Scan barcode
A review by mveldeivendran
Simone Weil: An Anthology by Simone Weil
5.0
When she died of heart failure early at the age of 34 by August 1943, the coroner’s report concluded that she “did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
Camus got to find the manuscripts of Weil around 1948 and it deeply influenced his ways of thinking and writing ever since until his own untimely death. His Essay Rebel (1951) felt, in a personal way, more like answering to Weil's argument on Justice and Freedom, Oppression, Revolt and Rebellion while reading her essays. He called her, 'the only great spirit of our time.' Many of her writings were indeed copied in his personal notebooks.
She studied with Beauvoir and other french intellectuals and later, taught geometry and philosophy to Uni students, and Greek tragedy to industrial workers. She organized French pacifist movements but also carried a gun alongside republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Despite her rich scholarly knowledge in Greek, Latin, English and German, she toiled herself in the assembly line factories until her death.
I feel that to try to genuinely understand Weil in her own way, one has to see the presence of two realities, similar to Plato's conception, material world and mystical world dominated respectively by science, geometry, and her own ground of metaphysical affliction and suffering, the beauty of justice.
This particular anthology has almost half of his contents from Gravity and Grace (1947), selected excerpts from the Needs for Roots (1949) and other political and metaphysical essays. As much as I enjoyed reading it, I would've enjoyed it better taking up one of her original works since the collections are anachronistically picked and felt a bit harder to reconcile.
Simone Weil is a enigmatic powerful force I write it with a provoked consciousness grateful for the enormous expansion in the possibilities of being in our times despite her contradictions. They say to be whole is to be full of contradiction.
Camus got to find the manuscripts of Weil around 1948 and it deeply influenced his ways of thinking and writing ever since until his own untimely death. His Essay Rebel (1951) felt, in a personal way, more like answering to Weil's argument on Justice and Freedom, Oppression, Revolt and Rebellion while reading her essays. He called her, 'the only great spirit of our time.' Many of her writings were indeed copied in his personal notebooks.
She studied with Beauvoir and other french intellectuals and later, taught geometry and philosophy to Uni students, and Greek tragedy to industrial workers. She organized French pacifist movements but also carried a gun alongside republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Despite her rich scholarly knowledge in Greek, Latin, English and German, she toiled herself in the assembly line factories until her death.
I feel that to try to genuinely understand Weil in her own way, one has to see the presence of two realities, similar to Plato's conception, material world and mystical world dominated respectively by science, geometry, and her own ground of metaphysical affliction and suffering, the beauty of justice.
This particular anthology has almost half of his contents from Gravity and Grace (1947), selected excerpts from the Needs for Roots (1949) and other political and metaphysical essays. As much as I enjoyed reading it, I would've enjoyed it better taking up one of her original works since the collections are anachronistically picked and felt a bit harder to reconcile.
Simone Weil is a enigmatic powerful force I write it with a provoked consciousness grateful for the enormous expansion in the possibilities of being in our times despite her contradictions. They say to be whole is to be full of contradiction.