Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a powerful thinker of the 20th Century, who declared that philosophy, “(including problems of cognition[1], etc) is exclusively an affair of action and practice” (Weil, 2015, p. 362). She is often described as a mystic, which is at least partly true, as long as one remembers that mysticism can have a phenomenological intensity of attention to the vibrant actuality of the here-and-now. (See for example Meister Eckhart’s interpretation of Mary and Martha meeting Jesus, which he turns upside down, making the practical Martha the true hearer. See also the Zen tradition, starting with Dogen’s Instructions to the Cook).
Philosophy-as-action is one reason why Weil ought to be of great interest to nurses, though she is barely mentioned in the nursing philosophical literature. Another reason is that one of the themes in her thinking as “affliction” which is close to suffering, in its usual senses, but for her meant degradation of human dignity to the point of “total humiliation” (Weil, 2005, pp. 90-91).
She usually associates affliction with outside forces, whether of nature, as in a life-altering disease, or harsh working conditions, or political oppression, though it also depends on a person’s response to external force. “The degree and type of suffering which constitutes affliction in the strict sense of the word varies greatly with different people. It depends chiefly upon the amount of vitality they start with and upon their attitude towards suffering” (Weil, 2005, p. 90). Affliction is connected with compassion by way of recognition that the potential for affliction is always present, since we are subject to external forces and ultimately to the force of nature in the form of death. Hence, “Compassion is the recognition of one’s own misery in another,” (Weil, 2015, p. 209) yet “In order to feel compassion for someone in affliction, the soul has to be divided in two. One part absolutely removed from all contamination and all danger of contamination. The other part contaminated to the point of identification” (Weil, 2015, p. 97).
Her way of talking about affliction and compassion in these quotations begins to give a flavour of her writing. She is challenging in the demands she makes on the reader – misery and contamination are not words one expects to find in contemporary sanitized accounts of a human phenomenon like compassion, which Weil sees as a vexed, conflicted thing for the very reason it is human phenomenon.
That is one of the reasons I suspect Weil does not feature in nursing literature. As sympathetic readers from T.S. Eliot to Robert Zaretsky (2021) have pointed out, you have to be prepared to think against her as much as with her. T.S. Eliot wrote, “I cannot conceive of anybody’s agreeing with all of her views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them” (Eliot, 2002, p. viii). There is no such thing as a Weilian, like a Marxist or a Foucauldian, and she would have abhorred the very thought of such a being. This inbuilt resistance to conformism grants her thinking an incommensurability that is frustrating and moving at the same time.
Another reason she has not been more discussed is that her work was almost entirely published posthumously and her ideas are scattered across articles, essays, notebooks, and letters. It makes it difficult at times to grasp even her most important concepts as she says different things about them in different moments and contexts. She moved from an idiosyncratic near-anarchist position in the 1930s to a profound religious belief in the last years of her life. Either or both of those are enough to deter many readers. And yet, like many others, I find a compelling quality to her work that is utterly defiant of the orthodoxies of her own lifetime and of the present moment.
This is a somewhat scattershot introduction to Simone Weil’s thinking – I had started out intending to discuss one of her observations about force and prestige, which I have not even mentioned yet. I wanted to give a semblance of an introduction with some suggestion of why I am writing about her on this site, about Nursing and Humanities. I will come back to the prestige thing!
References
Eliot, T.S. (2002). Preface. In S.Weil, The Need for Roots. Routledge.
Weil, S. (2005). An Anthology (S. Miles, Ed.). Penguin.
Weil, S. (2015). First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge. Wipf & Stock.
Zaretsky, R. (2021). The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. The University of Chicago Press.
[1] An intriguing aside – was Weil an enactivist avant la lettre?
Nursing and Humanities 