Simone Weil Biography and List of Works

French philosopher and religious searcher, whose death in 1943 was hastened by starvation. During her brief life Weil only published a few poems and articles. With her posthumous works - 16 volumes, edited by André A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy - Weil has earned a reputation as one of the most original thinkers of her era. T.S. Eliot called her "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints."

"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict."
(from The Need for Roots, 1949)

Simone Weil was born in Paris. She was raised in an agnostic Jewish family. Her father was an Alsatian physician and her mother was Austrian-Galician. Weil's brother Andre became a distinguished mathematician. Throughout her life, Weil had problems with food. She refused to eat sugar in 1914 because it was not rationed to French soldiers in the war. In the late 1930s, Possibly due to her malnutrition, she had mystical experiences.

Weil's studied at the Lycée Fénelon (1920-24) and Lycée Victor Duruy, Paris (1924-25), graduating as baccalaureate. She continued her studies at Lycée Henri IV (1925-28), where she was taught by the noted French philosopher Alain, pseudonym of Emile Auguste Chartier, who trained her students to think critically by assigning them topoi, take-home essay examinations. In 1928, she finished first in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure; Simone de Beauvoir finished second. During these years Weil attracted much attention with her radical opinions and she was called the "Red virgin."

In 1931 Weil received her agrégation in philosophy. She alternated stints of teaching philosophy with manual labour in factories and fields in order to understand the real needs of the workers Weil insisted that writing should be based on experience. Between 1931 and 1938 she taught at various schools in Le Puy, Auxeterre, Roanne, Bourges, and Saint-Quentin. She did not associate with her teacher colleagues but preferred the company of workers and sat with them in cafés. She shared her salary with the unemployed. After participating in a protest march she was forced to resign from Le Puy-en-Velay high school. In 1934-35 she was a "hopelessly inept" factory worker for Renault, Alsthom, and Carnaud. This hard period nearly crushed her emotionally and physically, as she confessed in her diary. In spite of her pacifist beliefs, she served briefly as a volunteer with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

"'I knew her very well,' Trotsky wrote in a letter of July 30, 1936, to his comrade Victor Serge. 'I have had long discussions with her. For a period of time she was more or less in sympathy with our cause, but then she lost faith in the proletariat and in Marxism. It's possible that she will turn toward the left again. But is it worth the trouble to talk about this any longer?'"
(from The Left Hand of God by Adolf Holl, 1997)

Weil revealed in her journals her deepening disillusionment with ideologies after witnessing the horrors of war in Spain. 'From human beings, no help can be expected'. She saw that Communism leads to the formation of a State dictatorship and for a time she felt attraction to Anarchism and Syndicalism. For a time she worked for the anarchist trade union movement La Révolution Prolétarianne. In the mid-1930s Weil became increasingly drawn to Christianity but she refused baptism into the Catholic Church. In 1938 she converted from Judaism to Christianity. Weil studied Greek poetry and Gregorian music, and in 1937 at the chapel of St. Francis of Assisi, in Asssisi, Italy, she had one of her mystical experiences.

During the first years of World War II Weil lived with her parents in Paris, Vichy, and Marseilles. Weil continued to write and worked at Gustave Thibon's vineyards in Saint-Marcel d'Ardéche. Before leaving France she gave to Thibon her notebooks and other papers, which form the core of her posthumous works. In Marseilles she met Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, with whom she had long discussions, but refused his offer to baptize her into the Catholic faith. She fled from Nazi occupation to the United States and then to England in 1942, where she worked for the Ministry of the Interior in De Gaulle's Free French movement. Weil died at the age of 34 of tuberculosis and self-neglect in Ashford on August 24, 1943. She refused food and medical treatment out of sympathy for the plight of the people of Occupied France. This act hastened her death, although it is debated whether her death was a result of actual suicide or mental illness. Weil believed that one must "decreate" oneself to return to God.

Weil's early essays were published in Alain's Libre Propos and from 1940 she contributed to Les Cahiers du Sud. Her writings from her first period (1931-36) explore contemporary problems from a revolutionary-political vantage point. The later writings (1938-43) reflect her religious quest. In Gravity and Grace (1947) she states "attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached." God, in creating the universe, effaced himself from his great work and surrendered it to its own law of gravity, or necessity. "Necessity is everywhere, and the good nowhere," she wrote. 'La pesanteur' or gravity equates in Weil's text to undeveloped, primitive forces in human beings. Another force, in conflict with it, is God's grace. "Two forces prevail in the universe: light and gravity." Weil's political philosophy is best expressed in the The Need for Roots (1953). The great problem of society is 'déracinement', its 'uprootedness'; the cure is a social order grounded in a 'spiritual core' of physical labour. From work one can find beauty, poetry and spiritual inspiration. She wrote it in 1943 at the request of the Free French organization as a guide to the reconstruction of post-war France. In Oppression and Liberty (1955) she is concerned with the nature and possibility of individual freedom in various political and social systems, finally opting for liberalism rather than socialism.

"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his cell."

For further reading: Simone Weil by Jacques Cabaud (1964); Simone Weil by Richard Rees (1966); Simone Weil: A Life by Simone Pétrement (1988, orig. French edition 1973); Simone Weil by Dorothy T. McFarland (1983); Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles (1987); Simone Weil by Pat Little (1988); Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography by Gabriella Fiori (1989); Red Virgin: A Poem Of Simone Weil by Stephanie Strickland 1993 ; Simone Weil by Heiz Abosh (1994)

LA PESANTEUR ET LA GRÂCE, (1947)