Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings - Softcover

Weil, Simone

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268041504 ISBN 13: 9780268041502

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015

Synopsis

Although trained as a philosopher, Simone Weil (1909–43) contributed to a wide range of subjects, resulting in a rich field of interdisciplinary Weil studies. Yet those coming to her work from such disciplines as sociology, history, political science, religious studies, French studies, and women’s studies are often ignorant of or baffled by her philosophical investigations. In Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, Eric O. Springsted presents a unique collection of Weil’s writings, one concentrating on her explicitly philosophical thinking.

The essays are drawn chiefly from the time Weil spent in Marseille in 1940-42, as well as one written from London; most have been out of print for some time; three appear for the first time; all are newly translated. Beyond making important texts available, this selection provides the context for understanding Weil's thought as a whole. This volume is important not only for those with a general interest in Weil; it also specifically presents Weil as a philosopher, chiefly one interested in questions of the nature of value, moral thought, and the relation of faith and reason. What also appears through this judicious selection is an important confirmation that on many issues respecting the nature of philosophy, Weil, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard shared a great deal.

About this title

About the Authors

Simone Adolphine Weil (1909-1943) was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher and taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks because of poor health and in order to devote herself to political activism. Such work saw her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in car factories, so that she could better understand the working class. Weil became increasingly religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. She wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields.

Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It can be highly misleading to separate out a complex thinker’s works too neatly into discrete subjects if one wants to understand the thinker herself. This is especially the case with somebody such as Simone Weil. Her works cover philosophy, history, social matters (such as justice, labor, and politics), mysticism, world religions, and subjects belonging to Christian theology. Valuable as these insights may be to those fields individually, there is an intellectual character to all of them that clearly shows they come from a single, and singular, mind. The insights are valuable in themselves, but the thinker transcends them. For anyone to say who Weil is as a thinker, and what she has to teach anybody, and to say it accurately, much less well, one ultimately has to take into consideration all of her work as a whole and its complex overlapping.

Still, it can be a very helpful exercise to take up the question of Weil’s thinking about philosophy as a particular subject, that is, to take up what she thought thinking is and ought to be and hence what she thought she was doing in writing all that she did. It is to take up what she thought the value of her work was and, as it turns out, what her thinking on value was.

But in treating what Weil thought philosophy is, we need to be careful about what exactly we are doing. Numerous books and articles on Weil have treated her from a philosophical point of view. But doing so can present certain problems, most generally when one fails to see where her interests and concerns go far beyond what academic philosophers normally treat. There are a number of places where this happens. Above all, to approach her in a strictly philosophical way will often completely miss―often deliberately―a genuine and central theological

commitment in Simone Weil the thinker, or will miss it as a theological or religious commitment. Her Christianity, as unorthodox as it often appears, is not an addendum or a conclusion to a chain of reasoning from elsewhere. For her, there really is an act of God that takes place in Christ’s Incarnation and Crucifixion that determines the nature of the world and of human beings. This conviction was something she herself admits that she came by unexpectedly through personal experience, and not by a process of reasoning. She even goes so far as to suggest that her reason wasn’t quite sure what to do with what was indeed a certitude in her life. Yet, lest one mistake things on the other side, it also needs to be understood that this religious commitment does not make serious and unremitting philosophical reflection beside the point for Weil. Far from it. She is not just an anthology of mystical insights. So, how this commitment and philosophy go together is of the first order for understanding Weil. It is a matter of getting it right on both sides of the equation.

A second mistake occurs when one treats her as a philosopher in the sense that she is somebody who produces a philosophy. This is more than a problem of ignoring the obvious and oft-repeated fact that Weil is not a systematic thinker. Even though she is not, she is not an incoherent thinker, and what she says in one place often really does have bearing on what she says elsewhere. She thinks in a highly analogical way and finds some very startling and striking connections between otherwise disparate areas of thought. For this reason, it really is possible to provide some sort of conceptual map of the distinctive parts of her thinking. It is possible to teach somebody what significant things she has to say, and it is possible to show a person how to move from one concept to another in her thought. She is not an oracle. Rather, the mistake comes in thinking that once one has provided such a map that one has said what she was trying to do as a philosopher. For example, one might be tempted once such a map has been drawn then to compare her various “positions” as a philosopher with those of other philosophers. Though she has startling and discernible positions, one might be tempted to think that such positions are what she thinks philosophers ought to be coming up with, and that philosophy, as it is in the academy, is a matter of continually arguing for and against these positions. One can see where this has happened in treating Weil, even from the very beginning of the secondary literature on her. For example, Miklos Vetö, in his early and still very helpful The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, provides a way to navigate around Weil’s thinking that is quite accurate and insightful.1 He is also quite helpful in regularly pointing out the degree to which Weil was indebted to Plato and to Kant. But Vetö also was insistent that Weil was a “classical metaphysician,” which is to say, he thinks that she was doing something like building a position, and that not only can one compare it to others, say, Kant, but that one intellectually ought to be doing that. But that is exactly what is at stake, at least insofar as Weil herself saw the nature of philosophy, because she did not think philosophy was that at all.

Finally, one can also make a related mistake by thinking that in uncovering her “metaphysics” one has uncovered the ultimate grounds for everything else she has to say, that one has somehow gotten “behind” what she says to find something like a theory that explains her various positions, or that somehow causes them, or that somebody else could use to build an intellectual position. Such a theory, of course, would constitute the ultimate meaning of her philosophical work, and what she has to say as a whole would then stand or fall on that. But again this is not how she thought.

So, with these caveats, it will be helpful to turn to some of Weil’s own striking comments to say what she does think philosophy is. Fortunately, we have not only suggestive isolated comments but also several essays and sets of notes from her most intellectually productive period that deal with the issue.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268041504
• ISBN 13: 9780268041502
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214