Some inconclusive thoughts about Simone Weil

What has set me reading Simone Weil?

I’ve been aware of Weil for some time.  I’ve seen references to her in Iris Murdoch, and in writing about Iris Murdoch, and it’s been clear that Weil was very important for Murdoch.  I’ve seen quite a lot of references to her in writing by Quaker friends (Ben Wood, Jennifer Kavanagh). Early in lockdown I read a blog post by Anna Rowlands that referred to Weil at some length.  In particular, I’ve come across references to the importance of attention for Weil - and there is a connection for me with a question I’ve sometimes asked myself about Quaker worship, which is to what extent it’s about trying to decide what to do next, and to what extent it’s simply a matter of learning to pay attention.  A similar question arises in relation to therapy.

The result of all of this groundwork was that before I had read any Weil at all, there was a sort of charisma about her.  The baptismal service talks about the glamour of evil.  But there’s also a glamour attached to the good, or to the places where we think the good might be found.  For me, Weil had acquired some of that glamour.

I started with “The Need for Roots” (TNFR). This is the only book-length publication that we have in the form in which Weil wrote it:  otherwise, we’ve got collections of essays, and selections from Weil’s notebooks.  It was written in London in 1943, during the last year of her life, when Weil was working for the Free French.  It's - ostensibly - a report setting out proposals for the reconstruction of France after the war.  It’s much more than that.

The first section of TNFR is about a fundamental theory of politics.  Obligations are prior to rights - there is a basic obligation owed to every human being, arising from our universal dignity as God-seeking and God-capable creatures - the practical effect of that obligation, is a duty to meet both the physical and spiritual needs of everyone - and an important and much-neglected spiritual need, is the need for roots.  And what it means to have “roots” is to be part of a community with both a shared memory of the past and a shared hope for the future.  This experience of rootedness is one that has been severely disrupted, and it needs to be restored.  

Reading that opening section I found myself responding on two levels.  There was a surface level, at which I tried to understand what I was reading, and thought:  I agree with that, I don’t think that’s right, I don’t understand that.  But there was also a sense of something being communicated at a different level - a sense of someone who had seen a great light, was half-blinded by it, and was trying to convey what she had seen.

I read on, and I finished the book, and I found a lot of it was a struggle.  Some very long chapters that made few concessions to the reader in terms of structure or signposting.  A lot about French history and culture, which made me realise my own ignorance, but which I couldn’t readily assess or assimilate.  

While I was part way through TNFR, I looked at the Penguin anthology of Weil's writing, and read her draft of a statement of human obligations.  This was a distillation of the political theory behind TNFR, in about ten pages, and using slightly less overtly theistic language.  I found it a powerful and inspiring manifesto.

And now I am reading “Gravity and Grace” - a collection of Weil's remarks on religious and spiritual themes, organised in short thematic chapters.  What a strange book this is!  It was put together after Weil’s death, from her notebooks.  There were editorial choices not just about which passages to include, but also about which passages to group together into chapters, and about the order in which the individual passages appeared.  We’ve no way of tracing how her thought developed (it would have been very interesting if each passage had been accompanied by the date when it was written).  It’s like a Gospel of Sayings - say, the Gospel of Thomas - except that you are at least confident that she did say (or write) all of these things.  I read with a pencil, underlining the passages that particularly strike me.

There's a lot here about the dismantling or "decreating" of the self, and some of this is very hard to read - particularly given that it's controversial whether Weil's own death was a form of suicide.  Yet - paradoxically - one thing that comes across is the sense of an overwhelmingly strong personality, fierce and intolerant and sometimes almost intolerable.    

I'm still trying to work out what to make of all this.