The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

Herein lies one of her enduring insights: true resistance begins with clear thinking. As thinking creatures, we are incapable of accepting servitude. But true thinking cultivates moderation, not excess.

“To clarify thought, to discredit intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis—to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.”

Eudaimonia is thus best translated as “human flourishing”—the ongoing and never-ending activity of fulfilling our potential, or capabilities, as human beings.

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

Is there, though, far from the dizzying crowd of practical readings, a single and right way to read? Is there a center, as Weil asks in her notebooks, “from which may be seen the different possible readings—and their relationship—and our own only as one among them”? By way of a rather cryptic reply, she then suggests that we “transport ourselves to

Affliction resulted less from physical suffering than from psychological degradation. Ridden by stern foremen and driven by production goals, workers were shorn of their human dignity.

Weil reminded her students of a simple truth: “If one stops oneself from thinking of all this, one makes oneself an accomplice of what is happening. One has to do something quite different: assume one’s place in this system of things and do something about it.”

“We must keep from falling into inertia, believing that the liberation will be carried out by others. Each of us must know that one day it will be his duty to take part in it, and hold himself in readiness . . . We must think of the precious things we allowed to be lost because we did not know how to appreciate them, things that we have to regain a