Simone Weil

Ray Briggs

What if we all really listened to each other?

 

Josh Landy

Could that put an end to oppression?

 

Ray Briggs

If you look closely at the world, can you see the face of God?

 

Josh Landy

Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

 

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

 

Josh Landy

And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Ray Briggs

Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

 

Josh Landy

And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

 

Ray Briggs

Today, it’s the next episode in our wise women series, generously sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities we’re thinking about the life and thought of Simone Weil.

 

Josh Landy

Simone Weil, she’s so interesting. She’s a 20th century French philosopher who was born Jewish, but ended up converting to Christianity, and she had some pretty strong philosophical views, but she often walked the walk as well. Like for six months, she left her cushy teaching job and went to work in a factory just to find out what it was like.

 

Ray Briggs

That sounds cool, but how does that work? I get that working in a factory would tell you something about what it’s like for the workers, but if you can just go back to your teaching job at any moment, isn’t your experience kind of different from the people who have to do it forever?

 

Josh Landy

Well, that’s a good point, and she herself didn’t think that it was enough just to look at things or form abstract beliefs about them. She thought, you also need to pay attention to people. You have to set aside all your own desires and projects and likes and dislikes and let your entire inner world be taken over by the life of somebody else.

 

Ray Briggs

Okay, that sounds uplifting everything. But what if I do that and I just notice the wrong things? So, for example, let’s say I visit a factory, but the boss only lets the happy employees talk to me and just keeps everybody else in the back room. Or maybe the boss isn’t doing anything, but I just happen to meet the one employee who’s genuinely contented with their lot and everybody else at the factory is miserable. Why should I base my whole attitude on that one interaction?

 

Josh Landy

Well, you shouldn’t. I mean, that’s why they spent a full six months in that factory. Attention isn’t a one-shot deal. You got to go out and talk to all kinds of people, and you got to really listen to them as deeply as you possibly can. Oh, sounds like you could do that forever. Now you’re getting it. That’s the right way to live fully, giving yourself over to other people.

 

Ray Briggs

No, Josh, that’s the wrong way to live while you’re out there thinking your beautiful thoughts about the plight of the workers the factory is still grinding along, oppressing them. At some point you have to do something.

 

Josh Landy

But Weil did do something, quite a lot of things. Actually. She helped dissidents flee from Germany when Hitler rose to power and when the civil war broke out in Spain, she went to fight against the fascists.

 

Ray Briggs

So, she was a woman of action, but I still don’t understand the point of all that extra contemplation.

 

Josh Landy

Look, you need to think first to make sure you do the right action. Suppose you see a little old lady at a crosswalk. Yeah, you leap into action and help her across the street. Then it turns out she was waiting for a bus. She never went across. She would have wanted to cross the road in the first place. You just made her miss her bus.

 

Ray Briggs

Okay, okay, I see why it’s important to be attentive to other people’s needs, but I still think they was an overthinker. She ended up moving away from enacting political change and toward Christian mysticism, she said, and I quote, “We must abandon the notion of progress. We must get rid of our superstition of chronology in order to find eternity.”

 

Josh Landy

Yeah, I’m not sure I’m fully onboard with that either, but I still find something genuinely inspiring about her later philosophy. She ended up thinking that literally, everything in the world can be beautiful. Just look hard enough at the world and you’ll see the face of God.

 

Ray Briggs

Yeah. She said, We must love all facts, because in each fact, God is present. Exactly, isn’t that great? No, it’s terrible. You want to love the fact. The workers are oppressed. What happened to paying attention and seeing people suffering?

 

Josh Landy

Well, sounds like we have a lot to ask our guest. It’s Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, author of Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction.

 

Ray Briggs

But first, let’s hear more about Simone Weil’s life. People talk about her tragic early death, but her life story has a lot of joy and brightness in it too.

 

Josh Landy

So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sheryl Kaskowitz, to find out more. She files this report.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

We’re listening to ‘The Nonsense Song’ from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times. Those familiar with Simone Weil may wonder what this slapstick comedian is doing here, since both her work and her life are steeped in self-sacrifice and moral seriousness, but they liked Chaplin’s work. In one of her published letters from 1936 she urged, “if you are in Paris, don’t miss the new Chaplain film.” Let’s back up so we can understand why.

 

Cynthia Wallace

Weil was born in 1909 in France, in Paris, to parents Bernard and Selma Weil, who were agnostic, secular, Jewish people living in France.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

Cynthia Wallace is an English professor at St Thomas More college at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of the new book The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil.

 

Cynthia Wallace

Her parents were very bourgeois, but they were also really committed to a life of the mind, and so they raised Simone and her brother André with a great deal of education.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

André Weil was a math prodigy, and he would become a world-renowned mathematician.

 

George Abbot White

She and her brother were very close.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

George Abbot White edited the book Simone Weil: Interpretations of Life. He had the chance to talk with Andre Weil at Princeton.

 

George Abbot White

He’s telling the stories about how they would screw around on the subway. And you know, just really have fun. They would make up languages as they’re going along, and then they would say things in this made-up language, and, you know, it’s Paris, right? People are like, what is this?

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

But Simone was equally committed to her studies.

 

Cynthia Wallace

She went on to gain a degree of education that was unusual for women at the time.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

She earned the equivalent of a master’s degree in philosophy, and then followed one of the few paths available to her: teaching philosophy at girls’ schools. But Weil had always wanted to do more.

 

Cynthia Wallace

From a very early age, Simone Weil had just a strong ethical drive. She was really interested in people who had less than she did, and in caring for those people.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

As kids, she and her brother donated their sugar ration to soldiers during World War One, and later, she showed a deep interest in the plight of the working class. She went to fight for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and became active in labor unions in France. Eventually, she went on leave from her teaching jobs to do factory work herself.

 

Cynthia Wallace

It was about learning with her body what was happening among the people that she wanted to write political philosophy about, and so it was grueling for her to attempt, but it was also dehumanizing labor for everyone, and that was one of her primary realizations during the time.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

This is where Charlie Chaplin makes his appearance. It’s the famous scene from Modern Times where he gets swallowed up by a factory machine down the assembly line and then winding his way through the literal cogs of the machine. That spoke to Weil’s experience, she described that scene as quote, “the most perfect and truest symbol of the workers position in the factory.” As the Great Depression gave way to the Second World War, she was forced to flee Nazi occupied Paris going to New York with her family.

 

Cynthia Wallace

But she was keenly committed to getting back to France or to Europe and being part of the war effort, and so she spent about the last year of her life in London contributing to the Free French effort, mostly by writing documents.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

In London, she became very sick.

 

Cynthia Wallace

While she was in hospital with tuberculosis, the only treatment for TB at the time was rest and kind of hyper nutrition, and she refused that out of solidarity with those who were in other parts of the war suffering more than she was.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

Simone Weil died in London in 1943, just 34 years old. Wallace thinks Weil’s life carries important lessons for or our own time.

 

Cynthia Wallace

She has a kind of tragic vision of the world that I think we kind of need right now. We need people to tell the truth about everything that’s wrong.

 

Sheryl Kaskowitz

And, Wallace says, we also need people who are as committed as they was to the idea that we can do something to make it better. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz.

 

Josh Landy

Thanks for that really interesting report, Sheryl—fascinating facts about a fearless philosopher. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the life and thought of Simone Weil.

 

Ray Briggs

We’re joined now by Rebecca Rozelle-Stone. She’s professor of philosophy and ethics at the University of North Dakota, and author of many things about Simone Weil, including most recently, Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction. Rebecca, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be talking with you all.

 

Josh Landy

So, Rebecca, you’ve written a lot about Simone Weil. What first got you interested in her?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Yeah, well, so it was around 2003 I was in grad school taking a class on women and the spirit, and she was one of the authors I studied there. What really grabbed me though about her writing was her discussion of this idea of attention. And it was at a time where I was just starting to teach my own class, and I noticed these new technologies were coming out, students had their own cell phones for the first time. They were logging on to Facebook, and the experience in my class was just very jarring. They were withdrawing into their own worlds. They weren’t paying attention to our discussions or even to each other. And I just I felt like there was something being missed more than just the content of the lectures, you know, that we weren’t connecting to one another, or, you know, the sense that there was some kind of empathy being lost. And so, I knew I had to dig into this idea of attention a lot more.

 

Ray Briggs

So Rebecca, speaking of empathy, Simone Weil came from a wealthy family, but she gave away all of her possessions and devoted herself to the care of others. What was it in her philosophy that led her to do that?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Well, I mean, she was definitely embarrassed by her own privilege from reading the biographies about her. We see this from an early age that she was just trying to give away, you know, her candy to soldiers and, you know, do everything she could for people that she saw as being less fortunate than her, but ultimately, as a more mature thinker, she realized that ideas have to become praxis. At some point, there has to be an embodiment of the theories that you are attracted to, otherwise, it’s meaningless. And so, when she’s studying worker conditions and is horrified by what she’s reading. She realizes it’s not enough to just study that and write about it, but she takes up work in the factory herself to get a better sense of what that really is and what that feels like.

 

Ray Briggs

So it makes a lot of sense to see like the world and think, oh, this is bad. This is bad for so many people. How do you get from there to this is a better way that the world could be, and how did they get there?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

So, in terms of, you know, she, she saw that there was so much emphasis on superficial distractions, on material concerns. I mean, even seeing that her coworkers in the factory, I mean, understandably, they were, you know, obsessed with the amount on their paychecks. But even that obsession can sometimes eclipse the more important observations, like, there’s something systemically wrong here, like tailorized factory work, where there’s this obsession with speed, this is dehumanizing people in a whole other way than just, you know, not being able to support oneself fully with the paycheck. So, it was about taking those bigger observations, looking at the systems behind the dehumanization, and attacking that first instead of focusing on some of the more I don’t know, trivial concerns, I guess.

 

Josh Landy

So “tailorization” is that kind of regulation of behavior, right? That kind of scientific study of how to how to get the most out of the poor factory workers, so that she’s thinking a little bit along Marxian lines, along the lines that Karl Marx laid down for thinking about dehumanization in factories. But she’s also thinking about power, if I understand correctly, she seems to have some very interesting ideas about how the world is ruined by power. Can you just say a quick word about that?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Yeah, absolutely. A word that she used a lot was force. And you know, famously, she wrote about this in her commentary on the Iliad. And she says the main character, the protagonist of the Iliad, is force. And for her, force is something that can turn anyone subjected to it into a thing. So, someone who wields force is intoxicated by it. Someone who’s on the receiving end of force is going to be crushed or annihilated by it. But she ultimately thought no one really possesses force. It’s something that that is a temptation to all of us. It’s a feature of what she called ‘moral gravity,’ so that there’s always this tendency to grab on to power force. And the problem, of course, is that then there’s this unlimited sense of, what can I do with this power? With this force, it leads to treating other people like they don’t exist, like they’re invisible. And you know, she saw that this is the real crisis. How do we intervene in this temptation to force.

 

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Simone Weil with Rebecca Rozelle-Stone from the University of North Dakota.

 

Ray Briggs

When someone is suffering, do you listen or just turn away? Have you ever wished that someone would really listen to you when you’re in pain? How do you want others to help?

 

Josh Landy

Looking, listening and liberating—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

 

The Pretenders

“I got to have some of your attention—give it to me!”

 

Josh Landy

Attention: if we gave it to other people, could we make the world a better place? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

 

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about early 20th century French philosopher Simone Weil. Our guest is Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, author of Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction.

 

Josh Landy

It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women series,” generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can listen to all the episodes in this series at our website, philosophytalk.org/wisewomen. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and mystify your mind in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

 

Ray Briggs

So, Rebecca, you’ve been telling us about vase concept of force and this idea that no one ever truly possesses it. Can you tell us more about what that means?

 

Speaker 3

So, she believed that power is something that’s always precarious. It can’t be absolute. So, in other words, like if a person who you know gets elected, let’s say, thinks that they have power that’s only enabled by those who are willing to acknowledge that power, who are willing to submit to it. And so, there’s this tendency with someone who has power for the moment, to want to try to hold on to it, to accumulate more of it, and, yes, sometimes to wield force in order to try and retain it. But ultimately, again, it’s a precarious thing which leads to that kind of fear and insecurity of those who are in power, and on the other hand, right, those who are being oppressed also are tempted to want power, and that’s why, in some ways, she was critical of Karl Marx and the idea that the proletariat could lead the revolution and free the working classes and bring about, you know, a greater society. She worried that really, this would just be a reversal of power, that you would just have a new kind of oppressive class, right?

 

Ray Briggs

So, she seemed to change her mind, kind of, through her life on Marxist revolution, like, I think, like she kind of started out in favor of it and ended up really skeptical if you don’t have revolution, like, how do you stick up for the interests of the powerless against the powerful.

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

It’s a great question. I mean, she was suspicious of revolution as another kind of opiate, ironically, or another kind of drug that would lull the working classes into a utopic fantasy. But so instead of that, you know, she thought we need to help workers to become more educated, but be able to have more thoughtful lives, to infuse, as she put it, poetry into the workday. And this requires changing the systems of work, changing our values, which is, of course, a much broader task. And for a lot of people, that sounds like revolution, but I think her worry was with positioning revolution as the answer is that it was just too easy to think in terms of grabbing force to accomplish that. Instead, it’s changing values from the bottom up.

 

Josh Landy

That’s one of the things I actually love the most about her theory, this idea that we shouldn’t embrace revolution as a thing we’re actually striving for. It’s just going to be, you know, new bosses, same hierarchy and the idea of the opening of people and but, you know, we should still think about as a kind what philosophers are called a regulative ideal. Think about it. Imagine what it would be like if society were. Or the way that Karl Marx thought it could be after evolution, and just try to inch your way a little bit closer to that. I think that’s lovely. The other thing I think is lovely is the thing that you started with, this idea of a kind of loving attention towards other people. So, wondering if you could say a little bit more about attention.

 

Speaker 3

Absolutely—and she did think we should give as much responsibility and positions of say, leadership to those who are attentive, but yeah, her idea of attention is unique. Basically, for her, it means being receptive to reality, and what that requires, according to her, is bracketing our egos, our tendencies toward illusions and fabrications that might be comforting to us, so any kind of mental or emotional constellations get in the way of really seeing the world for what it is, or other people for who they are. And sometimes that is painful. Oftentimes that’s painful, but that’s what’s needed to be truly responsive to the world as it stands. Ultimately, she thought that attention at its highest leads to or is what she called a kind of prayer. But it’s, it’s a kind of compassion that can be shown to anyone we encounter.

 

Ray Briggs

So, I think I’m still a little stuck on this, and maybe related to the idea of prayer as well. So, if I’m paying attention to somebody else’s suffering, this seems much better than ignoring them, but it doesn’t yet feel like a solution to their suffering. And even, like, letting them have an education. Like, that’s a that’s a nice thing to reach for, but like, maybe you could be educated and still suffering, like, maybe you could be an adjunct living in your car, and that still seems bad, like, what exactly is the connection between naming and seeing the bad thing and addressing the bad thing exactly?

 

Speaker 3

It shouldn’t just be a, you know, looking at or spectating on others’ misfortunes. That’s not what she meant by being attentive, but really it is first listening. So, the paradigmatic question for attention for her is, what are you going through? And so, to ask that with all sincerity and to really be open to the answer, and she thought that will guide us to the appropriate kind of action. Like upon hearing she said that someone needs bread, that they’re hungry, the one who is truly attentive won’t be able to help themselves but provide food. And so, she thought action would necessarily follow attention, that there’s no just standing apart again or spectating at, you know, the miseries of the world, but we would feel compelled, like an arrow going toward its target, to respond and respond appropriately, but without the kind of projections that usually accompany do gooding. You know, we’re, I’m going to be a good charity worker, and I’m going to give these people what I think they need. That was a problem, and that requires attention.

 

Ray Briggs

This might connect to a question we got from a listener, Adrienne in France. So, she asks, What role does the cultivation of an esthetic disposition have in Weil’s effort still urgent today, to quote, change the physical relationship between oneself and the world as through training a worker changes the relationship between himself and his tools?

 

Speaker 3

Wow, that’s a great, great, complicated question. So, the esthetic orientation that she talks about is also, of course, rooted in attention. But specifically, when it comes to esthetics, it’s about becoming open to the impersonal and the necessity, as she puts it, of the world. So, the kind of scenes that we often recoil and horror from, like waves in the sea that are overwhelming a ship right to come to appreciate that as not that this feels like a good thing, but this is real, and there’s something in reality that is beautiful. It’s not because of our own taste, right? It’s totally divorced from that, but it’s getting to the root of what is universal in the world. So, the kinds of esthetic appreciation that she had would be like the ancient Greeks and their appreciation for kind of eternal, timeless beauty, or the play by Sophocles Antigone where, you know, here’s this woman crying out for justice for her brother. That’s the kind of thing that transcends time she thought, and that’s what we need to tap into when it’s about connecting with the world, because we don’t. We shouldn’t be rooted to just particular instances that call to us specifically but see that there is something bigger that needs response.

 

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re talking about the life and thought of Simone Weil with Rebecca Rozelle-Stone from the University of North Dakota. Okay, so Rebecca, I mean, I’m, you know, I’m in a Literature Department. I’m a big fan of the arts, but I I’m not totally convinced that beauty is going to make us better people. I think that that seems to be, if I’m understanding correctly, part of a base picture that, you know, if I perceive this special kind of beauty in the world, or I perceive the world as beautiful, if I’m sensitive to great artworks like Antigone, I’m ultimately going to be better at paying attention, and thereby at being a moral agent, at treating people, right? But you know, beauty is also Helen of Troy, right? Beauty is also a lot of stuff that causes mayhem. And so, you know, much as I’m a lover of those, I sort of wonder, is it really guaranteed to make people better, people, more moral people?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Well, when we see beauty as something that’s impersonal, that includes, yes, even the Helen of Troy were more connected to what’s real, they thought. And that can’t help but cultivate better characters. She was very influenced by Plato. And I think we see this line of reasoning and platonic philosophy as well, that you can’t be an ethical a good person while living in the cave, so to speak. So being aware, not just aware, but responsive, to the world tragedies, and seeing that, I mean, it is a strange concept of beauty that it would include these tragedies, but because they’re real, she thought that has the function of cultivating us, of edifying us and making us more sensitive to tragedy where we would tend not to otherwise. And she did also think that there’s a problem in a lot of our literature that it seems to emphasize evil and characterize evil as being glamorous and exciting and interesting, whereas goodness is often portrayed as boring or flat, uninteresting. And she thought, you know, this is the opposite. This is what fiction is doing, is creating an illusion of evil as being somehow spectacular, but really, it’s boring for her, because it comes from the human ego, and that’s predictable. It’s tiresome, you know, to hear politicians talk about themselves and demonize other people like there’s nothing new about that. So good art can help elevate us beyond that, because it’s not about the personality, it’s not about the ego, it’s about something much more transcendent.

 

Josh Landy

Okay, so that’s helpful, because in on that version of the picture, it isn’t all art, it isn’t all beauty that is somehow pointing us to the real I mean, that would be a strange result, because we have a lot of things in our culture that we would consider beautiful, but that don’t really, they’re not even really trying to get to truth. They’re doing something else. I mean, in fact, you know, Friedrich Nietzsche thought the whole point of art is to save us from the truth. So Right. But you could have a saying, okay, yeah, yeah, there’s that kind of art, but that’s bad art. The good art is that is the kind of art that that points us in the direction of the truth. I think for me, there’s still the question that Ray and I were talking about at the beginning, which was, how is that supposed to work, that we find everything beautiful, right, this line of Weil, “we must love all facts, because in each fact, God is their present.” I mean, do I really have to love, you know, the existence of awful factories and sweat shops and other forms of injustice in the world.

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

So, I think when we use love in that way, right, we tend to think of it as having an affection for and that’s not the way in which she met love. She’s using the word love in a way that’s much more reminiscent of the stoics. So, it’s about acceptance more so. So we may not feel affection for seeing the suffering of others that would be pathological sadistic, but it’s more about coming to accept and not shy away from and that’s what she meant by love, in the same way that when she says we should love everyone, there are going to be people that we don’t like, but we can love them nevertheless, which is to accept their existence as independent entities from us and be responsive to that reality, which, again, we don’t necessarily have to like. We might find problems with, but the main thing is to not hide from it.

 

Josh Landy

Rebecca, we’ve got a question from Mega Logika on BlueSky, who asks, I would like to know more about Simone Weil’s conversations with her brother about science and mathematics.

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

I don’t I have not read a lot about her conversations with her brother. That’s an interesting and really unexplored area. I think of her philosophy. Not, not a whole lot has been written on that, at least not in my studies. I do know that she felt really insecure next to her brother’s intelligence. She, in fact, had a lot of perhaps personal difficulties and a sense of inferiority growing up, because he was already being regarded as this mathematical genius, whereas she was treated as, you know, the girl, and so she was expected to be pretty and abide by French society and its norms of femininity. But I think her relationship with her brother really was one of the things that motivated her to transcend any concerns with that kind of feminine expectation, and she was proud that her mother called her Simon, my other son. So, there was that kind of interesting dynamic between the two siblings. But as far as her conversations and what they talked about with mathematics, I can’t really comment on that.

 

Ray Briggs

Rebecca, I want to ask about Weil’s belief in God, which seems kind of for her, bound up in her idea of radical acceptance, if I can call it that, and her idea of attention and love, if you don’t believe in God, like, can you still sign on to her philosophical picture, or is God central to the whole thing?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

So Weil scholars would probably disagree on this, but I am of the thought that yes, a person could absolutely be atheistic or agnostic and sign on to Weil’s philosophy because she said things like, we need to be atheistic with that part of our soul that is greedy or consumptive, and I’m paraphrasing here, but that part of us that wants to console ourselves, that wants to elevate ourselves is needs to be rid of religion and the trappings of belief in God, because oftentimes that just exacerbates our egoistic tendencies. So, she said, for instance, that we frequently invent gods who smile on us. Right? Is there a person out there who believes in God who doesn’t think that in some ways, they’re doing what God wants? You know? How many people actually think that they are a disappointment to God while still believing in God? You know? So, she saw that that was the tendency. So essentially, religion can be a void filler, she said. And so, while she was a religious thinker. She thought of God as more of an absence, and in that sense, when anyone is religious in a true sense, there’s a yearning for something that is not here and that can’t be named and that can’t be described. So that prevents that kind of egoistic tendency of like, I know God, and God’s my best friend, and God approves of everything I do. It leaves intact a kind of mystery and ultimately a humility in the face of the unknown.

 

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Simone Weil with Rebecca Rozelle-Stone from the University of North Dakota.

 

Ray Briggs

Do you ever feel overwhelmed when you read the news? How do you stay compassionate with all the crises around you? What can we learn from Weil’s life and thought about how to live today?

 

Josh Landy

Coping compassionately with crises—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

 

Delta 5

No mind your own business. No mind your own business.

 

Josh Landy

Should we try to interfere with a world in crisis, or just mind our own business? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

 

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Rebecca Rozelle-Stone from the University of North Dakota, and we’re thinking about the life and thought of Simone Weil. It’s part of our “Wise Women” series, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

Josh Landy

So, Rebecca, before the break, we were talking about Simone Weil’s perspective on God. And, you know, it’s, I know that some of us read some of the things she says, you know, like only what comes from heaven can make a real impress on Earth. And I  think, Well, I don’t know if I totally buy that, but your point is that she has a somewhat nonstandard picture, right? So, she starts out at least she’s at least culturally Jewish, but then ends up essentially Christian, but a kind of particular kind of Christianity, where, if I understand correctly, she even has a rather unusual view about the resurrection. Can you say something about that?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Yeah, sure. This is unexpected. Probably. Probably for many Christians to hear. But Simone Weil thought that, you know, it’s a shame, in a sense, that the resurrection happened after Christ’s crucifixion, because it allowed this sort of entry of a good ending to the story, that the story for her was much more important. So, the idea of sitting with pain, sitting with the suffering of the world, and Christ being the perfect emblem of that, for her, was, was the important thing about Christianity, right? This is finally a God who has eschewed power and force and dominion and has taken on the suffering of the world. And so that was the important lesson. And she, I think, worried about how the resurrection could then be taken as well. See, it’s all good now, and, you know, everything will end up great, and we just need edto, you know, jump to the end, as opposed to, like life is often suffering. And she was influenced, on that note, by Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies, and so, you know, being able to appreciate that process of suffering with the world was critical for her.

 

Josh Landy

That’s, I’m happy to hear sex that I kind of got that flavor from her, a little bit of a hint of Buddhism in there, this idea that if we can sort of rid ourselves of self, if we can evacuate our desires and beliefs and projects and everything else, then we can achieve genuine compassion, we can sort of let the world in and understand ourselves as part of a greater totality. And I kind of love that. But there’s also a part of her picture around this kind of thing that I don’t know, it strikes me as perhaps just slightly bleak in terms of her vision of the world. And the quote that always stands out to me is a thing she said in her notebooks about love. She said, “I want the person I love to love me, but if he’s totally devoted to me, he doesn’t exist any longer, and I cease to love him. But as long as long as he’s not totally devoted to me, he doesn’t love me enough.”  And that sounds awful, but, but it doesn’t sound like my experience of love. For me, I feel like if the person loves me, that’s a reason to love them more, not to love them less. And so, it’s—

 

Ray Briggs

I don’t know, Josh, like somebody totally devoted to me that sounds terrifying. No, thank you!

 

Josh Landy

You should be totally devoted to each other—it’s a nice thing! You know, elsewhere, she says desire is evil. So, I don’t know, I take Ray’s point, but isn’t there an aspect of this philosophy that, although it’s beautiful and powerful and it’s really about compassion and love. Isn’t there another aspect of it that just seems like it’s a little impoverishing of human experience?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Well, it could feel that way, for sure. I mean, her philosophy is one that requires a lot of not just mental rigor, but I think emotional rigor and strength. It is a very stoic kind of philosophy. It’s unsentimental. And yeah, that point about love where, you know, we don’t want someone who’s completely enamored with or attached to us. She thought that’s true, because we don’t want that kind of constraint on another person. It shouldn’t be a kind of slavish adoration. You know, people should be able to retain their independence as persons, as unique beings. And that can be compromised when we attach ourselves too quickly to another person, as if they’re an absolute, as if they’re a god. And she worried about that tendency toward idolization with other persons. So again, here it’s that Buddhist sort of part of her philosophy, we need to be detached. Even in our loving relationships, there’s a kind of healthy detachment that allows the other to be and to exist independently of what we might want them to be.

 

Ray Briggs

So, Rebecca, you’ve written about crisis fatigue. What can we learn about that from Simone Weil?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Yeah, well, we certainly have a lot of crisis fatigue now, and I think she did too in her time, she saw fatigue as being the other side of attention. So it’s inevitable, right? If, if we’re being attentive in the way that she describes to the world, to other people, asking, What are you going through? That there would necessarily be a tiredness and exhaustion on the other side of that as a response. So that’s very real. And ultimately, you know, I don’t know if she herself is a good model of how we deal with crisis fatigue. After all, she died when she was 34 years of age, right from, arguably, from being attentive to her countrymen and country women. But I don’t think in our time you know self-help approaches are useful, either that would be too self-centered, certainly for her. So, we have to acknowledge fatigue, but we also have to acknowledge, as she says, that. There needs to be poetry infusing our lives. There need to be festivals for recreation. There need to be the pleasures of Sunday, as she put it. And I think in recognizing those things, it brings about a greater solidarity between people, even if we’re still suffering.

 

Ray Briggs

So actually, I think I’m a little bit confused about the relationship between attention and noticing suffering. So, on the one hand, the person who’s just endlessly doomscrolling on their phone is in some sense not paying attention, even though they’re noticing suffering. And on the other hand, you’ve suggested, like, maybe if I just go to a music festival and listen to some beautiful music, even though I know people are still suffering while I do it, maybe I am paying attention. So, like is, is attention mostly about suffering? Are these just two different things, and there’s a lot of suffering in the world. How does that work?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Well, yeah, doomscrolling would not be attention for her, because it’s more about spectating. And it can become its own void filler, right? Its own distraction for us from being responsive to the world like, Okay, I’m done now. I’ve looked at the news, put it away. And also, we shouldn’t treat those festivals like escapist, you know, outlets, but it is rather about being in person. And this is why she thought it was so important to go into the factories, to work in the vineyards, to be in person with others who are undergoing something, to really listen to them, to take it in, but also then to have moments of rest and recreation with those people and share in the trials with an idea to hopefully improving those conditions in conjunction with those others, of course. But yes, it’s it shouldn’t just to Doom scroll and then we go and free our minds on the weekend by drinking and going to music festivals.

 

Josh Landy

But there’s another aspect, right? Wait, so part of it is just becoming drained, exhausted. Part of it, I think, is also just the fact that there are so many different things that one could attend to that have a very reasonable claim on our attention. Right, injustice in working conditions. There’s also racism and sexism. And you go, go down the line when we talk about crisis fatigue, I think part of that is just that there are too many crises, even for the most sort of attentive person, even for the person who isn’t drained to attend to, what would they have to tell us about that? I mean, do we pick a cause or do we try to give a little to a number of causes? How do we respond?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think we have to remember that in our time, we have access to so much more information and know a lot all the time about what’s going on around the world than she did in the 1930s so, you know, maybe that challenge wasn’t as exacerbated for her, but she found herself in the situations in which she knew she needed to respond. But I think we could say the same for us, right? The idea is to look at what’s happening locally. Maybe we can’t address, you know, the war between ISRAEL PALESTINE right now, or you know what’s going on in Ukraine, but what about what’s happening in our own neighborhood, the racism there? So, I think thinking locally would be something that would come out of her philosophy, even though she didn’t state that, but it was because of her context. So maybe thinking more in that way and that, yes, we have limits. We can’t possibly respond to everything that calls upon our empathy and attention.

 

Ray Briggs

All right, so once we’ve picked which issues to pay attention to, maybe the ones that we can actually do the most about, there’s still this issue of avoiding compassion fatigue, and you’ve named two things that don’t work, so don’t burn yourself out the way that they did, but also don’t ignore other people. So, there’s probably another option in there. Does Weil give us any idea of seeing what it is?

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Hmm, I don’t know that she does. This may be a weakness of her philosophy, to be honest. And again, I see that, you know, in her ethical writings, it is so demanding of us that it would be hard for anyone to live that way. And she acknowledged that herself, I mean only the saints, I think, are really capable. And she didn’t think that she, herself was capable of being attentive in the way that she described. I do think that she might recommend working with other people who are undergoing the same kind of struggles that we are, who are suffering that just being in connection, having a kind of solidarity, there is something that can help address some of that compassion or crisis fatigue, that just even the sense of this is shared. You know, we’re not doing this alone, but this is a common issue, or at least common amongst a group of people. Can really help revive us, can help inspire us, and help us go on to do good work.

 

Josh Landy

Well, Rebecca, it’s been lovely sharing this hour with you. It’s. Been genuinely inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Well, thank you so much for the conversation. It’s been enlightening for me as well.

 

Josh Landy

Our guest has been Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, professor of philosophy and ethics at the University of North Dakota, and author of Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction. So, Ray, what are you thinking now?

 

Ray Briggs

Well, I feel like I haven’t got a recipe for how to fix what’s broken in the world out of Simone vey, but maybe she would say that thinking that I should get one is just another manifestation of my ego, and I should probably quiet down and listen and think about it more.

 

Josh Landy

Yeah, we’re desperate to have the power to solve these problems. Power is it’s just a desperate temptation. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophtalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

 

Ray Briggs

And don’t forget, you can listen to all the episodes in our wise women series at our website, philosophy talk.org/wisewomen.

 

Josh Landy

Now… pay attention before he’s gone—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

 

Ian Shoales

Ian Shoales… The ever-radical Simone Weil moved from Platonism to Marxism to Christianity, hanging on for dear life, such as it was, all the while, poor thing, so the notion of human rights became replaced by the notion of human obligations, the notion of oppression became replaced by the notion of affliction, and all of it guided by what she called “attention,” which was not so much about finding solutions, as looking for problems.  She was big on work, our Simone, factory work, farm work, leisurely work.  She looked at it deeply, and she even worked, though not well.  She was clumsy, nearly blind, and pretty much devoid of common sense, near as I can tell, but she wrote very well, with astonishing clarity, considering the vastness of her subjects.  She was very good with vivid metaphors.  For example, a wall separates two prisoners.  They talk by knocking.  The wall divides them and is also the means of communication.  So, with God.  Every separation is also a link.  That’s pretty good.  She claimed that God has withdrawn from the world because otherwise our imagination would dwell on His existence, as the miser dwells on gold – and I guess we wouldn’t get anything done.  And those chores won’t do themselves!  As a young student she was called “the categorical imperative in skirts.”  She was called the “red Virgin.”  Her first encounter with Christianity as a viable option for her busy brain came when she encountered a mourning procession of Spanish widows, which made her realize Christianity is the religion of slavery.  And later, she concluded that the promise of revolution itself is as big an opiate of the people as religion ever was.  All of which led her to champion a compassion-based morality, rather than law or rights, a morality based on a justice that is not of this world, except in the desire for the good that all humans share.  She engaged with some pretty big figures in her short life.  Arguing with Leon Trotsky, with Simone de Beauvoir.  In one of her many attempts to help France during WWII, she wanted to go undercover as a wireless operator; she also wanted to parachute onto a battlefield with white uniformed nurses.  Charles De Gaulle called her “crazy.”  After her death, some mighty big guns preserved and were influenced by her writing, including Albert Camus, Hanna Arendt, and the great American Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor, whose story, ‘The Violent Bear It Away,’ in title and tone, certainly reflects Ms. Weil’s themes of affliction and suffering leading to grace.  Grace maybe.  Maybe not grace.  Not our call is it.  She knew compassion and suffering, even in her life of relative privilege.  At the age of six, during the First World War, she sent her share of sugar and chocolate to the troops at the front, she nearly died of appendicitis as a girl, suffered from blinding headaches all her life—later, hearing Gregorian chants brought her some relief you’ll be pleased to know.  During the Spanish Civil War, she fired a rifle at an airplane, before the weapon was taken from her.  Shortly thereafter, she stepped into a pot of boiling oil, severely burning her, and her parents had to come and take her home.  As a girl, she wanted to be addressed as a boy, so she’d be taken seriously I think, and she moved through life in as many different attentive guises as she could, as a factory worker, as a farm worker, as a thinker, as a revolutionary, as a reformer, finally as some kind of mystic.  A central theme in her work was the idea of decreation.  Apparently, God, in making the universe, had to unmake Himself.  She wrote, “God renounces being everything.”  And suggested that those created from God’s sacrifices should reciprocate.  Lose yourself in compassion.  Our works are important, not us.  In 1943, sick in a British sanatorium, with tuberculosis, after a marathon of work, in which she wrote 800 pages in six days, she took to her bed, and would eat no more than what they were eating in occupied France.  Her death, aged 34, was ruled a suicide.  The coroner wrote, “The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”  On the other hand, I should note, with the stoical Ms. Weil, Christianity does not promise redemption from suffering but through suffering. Take that, Karl Marx. I gotta go.

 

Ray Briggs

Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

 

Josh Landy

Our executive producer is James Kass.

 

Ray Briggs

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Josh Landy

Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

 

Ray Briggs

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Josh Landy

And from the members of KLW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates. Support for this episode and all the episodes in our Wise Women series comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

Ray Briggs

The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

 

Josh Landy

Not even when they’re true and reasonable. That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

 

Ray Briggs

And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

 

Josh Landy

And thank you for thinking.