Simone Weil’s Ethic of the Other: Explicating Fictions through Fiction, or Looking through the Wrong End of the Telescope

Abstract

Simone Weil’s Ethic of the Other: Explicating Fictions through Fiction, or Looking through the Wrong End of the Telescope Ruthann Knechel Johansen When the “power of the social element” usurps God’s place in the soul, the collective soul is ascendant. “The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth.”1 Idolatry is due to the fact that, while athirst for absolute good, one is not in possession of supernatural attention; and one has not the patience to let it grow.2 I. Asbury Fox and Ruby Turpin, two characters in Flannery O’Connor’s twentieth century fiction—the first facing a slide toward death and the other self‐righteously ascending toward heaven on her virtues—illustrate the characteristics and dangers of collectivities that French philosopher Simone Weil regarded, along with force, to undergird all forms of oppression, including colonialism. Both Weil and O’Connor lived and worked—as do we—in the midst of powerful collectives; and each attempted to discern the operations from within them. Weil sought to understand and interpret through philosophical reflection the economic, political, cultural, and religious idolatries that coalesce in collectivities. O’Connor deferred to art and irony to disclose the legacies inherited from such collectivities as slavery and imperialism. As a literary scholar indebted to Simone Weil’s thought and to the work of Weil scholars, I read the philosopher and the American fiction writer in each other’s light for the mutual illumination they provide on each other's work and together offer for contemporary reflection, as citizens and governments confront residues of nineteenth and twentieth century colonialism and new threats of imperialism. Weil’s “The Colonial Question and the Destiny of the French People” and “Human Personality” (also translated “The Sacredness of the Person”), written within a year of each other and two O’Connor short stories—“The Enduring Chill” and “Revelation”—form the foundation for this analysis. Two provocative statements made by Weil, one in “The Colonial Question” and the other in “Human Personality,” inspire this examination of the relationship between collectivities and oppression. Written as response to the devastating threat of Hitler, not only in France but also across Europe, Weil argues in “The Colonial Question” that there can be no hope for the future of the human species without reconsidering colonial practices and the temptations on which those practices rest.3 In “Human Personality,” where Weil distills her observations about all forms of injustice into conclusions about the human person and investigates the relationship between individuals who compose a collectivity and the power of the collectivity as a whole, she asserts it is useless to explain to a collectivity that there is something in each of the units composing it which it ought not to violate. To begin with, a collectivity is not someone, except by a fiction; it has only an abstract existence and can only be spoken to fictitiously. And, moreover, if it were someone it would be someone who was not disposed to respect anything except himself.4 In her aesthetic described in “Morality and Literature,” Weil explains that her idea that fiction generates immorality is not confined to literature. She says that “the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future; and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent [emphasis added] what they are thinking, saying, and doing.”5 The perils of collectivities as fictions lead to my thesis: Explicating collectivities as fictions through fiction (1) illumines their roles in various forms of oppression and (2) points toward the need for detachment from social idolatries so that fuller alignment with the supernatural becomes possible. My decision to draw upon two Flannery O’Connor stories to develop the thesis of this essay is prompted by statements made by Weil in “The Colonial Question and the Destiny of the French People” that “the loss of the past is equivalent to the loss of the supernatural” and by her assertion that America’s lack of sympathy for the colonial system because it has “no colonies...