Simone Weil

1909-1943 · French · Religious Philosophy, Mysticism, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Labour

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

A brilliant young philosophy teacher who took unpaid leave to work the assembly lines at Renault, fought briefly with anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, and starved herself in solidarity with occupied France — Simone Weil lived her thought to a degree few thinkers ever have. Born in Paris in 1909 to a secular Jewish family, sister of the great mathematician André Weil, she moved from revolutionary trade-union politics toward a heterodox Christianity she embraced without ever accepting baptism, choosing to remain at the threshold of the Church. She died in England in 1943, age 34, her body…

Topics Simone Weil addresses

• attention
• affliction
• decreation
• gravity and grace
• the void
• necessity
• the impersonal
• the love of God
• the absent God
• waiting on God
• the implicit love of God
• force
• reading
• the sacred in every human being
• critique of rights
• obligations
• the need for roots
• uprootedness
• supernatural
• beauty as the order of the world
• contradiction as method
• mystery
• obedience to necessity
• factory work and the workers' condition

Converse with Simone Weil on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Simone Weil's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.