French philosopher, mystic, and activist. A student of Alain (Émile Chartier) at the École Normale Supérieure, she worked alongside factory laborers and fought in the Spanish Civil War. Her work, almost entirely posthumous, crosses philosophy, Christian mysticism (without formal adherence to the Church), social critique, and reflection on labor. She died at 34 in London, weakened by tuberculosis and her refusal to eat more than those rationed in occupied France. An unclassifiable thinker who fascinated Camus, who edited her first published books.
Key Concepts
- Attention (attention): the supreme faculty of the soul — pure, disinterested attention without will is the highest form of prayer and knowledge; studying mathematics or Greek is training attention for God
- Gravity and grace (pesanteur et grâce): gravity is the natural force that pulls human beings downward — selfishness, power, compensatory imagination; grace is the supernatural movement that elevates — but it requires emptiness, renunciation
- Malheur (affliction): a condition that strikes body, soul, and social position simultaneously — it destroys personality and renders the human being invisible; distinct from simple pain or suffering
- Uprootedness (déracinement): the modern condition of losing one’s roots — cultural, communal, spiritual — is the central disease of civilization; rootedness is the most important and least recognized need of the human soul
- Labor: a central experience of the human condition; Weil worked as a factory laborer to understand oppression from within — labor must be transformed to allow thought and dignity
- Decreation (décréation): voluntary renunciation of the self to let God act — inspired by Plato and Christian mysticism; the opposite of egocentric creation
Influenced by
- Plato — the Good, the cave, beauty as a path to the absolute
- Marx — analysis of oppression and alienated labor (but critiques orthodox Marxism)
- Pascal — greatness and wretchedness of humanity; existential wager
- Alain (Émile Chartier) — her teacher at the ENS; rigorous thought and attention
- Christian mystical tradition — St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart
Influenced
- Camus — edited The Need for Roots for Gallimard; affinities on the absurd and justice
- Levinas — attention to the other and ethics as first philosophy
- Philosophy of labor and contemporary social critique
- Political theology and contemporary mysticism
Works
Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la Grâce, 1947, posthumous); The Need for Roots (L’Enracinement, 1949, posthumous); The Condition of Labor (La Condition ouvrière, 1951, posthumous); Waiting for God (Attente de Dieu, 1950, posthumous); Notebooks (Cahiers, 3 vols., posthumous). Almost all of her work was published posthumously by Gustave Thibon and Albert Camus.
See also
Twentieth Century Philosophy