How can Human Unhappiness and Suffering be Countered?

Simone Weil's view on the necessity of participation

“...When we are faced with a geometrical or arithmetical problem, we understand by simply looking at it that it demands a solution.

When we receive a text in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit, we know just by looking at it: It needs to be translated.

In the same way, a suffering must be translated (transformed) when we look at it...with the attention that belongs to supernatural love. This love does not primarily require the ability to act, but much more fundamentally to be able to let oneself be affected by the suffering and misfortune of others, to accept it but to accept it as suffering, i.e. to suffer from it oneself”.

Introduction

“Do not think that heresies can arise from a few small souls running around. Only great men have produced heresies” writes Augustine.

As you can see, I have remained true to my sympathy for heretics and would like to introduce you this evening to a philosopher who not only shared this sympathy for heretics but can probably be described as a heretic herself.

The special feature of her philosophy is that she stands at odds with all the conventional categories of the history of ideas; her thinking is extraordinarily complex and so controversial that it has repeatedly led to irritation, whether as a social revolutionary or as a mystic.

Listen to what two Nobel Prize winners for literature had to say about her:

Nelly Sachs (1891-1970 ) wrote immediately after the publication of Simone Weil's first books in German:

“For several days and nights I was completely immersed in Simone Weil, until I finally had to stop, my heart pounding, because it is a heavy wine that leads almost to death in its finality”.

Heinrich Böll, wrote in 1978:

“A burden on my soul: ...Books that I have read and that I am not up to...One example: an author I constantly circle around but never reach, perhaps because I'm afraid of getting too close to her. I keep getting hold of her books, give them away or put them aside and get hold of them again, have them with me when I unpack, at home, in hotels elsewhere.

The author is on my mind like a prophetess: I want to write about her, to give expression to her voice, but I know I can’t do it, I'm not up to it, not intellectually, not morally, not religiously. What she wrote is far more than “literature”, how she lived is far more than “existence. I am afraid of her rigor, her spherical intelligence and sensitivity. Afraid of the consequences she would impose on me if I got really close to her. In this sense, she is a burden on my soul. Her name: Simone Weil”.

“A heavy wine” for Nelly Sachs, “A burden on the soul” by Heinrich Böll; What does Simone Weil herself say about her philosophy?

In her last letters to her parents from the hospital in 1943, the dying woman writes that she was certain that she possessed a “treasure of pure gold that was to be passed on. But experience and the observations of my contemporaries convince me more and more that there is no one to receive it...This does not cause me any pain. The gold mine is inexhaustible”.

I would like to invite you to join me here this evening in an attempt to bring some of this gold of Simone Weil to light, that is, to consciousness.

1. Short biography

There are few biographical details or photos of Simone Weil because she herself left no memoirs. It always annoyed her when people talked about her life or her great intelligence instead of asking the only question that was important to her: Is what she says true or not?

Simone Weil was born on February 3, 1909 (i.e. she would have been 100 years old last year) in Paris into a wealthy and very scientific Jewish family and died at the age of 34 (on August 24, 1943) in exile in England.   The circumstances of her death are somewhat mysterious because it is not really known exactly why she died. In any case, her doctor believes that she did not die of tuberculosis, which was almost cured. Ultimately, she died as a result of malnutrition. She refused to eat more food than the French prisoners of war received.

The philosopher is one of the figures of the 20th century who broke all the molds.  By her own account, she was “brought up in complete agnosticism”, i.e., completely areligious, and had “never made the slightest effort to get beyond that.”  Her father, Bernard Weil, a respected doctor, came from Alsace, her mother, Selma Reinherz, came from Russia.  Simone's brother Andre, who was three years older, showed mathematical talent at an early age, similar to Blaise Pascal.

The successes of his highly gifted brother plunged Simone into an abysmal hopelessness.

Quote: “At the age of fourteen, I fell into boundless despair, and I seriously thought of dying because of my inadequate mental abilities. 

I did not envy my brother for the sake of external success, but regretted that I could not hope to enter that transcendent kingdom where only the truly great find entrance - where truth is at home”. End quote

(Weil quote: “I would rather die than live without truth”)

This sentence is reminiscent of Blaise Pascal's saying: “On earth is not the home of truth. It wanders unrecognized among men”.

From a philosophical point of view, this corresponds to the maxim with which Weil - apart from Descartes, Plato and Kant – “distinguishes the imaginary, the shadow world, from the real, the transcendent world of truth”. (Plato's allegory of the cave)

Here she already showed an ambition that was by no means commonplace, a will that went beyond mediocrity to reach this transcendent kingdom of truth, although at the time she still believed that one had to have extraordinary mental abilities to do so, which gave way to a completely different insight at the end of her life, namely the realization that only fools can tell the truth because it is inexpressible. But before this realization, there is still an arduous path of political struggle and suffering ahead.

(Incidentally, Andre became one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century and died in America at the age of 94).

In her passion for truth, she, the philosopher, was a tireless seeker. The extremely well-read intellectual wanted to experience first-hand what factory work meant. The pacifist did not shy away from the fight for the disenfranchised, the oppressed and the weak. She suffered so much from the suffering and misfortune of people that she wanted to take their place. Simone de Beauvoir, who attended the same elite university (Ecole Normale Superieure) as she did, said in her memoirs:

“She interested me because of the great reputation for cleverness she enjoyed and because of her bizarre appearance; but even more than her talent in philosophy, I envied her a heart capable of beating for the whole world”.

She can hardly be classified religiously. She took inspiration from many mythologies and religions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.   But despite all the rifts and breaks in its development, one constant remains: an extreme longing for purity and clarity that does not tolerate compromise: Neither in thought nor in practical life.

Simone stood out early on due to her very strong self-will, rebellion, self-confidence, outsiderism (her family called her “the troll”). Her parents, teachers and brother interpreted much of this as youthful mischief, but in her case it was the expression of an attitude to life in which a decision valid for the whole of her life was expressed: Rebellion against generally sanctioned norms, against what was wrongly recognized.

But the main theme of her life is also the theme of this evening:

How to face human misfortune and suffering?

For Simone Weil, the main cause of misfortune was the relationship between “those who exercise power” and “those who suffer it”, and also between “those who count for something” and “those who count for nothing”. She was not interested in theories, but always wanted to form her own picture of everything. (she wanted to find out for herself what misfortune, suffering and oppression felt like, so she joined those who “don't count”).

Her conviction was that there can be no general philosophical systems that can solve this problem of misfortune in the world, but only a concrete answer in the now, which must be a unity of thought and action.   “The reality of life is not sensation, but activity”. (Weil quote)

2. religious socialist and anarchist mystic

Simone Weil's philosophy consists of 2 parts, a revolutionary one (5 years from 1932 - 1936) and a religious one (6 years from 1938 - 1943), which, however, do not represent a break:

The spirit of the revolutionary already contains hints of spirituality, and later the mystic continues to profess ideas of anarchist substance.

It is a matter of a transcendental anthropology. (Sacredness of man, his dignity consists in the “supernatural” (or man cannot realize himself without transcending himself).

(Philosophies of the transcendence of man claim, somewhat paradoxically, that man is what he is not yet.)

Simone Weil anchors her conceptual analyses phenomenologically, i.e. in the world of appearances.

(Phenomenology goes back to Edmund Husserl and aimed to establish philosophy as a “rigorous science” by means of the phenomenological method, i.e. to refrain from all hasty interpretations/readings in philosophy and to adhere without prejudice to the analysis of what appears to consciousness).

Spontaneously, before every deliberation or deliberate action, we behave differently towards people than towards things. But each of us can make a fellow human being into a thing. But we “know” or are certain before any reflection that we are doing him an injustice.

In addition to spontaneity, it is reactivity that shows that we perceive and treat our fellow human beings fundamentally differently from animals or things.

It is the eyes with which we are closest to each other (windows of the soul) and which express our recognition of the other or our disregard or even our non-recognition (wanting) in the simplest, most subtle, most “true” way. This is why it is (normally) impossible for us to gouge out someone's eyes or to pluck them out, as Simone Weil says at the beginning of her essay On the Person and the Sacred. This impossibility could be called “pre-moral”; it is deeply embedded in our humanity, on which something like morality or ethics can rise and settle in the first place.

Another expression for the special way of perceiving and reacting to our fellow human beings, to which Simone Weil draws attention, is the way we hesitate and then overcome an almost physical resistance when we do something to someone. However, in excessive anger, in an aggression that overwhelms us (as we tend to say), we can “forget ourselves”, which at the same time means forgetting the other, insofar as he is human and a person.

3) Influences on the development of their thinking

a) Emile Auguste Chartier, famous under the pseudonym Alain, was the star among French philosophers after the First World War, comparable to Sartre's importance after the Second World War. He was mainly inspired by Plato, Descartes, Kant, but also Husserl and Freud as well as Goethe and Stendhal.

His teaching was free, spontaneous and never dominated by abstract book knowledge. He was a convinced pacifist. It was said that he took philosophy to the marketplace, much like Socrates and the revolutionaries of the French Revolution, to whom he professed allegiance. He rejected any rigid system. He was close to the Stoics, whom he counted among his “best teachers” (a Hellenic doctrine of ethics and the preservation of life, which exerted a great influence on the ancient world, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, etc.).

“For me, to exist means to act” writes the eighteen-year-old Simone Weil. She became his best pupil and a strong supporter of his ideas. “What Alain taught was less a new philosophy - he took the old classics as his starting point - than a new way of philosophizing. What he taught was the primacy of mind over matter”.

b) Ancient Greece – “The Greek Miracle”

The Hellenic spirit was used for personal orientation and was interpreted for current purposes in a very personal way. The most important principle for the Greeks: the pursuit of balance (justice) (Iliad) as an essential part of their culture.

The goddess “Harmonia”, daughter of the god of war “Ares” and the goddess of love “Aphrodite”, symbolizes the union of two opposites in the legends of the Greeks; likewise “Apollo”, the god of truth, coherence and order, was regarded as a symbol of harmony. For the Greeks, the Apollonian being, harmonious, balanced and moderate, signified the highest spiritual perfection. see also Hans Jonas: Harmony is the measure of a system's perfection.

The idea that the world owes its creation and preservation to the interaction of two polar opposites, one enharmonic and one disharmonic, can be found in many teachings (Stoa - Spinoza)

This harmony is the absolute becoming, according to Hegel with Heraclitus - where “the differences do not persist as mere opposites against each other, but are to be brought into harmony”.

see also with the Egyptians the principle of Ma’at!

c) Cathars, an “exemplary civilization”

How many of you know where the word “heretic” comes from? It is a derivation of the name “Cathars”, which originally meant “the pure”, who abstained from all defilement. Another name for them was “Albigensians” after the city of Albi, a Cathar stronghold in southern France.

The Cathars/Albigensians were a medieval Christian heretical movement that spread rapidly across Europe and caused such a serious crisis for the Church in certain regions that its existence was endangered. All Simone Weil’s sympathy was with these Cathars. The fact that the name Cathar became the word “heretic” for all heretics shows how important this movement once was.

After the “Greek miracle”, Simone Weil discovered an “exemplary civilization” among the Cathars, whose value she sought to illuminate.  The philosopher found related ideas there, a last glimmering of Greek antiquity: “However little is known of the Cathars, it seems clear that they were somehow heirs of Platonic thought, of the secret cults and mysteries of that pre-Roman civilization that encompassed the Mediterranean and the Middle East. And, coincidentally, some aspects of their doctrine refer simultaneously to Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato and the Druidic doctrine that had once characterized the same soil”.

The Cathars are the model of a syncretism (fusion of philosophies and religions) that corresponds to Simone Weil’s thinking, and there she also finds a model of political organization that is decentralist.

(The freedom movement of the “Pure Ones” was cruelly defeated in the 13th century by a coalition of the Popes and the French royalty; the Cathars were tortured and killed “en masse”, their cities plundered and destroyed).

With harsh words, the author condemns the “perfidy” of the Church, which destroyed such a humane civilization.  The two essays published in the Cahiers du Sud in 1943 were not only intended to refresh a memory, because in the lost Occitania there are “longings that have not yet disappeared and that we must not let disappear, even if we cannot hope to fulfill them. Otherwise we kill a second time what has been destroyed, and we participate in the cruelty of weapons”.

4. socio-political reflections, book Die Einwurzelung (Rootedness)

Die Einwurzelung, the only complete work, her so-called intellectual legacy, was only published posthumously, like all her other books.

(Albert Camus, who carried a photograph of her with him throughout his life, made a great contribution to the first publication of her books, although they parted ways politically at an early stage).

The German occupation of France prompted her to emigrate in 1942 in order to reach the resistance movement around General De Gaulle in London via New York. As an editor there, she wrote basic papers for the political and intellectual reconstruction of France and Europe after the victory over fascism, In the latter, Weil saw the barbaric legacy of an occidental tradition that could not have detached itself from the image and idea of domination or power/violence, neither religiously (Rome) nor socially (Marx) nor epistemologically/scientifically (Galileo).

Understanding this phenomenon of violence and power (which for her was the cause of oppression, suffering and misfortune in the world) was the aim of her activity in militant-anarchist trade union groups (1931-1938) as well as her work in the factory and in the countryside (1934/35; 1941)

Her involvement in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the anarchist militia turned the problem of violence, revolution and state legitimization into a practical confirmation of her theoretical writings. (see Iliad or the Poem of Violence)

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I will not be able to go into the socio-political reform proposals in her book Die Einwurzelung any further this evening.

However, I am planning to organize an evening on this subject as part of the “Philosophical Round Table”, which our society also offers.

5. spiritual reflections (book: Gravity and Grace),

When did Simone Weil turn to religion?

The philosopher had already confessed in 1934: “There is no help to be hoped for from human beings”.

The final renunciation of the social-revolutionary world view took place after her war deployment in Spain, to which the convinced pacifist volunteered. She can't bear not to be there: she finds that is less bad than having to observe suffering from afar.

Quote:

“The misfortune spread over the earth haunts and oppresses me so much that my abilities succumb; I can only find them again if I take on a large part of the danger and suffering myself”.

In Spain, she witnessed how an atmosphere of contempt for humanity soon spread even among the “fighters for a good cause”, and above all she observed that the division between “those who count for something” and “those who count for nothing” was maintained, for example in the villages occupied by the anarchist brigades.

 This confirmed her opinion that it is not the correctness of ideals but the actual reality of life that is more important for concrete action.

What interests her about the Christian religion is the possibility of an attitude to life in the face of a misfortune that seems irremediable.

She sees the suffering of Christ as the purest expression of compassion for the oppressed. She visits monasteries, attends masses and has apparitions of Christ.

However, she keeps this radical change and her turn to religion a secret even from her friends and parents. This is only made public after her death with the publication of her notebooks.

In it, she testifies to her mystical experiences, which she first had during Holy Week 1939 in the Benedictine Abbey of Solesme in Italy.

Quote:

“I had a piercing headache; every sound hurt me like a blow; and then a supreme effort of attention allowed me to step out of this miserable flesh, to leave it huddled in its corner alone and to find a pure and perfect joy and bliss in the unheard beauty of the songs and words. Thanks to this experience, I try to better understand, by analogy, the possibility of practicing divine love through adversity. Of course, during those services, the Passion of Christ penetrated me once and for all”.

Because of this shattering experience, Simone Weil now finds access to that transcendent kingdom of truth that she had so desperately sought all her life.

She recognizes that only the attitude of attention, which she equates with pure love, can bring man's tendency towards violence and domination into an existential “balance”.

This “attention”, as understood by Simone Weil, has a spiritual dimension “even outside of any religious faith”; for every form of unselfish love (free of ego) fulfills that condition. In relation to the unhappy, this means: to look at their unhappiness in all its vastness and gravity and to recognize it without wanting to eliminate it immediately.

Quote:

“The fullness of charity consists simply in the ability to ask the neighbor: ‘What suffering torments you?’ It consists in the awareness that the unfortunate exists, not as an individual part of a series, not as a specimen of the social category labeled ‘unfortunate’, but as a person who is completely like us and on whom misfortune has one day left an inimitable mark. For this it is sufficient - but at the same time essential - that one knows how to direct a certain gaze towards him. (Tat twam asi - This is you) This gaze is above all an attentive gaze, whereby the soul empties itself of all its own content (ego) in order to absorb the being it is looking at in all its truth. Only those who are capable of the right love, of attention, are capable of such a gaze”.

(The philosopher Schopenhauer spoke of a “metaphysical realization”. It presupposes an identification with the other, a breaking down of the wall between people, so that “the other” no longer appears as an equally valid stranger, but as a person in whom I suffer, despite the fact that he is in a strange skin. This fundamental insight reveals that my own true, inner self exists in every living being and this is the basis for compassion, the inner sympathy on which all true, unselfish virtue rests and the expression of which is found in every good deed.

Spiritual basic words in Weil:

    a) Aufmerksamkeit, “attention”

    b) in Erwartung, in expectation, “en attente“

    c) Entwerden, Entausserung, emptying, “decreation”

(London notebook 1943)

Consequence of her doctrine of attention, of waiting and becoming empty

(or how one can arrive at the “understanding of transcendence”, as Jaspers calls it) - Via Negativa in theology)

“The real method of philosophy consists in clearly grasping the insoluble problems in their insolubility, then contemplating them, nothing more, unrelated, tireless, for years, without any hope, in waiting…”

(Simone Weil thus brings contemplation back into philosophy, which is the actual activity of philosophy for Plato and Aristotle under the title of “theoria”).

It is that passionate and tireless waiting, free of lesser needs and interests, that hopeless, yet not despairing waiting for the breakthrough to actual reality, for enlightenment through essential truth, for the arrival of divine grace, which became Simone Weil's basic attitude in the last years of her life. Here she elevates this attitude to the “methode propre de la philosophie”, the actual method of philosophy.

This is reminiscent of one of the last sentences in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where it says:

“The correct method of philosophy would actually be: To say nothing but what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science - something that has nothing to do with philosophy...”

(One of the most quoted philosophical statements of this century: “What one cannot speak about, one must remain silent about”)

But this negative approach is not the last word, for Wittgenstein does not exclude questions of ethics and aesthetics, religion and the “problems of life” as nonsensical; for him, only the attempt to say something about these things is nonsensical.

There is, however, the inexpressible. This shows itself: it is the mystical. Here only a “showing” is possible, but no "saying". Occasionally Wittgenstein also speaks of the “important unwritten second half” of the Tractatus, (Plato says the same in his 5th letter...) with which he wants to express that the really important questions arise from what is not said.

In Simone Weil's sense, an insoluble problem for man is the access to the spheres of the moral and the religious.

If one does not already live in these spheres - and most intellectually awake people in the Western world no longer do so impartially - then they seem inaccessible, transcendent. Then the question may arise as to how one can enter them (again) and how one can make sure of them.

How does one arrive at the point where moral or religious confession becomes not just an assumed, but an individual possibility of personal life?

For Simone Weil, the answer is: not at all through our own intellectual or vital strength, but only in our own active passivity of waiting!

Man cannot reach transcendence through his own efforts - that would be a contradiction in terms - since to be transcendent means to be closed to theoretical and practical endeavor.

“The transition to the transcendent takes place when the human faculties - intellect, will, human love - come up against a limit and man remains on this threshold, beyond which he cannot take a step, and this without turning away from it, without knowing what he desires, and tensely waiting”.

“And since man cannot cross the threshold - not even in expectation! - but can only remain (wait) on it, it is not he who reaches the unrecognizable and inscrutable transcendent, but the threshold itself has, as it were, moved away under his feet, so that he finds himself suddenly, unexpectedly, unpredictably in the space of the transcendent. Thus, the transition to transcendence takes place out of transcendence itself!”

Simone Weil's five-stanza poem La Porte/Die Pforte contains the same statement. In stanzas 3, 4 and 5 it says:

“…We see the gate; it is closed, insurmountable.

We fix our eyes on it; we weep in agony;

We see it all the time; the weight of time weighs upon us.

The gate is before us; what is the use of wanting?

It would be better to walk away and give up hope.

We will never enter. We are tired of seeing it...

The gate, when it opened, let through so much silence...

only the immeasurable space where there is emptiness and light,

was suddenly present everywhere, filling the heart

and washed the eyes, almost blind under the dust”.

There is no more wall, no more boundary, no more gate - and no more problem, no more question! Is this the answer? In any case, there is nothing representational there anymore, nothing that could refer to contents in the world, to situations in life. Instead, the world as a whole, life as a whole, shows itself in the light. The world, life are silent, they are empty, but not dark! It is not darkness that fills them, but silence, emptiness and light. Light fills the heart, washes the eyes...

Can, indeed must this special, experienced light of which she speaks not be identified with the unconditional, supernatural good, the truth, which plays such a central role in Simone Weil's thinking?

Some thoughts:

The same openness of an answer as to where the light comes from can be found in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. There it says:

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life have not yet been touched at all. Of course, then there is no question left; and this is the answer.

The solution to the problem of life can be seen in the disappearance of this problem.

(Is this not the reason why people who realized the meaning of life after much doubt could not say what this meaning was?)

However, there is something inexpressible. This shows itself, it is the mystical (the vision).

What is the mystical? What is mystical is not how the world is, but that it is. Pure existence is the absolute given and in this respect the inexplicable, i.e. the miraculous. And since the world and life are one in transcendental terms, this also applies to life: It is the absolutely given, which seems to have its meaning solely from itself”.

6. The last text...The Fool

On August 4, 1943, three weeks before her death, she described Shakespeare's fools as role models. It was necessary to recognize their tragedy, beyond the comic gestures:

"The fools are the only people who tell the truth... In this world, only those people who have reached the last degree of degradation, far below beggary, who are not only without social standing, but also lack the dignity most valued by everyone, reason, - only those people can tell the truth. All others lie." 

That was the last word of this proclaimer. It also marked the beginning of her unconventional career, as Simone Weil, without diplomatic consideration, always expressed what she considered to be the truth.  In this sense, she was always the fool in the face of established power.

Conclusion 

So that, as the philosopher Hegel says, the imagination and the heart do not run dry, I would like to conclude with a short story:

During his first stay in Paris, the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926 - 1904/05 secretary to Rodin) walked past an old beggar woman every lunchtime in the company of his girlfriend, a young French woman. She sat day after day on a piece of wall in a public garden, silent, immobile and uninvolved. She never looked up at any donor. She neither asked nor thanked. If someone put a coin in her palm, she would bring her hand back to herself, let the coin disappear in her pocket and put her open hand away again.

While the Frenchwoman always gave the beggar woman a handsome gift, Rilke never gave anything. “You should give to her heart, not her hand,” he said when she wondered about his behavior.

The next afternoon, when they met again, the poet carried a barely blossomed white rose delicately, gently between the tips of his fingers. A robe of joy ran over her friend's face. She thought, oh, Rainer Maria is bringing me a rose!

But this rose was not for her.

When he reached the beggar woman, the poet stood still and gently placed the white rose in the old woman's open hand. Then something happened that had never happened before: the beggar woman looked up at the giver. What's more, she stood up, grabbed the stranger's hand, kissed it and walked away with the rose.

In the days that followed, Rilke avoided the beggar woman's street. The friend, on the other hand, could not refrain from going the usual way every day just to give the beggar her daily coin, as she said to herself as an excuse. But to her great surprise, she never met the beggar. After a week, she could bear the silence no longer. She was determined to speak to the poet about the effect of his gift the next time he passed the beggar woman's street. 

But just as she was about to ask her question, Rilke turned into the street she had been avoiding for a week. ³Now we can walk along here again, because she is sitting in her place again today.² 

The friend was stunned. The poet was right. The old beggar woman sat on the wall as usual: silent, rigid, immobile, uninvolved. And while Rilke's friend placed a coin larger than ever in her outstretched hand and the beggar woman made it disappear in the usual way, Rilke gave nothing.

But the friend had a question that she could not suppress: What did she live on all those days when no one could put money in her hand? 

Rainer Maria Rilke answered her: ³From the rose!²