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Philosophy, out of Bounds: The Method and Mysticism of Simone Weil

Carmen Maria Marcous read

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study is exposition on the themes of method and mysticism in the work of Simone Weil. Nearly a decade before the onset of her first mystical experience, Weil developed a method to be rigorously applied in daily philosophical reflection. She outlines this method in her dissertation on Descartes (1929-1930). I examine the question of how Weil applied method to philosophical reflection on her mystical experiences (onset 1938-1939). I analyze Weil’s mystical experiences as a type of transformative experience in L. A. Paul’s strict sense of the term. On Paul’s view, an experience is transformative if it is both epistemically and personally transformative. An experience is epistemically transformative if the only way to know what it is like to have it is to have it yourself. An experience is personally transformative if it changes your point of view, including your core preferences (Paul, 2014).

I present a thought experiment and textual evidence to motivate the claim that Weil’s mystical experiences meet Paul’s conditions for transformative experience. I then propose two epistemological facts that can be revealed by philosophical reflection on mystical experience. First, it is possible to read meaning erroneously in the appearances of things. Second, it is possible to come to hold to the certainty of a conviction for reasons that elude the intellect. My findings suggest that Weil’s late views on philosophy accommodate these two epistemological constraints, thereby demonstrating a possible connection between Weil’s mystical experiences and her mature views on the nature, scope, and proper method of philosophy. However, my preliminary findings also suggest that Weil’s early work on method may have anticipated these epistemological obstacles prior to the onset of her first mystical experience. Thus, further exposition of Weil’s method is needed to support or elucidate the claim (Rozelle-Stone and Davis, 2021) that Weil’s epistemology underwent significant changes because of her mystical experiences.

Carmen Maria Marcous,  a Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences (2022).
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The Lost Futures of Simone Weil: Metaxu, Decreation, and the Spectres of Myth

Matthew J. Godfrey read

Abstract

This dissertation places literature and myth at the suture of two of Simone Weil’s most important concepts: decreation and metaxu. Decreation, or the decanting of subjectivity to become one with God, has become a fixture in Weil scholarship. Yet, the link between decreation and metaxu, the bridges that collapse self and other, has yet to be theorized. This study brings metaxu to the forefront of Weil studies to emphasize its role within the domains of community and culture, thereby signaling its unseen potential to harmonize the political and mystical strains of her thought. I counter decreation’s salvific consolation with metaxu’s radical materialism and its privileging of hybridity, relationality, and metamorphosis. Weil’s writing combines a critique of capitalism (the hegemonic gros animal) with a frequent entanglement of Greek and Christian myth. A discussion of metaxu is brought to bear on literary revisions of classical myths from the 1980s and 1990s, an important peak in capitalism’s global dominance. My work sets into a motion a metaxic hermeneutic to investigate literary revisions of myths of transcendence, but also transcendence as a key myth challenged by late-twentieth-century literature.

In Chapter 1, I outline the importance of metaxu to Weil’s writings on mysticism and locate its roots in Platonic philosophy, Greek Tragedy, and the myth of Prometheus—the subject of her most important (but nearly forgotten) poem. In Chapter 2, I analyze metaxu’s relationship to specific iterations of violence and sacrality in Weil’s “The Iliad: or the Poem of Force” (1939) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), which I interpret as an Americanized retelling of Homer’s epic. In Chapter 3, I locate metaxu’s connection to art and neoliberal globalism through Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). Chapter 4 applies metaxu to issues of metamorphosis and hybridity through Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987). Butlerdeconstructs notions of mysticism, eroticism, otherness, and species that are to be read against the patriarchal aesthetics of Homer, McCarthy, and Rushdie. By reading these texts together, a subversive and disruptive potential for metaxu will be revealed, one that heralds an important re-reading of Weil’s oeuvre, as well as an ability to reshape the intersection of literature, myth, and mysticism.

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A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English, York University Toronto, Ontario September 2021

 
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Simone Weil Bibliography

Saundra Lipton read

Although Simone Weil died very young at age 34, her essays and notebooks have been the topic of a significant volume of scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines including Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Nursing, Political Science, History, Psychology, Education, and Business.  However, the last comprehensive bibliography of critical works on Simone Weil compiled by J.P. Little, dates back to 1973 with a supplement in 1979 and a small update in 1995.  The diversity and range of this ongoing scholarship make an updated comprehensive bibliography critically important for those writing on Weil and her work.

Saundra Lipton, University of Calgary, and Debra Jensen, Mount Royal University have been active collaborators (till Debra’s untimely death July 15, 2012) in the compilation of a comprehensive bibliography of scholarly works on Simone Weil.  The goal of this project is to provide a valuable service to scholars and students in many fields by facilitating access to Weilian resources across disciplinary, geographic, and linguistic divides.  Publications worldwide have been surveyed. Over 5500 works have been discovered.  This online version of the bibliography currently lists more than 5000 book, essays, journal articles, and theses.

I dedicate my continuing efforts on this project to the memory of my dear friend and colleague Debra Jensen.

University of Calgary online library of resources
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Poetry As Decreation: Impersonality and Grace in T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil

Emily M. King read

This thesis posits that however separated T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil are by circumstance, political affinity, and Church affiliation, their thoughts intersect at a crucial point. While Weil’s theory of decreation and Eliot’s notion of impersonality are often cast as theological and poetic innovations, they both hearken back to the Christian mystical tradition – specifically, the aspect of via negativa. Placed alongside one another, Weil’s poetic mysticism and Eliot’s concern for the spiritual reveal the capacity of poems to decreate and bring the reader to a moment of void that awaits the fulfillment of grace. This thesis will study these topics with express consideration of Eliot’s Four Quartets and Weil’s notebooks, especially Gravity and Grace.

Honor’s Thesis, Department of English, Stanford University, May 2019.
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Hungry for Beauty: Simone Weil’s Inversion of Kant’s Aesthetics

Lyra Koli read

This master’s dissertation argues that Simone Weil’s aesthetics can be seen as an inversion of Immanuel Kant’s, concerning the relation between natural dependency and beauty. Kant’s notions of beauty and sublimity are shown to be founded on overcoming hunger and fear, and the relevance of the immortality postulate for the Critique of the Power of Judgment is demonstrated. Following Angelica Nuzzo’s Ideal Embodiment, Kant’s aesthetics is understood as describing a transcendental embodiment, where the feeling of life is an experience of the “humanity” of man. This “humanity” is argued as exclusionary in that it rests on an overcoming of hunger and fear. Furthermore, his notions of finality without an end and disinterested pleasure are described as reinforcing the view of man’s superiority to the rest of nature. The extensive Kantian influences on Weil’s aesthetics often claimed to be mainly Platonically inspired, are presented. Through a critical examination of beauty and eating in her life and work, the common idea of her aesthetics as one of ascetic renunciation is disputed. Instead, her aesthetics is found to be a radical materialist reinterpretation of some of Kant’s central notions, particularly finality without an end and disinterested pleasure, where hunger, fear and suffering remain present. An examination of the metaphors of eating used by Weil to describe beauty illustrates how her aesthetics reverses the relation between man and his natural dependency: instead of an immortal moral humanity, free from hunger and fear, the center of her aesthetics is the very mortal muddle Kant ostensibly overcame. For Weil, beauty is not an outline for man’s superiority; instead, it makes it possible for us to love the fact that we are not all, but part of the world of eating and being eaten.

Philosophy: Aesthetics and Art Theory: Kingston University, London.