Philosophy
1909 to 1943, Paris, France
Attention as the substance of love, affliction as the mark of force, and grace as the soul’s one escape from gravity.
Start learning Simone →Simone Weil’s central idea - that attention , a patient, self-emptying openness to what is real, is the hidden substance of prayer, of study, and of the love of our neighbour, and that it is the opposite of strain…
Weil’s harrowing analysis of affliction (malheur) - the extreme suffering that fuses physical pain, social degradation, and inner distress, stamps the soul with the mark of slavery, and makes its victim anonymous,…
Weil’s great essay reads Homer’s Iliad as the truest book about war ever written, because its real subject is force - the power that turns a human being into a thing - and because it looks at force with an u…
Weil’s political testament, written for the rebuilding of France - that the human soul has definite needs (order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, honour, and more), that uprootedness is the disease of modern l…
Weil’s mystical vision of the soul: that all its natural movements obey a moral gravity - the downward pull of the ego, ever seeking to expand and fill - while grace , the one exception, descends only into a soul…
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