Nov 11, 2018 12:17 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-i...us-persons
EXCERPT: . . . As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, [Simone] Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. In addition to her intelligence, other aspects of her biography have captured the public’s imagination. As a child during the First World War, she refused sugar because soldiers on the front could have none. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she died at 34 when working for the resistance government France libre in London, refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations of her German-occupied France. Teachers and classmates called her the Martian and the Red Virgin, nicknames suggestive of her strangeness and asexuality. A philosopher who refused to cloister herself behind academia’s walls, she worked in factories and vineyards, and left France during the Spanish Civil War to fight alongside the Durruti Column anarchists, a failed mission in many respects.
[...] A Weil revival is underway, in part due to the surges in nationalism, populism, tribalism and nativism about which she had so much to say in her work. Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’ Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent. For this reason, she advocated the abolition of all political parties, which, she argued, were in essence totalitarian. To substantiate this claim, Weil offered three arguments:
1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
2) A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
These tentacular organisations make people stupid, requiring a member to endorse ‘a number of positions which he does not know’. Instead, the party thinks on his behalf, which amounts to him ‘having no thoughts at all’. People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims, which is why they so readily join such groups. In a resonant passage in *The Need for Roots*, Weil writes: ‘A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy.’
Weil supported the freedom of individual expression. (She believed, however, in certain speech restrictions for institutions such as newspapers and government propaganda offices that, as collectivities, were, for her, naturally suspect.) She writes that ‘complete, unlimited freedom of expression for every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve, is an absolute need on the part of the intelligence’. The health of the intelligence relies on full access to the facts, and without it, thinking is always deficient. She would have sided with even the most detestable of speakers, if for no other reason than that thy enemy must be known.
Weil’s writings are infused with care. She believed it politically essential that every human soul feel ‘useful and even indispensable’ within the social body. She offers the example of unemployed people and manual labourers, who often feel little responsibility toward a society that does not embrace them. Regarding criminal justice, she believed in the redemptive power of punishment, arguing that it should ‘wipe out the stigma of the crime’ and offer an education to offenders, allowing for full re-entry into the community. Her care-infused recommendations for how to think of one’s nation could be edifying to consciences troubled by the confrontational nationalist movements of today.
[...] Thinking of your nation as something vulnerable, something that must be nurtured, stands in contrast to the chest-thumping, hubristic barking of today’s ultranationalists. Weil’s political pliability could account in part for the surge of interest in her work. Perhaps we are looking for someone to lead us out of the forest in which we find ourselves, planted by the sowers of discord.
I reflected on my attraction to Weil’s thought, and on my habit of putting her books into the hands of my students and friends saying: ‘Read this.’ There are six reasons I return to Weil and want to share her: 1) the total absence of irony in most of her philosophical writings; 2) her sustained campaign against a self-interested, narcissistic citizenry; 3) the ethical urgency with which she approached the problem of education; 4) her emphasis on first-hand knowledge (of the assembly-line worker’s plight, for example, or the farmhand’s daily exertions); 5) her belief that technology’s distancing effects would lead to total alienation; and 6) the congruity of her preaching and her practice.
Weil’s emphasis on the ethical urgency of education and her pursuit of knowledge through direct experience both counter some of the worst traits of the academic humanities today....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-i...us-persons
EXCERPT: . . . As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, [Simone] Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. In addition to her intelligence, other aspects of her biography have captured the public’s imagination. As a child during the First World War, she refused sugar because soldiers on the front could have none. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she died at 34 when working for the resistance government France libre in London, refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations of her German-occupied France. Teachers and classmates called her the Martian and the Red Virgin, nicknames suggestive of her strangeness and asexuality. A philosopher who refused to cloister herself behind academia’s walls, she worked in factories and vineyards, and left France during the Spanish Civil War to fight alongside the Durruti Column anarchists, a failed mission in many respects.
[...] A Weil revival is underway, in part due to the surges in nationalism, populism, tribalism and nativism about which she had so much to say in her work. Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’ Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent. For this reason, she advocated the abolition of all political parties, which, she argued, were in essence totalitarian. To substantiate this claim, Weil offered three arguments:
1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
2) A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
These tentacular organisations make people stupid, requiring a member to endorse ‘a number of positions which he does not know’. Instead, the party thinks on his behalf, which amounts to him ‘having no thoughts at all’. People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims, which is why they so readily join such groups. In a resonant passage in *The Need for Roots*, Weil writes: ‘A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy.’
Weil supported the freedom of individual expression. (She believed, however, in certain speech restrictions for institutions such as newspapers and government propaganda offices that, as collectivities, were, for her, naturally suspect.) She writes that ‘complete, unlimited freedom of expression for every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve, is an absolute need on the part of the intelligence’. The health of the intelligence relies on full access to the facts, and without it, thinking is always deficient. She would have sided with even the most detestable of speakers, if for no other reason than that thy enemy must be known.
Weil’s writings are infused with care. She believed it politically essential that every human soul feel ‘useful and even indispensable’ within the social body. She offers the example of unemployed people and manual labourers, who often feel little responsibility toward a society that does not embrace them. Regarding criminal justice, she believed in the redemptive power of punishment, arguing that it should ‘wipe out the stigma of the crime’ and offer an education to offenders, allowing for full re-entry into the community. Her care-infused recommendations for how to think of one’s nation could be edifying to consciences troubled by the confrontational nationalist movements of today.
[...] Thinking of your nation as something vulnerable, something that must be nurtured, stands in contrast to the chest-thumping, hubristic barking of today’s ultranationalists. Weil’s political pliability could account in part for the surge of interest in her work. Perhaps we are looking for someone to lead us out of the forest in which we find ourselves, planted by the sowers of discord.
I reflected on my attraction to Weil’s thought, and on my habit of putting her books into the hands of my students and friends saying: ‘Read this.’ There are six reasons I return to Weil and want to share her: 1) the total absence of irony in most of her philosophical writings; 2) her sustained campaign against a self-interested, narcissistic citizenry; 3) the ethical urgency with which she approached the problem of education; 4) her emphasis on first-hand knowledge (of the assembly-line worker’s plight, for example, or the farmhand’s daily exertions); 5) her belief that technology’s distancing effects would lead to total alienation; and 6) the congruity of her preaching and her practice.
Weil’s emphasis on the ethical urgency of education and her pursuit of knowledge through direct experience both counter some of the worst traits of the academic humanities today....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-i...us-persons