Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
I
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. The argument runs as follows:
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.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Emma Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 70:
The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.
This suggests one of several tests you might apply to yourself to see if you have a religious 'bent' or sensibility, or orientation toward life, or however you wish to phrase it. If, upon reading the Weilian line, a 'yes!' wells up in you, then the chances are excellent that you are religiously inclined. If your response is in the negative, however, or if you are just puzzled, then that indicates that you lack the religious attitude.
I offer the following, from an earlier post, as a partial unpacking of the Weil quotation:
Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in Pascalian divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.
An interesting thing about the Red Virgin is that, though she remained a virgin until death, she came to see though the illusions of the Left. This begs raises the question whether speaking strictly there could be a religious Left. To tackle this question properly, however, would involve explaining what ought to be meant by 'religion,' what ought to be meant by 'Left,' and then arranging a confrontation of their respective denotata.
Kenneth Rexroth's essay Simone Weil first appeared in The Nation in 1957. Rexroth hits upon an image more striking than apt when he describes Weil's "tortured prowling outside the doors of the Catholic Church — like a starving wild animal." Definitely worth reading, but of little value in understanding what is of lasting value in Weil.
To understand Simone Weil, you must understand her beloved master, Plato. So let's interpret a passage from the Phaedo, and then compare it to some statements of Weil.
At St. 83 we read, "…the perceptions of the eye, and the ear, and the the senses are full of deceit." The point is presumably not that the senses are sometimes nonveridical, but that they tie us to a world that is not ultimately real, and that distracts us from the one that is. The point is not epistemological but axiological and ontological. It is not that the senses are unreliable, whether episodically or globally, in respect of the information they provide us about an external world of spatiotemporal particulars. They are reliable enough in providing us such information. The point is rather that the senses deceive us into conferring high value on what is of low value, and into taking as ultimately real what is derivatively real.
It would be a mistake, therefore, to read the passage as an anticipation of the modern problematic of the external world. The point is much deeper. The Platonic inquiry call into question, not human knowledge of a physical world taken to be ultimately real, but the reality and importance of the physical world itself.
Continue reading “Simone Weil in the Light of Plato, Phaedo 83″
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Emma Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 77, emphasis added.
Non-violence is no good unless it is effective. Hence the young man's question to Ghandi about his sister. The answer should have been: use force unless you are such that you can defend her with as much chance of success without violence. Unless you possess a radiance of which the energy (that is to say, the possible effectiveness in the most material sense of the word) is equal to that contained in your muscles.
We should strive to become such that we are able to be nonviolent.
This also depends on the adversary.