Selected Essays 1934-1943

I imagine that quite a number of readers will be familiar with the work of the great French philosopher Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) who died in England during the war. I reviewed an excellent book on her work in relation to continental philosophy a couple of years ago. This volume contains essays from the last nine years of her life, a turbulent period in Europe, and I bought it principally for the essay on the Romanesque Renaissance as it was connected with the Cathars and the Occitan culture wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade, which for Weil was an essay in totalitarian spirituality, including as it did the establishment of the Inquisition.

This brings up the first important theme I want to consider, which is partly related to the presence of the chivalrous concept of love in the Troubadours of this region, which Weil characterises as a rejection of force. She observes that 'everything in the world is exposed to the contact of force, with only one single exception, which is love.' (p. 49) This chivalrous love, for her, is a patient attention towards the loved person, which, in its plenitude, is the love of God through the person loved. In the case of the Cathars there is a horror of force, non-resistance to evil and a willingness to endure martyrdom; they led by example, and were known for their purity and sanctity. In an essay on human personality, she defines love as 'intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention' (p. 28). Attention is a key term in her spiritual approach along with the other contemplative processes of entendre and attendre - listening and waiting, hence the reference above to patience.

The essay on Human Personality is dense and profound - its starting point is that the good is the only source of the sacred, and she goes on to say that this is not to be found in the person, but rather in the impersonal or universal. For her, truth and beauty dwell on this level of the impersonal so that 'what is sacred in science is truth; what is sacred in art is beauty' (p. 14) This level of impersonality can only be reached through a solitary and silent form of attention - we might now say meditation - that has nothing to do with subordination to the collective and seeks like the mystic to transcend the ego. If truth and beauty are always and everywhere good, the same applies to justice and compassion, which is then linked to the impersonal and divine order of the universe and reflected in the historical and political essays in this volume.

An essay on the Great Beast discussing the origins of Hitlerism (1939 – 1940) is magisterial in scope and penetrating in its analysis. For her, Napoleon was less of a propagator of liberty and equality than of the centralised State, the State as sole fountain of authority and object of devotion, which in France she traces back to Richelieu and Louis XIV – it manufactures order and power. Historically, she sees the origin of this pattern in Rome with its discipline, organisation, ruthlessness and unswerving resolution, sacrificing everything to prestige. She illustrates this with the Carthaginian war. The implications for our time concern the nature of the nation state with its justifications for political necessity - she refers to the disguising of aggression as legitimate defence, of which one can think of contemporary examples. Given state sovereignty, 'there can be no higher authority with the right to judge its actions' so that its power is 'limited solely by the power of other sovereign nations, that is to say by war or by the explicit or implicit threat of war' (p. 137). Using examples from the aftermath of World War I, she notes that the juridical concept of the sovereign nation is incompatible with the idea of international order, as was already apparent in her day with the League of Nations. I learned from the work of David Ray Griffin how both the League and the UN were in fact set up on a false premise in that the US retained the right and still does to do exactly what it wants without consultation with other nations, unless it suits US interests. For Weil, the fact that the dogma of national sovereignty was left intact is a singular inconsistency that still limits progress in achieving a multilateral international order, as my great-grandfather James Lorimer had already observed in the 1880s. Some degree of supranational authority will be vital for the sustainability of the planet, as Nicholas Hagger argues in his books reviewed in Issue 127.

Finally, I come to draft for a statement of human obligations, written in 1943. Already in the essay on human personality she is critical of the modern notion of rights, which she sees as dependent on force - she herself turns to 'that other force which is the radiance of the spirit'. I remember in the late 1980s there being a draft charter of human responsibilities to balance the charter on human rights, but this was supported by the Dalai Lama and therefore rejected by China. Weil reiterates her argument that truth, beauty and justice originate in a transcendent realm with which we can forge a link 'through directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and receiving good from it'. For her, the needs of the body are well known as food, warmth, sleep, health, rest, exercise, fresh air, but the needs of the soul she lists in pairs of opposites that balance and complete each other - much food for thought here: equality and hierarchy, consented obedience and liberty, truth and freedom of expression, solitude and privacy along with some social life, personal property and collective property, punishment and order, participation in a common task along with personal initiative, security and risk. One can see that political structures are to be found somewhere along the continuums but they also represent enabling conditions for human flourishing. From these reflections, one can appreciate the range and depth of Weil's thought involving perennial spiritual themes as well as practical political considerations. This is particularly valuable at a time when we have more need than ever for profound reflection.