The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who died of self-starvation and tuberculosis in a Kent sanitorium in 1943 at the age of 34, remains a conundrum. ‘Mais elle est folle!’ had been the spluttering response of Charles de Gaulle the previous year, during her short wartime period analysing 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 unrivalled 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.