the ways in which her argument that force turns “man into a thing” is born out of her earlier analysis of how in colonial wars “we, first of all, reduce whole populations to slavery, and then we use them as cannon fodder.”
I argue that this accomplishes three things. First, Weil provides an analysis of modernity and the rise of totalitarianism that specifically centers colonialism as fundamental to each and, consequently, to any analysis of international politics. Second, she develops her theories through her own political engagement and activism in the context of her time, negotiating and unsettling the governing intellectual, social, and political expectations – as articulated through gender, certainly, but also no less so through the complex intersections of class and religion. Accordingly, her politics and her scholarship continue to challenge a disciplinary post-1945 positioning of colonialism as peripheral to the development of international thought, and further confirm the significance of “historical women” in the field. Third, Weil’s own reckoning with the tumultuous politics of her time can animate contemporary analyses of force as understood and enacted in complex and critical ways.”
** Essay in Patricia Owens & Katharina Rietzler, eds., Women’s International Thought: A New History, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2021), pp. 72-92.
Helen M. Kinsella is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.