More than once, I have thought of the voice of Simone Weil as that of a teacher’s, a grave, ardent voice intent on imparting not just her thoughts and knowledge but also intent on imparting what she saw as the responsibility of thinking. This small female voice is speaking in the midst of the twentieth-century hurricane into which she was born: ideological politics, colonialism, antisemitism, industrialism, genocide, capitalism, and world war, to name a few enormities that she confronted. Anyone who reads her is bound to be astonished at her sheer bravery, how she let nothing pass, how she refused the ministrations of both the worldly-wise and the complacent. Like Christ, she abhorred the lukewarm.
As the United States in 2024 girds its weary loins for the tarnished spectacle of a national election, the essay that Weil wrote in 1943 feels like required reading. Most of Weil is required reading but the temerity of Weil’s thinking, her willingness to come out and speak to the worthlessness of party politics is—to put it mildly—bracing. As she puts it: “Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and justice.” I suppose the first response of many to this would be: “Oh, no, not my party. My party stands for virtue. My party stands for my rights. My party stands for my nation.” And how can there be politics without parties? Are we to believe that people can get along without such allegiances? Don’t political parties bind people to the nation in a coherent fashion? Are we to trust civic engagement as a good in and of itself, a willingness to consider the issues without emotional and prejudicial blinders?
As usual, Weil is alert to one more enormous gap in the human scheme of things, namely that politics is based on spiritual failure. We exalt the genius of whatever expediency confronts us and resolutely treat it as sovereign fact, an attitude that condones any number of horrors, beginning but not ending with war. In Weil’s words: “When a country is in the grip of a collective passion, it becomes unanimous in crime.” Conscience is extinguished. Whatever slogans are being hurled—Make America Great Again—are sufficient to wipe out all individual thought. The slogan suffices. To quote Weil at more length: “Whatever belongs to the domain of facts pertains to the category of means. Collective thinking, however, cannot rise above the factual realm. It is an animal form of thinking. Its dim perception of goodness merely enables it to mistake this or that means for an absolute good.”
Here is where General de Gaulle or any man of the world would shake his head and dismiss Simone Weil with a contemptuous smile and a shrug. The melee of contending nation-states has very little to do with justice, truth, and goodness. Those vast nouns are convenient notions to uphold as just that—notions rather than realities. They can be adapted to their exact opposites with a flourish of a propagandist’s banner. Understandably, Weil links political parties with propaganda. As to how this works, Weil notes: “The revolutionary temperament tends to envision a totality. The petty bourgeois temperament prefers the cozy picture of a slow, uninterrupted and endless progress.” You can take your credulity on the hard side or the soft side. At this point in time, “endless progress” seems to be the order of the day, despite all signs to the contrary.
We esteem Weil in part because she was able to combine thinking with spiritual awareness. She was fearless on both fronts. Her essay does not speak to what might be on the other side of abolition. In the case of a dictatorship the parties would be abolished. In another scenario, the irrelevance of the parties might become apparent to the populace so that the parties mattered less and less. In the case of the first scenario, we have seen a party that is very much eager to back a man’s dictatorial leanings. The fallibility of this eagerness has been shown before in parties that thought they could “control” a self-willed man of the people. In the latter scenario, many people in the United States currently feel the parties are irrelevant and that the issues that truly matter are not on the table. The inability of the American parties, tied as they are to the relentless economic engine, to do much of anything to confront the environmental grief that is staring humankind in the face testifies to a realm defined by—among other things—hypocrisy, venality, egoism, name-calling, flattery, ignorance, infighting, and self-righteousness. When it is not vicious, politics is inane.
Meanwhile, the United States trundles along asserting its democratic pedigree to anyone who will listen (and to many who would rather be left in peace). Yet as Weil succinctly puts it: “. . . we have never known anything that resembles, however faintly, a democracy. We pretend that our present system is democratic, yet the people never have the chance, nor the means to express their views on any problem of public life. Any issue that does not pertain to particular interests is abandoned to collective passions, which are systematically and officially inflamed.” Hannah Arendt also noted this large discrepancy. To say, however, that the United States is more like a money-ocracy, a permanently God-blessed entity fueled by a very narrow definition of economics (endless corporate growth) along with a generous helping of don’t-tread-on-me individualism, is impermissible. The charade must go on.
Weil often looked to the Greeks for guidance. They, after all, were the ones who came up with a vision of democracy and put it into practice. They also were the ones who took a hard look at man’s fate and who had, in the words of one of Weil’s biographers, Simone Pétrement, “a grim and painful conception of human existence” which applies, in Weil’s words, to “all those who keep their eyes open.” I will further quote in this vein from an unsent letter of Weil’s about the ancient Greeks: “But their sadness had an object; it had a meaning in relation to [her italics] the felicity that is the natural allotment of the soul and of which it is deprived by the harsh constraints of the world. Pain and sorrow never appear among them except as a defeat to an aspiration to felicity.” To keep one’s eyes open is not to banish felicity. It is to welcome it.
In the year 2024, the enormous hubbub about politics is an indulgence we can ill afford. Whether we are entertained or appalled (or both), we remain caught in our thoughtlessness, our conflicting assertions of conflicting identities. Unfortunately, in Weil’s words: “Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think.”
Bravo, as ever, Baron, for bringing a much neglected thinker to the present moment. I have been thinking of late about Simon Weil and Hannah Arendt and Etty Hillesum, three women who had unfathomable courage, which is in such short supply. A courage born of thinking. Thank you, once again.
I'm drawn, as a result of reading your essay, to revisit Weil. I don't want to slip into cynicism about the state of the world, particularly our portion of it. However, you make a compelling argument that there is reason to THINK and welcome felicity. Love that. I've long had a copy ofWeil's THE NEED FOR ROOTS and just reread the preface by T.S.Eliot who argues she is worth our attention and energy: "But agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul." Thanks for pointing me to reread and reconsider Weil with your essay.