Simone Weil and the Struggle against Time
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 03 February 2024 is the 115th anniversary of the birth of Simone Weil (03 February 1909–24 August 1943), who was born in Paris on this date in 1909. Weil lived a short life and died at the age of 34 in 1943. Despite her short life she left a significant body of work, much of it of a devotional character, though I don’t want to sound like I am belittling her work because it is devotional, rather than, for example, being more explicitly philosophical. St. Augustine’s work is also primarily devotional but also philosophical.
I hadn’t thought about Weil in relation to philosophy of history until I happened upon Bennett Gilbert’s paper “Simone Weil’s Philosophy of History.” This prompted me to look further into her work. Previously I had read one biography of her, the one by Francine du Plessix Gray, and I skimmed some of her books, but mostly because her life interested me. What makes her life interesting? Partly it’s the number of roles she played in her life: from graduate of the École Normale Supérieure to friend of Trotsky to factory worker to soldier in the Spanish Civil War to working with De Gaulle to aspiring to work as a secret agent in occupied France even while in her final illness.
Already recognized as an eccentric as a teenager, Weil was called the “Red Virgin” because of her uncompromising Marxism. Simone de Beauvoir met her once and described the encounter in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:
“She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits… I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started. She said in piercing tones that only one thing mattered these days: the revolution that would feed all the starving people on the earth. I retorted, no less adamantly, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to help them find a meaning in their existence. She glared at me and said, ‘It’s clear you’ve never gone hungry.’ Our relations ended right there. I realized she had classified me as a high-minded little bourgeoise, and I was angry.”
In 1934 and 1935, full of passion for the labor movement, she got work in factories as a machine operator. There’s something almost performative about a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure getting a job at a Renault plant, wanting to share the experiences of the proletariat, but this is what she did, and she kept a journal while working that is interesting in its own right. But if you read between the lines of her factory work and her military service you clearly get the impression that her fellow workers and fellow soldiers knew all too well that she was extremely clumsy with neither the talent nor the aptitude nor the stamina to do this kind of work. No doubt they respected her commitment and perhaps also her ideals, but they had to compensate for her performance.
If we wanted to be uncharitable we would say that she was larping as worker and a soldier, which is no better than Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milk maid. If we wanted to be charitable, we would say that she had a sincere desire to share the in suffering of the proletariat, and in fact her sincerity led her to actually involve herself in these activities and not merely to observe from a distance and write about it. When I think of Weil’s life I am reminded of what Walter Kaufmann wrote about Kierkegaard:
“Against the theoretical philosophy of Hegel and his predecessors [Kierkegaard] pitted a mode of reflection closer to the individual’s concrete existence. He tried to live his thoughts — at times grotesquely, as he pictures his own efforts in The Point of View, but at other times, especially at the end of his life, with a complete and utter disregard for his temporal welfare.”
This almost perfectly describes Weil as well, perhaps it even charitably describes her, including the utter disregard for her personal welfare. It seems likely that her health was permanently damaged by her work and her military service, and this may have contributed to her early death, which she would have called her passing into eternity. If you can live out your ideas, like Kierkegaard or Weil, why would you choose to live in history? Why settle for time when you can have eternity? In the lesson notes to her Lectures on Philosophy she betrays some of the struggle to transcend time and history:
“Time is the most profound and the most tragic subject which human beings can think about. One might even say: the only thing that is tragic. All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time. Time is also the origin of all forms of enslavement.”
And her notes end thus:
“There are two possible attitudes: One can either let time roll by (like a little boy with a ball of wool), or one can fill it up; this gives to the passing moments an eternal value. If one thinks of death as a passing into eternity, one has, of necessity, to think that there was something eternal in life. Cf. Mallarme: ‘So that at last he is changed into himself by eternity.’ So, the only problem that man has to face, is the struggle against time.”
We know how Weil responded to the choice that she framed above: she filled her life with the struggle against time, presumably giving to the passing moments something of eternal value. Again, one could give a charitable or an uncharitable account of this; one could call it a form of escapism or a form of idealism. Where do we draw the line between the two, or is there any line?
Time is a form of bondage to the world, hence a form of bondage to history, hence we struggle against time as we struggle to free ourselves from enslavement. Weil makes a distinction between escape from time and submission to time, such that, “All sins are an attempt to escape from time. Virtue is to submit to time, to press it to the heart until the heart breaks. Then one is in the eternal.” Eternity and the eternal appear on almost every page of her notebooks, one could even say that eternity is omnipresent in Weil’s thought, often contrasted to time, which is demonic: “Sanctity is the only way out from time. In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.”
Sanctity is presumably the way out of time through submission; one does not escape from time, but rather sanctity makes it possible to submit to time without servility. And one could say in the same spirit that we must submit to history, not escape from it. Despite keeping her distance form history, Weil acknowledges the role of history in human understanding, as long as events as shown in their true perspective in relation to the eternal order:
“No other method exists for acquiring knowledge about the human heart than the study of history coupled with experience of life, in such a way that the two throw light upon each other. It is our duty to supply this food to the mind of youth, the mind of Man. But it must be a truth-giving food. Facts must not only be correct, so far as one is able to verify them, but must be shown in their true perspective relatively to good and evil.”
Here history is submitted to the judgment of the eternal order, and thus, in a sense, history itself submits eternity no less than the individual submits to history. Weil offers an edifying account of the necessary submission to time and history that is consistent with her idealism:
“…consent and not fear of punishment or hope of reward constitutes, in fact, the mainspring of obedience, so that submission may never be mistaken for servility. It should also be realized that those who command, obey in their turn, and the whole hierarchy should have its face set in the direction of a goal whose importance and even grandeur can be felt by all, from the highest to the lowest.”
What is this goal? It is the eternal order that transcends history. We do not — we ought not — endure history with our teeth clenched. We must submit to history without servility, always with our eye on eternity. But can we do this, given what Mircea Eliade called the terror of history? Weil acknowledged the terror of history as an atrocity:
“Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity — the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious.” (Simone Weil, An Anthology, p. 159)
Despite this distinction (or perhaps because of this distinction) between two kinds of monotony — monotony as atrocity and monotony as eternity — Weil in her Factory Journal uses “eternity” in a colloquial way as a comment on the monotony of her working conditions:
“Going back to work infinitely more painful than I would have thought. The days seem an eternity to me. Heat… Headaches… These C4 by 16 screws disgust me. It’s one of the ‘cushy jobs’; I would have to do it quickly, and I can’t. Barely finished, I think, by 3:30. Prostration, bitterness at stupifying work, disgust. Fear also, all the time, of the cutter coming loose. Nevertheless, it happens. The wait to have the cutters changed. For the 1st time I succeed in changing a cutter myself, with no help at all, and Philippe says that it’s right in the middle. A victory, better than speed. I also learn, after another bad experience, to adjust the tightness of the screw and handle at the end myself. Lucien sometimes completely forgets to tighten it… The M.P.R. screws. Michel warns me. He doesn’t set them up, but ‘spectacles’ does it. I do the M.P.R.s a little faster than before, but still very, very slowly.” (Formative writings, 1929–1941, p. 223)
Everyone who has worked for a living will find this familiar even if all the particulars of it are different. Weil thoughtlessly called this experience of work “an eternity,” and I am mildly surprised that she did not elaborate on this theme of her workplace monotony as a form of unvarying perpetuity in contradistinction to monotony as a reflection of eternity; this was a missed opportunity for her thought. She admitted that, while working at the factory, she was exhausted and scarcely had the energy to think:
“The effect of exhaustion is to make me forget my real reasons for spending time in the factory, and to make it almost impossible for me to overcome the strongest temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking anymore, which is the one and only way of not suffering from it. It’s only on Saturday afternoon and Sunday that a few memories and shreds of ideas return to me, and I remember that I am also a thinking being. The terror that takes hold of me when I realize how dependent I am on external circumstances: all that would be needed is for circumstances someday to force me to work at a job without a weekly rest — which after all is always possible — and I would become a beast of burden, docile and resigned (at least for me). Only the feeling of brotherhood, and outrage in the face of injustices inflicted on others, remain intact — but how long would all that last? I am almost ready to conclude that the salvation of a worker’s soul depends primarily on his physical constitution. I don’t see how those who are not physically strong can avoid falling into some form of despair, drunkenness, or vagabondage, or crime, or debauchery, or simply (and far more often) brutishness — (and religion ? ).” (Formative Writings, p. 171)
In her factory journal she does sound like she is barely enduring the conditions of her employment, that she is, as I suggested above, enduring it with her teeth clenched. She has not managed to entirely separate time from eternity in order to transcend history. Despite the exhaustion she experienced, she recognized something redeeming within labor:
“The Spiritual function of physical labour is the contemplation of things, the contemplation of nature. Passing over to the eternal is, for the soul, an operation analogous to that by which, in perception, we refrain from putting ourselves at the centre of space although perspective makes us seem to be there. And, here again, it is the very condition for perception, the condition for seeing the real.”
This is a Copernican reflection: the perspective of the eternal is the condition for seeing the real. We could call this a spiritual Copernicanism, and her spiritual Copernicanism in part explains her criticism of providential philosophies of history:
“The good, which it is given to Man to observe in the universe, is finite, limited. To endeavor to discern therein evidence of divine action is to turn God himself into a finite, a limited good. It is a blasphemy… All providential interpretations of history are unavoidably situated on exactly the same level. It is the case with Bossuet’s conception of history. It is at the same time appalling and stupid, equally revolting for the intelligence as for the heart. One has to be more than ordinarily sensitive to the resonance of words to be able to regard this courtier-prelate as a great mind”
Weil goes on for several pages criticizing what she takes to be shallow and misguided conceptions of divine providence, eventually explicating her own conception of divine providence, which is a beautifully expressed ideal:
“Divine Providence is not a disturbing influence, an anomaly in the ordering of the world; it is itself the order of the world; or rather it is the regulating principle of this universe. It is eternal Wisdom, unique, spread across the whole universe in a sovereign network of relations.”
If, in passing into eternity we remove ourselves from the spiritual center, it is divine providence in splendid isolation from the human condition that takes its proper place at the center, constituting the eternal order upon which we at the margins keep our eyes fixed. Moreover, we need to be spiritually prepared to be able to see this as the real and to recognize it as such, rather than looking to the accidental and contingent circumstances of the world to reveal the order of providence, which we perceive as either as in accordance or contrary to our wishes, as a embodiment of hope or fear.
The ideal that Weil erects is so distant and so difficult to place beside the world we know, I wonder how many among us have the hardihood to entertain this as our hope. I wrote above that Weil possessed neither the talent nor the aptitude nor the stamina to be a factory worker or a soldier, but she did possess in abundance the aptitude and the stamina to conceive and to present a kind of Apollonian ideal of divine providence which few would have the strength to see as any kind of support in their hour of need.
There is a sense in which this is a providential philosophy of history, in spite of her criticism of the providentialism of Bossuet and others, which we might call vulgar providentialism. We could call Weil an internal critic of providentialism who then formulates a providentialist philosophy of history with a difference, but still with more in common with other providential thought than any other philosophy of history; this was, after all, is the only tradition in philosophy of history with which she engages, and it is here that the tradition begins with Augustine’s providential philosophy of history in his City of God.
Weil has been called a Christian Platonist, viz. by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil; Augustine is often called a Christian Platonist — we could say that Augutine’s philosophy was the origin of Christian Platonism. Not only was Augustine the first in the Western tradition to write a philosophy of history, he was also one of the few philosophers of history to also write on the philosophy of time (Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions is a detailed discussion of time). There is a large literature on time and eternity in Augustine, and it would be a worthwhile project to explicate Weil’s sense of time and eternity in light of the work that has been done on Augustine’s sense of time and eternity, but I will save that for another time.
