Simone Weil par Susan Sontag
Simone Weil
Susan Sontag
February 1,
1963 Issue
Selected
Essays
by Simone
Weil, translated by Richard Rees
Oxford
University Press, $7.00
The culture-heroes
of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they
are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by
force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual
ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The
bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who
bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter
of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the
impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too
deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the
voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age
which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of
sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth
in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of
an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths
must have a martyr.
What
revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the
elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of his heart”—the morbid, the
hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering
out of which Kliest’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today.
Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such
writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of
unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries
conviction.
Perhaps
there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening
of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not
doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is
always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the
need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual
thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary.
The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be
a lie.
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Thus I do
not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the
contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is
that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers
like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of
thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books
and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share
Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church,
or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body
denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the
Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers
could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing
originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness,
for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths,
and—only piecemeal—for their “views.” As the corrupt Alcibiades followed
Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and
full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of
spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.
Some lives
are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite
us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of
revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero
and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a
religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of
self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s. I am
thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for
pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her
elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not
exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her
tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to
martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves.
Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it,
nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the
presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession
of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is
superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not
all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of
life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.
This new
volume of translations from Simone Weil’s work, Selected Essays 1934-43,
displays her somewhat marginally. It contains one great essay, the opening
essay here titled “Human Personality” which was written in 1943, the year of
her death in England at the age of thirty-four. (This essay, by the way, was
first published in two parts under the title “The Fallacy of Human Rights” in
the British magazine The Twentieth Century in May and June 1959. There it
suffered the curious and instructive fate of requiring a defensive editorial in
June, when the second part of the essay appeared, replying to criticism of the
magazine’s decision to publish the essay “on the grounds that it involves heavy
going for some readers.” It certainly speaks volumes about the philistine level
of English intellectual life, if even as good a magazine as The Tweentieth
Century cannot muster an enthusiastic, grateful audience for such a piece.)
Another essay, placed last in the book, called “Draft for a Statement of Human
Obligations,” also written the year of her death, contains matter central to
Simone Weil’s ideas. The remaining essays are on specific historical and
political subjects—two on the civilization of Languedoc, one on a proletarian
uprising in Renaissance Florence, several long essays on the Roman Empire which
draw an extensive parallel between imperial Rome and Hitler’s Germany, and
various reflections on the Second World War, the colonial problem, and the
post-war future. There is also an interesting and sensitive letter to George
Bernanos. The longest argument of the book, spanning several essays, develops
the parallel between Rome (and the ancient Hebrew theocracy!) and Nazi Germany.
According to Simone Weil, who displays an unpleasant silence on the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, Hitler is no worse than Napoleon, than Richelieu, than
Caesar. Hitler’s racialism, she says, is nothing more than “a rather more
romantic name for nationalism.” Her fascination with the psychological effects
of wielding power and submitting to coercion, combined with her strict denial
of any idea of historical progress, led her to equate all forms of state
authority as manifestations of what she calls “the great beast.”
Readers of
Simone Weil’s Notebooks (two volumes, published in 1959) and her Intimations of
Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (1958) will be familiar with her attempt
to derive everything distinctively Christian from Greek spirituality as well as
to deny entirely Chrisianity’s Hebraic origins. This fundamental argument—along
with her admiration for Provençal civilization, for the Manichean and Catharist
heresies—colors all her historical essays. I cannot accept Simone Weil’s
gnostic reading of Christianity as historically sound (its religious truth is
another matter); nor can I fail to be offended by the vindictive parallels she
draws between Nazism, Rome, and Israel. Impartiality, no more than a sense of
humor, is not the virtue of a writer like Simone Weil. Like Gibbon (whose view
of the Roman Empire she absolutely contradicts), Simone Weil as a historical
writer is tendentious, exhaustive, and infuriatingly certain. As a historian
she is simply not at her best; no one who disbelieves so fundamentally in the
phenomena of historical change and innovation can be wholly satisfying as a
historian. This is not to deny that there are subtle historical insights in
these essays: as for example, when she points out that Hitlerism consists in
the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race
generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. (Immediately after,
of course, she says that these—both Hitler’s methods and the “normal colonial
ones”—are derived from the Roman model.)
The
principal value of the collection is simply that anything from Simone Weil’s pen
is worth reading. It is perhaps not the book to start one’s acquaintance with
this writer—Waiting for God, I think, is the best for that. The originality of
her psychological insight, the passion and subtlety of her theological
imagination , the fecundity of her exegetical talents are unevenly displayed
here. Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other
books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who
is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses
to the modern travail of the spirit.
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