Simone Weil (1909–1943) philosophized on thresholds and acrossborders. Her persistent desire for truth and justice led her to bothelite academies and factory floors, political praxis and spiritualsolitude. At different times she was an activist, a pacifist, amilitant, a mystic, and an exile; but throughout, in her inquiry intoreality and orientation to the good, she remained a philosopher. Heroeuvre features deliberate contradiction yet demonstrates remarkableclarity. It is value centered and integrated but not systematic. Itcontains scattered notes of her translations of and commentaries onseveral ancient Greek texts, Pythagorean geometry formulae, anddetailed accounts of her daily tasks within a factory; but her oeuvreis also composed of addresses to political, industrial, and religiousleaders as well as pieces intended for university students, radicalmilitants, industrial workers, and farm laborers. In both her life andher thought—itself an unstable distinction with respect toWeil—she is a philosopher of margins and paradoxes. In partbecause Weil’s thought defies categorization, the ways in whichher ideas are taken up often say as much about her commentator as theydo about her. She was taken as a prototype for Albert Camus’srévoltés. Giorgio Agamben (2017a) described herconscience as “the most lucid of our times”, and HannahArendt (2018, 131, n. 83) claimed that perhaps only Weil treated thesubject of labor “without prejudice and sentimentality”.Maurice Blanchot (1969, 178–179 [1993, 122]) described Weil asan “exceptional figure” who offers “an example ofcertitude” in the modern world, and Iris Murdoch wrote (1999,160) of “a profoundly disciplined life behind herwritings” that gave “an authority which cannot beimitated”. But Weil was also disparaged (for her plan toparachute white-uniformed nurses onto battlefields) as“crazy” by Charles de Gaulle (Zaretsky 2018). Theseremarks, however, betray an irony of which Weil was well aware andabout which she was deeply concerned near the end of her life, namely,that her person would be considered more than her thought. By focusingon the philosophical concepts Weil articulated and developed, thisentry presents her philosophy while speaking to her concern.

Following Weil’s philosophical development, her central conceptsare addressed under five categories: social-political philosophy,epistemology, ethics, metaphysical and religious philosophy, andaesthetics. The periodization employed is as follows: 1925–1934(early), 1935–1939 (middle), 1939–1943 (late). It isimportant to note that, given Weil’s rejection of systematicityand development of concepts, these categories and periods introduce adegree of artifice into her thought. The conclusion of this entryreports on her reception among the Continental and Anglo-Americantraditions of philosophy.

• 1. Philosophical Development
• 2. Social-Political Philosophy
• 3. Epistemology
• 4. Ethics
• 5. Metaphysical and Religious Philosophy
• 6. Aesthetics
• 7. Reception and Influence
• Bibliography
  • Cited Works by Weil
  • Other Works by Weil
  • Selected Secondary Sources
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Philosophical Development

Simone Weil was born in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her parents, both ofwhom came from Jewish families, provided her with an assimilated,secular, bourgeois French childhood that was cultured and comfortable.Weil and her older brother André—himself a math prodigy,founder of the Bourbaki group, and a distinguished mathematician atthe Princeton Institute for Advanced Study—attended prestigiousParisian schools. Weil’s first philosophy teacher, at theLycée Victor-Duruy, was René Le Senne; it was he whointroduced her to the thesis—which she would maintain—thatcontradiction is a theoretical obstacle generative of nuanced, alertthinking. Beginning in October 1925, Weil studied at Henri IVLycée in preparation for the entrance exams of the ÉcoleNormale Supérieure. At Henri IV she studied under thephilosopher and essayist Émile-Auguste Chartier (knownpseudonymously as Alain), whose teacher was Jules Lagneau. Like Weilat this time, Alain was agnostic. In his classes he emphasizedintellectual history: in philosophy this included Plato, MarcusAurelius, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, and in literature, Homer,Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Already sympathetic with thedowntrodden and critical of French society, she gained the theoreticaltools to levy critiques against her country and philosophicaltradition in Alain’s class. There, employing paradox andattention through the form of the essay (it is important to note thatnone of her writings was published as a book in her lifetime), shebegan intentionally developing what would become her distinct mode ofphilosophizing. It is therefore arguable that she is part of theAlain/Lagneau line of voluntarist,spiritueliste philosophyin France.

In 1928 Weil began her studies at the École Normale. She wasthe only woman in her class, the first woman having been firstadmitted in 1917. In 1929–1930 she worked on her dissertation onknowledge and perception in Descartes, and having received heragrégation diploma, she served from late 1931 tomid-1934 as a teacher atlycées. Throughout thisperiod, outside of her duties at eachlycée where sheinstructed professionally, Weil taught philosophy to, lobbied for, andwrote on behalf of workers’ groups; at times, moreover, sheherself joined in manual labor. In her early thinking she prized atonce the first-person perspective and radical skepticism of Descartes,the class-based solidarity and materialist analysis of Marx, and themoral absolutism and respect for the individual of Kant. Drawing fromeach, her early work can be read as an attempt to provide, with a viewtoward liberty, her own analysis of the fundamental causes ofoppression in society.

In early August 1932, Weil travelled to Germany in order to understandbetter the conditions fostering Nazism. German trade unions, she wroteto friends upon her return to France, were the single force in Germanyable to generate a revolution, but they were fully reformist. Longperiods of unemployment left many Germans without energy or esteem. Atbest, she observed frankly, the unions could serve as a kind of deadweight in a revolution. More specifically, by early 1933 shecriticized the tendency of social organizations to engenderbureaucracy, which elevated management and collective thinkingover the individual worker. Against this tendency, she advocatedfor workers’ understanding the physical labor they performedwithin the context of the whole organizational apparatus. In“Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and SocialOppression” (1934), Weil summarized her early thought andprefigured central elements in her thematic trajectory. The essayemploys a Marxian method of analysis that pays attention to theoppressed, critiques her own position as an intellectual, privilegesmanual labor, and demands precise and unorthodox individual thinkingthat unites theory and practice against collective clichés,propaganda, obfuscation, and hyper-specialization. These ideas wouldprovide a theoretical framework for her idiosyncratic practice ofphilosophy. Near the end of her life she wrote in a notebook:“Philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) isexclusively an affair of action and practice” (FLN362).

On 20 June, 1934, Weil applied for a sabbatical from teaching. She wasto spend a year working in Parisian factories as part of its mostoppressed group, unskilled women laborers. Weil’s “year offactory work” (which amounted, in actuality, to around 24 weeksof laboring) was not only important in the development of herpolitical philosophy but can also be seen as a turning point in herslow religious evolution.

In Paris’s factories, Weil began to see and to comprehendfirsthand the normalization of brutality in modern industry. There,she wrote in her “Factory Journal”, “[t]ime was anintolerable burden” (FW 225) as modern factory work comprisedtwo elements principally: orders from superiors and, relatedly,increased speeds of production. While the factory managers continuedto demand more, both fatigue and thinking (itself less likely undersuch conditions) slowed work. As a result, she felt exhausted anddehumanized. Phenomenologically, her factory experience was less oneof physical sufferingper se, and more one of humiliation.Weil was surprised that this humiliation produced not rebellion butrather fatigue and docility. She described her experience in factoriesas a kind of “slavery”. On a trip to Portugal in August1935, upon watching a procession to honor the patron saint of fishingvillagers, she had her first major contact with Christianity and wrotethat

the conviction was suddenly borne in upon [her] that Christianity ispre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot helpbelonging to it, and [she] among others. (1942 “SpiritualAutobiography” in WFG 21–38, 26)

In comparison with her pre-factory “Testament”, we seethat in her “Factory Journal” Weil maintains the languageof liberty, but she moves terminologically from“oppression” to “humiliation” and“affliction”. Thus her conception and description ofsuffering thickened and became more personal at this time.

Weil participated in the 1936 Paris factory occupations and, moreover,planned on returning to factory work. Her trajectory shifted, however,with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. On the level of geopolitics,she was critical of both civil and international war, and she approvedof France’s decision not to intervene on the Republican side. Onthe level of individual commitment, however, she obtainedjournalist’s credentials and joined an international anarchistbrigade. On 20 August, 1936, Weil, clumsy and nearsighted, stepped ina pot of boiling oil, severely burning her lower left leg and instep.Only her parents could persuade her not to return to combat. By late1936 Weil wrote against French colonization of Indochina, and by early1937 she argued against French claims to Morocco and Tunisia. In April1937 she travelled to Italy. Within the basilica Santa Maria degliAngeli, inside the small twelfth-century Romanesque chapel where St.Francis prayed, Weil had her second significant contact withChristianity. As she would later describe in a letter,“[S]omething stronger than I compelled me for the first time togo down on my knees” (WFG 26).

From 1937–1938 Weil revisited her Marxian commitments, arguingthat there is a central contradiction in Marx’s thought:although she adhered to his method of analysis and demonstration thatthe modern state is inherently oppressive—being that it iscomposed of the army, police, and bureaucracy—she continued toreject any positing of revolution as imminent or determined. Indeed,in Weil’s middle period, Marx’s confidence in historyseemed to her a worse ground for judgment than Machiavelli’semphasis on contingency.

During the week of Easter 1938, Weil visited the Benedictine abbey ofSolesmes from Palm Sunday to the following Tuesday. At Solesmes shehad her third contact with Christianity: suffering from headaches,Weil found a joy so pure in Gregorian chant that, by analogy, shegained an understanding

of the possibility of living divine love in the midst of affliction.It goes without saying that in the course of these services thethought of the passion of Christ entered into [her] being once and forall. (WFG 26)

At Solesmes, she was also introduced to the seventeenth century poetGeorge Herbert by a young Englishman she met there. She claimed tofeel Christ’s presence while reciting Herbert’s poem“Love”. As she fixed her full attention on the poem whilesuffering from an intense headache, Weil came to see that herrecitation had the virtue of prayer, saying, “Christ himselfcame down and took possession of me” (WFG 27). Importantly, shethought God “in his mercy” had prevented her from readingthe mystics until that point; therefore, she could not say that sheinvented her unexpected contact with Christ (WFG 27). These events andwritings in 1936–1938 exemplify the mutually informing nature ofsolidarity and spirituality in Weil’s thought that began inAugust 1935.

After the military alliance of Germany and Italy in May 1939, Weilrenounced her pacifism. It was not that she felt she was wrong inholding such a position before, but rather that now, she argued,France was no longer strong enough to remain generous or merelydefensive. Following the German Western offensive, she left Paris withher family in June 1940, on the last train. They settled eventuallybut temporarily in Marseilles, at the time the main gathering pointfor those attempting to flee France, and where Weil would work withthe Resistance.

In Vichy France Weil took up a practice she had long sought, namely,to apprentice herself to the life of agricultural laborers. Inaddition, in Marseilles she was introduced to the Dominican priestJoseph-Marie Perrin, who became a close friend as well as a spiritualinterlocutor, and through whom she began to consider the question ofbaptism. In an effort to help Weil find a job as an agriculturallaborer, Perrin turned to his friend Gustave Thibon, a Catholic writerwho owned a farm in the Ardéche region. Thus in Fall 1941 Weilworked in the grape harvest. Importantly, however, she was not treatedlike the rest of the laborers; although she worked a full eight hoursper day, she resided and ate at the house of her employers. Shereportedly carried Plato’sSymposium with her in thevineyards and attempted to teach the text to her fellow workers.

In 1942 Weil agreed to leave France in part so her parents would be ina safe place (they would not leave without her, she knew), butprincipally because she thought she might be more useful forFrance’s war effort if she were in another country. Thus shewent to New York via Morocco. In New York, as in Marseilles, shefilled notebook after notebook with philosophical, theological, andmathematical considerations. New York, however, felt removed from thesufferings of her native France; the Free French movement in Londonfelt one step closer to returning to France. In 1943 Weil was given asmall office at 19 Hill Street in London. From this room she wouldwrite day and night for the next four months, sleeping around threehours each night. Her output in this period totaled around 800 printedpages, but she resigned from the Free French movement in late July(Pétrement 1973 [1976: xx]).

Weil died Tuesday, 24 August 1943. Three days later, the coronerpronounced her death a suicide—cardiac failure fromself-starvation and tuberculosis. The accounts provided by herbiographers tell a more complex story: Weil was aware that her fellowcitizens in the occupied territory had to live on minimal food rationsat this time, and she had insisted on the same for herself, whichexacerbated her physical illness to the point of death (Von der Ruhr2006: 18). On 30 August she was buried at Ashford’s New Cemeterybetween the Jewish and the Catholic sections. Her grave was originallyanonymous. For fifteen years Ashford residents thought it was apauper’s.

2. Social-Political Philosophy

Always writing from the left, Weil continually revised hersocial-political philosophy in light of the rapidly changing materialconditions in which she lived. However, she was consistent in heracute attention to and theorizing from the situation of the oppressedand marginalized in society.

Her early essays on politics, a number of which were posthumouslycollected by Albert Camus inOppression et liberté(OL), include “Capital and the Worker” (1932),“Prospects: Are We Heading for the ProletarianRevolution?” (1933), “Reflections concerning Technology,National Socialism, the U.S.S.R., and certain other matters”(1933) and, most importantly, “Reflections concerning the Causesof Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934 in OL 36–117). Inher early writings, Weil attempted to provide an analysis of the realcauses of oppression so as to inform militants in revolutionaryaction. Her concern was that, without this analysis, a sociallyenticing movement would lead only to superficial changes in theappearance of the means of production, not to new and freer forms ofstructural organization.

The division of labor or the existence of material privilege alone isnot a sufficient condition for Weil’s concept of“oppression”. That is, she recognized that there are someforms of social relations involving deference, hierarchy, and orderthat are not necessarily oppressive. However, the intervention of thestruggle for power—which she, following Hobbes, sees as aninexorable feature of human society—generates oppression.

[P]ower [puissance] contains a sort of fatality which weighsas pitilessly on those who command as on those who obey; nay more, itis in so far as it enslaves the former that, through their agency, itpresses down upon the latter (“Reflections concerning the Causesof Liberty and Social Oppression”, OL 62).

Oppression, then, is a specific social organization that, as aconsequence of the essentially unstable struggle for power, andprincipally the structure of labor, limits the individual fromexperiencing the world to the full extent of her or his fullcapability, a capability Weil describes as “methodicalthinking” (pénsee méthodique). Bydivorcing the understanding from the application of a method,oppression, exercised through force, denies human beings directcontact with reality. Also informing her sense of oppression is hernotion of “privilege”, which includes not only money orarms, but also a corpus of knowledge closed to the working massesthat, thereby, engenders a culture of specialists. Privilege thusexacerbates oppression in modern societies, which are held togethernot by shared goals, meaningful relations, or organically developingcommunities, but through a “religion of power” (OL 69). Inthis way, both power and prestige contribute to a modern reversal ofmeans and ends. That is, elements like money, technology, andwar—all properly speaking “means”—are, throughthe workings of power, treated as “ends” worthy offurtherance, enhancement, and multiplication without limit.

In her early social-political thought Weil testified to what shecalled “a new species of oppression”(“Prospects”, OL 9), namely, the bureaucracy of modernindustry. Both her anarchism and Marxian method of analysis influencedhow she problematized revolutionary struggle: the problem lies informing a social organization that does not engender bureaucracy, ananonymous and institutionalized manifestation of force. Theoppressiveness of modern bureaucracy, to which she responded throughanalysis and critique, includes clichéd, official andobscurantist language—the “caste privileges” ofintellectuals (“Technology, National Socialism, theU.S.S.R”, OL 34)— and a division of labor such that, inthe case of most workers, labor does not involve, but in factprecludes, engaged thinking. Out of balance in this way, modern humanslive as cogs in a machine: less like thinking individuals, and morelike instruments crushed by “collectivities”.Collectivity—a concept that centrally comprises industry,bureaucracy, and the state (the “bureaucratic organizationpar excellence” [OL 109]), but that also includespolitical parties, churches, and unions—by definition quashesindividual subjectivity.

Despite her critiques of oppression, prestige, and collectivity, in apolemical argument Weil is also critical of “revolution”,which for her refers to an inversion of forces, the victory of theweak over the powerful. This, she says, is “the equivalent of abalance whose lighter scale were to go down” (OL 74).“Revolution” in its colloquial or deterministic sense,then, has itself become an “opiate”, a word for which thelaboring masses die, but which lies empty. For Weil, real revolutionis precisely the re-organization of labor such that it subordinatesthe laborers neither to management (as in bureaucracy) nor tooppressive conditions (as in factory work). As she sees it, ifrevolution is to have meaning, it is only as a regulative, and not apositive, ideal (OL 53). In Weil’s adaptation of this Kantiannotion, such a regulative ideal involves an attention to reality,e.g., to the present political and working conditions, to humanconditions such as the struggle for power. Only in this way can itprovide a standard of analysis for action: the ideal allows for adialectical relation between a revolutionary alternative and presentpraxis, which is always grounded in material conditions. Freedom,then, is a unity of thought and action. It is, moreover—and notunlike in Hegel’s conceptualization—a condition ofbalanced relations to and interdependence with others (who check oursovereignty) and the world (which is limited and limiting). A freeingmode of production, as opposed to an alienating and oppressing one,would involve a meaningful relation to thinking and to othersthroughout the course of labor. When workers understand both themechanical procedures and the efforts of other members of thecollectivity, the collectivity itself becomes subject to individuals,i.e., means and ends are rightfully in a relation of equilibrium.

The ontology behind Weil’s notion of free labor draws on theKantian emphasis on the individual as an end—especially, forWeil, in her or his capacity for thinking (with Plato, for whomknowing and doing are united). In addition, the teleology of labor inWeil’s philosophy corresponds with the thought of Hegel andMarx, and is in opposition to Locke: in the individual’s mixingwith the material world, her interest lies in how this promotesliberty, rather than property. The uprooting Weil experienced infactory work introduced a shift in her conception of freedom: as shebegan to see the human condition as not just one of inexorablestruggle, but of slavery, her notion of freedom shifted from anegative freedom from constraints to a positive freedom to obey. Shereferred to the latter, a particular kind of relational freedom, as“consent”. She concluded her “inventory of moderncivilization” (OL 116) with a call to introduce play into thebureaucratic machine and a call to think as individuals, denying the“social idol” by “refusing to subordinateone’s own destiny to the course of history” and by takingup “critical analysis” (OL 117). In sum, by 1934 Weilpictured an ideal society, which she conceptualized as a regulativeimpossibility in which manual labor, understood and performed bythinking individuals, was a “pivot” toward liberty.

Weil’s “Factory Journal” from 1934–1935suggests a broader shift in her social-political philosophy. Duringthis period, her political pessimism deepened. In light of thehumiliating work she conducted in the factories, her post-factorywritings feature a terminological intensification: from“humiliation” and “oppression” to“affliction” (malheur), a concept informed by herfactory experience of embodied pain combined with psychological agonyand social degradation—and to which she would later addspiritual distress.

In 1936 Weil advanced her political commitments in ways thatforeshadowed her later social-political thought. She continued toeschew revolution and instead to work toward reform, namely, greaterequality in the factory through a shift from a structure ofsubordination to one of collaboration. In addition, in response to theoutbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she argued against fascism whilefavoring—against the Communist position—Frenchnon-intervention. She was opposed to authoritarian logic, and she sawgoing to war as a kind of surrender to the logic of power and prestigeinherent in fascism.

One must choose between prestige and peace. And whether one claims tobelieve in the fatherland, democracy, or revolution, the policy ofprestige means war. (1936 “Do We Have to Grease Our CombatBoots”, FW 258)

Weil’s development of the concepts of power and prestigecontinued in her article “Let Us Not Start Another TrojanWar” (1936, subtitled, and translated into English as,“The Power of Words” in SWA 238–258). Her thesis isthat a war’s destruction is inversely proportional to theofficial pretexts given for fighting it. Wars are absurd, she argued(against Clausewitz), because “they are conflicts with nodefinable objective” (SWA 239). Like the phantom of Helenthat inspired ten years of fighting, ideologies (e.g., capitalism,socialism, fascism), as well as capitalized words such as“Nation” and “State”, have taken on the roleof the phantom in the modern world. Power relies onprestige—itself illusory and without limit because no nationthinks it has enough or is sure of maintaining its imagined glory, andtherefore ever increases its means to wage war—so as to appearabsolute and invincible. In response to these forces, Weil prescribeddistinguishing between the imaginary and the real and, relatedly,defining words properly and precisely. Taken together, theseprescriptions amount to a critique of ideology with its bloatedpolitical rhetoric.

[W]hen a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and canno longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomessimply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concreteobjective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit theintrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others byprecise analysis—to do this, strange though it may appear, mightbe a way of saving human lives. (SWA 242)

Further, Weil desired a kind of equilibrium between forces instead ofan endless pursuit of an illusion of absolute stability and security.Following Heraclitus, she saw struggle as a condition of life. What isrequired of the thinking individual, in turn, is to distinguishbetween worthwhile conflict, such as class struggle, and illusions ofprestige, which often serve as the foundation of war. In her middleperiod, then, Weil maintained the contrariety between reality, limit,and equilibrium on the one hand and imagination, limitlessness, andcollectivity on the other. In her 1937 “Note on SocialDemocracy”, she defined politics as follows:

The material of the political art is the double perspective, evershifting between the real conditions of social equilibrium and themovements of collective imagination. Collective imagination, whetherof mass meetings or of meetings in evening dress, is never correctlyrelated to the really decisive factors of a given social situation; itis always beside the point, or ahead of it, or behind it. (SE 152)

In her late period Weil provided an explication of the all-pervasiveand indiscriminate concept of “force” in the essay“TheIliad or the Poem of Force” (1940 in SWA182–215). It is important to note Weil’s locus ofenunciation for this concept, temporally after the fall of France andspatially from a position of exile, including antisemiticmarginalization, which is why the essay appeared in the December 1940and January 1941Cahiers du Sud under the anagrammaticpseudonym Emile Novis, taken up by Weil to avoid antisemiticconfrontation and censorship. This essay was not only the most widelyread of Weil’s pieces during her lifetime, but it was also herfirst essay to appear in English, translated by Mary McCarthy andpublished in Dwight Macdonald’s magazinePolitics in1945 (November, pp. 321–330).

In her essay on theIliad—a text Roberto Esposito calls“a phenomenology of force” (Esposito 1996 [2017:46])—Weil further develops an understanding of force initiallypresented in her earlier, unfinished essay “Reflections onBarbarism” (1939): “I believe that the concept of forcemust be made central in any attempt to think clearly about humanrelations” (quoted in Pétrement 1973 [1976: 361]). Theprotagonist of theIliad, Weil writes in an original reading,is not Achilles or Hector, but force itself. Like her concept of“power” in her early writings, “force” reifiesand dehumanizes no matter if one wields or undergoes it. Further,force includes not only coercion, but also prestige, which is to saythat it has a social element. Two important implications follow.First, on the level of the individual, each “personality”(la personne) is informed by social values and therebyfeatures the operations of force through accidental characteristics,such as the name of the family into which one is born or the embodiedfeatures that are considered physically attractive at a certain place,in a certain society, at a certain time. Second, on the level of thecollectivity, force can destroy not only bodies, but also values andcultures, as is the case, Weil is at pains to point out, in Frenchcolonialism. In her mid-to-late writings, then, she saw neitherMarx’s notion of class nor Hegel’s self-development ofGeist, but force itself, as the key to history. She presentsthis concept as “the force that kills” and as a specifickind of violence “that does not kill just yet”, though

[i]t will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merelyhangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature itcankill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment. (SWA184–185)

Weil’s concept of force, then, is also a development from Hobbesand Hegel: it names that which renders the individual a slave.

It was in London (1942–1943), during her work for the FreeFrench, that Weil articulated her most robust late social-politicalphilosophy. Her concepts of “labor” and“justice” thickened as she moved further towardChristianity and—against her early emphasis on theindividual—toward the social. Weil’spiècesd’occasion from this time period include “Draft for aStatement of Human Obligations” (1943), written in response tode Gaulle’s State Reform Commission in its drafting of a newDeclaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, as well as “Noteon the General Suppression of Political Parties” (1943), writtenbecause the Free French was considering recognizing political parties.In this piece Weil argues for the complete abolition of politicalparties. Drawing on Rousseau’s concept of the general will, Weilcontends that political parties subdue the independent, individualwills of which the general will is derivative and on which democracydepends. Most important from this period was her major workTheNeed for Roots (L’enracinement), which Weil calledher second “magnum opus” (SL 186), and which Albert Camuspublished posthumously in 1949, with Gallimard, as the first of 11volumes of Weil’s he would promote.

Weil wrote additional essays in London, the most conceptuallyimportant of which was “La Personne et lesacré” (1942–1943, translated into English as“Human Personality”), in which she critiques“rights” as reliant on force and poses as counter-terms“obligation” and “justice”. She distinguishesbetween two conceptions of justice: natural (hence social andcontingent) and supernatural (hence impersonal and eternal).TheNeed for Roots (1943 NR) adds “needs of the soul” asanother counter-balance to rights. Overall, Weil presents not alaw-based or rights-based, but a compassion-based morality, involvingobligations to another that are discernible through attention,centered on and evolving toward a supernatural justice that is not ofthe world, but that can be in it. As a departure from Kant, andthrough Plato, whom Weil “came to feel… was amystic” (“Spiritual Autobiography”, WFG 28), thebasis of her sense of (supernatural) justice was not humanrationality, but a desire for the Good, which she believed all humansshare, even if at times they forget or deny this. Importantly, givenher critique of French colonialism, and despite her claim thatobligations to another must be indiscriminate, i.e., universal, shedid not want to universalize law in a Kantian fashion. Rather, her aimwas for cultures to continue their own traditions, for the goal ofrootedness (l’enracinement) is not to change culturalvaluesper se, but more precisely, to change how individualsin those cultures read and orient themselves toward those values.

Weil’s concept of “roots” is crucial to her latepolitical thought. With connotations of both vitality andvulnerability, “roots” conceptualizes human society asdynamic and living while attesting to the necessity of stability andsecurity if growth and flourishing are to occur on the level of theindividual. Beyond the organic metaphor on the level of the natural,her concept of roots serves as a kind of bridge between the reality ofsociety and the ideal of supernatural justice. Roots do this bymanifesting human subjection to material and historical conditions,including the need to participate in the life of a community, to feela sense of connection to a place, and to maintain temporal links,e.g., to cultural history and to hopes for the future. In turn, arooted community allows for the development of the individual with aview toward God or eternal values. As such, andcontra herearly and middle maintenance of a critical distance from anycollectivity (or Great Beast, to use the Platonic metaphor shefrequently employs), in her late thought Weil sees roots as allowingfor a “new patriotism” based on compassion. Theestablishing of roots (l’enracinement) enables multiplerelations to the world (e.g., on the level of the nation, theorganically developing community, the school) that at once nourish theindividual and the community.

In addition to war and colonization, inThe Need for RootsWeil points to money and to contemporary education asself-perpetuating forces that uproot human life. The longest sectionof the text describes modern uprootedness(déracinement), occurring when the imagined modernnation and money are the only binding forces in society, and shecharacterizes this condition as a threat to the human soul. Moderneducation is corrupted both by capitalism—such that it isnothing except “a machine for producing diplomas, in otherwords, jobs” (NR 118)—and by a Roman inheritance forcultivating prestige with respect to the nation: “It is thisidolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form ofpatriotism” (NR 137). As an alternative to modern uprootedness,Weil outlines a civilization based not on force, which turns a personinto a thing, but on free labor, which in its engagement with andconsent to necessary forces at play in the world, including time anddeath, allows for direct contact with reality. Moreover, Weil’swriting inThe Need for Roots is refracted through herreligious experience. In this later period, then, she no longerconceptualizes labor in the mechanical terms of a “pivot”as she did in her early writings; it is now the “spiritualcore” of “a well-ordered social life” (NR 295). (Inher late social-political philosophy, in fact, a spiritual revolutionis more important than an economic one.)Contra the Greeks,who devalued physical work, her conception of labor serves to mediatebetween the natural and the supernatural. In her late writings, laboris fully inflected by her experiences with Christianity. As such,labor’s consent to and, moreover, working through natural forces(e.g., gravity) is in fact consent to God, who created the naturalworld. Labor’s kenotic activity, as energy is expended daily, isa kind ofimitatio Christi.

Her social-political writings in London are markedly different fromher early writings as an anarchist informed principally by Descartes,Marx, and Kant. While those influences remain, her later writings mustbe read through the lens of her Christian Platonism. She suggests thatwe must draw our spiritual life from our social environment. That is,while spirituality is individualvis-à-vis God, thisspirituality occurs within a social context, namely, the collectivity,and principally, the nation. This is a reversal from the criticaldistance she had maintained from the collectivity, especially in herearly emphasis on the individual’s methodical thinking.

3. Epistemology

Throughout her life, Weil argued that knowledge in and of the worlddemanded rigorous, balanced thinking, even if that difficulty andmeasurement led the thinker to near-impossible tasks. For her thesetasks of thinking included, for instance, her attempt to synthesizeperspectives of intricate Catholic doctrine on the threshold of theChurch with wisdom from various traditions such as ancient Greekphilosophy and tragedies, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. FollowingAeschylus, she believed knowledge was gained through suffering. Shapedby her social-political and religious thought, Weil’sepistemology would change over time, especially in light of hermystical experiences.

In her dissertation, Weil attempts to think with Descartes in order tofind foundational knowledge. Like Descartes, she argues for theexistence of self, God, and world. Hercogito, however, was adecisive break from his: “I can, therefore I am” (Jepuis, donc je suis) (1929–1930 “Science andPerception in Descartes”, FW 59). The self has the power offreedom, Weil argues, but something else—the omnipotent,God—makes the self realize that it is not all-powerful.Self-knowledge, then, is capability always qualified by theacknowledgment that one is not God. She maintained a kind of Cartesianepistemology during her time as a teacher, early in her academic life.InLectures on Philosophy (1978 LP), a collection of lecturenotes taken by one of her students during the academic year1933–1934 at a girl’slycée in Roanne, wefind that Weil is initially critical of sensations as grounds forknowledge, and thereby critical of empiricist epistemology (LP43–47).

From her early writings onward she was to problematize the imaginationas the “folle imagination”, a barrier betweenmind and reality, meaning that the human knower is kept fromthings-in-themselves. Weil’s epistemology, then, informed by herinitial studies of Descartes, would take on inflections of Kant andPlato while positioning her against Aristotle. She was critical of anysensation that universalizes one’s reading of the world, and shesaw the imagination as thus extending the self, because it could nothelp but filter phenomena through its own categories, wishes, anddesires, thereby reading the world on its own terms. Relatedly, Weilwould develop an intersubjective epistemology. Knowing the truthrequires not extending one’s own limited perspective, butsuspending or abandoning it such that reality—including thereality of the existence of others—could appear on its ownterms. This suspension involves a practice of epistemic humility andopenness to all ideas; intelligence for Weil demands the qualified useof language, acknowledgement of degrees, proportions, contingencies,and relations, as well as an ability to call the self into question.These epistemic practices are part of a broader recognition that theindividual knower is limited.

The progression of Weil’s epistemology can be seen first in herconceptualization of contradiction. ByLectures onPhilosophy, she affirmed a sense of contradiction beyond thelogical conjunction “a isb” and“a is not-b”. Indeed, she argues thatcontradiction can be a generative obstacle in that it requires themind to expand its thinking in order to transcend the obstacle.Drawing on the mathematics of Eudoxus, she elaborates on this notionto claim that incommensurables can be reconciled when set on a kind of“higher plane”. This is not, however, a type of Hegeliansynthesis that can be intellectually apprehended. Instead, thecontemplation of contradictions can lead the knower to a highercontemplation of truth-as-mystery. Thus, in her late epistemology Weilpresents this concept of “mystery” as a certain kind ofcontradiction in which incommensurables appear linked in anincomprehensible unity.

Mystery, as a conceptualization of contradiction, carries theological,or at least supernatural, implications. For instance, if contradictionis understood through formal logic, then the existence of afflictionwould seemingly prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent, whollybenevolent God; however, contradiction, understood as mystery, canitself serve as a mediation, allowing for the coexistence ofaffliction and God, seen most prominently on the Cross. Indeed, Christis the religious solution to Weil’s principal contradiction,that between the necessary and the good. Moreover, through incarnationthat opens onto universality, Christ also manifests and solves thecontradiction of the individual and the collectivity. Thus, in amodification of the Pythagorean idea of harmony, she claims thatChrist allows for “the just balance of contraries”(“Spiritual Autobiography”, WFG 33). More broadly, in her1941 “The Pythagorean Doctrine”, she argues thatmathematics are a bridge between the natural and eternal (or betweenhumans and God). That is, the Pythagoreans held an intellectualsolution to apparent natural contradictions. Inspired by Pythagoras,she claimed that the very study of mathematics can be a means ofpurification in light of the principles of proportion and thenecessary balancing of contraries—especially in geometry. Shesaw in the Pythagorean legacy and spirit a link between theirmathematical insights and their distinctly religious project topenetrate the mysteries of the cosmos.

As opposed to the suppression or dissolution of contradictions, as insystematic philosophy, in Weil’s value-centered philosophycontradictions are to be presented honestly and tested on differentlevels; for her, they are “the criterion of the real” andcorrespond with the orientation of detachment (GG 98). For example,Christ’s imperative to “love your enemies” containsa contradiction in value: love those who are detestable and whothreaten the vulnerability of loving. For Weil, submitting to thisunion of contraries loosens one’s attachments to particular,ego-driven perspectives and enables a “well-developedintellectual pluralism” (Springsted 2010: 97). She writes,“An attachment to a particular thing can only be destroyed by anattachment which is incompatible with it” (GG 101). With thesephilosophical moves in mind, Robert Chenavier argues that she has nota philosophy of perception, a phenomenology, but rather, borrowingGaston Bachelard’s phrase, a “dynamology ofcontradiction” (Chenavier 2009 [2012: 25]).

Overall, Weil’s presentation of contradiction is morePythagorean or Platonic than it is Marxian: it takes up contradictionnot through resolution on the level of things, but through dialecticson the level of thought, where mystery is the beginning and end-pointof thought (Springsted 2010: 97). In her unfinished essay “IsThere a Marxist Doctrine?”, from her time in London, Weilwrites,

Contradiction in matter is imaged by the clash of forces coming fromdifferent directions. Marx purely and simply attributed to socialmatter this movement towards the good through contradictions, whichPlato described as being that of the thinking creature drawn upwardsby the supernatural operation of grace. (OL 180)

She follows the Greek usage of “dialectics” to consider“the virtue of contradiction as support for the soul drawnupwards by grace” (or the good); Marx errs, she thought, incoupling such a movement with “materialism” (OL 181).

A second central epistemological concept for Weil is“reading” (lecture). Reading is a kindof interpretation of what is presented to knowers by both theirphysical sensations and their social conditions; therefore,reading—as the reception and attribution of certain meanings inthe world—is always mediated. In turn, readings are mediatedthrough other readings, since our perception of meaning is undoubtedlyinvolved in and affected by an intersubjective web of interpretations.Weil explains this through the metaphor, borrowed from Descartes, of ablind man’s stick. We can read a situation through attention toanother in order to expand our awareness and sensitivity, just as theblind man enlarges his sensibility through the use of his stick. Butour readings of the world can also become more narrow and simplistic,as for instance, when a context of violence and force tempts us to seeeveryone we encounter as a potential threat. Moreover, readings arenot free from power dynamics and can become projects of imposition andintervention; here her epistemology connects to her social-politicalphilosophy, specifically to her concept of force.

We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in thesereadings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery).Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). (NB 43)

She connects reading to war and imagination: “War is a way ofimposing another reading of sensations, a pressure upon theimagination of others” (NB 24). In her 1941 “Essay on theConcept of Reading” (LPW 21–27) Weil elaborates,“War, politics, eloquence, art, teaching, all action on othersessentially consists in changing what they read” (LPW 26). Inthe same essay she develops “reading” in relation to theaforementioned epistemological concepts of appearance, the empiricalworld, and contradiction:

[A]t each instant of our life we are gripped from the outside, as itwere, by meanings that we ourselves read in appearances. That is whywe can argue endlessly about the reality of the external world, sincewhat we call the world are the meanings that we read; they are notreal. But they seize us as if they were external; that is real. Whyshould we try to resolve this contradiction when the more importanttask of thought in this world is to define and contemplate insolublecontradictions, which, as Plato said, draw us upwards? (LPW 22)

It is important to note that for Weil, we are not simply passive inour readings. That is, we can learn to change our readings of theworld or of others. An elevated transformation in reading, however,demands an apprenticeship in loving God through the things of thisworld—a kind of attentiveness that will also entail certainbodily involvements, labors, postures, and experiences. Particularreadings result from particular ways of living. Ideally for her, wewould read the natural as illuminated by the supernatural. Thisconceptualization of reading involves recognition on hierarchicallevels, as she explains in her notebooks:

To read necessity behind sensation, to read order behind necessity, toread God behind order. We must love all facts, not for theirconsequences, but because in each fact God is there present. But thatis tautological. To love all facts is nothing else than to read God inthem. (NB 267)

Thus the world is known as a kind of text featuring severalsignifications on several stages, levels, or domains.

Weil’s epistemology grounds her critique of modern science. InThe Need for Roots she advocates for a science conducted“according to methods of mathematical precision, and at the sametime maintained in close relationship with religious faith” (NR288). Through contemplation of the natural world via this kind ofscience, the world could be read on multiple levels. The knower,reading thus, would understand that the order of the world is the sameas a unity, but different on its myriad levels:

with respect to God [it] is eternal Wisdom; with respect to theuniverse, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; withrespect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; withrespect to our flesh, brute force. (NR 288–289)

As in her social-political thought, in her epistemology Weil is a kindof anti-modern. She sees modern science and epistemology as a projectof self-expansion that forgets limit and thinks the world should besubject to human power and autonomy. Labor (especially physical labor,such as farming), then, also assumes an epistemological role for her.By heteronomously subjecting the individual to necessity on a dailybasis, it at once contradicts self-aggrandizement and allows for amore balanced reading: the intelligence qualifies itself as it readsnecessary relations simultaneously on multiple levels. This reading ondifferent levels, and inflected through faith, amounts to a kind ofnon-reading, in that it is detached, impersonal and impartial. Throughthese predicates “reading” is connected to her socialthought, aesthetics, and religious philosophy. That is, in her laterthought Weil’s epistemology relies on a time-out-of-mindmetaphysics for justification. Analogous to aesthetic taste, spiritualdiscernment—God-given and graceful—allows the abdicatedself to read from a universal perspective at its most developed stage.Thus, she argued, one can love equally and indiscriminately, just asthe sun shines or the rain falls without preference.

4. Ethics

Weil’s central ethical concept is “attention”(l’attention), which, though thematically andpractically present in her early writings, reached its robusttheoretical expression while she was in Marseilles in 1942. Attentionis a particular kind of ethical “turn” in herconceptualization. Fundamentally, it is less a moral position orspecific practice and more an orientation that nevertheless requiresan arduous apprenticeship leading to a capacity of discernment onmultiple levels. Attention includes discerning what someone is goingthrough in her or his suffering, the particular protest made bysomeone harmed, the social conditions that engender a climate forsuffering, and the fact that one is, by chance (hazard) at adifferent moment, equally a subject of affliction.

Attention is directed not by will but by a particular kind of desirewithout an object. It is not a “muscular effort” but a“negative effort” (WFG 61), involving release of egoisticprojects and desires and a growing receptivity of the mind. For Weil,as a Christian Platonist, the desire motivating attention is orientedtoward the mysterious good that “draws God down” (WFG 61).In her essay “Reflections on the Right use of School Studieswith a View to the Love of God” (1942 in WFG 57–65), Weiltakes prayer, defined as “the orientation of all the attentionof which the soul is capable toward God”, as her point ofdeparture (WFG 57). She then describes a kind of vigilance in herdefinition of attention:

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached[disponible], empty [vide], and ready to bepenetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within thereach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact withit, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to makeuse of. … Above all our thought should be empty[vide], waiting [en attente], not seeking anything[ne rien chercher], but ready to receive in its naked truththe object that is to penetrate it. (WFG 62)

The French makes more clear the connection between attention(l’attention) and waiting (attente). For Weilthe problem with searching, instead of waitingen hupomene(δἰ ὑπομονῆς),is precisely that one is eager to fill the void characterizingattente. As a result, one settles too quickly on some-thing:a counterfeit, falsity, idol. Because in searching or willing theimagination fills the void (le vide), it is crucial thatattention be characterized by suspension and detachment. Indeed, thevoid by definition is empty (vide)—of idols, futuralself-projections, consolations that compensate un-thinking, andattachments of collective and personal prestige. As such, itsacceptance marks individual fragility and destructibility, that is,mortality. But this acceptance of death is the condition for thepossibility of the reception of grace. (As explained below in regardto her religious philosophy, Weil’s concept for the dispositioncharacterized by these features of attention, with obvious theologicalresonances, is “decreation”.)

In attention one renounces one’s ego in order to receive theworld without the interference of one’s limited and consumptiveperspective. This posture of self-emptying, a stripping away of the“I” (dépouillement)—ultimately forWeil animitatio Christi in its kenosis—allows for animpersonal but intersubjective ethics. Indeed, if the primaryorientation of attention is toward a mysterious and unknown God (oftenexperienced as a desire for the Good), the secondary disposition istoward another person or persons, especially toward those goingthrough affliction.

The soul empties itself [se vide] of all its own contents inorder to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as heis, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.(WFG 65)

Weil recognizes and problematizes the fact that the autonomous selfnaturally imposes itself in its projects, as opposed to disposingitself to the other; for this reason, attention is rare but isrequired of any ethical disposition. The exemplary story of attentionfor Weil is the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which, on herreading, compassion is exchanged when one individual “turns hisattention toward” another individual, anonymous and afflicted(WFG 90).

The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this momentof attention. The attention is creative. But at the moment when it isengaged it is a renunciation. This is true, at least, if it is pure.The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure ofenergy, which will not extend his own power but will only giveexistence to a being other than himself, who will exist independentlyof him. (1942 “Forms of the Implicit Love of God” in WFG83–142, 90)

As such, attention not only gives human recognition and thereforemeaningful existence to another, but it also allows the individualengaged in renunciation to take up a moral stance in response to heror his desire for good.

It is important to distinguish Weil’s ethics of attention fromcanonical conceptualizations of ethics. Attention is not motivated bya duty (although Weil thinks we are obligated to respond toothers’ needs, whether of soul or body [see “Draft for aStatement of Human Obligations” in SWA, esp. 224–225]) orassessed by its consequences. In addition, through its sense ofphronesis (practical wisdom), which Weil assumed fromAristotle through Marx, attention is arguably closer to virtue ethicsthan it is to deontology or consequentialism. However, it is separatedfrom the tradition of virtue ethics in important ways: it oftenemerges more spontaneously than virtue, which, for Aristotle, iscultivated through habituation as it develops into ahexis;Weil’s emphasis on a “negative effort” suggests anactive-passive orientation that militates against Aristotle’semphasis on activity (it is more a “turning” than a“doing”, more orientation than achievement); it isexcessive in its generosity, as opposed to being a mean,e.g., liberality; its supernatural inspiration contrasts withAristotle’s naturalism; it does not imply a teleology ofrealizing one’s own virtuous projects—in fact, it is asuspension of one’s own projects; finally, for Weil, Aristotlelacks a sense of the impersonal good toward which attention isoriented (and in this respect she is, again, inspired by Plato).

Weil treats the connections among attention, void, and love, relyingon her supernatural (Christian Platonic) metaphysics, in “Formsof the Implicit Love of God”.

To empty ourselves [Se vider] of our false divinity, to denyourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, todiscern that all points in the world are equally centers and that thetrue center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule ofmechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center ofeach soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which isturned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor. (WFG100)

Attention can be seen as love, for just as attention consents to theexistence of another, love requires the recognition of a realityoutside of the self, and thus de-centers the self and itsparticularity.Contra the colloquial sense of love, it isbecause we do not love personally, but “it is God in us wholoves them [les malheureux]” (WFG 93–94), thatour love for others is “quite impersonal” and therebyuniversal (WFG 130). Weil allows, however, “one legitimateexception to the duty of loving universally”, namely, friendship(“Last Thoughts”, WFG 51). Friendship is “a personaland human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and areflection of divine love” (WFG 131), a “supernaturalharmony, a union of opposites” (WFG 126). The opposites thatform the miraculous harmony are necessity/subordination (i.e., drawingfrom Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, she sees it as animpossibility for one to want to preserve autonomy in both oneself andanother; in the world the stronger exerts force through will) andliberty/equality (which is maintained through the desire of eachfriend to preserve the consent of oneself and of the other, a consentto be “two and not one” [WFG 135]). In other words, infriendship a particular, self-founded reading of the other is notforced. Distance is maintained, and in this way Weil’s conceptof friendship advances her previous critiques of theethos ofcapitalism, bureaucracy, and colonialism—i.e., free consent ofall parties is the essential ingredient of all human relations thatare not degraded or abusive. Hence friendship is a model for ethicsmore generally—even,contra her claim, universally.

Friendship has something universal about it. It consists of loving ahuman being as we should like to be able to love each soul inparticular of all those who go to make up the human race. (WFG135)

Weil’s ethics of attention informs her later social-politicalphilosophy and epistemology. In relation to her social-politicalthought, attention suspends the centrality of the self to allow forsupernatural justice, which involves simultaneously turning attentionto God and to affliction. Justice and the love of the neighbor are notdistinct, for her.

Only the absolute identification of justice and love makes thecoexistence possible of compassion and gratitude on the one hand, andon the other, of respect for the dignity of affliction[malheur] in the afflicted—a respect felt by thesufferer himself [les malheureux par lui-même] and theothers. (WFG 85)

Additionally, attention, in its consent to the autonomy of the other,is an antidote to force. Important to Weil’s epistemology,attention militates against readings that are based on imagination,unexamined perceptions, or functions of the collectivity (e.g.,prestige). Attention here manifests as independent, detached thought.In its religious valence involving obedience and consent, attentionalso bears on Weil’s epistemology in an additional way: itsuggests that knowing the reality of the world is less an individualachievement or attainment of mastery and more a gift of grace. Thatis, attention is openness to what cannot be predicted and to whatoften takes us by surprise. In this way, attention resists the naturaltendency of humans to seek control and dominance over others. At stakein this ethical mode, then, is the prevention of injustices thatresult from projects of self-expansion, including the Frenchcolonialism Weil criticized in her time.

5. Metaphysical and Religious Philosophy

Although the metaphysics of Weil’s later thought was bothChristian and Platonic, and therefore graceful and supernatural, herturn to God occurred not despite but, rather, because of her attentionto reality and contact with the world. It is not the case, then, thather spiritual turn and “theological commitment”(Springsted 2015: 1–2) severed her contact with her earlymaterialism, solidarities, or Marxian considerations; rather, herspiritual turn occurred within this context, which would ground thereligious philosophy she would subsequently articulate.

In her late thought Weil presents an original creation theology. God,as purely good, infinite, and eternal, withdrew (or reduced Godself)so that something else (something less than fully good, finite, andspatio-temporally determinate) could exist, namely, the universe.Implicit in this outside-of-God universe is a contingency of forces.She calls this principle of contingency, the “web ofdeterminations” (McCullough 2014: 124) contrary to God,“necessity”. Necessity is “the screen”(l’écran) placed between God and creatures. Hereher creation metaphysics echoes Plato’s distinction between thenecessary and the good in theTimaeus. Her Christianinflection translates this to the “supreme contradiction”between creature and creator; “it is Christ who represents theunity of these contradictories” (NB 386).

Weil is clear that God and the world is less than God alone, yet thatonly heightens the meaning of God’s abdication. That is, out oflove (for what would be the world and the creatures therein), Goddecided to be lesser. Because existence—God’s very denialof Godself—is itself a mark of God’s love, providence istherefore not found in particular interventions of God, but understoodby recognizing the universe in all its contingency as the sum ofGod’s intentions. In this theology rests an implication forcreatures. If humans are to imitate God, then they must also renouncetheir autonomy (including imagined “centeredness” in theuniverse) and power out of love for God and therefore the world; shecalls this “decreation”(décréation), which she describes paradoxicallyby “passive activity” (WFG 126) and, drawing on herreadings of theBhagavad Gita, “non-activeaction” (NB 124).

Weil articulates her religious philosophy through a series ofdistinctions—of oppositions or contradictions. It is importantto read the distinctions she makes not as positing dualisms, but assuggesting contraries that are, unsynthesized, themselves mediationsthrough which the soul is drawn upward. Her concept of“intermediaries”—ormetaxu(μεταξύ), the Greek term she employs inher notebooks—becomes explicit beginning in 1939. Throughmetaxu God is indirectly present in the world—forexample, in beauty, cultural traditions, law, and labor—all ofwhich place us into contact with reality. In terms of herperiodization, her concept of mediation moved from relations of mindand matter on the level of the natural (found in the early Weil) to amediation relating the natural intelligence to attention and love onthe level of the supernatural (at work in the late Weil), thusencompassing her early view through a universal perspective.

Given that reality is itselfmetaxu, Weil’s lateconcept of mediation is more universal than the aforementionedspecific examples suggest. For her the real (le réel)itself is an obstacle that represents contradiction, an obstacle felt,say, in a difficult idea, in the presence of another, or in physicallabor; thus thought comes into contact with necessity and musttransform contradiction into correlation or mysterious and crucifyingrelation, resulting in spiritual edification. Her explanation of thismediation is based on her idiosyncratic cosmology, especially itsparadoxical claim that what is often painful reality, as distance fromGod, is also, as intermediate, connection to God. She illustrates thisclaim with the following metaphor:

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other byknocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them butit is also their means of communication. It is the same with us andGod. Every separation is a link. (GG 145)

When developing her concept of the real, Weil is especially interestedin distinguishing it from the imaginary. Theimagination—problematized on epistemological grounds in herearly thought—is criticized once again in her religiousphilosophy for its insidious tendency to pose false consolations thatat once invite idolatry or self-satisfaction, both of which obviatereal contemplation. This is why decreation, in which the individualwithdraws her or his “I” and personal perspective so as toallow the real and others to give themselves, is crucial not onlyspiritually, but also epistemologically and ethically. It is,additionally and more radically, why Weil suggests that atheism can bea kind of purification insofar as it negates religious consolationthat fills the void. For those for whom religion amounts to animagined “God who smiles on [them]” (GG 9), atheismrepresents a necessary detachment. Crucially, for her, love is purenot in the name of a personal God or its particular image, but onlywhen it is anonymous and universal.

The real leads us back to the aforementioned concept of“necessity”, for reality—essentially determinate,limited, contingent, and conditional—is itself a “networkof necessity” (Vetö 1971 [1994: 90]), such that necessityis a reflection of reality. Moreover, like “power” in herearly period and “force” in her middle period,Weil’s concept of necessity includes not only the physicalforces of the created world, but also the social forces of human life.Through necessity a sense of slavery remains in her thought, forhumans are ineluctably subject to necessity. In this way, enslavementto forces outside our control is essentially woven into the humancondition.

Time, contrary to God as eternal, along with space and matter, isfirst of all the most basic form of necessity. In its constantreminder of distance from God, and in the experiences of enduring andwaiting, time is also painful. Weil’s Christian Platonism comesto light in the two most poignant metaphors she uses to refer to time,namely, the (Platonic) Cave and the (Christian) Cross. In both cases,time is the weight or the pull of necessity, through which the soul,in any effort of the self, feels vulnerable, contingent, andunavoidably subject to necessity’s mediation here below(ici-bas). Time, then, is both the Cave where the selfpursues its illusory goals of expansion into the future and the Crosswhere necessity, a sign of God’s love, pins the self, sufferingand mortal, to the world.

Importantly, by 1942 in New York, Weil’s concept of time alignswith Plato’s against what she sees as Christian emphasis onprogress:

Christianity was responsible for bringing this notion of progress,previously unknown, into the world; and this notion, become the baneof the modern world, has de-Christianized it. We must abandon thenotion. We must get rid of our superstition of chronology in order tofind Eternity. (LPr 29)

For Weil progress does not carry normative implications ofimprovement, for the Good is eternal and non-existent (in that it isneither spatial nor temporal); time must be consented to and suffered,not fled. As for Christ on the cross, for creatures there isredemption not from but through suffering. She thus presents asupernatural use of, not a remedy for, affliction. One form of sin,then, is an attempt to escape time, for only God is time-out-of-mind.However, time, paradoxically, can also serve asmetaxu. Whilemonotony is dreadful and fatiguing when it is in the form of apendulum’s swinging or a factory’s work, it is beautifulas a reflection of eternity, in the form of a circle (which unitesbeing and becoming) or the sound of Gregorian chant. This beauty ofthe world suggests, when read from the detached perspective, orderbehind necessity, and God behind order.

A second form of necessity is “gravity”(pesanteur), as distinct from supernatural“grace”. Gravity signifies the forces of the natural worldthat subject all created beings physically, materially,psychologically, and socially, and thus functions as a downward“pull” on the attention, away from God and the afflicted.“Grace”, on the other hand, is a counter-balance, themotivation by and goodness of God. Grace pierces the world ofnecessity and serves to orient, harmonize, and balance, thus providinga kind of “supernatural bread” for satiating the humanvoid. Grace, entering the empirical world, disposes one to be purifiedby leaving the void open, waiting for a good that is real but thatcould never “exist” in a material sense (i.e., as subjectto time, change, force, etc.). For Weil, natural/necessary gravity(force) and supernatural/spiritual grace (justice) are the twofundamental aspects of the created world, coming together mostprominently in the crucifixion. The shape of the cross itself reflectsthis intersection of the horizontal (necessity) and the vertical(grace).

Weil’s concept of necessity bears on her late conceptualizationof the subject. She connects seeing oneself as central to the world toseeing oneself as exempt from necessity. From this perspective, ifsomething were to befall oneself, then the world would cease to haveimportance; therefore, the assertive and willful self concludes,nothing could befall oneself. Affliction contradicts this perspectiveand thus forcefully de-centers the self. Unlike her existentialistcontemporaries such as Sartre, Weil did not think human freedomprincipally through agency; for her, humans are free not ontologicallyas a presence-to-self but supernaturally through obedience andconsent. More than obedience, consent is the unity of necessity inmatter with freedom in creatures. A creature cannotnot obey;the only choice for the intelligent creature is to desire or not todesire the good. To desire the good—and here her stoicismthrough Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza emerges in her own appeal toamor fati—is a disposition that implies a consent tonecessity and a love of the order of the world, both of which meanaccepting divine will. Consent, therefore, is a kind of reconciliationin her dialectic between the necessary and the good. Consent does notfollow from effort or will; rather, it expresses an ontologicalstatus, namely, decreation. In supernatural compassion one lovesthrough evil: through distance (space) and through monotony(time), attending in a void and through the abdication of God. Thus,in regard to contradiction and mediation, just as the intelligencemust grapple with mystery in Weil’s epistemology, so too lovemust be vulnerable and defenseless in the face of evil in hermetaphysical and religious philosophy.

6. Aesthetics

Weil’s metaphysic sheds light on her aesthetic philosophy, whichis primarily Kantian and Platonic. For Weil beauty is a snare(à la Homer) set by God, trapping the soul so that Godmight enter it. Necessity presents itself not only in gravity, time,and affliction, but also in beauty. The contact of impersonal goodwith the faculty of sense is beauty; contact of evil with the facultyof sense is ugliness and suffering—both are contact with thereal, necessary, and providential.

Weil is a realist in regard to aesthetics in that she uses thelanguage of being gripped or grasped by beauty, which weaves, as itwere, a link among mind, body, world, and universe. Woven through theworld, but beyond relying simply on the individual’s mind orsenses, beauty, in this linking, lures and engenders awareness ofsomething outside of the self. In paradoxical terms, for Weil,following Kant, the aesthetic experience can be characterized as adisinterested interestedness; against Kant, hertelos of suchexperience is Platonic, namely, to orient the soul to thecontemplation of the good. Moreover, for Weil beauty is purposive onlybecause it is derivative of the good, i.e., the order of the world isa function of God. In a revision of Kant’s line that beauty is afinality without finality, then, she sees beauty not only as a kind offeeling or presence of finality, but also as a gesture toward,inclination to, or promise of supernatural, transcendentalgoodness.

At the same time, Weil’s concept of beauty is not only informedby her Platonism and thus marked by eternity, but it is also inspiredby her experiences with Christ and hence features a kind ofincarnation: the ideal can become a reality in the world. As such,beauty is a testament to and manifestation of the network ofinflexible necessity that is the natural world—a network that,in some sense, the intelligence can grasp. It is in this way—notas an ontological category but, rather, as a sensibleexperience—that through beauty necessity becomes the object oflove (i.e., in Kantian terms, beauty is regulative, not constitutive).Thus beauty ismetaxu (an intermediary) attracting the soulto God, and asmetaxu, beauty serves as a “locus ofincommensurability” (Winch 1989: 173) between the fragilecontingency of time (change, becoming, death) and an eternalreality.

Because beauty is the order of the world as necessity, strictlyspeaking, “beauty” applies principally to the world as awhole, and therefore consent to beauty must be total. Thus the love ofbeauty functions as an “implicit love of God” [see WFG99]. More specifically, on the level of the particular there are,secondarily, types of beauty that nevertheless demonstrate balance,order, proportion, and thus their divine provenance (e.g., those foundin nature, art, and science).

One’s recognition of the beauty/order of the world hasimplications, once again, for the subject. Because beauty is to becontemplated at a distance and not consumed through the greedy will,it trains the soul to be detached in the face of somethingirreducible, and in this sense it is similar to affliction. Bothde-center the self and demand a posture of waiting (attente).Contemplating beauty, then, means transcending the perspective ofone’s own project. Because beauty, as external to self, is to beconsented to, it implies both that one’s reality is limited andthat one does not want to change the object of her/his mode ofengagement. Furthermore, beauty has an element of the impersonalcoming into contact with a person. Real interaction with beauty isdecreative. True to this idea, Weil’s aesthetic commitments arereflected in her style: in her sharp prose she scrutinizes her ownthought while tending to exclude her own voice and avoid personalreferences; thus she performs “the linguistic decreation of theself” (Dargan 1999: 7).

7. Reception and Influence

Although the French post-structuralists who succeeded Weil did notengage extensively with her thought, her concepts carry a legacythrough her contemporaries domestically and her heirs internationally(see Rozelle-Stone 2017). In regard to her generation of Frenchthinkers, the influence of “attention” can be seen in thewritings of Maurice Blanchot; her Platonic sense of good, order, andclarity was taken up—and rejected—by both Georges Batailleand Emmanuel Levinas. Following Weil’s generation, in hisyounger years Jacques Derrida took interest in her mysticism and,specifically, her purifying atheism, only to leave her behind almostentirely in his later references (Baring 2011). It is possible thatWeil’s limited influence on post-structuralists is derived notonly from the fact that she was not greatly influenced by Nietzscheand Heidegger, but also, quite simply, because she did not surviveWorld War II. It is also important to note that throughout her life,Weil’s position as a woman philosopher contributed toadhominem attacks against her person rather than her thought;she was often perceived as “psychologically cold” asopposed to being engaged in “an ethical project with differentassumptions” (Nelson 2017: 9).

Across Europe and more recently, Weil’s “negativepolitics”—that is, turning away from institutions andideology and toward religious reflection—, in conjunction withMichel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, has been taken up bythe political philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito(Ricciardi 2009). In doing so, Agamben (who wrote his dissertation onWeil’s political thought and critique of personhood, ideasthat went on to shapeHomo Sacer [see Agamben 2017b])and Esposito rely on Weil’s concepts of decreation,impersonality, and force. Beyond the Continental scene, her ChristianPlatonism—especially her concepts of the good, justice, void,and attention—influenced Iris Murdoch’s emphasis on thegood, metaphysics, and morality, and was thereby part of a recentrevival in virtue ethics (Crisp & Slote 1997). In addition, manyhave noted the “spiritual kinship” that is apparentbetween the religious and ethical philosophies of Weil and LudwigWittgenstein. For example, both argued that belief in God is nota matter of evidence, logic, or proof (Von der Ruhr 2006). Thelegacy of Weil’s writings on affliction and beauty in relationto justice is also felt in Elaine Scarry’s writings onaesthetics (Scarry 1999). T. S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction toThe Need for Roots, cites Weil as an inspiration of hisliterature, as do W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, FlanneryO’Connor, Susan Sontag, and Anne Carson. The prominentcontemporary poets Christopher Kondrich and JenniferChang also use Weil to frame their work (Kondrich 2019; Chang2024).

The Anglo-American secondary literature on Weil has emphasized herconcept of supernatural justice, including the philosophical tensionsthat inform her materialism and mysticism (Winch 1989; Dietz 1988;Bell 1993, 1998; Rhees 2000). Additional considerations treat herChristian Platonism (Springsted 1983; Doering & Springsted 2004).Recent English-language scholarship on Weil has included texts on herconcept of force (Doering 2010), her radicalism (Rozelle-Stone &Stone 2010), her political philosophy (Davis 2023), her ecologicalethics (Lawson 2024), and the relationship in her thought betweenscience and divinity (Morgan 2005), between suffering and trauma(Nelson 2017), between literature and feminism (Wallace 2024), andbetween decreation and ethics (Cha 2017). Furthermore, her conceptshave influenced recent contributions to questions of identity (Cameron2007), political theology (Lloyd 2011), animality (Pick 2011), andinternational relations (Kinsella 2021).

Bibliography

Cited Works by Weil

• [FLN], 1970,First and Last Notebooks, Richard Rees(trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• [FW] 1987,Formative Writings: 1929–1941, DorothyTuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness (eds. and trans.), Amherst, MA:The University of Massachusetts Press.
• [GG] 1947 [2004],Gravity and Grace, Emma Crawford andMario von der Ruhr (trans), New York: Routledge;La pesanteur etla grâce, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1947.
• [LP] 1959 [1978],Lectures on Philosophy, Hugh Price(trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press;Leçons dephilosophie, Paris: Union Généraled’Éditions, 1959.
• [LPr] 1951 [2002],Letter to a Priest, A. F. Wills(trans.), London: Routledge;Lettre à un religieux,Paris: Gallimard, 1951.
• [LPW] 2015,Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings,Eric O. Springsted and Lawrence E. Schmidt (trans.), Notre Dame, IN:University of Notre Dame Press.
• [NB] 1956,The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Arthur Wills(trans.), 2 vols., New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
• [NR] 1949 [2002],The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declarationof Duties toward Mankind, Arthur Wills (trans.), New York:Routledge;L’enracinement. Prélude à unedéclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain,Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949.
• [OL] 1955 [2001],Oppression and Liberty, Arthur Willsand John Petrie (trans.), New York: Routledge;Oppression etliberté, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1955.
• [SE] 1962,Selected Essays: 1934–1943, Richard Rees(trans.), London: Oxford University Press.
• [SL] 1965,Seventy Letters, Richard Rees (trans.),London: Oxford University Press.
• [SWA] 2005,Simone Weil: An Anthology, Siân Miles(ed.), New York: Penguin.
• [WFG] 1966 [2009],Waiting for God, Emma Craufurd(trans.), New York: HarperCollins;Attente de Dieu, Paris:Éditions Fayard, 1966.

Other Works by Weil

• Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres,Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
• Écrits historiques et politiques, Paris:Gallimard, 1957.
• La condition ouvrière, Paris: Gallimard,1951.
• La connaissance surnaturelle, Paris: Gallimard,1950.
• Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks,Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler (ed. and trans.), London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1957.
• Intuitions pré-Chrétiennes, Paris: LaColombe, 1951.
• On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, Richard Rees(trans.), London: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• On the Abolition of All Political Parties, Simon Leys(trans.), New York: New York Review of Books, 2013.
• Oeuvres complètes, André Devaux andFlorence de Lussy (eds.), 7 vols., 1988–2012.
• Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour deDieu, Paris: Gallimard, 1962.
• Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, J.P.Little (ed. and trans.), Lanham, MA: Rowman & LittlefieldPublishers, Inc., 2003.
• Sur la science, Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
• “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, Mary McCarthy(trans.),Politics, November 1945, pp. 321–330.

Selected Secondary Sources

• Agamben, Giorgio, 2017a, “Preface”, to Benjamin Davis(trans.) of Simone Weil’sLa personne et le sacre, Paris:Rivages, 2017.
• –––, 2017b, “Philosophy asInterdisciplinary Intensity—An Interview with GiorgioAgamben”, interviewed by Antonio Gnolio, translated by IdoGovrin,Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory,02/06/2017,Agamben 2017 available online.
• Allen, Diogenes and Eric O. Springsted, 1994,Spirit, Natureand Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil, (Simone WeilStudies), Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Arendt, Hannah, 2018,The Human Condition, Chicago:University of Chicago Press,
• Avery, Desmond, 2008,Beyond Power: Simone Weil and the Notionof Authority, New York: Lexington Books.
• Baring, Edward, 2011,The Young Derrida and French Philosophy,1945–1968, New York: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9780511842085
• Bell, Richard H. (ed), 1993,Simone Weil’s Philosophy ofCulture: Readings toward a Divine Humanity, New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.
• –––, 1998,Simone Weil: The Way of Justiceas Compassion, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Inc.
• Bingemer, Maria Clara, 2011 [2015],Simone Weil: unamística a los límites, Buenos Aires: Ciudad Nueva.Translated asSimone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion,Karen M. Kraft (trans.), Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015.
• Blanchot, Maurice, 1969 [1993], “L’Affirmation (ledesir, le malheur)”, inL’Entretien infini,Paris: Gallimard; translated by Susan Hanson as “Affirmation(desire, affliction)”, inThe Infinite Conversation,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993, 122.
• Blum, Lawrence A. and Victor J. Seidler, 2010,A TruerLiberty: Simone Weil and Marxism, New York: RoutledgeRevivals.
• Bourgault, Sophie and Julie Daigle (eds.), 2020,Simone Weil:Beyond Ideology?, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Cameron, Sharon, 2007,Impersonality: Seven Essays,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Cha, Yoon Sook, 2017,Decreation and the Ethical Bind,New York: Fordham University Press.
• Chang, Jennifer, 2024,An Authentic Life, PortTownsend: Copper Canyon Press.
• Chenavier, Robert, 2009 [2012],Simone Weil, l’attentionau réel, Paris: Michalon. Translated asSimone Weil:Attention to the Real, Bernard E. Doering (trans.), Notre Dame,IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
• Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote (eds.), 1997,VirtueEthics, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Dargan, Joan, 1999,Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically,(Simone Weil Studies), Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Davis, Benjamin, 2023,Simone Weil’s PoliticalPhilosophy, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Dietz, Mary, 1988,Between the Human and the Divine: ThePolitical Thought of Simone Weil, Totowa, NJ: Rowman &Littlefield.
• Doering, E. Jane, 2010,Simone Weil and the Specter ofSelf-Perpetuating Force, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre DamePress.
• Doering, E. Jane and Eric O. Springsted (eds.), 2004,TheChristian Platonism of Simone Weil, Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press.
• Dunway, John M. and Eric O. Springsted (eds.), 1996,TheBeauty that Saves: Essays on Aesthetics and Language in SimoneWeil, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Esposito, Roberto, 1996 [2017],L’Origine dellapolitica: Hannah Arendt o Simone Weil?, Rome: Donzelli Editore.Translated asThe Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or SimoneWeil, Vincenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams (trans.), New York:Fordham University Press, 2017.
• Finch, Henry Leroy, 2001,Simone Weil and the Intellect ofGrace, Martin Andic (ed.), New York: Continuum.
• Holoka, James P. (ed. and trans.), 2005,Simone Weil’stheIliad or the Poem of Force: A CriticalEdition (Iliade, ou, le poème de la force), NewYork: Peter Lang.
• Kinsella, Helen M., 2021, “Of Colonialism and Corpses:Simone Weil on Force,” inWomen’s InternationalThought: A New History, Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler(eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 72–92.
• Kondrich, Christopher, 2019,Valuing, Athens:University of Georgia Press.
• Lawson, Kathryn, 2024,Ecological Ethics and thePhilosophy of Simone Weil, London: Routledge.
• Lévinas, Emmanuel, 1952 [1990], “Simone Weil contrela Bible”,Evidences, 24: 9–12. Translated as“Simone Weil against the Bible” in hisDifficultFreedom: Essays on Judaism (Difficile liberté),Seán Hand (trans.), Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, pp. 133–141.
• Lloyd, Vincent, 2011,The Problem with Grace: ReconfiguringPolitical Theology, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• McCullough, Lissa, 2014,The Religious Philosophy of SimoneWeil: An Introduction, New York: I.B. Tauris.
• McLellan, David, 1990,Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thoughtof Simone Weil, New York: Poseidon Press.
• Morgan, Vance, 2005,Weaving the World: Simone Weil onScience, Mathematics, and Love, Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press.
• Murdoch, Iris, 1999,Existentialists and Mystics, NewYork: Penguin Books.
• Nelson, Deborah, 2017,Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion,McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.
• Nunez, Sigrid, 2006,The Last of Her Kind: A Novel,New York: Picador.
• Perrin, J.M. and G. Thibon, 2003,Simone Weil as We KnewHer, New York: Routledge.
• Pétrement, Simone, 1973 [1976],La vie de SimoneWeil, Paris: Fayard. Translated asSimone Weil: A Life,Raymond Rosenthal (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.
• Pick, Anat, 2011,Creaturely Poetics: Animality andVulnerability in Literature and Film, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.
• Rhees, Rush, 2000,Discussions of Simone Weil, (SimoneWeil Studies), D.Z. Phillips (ed.), Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Ricciardi, Alessia, 2009, “From Decreation to Bare Life:Weil, Agamben, and the Impolitical”,Diacritics, 39(2):75–84, 86–93. doi:10.1353/dia.2009.0014
• Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca (ed.), 2017,Simone Weil andContinental Philosophy, London: Rowman & LittlefieldInternational.
• Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca and Lucian Stone (eds.), 2010,TheRelevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, New York:Continuum.
• –––, 2013,Simone Weil and Theology,New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
• Scarry, Elaine, 1999,On Beauty and Being Just,Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Springsted, Eric O., 1983,Christus Mediator: PlatonicMediation in the Thought of Simone Weil, Chico, CA: ScholarsPress.
• –––, 1986,Simone Weil and the Suffering ofLove, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.
• ––– (ed.), 1998,Simone Weil: EssentialWritings, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
• –––, 2010, “Mystery and Philosophy”,inThe Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later,A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone (eds), New York: Continuum,pp. 91–104.
• –––, 2015, “Introduction: Simone Weil onPhilosophy”, in Eric O. Springsted (ed.),Simone Weil: LatePhilosophical Writings, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre DamePress, pp. 1–19.
• –––, 2021,Simone Weil for the Twenty-FirstCentury, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Vetö, Miklos, 1971 [1994],La métaphysiquereligieuse de Simone Weil, Paris: J. Vrin. Translated asTheReligious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, (Simone Weil Studies), JoanDargan (trans.), Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994.
• Von der Ruhr, Mario, 2006,Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship inAttention, London: Continuum.
• Wallace, Cynthia, 2024,The Literary Afterlives of SimoneWeil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion, New York:Columbia University Press.
• Winch, Peter, 1989,Simone Weil: “The JustBalance”, New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Zaretsky, Robert, 2018, “What We Owe to Others: SimoneWeil’s Radical Reminder”,New York Times, February 20,2018. [Zaretsky 2018 available online]
• –––, 2021,The Subversive Simone Weil: ALife in Five Ideas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Scott Ritner and Catherine Fullartonfor their generosity and support, hospitality and friendship, duringthe writing of this entry.