We discussed Simone Weil’s “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation.” You can read it here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/weil.html
Transcript:
Matt Segall: Well, I really enjoyed our last conversation, and I haven’t read much Simone Weil, so this was a real treat—to hear her perspective on our obligations, human obligations, and her framing of what we usually call human rights. And the way she grounds that in the sacredness of the human heart and our connection to the good, I found quite moving, and I believe correct.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Yeah.
Karsten Jensen: Yeah. I’ve been moved a lot by reading her. I mean, it’s many years since I’ve read somebody who actually touched me so much in my heart, and inspired me also to think about self-transformation—how I can enter into this process, or intensify this process of transformation in the way that I look at the world. She’s been really inspiring in that respect. And I’ve had a lot of time to read her the last few months, so I’ve read a number of different things. But maybe I should just— I don’t know if you want to say something, Pedro, before—
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Yeah. I mean, similarly, I’ve been reading her more. I’ve even incorporated her into my syllabus when I teach ethics. I tend to pair her with Iris Murdoch, because my students tend to really enjoy Simone Weil’s ideas, although they’re skeptical of her theological bent. One good thing about pairing her with Iris Murdoch is that Murdoch’s ethics is so informed by Simone Weil, but she is an atheist—I’ll qualify that.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Iris Murdoch was a Platonist, and I guess thought of the Good as a real transcendent source of morality toward which we aim, but she didn’t believe in a personal God or anything like that. So I tend to pair Murdoch with Weil to give students a sense that you don’t have to be a Christian like Weil to believe in her ideas and see the value of what she’s saying, especially for human rights. I find that it really helps students understand why they think human rights are so important, even though they can’t really provide a justification for it in the language they’re taught at school.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: And I think Simone Weil’s really good for that, and also not just in terms of teaching, but also for me, in terms of my spiritual practice. Weil is my— I read— I have a little altar here next to my desk, and I have Gravity and Grace. I read it at least— I read a paragraph every morning before I meditate, and meditate on whatever I read that she wrote. So, for me personally, I don’t think there’s anybody, besides maybe Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s had a more profound effect on my spiritual practice.
Karsten Jensen: I have Gravity and Grace as well, and I also like to read just a few pages. It’s a good book for reading just a few pages before you go to bed. So I enjoy that.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Yeah.
Karsten Jensen: One of the things that’s interesting about her is that very often when she’s introduced, the introduction to Weil is typically very biographical. And I think it’s because she’s one of those philosophers where there’s a real tight connection between her thinking and her mode of being in the world. She had this huge strive to engage herself in the world, in the affairs of the world, and become involved.
Karsten Jensen: There are stories about how, in childhood, she wouldn’t eat sugar, because during World War I the soldiers didn’t have sugar. She became involved in Marxism and syndicalism. She had debates with Trotsky. Although she was educated in the most prestigious French educational institute—it’s called, I think, the École Normale Supérieure—she was top of the class, ahead of Simone de Beauvoir in her year, and still she went working in a factory for a couple of years.
Karsten Jensen: One of the criticisms she had of Marxism was that Marx didn’t really understand what it was like to be a worker, and she thought that modern-day work practices are much more devastating for the human being than Marx was able to see. It was not just about distribution of wealth and different classes; something spiritual was going on when you’re subjected to these modern-day work practices. And she experienced that firsthand by going to work in a factory.
Karsten Jensen: She was in the Spanish Civil War for just a brief while—luckily—because she couldn’t see very well and stepped into a pot of boiling oil and had to be brought home. The brigades she was a part of—I don’t think she was fighting; I think she was volunteering, perhaps as a nurse or something like that, because she was a pacifist. She didn’t believe in war. But still she wanted to be involved; she wanted to be where things were happening. And just after she was taken out of the Spanish Civil War, the brigade she was a part of was actually eliminated—all of them.
Karsten Jensen: During World War II she wrote anti-Nazi pamphlets, eventually fled because she was born Jewish, and ended up as part of the Free French in London, where she worked as an analyst. And the text that we’ve been reading today was one that she wrote while she was working as an analyst for the Free French. It was related to a larger work called The Need for Roots.
Karsten Jensen: And I think, Pedro, you read a part of The Need for Roots as well—the first pages or so—which is some kind of ontology of needs that she felt was necessary to understand, you could say, the telos of politics. So I just want to briefly touch upon some basic ideas that she brings into her analysis of politics and her political philosophy.
Karsten Jensen: She’s a Platonist, and she has this very sharp contrast between what she calls a world of necessity and this divine realm of absolute goodness that she understands negatively as something beyond normal human grasp. There are ways to approach this realm of absolute goodness, but it takes some spiritual practices to get there.
Karsten Jensen: When you look at the texts she’s writing, some of them are dealing with worldly affairs—what you’d call the world of necessity, the world of power, or the world of force. Some of them are theological texts—mainly the letters she wrote to Catholic priests that she befriended in the latter part of her life. And then there are some texts focusing on what could be called intermediaries—the Greek concept is metaxu—that which is “in between.”
Karsten Jensen: These are the different kinds of practices that can bring us from the world of necessity, the world of force, and allow us to approach the divine realm of absolute goodness. She’s thinking about beauty, for example—beauty as something bridging the gap between the world of necessity and the divine realm of absolute goodness. But also labor.
Karsten Jensen: She talks about how physical labor, if you look at the materials and the processes you’re involved with, and see them as symbols of a higher order—that’s kind of a Pythagorean trend in her thinking—there is this harmony in the universe that you do not see immediately. But if you attend to the process and the materials you work with as symbols of this higher order, you can somehow approach it. One of the examples she gives is somebody working in the field sowing: they can contemplate the whole cycle of birth, death, and rebirth while doing the sowing, and in this way approach some kind of higher order.
Karsten Jensen: The same goes for suffering. She saw suffering as something that can also become a bridge to the divine. This world of necessity she sees mainly as a world of force—impersonal forces that human beings are subject to that dehumanize human beings, make them into things. This is what happens with modern-day work practices, where you have this differentiation between planning and implementation: those who implement are not necessarily those who plan. And then the optimization, the mechanization of work, and so on—these things dehumanize the individual, make the individual into a passive thing, an object.
Karsten Jensen: The subjective side of that is something she calls affliction. The French term is malheur, which has connotations like unhappiness and accident, but normally it’s translated as “affliction,” so it’s something more than suffering. It’s being exposed to a very brutal force that dehumanizes you and destroys you—physically, psychologically, and socially. It’s a destructive force you can be subjected to as a human being in different ways. It can happen through the forces of nature, through war, but also through dehumanizing modern practices that are very common.
Karsten Jensen: And so the subjective side of being exposed to these forces is what she calls affliction. But she sees in that an opportunity. This is linked to the classical Christian term of kenosis—self-emptying—that this destruction you’re exposed to can be turned into an opportunity where the void that is created when you’re destroyed as a person can become an access point for the divine realm, and the experience of what she calls grace.
Karsten Jensen: So the basics of her philosophy are this sharp contrast between the world of necessity and the divine realm of absolute goodness beyond normal human grasp, and then this mediating sphere where, through certain kinds of spiritual practice—mainly what she calls attention, which we will have to go back to—attention is ultimately prayer. That’s how she sees it. And this is what is at the heart of all these different intermediaries that can bring you into contact with this divine realm of absolute goodness.
Karsten Jensen: That was just to outline some of the basics. Maybe I was a bit confused, because there’s a lot to say about her.
Matt Segall: I wonder if you, Karsten, or Pedro, could say a bit about what led to her conversion, and what her conversion experience was, that led her, sort of, if not away from some of the ideals of Marxism, at least—she seemed to grow dissatisfied with politics as a basis for moral action—and became Christian at some point. Do either of you know what transpired to lead to that shift?
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I know that, at least in terms of her conversion to Christianity, she had a set of mystical experiences that converted her to Christianity, I think. She mentioned two or three of them. The one that comes to mind for me, that I know a little more details of, is when she went to pray at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi—or a place where St. Francis of Assisi had inhabited—in Italy, and she claims to have had a mystical experience there where she saw Christ.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I’m trying to remember any other details. I don’t want to say something she didn’t say, but it was a series of mystical experiences that converted her to Christianity. Prior to that, she was kind of skeptical about religion. I also know that she studied Eastern philosophies deeply—learned Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads—knew Buddhism, knew Taoism. She talks about these things. And I think she mentions somewhere—and it’s something I resonate with—that studying these Eastern religions and philosophies actually helped her appreciate Christianity more.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: But like Karsten said, she grew up in a Jewish family, but I think they were pretty agnostic as a family. So I think it required those mystical experiences for her to have this full-blown conversion to Christianity.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: And in terms of her political commitments, I don’t know too many details about her moving away from Marxism, although she did disavow it. But like Karsten already alluded to, she thought that to solve a lot of the political turmoil and trouble of her time required an inner spiritual transformation.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I’m reading a book right now that’s super interesting comparing Georges Bataille and Simone Weil—two very, very different people, but they knew each other—in the 1930s in France, and interacted. They both participated, I think, in a particular journal that was, among other things, anti-fascist. One of the arguments of this book is that she sought to make her life almost like a sacred text as an example for people to follow.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: So, yeah, I think Karsten is very right to point out that she wanted to lead by example, to make her life the example for others to follow. It seems like she tried many times—through the Spanish Civil War; when she wanted to be sent to the front lines in World War II. I think she might have wanted a martyr’s death—to die on the front lines.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: That’s not what happened. She ended up passing away from tuberculosis in England and refused to eat more than the rations that the French soldiers got in France, and it’s debated whether you can consider that her starving herself or not. People seem to have different opinions about that. I think the coroner—the person who did the autopsy—considered it a suicide. Some people don’t consider it a suicide because she already had tuberculosis, but she did refuse to eat more than the rations of the soldiers in France, and that did seem to contribute to her death. But anyway, that’s what I know about the relationship between her commitments to the sacred and how that informs her politics.
Matt Segall: Nice. Yeah, interesting that she had that experience in Assisi. I visited there, and that basilica is one of the few where I felt a real sense of the presence of the divine. I find cathedrals and churches—many of them—quite beautiful, but walking into that one in particular left me with a real sense of the presence of the divine. I don’t know if that’s because of St. Francis’s purity or what, but it’s interesting that that was where she had that first important mystical experience that led to her conversion.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Yeah, and I should say: I don’t know if it was the first, and I don’t know if it’s the basilica you’re talking about, or just one of them. Those are details I don’t specifically remember. But it was definitely one that St. Francis of Assisi had either built or actively been in. So definitely fact-check me on those things, but those are the details I can claim that I read.
Matt Segall: Do you want to add something, Karsten?
Karsten Jensen: Yeah. First of all, she had a few experiences. The first she had was actually reading some English poem—I have it somewhere—and reading this poem out loud to herself. She suddenly realized that there was a prayer, and realizing that, she had some kind of profound spiritual experience. So that was before her encounter with Christ; that’s something that happened later on.
Karsten Jensen: But I think it’s important to say: I don’t think there’s such a thing as a sudden, dramatic conversion in her life, and I don’t think she saw it like that herself. I think she saw some kind of continuity in the ideas she had before, and that they just came into a kind of blossoming once she embraced, you could say, the Christian narrative and some of the Christian mystics as well.
Karsten Jensen: For example, Meister Eckhart was on her reading list in her notebook, so she read some of the Neoplatonic mystics. But she also had this view—very disputed—that she saw Plato as some kind of proto-Christian. She saw a continuity, in particular, in the Pythagorean trend in Plato’s philosophy.
Karsten Jensen: Without approaching it with any kind of historical-critical method, she had this idea that there was some kind of wisdom tradition going from ancient Egypt, through the Pythagoreans, into Greek philosophy, and onward into Neoplatonism and the Christian Church Fathers, and Christianity as a whole.
Karsten Jensen: Her views on Judaism are also provocative for some, because she really disliked a lot of the things in the Old Testament. She saw it as a description of a multitude of power games. She liked some of the prophetic literature. And she had this idea—again, not based on any historical-critical method—that this Pythagorean mode of thinking also somehow entered into the prophetic literature of the Old Testament. Things like the Book of Job and the Book of Isaiah were parts of the Old Testament she viewed very positively.
Karsten Jensen: And when it comes to Marxism, I think she was inspired by Marx her whole life, but it was the younger Marx—his analysis of alienation and so on, which he somehow adapted from Hegel, I think. She had a very positive view of that. It was more like, once Marxism became an ideology, she became very critical.
Karsten Jensen: One of the texts I’m reading is called something like “This War Is a War of Religions,” and she saw modern ideologies like Marxism, communism, fascism, liberalism as different religions fighting it out, so to speak.
Karsten Jensen: In her activism, she was part of the syndicalist movement in France. The reason she became disillusioned with that was because she saw it as power games again—people playing power games—and she felt that there was so much more needed than just having this fight over how to distribute wealth.
Karsten Jensen: Very often unions and so on will fight for higher wages for the workers, but she basically saw that as selling your soul to the devil for more money, because of these destructive, soul-destroying forces that are inherent in modern work practices.
Karsten Jensen: So I want to say: I think there’s continuity. There’s a flowering of some insights she originally had reading Plato. And she learned herself Sanskrit, as Pedro said, to read the Bhagavad Gita, and she was inspired by that as well. Her concept of decreation seems like something that comes from an Eastern concept of detachment—detaching yourself from worldly affairs and personhood.
Karsten Jensen: So I think there was continuity, and then she saw her mystical experiences and her embracing Christian ideas as a blossoming of something that was already there from the beginning.
Matt Segall: Yeah. So I think that’s nice background on who she was and her life. Maybe we can dig into this—what she calls “a draft for a statement of human obligation.” I’ve read through it twice now, and I found it so clear and quite moving.
Matt Segall: When I first read the first few propositions—which I’ll just share some snippets of—I couldn’t help but feel like she was approaching this from a Kantian point of view. But where Kant would separate theoretical from practical reason—we can’t have knowledge of the supersensory world in a theoretical sense, but we can, in our practical or moral experience. Kant would allow for some type of connection to what he called the moral law. And Kant would describe a feeling of reverence for that law that every human being has.
Matt Segall: And I gradually realized that Weil was really affirming the sacredness of the good, and that this good is experienced through the human heart. And while you can recognize the dignity and moral worth of human beings coming through our experience of the good, it seems like Kant was mediating that through the will—the subjective will, or the autonomous will—in a way. Maybe Weil was a little bit more skeptical of the extent to which the human will could reliably access and uphold that capital-G Good.
Matt Segall: But when she says, “There is a reality outside the world, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties,” that immediately sounds very Kantian to me. But then she says that corresponding to this reality, at the center of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
Matt Segall: And then an even more Kantian point: she says, “One of the manifestations of this reality lies in the absurd and insoluble contradictions which are always the terminus of human thought when it moves exclusively in this world.” So I thought of Kant’s antinomies of human reason, when we try to think our way to the origins of the world, or the nature of space, and so on. We end up in contradictions.
Matt Segall: So, just to throw something in the mix here from Goethe—which leads into a kind of anthroposophical view on this question—Kant doesn’t allow for a theoretical understanding of the ultimate nature of reality. We’re limited to phenomena as constructed by our intuitions of space and time and our categories of understanding. But Kant would say: in our awareness of the moral law, and that feeling of respect for that law, there’s some kind of non-empirical or trans-empirical affect that discloses our own freedom to us. And to the extent that we recognize that in ourselves, we can recognize it in others, and that respect for freedom forms the basis of what we would call human rights.
Matt Segall: Simone Weil values freedom, and she has propositions about that later, but it’s not only freedom. There’s something beyond even that—the good—that she’s gesturing toward. There is some degree of participation in a supersensory world through our feeling of reverence for the moral law and our sense of conscience.
Matt Segall: When Goethe was reading Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and other writings on morality, he asks: why must Kant demand that we rise above the finite understanding and our sensory intuitions of space and time in the moral sphere, but this can’t also apply to our aesthetic and imaginative and theoretical relationship to the natural world? Goethe didn’t think we were limited the way Kant did, and it seems Weil does as well: even though we contact something infinite, transcendent in our hearts, it’s beyond our capacity to fathom.
Matt Segall: Whereas Goethe would say—Goethe asks Kant, basically—if in our ethical action we’re drawing on ideas that outstrip our sense-bound, mechanical understanding, then why can’t we, through a kind of intuition of what he calls eternally creative nature, become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative processes? Goethe thinks there’s this deeper intuitive understanding of living form, that’s kind of a cognitive or theoretical analogy to moral faith.
Matt Segall: And when thinking about what Goethe is claiming there, from Simone Weil’s point of view as I understand it, I immediately feel like, oh, she would think that’s hubris—some kind of conceit that might be taking our attention away from the real task, which is not to know everything, but to bring goodness down from heaven, as it were, into earthly relationships. That’s what she felt was of most importance in human life, rather than what Goethe would call intuitive understanding of processes of metamorphosis and nature—interesting as that may be. Maybe she would say that’s a distraction, pulling our attention away from the moral task, which has preeminence.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I think she was inspired by the Pythagoreans on this point, in that her brother was a very well-known mathematician, and she was also very well versed in the sciences and math. She has a book that’s kind of hard to find, on math and science—something like relating math, science, and love. But toward the end of her life, I did read that she was studying physics more intensely, and mathematics. And she saw it all—like, to your point—I don’t think she dismissed it, but all of it should provide a greater reverence and deepen our relationship to the divine.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: So she saw math and science as opportunities for seeing the order of the universe, and we revere the order of the universe because we intuitively grasp the beauty that’s there. And the way Iris Murdoch puts it, that I love, is that beauty is the visible aspect of the good, and she gets that from Weil, I think, in her Platonism. So I don’t think she would completely dismiss Goethe, but if it’s just for the sake of understanding and doesn’t deepen our participation in the divine or transform us morally, then it’s in vain.
Matt Segall: Well, just to add to Goethe’s point of view, I think he would also say that it’s only through a loving attention to nature that these deeper forms—not visible to our physical senses—reveal themselves. So there’s something in that that suggests that we have to go through the good to get to the true.
Matt Segall: So maybe they’re not as incompatible as it was first seeming to me, because it just felt like initially Weil was declaring that human cognition is limited, and that we shouldn’t try to understand what our heart reveals to us about this transcendent world, which will always remain incomprehensible to us. But still, all we know about it is that we should revere it.
Karsten Jensen: I’m not sure she’s saying that it’s incomprehensible— I mean, it’s incomprehensible in terms of normal human faculties. But also, I think on her side it’s more of a Platonist point of view than Kantian, although some would also say that Kant is actually writing in the Platonic dialect somehow.
Karsten Jensen: If you think of Books VI and VII in the Republic, treating this concept of goodness, you end in some kind of aporia in terms of saying what this goodness actually is.
Matt Segall: Yeah, it can’t be defined.
Karsten Jensen: Yeah. So I think it’s more like: it’s there, she has the inspiration. When I read this, I was thinking about Keiji Nishitani and his concept of absolute nothingness, where he has this dialectic: when we think of nothing, we think of it as relative to being, and that’s, in his view, an impoverished view of what nothingness is. So there’s this absolute nothingness that goes beyond. It’s not nothing, and it’s not being either, but it’s something like the source of being. And nothingness in the relative domain lends itself to conceptualization.
Karsten Jensen: Nishitani also talks about some kind of existential turn where the self—once you approach this field of absolute nothingness—at a certain point the self is at stake. It’s like coming close to some kind of black hole: the self is kind of absorbed into this field of absolute nothingness. That happens in a process he calls the Great Doubt—that’s a term he has from his Buddhist background. Then, inspired by Nietzsche, and perhaps Heidegger as well, he talks about this turn he calls the Great Affirmation, or the Great Reaffirmation, where the world of samsara—the world of relative things—is reaffirmed once you’ve entered into this field of absolute nothingness and experienced your oneness with it.
Karsten Jensen: You can then turn your attention to samsara—the illusory world in the Buddhist tradition—but now it’s seen as rooted in this field of absolute nothingness, and thus acquires some kind of ontological status that it didn’t have before.
Karsten Jensen: And I think in Weil’s thinking— I think of Weil as an existentialist, in a sense. I know Albert Camus was one of the greatest admirers.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: “The greatest souls of our generation.”
Karsten Jensen: Yeah, something like that. So that’s one thing I would say: this aporia, in terms of what absolute goodness actually is, comes from Plato.
Matt Segall: And the Neoplatonic tradition, a reading of Meister Eckhart, and so on.
Karsten Jensen: And I just want to comment also on what Pedro was saying about her views on science and math. First of all, I read an article she wrote about quantum physics, and what I understood from that is that she has a criticism of modern science that is very much like Whitehead’s and Bergson’s criticism of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. She saw very clearly that there’s this tendency to treat our models as reality, or confuse our models with reality.
Karsten Jensen: And that touches upon another thing, relating to what we were saying, because to have this kind of existential turn, you need to allow for what she calls the void. There needs to be some kind of void where grace can pour in, so to speak. She was suspicious of certain uses of imagination when imagination is used to fill that void and, in a sense, block you off from the possibility of grace pouring into your life. So that would be her suspicion of imagination in that respect.
Matt Segall: Hmm.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: That reminds me of something you wrote once, Matt, that really stuck with me—that the soul is built out of what it believes to be true. You wrote something along those lines. I’d never heard anybody put it like that, and it immediately struck me as: that’s right, and that’s actually very important.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Relating to what Karsten’s saying: when you take these models for reality, I think it’s a kind of force. Extending her idea of force as that which dehumanizes us—obviously, when she writes “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” she writes how the Iliad talks about dehumanizing force. The person that suffers violence is dehumanized, turned into a thing. The aggressor is also dehumanized, and we can talk about that more too. I think that’s a more profound point people don’t talk about: committing violence also dehumanizes you.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: But connecting to what you said once, Matt—that the soul is made out of what it believes—that’s the problem with taking, for example, physicalist models as what you are. There’s something dehumanizing about that, in that it misses the moral aspects of our existence—as she would consider it the higher part of the soul, as opposed to the lower carnal parts of the soul, I think is the language she would use. So there is something dehumanizing there.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Combining what you said with the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, there’s an argument to be made as to how that’s a form of dehumanizing force on a subjective level.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: And there was one more thing—oh. Sorry. It’s the mystical experience part. I think this is where the mystical experience is really important for Weil, but also for grasping this. When you read the Allegory of the Cave for the first time, you’re like, “Okay, Plato, I guess this is a metaphor for enlightenment—when I know something, I’m smarter,” whatever. But I think the mystical experience is the crown jewel that finally establishes the continuity of everything she learned.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: You have these Eastern philosophies, and you have Platonism, and they all seem to point toward this idea of nothingness, or something beyond being, as Plato would put it, that’s kind of hard to grasp when you’re just reading it. And that’s because we’re trying to conceptualize these things as an object of knowledge, when I think what it’s all pointing at is that, at the end—outside of the cave, or these experiences of nothingness—it’s a non-conceptual form of knowledge. Conceptual knowledge relies on that subject-object distinction, but at that level of what they’re trying to talk about, it can only be known as subject.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I thought about this yesterday, and it kind of hit me. It’s so simple, but I never really thought about it this way: if you want to think about goodness or God, they can’t be known as an object. Any conceptual knowledge that I have of these things isn’t the real thing. God, for example—I think this is Martin Buber’s argument—could only be known as subject.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: So what does it mean to know God or goodness as subject? It means to become that thing. And so it can only be experienced through yourself such that there is a coincidence of the subject. But it still—so, it’s a different form of knowing, and that’s why I think the mystical experience is so important for Weil. Hopefully that makes sense. For me, that was very clarifying: goodness or God can only be known as subject, and therefore it’s a completely different order of knowledge.
Matt Segall: Do you think it’s subject so much as something more like second person, grammatically? I think of Martin Buber’s I and Thou—Ich und Du—I and you, really, would be a more colloquial translation. “You” as in another subject, but in a mode of communion with that subject, so it’s kind of like the divine or the good can only be known relationally—intersubjectively, maybe, or intra-subjectively, like in the space between subjects.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I like “intra.” Yeah. I think “intersubjective” still presupposes my—the empirical world. “Intrasubjective” implies maybe a communion, like you said, of a subjectivity that coincides with you, but still feels other in some sense, which is characteristic of a mystical experience.
Matt Segall: Yeah, because “subject,” to me, connotes private. And it seems to me that the nature of the divine, to the extent that we have any experience of that—mystically or morally—it’s neither. It can’t be sequestered into the privacy of interiority, but nor can it be just thought of as public, because obviously many people don’t experience God at all.
Matt Segall: But it’s sort of in between—in that space of relation. And so when you have a mystical experience, at least in my experience, and the reports of many of the mystics from Eckhart to Weil, it seems as though there’s an identification with the divine—a kind of theosis is occurring—but there’s still a distinction between oneself and the divine, so it’s not just a merger. It’s relational.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I think that’s what William James talks about—that there’s a sense of—I forget the exact terms he uses—of almost being commanded such that there’s a coincidence, but it’s not you calling the shots. That’s something that’s hard to describe.
Matt Segall: Right.
Karsten Jensen: I think maybe Plotinus would say about the One: we cannot understand the One, but we can be the One. And I think it’s also about coming to understand that, in a sense, you are the universal subject, and also experiencing somehow that this universal subject, in a sense, is all that there is. I get all the dangers of thinking in this way. I see and hear all the red lights, but there’s something about this: something you can only understand by being it. So it’s a collapse, you could say, of understanding and being—they kind of fuse in that moment.
Matt Segall: Right. And just to circle back to what you drew from something I wrote about the soul being composed of what it believes: to unpack that a little bit, I think it’s related to what Weil means by attention, and that we become what we attend to, or we become more like what we attend to.
Matt Segall: That means every thought, every feeling we indulge, every deed—whether deeds of love or deeds of hate. Certainly those who are inflicting violence on others are degrading the quality of their own soul as much as they’re degrading the souls of those they’re harming. And so it’s a comment that I take to follow from a process ontology.
Matt Segall: I think it’s related also to how the Romantic poets, like Keats in particular, relate to the nature of the soul. Keats has this great term: “soul-making.” It emphasizes the extent to which, while the soul may be eternal, it’s also a living being, which is to say it needs nourishment in order to grow. And if it isn’t nourished—if it’s malnourished—then it shrivels and becomes less powerful.
Matt Segall: Depending on our mode of attention, the quality of our attention, our soul can come more into its full potential, or it can wither away. And I think that speaks to the urgency of the human condition. Our physical bodies and our living organism take us so far, and then there’s a point where that natural growth stops, and it becomes a matter of soul-making. It becomes a matter of training our own attention, which is a moral question, really.
Matt Segall: And from that point forward, the extent to which we can direct our attention toward love determines the extent to which we continue to grow as human beings. And maybe, to the extent that we fail to develop that attention, out of our own freedom, we don’t even become fully human. We can be homo sapiens in the sense a biologist would define our species without loving attention, but to really become human in the deeper spiritual sense that someone like Weil is talking about, it’s up to us—each of us—as individuals. So that’s kind of what was behind that statement.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I talk about this with my students. I taught “The Poem of Force” this semester, and they really seem to resonate with it. Most of my students have— even though they come with certain dispositions toward relativism or against moral realism—they’re also very inclined to intuitively think that human rights are good, or believe in something like the Golden Rule. And the idea of dehumanization makes sense to them.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: When I teach “The Poem of Force,” I also teach Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass talks about an event where he’s given to a new slave owner, and the wife of that slave owner, Mrs. Auld, at first is the nicest white woman he’s ever met—the nicest slave owner he’s ever had. She takes care of him; she starts teaching him how to read, and he’s shocked. He’s like, “Who is this lady? I thought all the slave owners were mean.”
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: But then her husband says, “You can’t teach a slave how to read. They’ll become unfit to be a slave. You can’t be too nice to them—you have to impose yourself, be a slave owner.” And after receiving those orders from her husband, Douglass says she drank from the poison of irresponsible power, and she went from the sweetest angel to a demon.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I use that as an example to show students: it’s a little less intuitive for them to think, “How does violence dehumanize the aggressor?” Well, here’s an example. Sophia Auld goes from being a good Christian woman, taking care of this—recognizing the humanity in Douglass—and then she receives these orders from her husband, and she completely transforms her behavior, becomes a monster, becomes vile, and starts dehumanizing him. And he says she’s unrecognizable now, because now she is lying to herself and believing the lie that Douglass is less human than she is.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: That makes it click for the students. They can see she’s still a person, but she’s more of a monster than a human now. And what does it really mean to be human is a hard question, but it has something to do, as Weil says, with being sensitized.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: In “The Poem of Force,” she basically says as much: the greatest moments of humanity in the Iliad are when force is overcome by love, especially the loving recognition between enemies. She points out the mutual respect in a scene between Achilles and Priam. And she seems to argue that the aggressor becomes dehumanized in that they become deaf and dumb—she says—both to reason (we see this in Greek tragedies, like Antigone with Creon not listening to reason, Oedipus, these figures developing a tyrannical personality immune to reason), and then they suffer the consequences of force.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: But she also says it’s not just being deaf and dumb to reason—it’s being deaf and dumb to human compassion and suffering. So being less capable of using our reason freely, and being numb or desensitized to human suffering and compassion—these things make us less than human in the sense you’re talking about.
Karsten Jensen: Can I connect this to the idea of absolute goodness? One question you could ask here is: how do you know whether a person is actually attending to absolute goodness? And here, I think it’s a case of knowing the tree by its fruits. The way that Weil sees it is that what happens to you if you become attentive to this realm of absolute goodness is that you become attentive to all the basic needs that other beings have in the world of necessity.
Karsten Jensen: This is where she has this ontology of needs. She’s making a list—it’s incomplete, and she says it can change over time—but she mentions in the text we read today this list of needs of the soul: freedom, obedience, equality, hierarchy, private and collective property, security, risk, responsibility, honor, punishment, rootedness, etc.
Karsten Jensen: In the first part of The Need for Roots, she’s analyzing these different needs in more detail. It can be debated what the actual needs are, but she’s talking about needs of the soul, so it’s not just material needs.
Karsten Jensen: And there’s another thing she says—I think it’s in a text called “Are We Fighting for Justice?”—she talks about what she calls the madness of God, which is that God is in desperate need of consent from human beings. She talks about how those who are attentive to the realm of absolute goodness experience pain when something is happening to someone without their consent.
Karsten Jensen: So consent is very central, and it has to be informed consent, because through propaganda and all different kinds of things we can come into a situation where our consent is not informed consent—we do not actually know what we’re consenting to.
Karsten Jensen: I think for her, the telos of politics is addressing the needs of souls. Those who should be in power should be those who are attentive to the actual needs that human beings have. And what she’s opposing is political realism: might is right, you do what you can do simply because you can do it. She’s very lucid here, and very powerful in the way she phrases these things as a counterpoint to political realism.
Matt Segall: Right. Yeah. What you say about the divine needing human consent—she says that the good is a power which is only real in this world insofar as it is exercised. And so the human being becomes, to the extent that we can direct our attention to the good, the channel through which, or the bridge across which, the divine can pass into this world.
Matt Segall: It reminds me of something Whitehead says in Religion in the Making: he says the power of God is the worship that God inspires. In other words, to the extent that human beings can orient themselves to the good, that sacred power of goodness can operate in the world. But without human consent, it doesn’t happen. It’s much more participatory. It’s not actualized.
Matt Segall: In terms of politics, the way you’re describing it is very Platonic. I think of the Republic immediately, which on the surface is a dialogue about the ideal state, but it’s really a dialogue about the well-ordered soul, with the implication being—one of the implications, at least—that if you want a well-ordered state, you need to start with souls, and think about this in terms of education.
Matt Segall: You could read Plato as saying, just like there are different qualities of metals, there are different qualities of human beings, or you could read him as saying every individual human being has these different levels. And we need to have a well-ordered state and a just society cultivate the gold in us, which is the good, and use that to temper these other levels of our soul—our will, and our feeling life, and our sensory life—not because those are evil, but because if they’re running the show, we end up with a destabilized social situation full of injustices.
Matt Segall: To my mind, there are so many statements here where I can’t help but feel the urgency of their relevance to our moment. Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—it seemed like liberalism was ascendant, and liberal capitalism, and Fukuyama’s end of history and all that—we’re in a very different time now, a generation later, where liberalism seems like a failed project all of a sudden.
Matt Segall: I think part of that failure is how hollow the basis is for this idea of human rights in liberal political philosophy, where it’s no more than a shared agreement that’s been institutionalized. Human rights is only real to the extent that the UN can enforce that, which—there’s not very much power in that institution. And so it makes the idea of human rights, from that liberal point of view, seem flimsy and unrealistic, and so we default to this might-makes-right idea.
Matt Segall: That seems to be what’s governing the new multipolar world order right now: Russia will take control of its sphere of influence, the US will take control of its sphere of influence over this hemisphere, and there’s no higher sense of value to adjudicate human relationships.
Matt Segall: But for Simone Weil to state this very simply—every human being, without any exception, is something sacred, which we are bound to show respect. And she says this is the only possible motive for universal respect toward all human beings. So there has to be a spiritual ground here, or we’re lost.
Matt Segall: I think there are so many well-meaning intellectuals who are fearful of religion for various reasons that seem resistant to this. But I don’t see another way forward. If you don’t have that sense of the sacred that’s beyond our comprehension—at least our secular comprehension—how could we not default to might makes right, and a more Darwinian survival of the fittest, social Darwinism sort of situation? So it really strikes me that Weil has important lessons for us right now.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Yeah. And I hear you implying that this democratic, liberal project—government being for the people, legitimacy deriving from the consent of the governed, democratic participation—requires this spiritual basis, almost. It reminds me of something Hannah Arendt said about the distinction between power and violence. I think this is in her book On Violence: in the history of Western political thought, power has been almost equated with whoever is capable of doing violence, which goes back to Hobbes and the Leviathan.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: She wanted to flip that and say, actually, violence is weak in the sense that it always ultimately leads to its dissolution. We see this in totalitarian regimes: it starts as something great and powerful, but ultimately the maintenance of power through violence—through a few people increasing their violent tentacles and sphere of influence through technologies and armies and manipulation—eventually the circle of trust gets smaller and smaller, and eventually evil consumes itself.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: And to add to that, as Weil points out, there’s no real consent in being coerced. You’re never going to get someone’s consent if you use violence to get them to do what you say. The first opportunity they get to defy you, they will. There’s no real respect or consent in that.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: So Hannah Arendt wants to argue that real power comes from consent, but it’s fragile compared to violence that uses terror to maintain itself. But a liberal democracy requires consent—an inspired consent—not terror. And if there’s no spiritual foundation for that, like with human rights, then it’s fragile.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I think this is where the political importance of process philosophy comes in: pointing out all the ways in which our worldviews about science and consciousness and the mind shape the way we understand the human and what it means to be human.
Matt Segall: And that can actually be detrimental to having that moral foundation required for—
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: —for democracy.
Matt Segall: Right. And just to say about the fragility of democracy when there’s only a secular set of values to draw upon: we want to uphold this value of equality, but in what way are human beings equal?
Matt Segall: Weil raises this question. She says there are certain people who attract our attention and our love in a unique way—family members, romantic partners, friends. Because of that, there’s a sense in which our affections can’t be equally distributed at the level of everyday human faculties. We’re limited in the extent that we can love people, unless we have this deeper, transcendent sense that she identifies as the nature of the human being: this longing for an absolute good. And it’s that that makes us equal.
Matt Segall: It’s beyond our unequal affections at the level of normal sensibility. It calls for this transcendent good, by which we can recognize and respect others, even strangers.
Matt Segall: But political equality is different, and I think it often gets conflated in secular liberal societies, especially among progressives, where we want equality to be understood in terms of all capacities, which is obviously not true. We don’t all have equal capacities.
Matt Segall: And because we don’t have this transcendent source of what makes us all identical—where does she put it? She says: “Only by really directing the attention beyond the world can there be real contact with this central and essential fact of human nature. Only an attention thus directed possesses the faculty, always identical in all cases, of irradiating with light any human being whatsoever.”
Matt Segall: So equality is a spiritual, transcendent ideal. It’s not something we perceive in the sensory world. And if we’re in a secular cultural context where we think we only have access to our animal instincts and maybe some abstract rational ideals, we’re never going to perceive the basis of that equality by which a democratic society could be organized.
Matt Segall: So I think there’s a need for spiritual renewal, so we can understand what this value that all people in the modern democratic West say they uphold really means, and what it doesn’t mean. Because there’s a leveling effect if you try to apply equality outside of the political domain, to cultural activities—science, art, sports—where it’s obvious we’re not all equal.
Karsten Jensen: Yeah, this is where this need of obedience comes in. If I’m witness to a traffic accident and somebody’s hurt, and the doctor’s at the scene, we want to respect the capacities that the doctor has and step back. There are so many situations in life where we’re together with people who, in this or that direction, are more skilled than we are ourselves, and if we are loving creatures, we want to make space for them and allow them to do their thing.
Karsten Jensen: One thing I was thinking about, when we look at the state of affairs in the world, is Plato’s analysis of how debasement of drives leads to degradation in the forms of government. In his view of aristocracy, what is dominating is the desire for goodness, for truth. Then you have this other form—I can’t remember what he calls it—where it becomes love of honor instead. Then it becomes love of wealth in oligarchy. And in democracy— I think we see that in our modern-day world— it becomes consumption for the sake of consumption.
Matt Segall: Love of pleasure.
Karsten Jensen: Love for pleasure, yeah. Everybody just doing their own things. So you see this debasement of drives moving toward tyranny, where there’s this person who just wants it all for himself, and maybe has powers to mislead people, and you end up with tyranny. Plato’s not anti-democratic, but he’s anti-debasement of our drives. He wants our society to be governed by people who aspire to the highest truths and forms of goodness.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: That’s where I think the discussion between Thrasymachus and Socrates is relevant, and later toward the end of the Republic, when I think Socrates says something along the lines of: there’s actually a lot of similarity between the soul of the philosopher and the soul of the tyrant. The difference is where eros is directed. In the tyrant, it’s unbounded. In the philosopher, it’s directed toward the good.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: And I often have little debates in my head between Nietzsche and Socrates—or Nietzsche and Weil—which is why I got this book on Bataille and Weil. It’s really the question of: is there any grounding to transcend toward, or is it just completely groundless?
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: The image we have of the ideal liberal individual—the ideal our society seems to hold—is that we want people free to pursue whatever projects they may have, insofar as it doesn’t interfere with the freedom of others. We want to give as much unbounded freedom as we can for people to be whoever they want, pursue whatever identity they want.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: In one sense, there are good things about that, but it risks, going back to Plato, missing the moral education or moral direction needed to form a responsible populace that can handle having a democracy that doesn’t devolve into a sloppy sort of rule.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Aristotle said the ideal rule by one person is monarchy, degraded monarchy is tyranny; aristocracy, degraded aristocracy is oligarchy; then there’s democracy, but there’s no name for a degraded democracy—at least I don’t think he gives one in the Politics. But sustaining a good democracy requires an educated citizenry, and that requires some moral grounding or foundation that Plato points to. In our idea of the liberal individual, there is no grounding, there is no direction: do what you want as long as you’re not breaking laws or interfering with the freedom of others.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: And I think having no ideals such as the good, or a moral foundation for how a populace should be educated, is harmful and leads to the degradation of democracy. I keep thinking of Nietzsche here. Nietzsche seems to be this great champion of will to be yourself. It doesn’t matter, essentially, what you will to be, as long as you aspire to some great version of yourself, unbounded by any standard of goodness. There are nuances to how you read Nietzsche, but that’s how a lot of people receive Nietzsche, and that expresses the liberal ideal we have, which may be harmful to having a well-functioning democracy. I don’t know if that makes sense, but—
Karsten Jensen: It makes me think about what Weil writes about education, which she picks up as a Platonic thing. She writes about education and the necessity of a certain kind of education, and for her, education is basically about the cultivation of attention.
Karsten Jensen: She puts it like this: the best way to train your attention is to study things that you’re not interested in—study math for the sake of math, not necessarily out of love for math. She says that’s actually better when it comes to training your attention. Of course, you have to dedicate yourself to the study, but attention is best trained if you overcome your own inclinations.
Karsten Jensen: The ultimate form of attention, in her view—what all kinds of practice or training of attention is a preparation for—is prayer. Prayer is the highest mode of attention, in her view, but it’s not prayer like we normally think about it. It’s prayer as meditation, awaiting, for goodness—for grace to enter into your life, into the void created through your kenosis, your self-emptying, when you’re fully attentive to something.
Karsten Jensen: I read that there was this priest, a friend of Weil, who said that when you talked with Weil, you had the sense of a person fully attentive to everything you said, and in that communication. So in that respect, she was walking the walk as well as talking the talk.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: It goes to the question of what education is for. Being in academia now, it seems to become more and more about filling seats than anything else—more of a neoliberal model of education—fill as many seats as possible, make as much money as possible.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I hear that between maybe the 1950s and the 1970s there was more of a sense that higher education in the United States had much more of a moral value, in the sense of educating liberal individuals—not liberal left or right, but free individuals who are responsible with their own freedom—and educated to participate responsibly in the political process. That’s the ideal of liberal education as I understand it.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: That seems to be becoming more and more degraded in favor of an instrumental approach to education: “I got my degree, now I can go get my job and do my own thing.” My worry with that—going away from more socially responsible forms of education and sliding standards of education—is that we go more and more into developing a society of, going back to Plato, where education just becomes another means to an end: get what I want, rise up the social ladder. It’s just developing more tyrannical personalities, maybe, in the sense that even my education is just about what it can do for me—what I can get or consume out of it.
Matt Segall: There may be— in my opinion, there’s nothing more dehumanizing, or all forms of dehumanization stem ultimately from that attitude toward education. Because if the soul is a process of formation itself, then education can’t be a means to something else. Paideia, Bildung—education is the essence of human existence. It’s how we become more fully human. And I don’t think there is a final limit to that becoming.
Matt Segall: Learning as a lifelong pursuit has to be the basis of any just society. The meaning of human life as such, I think, is education in the highest sense.
Matt Segall: So I think it’s quite a diagnosis you’ve made, Pedro, in the way education gets instrumentalized in our time as just a means to the end of getting a well-paying job. Even if it would be better if education was understood as a means of creating a well-informed citizen who could participate in self-governance, even that would still be instrumentalizing education to some degree, but toward a higher value than the economic one.
Matt Segall: I think we need to reach higher than that, to something infinite like the good. We’ll never be done trying to become adequate to that transcendent good that Plato is trying to direct our attention toward. So it comes down to paideia.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Education, in the end.
Karsten Jensen: One of the most common questions I get as a math teacher is: “What is it good for?” And it’s the one question I don’t want them to ask. A lot of my task is to make them stop asking that question, because if I try to answer it, it never helps. They don’t get any more motivated.
Karsten Jensen: Actually, I think where I see the most motivation is when I start talking about some of the paradoxes surrounding the concept of infinity—things like Hilbert’s Hotel, or Cantor’s analysis of transfinite numbers. They very often find that stimulating. Or if I talk about the fact that they cannot see a triangle, because of the way it’s defined: it’s not perceivable. They can think it, but they cannot see it.
Karsten Jensen: When I put these paradoxes in front of them, I can feel they are stimulated much more than if I try to explain what math is good for.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Quite a different approach. You come into the class thinking, “Math should teach me how to solve these problems,” but Weil’s approach would be: how can math deepen your participation in reality, and appreciate the beauty and reality that’s there, which is ultimately participation in the good? Those are very different ways of teaching math.
Karsten Jensen: Yeah.
Matt Segall: Yeah. She says there’s no evidence for this transcendent good. And yet I think Plato, the Pythagoreans—and maybe she gets into this elsewhere and nuances that statement—but math, and mathesis, or learning in general, the intuition that there is a truth beyond anything we can sense, comes through particularly the study of mathematics. That does seem to me to be at least the closest thing we might have to evidence for a transcendent Good.
Matt Segall: So: what is it good for? It’s good for cultivating the sort of attention that would allow us to—that would lead us to the good.
Karsten Jensen: That’s how Weil uses it as well. She has a large piece called “Concerning the Pythagorean Doctrine,” where she goes into an analysis of math and what it’s for, and it’s exactly what you’re saying. It’s leading us toward the good, to realize the good, the absolute goodness.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I think Spinoza says something along those lines when he says that the person who really desires and works toward understanding nature and the universe and the network of relations that is nature really loves God. I really like that line, too.
Karsten Jensen: I know you have to leave soon, Pedro, so I just want to say: I think a conversation like this is also very stimulating in terms of approaching the divine realm of absolute goodness. I get a sense of peace wash over me at the end of these sorts of conversations that I know is kind of— it’s like little nudges in the right direction.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: I really wish I didn’t have to go. I could keep going if you guys want to continue the conversation. I’d love to.
Matt Segall: Yeah. I don’t have a flight to catch, but I have some grocery shopping to do, and they deliver bread at the local grocery store pretty soon, and if I don’t get there, it’ll be gone. So I’ve got to get my human needs met. But no, this was a really enriching conversation.
Karsten Jensen: I don’t have as many conversations as you guys, so I’ll probably contact you again with feedback.
Matt Segall: I do, Karsten.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Yeah, please do. I’d love to brainstorm and see where we can take this discussion.
Matt Segall: Sounds good. I look forward to that. I hope you both have a Merry Christmas and a nice New Year. Talk to you soon.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Y’all too. Have a good end of your year.
Matt Segall: Thanks. Safe travels, Pedro.
Karsten Jensen: Yeah, safe travels, Pedro.
Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea: Thank you, Karsten. Bye, y’all. Thank you for the discussion.
Karsten Jensen: See you.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?