Women in Philosophy, 20th Century French Philosophy, Philosophers - Biography

Simone Weil (Penguin Lives Series)

Name: Simone Weil (Penguin Lives Series)
Author: Francine du Plessix Gray
ISBN: 9780670899982

by Francine du Plessix Gray, Francis Du Gray

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Overview

In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life a patriot, mystic, and activist, a pampered intellectual who believed in the redemptive value of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, the daughter of a secular Jewish family who yearned to enter the Catholic Church, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foreshadowed many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence religious thought today. Du Plessix Gray's biography traces Weil's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher, as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. This subtle and compelling biography illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience.

Synopsis

Book Magazine

In this complex biography, Gray suggests that the French philosopher, activist and feminist Simone Weil (1906-1943) was a fiercely intelligent woman who continually sacrificed her personal welfare for the sake of her ideals. Rejecting her Parisian family's affluent lifestyle in her teens, she starved her body and "binged" on intellectual pursuits. When studying, Weil made formidable reading lists for herself, spreading volumes by the likes of Aristotle and Nietzsche on the floor, reading for days with little sleep. A frail woman with crippled hands, she took backbreaking factory jobs because she believed that work was "the truest road to self-knowledge." Determined to place herself in dangerous and unhealthy situations whenever possible, she signed up for the militia that served on the front lines during the Spanish Civil War. As the result of her severe approach to life, Weil died at the age of thirty-four of tuberculosis and starvation. Gray balances the accounts of Weil's misadventures by tracing the evolution of her inspired writing career. In the final chapter, she summarizes Weil's theories on Christianity, politics and sexuality for those who are unfamiliar with her work. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her book At Home With the Marquis de Sade, Gray communicates her fascination with this enigmatic woman, but she treats the facts of Weil's life honestly, with both high esteem and skepticism.
—Susan Tekulve

(Excerpted Review)

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Editorials

Library Journal

This is a valuable and useful book, portraying a highly complex figure for general readers in a clear and easily readable style. The Parisian-born Weil (1909-43) has emerged as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Labor organizer, educator, trade unionist, protofeminist, mystic, and prolific writer, she ultimately became one of the foremost modern philosophers. Herself an acclaimed thinker and writer, du Plessix Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade) movingly recounts the chronology of Weil's short life, all the while interweaving Weil's emerging political, philosophical, and spiritual ideas into the biographical narrative. She effectively explains Weil's deepening engagement with working-class problems and raises candid questions about Weil's "deep unease about her Jewishness." Drawing heavily on Weil's own writing, the author ends her brief biography with a summary chapter in which she pulls together the key elements of Weil's philosophy as it crystallized in the last two years of her life. Part of the well-received "A Penguin Life" series, this biography should be welcomed by students and informed lay readers. Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A lucid portrait of the enigmatic French writer and mystic. With this volume, Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 1998, etc.) adds to the considerable success already achieved by the Penguin series of brief biographies. Weil makes for a challenging subject: Her writing is relatively unknown in the US, and in many respects her life was her most ambitious work. Born into a prosperous Jewish family in 1909, she eventually found fulfillment through a combination of extreme asceticism, solidarity with the working class, and Catholicism. At 16 she wrote, "Sacrifice is the acceptance of pain, the refusal to obey the animal in oneself, and the will to redeem suffering men through voluntary suffering." And suffer she did: lifelong migraines, anorexia, and a tendency—perhaps subconscious—towards self-mutilation. As Gray observes, for Weil "the cult of self-mastery could all too readily become self-destructive." Despite her cultivation of personal misery, Weil achieved a great deal. A brilliant student, she went on to considerable success as a schoolteacher, and offered free courses to working people in her spare time. She also spent a year working in various factories, where she attempted (with increasing disillusionment) to help the workers organize. Despite her sympathies with the working class (and her service with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War), Weil was an early critic of Stalin and the Communist Party. Her position reflected a deep suspicion of power: A keen student of Machiavelli and Hobbes, she realized that those in power, whatever their professed beliefs, quickly become concerned primarily with self-perpetuation at the cost of socialadvancement. Towards the end of her brief life (she died at 34), Weil became deeply attached to Catholic doctrine, but she was reluctant to identify herself with any religion and deliberately chose not to be baptized. Many of her most important essays date from her final years and concern her search (never fully realized) for redemption. A superbly nuanced portrait of a tortured character.