How to Read Simone Weil, Part 3: The Existentialist / Deborah Casewell

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” … “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” … “I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.” … “To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.”

(Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace)

“That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the  one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you  are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.” (Deborah Casewell, from this episode)

This is the third installment of a short series on How to Read Simone Weil—as the Mystic, the Activist, and the Existentialist.

This week, Evan Rosa invites Deborah Casewell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.—to explore how to read Simone Weil the Existentialist.

Together they discuss how her life of extreme self-sacrifice importantly comes before her philosophy; how to understand her central, but often confusing concept of decreation; her approach to beauty as the essential human response for finding meaning in a world of force and necessity; the madness of Jesus Christ as the only way to engage in struggle for justice and how she connects that to the Greek tragedy of Antigone, which is the continuation of the Oedipus story; and, the connection between love, justice, and living a life of madness.

About Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.

About Deborah Casewell

Deborah Casewell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and is Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.

Show Notes

• Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace (1947) (Available Online)
• Deborah Casewell’s Monotheism & Existentialism
• Simone de Beauvoir’s anecdote in Memories of a Beautiful Daughter: “Shouldn’t we also get people’s minds, not just their bodies? Weil: “You’ve never been hungry have you?”
• Leon Trotsky yells violently at Weil
• The odd idolizing of Weil without paying attention to her writing
• ”You get a kind of, as you say, a kind of odd idolization of her, or a sense in which  you can't then interact so critically   or systematically with her philosophy, because her figure stands in the way so much, and the kind of the respect that people have.”
• Anti-Semitism despite Jewishness
• Simone Weil’s relationship to food: an unhealthy role model
• “She’d reject anything that wasn’t perfect.”
• Extreme germophobe
• Expression of solidarity with the unfortunate
• Her life comes before her philosophy. Being, you might say, comes before thinking.
• Weil’s life of extreme self-sacrifice as “mad”—alienating, insane, strange to the outside world.
• “ I think an essential part of, to an essential part of understanding her is to understand that   world is kind of structured and  set up in such a way that it runs without God, without the supernatural, God's kind of abdicated through the act of creation. And as a result, the universe operates through necessity and through force. So left to its own devices, the universe, I think, tends towards crushing people.”
• Abandonment vs abdication
• People possess power and ability and action—a tension between activity and passivity
• Weil’s Marxism and theory of labor and work
• Activity becomes sustained passivity
• Consent, power, and the social dynamics of force and necessity
• I think she sees the best human existence is to be in a state of obedience instead. And so what you have to do is relinquish power over people.
• The complexity of human relationships
• “She was a very individual person … a singular, individual life.”
• The Need for Roots
• “And this is what I do like about Simone Weil—is that she's always happy to let contradictions exist. And so when she describes human nature and the needs of the soul, they're contradictory. They all contradict each other. It's freedom and obedience.”
• Creating dualisms
• She is a dualist
• Simone Weil on Beauty and Decreation
• ”Decreation is essentially your way to exist in the world ruled by force and necessity without succumbing  to force and necessity, because in a way there's less  of you to succumb to force and necessity.”
• Platonic idea of Metaxu
• Weil on the human experience of beauty—” people need beautiful things and they need experiences of beauty in order to exist in the world, fundamentally… if this world is ruled by force and necessity.”
• The unity of the transcendentals of beauty and truth and goodness—anchored in God
• Weil’s Platonism
• Weil as religious existentialist, as opposed to French atheistic existentialist
• “ For her, God is the ultimate reality, but also God is love. And so the goal of human existence, I think, is to return to God and consent to God. That's the goal of human life.”
• “What are you paying attention to?”
• The madness of Christ
• The struggle for justice
• “Only a few people have this desire for justice, this madness to love.”
• Existentialism and Humanism: “Sartre says that  man is nothing but what he makes of himself.”
• Making oneself an example
• “The real supernatural law, which is mad and unreasonable, and it doesn't try to make accommodations and get on with the world and deal with tricky situations. It's just mad.”
• Simone Weil on Antigone and the continuation of the Oedipus story
• Summary of the Greek tragedy, Antigone
• “And so Antigone says, the justice that I owe is not to the city. It's not so that the city can, you know, continue its life and move on. The justice that I owe is to the supernatural law, to these more important primordial laws that actually govern the  life and death situations and the situation of your soul as well. And that's why she does what she does. She's obedient to the unwritten law rather than the written law.”
• “The love of God and the justice of God is always going to be mad in the eyes of the world.”
• ”The spirit of justice is nothing other than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love.”
• The mad, self-emptying love of Christ
• “That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the  one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you  are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.”
• Does Weil suggest an unhealthy desire to suffer?
• “ It hurls one into risks one cannot run. If one has given one's heart to anything at all that belongs to this world. Um, and the outcome to which the madness of love led Christ is, after all, no recommendation for it.”
• “But if the order of the universe is a wise order, there must sometimes be moments when, from the point of view of earthly reason, only the madness of love is reasonable. Such moments can only be those when, as today, mankind has become mad from want of love. Is it certain today that the madness of love may not be capable of providing the unhappy masses, hungry in body and soul, with a food far easier for them to digest than our inspirations to a less lofty source? So then, being what we are, is it certain that we are at our post in the camp of justice?”
• “ From a loftier view, only the madness of love is reasonable.”
• “Only the madness of love can be the kind of love that actually helps people in the world. Fundamentally, that people, even though they know it's mad, and they find it mad, and they would sometimes rather not see it, they need that kind of love, and they need people who love in that kind of way. Even if it's not the majority, people still  need that. And so in some way, the way in which  she is, and the way in which she sees Christ being, is indispensable. Even though the path that you have to go down has nothing to recommend, as she says, in the eyes of the reasonable world, nothing to recommend it. It's the only just thing to do. It's the only just and loving thing to do in the end.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Deborah Casewell
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give