Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?

Sophie Bourgault, Julie Daigle, Sophie Bourgault, Julie Daigle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030484019
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

In the last decade, interest in the writings ofFrench philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) has surged.Weil is admired for her militant syndicalism, her factory experience and participation in the French resistance, but it is above all the eclectic and rich character of her work that has increasingly attracted scholarly attention.Weil reflected on subjects as diverse as quantum physics, Greek tragedy, bankruptcy, colonialism, technology, education, and religious metaphysics, but perhaps most interestingis the way that her work seems to defy any clear ideological labelling: Marxist, anarchist, liberal, conservative and republican all seem to fall short in describing the complexity of Weil's thinking.Adding to the interpretive difficulty is the fact that Weil often expressed biting criticisms of most things political. What this edited volume argues is that it is precisely Weil's unclassifiable nature, combined with her sharp and sometimes ambivalent criticismsof politics, that make her work a most timely and fascinating object of study for contemporary political philosophy.It proposes a two-pronged approach to her thought: first, via a series of conversations set up between Weil and key authors in modern and contemporary political theory (e.g. Sandel, Rawls, Ahmed, Agamben, Orwell); and secondly, via a close study of Weil's reflections on various ideologies. The goal of this book is not to position Simone Weil squarely within a single ideological tradition but rather to propose thather thought might allow us to critically engage with various ideologies in the history of political ideas.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. Bourgault, J. Daigle (eds.)Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48401-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Weil, Politics and Ideology

Sophie Bourgault¹ and Julie Daigle¹

(1)

School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Sophie Bourgault (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Julie Daigle

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Simone WeilIdeologyPoliticsPolitical thoughtModernity

End Abstract

At a scholarly event devoted to her work held in 1972, Hannah Arendt was asked to clarify her ideological commitments. Political scientist Hans Morgenthau inquired: “What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position in the contemporary possibilities?” The biting answer Arendt offered would soon become a widely cited response of hers: “I really don’t know and I’ve never known. […] And I must say I couldn’t care less.”¹ It is tempting to suggest that French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) may have answered in a similar manner had she been urged during her own lifetime to take a clear-cut position on ideologies and on where she stood politically.² Indeed, any attentive reader perusing Weil’s early and later writings will quickly realize the variegated scope of ideologies Weil’s oeuvre addresses and the biting concerns she expressed about most of them.

Simone Weil’s critiques of French imperialism and colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s certainly made her a forerunner of later criticism, and have in recent years increasingly been the object of scholarly discussion.³ But the ideology that has been the main object of study among Weil specialists in the past decades is above all Marxism, namely her complex relationship with Marx and Marxist militants of various stripes.⁴ Simone Pétrement, Weil’s close friend and biographer, believes that if we understand the term “communist” in a broad sense, then it would be fair to say that, at a certain point in her life, Weil was a communist.⁵ However, she was always reluctant to officially join the Communist Party. Her brother, the mathematician André Weil, recalls seeing a letter penned by his sister, requesting membership to the Communist Party, lying around in Simone’s room for many months, but there is no proof that she ever sent it.⁶ What we do know is that she enjoyed encouraging the belief that she was a Communist by doing things like reading L’Humanité (the voice of the French Communist Party) in public, and drawing the hammer and sickle on her student’s work.⁷ Weil was also involved in revolutionary trade-unionism in the early 1930s, during her brief stint as a philosophy teacher in various lycées, but she quickly distanced herself from these groups.⁸ At the beginning of the Second World War, she wrote that she had always “wanted a social transformation to the advantage of the less fortunate, but [that she] was never favourably inclined toward the Communist party […].” She added that the trade union movement had attracted her when she was eighteen, but that “[s]ince then, [she] ha[d] never stopped going farther and farther away from the Communists, even to the point of regarding them as the principal enemy.”⁹

After spending nearly two months in Berlin, in the summer of 1932, Weil would finally come to lose all respect for the Communist Party.¹⁰ The time spent in Germany inspired her to condemn the Party’s incapacity to stand up to the dangerous rise to power of Hitler; she did so by penning several articles for journals like La Révolution prolétarienne, L’École émancipée and Libres Propos. In an important piece from 1933 titled “Prospects: Are We Heading for the Proletarian Revolution?,” Weil submits the hypothesis to her comrades that the Stalin/Soviet regime is not, as Leon Trotsky believed, “a dictatorship of the proletariat” with “bureaucratic deformations.”¹¹ Rather, it is a “new species of oppression […] exercised in the name of management,”¹² threatening to eliminate what remains of the October Revolution.¹³ Weil also makes a case here for the supreme value of the individual over the collective,¹⁴ since the latter tends to destroy the conditions necessary for the well-being and free reflectivity of the individual. She writes: “In the subordination of society to the individual lies the definition of true democracy and that of socialism as well.”¹⁵ As Pétrement recounts, Trotsky responded acerbically to Weil’s article: “Simone Weil has found consolation in a new mission: to defend her personality against society. A formula of the old liberalism, refurbished by a cheaply bought anarchist exaltation. […] Many years will have to pass for her and her like before they free themselves of the most reactionary petty bourgeois prejudices.”¹⁶

A few months later, when Trotsky was in exile in France, Weil seized the opportunity to further discuss these questions with him, whom she otherwise greatly admired for his criticism of Stalinism. She invited him to stay at her parents’ apartment in Paris at the end of December 1933, and took that opportunity to subject him to an intense and memorable discussion-turned-argument. Pétrement recounts how Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sédov, who was listening in the next room with Weil’s parents, was astounded by “[t]his child [Weil was 24 years old] holding her own with Trotsky.”¹⁷

This sharp philosophical spirit was in part nourished by Weil’s teacher at Lycée Henri IV, Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier). What Alain may also have stimulated in his student is her individualism, her critique of power, as well as a general wariness toward the collective (what Plato called the “Great Beast”¹⁸ ) and toward all forms of authority.¹⁹ In many of the chapters of this edited volume, readers will have the opportunity to learn much more about Weil’s critique of “collectivities” and the “social” (e.g., bureaucracy, political parties, churches, unions, industry, or the state more generally).

Weil passed on these critical teachings about collectivities to some of her own students. In Anne Reynaud-Guérithault’s notes from Weil’s philosophy lectures given at Roanne during the 1933–1934 school year, we find the following duties of the individual toward the state: “[O]ne has a duty, and not a right, never to let one atom of the liberty which the state allows to disappear; never to accept official ideology, but to create centres of independent thought.”²⁰ Weil would never abandon this deep concern for the importance of individual thought. Indeed, it would be at the heart of what she affectionately called her grand oeuvre (her magnus opus), her “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934). Analyzing capitalism’s oppression of workers, the essay deplores the progressive disappearance of methodical thought in social life: “Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.”²¹

According to Mary G. Dietz, “[d]espite her deep engagement in the French left in general and the working class movement in particular, Weil’s thought in [“Reflections”] is launched from a philosophical position closer to Kant than to Marx, and more inclined toward humanism and respect for the individual than toward any of the varieties of modern antiliberalisms that were emerging in the twentieth century.”²² Certainly Weil’s relationship to Marx and Marxism is a complex and debated one. For scholars Lawrence A. Blum and Victor J. Seidler, Weil’s work ought to be seen as alternative to both Marxism and Liberalism—if not in fact, more generally, as a radical challenge to most “received notions of what ‘politics’ is.”²³ For his part, Alain believed that Weil’s 1934 “Reflections” and her discussion of Marx brought philosophical conversations on a wholly new terrain. After reading her essay, he enthusiastically wrote to his student that her writings would give courage to generations disappointed by ontology and ideology.²⁴

Weil’s defense of individual thought was bolstered by a profound commitment to truth that made her allergic to anything that sacrificed the individual’s personal search for truth through careful attention (e.g., strong party discipline, dogma, bureaucratic rules). For André A. Devaux, this uncompromising commitment underlies Weil’s critique of the prevailing ideologies of her time, and perhaps particularly Marxism, personalism, and existentialism.²⁵ This attachment to the unveiling of truth would lead her to seek out— as Robert Chenavier has eloquently shown— experiences of the real (most notably through manual labor).²⁶ Indeed, after writing her “Reflections,” Weil would go on to fulfil one of her deepest desires by working in three factories in the Paris region, thereby deepening her analysis of social oppression and her criticism of capitalism. The affliction she experienced during this year would have profound effects on her thinking. So much so, in fact, that she would see herself as a slave for the rest of her life.²⁷ In August of 1936, despite her pacifism (another conviction she picked up from Alain, who had been deeply scarred by the First World War),²⁸ she would enlist in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans. She joined the ranks of the anarchists’ Durruti column in the fight against Franco, but a bad burn from setting foot in a pot of boiling oil forced her back to France by the end of September.²⁹

After the brutality of factory work and war, the “older” Weil claims to have been forever transformed by three profound mystical experiences that drew her progressively closer to Catholicism. Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Weil, Politics and Ideology
• Part I. Weil in Conversation
• Part II. Weil and Ideology