No man can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
MATTHEW 6:24
Love undefeated in the fight,
Love that makes havoc of possessions,
Love who lives at night in a young girl’s soft cheeks,
Who travels over sea, or in huts in the countryside—
there is no god able to escape you
nor anyone of men, whose life is a day only,
and whom you possess is mad.
CHORUS, ANTIGONE1
Irving Singer once noted, “In the philosophy of love . . . I am convinced that every discussion must start with Plato.”2 This remark is certainly valid in the context of Simone Weil’s thinking on the subject of love and the related notion of philosophical detachment. We know that Weil read Plato as a spiritual thinker, a mystic even. She famously wrote, “. . . Then what is Plato? A mystic, the inheritor of a mystical tradition which permeated the whole of Greece.”3 These words point to the inseparability, for Weil, of an experiential spirituality and philosophical rigor that are oftentimes assumed to be quite distinct, if not altogether contrary to one another. It is because both are grounded in a common orientation—she names attention—that they are not at odds and, in fact, are complementary.
But as with all of Weil’s significant ideas, there is a paradox at the base of her Platonic-Christian understanding of love. We know that for the ancient Greeks and their Christian inheritors such as Dante, St. Augustine, and Pascal, self-control was a central concern for living “the good life,” especially when it came to matters of the heart and flesh.4 As we will see, in fact, self-renunciation underlies the purest form of love in Weil’s philosophy. However, the ancients also recognized that excessive regulation of the self to the detriment of eros precluded genuine education and therefore growth—be it moral or spiritual. Weil, too, underscores the importance of spontaneous desire in the formation of attention,5 which, for her, is synonymous with love, a desire to come into greater contact with reality.
Thus, there is a tension at the heart of Weilienne love that must be navigated. In the erotic pulsation that stirs her to reach for what is by definition not present but beyond perceptible edges—the absent God/the absent good—she is simultaneously performing deliberate preparations for the possible arrival, reception, and manifestation of such supernatural values. The preparatory work is the work of the will and intelligence, necessitating philosophical analysis and self-critique; this duty is carried out by the disciplining task-master-self who, after diligently clearing the ground of egoistic projections and selfish desires, is one day overcome by an experience of love that exceeds the formerly useful intellectual categories. Weil eloquently describes this possibility:
A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again and look with terror at the wall, until one day he begins afresh to beat his head against it; and once again he will faint. And so on endlessly and without hope. One day he will wake up on the other side of the wall.
Perhaps he is still in a prison, although a larger one. No matter. He has found the key; he knows the secret which breaks down every wall. He has passed beyond what men call intelligence, into the beginning of wisdom.6
Therefore, the love of wisdom—philosophy—is simultaneously a process of self-annihilation and liberation. Weil thought that “intelligence resides in every man,”7 but wisdom, whose condition (according to Weil) is supernatural love, is unattainable through human effort alone. Intellectual and academic exercises ultimately reach a limit in their attempts to make contact with reality, and after this point, if we have been fully committed, supernatural love characterized by “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, [and] generous attention”8 permits the light of truth to inspire all our ideas and relations. Like Plato acknowledged, the soul bitten by such love will appear foolish, absurd, and even ignoble, but this is in part because we forget that “the best things we have come from madness [mania], when it is given as a gift of the god.”9
Aside from pure love being a disciplined madness, another significant paradox will be apparent in our subsequent discussion. When Weil writes, for instance, that “it is total detachment [from the world] that is the condition for the love of God”10 and thus the condition for the reception of (supernatural) truth and the center of Christian mysticism, we are left with the difficulty, that has long been a criticism of Plato, that such an orientation forsakes the world, its issues, and its inhabitants through an other-worldly attitude that is anything but what we would call loving. Irving Singer, for instance, remarks,
The Platonic lover does not love anyone: he loves only the Good, either in abstraction or in concrete manifestations. But then . . . there is at least one kind of love that Plato’s philosophy neglects. That is the love of persons, the love between human beings who bestow value upon one another, each responding to the uniqueness of the other, each taking an interest in the other as a separate individual, regardless of imperfections and apart from satisfactions that also accrue . . . If Platonism fails here, its shortcoming is very great indeed.11
Singer ultimately argues that Platonism does fail on this account, precisely because the love of ideals (which is his interpretation of Platonic love) precludes love of particular persons. Weil’s own descriptions of impersonal, detached, and universal love have been called “evil” and “a flight from responsibility.”12 In examining the interconnected Weilienne ideas of love and detachment, we must give serious consideration to these charges. Can love be both impersonal/just and interpersonal/caring? Is universal love really an avoidance of particular humans and their needs? If pure love is ultimately a supernatural orientation that surpasses our will and control, in what does our human responsibility lie? (Is ethics grounded in religion?)
To answer these and other related concerns, this chapter proceeds in five parts. First, we explore at greater length the Greek heritage and ideas that have particular significance for Weil’s notion of love, especially Platonic eros and mania as read through Symposium and Phaedrus. Second, we consider the implications of losing (self) control in love, and the connections between this loss and decreation, in light of divine mania. Given that such decreative humility is the basis for love, in the third section, we explicate Weilienne love in detail, emphasizing it as a synonym for justice. One primary example of how loving attention is impossible given human nature but paradoxically demanded as the source of justice is in the phenomenon of affliction (malheur). In the fourth section, then, we will examine the implications for attentive love, given the fact of affliction, and through this analysis, explain why detachment is necessary to love. Lastly, in the fifth section, we investigate the tensions just raised, regarding the implications of Weilienne love and the detachment it requires for interpersonal relationships. Is Weilienne love only frustrating to us who are selfishly inclined and prone to the effects of moral gravity—or is it itself a kind of evil?
Platonic eros and divine mania
Arguably the two most important Platonic dialogues about love—and which have also had the most noticeable impact on Weil’s understanding of love—are Symposium and Phaedrus. Taken together, however, the two dialogues offer what may seem to be conflicting accounts of the philosophic ideal of love. In Symposium, love (which becomes synonymous with the lover of wisdom or philosopher)13 is cool-headed, calm, and clearly oriented toward absolute beauty and goodness. Socrates exemplifies this love and the disposition it implies; he embodies this way of life, given Plato’s descriptions, showing it as a possibility for humanity to emulate. But as Singer notes, in Symposium, “Though sociable and well-mannered, Socrates is emotionally cool, unimpassioned, involved in the life about him but also at a distance from it.”14 His rationality and chaste demeanor are sharply contrasted to the drunken proclamations of love, sexual overtures, and physical preoccupations of Alcibiades.
In Phaedrus, however, love—still understood as the philosophical spirit—is portrayed as a divine madness or mania, while the non-lover is castigated as boorish, uninspiring, and burdensome. Plato writes, “A non-lover’s companionship . . . is diluted by human self-control; all it pays are cheap, human dividends, and though the slavish attitude it engenders in a friend’s soul is widely praised as virtue, it tosses the soul around for nine thousand years on the earth and leads it, mindless, beneath it.”15 The true lover, however, “possesses the Good by enabling the Good to take possession of him.”16 He has lost his own control under the influence of a radiant beauty that is reminiscent of the gods. When the lover encounters someone truly beautiful, his fearful and trembling soul, feeling itself in the presence of something divine, responds reverentially to the beloved—but in a way that looks excessive and foolish to one whose soul has not had the privilege of coming to know the divine Forms and is being rigidly monitored for the sake of self-preservation. Singer comments that we get “an inkling of possession in the religious sense”17 in Plato’s description of the lover:
A recent initiate, however, one who has seen much in heaven—when he sees a godlike face or bodily form that has captured Beauty well, first he shudders and a fear comes over him . . . then he gazes at [the beloved] with the reverence due a god, and if he weren’t afraid people would think him completely mad, he’d even sacrifice to his boy as if he were the image of a god. Once he has looked at him, his chill gives way to sweating and a high fever, because the stream of beauty that pours into him through his eyes warms him up and waters the growth of his wings.18
The wings—which Weil, in her Christian reading of Plato, will interpret as grace (“it would be impossible to state more clearly that the wing is a supernatural organ, that it is grace”19)—enable this lover eventually to make an epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic ascent until there is (re)union with the Absolute, the source of all beauty, truth, and goodness. This growth of wings, which is both painful and joyous, is a process that happens outside of the lover’s managerial will and control. The wings are divine inspiration that carry their subject to unfamiliar and unanticipated places.
Though the two descriptions of love gained from Symposium and Phaedrus appear, on the surface, to contest one another, the appropriation of these ideas into Weil’s Christian mysticism reveals their possible congruence: the descriptions represent, not competing accounts of love but, arguably, two stages of the soul’s ascent toward the good. In the first stage, represented by the account given in Symposium, we learn the importance of certain refusals, as manifested by Socrates. For instance, he refuses the lusty advances of Alcibiades for the sake of his love of excellence and wisdom. He pointedly asks his suitor: “Is this a fair exchange you propose? You seem to me to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself, ‘gold in exchange for bronze.’”20 In this way, Socrates underscores what are erotic distractions: physical appearances, material concerns, preoccupations of the flesh. We then see love as beginning with renunciation of the common and earthly, and in many scenes in the Symposium, we find the evidence of Socrates’ philosophic love: he is lost in thought, oblivious to weather, hunger, clothing, and his own health.
This first stage is one of “ground-clearing”—a forceful removal of illusion, distraction, and the falsifying imagination. Weil calls this process “training” (dressage) and understands that conditioning plays a role: “Training is based upon what are called today conditioned reflexes. By associating pleasure or pain with this or that object, new reflexes are formed which end by becoming automatic.”21 It is perhaps ironic that genuine love begins in the chastening of particular desires, but Weil, like Plato, understands that human nature is constituted in part by base desires that, left to their own devices, would respect no limits or reason. This is our “animal” nature. Hence, she continues with a vivid metaphor:
[Through training] we can compel the animal in us to keep quiet and not interrupt when our attention is turned towards the source of grace. Circus dogs are trained with the whip and with sugar, but much more quickly and easily with the whip, and in any case sugar is not always available. So pain is the principal method.22
This operation sounds violent, and, in fact, it is. The reorientation of the soul toward the good (or God, or grace, or truth) implies a simultaneous turning away from the void-fillers we have previously discussed. As we have seen, this emptying/preserving of the void is painful. It is also a voluntary process, and as Weil notes, “training is a finite operation,” for “the evil within us is finite like ourselves.”23 So we are wrong if we continue to whip the animal within us when he has already become docile because then the pains are useless exercises of asceticism and even harmful to spiritual progress.
If this negative operation were the sole criterion of love, critics might be justified in calling Weil masochistic or ascetic. But if the reader will recall the previous chapter, the process of decreation was distinguished from that of “destruction,” because its mode of renunciation enabled its creativity by opening to the good that is outside us. Destruction has no purpose in view other than pure annihilation or sadism-masochism, whereas decreation is the manifestation of human love, exemplified by Christ on the cross. At the second stage, therefore, after we have stilled and silenced the distractions, we become truly vulnerable to possession by the good—which Weil at times calls “grace”—provided we maintain the orientation:
[Grace] is something that we receive without doing anything positive; except that we have to keep ourselves exposed towards [it]; that is to say, to keep our attention oriented with love towards the good. The rest, whether painful or sweet, takes place in us without our co-operation. It is the fact of this second element which proves that it is truly a mysticism.24
Thus, in the Phaedrus, the sprouting of the wings of the lover’s soul and the subsequent mania are the events that happen in spite of us and our self-control. The obvious paradox is that self-disciplining is initially required for reception of the good that then subverts the whip. This is why orientation toward the good is key to this transformation; orientation toward the methods or the rituals themselves, for instance, signify an idolatry that will result in attachment to the masterful, punishing self (or masochism). As Weil puts it: “One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”25
Losing control and preparing to die
We have argued that, for Weil, love consists in two stages wherein the will disciplines the subject’s base desires and falsifying imagination to bring about an orientation toward the good, which it is incapable of creating. Eventually, the will that has brought about this direction is overcome and rendered powerless by that good that is outside of its control and prediction. An important transformation occurs in this moment: the sovereign subject, who even in her self-disciplining practices had a hold on her world and herself, is deposed by the mysterious and rupturing movement of grace. (The phenomenon of grace is described in greater detail in Chapter 6.) That is, the once possessive subject is possessed, but the effect of this transformation is the emergence of a radical (non)-subject whose protective boundaries and static identity have been troubled. It is to this issue that we now turn, for the obvious question is: How could love continue, if there is eventually no subject remaining who consents to love? Must we not hold on to ourselves? And, in terms of our physical bodies, aren’t we obliged to actively master their impulses and affects to be responsible and truly loving partners?
To explore the tensions underlying these questions, we now turn to an unexpected area of scholarship—at least, unexpected in the context of Weil’s religious philosophy. Recognizing that much has been written in contemporary Continental feminist philosophy about experience of controlled and disciplined embodiment, it is helpful to assess some of these insights in light of the aspect of religious love that is grounded on losing control and consenting to a porous experience of embodiment. We know that for feminists, especially, a fundamental issue of ethical and political concern is not only the cultural context that mass-produces homogenizing and digitally altered images of female beauty but also the ways in which women’s bodies are subsequently inscribed upon, monitored, and then read. In particular, feminists such as Sandra Lee Bartky and Susan Bordo, drawing on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, argue that the female body epitomizes the “disciplined” and “docile” body in its mundane daily rituals, preoccupations, and postures. Moreover, moral evaluations have been applied to the degrees of somatic control, discipline, or continence that people (women especially) demonstrate. There is also a recognition from these philosophers that “self-control” cannot be divorced from the broader political institutions and the pervasive and anonymous systems of power that are unconsciously internalized so that people happily police themselves. As Foucault remarks, “The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”26 Under this recognition, self-control is not so benign since it colludes with a wider system of domination, and a lack of self-control—or what Aristotle calls akrasia—begins to appear ironically as a more conscious and liberated way of being.
Akrasia turns out to be surprisingly relevant to our understanding of Weilienne love, but it is negatively characterized by Aristotle as a sort of “weakness of the will,” an “effeminacy,” or in some cases, “impetuosity.”27 Often widely translated as “incontinence,” it is generally understood to indicate a lack of self-mastery or self-control. To be afflicted with akrasia is not, for Aristotle, as shameful as being wholly vicious, for even though one committed vicious acts, they were preceded by an internal struggle to act virtuously; akrasia is a result of poorly formed habits but with intellectual understanding of what is morally correct. (It is no surprise that Aristotle associates akrasia/incontinence with effeminacy given the values of ancient Greek culture, but subsequently, the association of akrasia with feminine qualities has remained largely unchanged.)
But even today, beyond our philosophical heritage in which earlier figures such as Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Descartes identified the feminine with nature and nature with irrationality, unpredictability, and uncontrollability, we judge the health and continence of a physical body to be directly related to one another, and furthermore, assume a person’s moral and spiritual character on the basis of this notion of “health.” There is an unspoken imperative to always be in control, especially of one’s body. In recent studies on female urinary incontinence, for example, researchers noted the paradox of embodiment:
While Christian tradition conceives of the body as weak flesh, the location of sin, it is also an instructive site of moral purpose and intentions, with health the sign of moral well-being. In this context, women move from innocent transgression to intentional adult immorality and accede to the legitimacy of loss of social membership as a consequence. “If they knew you had a problem with your bladder, I think they would judge you differently; they would think you had some fault. If you can’t control your bladder, how much control do you have over the rest of your life?” (Dawn, [the interviewee])28
Ironically, the researchers concluded that “women associate incontinence not only with lack of physical and social control, but also with willfulness,” just as children who are “naughty” intentionally breach and reject “appropriate social behavior.”29 In a different context, Susan Bordo describes the way in which thin bodies (signifying control over fat) are read in our culture: “Thinness represents a triumph of the will over the body, and the thin body . . . is associated with ‘absolute purity, hyperintellectuality and transcendence of the flesh.’”30 Conversely, “fat . . . is associated with the taint of matter and flesh, ‘wantonness,’ mental stupor . . . mental decay,” and a weak will.31 Whether the incontinent body is read as actually being willful, or as in most cases fickle and loose, it is always associated with some sort of moral degradation or deviancy.
The seemingly unfortunate association of women’s corporeality to the uncontrollable and the subsequent lived feminine experience of body as “porous” and “seepage,” serves as a constant reminder of the impossibility of the discrete and self-sufficient agent and may help reveal the illusion of static self-identity that serves the ego and prevents love. Though coming from a different line of thinking than Weil’s, Elizabeth Grosz reminds us that the experience “force[s] megalomaniacal aspirations to earth,” and “demonstrate[s] the limits of subjectivity in the body.”32 What Grosz reveals, then, is the possibility for a radical revaluation of akrasia: rather than being a sign of moral degradation, it is a condition of humility, of (literal/physiological) openness to the world, that is, for Weil an ethical receptivity. It does not permit the false and problematic idea of sovereignty that we too often assume in relation to others or to our selves, or the corresponding colonizing demeanor that seeks conversion of the other to the same. In this way, experienced bodily incontinence could be read as a gift that can translate to the analogous release of the tyrannical self and therefore a negation of the tendency to dominate the world we encounter. Of course, because of the dominant paradigm, which reads incontinence in a negative light, virtues such as humility will be obscured and misread until, perhaps, in an unavoidable vulnerability due to necessity, one experiences a communion with the world or with another person that was formerly impossible.
In light of these considerations, we propose that Weil’s idea of training (dressage), which is the first stage of love, paradoxically leads to consent to and acceptance of (bodily) incontinence—not only for women—that reveals the illusion of the bounded self or ego. Therefore, although training makes use of the will, when oriented correctly, the discipline does not produce an amplification of the will, but it is already preparation for its release. Training, that is, reflects the Platonic characterization of philosophy as a preparation for and learning how to die, and it engenders humility rather than self-assuredness. Although Weil did not address or describe the particular lived experiences of the male or the female body in any significant way, mainly because of her commitment to impersonality and the universal human condition that transcends sexual distinctions and concerns, she did articulate general themes of human experience that reveal her perspective on the self as a controlling agent and the obstacles to a genuinely moral orientation that such a self generates. For her, the practice of training undermines the sovereignty of the self, without thereby suggesting that one be subject to natural powers or collude with a system of oppression and force. And it is precisely the deposing of the self that enables and is the sign of love. Anne Carson describes the deposition of self in love in a similar way:
All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible, and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.33
What Carson means by “the edge” is the alterity of the other person or the recognition of genuine externality and the “not-me.” In Weilienne terms, this edge may be another person, or it may be the reality or necessity of the world that triggers recognition of the void—in short, the distance between creation and Creator.
That is, Weil acknowledges an essential feature of human existence that sets up imaginary boundaries between ourselves and the world: “We are born in order to ‘identify’ ourselves . . . [but] one is never oneself. One is always something else,” she writes in her Notebooks.34 Elsewhere, we have noted that she describes this condition as carrying around “an imaginary divinity”35 that must be shed. We gravitate toward such identities because they lend a sense of certainty and stability, a presumption of the centrality of our projects, a “security” to our existence, and a preservation and even extension of our natural human limits. In short, the “imaginary divinity” is equivalent to the feeling of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and independence in identity that lends itself to the construction of incontinence (and thereby supernatural love) as a morally degraded state.
As formerly noted, Weil recommends renunciation of this illusion in a process she calls decreation, and which is clearly a central part of training:
It is as a limited being that one must renounce the self, and for this purpose all that is necessary is to recognize all limited things as being limited. If I were to think of everything which is limited as limited, there would no longer be anything in my thoughts which emanated from the “I.”36
As we have shown, for Weil, decreation is the process of making the created uncreated, unraveling our constructed and reified identities to which we have become attached. This process is more often than not inspired by undergoing experiences of marginalization or encountering, in a significant way, one who is “marginal.” As bell hooks describes it, “For me this space of radical openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult but necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place.”37
But significantly for Weil, this risky displacement through decreation requires a corresponding participation of the body in that change.38 She thinks it is not by accident that Plato describes genuine education, in the Republic, as a reorientation of the whole soul, necessitating a revolution of the body: “But whereas we can turn our eyes in a new direction without or almost without using the body, it is not so as regards the soul. The soul cannot turn its eyes in a new direction without turning entirely in that direction.”39 While intelligence, in its limited way, can sharpen its focus on any given natural phenomenon, wisdom is not attained until the ideas penetrate the body, in a process not unlike the one Rilke called “blood-remembering.”40 This is what training accomplishes, according to her.
Since we have a tendency to set up barricades around an illusory ego, our natural attempt to overcome this temptation is to amplify the will and resolve to be more humble or to intellectualize humility. Weil recognizes the contradictions in these decisions. Instead, she offers dressage or “training” as the practice of “transforming the sense of effort into a passive sense of suffering.”41 To employ the will and intellect and assert control against the self for its own sake is paradoxically to preserve that very self and illusion one is trying to combat; the mechanism to evade this trap must be wholly other. Recall her admonition: “Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.”42 In this light, the training that is required to avoid the ego’s insistent presence is a gradual release of oneself, or in other words, the losing of control and, thus, a preparation for death. For the loss of control is really a death for us. Again, it is impermissible that one “choose the cross,” for this does not carry us “beyond the will.”43 However, when we renounce the controlling self in a negative way—by not resisting the reality of suffering or by not turning away from the socially marginalized, for example—we begin the process of “uncreation” that leads beyond ourselves via an ethical orientation characterized by loving attentiveness.
Weil tells us, “Note that although this training is a voluntary process, and therefore a natural one, it is only performed because the soul has been touched by the memory of the things above and its wings are beginning to sprout. And it is a negative operation.”44 Elsewhere, she describes this training as having to “accomplish the possible in order to touch the impossible.”45 That is, love as the training of our desires where we are somatically affected ushers in a higher form of love wherein the subject, through his attentiveness, serves as the vehicle for the transmission of the good, beauty, and truth that are external to him and require his eclipse. He appears to lose his wits, sense of balance, and what has been deemed “sane” about him. In actuality, he is finally making contact with reality and thereby regaining his sanity in the midst of an insanely deluded and desensitized world.
Before we delve into the issue of this higher form of love as attentiveness to the reality of the world, we should further consider the value of bodily suffering and vulnerability in training, as Weil understands it. As we have noted, her view is that “the body plays a part in all apprenticeships.”46 We have something to learn from pain. “On the plane of physical sensibility, suffering alone gives us contact with that necessity which constitutes the order of the world,” she writes, clearly referencing Christ’s mediation on the cross as a model for us.47 That contact with necessity permits us to be “wholly sensitive” to the universe, in a way that pleasure does not. That contact is also requisite for philosophy as a preparation for dying: “There is no philosophical reflection without an essential transformation in sensitivity and in the practice of living, a transformation that has an equal importance for the most ordinary and the most tragic circumstances of life.”48 It is not that we seek for suffering (or “choose the cross,”) but when it comes to us, as Weil writes, “we have to open the very center of our soul to it, just as a woman opens her door to messengers from her loved one. What does it matter to a lover if the messenger be polite or rough, so long as he delivers the message?”49 We must not make the mistake of concluding that Weil advocates submission to human abusers or tyrants; in fact, openness to reality and the subsequent sensitivity will prompt resistance to and rigorous critique of human violence and force, while the escapist imagination may in fact diminish the level of cruelty in the oppressor out of fear or convenience.
The broken or incontinent body (whose margins have been blurred) appears to be a qualified messenger of necessity, and an acknowledged helpmate of philosophy, reminding us, as it does, of our limits, finitude, dependency, and vulnerability in a way that circumvents and precludes a prideful self-centeredness. In this way, Weil affirms, “So it becomes quite evident that philosophy does not consist in the acquisition of knowledge, as is the case with science, but in a change of the soul entirely.”50 Training, then, is not successful if it only results in different behavior through conditioning and habituation; it must really effect a change in desires and therefore a reorientation of the soul toward the good. But this good is not experienced as a tangible something, but as a void, or an absence. This is why the process of reorientation and the subsequent new outlook will be felt as emptiness that many will perceive as suffering.
We spoke earlier of a revaluation of akrasia and meant by that its potential for ethical conditioning. It may be, too, that akrasia, given this revaluation, is not necessarily experienced as strictly painful but as the opening of new possibilities. Weil describes this phenomenon: “Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other.”51 How literate we are in terms of making connections between events, noting necessary relationships, and recognizing the limits of our own intelligence will determine to what extent we are pained by the development of love and its mastery of us. Thus, the question will be for us: How will we read the incontinent—or crucified—body, once we have contemplated its value in the philosophical orientation that is synonymous with love?
What is important in the experience of incontinence is not any particular sensation of pain, but the process and effect of undergoing, of pathos. To be sensitive to the universe, we need only recognize our innate marginality and void; to be just, however, we must go farther. Recall Weil’s definition of moral innocence, personified by Christ: “To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight. In emptying ourselves we expose ourselves to all the pressure of the surrounding universe.”52 Without a doubt, pain often accompanies this disposal of the counterweight and consent to bear the weight of the world; laying down the sword exposes us to persecution, as it did Christ to crucifixion. But the effect of the orientation is of secondary importance to the orientation itself and the potential for the expansion of love through the attentiveness it awakens.
With the reorientation of the soul toward the good, self-control is finally displaced. It is not needed, however, because a new power has been submitted to, and the managerial self would only get in the way. This fact is what Socrates, as the true lover, recognizes in Phaedrus. Carson explains:
Socrates’ central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursions formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind, Socrates says (244a–45). Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.53
This argument, especially in Socrates’ context, is quite radical and subversive. Whereas those who advocate self-control stockpile reinforcements against any erotic takeover and thus protect the status quo, Socrates casts love as a risk and adventure; “he unfolds himself for flight.”54 The loss of self for the sake of inspiration and recollection of what is divine is not an evil, as the traditional Greek attitude would have it,55 but is central to the philosophic spirit and anything that would be called “education.” But it also offers no predictable results or natural safety: “If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God.”56 For Weil, this radical and impossible love of God/the good implies a detachment via the renunciation of all possible ends—“a renunciation that replaces the future with a void, as the imminent approach of death would do.”57 The impossible love that is oriented toward a void is nothing other than what Weil calls “attention.” Let us examine this posture in more detail and see how it is synonymous with justice.
For Weil, attention is the decreative release of self to receive the world in all its reality. Paradoxically, this (passive) letting go of self and accompanying control is simultaneously a “creative” action: attention sees what is invisible (as the Good Samaritan saw the bleeding, anonymous, dirty man in the ditch) and hears what has been deprived of a voice because the din and smog generated from our maintenance of control has finally cleared. “Those are the sounds and images,” bell hooks tell us, “that mainstream consumers find difficult to understand. Sounds and scenes which cannot be appropriated are often that sign everyone questions, wants to erase, to ‘wipe out.’”58 And we who have been so “centered” seek to eradicate these encounters, these voices, because we are destabilized by them—our solidity and our protective borders are troubled. However, Weil warns that before reaching the stage of attentiveness, “we must have worn down our own will against the observance of rules” in that practice she called training.59 This is why Weil argues that if attention can be called an effort, “it is a negative effort,” one that consists of suspending thought, agency, and will, and leaving us “empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate [us].”60 The most precious gifts are obtained, she suggests, by waiting for them, and they come to us as a surprise.
She offers an example that is familiar to many of us of the mysterious effects of waiting attention:
Suppose I have had a thought and have forgotten it two hours later. . . . I direct my attention for a few minutes towards an empty space; empty but real. Then suddenly the thought is there, beyond all possible doubt. I did not know what it was, and yet now I recognize it as being what I was waiting for. An everyday experience, and an unfathomable mystery.61
This strange yet recognizable experience demonstrates the paradoxical efficaciousness of quieting the frantic and frenzied mind. Attention, for Weil, looks nothing like what we call attention today, when we urge schoolchildren, for instance, to pay attention. That command is meant to get students to go on an active search for answers, to focus—that is, to “zoom in” narrowly on a particular topic to the exclusion of others. It is an understandable prescription in a cultural landscape filled with distractions. Yet Weil’s idea of attention recommends a relaxing of the mind, not for lack of seriousness, but for the sake of openness to relations and ideas the subject’s own efforts would have excluded, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The posture of attentiveness, then, may be compared to hungering—a refusal to fill the void. It is through this enriching emptiness that one may be penetrated by reality because the usual defenses, projections, and deflections have been surrendered. Rather than eating, then, attention is looking: “Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.”62 This method has important implications for the ways in which mysteries and experiential ambiguities have been interpreted by humans in our active quests for certainty. Theology, in fact, is arguably one such attempt to construct meaning and impose order by interpreting events that transcend natural understanding through narrative projections and system-building. As Huston Smith contends:
It was not the disciples’ minds that were first drawn to Jesus. Rather . . . it was their experience—the experience of living in the presence of someone whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way his disciples found divinely mysterious. It was only a matter of time, however, before Christians felt the need to understand this mystery in order to explain it to themselves and to others. Christian theology was born, and from then on the Church was head as well as heart.63
As Smith goes on to describe, it is natural that our experience of invisible or inexplicable events should give rise to symbols and then conceptualizations of those symbols, as the mind actively seeks comprehension through what is familiar to it already. Theology is this systematization of our interpretations, which may explain why Weil reads the Gospels as a conception of human life rather than as a theology. The former mode of reading preserves mystery. A theology, by contrast, given Smith’s account, is necessarily a product of inattention but has the unfortunate effect of granting a pretense of knowledge; theologies offer consummation and illusions of being “full” for the spiritually hungry.
Unfortunately, in the same way that religious sacraments are confused with social ceremonies, love is often confused with consumption, attachment, and even active conquest. This is not to say that we are to refrain from human interactions or searches for meaning, but we should make every effort to refrain from consumptive attitudes and actions so that love may be possible. Weil writes, “A gambler is capable of watching and fasting almost like a saint,” but “there is a great danger in loving God as the gambler loves his game,” which is to say, with attachment and a consumptive demeanor.64 To love something or someone is simply to desire their existence independent of ourselves, our intrusions, and our interferences. And Weil eloquently describes this state:
The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.65
Hence a soul loves in emptiness, in hunger. Contrary to our modern self-help mantras that insist on one’s own fulfillment/satisfaction/health in order to love another, Weil declares that the prerequisite to real love is void, sensitivity to suffering, renunciation of greedy attachments, and even renunciation of the desire for consummation—whether physical or intellectual.
Moreover, the filling imagination must be countered by attention because the former leads us away from the present toward future “rewards.” This is why attention involves a detachment from all goals and projects—that is, a replacing of the future with a void, so that we do not escape into our projective imaginations to a-void what stands before us. In the same way that we do violence to others by demanding that they be the creatures of our imaginations, we also do violence to the present by making it subservient to a future where we believe these rewards await us. As we have described in Chapter 2 in the case of eschatological thinking, we seek an eventual equilibrium, some sort of compensation, and thus shun the recognition of our inherent vulnerability. In seeking refuge in the future, we become unable to love, as love requires reality and is a receptivity to that reality, which is to say attention to reality’s absolute presence that has no guaranteed happy endings.
It is for these reasons that, as previously noted, Weil counters: “We must prefer real [present] hell to an imaginary [future] paradise.”66 Such a preference, so against our nature, and demanding a kind of detachment that comes only from a long period of training, is the orientation of attention. It is accompanied by an attitude of waiting and patience, a sort of perseverance at the void. While it does indicate a detachment of sorts in the attentive person, loving attention does not excuse one from the world; in fact, it involves her all the more. As Weil explains:
But the detachment in question here is not without its object; detached thought has as its object the establishment of a hierarchy among values, all values. Thus it has as its object a way of life, a better life, not somewhere else, but in this world and right now, for the values placed in order are the values of this world. In this sense philosophy is oriented toward life; it aims at life through death.67
But this explanation of philosophical detachment only begs several questions: What values are illuminated by attention? What is the “better” way of life that is the object of detachment? If the attentive person epitomizes openness and vulnerability to reality, is she equipped with the energy to respond to the needs she perceives—or has the eclipse of herself disabled any response-ability? Simply put, how does the attentive person weigh the demands of justice and care? (Or is it possible that these traditionally juxtaposed ethical concepts are reconciled in Weilienne attention?)
Indeed, in many contemporary philosophical discussions of justice and care, these two concepts are described in ways that emphasize their distinctness from one another; care and justice are seen as two separate moral orientations, involving different emphases, expectations of situations, virtues, vices, and often entailing different actions. Even their contraries—injustice and uncaring neglect—are also understood as being separate, even if related, issues. For example, Sara Ruddick in her essay, “Injustice in Families: Assault and Domination,” argues that under the care perspective, “exemplary wrongs involve indifference, neglect,” or inattentiveness, whereas from the justice perspective, wrongness is defined by a lack of the “virtues of restraint and detachment,” which signal the presence of domination and assault.68 What this means for her is that there may be “little correlation” between the tendencies to be inattentive/neglectful and assaultive. She describes this distinction in the context of motherhood: “Some mothers, for example, are indifferent, inattentive, even frankly neglectful, but do not assault their children. Other mothers are protective and attentive, yet engage in assault.”69
Weil would argue that this divorcing of domination (as injustice) and inattention (as uncaring) is imagined, and that to be inattentive is to be unjust and violently so, given her understanding of attention. Although Ruddick makes reference to Weil as support for her argument, she unfortunately misappropriates Weil’s ethical philosophy. There are two major questions, then, that require investigation: How is it that inattentiveness is not distinct from domination/violent injustice in any morally significant way? And, how is one able to cultivate this attentiveness that entails both care and justice? The responses to these questions will reveal a revision of the traditional notion of inattentiveness such that our sense of responsibility will be heightened in times that would otherwise be assumed banal. Because of the stricter demands of attentiveness seen in this light, explaining its means of cultivation becomes a moral imperative, as well, and our analysis will reveal that the development of attention is simultaneously an ethical and an aesthetic process,70 mirroring the fact that Platonic love (which is its inspiration) is love of the good and the beautiful.
One of the reasons that Ruddick and others institute a division between neglect (uncaring) and domination (injustice) is because the former is assumed to be passive—a lack of doing—whereas the latter is seen as active harm. This passive-active distinction abounds in philosophical debates on different ethical dilemmas (for instance, passive versus active euthanasia), but the divide is often shown to be superfluous, arbitrary, and a cause of harm more than clarity. Take for instance Peggy McIntosh’s discussion of “privilege” as “unearned advantage and conferred dominance” that is accorded to whites, males, and heterosexuals, among other categories—we might add “Christians” to the list—in the United States.71 Privilege, she says, is like an “invisible knapsack” that such groups carry around and are oblivious to. But the word “privilege” carries the connotation of being something everyone should want and strive toward, and it gives its possessors seeming permission to dominate and control (i.e., to be unjust) simply by virtue of belonging to that group. In our mundane way of seeing things, one who is simply privileged is not guilty of doing anything and is therefore not “unjust.” It may be that they are oblivious to the plight of those suffering from oppression, but this is assumed to be an unfortunate effect of a desirable status rather than injustice defined as aggression toward or intrusion upon the other.
However, even McIntosh’s description makes clear the active aspect of privilege: with privilege, one is permitted dominance and power to control. Moreover, in this station, one is more liable to see only “active” and explicit forms of oppression as problematic, and to be blind to their own oppressive stances and “embedded” forms of oppression (no less active). As a white woman, McIntosh writes,
In my class and place, I did not see myself as racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth. Likewise, we are taught to think that sexism or heterosexism is carried on only through individual acts of discrimination, meanness, or cruelty toward women, gays, and lesbians. . . .72
Still, the question remains as to whether “permission to dominate” can be identified with being domineering or being unjust. At first glance, it would appear to be an unwarranted equivocation. Nevertheless, the inattentiveness that accompanies such privilege makes certain (unjust) actions inevitable, and other (loving) actions impossible.
It is Weil’s understanding of the nature of attention, on the one hand, and the power to dominate, on the other, that leads us to be suspicious of divorcing privileged obliviousness from outright acts of domination. Attention, for her, is a radical renunciation of our own projects, desires, biases, and ambitions in order to be truly receptive to the reality of others and the external world. Attention “lets otherness be.”73 Because it involves a bracketing of self-centered aims and images, the attentive person is able to see what is (because of our self-preoccupations) usually invisible and hear what is usually silent or muffled sound. For Weil, attention characterizes artistic geniuses, then, as much as it does saints; it is creative and inspired by virtue of our decreation. It rids us of the clichés and obscurities caused by our persistent egos, and it reveals to us the “knapsacks of privilege” we carry unconsciously. As we have described in Chapter 3, we are naturally constituted by void, but everything in our being revolts against recognizing this. We described how the “filling imagination” functions to disguise this nature, but there is a more passive aspect to our natural state, too, that makes attention nearly impossible. As Weil contends: “We are born and live in unconsciousness. We are unconscious of our misery. . . . The degradation of affliction always has this effect: the soul clings to it until it is no longer capable of detaching itself (ersatz of resignation).”74 We are attached, that is, to our captivity in ignorance and feel hatred for sources of illumination that bring things into proper perspective. We become actively aggressive toward anything (real) that challenges our imagined centrality.
Thus, fantasy—or daydreaming or l’imagination combleuse—is the enemy of attention, for Weil, and our usual mode of consciousness is a fantastic one because of the ego’s natural tendency to protect itself through imagined narratives and deflections of all sorts. This is also what injustice is. However, when we renounce the falsifying and fantastic imagination, a “transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility,” says Weil.75 She describes the transformation via analogy:
It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognize as a rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way.76
To give another example, many of us could relate to the kind of change of perspective effected after traveling abroad for this first time. We see our native country, our habits, our religion, and our attitudes about other nations differently; we smell and taste our own cuisine differently; we begin to experience time differently, and we hear our music differently. These transformations occur because of a rupture and subsequent detachment from what was familiar and taken for granted as being the definition of what is most real. Our neat categories become absurd in the face of unexpected encounters, and we realize the extent to which we had been at the center of our supposedly sacred narratives. In this way, attention grants the reality of what has been deprived of being, such as the Good Samaritan did before the naked, bleeding, and anonymous fellow lying in the ditch on the side of the road in the famous Gospel story. Clearly for Weil, attention brings an epiphany; but does the imagination entail the sort of violent objectification that Ruddick characterized as injustice? Is inattention synonymous with (active) domination?
The answer to these questions lies in Weil’s depiction of evil, as described in Chapter 3. Recall the way in which she characterizes the root of both sadistic assault and the convenient neglect of one who suffers: “There are no other restraints upon our will than material necessity and the existence of other human beings around us. Any imaginary extension of these limits is seductive, so there is a seduction in whatever helps us to forget the reality of the obstacles.”77 In other words, when we are inattentive, human lives are emptied of their reality and people are turned into puppets. Inattention is active in the sense that it consists in (imaginarily) extending our limits, through and over the existence of others, who should serve as our limits. This happens not only in cases of war and slavery (or assault and domination) but also in the more common cases of our egotistical projections of our desires that result in our not seeing or hearing the affliction and needs of others.
Therefore, it is characteristic of inattention to wield power actively over others. Weil often compares our self-satisfying delusions (or, the obliviousness of privilege) to wielding a sword, in the complete license it appears to permit: “The sword affords deliverance . . . from the intolerable weight of our obligation.”78 In light of this metaphor, ego-defensiveness is a violent posture and cannot be resistant to the temptation of force. She cites Thucydides, who described the necessity by which humans command wherever they are able and have power:
Possibility and necessity are terms opposed to justice . . . Possible means all that the strong can impose upon the weak. It is reasonable to examine how far this possibility goes. Supposing it to be known, it is certain that the strong will accomplish his purpose to the extreme limit of possibility. It is a mechanical necessity.79
To refuse to see the limitation manifested by others and to contemplate only what is possible for us to accomplish within a particular context is the meaning of inattention. Without doubt, this singular and exclusionary focus is the initiation of the automatic and mechanical expansion of our projects, and it implies the absence of respect for the being of others as ends-in-themselves. In Ruddick’s own words,
From the perspective of justice, relationships require restraint of one’s own aggression, intrusion, and appropriation, and respect for the autonomy and bodily integrity of others. . . . A primary temptation . . . is to flout the rules of fair play, taking whatever you can get, what you are strong or lucky enough to be able to exact.80
Clearly, inattentiveness (understood here as disregarding the reality of other persons in favor of self-aggrandizement) is then synonymous with injustice, and the corollary, that attentiveness (or in Ruddick’s terms, “care”) is justice, is also true. As Weil puts it, “We have invented the distinction between justice and charity [caritas]”81 because our more convenient notion of justice dispenses us from the constant vigilance demanded by attention.
Have we, in our industrialized late-capitalistic societies, made ourselves more immune to the void and to the hunger that signals it? Certainly, now we have more and easier access to false foods, as it were, (via the instant gratification of digital technology and of mass-produced material surplus) than ever before. Have we not descended into a vortex of sensing entitlement not-to-suffer, of not-to-feel-hunger? Instead of looking or attending, arguably we have taken up the consumptive posture of voyeuristic watching (of spectacles).82 Even Weil, writing in the early 1940s, recognized: “The talking cinema is very much like [Plato’s] cave. Which shows how much we love our degradation.”83 This latter activity is not one of openness, for we go into watching with expectations, usually expectations of entertainment.84 Watching is also an activity that protects power, privilege, and obliviousness on one side while on the other side, certain groups of people are subjected to illusory fabrications (i.e., violence) at the hands of those who fashion these distractions. In the urgency of subsequent a-voiding, in our lust for control and power and the suppression of love, we have become the personification of one side only of the cold steel of the metaphorical sword; we are the side of brute violence and aggression:
Contact with the sword causes the same defilement, whether it be through the handle or the point. For him who loves, its metallic coldness will not destroy love, but will give the impression of being abandoned by God. Supernatural love has no contact with force, but at the same time it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel . . . If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God.85
We need to release the handle of the sword if we wish to be attentive, though of course, the release itself would imply attention. This release is none other than the divine mania (what Weil calls “supernatural love”) elucidated in Phaedrus. Clearly, this reorienting is risk-filled: releasing the handle of the sword may mean that we find ourselves quickly at the point, and as we have demonstrated, for Weil this release is exemplified by the Crucifixion. Again, modern psychology calls this move “masochistic.”86 But Weil tells us, “This is not any kind of masochism. What excites masochists is only the semblance of cruelty, because they don’t know what cruelty is.”87 Conversely, the one who attends to reality knows affliction and suffering and the absence of God, this other side of cruelty. It is in this tangible absence of the good that we must wait and be irresistibly impelled to action. Haste and distractions are, in this state, perpetual temptations. But as Weil warned, “Alas for her if she gets tired and goes away. For the two places where God and humanity are waiting are at the same point in the fourth dimension . . .”88 This point is the mid-point between life and death, the good and the necessary, the possible and impossible, the human and divine. This is a no-man’s land, an intolerable ambiguity. This is the place of Antigone, of Socrates, of Jesus, of all such mediators. It is the place and experience of the cross—that is to say, being “nailed down” to the present, in exile—where there is a peculiar but unrecognizable advantage in the nourishment of our attention.
To complete our analysis of loving attention as justice, we ought to consider the fact of what Weil called malheur (roughly translated as “affliction” and embodied, par excellence, by the crucified Christ)89 as a large part of what constitutes human reality and is perhaps the strongest challenge to attention—both for the victim and the attendant. First, in a surprising statement, Weil tells us that the love of one who is afflicted is comparable to the love of beauty, as both have a tendency to inspire renunciation and thus are great occasions for the cultivation of attention. She writes, for instance, “Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it. The same with an affliction which we contemplate without drawing back.”90 Of course, while the phenomenon of affliction may be spiritually useful in this way, this does not mean that it is something to be desired or sought, as is the case with beauty. Moreover, Weil tells us: “I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.”91 But there is something else that links real beauty and affliction and is essential to their very being: both beauty and affliction carry an element of impersonality in themselves, such that eventually the impersonal also becomes the character of one who attends to these phenomena. What does Weil mean by “impersonality,” however? And how could impersonality constitute attention—that is, love—to this person? Beyond these questions, we must also consider the other tendency of affliction—its supreme ability to produce flight from the void.
Weil knew, and we are aware, that in this world, some people will attract our notice (“either through the hazard of circumstances or some chance affinity”) and others will remain anonymous to us, escaping our gaze, or at most, we will see them “as items of a collectivity.”92 When Christ said that we have to love our neighbor, the example he gave as an illustration of that commandment was that being who was anonymous and forgotten, lying naked and bleeding on the roadside. Thus the love directed toward him would be, according to Weil, “completely anonymous, and for that reason, completely universal love.”93 Because humans are unequal in terms of their relations to the things of the world, it is imperative to give respect to that which is equal and identical in all humans, namely their “unquenchable desire for good.”94 In this way, we remember that what is to be attended to (and thus loved) in another is her hunger, or void; this is, after all, the reality of the human creature, and “love needs reality.”95 To do this, however, is paradoxically to direct one’s attention beyond this world, because the universal human reality is linked to the supernatural reality, its origin. The human void, that is, implies “a reality outside the world . . . outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.”96 The void is only the universal absence of God—the inverse reflection of the supernatural. According to Weil, by virtue of directing our minds with attention toward that supernatural, we are able to make real contact with the universal center and essence of the human being who is afflicted, thereby enabling good to work through us. Those who love in this way are the sole intermediaries for true goodness to manifest in our earthly existence.
So for Weil, this universal aspect of humans that is the link to the other reality is “sacred,” and it is what goes by the name of the “impersonal.”97 It is given an elevated status in part because all errors that we commit (including what are called “sins”) are tied to the human personality, whereas “perfection is impersonal” and on the level of anonymity.98 Thus, when we turn with loving attention to another human, it is because we have first detached from the temporal things of the world to turn entirely toward God, an altogether impersonal and self-renouncing experience in itself. Moreover, since “affliction is anonymous before all things” and “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things,”99 if we can turn attentively toward one who is afflicted (which is to say, toward her impersonality, or her yearning for the good), we are prevented from consuming or assimilating her into ourselves or our own limited experiences. Why? Emptiness, by definition, cannot be eaten, but must be regarded. It is then that we are forced to remember our own hunger and, therefore, what absolutely unites us with the rest of humanity. For Weil, this should also be the effect of our contemplation of Christ’s suffering on the cross—not satisfaction (by viewing it as a means to the resurrection), but a consent to suffer with others in the face of necessity (compassion).
Recognition of this commonality in humans by attending to the supernatural is “the only possible motive for universal respect,” according to Weil.100 This is because if we keep our attention tied to the horizontal plane of existence and the world of facts (rather than to verticality, or the good), we become unconsciously susceptible to prejudice, self-interest, proximity, convenience, pleasure, and all sorts of factors that preclude a nonpartisan (real) perspective and response. What is required by this supernatural attention demands everything of us:
The entire soul—including therefore its sentient and carnal part which is rooted in the things of sense and draws life from them. It must be uprooted. And this is death. . . . The loss of anything or anyone we are attached to is directly experienced as a sense of dejection which corresponds to a loss of energy. And what we have to do is to lose all the vital energy which is supplied to us by all the things and all the people we are attached to. . . . Thus it is total detachment that is the condition for the love of God, and when once the soul has performed the motion of totally detaching itself from the world so as to turn entirely towards God, it is illumined by the truth which comes down to it from God.101
But the obvious question here is, what does it mean to turn the attention toward God (or the supernatural), especially if this is something we cannot, by definition, and by our limitations, know?
In some sense, God cannot be an “object” of attention, for conceptions of God and theologies are necessarily artifices, as we have argued at length. Our attention, or love, cannot have God for its direct object, since “God is not present to the soul and has never yet been so.”102 What is possible is indirect or implicit love of God, which is ultimately “destined to become the love of God.”103 Such implicit love of God, as for example, the creative attention to the afflicted, is the fulfilling of the commandment “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” and is the only sensible meaning of it, according to Weil.
We appear to have run into a contradiction: On the one hand, we must love God directly and detach ourselves from earthly, sensible things; on the other, God cannot be a direct object of our love, so we must turn to the world to love God implicitly—the only way we can. But there is no contradiction. What we attend to, for instance, in another person, is of a supernatural/universal order: the impersonal longing for the good. This sort of attention is a detachment from the temporal and perishable, for the yearning is an eternal one. In the same way, when we attend to the impersonal necessity of the natural world, we share in a universal perspective that is a reflection of the supernatural: “Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate and imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and sunlight.”104 The effect of such attention to what is impersonal in the world is similar in both cases: we are displaced from our imaginary center of the universe, and with us, our false ideas of time, our parochial hierarchy of values, our sense of what is real and what is not—all the convenient projections of our ego are put in their proper place, which is to say, as merely one among others.
However, there is a special problem when it comes to attending to the afflicted. As Weil rightly notes, oftentimes, when we encounter someone who is afflicted, we are practically unable via our own natural efforts to give this person any moment of attention. We can scarcely look in their direction. Weil writes:
Thought revolts from contemplating affliction, to the same degree that living flesh recoils from death. A stag advancing voluntarily step by step to offer itself to the teeth of a pack of hounds is about as probable as an act of attention directed towards a real affliction, which is close at hand, on the part of a mind which is free to avoid it. But that which is indispensable to the good and is impossible naturally is always possible supernaturally.105
It is true that an encounter with affliction, whether experienced directly or indirectly through empathy, can, by virtue of its horror, induce a flight into unending distractions and deflections of reality. Weil acknowledges: “Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls. It is a terrible risk but one that must be run, even during the instant when hope fails. But,” she adds, “we must not throw ourselves into it.”106 The last clause is crucial, for the seeking out of affliction implies the retention of control, power, and will in manipulating force; by definition, then, one is unable to bring affliction upon oneself. We may be able to bring suffering upon ourselves, but not affliction, because part of what distinguishes affliction is the component of real social exile—it is something externally imposed and therefore truly bitter. As Weil says, “[Affliction] is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery.”107 More precisely, she states:
There is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another.108
Ironically, then, the afflicted one who is the literal embodiment of the living dead—a monster109—makes it nearly impossible for one who looks at her for only a second to engage the imagination, to make “a suitable adjustment of the mind.”110 The veil has been ripped away. The only option left is complete a-voidance—looking away. How, then, is it possible to turn with love toward the one who is afflicted?
On one level, this action is impossible. As we have seen, our thought naturally revolts from contemplating affliction, and our tendencies of self-preservation keep it at bay. Also, Weil notes that affliction cannot be communicated to those who have not experienced it, and “as for those who have themselves been mutilated by affliction, they are in no state to help anyone at all.”111 “Thus,” she concludes, “compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility.”112 But of course, Weil does not mean that such compassion is a literal impossibility and that we are excused from it; it is only an impossibility on the natural level of human effort. Here we must recall an important lesson in the cultivation of attention (manifested in this context as “compassion”): if one has desired to be attentive in such situations already, as evidenced by the training undertaken to clear away distractions, then supernatural energy will make the impossible possible. In this context, her words regarding training—“we have to accomplish the possible in order to touch the impossible”113—take on new meaning. And this applies to the afflicted one as well:
The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world to it, as in the case of Job. But if a soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.114
The phenomenon of affliction as a test of attention is an extremely precarious one. But if an original consent to the void has been made, the development of love and attention grows exponentially in confronting atrocity and degradation, for “affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.”115 Again, the description of this phenomenon’s potential for the growth of attention can be prescriptive in no way. We raise the issue only to suggest, as Weil does, that it reveals our a-voidance and (dis)orientation to ourselves, in a most concrete way. “One can only accept the existence of affliction by considering it at a distance,” she tells us.116 (This claim appears verified by the well-known contemporary phenomenon in which masses of people flood internet sites promising to show gory videos of human cruelty and torture, as an apparent source of amusement.)117
However, the distance itself is not the problem, as long as there is attention; the problem is the looking away, which may take the form of a consumptive imagination: “Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction,”118 which is to say, away from reality and its inherent connections, and toward personal aims that have become inflated, including the transformation of everything into a spectacle for our entertainment. And this turning away from reality, though itself constituting a choice, means that a person gives himself over to the laws of moral and spiritual gravity, where “he thinks that he can decide and choose, but he is only a thing, a stone that falls.”119 In turning away from the “supernatural light” that illuminates the real irreducibility of affliction and the impersonal order, the mere spectator becomes obedient to those blind and mechanical laws of gravity, where his subsequent choices are only semblances of choice. It is important to note this irony: a man flees the scene of affliction through his imagination, presumably because the objectness and abjectness of the afflicted fill him with the horror of losing his own person (i.e., his freedom), but this is precisely what he loses in turning away.
On the level of attention that can really “look” at affliction (having been prepared by training in solitude and exercises of self-effacement), freeing love is truly made possible. Here is where decreation happens, and where false gods flee the scene, for affliction is felt as the irreducible and unavoidable absence of God. Consider Weil’s example of attending to an afflicted other, which is also a perfect example of the refusal to consume him as a spectacle:
One of two [humans] is only a little piece of flesh, naked, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch; he is nameless; no one knows anything about him. Those who pass by this thing scarcely notice it, and a few minutes afterward do not even know that they saw it. Only one stops and turns his attention toward it. The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention. The attention is creative. But at the moment when it is engaged it is a renunciation . . . The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him. Still more, to desire the existence of the other is to transport himself into him by sympathy, and as a result, to have a share in the state of inert matter which is his.120
We see here that creative attention, which is really a decreation, causes us to be transported into the afflicted Other, rather than the reverse, which is caused by the imagination: transporting the unconsenting Other into us and our fantasies. Thus, loving and attending to the Other means that we accept diminishment of our egos, for it is a necessary consequence any time we are truly open to the reality of other persons. In this loving, we also detach ourselves from any possible return from the beings we love. According to Weil, loving our neighbor means being able to ask him, “What are you going through?” “It is a recognition the sufferer exists,” she contends, “as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”121 In other words, to love is to embrace the void of another without trying to fill it with our own finite and limited human (pseudo-)solutions and easy consolations; after all, even these well-intentioned tactics too often are meant to help us forget our own hunger.
Hunger (or the void) is our universal reality, as we have seen:
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.122
Though we may not think we wish to possess the being we approach, the distance effected by self-renunciation is necessary to maintain our humility before, and hence our love for her. Again, we must love in the other what is real. Weil reminds us, “To be able to love in our neighbor the hunger that consumes him and not the food he offers for the appeasement of our own hunger—this implies a total detachment. It implies that one renounces feeding on man and wants in the future to feed only on God.”123
Still, there remain questions about the lived experience of this detached and impersonal love—for both the lover and the recipient. Is this supernatural love ultimately satisfying to humans’ needs? Can universal love account for the real complexities of interpersonal relationships with particular others? In recent decades, there has been much criticism of theories of love such as the one just presented. As we will demonstrate, critics argue that this impersonal love amounts to an abdication of responsibility and avoidance of genuine commitment to the complexities of human relations. How might Weil respond to these serious charges?
If love is conceptually a paradox for Simone Weil, in her personal life it was arguably “an ordeal.”124 While many, such as Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, marveled at “her love for the disinherited of this world” in all the forms it took, the same has also noted an “interior problem”: “Kind and merciful as she was,” Perrin wrote, “she would sometimes tend to make the exacting demands of a merciless logician.”125 Gustave Thibon remarked that “she was inwardly founded on love like those volcanoes of the arctic regions of which the lava is hidden under a covering of ice.”126 Weil herself, in writing to one of her pupils in the spring of 1935, during the time of her employment at the Renault factories, confesses,
I can tell you that when, at your age, and later on too, I was tempted to try to get to know love, I decided not to—telling myself that it was better not to commit my life in a direction impossible to foresee until I was sufficiently mature to know what, in a general way, I wish from life and what I expect from it.127
It is entirely apropos that this “problem” was evidenced in both Weil’s writings and in the records we have of her short life, for there was rarely, if ever, a bifurcation between these two aspects in her.
Describing the rarity of the authentic unity that typified her life and thought, E. W. F. Tomlin tells us, “The false mystic is concerned with elaborating what he has seen, or with trying to define and convey the emotions which accompanied his vision. Simone Weil is solely engaged in the seeing.”128 Thus, what she sees, that is, what she attends to, will by necessity and definition come to inhabit her being and hence will resist objectification. For instance, Weil readily admitted that there were ideas that would not let her rest, words that had the innate virtue of illumination and edification, but not consolation—“vertical” words such as God, truth, justice, and, significantly for our purposes here, love.129 Such words imply a risk and a danger, because there is the constant temptation to elaborate and posit conceptualizations through associating them with the horizontal and familiar. But because these words refer to absolute perfection, for Weil, and “are the image in our world of [the] impersonal and divine order of the universe,” we should not try to make them conform to our limited paradigms, since their realities are beyond conceptualization.130 Rather, we must accept them as “uncomfortable companions,” and in finding associated ideas and actions in the light they shed, come to abolish “everything in contemporary life which buries the soul under injustice, lies, and ugliness.”131
Love, then, being one such “uncomfortable companion” for Weil and being described as light and not consolation,132 will naturally be found mystifying not only to the intellect but also to the lived experience. Rush Rhees is one scholar who openly struggled with Weil’s notion of purity, especially in its implications for love. In letters to his friend, M. O’C. Drury, and in notes never intended to be published,133 Rhees confronted the difficulties—both theoretical and practical—that he imagined would ensue from a total acceptance of Weil’s love philosophy. In fact, as we noted earlier, Rhees goes so far as to write that this pure love “in her hands . . . goes to ways which are . . . in a deep sense evil.”134 There are four major points of his critique we have identified that lead him to the conclusion that Weilienne love is quite possibly evil, and which need to be addressed. Although D. Z. Phillips makes an important point in saying, “Rhees’s concentration on difficulties counters the easy tendency for religious admiration of Simone Weil to lead to an uncritical acceptance of everything she says,” her insights regarding the nature of supernatural love are more nuanced than they tend to be presented by critics such as Rhees.135 While we do not pretend that there are any final resolutions to the challenges, it seems clear that Rhees neglected to consider important factors, not only chez Simone Weil but also in broader philosophical and historical frameworks. For instance, as we will describe, the social activism of another early twentieth-century female philosopher, Jane Addams, provides some pertinent parallels to Weil’s thinking about universal love. Nevertheless, there are others like Rhees who would provide strong challenges to Weil’s perspective on love—including those who emphasize “interpersonal” religious ethics, like Emmanuel Levinas, and those who emphasize care ethics, like Nel Noddings. We will examine possible critiques from these figures, in addition to Rhees’s, and proffer Weilienne responses.
To begin, Rhees stated or implied the following four challenges, which we will subsequently examine closely because they represent the most common objections raised to Weil’s idea of impersonal and supernatural love. First, Weil’s notion of pure love involves an indifference to the temporal life of others and self, whereas many think that in loving a particular person, one “ought to hope that things will go one way” and not another for them.136 Second, charity and compassion necessarily require some form of attachment.137 Third, wanting to be physically near the beloved does not necessarily mean wanting to possess (or consume) them, but rather this may really indicate a love for them and not a love of the possession of them.138 Finally, cutting attachment to the world is a “flight from responsibility”; it “disregards the dependence of others on you,” and it is “evil.”139 Furthermore, Rhees claims that Weil ignores the suffering inherent in intimate relations (e.g., marriage or parent-child relationships), instead focusing her discussions on love of strangers and love of God, throwing into question whether she could love humans as humans.140
In general, Rhees’ problems with Weil’s notions of purity and love are arguably more (self-)disclosive of the human attachment to attachment itself, rather than suggestive of something “evil” inherent in Weil’s thought. By carefully and philosophically revisiting themes central to Weil’s ethical-religious account of love, such as the void, detachment, “gift,”141 charity, and distance, we do not attempt to solve the perplexities of pure love in Weil’s writings and life but to dissolve some of the problems that are unnecessarily projected onto the issue.
The first problem Rhees identifies concerns the practical consequences of Weil’s contention that pure love must be a detached love. For example, she writes,
Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire? . . . In this sense, and on condition that [love] is not turned toward a pseudo-immortality conceived on the model of the future, the love we devote to the dead is perfectly pure.142
Indeed, as we have seen, for Weil, love is simply the desire for the existence of a being, without the escape into the (imaginary) future. But Rhees ponders, “It would seem to follow [from this] that if you love someone, you ought not to be concerned about what may happen to him while he is alive. You ought not even to care whether in his life he is going to come nearer to God or to be degraded.”143 For him, love entails that we ought to hope that things will go one way, and not another.
One might simply respond that Rhees confuses an “is” for an “ought.” That is to say, just because we often do hope for particular things for those we love does not imply that we should. But why shouldn’t one do so? Weil makes it clear that “the future is a filler of void places.”144 Hoping, as a futurally oriented phenomenon,145 would be tied up, according to Weil, with the workings of the imagination, in its projections for certain ends, either for oneself or for another. Therefore, in hoping, one would not be fully attentive to the present existent, and while we may believe ourselves to be participating in the good, we have in fact allowed ourselves to be distracted from reality, where we could have become intermediaries for the good. Perhaps this only demonstrates Vance Morgan’s point about Rhees: “Rhees’ problem with Weil,” he writes, “is on a metaphysical level and is an example of an interpreter attempting to understand a text from within the confines of a particular metaphysical framework, when the author of the text is writing from within the confines of an entirely different framework.”146
Indeed, rather than hoping for good, it is for humans to turn their attention and love toward “the reality that exists outside the reach of all human faculties,” and in so doing, to become mediators through which good can descend from there and come among one’s fellows.147 As we have shown, to love is to be just. Hence it is not merely a metaphysical difference for Weil and Rhees, but it follows from Weil’s understanding of this love of reality that all persons would be established as equals in their capacity to attend to what transcends contingency and particular contexts. Hoping for a particular end for another, then, is not only escapist but also short-sighted, presumptuous, and self-satisfying; for in hoping, I hope that, and am thereby transferred to another reality—that is to say, unreality. It is no surprise that “hope” is one of those words that is (and has been) easily appropriated by political campaigns, for the politician seeking election desires nothing so much as to have his constituents forget about the present. Instead of hoping, waiting (without knowing for what) or “listening ceaselessly” is the mode by which one becomes a vessel for true goodness. Only by renouncing every form of the imagination—hoping included—do we preserve the interior void, a condition for love. As Weil asks, “If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe?”148
Regarding his second critique, in questioning the theoretical soundness of Weil’s notion of loving in the void, Rhees insinuates that charity and compassion necessitate some form of attachment, thus throwing doubt on whether love is really always “detached.” He writes, “Sometimes Simone Weil speaks as though all attachment were something like the attachment of a miser for his treasure. But of course she cannot hold to this line, since it makes nonsense of charity, of compassion, and so on.”149 In order to assess whether Rhees is correct in his insinuation, we must first give an account of authentic charity, or benefaction, and then proceed to its implications for pure love.
When one is charitable, one gives a gift. Jean-Luc Marion, in his “phenomenology of givenness,” has had this to say about what constitutes a gift:
The gift, to be given, must be lost and remain lost without return. In this way alone does it break with exchange, where one gives only to have it repaid (with a marginal profit) . . . [I]t is a question of the pure and simple loss involved in giving with abandon. . . . Hence the paradox: the gift must be lost for me, but not for everybody. It’s necessary that an Other receive it and definitely deprive me of it.150
From Marion’s compelling description of a gift, we see that detachment is a necessary ingredient of charity; otherwise, when one is attached, (even to the intended beneficiary!) what one engages in is not properly giving, or benefaction, or charity, but some sort of controlled economic exchange. If one is attached to the Other who receives, there is necessarily a return to self in the so-called giving; “investment” would be a more appropriate label. Pure love, on the other hand, would compel the giving, such that it would not even be recognized as such. Weil cites the disciples: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?”151
Giving, for Weil, would involve the Hindu mandate to be detached “from the fruits of action . . . to act not for an object but from necessity.”152 She tells us, “Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not ‘What is the aim?’ It is ‘What is the origin?’”153 And clearly, for her, the origin should be God. Hence, “[w]e should not go to our neighbor for the sake of God, but we should be impelled toward our neighbor by God, as the arrow is driven toward its target by the archer.”154 Nowhere in this depiction of charitable action would attachment be a possibility. Again, this is not simply a metaphysical matter, but an ethical one as well. What would it mean for there to be an attachment, even to the Other, in the act of giving? Would the recipient not feel the constraint of the attachment, and if so, are we not buying him? Weil tells us, for instance, “Almsgiving when it is not supernatural is like a sort of purchase. It buys the sufferer.”155 Thus, it becomes clear that real loss, which cuts the cords of attachment, is necessary for the gift to be pure. Weil writes, “Benefaction is permissible precisely because it constitutes a humiliation still greater than pain, a still more intimate and undeniable proof of dependence.”156 This mention of dependence would seem to contradict what we have established concerning the absence of attachment in giving. But she continues, “The dependence, however, must be on fate and not on any particular human being. That is why the benefactor is under an obligation to keep himself entirely out of the benefaction.”157 Real charity, then, issues from a detached and pure love, which is to say, from a desire to do what justice demands and thus not only does not necessitate attachment but also absolutely precludes it.
For Weil, consenting to distance from the beloved is key to a pure or “supernatural” love, one not tarnished by attachment, modification, domination, submission, or the desire for possession. So it is in this context that Rhees makes his third objection, “If I do not want to be separated from the person I love, this need not mean that I want to possess him (or her).”158 He goes on to protest Weil’s analogy of this desire for proximity with the miser’s love of a treasure, arguing that although the miser may make sacrifices to keep the money, “he does not make sacrifices for it; he does not have a love for it in the way in which you love the woman who is yours, and for whom you make every sacrifice.”159 In other words, he questions why the desire for proximity would imply a desire for consumption.
As we have noted, Weil does often compare love with hunger; of course, for her, pure love would be evidenced by looking antithetical to eating. Can one, in fact, have a pure love for something that one dares to approach? Weil thinks that by “remain[ing] quite still” we actually unite ourselves with that which we desire.160 It is this way with God, for instance: we do not dare approach Him, but paradoxically, by our self-renunciation it is possible to be closest. The approach itself is an assertion of self and suffices to bring one the sort of satiation and consolation that arises from a consumptive posture. Anytime distance is reduced, love (i.e., hunger) is conquered. But this is precisely the danger, for it is the hunger that is real: “We imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real; we have to fasten onto the hunger.”161 What this means is that as finite, fallible creatures, our remembrance that this is our constitution is of utmost importance. In constantly seeking proximity to the beloved, we ironically forget our essential hunger, for this is the paradoxical nature of desire that Emily Dickinson expresses in the last stanza of her poem, “I Had Been Hungry”: “. . . so I found / that hunger was a way / of persons outside windows, / the entering takes away.”162 Though we may not think we wish to possess the beloved we approach, the distance is necessary to maintain our humility before, and hence our love for her.
Simone Weil is not the only woman to have been criticized for finding her vocation in serving the world beyond and even to the exclusion of, intimate and familial relations. In his fourth critique, Rhees saw in Weil a “tendency to ignore the relations between two persons . . . which are the relations of just these individuals” and thereby to ignore the suffering that would be inherent therein.163 Care ethicists, such as Nel Noddings, are also highly suspicious of notions like “universal love” because of the propensity toward abstraction and abstention from the practical world. Noddings worries about the caring that retreats from the tending to particular persons by going
. . . toward other objects of caring—ideas, animals, humanity-at-large, God—[such that] her ethical ideal is virtually shattered. . . . Our ethic of caring—which has been called a “feminine ethic”—begins to look a bit mean in contrast to the masculine ethics of universal love or universal justice. But universal love is illusion. Under the illusion, some young people retreat to the church to worship that which they cannot actualize; some write lovely poetry extolling universal love; and some, in terrible disillusion, kill to establish the very principles which should have entreated them not to kill. Thus are lost both principles and persons.164
If this neglect of persons is true, can it be justified? Jane Addams, another social activist of the early twentieth century who felt called to “higher claims” argues, by contrast, “The stern [ethical] questions are not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit the poor, the criminal, the sick, and did ye feed the hungry?”165 Addams believed that the two interests, personal and social, did each have a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life; however, these interests are bound to collide tragically, unless family and close friends are educated to recognize the broader social claim as legitimate. Hence, for Addams, the responsibility lies with the family and the spouse to adjust to the more expansive and inclusive ethic.
While Addams argued on the basis of a democratic humanism that “to attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality . . . is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation,”166 as we have seen, Weil explains impersonal attention on a religious basis: in order to truly love those here below, our love must “detach itself completely from creatures to ascend to God,” pass “through God as through fire,” to then come down again “associated with the creative love of God.”167 As we have pointed out, however, since God cannot be a direct object for our love, Weil actually means that we attend to the universal human void which is sacred. She explains:
We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. . . . Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.168
Her maddening paradox of the imperative to love what is here below while detaching from its particulars to ascend to a supernatural commonality points to the extraordinary difficulty of resisting idolatry—which we commit either by imagining the supernatural or absolutizing the natural. The orientation of love is, for Weil, as challenging as the proverbial camel who passes through the eye of the needle, or more to the point, “the rich man [who enters] . . . into the kingdom of God.” When the disciples expressed their dismay at this illustration, wondering how they could then be saved, Jesus responded: “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”169 Weil does not deny the importance of interpersonal relations, for they are essential in avoiding pure abstractions and fictions: “In all departments of life, love is not real unless it is directed toward a particular object; it becomes universal without ceasing to be real only as a result of analogy and transference.”170 The point is, we ought not to privilege certain relations and persons above others by making exceptions, special excuses, et cetera, because the ego is always involved in such rankings. In addition, such privileging shows that we have fallen under a conceit that select people, concerns, and relations are more real than others. By contrast, our love of a particular person must leave impartiality intact and preserve the autonomy in ourselves and others; these qualities are of an impersonal order. Weil provides a helpful example to illustrate this transference: “As a geometrician looks at a particular figure in order to deduce the universal properties of the triangle, so he who knows how to love directs upon a particular human being a universal love.”171 This detached love does not diminish the beloved but in fact is like a vision that refuses to be distracted by what is inessential and accidental about a person—the very same qualities that the ego exaggerates and uses as the basis of discrimination.
If this detachment brings about resentment and abandonment on the part of our comrades in our personal lives, we can be certain that they “are no true friends of God,” Weil remarks.172 “Our neighbor, [and] our friends . . . do not fall to the level of unrealities after the soul has had direct contact with God,” she continues, distinguishing herself from Plato. “On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality.”173 So despite Rhees’ claim that cutting attachment to the world constitutes a flight from responsibility and is evil in its apparent disregard of “the dependence of other people on you,”174 it seems that real justice is possible only through this impersonal attention. The temptation to give preferential treatment to one’s closest friends, and to leave the ego intact in doing so, is too great otherwise. It would be uncomfortable for the average human to accept that “love is not consolation,” but “light”175 and that loving truth (which is a mandate) entails enduring the void. What may be perceived as fleeing responsibility, as disregarding the dependence of others, may in fact be the result of the sort of attachment that should itself become enlightened. We are tempted to label the discomfort and personal neglect we feel from the saint’s detachment as evil, but is the evil not in us? Weil reminds us, “The sin in me says ‘I’. . . . Evil makes distinctions, prevents God from being equivalent to all.”176
Still, are there not other philosophies on love that extol the singular uniqueness of particular persons in relationships as central to the ethicality of the engagement? Emmanuel Levinas is clearly one such philosopher who, by taking a phenomenological approach to the encounter with the Other, reveals the “height” and “infinity” (or vertical dimension) that manifests in the experience of that irreducible alterity. We generalize here some key points from his work, Totality and Infinity, for the purposes of this contrast to Weilienne love. For Levinas, broadly speaking, it is the encounter with difference or alterity of the Other—the fact that he is irreducible to the Same (the subject, me)—that founds the religio-ethical dimension and thus my responsibility for the Other. In fact, “preexisting the plane of ontology is the ethical plane,”177 for Levinas, insofar as relation and encounter are primary, whereas abstraction, systematizing, and totalizing are secondary.
In the encounter, the Other comes to me as “absolutely foreign,” and this strangeness is the property of his freedom, his distance from me. As Levinas notes, “The absolutely foreign alone can instruct us. And it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me—refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification. . . .”178 While Weil also emphasizes the importance of distance between two persons to preserve autonomy and the capacity for free consent, goodness is only possible in a relation when there is a recognition of what is common in all people—the impersonal hungering. Levinas does say that “to recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger,” but he goes on to say, “To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘You’ in a dimension of height.”179 Levinas thus describes the experience of the Other as one of divinity (or, in his term, “infinity”). Weil, on the other hand, reserves that level of alterity/mystery for the supernatural—which we only know by its absence. Other persons are limits to us and our projects, but only on the basis of the common link to the good, by virtue of their desire for the good. That is, there is mediation (exemplified by the Christ figure) between the immanent and transcendent in Weil’s philosophy, whereas, for Levinas, “[t]he dimension of the divine opens forth from the [particular] human face”180 in an unmediated way.
Beyond this difference, we also know that for Levinas, there is a distinction between the ethical dimension and that of the uniquely loving or erotic relationship. In the latter, Levinas describes an ambiguity wherein desire (a tending toward the absolutely other, characteristic of the ethical relation) and need (a tending toward satisfaction and consummation for the self) are joined. In the loving relationship, that is, Levinas emphasizes the additional element of enjoyment of the Other and, therefore, a return to self in consummatory experiences. He writes of the ambiguity: “Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, and this need still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved.”181 Weil, however, is unequivocal in her denigration of carnal love, but more to the point, she warns of the destructive influence of the element of “need” admitted into any friendship or relationship. “To soil is to modify, it is to touch,” she says, describing the disfiguring effects of power exerted in any relationship, including the erotic caress.182 And, “In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity.”183 The problem is precisely that lovers want to possess, to enjoy the Other, to reaffirm the self through the Other. In this light, Levinas’ description of the (feminine) beloved is telling:
The beloved is opposed to me not as a will struggling with my own or subject to my own, but on the contrary as an irresponsible animality which does not speak true words. The beloved, returned to the stage of infancy without responsibility—this coquettish head, this youth, this pure life “a bit silly”—has quit her status as a person. . . . The relations with the Other are enacted in play; one plays with the Other as with a young animal.184
While philosophers like Luce Irigaray have been critical of passages in Levinas’ phenomenology of eros such as this one for primarily feminist reasons, Weil would see the description as indicative of a mind that has given (in the Platonic sense) full reign to its basest desires and complete license to the falsifying imagination that projects animality onto the reality of a person.
Moreover, according to Levinas’ description, our love is ultimately defined by its return to us. He writes, “If to love is to love the love the Beloved bears me, to love is also to love oneself in love, and thus to return to oneself. Love does not transcend unequivocably—it is complacent, it is pleasure and dual egoism.”185 In Weil’s thinking on love, this is a recipe for domination and constraint within relationships—that is, injustice. The autonomy (and integrity) of the Other is compromised by the consumptive aspect of the erotic orientation, for they become a means to my self-love. Hence, for Weil, even “to desire friendship is a great fault,” for it is of “the order of grace” and should be for us an unexpected and gratuitous joy. “Friendship is not,” she contends, “to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).”186 This virtue requires the preservation of hunger on our part and the refusal to fill this void with another.
In the end, Simone Weil can perhaps be accused of seeking to express and live a love that is not pleasant, a love that is too great for the intellect’s grasp, and too detached for the hungry ego. Despite Richard Rhees’ admitted high regard for Weil and her work, when he says in various places that he thinks Weil is mistaken about love, one wonders whether he is not in actuality wishing (imagining) her to be mistaken. Such a desire would be a temptation for anyone. Weil herself recognized the tension that pure love is bound to produce. She knew, for instance, that the testing of Job was “a question of the level of love.”187 The question that must be confronted is: “Is love situated on the level of sheep, fields of corn, numerous children? Or is it situated further off, in the third dimension, behind?”188 And Weil did not believe that she would pass this test, either, confessing, “I think I must love wrongly: otherwise things would not seem like this to me. My love would not be attached to a few beings. It would be extended to everything which is worthy of love.”189 This sort of love seems impossible to us, but “it is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world” and approach the door of the supernatural, the real.190
In an age where distractions are omnipresent and where self-love is touted as the foundation of all other loves, the dream world appears to be inhabited consciously and willingly. It is no surprise that we do not see whole races of people, whole nations, the poor, and the diseased but primarily direct our “attention” toward those who entertain us and who perpetuate our fictional worlds. It is therefore a revolutionary hypothesis that love is the selfless attending to reality. It is in this way, and no other, that love is a condition of justice, for while such love seems impossible to us, it is something we must begin to “see” in order to begin seeing those whom our preferential loves have made invisible. But it is in this way, too, that pure love (and thus, “real mysticism”) is not ennobling or glorious, but crucifying. Perhaps the question Weil leaves in her wake is whether we are prepared to accept a detached, pure, and patient love as the model for our interaction with others. This “impossible” love—which for Weil is the only love—may be our greatest ethical and religious challenge, and by virtue of an inherent reference to absolute perfection, an uncomfortable companion for us as well.