Misfortune and Divine Love: Simone Weil’s Journey1
Voices:
Narrator. First Speaker, Second Speaker, and Reader of Quotations from the
Writings of: Simone Weil, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Thibon, Madame Thévenon, and a
French Worker.
NARRATOR:
When, shortly after the War, Simone Weil was first spoken of in Germany, in Francophone
superlatives, the denizens of circles hoping for “spiritual renewal from the
Christian spirit” hastened to repeat these superlatives; there were actually
even a few people who were familiar with several of her works in the original
language. But finally, in 1953, two whole
books were published in German, by the firm of Kösel, in an excellent
translation by Friedhelm Kemp. They were
entitled Misfortune and Divine Love
and Gravity and Grace.2
By 1953, one
only rarely still heard talk of a “spiritual vacuum,” and such general demands
as the one for “spiritual renewal” had ceded pride of place to the demands of the
daily grind. Everybody had indeed “caught up on what was to be caught up on”;
everything “unusual” had resumed its place in the system of cultural life. Moreover, legends about personalities
obviously flourish only as long as their work remains scarcely accessible or
their biography is shrouded in obscurity.
One’s craving to see what cards they were holding sustains one’s
interest and imagination.
One may presume that the legend of Simone Weil, that peculiar
creature, a philosophy teacher and factory worker, a Jew and a pious Christian,
the critic of the Catholic Church and the semi-heretic and potential saint—that
the legend of this peculiar creature has been fading since her books began being
translated into numerous languages and the dates of her biography began
becoming widely known. And so the only
question that remains to be asked is whether this fading is to Simone Weil’s
detriment or whether her work will survive her legend.
I believe this question can be can answered in the
affirmative. Of Simone Weil’s “written
works” all too few were published in her lifetime; for the most part these
consist of essays on topical questions that acquire significance only in the
context of her actual oeuvre. After the
war, in newly liberated France, a French lay theologian, Gustave Thibon, edited
a few of the ten sheaves of papers that had been relinquished to his care; most
of them have in the meantime been published by Plon, and a few others by
Gallimard in Paris.
These ten volumes contain something that is difficult to
define, namely propositions and theses regarding the so-called last things. Because everything regarding the “last
things” is constituted in such a fashion that it cannot be relinquished to the
mercies of either silence or confession, it will not be easy to do justice to
Simone Weil’s theses; they live out of reason and disembogue in confession. To do justice to a confession or even to judge
it as one judges scientific propositions and theses is impossible. One can, however, follow the itinerary of the
journey that led to this confession and record and retrace the insights she
acquired and errors she fell prey to along the way. Finally, one can contemplate the linguistic
archive of her efforts—which owes its illuminating power to an extraordinary
intellectual passion and is accordingly possessed of both style and form—as an aesthetic
artifact, even though she herself would have had nothing to do with this; but
after all, every utterance and every pronouncement falls to the share of our
world and its categories.
Simone Weil was no “authoress.” She was not productive. She did not write in order to write and to
create something that could stand on its own; rather, for her writing was—in
addition to being an outlet for strong critical and pedagogical impulses—above
all an exercise. An exercise that ranged
between humility and rebelliousness and remained important to her as long as
in her eyes the gap between “knowing” and “knowing with one’s entire soul” had not
been bridged. She was a fanatic about
precision, both in her thought and in her life, a precision that was brought to
bear on matters of the smallest as well as of the largest dimensions, a
precision that inevitably maneuvered her thought and life into extreme
situations.
FIRST SPEAKER: Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris; she was the
second child of well-to-do Jewish parents.
It was to her older brother—who is now a professor of mathematics at the
University of Chicago—that she owed her early preoccupation with literature and
science, her precociously exceptional mastery of difficult systems of
knowledge. After completing school, she
studied philosophy with Alain, then enrolled at the Ecole Normale Supérieure
and left it with an agrégation de philosophie—which
is only superficially equivalent to our doctorate of philosophy, as it is a much
more difficult academic goal to attain.
Until the outbreak of the Second World War, she taught—with voluntary
and involuntary interruptions—at various secondary schools. She participated in French political life at
a very early age and fought in the ranks of the extreme left without ever
belonging to any political organization.
Her party was the party of the poor, weak, and downtrodden, and she
joined this nameless party in her own fashion.
She took a leave of absence from her teaching career, enlisted as a
milling-machine operator working alongside foreign names at the Renault
factory, lived with and among the workers and in the same conditions as the
ones in which the majority of French workers of the period had to live. She was unable to bring her first experiment
to a successful conclusion. A case of
pleurisy forced her to quit her job.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she aligned herself with
the Reds, went to the Catalonian front, and helped whenever she could. She only refused to use weapons personally. But once again she was obliged to give up;
this time it was an accident, which forced her to move back to France. She had burned her feet with boiling oil.
In the summer of 1940, when the Germans were approaching
Paris, she decided to accompany her parents to Marseilles, but then she left
them to spend a few months in the country as a farmhand. The beginning of her acquaintance with the
philosopher and lay theologian Gustave Thibon dates from this period. Her days spent working in the vineyards were
followed by evenings in which she continued her study of Greek philosophy and
literature and Indian philosophy and began to turn her attention to
mysticism. A short [time] later we find
her back in Marseilles. At the urging of
the Dominican priest Joseph-Marie Perrin she gave lectures on Plato and the
Pythagoreans in the crypt of the Dominican monastery. Finally her parents prevailed upon her to
emigrate with them. They traveled
together to the United States. But Simone
Weil, who had called justice a “refugee from the victor’s camp” felt that she
belonged in the unfortunate camp that was occupied France. She welcomed the Resistance, left hospitable
America after only a few months, and went to Maurice Schumann in London to work
for the French government in exile. Her
request to be sent on a mission to France was refused. They feared that the worst would happen to
someone of her racial affiliation in a country infested by the Gestapo. But for the sake of at least sharing in the
material deprivation of the French, she waived her right to extra food rations as
a gesture of solidarity with the refugees.
Years of hunger and overwork were wearing her out. She had to be checked into a sanatorium with acute
tuberculosis and died shortly thereafter in Ashford, Kent on August 24, 1943,
having not even reached the age of thirty-four.3 Nobody has given an account of her last days. She was probably alone there. Her few friends were in France.
WEIL: “Agony is the supreme dark night that even the perfect
have need of in order to attain absolute purity, and therefore it is better if
it is bitter.”4
NARRATOR: Anyone familiar with Weil’s biography must be
inclined to think that she was—especially in the political and social conflict of
pre-war and wartime Europe—a person with a strong need to share in the
sufferings and struggles of others, and prepared to make any sacrifice. Seen in this light, her life would be a rare
exemplum of humane benevolence, but as such an exemplum it would have remained
invisible and inglorious like so many sacrificed lives.
The integrity of her life is destined to remain inviolable and
to speak for itself. We intend to speak
of her thought, of her intellectual legacy and the manifestations of her
thought at the various and diverse stations of her journey, a journey that she
felt she had been expressly called to undertake. Accordingly, although we shall not disregard
the fact that her vocation was a “spiritual” one, we must initially focus our
attention on her social and political thought.
The mainspring of this part of her personality was very strong, as she
herself belatedly acknowledged:
WEIL: “The
contemplation of social matters is as effectually purifying as withdrawal from
the world, and accordingly there has been nothing perverse about my
longstanding involvement in politics…”5
FIRST SPEAKER: Simone Weil first drew public attention to
herself when as a teacher in [Le] Puy she spoke up for the striking workers in
that commune. During this episode she
came into contact with a group whose mouthpiece was the extreme-left
trade-union newspaper Révolution prolétarienne. But she attracted an even greater degree of
attention from the workers themselves. They
had no use for people like her; they suspected her of being one of those
intellectuals whose sympathy with the proletariat arises from a misunderstanding,
who succumb to a fascination with complete otherness out of a feeling of
insecurity and emptiness. Preoccupied as
they were with their own concrete problems, these workers were by no means
appreciative when these kinds of intellectuals poked their noses in their
affairs. They therefore may have initially
found Simone Weil’s presence disagreeable; later they found it disturbing. They were disturbed by her superior knowledge
of socialist theories, by her dazzling intellectual gifts and her ardent and
pure interest in the situation in which French workers then found themselves,
and by her ruthless advocacy of an improvement of their condition. Simone
Weil’s position was not an easy one. She
was very young and not very attractive, fairly unamiable, lacking in charm, uncompromising,
and deadly serious. But she was also
thoroughly truthful, tough, and single-minded, and she managed to prevail. She managed to get these men, from whom she provoked
nothing but bemused head-shaking, to accept her as a friend. The effect she had on them is best
characterized by a tragicomic remark made by one of these French workers, who
when deeply shaken by the news of her death said:
WORKER: “She didn’t know how to live. She was too bookish and never ate anything.”6
SECOND SPEAKER: Simone Weil was a “highly strung” person—a
person possessed of an unparalleled cerebral intensity on the one hand and a
total ignorance of material exigencies on the other. She wanted to force the workers to think; she
wanted to explain their situation to them.
For she saw that the thoughtlessness of the employers was complemented
by the thoughtlessness of the workers.
She wanted to attack the evil at its root and was mistaken only inasmuch
as she assumed that all human beings enjoyed the same intellectual
possibilities as she did. She assumed
this not out of arrogance but out of naivety and rarely noticed that she was
being left on her own during the intellectual excursions that she was trying
to get the others to participate in.
Nevertheless, in her memoirs of Simone Weil in this period, Mme
Thévonon, the wife of one of the leaders of the syndicalist movement, speaks of
her character and her ideas so sympathetically that one may readily suppose
that despite her awkwardness around other people Simone Weil did not fail to
have a lasting effect on them.
MME. THÉVENON: “She was very simple, and although her level of
culture was far superior to ours, we could carry on long conversations with her
in a fraternal tone. She enjoyed herself
when she was with us and often asked us to sing—but not the most orthodox songs. When we were with her, she sat in her hideous
room, in which there was hardly any furniture, at the foot of her iron bed, and
recited Greek verses that we didn’t understand but that we delighted in because
we could sense her delight in them. Then
sometimes she would give us an unforgettable smile, a look of acquiescence in
comical situations; this side of her character rarely made an appearance on
account of the earnestness with which she confronted everything…”6
SECOND SPEAKER: Because Simone Weil recoiled from every kind
of conformism and every one of her thoughts breathed the air of liberty, she
also conquered her surroundings. She did
not fight for any sort of utopia but for the present day. She also did not believe in any sort of ideal
program for answering the question of what was best for the workers but rather
in a step-by-step solution to their problems.
She stationed herself on the rock bottom of reality, or as she herself
would have put it, in “misfortune,” in which she knew she was imprisoned along
with everyone who suffered from it in any form in which it figured in the
world. For her, thinking honestly meant
taking givens as the starting-point of one’s thoughts.
FIRST SPEAKER: We know from her biography that she quit
working as teacher for a while and took a job as a milling-machine operator at
the Renault plant. At the time, she kept
a Factory Diary from which we would
like to read a few passages in order to show that before she formulated them,
she was already undergoing the experiences that would enable and entitle her to
do so. This diary is neither overwrought
nor stylized; rather, it records what she encountered each day with great
authenticity and immediacy. It is her
encounter with the monotony and the moral and psychic void that was engendered
in the workers by their work in the large factory. In the process of appraising it, we must also
take into account the particular conditions of French factories in those years,
but one can only derive a sense of the general situation from numerous
particulars.
SECOND SPEAKER: At this time, Simone Weil worked a shift that
lasted from 2:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. The
times of day referred to must be understood in this context. So on a Thursday in 1935 she writes:
WEIL: “I go to the plant with an
excessively heavy heart: each step costs me (morally; on the way back, it does physically). Am in a semi-distracted state in which I am a
moving target for every sort of hard knock…From 2:30 to 3:35, 400 pieces. From 3:35 to 4:15, time lost to the fitter in
the hat (he makes me fix my botches)—Large pieces—slow and very hard because of
the new setup of the crank on the vise. I
have recourse to the foreman.
Discussion. Resume work. I puncture the end of my thumb (there it
is—the hard knock)—Infirmary—Finished the 500 at 6:14. No more pieces for me. (I’m so tired that I’m
relieved!) But they promise me
some. Ultimately I don’t get any until
7:30 and only 500 (to round out the 1,000)…At 8:00, 245. I finish the 500 big ones, suffering a lot
all the while, in 1-1/2 hrs…Off at 9:40.
But earned 16.45 francs!!!...I go home tired.”7
SECOND SPEAKER: Three weeks later, again on a Thursday.
WEIL: “Drama at the factory
today…They fired a female worker who had botched 400 pieces. A tuberculosis patient with a husband who’s
out of work half the time and some kids (by another man, I think) being brought
up by the father’s family. The attitude
of the other female workers, a mixture of pity and a schoolgirlish ‘it serves
her right.’ It seems she was a bad
comrade and a bad worker. Comments. She had blamed the darkness (after 6:30, they
turn off all the lights). ‘And I’ve definitely done all sorts of things without
any light.’ ‘She shouldn’t have talked back to the foreman (she had refused to
do the work); she should have gone to the assistant director and said: I made a
mistake, but etc.’ ‘When you’ve got to earn a living, you’ve got to do what
you’ve got to do.’ ‘When you’ve got a living to earn, you’ve got to be more
conscientious (!).’”8
SECOND SPEAKER: From an undated entry:
WEIL: “Your
total ignorance of what you’re working on is excessively demoralizing. You don’t get the feeling that a product is
the result of the effort you’re putting in.
You haven’t got any kind of a sense of the number of producers involved. You also haven’t got any notion of the
relationship between your labor and your wages either. Activity seems to be arbitrarily imposed and
arbitrarily remunerated. You get the
impression that you’re a bit like one of those kids whose mothers keep them
calm by giving them pearls to thread while promising them candy.”9
SECOND SPEAKER: On a
Saturday:
WEIL: “Violent headaches, my
mood distressed, better in the afternoon (but weep at B.’s…”10
SECOND SPEAKER: Monday:
WEIL: “Leclerc summons me[…].
Starts bawling me out because I’[ve finished] these pieces without
speaking to him about them first. He
asks for the number. I bring him my notebook! He takes a look at it and starts being nice,
nice.”11
SECOND SPEAKER: Wednesday.
WEIL: “Earned 255 francs (I was worried I wouldn’t even get
200…) for 81 hours. Didn’t sleep a wink
all night.”12
SECOND SPEAKER: From a pair of undated entries:
WEIL: “In all other forms of slavery, the slavery is
contextual. Only here has it been
transposed into the work itself. Effects
of slavery on the soul.13
[…]
A factory-owner. I
enjoy untold costly pleasures and my workers suffer from poverty. He can pity his workers quite sincerely and
yet not form any kind of relationship with them.
For no relationship can form if thought is not generating it.”14
FIRST SPEAKER: Simone Weil tried to form relationships through
thought in the works in which she explicitly preoccupies herself with the condition
of the modern industrial worker, with the “rationalization” of the question of human rights, a preoccupation that
is notably and definitively summarized in a “Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind”15
that constitutes her last will and testament.
We cannot discuss each and every one of her works; but we will
try to discover the leitmotiv that dominates them all and to delineate her
principal ideas. Poverty—poverty
originating in misfortune—figures throughout these writings in various
guises. Simone Weil discerns the most
visible form of poverty in the social and political sector, because this form
of poverty is an insuperable roadblock lying athwart humankind’s path to
freedom. Hence it is first and foremost
necessary to deal with this form of poverty, to aim for the establishment of an
equitable social order, of a social equilibrium. It is for this reason that she addresses
herself to workers and tries to enlighten them on the causes of their poverty,
which she discerns in Taylorism—specifically, in Taylor’s system of the
rationalization of labor, which, together with the Fordian system, which aims
at the attainment of the highest level of productivity, is being more or less
consistently implemented in modern factories. “What kind of scientifically based system is
this?” she asks, and she replies:
SECOND SPEAKER: One calculates the amount of time in which a
certain task can be completed and establishes this interval as a norm for
workers. Via bonuses, surveillance, and
ruthlessly prompt dismissal for failure to meet the targets set for them,
workers are motivated to achieve the highest levels of productivity. Taylor was very proud of this system because
it catered to the interests of both employers and workers; both derived external
advantages from the system, and not insignificantly it made commodities cheaper
for consumers. He thought that with it
he had obliterated all social conflicts and generated social harmony. But as Simone Weil explained, this system
embodied the most perfect form of slavery imaginable; it had led the workers
into a state of complete isolation; in their competitive struggle against one
another the solidarity of the workers was being destroyed. The division of labor ultimately led to human
atomization in the factories and generated unparalleled monotony there. Ford said that workers do not find monotonous
work unpleasant, and he was right to the extent that there is nothing people
get used to more easily than monotony.
But this habituation marked the beginning of the moral disintegration of
humankind.
Accordingly, Simone Weil also vehemently opposed the
application of psychological techniques—which incidentally were still in their
infancy then—and was of the opinion that under the dictatorship of their
calculations—calculations regarding, for example, incipient fatigue, decreasing
concentration, etc.—enslavement was being brought to perfection. For no psychological technician could ever compute
and precisely specify how long or short a specific worker (as opposed to an
abstract worker generated by methodical computation) would find a specific
interval. Only such a worker himself
could say that.
FIRST SPEAKER: After dealing with these “internal” problems,
in the essay La Condition Ouvrière
she came to speak of a related and comprehensive problem: the exclusively
nationalistic treatment of questions of production.
SECOND SPEAKER: She takes the phenomenon of the product as the
starting point of her analysis. An
example of a product is the automobile.
An automobile can be various things; in our eyes, it is a useful means
of transportation that we can no longer imagine doing without. But automobiles do not exist merely to be
driven on the street sooner or later; they are also a permanent weapon in the
battle between the automobile industries of France, Italy, Germany, etc. Even if one wanted to shorten the working
hours in the factories of a given country in the interest of its workers, one
couldn’t do so. One would run the risk
of being squeezed out of the market by foreign automobile industries. A system of regulations could only succeed if
it were implemented on an international basis and were predicated on a uniform
curtailment of production. Simone Weil
says that when the statisticians observe that production is being ramped up even
further and for the umpteenth time, this by no means signifies progress—that to
the contrary, it is a step backwards towards the most extreme and appalling
form of slavery. This hectic competitive
struggle finds its most graphic expression in arms production, which of course
no country will restrict in the absence of international regulations.
FIRST SPEAKER: To be sure, Simone Weil’s demands, which in the
1930s still enjoyed a fair chance of being realized, seem merely illusory
today, even though they have lost very little of their persuasiveness. She was actually writing during a period when
she scarcely could have guessed how right she was already turning out to be,
specifically in connection with Hitler:
If international praxis is increasingly being neglected,
progress could come in a specifically national social context. But progress in this case would march hand in
hand with an increasingly dictatorial system of government. In dictatorships the citizenry are
hermetically sealed off from foreign products, from human contact, and from
communication with people from other countries.
Say hello to full employment, higher wages, and, concurrently, the
upward and outward expansion of an enormous arms-manufacturing industry.
SECOND SPEAKER: But the “misfortune” of the worker remains
unaffected by any of this. She calls this
misfortune “mysterious” and believes that the workers’ misfortunate inability
to speak articulately about their own misfortune is itself a part of the
misfortune. For when they do speak about
it, they employ the phraseology of people who are certainly not workers. The slogans of workers are for the most part
borrowed [from] non-workers.
The factory with its atmosphere, which is inimitably evoked by
Weil, with its rhythm, which causes a human being moving among machines in
motion to feel as if he is no longer in control of his own body, imposes a
state of servitude on that human being, on the worker. At the factory, the worker is not “his own
man.” If its monotony is interrupted,
the workers inwardly kick up a fuss.
This is appropriate. But the
reason it is appropriate is that any new task must be performed in conformity
with certain instructions, just like the old task. Neither the old task nor the new one has any
intrinsic connection to the worker. The
only thing that ever changes is the instructions. If the worker makes ten parts, ten movements
of his hand, in a minute, and so forth, it is certain that he will make another
ten parts, ten hand-movements, and so forth, until he receives the next set of
instructions. But his suffering is not
confined to working hours; his commute to work and back home, his Sundays off,
even his handful of idle minutes garnered during working hours thanks to, say,
the malfunctioning of his machine, are “contingent.” He lives his life in continuous oscillation
between monotony and contingency. The
circle cannot be broken.
FIRST SPEAKER: Misfortune
is a mystery, she repeatedly insists.
And she makes a surprising turn to the following proposition: even if
working hours and working conditions were improved (as in most respects they
have been in many countries by now), misfortune wouldn’t disappear. In what sense would it survive?
SECOND SPEAKER: It would survive inasmuch as a worker has no
future; for if he “works his way up to the top of the ladder” he will no longer
be a worker. His existence is stuck in a
paradox. A dentist who is starving to
death (or any other starving person who has a profession) will still be a
dentist no matter how rich he becomes.
But a worker who manages to get control of a factory is no longer a
worker, but rather the manager of a factory.
FIRST SPEAKER: Nothing about his lot can ever be changed, even
if he calls himself “comrade” or whatever else.
SECOND SPEAKER: So there are many forms of freedom, lamentable
and dignified forms of it, but only one form of slavery. Beyond the monotony, all that is left to the
enslaved is the short-lived desire for change and for pleasure, and cheek by
jowl with it stand the temptations: idleness, nausea, disgust. The oscillation between mealtimes and work
and rest and work again, this “eating in order to be able to work and working
in order to be able to eat,” this absence of a goal, of a finalité, is the hallmark of naked existence.
Accordingly, Simone Weil believes that revolt against social
injustice is necessary; it is necessary to the curtailment of evil, to the
establishment of an approximation of equilibrium. But she also believes that to promise the
workers a successful revolt against their misfortune is to lie to them.
WEIL: “These lies lead to the abuse of workers’ greatest
strengths. They promise them a paradise
that is impossible. Marx said that
religion was the opium of the people.
No, revolution is the opium of the people. Revolutionary hopes are stimulating. All final systems are fundamentally
mistaken.”
NARRATOR: To be able to understand Simone Weil’s next move, we
must be familiar with her conception of the world beforehand. At the moment when she supposes she has found
the solution, we are already setting foot on the proscenium of her religious
creed. And for the sake of being able to
follow her, we wish to make it clear in advance that she believed in God. Yet we intend to reserve for ourselves her
peculiar form of Christian theism, her borderline heretical “Catholicism,”
which refused to affiliate itself with the Church because the Church was not
truly “catholic,” not “universal.” Hence
she sees the inescapable misfortune of the worker, his essential misfortunateness,
as a peculiar distinction. For a human
being who enjoys no possibility of orienting his desire towards goals, towards
things that could exist or will exist, can only orient his desire towards
something that already exists.
WEIL: “This something is beauty. Everything beautiful is an object of desire,
but its desirer has no desire for it to be different, to change anything about
it; he desires it as it already is…what he desires is precisely…something he
already possesses. As the people are
compelled to orient their desire entirely towards what they already possess,
beauty is made for them and they are made for beauty…The people need poetry as
they need bread. Not the poetry immured
in words. They need to have poetry as
the substance of their everyday lives.
Such poetry can only have one source. That source is God. This poetry can never be anything but
religion.”17
SECOND SPEAKER: By this Simone Weil means that the worker’s fundamental
misfortune produces a vacuum between man and God. A human being whose view was not blocked by
any desires, by any goal, would only need to raise his head and look upward to
realize that nothing separates him from God.
The difficulty would lie only in getting him to raise his head.
FIRST SPEAKER: But it would be wrong to infer from this that
she wishes to justify social misfortune, to justify deficiencies of this kind. In an earlier passage, we said that she involved
herself in revolts against social deficiencies, and she did indeed involve
herself in one very materially when she supported the French metalworkers’
strike in [1936] by greeting it with enthusiastic words. And yet in her eyes man’s essential
misfortune is ineradicable, although she believes it may be possible to
eradicate its concomitant, the accidental misfortune that robs him of the
strength to raise his head. Later she
formulates this principle as follows:
WEIL: “Misfortune must be eradicated from social life to the greatest possible extent, for misfortune serves grace alone and our society is not a society of the elect. There will always be sufficient misfortune for the elect.”18
SECOND SPEAKER: The fact that [she] was free [of] every trace
of sentimentality, even in her unconditional championing of the downtrodden,
and that she viewed both her struggle and her fellow-strugglers sub specie æternitatis, so to speak, was
owing to something that at first blush cannot but be quite off-putting, namely
her conception of the entire social and political sector as an appurtenance of
“evil.”
WEIL: “The good does not enter into the social domain at all19…The
social domain is irreducibly the prince of this world’s domain. In the social domain one’s only duty is to
try to curtail evil.”20
SECOND SPEAKER: This because:
WEIL: “It is the social domain that imparts the color of
absoluteness to relativism. The remedy
for this is contained in the idea of relatedness. Relatedness takes a violent leap out of the
social domain.”21
SECOND SPEAKER: But with this leap we have already arrived at
a new station of her journey. Naturally,
the stages of this journey overlap—although her religious thought finally
crystallizes only in the last years of her life, and although the social and
political problematic of the thirties remains the soil in which she took root
and the material of the period [tended] toward dematerialization [---].22
Simone Weil and her journey to God are of a peculiar
kind. She is a maverick. Accordingly, it has not even occurred to us
to situate her in relation to the other French Christian intellectuals of her
time, and it is probably also no accident that she never drops the names of
Péguy, Bernanos, or Bloy; and it is a moot question whether she was unaware of
them or disregarding them or deliberately setting herself apart from them. Her connection to twentieth-century
literature and philosophy seems to be merely tenuous. She makes one mention of Arthur Koestler’s Spanish Testament, which probably
impressed her because of its preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War. There are also one-time mentions of Proust,
Valéry, and Joseph Conrad, all of whom she held in high regard. In truth her attention was absorbed by things
of an entirely different nature, not including her interest in the social-scientific
theories that delineated the social and political landscape. These other things were texts in the canons
of ancient Greek literature, above all the Iliad;
and ancient Greek philosophy, above all, Plato, and also Pythagoras. She translated and interpreted classical
Greek texts, because she believed that they were essentially conveyors of “pre-Christian
intuitions.” It is of course an open
question whether the classical Greek conceptions of God and divine knowledge
were actual anticipations of the Christian conceptions of them or have merely
come to look like such anticipations in hindsight, since their absorption and
assimilation [into] those conceptions. In
her engagement with certain texts—those of classical Greece, the writings of
the Christian mystics, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Shakespeare, and
Racine—Simone Weil is prone to ardent love and veneration; whereas towards
certain others she feels nothing but an implacable antipathy: for the most
part, the Old Testament, Aristotle, and classical Roman literature simply
disgust her; whatever she cannot love she must toss onto the rubbish heap. The only texts that matter to her are the
ones that have been the recipients of “sacrifices,” or, to put it another way, those
in which she is capable of seeing traces of such sacrificial offerings. Her criticism often comes across as
presumptuous, and scarcely any reader will find it possible to share her view
of everything; but a good many readers will come to share her view of most of
the things that she found admirable—this because in a few of her essays she
manages to convey the beauty of ancient texts in a new and fascinating way.
Such is the upshot of the emollient and insightful words that
T.S. Eliot found to bestow on her and her work in recommending patience to readers
immersing themselves in Weil for the first time:
ELIOT: “Certainly she could be
unfair and intemperate; certainly she committed some astonishing aberrations
and exaggerations. But those immoderate affirmations which tax the patience of
the reader spring not from any flaw in her intellect but from excess of temperament…and
as for her own mind, it was worthy of the soul which employed it. But the
intellect, especially when bent upon such problems as those which harassed
Simone Weil, can come to maturity only slowly; and we must not forget that
Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-three. […S]he had a very great soul to
grow up to…”23
NARRATIVE: On account of this,
we will also avoid giving very close consideration to her opinions on this or
that subject—not because these opinions do not deserve such attention, but
rather because we wish to keep our eyes on her journey, which, although it did
indeed bring her into constant contact with bodies of literature and
philosophy, remained unique to her.
There is much talk nowadays of
a “pilgrimage to the absolute.” Now in
simple terms Simone Weil isn’t so much a pilgrim as an anti-pilgrim. Her journey is a via negativa, a journey away from God intended to increase the
distance between herself and God. And
this infinite distance [to] which she is brought by acceptance of the utmost
extremity of “misfortune,” is intended to make it possible for her not to confront
God as an individual, as a personality, whether from the perspective of a sceptic
or from that of a believer, but rather to experience grace as an extinguished
and naked existence. Thus in our hands
her multifaceted and multilayered work becomes an attestation of pure
mysticism, perhaps the only such attestation we have received since the Middle
Ages. It is probably under this aspect,
the aspect of an incomprehensible inspiration, that we should view her
writings if we are to do them full justice.
FIRST SPEAKER: A system, for
example, of a philosophical kind, is not contained in Simone Weil’s writings. Where they do evince the rudiments of a
system, they are downright weak; they are strong in rapport—a word that is difficult to translate into German and that
means entering into a relationship.24 The rapport occurs between her reason and
the absent God, for in everything that we think, learn, and experience, God is
nowhere to be found.
WEIL: “God cannot be present in
the creation except in the form of absence.”25
“One must situate God at an
infinite distance in order to conceive of him as innocent of evil:
complementarily, evil reveals that God must be situated at an infinite
distance.” 26
“Inasmuch as this world is
completely devoid of God it is God himself.”27
“One must exist in a desert. For he whom one must love is absent.”28
“Nothing that exists is
unconditionally deserving of love. One
must therefore love that which does not exist.”29
FIRST SPEAKER: This mere
handful of statements by Simone Weil fully conveys a sense of the version of degree
zero from which she tenaciously refused to budge. But in her case refusing to budge did not entail
idleness but rather thought and action, conscientiousness, discharging “one’s
duties to one’s fellow-man with the utmost stringency” possible, plodding indefatigably
onwards into the void for the sake of curtailing evil, and establishing
conditions for contact with “spiritual reality.” For as she says:
WEIL: “A paralytic is incapable
of perception.”30
SECOND SPEAKER: But she
categorically and especially will have no truck with anything that deceptively
distances us from this ground zero—with the search for consolation, hope, or
the remediation of suffering, with any attempt to flush out the void via an exercise
of the imagination.
WEIL: “The imagination is
constantly striving to caulk all the cracks that grace could possibly seep
through.”31
“In its effort to fill the
void, the imagination is essentially duplicitous.”32
“The past and the future
forestall the salutary effect of misfortune in affording a field-day to
imaginative flights of fancy. This is
why the renunciation of the past and the future is the most important of all
acts of renunciation.”33ball to
SECOND SPEAKER: Next she draws
into this terrifying logical nexus those central imaginative concepts of the Christian
religion from which its adherents derive their chief consolation. She reasons as follows: divine mercy consists
in the utter absence of God’s mercy from the earth. And a belief in immortality as a prolongation
of life only prevents the believer from making the proper use of death. One must prohibit oneself from entertaining
this belief for God’s sake, for it does not lie within our power to imagine the
soul as a disembodied entity.
FIRST SPEAKER: But she thinks
along these lines because there is one thing she is keen on avoiding at all
costs—namely the creation of an imaginary God, a new “great beast”—the term is
taken from Plato’s Republic—that
would join forces with the other “great beasts.” She numbers among the great beasts everything
that wields power and everything that ever has wielded it.
WEIL: “Rome: the atheistic,
materialist great beast, which worships itself alone. Israel: the religious great beast. Neither of them is loveable. The great beast is always repulsive.”34
“To the extent that Marxism is
true, it is contained in its entirety in Plato’s passage on the great beast,
and its refutation is also contained therein.”35
“Service rendered to false gods…purifies evil in eliminating
its horror. In the eyes of someone who
renders such service, nothing seems evil but any lapse in this rendition. But service rendered to the true God allows the
horror of evil to subsist and even intensifies the horror.”36
SECOND SPEAKER: The fact that Simone Weil’s most vehement
strictures on all forms of totalitarianism are directly connected to her love
of God is readily inferable from these passages. But we would like to single out another
feature of them in order to clarify her attitude towards the Catholic
Church. In a single breath and using the
term great beast she dismisses not
only the entire trajectory leading from Allah to Marxism and the Roman Empire
to Hitler, but also the God of the Old Testament. But the divine mission of Israel is the basis
of the New Testament, and consequently the basis of the Christian Church. Eliot is of the opinion that her rejection of
Israel prevented her from becoming an officially confirmed Christian, that the
difficulties that emerged from this rejection made it impossible for her to
undergo conversion. This may indeed be
the explanation; in any case, it is certain that she did not wish to
convert. She set out her reasons in her
letters to the Dominican monk Father Perrin, the warmest and most personal
letters she ever wrote. Here for the
first time is a person who understands her, who does not bemusedly shake his
head at the very thought of her. Her
brusqueness was transformed <…>.
WEIL: “Being continually ready to admit that another being [un
autre] is something different [autre] from what one reads in him when he is
present (or when one is thinking of him).
Or rather to read in him that he is assuredly something different,
perhaps something entirely different from what one reads there.
Every being is a silent cry to be read differently.” 37
SECOND SPEAKER: The letters to Perrin date from 1942, before
she leaves Europe; this is a year before her death. In them she explains why she cannot join the
Church.
WEIL: “Christianity must
encompass all vocations without exception, because it is catholic. Hence the Church must also be so
all-encompassing. But in my eyes
Christianity is catholic de jure and
not de facto. So many things are outside of it, so many
things that I love and do not wish to abandon, so many things that God loves,
for otherwise they would be devoid of existence. The entire immense expanse of past centuries,
with the exception of the last twenty; all the countries inhabited by people of
color; the entirety of secular life in white people’s countries; in the history
of these countries, all the traditions accused of heresy, like the Manichean
and Albigensian traditions; all the things that came out of the Renaissance,
which have been too often debased, but never absolutely devoid of value.
As Christianity is catholic de jure and not de facto, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of
the Church de jure and not de facto…”38
SECOND SPEAKER: She speaks of the
necessity of the Church as a collective protectress of dogma, but she believes
that it is abusing its authority whenever it imposes its language as a norm on
our reason and our love.
WEIL: “This abuse of power does
not emanate from God. It comes from the natural
tendency of all collectivities, without exception, to abuse their power.”39
SECOND SPEAKER: She continues
along these lines in another passage:
WEIL: “In order for the
Church’s current attitude to be efficacious and genuinely penetrative of social
existence, the Church would have to admit that it has changed or wishes to
change. Otherwise how could anyone who
remembers the Inquisition take it seriously?
You must pardon me for mentioning the Inquisition; owing to my friendly
regard for you, which extends beyond you to your order, it pains me very much
to call to mind this institution here.
But the institution existed. After
the fall of the Roman Empire, which was totalitarian, it was the Church which
drafted the first blueprint of totalitarianism in Europe, in the thirteenth
century, after the Albigensian Crusade.
This tree has borne ample fruit....Moreover, it
was via a judicious transposition of this practice that all the parties established
by totalitarian regimes in our own time were founded. This is a historical moment that I have
studied with particular attention.”40
FIRST SPEAKER: But after
drawing attention to this criticism of the Church, of that portion of the
Church belonging to the social and political sector, it would be unfair not to
highlight her profound reverence for the Christian religion. In her eyes Christ is the model of
righteousness because he was naked and dead.
His healing of the sick, his resurrection of the dead, seems to her the
most trivial part of his mission, its human part; she singles out as the
supernatural part of his mission his unfulfilled longing for human
consolations, his feeling of being forsaken by God. Through this feeling one can strive to equal
God, not God Almighty, but God who died on the cross, for whom God is likewise
absent.
SECOND SPEAKER: But [in] all
her reflections, which she repeatedly and insistently elucidates to Perrin, she
keeps returning to the question of what must be done “now.” In one passage she speaks of one of her
contemporaries—Maritain—and takes up his call for a new type of holiness. To be sure, she points out, Maritain has
contented himself with enumerating aspects of earlier versions of holiness that
have fallen into temporary obsolescence.
WEIL: “The world needs saints endowed with
genius as a city infested with the plague needs doctors.”41
SECOND SPEAKER: And she hopes
that where need is in evidence, a sense of obligation will also emerge.
NARRATOR: Needless to say, the description
of a complex body of work and of the numerous themes that it deals
with—especially given that they are not dealt with in a systematic, coherent
fashion; the description of a life that is ever-so-intimately bound up with
this body of work, must confine its attention to a handful of highly significant
and readily discernable features. But
even if this description can be said to have succeeded in shining some light on
the phenomenon that is Simone Weil, something else is still missing—that
something being an elucidation in the fullest sense of the word.
Her first editor—Gustave
Thibon, with whom she was also personally acquainted—has to some extent
provided this elucidation in expressing the understandable fear that after
publication her writings would be interpreted in the light of current political
life, by which he may have principally meant the distorted versions of politics
practiced by political parties.
THIBON: “No social group or
worldview has the right to claim her. Her
love of the people and hatred of all oppression do not suffice to ally her with
any of the parties of the Left; nor do her negative stance towards progress and
her reverence for tradition authorize her classification as a member of the
Right. Every time she committed herself
politically, she did so with the selfsame passion with which she engaged in
every activity; but by no means did this amount to anything like the
deification of an idea, a nation, or a class…”42
NARRATOR: This is all quite true, but for precision’s sake one
must add that not even the Church can claim her as an ally. Wherever she found herself, she always
remained standing at the threshold, rigorously consistent to the last.
To interpret Simone Weil’s work in the light of genuine
current political reality, which includes all current realities, is
nevertheless still necessary. She may
yet contribute to the demolition of relations, to the recognition of the “Great
Beast” in every form in which it manifests itself. Anybody who recognizes it will cease to serve
it and instead do everything in his power to curtail the evil engendered by
it. Championing the curtailment of evil
will then become an authentic social duty.
For Simone Weil this was a duty that had to be performed “in all
circumstances” lest the love of one’s neighbor remain nothing but an empty
phrase. Neighborly love is a universal
love and loves every human being who needs help regardless of whether it knows
his name. Thus Weil wished, for example,
to go to Russia when the Germans had penetrated deep into that country, even
though she regarded the Soviet State as an evil, as a modification of Marxism,
of the “Great Beast.” When fulfilling
this wish proved impossible, she still had enough time left to give proof of
the sincerity of her neighborly love.
The suffering inflicted on her by the persecution and annihilation of
the Jews in Germany, the misery of the occupied French, destroyed her
psychically; the work she undertook in the hope of alleviating the sufferings
of others destroyed her physically.
Her faith in God, which sometimes seemed impossible [to her]
in the light of the ever-increasing horror, was not destroyed. The relationship with the absolute into which
she entered was sustainable for her.
This relationship made it possible for her to believe that there was
love in the “worst of all possible worlds,” because it repudiated the presence
of God in that world.
There is nothing about this mystical
entering-into-a-relationship-with-the-absolute that we can make our own in any
way. It would be madness to maintain
that we can participate in it, that we can exploit it for our own uses like a
system of knowledge. Such being the
case, this portion of Simone Weil’s journey is impracticable in the strictest
sense. It was always only ever
vouchsafed to a few and will only ever again be pursued by the few in sundry ways. It has always been pursued in sundry ways and
always will be pursued in sundry ways.
But to the extent that we are receptive
to it, the beauty that inheres in everything that is thought and lived in
purity ultimately finds a refuge in us. Once illuminated by this beauty, we repeatedly
catch glimpses of something concealed from us by the darkness—the
indestructible visage of the human individual in a world that has been
conspiring to bring about his destruction.
WEIL: “After my year of factory
work, before my resumption of teaching, my parents had brought me to Portugal,
and there I left them and went to live alone in a small village. My body and
soul had both been ripped to pieces after a fashion. That contact with misfortune had murdered my
youth. Until then I had not experienced
any misfortune apart from my own, which seemed unimportant to me because it was
my own, and which in any case was merely semi-misfortune in being of a
biological rather than a social nature. I was well aware that there was a great
deal of misfortune in the world; I was obsessed with it, but I had never
observed it while being in sustained contact with it. During my time at the factory, lost as I then
was in the anonymous mass in both everyone else’s eyes and my own, the
misfortune of others seeped into my flesh and into my soul. Nothing separated me from it, for I had
genuinely forgotten my past and I expected nothing from the future, as I found
it difficult to imagine surviving that period of constant fatigue. What I suffered then has marked me…indelibly…There
I received the mark of the glowing iron that the Romans burned into the
foreheads of their most despised slaves. Ever since then, I have regarded
myself as a slave.”43
THE END
Notes
1. First
broadcast in the first half of 1955 on Bavarian Radio in Munich. The specific broadcast date is no longer
known. [editors’ note (hereafter Ed.)]
2. Misfortune and Divine Love is my fairly literal
translation of Das Unglück und die
Gottesliebe, the title of Kemp’s translation of Attente de Dieu, a title more literally known in English translation
as Waiting for God or Awaiting God. Gravity
and Grace is the standard English title of Le Pesanteur et la grâce, which Kemp likewise literally rendered as
Schwerkraft und Gnade. [translator’s
note (hereafter Tr.)]
3. Having been
born on February 3, 1909, Simone Weil was actually already 34 years old at the
time of her death [Tr.]
4. Gravity and Grace, translated
by Friedhelm Kemp (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1952), p. 159, modified. [Ed.] Here,
as elsewhere when I have access to the original French source (in
this case, p 79 of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi electronic edition of
"La pesanteur et la grâce"), I have collated the German with that
original to produce a composite translation, and when the editors have noted modifications,
I have pointed out substantial divergences from the original that may
correspond to them. As I do not have
access to Kemp’s translations, I cannot be certain that such divergences in passages
taken from these translations (such as the one cited in the present note) are the
result of liberties taken by Bachmann rather than by Kemp. The only substantial divergence in this
passage is the presence of zu erreichen
(to attain), which introduces a sense of striving and movement not immediately
entailed by pour la pureté on its own.
[Tr.]
5. Simone Weil, Cahiers [Notebooks] II, (Plon: Paris, 1953), p. 260f., modified. [Ed.] As I
do not have access to the Cahiers, I
have translated this passage, along with the one from them cited later in the
essay, exclusively from Bachmann’s German. [Tr.]
6. As the editors
do not cite a source for these passages, I have translated them exclusively
from the German. [Tr.]
7. “Journal
d’Usine (Factory Diary) 1934-1935,” in La
condition ouvrière. Gallimard,
Paris: 1951. Paperback edition, p.119.
[Ed.] Translated directly from p.79 of Université
du Québec à Chicoutimi electronic edition of "La condition ouvrière,"
with approximations of Bachmann’s ellipses. [Tr.]
8. “Fragments” in
La condition ouvrière, p. 130. [Ed.]
Translated directly from ibid.,
p. 100. [Tr.]
9. Ibid., p. 153.
[Ed.] Ibid.,
p. 101. [Tr.]
10. “Journal
d’Usine,” p. 130. [Ed.] Translated directly from ibid.,
p. 86. [Tr.]
11. Ibid., p. 131.
[Ed.] Translated directly from ibid.,
p. 87, with the exception of the bracketed sections, which correspond to
alterations made by Bachmann but unnoted by the editors. [Tr.]
12. Ibid., p. 134.
[Ed.] Translated directly from ibid.,
p. 88. [Tr.]
13. “Fragments,”
p. 168. [Ed.] Translated directly from ibid.,
p. 111. [Tr.]
14. Gravity and Grace, p. 238. [Ed.] Translated
directly from the
Université du Québec à Chicoutimi electronic edition "La pesanteur et la
grâce," p. 138. [Tr.]
15. Since
published in a translation by Friedhelm Kemp entitled “Studie für eine
Erklärung der Pflichten gegen das menschliche
Wesen” in Simone Weil, Zeugnis für
das Gute. Traktate—Briefe—Aufzeichnungen. Walter Verlag, Olten and Freiburg: 1976.
[Eds.] Bachmann is presumably referring
to Enracinement (1949), whose 1952 English
translation by Arthur Willis is entitled The
Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind.
16. “Condition
première d’un travail non servile” in: La
condition ouvrière, p. 358, modified. [Ed.] I have translated from Bachmann’s
German, as it differs so dramatically from the original passage (on p. 218 of the
electronic edition) as to be more accurately regarded as a paraphrase than
as a translation, and the explicit equation of revolution to opium comes from La pesanteur et la grâce. (See
p. 178 of the electronic edition.) [Tr.]
17. Ibid., p. 265
f. [Ed.] La
condition ourvrière, p. 219.
18. Gravity and Grace, p. 264.
[Ed.] La pesanteur et la grâce, p. 157. [Tr.]
19. Ibid., p. 266,
modified. [Ed.] Ibid, p. 159. Bachmann’s
modification consists in the trimming of a sentence that in full may be
translated, “The vegetative and the social are the two domains into which the
good does not enter.” [Tr.]
20. Ibid., p. 266.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 159 [Tr.]
21. Ibid., p. 266.
[Ed.] Ibid. [Tr.]
22. “Tended” is my
guess at the identity of the clause’s missing second verb.
23. Misfortune and Divine Love, translated
by Friedhelm Kemp, preface, p. 12. [Tr.] The passage puzzlingly corresponds to one in
Eliot’s preface to a different book, The Need for Roots. I quote the original English source, as
presented here.
24. The peculiar definition
of rapport as entering into a
relationship rather than as an already-established relationship is all
Bachmann’s (“entering into a relationship” is my rendition of Bachmann’s
“In-Beziehung-Setzen,” most literally translated as “placing-in-relation”), and
it entails the unidiomatic “occurs” (for findet
statt) in the following sentence.
25. Gravity and Grace, p. 200. [Ed.] La pesanteur et la grâce, p. 110. [Tr.]
26. Ibid. [Ed. and Tr.]
27. Ibid. [Ed. and Tr.]
28. Ibid. [Ed. and Tr.]
29. Ibid., p. 200.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 111. [Tr.]
30. Simone Weil, Cahiers [Notebooks] II, p. 272, modified. [Ed.] See n. 5. [Tr.]
31. Gravity and Grace, p. 78. [Ed.]
La pesanteur et la grâce, p. 24.
[Tr.]
32. Ibid., p. 79.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 25. [Tr.]
33. Ibid., p. 82.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 27 [Tr.]
34. Ibid., p. 268.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 161. [Tr.]
35. Ibid., p. 269.
[Ed.] Ibid. [Tr.]
36. Ibid., p. 270.
[Ed.] Ibid. [Tr.]
37. Ibid., p. 233.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 133-134. [Tr.]
38. Misfortune and Divine Love, p. 58 f.
[Ed.] Attente de Dieu, Université
du Québec à Chicoutimi electronic edition, p. 42.
39. Ibid., p. 65. [Ed.] Ibid., p. 46. [Tr.]
40. Ibid. p. 67 f. [Ed.] Ibid. pp. 47-48. [Tr.]
41. Ibid., p. 88.
[Ed.] Ibid., p. 63. [Tr.]
42. The editors do
not attribute this passage, but it is to be found in Gustave Thibon’s introduction
to La pesanteur et la grâce. As the Chicoutimi electronic edition of the
book does not include this introduction, I have translated from Bachmann’s (or,
as it may be, Kemp’s) German. [Tr.]
43. Ibid. [i.e., Misfortune and Divine Love], p. 47.
[Ed.] Attente de Dieu, p. 35. [Tr.]
Translation
unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke, edited by
Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster (Munich: Piper,
1978), Vol. IV, pp. 128-155.