How Sound A Sacrifice?

"Do you think Weil was a self-hater?" a student asked me provocatively over Sunday dinner after reading Elizabeth Hardwick's recent New York Times Book Review piece on this new biography of Simone Weil. The questioner was suggesting that Weil, the French Jewish philosopher who died of self-inflicted starvation during the Second World War, was driven in her life and was led to final self-destruction by a sense of racial shame and guilt.

Drawing from Hardwick's powerful summary of this troubling figure's 42 years, my company sought a facile, shrinky key to Weil's life history of self-punishment: her insistence as a child that she always carry the heaviest bundles on family trips; her stubborn rejection of all bourgeois fashion and living comforts; her willful insistence--while she held a well-salaried job with the Ministry of Education--to surround herself with only the bare necessities she thought the unemployed could afford.

But even more puzzling to this woman than Simone's lifetime of asceticism was Weil's noble yet awful and haunting death. The end came in forced war-time exile from France, when Simone Weil, frail since childhood and now suffering from tuberculosis, chose to starve herself to death in British hospitals rather than accept more food than prisoners of war were offered inside occupied France. With what one doctor later called "total lucidity of mind" and a saintly air of peaceful self-possession, Weil drove herself to the point where her body could no longer take in enough food to sustain life. Apologizing to her English doctors for her stubbornness a Dr. Brockerford reports that Weil explained that she "couldn't eat when she thought of the French people starving in France."

As it turns out, slick interpretations like racial guilt amount to nothing more than cheap shots that totally miss the mark when dealing with Weil. Although she flirted with the thought of converting to Christianity in the years before her death, allegedly telling a friend while in London "if one day I am completely deprived of my will, in a coma, then they ought to baptize me," Simone Petrement makes clear in this thoughtful biography that the Weil family never either stressed nor denied their religious and cultural ancestry.

Yet the suspicious curiosity that drives one to make this stab psychologism cannot be dismissed so easily. The question still remains: what motivated Weil's deliberate self-destruction? Could Weil really have been as sound-mindedly generous and saintly in her suffering as Hardwick asserted in her review, and as Petrement argues throughout this study? Isn't there something just plain wrong with someone who makes a vocation out of subjecting herself to the same oppression that prisoners and workers--whom Weil called "the humiliated layer of the social hierarchy"--had to face? (Compassion is one thing, but self-torture is another.)

Given this highly introspective, sensitive woman and a morally confusing, violent historical background, the answer can by no means be simple. Yet this thorough biography, written by a schoolmate-friend of Weil's and bringing together unpublished fragments of Simone's letters and thoughts that afford fascinating insights into her intellectual and ideological maturation, provides reasoned, judicious evidence that suggests some possibilities.

Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris, to Dr. Bernard Weil and his wife, Selma. By Petrement's account Simone's were model parents--cultured yet unaffected, proud of their children's successes but not pushy, fun-loving and emotionally honest. Simone and her brother Andre, a precocious methematician who currently works at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton, enjoyed a materially privileged and psychologically peaceful childhood--spending early years and summers in the country and benefitting from the best of Parisian schooling during their teens and early twenties.

During the four or five years of the first World War, however, the Weils moved about often, following Simone's father to the various outposts where the French Army stationed him. There Simone's mother devoted herself to nursing her physician husband and his comrades. So one could argue (Petrement certainly seems to) that from observing her mother's altruism, the germ of self-sacrifice was planted early in this otherwise normal, gifted child.

But nothing in Simone's background quite prepares the reader for the rush of intense intellectuality and social activism that marked her twenties. After graduation from the Lycee Henri IV in Paris, Weil entered France's prestigious Ecole Normale as one of the first women admitted to the institute, and proceeded to scandalize professors with her ardent and polemical radicalism. She habitually carried a trade union bulletin in one pocket of a rumpled man's jacket and the French communist newspaper L'Humanite in the other. She unabashedly solicited donations to worker relief funds from incredulous instructors.

One teacher, who had a particularly intense dislike for Simone, her daring philosophical syntheses and her belligerent leftism, labelled her the "Red Virgin." When she received her teaching certificate, he arranged to have the Education ministry refuse her a post in the industrial, union-base cities she had requested, and to have her sent instead to a small town called Le Puy in central France. (This professor is rumored to have said, "we'll send her...as far away as possible so that we shall never hear of her again."

At Le Puy Simone nevertheless hurried to involve herself in the struggle for trade union unification, participating in demonstrations of the unemployed in nearby St. Etienne. There she gained a reputation in the local national press as a Moscow agent. (Weil never joined the Communist or any other party, and Petrement only hints that she may have wanted to at one time. In any case, what began as a vigorous skepticism about the value of political reforms and party discipline later grew into a repudiation of any faith in political goals, either revolutionary or reformist.)

After her half-decade of immersion in the life of a student, Simone's ties with the union chiefs and members, which she would keep up until her death, seem to have fulfilled an extroverted, folksy side to her character that allowed her to be accepted as a friend and comrade. Snide journalists accused her of class hypocrisy, but her determination to serve rather than self-congratulate convinced the workers of her sincerity.

Weil's resolve to share the material and psychological hardships of what she called society's "afflicted" led her, three years after receiving her teacher's certificate, to go through a year of factory work in an electrical shop and a Renault plant in Paris. Finding that she needed to train her body to operate like a machine to meet "piece-work" quotas, giving her neither time nor energy to think or reflect, Weil began to change all her notions about the chance of worker resistance and solidarity. She found that the oppressive conditions, instead of reinforcing her ideological belief in rebellion, mesmerized her into docility and submission.

Only then, she later wrote, did she understand the fate of the "afflicted"--those who, unlike the "oppressed" who harbour either real or imagined hope for revolution, must live with the inexorable fear that life will victimize them. "Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave," she wrote shortly before her death.

The factory experience, along with a gradual disillusionment with political and unionist haggles that had set in the years before, finally led Weil to focus all her later, seminal writing on the question of how to alleviate this sense of enslavement. She rejected all forms of State domination, comparing both Hitler's fascist state and Stalin's Socialist state to the Republic and Empire of Ancient Rome, which she loathed. Even though she herself volunteered to fight alongside the Republic and during the Spanish Civil War, she pamphletted against France's involvement and against all forms of international war, abhoring the way rearmament perpetuated industrial subjection and the way military discipline degraded the soldier.

The Roman regime and the stories of the Old Testament sickened her with their exultation of cruelty and bad faith. Greek tragedy and the Gospels cheered her with suggestions of how men can deal with his sense of imprisonment by nature and by history. In her last essay, "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," she goes so far as to challenge Marx, arguing that force, rather than class struggle, is the key to man's fate. And since liberation from these forces is hopeless, she concluded, to deal with "affliction" man must cling to a belief in a Supernatural Good--for Simone, perhaps, to a Christian God.

Although Weil's last ideas mark a certain defeatism--a final submission to the need for inner faith--Petrement's presentation suggests that Simone was headed along this path all along, and her primary motives and objective in life, both intellectual and emotional, are tied up with this spiritual journey.

For from the very earliest essays she wrote at the Lycee for her intellectual mentor, the philosopher Alain, Weil had stressed the conviction that to make her life worthwhile--to not "waste death," as she once put it--she would have to exert her Will against the seemingly infinite limitations that life presented (her own frail body, her recurring headaches, the constraints on social and political change in her lifetime). This doctrine of Will seems to have provided a mission and to have met her psychological and emotional need for expectation, devotion and objective response.

Yet her tests of will--the factory work, or her struggle to continue writing despite almost paralyzing headaches--did not represent for Simone a way of feeling heroic or omnipotent, but rather of reminding herself constantly that she had limits and, as she once wrote in a note to herself, that she wasn't God. Thus the final turn toward mysticism suggest a spiritual reconciliation with this challenging awareness of limits.

Of course the potential for such as idealist life (I use idealistic both in the sense of "positive" and "ideal-based") could only have flourished with the encouragement of both an understanding family and a social and historical framework that made Weil's ideas and then actions--the constant testing of her will--seem worthy. Weil was blessed with both these supports; thus much of what now appears to be eccentricity sprang, in reality, from inspiring influences.

It may therefore seem irrelevant today to ask, as a Harvard lecture series on Simone Weil did last year, "Live Like Her?" But those who encounter her thoughts and deeds through this fine biography will no doubt be haunted by her noble example, perhaps only for a moment--but perhaps for a long while.

Weil herself left the world upset that people praised her life rather than looking to her works. "Is what she says true?", is the question that, three weeks before her death, she said she wanted posterity to address.

Yet the philosopher Alain, who had exerted such a formative influence on her ideas about life fifteen years earlier, might have answered her plea with this definition of truth (paraphrased from his informal "doctrine" by Petrement): "an idea is not true by itself, independent of the thinker: it is not right to speak of a true idea but rather of true thoughts, of true men and women." Simone Weil lived this definition. And it may be that in the end she feld that only letting herself die could she continue to live her truth