Weil, Attention and Humility

“Humility is attentive patience.” — Simone Weil (2015, 111)

In her autobiographical Chez les Weil, Sylvie Weil (2013, 80-81) marks a strong contrast between her father’s spectacular lack of humility and her aunt’s radical humbleness. While some readers might quibble with the view that Simone Weil was humble (a few scholars might rather argue that she exhibited a peculiar mix of prideful confidence and paralyzing self-doubt), we know that the philosopher earnestly aspired to possess humility, which she characterized in the most laudatory terms. Indeed, her later essays and notebooks are peppered with striking claims about how precious humility is – variously describing it as “the root of all authentic virtues” (Weil 2015, 210), as the root of all love, as “the most beautiful of all the virtues” (Weil, 2009, 5), and – most importantly for our purposes – as a term interchangeable with attention (Weil, 1999, 867).  As such, it is unsurprising that she proposed, in her “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies”, that a decent apprenticeship in attention ought to be nourished by humility.

In what follows, I propose a brief exploration of Weil’s account of attentive humility and of what she has to say about how to cultivate it. Hers, I argue, is an account that largely prefigures philosopher Alia Al-Saji’s phenomenology of hesitation (2014) – and in particular, the latter’s timely invitation to decelerate perception, to slow down the way we ‘read’ others. 

On developing the faculty of attention

In her piece on school studies, Weil suggests that there are two conditions necessary for the development of the faculty of attention. First, there has to be a sincere desire to increase our attention and get closer to the truth; the apprenticeship ought to be free of ulterior motives or ambitions for good grades or recognition. (Weil, Simone, “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies,” in Weil, Basic Writings, 2024) (SS, 227) Second, and most importantly for our purposes, learners ought to look over their mistakes carefully and slowly, an extremely difficult task given the discomfort caused by the facing of one’s shortcomings. The all-too-human tendency is to overlook one’s mistakes or limits, or to blame others. But she insists that this quasi-universal tendency ought to be fought against. 

“The virtue of humility, she wrote, is “a treasure infinitely more precious than any academic progress.” (SS, 228; my italics) Weil regarded humility as so important in part because she thought it opened the door to truth, or what we could call, using Murdochian terms, ‘correct vision’ (a way of looking at others and reality that is as devoid as possible of prejudices and selfish concerns). Elsewhere, we learn that it is humility, much more than the acquisition of any particular knowledge or expertise, that is at the root of genius, and of one’s ability to attend to the afflicted. (Weil, 2024, 196-197) Indeed, as E. Jane Doering noted in her fine analysis of Weil’s concept of force, it is humility that has the power to render some humans “fully attentive to another’s needs by mindful listening.” (Doering, 2010, 6) 

Weil and Alia Al-Saji “in conversation”

What sort of psychological, temporal or material conditions might help support the cultivation of the humility necessary for attention? Allow me to present some of Weil’s reflections by briefly putting them in conversation with Alia Al-Saji’s insights on epistemic humility. In an essay reflecting on how to decrease racism, Al-Saji stresses the need to work not only via arguments or discourse, but also to focus on the more affective, embodied, less conscious dimensions of racism. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson to challenge the view that hesitation is a character flaw or a hindrance to thought, she proposes that certain types of hesitation can in fact be highly salutary for thought and countering prejudice. 

There is no room here to consider in detail her rich account of hesitation; I will merely note two crucial elements of what it entails. First, she argues that hesitation can sometimes (albeit not always) entail a healthy “moment of indetermination” and “non-teleological searching” (Al-Saji 2014, 145). For her, this is a moment of extreme receptivity where one attends openly, without a clear finality in mind. One seeks to cast aside old “sedimented habits” of perception, and to look without judging precipitately; it is a seeing differently that begins “in an attentive effort” (ibid, 157). A fruitful hesitation is one where we accept “to wait without projection” (ibid, 148) and, as such, it leads to a certain discomfort given that few of us appreciate this state of indetermination.  There are striking resonances here with Weil’s concept of attention, which is typically defined in terms of a radical receptivity, of a temporary and always imperfect suspension of our “already-formed thoughts.” “Attention consists in suspending one’s thinking, in leaving it available, empty and penetrable to the object.” (SS, 229) 

Similarly to Al-Saji, Weil thought that it is only when one embraces this indetermination or this putting of the self ‘on hold’ – which requires an acknowledgment of our limitations and our knowledge’s imperfections – that one might be able to see or read a fellow human being more adequately (beyond social prejudices, we could say). (SS, 231) Elsewhere, Weil observes that both justice and love require that we humbly acknowledge the inaccuracy of our “readings” and perception:“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read […] Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different, from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” (Weil, 2009b, 135)

In addition to involving a posture of receptivity, Al-Saji argues that a fruitful hesitation will entail a “delay” in the flow of time, a “slowing down.” of affects. (Al-Saji, 2014, 147) It is such deceleration, in her view, that can alert us to the inaccuracy of some of our mental and affective shortcuts. She explains: “Hesitation is a deceleration that opens up the affective infrastructure of perception, in order both to make it responsive to what it has been unable to see and to make it aware of its contextual and constructed features.” (ibid, 147) Similarly, Weil’s apprenticeship in attention is also about learning to see what we were unable to previously see, by halting our movement and embracing a silent immobility. Indeed, when she compares the ‘wrong’ kind of attention based on forced muscular tension with the negative effort entailed in true attention, Weil often describes the latter in terms of a “waiting,” of an “attentive and faithful immobility” (e.g., Weil 2009, 128-129) Attentive humility is thus a kind of looking (un regard) nourished by love and it requires “that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen” (Weil 2009, 140). In her essay on the Iliad, Weil also underscored the close ties between the capacity to momentarily ‘stop’ (to embrace that “interval of hesitation”) and the ability to treat others decently, rather than as things to be manipulated or crushed (see also Weil, 2024, 165). If there is a constant theme running through Weil’s oeuvre, it is certainly her conviction that excessive speed at work and in most activities can only compromise the meaningfulness, quality, and joy of these pursuits. Readers will recall that Weil regarded the impact of Taylorisation and of speed on workers’ attention as the worst assault on the soul (CO, 433); she also repeatedly noted the close ties between a hurried pace and poor ethical judgment. 

Weil’s untimeliness

In short, for Weil as much as for Al-Saji, “time makes a difference” (Al-Saji, 2014, 148) for the way we perceive others and experience the world. Truth, love, joy, and decent relationships are more likely to belong to the unhurried. Needless to say, nothing is more untimely than Weil’s and Al-Saji’s invitations to slow down, to wait silently, and to hesitate rather than to live, to love, to work and to judge hastily or brazenly. Ours is a world driven by a frantic temporality, by noise, and by social media self-promoting practices that are quite inhospitable to the humility and quiet receptivity celebrated by Weil. 

Nothing seems more ill-timed either than Weil’s call to diminish ourselves, to put aside egoistic interests, and to simply sit with the discomfort induced by the contemplation of our incorrect readings, of our mistakes and of what Weil provocatively called our “mediocrity” and “stupidity” (SS, 228). If few have ears to hear the language of ‘mediocrity’ many might find precious inspiration in Weil’s plea for the deceleration of our learning and of our encounters with the world. 

Bio Statement

Sophie Bourgault is a full professor of political studies at the University of Ottawa and past president of the American Weil Society (2019-2022). Her writings, in French and English, on Weil include Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology? (edited with Julie Daigle, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and “The discreet wearing out of bodies and souls at work: Simone Weil on speed, humiliation and slow affliction,” Logos, vol. 56, pp. 235-252 (2023).

Sources

Doering, E. Jane. Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force. University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.

Al-Saji, Alia. “Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing”, in Emily Lee ed, Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. SUNY Press, 2014.

Weil, Simone. Oeuvres. Edited by Florence de Lussy. Gallimard. 1999. 

_______. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. Harper Classics, 2009.

_______. Gravity and Grace. Translated by E. Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. Routledge, 2009b. 

_______. First and Last Notebooks. Translated by R. Rees, forward by E. O Springsted Wipf & Stock, 2015.

_______. Basic Writings. Edited and translated by D.K. Levy & Marina Barbaras. Routledge, 2024. 

Weil, Sylvie. Chez les Weil. Libretto, 2013.

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