(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Simone Weil was born in 1909 and died in 1943, aged just 34. She was admitted to the famous elite school École Normale Supérieure at the same time as Simone de Beauvoir, leaving the school with honors in 1931. Weil remained a marginal figure, a social activist thinker driven by a desire to reveal the hidden truth of work – a frontier philosopher for whom man is caught between a manipulated world and a longing according to goodness and beauty.
Along with Nietzsche and Heidegger, Weil belongs to the list of so-called 'dangerous thinkers', but unlike them she does not even occupy a niche in the established philosophical pantheon. The reason is not that Weil does not live up to an idea of consistency in argumentation, but rather that she carries on an old tradition in thinking, for whom philosophy and religion/theology cannot be separated. She herself lays the foundation for a Christian Platonism.
A degeneration of both God and fatherland that leads to the death camps and National Socialism.
The rooting is a commissioned work from the exile milieu in London around Charles de Gaulle and published in 1949. A bid for a diagnosis and a future social-political development. Here, Weil explores rootlessness and its impact on modern society, arguing for the importance of grounding and rooting – cultivating some form of meaning and purpose in life. But the freedom-loving and existentialist searcher after World War II did not want Weil's thoughts on tradition, rootedness and universal values. Weil's writing ended up in the drawer. The book is Weil's last and was created during a frenetic work process in the months and weeks leading up to her death before her body gave up in August 2. It appears as a buffet of fragments, where conservative and anarchist, reactive and active elements stand side by side. The book's organic coherence hides itself in the background at the same time, connected as it is with Weil's other thoughts on work, politics, mysticism and religion.
Rootlessness
By rootlessness, Weil understands the loss of traditional values and social structures, which results in a lack of connection with surroundings and nature, but also a life without any real direction or purpose. To be rooted, to have a point of view, is for Weil the prerequisite for being able to establish a basis for stability and continuity in life. Red-
the attachment finds its place in social settings such as family, community, religion and culture.
Rather than simply serving to sustain life, she emphasizes the need to consider work as a service with an inner purpose that contributes to a common good. Weil emphasizes a more musical and artisanal side of work that anchors work in a greater experience of connectedness with tradition, continuity and the wisdom of the earth. Capitalization and reduction of the land to a resource has created homelessness and rootlessness for the farmer as well. You can read at this point The rooting as a contribution to a contemporary ecological way of life and climate thinking. And is also read like this at home, among other things. by Sofie Isager Ahl in her thesis on regenerative agriculture: Regeneration. Mutually healing practices in a new understanding of agriculture (2023, see also essay on page 28).
Fascism and Judaism
"The big beast" – that's how Weil referred to the collective. For her actually the curse of civilization. The familiar, the local, the own country, must not in themselves be confused with goodness. You must love your own and your place, writes Weil, but never make a religion out of it.
Weil recommends Platons Timaeus with «the image of man as a plant [turned upside down] whose roots penetrate the sky.» The aim of the rooter is not the cultivation of tribalism or collectivism, church institutions and political parties, but the building up of an experience of an impartial goodness that rises above patriotism and nationalism.
As a child of both the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Simone Weil became early engaged in the worldwide oppression of the working class that she writes about in On Oppression and Liberty (published in 1958), and as she in The weight and the grace (1948/2001) describes as the disease of the soul that leads to fascism. A degeneration of both God and fatherland that leads to the death camps and National Socialism.
For Weil, fascism as a disease of the soul was not so much a political as a religious problem. She finds the reason for this in the idolatry of the collective and the State. Nationalism and its hidden racism is the perversion that destroys religion and politics from within. It was the cruel consequences of this tribalism that led to her rejection of Judaism. How can the vengeful God Yahweh be Jesus' father, she asks? The belief that God can command men to commit violent atrocities is based on the greatest misunderstanding and can never form the basis of a religion.
This is, of course, a generalization of Judaism. Weil did not know this inside, the Talmud and its universal ethics. Strange that Weil, who always had sympathy for the most vulnerable, should have been insensitive to those who throughout history have always been persecuted and oppressed. But it is, as the Jewish writer Susan Taubes points out, because Weil's real focus is on what blocks the cultivation of common goodness (tribal thinking): «that Israel has built a wall around itself, which separates it not only from the world, but from a universal mission', which is Weil's focus (according to Susan Taubes).
Goodness: Cultivating Duties
As she writes with reference to Socrates' defense speech, «we must respect the collective – country, family etc. – but never for its own sake.» In the same way that we nourish the soil for the benefit of its plants, we must nourish the local to nourish the soul. Cultivate that in the soul that connects us with the living earth, with others, with quality and craftsmanship. There are objective values at stake, there is experience at stake, and therefore a cultivation of duty is essential.
But goodness is both rare and difficult, as avid Weil reader Iris Murdoch writes in The sovereignty of the good (2022). You see it in simple people. Those for whom sincerity and authenticity come naturally. Most people are chained to things and therefore think mostly about rights. To cultivate the good (the duty) one must break through the ignorance, confusion, fear, wishful thinking, and lack of exploration that make us feel that moral choices are random and subjectively arbitrary. The good expresses not only a moral ability to act, but also an ability to see reality and one's fellow human beings in a true way, freed from prejudices and ideologies.
She finds fascism as a disease of the soul in the idolatry of the collective and the State.
Good art can show how different and wonderful the world can appear to an objective gaze. Today's focus on identity politics would Weil see as a false consolation, a compensation that takes the eye away from the real problems of political and religious depth.
Materialistic mysticism
«Nothing in the world is the center of the world». This is how Weil writes in Intimations of Christianity of the Ancient Greeks (1958). It is «God as outside the world, at the same time as its center». That which in The rooting at first sight seems to hold man to his home base, to the nation, also contains the herd animal's striking side, which pulls him down, the 'weight' she called it.
The God she envisioned shattered all frameworks for the church as an institution (the collective beast) and has as many parallels to the pre-Christian movements, Indian religion and Taoism (Letter to a Clergyman, 1953). God has created this world apart from his own being, which can only be grasped in glimpses, in states of grace. This world is subject to the weight (status, money, social pressure and desire) which is not only of matter but also of spirit. Matter and spirit are subject to the same inexorable laws, the same necessity. Weil describes this necessity as «God's veil». In order for God's light to enter the world, he must withdraw from the world. In this withdrawal there is left an empty space, in the world, for creation, for renewal, for return, for light. A kind of materialistic mysticism, devoid of the 'spirituality' that is the comfort of many people today. The religion of Weil does not comfort, must not comfort. The infinite love is a light that is received. A light in clarity and understanding.
Penetrate through the world to my neighbor
Weil approaches a Gnostic dualistic worldview that divides things into the strangeness of this world and another brighter world. Also in modern Jewish thinking, we see the necessity to break with the world, to open up to this nihilism, the empty space in the middle of the world – tsim-tsum (Jewish philosophy and mysticism of Isaac Luria 1534–1572). For Weil, it becomes a matter of going into the heart of this world's nihilism (worthlessness, lust for money, way of life) to discover God, the light, making herself infinitely small, hence her urge to destroy herself. The argument put to the head reads: Man is not subject to the world. We are not in an immediately celebratory relationship with the world: Oh, the world is a wonderful place, a gift etc., the world in itself is good, if only we could understand it.
It is the other way around, the center is outside the world: the way out of nihilism goes through our relationship with the other, the human other, the light of infinity. A central element of Jewish ethics and thought. By penetrating nihilism in this way, we learn to affirm the world as it is. Discover the inherent value and beauty of things. A positive God sound and meaning is born with this nihilism. An ability that makes the same things shine and light. Thinkers such as Levinas, Blanchot, Scholem, Taubes, Kafka and others. belongs here.
Goodness in this world
But the dualistic worldview is a dead end. And it is strange that Weil, who was so fond of Spinoza, did not see the importance of transcending dualism. The point: There is only this world, but in this world there is also another world. In her book on Greek thought and Christianity (mentioned above), she herself asked the question: "Is something Good because God commands it, or, does God command it because it is good?" Only the second answer can she accept. The good is also what is sensible. Our ability to see reality.
A vulnerable female anarchism grafted with a simplicity of courage and way of life.
God's goodness is therefore inseparable from his being. In other words, that man in his being is connected with goodness, which also contains an ability to see the real. Here Plato, Spinoza and Heidegger meet.
The problem is the massive forgetfulness of our time. A human self-worship that elevates us above the surroundings, nature and other people and which has made it almost impossible to maintain a holism. Plato's allegory of the cave is actually, according to Heidegger, an attempt to release and awaken man's inner being to the good (Heidegger: The Essence of Truth. On Plato’s Cave Allegory, and Theaetetus. 1932/2013). To see the light, see reality. Goodness as an idea of being, which is also connected with the lowest, in the same way that truth is connected with untruth and being with non-being. The good is not a moral idea of good and evil, but deals with reality itself. Heidegger also thinks more Christian than Jewish: The world appears meaningless and evil, but one is saved through faith in the goodness of creation: One returns to the world, steps out of the hidden (the cave), transformed and yet the same, even more oneself than before , although you may fall back again and again. Not just me as subject and person, but me as being. So it requires something. They say that God helps those who help themselves.
Weil and new generations
Why read Simone Weil today, we who can neither disappear nor abandon the world?
Perhaps because in Weil we meet a unique personality, a rich inner experience, a bodily and mental pain illuminated by thought – written out in a language of exemplary economy, where every sentence seems a definitive statement. New generations also need a cosmic tremor, a transcendental shudder, objective values. A vulnerable female anarchism grafted with a simplicity of courage and way of life.
