Simone Weil (1909–1943),

a French philosopher,

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is another of our little samplers, this time dedicated to the French Philosopher Simone Weil-part I of a forecasted few. ‘Weil was a precocious student, proficient in Ancient Greek by age 12. She later learned Sanskrit so that she could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. Like the Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola, her interests in other religions were universal, and she attempted to understand each religious tradition as an expression of transcendent wisdom.’ (Wikipedia). Very difficult to classify, very fond of her freedom of thoughts, her fluid versatility would put off quite a lot of critics. Nevertheless, Simone Weil’s legacy was recognized by no less than Hanah Arrend, T.S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, among others praising her singular voice. Her acute sensibility to human suffering led her work to focus on the study of the notions of strength and power, labour and exploitation, presence and absence, pleasure and affliction, connection and separation, beauty and disharmony, oppression and liberty, gravity and grace, etc… Simone Weil is notorious for her conversion from a leftist Jewish background to Christianity, characterized by strong gnostic leanings with a solar attraction to the Cathars and their creed. ‘For the third quarter of the 20th century, she was widely regarded as the most influential person in the world on new work concerning religious and spiritual matters. Her philosophical studies-besides Weil’s social and political thought- also became popular, although not to the same degree as her religious work.’ (Wikipedia). Our little sampler’s text source is: ‘La Source Grecque’, Editions Gallimard, Paris 1953. A Via-HYGEIA English translation from the original French.

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Context

While a fierce critic of the Roman Empire and its Christian avatar, ‘The masterpieces of Greek poetry and philosophy, which Simone Weil admits to “loving passionately”, nourished her reflection on man as well as on the future of European civilization after its dechristianization. Her reading of Greece leads her to think, against Nietzsche and Heidegger, that Hellenism is at the source of Christianity; this intuition was already that of Clement of Alexandria, for whom Greek philosophy is “an authentic prophecy and a preparation for the Gospel”; the same organic continuity between paganism and Christianity was also recognized by Schelling; finally, the philosopher Maurice Blondel also considered Pythagorean thought as the first discovery of a “constant mediating function, the key to which would be the Mediator”. Simone Weil believes, like the great Hellenist Werner Jaeger, that this Greek source alone can restore spirituality to Europe, and give Greek culture a new universalism‘ (Wikipedia).

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From ‘The Iliad or the poem of strength’,

written between 1939 and 1940

‘The true hero, the real topic, the kernel of the ‘Iliad’ is strength. Strength manipulated by humans, strength that submit humans, strength that makes the flesh of men flicker. The human soul never ceases to appear in it modified by its relationship with strength, led, blinded by the strength it fancies to own, bent over by the constraint of strength she bears. Those who have dreamed that strength, due to progress, was a thing of the past, could see in this poem a document; those who know how to distinguish strength, in present time as in the past, see in it the most beautiful, the most pure mirror. Strength is what makes anyone a thing. When its action comes to an end, it makes the human being a thing in the most literal sense, because it makes it a corpse. There was someone and, a moment later, there is no one anymore. This is the scene the ‘Iliad’ never ceases to show-case us.’

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(About slaves) ‘At the very least, the supplicants, once their wishes granted return to be humans like the others, but there are beings more sorrowful who, without dying become things for their entire life. There is in their days no game, no empty moment, no spare time for them to do anything by themselves. They are not humans living more dreadfully than others, or being placed socially at a lower position than others; it is another human species, a compromise between a human being and a corpse. That a human being is a thing, on a logical point of view it’s a contradiction; but when the impossible becomes reality, the contradiction becomes in the soul tearing. This things aspires at every moment to become a human being, a man, a woman and at any time never succeeds. It is a death that stretches a life-long; a life that death has frozen before disposing of it.’

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(About slaves) ‘In no occasion the slave has license to express anything, but only what can please the master. This is why, in such a bleak life, a feeling may arise and animate him/her a bit; but it can only be love for the master; any other path is blocked to the gift of love-alike for a harnessed horse, the stretchers, the reins, the bit block all the paths except one. And if by miracle the hope of becoming one day again someone by favor, to which degree will reach the gratitude and love of these beings towards a past that is still very near and still inspires dread? One cannot lose more than a slave; he/she loses all inner life and finds a bit only when appears the possibility of a change of destiny. Such is the grip of strength; this stronghold goes as far as nature does. Nature also, when vital needs come into play, erase all inner life.‘

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‘Never was expressed with more bitterness the misery of human condition, at such a point that it even makes impossible the very feeling of  misery. Strength manipulated by others is hegemonic upon the soul like extreme hunger, as soon as it consists in a perpetual license of life and death, and it is a grip, as cold and hard as if it was exerted by inert matter. The human being who finds him/her self  the weakest in the hearts of cities is also the loneliest, more lonely perhaps than someone lost in the middle of a desert.’

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‘So ruthless strength crushes, as without mercy it intoxicates anyone owning it, or believing it does. Nobody really owns strength. Human beings are not divided, in the ‘Iliad’, between defeated, or slaves, or supplicants on one side and victors, or leaders, on the other. There is not one human being who hasn’t at such and such time been compelled to bend under the grip of strength.’

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‘By dint of being blind, fate establishes a sort of justice-also blind-that punishes the armed men with the penalty of the ‘talion’: the ‘Iliad’ stipulated it long before the Gospel, and almost in the same wording: ‘Ares is fair, and only kills those who kill.’

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‘This punishment with a geometrical rigor, that automatically punishes the abuse of strength, was the first object of mediation for the Greeks. It is the heart of the epic; under the name of Nemesis, it is the dynamic of the tragedies of Aeschylus; the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato, started from there to think humankind and the universe. This notion became familiar everywhere Hellenism reached. It is this very Greek notion that may  subsist under the name of ‘karma’ in the Eastern countries pervaded with Buddhism; but the West lost it and has not, in any of its tongues, words to express it; the ideas of limit, measure, balance, that ought to determine life, only have left a servile use within technology. We are surveyors only in facing matter; the Greeks first were surveyors in the apprenticeship of virtue. The progress of war, in the ‘Iliad’ only consists in this seesaw game. The victor of the moment feels invincible, even though some hours earlier he felt defeat; he forgets to use victory as something that will pass.‘

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‘Even once endured, war does not cease to be seen as a game. The intrinsic necessity of war is terrible, quite alien to the one linked to the works of peace. The soul only submits to it only when it cannot escape anymore; and as long as it does escape, it spends its days without necessity, days of game, dream, arbitrary and unreal. The danger then becomes an abstraction, the lives that we destroy are like toys broken by a kid as much indifferent; heroism is a posture belonging to the stage and stained with pride. And if for a moment an influx of life comes multiplying the might of action, we believe we are invincible due a divine help that warrants against defeat and death. War is easy then and basely loved. But for most of us, this state does not last. One day, the death of dear companions bends the soul of the fighter under necessity. War ceases to be a game or a dream. The warrior finally understands that it really exists.’

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‘The tradition of hospitality, even after a few generations, outweighs the blindness of battles.’

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‘The extraordinary equity that the ‘Iliad’ inspires, may have had examples unknown to us, but did not have imitators. It is hardly if one feels that the poet is Greek and not Trojan. The tone of the poem seems to carry a direct testimony of the origin of its most ancient parts; history will perhaps never give us upon this the desired clarity. If we believe Thucydides, eighty years after the destruction of Troy, the Achaeans in turn also suffered  a conquest; and we can ask ourselves if these songs where iron is rarely named, are not songs of defeated people who, for some, went into exile. Coerced into living and dying ‘far from the motherland’ like the Trojan that had lost their city, they find themselves as much in the victors their fathers were, as in the defeated whose misery resembled to theirs; the truth of this war-still quite close-could appear to them through the years, veiled neither by the intoxication of pride nor by humiliation. They could represent it themselves at the same time as defeated and as victors, and henceforth know what victors and defeated never knew, being each other blinded. It is just a dream. One can only dream upon remote times.’

(To be continued with upcoming Part II)

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