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Gravity and grace

2020-08-09T14:32:19.786Z


Simone Weil argues that there are two forces that strain any phenomenon. The first tends to heaviness, the second makes bodies feel the breath of inspiration


“You have to distribute the logos well through the entrails” —Empédocles

If the secret of life is never to have an inelegant emotion, and if real life is one that we do not direct, which takes us from one battle to another, as Oscar Wilde proposed, then the life of Simone Weil is a model of life full, unfair, as a life should be (because if it were fair it would be worse). Weil is an example of a free and chained soul. Free because of her strong will to cross ideological, ethical and metaphysical boundaries: she was Christian and Jewish, worker and anti-communist, peasant and intellectual, pacifist and fighter, philosopher and theologian. Chained, for her exquisite sensitivity to perceive the macabre drift of interwar Europe. No one of her time had such a lucid awareness of the oppression that hung over the old world. Hence, Albert Camus blessed her as "the only great spirit of our time." To know first-hand the working-class reality, she worked in the fields and in the factories, she joined the Durruti column in the Spanish civil war (with a rifle without ammunition and an 11-rod shirt) and then the French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Her honesty might be unbearable, but her sweetness ended up paving the way for dialogue and compassion.

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Three months after Hitler was constitutionally appointed Chancellor of Germany, another great philosopher, Edith Stein, entered the Carmel in Cologne. Germany was projected, imperial, outwards. Stein does it, empathetic, inward. Six trunks loaded with books accompany your entry. In that same year, Weil, who is the age of Christ, faced the socio-political and spiritual crisis in Europe in a different way. He has already opted for the demand for intellectual probity, to which he joins a tireless criticism of the forms of power. An ecologist without knowing it, she questions the Marxist logic of the unlimited growth of the productive forces and prepares Reflections on the causes of freedom and social oppression, which collect what she learned within the revolutionary syndicalism before her experience as a worker in the industry of the car. He aspires to find the mechanism of oppression in the material conditions of social organization. It vindicates the "true legacy of Marx", materialism as a method of knowledge and action. Discover the causes of oppression not only in the hierarchical structure of the factory, but also in specialization and the division of labor. Faced with the "religion of the productive forces" characteristic of vulgar Marxism (and the comforting dogma of progress), he proposes a new science of society that anticipates Foucault and that focuses on the study of the struggle for power and social force. While totalitarianisms proliferate, she seeks the conditions of a free society in which the individual capacity to think and act prevails over the social machine and the blind collectivity. A situation similar to the one we live in today with dataism. Weil would agree that dataism supposes the liquidation of thought and that handing over thought to machines is the ultimate surrender of freedom.

His honesty might be unbearable, but his sweetness paved the way for dialogue and compassion.

A deep religious crisis brought her closer to Christianity, but, like Bergson, she renounces being baptized because of her status as a Jew. She maintains that there are two forces that strain any phenomenon, no matter how small: gravity and grace. The first tends towards heaviness, the second illuminates the grave and draws it towards itself, elevating it, making the bodies feel the breath of inspiration. An ancient doctrine that she updated in her notebooks, which she filled with fervor. The universe is not only gravity, it also experiences a "deifugal" force (the flight of God), with which the One attracts the plurality into which it has been disintegrated. The driving motive of his metaphysical reflections is the unity of the finite and the infinite that the divine has realized in time. Like Leibniz, he believed that creation requires God to renounce his omnipotence. Love of neighbor and prayer are the way to shed the ego and reinforce the bond with the divine. An idea consigned over and over again in the Greek and Hindu tradition. All of them methods, such as the nostalgia for the good, of overcoming one's own finitude.

I would agree that handing over thought to machines is the ultimate surrender of freedom

As in the case of Spinoza, Weil's works were published by his friends after his death from tuberculosis. He was 34 years old, 10 years younger than the Sephardic. In his brief life he chose empathy in the face of power, experience in the institution, the eccentric in the concentric, the mystical in pragmatism. He knew that the concept of justice, when applied to life, is perverted, as well as that of contradiction. He searched boldly for a religious experience that was not the patrimony of the great or the intellectuals, but the legitimate aspiration of workers and simple people. An unrepentant activist, she was more Greek than Roman, more Orphic than Pythagorean. He was willingly carried away by the presentiment of the divine destiny of the soul, by the Platonic nostalgia for the eternal good. An intuition "that is distilling, drop by drop, in the dream of the unconscious". When it comes to becoming aware of oneself, he adds, one is already a prey of grace. It only remains to give consent. A feminine ethos that flees from abstractions and is oriented towards the living and concrete, to integrate the intellectual and affective, to a perception of the heart.

Weil would subscribe the words of Don Quixote to Sancho, although he would omit the insult. “Fool, it is not up to the knights-errant to find out if the afflicted, chained and oppressed that they encounter on the roads go that way or are in that anguish, because of their faults or misfortunes; He only has to help them as if they are needy, putting his eyes on their sorrows, and not on their mischief ”. She was one of them.

Source: elparis

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