The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

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.

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

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

This is how affliction works: it “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.”

In short, the way in which we read the world turns on our particular location—moral, social, political, and economic—within the world. And the world, of course, is what humankind makes of it.

In effect, the foreman judged Weil’s status not just as a worker, but also as a human being.

She berates herself for falling short of a goal or failing to grasp a clue, declaring, “I’m stupid . . . An example of my stupidity. Analyze it.”27 Thus the reminder to herself that at “every blow of fate, every pain, whether small or great, say to oneself: ‘I am being worked on.’”

Attentiveness entails the difficult task of waiting, not for the world to take note of us, but for us to take note of the world.

Weil instead asserts that values and sensations are coterminous. As Peter Winch notes, “our concepts, which give the world its shape, are unintelligible except as concepts exercised by beings whose common life exhibits certain aspirations and values.”8 This interpretation—one where the epistemological is the ethical—seems to pull the rug out from u