The cataclysm of World War II was crushing for millions. But sometimes pressure produces diamonds. In women like St Edith Stein, or Etty Hillesum, or Hannah Arendt, the war gave them a more penetrating vision of the human condition.
One of these diamonds was a French Jewish woman named Simone Weil (pronounced Vay) who escaped from Vichy France and died in London in 1942 at the age of 34.
She was hailed by the Nobel Prize-winning poet TS Eliot as, “A woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Another Nobel laureate, Albert Camus, said that she was “the only great spirit of our time”.
And Benedict XVI quoted her at some length in his 2009 address to artists. Weil, he said, was a witness to the fact that beauty leads us to God and that art was essentially religious.
The range of her admirers shows how complex Weil was. Eliot was an Anglican poet; Benedict was a Catholic theologian; Camus was an atheist novelist. In her last years Weil was close to the Catholic Church – to the point of attending daily Mass – but she refused to be baptised.
Already weakened by tuberculosis, she died of starvation in the midst of plenty, refusing, as an act of solidarity, to eat more than her compatriots in Nazi-occupied France.
In August in Melbourne and Brisbane, Professor Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, of the University of North Dakota, and an expert on Weil’s thought, is giving public lectures in Melbourne and Brisbane at campuses of Australian Catholic University.
The Catholic Weekly interviewed Professor Rozelle-Stone by email and asked what insights Weil has for us today.
One of Simone Weil’s essential insights was to pay attention. What did she mean by that? Why is it so important for us?
In describing attention, Weil means something quite different from how we typically employ the term.
She characterises it as an emptying of the mind, a setting aside of our preoccupations, desires, and projects, in order to be present and receptive to who/what we encounter. It is not so much that we should “pay attention,” but be attentive.
Attention is so important because according to Weil, we are naturally self-oriented and therefore misread, mishear, overreact, neglect, falsify, and in general, avoid reality (including the reality of other people), especially when it is inconvenient to our ambitions.
Without attention, we cannot be truly present with another in their suffering, or read an author’s words with generosity, or respond appropriately to problems.
What advice would Simone Weil give to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of weapons of mass distraction?
Weil would see Zuckerberg as a morally and spiritually bankrupt person – one who has created extremely powerful and addictive products that incentivise self-obsession, voyeurism, and comparisons based on the shallowest and basest of values; one who wants to control and capitalise on the “attention economy” but makes genuine attention nearly impossible; who profits from tools that give new avenues for cruelty; who does not seem to care about social media’s destruction of young people’s lives; and who aligns himself with empires of force and their interest in surveilling us.
If he were open, her advice to him would be to dismantle everything he has created and to donate his hundreds of billions to humanitarian causes.
Could she have written ‘Simone’s Guide to Multitasking’?
She could have never written anything that recommends or praises “multitasking.” To multitask means to not give anything our whole, undivided attention.
It is usually in service to mandates of productivity and speed; we aren’t compelled toward beauty, complex truths, or justice when we are in these fractured states.
We’ve engineered and have succumbed to contexts that fill every spare moment of silence, leaving no space for the kind of contemplation that would help us address injustices or be compassionate and meaningfully responsive to suffering. Real attention is difficult in any case, but our new technologies have only exacerbated that difficulty.
Tragically though, many people have confused multitasking with increased attentiveness.
What advice would she have given about AI?
Weil would have probably said that there is nothing “intelligent” about AI. Even human intelligence has its limits, but algorithms and computational processes are only derivative of our inputs, minus the caring, sensitivity, responsibility, and wise judgements that come from embodied, mortal living and holistic attention we can cultivate.
The creation and use of AI reflect our hubris and detestation of limits, while ironically outsourcing the work of thinking, analyses, and creative abilities that have helped us form connections between ideas, with the natural world, and with other people.
Undoubtedly, she would advise us to proceed with extreme caution, scepticism, and extensive restrictions on AI so that it serves human and humane ends… but she would have been pessimistic about our willingness to restrict these powers.
She apparently died through self-imposed starvation: was it suicide, anorexia, solidarity, or martyrdom?
I read Weil’s life as reflecting her philosophy: one of ultimate attention to the world. In my view, her death was also linked to this kind of attention to others, which means her own self and well-being was decentred and de-prioritised. She simply didn’t think about herself.
Given this, I do not think she was willing her demise in any way – not via anorexia, martyrdom or suicide. I think she felt she could not eat very much because she believed her country’s people were not able to eat much, either, due to the rations.
It was out of solidarity, perhaps, but her philosophy would suggest that it was more like an unselfconscious bodily response to the awareness of others’ meagre diets during wartime.
She is regarded as a mystic – but she never became a Catholic, even though she attended Mass daily toward the end of her life. Why?
Weil was extremely enchanted by and drawn to Catholic rituals, sacraments, prayers, and meanings – so much so that she confessed to her Dominican friend Father Perrin that she was tempted to join the church.
But she said that she did not feel compelled by God to join the organisation and in fact, felt it her vocation to remain on the outside.
In part, this was also connected to her distrust and critique of “collectivities,” which includes religious organisations, especially their tendencies to create and expect blind loyalty, to set up exclusions, to be drawn to power, to make excuses for organisational mistakes, and to fill psychic and emotional voids for people in problematic ways.
She wanted, instead, to mix with the masses of diverse people outside the church, remaining in a posture of attention on its threshold, and to maintain the liberty of thought that is often compromised by a collective body as the guardian of dogma.
What book would you recommend for learning more about Simone Weil?
I would first recommend the book Waiting for God, which contains her letters to Fr Perrin detailing her spiritual reflections, as well as a few significant essays of hers, including the one that sparked my interest in attentiveness: “Reflections on School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”
I would also suggest Gravity and Grace, which is a compilation of some of her notebook writings organised by various moral, spiritual, and political topics (like detachment, the self, love, evil, the cross, beauty, and so on).
Her friend Gustave Thibon arranged this little collection of her writings, and it can give the reader an excellent sampling of some of her most profound and challenging ideas.
