The Thought Of Simone Weil, The Red Virgin

Simone Weil is one of those special and difficult-to-classify cases. She was a great Jewish philosopher; however, there are many Catholics who consider that she should be proclaimed a saint in their church, although she did not actually practice any worship.

In fact, Simone Weil was raised as an agnostic and she stayed in that vein her entire life. However, he never stopped thinking about God. At the same time, throughout her entire existence she was committed to the poorest.

She was a fellow student of Simone de Beauvoir and the latter expressed her admiration for Simone Weil’s sensitivity. In his memoirs he comments that he once saw her cry for a famine that had broken out in China. It struck him that this philosopher-in-training felt the suffering of others so deeply her own.

Simone Weil, the red virgin

Simone Weil was born in Paris in February 1909. She had a brother, two years her senior, gifted with exceptional intelligence. He became one of the most famous mathematicians of his time. At age 14 he had an “existential crisis” for which he thought “seriously about dying.” His abilities were felt to be far inferior to his brother’s.

The truth is that he advanced and studied philosophy. She then became involved in the anarcho-syndicalist labor movement and has since been nicknamed “the red virgin. ” At the age of 25 she decided to work as a worker in different factories, an experience that marked her definitively. He said that going through these tasks had caused the misery of others to enter his body and soul forever.

She was the first intellectual of her time to approach so deeply the suffering of the most disadvantaged. This allowed him to write two of his most famous works: The Workers’ Condition and Reflections on the Causes of Freedom and Oppression . He discovered firsthand that oppression and exclusion  were much more than an economic issue.

He went so deep into that alienating work experience that he even questioned Marx for falling short. This led Albert Camus to say about her that: “since Marx political and social thought had not produced in the West anything more penetrating and prophetic. “

Mystique and self-control

Simone Weil had some experiences that could be classified as “mystical”. He even went so far as to say that he had experienced how Christ took possession of his heart. Still, he never formally practiced religion. In exchange, she enlisted as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War.

He then went into exile in Marseille and later in New York, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of 34. He left a gigantic work unpublished. Her thinking is fabulous and many are convinced that she will be canonized one day, even though she was never a Catholic as such. Tackling all of your thinking is a task beyond the scope of this article.

However, in this introduction we want to highlight a topic that he worked on in a very original way: self- control. He considered it the source of all virtue and of all possibility of personal growth. In turn, he stated that this goal was only achieved through discipline.

Discipline at Simone Weil

For this French philosopher, discipline is an effort to overcome inner obstacles. He points out that this effort is not very arduous when one has the subjective feeling of fulfilling a duty that has been freely chosen. Instead, if that sense of what is due fades, what arises is unsustainable suffering.

Note that it is inevitable that there will come times when it falters. For the same reason, it is convenient to take advantage of the initial impulse and apply all the will in it. In this way, we anticipate those moments of weakness that will sooner or later come. Forging yourself a discipline is a part of “the art of loving”, as she called it.

He points out that the most damaging thing for the will and discipline is  procrastination . Taking this posture only dissipates the energy to act. That is why it is so important to take advantage of the initial positive moments and not punish ourselves for not being able to sustain the will in other moments. Discipline is a virtuous cycle of positive feedback, he notes.