“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
IN GOD ALL contradictions are resolved, claim the theologians along with Nicholas of Cusa. But on this miserable earth they are by no means resolved. They tear apart the individual and society. Simone Weil is the tragic example for the impotence of the deus absconditus in the face of the world’s contradictions. Her thirst for the absolute literally withered her. Everything relative—origins, social station, education—was her downfall. She wanted to live wholly for others; her hardly surpassable egocentrism enveloped her as though she had been poured into amber. She aspired toward the eternal but the times formed her and finally turned her into a sacrificial animal. Her spirit dwelt aloft somewhere in the thinnest air of purity; her physical appearance was neglected and gave some people the impression that she was dirty. She hated Judaism, and externally as well as in her character make-up, she was extravagantly Jewish. She wanted to be a worker, but she was incapable of satisfactorily performing even the most rudimentary manual task. She felt that she was destined to be a hero, but when she went to Spain in order to take part in the Civil War, she clumsily scorched herself with boiling oil and had to be returned home straightaway by her caring parents. She succeeded only in dying. And when this passionate Christian mystic was buried in Ashford, England, she was not baptized and not even a priest was there to bless her remains. Because of an air-raid alarm, the man of God had missed his train.
To make her out is no easy matter, for legends have obscured her being and work. Hagiography took the place of critical biography. Charles de Gaulle, who was no mean judge of people, said tersely that she was folle, crazy. But Camus, oppressed by the transcendent and transcendental basic human condition, spent an hour of meditation in her Paris room before he boarded the plane to Stockholm in order to accept the Nobel Prize. The philosopher Alain saw in her by far the most gifted of his pupils. Among those for whom she sparkled as a star in the darkness of time were T. S. Eliot, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Schumann, Dietrich von Hildebrandt. She was, and has remained until today, a rare jewel that it would be blasphemous to touch. The prestige of her death has shielded her from criticism. But difficult as such an attempt may be, it is high time to penetrate the overgrowth of legend and get to the person—because what she was and did fits all too well into a neo-irrationalist trend whose grim consequences cannot yet be foreseen.
The circumstances of her birth already contained those possibilities of her life and tragic dying that became reality. She was born in Paris in 1909. Social drama was bursting forth in a land that in its length and breadth was still yearning for a pastoral idyl. Jaurès was already at work. The waves of the Dreyfus case had hardly subsided. A young man named Léon Blum had just renounced his estheticism and allied himself with those who truly were still the damned of this earth.
Bernard Weil, her father, a respected and prosperous physician from an old Jewish-Alsatian family, was practicing in Paris. Salomea, her mother (also called Selma and “Mime”), was born in Rostov-on-Don and was of Austrian-Galician background. Thus does one become an outsider in the heart of France. Alsatians and Jews are never quite genuine Français de France. One bears a double taint when, in addition, the Alsatian element is mixed with the elusive Jewish element. It doesn’t matter if you were born and grew up in the capital city a hundred times over. I agree for the most part with the Franco-Jewish author Paul Giniewski, who in a recently published book interprets Simone Weil’s existence as having been essentially determined by her origins. One need only read her writings and the secondary literature alongside the memoirs of the one-year-older Simone de Beauvoir, and one immediately perceives a difference that reaches into existential depths. In the case of the indisputed “Française de France,” Beauvoir, everything is natural, down to her exaggeratedly extreme leftist and feminist protest. In the case of the Jewess, born of Alsatian-Galician family, even what is seemingly most natural becomes problematic. The being of the one is credible whether you admire her or not; but even those who wildly overestimate the other will perforce have their doubts about her.
The least one can say is that Simone Weil was ill at ease with herself, and this state affected almost all who knew her. “I have the suspicion,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “that Simone Weil was unbearable at times.” In fact, she was unbearable not only “at times” but almost always and everywhere. A lyceum superintendent reproached her for the “diffuseness and confusion” of her courses—rightly, as is known. Her friend and host Gustave Thibon, for whom she wanted to work as a farmgirl (which, of course, miscarried, since she was of no help in either house or field), suffered from her presence, despite the respect he showed for her intelligence and her assiduous search for God. Her pupils were bored during her classes, which she conducted as passionately as she did monotonously, and the majority of them failed the final examination. At the grape harvest, in which she felt compelled to participate in order to experience the living conditions of the rural proletariat, she plagued a fellow worker with the wisdom of the Upanishads—something the girl sufferingly endured. Her most important work to my mind bears the title The Need for Roots. But she herself was unable to take root, either among her colleagues at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, or as a teacher, or as a factory worker and syndicalist. As a Jew, as a homely girl (who almost ingeniously made herself even more unattractive than she already was through sloppy dress and a messy hairdo), as a poor teacher and hopelessly inept worker, she forever stood “outside,” before the gates, hungering. The God after whom she yearned also held her at a distance.
Three characteristics determined the existence of this extraordinary woman: her uncanny, penetrating intelligence, her fierce determination to cleanse mankind of its earthly smut, and a boundless longing to suffer. Having grown up with a brother three years her senior, who early in life was already regarded as a scientific genius, she competed with him; and while she didn’t catch up with him, she reached the point where she could understand quantum physics and even write on this most difficult subject. Her knowledge of ancient languages, particularly Greek, far exceeded the requirements of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which in themselves were already excessively demanding. When she immersed herself in East Asian wisdom, she studied Sanskrit. After her turn to Catholicism she acquainted herself so thoroughly with the field of theology that she was able to discuss the problems of patrology and scholasticism with any scholar.
Her intelligence was also strikingly Jewish. Contrary to a widespread belief, Jews are very often very stupid. At the same time, however, they are endowed as a group with a store of talent that causes embarrassment even to a philosemite. For if he enumerates the Jewish geniuses, even against his own will the ugly word “egghead” will occur to him. Less would be better, one thinks when reading Simone Weil. Even in her Letter to a Priest, which ostentatiously places humility at the core of all thought, she argues—against herself—in a hairsplitting manner that not only a malicious antisemite would characterize as “talmudic.”
Also her passion for social reform went to the very extreme and even beyond. She saw social misery more clearly than others; the social injustice in France, which was alleviated only under Léon Blum’s shortlived Popular Front, hurt her more than any of her contemporaries. But her reactions were far removed from both meliorist naïveté and rational-revolutionary methodology. Her social involvement, with all its estimable humaneness, brought nothing but trouble for her and burdens for her fellow fighters. In 1932 she took part in a strike in Le Puy; she managed to get arrested but had to go without the martyrdom to which she aspired—since the philosophy teacher was viewed as a harmless fool and immediately set free. Half in jest and half in scorn, she was called “la vierge rouge.” During a miners’ strike in Saint-Etienne she carried the red flag, a Joan of Arc without her Dunois and La Hire. But when she met Leo Trotsky shortly thereafter in her parents’ home, he had the impression that she was a distraught person. He later remarked in a letter that it was hardly worth discussing her.
Precisely this “blind” involvement, as it were, contributed to the creation of the legend. Or had she really been a pioneer: in her criticism of the Soviet Union and the Comintern as well as in her anarcho-syndicalist rebellion? Was she a forerunner of those who today see salvation only in the economic self-management by the workers? Was she the presaging prophetess of the “nouveaux philosophes,” who see everywhere only the “prince,” the “maitre,” and take the side of the plebs, whom all of the organized parties had arrogantly overlooked? She was, and then again she was not. For there exist texts, written by her in English exile, that bear witness to a frightening tendency toward authoritarian social systems of class character.
Actually, she was unpolitical. She saw in society, every society, only Plato’s “Great Beast.” She was always concerned only with pursuing her own salvation. No, not even that, but rather her own disaster; and at this, to be sure, she succeeded tragically. Wherewith we have touched the heart of her biography, her passion of passions. She wanted to suffer, absolutely and at any cost, even if she caused others pain by it—above all her parents, who were constantly fearful for her. She nourished herself poorly, wore garments of haircloth like a penitent, renounced a portion of her teacher’s pay for the benefit of the unions, and finally died of hunger in England because she wanted to eat no more than the amount allotted in France to the “normal consumers,” who had been placed on miserable rations—though, of course, even the poorest in that country naturally increased his food supply with illegal purchases. Was she a “masochist,” as has often been said? That is a question of terminology. I prefer to apply the term only to a definite sexual deviation and would rather speak of her self-torment. Her Lord’s Prayer would logically have had to end with the words: Forgive me never my debts and send me all that is bad, now and in the hour of my dying. Amen.
For years, since 1938 almost unceasingly, she suffered from agonizing headaches—Adrian Leverkühn’s “head ache”—but I’ve never read that she ever submitted to serious medical treatment or even took analgesics. And above all: she imposed on herself the obligation to do physical labor although she was about as fit for it as she was for ballet. That was heroic, no doubt, even if here too a few remarks that will diminish the Simone Weil myth are imperative. Her work—first in a factory, then on a farm—lasted altogether a total of a half-year. Because she apparently wanted it that way, she was an échec, a failure: as a teacher, revolutionary, and worker. Even as a Christian.
Her Christianity, Manichean to the point of heresy, was nothing but suffering for God, and not salvation. What Weilian theology was, she herself described roughly in an opaque reflection on philosophy; in her work La Connaissance surnaturelle, whose very title contains an unre-solvable contradiction, she wrote: “The characteristic method of philosophy consists in comprehending the problems as insoluble and in observing them, for years without end, expectantly, without any hope.” Just as she denied herself sensible nourishment and modest everyday pleasures, she also denied herself every kind of intellectually positive accomplishment. The passionate Christian, who reminds us of Kierkegaard, also did not permit herself baptism, partly because she did not deem herself worthy of the sacraments, partly because she saw in the church less the mystical body of Christ than the ecclesia triumphans with its potential evil. Constantly in search of “perfect purity, perfect beauty, perfect justice,” but aware that they are unattainable, she lost sight of all real beauty, good, and justice (since they can, after all, never be perfect). She was indeed “not of this world.”
Her theological Manicheanism, whose roots we can explain only on the basis of her psychic constitution, extended deep even into her writing on completely profane subjects. In her notes on the “condition ouvriére,” she penned very clever though not exactly overwhelmingly new thoughts on the alienation of female assembly-line workers. What she left out—because she hadn’t experienced it—were the tiny compensations that enabled her fellow workers to endure: the fun of the Saturday dance, the short chat during work breaks, their love affairs. She herself, God’s bride, was so chaste—and surely not only because her disposition and mournfully Jewish intellectual’s face did not exactly attract droves of suitors—that she felt revulsion at any sort of physically tender communication. She regarded herself as a discard, a “slave,” as she literally wrote. But absurdly, at the same time, as a genius of the absolute. To the extent that Simone Weil was really a clinical “case” (a thesis that can be confirmed), her condition would have to be diagnosed as that of an autodestructive megalomaniac. “Whatever I do,” she wrote in La Connaissance surnaturelle, “I know with perfect clarity that it is not the Good. For what I do cannot be the Good once I do it. . . . Whatever one does, one accomplishes the Bad, and it is the unbearably Bad.” Thus she proceeds from “I” to “one”: Whenever she castigates her lamentable self she is carrying out morbid autodestruction; as soon as she says “one” and thus also includes others, she is setting herself up as a judge of mankind altogether, she is deifying herself. Delusions of personal insignificance and of grandeur become absurdly congruent.
If the concept of the absurd, in the theological and philosophical sense, can be used at all, it hardly applies to anyone as accurately as to Simone Weil. Absurd were not only her unsuccessful teaching career, her attempt to force her way into the world of labor, her search for the undiscoverable God; her conduct during the storms of the epoch was also absurd. She was a radical pacifist at a time when even a child could see that what mattered was to destroy Hitler and his ignominious empire at any price. She protested, by the way, in an extraordinarily and admirably bold letter to the Commissioner of Jewish Affairs of the Vichy regime, Xavier Vallat—but not as the Jew she was and as which the others designated her and had already sentenced her; rather she protested by referring to the fact that she had never visited a synagogue and that she was rooted in Hellenistic Christian culture—an argument that, given the historical moment, was both heroic and naïve. A la fin du compte, after she had tossed her pacifism overboard after all and had become a determined patriot, she wished to remain in France. But in June 1942, at the last moment, she emigrated with her parents to America, not in order to stay there, however, but rather in order to get to England and from there to return to France, a little detour she could have reasonably spared herself. But what did reason mean to her? “God created us free and intelligent so that we can give up our will and our intelligence . . .” (The Notebooks of Simone Weil, II). Thus she actually did offer up reason and life on the sacrificial altar of her God. In the process, she often had “more luck than brains,” as the saying goes: The officials regarded her as an uninteresting case! Misfortune and martyrdom refused to materialize, even when one day, through pure clumsiness, she dropped a suitcase with Résistance documents, which then lay scattered on the street.
She was also an “uninteresting case” for the Free French Forces in London, where she had gone from America. Thanks above all to her friend Maurice Schumann, they barely let her have her way but never at all considered assigning her real tasks. How important for her the actual battle really was, is a question that must be asked. By this time she had long since given up her belief in the antifascist struggle as well as in the revolution, the hope of all those who, espousing the motto of the clandestine newspaper Combat, said: De la résistance à la révolution! “Marx declared that religion is the opium of the people,” she wrote. “No, the revolution is opium. The revolutionary hopes are a stimulant. All final systems are utterly wrong.” We know that there is truth in this pronouncement. But obviously, it could only be half-true, since it was written at a time when the antifascist struggle possessed at least a relative finality. However, she was not interested in the world, but in God.
The conversion of this Jewess, who had grown up in a free-thinking milieu, had begun in 1938 while she was listening to a Gregorian mass at an Easter service; during this mystical experience the convert suffered from raging headaches. This moment of suffering determined the five next years still granted her. Her posthumous writings, especially Waiting for God and Letter to a Priest (addressed to the Dominican priest Perrin), lend both moving and dismaying testimony to the long passion of these years. The process of her detachment from reality can be followed like a case history, and the subtlest theological interpretations—the analogy with gnosis, with St. Theresa of Avila and Pascal—change next to nothing. Simone Weil shirked not only the demand of the day, not only common sense, but logic in general, which is the reflection of existence. Christ did not become her “favorite dish,” as Heine puts it with revealing cynicism, but he did become the oxygen of her mental respiration. She didn’t argue; instead she contented herself with brusque claims such as this: “Only the presence of Christ can explain the phenomenon of thoughts or supernatural acts, of justice, the comprehension of misfortune, of benevolence, altruism. To believe that they can be present where Christ is absent is godless, even blasphemous.” Thus, there can be no salvation in this world. Not with God; for he can only be eternally awaited—in vain; but he cannot be reached through patient approximation. Utopia is a sacrilege. There remains only a sacrificial death.
Simone Weil died in an English hospital on August 24, 1943, according to the coroner from “heart failure due to myocardial insufficiency caused by hunger and pulmonary tuberculosis.” His down-to-earth business did not permit him to say: “Suicide resulting from a religious compulsion neurosis.”
Her essential writings appeared after her death, which, as the end of a national martyr, silenced the beginnings of any criticism in France. The shadow of death became a halo, and this not only in her own country but in the entire world. Thus it would have been in bad taste or, worse, blasphemy to disparage the unsystematic nature of her oeuvre. For who could demand of a mystic, chosen to suffer, that she systematize her experience of God like some academic theologian or other? One dared even less to examine her political statements. After all, she had carried the red flag at strikes, had been in Spain, wanted to risk her life for the Résistance. That sufficed in those days. Today it does not; for as Voltaire says: “One owes consideration to the living, to the dead only the truth.”
Simone Weil lived, beyond her earthly sojourn, in the early postwar years. Only now is she, the deceased, truly dead, and truth is attaining its full due. From the incense that surrounded her there now emerges quite a bit that does not show up so well at all in full light, especially since it oddly forebodes what is being proposed in our own time by a Left that has become estranged from itself. The spirit of the estates, “l’esprit des corporations,” must be reawakened, we read in The Need for Roots. In those days that was the influence of Pétain’s “révolution nationale.” In a liberated France, she said, the great industrial complexes would be dissolved. Small manufactories, archaic in character and strewn far across the land, were to nourish and also clothe the nation as productive resources and capital goods. That too was Vichy, and since then the Left has probably abandoned itself a hundred times over to similar notions of a retrogressive utopia. While work—manual, but above all agricultural work—is to be limited in time, it is to have a quasi-sacred character. Is this the surmounting of alienation, or is it reactionary homesickness for something historically outmoded? The latter, naturally; not the former. “If the young worker thinks of settling down,” she writes, “he would then be ready to take root.”
In the dry fields of human reason there grows no nature cure for such revelations. In any case, let all those civilization-weary hyperin-tellectuals who project their personal nausea into the social sphere be warned of an influence that can produce no good. One can love Simone Weil the human being. One certainly must pity her. But Weil the thinker is of no concern to anyone who cares about the enlightenment of mankind.
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“Simone Weil—Jenseits der Legende,” Merkur XXXIII (January 1979): 80-86.
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