Simone Weil: Waiting on Truth (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 67 J. P. Little. Simone Weil: Waiting on Truth. Berg Women's Series. Berg Publishers Ltd, 1988. 170 pp. This is a compact, accessible introduction to an increasingly interesting thinker. Unfortunately, as Simone Weil's thought has become more relevant to contemporary life, there has not been an appropriate increase in the scholarly and critical attention paid to her work. This volume, along with several 1989 publications, is a step in the right direction, since it summarizes both Weil's short, intense life and her major works and ideas. The book has something to offer virtually any reader, from the beginning undergraduate philosophy or literature student to the graduate student or scholar with an awakening interest in Weil. Some of Weil's ideas and arguments—and she is always contentious—are striking to the "inhabitant" of the West in 1989. With governments overburdened by middleclass entitlements and social consciousness scarce, her thoughts on "rights" and "obligations " seem both lucid and clairvoyant. According to Weil, and her thinking on this subject is well summarized here, rights are of an order inferior to obligations for two reasons: first, no right can have meaning without recognition of obligation by both the possessor of the right and all other members of society; furthermore, "right" is linked to property, and is thus a matter of quantity, not of quality. Rights have only an indirect connection with justice. According to Weil, and Little quotes her here, the victim of injustice asks "Why am I being hurt," while the the claimant of a right asks "Why has he got more than I have?". This reader, at least, finds that this passage of Little's book sheds a clear light on contemporary politics in the United States. Little seems a bit embarrassed by Weil's implied rejection of most Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought on the issue of rights, but if that thinking has run its course—and many of our current problems suggest that it has—then Weil's meditations are a useful start toward some re-thinking. Her contention that obligation and freedom are inextricably linked is especially timely. These thoughts on rights and obligations derive from Weil's more general contention that modern social attitudes and institutions derive essentially from Roman rather than Greek sources. In this connection, again, Little provides a brief but lucid summary of Weil's thinking. The modern State, from Richelieu to the present, has been built on the Roman model. Richelieu, Weil says, transformed the State into an absolute and divorced it from the public or people. Louis XIV and Napoleon both greatly admired the Augustan version of the Roman State and sought to recreate it in France. Weil is certainly correct here, since it was in seventeenth-century France that the State came to be conceived both as the "head" of the social body and as the properly powerful agent transforming both society and the environment in keeping with its own standards of "order." Indeed, this transforming power, given its connection with creating wealth, and therefore rights, has legitimated the exponential growth of States throughout modernity. Weil sees that the individual may have renounced real freedom, along with obligations, in exchange for a growing array of rights. These considerations are closely related to Weil's writings on the subject of work, which is always one of her main interests. She criticizes Karl Marx for accepting the modern deification of progress and therefore the transforming power of large institutions , but agrees with him that money debases work by becoming its sole motivation. She takes trade unions to task for following the modern fascination with numbers and bargaining for higher salaries rather than for more humanistic work and working con- 68 biography Vol. 14, No. 1 ditions. Weil was in favor of improved technology to humanize work, but, as Little points out, in her early writings, Weil did not see the danger that workers themselves would be devalued or replaced by machines. Little explains very clearly, and very usefully for the contemporary reader, Weil's ideas about the religious significance of these political and social developments. Weil's concept of "idolatry" is quite fascinating. Following Plato in seeing society as...