The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

Hence the capital distinction she makes concerning the use of method: “What is important (for freedom) is not that the work should be methodical, but that it should be methodically performed.”

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

Philosophy, at least in Hadot’s reconstruction, thus rediscovers its original purpose: it is a discipline, or spiritual exercise, that trains your character to mesh with a set of moral principles.

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.”

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.

In the opening lines of her first letter, Weil set the tone: “I am tired of talking to you about myself, for it is a wretched subject, but I am obliged to do so by the interest you take in me as a result of your charity.”12

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.

Reflecting on the remorseless nature of capitalism, Weil lamented the “naiveté of a man who has never suffered.”11 This naiveté deepens with the failure to understand that the worst suffering is not physical, but psychological—the kind of suffering that metastasizes into affliction, turning both oppressors and oppressed into things. Men no less tha