Weil & Other Thinkers

When Fiction & Philosophy Meet: A Conversation with Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil

E. Jane Doering & Ruthann Knechel Johansen read

An innovative book, WHEN FICTION AND PHILOSOPHY MEET explores the intersection between the philosophy of Simone Weil from Paris, France, and the fiction of Flannery O’Connor from the Southern state of Georgia, USA. In an era of war, of unprecedented human displacements, and of ethnic, racial, and religious fears the ideas of these two intellectuals bear on our present condition. Both women keenly desired to perceive the realities of good and evil inherent in human existence and to bring this truth to the consciousness of their contemporaries. Embracing their belief that truth is eternal but must be transposed and translated, generation after generation, in language appropriate to each age, the authors acquaint O’Connor readers with concepts in Weil’s religious philosophy as seen in O’Connor’s stories. Doering and Johansen simultaneously illustrate how Weil’s philosophy, when embodied in fiction, reveals the lived realities of the human condition across time and space.

Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor were audacious thinkers with inquiring minds who held clear and firm religious convictions. Each applied her understandings of enduring spiritual truths to the challenges of nihilism and social oppression as seen in the spreading totalitarianism and the distressing legacy of slavery throughout human history. Both Weil and O’Connor crossed disciplinary boundaries and influenced their respective fields with innovative ideas and artistic expressions.

Taking their cues from these writers, Doering and Johansen bring these two remarkable women into a four-voiced dialogue–Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor with Doering and Johansen–by engaging each writer in the forms of her own genre and inviting readers to enter a dialogue of courage with Weil and O’Connor in the postmodern and post-Christian world.

Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2021

Homer: The Very Idea

James L. Porter read

Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived, and whether he was an actual person, a myth, or merely a shared idea. Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of this character, James I. Porter explores the sources of Homer’s mystique and their impact since the first recorded mentions of Homer in ancient Greece.

Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.

University of Chicago Press, October 25, 2021

Against Religious Fellow-Traveling

Taylor Ross read

This essay argues that Simone Weil’s writings suggest a phenomenological method of particular relevance to investigating ethical questions. It begins by presenting evidence that although Weil does not mention phenomenology explicitly, she thinks about ethics in a phenomenological manner. Subsequent sections outline a “phenomenological ethics” derived from Weil’s notion of attention and her hermeneutics of ‘reading’ the world. Since attention sets aside the self and its personal world, this allows for an ethics of self-abdication (decreation) relatively free of influence by the forces of domination. David Rousset’s term “concentrationary universe” is introduced to describe the claim, argued by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and others, that present-day societies show evidence of an increasing reliance on ways of thinking derived from the Nazi concentration camps. Examples are given of applications of Weil’s phenomenological method to the problem of how to recognize signs of potential domination in a concentrationary universe.

Macrina Magazine, no. 6, (December 5, 2020)

The Logic of the Rebel: On Simone Weil and Albert Camus

Robert Zaretsky read

Excerpt: “. . . . The letter writer and analyst, it turns out, had more than tuberculosis in common. The former, Albert Camus, and the latter, Simone Weil, went on to become two of France’s most famous thinkers and writers. Camus had already established himself during the war not just as the author of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, but also the editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat. By the time of France’s liberation, the French-Algerian writer had become the face — a rather Humphrey Bogartian one at that — of the French Resistance. Sixty years later — he died in a car crash in January 1960 — Camus is also the face of French existentialism.

As for Simone Weil, fame had to wait. She certainly did not seek it out — as evidenced by the many contradictory things she did during her short life. Weil taught philosophy to middle-class students and Greek tragedy to industrial workers; she organized French pacifist movements and carried a gun alongside republicans during the Spanish Civil War; she was fluent in Greek, Latin, English, and German, and worked on assembly lines in a series of factories; she was born into a secular French-Jewish family and died as a near-convert to Roman Catholicism. . . .”

Los Angeles Review of Books (March 7, 2020)

Robert Zaretsky is the author, among other things, of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (2021).

On the Differences Between Rush Rhees and Simone Weil

H.O. Mounce read

Rhees seems unaware that Simone Weil differed from him both in her conception of philosophy and of its relation to religion. She differed also in her view of the relation between religion and science. On her view, the aim of science is to find the laws which will allow us to apply deductive reasoning to nature. The necessities revealed had for her a religious significance. But this can be understood only given her view of the relation between God and the world. On her view, the creation of the world did not involve an extension of God’s power. It involved a withdrawal of his power, so that there could be an existence independent of himself. God does not interfere in the details of the world but sustains it through a network of necessities. For this reason, these necessities can serve as a sign of God.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 71-75.

Peter Winch in India 1986 Lecture on Simone Weil

Peter Winch read

This is a talk given by Peter Winch in 1986 when he would have been nearing completion of his Simone Weil:“The just Balance” (1989). The talk was given to a small group in Mahabaleshwar in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and the transcription by Michael Campbell is from a recording made by Prabodh Parikh who, with Probal Dasgupta and Michael McGhee, initiated the Convivium series of meetings between Indian and Western philosophers.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 19-39

Prophetic Voices: Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor

E. Jane Doering & Ruthann Knechel Johansen read

This study juxtaposes Simone Weil’s exposition of God’s invitation to know and love the good through the divine signature of beauty stamped on the order of the world and Flannery O’Connor’s depiction of a society whose oppressive order allows some characters to oppose outright a divine order or to live under the illusion that the divine invitation is irrelevant because they, in their egoism and materialist values, are the centre of the universe. An examination of O’Connor’s and Weil’s ideas on order and beauty, grace and decreation, within the disorders of their contexts, reveals both writers’ skills in pointing prophetically through disorder to divine order, thus, disclosing bridges of revelation.

PhilosophicalInvestigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 101-114

Mathematics and the Mystical in the Thought of Simone Weil

John Kinsey read

On Simone Weil’s “Pythagorean” view, mathematics has a mystical significance. In this paper, the nature of this significance and the coherence of Weil’s view are explored. To sharpen the discussion, consideration is given to both Rush Rhees’ criticism of Weil and Vance Morgan’s rebuttal of Rhees. It is argued here that while Morgan underestimates the force of Rhees’ criticism, Rhees’ take on Weil is, nevertheless, flawed for two reasons. First, Rhees fails to engage adequately with either the assumptions underlying Weil’s religious conception of philosophy or its dialectical method. Second, Rhees’ reading of Weil reflects an anti-Platonist conception of mathematics his justification of which is unsound and whose influence impedes recognition of the coherence of Weil’s position.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2 (January-April 2020), pp. 76-100.

Elastic Worker: Time‐Sense, Energy and the Paradox of Resilience

A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone read

This essay considers Simone Weil’s experiences in factories and her social–political reflections on work, time and energy, in conjunction with arguments from theorists Melissa Gregg, Theodor Adorno and Sara Ahmed, to raise questions about supposedly humane interventions, including the cultivation of resilience, in the contemporary workplace. The transition from time-sense in factory work at the turn of the century is examined, along with the growth of corporate time management ideologies and practices in the mid–late 20th century, and finally, the associated forms of disciplining resilience/elasticity in the worker that bring together certain notions of time, space and psychological investments.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 177-196.