Weil & Other Thinkers

Weil and Wittgenstein in Winch’s “Reading”: Philosophy as a Way of Life

Francesca R. Recchia Luciani read

Abstract:  Peter Winch’s study Simone Weil: The Just Balance adopts a heuristic method through which Weil’s philosophical and religious thought is illuminated by surprising parallels with some concepts developed independently by Wittgenstein. The comparative analysis illustrates that for both these Socratic philosophers, theory corresponds to daily experience, a real “way of life” which in itself gives rise to an ethical-philosophical pragmatics that informs the most intimate ontological dimensions, encapsulating in their thought the meaning of their whole life.

Michael Campbell & Lynette Reid, eds., Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch (2020), pp 149-166.

The Identity of Man – Winch Between Spinoza, Weil, and Wittgenstein

Sarah Trooper read

Throughout his philosophical career, Peter Winch had a particular interest in the philosophy of Spinoza, as is evidenced not only by a variety of references on a diverse range of issues in his works but also by several lectures and seminars he delivered on this thinker. A reconstruction of his interpretation of Spinoza’s system, which unites epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical considerations as mutually dependent, brings to the fore Winch’s interest in the individual not only as an important epistemological but equally as a moral agent, who is embedded in a web of circumstances that shape her view on the world and the possibilities and options she is able to entertain. Moreover, in his reading of Spinoza, the focus on the irreducibility of the individual’s standpoint is also connected to the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, a connection which adds at the same time an emphasis on a fundamental limitation of moral philosophy in general.

Sarah Trooper, “The Identity of Man – Winch Between Spinoza, Weil, and Wittgenstein,” in Michael Campbell & Lynette Reid, eds., Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch,  Springer (2020),  pp. 135-148

The Politics of Rootedness: On Simone Weil and George Orwell

Oriol Quintana read

Simone Weil and George Orwell both reflected—at a time when liberalism and Christianity were being challenged—on how to provide rootedness to societies and how to provide a moral anchoring and collective inspiration. The chapter considers the extent to which religion plays an important role in these authors’ politics of rootedness. A comparison between them suggests that rather than worrying first about whether or not we need a religious revival, we should worry about whether individuals have the opportunity to enter into contact with beauty. For both Weil and Orwell, a society is well-rooted when there is a continuity between natural beauty and social life. As such, a politics of rootedness entails, in their view, a genuine search for the recognition of all members of a collectivity and, above all, the search for a way of learning again how to find nourishment in the beauty of the world.

in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-123.

Simone Weil and theatre: from attention to the descending way

Giuliano Campo read

Theatre artists and philosophers all over the centuries have often pointed out the existence of two levels within every phenomenon; we call this thought “Dualism”. During the last centuries, many have focused on a specific, although the traditional, example of dualism, which envisions a superior, transcendent reality – that is not connected to ours -. The performer can create such a connection, through her work on “verticality”, touching the superior invisible realm, which must then descend back to our everyday dimension. This article analyses one of the main tools used in order to set up a connection between these two dimensions, that is attention, according to in particular to one of the main thinkers of the twentieth century: Simone Weil. In this regard, the author explores the last pedagogical work of French actor and theatre pedagogue Louis Jouvet and the last period of research by Jerzy Grotowski and his pupils, both focused on that “attention” and “descending way”, which works on the same line of what is better known as “Verticality.” In the second part, Campo comments on Weil’s selected passages.

Stanislavski Studies: Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater, vol. 7, no. 2 (2019), pp. 177-200.

Attention: Thomas A. Clark and Simone Weil

Simone Kotva read

This essay studies the connection between attention and redemption in the poetry of Thomas A. Clark. It discusses the possibility of using Simone Weil’s religious philosophy to interpret Clark’s understanding of attention as ‘waiting’. It argues that while there are affinities between Clark and Weil, Clark’s poetic practice also reveals a resistance to the ascetic extremes which attention assumes in Weil’s philosophy. To think through the difference between attention as method and style, the essay then draws on the failures of Descartes’ Meditations in order to argue that only a practical, that is to say, stylistic, engagement with attention will allow for the radical attention that Weil sought but could not achieve.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–16, and American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3.

Turning the gaze to the self and away from the self – Foucault and Weil on the matter of education as attention formation

Johannes Rytzler read

Ethics and Education, vol. 14, no. 3

Poetry As Decreation: Impersonality and Grace in T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil

Emily M. King read

This thesis posits that however separated T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil are by circumstance, political affinity, and Church affiliation, their thoughts intersect at a crucial point. While Weil’s theory of decreation and Eliot’s notion of impersonality are often cast as theological and poetic innovations, they both hearken back to the Christian mystical tradition – specifically, the aspect of via negativa. Placed alongside one another, Weil’s poetic mysticism and Eliot’s concern for the spiritual reveal the capacity of poems to decreate and bring the reader to a moment of void that awaits the fulfillment of grace. This thesis will study these topics with express consideration of Eliot’s Four Quartets and Weil’s notebooks, especially Gravity and Grace.

Honor’s Thesis, Department of English, Stanford University, May 2019.

The Dimensions of Miracle: An Ethics of Mediation in Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Virginia Woolf

Collin (Lin) Michael Pritchard read

This project is concerned with the ethics of mediation, as might allow us to see the existence of the world as miraculous. To contextualize these terms, as involve the constraints of personal autonomy and understanding, this first chapter of this inquiry is a comparison of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophies; from this comparison comes a recognition of the importance of ‘mediation’ in one’s understanding of value, of an “absence that is felt,” which argues for a form of attention constituted by one’s relation to the world and to others. The second chapter introduces how Weil’s concept of ‘reading’—that is, her conception of how one ‘reads’ meaning in the world—has both an ethical and theological dimension, as well as introducing Virginia Woolf’s fiction as exemplary of how this ‘reading’ is a principle of literature; through a comparison with Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘aspect-perception’, it argues for a kind of affective proprioception, which would place one’s actions in relation to a dimension both aesthetic and ethical. The third chapter is a study of Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’, which demonstrates the comparative ethics of literature, as a valuation of characters’ ‘reading’ of others and the world is both implicit and explicit in Woolf’s narration; this study profiles four characters—Lily Briscoe, Mr. Ramsay, Charles Tansley, and Mrs. Ramsay—and centers Lily Briscoe’s painting as a technique of mediation expressive of Woolf’s narrative style, and of certain ethics. This project ends on the question of miracle—and gestures to a gratuitous world.

Bard Digital Commons, Spring 2019.