Formative Writings: 1929-1941

by Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909-43) is widely recognized as one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France. She dedicated herself to searching for answers to fundamental questions about the nature of oppression and the reasons for human exploitation. She attempted to alleviate suffering or share in it and, in the last years of her life, profoundly explored the relationship of the human condition to the realm of the transcendent. This volume make available for the first time in English an important part of Weil's early writings. Although known primarily as a religious thinker, she devoted enormous energy in her formative years to her work as a political activist and as a philosopher/teacher. This book reveals these other sides of Weil and demonstrates the lines of continuity underlying her whole thought. Written between 1929 and 1941 and including her diary of her time on the production line at Renault, the book covers a crucial and transitional period in Weil's life. Taken together they represent invaluable primary source material on the evolution of Weil's thinking and on her chosen method of abstracting elements from her personal experience and transmuting that experience into considered thought. Even when highly theoretical, her writing was always concerned with the application of her intelligence - through education, study, work, political involvement, and the practice of contemplative attention - to concrete problems of human existence.

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1987

About the author

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".

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[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

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