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Simone Weil and the Need for Roots
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15029 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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9 / 1988 |
4,140 Words |
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Maura A. Daly
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Genius, holiness, and martyrdom do not characterize most twentieth-century intellectuals, but they define Simone Weil. Even in the august company of greats like Camus, Sartre, and Gide, she stands out. The brilliance of her thought equals theirs, but the intensity of her character and the quality of her witness dwarf those of most of her contemporaries.
This is not to say that she shared no common ground with them. Like them, she offered a searing critique of modernity, which she believed cut man off from his roots, his family, his culture, and himself. She deplored the dehumanization of workers in mechanistic jobs and feared the threat of totalitarianism. But for Weil, these pressing issues can be resolved only by finding the correct answers to the great existentialist questions: "What is truth?" and "What is meaning?"
Unlike the existentialists, however, she believed that these questions can be answered only by asking two others: "What is man?" and "How does he find God?"
Perhaps her insistence on asking these difficult unfashionable questions accounts for her lack of popularity, even though her work has been hailed by many of the most important intellectuals of our time. As Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos, and T.S. Eliot freely acknowledged, hers was a mind of the highest caliber. Both brilliant and prolific, her work speaks for itself. Her output and range--more than sixteen volumes composed in thirty-four short years, including articles on religion, history, mathematics, literature, and philosophy--are astonishing.
Why, then, is she so little known? Perhaps the shortness of her life, the difficulty of her character, and the complexity of her thought explain why relatively few recognize her name or know her work. But perhaps there is another reason. Could it be that Simone Weil is a heroine who makes us uncomfortable? Could it be that Simone Weil is a heroine who makes us uncomfortable? Could it be that her refusal to compromise, her quest for truth at any cost, and her capacity, for self-sacrifice make us uneasy? Could it be that we feel more at home with the rebels and poetes maudits, with the outrageous intellectuals whom we can simultaneously enjoy and dismiss as a result of their very outrageousness?
Perhaps, however, it is from the atypical intellectuals that we have the most to learn. If so, Simone Weil is eminently qualified to teach us. For in life as in death, she was the quintessential outsider. As David Riper, one of her admirers, observes, "Simone Weil... achieved a conception of absolute good that left her outside every modern school of philosophy, and every milieu in which that perfection was compromised or disbelieved." She was, he observes, "an outsider, quite literally, par excellence."
But outsiders, as Claude Levi-Strauss recognized, define the boundaries of the inside, and Weil stood on the boundaries of truth as a witness and a sentinel. She went far beyond the clinical debunking of many French intellectuals, beyond the political posturing of others. She had nothing but scorn for the vain jockeying for position that engrossed many of her contemporaries. Like them, she decried the decadence of our age, but she did far more than chronicle its decline; she testified for truth and gave her life to it. A most atypical modern intellectual, she chose sanctity
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