This in-depth study examines the social, religious, and
philosophical thought of Simone Weil.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century presents a
comprehensive analysis of Weil's interdisciplinary ...thought,
focusing especially on the depth of its challenge to contemporary
philosophical and religious studies. In a world where little is
seen to have real meaning, Eric O. Springsted presents a critique
of the unfocused nature of postmodern philosophy and argues that
Weil's thought is more significant than ever in showing how the
world in which we live is, in fact, a world of mysteries.
Springsted brings into focus the challenges of Weil's original (and
sometimes surprising) starting points, such as an Augustinian
priority of goodness and love over being and intellect, and the
importance of the Crucifixion. Springsted demonstrates how the
mystical and spiritual aspects of Weil's writings influence her
social thought. For Weil, social and political questions cannot be
separated from the supernatural. For her, rather, the world has a
sacramental quality, such that life in the world is always a matter
of life in God-and life in God, necessarily a way of life in the
world.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century is not simply
a guide or introduction to Simone Weil. Rather, it is above all an
argument for the importance of Weil's thought in the contemporary
world, showing how she helps us to understand the nature of our
belonging to God (sometimes in very strange and unexpected ways),
the importance of attention and love as the root of both the love
of God and neighbor, the importance of being rooted in culture (and
culture's service to the soul in rooting it in the universe), and
the need for human beings to understand themselves as communal
beings, not as isolated thinkers or willers. It will be essential
reading for scholars of Weil, and will also be of interest to
philosophers and theologians.
In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer’s Iliad—that ...“great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others”— as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.
Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt’s and Weil’s voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Esposito’s notion and practice of “the impolitical.”
In Esposito’s account Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other’s thought, in the shadow of the other’s light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the West’s illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.
Abstract
Attention has often been seen as a selective process in which the mind chooses which already‐formed objects to focus on. However, as Merleau‐Ponty and others have pointed out, this ignores ...the complexity and ambiguity of sensory information and imposes on it a set of already‐formed objects in the world. Rather, attention is a process by which objects in the world are constituted by the perceiving subject. Attention thus involves a process of mutual negotiation with the environment. There are connections between this and the process of
attente
described by Simone Weil, in which the perceiving subject suspends the dominant preoccupations of the ego in order to become more aware of an independent reality. This, in turn, expresses in a more modern idiom what early Christian teachers had to say about the role of attentive looking in the contemplative life.
The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, remains in every way a thinker for our times. She was an outsider, in multiple senses, ...defying the usual religious categories: at once atheistic and religious; mystic and realist; sceptic and believer. She speaks therefore to the complex sensibilities of a rationalist age. Yet despite her continuing relevance, and the attention she attracts from philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies, spirituality and beyond, Weil's reflections can still be difficult to grasp, since they were expressed in often inscrutable and fragmentary form. Lissa McCullough here offers a reliable guide to the key concepts of Weil's religious philosophy: good and evil, the void, gravity, grace, beauty, suffering and waiting for God. In addressing such distinctively contemporary concerns as depression, loneliness and isolation, and in writing hauntingly of God's voluntary 'nothingness', Weil's existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke. This is the first introductory book to show the essential coherence of her enigmatic but remarkable ideas about religion.
This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil's ethical theory is considered against the ...backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil's philosophy - gravity, decreation and grace - are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil's thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she places on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty and love.
This paper suggests that cultivating an aesthetics of attention in education can be a valuable affective tool for combatting the kind of numbness often associated with the resilience of racism. The ...notion of attention broadens the frame of analysis of racial violence by taking into consideration the affective and aesthetic dimensions of attention. The paper brings together Taylor Rogers' recent theorization of 'affective numbness' and Simone Weil's theory of attention to argue that the cultivation of an aesthetics of attention to others' personhood has a potentially pivotal role in education to restore hearing of non-dominantly-situated persons' cry of injustice. The article suggests pedagogical ways of engaging teachers and students affectively to resist their numbness in the classroom. The analysis argues that 'paying attention' to racial violence can contribute to creating 'reparative futures' in education, but care is needed to avoid re-traumatizing students of color and other traumatized students.
Simone Weil Bingemer, Maria Clara; Kraft, Karen; Barcelo, Tomeu Estelrich
2015
eBook
The present book reflects on the life, work, and legacy of an exceptional and enigmatic woman: the philosopher and French Jewish mystic Simone Weil. It constitutes a testimony so unique that it is ...impossible to ignore. In a Europe where authoritarian regimes were dominant and heading, in a sinister manner, toward World War II, this woman of fragile health but indomitable spirit denounced the contradictions of the capitalist system, the brutality of Nazism, and the paradox of bourgeois thought. At the same time, her spiritual journey was one of zeal and sorrow--that of a true mystic--but her radical intransigence and passion for freedom kept her from actually approaching the institutional church. Curious and insatiable, she wanted to experience, in the flesh, the suffering of society's least fortunate and the truths of other religions. The reader will need to develop a discerning empathy for Simone Weil's sensibility, beyond her particular passion and zeal, in order to appreciate her in depth. But undeniable are this truly singular woman's authenticity, her capacity to suffer, her identification with the other, her inner passion, her almost magical perception of the depths of the human spirit. And that is why her story merits being told as one of the great witnesses of our age.
This article explores the way sound, music, rhythm and movement reflect experiences of suffering, trauma and aliveness by reflecting on colonializing and decolonializing modes of understanding the ...role played by sounds and music in living through suffering, displacement, cultural devastation and illness. Music and sound practices offer people ways of connecting life narratives and coping mechanisms to deal with loss and suffering. A peculiar aliveness of the body is mediated by sound and rhythm. The experiences with personal and cultural suffering of Richard Wilhelm, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein and people in the author’s life are read against the background of the ethical and communicative dimensions of sound and music, in an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic as much a philosophical study.
Marie Cabaud Meaney looks at Simone Weil's Christological interpretations of the Sophoclean Antigone and Electra, the Iliad and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Apart from her article on the Iliad, ...Weil's interpretations are not widely known, probably because they are fragmentary and boldly twist the classics, sometimes even contradicting their literal meaning. Meaney argues that Weil had an apologetic purpose in mind: to the spiritual ills of ideology and fanaticism in World War II she wanted to give a spiritual answer, namely the re-Christianization of Europe to which she (though not baptized herself) wished to contribute in some way. To the intellectual agnostics of her day she intended to show through her interpretations that the texts they cherished so much could only be fully understood in light of Christ; to the Catholics she sought to reveal that Catholicism was much more universal than generally believed, since Greek culture already embodied the Christian spirit - perhaps to a greater extent than the Catholic Church ever had. Despite or perhaps because of this apologetic slant, Weil's readings uncover new layers of these familiar texts: Antigone is a Christological figure, combating Creon's ideology of the State by a folly of love that leads her to a Passion in which she experiences an abandonment similar to that of Christ on the Cross. The Iliad depicts a world as yet unredeemed, but which traces objectively the reign of force to which both oppressors and oppressed are subject. Prometheus Bound becomes the vehicle of her theodicy, in which she shows that suffering only makes sense in light of the Cross. But the pinnacle of the spiritual life is described in Electra which, she believes, reflects a mystical experience - something Weil herself had experienced unexpectedly when 'Christ himself came down and took her' in November 1938. In order to do justice to Weil's readings, Meaney not only traces her apologetic intentions and explains the manner in which she recasts familiar Christian concepts (thereby letting them come alive - something every good apologist should be able to do), but also situates them among standard approaches used by classicists today, thereby showing that her interpretations truly contribute something new.
