|
"She's an extraordinary clear writer on the one hand, and on the other hand she's an extremely demanding writer."
-- Robert Zaretsky
"The simplicity that makes fictional good a pallid thing that cannot get a glance from us is an unfathomable marvel in real good."
-- Simone Weil
"Although both Herder and Weil were patriots, ... they have little in common with many of those who now claim that label. Both of these thinkers insisted that every civilization was unique and incommensurable with others. ...The claim of incommensurability ...... renders pointless the insistence of the greatness of one's nation."
-- Robert Zaretzsky
"... turning away from one's own self and turning towards the world,
making a place for others by placing one's own self in a subordinate
position -- is true attention [on Weil's concept of attention]. "
-- Robert Zaretsky
Further reading
Jacques Cabaud, A Fellowship in Love, Harvill Press, London, 1964.
Simone Weil, Seventy Letters, Translated and arranged by Richard Rees, Oxford University Press, London, 1965.
Richard Rees, Simone Weil: A Sketch for a Portrait, Oxford University Press, London, 1966.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind,
Translated by Arthur Willis, Routledge Classics, Oxford, 2002 (first published in Paris in 1949 as L'Enracinement).
|
|
| |
BOOK NOTES
The subversive Simone Weil: a life in five ideas
Robert Zaretzsky
The University of Chicago Press, 2021; ISBN-23:978-0-226-54933-0
The philosopher Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Her parents were agnostic Jews, cultured and affluent. Very early, she exhibited a social conscience and a determination to act upon it. When she was about ten, she slipped out of her parents' apartment to join a band of striking workers marching along the street. When Weil entered l'École normale supérieure she was the only female philosophy student in her year. Her philosophical, social, and spiritual views derived from a formidable intellect, personal experience and a highly developed, even extreme, altruistic sense. She is exceptional in the way she refused to separate her intellect from her actions, exemplified by her statement 'philosophy is purely practical'. Her thought ranges across a very extensive range of social, political, religious and philosophical concerns, including mathematics and science. Initially a pacifist, she served with the anarchist Durruti column in the Spanish civil war, and was fortunate to avoid death. A mystical experience in Assisi in 1937 had a major effect on her subsequent outlook, and she is sometimes considered to have been a mystic.
In this book, Robert Zaretsky provides an excellent and humane account of her life and thought, with successive chapters considering five ideas in the context of her life: The Force of Affliction, Paying Attention, The Varieties of Resistance, Finding Roots, and The Good, the Bad, and the Godly. Weil assigns to these words and ideas a meaning and depth going well beyond day-to-day usage. Zaretsky is not uncritical of Weil but presents her ideas and life with intellectual and emotional perception. Weil herself writes with a characteristic clarity and directness, but that implies neither an easy comprehension of the depth of her ideas nor an acceptance of them. Some of her ideas may seem impractical and have been often questioned, as Zaretsky does, but others strike us with great force. Exiled from France, Weil died in 1943 in Ashford, Kent. Her life and writings remain an intellectual and moral challenge and a subversion of our usual expectations that continues to influence and inspire many, extending far beyond academic circles. She was little-known during her lifetime but was described by Albert Camus, upon whom she was influential, as 'the only great spirit of our time'. Her grave is now a much-visited site in Ashford. Rodney Nillsen
Acknowledgement. The above review originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia (NSW) in Bulletin 114, January, 2024.
|
|
|