Keywords

“A terrible responsibility”: In today’s U.S., patriotism is essential — but not easy

Robert Zaretsky read

In early July 1942, a 30-something French Jewish woman and her parents, having fled occupied France months earlier, disembarked in New York City. While the parents were still unpacking, the daughter began to write letters to friends, acquaintances, even strangers to help her return to France.

How Simone Weil taught us to confront a world poisoned with lies.

To an English officer she heard on the radio discussing France, she poured out her heart in near-fluent English.

“It is a very hard thing to leave one’s country in distress,” she Weil wrote. “Although my parents, who wanted to escape antisemitism, put a great pressure upon me to make me go with them, I would never have left France without the hope that through coming here I could take a greater part in the struggle, the danger and the suffering of this war.”

Simone Weil, the author of the letter, then tried to sell its recipient — as she had dozens of others — on the idea of creating squadrons of unarmed French nurses who, garbed in white and led by Weil, would be parachuted onto battlefields to tend to the wounded. Though the idea never got off the ground, Weil did manage to get as far as England toward the very end of that year, and join Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement. . . .

Forward (July 3, 2022).

Knitting with Simone Weil

Alejandra Oliva read

. . . Simone Weil, in her ponderously titled but wonderfully argued essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” moves nimbly from a teacher’s order (“Pay attention!”) to prayer to the bedsides of the suffering. Her argument begins with the kind of attention a schoolchild might turn to a tricky Latin translation or mathematical proof—unfocused, somewhat unrewarding, aware of one’s own shortfalls. It’s the kind of attention I pay to the stitches clicking between needles during a meeting or to setting up a press release on the website. Weil reminds me that the time and attention taken to getting it right—and to messing up along the way—are as worthwhile when making a sweater as when struggling for justice.

The Christian Century (Nov. 16, 2022)

An Endless Seeing

Jacqueline Rose read

Selected Excerpts

from New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2022), pp. 58-61 (6,286 words)(reviewing Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (U. Chicago Press, 2021)).

[On madness & genius]

“[T]he epithet of ‘madness’ has constantly trailed her, mostly coming from those who could not fathom her, including Charles de Gaulle, who came to know of her through the papers on resistance that she wrote in London in the last year of her life.

And yet it is central to Weil’s unique form of genius that she knew how to identify the threat of incipient madness for the citizens of a world turning insane. A straight line runs through her writing from the insufferable cruelty of modern social arrangements—worker misery, swaths of the world colonized and uprooted by “white races,” force as the violent driver of political will—to the innermost tribulations of the human heart. What would it mean, under the threat of victorious fascism, not to feel that you might go crazy?”

[Image of Justice as a woman]

“She was haunted, she wrote, by the idea of a statue of Justice—a naked woman standing, knees bent from fatigue, hands chained behind her back, leaning toward scales holding two equal weights in its unequal arms, so that it inclined to one side. . . . . As so often in Weil’s writing, it is almost impossible not to read this image as a reference to herself, although her political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held more or less in steady contempt. She may have been sculpting herself in her dreams, but her template was universal. Justice was for all or for none. . . . ”

“The fact that Justice was a woman was not incidental. According to Simone Petrément, her biographer and one of her closest friends, Weil’s mother told her that killing to prevent a rape was the one exception she made to the commandment against murder. Much later, she took the image of a young girl refusing—with an “upsurge” of her whole being—to be forced into prostitution as the model of a true politics. Antigone and Electra were Weil’s heroines, both belonging to the Greek lineage in which she sourced the cultural values she most cherished in the modern Western world. (She translated central passages from Sophocles’ plays.) Antigone in particular she returned to at the end of her life, for her appeal to an unwritten law that transcends natural rights—which, as she saw it, always sink to the individual claim. The Greeks, she insisted, had no notion of rights: ‘They contented themselves with the name of justice.'”

[Justice as elusive]

“A central question that has vexed so much political thought becomes why justice is always so elusive. Weil’s struggle with this question makes her a psychologist of human power.”

[Mystic and activist]

“A recurring principle in pretty much every stage of her writing from start to finish, the concept of justice renders futile any attempt—though many have tried—to separate Weil the mystic from Weil the activist, or Weil the lover of God from Weil the factory worker, who felt that the only way to understand the wrongs of the modern world was to share the brute indignities of manual labor, which reduced women and men to cogs in the machines they slaved for.”

[turning point in Weil’s thinking]

“If there was a turning point in her thinking, a far better candidate than her mysticism would be her experience at the front during the Spanish Civil War, which is too often dismissed as a bit of a joke because she had to be rescued by her parents when she tripped and immersed her leg in a drum of burning oil, or because, to her credit, as I see it, she was useless at aiming a gun.”

[Creature of analogy]

“By her own account, she is a creature of analogy, starting with perhaps the most vexed of them all—between Hitler and ancient Jerusalem, or Nazism and colonialism. Analogies are deceptive (trompeuses), she wrote in 1939, but they are her ‘sole guide.'”

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— Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition: A History of Labor and Human Flourishing

Jeffrey Hanson read

The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards.

Beginning with Plato’s extensive thinking about work’s relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world’s only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe.

This original study of Plato and his inheritors’ ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality. — Jeffrey Hanson is  a Senior Philosopher in The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Bloomsbury Academic (April 21, 2022)

Dialectics of Silence for a Time of Crisis: Rethinking the Visionary Insights of Michel Serres and Simone Weil

Marjolein Oele read

This paper examines the figure of silence in the works of Michel Serres and Simone Weil. It argues that, in the spirit of Serres and Weil, our time of crisis calls not for a short-term response, but for long-term engagement in a dialectics of silence: the dialogical movement between the silencing of institutions and the attentive silence of visionary insights. Such dialectics can revalidate the value of institutional silencing if based on solid rational proof (rebutting so-called visionary ideas that are baseless) while simultaneously showing the value of visionary ideas that rightfully combat problematic institutional silencing. Especially in this current moment, in which science and scientific propositions are relentlessly questioned, there is a need to lean into silence so as to promote a productive dialogue that regains trust in proven scientific ideas and institutions while allowing visionary insights their place as well, provided that we are willing to test them.

Research in Phenomenology, vol. 52, no. 2 (2022), pp. 183-202.

Marjolein Oele is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco.