Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

It was in this interplay between image and reality, art and truth, recollection and recognition that the writings of Simone Weil first spoke to Iris. Above all, they unlocked the significance of Plato for her. As a youthful Communist during the war, lectures by E. R. Dodds (Mary’s future doctoral supervisor) had left Iris cold. She had read Plato’s Republic in 1940, while busy with the Oxford reds preparing for another Bolshevik Revolution, and had been so disgusted by ‘the old reactionary’ that, as she joked to a friend, she took to selling the Communist Daily Worker.[143] She had wanted to get close to the ‘thronging multitudes’ whose lives ‘in mines & cotton mills’ were a rebuke to Plato’s vision of a just aristocracy. Now in Simone Weil she confronted a red who kept the Symposium in her pocket: when labouring as a grape picker in Vichy France, she carried it with her and taught it to her fellow farmhands.