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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you to the people who support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the podcast on Instagram and TikTok at Philosophize This Podcast, Twitter at IamStephenWest. Today is part two on one of the realest people I've ever had the privilege of reading, Simone Weil. I hope you love the show today. So I was sitting in a coffee shop one time and this random guy just started talking to me.
Now, usually when this happens, my strategy is very simple. I just sprint for the door. Any possessions I may have at the table, my computer, phone, whatever it is, I just leave it behind, accept it as a loss, start a new life at another coffee shop somewhere else. But on this particular day, the guy starts talking to me and I look towards the door, as I do, and I see that it's raining outside. Like torrential downpour kind of rain. The rain's going sideways against the window. And I make an executive decision in that moment that I'm going to talk to this guy today.
I mean, that's what human beings do on this planet, right? They talk to people. Alright buddy, let's have a conversation. And you should have seen it, the guy's interrupting me after every three words that I say. He asks me about myself. I tell him I like philosophy. He asks me who my favorite philosopher is. I tell him at the time I'm feeling Simone Weil. This was years ago.
And he's asking what I like about her so much. So I start telling him. I tell him more or less what I told you people last episode at the beginning, that she was a moral sage on a level most people only think they can relate to. Died at the age of 34 because she wouldn't compromise her intense moral convictions. The guy interrupts me again. He says, well, that seems like a waste. I say back to him, why would that be a waste? He says, well, if she is such a profound person like you say she is,
Seems pretty dumb to be so irresponsible with her health and safety. I mean, think of all the good she could have gone on to do if she didn't put herself in harm's way so much. Think of all the books she could have written. Think of the lives she could have gone on to shape with all the time that she threw away. And to the guy's credit, that was the last time he interrupted me. Because for the next 20 minutes or so, I told the guy what I'm going to try to tell you fine folks on the episode here today. Simone Weil might say back to this guy...
That maybe when you keep yourself at a safe distance from everything that's going on in the world, it prevents you from ever being able to see the world in a truly clear way. And let's say that's the case. You want to talk about waste. She might say, consider all the potential waste when someone sits back inside of a warm classroom and spends their career writing about something they don't actually understand. Simone Weil might want to give the example of someone like Karl Marx.
When Marx writes about something like the alienation of the worker, when he writes these vast predictions about how the worker is obviously going to behave in response to these chains that they're living in, if some of Marx's predictions ultimately turned out to be wrong, maybe, Simone Weil might say, that has something to do with the fact that he didn't really understand what it felt like to be a worker.
He certainly was a great economist. He certainly understood what it felt like to read about being a worker. But what Marx didn't know is what it felt like to clock in every day at 4 a.m. with every joint in your body aching, just praying a forklift falls on top of you so you can at least feel something on that fine Tuesday morning.
Simone Weil wasn't ever going to be one of the ones that sat safe on the sidelines reading first-hand accounts of other people, just assuming she knew what was going on. She needed to feel this stuff for herself. And to her it's like, what's the point of living forever? What's the point of writing every book in the library if you don't actually understand what it is you're even trying to write about? She was the kind of person that was going to make sure she did understand. And you know, you read her early journals. And then you read her journals after she goes and works in these factories.
And something changes dramatically in her writing. Something changes about the way she's thinking when it comes to ethics. See, in her early journals, when she talks about something like the alienation of the worker, and she talks about what our potential response should be to all of it, generally the response always pretty closely resembles a traditional brand of religious compassion. There's nothing too out of the ordinary there. We've seen it many times before.
But after actually going and working in the factories, feeling the affliction firsthand, the range of responses she thought actually had the potential to make positive change shrinks dramatically and grows far more radical. The perspective that she writes from and the path forward that she carves out turns out to be something that is absolutely unprecedented. And before you go thinking that what that means is she's going to call for some massive political revolution,
I'll tell you right now, that is not what the end of this episode is going to be. To get us to the end of the episode, though, for now, it should be said that this skepticism that Simone Weil had for people that lived their lives exclusively in the abstract instead of the real, this is a beautiful part of her thinking that you'll see mirrored in a lot of other areas of her thought. What she realized, I think, is that people sometimes hide behind the abstract.
There's a type of person out there that'll sit around having philosophical discussions about nothing, basically. They'll spend years of their life just talking with other people like them about abstract philosophical questions. You know, what is consciousness? No, no, no, not what is consciousness. What is it? What is the ultimate virtue upon which all other virtues rely? Meaning, what does any of this stuff around us even mean?
It's not that Simone Weil thought there was no place for conversations like this, just that conversations like this can so easily devolve into a sort of bourgeois nonsense that does a whole lot of talking, doesn't ever really accomplish much, and all the while there are tons of real people that are out there who are starving. You know, there's people who will say they don't believe in God because they like to believe in things that they can see, smell, and touch, things in the here and now, things that are empirically provable.
Okay, she would say. Here's something else that's empirically provable then: the existence of other people around you and the fact that we have a moral obligation to them. Real people who are starving. And not just starving in the usual way we tend to think about starving, where they just don't have enough food. People are out there starving to Simone Weil on levels that are far less visible and far less appreciated as fundamental needs.
If food, water, and shelter can be called the needs of the body, then Simone Weil thinks people are also starving when it comes to what she calls the needs of the soul. And she places both these categories on equal ground when it comes to what human beings need to flourish and live a healthy life.
And if you think about it, why wouldn't these be placed on equal ground? Are psychological needs any less important than bodily needs for people? Maybe your answer back to that is, it's not that they're less important, it's just given the variance between people's psychological needs, it's much harder for our social structures to facilitate psychological needs like that. Still though, hypothetically, let's say a country had a strategy for how they're going to run things, and what that strategy produced was a population of people that could barely get food, water, and shelter.
It would not be a surprise if there was pandemonium in the streets. It wouldn't be a surprise if people were asking, what are we even doing here? What kind of strategy can't even secure food for people? How about we find a way to do it better? All of this would be understandable if people couldn't get food, water, and shelter.
Nonetheless, the world is filled with societies that have strategies that more or less leave people to their own devices when it comes to their psychological needs. Not only that, some of these societies are structured in a way that makes it difficult, near impossible, for some people to feel psychological balance. Again, if it was nearly impossible to get food, pandemonium. Needs of the soul, though, well, we just see those needs as different. But Simone Weil is going to say that we should think of them as equally important.
there are 14 different needs of the soul that Simone Weil writes about. Just an example of one of them, so we can start talking about it, is the human need for something like order. Order is a need of the soul to Simone Weil. Because let's say you had all the food, water, and shelter you could possibly carry in your backpack. You're never going to go hungry. You can have a full stomach and a roof over your head, but if you're living in a world of total chaos where you don't even know which direction you should be applying any of your efforts...
Are you ever going to feel like you're flourishing as a human being? No, again, it doesn't matter how much food you have. You'll always feel this constant malaise, like you're starving at a different level of your existence. Human beings need order to function just as much as they need food. Now, you may be thinking, order? I guess I can see that. But what's she calling for here? A totalitarian regime? Doesn't the soul also need some kind of individual freedom or liberty?
Well, yes. Good thinking, hypothetical Steve. You're right. That's exactly what she's saying. Liberty is another crucial need of the soul.
And what you'll find if you read all 14 of these is that Simone Weil clearly believed that part of producing the conditions in society that allow for mutual self-respect between people requires us to balance certain values that on the surface appear to be opposites. Order and liberty, obedience and responsibility, equality and hierarchism, security and risk, the list goes on.
Point is, any society that is over-indexing on any one of these too much is probably going to start to run into problems. You overdo it on security and don't allow people enough risk. That's how you get people dressed up like RoboCop on the street corner. That's how you get drones floating down from the sky talking to you. Return to your home at once, citizen. Then again, you overdo it on risk and you don't have enough security. Well, that's where we get things like the financial markets or Waffle House.
Point is, each one of these 14 needs of the soul contributes to a different psychological need that people have. And if people are living in a society where it's structured in a way that makes it impossible or extremely difficult to get any one of these, you can imagine how Simone Weil thought you'd no doubt see populations starving in different ways than just hunger.
You know, she says the greatest societies of the past have made sure that they have some way of guaranteeing food, water, and shelter for their respective populations. They did this because they realized that it doesn't benefit anybody to have a population of people who are starving. And this brings me to one of the biggest needs people have that Simone Weil thinks is not being guaranteed by society based on its current setup. In fact, it's not only not being guaranteed, it is being actively and deliberately sabotaged.
What I'm talking about is what Simone Weil called the need for roots. Yes, that's roots like a plant has roots. A couple of big points to understand what Simone Weil means when she's talking about roots. First point, Simone Weil is living in the wake of a long history in Western philosophy that says that what a person is at their core is an individual, rational, autonomous agent that is making decisions.
Who I am is made up of a ton of preferences, intuitions, independent things that I ultimately decide. But what people are starting to ask around this time is, can you give me an example of any human being that is truly independent of everyone else around them? This way of thinking says no. Every individual lives while also being embedded into a society.
Their relationship to this society is an important piece of who they are. You can't separate the two. And be skeptical of anybody putting in tons of work trying to figure out a way to force that separation between the society and the individual. Second point: if we're all embedded into a society, well, what is a society? Or the more relevant question during the time of Simone Weil: what is a nation? Let's say there's a random group of people. They congregate together in a field somewhere.
At what point does that random group of people officially become an organized nation? And there were a lot of different answers to this question, but one of them formulated just before Simone Weil was born that she puts a lot of stock in is that a group of people becomes a nation when they, one, have a shared history of customs, mores, and experiences that link them together that they're trying to preserve, and two, have a shared set of expectations and goals moving into the future.
if any one of these two criteria fall off, you start to see a nation unravel. It starts to less resemble a nation and start to more resemble a patchwork of warring factions, not a solidified group. This is why it's so important for an ostensible nation to be able to agree on their history and agree on where they want to go into the future, and why something like misinformation is so good at dividing people within a country. Now back to the concept of roots.
Not unlike a plant, Simone Weil would say, a human being needs roots to be able to survive and to grow. But while a plant needs soil to grow in, people get their roots from their, quote, real, active, and natural participation in the life of the community, end quote. In other words, people feel rooted when they can participate in the culture or the nation that they're a part of.
And more than that, there's a certain part of everyone, certain particular ways that you talk or act around other people that can only be expressed and really only make sense in the context of the culture or nation that you're rooted in. So to continue the metaphor of the plant...
Let's say someone comes along and rips a plant out of the ground or tears up the soil that the plant's growing in. And when they do that, it's not surprising when that plant dies. Simone Weil would say that when we live in a world of rampant colonialization, where we destroy cultures for the sake of our political ends, we are essentially ripping people, like plants, out of the only soil they have that allows them to survive and grow.
Now, what is she referring to when she says colonialism? Well, remember, she's living in France at the beginning of World War II. And at this point, the Nazis have already invaded. And if the Nazis decide to let you live, French culture from this point forward is effectively subjugated and silenced. If you are a former citizen of France at this point, you're told that you should be thankful to have the privilege of being a Nazi now. Because don't worry, the Nazis will tell you, this is a better culture than yours was before. You should be thankful for it.
Simone Weil is going to almost instantly make the point that no French person that hears this thinks what the Nazis are doing here is okay. But where's their bleeding heart for the hundreds of years of colonizing that France had done up until that point in World War II during the Age of Exploration? She says France also subjugated cultures and told them, don't worry, don't worry, this is a much better way of doing things. We're going to civilize you. You shouldn't be complaining. You should be writing us a thank you card right now.
And at the risk that somebody out there thinks colonialization is something that only went on a long time ago, invading countries with the intent of doing away with ideas that are quote-unquote inferior to the ideas of the invading army, that's in the news today. It's in the news of the recent past. It's in the United States invading Iraq. It's in the Soviets and their treatment of the culture of Kazakhstan.
There are so many obvious examples historically, probably in all of our countries, that still have echoes to this day. My point is this idea that in order to help people, what we got to do is invade them and then transplant them from one cultural flowerbed to another. And then on the other side of that, tell them, well, it's just a better culture. You guys should be grateful. Find a way to make it work.
Both human beings and plants don't work that way to Simone Weil. When you take a plant and you tear its roots out of the ground and you plant it in an entirely different type of soil with a totally different microbe profile, that plant could die, or even worse sometimes, continue on living sad and withered. Well, what happens when you do that with people? Colonialization is the cause of many of the problems that we face in the world right now to Simone Weil.
And she's not just talking about physical colonization where an army takes over a culture by military force. That's certainly part of it. But there are ways to uproot people through political force as well. Force, remember, is that concept we talked about at the end of last episode.
Because when you spend time in the factories, when you spend time on the front lines with soldiers, when you spend time with anyone living in this age of industrialization and rationalization, the society of the spectacle comes to mind. For anyone where human relationships have been reduced to moving images on a screen, or monetary transactions, or numbers.
Wherever you can find afflicted people, you will find people who find it extremely difficult to feel rooted in the culture they geographically live in because it's extremely difficult to participate in a meaningful way. You don't have to colonize and uproot people if they never had roots to begin with. Some societies are systematically designed in a way that makes it difficult for the average person to feel rooted in participating within it.
Now again, if a society was set up in a way where it was really difficult for people to get food, it would almost seem like a human rights violation. When it comes to roots, though, well, we feel differently about that kind of thing. But should we be? When Simone Weil's writing about the need for roots, she's assuming that Hitler's going to lose the war and assuming that France is going to have to rebuild the nation after this whole thing's over.
And while she doesn't envy anyone that's going to actually have to do that rebuilding, she definitely thought this would be an opportunity to rethink the priorities we have moving forward. For her, among other things, it was going to be to think of these needs of the soul on the same level as we think of the needs of the body. You know, you may have heard by now that Simone Weil, quite famously, was not a big fan of discussions about human rights.
But that statement in itself is kind of misleading, and I want to offer a bit of context as to where she's coming from there. Again, Simone Weil is living during World War II, and understandably, when people hear about what's being done to people in the war out there, there's a lot of talk that starts going on about human rights. Should there be lines that nobody ever crosses? Should there be a baseline of human dignity that we can quantify, that everybody gets regardless of what side of the battlefield you're on? Can
Can we write these down in a very clear way so that they can't be misunderstood? Can we all shake hands and agree to follow them in the future? Seems like a noble pursuit. Well, just like with the abstract philosophical discussion, it's not that Simone Weil thought there was no room for conversations like this. I'm sure she'd say, "Go ahead, write them down. Chisel into stone these standards for human rights." But she'd say, "Isn't that in some ridiculous way missing the point of why we care about these human rights in the first place?"
First of all, she would say, write these human rights down on a piece of paper all you want, but the next Hitler that comes along isn't going to honor them. Anyone willing to invade a country like that isn't going to care about your little convention that you had, or the letter that you're going to send them telling them how mad you are at them. It's like having your criminal justice strategy be that when someone breaks the law, we'll just have them sign a contract saying they won't be a criminal anymore. Secondly, it just misses the point of why we care about human rights in the first place.
You know, in our modern societies, we think so much in terms of law and economics that we think that if we just write this stuff down and shake hands on it and make a deal, that we're doing something about it. But Simone Weil would say all you're really doing is transcribing human dignity into the language of commerce and law. And that's missing the point. She gives a great example in one of her journals. Slight paraphrase here. She says, imagine a farmer who goes down to the farmer's market every weekend to sell his eggs.
The eggs are $4.99 a dozen. Customer comes up to him and says, "Hey look, I'm only going to give you $1.99 a dozen." Farmer says, "No you're not. They're $4.99 a dozen." Customer says, "Why do you think you can just charge $4.99 a dozen?" Farmer says, "Because that's my right. I have the right to charge as much as I want for them. And I have the right to go out of business if people don't like it." All of this makes sense in the context of a farmer's market and commerce.
But then Simone Weil says, contrast that example with someone who forces a woman into prostitution. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 100% of people listening to this would find that to be wrong. And if I were to ask you why it was wrong, would you say back, well, it's wrong because it's that woman's right to not be a prostitute if she wants to. She has a right to choose other courses of action in her life.
It's like, no, no, that is ludicrous, Simone Weil writes in her journal. The idea that that's the reason why it's wrong? No, obviously, we all know the reason it's wrong is something far deeper than just her legal rights, something much more universal. This isn't a farmer selling his eggs anymore. This woman's very personhood is being robbed from her. Another example, picture a person next to you starving, withering away, clearly hours from death.
You're standing next to them and you got a sandwich in your hand and you're not exactly that hungry. They're begging you for the sandwich. Would you give it to them? Again, I'm going to go out on another limb here and say that 100% of people listening would give it to them. And why? Is it because it's their right to not starve to death? What, you don't want to violate their rights?
Or if we talked about it in terms of rights, would that be missing something or at least obscuring something important about this whole process? This is why Simone Weil didn't hate human rights by any means. She just preferred to talk about human needs rather than human rights. Rights are legalistic and commercial. Needs recognize that there's something deeper here, that there's an underlying moral obligation that we have to our fellow human beings.
And whether a person has been uprooted from their culture by history, by society, or by military force, Simone Weil thought the more accurate way to be looking at it is not as a human rights violation, but as a violation of their very personhood. A theft of a ton of important things that go to make up their self and identity. So in other words, when someone is denied their ability to feel rooted within their culture, this is not just oppression to Simone Weil. This is dehumanization.
And when she has this realization, she has a moment where she finally recognizes the true extent of the problem of affliction.
She also recognizes why so many academics can talk about the experience of the unrooted person from the sidelines and never really understand what they're talking about. They just can't see it because they've never had to experience it. They can't see that this is not just a bunch of workers being used as economic pawns and they just need to organize and rally together and rise up workers' rights. That's the answer. No, this existence that they're living every day is soul draining. It
It creates a deterministic vacuum. It robs them of a piece of what even makes them human. Knowing that, what person immersed in these circumstances is in any sort of place to start a revolution, as Marx predicted was going to happen from his perspective? The only way you could predict that is if you didn't understand their spot. Simone Weil, like many young people, certainly had a bit of a revolutionary phase. But after seeing the problem for herself firsthand, she realized the truth of the matter.
Revolution was the new opiate of the masses. A cause, she says, that people believe in wholeheartedly. They often die for it, with usually very little ever really coming out of it. Mostly superficial changes, barring rare exceptions. The path forward for Simone Weil was not going to be a political revolution. It was going to be, as I said before, a new way of thinking about ethics that emerges in her writing after going into the factories and seeing the face of the problem. And this is where we need to return back to that concept of attention that we talked about in the first episode.
In very Simone Weil fashion, once she goes into the factory, she starts to explore new questions about old questions. And one of the ones she spends a lot of time thinking about is this. That moral obligation that we feel towards our fellow human beings, where exactly does that begin and end? Like what makes a human being a human being? What makes each person irreplaceable? In the language of Simone Weil, she's going to ask, what makes a person sacred?
Let's brainstorm a bit like she did. If the Nazis invaded someone's country and they robbed someone of their culture and they feel that sense of rootlessness as though a piece of them has been taken,
Is that person still human? Are they still worthy of dignity and compassion? Of course they are. Okay, well, how about when you go into a factory or any modern scenario where people feel rootless within their own culture because it's extremely difficult to participate? Is that person still worthy of respect? Well, of course they are.
In fact, Simone Weil says the only reason we allow these sorts of situations to go on is because we don't gotta look at them every day. If you had to look at the factory worker or the person in the inner city every day, you magically wouldn't feel so complacent about it. So what is it then? Is what makes somebody sacred and human something physical about them or empirical? Like all human beings have two arms, two legs, and a head? Well, that can't be it because if you chop off someone's leg, I still care about them the same. Could it be their personality?
These are all examples that were offered at the time, by the way. I swear I'm not coming up with these. But could it be their personality? That what makes somebody sacred and irreplaceable is the unique confluence of personality traits that makes up who they are? That they're not like anyone else out there? Well, that can't be it either to Simone Weil. First of all, if two people for whatever reason happen to have the exact same personality, it wouldn't make either one of them less sacred.
Second, she would say, people may often help out certain personalities over others just because they like them more, but because I like one personality over another doesn't make them necessarily any more deserving of attention or love. To Simone Weil then, what makes someone sacred must therefore be something impersonal about them, which is to say that it must be located somewhere outside of anything that is personal to them.
And all this discussion so far has been to build this philosophical foundation for the ethical strategy she's going to offer moving forward, and here it is. She would say that we have big problems that face us in this world. We have millions and millions of people living lives feeling completely uprooted in a soul-draining state of affliction. We have colonialism robbing people of their cultures and their personhood. We have the structure of society making it more difficult than it has to be to meet the psychological needs of the soul.
The way out of this is not a political revolution, though. The way forward first is going to have to be a spiritual revolution in the individual. And the main weapon this revolution is going to be fought with is the cultivation of a totally different kind of attention.
We talked last time about this new kind of attention as it relates to our general thinking. Simone Weil described it as, quote, But another way of thinking of that is that this is a momentary suspension of anything personal that you may be projecting onto reality.
Or in other words, to pay attention in this new way is to renounce the I, as she says, or to renounce the ego, which to her ultimately meant to accept the death of everything personal about yourself so that you can better sit listening in that place of passive activity that we talked about last time, poised, ready, and more capable than ever to receive the world in a more universal, impersonal way.
She said practicing this skill is to practice what she called a type of de-creation. We are de-creating the biases, privileges, judgments, assumptions that we usually bring to bear on every experience that we have, which then leaves us more open to experiencing people on impersonal terms. To master this skill would accomplish a few different things to Simone Weil, all of which would account for nothing short of a spiritual transformation in most individuals.
For one, it would allow you to connect with any other human being on a level that isn't dependent upon your personalities getting along, your cultures being similar, you looking or sounding the same. There's a feel as though within this impersonal connection can be something that links all human beings together, irrespective of culture. Something that maybe we've forgotten in our modern society where we've all essentially become pawns in some elaborate political chess game.
Second, this new kind of attention would allow you to make another person, maybe somebody deep in the throes of affliction in their own life. It would allow you to make somebody else feel seen and heard on a level that maybe they've barely experienced in their entire life. We compared it last time to the Catholic sacrament of the baptism, allowing this person to feel a sense of renewal and hope that otherwise wasn't available to them. Like a Catholic priest, you would be somebody able to administer that to another person.
But lastly, what this attention can offer people, Simone Weil thinks, is very similar to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, where you consume the body and blood of Christ and a piece of God supposedly becomes a piece of you. What does she mean by that? Well, if we think of this new form of attention as a new lens that we're viewing people through, then imagine taking that lens and then pointing it towards the rest of the world.
Imagine seeing the world not in terms of how it relates to you, or some personal project or set of assumptions you have about it, where instead of always being in the process of creating new schemas and new knowledge about it, you were just open, passively active, waiting for the universe to disclose something to you, consuming like the Eucharist, taking in what the universe has to say and making it a part of you, maybe listening and waiting for the moral truth of the universe to offer itself to you.
In the language of Simone Weil, you essentially become an antenna for God to communicate with. People will say, "Talking to God." Oh, how convenient. These nutjobs over here apparently talk to God every day. But, uh, silly me, I can't seem to get the guy to return a text. God doesn't talk to me. He apparently has better things to do. Well, what if there was a frequency that was being broadcast all the time that you just aren't paying attention to? For the more secular-minded out there like myself, this is a metaphor.
What if there was an experience available to you where you would feel a closer connection to the universe, but you're just not open to it? Fact is, you wouldn't even know if it was there or not if you weren't willing to be open to it in the first place. Another way to say that is that unless if you put in the work on yourself and on cultivating your attention and prepared your mind in a way that allows it to be open to certain experiences, you will never have any other experiences than the ones you do.
This is the meaning of the title of her most famous book called Waiting for God. And as for how to practice attention, as for what she thinks that moral truth may be, and how we can further understand our place alongside other people in this world, that'll have to wait till next episode. But I guess to answer the guy at the coffee shop at the beginning of the episode, was it a waste for Simone Weil to put herself in harm's way?
Maybe it could be argued that there's some sort of happy medium that she could have walked during her lifetime. But then again, it's not like she set out to die that day that she did at the hospital. She was just that morally consistent. More than that, though, happy medium isn't exactly the term I'd use to describe Simone Weil. And sometimes I wonder, could anybody out there sitting in a classroom ever have arrived at the conclusions that she did?
Could anyone ever have had these insights if they didn't live as fully, and yes, sometimes as dangerously as Simone Weil lived? It's almost as if the universe discloses more about itself to those who are daring enough to not stay at a safe distance. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.
