France and Britain went in opposite directions around the year 1905. France drove the Catholic orders out of education and refused to provide any State funding for Church schools. This meant that a large section of the population felt alienated from the Republic. In England, despite Civil Disobedience from 'Dissenters', Church Schools got State Funding. Other measures taken around that time conciliated organized labour and introduced 'death duties' much to the distress of the landed Aristocracy. All in all, the UK was more united, going into war, than France. This directly affected military strategy and is quoted as a reason for France's defective offensive doctrine.
French intellectuals of the inter-war period proved deaf, dumb and blind to the real problems facing their country. Teachers in State Schools should have championed the cause of their ill-paid brethren in the Catholic 'free' schools. But education itself should have been geared to boosting productivity and increasing national security.
Even after Paris was occupied, the intelligentsia lived in a fantasy world. Hilariously, they would later pretend that some supposed psilosophy of 'Freedom' had helped in their liberation. One nutter who didn't live to see it was Simone Weil- the cretinous younger sister of the great mathematician Andre Weil.
Christy Wampole writes in Aeon
Simone Weil belonged to a species so rare, it had only one member.
She belonged to the same species as the rest of us. She wasn't really a 'Martian'. Anorexia of some sort is a cruel affliction. At one time it was thought that 'high achieving' girls were more likely to suffer it but that does not appear to be the case. I believe great strides have been made in its treatment.
This peculiar French philosopher
the French are wrong to make High School Students pass an exam in worthless shite. It is not surprising that those condemned to teach that subject, go utterly bananas trying to escape from that miserable fate only to enter into the yet drearier occupation of writing ignorant nonsense.
and mystic diagnosed the maladies and maledictions of her own age and place – Europe in the first war-torn half of the 20th century –
she was mentally ill. She couldn't diagnose shit.
and offered recommendations for how to forestall the repetition of its iniquities: totalitarianism,
Only one thing worked. Winning a total war and then having enough nukes to destroy the fucking planet.
income inequality,
a good thing. It drives 'Tardean mimetics' leading to higher productivity and material standards of living.
restriction of free speech,
Speech doesn't matter. Any nutter can talk. Where productivity is rising, people have better things to do than worry about what nutters are saying.
political polarisation,
A good thing. Society has to make choices. It can't have its cake and eat it to. Where there is polarisation, there is more information about 'opportunity cost'. This means better decision making.
the alienation of the modern subject,
shite invented by nutters.
and more. Her combination of erudition,
ignorance. Passing an exam in shite isn't education. It is coprophagy.
political and spiritual fervour,
hysteria
and commitment to her ideals
lunacy
adds weight to the distinctive diagnosis she offers of modernity.
What the lass needed was to do was put on weight by eating three square meals a day.
Weil has been dead now for 75 years but remains able to tell us much about ourselves.
Her cultus was part and parcel of the Cold War initiative to reconstitute a Catholic 'Zentrum' or its equivalent in European countries menaced by Communism.
Born to a secular Jewish family in Paris, she was gifted from the beginning with a thirst for knowledge of other cultures and her own. Fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 12,
Nobody is fluent in Ancient Greek. What is meant is that she could pass an exam in a subject which did not require much reasoning power.
she taught herself Sanskrit,
like her elder brother. Again, this isn't difficult.
and took an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism.
like her elder brother, she understood nothing of either. To be fair, Hindus her brother met in India were even less interested in that type of philosophy. Religion is merely a service industry. If it is helping raise productivity, well and good.
She excelled at the Lycée Henri IV and the École normale supérieure, where she studied philosophy.
Grete Harmann studied Math & Philosophy. What she did was useful. What Simone got up to was stupid and useless.
Plato was a lasting influence, and her interest in political philosophy led her to Karl Marx, whose thought she esteemed but did not blindly assimilate.
She understood nothing of what she read. Nothing wrong with Plato if you are a Godel type math maven. Marx was simply wrong. Still, if you had a bit of Math, you could go in the direction of Slutsky.
As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy.
No. Her stupidity caused her to be attracted to various stripes of stupid shite. Thankfully, she was bat-shit crazy so it was in nobody's interest to recruit or retain her.
In addition to her intelligence, other aspects of her biography have captured the public’s imagination. As a child during the First World War, she refused sugar because soldiers on the front could have none.
French soldiers received sugar. Once rationing was introduced, towards the end of the war, this was limited to 48 grams. That's 12 teaspoons a week. Some kids sent their sugar and chocolate ration to soldiers at the front. During the War on Terror, I refused to eat any of my own shit till every last Noam Chomsky had consumed at least 5 kg of faeces for breakfast. Sadly, I did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she died at 34 when working for the resistance government France libre in London, refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations of her German-occupied France.
She had got it into her head that they were all starving. The coroner's report said ;The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
Teachers and classmates called her the Martian and the Red Virgin,
as opposed to 'Farty-pants' which, I firmly believe, is what they called Simone de Boudoir.
nicknames suggestive of her strangeness and asexuality.
better a Martian Virgin than a promiscuous farty-pants.
A philosopher who refused to cloister herself behind academia’s walls,
She was only licenced to teach in High School. She quit to go work in a factory.
she worked in factories and vineyards, and left France during the Spanish Civil War to fight alongside the Durruti Column anarchists, a failed mission in many respects.
She had some family money. She was a dilletante. Still, she could have made a career out of it by writing silly books. Anything is better than teaching shite to high skool kids. They deserve better. So do you.
Several mystical experiences, including Weil’s discovery of the poem ‘Love (III)’ by the 17th-century poet George Herbert led her to embrace Christianity,
the good thing about Catholicism is that you don't have to torture yourself. Just say your Hail Marys and get absolution already.
and many have called for her canonisation as a saint.
Not anti-Semitic enough.
In her book Devotion (2017), the Francophile poet and punk-rock star Patti Smith described Weil as ‘an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets. Brilliant and privileged,
Stupid as shit, when compared to her elder brother.
she coursed through the great halls of higher learning,
she studied stupid shite
forfeiting all to embark on a difficult path of revolution, revelation, public service, and sacrifice.’
The US taxpayer's financial sacrifice liberated France. Only after it got nukes did it become safe.
The French politician Charles de Gaulle thought Weil was mad,
nobody who studies and teaches stupid shite isn't mad or doesn't become so.
while the authors Albert Camus, André Gide and T S Eliot recognised her as one of the greatest minds of her time.
Like they'd know! Von Neumann had a great mind. So did Andrei Weil.
Weil’s best-known works – The Need for Roots,She thought 'order means society requires a web of social relations where no one must violate an obligation to fulfil another obligation'. She didn't get that type theory makes this trivial albeit not categorical. In other words, any configuration of Society can have many different such webs. Even if there is no 'overlapping consensus', still there are 'trade-offs' of an economic or political type.
Gravity and Grace,
if you are going to rely on God's grace, why not also rely on your confessor for absolution? Say your Hail Marys and then carry on living your best life. Religion is a service industry just like Education. Weil got a credential in worthless shite but others didn't. They did something useful with their lives and enjoyed themselves at least some of the time. She tried to make Catholicism as useless and stupid as the worthless shite she had been taught to teach. Still, she managed to get out of that line of work. That's what makes her a role-model. Sadly, few of her admirers starved themselves to death.
‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’,
That war was won by guile not force.
Waiting for God,
don't be in a hurry. Believe me, the Big Guy in the Sky isn't dying to meet you.
and On the Abolition of All Political Parties,
because bureaucrats run things so well- right?
all published posthumously
it is safer to make a cult of a dead shithead
– offer only snapshots of the philosopher’s wide-ranging diagnoses of societal maladies.
Everybody should starve to death because otherwise everybody won't be obliged to starve to death.
Based on her notebooks, letters and published essays, scholars have traced compatibilities between her thought and that of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Blanchot, Nikolai Berdyaev, Iris Murdoch, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Quentin Meillassoux, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Jan Zwicky, Meister Eckhart and John Rawls, to name just a few.
Leaving aside Eckhart, the rest were or are ignorant shitheads.
Weil is a hinge between religious and philosophical thought,
of a shitty kind- sure.
and her notebooks often do away with differences between them.
Doctors differentiate between types of shit. Indeed, they can diagnose stuff from your turds. Weil's oeuvre was that of a lunatic.
All of her work
failed because she had been trained in stupidity
constitutes an attempt to regenerate connective tissue between all disciplines, between culture and nature, science and art, and God and humans.
People doing useful stuff have no trouble in that department. It is only if you teach stupid shite that you have to pretend that some horrible metaphysical calamity has befallen mankind. Only by eating our own shit can we restore a truly human way of life.
A Weil revival is underway, in part due to
shitheads who want a credential in stupid shite
the surges in nationalism, populism, tribalism and nativism about which she had so much to say in her work.
Because you don't get paid for saying 'eat your own shit. It's delicious!' You have to pretend to be 'resisting' Fascism or Neo-Liberalism or shite of that sort.
Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’
No. Intelligence is defeated by going kray kray and believing all sorts of crazy shit.
Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent.
Which is the only reason more people aren't eating their own shit.
For this reason, she advocated the abolition of all political parties, which, she argued, were in essence totalitarian.
Though only totalitarian societies abolish all political parties.
To substantiate this claim, Weil offered three arguments:
1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
Only in the sense that Churches and Schools and Cinema halls and Sports Stadiums are such machines
2) A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
That's a Church. It aint any mainstream party in a Liberal Democracy.
3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
That may be true of the Catholic Church. It isn't true of the Tory party. They really don't want to recruit members from the Cannibal Isles.
These tentacular organisations make people stupid,
In which case, smart peeps will run circles round them
requiring a member to endorse ‘a number of positions which he does not know’.
Like Catholicism.
Instead, the party thinks on his behalf, which amounts to him ‘having no thoughts at all’.
It really doesn't.
People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims, which is why they so readily join such groups.
One can live a solitary life without much necessity for thought.
In a resonant passage in The Need for Roots, Weil writes: ‘A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy.’
It can ban such parties and incarcerate their members.
Weil supported the freedom of individual expression.
It was she who encouraged Simone de Boudoir to fart noisily every time she saw Jean Paul Sartre. This wore him down and he finally asked her out to the Prom.
(She believed, however, in certain speech restrictions for institutions such as newspapers and government propaganda offices that, as collectivities, were, for her, naturally suspect.)
Sadly, nobody cared enough her to get her admitted to a lunatic asylum.
She writes that ‘complete, unlimited freedom of expression for every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve, is an absolute need on the part of the intelligence’.
She needed psychiatric care & medication. Intelligence turns to shit unless it is focused on doing something useful.
The health of the intelligence relies on full access to the facts,
If all the facts are known, intelligence is not required. When no facts are known, we need smart peeps to formulate hypotheses and proceed on that basis.
and without it, thinking is always deficient.
Simone had access to lots of facts which, because she had been taught stupid shit in Collidge, she blithely ignored.
She would have sided with even the most detestable of speakers, if for no other reason than that thy enemy must be known.
Thy real enemy will lie when she speaks so as to be stick the knife into you when you least expect it.
Weil’s writings are infused with care.
No. She takes extreme positions because she really doesn't give a fuck if she comes across as bat-shit crazy. This is because she was bat-shit crazy.
She believed it politically essential that every human soul feel ‘useful and even indispensable’ within the social body.
This is true only in the sense that it is essential for plumbing maintenance that every human and animal should be useful and indispensable in fixing my fucking toilet. A good polity is one where comparatively few people make policy decisions so other people can concentrate on economically productive activities. Fuck that. We just want to party.
She offers the example of unemployed people and manual labourers, who often feel little responsibility toward a society that does not embrace them.
They are also pissed off with an Economy which does not give them a rim job and a Technology which does not come to their birthday party and an Ecology which does come but brings a shitty present and then drinks up way too much of the good Champers.
Regarding criminal justice, she believed in the redemptive power of punishment
if the thing is redemptive, it should be applied to people who want or are capable of redemption no matter how innocent they may be.
, arguing that it should ‘wipe out the stigma of the crime’
Simone didn't get that prisoners wipe out the stigma of having to do time with pedo scum by kicking their fucking heads in.
and offer an education to offenders, allowing for full re-entry into the community.
Simone had received an expensive education but was utterly useless to any community she entered.
Her care-infused recommendations for how to think of one’s nation
was shit. French peeps needed to be thinking of their nation as one which needed to hang together or else risk enslavement. Nutters like Simone wanted to exacerbate class and other divisions in French society. Also, they were as stupid as shit.
could be edifying to consciences troubled by the confrontational nationalist movements of today. She wrote:
[The] poignantly tender feeling for some beautiful, precious, fragile, and perishable object has a warmth about it which the sentiment of national grandeur altogether lacks
Cheese eating surrender monkeys don't have national grandeur. Who gives a fuck, so long as they have cheese
… A perfectly pure love for one’s country bears a close resemblance to the feelings which his young children, his aged parents, or a beloved wife inspire in a man.
Simone thought she was a man. She wasn't. Men hate their young kids, aged parents and beloved wives. They firmly believe that but for these impediments they would be shagging super-models and jetting around the word as a secret agent or some such shit.
The thought of weakness can inflame love in just the same way as can the thought of strength …
All of this is wholly irrelevant more particularly if war is imminent. Everybody in the country may agree that the place is a shit-hole but they may also agree to pretend otherwise and fight hard to protect it. Why? The alternative is enslavement or eradication.
Thinking of your nation as something vulnerable, something that must be nurtured, stands in contrast to the chest-thumping, hubristic barking of today’s ultranationalists.
Ukrainian ultra-nationalists are kicking Putin's ass. No army has succeeded in defending its country by 'thinking of their nation as vulnerable or incontinent or mentally retarded.
Weil’s political pliability could account in part for the surge of interest in her work.
That surge was confined to pseudo-intellectuual shitheads.
Perhaps we are looking for someone to lead us out of the forest in which we find ourselves,
because we are Hansel & fucking Gretel- right
planted by the sowers of discord.
Forests aren't planted. Crops are.
I reflected on my attraction to Weil’s thought,
which is a reflection of your stupidity
and on my habit of putting her books into the hands of my students and friends saying: ‘Read this.’
This is acceptable. What is unacceptable is putting your dick into the hands of your students.
There are six reasons I return to Weil and want to share her: 1) the total absence of irony in most of her philosophical writings;
she was a humourless moron
2) her sustained campaign against a self-interested, narcissistic citizenry;
like that of the US of A which liberated France
3) the ethical urgency with which she approached the problem of education;
what was urgent was getting rid of Philosophy as a compulsory subject for High School Students.
4) her emphasis on first-hand knowledge (of the assembly-line worker’s plight,
which Time & Motion analysts had. 'Taylorism' was big in the Soviet Union- not just the US.
for example, or the farmhand’s daily exertions);
which it was profitable and socially beneficial to make less back-breaking. Come to think of it, Pratap Singh Kairon, despite getting a useless MA in Poli Sci in America, spent ten years working on farms there. That's why, as Chief Minister, he was able to lift up East Punjab so quickly. Simone was a shithead who didn't get that the interesting thing about manual labour is that using your brain helps you figure out ways to do the thing better and cheaper. Moreover, an innovation in one branch of labour can be adapted and applied elsewhere.
5) her belief that technology’s distancing effects would lead to total alienation;
She was already mad. But mad people existed before there was technology
and 6) the congruity of her preaching and her practice.
Her practice involved starving to death because she believed crazy shit. I suppose she got high on her own supply of shitty preaching.
Weil’s emphasis on the ethical urgency of education and her pursuit of knowledge through direct experience both counter some of the worst traits of the academic humanities today.
No. She was shit and academic humanities today are shit. Don't forget, what a Philosophy teacher in a French High School was doing was simply introducing kids to a few Greek and Latin tags and getting them to polish up their essay style.
The strange proliferation of empty jargon and self-aggrandising theories, conferences and scholarly articles and books of dubious necessity, and the greed-fuelled transformation of houses of learning into houses of earning, all would have unsettled Weil.
It's one thing to teach High Skool kids some of whom will end up as teachers. It is another to teach Collidge kids who will have to teach even more imbecilic Collidge kids. Why? The opportunity cost is less for seventeen year olds.
The precarious livelihoods of public schoolteachers and university adjuncts and lecturers would have bewildered her as well.
Nope. It existed in France. People like her were relatively well-paid by the State. But the situation of Catholic schools was financially parlous and legally ambiguous. Though the interwar period saw many Catholic schools operating as such, pay was low, organization was poor and there was an element of secrecy and deceit.
Indeed, she keenly observed the connections between what was happening in the schools and in the factories: ‘The youth of our schools are as much obsessed by their examinations as our workmen engaged in piece-work are by their pay packets.’
Sadly, her own obsessions weren't as reasonable.
I knew Weil was speaking my language when I came across this passage in her book The Need for Roots:
A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the Earth moves round the Sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This Sun about which they talk to him in class hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the Universe around him.
No he isn't. Only the person who writes such self-regarding shite is severed from the world around her. She thinks it is evil. It thinks she is stupid, useless and as ignorant as fuck.
She described how those outside the intellectual class had been alienated from thinking, cut off from the great philosophy and literature of the past
it really wasn't that great though, if you had to teach it, you had to pretend otherwise
that caught the essence of what it is like to experience the world as a worker, a farmer, or a soldier.
Fuck essences, she couldn't even catch the clap from them dudes.
She hoped to restore these lost connections by introducing every person to history’s richest texts, particularly the Greek classics,
they are shit- at least in the manner they are taught by stupid pedants. Otherwise, they provide a data set. That's useful.
which articulate what it means to fully inhabit the world.
The ancient Greeks decided 2000 years ago that their 'classics' fell short in that respect. That is why Europe became Christian. Zeus can go fuck himself. He isn't getting any burnt offerings from us.
Weil would have appreciated Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project, which brings Sophocles’ war plays to military and civilian audiences in the US and Europe in order to ‘forge a common vocabulary for openly discussing the impact of war on individuals, families and communities’.
It brought peace to Ukraine- right?
Weil also believed that by infusing every physical movement required by one’s trade with full, contemplative attention, one could become woven into the vocation and into the generation line of forebears who’d also practised it.
Sadly, she didn't take up the world's oldest profession.
The alienation produced by the mind-numbing repetition of meaningless
shite by people like this Professor doesn't matter in the slightest. All we ask is that they put books, not their dicks, in the hands of their students.
gestures would hence disperse, and factory workers, farmers and other manual labourers would recover the dignity they’d lost in the industrial age.
If America hadn't liberated France, sooner or later, Philosophers too would have been drafted to work in German factories or to bring in the German harvest.
To try to understand the appeal of Weil to a contemporary person, I took a close look at three examples from the first two decades of the 21st century, instances where her thought and life have been harnessed toward imaginative projects: Chris Kraus’s book Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Anne Carson’s collection Decreation (2005) and Julia Haslett’s experimental documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil (2010). Weil’s work seems to have a particular resonance with women.
Stupid women. Not CEOs.
In part, the radical embodiedness of her thought – with its apparent inseparability from her afflicted body – appeals to women because it invites everyone to recognise what they likely already know: that the body, with all of its burdens and pleasures, is the precondition for all thought and creation.
Atheists may believe that. Catholics don't. Pick a side.
The bodies of male philosophers, artists, musicians or writers have been virtually irrelevant in considerations of their work, while a curious emphasis has been placed on the bodies or troubled psychologies of women thinkers and creators.
No. We speak of the different types of mental illness or psychological affliction particular writers or notable personalities suffered from.
Kraus offers an example, noting that though Friedrich Nietzsche had migraines, he was never thought of as the philosopher of headaches,
He was a syphilitic nutter.
while Weil is popularly imagined as the ‘anorexic philosopher’.
because she starved to death
Weil forces us to see the body as the vessel out of which thought arises.
Her body was irrelevant. She repeated and expanded upon shitty availability cascades of the period.
Her outsider status – as a woman in the man’s world of philosophy, as a mystic among secularists, as an intellectual among workers and peasants, as a woman whom Kraus calls ‘Bizarre-Simone’ and an ‘admirable freak’ – makes her a compelling figure for anyone trying to
be as useless and shitty as her under the pretence of teaching shite.
insinuate themselves in a realm made by and for someone else. Weil is the patron saint of anomalous persons. The women inspired by her see something of themselves in Weil.
Sadly, they don't starve themselves to death. Indeed, they put on weight.
Weil understood human vulnerability in the most visceral way. She argued that: ‘Fear and terror … whether they be caused by the threat of unemployment, police persecution, the presence of a foreign conqueror [or] the probability of invasion’, give rise to ‘a semi-paralysis of the soul’.
Weil was wrong. The threat of unemployment causes people to acquire useful skills or to save money. The presence of a foreign conqueror may reduce fear and terror. Also, though the body may be paralysed, the soul- being immaterial- can not be. It may be constrained or it may be lethargic, it can't be paralysed.
Her objective was to use the individual as a conduit for bringing feeling back to the numbed limbs of the social body.
There is no social body. Weil was as stupid as shit.
In all of her recommendations, we see the connections between political theory and spirituality, which at times conflict.
There is no political theory- as opposed to puerility or paranoia in her writing. Is there 'spirituality'? No. Spiritual people may be very stupid but stupidity is not spirituality.
We see a tortured individual too susceptible to the world’s pain,
No. She had some sort of medical condition. Also, she studied worthless shite at Collidge.
too committed to her idealistic plans to live long enough to execute them. Surely this is not a model to emulate.
It is wrong to mock the afflicted. But we may well mock stupid Professors who gas on about Weil or Arendt. They were stupid and wrote shite. Still, Arendt made a good living doing so. Simone- like Shulamith Firestone- was mentally ill.
So, what can be done with Weil?
Make some money of her by pretending she was smart.
If her psychological complexity makes it difficult to take her as a paragon, her work still offers an ethical invitation.
Only in the sense that a lunatic eating her own poo offers one.
She provides unusual but practical counsel for educators, students, workers and citizens.
No. What you should do is not 'maximise cost' but 'minimize opportunity cost'. Why not simply say 'eat your own shit! It is chocolate cake!'
For outsiders of any gender, creed or colour, she has something to say.
It is the equivalent of 'eat your own shit'.
She is relentlessly anti-ideological, and gives judicious guidance for resisting the pull of narcissism.
But not the pull of starving yourself to death.
She invites us to act in the world, and to identify and eliminate the hypocrisies that tarnish almost everyone.
It is hypocritical to pretend she was smart.
Stressing the urgency to write, think and, most importantly, do, her life can inspire fictions, poems, songs, images and political action.
Shite ones- sure.
She serves as a muse for those who are open to her mystery.
But they write crap.
Above all, in a society whose most distinct feature is alienation,
The society of this woman may well feature not just alienation but coprophagy.
Simone Weil proposes ways to feel at home again in a place that has become strange.
Like starving yourself to death because Neo-Liberalism has brainwashed people into eating nice food rather than their own shit.
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