Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 into a secular Jewish family; her brother André became one of the great mathematicians of the century. At the École Normale Supérieure she was nicknamed “the Red Virgin” for her politics; in a 1927 philosophy examination at the Sorbonne she came first and Simone de Beauvoir second. As a schoolteacher she gave her salary away beyond what a poor worker earned and joined the protests of the unemployed.
Photograph, 1921, public domain
Into the Factories and the War
Weil believed you could not think about workers’ lives without sharing them. In 1934–35 she took a year off teaching to work on factory assembly lines in Paris, and wrote about how the exhaustion and humiliation of that work crushed thought itself. In 1936 she joined an anarchist unit in the Spanish Civil War, until a pot of boiling oil burned her leg and sent her home.
Attention and Affliction
Mystical experiences in 1937–38, at Assisi and while reciting a poem by George Herbert, turned her toward Christianity, though she refused baptism to stay alongside those outside the church. Her central idea is attention: a patient, empty, receptive waiting on reality and on other people. Even schoolwork, she argued in a 1942 essay, is valuable because it trains attention, and the capacity to give real attention to a suffering person is rare and precious. She wrote of affliction (malheur), suffering so deep it marks the soul and makes its victims invisible to others.
The Need for Roots
Working for the Free French in London, she wrote The Need for Roots, arguing that human beings need obligations and belonging, not only rights, and that uprooting, by war, conquest or factory work, is one of the deepest harms. Refusing to eat more than the rations allowed to people in occupied France, she died of heart failure in Ashford, Kent, in August 1943, aged 34. Almost all her books, including Gravity and Grace, were published after her death. Albert Camus, who edited several, called her the only great spirit of their time.
Written in 1940 as Germany overran France, this essay is the best place to start. Weil reads Homer’s war poem as a study of force: power that turns anyone subjected to it into a thing, the victim first, and finally the one who wields it too, who is just as much its slave. The Iliad is great, she argues, because it pities both sides equally. Few essays say as much about violence in so few pages.
Key Ideas
Gravity and grace. Like physical gravity, moral “gravity” pulls everything downward towards self-interest and force; goodness enters only as grace, from outside the system.
Decreation. The self must be emptied, not inflated, to make room for what is real. She meant it spiritually, not as self-harm, though her own life blurred the line.
Obligations before rights. The Need for Roots opens with the claim that the idea of obligation comes before that of rights: a right means nothing unless someone recognises an obligation to honour it.
Attention in study. In her 1942 essay on school studies, even a geometry problem you fail to solve is not wasted, because the effort trains the attention we later give to God and to people in pain.
Things People Often Get Wrong
“A Catholic convert.” She was drawn to Christ but refused baptism to remain with those outside the church.
“She starved herself to death.” The coroner recorded suicide while her mind was disturbed, but she also had tuberculosis, and friends saw her refusal of food as solidarity rather than a wish to die. The truth is uncertain.
“Gravity and Grace is her book.” It is a selection from her notebooks, arranged by her friend Gustave Thibon and published in 1947.
Check Yourself
Three quick questions on Simone Weil. The wrong answers describe other thinkers on Darshniks.
Photograph, 1921, public domain
