The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil

An Introduction

Lissa McCullough

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857736796
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, remains in every way a thinker for our times. She was an outsider, in multiple senses, defying the usual religious categories: at once atheistic and religious; mystic and realist; sceptic and believer. She speaks therefore to the complex sensibilities of a rationalist age. Yet despite her continuing relevance, and the attention she attracts from philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies, spirituality and beyond, Weil's reflections can still be difficult to grasp, since they were expressed in often inscrutable and fragmentary form. Lissa McCullough here offers a reliable guide to the key concepts of Weil's religious philosophy: good and evil, the void, gravity, grace, beauty, suffering and waiting for God. In addressing such distinctively contemporary concerns as depression, loneliness and isolation, and in writing hauntingly of God's voluntary 'nothingness', Weil's existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke. This is the first introductory book to show the essential coherence of her enigmatic but remarkable ideas about religion.

CHAPTER 1

REALITY AND CONTRADICTION

To love truth signifies to endure the void, and consequently to accept death. Truth is on the side of death. To love truth with all one’s soul is something that cannot be done without a wrenching. (N 161)

Religion could have been defined by Simone Weil as it was more recently by the Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani as the “real self-awareness of reality.”¹ Weil claimed that nothing is so important as to be able to define reality (N 480), and although nowhere in her writings does she make a definitive effort to do so, she does provide clues here and there toward a definition, and indeed the problem of ascertaining reality arises in her work passim. Her thinking is continually in quest of the real, understood as that which cannot be reduced, disciplined, or purified away; that which, when tested—not abstractly but experimentally, existentially, and especially under conditions of extreme suffering—cannot be found to be unreal and in this sense cannot be denied or doubted, cannot be an illusion. The real for Weil is finally the true, for “truth is the radiant manifestation of reality,” and to desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality (NR 253). This makes the need for truth the most sacred need of the human soul (NR 37).

Reality: The Irreducible

Only the real has value precisely because it is real, nonillusory. The real is real by virtue of being irreducible, and its virtue is precisely its irreducibility. It is that which remains when all else has, through the discipline of necessity and the expiation of suffering, been accounted as nothing. Ultimately, what is real cannot be lost; it is inalienable. By this strict criterion, only God is maximally real for Weil. Only God is eternal, uncreated, without beginning or end, and as such can never perish or be lost. Weil acknowledges differing “degrees” of reality, reflecting a traditional Western metaphysics of being, according to which the more perfect has more reality than the less perfect.² God therefore has absolutely maximal reality. But her concept of creation gives this traditional “chain of Being” metaphysics a strong dialectical and existential twist: it presses the continuum of “degrees” toward a comprehensive ontological dialectic.

The world exists; God does not exist—at least not in an equivalent sense. God is transcendently real. The essential being of God resides in the fact that he is not a being or thing to whom good is attached as an attribute, but is absolutely pure good in itself (N 383, FLN 316). Following a Platonic logic at this point, Weil posits that pure good eludes all particular relationships (FLN 285). Whereas all things that exist have properties, making them a mixture (mélange) of good and evil, the good itself, because it is transcendent, is without properties and therefore is not representable in itself. It has no property at all except the fact of being good. The good cannot “exist” for this reason. Or rather, it “exists” or “has reality” in such a radically different sense than do things of the world that “it makes no sense to say the good exists or the good does not exist; one can only say: the good” (FLN 316).

We can only approach the good itself by analogy, tending toward the nonapprehensible (N 252). We can only represent it indexically by making an architecture of the goods that can be represented:

All goods in this world, all beauties, all truths, are diverse and partial aspects of one unique good. Therefore they are goods that need to be ranged in order […]. Taken all together, viewed from the right point and rightly related, they make an architecture. Through this architecture the unique good, which cannot be grasped, becomes apprehensible […]. The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor. (FLN 98)

While God is essentially a good that does not exist, necessity (nécessité) is the essence of the reality of the things of this world. Weil uses the word necessity to invoke all reality that is essentially determinate, conditional, and contingent. Their essence lies in not being goods or ends in themselves: “Just as God is a good that is nothing else but a good, so matter is nothing else but a non-good” (N 496).

It is the creation of the world that inaugurates this dialectical relationship between two incompatible, contradictory realities—God and world—which then gets expressed in many correlative oppositions, such as necessary versus good; immanent versus transcendent; created versus uncreated; and temporal versus eternal. These oppositions derive from the primordial contradiction that originates in the will of God as creator, for creation itself is a contradiction of the infinite being of God: “It is contradictory that God, who is infinite, who is all, to whom nothing is lacking, should do something that is outside himself, that is not himself, while at the same time proceeding from himself” (N 386). The supreme contradiction, Weil writes, is the creator–creature contradiction.

There is an absolute contradiction between the nonexistential reality of God and the existence of the world. God and world are posited in inverse relationship: “Full reality for God lies outside this world, but full reality for a man lies within this world, even should he happen to be perfect” (N 374). To be grasped by the full import of this contradiction is to live in the fullest possible contact with reality. The human being as a thinking creature in the world participates existentially in the dialectic of this contradiction. Far from being an intellectual abstraction, this contradiction is undergone in all rigor by the existing creature:

God has created a whole range, an infinitely varied scale of beings. And the lowest limit of this scale in the category of thinking creatures is the most wretched one that is capable of loving him. The love of the most wretched one is the most precious love of all; for when such a creature has become transparent, something by way of which God can love himself, the creative act has been completed. (N 333) / God has left in the world the minimum amount of good that is indispensable for enabling a thinking and carnal creature to conceive good—the strict minimum. He has placed the greatest possible distance between his creation and Himself, who is pure good. Thus creation by itself forms a harmony, a union of opposites. (N 486)

Creation is completed only when the furthest extreme of the dialectic is reached: when the maximal goodness of God, who does not exist, is correlated with the maximal wretchedness of the creature, who does exist, across the greatest possible distance, an infinite distance. This infinite distance itself constitutes the crucifixion (N 429).

So the creator–creature contradiction that is posited in creation lays the foundation for a dialectical faith in God who is, as pure good, a totally transcendent reality.

To believe that nothing of what we are able to grasp is God. Negative faith. But also, to believe that what we are unable to grasp is more real than what we are able to grasp; that our power to grasp is not the criterion of reality, but on the contrary is deceptive. To believe, finally, that what lies beyond our grasp appears nevertheless—hidden. (N 220)

Weil’s religious thought is structured at its core by a dialectical opposition between the “full reality” of God and the “full reality” of creation, two full realities that are portrayed not as in a continuum of being, but as in ontological contradiction. This fundamental framework bears closer structural resemblance to modern Christian dialectical thinkers like Hegel or Kierkegaard than to Plato or Platonic traditions. God and the world not only belong to two disparate orders of being, as in Plato, but to mutually contradicting realities, as a consequence of creation ex nihilo, and this contradiction defines the most elemental structure of Weil’s theology. This supreme contradiction is not one that can be “solved” in the sense of eliminated or done away with: it does not admit of being denied, avoided, or evaded. It must be recognized, consented to, and lived as an “impossible” reality for as long as we exist (N 311, SNL 197). To do this is to resort to dialectical faith, a mode of existing that recognizes and contemplates the contradiction without removing it. Faith is what reconciles the nonexistence of the good (God) with the existence of the nongood (the order of the world), as we shall see in some detail.

Real contact with the reality of the world—in all its paradoxical existence-and-nonexistence—is achieved through love of the world, for to believe in the reality of the outside world, fully and truly, and to love it are one and the same thing. In the last resort, Weil claims, supernatural love is the “organ of belief” not only with regard to God, but even with regard to earthly things (N 299).

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything […]. That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why pure joy and the feeling of reality are identical. Everything that is grasped by the natural faculties is hypothetical. It is only supernatural love that posits. In this way we become co-creators. (N 309)

Because of an illusion of perspective, being seems to us less and less concentrated the more remote it is from us (WG 159); therefore only love teaches us truly to believe in an external reality (N 198). Love accepts any and every event because it exists, and by this acceptance loves God through and beyond it, for nothing happens unless God wills it (FLN 136). Acceptance is none other than the full recognition that something is (N 293). To recognize reality and to accept it are always achieved in the same stroke of consciousness: “To accept that it should exist, because it does exist, what exactly does this mean? Is it not simply to recognize that it is?” (N 288).

The human faculty most effective in denying and evading reality is the imagination, which fabricates an “ersatz form of reality” for itself (N 313) as a way of escaping the inconveniences, disappointments, and sufferings inevitably caused by the contradictions in which the finite creature must live. Even in petty matters, we hate people who try to bring us to form connections we do not wish to form (N 349). The powerful falsifications and illusions put in place by imagination can be overcome only by recognizing and unveiling them as such: “The imagination is something real. In a sense the chief reality. But in so far as it is imagination” (N 125). A crucial aspect of contending with reality as we actually encounter it is contending with the ersatz reality that human imagination produces, both in individual perceptions and in collective consciousness at all levels of society.

For Weil, time is a ubiquitous component of imaginary reality, just as it is (in rather different senses) for Spinoza and Kant, who are her philosophical forebears in this judgment. Although time is not real, strictly speaking, humanly speaking it is the most ominous and imperious of realities; it always occupies the forefront (N 70). The illusory veil of time is woven of past and future; that is, memorializing imaginings of the past and fantasizing imaginings of what might occur in the future are the actual stuff of which a human life is composed. Both are nonexistent projections of imagination. As such they compose the real-qua-imaginary substance of all human suffering: “Suffering is nothing outside the relationship between past and future, but what is there more real for man than this relationship? It is reality itself” (N 157). Time is all too real qua imaginary; it is the stuff of which the world is woven (N 26). Time does us violence; it rends the soul (N 28). “Hell would be pure time” (FLN 198).

Because of the imperious grip of time on us, and only because of it, Weil insists, we must believe in the reality of time, otherwise we are just dreaming (N 305). But this is nonetheless to believe in the ersatz reality of time as an illusory product of human imagination, for human beings are really bound by unreal chains:

Time, strictly speaking, does not exist (except the present, as a limit), and yet it is that to which we are subjected. Such is our condition. We are subjected to that which does not exist. Whether it be a question of duration passively endured—physical pain, waiting, regret, remorse, fear; or of time actively handled—order, method, necessity—in either case, that to which we are subjected does not in fact exist. But our subjection exists. Really bound by unreal chains. Time, itself unreal, covers everything, ourselves included, with a veil of unreality. (N 71)

So, even though space and time are in a sense only thoughts, they constitute that which fetters thinking being beyond any possibility of liberation (N 23).

But under certain circumstances, suffering can also penetrate the unreality of time’s illusions, enabling one to distinguish between real and unreal. Finally human desire must find something to love that is not unreal, even if it means that what we love is strictly speaking nonexistent, either nonactual or purely transcendent.

Love is in need of reality. What could be more appalling than to love through a corporal appearance some imaginary being, when the day comes that one realizes the fact? Far more appalling than death, for death cannot prevent the loved one from having existed. It is the punishment for the crime of having fed love with imagination. (N 273)

Because the distinction between illusion and reality can be profoundly elusive to pin down (N 327), the danger of idolatry, or faith in a false God, is especially worrisome, for “nothing is easier than to fall into an imaginary love of God” (N 326). Even in the case of what she calls “real love of God,” she asks, is it not simply a second-rate form of the imaginary revalued into a first-rate form? She finds this a “horrible thought” (N 326), for it implies that ersatz reality produced by imagination is inescapably part of irreducible reality—even in the truest and purest possible faith.

Although there is no possibility in human life to escape the effects of imagination, the principal criterion for distinguishing its falsifying illusions and projections from perception of reality is contact with necessity. Necessity is the criterion of reality always, in all orders of reality (N 361), because it is the obstacle that persists in contradiction to our will and its arbitrary desires.

Reality for the human mind is contact with necessity. There is a contradiction here, for necessity is intelligible, not tangible […]. We convince ourselves of the reality of an object by going around it, an operation successively producing varied appearances that are determined by the immobility of a form […]. By this operation we know that the object is a thing and not an apparition, that it has a body. (IC 178)

Weil scholar J. P. Little remarks on the Weilian paradox that access to knowledge of the real begins only with the recognition of the impossibility of such access.³ Reality represents essentially contradiction, for “reality is the obstacle,” and the obstacle for a thinking being is contradiction (N 387). Necessity is that which defies our will and thereby convinces us that we are contending with a set of conditions extraneous to and independent of our desires, independent of our imaginative construal of things.

Truth and Affliction

Knowledge of the existence of something other than oneself is especially irreducible and inescapable in suffering, when the negation of good by evil is most acutely felt. This uniquely privileges suffering as a mode of relation to the supernatural. If beauty gives joy through a sense of perfect finality, suffering imposes a sense of perfect emptiness of finality, absence of significance, futility, meaninglessness, nothingness, void; whereas joy increases the feeling of reality, pain diminishes it. To find transcendent joy in suffering is a question of recognizing the same fullness of reality in the case of pain as in that of joy. In suffering, “the sensibility says: ‘That is not possible.’ One must reply: That is” (N 288). The beauty of the real then shines through suffering more purely than it can ever do through joy.

Our lives are lived in constructs and distortions of perspective that refuse reality to people and things outside the orbit of our interests. We do this systematically, according to Weil, and it is the predictable, systematic quality of the distortion that constitutes the “false reality.” Because imagination is prone to uphold a false reality, acceptance of what is is never simply necessitated for the mind. A commitment must be made by the mind that it is preferable to be in contact with reality than with fantasy, falsehood, and illusion. This entails a commitment to the inescapable relation between truth and necessity. At this point a cognizance of the ontological poverty and perishability of the human condition is indispensable for grasping the inexorable subjection of everything to necessity: “Reality only becomes perceptible for the man who accepts death […]. It is death alone that teaches us we have no existence except as a thing among a lot of other things” (FLN 285). Consciously and unconsciously, we resist awareness of reality because it entails a death-dealing immersion in the void to be seized by the realization that we are “nothing,” that we are creatures constituted by radical want (IC 129), that ultimately we have no resource against the conditions that rule our existence, and that time is ineluctably carrying us where we would not go (N 28, 131).⁴

Truth is more than simply thought about reality, it is a spirit in which reality is encountered: it is a critically self-purifying relationship of thought to reality. Truth is the work that results from thought that is pure, not the expression of things themselves (LP 195). Truth is not an object, therefore it cannot be the object of love; only reality can be: “The acquisition of knowledge causes us to approach truth when it is a question of knowledge about something we love, and not in any other case” (NR 253). We desire truth in order to know the truth about what we love. Rather than talking about “love of truth,” then, it is more accurate to evoke the spirit of truth in love (FLN 349–50). Inasmuch as truth is the thought of a purified thinker, the real value of truth is that it transforms the one who proves capable of it. When Weil writes of truth, she nearly always has in mind its power to effect salvation, for truth is the means to salvation, and because “only death is true” (NR 249), nothing apart from salvation ultimately matters in human existence.

Thus Weil writes of a purity that is achieved only through death, and that purity is truth. To realize that death is the truth of the human condition is to accept it, and one who does not accept it will never truly or fully realize it. What is to be realized is that the individual life is destined to be overruled by annihilation and negation; that from the time of birth, life is saturated with the destiny of death; that finally human life is a “nothingness.”⁵ Life posits a contradiction for which death is the only resolution. Weil considers this the starting point for contemplating truth as against illusion. Life is a lie, she writes: an impossible, untenable attachment (NR 249). Life must be purified of this lie if truth is to be attained (RM 183n17). Death—or rather, the in-life equivalent of death, a state of absolute detachment—is the only purification. “Total humility means consent to death, which turns us into inert nothingness. The saints ar...