Weil, Simone – Maverick Philosopher

Julian Green on Simone Weil

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957. Entry of 3 December 1950, p.223, emphasis added:

Simeone Weil. I know very little about her works and I am reading them at present with astonishment. She touches on all the subjects that move me most and seeks what is deepest in us. Her passion for the absolute makes her kin to the best, and her contempt for what is relative is, I think, unequaled except by St. John of the Cross and Pascal . . . . How many books that were mere literature does she convict of vanity! How many things does she outmode and reduce their contents to nothing! Robert tells me that her conclusions are nonhuman, and I think so too, but that means that she climbs to heights where we find it hard to breathe. A monster of intelligence. There is something about her that horrifies.

For more excerpts from Green’s diary, visit my Green, Julien category.

Karl White tells me he looked for this old essay of mine but couldn’t find it. His interest, for which I am grateful, inspired me to thoroughly re-think and re-work it. It is now tighter, cleaner, and better organized, and to be found at the top of the Stack.

In her New York Notebook from 1942, Simone Weil presents an argument which she claims “…is greatly preferable to Pascal’s wager.”[i] One of her commentators agrees, finding her argument “obviously both morally and intellectually” superior to Pascal’s.[ii] I will call this argument “Weil’s Wager.” As far as I know, it has yet to be subjected to a close examination.

Church Patriotism

Simone Weil, somewhere in Gravity and Grace, speaks of "church patriotism." It's comparable to the knee-jerk patriotism of the "my country right or wrong" sort. Both are forms of idolatry. Ecclesiolatry on the one hand, statolatry on the other. (That's not my coinage; bang on the link.)

Be neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois

A Substack short with a scene from "Barfly."

Is that Bukowski at the bar?

Why a Philosopher Should Meditate . . .

. . . and why it is difficult for a philosopher to meditate. I trust that you are alive to the semantic polyvalence of 'meditate' and appreciate the sense in which I am using the term.

Substack latest.

Crucifixion as Incarnation in extremis

In an earlier thread, Vito Caiati states:

Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die [in horrific] pain but without the terrors of the unknown that plague us ordinary human beings.

I responded:

But then Christ is not fully human. The orthodox line is that he is fully human and fully divine. To be fully human, however, he has to experience the horror of abandonment which is worse than physical suffering. The scripture indicates that he does: "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On the cross, Christ experiences the terrifying doubt that he was deluded in thinking himself the Son of God or perhaps even that there is a God in the first place. If he didn't experience at least the first of these, then the Incarnation is not 'serious' and he didn't become one of us in full measure.

And then this Good Friday morning it occurred to me that I may have gotten this idea from Simone Weil, an idea that I discuss in At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron which I uploaded to Substack on Good Friday three years ago. There I wrote:

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis. Christ’s spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament. He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional.

The darkest hour. And then dawn.

The reason?

If God were to become one of us, fully one of us, a slob like one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh? Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery? That is Weil's point. The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all human beings, define being human.

But Vito has a response:

I would suggest that when we speak of Christ’s humanity, we are referring to a human nature that is not deformed by original sin. Thus, the human nature that he shares with us is the prelapsarian one intended by God [for us before the Fall].

But this complicates the theological picture. For not only is the man Jesus born of a virgin, supernaturally impregnated by the Holy Spirit, the virgin Mary cannot be a transmitter of Original Sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: the BVM had to be conceived without Original Sin. The further theological 'epicycle,' even though it does not render the whole narrative incredible, does make it more difficult to believe.

But even if it is all true, Original Sin, Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Weil's point would seem to retain its merit. Perhaps it could be put like this. For the redemption of such wretches as we are, God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, would have to enter in full measure into our miserable animal predicament if he is to be fully and really human.

It is almost as if there is a whiff of docetism in Vito's suggestion. It would be instructive to work through all of the Christological 'heresies.'

Intimations of Elsewhere: Sensible Reminders of Hidden Beauty

Salzburg, Austria, December 1971. A young Austrian girl, radiant and beautiful, walked into the kitchen. I lost all desire for the food I had prepared. My soul sprouted wings. The visible beauty triggered a memory of a timeless Beauty. Anamnesis pierced for a moment the amnesia induced by the bodily senses.

Dayton, Ohio, 1978. Gripped by the audible beauty of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, the solo passage near the beginning of the Larghetto (26:33), upon return from a long, hard run, I could not eat the huge salad I had prepared. I set it down, my appetite gone.

Simone Weil (FLN, 318): "When once the whole of one's desire is turned toward God, one has no desire to eat when one is hungry."

The metaphysical elsewhere: beyond space, before time. Space- and time-bound as we are 'at present,' we must use spatial and temporal language to point beyond the spatiotemporal.

The intimations are rare. Don't ignore them, record them, honor and remember them. To dismiss them as the worldly are wont to do strikes me as the height of spiritual foolishness.

Simone Weil in the Light of Plato

Substack notes on Phaedo 83.

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 4, p. 57 (10 October 1960):

The superb moral and positive beauty of the Phaedo. One does not have to agree with Plato, but one must hear him. Not to listen to such a voice is unpardonable, it is like not listening to conscience or nature.

Absolutely right.

The writings of Plato are inexhaustible in their riches. For years I read and taught the Phaedo dialogue, without appreciating the theory of relations contained therein until I read Plato's "Phaedo" Theory of Relations by Héctor-Neri Castañeda. I spent the summer of 1984 with Hector in Bloomington at Indiana University on an NEH summer seminar grant. Little did I know at the time that Frithjof Schuon, a very different type of philosopher than Hector, and one I admire more than Hector, was living in Bloomington at the same time. An opportunity missed!

Hector was a brilliant man, a creative powerhouse, and most generous in the help he gave his younger colleagues, but his approach to philosophy was merely theoretical; I discerned no spiritual depth in him. Schuon was roughly the opposite: spiritually deep but in need of some analytic discipline. Plato combined the attributes of spiritual depth and analytic penetration that fall asunder in lesser mortals.

For Weil, Plato "has genius whereas only the word talent applies to Aristotle." ("Human Personality" in Simone Weil, An Anthology, p. 67)

Simone Weil on False Gods

Over at Substack. If you haven't made the acquaintance of Simone Weil, may I introduce you?

A False Religious Humility?

I wonder about the self-abasing humility of those at the extreme forward edge of the religious sensibility as personified by Simone Weil and others and as expressed in such locutions as "I am nothing" that one finds sprinkled about in devotional literature. How could I be nothing given my divine origin? Is the creature nothing at all? That makes no sense. If the creature is nothing at all, then there is no creature and God is not creator.

From our inauspicious debut in copulative slime to our end in ashes and dust, we are nothing much, but real nonetheless. The Weilian extreme with its false humility is best avoided, but better than the insane arrogance of a Russell or a Sartre.

To be arrogant is to arrogate to oneself attributes one does not possess. And so the mortal man puffs himself up as if he were an immortal god. Russell and Sartre and Co. make idols of their petty, rebellious egos. They've got the direction right, but not the way to it. Theosis is indeed the goal, but it cannot be attained on one's own, by one's own power. Genesis has it that man alone is made in the image and likeness of God. I take that to mean that man alone is a spiritual animal, a personal animal. Man alone has a higher origin and higher destiny, a destiny that Eastern Orthodox Christianity describes as theosis or deification. The goal is to become god-like, a goal unattainable without God and the divine initiative.

Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil

My Substack latest

Simone Weil on False Gods

Despite her infuriating extremism, Simone Weil may well be the purest incarnation of religious sensibility in the twentieth century. "It's not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods." As Weil understands, essential to genuine religion, though not exhaustive of it, is the realization that nothing here below can satisfy us, and that the things we zealously pursue as if they could satisfy us are false gods. The following statement of Weil's is exactly right:

First, not to believe that the future is a place capable of fulfilling us. The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We well know that what we have that is good, wealth, power, esteem, knowledge, love of those we love, prosperity of those we love, and so on, does not suffice to satisfy us. But we believe that the day when we will have a little more, we will be satisfied. We believe it because we are lying to ourselves. For if we really think about it for a while we know it's false. Or again if we are suffering affliction, we believe that the day when this suffering will cease, we will be satisfied. There again we know it's untrue; as soon as we have gotten used to the cessation of suffering we want something else.

More here.

Thought, Prayer, Meditation

"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses. It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate and wait, like Weil, in silence. (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)

So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer. But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the hum an condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute. But we are also, undeniably, animals. Our human condition is thus a predicament, that of a spiritual animal. As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought. As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth. As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes. As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals. In the extremity of suffering, the body that served us as vehicle becomes a burden and a cross, and our way through the vale becomes a via dolorosa.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh? Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery? That is Weil's point. The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis. His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament. He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional.

The darkest hour. And then dawn.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh? Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery? That is Weil's point. The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis. His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment. He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional.

The darkest hour. And then dawn.