Simone Weil, an intellectual biography

Abstract

traces intellectual life of a woman whose madness for truth, in words of Albert Camus, allowed her understand, beyond her most natural prejudices, illness of her approach and to discern remedies. Born in 1909 in Paris, France, second child of well-off Jewish parents, Simone Weil died in 1943 of self-starvation, leaving behind a collection of letters, notebooks, essays and poems that embodied elements of her fiery, complex thought. Gabriella Fiori's biography of Simone Weil aims to set woman and her thought within context of her times. Fiori follows Weil from her childhood through her years in school, where she began to formulate rigorous ideas that she later focused on a European world charged by war and revolution. As a teacher, activist, and worker, Weil felt every current that swept through Europe yet was carried away by none of them. Involved with unions and Communist party, travelling to Germany to witness rise of fascism and to Spain to fight with anarchists, Weil sought to pin each movement to facts and to truth of its ideals. Working in factories and later as a grape picker in fields of southern France, Weil felt the sense of not having any right and wrote forcefully about relation of man to industrial machine. In her final work, L'enracinement, Weil gives an account of what, in her view, are symptoms, causes, diagnosis and therapy for illness of Europe.