Attention is the rarest and most precious form of generosity. Very few spirits are able to discover that things and beings exist», wrote the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil in one of her last letters. It was 1942, a year before she died. And today, which is the eightieth anniversary of her passing, I like to remember her like this, with this sentence that sums up very well the depth and finesse of her thought.
Died at the age of 34, Simone Weil was an atypical intellectual. She that she has left us tens of thousands of letters, reflections and thoughts and that she, without ever publishing any academic essay, has been able to deal in an original way with the themes of work, the working condition, uprooting and emptiness . She struggled all her life against the weight of her own body—suffering from anorexia and dying from self-imposed deprivation. But each of her writings manages to touch the solid soul of things, dissecting their essence and highlighting their many and contradictory facets.
Simone Weil, the events, passed through them. To talk about the workers’ condition, she went to work in the factory: “In the face of machines there is little solidarity, everyone withdraws into themselves, prisoners of the imposed speed”; she to defend freedom, despite being a convinced pacifist, she went to Spain to fight against Franco’s fascism: “No one has greater love than the one who knows how to respect the freedom of the other”; to fully understand the fragility of the human condition, she starved herself: «Loving the truth means enduring emptiness; and then accept death. The truth is on the side of death.” Hers has always been an embodied, lived, tormented thought. And while some of her contemporaries delighted in using refined and incomprehensible language, deluding themselves that complexity was synonymous with depth, she remained simple and true, inhabiting every single word spoken or written to the very end.
Authentic to the bone and always against the tide, Simone Weil was a radical intellectual. She who hated compromises and couldn’t stand smudges, to the point of being sarcastically nicknamed a “categorical imperative in a skirt”. Although no philosopher has been more distant than her from Kant’s abstract rigour. And every thought of her and written about her are the fruit of experience lived alongside the oppressed and the dispossessed, the little ones and the outcasts.
He died of starvation, but he taught us to defend our freedom and our ideas. He took the bread out of his mouth, but he passed on to us the true sense of justice pushing us never to stop, not even on the verge of death, fighting to build a world where anyone can be free to be himself: «The ability to pay attention for an unfortunate person it is very rare, very difficult; it’s almost a miracle, it’s a miracle. Almost everyone who believes they have this ability doesn’t have it. The warmth, the impetus of feeling, pity are not enough”.