She was, in fact, no less singular in her insistence on accepting the consequences of a given truth than she was in her insistence on matching her ideals with her acts. But Weil’s effort to straddle these contradictions, as well as the nature of the ideals that inspired her action, demand our attention. They reveal the inevitable tensions in a life that placed so great a premium on aligning ideals and practice, an effort that had to fall short sooner or later. It is, she declared, “exclusively an affair of action and practice.” This was the reason, she thought, why it was so difficult to write about philosophy-it was, she suggested, like writing a “treatise on tennis or running”-but it is also the reason why contradictions score Weil’s life. And one can hardly even say a few.” Not surprisingly, Weil held an exacting view of the philosopher’s mandate. In her notebooks, she wrote that the “proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.”īy this measure, Weil concluded, “there are few philosophers. It helps to see these instances less as inconsistencies in Weil’s work and life- though, at times, they are precisely this-than as invitations to reflect on both one and the other. An anarchist who espoused conservative ideals, a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a saint who refused baptism, a mystic who was a labor militant, a French Jew who was buried in the Catholic section of an English cemetery, a teacher who dismissed the importance of solving a problem, the most willful of individuals who advocated the extinction of the self: here are but a few of the paradoxes Weil embodied. ![]() It has become a ritual among Weil biographers to sum up her life with a series of contradictions. Read More about The Subversive Simone Weil Read Less about The Subversive Simone Weil ![]() Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today. ![]() While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions-the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. ![]() Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals.
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