Simone Weil

Personal and impersonal in Simone Weil
We would like to introduce some aspects of Simone Weil’s thought concerning the
relationship among "Personal and impersonal"

A. Criticism to the concept of person (pars destruens)
The distance from the personalism. It is known that Simone Weil expressed a definite
refusal of the term "personalism". Such refusal seems today more proclaimed than relating to
content, but it should be contextualized and not be underestimated. Weil thinks that
personalism, that she knew above all through Maritain, Mounier and their friends, ties up to
bourgeois environments, neither more nor less than Sartre and De Beauvoir’s existentialism,
although of different sign: "… Personalist philosophy - she wrote - was born and has spread
not in the popular environments, but among writers, who for profession, possess, or hope to
acquire, a name and a reputation".
It is evident the contrast among that middle class environments, that she knew very well also
for birth, and friends chosen by Weil: syndicalists, workers, socialist, anarchists, people a
priori hostile to the world of the intellectuals, among which were the personalists of the
Thirties. It seems to be visceral for Simone a certain tuning with suffering peoples, warned
deeply since the childhood: to be well with herself, to feel herself in tuning with life, she had to
run away from the world of social conventions. She did it personally, as we know, choosing to
be a worker and a farmer. It doesn't deal with a sort of hermitage escaping from the world,
since we know well that she has always continued to deal herself with active life and with
politics all along her life. It’s because of a sort of moral obligation, strongly warned, that she
was used to choose the most authentic values: "I have, above all, the sense to be escaped from
a world of abstractions and to find myself among real people – clever or not - but of authentic
goodness or wickedness."
With today's eyes, Weil’s critic to personalism should be connected to her social context of
election, without excluding a certain intolerance that characterizes her personality and often
constitutes a limit in her approach to the world.
Nevertheless we have to keep in mind her critical attitude to the concept of person itself.
Simone considers essential to go against that notion avoiding the drifts of ego’s delirium, in her
opinion generally underestimated by personalists and by those who assume an abstract and
élite concept of person as reference of rights. She had the impression that for those intellectuals
the assignment of one’s life consisted on looking for gratifications and reassurances. The
matter is moral because of fearing egocentrism: person cannot be the criterion of truth: if ego
desires truth, that truth has to be elsewhere and has to overcome person. It is in this context
that the theme of impersonal takes place.
Is there a true distance between S. Weil’s and personalist’s thought? There are scholars who
don't see any obstacle to consider Simone Weil in the frame of personalist inspiration, as in the
case of A. Devaux and of Sfamurri, who concludes: "If Simone Weil had not left any
thoughts about this, we would equally have been able to affirm that person constitutes for her
the richest and most binding reality."
In fact, Weil’s distance from personalists is not so strong as it appears. The outward refusal
does not correspond to a real theoretical distance. Studying deeply the meaning of the terms
she uses, one can have even the impression that she falls in contradiction when, at the same
time, she refuses the term “person” and then she puts all her effort in promoting it. Some
concepts she stresses, such as relationship, respect of diversity, conscience, unicity and
integrality, are peculiar to personalists and belong as well to the whole Weil’s thought. The
criticized expression Rights of person doesn't appear very far from "obligations" the term
preferred by Simone Weil to stress the moral engagement toward every human being. After all,
what should we say of the whole proposal part of the last years about her detailed listing the
"obligations toward the human beings" (Enracinement)? We can find there, again, many
echoes of what personalists developed in the same period, although expressed in different way
and also many good suggestions on the better way to be close to poor and suffering people.
It would be better to underline Weil’s wish to escape from a half consolatory truth, to avoid
traps of naturalism and culturalism, of individualism and collectivism, of spiritualism and
materialism, in order to approach, as near as possible, the central nucleus of an anthropology
that cannot be self-referential, but that need to look at outside, toward an impersonal - in the
sense of meta-personal - truth, a truth that finally reveals itself as a loving Person.
Weil’s aim is to free human being from the the tendence to build idols considered as truth, all
along a life-trip that is a sort of despoliation. Person’s de-creation is the preliminary condition
to be person in an higher and other way and to approach the truth that comes from a superior level.
Problems of language. As S. Fraisse wrote: "S.Weil and personalists couldn’t be
adversaries. But they used an almost entirely opposite vocabulary, with evident
misunderstandings". The same Fraisse adds nevertheless that it would be wrong to reduce
everything to vocabulary, because the strongly negative connotation of person’s concept must
be connected to its inevitable degeneration on the mouth of men and women who saying the
term "person" they mean "me", confusing ego for pure gold. In Weil’s vocabulary we have to
read “person” as “me”, “impersonal” as “truth”, “individual” as “Thought” and “collective” as
“mass”. This sets a linguistic universe well distinguished from the personalism’s one, in whose
point of view, instead, ego means individualitism, person emerges from the relationship, from
the transcendence of itself, while impersonal is conjugated with anonymous, collective, “on”,
that means the world born when the ego abdicates its own responsibility and becomes mass.
If we try, for example, to do a comparative analysis of Weil’s vocabulary and E. Stein’s one,
who takes back the classical and Christian concept of person, the opposition, apparently
abyssal, among antipersonalism and personalism desappears. Edith Stein starts from a principle
of individualization that delineates every human being as servant and, therefore, as object of
love coming from God. Person realizes itself if it strips of its attachments and answers to God’s
love offering integrally itself, body, intelligence and love. In the measure in which human
created being looks like God (analogy), it is person, in a whole sense. As we can see, it
however concerns with a theological founded anthropology.
According with Weil’s position, the wide use of the term person by personalists it would
behave a conceptual gap: "You will say: my person is not important", but not "I am not
important". It tests that modern personalist’s current dictionary is wrong. In this extend,
wherever there is a serious mistake of vocabulary, easily there is a serious error of thought
too"127. Undoubtedly Weil’s perspective is still affected by her mathematical, scientific and
agnostic education, with the consequent necessity of exalting the difference and avoiding
metaphysical levelling between creature and Creator, intelligence and Grace, scientific
knowledge and mystical contact. In her opinion, it is necessary a definite separation from
personal dimension, over the appearances, over the deformations, mutable impressions of ego,
conventions and cultural fashions. Person’s task, all its life long, is to avoid the recurrent risk
to confuse truth with impressions, inclinations, needs and all things that, sooner or later, show
to be a real ditching of truth. Finally there’s a metaphysical question: truth must be reached
through intellectual knowledge, through hand work or through bad luck (malheur), the main
important thing is that it hasn’t to be confused with the ego, that needs to open itself to
something that goes over itself and that it receives, in order to reach the truth.
Person and sacred. A misunderstanding connected to all that - and that Weil wants to
unmask – is the identification of person with sacred. " In every man there is something sacred.
But it’s not its person. At the same time it isn’t the human person. It is that one, simply that
man. Here it is someone who is walking on the road who has long arms, blue eyes, a mind
thinking something I ignore, perhaps mediocre. It is neither his person, nor the human person
inside him what is sacred for me. It is he. The whole of him. Arms, eyes, thoughts, everything.
I would not appropriate anything of this without endless scruples... ". Speaking of person
one risks to sacralise what it is not sacred, or however to generate confusion mixing good, ego
and social one, it would be better that someone clearly says that "the cause that prevents that
the person feels itself sacred is that, it isn’t sacred at all". Consequently: "What is sacred,
and it’s different from person, it is what in a human being is impersonal. It is sacred all that is
impersonal in men, and just this". In the Taccuini, A. Camus will agree with her: "It is not
the human person that one needs to protect, but the possibilities that it implicates".
There is someone underling the distance among Weil’s philosophical education and Jewish-
Christian inspiration, that sees person as an image of God. There is no contradiction, since
what is important in Weil’s opinion is that one, realistically, understands the nothingness of
human being in the cosmos, according with what people use to repeat on Ash Wednesdays:
"You are dust, and into dust you shall return."
Only the seed of goodness that dwells inside the man is sacred and therefore what concerns
with the aspiration to good is image and trace of it. "There is from the smallest infancy up to
the grave, in the deepest part of the heart of every human being, something that, despite the
whole experience of committed, suffered and observed crimes, expects in return some good
and not evil. This is, before any other consideration, what is sacred in every human being.
Good is the only source of sacred. There is nothing of sacred but the good and what is related
to the good". The nucleus of the problem is in the substantial difference, platonic and
metaphysics, that Weil wants to confirm among supernatural Good and all of what it is other
from the good; the passage among the two levels doesn't go by accumulation, but it requires a
metaphysical jump.
Abstraction. The term person sounds her like an indefinite abstraction, corruptet by an
unfounded substantialism that, because of the inability to define the object of her speech,
exposes itself to every kind of manipulation. "It is impossible to define what is human person’s
respect. It isn’t difficult only to define it by words. A lot of bright notions are the same. But
this notion cannot be conceived anymore; it cannot be defined, delimited by a mute operation
of thought" In her opinion there’s inevitably too much rhetoric around this term, that would
reveal a sort of escape in comparison to the concrete necessities of single men and women.
Whereas she proceeds for abstractions, human beings are cut out, since abstraction and
oppression go together: "It is the cause of every sort of tyranny to take a notion, impossible to
define and to conceive, as a rule of public ethic".
In Simone’s opinion "Person" is not the only deceptive and lying notion. A lot of other and
high notions are similar and are misused in rhetorical proclamations, as, for example, the word
"nation", that has its real sense just in connection with the different social groups. The same is
for the word "sovereignty". "Sovereignty belongs to people"; this is an unrealized and
unattainable proclamation in the history; it would be more realistic to say: "Sovereignty resides
in a chosen national assembly".
Besides, because it is abstract, the concept of person considers all equal ones, but it’s false
and it’s a real big source of discriminations, being men and women different for birth, for
social class, education, temperament.... Underestimating the concrete inequalities, the
"egalitarian" concept underlines the injustices, and there’s no worse injustice than treating
differences as equal. This is another reason to sustain that it’s not the generic person that must
be taken in consideration but that man that one can meet along the street with his needs and his
sufferings, that man who doesn't succeed in being "person" in proper sense. As Weil writes:
"Since person doesn't expand itself as long as the social prestige swollen it; its expansion is a
social privilege". Person and human rights. Building a connective human fabric among nations,
after the two Wars, needs particularly, as we know, the convergence on Men’s Rights Declaration (1948),
with the great contribution of personalist, particularly Jacques Maritain. Simone Weil stresses
the conceptual weakness of person and right notion: "The notion of right launched through the
world in 1789, has been, for internal insufficiency, impotent to realize the function that was
submitted her. To join two insufficient notions speaking of human person’s rights won't bring
us farer than we are now". She reports rather the worm of a vicious circle between person and claiming rights.
To think person as "subject of rights" it would be to consider interpersonal relationships as a merchant
exchange. According to her personality, Simone fears the deception of a concept that tickles
the most egocentric man's dimension when, on the contrary, it should be aimed to set the
conditions for relationships planned on authenticity and mutual responsibility. This aim asks
for the separation from the ego, that allows to the impersonal dimension of soul to enter out
relationship with the other one, without being affected by the prestige that dominates society.
Instead, aiming at the necessity to realize the person, one would be fomented a vindictive
attitude, making some society a strident shouting of dissatisfied egos and tickling the lowest
part of egos, that are more affected by evil’s conditionings: "Inside us, person is error and
sin"138. Besides, since only some people enjoy some privilege to know and to be able to
articulate its own rights, it isn’t possible with that notion to reach everybody. It is, in fact, the
impersonal one that faces social relationships based on prestige.
Insisting on rights, she really appeals to that collective reality which man should distrust.
Weil, in fact, fears the risk when escaping from ego, one shelters in a collective reality: "The
greatest damage is not the tendency of the collective reality to compress person, but that of
some person to throw itself, to deny itself in the collective reality... " , and she adds:
"Personal is opposite to impersonal one, but it is possible to pass from the one to the other;
instead there is no passage from the collective to the impersonal one… Only in that sense
person has something sacred more than collective reality does".
False rights. A human being is a lot more than a sum of rights, or of integrity of single
aspects of its body and its psyche. Mutilating an aspect we inevitably injure the whole person.
So, in the example of "extracting eyes", Weil plays on the paradox of a defence of person as if
it could be limited to the right to preserve its eyes: "Once blind, he will be a human person
exactly as before. I wouldn’t have quite notched the human person in him. I would have
destroyed only his eyes". Besides, not all desires can be right, but the idea that ego is primarily
titular of rights indiscriminately assembles real experiences and desires. That makes difficult to recognize
the true needs. Inevitably some needs of person are complained and they are codified and protected
as rights, while others are forget. From a social point of view, and following fashions, it is
ended up complaining only those enjoyable goods, addressed to person’s own comfort (means
for subsistence, defence of body and liberties…), that can be insufficient to assure what is
deeper in a human being. In his sense the claim of rights is inevitably partial and it often
neglects the main points. There are highly desirable and inexpressible goods, not only because
there are no words to say them, but also because there are no people able to understand their
value and to pursue them. It deals with demands that don't concern only with body, since:
"Soul has some needs as well, and when they are not satisfied, it is in a state analogous to that
of a hungry and cripple body". After all they aren’t exactly rights because they arrive
without a human being can complain them. They are decisive for the soul, but they don't derive
from thought, wish or from a collective reality. The role of society towards these goods is not
to grant them. It wouldn’t have the power to do it. Society’s task is just not to hinder to reach
them or also the task "to clean the air", or rather to make intelligence and heart ready and
available in order to let them understand that goods.


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