Category: Weil, Simone
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“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”
I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In many of its forms it borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays…
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The Extremism of Simone Weil
A longish essay of mine, Weil's Wager, ends like this: Although Weilian disinterest may appear morally superior to Pascalian self-interest, I would say that the former is merely an example of a perverse strain in Weil’s thinking. One mistake she makes is to drive a wedge between the question of the good and the question…
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Hans Meyerhoff Contra Simone Weil
A trenchant critique from September, 1957. (HT: Karl White)
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Credo
Simone Weil's Profession of Faith begins as follows. There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good,…
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The Strange World of Simone Weil: God Does and Does Not Exist
In the chapter "Atheism as a Purification" in Gravity and Grace (Routledge 1995, tr. Emma Craufurd from the French, first pub. in 1947), the first entry reads as follows: A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God…
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The Impermanence of the Impermanent and the Permanent
The most ephemeral and fragile of things are yet not nothing: a wisp of cloud, a passing shadow, a baby whose hour of birth is its hour of death. And such seemingly permanent fixtures of the universe as Polaris are yet not entirely being. Both the relatively impermanent and the relatively permanent point beyond themselves to the absolutely permanent. …
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Self-Effacement and Self-Importance
To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance? I am thinking of Simone Weil. In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself. "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit…
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Idolatry and Iconoclasm: A Weilian Meditation
In one of its senses, superstition involves attributing to an object powers it cannot possess. But the same thing is involved in idolatry. Someone who makes an idol of money, for example, attributes to it a power it cannot possess such as the power to confer happiness on those who have it. So we need…
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Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil
Both refused to live conventionally. The Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin. Both said No to the bourgeois life. But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed. Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent. For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church…
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Pet Love as Idolatry? Problems of Attachment and Grief
I buried my little female cat Caissa at sunrise this morning in a beautiful spot in the Superstition Mountains in the same place where I buried my male cat Zeno in October of 2002. When I buried Zeno, just before leaving the burial site, I prayed, "May we love the perishable as perishable and…
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Emile-Auguste Chartier
Emile Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. What follows is a striking sentence from the essay "Maladies of the Mind"…
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Can a Faith Commitment be Tentative?
Ed Farrell writes, I greatly enjoy your blog and read it often. I think your latest post (Mature Religion: More Quest than Conclusions) misses the mark. For the believer of a revealed religion (I'm a Christian) the issue is not so much quest or conclusions as commitment. It's true we can't know God in the…
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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…
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Grades of Prayer
1. The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane…
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Czeslaw Milosz on Simone Weil and Albert Camus
Czeslaw Milosz, "The Importance of Simone Weil" in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (University of California Press, 1977), p. 91: Violent in her judgments and uncompromising, Simone Weil was, at least by temperament, an Albigensian, a Cathar; this is the key to her thought. She drew extreme conclusions from the Platonic current…