“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.

What Murdoch took from this “admirable Platonist” was the conviction that seeing well is tantamount to doing well. Discerning the Good—the way the world truly is—whittles down our range of choices to just one.

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

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

Children have been taught, she wrote, that “things concerning the country . . . have a degree of importance which sets them apart from other things.” But here’s the rub: “It is precisely in regard to those things that justice, consideration for others, and obligations assigning limits to ambitions and appetites never get mentioned.”

This goes to the heart of Weil’s enterprise: the corollary to another’s needs is our obligation to recognize them, regardless of conditions.

We are always already social creatures, our selves formed and informed by the community into which we are born and in which we are raised. There is, quite simply, no self without society.

“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.”