According to Camus it is only in the face of the absurd - and through our unremitting revolt against it - that meaning can be generated. Espousing the Christian faith abnegates the absurd, and with it the only possible source of meaning for modem man. This critique can be addressed by engaging with Simone Weil. She develops an original dialectic ofdivine absence (in the laws of indifferent ’necessity’ and affliction) and presence, which reflects the intra-Trinitarian unity and distance of the divine Persons, and which finds ultimate expression on the Cross of Christ. For her this dialectic does not induce revolt but a sophisticated kind of reconciliation that involves a selfless openness to, and engagement with, this world.

The Heythrop Journal, 2017

1998

This essay interrogates the relationship of post-Enlightenment epistemolom to the conduct of modern politics through the thought of Simone Weil and Albert Camus. Contemporaries and fellow members of the French Resistance, Weil and Camus begin their critiques of modern politics with critiques of modern epistemology. They begin from different orientations to reality: Weil's is a God-centered universe of "necessity" while Camus's concern is to live with the 'absurdity" of human existence. Their shared experience with the violence of modern politics. however, led them to similar conclusions: a calculative form of reason, presumably capable of unmasking the mysteries of (human) nature and positing totalizing explanations of human experience entails the perpetration of a destructive and dehumanizing violence on human existence and nature in general. Overcoming our epistemological prejudices is thefirst step to reclaiming politics for human beings.

The problems of nihilism and absurdism as presented in the works of Samuel Beckett which presuppose a bleak view of the world without transcendence are effectively solved by turning to Simone Weil’s philosophy which appropriates key absurdist premises in its transcendence-centred interpretation of knowledge and experience. Weil’s rereading of religion appropriates important criticisms from existentialist-absurdist writers like Beckett and crtics of traditional religion. It is possible to transcend absurdist impasse by turning to Weil. Notebooks of Weil are here read as providing important insights to answer absurdist nihilist pessimist vision.

2004

In this book, a group of renowned international scholars seek to discern the ways in which Simone Weil was indebted to Plato, and how her provocative readings of his work offer challenges to contemporary philosophy, theology, and spirituality. This is the first book in twenty years to systematically investigate Weil's Christian Platonism. The opening essays explore what actually constitutes Weil's Platonism. Louis Dupre addresses the Platonic and Gnostic elements of her thought with respect to her negative theology, and the Christian Platonism of her positive theology as found in her reflections on beauty and the Good. Michel Narcy provides a close historical reading of Weil and discusses the degree to which her teacher Alain influenced her Platonism. Michael Ross contends that Weil's interest in Plato is in "ethical Platonism." Essays by Robert Chenavier and by Patrick Patterson and Lawrence Schmidt consider the importance of matter and materialism in Weil&#39...

Scottish Journal of Theology, 2010

Although rarely examined together, Elie Wiesel’s The Trial of God and Albert Camus’ The Plague are distinct, but philosophically related projects. Both respond to the moral crisis that culminated in widespread fascism and genocide in Europe prior to and during World War II by claiming that humanity must struggle against absurdity to make its own meaning, even in the face of profound and meaningless suffering. This essay argues that without such meaning, there can be no truly shared, universal ethics. Wiesel and Camus successfully make a similar claim not by asserting the world has become absurd, but by claiming that it has always been absurd. Both assert that we can ease human suffering by adopting an ethics that operates in spite of the constant uncertainty caused by absurdity.

Logos. Anales del Seminario de Metafísica, 2023

The aim of this article is to relate the concept of 'force' to that of 'spiritual education'. Starting from it, we can better understand the link, fundamental for Simone Weil also in the political sphere, between immanence and transcendence. The predominance of force over immanence seems, indeed, to decree the impossibility of a 'just' politics. Weil shows that awareness of the predominance of force in this world is a first and indispensable step towards justice. This explains the centrality that Weil attaches to the education of attention, particularly for those who are to assume governmental roles. Reflection on politics and justice thus assumes, in the last years of Weil's life, the role of an 'otherwise than power', effective on two levels: firstly, as a reflection on power and the forms of government to be given to France liberated from the Nazis; secondly, as a project of true spiritual education for those who will be called to govern at any level.

MA Dissertation, 2021

The writings of Simone Weil have profoundly shaped my own thinking; however, her soteriology is unorthodox (some would say heterodox) and raises many questions. In this paper, I critically evaluate her soteriology in relation to her doctrine of creation, viewed as a response to the question “where is God?” in a suffering world. Employing light as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit, she explores how the supernatural illuminates the contradictions of human existence and, through beauty, attention, and affliction, brings us into an existential contact with God in this world. The fact of our existence is what separates us from God, and we must consent to the death of our false selves, so that God’s unconditional love may pass through us uninterrupted to the world. With her concept of decreation, Weil ultimately turns these insights negatively upon herself, but I argue that they should be understood as metaphors describing the “new creation” and our union with God through Christ. I conclude by exploring the implications of her thought for creation’s consummation and the individual in eternity, before considering her own lack of assurance revealed in the “Marseille Prologue.”

Cosmos and History 2020

In this essay, I assess the experiences of divine revelation in St. Teresa of Ávila and Simone Weil by contrasting their underlining models for the realization of the highest good. For St. Teresa, god’s manifestation is physically gratifying, which implicitly represents the world as part of a metaphysical order in which god intervenes to reward the good with happiness. For Weil, on the contrary, divine revelation issues from suffering, which she calls “affliction.” Against the conventional view that Weil defends a theodicy, I argue that her account of affliction highlights the problem of radical evil and senseless suffering in 20th-century Europe. In line with Kant—an unlikely ally, perhaps—she articulates the moral grounds of religion to sustain moral faith, namely: the challenge of maintaining a good will in the aftermath of senseless suffering and for resisting the natural propensity to radical evil in response to being a victim of wrongdoing.

Ultimate Reality and Meaning

International Journal of English and Literature, 2013

Nihilism as appropriated in existentialist-absurdist thought appears as a stubborn problem and consequent absurdism of such writers as Beckett follows which is a very unsatisfactory position from a philosophical or metaphysical viewpoint. Mysticism as articulated in such writers as Simone Weil offers an alternative approach to tackle the problem of nihilism and critique existentialist thought and its appropriation for absurdist response. The present paper, building on the works of Simone Weil, presents the version of religion that appropriates absurdists challenge in a novel manner. Her metaphysical/mystical reading of Christianity is largely immune to existentialist-absurdist critiques as she does not invoke problematic conceptions of divinity, hope, consolation and soul or self that have been criticized by absurdists like Beckett.

London: I.B. Tauris / Bloomsbury, 2014

French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) defies the usual religious categories: at once atheistic and religious, mystic and realist, skeptic and believer. Weil’s existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke readers in philosophy, religion, cultural and feminist studies, mysticism and spirituality. Lissa McCullough offers an in-depth exposition of Weil’s religious philosophy. This is the first introductory book to demonstrate the essential coherence of Weil’s enigmatic and remarkable religious ideas. // “The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil is a beautifully written exposé of one of the most spiritually intense thinkers of the twentieth century. Shunning the cult of personality, McCullough delves deeply into Weil’s thought, offering the reader a lucid exposition of a spiritual path sustained by profound philosophical wisdom. The writing of this book, and the reading it demands, are exemplary of the kenosis that is at the core of Weil’s mystical vocation. We are all indebted to the author for this labor of love.” —Elliot R. Wolfson, Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Judaic Studies, New York University // “This book is a page-turner. It is totally compelling in the service of making available a religious thinking on the border between Judaism and Christianity, and also on the border between Platonism and Christianity; a thinking of God that continually troubles Christian orthodoxy while embracing it passionately; a thinking of God beyond the idolatries of divine presence. This is an extraordinarily readable text. The author’s meticulously close attention to Weil’s own texts makes for the appearance of the stark beauty of Weil’s thought.” —Cyril O’Regan, Huisking Chair of Theology, University of Notre Dame

This thesis focuses on Simone Weil’s philosophical, ethical, and religious perspectives on affliction by clarifying the essential difference between what is necessary and what is good. According to Weil, reality is governed by blind physical and moral necessities. She claims that we experience necessity as constraint and constraint as suffering. But affliction, she claims, is something essentially different; it is not reducible to mere suffering. I will argue that Weil’s conception of affliction can be best understood as a momentarily ‘numinous experience’ of God’s absence or the feeling of the absolute good. Numinous experience, according to Rudolf Otto, is a kind of experience which contains a quite specific moment and which remains ineffable. What is ineffable can only be felt. That is, Weil’s investigation of affliction concentrates on the feeling response to the absence or silence of God, the feeling which remains where language fails.

Choosing the concepts of Necessity and Affliction in a thinker like Simone Weil is only one of many entry doors into a very complex system of reflections, experiences and ideas. The selection of these two, in this essay, will show how Weil’s ideas are a fresh perception on how to understand creation, how we experience this world, the forces and mechanisms which rule over the world, and her understanding of God. This exercise, at first glance, would seem to be little more than a redefinition and clarification of many words and concepts, but as fruitless as this attempt may sound, if we agree to explore her ideas, we will be facing many challenges on values that society takes for granted: God, the world, suffering and evil among others. I will argue that through her ideas, one of the most important results will be a different perspective towards how to treat the concepts of moral and ethics, a perspective which separates individual values from social values.

Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, 2021

Toward the beginning of one of her notebooks, Simone Weil interrupts a dense series of reflections on war, force and prestige to write, in parentheses: "(To think on God, to love God, is nothing else than a certain way of thinking on the world.)" In some respects, this one sentence is a crystallization of everything Weil wrote about God. The thought of God is somehow inseparable from a new mode of attention to and valuation of things "here below"; that is, from "a certain way of thinking." In the discussion that follows I reflect on how this "certain way of thinking" might be understood, in dialogue with a few exemplary moments from Derrida's late work, Martin Hägglund's reading of Derrida, as well as some biblical scholarship on Philippians 2: 5-11, and a number of richly suggestive comments from Weil's notebooks. I show that the conceptual aporias that, on Derrida's account, reliably emerge from ethical reflection are inchoately affirmed by Weil and (a certain reading of) the Philippi hymn. More than this, I will suggest that when read in this way, the latter allows for a new interrogation of the role that the experience of conceptual aporia may play in metanoia, the changing of mind.

RUDN Journal of Philosophy, 2019

The purpose of this article is to introduce the reader to some intellectual origins of Simone Weil’s philosophy through a summary of and comment on her Lectures on Philosophy (1978) given when she was a teacher at a girls’ school at Roanne in the Loire region of central France. The article provides a comment on Simone Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. There is a brief Introduction followed by a summary of Weil’s life which indicates her various interest as a religious thinker, mystic, anarchist, and political activist and some of the important academic commentaries on these aspects of her life and work. The source of the Lectures on Philosophy edited by her pupil Anne Reynaud-Guérithault is then discussed followed by a detailed summary of and comment on the Lectures themselves. They are grouped under five headings which are considered in turn. These are: The materialist point of view; after the discovery of mind; politics and social theory; ethics and aesthetics; miscellaneous topics a...

Secular modernist thought is consciously severed from any vertical reference and any theological grounding. However it is strange that generally modern literature is not subject to a critical appraisal from the perspective against which it was a rebellion. It isn’t generally recognized that despairing tone of much of modern literature is only a symptom of a deeper disease that traditional civilizations well curbed. The context of modernity, the background worldview that informs modern literature in general and absurdist literature in particular is not subject to a rigorous critique from traditional metaphysical/mystical/religious perspective. It is not generally in fashion in critical circles to wrestle with the philosophical presumptions of the great protagonists from a perspective from which absurdists take departure. Major critical schools are either explicitly antitraditional or distance themselves from it. Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, deconstructionist, new historicist, cultural materialist – to name major schools only – all are hostile to traditional metaphysical and religious outlook that nurtured traditional civilizations and literatures which hardly knew such things as despair or other fruits of nihilism such as absurdism. The present thesis is a critical work that takes the standpoint of perennialists for approaching absurdists. Certain convergence in their responses to fundamental problems of existence is also emphasized. In fact there is a remarkable fusion of Eastern and Western thought currents in absurdists and in their writings one sees a sort of impasse in Western philosophical tradition, a searching reexamination of the fundamental assumptions on which the Western especially the post- Renaissance modern civilization is based. They have ruthlessly exposed the fictive idols constructed by modern man to replace God. They have made fundamental criticism of Christian theological and Western modernist philosophical worldviews. They have exposed many cherished myths of the modern age. Though they have not consciously taken a mystical view or the Eastern metaphysical position but their point of departure has remarkable convergence with Eastern approach though their solutions and conclusions often differ sharply. Their key failure, according to perennialist reading, lies in not providing antidote to despair that they inherit from modern forms of nihilism. The present work is an attempt to more rigourously examine those background assumptions of modern antitranscendentalist thought that inform their work and then dissolve the issues like nihilism which crop up. The absurdist attempt of overcoming nihilism is not convincing. For achieving this end metaphysics as defined by perennialists in “empirical” rather than speculative or rationalist terms that bypasses critique of modern antimetaphysical thought currents needs to be appropriated and a dialogue ensued between perennialists critics of Western Modernity and its cultural products and postmodernist/absurdist critics of the same. The present work is an attempt to see how this dialogue may fare and bridge the gap between those who complain of hiddenness of God and feel excluded from grace and those who claim that grace is there but man is refusing to receive it. The thesis attempts to analyze the major works of Camus and Beckett from the perspective of the perennialist school whose major exponents are Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. It is an attempt to see why the East has not been bedeviled by the problem of pessimistic absurdism. This problem, as it will be argued, could only arise in the Western context that shares either an exoteric Christian theological or the egocentric rationalist framework. This pessimism is the logical dead end of Promethean Faustian humanistic secularist ideology to which the post-Renaissance Western man is committed. It represents the crisis of antitraditional outlook of the modern West. But the question is why not historicize this outlook and see if at all this crisis could have been initially averted or could be averted by an improved understanding of both theological and metaphysical heritage against which it revolted and got itself landed in murky waters from which it has been unable to escape? Foregrounding the problem of contemporary attitude towards transcendence I have raised certain questions that problematize our usual approach of engaging with absurdist thought in general and Beckett/Camus criticism in particular. I have attempted a sort of deconstructive reading of absurdist works such as The Myth of Sisyphus and Waiting for Godot and tried to juxtapose it with the perennialist alternative reading of the same and then argue for exploring the possibility of appropriating and proceeding beyond post-Nietzschean bleak vision of modern man as presented by Camus and Beckett that is to a significant extent shared by almost all representative writers of the modern West. Taking note of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian-postmodern critiques of onto-teleo-theological thinking and seeking to appropriate it from the vantage point of transtheistic traditional metaphysics the thesis attempts to explore, through recovering the fragmentary images of the sacred scattered here and there in otherwise desolate landscape of (Post)Modernity, the possibility of dealienation of alienated anti-traditional modern man.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Humanities Library, 1981

Albert Camus is one of the greatest French writers who has ever lived. Born in Algeria in 1913, he was raised in poverty, certainly an inauspicious beginning for a world-renowned author. This essay focuses on the absurd theme in these three early works: The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula. This will be accomplished by using the ideas set forth in The Myth of Sisyphus as a philosophical starting point. Camus' own ideas about the absurd will prescribe the limits for analysis of the novel and the play. The thematic unity contained in both these writings will be illustrated with examples from the texts and then subsequently analyzed to reveal Camus' insights into the problem of human existence. All aspects of the works which are relevant to the theme will be examined: style and language, characterization, form, setting, plot, development, and symbolism. The Myth of Sisyphus will be used only as a reference and as a source for additional supporting evidence or clarification of analysis of the other two works. In this way, a more precise expression of Camus' insights into the absurd contained in both the fiction and the drama can be formulated. Because the absurd aspect of human existence was such an important question in Camus' own life, it becomes the key to his thought. By thorough analysis of the concept of the absurd in his works, one can realize the rationale for his ideas and for his choice of their presentation, because his conception of the absurd is the basis of all his thought.

• Explore
• Papers
• Topics

• Features
• Mentions
• Analytics
• PDF Packages
• Advanced Search
• Search Alerts

• Journals
• Academia.edu Journals
• My submissions
• Reviewer Hub
• Why publish with us
• Testimonials

• Company
• About
• Careers
• Press
• Help Center
• Terms
• Privacy
• Copyright
• Content Policy