Biographical

The Intimacy and Resilience of Invisible Friendship: Marie-Magdeleine Davy and Simone Weil

Brenna Moore read

The title comes from chapter 4 of Brenna Moore’s new book, Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2021) pp. 145-171. In it, Moore focuses on the bond between French medievalist Marie Magdeleine Davy (1903-1998) and Simone Weil. Davy and Weil were acquaintances, but after Weil’s death, Davy dedicated significant scholarly attention to Weil’s thought and life. She authored one of the first books on Weil in 1951, lifting her up as a model for a new kind of sanctity in the modern world. In the late 1950s and ’60s, Davy’s projects were animated by what Moore calls an “invisible friendship” with Weil. Spurred on by memories of Weil, in 1962 Davy created an experimental utopian community for international students in rural France, the Maison Simone Weil, in her friend’s honor. As Moore puts it, “Simone Weil, more than anyone else, was Marie-Magdeleine Davy’s invisible friend, her inner guide, and her saint.” The story uncovers one of the many fascinating afterlives of Simone Weil, one that has not yet been told to English-speaking readers.

Against Religious Fellow-Traveling

Taylor Ross read

This essay argues that Simone Weil’s writings suggest a phenomenological method of particular relevance to investigating ethical questions. It begins by presenting evidence that although Weil does not mention phenomenology explicitly, she thinks about ethics in a phenomenological manner. Subsequent sections outline a “phenomenological ethics” derived from Weil’s notion of attention and her hermeneutics of ‘reading’ the world. Since attention sets aside the self and its personal world, this allows for an ethics of self-abdication (decreation) relatively free of influence by the forces of domination. David Rousset’s term “concentrationary universe” is introduced to describe the claim, argued by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and others, that present-day societies show evidence of an increasing reliance on ways of thinking derived from the Nazi concentration camps. Examples are given of applications of Weil’s phenomenological method to the problem of how to recognize signs of potential domination in a concentrationary universe.

Macrina Magazine, no. 6, (December 5, 2020)

On the Differences Between Rush Rhees and Simone Weil

H.O. Mounce read

Rhees seems unaware that Simone Weil differed from him both in her conception of philosophy and of its relation to religion. She differed also in her view of the relation between religion and science. On her view, the aim of science is to find the laws which will allow us to apply deductive reasoning to nature. The necessities revealed had for her a religious significance. But this can be understood only given her view of the relation between God and the world. On her view, the creation of the world did not involve an extension of God’s power. It involved a withdrawal of his power, so that there could be an existence independent of himself. God does not interfere in the details of the world but sustains it through a network of necessities. For this reason, these necessities can serve as a sign of God.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 71-75.