The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

she notes that true contemplation allows her to see others “as they are related to themselves, and not to me.”

Work, in contrast, is the business of, well, one’s hands: when they engage the world, hands are the extension of one’s thoughts. Rather than being acted upon by the world, which is the lot of the laborer, the skilled worker shapes, with thought and deliberation, the material she finds in the world—an insight that also applies to the intellectual wh

This is how affliction works: it “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.”

The meaning of “collectivity” tends to shift from one text to the next, as does the word itself; at times, Weil applies the label of “blind social mechanism.” But the fundamental conception remains constant, pointing to the convergence of the political, social, cultural, and economic forces that dictate our lives.

First, she gives this notion a particular twist: by embracing the going and not the getting there, we will ultimately get to somewhere more important than the original destination. Even should we fail to solve a geometry problem at the end of an hour, we will nevertheless have penetrated into what Weil calls “another more mysterious dimension.”16 T

It is only by getting the words right—describing the world as it is—that one can act rightly and resist on behalf of others and oneself.

Children have been taught, she wrote, that “things concerning the country . . . have a degree of importance which sets them apart from other things.” But here’s the rub: “It is precisely in regard to those things that justice, consideration for others, and obligations assigning limits to ambitions and appetites never get mentioned.”

What Murdoch took from this “admirable Platonist” was the conviction that seeing well is tantamount to doing well. Discerning the Good—the way the world truly is—whittles down our range of choices to just one.

The doctor’s reply—“Yes, but it is no reason for giving up the struggle”—at first sounds pat. But instead, it sounds the depths of human purposefulness: the demand, in the face of political or ideological absurdity, for justice and dignity.