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.