Recommended
Simone Weil’s ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’: A Comment
The purpose of this article is to provide a comment on Simone Weil’s brief but seminal essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ It complements an earlier one on Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. The essay was sent via a letter to her friend and mentor, the Catholic priest, and Dominican friar, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin O.P. It set out her belief that school studies should provide the individual pupil or student with an education in the value and acquisition of attention. This, Weil believed, would be of fundamental value when reaching out to God through prayer. Such a capacity for attention would also enhance the student’s general academic and social learning providing a basis for authentic dialogue with others, and not only teachers and schoolfellows. The article introduces her as a religious philosopher, explains the origins of the essay, and Weil’s friendship with Father Perrin, who was her Christian religious mentor, examines the text itself, considers some critical commentaries, and assesses its relevance to the philosophy and practice of education today.
RUDN Journal of Philosophy, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 398-409
Simone Weil’s Conservatism
The 20th-century anarchist philosopher and mystic could point the way forward for today’s right
Slate, May 25, 2021
Simone’s Svengalis: A Petainist, a Missionary, and the Making of Simone Weil
Abstract
Two of the first books published in the name of the brilliant absolutist Simone Weil (1909-43), La Pesanteur el la Grâce (Gravity and Grace) (1947/8) and Attente au Dieu (Waiting on/for God) (1950), were tendentiously fashioned. Consequently, the packaging that her Svengalis—the Petainist Gustave Thibon and the missionary Joseph-Marie Perrin—imposed, so severely distorted her thought that the first is no longer considered by French specialists to be her own work and the second has no stable text. Nevertheless, these two problematic books have defined Simone Weil. This [interview] reveals the origins and purposes of the books that Thibon and Perrin created.
Boisi Center (Feb. 11, 2015).
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Benjamin Braude is an associate professor of history at Boston College. His research focuses on the construction of collective identities in the Middle East and Europe, as well as Jewish and Ottoman history. He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on the controversial legacy of 20th-century philosopher Simone Weil at the Boisi Center.
Patriotism as Compassion: Simone Weil and the alternative to pride
Excerpt: ” . . . So if liberal patriotism is not just pride in secular futurity, as Rorty would have it, or loyalty to a shared ethos, as Smith thinks, can it be anything at all? I think so, but it seems to me that the best writer on the question is, oddly enough, the French religious writer and social theorist Simone Weil. Weil’s L’Enracinement, or in English, The Need for Roots, written in 1943 while she was working on behalf of the Free French in London during the height of World War II, articulates a totally novel theory of patriotism that lies at the opposite extreme of national pride and does not rely on idealistic notions of a common outlook or way of life. For Weil, in short, patriotism is not national pride, but rather national compassion. . . .”
Source: The Point (Feb. 12, 2022)
Author: Sam Gee is a contributing editor to The Point
Looking for Heroes in Postwar France: Albert Camus, Max Jacob, Simone Weil
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England
About Simone Weil by Eric Springsted
This biographical sketch is reproduced, with permission, from Eric Springsted, Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), pp. xix-xxi.
Theatre project explores the philosophy of French mystic Simone Weil
‘Simone Weil: Performance as an experience of nothingness’ is a new theatre research project by Dr. Tyrone Grima, which explores an approach to theatre-making, inspired by the philosophy and the spirituality of the French mystic, Simone Weil.
The project translates in a practical and experiential manner the insights of the spirituality and the philosophy of Simone Weil, particularly those on art and theatre, to the performative medium. This with the aim of discovering a way of putting into practice the theoretical framework of Weil in theatre-making. Central to the approach is the notion of ‘nothingness’.
Newsbook, June 10, 2021.
The Enigma of Affliction
in Diogenes Allen and Eric Springsted, Spirit, Nature, and Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1994, chapter 6, pp. 97-110.
Black Sun: A Letter to a Brother
From Valery Panyushkin, a Russian writer, posted on YouTub. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, and I very much regret that so little of its power comes through without the rhyme and meter of the language.
Still, here is a highly imperfect translation (adapted from one by Arik Kruglyak). Even if it doesn’t work for you, please forward the YouTube link to any Russian speakers you know; I hope they were as affected by it as I was. — Eugene Volokh
