"What Would Weil Do?": Philosophy as Work

“You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything has been lost.” - Simone Weil

The first time I read Weil, I was a senior in high school. I was given a copy of Gravity and Grace by my older, much wiser friend who was in college and who seemed infinitely more advanced than me. Weil had become, for her, a kind of spiritual and intellectual mentor. For years, she carried her dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of Gravity and Grace with her like a pocket King James Bible. The epigrammatic, koan-like Gravity and Grace reminded me of the austere architecture of a Roman cathedral—something both lofty and utterly removed from daily life—or of the uncanniness of medieval Christian portraiture. There was something alien to her writing, something simultaneously recognizable as human while also appearing to exist primarily outside of our world. On my first read, I’ll admit that I found Weil, cold, impersonal, and opaque. As someone who was raised Christian but who has since lapsed into a vague spiritualism, her intense devotion was initially off-putting to me. It often felt, while reading her, that she was speaking another language. Nevertheless, I sensed that there was something to her, a reason why my friend and so many others were consistently drawn to her life and work.

In the fall of 2020, as the world reeled from the pandemic, I, like everyone else, was spending a lot of time at home and alone with my thoughts. I decided it was time to give Weil another try. After acquiring an anthology of her writing, I began working my way through it, and instead of finding her writing dour, discomforting, or off-putting, I felt as if I were being led by a warm, firm, steady hand. I took comfort reading her during the dark winter months of 2020, finding something reassuring in reading a thinker who could write with such moral clarity

during another uniquely calamitous time in history.

Weil lived during a time filled with ethically fraught, high-stakes decisions. Although the circumstances were different, the pervasive feeling that one’s daily decisions had grave, large-scale consequences, is common, I think, to both Weil’s lifetime and our own. Weil

was living through an ethically convoluted environment similar to the one that myself and everyone I knew faced as we attempted to navigate our lives during a global pandemic, where daily decisions could have literally life or death consequences. Weil’s writings on living ethically during fraught times resonated deeply with me. I found myself asking, only partly ironically, when faced with challenging day-to-day choices and attempting to calculate what would cause the least amount of harm: “What would Simone Weil do?”

One way, out of many, to read Weil’s work and life, is to examine how she applied her ethical philosophy to her own actions. This is the kind of reading I will attempt here—looking at the way theory and praxis merged in the particular instance of Weil’s engagement

with labour throughout her work, following some of the twists and turns in the development of her thinking on the topic of work, both in an abstract and a literal sense. The site of this engagement was most often the factory floor. During her short career, the factory, like the lycée, was a place where Weil engaged in philosophy, among her peers and her fellow workers. It was a fertile breeding ground for Weil, and, especially early in her career, a place where “What Would Weil Do?”: Philospohy as Work

some of her most well-known theories—notably her theories of “attention” and “affliction”—were first sketched.

Simone Weil lived a short and intense life bracketed by two world wars. Born in 1909, a few years before the outbreak of World War I, she died in 1943 from a combination of tuberculosis and self-imposed malnutrition. In her short life, she produced a prolific amount of work on everything ranging from classical literature, mathematics, psychology, science, and religion to, of course, philosophy. In a short time, she managed to live a remarkable amount of often contradictory lives, and part of the joy and difficulty one encounters reading her work is how to make sense and reconcile the starkly different “Weils” that one encounters. Weil was, at various points in her life: a Frenchwoman, a mystic, a Platonist, a philosopher who labored among factory workers, a Jewish-born convert to Roman Catholicism, a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a revolutionary who was skeptical of revolution, and (according to André Gide) the “patron saint of all outsiders.” Having lived through three wars and participated in two (the Spanish Civil War and World War II), her short life during this intense historical period gave her a unique amount of opportunities to put her ethics to the test. Unique among her contemporaries is the narrow distance between the values she espoused and the actions she performed. Although she contradicted herself over her career, and her actions were sometimes misguided and even unhelpful (see, for example, her absurd proposal to parachute unarmed nurses onto the Allied front-lines, or her botched attempt to fight in the Spanish Civil war, which ended after she accidentally burned herself with oil) Weil was, above all else, deeply committed to all of her beliefs.

I.

One of the first causes the young Weil pledged herself to was the plight of the workers. Like many other French intellectuals of her period, she was attracted to Marxist ideas and from a very early age expressed an interest in labor relations. Where Weil differs significantly from her French intellectual contemporaries, however, is how she applied her concern for the worker’s conditions. She was not

simply an armchair Marxist, teaching about dialectics in a university somewhere: she made concerted (if sometimes ridiculous) efforts to meet the workers where they were, to tutor them in the cultural education she felt them to have been robbed of, and to engage with them on their own terms. Weil was not, despite her bourgeois class position, writing about labor from an idealized, comfortably removed position. Rather, Weil wrote from the perspective of someone who had intimately acquainted herself with physical work and who knew both how soul-crushing and how fulfilling it could be.

While teaching at a small lycée in Roanne, an industrial city in southeast France, Weil applied to work at the Alsthom factory in Rue Lecourbe. Slight, clumsy and plagued by migraines, she was certainly a poor candidate for hard labor. But despite these deficits, she persisted in her search for factory work, finally convincing the factory director to take her on in 1934. While teaching her half-dozen students philosophy at the lycée, she worked during her off-hours at a machine press on the Alsthom factory floor. It was obvious that she was not well-suited to the work: she often missed her her quotas (once damaging an entire quota’s worth of metal components), frequently burned herself, and, wracked by migraines and fatigue, finished most of her work days weeping.

Despite not being a very capable manual laborer, her experience at the factory proved fruitful intellectually, as is documented in the “factory journal” she kept during her time at Alsthom. To read her journals from this period is to watch her distilling her physical experiences with labor into philosophical theories in real time. At the factory, her experience with the mind-numbing, repetitive, painful experiences of physical labor was essential for the development of her ideas, especially her writings on affliction and attention. Work, as Weil’s thought develops, becomes an especially intellectually dense locus within her broader philosophical system. This sphere of activity is a meeting place where many of the ideas Weil explored are staged. In her later writings, as will be shown, work acquires for Weil spiritual implications that are latent in the earlier “factory journal” entries.

When work is done under nonideal conditions it produces the

the kind of acute mental and physical suffering Weil experienced herself on the Alsthom factory floor. This affliction is both physical and psychological: it reduces those that endure it (the workers) to the status of things—dehumanized, non-thinking things. To paraphrase Weil, affliction reduces its victims to slaves. Writing about inhuman labor conditions and affliction, Weil often sounds like Marx writing on the alienation of the worker from his labor.

In an essay written a few years later in Marseille in 1941, “Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour,” we find Weil writing again about the negative effects of work done in inhumane conditions, but this time from the vantage point of someone who was undergoing a spiritual conversion. She begins the essay by stating that in all manual work and all work done out of the need to survive, there is an element of constraint: “it means exerting effort whose sole end is to cure no more than what one already has, while failure to exert such effort results in losing it.” Anyone who has had to work for a living—to pay rent, support their family or themselves, and put food on the table—will understand the kind of experience Weil describes vividly: “the unit of time is a day and [workers] oscillate like a ball bouncing off two walls, from work to sleep, working so as to eat, eating so as to continue to work and so on ad nauseum.”

For Weil, the condition of working simply to subsist produces “revulsion.” All workers, but especially those who work under inhumane conditions, are the most susceptible to revulsion. The connection to her earlier notion of “affliction” is explicit. Revulsion, it seems to me, is an instantiation of Weil’s theory of affliction that applies specifically to workers. In this state of revulsion for the worker where all “effort is survival,” the Good is notably absent. As Weil puts it, “necessity is omnipresent, good nowhere.” Weil’s intellectual debt to Plato, her deep love and allegiance to his philosophy, is especially evident here, and is indicative of her moral philoso-phy at this later stage in her career.

Never a particularly orthodox Marxist, it is Weil’s unique conception of work as it relates to the Good that I would argue distinguishes her among other philosophers similarly concerned with labor relations, forms of oppression, and revolutionary politics. Breaking ranks with Marxist orthodoxy, Weil claims that Revolution is not a cure-all for this state of revulsion, but rather like a “drug”; it is an illusionary form of compensation. Revolution “as a revolt against the injustices of society” is right, according to Weil, but “as a revolt against the

essential misery of the working condition it is misleading, for no revolution will get rid of the latter.” If revolution is only a partial solution, what does Weil suggest as an alternative?

II. As “Prerequisite to the Dignity of Labour” continues, Weil makes a turn, revealing her hand. It is here, as her thought begins to ascend to a loftier, spiritual plane, where Weil begins to lose me. What workers need most of all, Weil argues, in order to fill their miserable and empty lives, is beauty. “Only one thing,” Weil writes, “makes monotony bearable and that is beauty, the light of the eternal.” What is not needed for workers is bread so much as beauty in the form of poetry—but not poetry’s “closed inside words,” as we would conventionally assume— poetry in the form of religion. “Such poetry can come from one source only, and that is God,” she writes. Religion fulfills what workers are fundamentally lacking in their lives: purpose. Interestingly, for Weil it is the worker who is in a social and economic position most well-suited to receive God: “Nothing separates them from God. They have only to lift their heads.” The very work that they do, which was also the medium for much of their misery, becomes also a vehicle for their salvation. Although in the workplace “all thought is dragged down to earth,” the tools and material of the workplace contain, for Weil, the cure. The workplace, as Weil enumerates, is full of reminders of God. For these workers, “the very work which paralyses, provided it be transformed into poetry, will lead to intuitive attention.”

Work is the ideal medium for the practice of Weil’s notion of “attention,” a crucial, loaded term in her philosophy, traces of which can be found in her early factory journals, although it wouldn’t become a fully fledged concept until the final years of her career. What then is Weil’s theory of attention? It is hard, given limited space, to summarize her concept fully. Nevertheless, here is an attempt.

Contrary to the conventional understanding of attention as a kind of intense mental effort, Weil separates attention into two categories: inferior attention (mental exertion or “mental gymnastics”) and intuitive intention. “Pure, intuitive attention,” she writes, “is the only source of perfectly

beautiful art, and truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbor.” Attention is also, for Weil, a form of prayer, one that, if practiced correctly, promises a direct link with God. Like prayer, it involves a great amount of patience, and it requires us to leave ourselves open to the possibility of being awed.

Weil’s practice of attention is also intimately connected with the Good. It is here where we see Weil’s particular flavor of Platonism in full force. She writes, in Gravity and Grace: “If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” This kind of orientation towards the Good, through the practice of attention, involves a particular form of self-abnegation—the suppression (or even destruction) of the Ego. However, in Weil’s case, this detachment does not result in a hands-off, cloistered kind of noninvolvement, but instead a particularly charged form of ethical engagement with the world.

At first, this statement seems to be, like many of Weil’s theories, a paradox. Here, understanding a little about Weil’s thinking on the relation between perception and ethics is helpful. For Weil, in contrast to other theories of phenomenology, perception and value judgement are coterminous. Thought, she argues, occurs simultaneously with discernment: we perceive and we judge simultaneously. Thus, for Weil, acting morally is contingent on “seeing” the other properly. Attention, in Weil’s unique formulation, is therefore able to take the form of an ethical precept. Especially when the subject of our attention is another human and their suffering, the act of attention takes on pronounced ethical dimensions: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it.”

Attention, when its object is another human being, can be described as a conscious attuning to the sacredness inherent in the other regardless of their status, their behavior, or their identities. Proper action towards another human, for Weil, can only first emerge when this inherent sacredness of the other is properly

apprehended.

III. With all this in mind, what can studying Weil, both her work and her life, teach us today? What if we do not agree with all of her views, especially those concerning God? What if we are unbelievers? I’ve struggled with this often while reading Weil, as I find myself torn between being drawn to her strongly and almost inexplicably despite rejecting (or at least severely doubting) many of her fundamental religious beliefs. As a spiritually curious, lapsed Christian, there is much of Weil that I disagree with. Still, I can’t stop reading her. Reading gives me a glimpse of the kind of clarity and surety that having such devout belief can bring to one’s life. It is this feeling, of being awed by such a display of devotion, that is part of the reason I return to Weil, again and again. This, and the fact that she seems to have something important to say about nearly everything. As one of her translator’s, Richard Rees, puts it in the introduction to her First and Last Notebooks: “There is probably not a single fundamental problem of our age, in any domain, that is not resolutely faced and examined somewhere in these pages.” She is a thinker who, I believe, rewards continual, long term engagement. In other words, Weil rewards our attention.

Unfortunately for her readers today, Weil’s work will not provide a simple compendium of answers to common ethical questions. A reader looking for a “self-help” style guide on how to live will come

away frustrated. Her writing does not provide any easy answers. It will not, for example, tell us how to solve climate change, who to vote for, or whether you can buy from Amazon and still consider yourself a good person. Even the more direct answers that she does give to moral problems may prove equally unhelpful, at least initially. But do I believe that a sustained engagement with her work does serve to train us to be better at thinking “ethically”— at interrogating our beliefs, and our motivations, and our ideals, so that when we do act, we do so with great intention and moral clarity.

In a general sense, I think Weil serves as a model of someone who lived a committed life, held firm ideals, and thought and lived rigorously until right up until her death. She is a model for a version of the philosopher: the philosopher as a thinker who is also engaged in daily life—a model of philosophy not as a solipsistic retreat, but as continual re-engagement with the world. It is not only Weil’s theories that are worthwhile to study today, but her particular way of thinking through them.

It was Weil’s thought as a verb and not as a noun that ultimately proved the most rewarding takeaway during my year of reading her. By reading, in her journals and essays and lectures, Weil articulating simultaneously her experiences “doing” work and “doing” philosophy, I began to understand the intimate relationship the two possessed for her. Philosophy, for her, was not something detached from one’s daily, banal existence but something fundamentally inextricable from it. After spending a year with Weil, I believe that she has much to teach us about what it means to be a thinking person in this world and how thinking itself is a morally fraught action. Weil is something of a philosopher’s philosopher: she writes lucidly about the role

of a philosopher, and what doing philosophy means at all.

At her very best, Weil is a kind of moral exemplar in the sense that she encourages us to think more critically about our thought processes (and the actions that spring from them) and to commit ourselves more deeply to what we believe in. As she writes in her notebooks, “philosophy is exclusively an affair of action and practice. That is why it is so difficult to write about it. Difficult in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running, only much more so.” This is both a wonderful, succinct definition of her conception of philosophy and a useful way to approach her own philosophical practice. For Weil, thought was action, although it was not a complete substitute for it. Even if her attempts to enact her ideals were sometimes flawed in execution, there is much to admire in a person who is willing to live and die by their beliefs, a person whose ethics are so enmeshed in their life, that it is nearly impossible for them to separate ethics from existence.

It took me a long time to come around to Weil. I felt intimidated, uncomfortable, and a little guilty reading her. It is easy, when reading Weil, to feel ashamed. One feels that they are continually falling short in her presence. I am reminded, every time I read her, that I am not doing enough for the causes and ideals I believe in. I think that, especially today, this feeling is not a bad thing. As one of her earliest friends and later her biographer said of her, “Who would not be ashamed of oneself in Simone’s presence, seeing the life she led?” Shame, I think, should only be our initial feeling reading her. For if we get past the shame, the richness of Weil’s teachings are unveiled to us, and we are given the immense privilege of bearing witness and giving attention to her beautiful, luminous mind.