Latria, dulia & Simone Weil's abulia

The Church makes a distinction between 'latria'- adoration of the Godhead- and 'dulia', veneration of Saints or 'hyperdulia' veneration of the Virgin Mary. In the Gospels, 'dulia' has the connotation of slavery. Latria is sacrificial and liberational and directed at the Absolute. We may bind ourselves in love and veneration to what is closer to our own human-all-too-human contingency. But we should only do this as a step towards something higher.

Simone Weil's version of the cogito was 'I can, therefore I am'. She could convert to Catholicism and she did come pretty close but she couldn't be a Catholic- at least in the sense of preserving a Catholic 'conatus' by eating enough to keep body and soul together. She may have had a medical condition- anorexia or something of that sort- or she may merely have lacked some necessary motivational or epistemic resource to avoid a type of abulia- a lack of will- sufficient to preserve 'conatus'- i.e. her continued physical existence in the congregation of the Faith she had espoused.

It may be that Simone Weil would have had a very different life had she been born a Catholic and received thorough instruction in that creed. In particular, she would have understood that 'latria' is a purely internal process. It does not alter or enhance its object- which can only be the Godhead, nothing lower or lesser. For Catholics, it is folly to worry over the mysteries of Faith. A layperson may rely wholly upon her confessor. She is not required to set the world to rights. Instead she can do something useful, or simply enjoy life. That is the great benefit of embracing Catholicism- your burden is lightened by humility because, it turned out, your Cross was just an ego inflated by studying worthless shite at College and being told you were really smart and thus you should teach that shite. 

 Sadly, for Simone Weil, though she was passionately for the Roman Church, her passions were not of it. The truth is, she was as crazy as a bed-bug- a desirable property in a crap, ultracrepidarian, French psilosopher but a nuisance more generally speaking. It is sad that a few pedants are still obliged, simply to advance their career, to pretend Weil had something important to say about ethics or morality. 

As a case in point, Deborah Casewell has an essay in Aeon on Weil which well illustrates the mischief caused by a failure to distinguish latria- worship directed at the Trinity- from contemplatio as dulia- which is harmless only if directed at long dead Saints. Furthermore, contemplative veneration, being wholly internal, is not itself any sort of resource we can more equitably re-distribute. It is not the case that if we decide to adore all equally then we have done anybody at all some great favor.

 You may look at me with a 'just and loving gaze' but I quickly draw the curtains  or tell you to fuck off. This is because I gain no benefit from your being a holier than thou asshole. Still, if you venerate that which is venerable, but do so in a judicious and hierarchical manner, then- it may be- your character and disposition improve and you stay the fuck away from my back-garden and don't inflict your 'just and loving gaze' on me as I sit on the toilet. 

Casewell writes-

(In)What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?’ Weil uses two examples to illustrate her ethical vision and challenge our immediate idea of why and how we should act towards others. She begins by focusing on what appears to be a rather common-sense approach to the question of how we should relate to other people – we should look at each of them as a person, with a personality, a certain je ne sais quoi, which we respond and relate to. This is a form of personalism.

This may seem a harmless enough tautology. We should relate to an x by seeing it as an x.  The problem here is that either we too are persons and must relate to ourselves as persons or else persons aren't persons for themselves. One solution is to make 'personalism' an antisymmetric relation for each person. One is most a person for oneself and then there is a partial order over other persons to the extent that they are persons for you and vice versa. This gives rise to the 'natural' notions of oikeiosis as kinship and belonging together. What this entails is that it is cool to bombard your g.f with gifts and texts. It isn't cool to do any such thing to a stranger. That's called 'stalking' and is a strict no-no. 

Another solution, if you have lost your family and have become a refugee and thus are cut off from your natural 'oikeiosis',  would be to accept an ethics based on an imposed partial ordering- e.g. everybody having the same duty to the King and then various shades of obligation as by Law prescribed or permitted for Economic, Aesthetic and Emotional reasons. Here, it is still the case that there are some persons are more important than others. Indeed, there may be a class of non-persons.

 'Personalism' is not, by its nature, associated with any specific deontic logic. The latter may be a purely contingent, or wholly economic, matter. There is a duty to the self, because there is a self-preserving or 'conatus' based relationship to the self, just as there is a duty to others engaged in a joint enterprise, but since the self is a closer person that duty takes precedence save by express stipulation- e.g. recruitment to the armed services- of a contractual or otherwise binding kind.

As opposed to seeing oneself and others as persons, one may try to see God or the Devil or some abstract utility or quality as animating, to a greater or lesser degree, all bodies. In this case 'personalism' isn't about actual people. It is a dangerous type of 'dulia'- a bondage to a false God or Matter's mere decay.

Personalism sees that the personality constitutes the particular metaphysical centre of the person, and thus grounds the rights of the individual.

e.g. my right to fly up into the sky and hurl mountains into the ocean is grounded in my metaphysical center.  

Weil explores this, and asks us to imagine encountering a man on the street. When you do, you notice particular aspects of him. For example, he has long arms, blue eyes, his mind is full of thoughts, probably about nothing in particular. Now, Weil poses her direct challenge: what prevents her from putting out his eyes?

He'd stomp her.  

After all, if it is to the personality, that particular metaphysical centre of the person, that we owe and direct ethical action:
If the human personality were what is sacred for me, I could easily put out his eyes. Once he was blind, he would still have a personality.

But Weil would have been stomped. Why is she pretending she's Batman? I suppose coz she was mental. She scared people.  You never know with loonies. They might be quick enough to poke your eyes out before you stomp them. OMJ! Weil was the Joker!  

This stark thought experiment underlines her fundamental dispute with personalism: it ignores the effects of suffering on the personality.

Suffering had turned Weil into a super-villain. She might have weighed 80 pounds and been as blind as a bat but she could probably poke your eyes out before you could stomp her.  

In making that the centre of our response to the other, it supposes it impossible that human beings can be utterly destroyed by suffering, and instead maintains that they have the power to overcome their circumstances, no matter what.

Yet people suffering a stab wound may die and be cremated because of that suffering. It seems immortality of some sort is being assumed. Even if a guy whose eyes you poked out dies as a result of his injuries, his ghost may still be around. 

So, it cannot be that which stops her from putting out his eyes. Instead, what would stay her hand is ‘knowing that if someone were to poke out his eyes that it would be his soul that was lacerated by the thought that someone had done evil to him’.

So, this is gonna be one pissed off ghost or soul or spirit or whatever. That's why you shouldn't keep poking out people's eyes. Their ghosts may get together and stomp you but good.  

Similarly, she rejects the idea that what prevents us from harming others are their rights.

Coz she's a nutter who thinks in terms of poking out the eyes of dudes she meets. 

The notions of rights and of the person give you nothing

unlike what happens when you scoop the eyes out of your victims to make yourself a tasty broth, or just take their wallets and watches 

if unconnected with the language of our human relatedness.

Why? Suppose 'the notions of rights and of the person' causes some dudes to turn up to talk to you in 'the language of our human relatedness', then you could gains a few pairs of eyes to make into tasty broth as well as gain some nice wallets and watches. Also, have you considered removing the kidneys and livers of your victims? You may be able to sell them if you pack them in ice.  

Rights talk doesn’t stop evil:

Actually 'Rights talk' prevents the evil of incarceration being visited upon a guy who stomped you coz u were trying to poke out his eyes. The fact is, he had the right of self defense. You, on the other hand, had no right to poke his eyes out. Sad. 

it is more appropriately the language of commerce and legal pleading.

But it is also a defense in law for battering in the brains of a lunatic who goes around poking peeps' peepers out.  

When the language of rights is used, the relationship that we hold towards that person becomes objectifying, it transforms a cry of pain into a weight on the mute scales of justice.

Actually, the language of rights includes immunities from having any fucking relationship whatsoever with nutters save that of being the guy who batters in their brain when they try any rough stuff. 

We see them, not as a person to whom we owe a fundamental, impersonal and constant duty,

for example that of poking their eyes out 

but as a holder of various externally imputed values.

Like valuing having functioning eyes in their heads. 

For example, she argues, if you’re a farmer setting a price for your eggs, you have the right to reject someone offering a ridiculous price because of your relationship to the eggs and the price being set.

This is not the case. A farmer setting a price for his eggs is subject to various laws and administrative orders. He may be obliged to sell his produce directly to a marketing board.  

In the case of a young woman who is forced into a brothel, that language of rights is ludicrous.

No. It is the basis on which she can be rescued and her tormentors can be punished. 

Another thing entirely is being violated; what you are dealing with is an ‘uprising of the whole being, fierce and desperate’ and ‘at the same time a cry of hope coming from the bottom of the heart’. This is an injury that cannot be paid back or bargained away.

It can be prevented by battering the violator's brains in. Equally an 'uprising of the whole being' can be terminated by a swift shotgun blast. 

It is the human being to which we owe everything.

My Bank thinks otherwise. 

The language of rights obscures this

Sadly, this isn't the case.  

Her argument here is that we owe ethical action, not to the person conceived or known through any aspects of their personality, but instead to this universal cry of pain, which is impersonal – it’s not attached to the person, but present in everyone.

The ethical duty we owe to the universal cry of pain which is present in everyone may be discharged by poking out the eyes of those we encounter so as to give them something to really cry about. If Simone Weil beat us to it, maybe we could shove hot pokers up their arses. Those blind fucks sure will have something to howl about then!

It is not only this universal capacity to suffer that we are obligated to, but also a fundamental universal expectation that this is not right.

though it may be to the left of the universal expectation of the capacity of the hot poker up its pooper.  

Even though Weil is, as the above brief biographical comments show, extraordinarily aware of the pain and suffering of others, and the universality and frequency of it, she argues that, despite this, humanity hopes and expects good to be done rather than evil.

Because humanity kills those who expect to get away with doing evil.  

This is not linked to any particular aspect of personality, nor to anything that differentiates one from another.

It is linked to 'tit for tat' 

Instead, Weil argues that the cry of the person who is suffering is an impersonal cry.

Though what they are crying out is 'keep that nutter the fuck away from me for the holy sake of fuck!'  

This impersonal cry comes from the capacity to suffer, not from the means, reason for, or gravity of the suffering in the particular case, as ‘[w]hat is sacred in a human being is that which is, far from the personal, the impersonal. Everything that is impersonal in a human being is sacred, and that alone.’

Explain this to them after you poke their eyes out. You aren't torturing them at all. You are worshipping that which is sacred in them- viz. their ability to feel a lot of pain coz u blinded them and are now shoving a red hot poker up their bum.  

Another way of putting this is that there is something absolutely sacred about every human being, something that goes beyond the circumstances of their lives and the contingencies of their personalities.

Torturing and then killing people may indeed cause them to call out to God and, it may be, their souls ascend to Him. Thus, to a certain sort of mind, it makes sense to be obsessed with poking out peepers or shoving red hot pokers up poopers cause it's all about getting closer to the sacred, right?

What should prevent evil is an awareness of this sacred aspect of humanity, not their right not to be harmed.

Weil was evil- at least to herself. She starved to death. It is true that she may simply have been mad and was let down by the doctors of the period. But the fact is, she represented a shitty, not a sacred, aspect of humanity- viz. its love of shitting higher than its arsehole.  

Saying that the impersonal is what is sacred entails, for Weil,

tearing out the entrails or poring out the eyes of random dudes- at least in thought experiments.  

that our ethical response to another person is rooted in that, not in the particularity of how they present themselves to us, or whether or not they grab our attention. In the text ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’, she acknowledges that despite this inherent universality and equality in being subject to harm, we do not live in situations that enable us to realise this, because, in our social situations and interactions, ‘[m]en are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception’. This is why Weil stresses the identical, the impersonal and the sacred in each person.

Why not extend this to animals and plants and rocks and lakes? 

If we do not have this base, she says: ‘It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them.’

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things because feeling respect uses up scarce cognitive resources. It is also impossible to feel up everybody at the same time because you only have two hands and a lot of hot bods keep well clear of them. 

Our obligation to another human has to be unconditional to be of use and of meaning.

The reverse is the case. My obligation to repay your loan is conditional upon your actually having lent me money. It is useful to have these types of conditional obligations. By contrast, an unconditional obligation to repay debts to all and sundry, regardless of whether they lent you money, would be utterly mischievous.  

And it is only unconditional because it has its source in that reality outside of us.

It is because there is a reality outside us that unconditional obligations are mischievous. Weil may not have known about Gentzen's sequent calculi which proceed on the basis of conditional tautologies. The silly bint was using the wrong type of logic. Then she starved to death. Sad. 

This reality that is outside the world, and outside of humanity’s understanding and efforts, is the good, as found in the being of God.

If that is reality, what is fantasy? 

This undergirds all that is beautiful, truthful and good in the world, and ‘at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world’.

At the center of this silly bint's human heart was crazy shit. Then she starved to death. Sad. 

It is this Platonic vision of reality that grounds our obligations,

This is not a 'Platonic vision'- Plato didn't starve to death- it is the vision of a nutter.  

because ‘consciousness of the various obligations always proceeds from a desire for good which is unique, unchanging and identical with itself for every man, from the cradle to the grave’.

This is simply untrue. Consciousness of our various obligations proceeds from the reputational and other harm we incur by failing to discharge those obligations in a proper manner. Thus I pay my taxes because I could go to jail if I don't. I repay loans, because my creditors could distrain my assets if I don't. I know that if I get the reputation of being an ungrateful and unreliable fellow, then my life will get much worse. 

The language of rights, she claims, obscures this

Weil used language to obscure common sense to herself. Then she starved to death. Sad. 

and locates our duty and obligation elsewhere. It is the human being to which we owe everything, and we do so ‘for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to be fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such obligation on the part of the individual concerned’.

But we don't actually do any such thing- unless we happen to be mad and are starving  ourselves to death for some silly reason. 

Yet, as her example of the man on the street shows, we are not immediately aware of this. It is not only that aspects of their personality stand out and call us to care more about one person than the other; it is not only that we live in situations that elevate one person over all the others; it is also not only that we are more inclined to view others as means, but we ourselves rarely look beyond this to find the impersonal.

Why? Because this type of behavior has survival value. If we want the impersonal we should do latria to the Godhead not pretend that spying on peeps with a just and loving gaze as they do number 2 is some great benefaction on humanity.   

So, while the impersonal is universal and thus the basis of our ethical obligation and response to the other, it needs bringing out and working towards.

This is false. The 'impersonal' is not universal. It is merely an absence of affect. Such absence may be universal among rocks and stones but it is not universal among humans because emotions have survival value. Evolution has endowed us with them for a good reason.

Obligations are meaningless save in relation to corresponding entitlements. They are conditional, contingent and are associated with uncorrelated asymmetries. Indeed, they arise under 'bourgeois strategies'. That may not be cool, it may not be hip, it may not be groovy, but it is true.  

This is where the development of a particular ethical stance of attention, rather than a set of ethical mandates, comes in – although it must be said that Weil insists that the principal needs of the human body – such as food, warmth, sleep, health, rest, exercise, fresh air – and the principal needs of the soul must all be met for a society to be just.

So ugly and horrible men, like me, must be supplied with affectionate wives and kiddies. Good to know.  

Weil’s ethics entail an attitude of ‘attention and love’ that is both developed from us and given to us from that external reality.

The Church has good reason for insisting that 'latria' be accorded only to God. St. Aquinas says '"Reverence is due to God on account of His Excellence, which is communicated to certain creatures not in equal measure, but according to a measure of proportion; and so the reverence which we pay to God, and which belongs to latria, differs from the reverence which we pay to certain excellent creatures; this belongs to dulia,

We cannot, by our own efforts, bring the good into the world as it is beyond the world and any human faculties, but we do have the power of turning our attention and love towards it.

This is not the teaching of the Church. Indeed, this is mischievous nonsense. We can by our own effort bring good into the world. Religion helps us do so more amply. However, this aint the only reason for our existence. Many of us can do no good- at least not at our age or given our physical, mental or economic condition. Yet, we may be something good in the mysterious economy of the katechon. This does not license you inflicting your 'just and loving gaze' on me when I'm sitting on the toilet. Seriously, dude. I've warned you of this before. Fuck off or I'll call the police. 

It is thus that ‘[t]hose minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men’.

Balderdash! The Church may be the bride of Christ and the Pope may hold the keys of St. Peter but no 'sole intermediary' is posited by the Christian Faith. It is a different matter that salvation may only be through the Lord Christ. Furthermore, Rome diverged from Byzantium on the importance accorded to 'contemplatio'. Speaking generally, it is in Orthodoxy that hesychasm and theosis and so forth license the view Weil is taking. In any case, she was merely a convert. She needed to take instruction in the mysteries of the Faith rather than just dash off any garbled nonsense of her own. Still, allowances should be made coz she didn't have a penis. 

Paying attention to others in this way is something that we have the potential to do, but not something that comes naturally. Instead, it needs to be trained and developed. In ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’ (1942), Weil suggests that learning to attend is akin to the drudgery of schoolwork:
If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension.

Fuck off! I have sat through or slept through many a Maths class. The only 'mysterious dimension' I made progress in related to the quality and quantity of my resentful farts. Eventually, the College authorities gave me a Degree in Mathematical Economics even though I hadn't passed a single maths exam. The fact is they just wanted me off the premises which, no doubt, they carefully fumigated.  

Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.

If you've got so much light in your soul, how come you peep into my window so as to inflict your 'just and loving gaze' on me while I poop?  

Attention is not as active a process as it might first appear in this analogy. As Weil conceives it, attention is less like the active straining to solve a geometric problem, and instead more a sustained passive state where you are attentive to what the conditions are that aid you in solving the problem. ‘Attention,’ Weil wrote, ‘consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.’ You hold this knowledge that you have acquired in your mind, but let that object itself make its mark on you.

Yes, yes. This is a slow witted take on a perennial wisdom which, however, doesn't involve starving to death or being a blathershite.  

This attention is at the higher level directed to God and to the other. I have described this as a stance or a posture, but another way that she describes this is ‘looking’ and ‘reading’. She sees that the ethical action towards the other, especially to the other who is suffering, is to look at them in a way that is attentive, where ‘[t]he soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth’.

Okay, okay. I sometimes do suffer from constipation and moan and groan while on the potty. Does this really justify all you God-botherers coming to gawk at me? Fuck kenosis. It is my bowels which need emptying, hopefully, without doing to much damage to my asshole.  

This way of looking is only possible after training in attention.

and being crazy and thinking God likes being contemplated the fuck out of.  

This is what Iris Murdoch,

an alcoholic nutter 

among others, appreciated about Weil’s thought. Weil’s concept of attention does not presume that ethics is purely a matter of calculation, choice and action, or that the consequences are of the greatest importance. Instead, in Murdoch’s characterisation of Weil’s concept, attention involves the development of a ‘just and loving gaze’ towards the other. It is this, not the choices that are made, which is the proper mark of a moral agent.

Which these crazy bints weren't. Writing stupid shite is immoral.  

Ethics then becomes the entire attitude that is adopted towards the other person in specific and the world in general. When you view someone with this just and loving gaze, you can see them as they really are (as Murdoch explores through the always topical example of a mother- and daughter-in-law).

That shite creeps people out. They don't think it is ethical at all. Chesterton has a story about a philanthropist whose 'just and loving gaze' sizes up the dregs of humanity and procures them the help they need. They gang up and kill the cunt. Father Brown sympathizes with them. A human gaze can be just or it can be loving, it can't be both.  

This demand is not an easy one.

Foolish demands seldom are. 

While akin to the Kantian demand to view another as an end, not a means,

Which we immediately repudiate because we mustn't be the means to some pedantic cunt's end.  

it does not easily define or detail how you are to act towards the other. Instead, it details how you are to adjust your vision of the other.

Unless you have starved yourself to death in the mean time. 

And perhaps our immediate response to this is that we are already well aware of those who suffer and well aware, too, of how best to alleviate their pain.

No we aren't. Even the smartest Doctors are kept on their toes finding better ways to alleviate pain without turning people into junkies.  

We echo the words of the young Weil and call, if not for revolutions to feed the starving, at least for increased donations to charity and structural changes to aid those most vulnerable.

Thus creating poverty traps. 

Yet Weil’s ethical concern is not just for those abstract, suffering others (as her identification of the vital needs of the person shows), but for the way that we delude and justify ourselves. As she writes in the ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’, we live in a world where we do not notice those, in front of us, who are suffering.

Very true! Weil's friends and associates should have got her medical help. They were probably too afraid coz she kept talking about poking peeps' peepers out.  

If we keep our attention on this world, we never notice those others, because we cannot give equal respect unless we look beyond the particularities to that which is identical in all.

We mustn't give 'equal respect'. At least, that is the teaching of the Church Weil converted to.  

We must go past the personalities and stories that capture us to the impersonal that underscores our duty to the other person. This is the tension at the heart of Weil’s life and vision.

No, the tension at the heart of that crazy bint's life probably had to do with anorexia compounded by some sort of frontal lobe malfunction. Also, the poor thing had been educated in France- where philosophy is a compulsory subject at High School.  

She understands that we have to be forced out of our partiality for the particular over the universal. Yet her ethics challenge us to do this to her. She lived an exceptional, singular life, one that catches the eye and holds our attention, a life that challenges and changes our ethical ideals.

Only if we are stupid and ignorant or have to earn a living teaching stupid ignorant shite 

But, if we are to take the mandate of her ethics seriously, if they are to be possible, then we must turn our gaze beyond her and attend instead to the impersonal, universal in humanity.

Everybody shits. The thing is universal. Still, that doesn't license you come watch me poop no matter how 'just and loving' your gaze might be. Fuck off and leave me alone.  

It is this that is everything, without which we will be lost.

Unless you get a proper job- like delivering pizza  

That, surely, is worth another self-sacrifice.

OMG, is this silly lady gonna starve herself to death? That would make reading her shite so worth it.