This article explores Simone Weil’s account of the relationship between human suffering and intellectual life, with reference to the issues raised by the allegation that as an enterprise theodicy evinces a failure to ‘take suffering seriously’. The article shows how Weil’s understanding of the relationship between suffering and attention gives a clear and powerful account of the way that compassion—which involves an uncompromising acceptance of suffering—can be discerned in patterns of thought. Nevertheless, it is less clear in her work how (...) these convictions might serve as a guide for theological statements. Weil’s understanding of the Christian conception of life is centred on the experience of finding God present in and through suffering, and this leaves her with the problem of how to reconcile her commitment not to ‘sweeten what is bitter’ with consolations or compensations with her intuition that the truth of creaturely existence is made available through suffering. Through an analysis of the inner contours of this conflict, it is argued that Weil’s central problem is of how to articulate spiritual reality in such a way as to encourage undivided attention, which is the only ground for the hope that truthful, compassionate thought about suffering might be possible. (shrink)

Toward the beginning of one of her notebooks, Simone Weil interrupts a dense series of reflections on war, force and prestige to write, in parentheses: “(To think on God, to love God, is nothing else than a certain way of thinking on the world.)” In some respects, this one sentence is a crystallization of everything Weil wrote about God. The thought of God is somehow inseparable from a new mode of attention to and valuation of things “here below”; that is, (...) from “a certain way of thinking.” In the discussion that follows I reflect on how this “certain way of thinking” might be understood, in dialogue with a few exemplary moments from Derrida’s late work, Martin Hägglund’s reading of Derrida, as well as some biblical scholarship on Philippians 2: 5-11, and a number of richly suggestive comments from Weil’s notebooks. I show that the conceptual aporias that, on Derrida’s account, reliably emerge from ethical reflection are inchoately affirmed by Weil and (a certain reading of) the Philippi hymn. More than this, I will suggest that when read in this way, the latter allows for a new interrogation of the role that the experience of conceptual aporia may play in metanoia, the changing of mind. (shrink)

This article highlights some of the difficulties that accompany any attempt to articulate an understanding of forgiveness that is at once coherent, just and desirable. Through a close examination of Charles Griswold’s book Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, I suggest that there are good reasons to think that forgiveness is intrinsically ambiguous, both conceptually and morally. I argue that there is an underlying tension between the concerns that shape the definition, and those that are invoked when affirming the good of forgiveness. (...) Using Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, I then provide some commentary concerning this ambiguity and make some brief suggestions about how this ambiguity might be theologically fruitful. (shrink)

This paper identifies and offers commentary upon a previously un-remarked consonance between Nietzsche and Weil when it comes to the idea of a universal love of the world. The discussion focuses on five features of the Nietzschean account of affirmation, which are as follows: that the possibility of affirmation has the form of a fundamental question at the heart of human life, which has an all-or-nothing character ; that genuine affirmation is rare, difficult or traumatic in an existentially revealing way, (...) primarily because affirmation means facing up to the lack of finality in the world, and in particular the problem of meaningless suffering, which means that affirmation is tied up with a fundamental revaluation. The first half of the paper outlines the parallels between Nietzschean affirmation and Weilian ‘consent to necessity’ in relation to the first three of these, which are also the most general. The second half of the paper explores the fourth and fifth, so as to suggest a way of reading the underlying similarity between these two projects: both are attempts to rediscover the possibility of an all-embracing affirmation of reality in the absence of any existential teleology, and when eschatology has been presumed to be impossible. In other words, both Nietzsche and Weil are compelled to find a way of achieving a transfigured perspective on ‘the whole’ in the absence of any transformation of ‘the whole’. (shrink)