The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

“Only the greatest art,” Murdoch noted, “invigorates without consoling.”

“Nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly.”

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.

Affliction resulted less from physical suffering than from psychological degradation. Ridden by stern foremen and driven by production goals, workers were shorn of their human dignity.

Reduced to cogs in a machine, whether as machine workers at Alsthom or warehouse workers at Amazon, the “majority of working men,” Weil asserts, “have experienced the sensation of no longer existing, accompanied by a sort of inner vertigo, such as intellectuals or bourgeois, even in their greatest sufferings, have very rarely had the opportunity of

Reverence, in short, is the realization that there is more than this and that there is more than me; it is both the cause and consequence, as Iris Murdoch notes, of “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for it . . . that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.”

Reflecting on the remorseless nature of capitalism, Weil lamented the “naiveté of a man who has never suffered.”11 This naiveté deepens with the failure to understand that the worst suffering is not physical, but psychological—the kind of suffering that metastasizes into affliction, turning both oppressors and oppressed into things. Men no less tha

“To be free and sovereign, as a thinking being, for one hour or two, and a slave for the rest of the day, is such an agonizing spiritual quartering that it is almost impossible not to renounce . . . the highest forms of thought.”