Episode #175 ... Simone Weil - Vessels of God
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This, important message to listeners of the podcast. There were two episodes of the podcast released today, parts 3 and 4 of the Simone Weil series. This episode, which is part 4, builds off of ideas that were discussed in the last episode, which is part 3. So if you haven't yet listened to part 3, highly recommend you go and do that first.

Part three is called The Mathematician. This episode is called Vessels of God. Both of them are released right now. Thanks for doing all you can to help keep the show going. I'm doing all I can to make it interesting for you fine folks. PhilosophizeThis.org for ways to do that. I hope you love the show today.

So we ended last time comparing attention and will as two different ways of approaching the task of self-transformation. There's a really common attitude in the Western world that how strong of a person you are just comes down to how much stuff you can do that you absolutely hate. How long can you force yourself to do something to yourself that if anyone else did the exact same thing to you, we wouldn't call it self-improvement as much as we'd call it a class B felony or a violation of the Geneva Convention.

We see people that can do this stuff to themselves as strong. But is having a strong will in uncomfortable spots really all that we should respect about a person that makes them strong? Or, as Simone Weil is saying, are there other important skills that need to be developed as well that are just better skills to have all things considered across the multiple situations that life may throw your way?

Real quick recap at the very end of last episode for anybody listening to these two parts separately. The example we used last time was let's say you wanted to read more, but you hate reading. How do you get yourself to change from someone who doesn't read into someone who reads? Okay, well one approach that's really popular in the West is that change occurs through willpower and discipline.

The strategy is simple. You hate reading, but you force yourself to do it anyway. You grind, you struggle through it, and after enough time forcing yourself to read, eventually it just becomes something you do that's a habit. Eventually, getting yourself to read takes about as much willpower as it takes to get up in the morning and take a shower or to brush your teeth. In other words, it's not something that you agonize over. It's just something that you do.

forcing yourself through strength of the will is one way of getting yourself to do the things you don't want to do. But a totally different way of orienting yourself towards the things you don't really want to be doing is to see them as things that you haven't really put your full effort into seeing clearly yet. That sure, you may hate reading right now, but let's break that down. What is that really? Were you born with a deep-seated hatred of words on a page?

What, did you have a bad experience at a Barnes & Noble when you were seven? Point is, you hate reading because you have a lot of assumptions about this activity that you're dreading called reading.

Maybe if you took a fraction of the effort you could spend forcing yourself to read for months and apply that effort to broadening your horizons, to opening yourself to try to see this activity of reading through a new set of eyes, maybe you could find something that interests you about it and magically getting yourself to do the thing you hate doing isn't really a problem anymore. Your life's driven by desire instead of denial. Now,

First thing that probably needs to be said here is that Simone Weil did not see these two things as mutually exclusive. No doubt she thought people need both will and attention to be able to be the best person they can be. But she definitely wants us to consider each of them individually as tools, and to really think about which situations in life each of these tools are the most useful in. And she thinks that when you do that, you start to realize the built-in limitations of something like will and discipline.

Just listen to how she writes about it. She says, quote,

As this is not the case, we can only beg for them, or should we cease to desire them? End quote. What's she saying here? Well, first of all, she's making the point that the will is certainly good at doing some things for people. But if you really broke it down, the will is mostly good at performing physical stuff.

It's a great tool to use if your goal in life is that you want to increase your max deadlift weight. It's a great tool if you want to sit in an ice bath or any uncomfortable situation and endure things for as long as you can. If you're a writer, the will is great at getting you to sit down and put pen to paper and start doing the work. But there are certain things that strength of the will can never get you closer to. For example, if you're a writer, you can't will yourself to something like creativity.

You can try to use the will there if you want. You can try to write really, really hard for hours on end. You can say, "I'm not getting up from this table until I've written 2,000 words today." You can force yourself to move the pencil up and down on the piece of paper, but if every word you write is completely uninspired, then you're just wasting trees at that point.

She says, "What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and try to will ourselves into writing a good poem, or to will ourselves into an understanding of virtue?" Like she said before, you can't will yourself into an understanding of the truth just by going down to the library and reading really hard for a while. Now don't get her wrong. Again, the will is an amazing tool at doing some stuff.

But the point she's making at the end of that quote from before is if all you ever worked on when developing yourself in this life was will and discipline, if you didn't practice this cultivation of attention at all, then when you're in a situation where you need something like inspiration or moral clarity or an openness to the truth, if all you have is discipline and will trying to physically assert yourself onto the moment, then you're in a situation where you need to be able to

What can you do in that spot? It's the wrong tool for the job. That's why she asked those questions at the end of the quote. Pretty facetiously, I might add. She says, what do you do? Do you just find some way to convince yourself you don't want these things anymore? Do you beg somebody else for inspiration? She asks.

Again, both of these skills are necessary, but to Simone Weil, we have to be honest with ourselves and recognize that sometimes the more useful skill to have in a situation is not to be able to will everything about the universe into existence, but instead to do the work, to become so open and receptive to experience that you become capable of being a catalyst for the universe to exist through you.

If it's not obvious by now, this is going to be an extremely different take on morality than the existentialist heroism that was beginning to dominate Europe during her time. This is also why the suspension of the ego and the personal biases, that's why all this has to go. We're ultimately trying to develop a sensitivity to be able to receive something that lies outside of the five conventional senses we typically operate within. Just as there are things that can't be willed into existence by physical brute force,

There are things that cannot be perceived by the human senses that still nonetheless exist to Simone Weil. There is obviously some sort of continuity to this existence that we're in. There's something that lies outside of our perspective of space and time that guarantees existence as it is from moment to moment, or at least has so far.

The thing that makes an apple tree sprout an apple instead of a strawberry. What is that? I mean, you can describe it through something like DNA, but what guarantees the continuity of that DNA? What process is that DNA a scientific record of?

To Simone Weil, there is an order, a symmetry, a harmony to the universe. She writes about what's included in it at one point. She says, quote, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behavior that is mindful of obligations, end quote. So what is she talking about there? Well, she's obviously talking about something non-material here, which would explain why a huge fan of science like Simone Weil wouldn't necessarily want to use science to classify this kind of stuff.

But it definitely raises an important question: how do we describe something like what she's talking about here in purely secular terms? Is it possible?

There's certainly not a bunch of magical thinking she's bringing to this. She's not saying the world's built on the back of a unicorn or something. What she is saying, though, is that there are certain mystical elements of human reality that can't yet be understood by purely empirical study. So do we just ignore them? Do we only talk about things that are totally demystified and fully understood by science? Oh, science will figure it out eventually. Or would that be you potentially missing out on a huge piece of what being a person is?

You can try to put it in purely secular terms if you want, but Simone Weil thinks the best language to use when describing this beauty, truth, justice, order, she's just going to refer to it as God.

And if you're someone that hears the word God and you start convulsing in your chair because of how loaded the term is and how can any intelligent person really believe in something like a God, lest you forget from episode one that Simone Weil is among the most philosophically educated human beings to have ever lived. This is not just someone throwing around terms, not realizing the weight of them. This is also not someone trying to get you to come to their Bible study class on Wednesday.

In fact, every argument in your head right now about the existence or non-existence of a god, the social utility of a belief in god, she would have heard all of them a hundred times over in her life. And I'm sure she'd say, use whatever language you want to describe what she's going to call god. But understand that this god Simone Weil is talking about is nothing like the god that's talked about in the ramblings of fundamentalists. This is not a god that you should rely on to save you from all the problems of this planet while you sit around on Sunday reading stories about an ark.

This is not a God that you pray to and ask for favors. This is not a God where you sit on his lap like he's Santa Claus and ask for a Mr. Potato Head for Christmas. This is a vision of God, and all of that which lies outside of space and time, that is centered around moral accountability.

It is centered around the obligation we have to the impersonal universal truth that transcends a particular culture or a particular ideology. This is a universal good that links all people together. It lies in the heart of everyone, she says. And it's something that we've forgotten because of the structure of modern society and the way it teaches us to horribly pay attention to the world and to see the people around us merely in terms of how useful they are to us.

This is a vision of God that says that if there is anything in line with this universal good that ever gets done on this planet, recognize that that good stuff happened ultimately because it was done by some person somewhere. In other words, the only way that God ever exists in the world of Simone Weil is if we are the ones who are enacting this universal good. To Simone Weil then, we are essentially vessels of God.

And when you start to look at it that way, doesn't that view just instantly make you realize the responsibility we have as people to do good things? If God can be thought of as a kind of frequency, then to extend that comparison, you can think of yourself as kind of like an antenna. And there are messages being sent all the time over this frequency for you to be able to potentially receive. You can call these messages God if you're religious. If you're more secular, you can call them the universe. Totally different option is to call them mass consciousness. That

That what she calls universal messages, what you're really receiving are bits of a larger collective wisdom that's being exchanged by people culturally. But whatever you decide to call them, one thing's for sure to her. You don't access these more universal messages if you're locked into a closed system of thinking like an ideology. And here's one of her big points.

If we existed in a world where there were no people that had ever done the work or had transcendent experiences that were calibrated enough as an antenna to receive this frequency, there would be no new beauty. There would be no new creativity. There would be no new justice. In other words, if you're living in that sort of world, Simone Weil says, then the atheist is right. God doesn't exist. And there's no evidence in that world that these messages are being sent either.

God only exists to Simone Weil when there is a person who has done the work to receive this higher level message and then takes action as a vessel in the world for these new forms of justice, beauty, order, mindfulness of obligations, and so on.

The most important thing to remember about this whole process to Simone Weil is that it all relies on that taking action part of the equation. It's in that participation in the going-ons of your society that any of this stuff, the justice, the beauty, whatever, that participation is the only way this stuff ever becomes real to Simone Weil.

This is an extremely important point in her work, so let's talk about it a little. You know, some people see studying philosophy as an alternative to living a religious life. Like if you can go to church when you're a kid and you can get those answers and believe in them, more power to you. But if for whatever reason you can't do that, and you still want to grapple with the difficult questions of being a person, some people think philosophy is the best way to get there.

But Simone Weil saw it a different way. She saw philosophy as the requisite work that needs to be done to prepare someone's mind to be able to properly live a religious and morally consistent life.

Philosophy humbles a person if they study it long enough. Philosophy gets you to question those personal prejudices, your limited viewpoint, your position within culture, even the language that you use to express yourself. Philosophy, in other words, primes someone's attention of the world in a way where they're far less prone to projecting themselves out onto the world and then thinking they've arrived at the truth.

But philosophy only primes you to receive this universal good. It's not enough to just receive it to Simone Weil. It's not enough to sit around philosophizing about stuff all day. Being a vessel for goodness in this world requires an act of being. You have to take action for anything real to happen. You know, you can be the most calibrated antenna in the history of the world to these universal messages.

You can have the perfect song up in your head, the perfect book waiting to be written, deeply inspired. You've opened yourself up to what the world is feeling right now. You've come up with something that just needs to be expressed at this moment. But if the idea only ever exists up in your head because you don't take action, then you're never really a vessel for anything. It never really becomes real.

And then what usually happens is some other person, some other antenna out there recognizes the same message that needs to be expressed and someone else writes the song or writes the book. And there's been many a person that sat around watching other people that came out with an idea that they had first and they sit around lamenting the fact that they should have gotten all the credit. But no, it's only in action and participation that somebody becomes a vessel for good.

To Simone Weil, this also helps to explain why the colonization of people that we talked about on episode two, you know, uprooting people, robbing them of their culture and their ability to participate in culture. This explains why this is such an effective tactic to use if your goal was to spiritually impoverish people.

This applies also to the Society of the Spectacle that we recently talked about. To Simone Weil, the concept of the spectacle would make sense in theory. I mean, if you don't have to kidnap people and tear them away from their culture physically, if you can reduce someone's reality to a succession of self-referential images that they consume, and now they don't participate in their reality anymore, they just consume what other people feed them,

This explains why the spectacle would be such an effective method of keeping people feeling a sense of learned helplessness and emptiness.

What she's ultimately getting at is that people used to pray or meditate or have any number of religious rituals that allowed them to feel a stronger connection to the God that they believed in. But under Simone Weil's vision of God, it's through participation and action as a vessel for good that you end up feeling more spiritually connected to things. And if for whatever reason you can't participate or are not willing to, of course the world seems like a godless and meaningless place when you're not meaningfully participating in anything.

There's an interesting line of thought she goes on in one of her journals. She says, the way it should be probably in these modern productive material societies that we live in, where so many elements of them are centered around the manipulation of materials and nature around us, our workplace should probably be the location of spiritual connection for the modern person. Work could easily play the role in our psychology that prayer used to serve for people.

I mean, think about it. It's an activity where we're participating, we're working, we're creating something that's productive and useful for the people around us, for the world we live in. That sounds like a place where we should feel a similar level of joy and connection for our contribution to the whole process that's going on. But that's not how it actually is. In actuality, we have people grouped into these collectives that do their best to alienate people from how their work connects to others in a meaningful way. We never meet the person that made the beautiful vase that we have.

Is it simply a coincidence that that's the way things are set up? But anyway, now that I've spent years of your life telling you about how important attention was for Simone Weil, let's talk about how we can get better at it. How do we become a better antenna for feeling connected to the universe on a deeper level, or what she calls God?

Well, to Simone Weil, the more you practice, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more messages that you're going to start noticing. But if you're starting from absolute zero here and you wanted to know how to get started practicing attention, there are three types of experiences that you can gravitate towards in your life. Now these three activities initially look like very different explicit activities.

But she thought the more you practice, the more you experience them, the more you'll start to realize that all of them are actually just the same experience. It's the same recognition of what she calls an underlying implicit love of God. Once again, moving away from the particulars to access the universal. The first way to practice is to try to orient yourself towards love of the beauty of the world. The second is to orient your attention towards the love of your neighbor. And the third is an orientation towards love for religious ceremonies.

Let's go through these one by one, but one thing that obviously needs to be said right at the outset here is that it is not a coincidence that everybody listening to this has at least heard a story of someone who's witnessed the beauty of nature or helped a fellow person or experienced a religious ceremony and claimed to have had some sort of transcendent moment.

And it's also not a coincidence that most of those people have no idea who Simone Weil is. Which is just to say, it's not like these people are on the payroll or something promoting her philosophy. Simone Weil is clearly speaking to something that's a more universal human experience here. And when you consider the parallels between these sorts of experiences and other religious experiences people claim to have, say in deep contemplative practice or psychedelics,

I just think Simone Weil would be very open to the possibility that a lot of people are all accessing the same thing here and having very similar insights for a reason. So anyway, the first exercise you could try is feeling love for the beauty of the world. Now you can obviously witness the beauty of the world anywhere. You can see it in a mountain range just as much as you could see it in the eyes of someone you love.

But again, if we're coming up with a way to get your foot in the door of this whole process of cultivating attention, one place people tend to find it easier to focus their attention, probably because it's just so immersive, is by getting away from your normal life and going out into nature. Hopefully some are safe with no bears. And just trying when you're out there to feel your presence in the grand scheme of all of this.

Pretty common for people to do this sort of thing and come back and say, man, when I was out there, I just felt so connected to everything. I saw my place in the larger order of things. That's one possible access point to this experience. The second exercise you could do is feeling love for your neighbor.

Now, again, how many people have you heard say things like, I saw someone when I was out today. They obviously were in a bad spot. I did my best to talk to them, did what I could to help them. And on the other side of it, I felt this intense feeling of connection. I felt like I connected with this person on a human-to-human level, regardless of how they looked, regardless of who they voted for, or any other particulars like that. That's an experience to try to cultivate as well.

You know, this connection that's available when you open yourself and receive someone as they are, where you're not just projecting yourself onto their experiences. Caring for another person, or for another life form for that matter, is an absolutely critical part of the human experience for a lot of people. It can be the entire way people feel like their actions mean anything at all. There are people that go their entire lives in this narcissistic haze where it's all about them all the time, feeling zero connection to anything around them.

And then one day they're in a situation where they suddenly have to take care of something other than themselves. And they just get hit like a truck with this sense of purpose that they're serving for another person. They start to feel that connection to other people that really we all begin life with as babies born into the care of others. Totally possible to reconnect with that. And love of your neighbor is something that's available to most people all the time.

The third exercise she recommends is to try to orient your attention towards the self-transcendence that's possible in a religious ceremony. Now, this one's a little bit more complicated. See, anyone who's religious probably has already felt a connection like this before at some religious ceremony. But to the non-religious folks out there, this applies to you too.

Maybe as a non-religious person, you've at least witnessed a religious ceremony going on. And maybe when you were watching it, you've at least been able to acknowledge that, look, whether I believe in the same things or not, these people clearly are having some kind of different experience here. That there's a whole different energy that's often going on in these religious ceremonies where people can sort of lose themselves in the moment, where they don't have to worry for a bit about protecting their egos or the judgment of others.

And it's in this sense that I think the main thing about religious ceremonies to Simone Weil that make them an easier access point to feeling this connection with what she calls God is not the particular religion that the ceremony is connected to, but it's in the openness of the format of the ceremony. It's an event where everybody gathers together and the whole agreement is that we're all here to attempt to connect to something greater than ourselves. And part of that agreement is that no one here is going to judge you for trying to do that. Be however you want to be.

Based on that definition, I think Simone Weil would say that a lot of things fall into this category of a religious ceremony that aren't necessarily connected to any organized religion. How about someone that goes to a concert or a music festival and gets lost in the music, dancing? How about somebody that goes on a vision quest or something?

Tons of potential examples here. You'll have to find the things in your life that apply. But one thing's for certain. If there's any advice I think Simone Weil would offer to someone who's just starting out on this journey of getting past the conditioned personal ways of making sense of the world, I think it would be to not make the mistake of thinking that just because you practice these exercises for a bit, that you somehow arrived at the pinnacle of what it is that she's talking about.

See, it's so easy to think, oh yeah, I'm going to be more open today. I'm going to put on my little circle glasses and be more like Simone Weil. Yeah, there's this guy that works in accounting at my office. Total moron. Genuinely just a pathetic human being in every sense of the word. But you know what? I'm going to take him out to coffee today. I'm going to be open and receptive just like Simone Weil. And when he starts talking and saying all the insufferable stuff he usually says that ruins my life, I'm going to use it as an opportunity today. I'm going to use it as an opportunity to practice patience.

I'm going to identify some things that I love about this person and try to get those to rub off on me a bit. But what are you really doing there, she would ask. Are you accepting that person the way that they are? Is this a deep love of your neighbor where you're trying to connect to them on a universal level? Or are you just reframing aspects of their existence to be something that benefits you and your own personal projects?

Again, it's so easy to set out on this journey of trying to cultivate attention and then to see a little bit of progress to think, well, I'm the most open, receptive person that I know. I must have done it. When I was practicing the other day, I must have reached sainthood. Call me Santa Steve from now on.

It kind of reminds me of a really common story you hear when people try to learn mindfulness meditation. Somebody will start meditating. They'll follow the instructions. They'll pay attention to their breath. They'll pay attention to the sensations in their body. Allow the thoughts to come and go. Don't judge them. Just observe them. Be present. And they'll get done meditating and they'll want to be more present in life and they'll read the words of the wise Zen masters. What do they say? What is it to be present? Well, it's quite simple. When I walk, I walk. When I eat, I eat. And when I sleep, I sleep.

They'll read this stuff and they'll say, hey, I think I get it now. I shouldn't think about the past. I shouldn't worry about the future. I just got to be right here in the present. So whatever I'm doing, I just got to focus on that activity and nothing else, right? That's what it means to be in the present moment. When I'm driving, I'm thinking about driving. Now, is that technically moving in the right direction when it comes to presence?

Sure, you could say that. You're certainly more present than if your mind was just completely wandering in all directions with no effort being made at all. But on the other hand, there is obviously a very severe difference between the experience of that person and the experience of presence that someone's going for when they're living in a Buddhist monastery on top of a mountain. Is it better than nothing? Probably. But Simone Weil might say, just be sure to remember there are levels to this stuff. And the same thing applies to the skill of attention.

Never forget, she would say, that society incentivizes people to fall back into these old habits of projecting their agenda onto things, including this process of cultivating attention. So if you're looking for a solution all the time, or if you're seeking a destination where you've practiced being open and receptive enough, and now I'm a moral sage, you're no doubt going to find that destination. Cultivating attention, then, has to go hand in hand with a healthy level of self-awareness. We have to keep ourselves in check,

because nobody else out there is going to do it for us, not even society. We have to remain humble. And the only way you can ever hope to do that really is if you develop your ability to think as clearly as possible. Remember, she thought that lucidity was the only path to the virtues of moderation and courage.

Two virtues, she says, that without which life is nothing but a disgraceful frenzy. But the value of moderation and courage extend far beyond our own personal development. We ultimately need both of these things to be able to effectively resist anything in the world politically without ourselves becoming a disgraceful frenzy in the process. And this is where the mathematician situation from last episode becomes a bit more complicated. Because let's say you can get to the point where you're actually seeking the truth.

And let's say you follow her solution of refusing to join one of these collectives and you take the road less traveled and work on the skill of attention. By the end of her life, it was clear to her that there are certain situations that the world can throw your way, where just refusing to join a collective way of thinking was not the appropriate level of protest if you were going to be a morally consistent person.

She actually lived through one of these situations, by the way, when Hitler invaded Poland, and then Denmark, and then Norway, and Belgium. And as he went, there came to be a time in Simone Weil's life where just being a pacifist and refusing to participate, that sort of resistance started to seem to her to be pointless. I mean, by all means, she would say, if the situation doesn't require violence, non-violent civil disobedience is great.

But she says when you're facing someone like an Adolf Hitler, at a certain point in a certain kind of social conflict, you have to fight fire with fire. She says he can't just sit back passively taking personal pride in the fact that you're morally superior to the Nazis. Oh, history is going to look back on me and say that I was in the right. No, that's not enough sometimes when people are out there being colonized and murdered.

Simone Weil thought there were situations in life where it's going to be necessary for a person seeking the truth to make the choice to align themselves with the collective. And most of the time when they do that, that's going to be something that person sees as a lesser evil in the moment that they have to support. And while we can never view the philosophy of Simone Weil as by any means a completed work just given how early she died, I think she'd want to say to this thinking person that feels that they have to resist the way that things are by temporarily aligning with the collective,

That when you choose a lesser evil, never allow yourself to forget that you ultimately chose evil there. We need courage and moderation to make these choices. Maybe the two virtues that most closely resemble moral obligation and thinking clearly. Two things I don't know if I've ever seen any other philosopher more committed to than Simone Weil. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.