Simone Weil 1909 – 1943

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Trained in philosophy alongside Simone de Beauvoir, she taught at provincial lycees while spending vacations in factories, in the fields, and on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War in order to share the conditions of those she wrote about. Her later writing turned to a Christian mysticism without baptism, articulating themes of attention, affliction, and decreation. She died at thirty-four during the Second World War, having refused food beyond the rations of her compatriots in occupied France.

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, religious-political mystic, and labor activist whose short life produced one of the most distinctive bodies of twentieth-century philosophical-religious work. Born in Paris to a secular Jewish family, she was educated at the École Normale Supérieure where she ranked first ahead of Beauvoir, taught philosophy in provincial lycées, worked as a factory laborer to share the conditions of the working class, and fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side.

Weil's philosophical writings combine an unusual range of sources: Plato (whom she read as a religious mystic rather than a metaphysician), the Christian tradition (she experienced a series of religious-mystical encounters in 1937–1938 but never converted from Judaism or formally entered the Catholic Church), Indian and Chinese philosophy, Marx, and the working-class experience of factory labor. Gravity and Grace (selections from her notebooks, published posthumously in 1947) and The Need for Roots (1949, written for the Free French government in exile) are her most-read works.

Weil's central philosophical-religious concept is attention — the disciplined effort to perceive and respond to the reality of another person or situation, free from the projections of the egoistic self. Her ethics of attention has been most influentially extended by Iris Murdoch. She died in England in August 1943, at thirty-four, from a combination of tuberculosis and a refusal to eat more than the rations available to her countrymen in occupied France.