The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

“Only the greatest art,” Murdoch noted, “invigorates without consoling.”

Weil called for the abolition of all political parties. She argued that parties, regardless of their ideological coloration, share three basic traits. They are dedicated to nurturing collective passions, designed to exercise collective pressure upon the minds of their members, and devoted to their collective self-preservation.

“To be free and sovereign, as a thinking being, for one hour or two, and a slave for the rest of the day, is such an agonizing spiritual quartering that it is almost impossible not to renounce . . . the highest forms of thought.”

“Nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly.”

Work, in contrast, is the business of, well, one’s hands: when they engage the world, hands are the extension of one’s thoughts. Rather than being acted upon by the world, which is the lot of the laborer, the skilled worker shapes, with thought and deliberation, the material she finds in the world—an insight that also applies to the intellectual wh

It is only by getting the words right—describing the world as it is—that one can act rightly and resist on behalf of others and oneself.

Reduced to cogs in a machine, whether as machine workers at Alsthom or warehouse workers at Amazon, the “majority of working men,” Weil asserts, “have experienced the sensation of no longer existing, accompanied by a sort of inner vertigo, such as intellectuals or bourgeois, even in their greatest sufferings, have very rarely had the opportunity of

This is where the Good enters. It is the transcendental reality that lights the path to “unselfing”—a term whose therapeutic character Murdoch understandably preferred to Weil’s apocalyptic “decreation.” The Good invites us to cast away our own self, allowing us to see and respond to fellow human beings in all of their subjectivity. To seek the Goo

As Weil observed, “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.”