Adonis Diaries

Simone Weil: No credible philosophy without active field engagement…

Note: A re-edit of my post in 2012

In this century of global turmoil and global wars, WWI and II, successive genocides, Afghanistan, Viet Nam, Iraq, ISIS,…Simone Weil was concerned to find links between the state of Gravity (miseries, injustices, brute force, subjugation…) and the state of Grace (Justice, equitable treatment, civil rights, political rights…)

Weil visited Germany in 1932 and experienced the incapacity of the German communist party to be freed from the Soviet dictate and Soviet bureaucracy.  Consequently, faced this rude reality, Weil dropped her previous revolutionary positions due to the total passive behavior of the communists in Germany.

In 1934-35, Weil took a sabbatical from teaching, and worked at the factories of Alsthom and Renault as a daily worker. She kept a diary, and she had to share the workers daily conditions and feelings on the floor-shop, if she had to talk of the working class…

How can people balance the repeated society massive submission to the power-to-be (following orders that are terribly evil) and the individual tendency to avoid harming innocent people?

Are the systematic coercive structure and violent acts of totalitarianism behind this recurring mass subjugation phenomena throughout history?

Desiring to know the truth is a yearning to be in direct touch with reality, no matter how cruel and brutal it might be.

For example, if you claim to describe the conditions and represent the working class, you must be engaged in the daily work activities of the worker, and be connected to the actual working people in specific domain of productions…

In 1936, Weil was side by side with the Spanish anarchists during the civil war…

Simone Weil proclaimed to study the ancient mythologies, the metaphysical texts, the universal folkloric stories…with the same intellectual probity of attitude.

She was opposed to apartheid Zionist ideology and had harsh critics of the radical Hebraic practiced religion:

1. All that is inspired from the Old Testament by Christianity is bad…

2. The concept of Sanctity in the Church was emulated from the Sanctity notion of Israel…

3. Up until the Israelite were exiled to Babylon, not a single character in the Bible was not soiled by horrible acts…

4. Daniel was initiated to the Chaldean wise culture in captivity…

5. The Genesis is a compendium of all the Egyptian stories, transported and adapted… (including the Near-East culture)

6. Weil cannot comprehend how a reasonable mind can see similarity between Jehovah and the Father of the New Testament…

7. The mission of Israel was to acknowledge the unity of a God, without discriminating among people, culture, and the principles of Good and Evil…

8. The Hebrew attributed to God all that is considered supernatural, what is divine and what is demonic: Simply because they view their God in the angle of Power and not in the approach of what is Good and what is Evil…

Viewing God of Power denies any intermediary between the believer and God, although there is no alternative to an Mediator.  Otherwise, God is emptied of divinity and is reduced to a racial and national entity that is directly accessible to anyone (with evil intentions)…

9. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks had this recognition that God is The Good. The God of the Hebrew was carnal, collective, heavy…who engaged in temporal promises.

10. Weil rejects “National God” and refuses the notion of a “Promised Land“…

Note 2: Simone Weil published “Gravity and Grace”, “The rooting” (L’enracinement)

Note 3: Simone Weil was a French deputy, a minister and inducted in the French Academy