The degree to which the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) was influenced by Plato can hardly be understated. Her notebooks are studded with reference to Platonic terms and ideas, which she developed over the course of her short life. While her ideas reflect her own unique approach to problems such as necessity, grace, and divine absence, there is almost always a resonance with Plato. As one who consistently sought to bring the disparate parts of her thought—intellectual, political, and spiritual—together towards a unity, Weil is well known for having had a Platonist spirit. A posthumous collection of her writings titled Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks further illustrates the extent to which her thought is indebted to the Greek philosopher, whom she regarded as a mystic.[1]
Weil’s unique connection to Plato has been explored in the monograph The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, upon whose insights I hope this paper will build and generate more conversation.[2] I will consider the tension between the abstract form of the Good in Plato with Weil’s distinctly Christian notion of grace, as well as the implications of their differences in approach to reading and writing.
Deeply compelled by the Platonic vision of forms, as well as being implicitly influenced by the Christian negative theological tradition, Weil developed a metaphysics of the attention that involves the suspension of what she called the “imagination” in order to cultivate a state of void that awaits the fulfillment of grace. While there are many possible angles through which to focus a study of Weil’s Platonism, my paper will primarily attend to the question of how Plato and Weil each conceived of writing as related to the vision of God.
At the panel, I hope to address the following questions: What are the key differences and similarities between Plato and Weil’s visions of God? How did each thinker address the epistemological and practical challenges of what it is to really know and do the Good? How did Plato and Weil think about the transmission of knowledge—especially knowledge of God and the Good—beyond the form of interpersonal dialogue? Given the focus on reading and writing, I will ground my paper in the Phaedrus, as I compare ideas from this dialogue to Weil’s notebooks, whose formal qualities as abandoned literary objects are also of special concern in the paper.
I argue that one of the points of continuity between Plato and Weil is their interest in the role of writing in aiding the mind in its search for truth. Weil thought that a mystical method for understanding images and symbols could be followed, wherein: “One should not try to interpret them, but contemplate them until their significance flashes upon one.” What is at stake for Weil in this hermeneutic is the possibility of the real becoming visible—a phenomenon that only becomes possible if the attention “consists of a contemplative look and not one of attachment.”[3] What are the conditions of this contemplative look? And how may it be sustained over time and passed on?
As a student of Plato, Weil would have been familiar with the Platonic notion that writing is a degraded form. Plato’s Phaedrus, in contrast, criticizes the written word for breeding complacency in readers, who, believing to have knowledge safely recorded in a codex, would no longer feel the need to truly know wisdom “from within themselves.” Socrates says “[Words] seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.”[4] In this dialogue, the written word is characterized as a poor imitation of speech. It is not just that writing crystallizes the dynamism of conversation into unmoving sentences, but that it also encourages false ideas about knowledge—namely, the misapprehension that wisdom is to be found enclosed within texts and readily available for straightforward interpretation.
It bears mentioning, however, that the Platonic criticism of writing is only available to us so many centuries after the fact because, if we follow the conceit, Socrates’ student betrays the ethic of his master by inscribing his words for posterity. From this tension, I propose the thesis that both Plato and Weil reserve a special—and limited—role for writing in their conceptions of divine vision. While Plato’s skepticism about the written word can be plainly seen from his criticism of the sophists and the banishment of the poets from Kallipolis, words are also the necessary components of dialogue—and, not to mention, the only way that we make contact with the wisdom of Socrates, albeit at more than one literary remove.
It is my contention that Weil goes further than Plato in this regard, as she held that certain texts—such as, but not limited to, scripture—are capable of elevating the reader to a true understanding of goodness, truth, and beauty through prayerful attention, which may introduce a “change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul.”
[1] Weil, Simone. “Spiritual Autobiography”, WFG 28.
[2] Doering, Jane and Springsted, Erik, The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
[3] Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil. 334.
[4] Plato, The Phaedrus (Cambridge: The University Press, 1952), 274b-277a.
My paper will primarily attend to the question of how Plato and Weil each conceived of writing as related to the vision of God, considering the tension between the abstract form of the Good in Plato with Weil’s distinctly Christian notion of grace, as well as the implications of their differences in approach to reading and writing.