Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
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Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
I am trying to get to the bottom of Weil's relationship to activity vs. passivity. For example, I have had it in my head that I want to make the critique that (though she went and empathised with those in factories or denied herself food to empathise with the poor) she wasn't really taking active steps to better their position in any definitive way. (Does anyone have suggestions of a philosophy that would want people to 'do good' with definitive actions?)
In addition, there seems to be an aspect of passivity in her idea of attention, in the way that it is kind of effortful and yet a kind of 'negative effort' which I suppose could be read as a kind of passivity? My supervisor has emphasised the importance of passivity in her writing but I'm not picking up on really what he could be referring to.
Also, though, she did have a strong focus on action eg. she criticised Descartes and formulated his idea to 'I will, therefore I do' or similar. Did she perceive that she was 'doing' in the actions she took towards others and so is it really a case of philosophical opinion ie. utilitarians would have wanted her to do 'the greatest good for the greatest number'? A related question would then be where the idea of the will comes into things. With the focus on negative effort, a kind of action and inaction, this is not really an experience of the will and yet she seems to have held onto that idea of willed action to some extent - judging from her commentary on Descartes?
If anyone has any answers or takes on whether these issues are resolvable with more reading and understanding or even if they are recognisable contradictions in her work, let me know.
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
Simone is not that easy to uderstand because she was a complete individual with a strong need for truth which surpassed the normal human desire for pleasure and recognition. She put herself in the position of the suffering in order to experience the truth of it.
She would say Man doesn’t know how to listen. If we did listen with conscious attention, then everything would change for the better."Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him."
Excerpted from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin:
At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.
She was comparing herself to her older brother who became one of the world’s greatest mathematicians but still wanted to become part of that “”transcendent kingdom wherin truth abides.”
Albert Camus wrote on Simone Weil
Conscious attention is an active process so I’m not sure what you mean by passive. When she was a Marxist she was admired by Leon Trotsky. She died a Christian mystic and intellectual influence on Pope Paul V1Simone Weil, I maintain this now, is the only great spirit of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.
For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.
When she died there were seven outsiders at her funeral. Now she is loved around the world since a person senses the dedication to truth in her which is very rare. She didn’t earn this love from fine speeches but something at the depth of her being touches another at the depth of their being. It feeds the soul.
If there is one particular idea like the value of conscious attention or the effects of imagination on the human psych we can do itThomas Merton records being asked to review a biography of Weil (Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, Jacques Chabaud, 1964) and was challenged and inspired by her writing. “Her non-conformism and mysticism are essential elements in our time and without her contribution we remain not human.”
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
We are now in the post-modern age, where most scholars (and I) think there is no "transcendent kingdom" of truth. Reality is subjective, and truth does not transcend one's cultural training, individual perceptions, linguistic limitations, and environmental perspectives. The religious and the modernist scientists seek to transcend their training and environments. The question is: Do they (and can they) succeed?
p.s. I've never read Simone Weil. My apologies if I'm mischaracterizing her position (based on Nick's post).
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
If you are right, there is no conscious evolution or the evolution of fragmentation into wholeness. Man is doomed to sail on the ship of fools forever arguing opinions. Simone when she was 14 felt there must be more to it which Marxism was oblivious of and came to understand that human understanding requires help from above in the form of grace.Ecurb wrote: ↑June 22nd, 2021, 10:56 am Is there a "transcendent kingdom wherein truth resides"? In the religious eras, people thought there was, and that it could be discovered with the help of God, or Jesus or the Buddha. In the Modernist era scholars thought there was, and it could be discovered in the vast unifying truths that could be identified in the physical world.
We are now in the post-modern age, where most scholars (and I) think there is no "transcendent kingdom" of truth. Reality is subjective, and truth does not transcend one's cultural training, individual perceptions, linguistic limitations, and environmental perspectives. The religious and the modernist scientists seek to transcend their training and environments. The question is: Do they (and can they) succeed?
p.s. I've never read Simone Weil. My apologies if I'm mischaracterizing her position (based on Nick's post).
Simone was not alone in needing the transcendent level of reality and striving to escape Plato's CaveHumanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace..~ Simone Weil
Frithjof Schuon in his book "The Transcendent Unity of Religions" describes a seeker of truth evolving from the exoteric level of reality in search of the Transcendent.
https://integralscience.wordpress.com/1 ... religions/
Simone is known as Plato's spiritual child because of her pure awareness of human conscious potential. That is why the minority beginning to inwardly open are drawn to her. Her purity matches her intellect which is extremely rare and why she has become such a valuable awakening influence in the modern world..
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
I don't think that a failure to evolve from fragmentation into wholeness dooms us to be fools. Indeed, the opposite could just as easily be the case. Why is "wholeness" the only worthwhile value?Nick_A wrote: ↑June 22nd, 2021, 11:45 am
If you are right, there is no conscious evolution or the evolution of fragmentation into wholeness. Man is doomed to sail on the ship of fools forever arguing opinions. Simone when she was 14 felt there must be more to it which Marxism was oblivious of and came to understand that human understanding requires help from above in the form of grace.
Simone was not alone in needing the transcendent level of reality and striving to escape Plato's CaveHumanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace..~ Simone Weil
Frithjof Schuon in his book "The Transcendent Unity of Religions" describes a seeker of truth evolving from the exoteric level of reality in search of the Transcendent.
https://integralscience.wordpress.com/1 ... religions/
Simone is known as Plato's spiritual child because of her pure awareness of human conscious potential. That is why the minority beginning to inwardly open are drawn to her. Her purity matches her intellect which is extremely rare and why she has become such a valuable awakening influence in the modern world..
The Post-modern world thinks truth is contingent, conditional, and based on a point of view. Although this may not be as satisfying as transcendental truth, or generalizing scientific theories, it does not follow that it is less representative of the truth. However much we might desire transcendental, unifying truths, the "seeker of wisdom" (to paraphrase your terms) should not be prejudiced by his desires. He must take things as he finds them, rather than twisting things into a shape that matches his desires (although, of course, we are all guilty of such twisting).
The post-modern world view is suspicious of master narratives and unifying theories, Subverted order, fragmentation, and the loss of central control are essential values of this point of view. Post-modernist ANSWERS are few and far between; post modernist critiques of the modernist and religious world-view are cogent and telling.
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
A person worthy of the name man" would be able to put the results of frgmentation into a conscious wholeness perspectiveEcurb wrote: ↑June 22nd, 2021, 2:40 pmI don't think that a failure to evolve from fragmentation into wholeness dooms us to be fools. Indeed, the opposite could just as easily be the case. Why is "wholeness" the only worthwhile value?Nick_A wrote: ↑June 22nd, 2021, 11:45 am
If you are right, there is no conscious evolution or the evolution of fragmentation into wholeness. Man is doomed to sail on the ship of fools forever arguing opinions. Simone when she was 14 felt there must be more to it which Marxism was oblivious of and came to understand that human understanding requires help from above in the form of grace.
Simone was not alone in needing the transcendent level of reality and striving to escape Plato's CaveHumanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace..~ Simone Weil
Frithjof Schuon in his book "The Transcendent Unity of Religions" describes a seeker of truth evolving from the exoteric level of reality in search of the Transcendent.
https://integralscience.wordpress.com/1 ... religions/
Simone is known as Plato's spiritual child because of her pure awareness of human conscious potential. That is why the minority beginning to inwardly open are drawn to her. Her purity matches her intellect which is extremely rare and why she has become such a valuable awakening influence in the modern world..
The Post-modern world thinks truth is contingent, conditional, and based on a point of view. Although this may not be as satisfying as transcendental truth, or generalizing scientific theories, it does not follow that it is less representative of the truth. However much we might desire transcendental, unifying truths, the "seeker of wisdom" (to paraphrase your terms) should not be prejudiced by his desires. He must take things as he finds them, rather than twisting things into a shape that matches his desires (although, of course, we are all guilty of such twisting).
The post-modern world view is suspicious of master narratives and unifying theories, Subverted order, fragmentation, and the loss of central control are essential values of this point of view. Post-modernist ANSWERS are few and far between; post modernist critiques of the modernist and religious world-view are cogent and telling.
Richard Feynman and Simone Weil are attracted to the question of Beauty. Richard Feynman is attracted to fragmentation while Simone is attracted to the wholeness beauty conceals. Bot are right but somehow the world wants one or the other. The modern world is becoming more fragmented. The world needs more Simones to remind us of the other side.
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" ~ Richard P. Feynman
"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at." ~ Simone Weil
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
is conscious attention an active or passive process? Is going with the flow an active or passive process?I am trying to get to the bottom of Weil's relationship to activity vs. passivity. For example, I have had it in my head that I want to make the critique that (though she went and empathised with those in factories or denied herself food to empathise with the poor) she wasn't really taking active steps to better their position in any definitive way. (Does anyone have suggestions of a philosophy that would want people to 'do good' with definitive actions?)
“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge
Simone Weil was like a salmon willing to fight the currents and swim upstream to experience truth and return to her source.
Simone is not for the majority content to function in the chaos of Plato's Cave. But for those who have experienced that the attractions of life in the world are insufficient for the needs of the active heart, her influence is a necessity. She chose to receive the active conscious experience of truth as opposed to the passive comforts of pleasure. The world may not want conscious experience but a minority does and Simone is an essential part of this minority"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present....
"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
One of the best sermons I ever hear was in Santiago de Compostela. The cathedral at the end of the Camino offers famous services to the pilgrims. You may have seen pictures of the giant pendulum of burning incense (once necessary to mask the odor of the unwashed pilgrims) swinging through the vaulted walls of the church.
When I was there, a Catholic Potentate (he wore a funny hat, anyway) gave the sermon. Translated from my imperfect Spanish, the conclusion went something like this:
"Many of you have walked the Camino de Santiago, and each may have done it for his or her own reasons. Perhaps some of you wanted an adventure. Others may have thought you wouild meet interesting companions along the way. Some, perhaps, wanted the exercise. Perhaps, even, some of you may have undertaken the journey in the hope that you could find God. I'm here to tell those that you cannot find God. He has to find you."
Active or passive?
(I'm off on a backpacking trip for a couple of weeks so I may not respond.)
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
With anything as amorphous as god it's impossible to tell the difference between finding and being found.Ecurb wrote: ↑June 23rd, 2021, 2:10 pm
When I was there, a Catholic Potentate (he wore a funny hat, anyway) gave the sermon. Translated from my imperfect Spanish, the conclusion went something like this:
"Many of you have walked the Camino de Santiago, and each may have done it for his or her own reasons. Perhaps some of you wanted an adventure. Others may have thought you wouild meet interesting companions along the way. Some, perhaps, wanted the exercise. Perhaps, even, some of you may have undertaken the journey in the hope that you could find God. I'm here to tell those that you cannot find God. He has to find you."
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
It is an active conscious processEcurb wrote: ↑June 23rd, 2021, 2:10 pm It seems to me that "to believe in God is not a decision we can make" is at odds with the notion that the conscious eperience of the truth is "active".
One of the best sermons I ever hear was in Santiago de Compostela. The cathedral at the end of the Camino offers famous services to the pilgrims. You may have seen pictures of the giant pendulum of burning incense (once necessary to mask the odor of the unwashed pilgrims) swinging through the vaulted walls of the church.
When I was there, a Catholic Potentate (he wore a funny hat, anyway) gave the sermon. Translated from my imperfect Spanish, the conclusion went something like this:
"Many of you have walked the Camino de Santiago, and each may have done it for his or her own reasons. Perhaps some of you wanted an adventure. Others may have thought you wouild meet interesting companions along the way. Some, perhaps, wanted the exercise. Perhaps, even, some of you may have undertaken the journey in the hope that you could find God. I'm here to tell those that you cannot find God. He has to find you."
Active or passive?
(I'm off on a backpacking trip for a couple of weeks so I may not respond.)
Simone wrote something similar. The trick is through prayer, conscious attention, meditation, or conscious contemplation, a person makes the inner space to receive the Spirit.
"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves."
"In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void (the poor in spirit). In no matter what circumstances... imagination can fill the void. This is why the average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes, and pass thru no matter what suffering without being purified."
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
I have thought about the issue a little more and questioned whether the categories of 'active' and 'passive' are ultimately all that helpful. Instead, I've been re-reading sections of her 'Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies...'. She writes "Will power...has practically no place in study" when commenting on how one can use their studies as preparation for spiritual life (ultimately achieving the attention required by prayer and subsequently the kind of attention needed to be shown to the afflicted).
Instead of will-power, she details that "It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for spiritual life, for desire directed towards God is the only power of raising the soul". When studying, just as in attention, she believes that the individual should by 'waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive'. It seems then that one has to both have the strong desire for that encounter, which seems to dispel that one is wholly passive in the scenario, but we are asked not to hunt for the encounter, to cause ourselves strain perhaps by trying to rationalise or force our way to God. In this sense then, the important bit is not how far we are to be active or passive when we are being attentive because really it is this nebulous case of an active-passive sense (the strange negative effort one might find in mediation). Perhaps then more important is to focus on the displacement of the 'will-power' and how we should be turning towards desire and joy? Maybe a follow-up question is then when she dispenses with the power of this will, does this dispense with the role of the will altogether or is she merely asking us to turn our will itself to joy and desire instead of power? If it is the latter, perhaps then we are not talking about active or passive, but actually that she is trying to get us to rethink how we will reach God. In both cases we are active in our desire, but when we turn to God with pure desire or joy instead of power, we have (not become more passive) but we have accepted our human limitations ie. that because of gravity we cannot so easily lift our souls to meet God).
My last point is also another question. As I mentioned, it is my supervisor who has raised the importance of passivity for Weil. In an essay I wrote, I quoted Iris Murdoch on Weil as a way of countering the potential criticism that Weil is suggesting a kind of ethical passivity ie. encouraging us to become moral agents who look and listen but don't 'do'. Murdoch, in contrast, describes attention as ‘the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent’. My supervisor in turn has commented "this voluntarism is very far from Weil – Weil often emphasizes the importance of passivity". Is Murdoch really so far from an accurate sense of Weil?
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Re: Simone Weil: Activity vs. Passivity
In her early years when she was a Marxist, she learned by her experiences in factory work why all her apparently active work in social justice was self defeating. Man’s will to power leads to the same problems repeating. She wrote:
Living collectively as creatures of reaction within Plato’s Cave, how could it be different? Since we are as we are, everything is as it is.Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace. Simone Weil
Simone is considered Plato’s spiritual child so sometimes it is easier to understand her with Socrates help. He said
The outer man is our personality and people consider it to be the active part of ourselves. Our personality is the result of what a person does has become developed by family, friends, and society.“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.”― Socrates
The inner Man consists of traits and talents we are born with. It is the living part of ourselves which can receive the help of grace while the personality is like a reacting computer. The majority in society have an indoctrinated active personality living their lives with a passive inner man not having the chance to develop. Simone suggests the inner man becoming the active part of the human organism while the personality remains the passive.
“[Education] isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.” - The Republic, Book VII
This is the same idea. By inwardly turning towards the light, the inner man becomes active and can become conscious of its source while the outer man becomes passive. An educated person is one who is capable of giving to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. It is only possible for a person who has practiced sustained conscious attention. The result isn’t indoctrinated morality but the experience of perennial objective conscience.
Simone wrote concerning the results of conscious attention. Would you agree it is an active process the World often opposes because it hasn’t learned how to “look”?
There Comes
If you do not fight it---if you look, just
look, steadily,
upon it,
there comes
a moment when you cannot do it,
if it is evil;
if good, a moment
when you cannot
not.
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