Simone Weil: Philosopher of compassion

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

I read a novel that mentioned Simone Weil in passing and I didn't know much about her so I got a biography of her to read. I'm writing about her here because she was a Christian Mystic and very interested in suffering, and she had some interesting ethical ideas. I think she was a Bodhisattva.

I think it's cool that the internet has three different examples of how to pronounce her name: One, two, three. This one is different.

She was born in Paris in 1909. Her brother was a math genius, her mother was an frustrated/oppressed female who wasn't allowed to be a doctor, so she channeled her energy into her children. Simone was among the first women to go to college, and because of her confrontational style was sent far away to teach as part of the French system. Her nickname was the Red Virgin and she was sent to Le Puy that had a red virgin statue, a 9 hour train ride from Paris that her devoted mother would travel once a month to care for her.

She taught laborers philosophy and other subjects to help them pass exams to get promotions. She had an ascetic side, and an androgynous style, and always had those glasses and haircut. Her students in Le Puy admired her devotion and her limitations. She was a Marxist for a while and believed in the redemption of work, evolved to revolutionary syndicalism. She worked on a fishing boat and remained connected to the fisherman who gave her a chance to work on his boat during a vacation. She was a kind teacher, but she was cruel to her student peers when she was in school, cutting one friend off for a year when he used a source in a presentation that she did not approve of. Her family still invited him over for dinner and she just ignored him for a year. She dismissed the author of the Second Sex in their one meeting. She was sickly and would push herself to the point of a breakdown, and had an eating disorder. She would go to Berlin and live with a working class family to further political action.

To follow her life, is to go through some interesting European history. It is better to read a full account instead of my outline but I thought it was funny that a right wing newspaper likened her to "...mushrooms that grow on hummus." They didn't like her supporting the unemployed and poor rights, but in the end they didn't force her from the school and the work program got a raise and better conditions! She would go to the nearest industrial city and teach workers on the weekend, and generally seemed to agitate for the the good with a full schedule of activities.

Like Hemingway and Orwell she went off to Spain to fight against Franco. She stepped in a pot of boiling water and was pulled out of the fighting.

She went to the USA because her parents wouldn't go without her, and she wanted to save them. But she went back to London. Like Walt Whitman she wanted to be a nurse on the front lines. She died before she could go. She died at age 34. She had tuberculosis but refused to eat more because others were so hungry. Was it a kind of suicide to not eat enough to recover?

From Francine du Plessix Gray's biography, "Might not her reluctance to join the Church have been equally impelled by her need to renounce all forms of satisfaction--by her spiritual anorexia?"

The biography says she discovered Milarepa at the public library in NYC. Googling Simone Weil and Buddhism I found this bibliography. He notoriously starved himself as well, turning green from nettle soup. I think she liked his asceticism.



Links
What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil’s Radical Reminder (NY Times)

American Weil Society

Enlightened by love 5 part podcast by David Cayley

An Encounter with Simone Weil. A filmmaker Julia Hazlett is inspired by "Attention is the rarest and purest for of compassion." a quote from Weil. She also grooves on, "always do what will cost you the most." Here is a NY Times article about the movie. Turn on the subtitles to get French translations when people speak French. If you don't have Amazon Prime, it's on Vudu with commercials. What I get from this movie is how integrated she was, she really put into practice her beliefs. She quit eating sugar in solidarity with the soldiers during WW1. Hazlett weaves in her own questions about her father and her brother's suicide. Could she have prevented them from committing suicide? What if she had given them more attention and less judgement? I think it's a mark of grief to wonder what more could I have done.

In Our Time BBC

WikiQuotes of Simone Weil



Writings in translation/English by Simone Weil

The Illiad or the poem of Force.

Oppression and Liberty

Attention: Awaiting God

Gravity and Grace

Factory Works

Lectures on Philosophy

An Anthology



Secondary Works

Susan Sontag on Simone Weil

by Robert Chenavier Simone Weil: Attention to the Real chapter one

The ''Seriousness'' of Simone Weil by FREDERICK C. STERN (a book review of George Abbott White, ed., Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life)

Abi Doukhan lectures on Awaiting God