Simone Weil on paying attention to others

By doing the opposite of what the phrase typically means

Described by Andre Gide as “the most truly spiritual writer of this century,” and by T. S. Eliot as “a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints,” Simone Weil was also a brilliant philosopher and someone who lived out her convictions with unusual intensity and consistency. She wrote the influential books The Need for Roots and Waiting for God. She died in 1943. The first quote is taken from her Lectures on Philosophy, quoted in a review by Toril Moi in the London Review of Books, the second from an essay titled “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” collected in Waiting for God.

I.

One can give money to the unemployed, but that doesn’t stop them from being unemployed; one can do the same for miners, but that doesn’t mean that they no longer have to face the threat of death due to fire-damp; one can give one’s attention to the children of the workers, but that will not mean that they will find work when they leave school, etc.

It is quite impossible to avoid the social problem. The first duty that it places on one is not to tell lies.

The first form of lie is that of covering up oppression, of flattering the oppressors. This form of lie is very common among honest people, who in other ways are good and sincere, but who do not realise what they are doing. Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

A second kind of lie is demagogy.

These two faults are serious ones. They are faults committed by honest people.

II.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous vessel that satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated Host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, “What are you going through?”

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.

For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.

Only he who is capable of attention can do this.

So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.

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