"For" and "Against"...

Truth, Justice, and Public Good: Simone Weil on Political Manipulation, the Dangers of “For” and “Against,” and How to Save Thinking from Opinion

“True attention is a state so difficult for any human creature, so violent, that any emotional disturbance can derail it. Therefore, one must always endeavour strenuously to protect one’s inner faculty of judgment against the turmoil of personal hopes and fears.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

At the age of nineteen, Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943) placed first in France’s competitive exam for certification in “General Philosophy and Logic”; Simone de Beauvoir placed second. In her short life, Weil went on to become one of the most penetrating and far-seeing minds of her era. Albert Camus lauded her as “the only great spirit of our times.” The Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz considered her France’s “rare gift to the contemporary world.” She was an idealist who lived out her ideals. Born into a family of Jewish intellectuals, the 24-year-old Weil took a year off teaching to labor incognito in a car factory — despite a rare neuropathy that gave her frequent debilitating headaches — in order to better understand the struggles of the working poor. At twenty-seven, she enlisted as a soldier in the anarchist brigade during the Spanish Civil War. At only thirty-four, she died of starvation in an English sanatorium, where she was being treated for tuberculosis, having refused to receive more food than what her compatriots were rationed in Nazi-occupied France. Along the way, she wrote with uncommon insight and rhetorical rigor about such elemental questions as the essence of attention, the meaning of rights, how to make use of our suffering, and what it means to be a complete human being.