Simone Weil's essay “La personne et le sacré,” known in English as “Human Personality,” is a remarkable piece of philosophy that has not, I think, received as much attention as it deserves among analytic philosophers. And when it has been discussed by such philosophers, they have not always gotten to the root of its oddities and peculiar interest. Granted, it is in some ways extremely difficult to translate Weil's approach to her themes into the kind of discourse characteristic of present-day Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Also, those who are attracted by Weil's writings tend to read her on her own terms, which leaves one with a sense that the hardest questions have not been put to her, and that the difficulties of her work have not been fully brought to the surface.¹

Be that as it may, I wish here to take seriously the central claims that Weil makes and to explore them from an analytic perspective, not least because “Human Personality” contains, in nuce, most of the themes that preoccupied Weil.²

A key target of Weil's essay, as Eric Springsted has shown, is Personalism, especially as represented in the writings of Jacques Maritain.³

Personalism attributes to each human being a metaphysical center, constituted by his or her personality, that grounds the individual's inalienable human rights. According to Springsted, Weil raised two objections to this claim. First, her engagement with Marx left her skeptical about whether the personality is anything more than a product of historically contingent social forces, and hence she was hostile to any attempt to ground rights in the notion of the personality. Second, and this is Weil's more serious objection, Personalism fails to understand properly the nature of human suffering, since it supposes that it is a metaphysical impossibility that “human beings can be crushed and destroyed.” Personalism—like liberalism, the alleged best guardian of the rights of the individual—maintains that there is something in the individual that can “overcome circumstances, no matter how bad they are.”⁴

Springsted is no doubt right that Weil objected to Personalism on the grounds, as she saw it, that it could make no proper sense of human suffering. However, I would put this point in a slightly different way. For if Personalism says that there is always a metaphysical core to the individual that cannot be destroyed even as the person lives, then the real problem is that no one, in real dealings with human beings, can actually believe this. The philosophy does not capture a proper understanding of what we all know to be the case: that a human being can be spiritually destroyed, that his soul can be killed, even as he lives. But because Personalism is so hopeless at making sense of the way in which a human being's life can be destroyed, it is also hopeless at making sense of why one would find something morally repugnant in destroying another human being. This is why Weil poses at the start of the essay the key question, “What exactly prevents me from putting out the eyes of this man if I am allowed to and I feel like doing it?” (12). And her point is that Personalism does not offer any kind of plausible answer to this question. Just as the notion of a metaphysical core can make no sense of evil suffered, neither does it provide any proper understanding of evil inflicted: if a human being possesses a metaphysical core that protects him from the worst forms of evil that he might suffer, then one cannot inflict evil of that kind on him. Yet we know this to be false. And if we wanted a paradigm case of the kind of evil in question, we could think of a lot worse than putting out a man's eyes.

These reflections show that there is a more general philosophical perspective implicit in Weil's comments about Personalism and her way of approaching these issues. Or, at any rate, she can be enlighteningly read as exploring such a perspective, as I hope to show. That perspective involves the rejection not only, as we have seen, of the answer Personalism gives to the question of what would stay my hand if I felt like putting out this man's eyes and were allowed to, but, more generally, of the sorts of answers to this question that can be gleaned from the philosophical tradition. Such answers might include that to do so would be to frustrate his desires or interests or welfare; or, that it would violate the respect owing to him as a rational or self-conscious or autonomous being; or, that I should resist it were he to do the same to me, and hence I ought not to do it to him. But all of these look inadequate to the purpose. Suppose he wanted to have his eyes put out: we should still feel that we ought not to do it. The fact that he wants to be blinded or that being blind would serve his interests does not detract from the horror of blinding him. Again, babies and infants are no doubt neither rational nor self-conscious nor autonomous, but this hardly means we can blind them with impunity. Indeed, to put out the eyes of a dog or cat is to do something horrific; what is wrong with doing so is hardly that a dog or a cat is rational or self-conscious or autonomous. And the appeal to moral symmetry is no help, either: it is nothing but a more circuitous version of the appeal to desires, or interests, or welfare.

Weil rejects all the typical philosophical accounts of what would prevent me from putting out this man's eyes. She locates their weakness in the emphasis that these accounts place on the empirical features of the man, be they desires, rational-ity, or whatever. Paradoxical and unhelpful as it sounds, there is a sense in which Weil claims that there is nothing about this man that makes blinding him evil. That is, there is nothing about the fact that this man is this man that makes it evil. We could look at it this way: if we try to base the evil of putting out a person's eyes on some empirical characteristic or characteristics of this person, then we shall come up against the problem that a realistic assessment of human beings will tell us that human beings are what the great French moralistes (and others) have always said they are, namely, remorselessly driven by self-concern in all its varieties of fear, greed, and envy. Weil herself explored such thoughts through the notion of the void in the human heart. She was referring to the craving that our desires, needs, hopes, and fantasies constitute for us. We long to satisfy them, but when we do, we are often ourselves not satisfi ed; and even if we are, we are immediately assailed by other needs, desires, and the like. The present thus becomes empty, and we live in an imagined past in which all was better, or in an imagined future in which all will be better. In other words, we live in a fantasy world, cut off from reality. We are subject in our cravings, she says, to the law of “gravity.” Of course, there are good things in human beings. But the point is that, even if we were to find some characteristic of some individual human being that might ground our sense of his value and thus justify our sense that to put his eyes out was wicked—say, that he is noble of soul—we know not only that this nobility is itself in all likelihood held in place by much that is ugly, e.g., vanity, but also that precious few human beings possess it. And surely what we wanted was something that human beings share which makes putting out any person's eyes wicked.

Weil answers her own question thus: “What would stay it [my hand] is knowing that if someone put out his eyes his soul would be torn by the thought that evil was being done to him” (12–13). She explains:

Whatever else Weil means by this, it seems she cannot be referring to some universal psychological trait of human beings.⁵

For not only does it seem clear that such a psychological generalization is weak, since it would seem to make in-comprehensible some forms of despair in which a human being expects that only evil will come to him or her, it also seems that it would be saying little more than that human beings are selfish, since they want what satisfies their desires. But the trouble is, if she does not mean to be describing a psychological trait, it is hard, to say the least, to see what she does mean. And this problem is made all the more pressing by the fact that Weil herself seemed to see that a human being could suffer in such a way that he or she would lose all sense of the possibility of good being done to him: she put this in terms of “l'absence de Dieu … défi nitive”⁶ from the life of a person thus suffering.

Richard Rees expresses a common understanding of Weil's thought here, saying that, according to Weil, there is a

Certainly Rees is right to connect—indeed, to identify—Weil's point about a human being's expectation that good and not evil be done to him with her idea of thirsting for pure good. But that latter point looks as much like a universal claim about human psychology as did the former. Hence, Weil claims that all human beings search for the beauty of the world and she suggests that “all the tastes of men from the guiltiest to the most innocent, from the most general to the most particular” are attempts to gain access to the beauty of the world, which beauty Weil licenses us to think of as goodness.⁸

Our problem recurs, however. It is implausible to think that Weil could be describing human psychology in any other than a highly value-laden manner. And the problem is not that we might be able to describe human psychology in value-free terms, for we almost certainly cannot. The issue is one concerning the specific terms that are employed. And the terms Weil uses just look strained: if we try to think that any kind of realistic psychology will deliver the result Weil is after, we are surely mistaken. But, like Rees, many commentators seem to think that Weil is making a point about human psychology—or, if they do not think it is that, they do not say what it is. Sometimes, in not subjecting Weil's view of human beings to criticism, they discuss it as if it were obviously true. It may be that they do not submit it to criticism because it is a deeply edifying thought. Unfortunately, that it is edifying does not make it true, or even clear.

Richard H. Bell has sought to make up the lacuna here by suggesting that a confirmation “that all humans have some conception of the good” can be found in the fact that we have not given up in the face of all the cruelty of human life. He writes:

But Bell's claim is clearly questionable. For even if it is true that all human beings have some conception of the good, it does not at all follow that this is the kind of absolute good Weil has in mind. Something less could keep us going, so to speak. But, more decisively, Bell's point can only work as long as we ignore those who carry out the cruelty to which he appeals to make his point. Do they have the desire for the absolute good? If one says that they do, as Weil does, then we do not solve our problems, but merely raise them all over again. Why interpret their desires as desires for such a good? So far, we have no reason to do that at all.

In fact, Weil's point is not, I want to suggest, about human psychology at all. That is, when Weil says that something in a human being goes on expecting that good and not evil will be done to him or her, we should understand this not as a claim about human psychology, about what human beings (always) expect, but rather as a claim that human psychology does not really matter. Similarly, when she speaks of human beings’ thirst for pure good, we should not see her as making a claim about what human beings are in fact like, about what they actually want. We should see her as inviting us into a distinctive ethical perspective on human life and human beings.

This suggestion can be supported by other statements in “Human Personality.” Weil puts her rejection of the idea that it is by referring to a human being's empirical characteristics that we can see what is awful about inflicting harm on him in terms of a rejection of the value of the human personality. It is not on account of what is personal in him—that he has a personality with such and such qualities—that it is wrong to inflict harm on him. It is, rather, the impersonal in a person that makes it wrong. It is the impersonal in a human being, says Weil, that is sacred (16).

Part of what Weil is getting at is to oppose a worldly conception of value to a wholly otherworldly conception. We can begin to bring out what she means here by considering her discussion of Antigone (25–26). The brothers Polyneices and Eteocles have fought over the kingdom of Thebes, and both have died in the struggle. Creon, king of Thebes and the uncle of the two dead men, has forbidden the burial of Polyneices, the aggressor in the conflict. Antigone, sister of the dead men, refuses to accept this, and performs funeral rites for Polyneices. She is punished by being walled up to die.

Weil says of Creon's claims against Antigone that they make good sense and are perfectly reasonable: it is foolish of her to wish to treat the two brothers equally. Weil refers to Antigone in this context as being a “little fool” (petite niaise. From the point of view of human institutions and what their protection legitimately requires, of human needs and desires for security, stability, and so on, and of what different individuals can be said to deserve, Creon is right and Antigone wrong. But, says Weil, Antigone is possessed of a pure love. In the light of this love, those human concerns do not matter. Issues of what someone deserves, or of self-protection and self-preservation—issues, that is, of what Weil thinks of as the personal—are of no concern here. There is in the light of this love—a sort of love Weil found best exemplifi ed in the life of Christ—a kind of radical equality of all human beings in which issues of what kind of person one is, of what one has done, and of what one has achieved are of no consequence whatsoever. In the light of this love, all are sacred and, therefore, harming another is evil.

So, by an “otherworldly” conception of value I mean, roughly, a conception of value in which the usual evaluations we make of individuals' motives, deeds, character, achievements, and so on, in order to assess or judge their worth or value in some given respect or for some given purpose, e.g., as employee or confidant or enemy or leader, lapse and are replaced by an all-embracing love of individuals regardless of such considerations. And someone who looks at things this way, or longs to do so, will be extremely skeptical about placing any value in social prestige or success, or in material comfort, or in wealth and the like—as, indeed, Weil was.¹⁰

When Weil claims, then, that it is the impersonal in the human being that is sacred, what she means, I think, is that there is a kind of love—a kind of attention¹¹

—in the light of which it is possible to see human beings as sacred. That is, it is precisely because this kind of love is one which bypasses all interest in the empirical characteristics of a human being, in what individuates a human being, that it sees the human being in the light in question. This kind of love, which Weil also refers to as a supernatural goodness,¹² and the view it affords make no sense from any realistic assessment of human psychology.¹³ It is foolish, unreasonable, absurd.

How plausible is Weil's view? It would be silly to think that one could come to a definitive answer to that here, but something needs to be said. Her view is clearly intended to cut off the possibility of a justifi cation for the idea that it is evil or oth-erwise morally reprehensible to inflict harm on another. That is, she intends to cut off the possibility of providing an argument for that idea such that, if a person—any person—whose reason is functioning properly considers and follows the argument, then, regardless of his affective or spiritual state, he will accept the conclusion and thus believe that it is evil to inflict harm on another. And if we grant that the usual philosophical attempts to provide such a justification fail—as I suggested earlier that we have at least some reason to grant—then we can, perhaps, be sympathetic to the methodology of her approach. And this point can be strengthened by con-sidering Weil's example again. Any justifi cation for the thought that to put out a man's eyes is evil, is, on account of its philosophical complexity, arguably less certain than the sheer thought that this act is, indeed, evil. Philosophy lags behind our moral experience here.

But what about the idea that, as Weil says, Creon's view is reasonable and Antigone's foolish? More generally, what about the fact that Weil construes the love she is interested in as absurd? We may observe that her approach seems deeply and genuinely Christian. After all, there is clearly an absurdity in much of what Christ taught: love of one's enemies, infi nite forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and giving up all worldly goods hardly make much sense from the point of view of a realistic human psychology. That is partly what makes Christ's teachings so attractive to some (and so repulsive to others). It has to be said, I think, that most Christians have not lived in anything like that way, and Weil was as impatient with that as were Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in their different ways. For Weil, there can be no real content to a faith that is professed but not lived. That is, we are dealing here with the kind of life a person lives, a whole Christian praxis, not assent (or not merely assent) to some set of propositions concerning a certain kind of value. I think, then, that we should see her as striving to recapture a genuinely Christian, that is, Christ-like, vision of life, however absurd—or, rather, because it is so absurd, and so open, therefore, to degradation. Whether one thinks that makes sense will depend to a great extent on one's general attitude to the things of this world—and, in particular, on whether one thinks that there can be a form of worldliness that is not, in the end, a kind of corruption. Needless to say, that is far too large an issue to be dealt with here. But if it is at least an open possibility that worldliness ends in this way, then I suspect that means the absurdity of Christ's message might well be found appealing.

But here we run up against a difficulty: if it is true that there is nothing empirical about a human being that justifies the response of love, then what is it that makes human beings the fit or proper object of such love? If the situation is as I have put it, then why could not, say, some animals be the object of such love? Indeed, why could not even mountains or trees be such an object?¹⁴

We can put this problem in terms of Weil's notion of attention. For she wants to say that to be attentive to an object of concern, be it a human being or a mathemati-cal problem, it is required that “our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”¹⁵

Yet Eric Springsted is right when he says that, in some sense, attention “is a moral activity that creates the very human person” who is the object of the attention. And if there is creation here, then why cannot animals or trees be the object of that creation? How can attention be empty, receiving the object as it is, imposing nothing on it, and yet be creative? And I hope it is clear that the problem is only concealed by Springsted's talk of the creation of the very human person “by responding to his or her desire for good”—for that precisely limits the notion of creation and returns us to the difficulties about human psychology with which we are dealing.¹⁶

We can now perhaps see why some commentators have been keen to suppose that what justifies Weil's claims about love—indeed, what justifies the love itself—is, after all, something empirical about human beings, i.e., a psychological trait that is the thirst for an absolute good. The commentators have seen, quite rightly, that without something like this, Weil's project looks as if it might collapse. But if I am right in what I have been arguing, there is little plausibility in such a conception of human psychology.

I think that Weil never really saw the problem here. Despite all her talk of impersonality, she harbored a ferocious attachment to her own ideas. As Rees has said, commenting on Weil's notion of detachment from the things of this world in favor of an otherworldly conception of value: “She knew very well that perfect detachment means being detached even from one's detachment, but her writing hardly shows it.”¹⁷

There is a sense in which she could not, in the end, seriously believe that anyone could not thirst for the bien absolu as she did. To that extent, she would have agreed with her commentators that she was describing a universal psychological trait of human beings. Her belief in such a universal trait explains, at least partly, her syncretic manner of working, ransacking other cultures to fi nd intimations of Christianity in them, and expressing a deep hostility when she failed to do so, as was the case with her understanding of Rome. Such cultures and ways of life brought her face-to-face with the utterly contingent nature of her own sense of things. She was, by temperament, not someone who could feel happy with such things.

Part of Weil's problems here stem from her desire to retreat from providing a metaphysical underpinning for her notion of the value of the human being.¹⁸

But what that means is that Weil's claims about, and view of, human beings are a form of her bearing witness to a sense of things. Whether that carries any weight or au-thority for the reader will depend heavily on his or her experiences, temperament, and sensibility. Weil's thoughts here are close to those of Nietzsche, who argued that what philosophy has hitherto presented as an impersonal voice is not that at all, but rather is deeply dependent on, indeed expressive of, the particular voice of a specific thinker offering his or her thoughts. But this is not anything Weil readily acknowledges about her own work. She would like all the power and impersonal authority of a metaphysical system even as that system is anchored in, and draws strength from, her own deeply personal sensibility and experiences. But this creates an instability in her work that is clearly simultaneously deeply personal and yet longs to be impersonal. I shall return to this issue below.

Weil seems to think that there are two principal ways in which we are blind to the value of the impersonal: through the assertion of our own personality as individuals, and through our submergence in the collectivité, in the social group.

Weil is concerned with the first of these primarily in terms of the notion of rights. She (largely) rejects this notion as involving an assertion of oneself and as therefore being opposed to the impersonal in a human being. She claims that such an assertion is foreign to the spirit of justice, suggesting that an appeal to rights—“I have the right to …,” “You don't have the right to …”—contains a latent war and evokes the spirit of war, of confrontation. An appeal to justice—“What you're doing to me isn't just”—can, however, evoke a spirit of love. What she reveals here is an intense sensitivity to the very language of morality or, perhaps more exactly, to the language in which we express our understanding of good and evil. This last point comes out strikingly when she says that if a young girl were being forced into prostitution, then it would be wholly inadequate to speak of the girl's rights (26–27). One might say: she is being violated, not her rights.¹⁹

Despite the fact that, in objecting to talk of rights, Weil is objecting to a form of discourse that is deeply embedded in Western culture (and increasingly embedded elsewhere), she surely has a powerful point. After all, if we acknowledge the evil of, say, torture or rape or whatever, then it seems superfluous to go on and insist that a person's rights have been violated by being treated in this way. If I say that what someone has done is evil, what does it add to say that it violated another person's rights? We vaguely have the thought, I suppose, that to speak the language of rights gives us a certain power over the evildoer, but in what way this is so is unclear: it may be little more than rhetoric. A person who is contemplating doing something evil will not desist when he realizes that the deed is, after all, a violation of the victim's rights. Of course, that one has legal rights gives one recourse to the law if they are violated, and Weil does not seem opposed to all such rights, for she says that a farmer has a right to sell his eggs at the price he wishes. She is, it seems, more concerned with the notion of natural or human rights, i.e., rights that are supposed to attach to us simply as human beings, even if we are outside any legal framework, i.e., stateless. But the trouble is that, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out,²⁰

talk of the rights of stateless persons becomes idle if no state is prepared to accord them the legal rights it extends to its own citizens, in which case it might just be better to drop talk of human rights and speak of the unjust treatment of certain individuals. Moreover, Weil surely has a good point that the appeal to legal rights tends to evoke a spirit of hostility when what is needed above all is a spirit of charity and compromise. This is because rights are backed by, and for Weil are therefore a form of, force.²¹ And there is a further point that she does not make, but which is in the spirit of her thought, namely, that an ever-increasing appeal to the language of rights tends to lead us to overlook other moral concepts that help us understand our situation: the language of rights tends to seek to establish a hegemony over our moral thinking, which means we become blind to the value of a number of other concepts that help us in this area of life. Weil would certainly say that love is one of them. But there are others. Thus, for example, even if it is true that aborting a fetus in a given situation violates no rights, it does not follow that the deed is not callous or thoughtless or brutal, a point which those who discuss the morality of abortion often miss, supposing that it is enough to clinch the argument if one shows that the fetus has no right not to be aborted. But this, I am suggesting, may not be the case. Indeed, the real issues may lie quite far away from issues of rights.²²

Weil's concern with the language of good and evil, however, goes beyond her observations about the language of rights. She insists that the conception of love we have been discussing, and the related notions of the impersonal, justice, and good-ness, cannot be properly grasped or expressed in language. To use such language is, she says, “an ordeal” (une ordalie), because what they express is inconceivable (42). Relatedly, says Weil, language can only allow us to express opinions. I think that what she means by this is that language is a medium for one's own self-asser-tion. Hence she unfavorably compares Aristotle, in all his immense facility with language, and the judge, speaking elegantly in court, with the village idiot and the stammering vagabond, respectively. Both Aristotle and the judge are effectively sealed off from love and justice on account of their very mastery of the language through which they assert themselves (14; 31; 32; compare 38).

This attitude towards language—one of caution—raises a number of interesting questions. One of these is Weil's attitude towards philosophy. For, whatever else philosophy is, it is a highly elaborated, immensely sophisticated form of discourse that takes a great deal of time to grasp and that can never be wholly mastered. Weil would be suspicious that such a mode of discourse might allow us to lose our sense of what is important in life in a labyrinth of impressive-sounding, but empty, phrases. But this raises an acute problem for Weil, for she is writing philosophy. Moreover, this problem is exacerbated because she writes that there is no way of articulating in language the things that really matter. So this sets for her the task of trying to write in such a way as to avoid the traps that language sets. She has to write in such a way that her own personality is not at all present in the work. This largely accounts for her interest in the style in which thoughts are expressed. She believes that the quality of a thought cannot be distinguished from the style in which it is expressed. And she aims to write in such a way that the language is absolutely stripped of all that is, or might be thought to be, rhetorical or otherwise there for show.

But the oddity in all this is that Weil's writings are unmistakably hers. That is, her own personality is clearly there on the page. By this I do not mean that the personality of the woman, Simone Weil, is clear from what she writes (though this might be so). I mean that her writing style is manifestly that of a distinctive human voice. Far from being impersonal, her style clearly reveals what one might call the autobiography of a soul. Her writings are powerful largely because they are not impersonal in the way that Weil wanted them to be, as Gilbert Kahn has pointed out.²³

Kahn draws attention to the different rhetorical devices that Weil employs, including, interestingly enough, sometimes using grammatically masculine forms when writing of herself —for example, “Je n'ai pas été baptisé.” As he points out, this is an attempt to efface all reference to herself as the individual she is, an especially odd procedure in a piece titled “Lettre autobiographique,” from which the example is taken.

In this sense, Weil is caught, in her own way, in an old problem that religious writers often have, namely, that of saying that there is nothing one can say to make clear what it is that they are talking about—about which they should, as it were, not be talking in the first place. But there is a more general problem here about writing itself. Those who write, do just that—they write. They appear for some moments in their life as writers and the rest of the time get on with their life, not, indeed, as those who do not write, but as those who, at those times, are not writing. So, the question for any writer is: Who am I when I am writing? Weil, regarding herself, wants the answer to be: No one in particular. But she cannot, of course, be that as a writer. She wishes for her own destruction even as she asserts herself against it.

I use the word “destruction” advisedly. For Weil herself uses this word: ané-antissement. She connects this with the notion of affliction—malheur—a kind of intense suffering in which self-contempt, humiliation, and social ostracism are mixed. A good sense of it is given by this passage:

Weil thinks that affliction is one principal route into the impersonal (and therefore into goodness and love), because it is precisely in affliction that one recognizes one's nothingness. But someone who is writing about affliction is clearly not af-flicted at that time. At best, he or she will be recalling the affliction at some later point, as Weil was. This raises all kinds of questions concerning what it is to bear witness to an experience. In particular, in this case, the task will be dogged by the possibility that what is said will falsify the experience by presenting it as more tractable, more comprehensible than it is. For someone who placed such intense demands on herself concerning the necessity to speak without any affectation or falsity, as Simone Weil did, such a possibility is horrifying. It means that writing itself can be seen as a kind of betrayal. The village idiot and the stammering vaga-bond become, in a strange way, models to be emulated and envied, free of—or deprived of—the burden of speech about that which cannot be spoken about, but about which Weil felt she must speak if we are to have any understanding of their condition, however impoverished that understanding is (28–29).

We can see better what is at stake here if we look for a moment at Hannah Arendt's development of Weil's insights concerning language and goodness.²⁴

Arendt suggests that goodness—a goodness beyond virtue of the kind that inter-ests Weil and which she calls, as I have already noted, “supernatural goodness,” a goodness seen in Christ's love—can find no real place in the world. It is fleeting and can found no institutions or political order—a point that Weil explicitly makes when she claims that the good has no relation to any political order (“sans relation avec aucune forme politique,” 43). Further, no one can actually be good in this sense, which is why Christ insists that only the Father in heaven is good. Most importantly for our purposes, this kind of goodness is mute: it cannot speak itself since it is the kind of goodness that can find no permanent place in the world. To be able to speak of such good already signifies, then, from this perspective, exclusion from it. That is only, for Weil, the other side of the fact that affliction, a central route to impersonal goodness, cannot speak itself. Here, as so often, one has the sense that the most important things in human life withdraw from us as we speak of them. But the need to speak of them is deep in us.²⁵

I said earlier that for Simone Weil the second principal way in which we are blind to the value of the impersonal is through being submerged in the social group. She clearly thought that there was a kind of betrayal of oneself in the social world, and she valued a type of ferocious independence of spirit. It was this that led her to be highly suspicious of democracy, which she associated with the vocabulary of rights and the person. But her hostility to democracy had another source: from her otherworldly conception of value, she was incapable—or, at best, only margin-ally capable—of making distinctions between values in this world that we surely want to make. Thus, for example, she insists that the distinction between Nazi Germany and the France of 1940 is not one between barbarism and civilization but between one form of loss of the impersonal (the submergence of the individual in the social group) and another (the self-assertion characteristic of individuals in bourgeois society). The only real choice, she says, is not between the goods of this world—for they are not really good, but merely mediocre—but between supernatural good and evil (29).

In one sense, something must have gone wrong with this line of argument. Despite all the idiocies of democracy in the modern world, it would surely be ludicrous to insist that there was nothing to choose between democracy and the kind of totalitarianism characteristic of Nazi Germany. And, of course, Weil could not seriously have thought otherwise. But what she is grappling with is the fact that Christianity is so deeply opposed to the values of this world that it looks as if there can be no compromise between it and them. Hence Weil speaks of the necessity to “despise absolutely and without exception everything which is not pure goodness, perfection, truth, justice, love” (42). Christian thinkers have often gone to extraordinary lengths to suggest that a compromise can be achieved between such a point of view and the values of the world. Weil would certainly condemn nearly all of them as self-serving and false, although perhaps most of them are not as crude as Mrs. Bulstrode in George Eliot's Middlemarch, who believed in “the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass.” Weil was well aware that, usually, what appears as otherworldliness is merely dishonest worldliness. But this left her, as I have suggested, unable, at least at times, to make distinctions we need to make in matters of value. This is, indeed, one of those places where the deeply Manichean strain of her thought comes through.²⁶

One way out of this difficulty is to understand the matter in terms of the spirit in which a person lives. The issue is one of a kind of detachment that is consistent with losing oneself in—being absorbed in—the world. This is an extremely delicate spiritual balancing act, no doubt hardly achievable, but not, I think, absurd.²⁷

And it is surely something like this that is required if the kind of otherworldly love and justice we are concerned with is not to descend into a kind of hatred or denial of life. The trouble is that, although much in Weil's writing suggests a kind of affirmation of life by living it in the spirit in question, much of what she says also militates against that. Thus, for example, in her essay “Luttons-nous pour la justice?” (“Are We Struggling for Justice?”) she claims that, when we are engaged in our quotidian activities, we unthinkingly use others to achieve our ends without asking ourselves whether they have consented.²⁸ Our only concern is with the suc-cess of the enterprise. She goes on: “This is necessary. If it were otherwise, things would not get done, and if things did not get done we would perish. But from this fact action is defiled by sacrilege [souillée de sacrilège].” But to see action in this way is surely to see it as a necessary evil. And it is a short step from that to seeing human life as a necessary evil.

Perhaps the key element of Weil's thinking which militates against that kind of view, and which balances her emphasis on affliction as a route towards goodness, is her understanding of beauty, particularly the beauty of the material world, of the folds of mountains and the movements of the sea (37–38). Beauty, she says, attracts us, but is painful. It is painful because we would like to possess it—eat it, she writes at times—but we cannot, for that would be to destroy it. So we have to learn to content ourselves with bearing the tourment délicieux—the exquisite agony—of looking at and loving the beautiful without being able to take possession of it. This involves not wishing to change it, but learning to leave it as it is. And this teaches us to relinquish desire, a concern for ourselves, which is transformed in this way into love.

There is little doubt, I think, that Weil alights here upon something extremely important in our understanding of the material and natural world. But one difficulty is seeing how the outlook in question can fi nd application in one's attitude toward others. Of course, we could say here that the issue is one of not wishing to change or appropriate (in one of the many senses of that word) other human beings. But this, one might have thought, can hardly carry the same sense in the case of human beings as it does in the case of the natural world, since the notion of beauty surely has a sense quite different in the two cases. For example, the notion of beauty in the case of human beings has, in however complicated a way, a connection with our nature as sexual beings, a connection which is, it seems, wholly absent in the case of the natural world. Yet Weil seeks to assimilate our response to the beauty of the natural world to our response to human beings. For not only did she think that love of the beauty of the world expresses the same renunciation as does love of one's neighbor, she also claimed that in carnal love “we want to love the beauty of the world in a human being.”²⁹

Hence, her sense of the importance of placing no value on the satisfaction of desire in the context of the beauty of the natural world spreads easily to many parts of her thinking in a way that weakens, rather than strengthens, her thought. Thus, in her discussion of rights and democracy she says that the cry, “Why am I being harmed?” can easily be confused with the cry, “Why has the other got more than I have?” Concerning this second cry she says that we should seek to silence it with as little harshness as possible, and she clearly sees it as nothing more than mean-spiritedness dressed up as a cry for justice. And she can recommend this silencing of certain desires, not simply because she is suspicious about the satisfaction of desire as such, but also because she claims that those workers who raise this cry are basically tricked by those who have a lot into supposing that having a lot is what will make them, the poor, happier. Be that as it may, she also claims that the poor, though they cannot articulate their thoughts, know deep down that the whole thing is a matter of privilege being extended to them from those who are in power and, since it is a matter of privilege and not real equality or justice, a scam. What the poor really want, and what they really know they want, is something else. But Weil would need a lot more argument than she gives—indeed, she gives none to speak of—to make that claim stick.

Weil was deeply influenced by Plato, but Plato would have found nothing surprising in the thought that most people are more interested in a comfortable life than in the kinds of spiritual concerns that preoccupied him—and preoccupy Weil. Weil does nothing to show why this is not true. Otherwise put, she does not do enough to confront the claim that Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, places in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor, to the effect that most people just do not want the kind of spiritual bread that Jesus offered, preferring instead mundane bread. And even if Dostoyevsky means to show that the Grand Inquisitor holds people in contempt in viewing them this way, that raises the challenge to fi nd a middle way between Weil's spiritual concerns and the Grand Inquisitor's belief that people are utterly base in their desires. That might be one way to describe the give and take of politics, but Weil does not do much to explore it in this essay. Certainly she says in the essay that those who have suffered affliction need space and comfort if they are to be healed, but this hardly meets halfway those whose conception of justice requires something more like equality in material and social terms. In truth, Weil is, in this essay, alienated here from normal ways of thinking about justice and politics, as, indeed, her otherworldly conception of value would lead one to expect.³⁰

As Mary G. Dietz has noted, in “Human Personality” Weil “robs politics of almost all its substance,”³¹ an odd circumstance in a piece largely devoted to political philosophy.³²

Part of the problem here concerns Weil's attitude towards metaphysics, a problem I mentioned earlier. I take it that if Weil had construed in a metaphysical sense her talk of an absolute good, our longing for it, and the notion of human beings as being sacred, then what she would have had to seek to provide would be a theory, based on argument, about the way things are in the world and beyond it, such that any clear-thinking, rational person could see that this is, indeed, the way things are. Then, for example, she could get to her conclusion about what the poor really want. But Weil, in general, as I have already noted, does not seek to do that. Her work consists, rather, in an attempt to cast things in a particular light, making it clear that things can be seen in this way, but not that they must be. However, as Peter Winch has shown, Weil repeatedly understands her speech in a metaphysical way, as if what she was seeking to provide were a metaphysical theory that could secure a conclusion, and provide some demonstrative proof.³³

But I do not think that Winch gets fully to the problem with which Weil is dealing, profoundly helpful though his reflections are. This is because he treats Weil's metaphysical construal of her own insights as something like an aberration, something that weakens her thinking, a temptation to which she succumbed. And things are, I think, even more complicated than Winch allows. This is because Weil's talk of love, goodness, and so on has been elaborated and developed in the deeply metaphysical philosophical and theological discourse of Christianity (I do not mean, of course, that all of the discourse of Christianity is metaphysical). For sure, one can argue with a great deal of plausibility that Weil for the most part wished to slough off that way of speaking. She wished to do so because, roughly, she saw such a metaphysical construal as a kind of corruption of the kinds of ideas she was exploring, since she thought it made belief in God into idolatry and love of the world into yet another form of assertion of what Iris Murdoch called “the fat relentless ego,” a kind of roundabout way of serving oneself (e.g., through the hope of reward in a life beyond this). But the problem is that Weil's vocabulary cannot escape carrying (some of) the resonances and associations—the charge—of its elaboration in metaphysical terms, all of which helps to make this vocabulary intelligible to us. To fail to see this would be to fail to see that this vocabulary has a history. This is by no means a problem unique to Weil: it, or versions of it, have been faced by many different thinkers who feel there is something right and deep about Christianity, or, more generally, religious discourse, but something implausible or otherwise mistaken about metaphysical construals of religious discourse. In other words, even as Weil retreats from metaphysics she remains caught in its categories. But, although she wanted to move beyond metaphysics, she was aware, as I mentioned earlier, that she would like the power of metaphysical thought to support her thinking. Her struggle with this problem is not, or not only, as Winch suggests, a struggle against a temptation, but rather the struggle of one who is to some extent dependent upon a tradition which she wishes to reject. Of course, there is more that could be said of Weil's attitude towards metaphysics, though there is no space here to pursue the issue in all the depth it deserves. Nevertheless, I hope it is clear what general line of exploration I would recommend in Weil's case. Indeed, this essay itself is intended to be, in some ways, part of such an exploration.

I think this kind of problem about metaphysics comes out in Weil's claims about what the poor really know deep down concerning the scam of social justice. For part of what she surely has in mind here is something about where the true good of the poor (and the rest of us, of course) lies, even if they (or we) do not see this. And if we had a demonstration that what we are metaphysically is God's creatures, endowed with a certain nature that dictates certain ends for us, then we could get to the conclusion Weil is after. For if we had such a demonstration, then those who did not see where their good lies would simply be mistaken, and Weil's argument could proceed. But Weil does not offer a detailed account of such a metaphysic, for reasons I have suggested. Another possibility would be that she was speaking out of her own experience of life with afflicted workers: she worked in an automobile factory and also on the land in order to experience the life of the poor. And it is certain that she formulated her notion of affliction in the light of such experiences. It may well be true that she believed of herself that this affliction brought her close to God and that the only way out of it was using it to allow her to be drawn to the impersonal good. But here, as so often, one has the sense that Weil generalized to others her own experiences, in this case, her response to affliction.³⁴

Now, this line of thought may be challenged on the ground that Weil herself did not claim to have experienced affliction, but only to have witnessed or been touched by it. Thus, it cannot be right to say that she was generalizing her own experience.³⁵

However, the evidence is not entirely clear. At times Weil seems to say that she really had suffered affliction, and at other times she seems to say that she had not.³⁶ I have already suggested that her very ability to speak as she does about affliction gave her reason to doubt that she had experienced it. But even if we were to grant that she had not, I do not think that the spirit of the line of thought in question is really undermined. For even if she is speaking, not about any affliction of her own, but about that of the workers among whom she labored, she is still bearing witness in her writing to her sense of the condition of those workers and what they really need. And, I think, the absence of a metaphysical justification for her claims need not flatly undermine them. But they will have a power somewhat different from that which they would have had, had they been metaphysical claims (and had we been convinced by them).

There are at least two ways in which we can understand the power of Weil's claims. First, we will need to appreciate them as the product of someone who has reflected on her experiences of life and now offers her thoughts to us as a kind of gift—where seeing them as a gift depends upon a number of things, most crucially, I think, that we see them as offering a deepened understanding of what they are claims about. There is here less an attempt to secure conviction in us than a desire to make alive a certain kind of spiritual orientation. We might speak here of wisdom, of Weil's having reflected on her experiences in such a way as to be able to offer us a deepened understanding of life. Second, if we are to be faithful to that sense that Weil offers a deepened understanding, then we can perhaps learn from her even as we do not straightforwardly accept her claim about what the poor really want, even if they do not know this. What we shall learn will, no doubt, vary from individual to individual, but at the most general level it is probably right to say that we shall learn something about what a more generous and charitable view of those who are at the bottom of the social pile might be. Perhaps, indeed, we can say that one of the best expressions of a spiritually generous view of such people is in terms of what they know deep down that they want, even if this claim is, taken in an unqualifi ed manner, implausible, for the reasons I have suggested. This may seem odd, but it can often be the case that a certain moral idea is best expressed by a claim that, strictly speaking, is untrue. Weil herself provides an example of this when she says that intellectual honesty requires that any thought should be considered with equal attention.³⁷

Taken strictly, this is clearly not true, as Weil certainly knew: there could be no sense in which Weil would think that one was under an obligation to consider seriously the claim that, say, the Holocaust was a noble enterprise on the Nazis' part. But her way of expressing the point might be the right way of expressing what she wanted to say. The issue is one of the spirit in which something is said: the right spirit can, as it were, require words that are, literally taken, false or otherwise implausible.³⁸ My point, then, is not that the value of Weil's work is undermined by her speaking personally and not metaphysically: both ways of speaking have a power peculiar to themselves. And, indeed, there is a peculiar and special power in Weil's work because she speaks personally. And that claim is not undermined by my earlier comments about her inability fully to extract herself from metaphysical talk, for her very struggle with that problem is a deep and important aspect of her intellectual honesty and integrity. It is part of the power of her individual voice that it knows itself dependent, in part, on the power of a “metaphysical voice” that it would like to dispense with.

But still there is, I believe, a problem here in Weil's thought, quite aside from any issue of metaphysics. We can see this in the following way. Weil, I suggested at the outset, wants to say that empirically there is nothing that can justify the sense that human beings are sacred because human beings are fundamentally driven by base motives. She uses this idea to say that what makes sense of the thought that human beings are sacred is the impersonal in them, which impersonality appears in the light of a certain kind of love. This requires that they be treated with respect and dignity, that they never be harmed. But the problem is, if we use the baseness of human beings to get to that conclusion, then we are going to be at something of a loss to attribute to them the kinds of extraordinarily refined spiritual concerns that concerned Weil—for example, using affliction to come to God. This tension runs in various forms, I believe, throughout Weil's work. As Conor Cruise O'Brien strik-ingly put it, Weil is “antihuman” in the sense that she combined “great compassion for the suffering with a settled contempt for those of us who are up and around, but not up to much.”³⁹

If Weil was in some respects a deeply otherworldly, even Christ-like figure, she also in some ways shared the contempt for human beings that the Grand Inquisitor possessed. So often it is like this: those who most long for a loving attitude towards humanity are those most easily susceptible to contempt for them, whilst those who make fewer demands on themselves to love their fellow men and women are often better able to accept them in all their foolishness and nastiness. This latter articulates a kind of urbane acceptance of others, itself a rare spiritual achievement, and one which was totally foreign to Weil: urbanity is about the last quality she possessed, which is largely why, as T. S. Eliot remarked, her work is so lacking in a sense of humor.⁴⁰

Yet it would be wrong to end on a negative note. For there is a peculiar power in Weil's work that comes at least partly from the fact that her thinking is so extreme and uncompromising. Perhaps some readers of Weil's work have the same sense in reading her that I do, namely, that there is something utterly wrong, and yet at the same time, utterly right, about her view on the world. She seems able to cut through academic verbiage to get at something deeply important and deeply right—say, her thoughts on the value of the individual human—and yet, when one turns round to look at the path covered to get there, it all seems mistaken, absurd, and lacking in any realistic sense of human beings and the ways of the world. For me, at any rate, most other thinkers whose thought is also marked by a kind of fanaticism—one thinks of Kant—lack this peculiar kind of power. To put one's finger on what, exactly, gives her work this power is extremely difficult. I hope to have made some gestures towards doing so in this paper.⁴¹