Philosophy

The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction

Lissa McCullough read

The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, remains in every way a thinker for our times. She was an outsider, in multiple senses, defying the usual religious categories: at once atheistic and religious; mystic and realist; sceptic and believer. She speaks therefore to the complex sensibilities of a rationalist age. Yet despite her continuing relevance, and the attention she attracts from philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies, spirituality and beyond, Weil’s reflections can still be difficult to grasp, since they were expressed in often inscrutable and fragmentary form. Lissa McCullough here offers a reliable guide to the key concepts of Weil’s religious philosophy: good and evil, the void, gravity, grace, beauty, suffering and waiting for God. In addressing such distinctively contemporary concerns as depression, loneliness and isolation, and in writing hauntingly of God’s voluntary ‘nothingness’, Weil’s existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke. This is the first introductory book to show the essential coherence of her enigmatic but remarkable ideas about religion.

New York: I.B. Tauris

‘In the beginning was the deed’

David Cockburn read

Winch’s readings of Wittgenstein and Weil call for a significant rethinking of the relation between ‘metaphysics’ and ‘ethics’. But there are confusions, perhaps to be found in all three of these writers, that we may slip into here. These are linked with the tendency to see idealist tendencies in Wittgenstein, and with his remark that giving grounds comes to an end, not in a kind of seeing on our part, but in our acting. The sense that we think we see in this suggestion is dependent on a distorted conception of ‘justification’. Getting clear about this involves coming to appreciate just how much of our nature as ethical beings is engaged when we do philosophy.

— David Cockburn, Emeritus Professor, University of Wales.

Simone Weil

Palle Yourgrau read

Simone Weil, legendary French philosopher, mystic and political activist who died in England in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, belongs to a select group of thinkers: as with St Augustine, Pascal and Nietzsche, so with Weil a single phrase can permanently change one’s life. In this book, Palle Yourgrau follows Weil on her life’s journey, from her philosophical studies at the École Normale Supérieure, to her years as a Marxist labour organizer, her explosive encounter with Leon Trotsky, her abortive attempt to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, her mystical experience in the town of Assisi. We see how Weil’s struggle to make sense of a world consumed by despotism and war culminated in her monumental attempt, following St Augustine, to re-imagine Christianity along Platonistic lines, to find a bridge between human suffering and divine perfection.

How seriously, however, should Weil’s ideas be taken? They were admired by Albert Camus and T. S. Eliot, yet Susan Sontag wrote famously that ‘I can’t imagine more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won . . . really share her ideas.’ If this is really true, Palle Yourgrau must count as one of the handful. Though he brings to life the pathos of Weil’s tragic-comic journey, Yourgrau devotes equal attention to the question of truth. He shines a bright light on the paradox of Simone Weil: at once a kind of modern saint, and a bête noire, a Jew accused of having abandoned her own people in their hour of greatest need. The result is a critical biography that is in places as disturbing as Weil’s own writings, an account that confronts head-on her controversial critique of the Hebrew Bible, as well as her radical rejection of the received wisdom that the Resurrection lies at the heart of Christianity.

Reaktion Books, 2013

“Simone Weil and the Traps of Intellectual Engagement”

Robin Lathangue

in William Sweet, ed.,Ideas Under Fire: Historical Studies of Philosophy and Science in Adversity, Madison, UK: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 217-230

“Simone Weil’s Phenomenology of the Body, Comparative and Continental Philosophy”

Lissa McCullough

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 4, # 2

Stephen Plant on Simone Weil: Parts I & II

Stephen Plant watch

Dr. Plant is Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall and lectures on Christian theology and on ethics in the Faculty of Divinity. He has written and edited several books including Bonhoeffer (Continuum, 2004), Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction (Orbis Books 2008), Letters to London (SPCK, 2013), and Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer ( Ashgate, 2014). From 2007-13 he edited the influential journal Theology for SPCK/SAGE. His current research includes theology and international development, on which he is writing a book for Bloomsbury Press, and the theology and life of Karl Barth. He is willing to consider doctoral students in 20th century Protestant theology, theology and international development, and political theology.

YouTube, April 22, 2012 // Part 1 here  // Part 2 here

The ethical implications of Simone Weil’s Notion of reading

Olwyn Stewart read

In this thesis I develop the ethical implications inherent in a short paper written by Simone Weil, entitled ‘Essay on the Notion of Reading,’ with a view to exploring possible ways in which we are able to incorporate the unconditional value of each and every human being into our everyday apprehension of the world. Mindful of the fact that conceptions of unconditional value tend to be associated with religious belief, I make a distinction between religious theory and practical religious engagement, privileging the latter, in order to show the common ground between theistic and nontheistic ways of understanding unconditional value. My focus is on practical ethics, and the relationship between our direct and immediate ethical responses and their conceptualization plays an important part in my thesis, in tandem with an important distinction between absolute and relative forms of evaluation. The emphasis I place on the relationship between direct responses and their conceptualization is developed in the light of Wittgensteinian philosophical insights, both of Wittgenstein’s own and those of certain other philosophers who employ versions of his method. I also draw on both Platonist and Aristotelian conceptions of virtue, with particular attention to the relationship between our natural ethical responses and the terminology in which they find expression.

The University of Auckland, Ph.D. dissertation (2012).

Simone Weil’s Phenomenology of the Body

Lissa McCullough read

Abstract: Major thinkers of the twentieth-century (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead) explored the conditions for the possibility of perception, language, and thought, and Merleau-Ponty in particular addressed the physi- cal body as a condition of existing and being situated in the world. Although French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) has not been recognized as belonging in this stream of philosophical history, this article seeks to dem- onstrate that Weil was a pioneering phenomenologist of the body; for remarkably like Merleau-Ponty—yet more than a decade before him in the early 1930s—Simone Weil’s thinking centered on the foundational role of the body in structuring thought and ordering the world. The body is the first and primary orderer of experience for Weil: it grasps relations intuitively, pre-linguistically, and mediates action and thought. Weil’s body-thinking reconfigures the basis of thinking itself, positing that bodily movement is the factor sine qua non that enables ordered spatial-temporal perception, a perception on which the most abstract reaches of language and thought depend.

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2 (2012): pp. 195–218