The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real With Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
Recommended
The Play’s the Thing: On Simone Weil’s Venice Saved
Excerpt: With Venice Saved, yet another of Weil’s unfinished works is resurrected, and happily so. Early on, Albert Camus recognized in Weil a great mind that wrestled, as did his, with fundamental problems of the human condition. And so he arranged to publish 11 of the first Weil books to be released by Gallimard. There was also Gustave Thibon, who culled portions of her journals and organized them topically, and with a Catholic bent, in Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grâce). Others followed suit in piecing together her writings on topics ranging from colonialism to mysticism and from political philosophy to physics.
Enter Silvia Panizza and Philip Wilson, who are the first to translate into English Weil’s three-act tragic play, including eight pages of revealing extracts from the author’s notebooks that sketch out her ideas about the direction of the play, which was almost complete. Panizza and Wilson also add explanatory commentaries and endnotes to fill in a number of the blanks left open by Weil. In most cases, these notes are quite insightful and helpful. Sometimes, however, the editors’ scholastic asides distract from the main focus of the play (e.g., on the question of whether Weil was a “feminist” or whether her views match up with Sudhir Hazareesingh’s “five characteristics of French thought”). Even so, their translation and admirably researched presentation of Venice Saved fill a gap in the Weil literature and contribute much to the mosaic — at once philosophical, political, and mystical — of her legacy.
Los Angeles Review of Books, August 28, 2019.
Simone Weil
This essay originally appeared in The Nation (January 12, 1957) and was reprinted in Essays (New Directions, 1961) and World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New Directions, 1987). Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
‘Waiting on God’: A Radio Talk on Simone Weil
Excerpt: ” . . . . For Simone Weil the main fact of human life, and the fact which we must not flinch from if we are to find out any truth about it,8 is the fact of affliction. Le Malheur. For her, the centre of Christianity is the passion and the central moment of the passion is the cry of dereliction. The greatness of Christianity, Simone Weil says, lies in its seeking not a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for the suffering. Let us see how she conceives this use. Her thought, although we have it in this scattered aphoristic form, is curiously systematic.
Two things strike one immediately about her ‘system’. That it is very austerely dualistic, and that it enunciates with a strange sort of confidence a view of the physical and of the spiritual universe which one might call ‘mechanical.’ The dualism is between La Pesanteur and La Grâce – gravity, this is gravitational force, and grace. All natural phenomena, including psychological phenomena, are subject to ‘gravity’, by which she means that they are subject to ‘natural law’ in the scientific sense. This realm of natural necessity is purposeless; things have causes but not ends. The only sort of finality which we can detect in it is the purposeless finality of the total ordering of natural things. . . . ”
Iris Murdoch Review, (2017), pp. 9-16, preface by Justin Broackes, (BBC broadcast, Oct.18, 1951, 7.40 p.m. on the Third Programme)
Related
— Paul S. Fiddes, Iris Murdoch and the Others: A Writer in Dialogue with Theology, T&T Clark (December 2, 2021) (Chapter 6: “The Void and the Passion: A Dialogue with Simone Weil” & “Coda: With and Beyond Simone Weil: Between Murdoch and Theology”), pp. 155-204.
— Justin Broackes “Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil,” Royal Institute of Philosophy (2018), YouTube.
— Silvia Panizza, “The Importance of Attention in Morality: An Exploration of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophy,” Ph.D. dissertation (2015)
“The Death of Simone Weil” (Part 2: Renault)
JCA Orchestra
The Actor & Scholar in Conversation: Simona Giurgea and E. Jane Doering on Simone Weil
Simone Weil’s “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” is a profound exploration of the power of force and the hubris of mankind in attempting to control it to our advantage. Force is inherently destructive, and we risk it overwhelming us when we unleash it upon ourselves. This two-part essay, published in the Cahiers du Sud in 1940 – 41, is every bit as relevant today in all human interactions, from the interpersonal to the geopolitical.
Join us for a discussion of this piece by Professor Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and renowned Weil scholar Dr. E. Jane Doering and Simona Girugea, Senior Lecturer in of the University Theatre at Colgate University, who adapted this writing into a compelling one-woman dramatization (performed at the library on Friday, October 15). Hosted by Ron Collins, Senior Editor of ATTENTION. The discussion will probe this compelling essay in depth. The conversation will be followed by a reception sponsored ATTENTION.
E. Jane Doering is professor emerita of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame University. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 19th and 20th-century French literature and culture. She also holds a Masters of Education from Goucher College and an M.A. in French Literature from the University of Notre Dame, along with a Diplôme d’études from La Sorbonne, Paris. She received the Notre Dame Kaneb Teaching Award for excellence in teaching. Her books include When Fiction and Philosophy Meet: A Conversation with Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil (2019), Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-perpetuating Force (2010), and The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil (2014). She has authored over three dozen articles in English, French, and Italian on the multi-dimensional thought of Simone Weil, and delivered numerous talks in the USA, Canada, France, Italy, and Israel. Her professional responsibilities include being a longstanding member in an advisory capacity of the American Weil Society and of the international Association pour l’étude de la pensée de Simone Weil. She is also on the board of advisors of ATTENTION.
Lewes Public Library, October 16, 2021
NOTE: this session is available to attend in-person or through Zoom. You MUST REGISTER and indicate which you prefer.
How Simone Weil taught us to confront a world poisoned with lies
Excerpt
. . . . Truth is one of the first casualties of deracination. Of course, it was hard not to be driven mad by the assault on truth both before and during the war. Though trained as a philosopher, Weil’s preoccupation with truth was not a professional habit, but an existential imperative. She loathed fascism and communism not simply because they deny the inherent dignity of each and every human being, but also the existence of objective truth and a common reality.
This threat — both political and epistemological — was embodied by the German occupiers, of course, but also by their French collaborators based at Vichy. Inevitably, some were true believers in the reality offered by Nazi ideology — a reality that divided human beings worthy of life from those unworthy of life. Many more collaborators, though, were little more than opportunists for whom truth was as expendable as were the lives of those who depended on seeing and speaking the truth.
Forward, May 17, 2021
Religion, Collaboration, and Resistance during the Second World War (abstract)
Panel Abstract:
The collaboration/resistance divide in France could be porous, as the many examples of collabo-resistance illustrate. Double-jeu, duplicity, was the coin of the realm. One revealing indicator is that Vichy France, while de facto a subaltern ally of Hitler, de jure remained in a state of war with Nazi Germany.
The two women and one Jesuit discussed in this session, demonstrate how religious commitments may further complicate this problematic. French Catholicism had long been engaged in resistance — but against a very different opponent. On the eve of the Second World War, fiercely opposed to the state’s aggressive laïcité, some Catholics preferred the Third Reich in Germany to the Third Republic in France. Thus, the natural instinct of such faithful was support for Marshall Philippe Pétain’s policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Yet a spiritual resistance to Nazism, nurtured among French Jesuits by Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), did emerge. This abandoned the obsession with restoring the confessional ancien regime. Instead, it proposed transcending old battles against the Republic through an alternative, a collective spiritual mobilization beyond secular politico-centricity. It drew upon the resources of the Church’s intellectual arsenal — e.g. aspects of theology, ecclesiastical structure, and biblical scholarship — reformulated to meet new challenges. However, since the church of both de Lubac and Pétain was ultimately the same, the new vision could not break sharply with the past. Consequently, both demonstrated significant political similarities, as SARAH SHORTALL’s paper discussing the Jesuit journal of resistance, Témoignage chrétien, (Christian Witness) reveals.
Through the scholar of Cistercian monasticism, Marie Magdeleine Davy (1903-98), BRENNA MOORE addresses a more forceful resource for resistance, mysticism and comparative religion. During the war, Davy sheltered and organized the escape of Allied aviators downed in France even as her scholarship attacked the fantasy of the so-called West, a pure white Christian Europe, propagated by the highly influential Henri Massis. Davy herself acknowledged how her immersion in the texts of medieval Christian mysticism had sustained her rejection of Vichy.
Simone Weil (1909-43), another philosopher-mystic, clandestinely distributed Témoignage chrétien and knew Davy, but her trajectory diverged from both, according to BENJAMIN BRAUDE. She came under the influence of antimodernist acolytes of Massis and the monarchist antisemite Charles Maurras, who illegally fashioned elements of her posthumous oeuvre into a Trojan horse insinuating neo-Pétainism into France at mid-century. Weil’s tortured political-religious behavior during the war and her post-war legacy accentuate the porousness of the divide between opposing and supporting Vichy.
___________
Annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Catholic Historical Association (Jan. 2022)
Panel: Religion, Collaboration, and Resistance during the Second World War
Chair: Charles Gallagher, S.J., Boston College
Papers:
“The Weapons of the Spirit: Catholic Theology and the Resistance to Nazism in France”
— Sarah Shortall, University of Notre Dame
“Mysticism and Resistance: The Case of Marie-Magdeleine Davy”
— Brenna Moore, Fordham University
“The Collabo-Resistance of Simone Weil”
— Benjamin Braude, Boston College
Comment:
Bernard M. J. Wasserstein, University of Chicago
Review Essay of “Simone Weil and Her Writings”
Mystical Experience: Women’s Pathway to Knowledge
Abstract: The mystical experience is generally understood as an affective one, made of love and union. The history of Christianity has been marked by this type of experience and owes to it some of its most luminous milestones and highlights. Christian mystics have been great founders, bright intellectuals, and paradigmatic figures in raising new issues for Theology and Philosophy theology, philosophy, social justice, and politics. In this article we wish to reflect and write about two issues in the vast area of mystical studies, focusing specifically on Christian mysticism:
(1) The link between mystical experience and knowledge; and
(2) Mystical experiences lived through by women as a pathway to and from knowledge. We will briefly highlight a few women mystics in order to set the stage for the topic to be further developed below.
Firstly, we will attempt to circumscribe the concept of mysticism by retrieving some of the main thoughts of scholars who have studied the mystical phenomenon and writings of individuals who experienced it. For this purpose, we will apply some elements from philosophy, but mostly from theology.
Secondly, we will pursue our reflection with the aid of thoughts by philosophers and theologians who thought and argued that mystical experience is and contains knowledge and bears not only affective and spiritual, but also intellectual, fruit. Thirdly, we will attempt to show how a significant group of women were the specific protagonists of this synthesis between experience and knowledge and how this allowed them to bring original contributions to their context and historical time.
We conclude with a detailed commentary and reflection on the French 20th-century mystic Simone Weil who, as both an intellectual and a mystic, was a pioneer in bringing a prophetic vision on some issues that would inspire society, the Church, and spiritual life many decades after her death. As such, she became a paradigmatic figure who demonstrated that intellectual ability does not entail only rational thinking, but consists in a great level of spiritual sensitivity, which brings altogether an enormous responsibility in leading humanity towards fulfilling its vocation to live fully. Our conclusions will be based on the countercultural benefits that mystical experience, as lived through by women, can bring to contemporary times.”
- Religions, vol. 14, no.2 (Jan. 2023), p. 230.
Maria Clara Bingemer (PhD, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome) is a noted Brazilian theologian. A full professor at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC), she focuses her research on systematic theology, mysticism, and in particular on Latin American and liberation theology. Bingemer’s current research project is on Mysticism and Testimony: a study of knowledge, language and praxis in contemporary mysticism.
