WEIL, SIMONE

French philosopher, mystic, and social critic Simone Weil (1909–1943) was born in Paris on February 3 and died in Ashford, Kent, in England on August 24. Though raised in a prosperous bourgeois family and classically educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Weil sympathized from an early age with the plight of the poor, the oppressed, and the afflicted.

Before the age of twenty Weil identified herself as an anarcho-syndicalist. She was attracted to the philosophy of Marx but refused to join the communist party. Her earliest sustained social analysis, "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression," provided a critique of Marxism that Albert Camus (1913–1960) judged the most profound of the twentieth century. This critique focused on what Weil thought was the inadequacy of Marx's optimistic view that technological progress would lead inevitably to the liberation of the proletariat. For her, technological development gave humanity more control over nature only at the expense of greater dependency on what she called the collectivity. The collectivity includes the bureaucratic structure of the state (political and legal authority, including the government and the police) as well as the private corporations that produce the goods and services of the economy.

Weil argued that labor is not in itself the cause of oppression. For her, genuine human freedom meant freedom from the illusions that, in industrial society, take the form of ideologies and myths, of which the idea of progress is the preeminent example. In order to be free of the tyranny of illusion, human beings must come to know themselves as limited beings. Their finitude is revealed through methodical, thoughtful engagement with necessity; in other words, through work. Work is therefore a good that is not to be eliminated but ought to be the spiritual center of civilization. Weil argued that the problem with modern technology is that methods (mechanical or bureaucratic) are built into machines or organizations, thereby eliminating the need for thinking. A method, once developed, can be applied indefinitely, without ever being understood by the person who applies it. Generally, there is method in the motions of work, but none in the minds of the workers who tend automatic machines. They are reduced to slavery; they have lost their freedom.

This analysis formed the basis of Weil's critique of the industrial system that, in her view, dedicated itself to the maximization of the productivity of the worker rather than the maximization of freedom in the work process. In her two years of factory work (1934–1935), she saw that workers usually cannot understand the techniques they apply and this fact undermined their thinking relationship to reality. Due to the division and coordination of labor which in turn is a function of the techniques of production, there is a virtually complete divorce between thought and action. The manual laborers on a production line are not free, are dehumanized and reduced to slaves, not because they perform physically laborious tasks but because their tasks are so structured as to exclude the possibility of thought. Mental workers, those who make up the essential bureaucratic structure by which the activity of the workers is brought into coordinated relation, may be as enslaved as the manual laborers themselves because their thinking is ordinarily divorced from any direct action or work, and does not involve a dialogue with those whose lives they order. They too have lost touch with necessity.

Weil's critique of modern industry led her to analyze modern science as itself having become a thoughtless collective enterprise that relies on specialization for its advancement. No single mind can grasp even a sub-discipline of physics or chemistry. Researchers take over not only the results but the methods developed by their predecessors without understanding them or their relation to the whole. Weil concluded that the scientist can be crushed by science in much the same way that the workers are crushed by their work.

Toward the end of her life when her most profound religious thinking and social analysis was done, Weil contrasted modern (or, as she called it, classical) science, developed after Galileo and Newton between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, with ancient Greek science. She concluded that modern science had emancipated the study of nature, first understood on the analogy of work (that is, in terms of energy), from the idea of the good, and then from the idea of necessity. In the 1940s, Weil predicted that the incomparable technical achievements of science would become divorced from any ordering principle and destroy human scale, as complexity was piled on complexity and society became uprooted.

Weil died prematurely in England at the age of 34. The significance of her posthumously published writings on religion as well the social and political crises of her times are only beginning to be appreciated for their depth and originality.

LAWRENCE E. SCHMIDT

SEE ALSO Freedom;Humanization and Dehumanization;Marxism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McLellan, David. (1990). Utopian Pessimist. New York: Poseidon Press. A biography by the renowned scholar of Marxism that emphasizes her links to the labor movement in France between the wars.

Pétrement, Simone. (1976). Simone Weil: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books. A carefully documented biography by a dear personal friend and renowned scholar of ancient Gnosticism.

Weil, Simone. (1968). "Classical Science and After." In her On Science, Necessity and the Love of God. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Written in Marseille in 1941, this essay takes up the critique of classical (modern) science adumbrated in "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression."

Weil, Simone. (1971). The Need for Roots. New York: Harper Colophon. Written at the end of 1942 for De Gaulle who was leading the Free French in London, this report outlines Weil's proposal for the reconstruction of France after Hitler's defeat.

Weil, Simone. (2001). "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression." In her Oppression and Liberty. Translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie. New York: Routledge. Written in 1933–1934 before her year of factory work, this lengthy essay outlines Weil's reasons for rejecting the liberal and Marxist optimism about the liberating potential of technological progress.