Weil & Other Thinkers

Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

Deborah Nelson read

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches.

Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2017)

Hungry for Beauty: Simone Weil’s Inversion of Kant’s Aesthetics

Lyra Koli read

This master’s dissertation argues that Simone Weil’s aesthetics can be seen as an inversion of Immanuel Kant’s, concerning the relation between natural dependency and beauty. Kant’s notions of beauty and sublimity are shown to be founded on overcoming hunger and fear, and the relevance of the immortality postulate for the Critique of the Power of Judgment is demonstrated. Following Angelica Nuzzo’s Ideal Embodiment, Kant’s aesthetics is understood as describing a transcendental embodiment, where the feeling of life is an experience of the “humanity” of man. This “humanity” is argued as exclusionary in that it rests on an overcoming of hunger and fear. Furthermore, his notions of finality without an end and disinterested pleasure are described as reinforcing the view of man’s superiority to the rest of nature. The extensive Kantian influences on Weil’s aesthetics often claimed to be mainly Platonically inspired, are presented. Through a critical examination of beauty and eating in her life and work, the common idea of her aesthetics as one of ascetic renunciation is disputed. Instead, her aesthetics is found to be a radical materialist reinterpretation of some of Kant’s central notions, particularly finality without an end and disinterested pleasure, where hunger, fear and suffering remain present. An examination of the metaphors of eating used by Weil to describe beauty illustrates how her aesthetics reverses the relation between man and his natural dependency: instead of an immortal moral humanity, free from hunger and fear, the center of her aesthetics is the very mortal muddle Kant ostensibly overcame. For Weil, beauty is not an outline for man’s superiority; instead, it makes it possible for us to love the fact that we are not all, but part of the world of eating and being eaten.

Philosophy: Aesthetics and Art Theory: Kingston University, London.

“Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini”

Lisabeth During

PhilPapers, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 16-32

Overlapping Consensus Thin and Thick: John Rawls and Simone Weil

Aviad Heifetz & Enrico Minelli read

John Rawls and Simone Weil presented two distinct conceptions of political justice, aimed at articulating a common ethos in an inherently heterogeneous society. The terms of the former, chiefly concerned with the distribution of primary goods, underwrite much of today’s Western democracy’s political liberalism. The terms of the latter, chiefly concerned with the way interaction is organized in social activities in view of the body and soul’s balancing pairs of needs, are less well known. We explain the sense in which the overlapping consensus in Weil’s notion of political justice is “thicker”, and may thus deserve more attention – alongside that of Rawls – for substantiating a democratic ethos within political liberalism.

Philosophical Investigations 39:4 October 2016, pp. 362-384

Effing the Ineffable: The Mysticism of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein

K G M Earl read

Both Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein hold mysticism—i.e., the belief in something utterly transcendent—centrally. The mysticism present in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus presents a problem: if “the mystical” is “deep” nonsense, and there is something important that cannot be sensibly presented in language, we are left in an undesirable situation. The mystical is taken to be of paramount importance but is ultimately inaccessible to reason. Weil, starting with political and theological considerations, arrives at a similar problem. A mystical position yields the “problem of mysticism”: There is the mystical; it is of crucial importance, and it is inaccessible to our reason. Weil’s mystical praxis of decreation is a solution to the problem. This does not present a way that we can come to the mystical, but a way that we can become aware of its revelation, which bypasses our reason.

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, MA dissertation.

“Beholding and Being beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention”

Mark Freeman read

The Humanistic Psychologist, Vol. 43, Issue 2, 160–172.

‘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.