Tag: simone weil

Podcast notes – Simone Weil on the need for roots – Philosophize This!

Follow-up to previous notes: https://kevinhabits.com/podcast-notes-philosopher-simone-weil-on-attention-human-dignity-and-factory-work/

Moral sage
Died at 34

If keep life at safe distance, prevents you from seeing world in truly clear way

Marx – if his predictions were wrong, it may be because he never truly lived a worker’s life

After working in factories, feeling affliction firsthand, ideas grow more radical

People hide behind the abstract
While many out there are truly suffering and starving

We’re also starving in “needs of the soul”

14 of these needs
1. Order – need some order to function, just like food
2. Liberty
3. etc
Many of these are in tension with each other – and need balance
Each contributes to peoples’ psychological needs

Biggest need that is sabotaged by modern society – “the need for roots”, like a plant

Any human being that is truly independent?
No, inseparable from society

People get roots from active participation in life of community

Colonialism destroys this culture and solidarity
In her time, France subjugated foreign cultures, tried to replace with French culture
This transplanting is like uprooting a plant, destroying the roots

Codified human rights won’t matter to a person like Hitler

Forced prostitution is wrong and we all agree on it – but it’s far deeper than legal rights

Preferred discussing human NEEDS rather than rights

Separating people from their own culture, roots is de-humanizing

Revolution was the new opiate of the masses – but very little comes out of it

After her factory experience, she discovered a new way to think about ethics

What makes someone sacred?
Is it their body? Their unique personality?

The way forward is a spiritual revolution
Cultivation of a new kind of attention
Renounce the ego
Receive the world in a more universal, impersonal way
De-creating biases, assumptions, that we bring to bear
This is a spiritual transformation
Connect to human beings on a universal shared level, instead of at level of personality or physicality

Similar to Catholic sacrament of Eucharist

This new form of attention is a new lens to see the world

Become an antenna for God to communicate with
An experience to feel closer connection to the universe

“Waiting for God” – her most famous book

Podcast notes – philosopher Simone Weil on attention, human dignity, and factory work

“philosopher simone weil teaching a class of students under a big tree, photorealistic, renaissance art style”

Link to episode: https://philosophizethis.libsyn.com/episode-172-simone-weil-attention

Podcast: Philosophize This!
Topic: Simone Weil (SW)

1928 – Simone accepted to Ecole Normal Superior – Sartre, Derrida, Foucault
One of 11 in her class, only woman
Scored highest marks – second was Simone de Beauvoir

SW tried to live by the values she espoused – a living philosophy
Died at 34 from tuberculosis, arguably from hunger bc she wouldn’t accept more food due to the widespread famine

As a teen, taught herself Sanskrit so she could read Bhagavad Gita

Camus said she was “the only great spirit of our time”

Importance of attention, the ethics of attention
The quality of attention dictates every experience that you have

Different experience of everything you do is available to you – depending on how you choose to pay attention
ONLY if you’re open to receiving it

Most people fall into default state of attention – based on biology and habits

School education – one of first places we learn to pay attention

After graduation, SW gets a job teaching, unique style
Her class would sit under a tree and just think about new problems in a field (eg, geometry)
Encouraged students to think openly and creatively

For complex problems, by default, people search for answers, and settle into incomplete answers, and then it’s about defending your position and finding people who just agree with you
Hardest job of teaching is to change this collectivist way of thinking

Instead, accept that everything you believe is a partial truth, seek new experiences, without agenda

Our thought should be empty, open, not seeking, ready to receive

Concept of “passive activity”
Strike a balance between completely passive and completely in control / aggressive activity
Middle path – put in effort, but remove your personal prejudices, detached from your self

“The great human error is to reason in place of finding out”

She could’ve lived a very comfortable life, but chooses adventure / new experience
Went to the trenches, joined front of Spanish Civil War, lies and says she’s a journalist! Despite being far sighted
Act of courage based on moral conviction
Accidentally steps into pot of boiling oil, scalded badly

Quit job as a teacher
For months, she does physical labor in an auto factory to better understand the working class / worker life
Learns that the main priority of these jobs is the “quota”, the output – matters more than the people
Impossible for these workers to think about other stuff – must meet quota
Thinking is the first thing to go
Means to an end for someone else’s economic goal
Made into a modern day slave / robot
Zero connection to what you’re producing

Concludes that the biggest thing these factories produce (in workers) is affliction, a spiritual malaise
Affliction is when people are transformed from human begins into things – and they’re incapable of thinking their way out of this stuck place of existence

Force is to humans as gravity is to physical world – what makes things happen
Power itself isn’t the problem; the problem is the “pursuit of power”, in this pursuit people will be turned by others into instruments

As remedy, could focus on Political change vs. Spiritual change

All it takes is one person to see things differently to inspire change in others

Suspend your own personal agenda, see others as they are