Simone Weil had a troublesome idealism

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who died of self-starvation and tuberculosis in a Kent sanatorium in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, remains a conundrum. “Mais elle est folle!” had been the spluttering response of Charles de Gaulle the previous year, during her short wartime period analyzing reports for the Free French in London. Her simple brief was to précis the ideas coming in from the Resistance movement on how to reconstruct France after liberation. The result — which was posthumously published, as were most of her writings — turned out to be a major work of original philosophy,  Enchainement (The Need for Roots), running to hundreds of pages, a testimony to Weil’s lifelong need to go further than anyone could ever have required into what she saw as the truth of things.

Susan Sontag called Weil “one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travails of the spirit.” After her death, her intellectual champions would include, among others, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch. The writings collected in La Condition ouvrière — written by Weil in response to her experience of working in factories in the 1930s, which she undertook in a spirit of empathy and enquiry — were regarded by Hannah Arendt as an unrivaled exposé of capitalism’s deadening effect upon the soul. Later, after a spiritual epiphany, Weil became attracted to Christian mysticism, explored in a series of letters published after her death as Waiting for God.

Her most salient philosophical themes are malheur (affliction) and attente (attention). The first reflects her unsparing insights into how power obliterates the powerless by changing “a person into a thing.” The second, a sort of answer, suggests how we should feel it a duty to pay infinite attention to others’ suffering to the extent that our own sense of self becomes, in a transcendent if paradoxical way, as erased as that of the sufferers. One important philosophical legacy, perhaps, is Weil’s attempt to shift the focus of liberalism from the idea of human rights to one of human obligations.

She was born in Paris into a well-to-do secular Jewish family in which education was highly valued. Her elder brother, André, was a mathematical prodigy who made good his early promise in a long and distinguished career in algebraic number theory. Simone was also educationally encouraged by their parents, but often felt inadequate, despite her clear ability.

She later recalled that, aged fourteen, “I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair… and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties.” She nevertheless went on to enter the École Normale Supérieure as the only girl in her year, where her intellectual severity earned her the nickname “the categorical imperative in skirts.” In fact, her dress style was almost eccentrically unwomanly. Unlike her near contemporary Simone de Beauvoir, who trained her philosophic eye on interrogating the feminine, Weil was determined to sidestep gender, as she also sidestepped her ethnicity (George Steiner called her a “self-hating Jew.”)

From early childhood Weil evinced a preternaturally altruistic awareness of the human world. At the age of six, during World War One, she sent her share of sugar and chocolate to the troops at the front; by ten she was an outright rebel, absconding from home to join striking workers in solidarity. As her father later put it to the poet Jean Tortel: “Monsieur, if you ever have a daughter, pray to God that she isn’t a saint.”

Yet, as Simone Weil: A Life in Letters demonstrates, she also remained dependent on her parents, and especially her mother, with whom we are told she had “an intensely close and destructive relationship.” Her urge — it was felt as an inner necessity — to place herself in positions of physical strain or danger in order to identify with suffering prompted her parents to follow her around and pick up the pieces again and again.

She was comically clumsy, myopic (she wore thick glasses) and lacking in common sense, despite her brilliant mind. When she enlisted in the Spanish Civil War, her comrades were worried about trusting her with a rifle. Their anxieties were shown to be justified when she went on to tread blunderingly into a vat of boiling oil, suffering terrible burns. Her parents were, typically, waiting nearby in Barcelona to spirit her away and get her the treatment she needed. She was, perhaps, able to make unworldliness into such a severe philosophy of life because, as Jean-Paul Sartre realized, she never truly escaped childhood. She retained and radiated a radical innocence.

The line between sainthood and psychopathology is a fuzzy one. This book — perhaps unintentionally — tends towards the latter, given its emphasis on the private life and consisting as it does of Weil’s letters to her parents and her brother rather than focusing on her works.

De Gaulle may have had a point. He was responding to the way Weil’s ambitions for heroic self-denial had become yet more unrealistic by the time she was in London working with the Free French. She was desperate to be parachuted into France to risk her life as a secret Resistance fighter — though her lack of guile would have made her a bad spy, and there were worries that she looked too Jewish not to arouse the immediate suspicions of the Nazis. Alternatively, she wanted to be dropped directly onto the battlefield at the head of a self-sacrificing band of white-clad nurses, though she had no medical skills. Neither of her suggestions was accepted.

In her despairing last months, Weil had a “growing inner certainty that there is a repository of pure gold in me that must be passed down,” but was “more and more convinced that there is no one to receive it.” By then she was further away than she had ever been from her helicopter parents, since they were in New York. Given her devotion to “that transcendent kingdom wherein truth abides,” her last letters to them are painful, since she fibs, withholding from them how ill she is, and how she is refusing food, and thus disallowing them from paying her own suffering attente, if only by letter, or from preparing themselves for her loss.

The coroner returned a verdict of suicide: “The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat while the balance of her mind was disturbed.” The editors of this volume prefer to see her death as an ideal “moment of truth,” which perhaps it was, in that it seems a symbolic response to the horrors of the twentieth century. Weil wanted above all to make philosophy into lived experience, but how much her personal life can be read as an aspirational template remains uncertain. No one, however, could deny that hers was one of the most extraordinary minds of the era.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.