Simone Weil Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French social, political, and religious philosopher whose writing continues to influence contemporary social ethics, theology, and political theory.

Born into a nonreligious Jewish family, Simone showed a gift for languages and moral reasoning at an early age. She studied philosophy at the Lycée Henri IV secondary school and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Weil was influenced by her mentor, Alian (Emile Auguste Chartier), a philosopher who taught the importance of imagination and logic, the close reading of texts, and the avoidance of ideological thinking and the easily summarized argument—all directives that become characteristic of Weil’s own written work.

As a university student, Weil became active in French politics and the trade union movement. Although not a communist (in fact, Weil was critical of party organization and materialist explanations of class conflict) she nevertheless drew from German philosopher Karl Marx’s radical critique of society. She worked as a provincial school teacher, factory worker, field hand, and journalist. Though she was a pacifist, she experienced the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) first hand, feeling it was necessary to bear witness to the major events of her time. Weil opposed French colonialism and was a Christian mystic who refused baptism on the grounds it would separate her from nonbelievers as well as limit her freedom of thought. She has been described by the literary scholar Leslie Fiedler, in his introduction to Weil’s Waiting for God (1951), as the “patron saint of outsiders.”

Central to Weil’s political thought, much of which is gleaned from posthumously published essays, notebooks, and letters, are ideas concerning the importance of suffering, affliction, oppression, and force as independent variables in human history. In her 1934 essay, “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression,” and other writings, she argued, not unlike thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud before her, that modern civilization is plagued by “disequilibrium” caused by a separation from God and nature, a growing reliance on technology, and a slavish attachment to the “collectivity,” be it the “Great Beast” of the state or society itself. Weil argued that progress is an illusion and that the only hope for society was in greater social cooperation and decentralization of authority. In one of her most highly regarded essays “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” (1940), Weil argued that Homer’s underlying message (not unlike that of the Gospels) is that reconciliation can only be achieved when warring parties recognize the limits of power and the need to empathize with enemies. In The Need for Roots (1952), written in anticipation of the end of World War II (1939–1945) and published posthumously, Weil argued for a reawakened spiritual politics based on the cultivation of community, self-denial, compassion, and mutual obligation over rights.

Weil’s strength as a political thinker is found in her nuanced reflections on what she referred to as the metaxu, or mixed blessings, of the “in-between” institutions of family, home, work, church, and country (as opposed to state) that she believed nourish the roots of civic life; her failure was in not fully coming to terms with the role that public debate, interest group politics, parties, and competitive elections play in the establishment and maintenance of democratic regimes. In that sense, Weil brilliantly confused her longing for grace or “what ought to be the case” in politics, for the harder, more mundane gravity of “what is.”

Weil died in a London sanitarium of tuberculosis and heart failure after refusing to eat more food than what she mistakenly believed noncombatants ate under German occupation.

Bibliography:

Dietz, Mary G. Between the Human and the Devine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988.
Pétrement, Simone. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon, 1976.
Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1951.
Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
The Need for Roots. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
First and Last Notebooks. Translated by Richard Rees. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Oppression and Liberty. Translated by Arthur and John Petrie. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.
“The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” In War and The Iliad. Translated by Mary McCarthy. New York: New York Review Press, 2005.

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