Recommended

Attention in Simone Weil’s Thought

Zahra Qasemzadeh, Seyyed Mostafa Mousavi Azam, & Ehsan Momtahen read

Abstract

Simone Weil has considered attention more than any other philosopher and mystic. Her thoughts on attention are not merely cognitive, scientific, or psychological issues, rather, it has direct and far-reaching effects on education, theology, and even politics. She expresses attention as a way of life, both at individual and socio-political levels. According to Simone Weil, although man does not create or make anything by paying attention to it, attention brings life to what is being attended to. Only that man’s attention to surrounding matters is a life-giving one which is “pure”. Pure attention is free from any attachments and through which man frees himself from imaginary and illusory matters and achieves the truth. What leads a person to pure attention is “to desire without an object”. On the other hand, Simone Weil refers to the suspension of thought as a state of pure attention, which is to endure void and wait.

In Simone Weil’s view, pure attention can be considered as love, because just as attention is consenting for anything other than oneself, so love also requires recognizing reality by turning away from oneself. Simone Weil introduces attention-based ethics, and by turning one’s attention to God, not only she builds her individual ethics, but also her epistemology and socio-political philosophy. And along with divine grace, she considers attention as an antidote that is necessary for man’s salvation.

Philosophy of Religion Research, vol. 19, no. 37, issue 1 (Summer/Autumn 2021), pp. 1-28

Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations

Kathryn Lawson & Joshua Livingstone, eds. read

Kathryn Lawson & Joshua Livingstone, eds., Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)

Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil were two of the most compelling political thinkers of the 20th century who, despite having similar life-experiences, developed radically distinct political philosophies. This unique dialogue between the writings of Arendt and Weil highlights Arendt’s secular humanism, her emphasis on heroic action, and her rejection of the moral approach to politics, contrasted starkly with Weil’s religious approach, her faith in the power of divine Goodness, and her other-centric ethic of suffering and affliction.

The writings here respect the profound differences between Arendt and Weil whilst pulling out the shared preoccupations of power, violence, freedom, resistance, responsibility, attention, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Without shying away from exploring the more difficult concepts in these philosophers’ works, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil also aims to pull out the relevance of their writings for contemporary issues.

About the Editors

Kathryn Lawson is a Lecturer and Researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Simone Weil and Ecological Ethics: Decreation for the Anthropocene as well as several journal articles and book chapters on continental philosophy, religion, and Simone Weil.

Joshua Livingstone is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is author of a forthcoming book chapter on Hannah Arendt and the Free Press.

The Red Virgin: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Simone Weil

Clark McCann read

The Red Virgin, by Clark McCann, reimagines the life of the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943) through the character of Sabine Arnaud. Weil acquired the pejorative nickname, “red virgin,” at the Sorbonne because of her radical politics, mannish clothes, and asexual nature. During her short life, Weil frustrated all those who might claim her for their own. She was a Christian who refused baptism, a Jew who denied her heritage, a Marxist who denounced communism, and a towering intellect who condemned the intelligentsia for their social privilege and moral cowardice. Perhaps most telling, she was a prophet of love who shrank from the touch of man or woman. The Red Virgin brings the mind and spirit of this fascinating woman to life in a philosophical novel with a plot worthy of a thriller.

The story opens in Los Angeles in 1976. Craig Martin, a jaded sitcom writer, discovers clues among his mother’s effects that a long-dead French philosopher, Sabine Arnaud, might be his birth mother. Arnaud, a refugee from Occupied France, had been a neighbor of his mother in New York in 1942, the year of his birth. Arnaud then left for London, where she hoped to join de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, only to fall ill and die of tuberculosis before realizing her dream of fighting the Nazis.  Martin sets off for Europe in search of Arnaud’s past and stumbles on a wartime secret that puts his life in danger. Arnaud’s death may have been faked by British Intelligence before sending her on a mission to Occupied France. As the mystery shrouding Arnaud’s life and death unfolds, Martin follows her trail, a step ahead of those who would silence them both. Alternating between the 1970s and World War II Europe, we follow Martin and Arnaud on their separate journeys, across three continents, until Martin finds the answers he seeks in the remote mountains of Ethiopia.

Issaquah, WA: Solesmes Press, 2019

Investigating “Man’s Relation to Reality”: Peter Winch, the Vanishing Shed and Metaphysics after Wittgenstein

Olli Lagerspetz read

Peter Winch believed that the central task of philosophy was to investigate ‘the force of the concept of reality’ in human practices. This involved creative dialogue with critical metaphysics. In ‘Ceasing to Exist’, Winch considered what it means to judge that something unheard-of has happened. Referring to Wittgenstein, Winch argued that judgments concerning reality must relate our observations to a shared ‘flow of life’. This implies criticism of the form of epistemology associated with metaphysical realism. Just as, according to Wittgenstein, a sentence has no fixed meaning in isolation — an observation does not constitute knowledge outside shared human practices.

Philosophical Investigations, 5 Jan. 2022

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

Robert Zaretsky read

Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance.

Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.

Robert Zaretsky is the author of Boswell’s Enlightenment; A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning; and Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment, among other books. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, he lives in Houston with his wife, children, and assorted pets.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021