Episode #175 - Transcript

So we ENDED last time comparing Attention and Will as two different ways of APPROACHING the task of self transformation. 

There’s a really common ATTITUDE in the western world that how STRONG of a person you are…just comes down to how much STUFF you can do… that you absolutely hate. How long can you FORCE yourself to DO something to yourself… that, if someone ELSE did the exact same THING to you… we wouldn’t call it self improvement as much as call it, you know a class B felony. Or a violation of the Geneva convention. We see people that can DO this to themselves as STRONG, but is having a strong will in uncomfortable spots REALLY…ALL that we should respect about a person that makes them strong? Or, as Simone Weil is saying, are there OTHER important skills that need to be developed as well…that are just BETTER skills to have all things considered across the multiple situations that life may throw your way. 

Real quick recap of the very end of last episode for anybody listening to these two parts separately: let’s say you wanted to CHANGE something about yourself…the example we used last time was let’s SAY you wanted to READ more. But you HATE reading. How do you get yourself to change from someone who doesn’t read… into someone who reads. 

Ok… well one approach that’s pretty popular in the west is that CHANGE occurs through WILL power and discipline. The strategies simple: you hate reading…. but you force yourself to do it anyway. You grind. You struggle through it, and after enough time forcing yourself to read…eventually it just becomes something you do that’s a habit. Eventually getting yourself to read takes about as much will power as it takes to get up and take a shower in the morning or to brush your teeth. In other words it’s not something you AGONIZE over…it’s just something you DO. FORCING yourself through strength of the will is ONE way of getting yourself to DO the things you don’t want to do. 

But a TOTALLY DIFFERENT way… of orienting yourself towards the things you don’t REALLY want to be doing…is to see them as things that you haven’t really put your FULL effort into SEEING CLEARLY yet. 

That sure you may hate reading right now…but let’s break that down, what is that really? Were you BORN with a deep seated HATRED of words on a page? What did you have a bad experience at a Barnes and Noble when you were seven? Point is: you HATE READING…because you have a lot of ASSUMPTIONS about this ACTIVITY that you’re dreading called READING. Maybe if you took a FRACTION of the effort you could spend FORCING yourself to READ for months, and applied that effort to broadening your horizons, opening yourself to try to SEE this ACTIVITY of READING through a new set of eyes…MAYBE…you could find something that INTERESTS you about it and magically… getting yourself to DO the thing you hate doing ISN’T REALLY A PROBLEM anymore. Your life’s driven by desire instead of denial. Now…

First thing that probably needs to be said here is that Simone Weil did NOT see these two things as mutually exclusive. No doubt she thought people need both will AND attention to be able to be the best person they can be. But she’d definitely want us to consider EACH of them individually as tools… and to really think about WHICH situations in life each of these TOOLS are the most USEFUL in. And she thinks that when you DO that…you start to realize the built in LIMITATIONS of will and discipline. 

Just listen to how she writes about it: 

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them?” 

What’s she saying here? Well FIRST of all she’s making the point that the WILL is CERTAINLY good at doing SOME things for people. But if you really break it down…the will is MOSTLY good at performing PHYSICAL stuff. It’s a great tool to use if your GOAL in life is that want to increase your max deadlift weight. It’s a GREAT tool if you want to sit in an ice bath or ANY uncomfortable situation and ENDURE things for as long as you can. If you’re a WRITER…the will is GREAT at getting you to sit down and put pen to paper and to start doing the work. 

But there are CERTAIN things that strength of the will…can NEVER get you closer to. For example, if you’re a writer…you can’t WILL yourself to something like creativity. You can TRY to use the will there if you want…you can try to write really, really HARD, I guess, for HOURS on end. You can say I’m not getting up from this TABLE until I’ve written 2000 words today. You can FORCE yourself to MOVE the pencil up and down on the piece of paper but if EVERY word you write is COMPLETELY uninspired, then you’re just wasting trees at that point. 

She says what could be more stupid, than to tighten up our muscles and try to WILL ourselves into writing a good POEM, or to WILL ourselves to an understanding of virtue. Like she said before…you can’t WILL yourself into an understanding of TRUTH…just by going down to the library and READING, REALLY HARD for a while. 

Now don’t get her wrong…again, the will is an AMAZING tool at doing SOME stuff…but the point she’s making at the end of that quote from before is if ALL you ever WORKED on when developing yourself in this life was WILL and DISCIPLINE, if you didn’t practice this cultivation of attention at all…the when you’re in a situation where you NEED something like inspiration or moral clarity or an openness to the truth…if ALL YOU HAVE is DISCIPLINE and WILL trying to physically ASSERT yourself onto the moment…what can you DO in that spot? It’s the WRONG tool for the job. That’s why she asks those questions at the END of the quote, pretty facetiously I might add…what do you do, do you just find some way to CONVINCE yourself you don’t WANT these things anymore? Do you BEG somebody else for inspiration she asks? 

Again, BOTH these skills are necessary…but to Simone Weil we HAVE to be honest with ourselves and RECOGNIZE the fact sometimes, the more useful skill to have in a situation is NOT to be able to WILL EVERYTHING about the universe into existence…but instead to DO the work, to become so OPEN, and RECEPTIVE to experience… that you become CAPABLE of being a CATALYST, for the universe to exist, THROUGH YOU. 

If it’s not OBVIOUS by now this is gonna be an EXTREMELY different TAKE on morality than the existentialist HEROISM that was beginning to dominate Europe during her time. This is ALSO why the suspension of the ego and the personal biases, that’s why ALL OF THIS has to GO. We’re ultimately trying to develop a sensitivity… to able to RECEIVE something that lies OUTSIDE of the five conventional senses we typically operate within. 

Just as there are things that can’t be WILLED into existence by physical brute force. There are things that cannot be perceived by the human senses that STILL nonetheless exist to Simone Weil. 

There is obviously… some sort of continuity, to this existence that we’re in. There is something that lies outside of our perspective of space and time that guarantees existence as it is from moment to moment, or AT LEAST has so far. The thing that makes the apple tree sprout an apple instead of a strawberry, WHAT IS THAT? I mean, you can DESCRIBE it through something like DNA but what guarantees the continuity of that DNA, what PROCESS is that DNA a scientific RECORD of? To Simone Weil, there is an order, a symmetry, a harmony to the universe…she writes about what’s INCLUDED in it at one point she says: “all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.” 

So what is she TALKING about there? Well, she’s OBVIOUSLY talking about something NON-material here. Which would explain why a huge FAN of science LIKE Simone Weil wouldn’t necessarily want to use SCIENCE to CLASSIFY this kind of stuff. 

But it definitely RAISES an important question…how do we DESCRIBE something like what she’s TALKING about in PURELY secular terms? Is it possible? There’s certainly not a bunch of MAGICAL thinking she’s bringing to this…she’s not saying the world exists on the back of a unicorn or something. What she IS saying though is that there are CERTAIN mystical elements of human reality that CAN’T yet be understood by PURELY empirical study. So do we just ignore them? Do we ONLY talk about things that are totally DEMYSTIFIED and fully understood by science? OH, Science will figure it out eventually. Or would that be you potentially missing out on a HUGE piece of what being a person is?

You can TRY to put it PURELY in secular terms if you want, but Simone Weil thinks the BEST language to use when trying to describe this beauty, truth, justice, order…she’s just going to refer to it as God. 

And if you’re someone who hears the word God, and you start convulsing in your chair because of how loaded the term is and how can any intelligent person REALLY BELIEVE in something like a God…lest you forget from episode one…that Simone Weil is among the most philosophically educated human beings to have EVER lived. This is NOT someone just throwing around terms not realizing the weight of them. This is not someone trying to get you to come to their BIBLE study class on wednesday. Every argument in your head right now about the existence or non-existence of a God, the social UTILITY of a belief in god… she would’ve heard ALL of them 100 times over in her life. 

And I’m SURE she’d say to USE whatever language you want to describe what SHE is going to call God…but understand…that this God that Simone Weil’s talking about is NOTHING like the God that’s talked about in the ramblings of fundamentalists. This is not a god that you should RELY on to SAVE you from the problems on this planet while you sit around and read stories about an arc. This is not a God that you pray to and ask for favors…this is not a god where you sit on his lap like Santa Claus and ask for a mr potato head for xmas.  

This is a vision of God… and ALL of that which lies outside of space and time… that is CENTERED, around moral accountability. It is CENTERED around the obligation we have to the impersonal, universal truth… that TRANSCENDS a PARTICULAR culture or a PARTICULAR ideology. This is a universal GOOD that LINKS all people together that we’ve FORGOTTEN…because of the structure of modern society and the way it TEACHES us to horribly pay ATTENTION to the world and to see the people AROUND us merely in terms of how they’re USEFUL to us.

This is a vision of God that says that if there is ANYTHING, in line with this universal GOOD that EVER gets DONE on this planet…RECOGNIZE…that THAT good stuff HAPPENED…ultimately because it was DONE…BY SOME PERSON…SOME WHERE. In other words…the ONLY WAY that God ever exists in the world to Simone Weil…is if WE are ones who are ENACTING this universal good. To Simone Weil then…we are essentially VESSELS…of God. And when you start to you look at it that way…doesn’t that view just INSTANTLY make you realize…the responsibility that we have as people…to DO good things?

If God can be thought of as a kind of frequency. Then to EXTEND that comparison you can think of yourself as kind of like an ANTENNA. And there are messages being sent…ALL THE TIME over this frequency FOR you to potentially receive. You can call these messages God if you’re religious, if you’re more secular you can call these messages the universe…totally DIFFERENT option is to call them mass consciousness… that what SHE calls universal messages…what you’re REALLY RECEIVING are bits of a LARGER collective wisdom that’s being exchanged CULTURALLY by people…but WHATEVER you decide to call them ONE things for sure…you don’t ACCESS these more universal messages if you’re LOCKED IN to a closed system of thinking like an ideology. 

And here’s one of her big points: if we existed in a world where there were NO people that had EVER done the work, or HAD transcendent experiences that were calibrated enough as an antenna to RECEIVE this frequency…there would BE no new beauty…there would BE no new creativity…there would BE no new JUSTICE. 

In other words if you’re LIVING in that sort of world Simone Weil says…then the Atheist is RIGHT. God DOESN’T exist. There’s no EVIDENCE in that world that these MESSAGES are being sent EITHER.

God ONLY exists…when there is a PERSON, who has done the work to RECEIVE this higher level MESSAGE…and then TAKES ACTION, as a VESSEL in the world FOR these new forms of justice, beauty, order, mindfulness of obligations and so on. 

The MOST IMPORTANT thing to REMEMBER about this whole process to Simone Weil…is that it ALL RELIES on that taking ACTION part of the equation. It’s IN that PARTICIPATION in the goings on of your society…that ANY of this stuff, the justice the beauty…that participation is the only way this stuff ever becomes REAL to Simone Weil. 

This is an EXTREMELY important point in her work, so let’s TALK about it a little. 

You know…some people see studying philosophy…as an ALTERNATIVE, to living a religious life. Like if you can go to church when you’re young and you can BELIEVE in the answers that are given to you, more power to you. But if you can’t do that and you STILL want to grapple with the difficult questions of being a person…some people think philosophy, is the best way to GET there. 

But Simone Weil saw it ANOTHER way. She saw PHILOSOPHY…as the requisite WORK that NEEDS to be done…to PREPARE someone’s mind…to be able to properly LIVE a religious and morally consistent life. 

Philosophy, humbles a person if they study it long enough. Philosophy gets you to question those personal prejudices, your limited viewpoint, your position within culture, even the language you use to express yourself…philosophy in other words PRIMES someone’s attention of the world in a way where they’re far less prone to PROJECTING themselves onto the world around them and thinking they’ve arrived at TRUTH. 

But philosophy only PRIMES you to RECEIVE this universal good. It’s NOT ENOUGH to just RECEIVE it. It’s not enough to sit around PHILOSOPHIZING about stuff all day…BEING a vessel for GOODNESS in this world… REQUIRES an ACT of BEING. You HAVE to take action.

You know you can be the most CALIBRATED ANTENNA in the HISTORY of the world to these universal messages. You can have the PERFECT song up in your head…the perfect book waiting to be written…DEEPLY inspired, you’ve OPENED yourself up to what the world is feeling right now…you’ve come up with something that just NEEDS to be EXPRESSED at this moment…but if the idea only ever EXISTS up in your HEAD because you don’t take action…then you’re NEVER really a vessel for ANYTHING. 

It never really becomes REAL. And then what USUALLY happens is some OTHER person, some OTHER antenna out there recognizes the SAME MESSAGE that needs to be expressed…and someone ELSE writes the song or writes the book. And there’s been MANY a person that sat around watching OTHER PEOPLE that came out with an idea THEY had FIRST and then they sit around LAMENTING the fact that THEY shoulda got all the credit. But NO. It’s in ACTION and PARTICIPATION that someone BECOMES a vessel for good. 

To Simone Weil, this ALSO helps to explain why the COLONIZATION of people that we talked about on episode two, UPROOTING people, ROBBING them of their culture and their ability to PARTICIPATE IN a culture…this explains WHY this is such an effective TACTIC, if your GOAL was to spiritually impoverish people. 

This apples ALSO to the Society of the Spectacle that we recently talked about…to Simone Weil the Spectacle would make SENSE in theory…if you don’t even have to kidnap people and tear them away from their culture physically…if you can reduce someone’s reality to a succession of self-referential images that they consume, and now they just DON’T participate in their reality anymore they just CONSUME what people FEED them…this explains why that’s such an effective method of KEEPING people feeling a sense of learned helplessness and emptiness. 

What she’s getting at is: people used to PRAY or MEDITATE or have ANY NUMBER of religious rituals that allowed them to FEEL a stronger connection to the God that they believed in. But under Simone Weil’s vision of God…it’s through PARTICIPATION and ACTION as a VESSEL FOR GOOD, that you end up feeling more spiritually connected to things. OF COURSE the world seems GODLESS and MEANINGLESS when you’re not MEANINGFULLY PARTICIPATING in anything. 

There’s an interesting line of thought that she goes on in one of her journals where she says you know… the way it SHOULD be…in these modern, productive material societies that we live in, where SO MANY ELEMENTS of them are centered around the manipulation of materials in nature around us…our WORKPLACE, SHOULD be the location of spiritual connection for the modern person. Work could EASILY play the role in our psychology that PRAYER used to serve to people.

I mean think about it it’s an ACTIVITY where we’re participating, working, CREATING something that is productive and useful for the people around us, for the world that we live in…THAT should be a place where we feel a SIMILAR LEVEL of JOY and CONNECTION for our CONTRIBUTION to the process going on all around us. But that’s not how it ACTUALLY is. In actuality we have people grouped into these collectives… that do their BEST to ALIENATE people from how their work connects to others in a meaningful way. Is it simply a coincidence that THAT’S the way things are set up? 

So now that I’ve spent YEARS of your life telling you about how IMPORTANT attention was for Simone Weil…let’s talk about how we can get BETTER at it. How do we become a BETTER antenna for feeling connected to the universe on a DEEPER level… or, what SHE calls God? 

Well, to Simone Weil the more you practice. The better you get at it. The better you GET at it. The more messages that you’re gonna start noticing. But if you’re starting from absolute ZERO here and you wanted to know how to get started PRACTICING attention...there are three TYPES of experiences that you can gravitate towards in your life. 

Now these three activities INITIALLY look like VERY different EXPLICIT activities…but she thought the more you practice, the MORE you experience them the more you’ll start to realize that ALL of them… are ACTUALLY just the SAME experience…its the SAME recognition of what SHE calls an underlying IMPLICIT, love of God. Once again moving away from the PARTICULARS to access the UNIVERSAL.

The FIRST way to practice…is to try to orient yourself towards love of the beauty of the world. The SECOND is to orient your attention towards the love of your neighbor. And the THIRD is an orientation towards love for religious ceremonies. 

Let’s go through these one by one, but one thing that OBVIOUSLY needs to be said right at the outset here…is that it is NOT A COINCIDENCE…that EVERYBODY LISTENING to this…has at least HEARD a story of someone who’s witnessed the beauty of nature or HELPED a fellow person or EXPERIENCED a religious ceremony and claimed to have HAD some sort of transcendent moment. 

It’s ALSO not a coincidence that MOST of those people… have NO IDEA who Simone Weil is…which is JUST to say it’s NOT like these people are on the payroll promoting her philosophy or something…Simone Weil is clearly speaking to something that’s a more UNIVERSAL human experience here…and when you CONSIDER the PARALLELS…between THESE sorts of experiences and OTHER religious experiences people claim to have say in deep contemplative practice, psychedelics…I just think Simone Weil would be VERY open to the possibility that a lot of people are all accessing the same thing here, and having VERY similar insights for a reason. 

The FIRST exercise you could try: is feeling love for the beauty of the world. Now you can obviously WITNESS the beauty of the world ANYWHERE, you can see it in a mountain range as much as you can see it in the eyes of someone you love. But again if we’re coming up with a way to get your FOOT into the door of this whole process of cultivating attention, one place people tend to find it EASIER to focus of their attention, just because it’s so IMMERSIVE…is by GETTING AWAY from your normal life and going OUT into nature… hopefully somewhere safe with no bears…and just trying when you’re OUT there, to feel your presence in the grand scheme of all of it. Pretty common for people to DO this and to come back and say, man when I was out there…I just felt so CONNECTED to everything…I saw my PLACE in the larger ORDER of things. That’s ONE possible access point.

The SECOND exercise you could do: feeling love for your neighbor. Again…how many people have you heard say things like I saw someone when I was OUT today…they obviously were in a bad spot…I did my best to talk to them, did what I could to help them… and on the other side of it…I felt this intense feeling of CONNECTION. I felt like I CONNECTED with this person on a human to human level REGARDLESS of how they looked, REGARDLESS of who someone voted for or any other particulars like that.

You know this connection that’s available when you open yourself to RECEIVE someone as they are, where you’re not just projecting YOURSELF onto THEIR experiences…CARING for another person or another lifeform for that matter…this is an absolutely CRITICAL part of the human experience for a lot of people. It can be the ENTIRE way people feel like their actions MEAN anything at all. 

There are people that go their ENTIRE LIVES in this narcissistic haze where it’s all about THEM all the time feeling ZERO connection to ANYTHING around them…and then one day they’re in a situation where they suddenly have to take care of something OTHER THAN themselves…and they just get HIT, like a TRUCK, with this sense of PURPOSE that they’re serving for another person…they finally feel that CONNECTION to other people…that REALLY we all START life with as babies born into the care of others. Totally possible to reconnect with that, and love of your neighbor is that’s available to most people all the time.  

The THIRD exercise she recommends… is to try to orient your attention towards the self-transcendence that’s possible, in a RELIGIOUS ceremony. Now, this one’s a little more complicated. Anyone who’s religious listening PROBABLY has already has FELT a connection like this before…but to the NON-religious folks out there this APPLIES to you too… maybe as a non religious person you’ve at least WITNESSED a religious ceremony going on… and maybe when you’re watching it you’ve AT LEAST been able to acknowledge…that you know, whether I believe in the same things or not, these people CLEARLY are having SOME kind of different experience here. That there’s a WHOLE different energy that is often going on in these religious ceremonies where people can sort of LOSE themselves in the moment… and they don’t have to worry for a bit about protecting their egos or the judgment of others.

It’s IN THIS sense… that I think the MAIN thing ABOUT religious ceremonies that make them an easier access point to feeling this connection with what Simone Weil calls God…is NOT the particular RELIGION that the ceremony is CONNECTED to…but it’s in the OPENNESS of the FORMAT of the ceremony…where everybody gathers together and the whole agreement is that we’re ALL HERE to attempt to CONNECT with something greater than ourselves… and an important PART of that agreement is that NO ONE HERE is gonna JUDGE you for trying to DO that. BE however you WANT to be. Based on THAT definition…I think Simone Weil would say that a LOT of things fall into this category of a “religious ceremony” that aren’t necessarily connected to any organized religion. How about someone that goes to a concert and just gets LOST in the music dancing. 

How about somebody that goes on a VISION quest or something. 

Tons of potential examples… but one things for certain…if there’s any ADVICE I think Simone Weil would OFFER to someone who’s JUST starting out on their journey of getting PAST all of the conditioned, PERSONAL ways of making sense of the world…it would be to NOT make the mistake… of thinking that just because you’ve practiced these exercises for a bit…that you’ve somehow ARRIVED at the PINNACLE of what it is that she’s TALKING about. 

It is SO EASY to think oh yeah, I’m gonna be more OPEN today. I’m gonna put on my little CIRCLE glasses and be just like Simone Weil…there’s this guy that works in accounting…TOTAL moron, genuinely just a pathetic human being overall, but you know what? I’m gonna take him out to COFFEE today. I’m gonna be OPEN and RECEPTIVE JUST like Simone Weil…and when he STARTS TALKING…I’m gonna use it as an opportunity to practice patience…I’m gonna identify the things I LOVE about this person and TRY to get those to rub off on me a bit. 

But WHAT are you really DOING there? Are you accepting that person the way they are? Is this a deep LOVE of your neighbor where you’re trying to connect on a universal level? Or are you just REFRAMING aspects of their existence to BE something that BENEFITS you in your OWN personal projects. Again it’s so easy to SET OUT on this journey of trying to cultivate attention…and then to SEE a little bit of PROGRESS…to think well, I’m the most open, receptive person I know! I must have reached SAINTHOOD. Call me Santa Steve. 

It kind of reminds me of a really common story people tell when learning mindfulness meditation. Somebody will start meditating. They’ll follow the instructions. They’ll pay attention to their BREATH. Pay attention to the sensations in their body. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Don’t judge them. Just observe them. Be present.  

And they’ll get done meditating and they’ll want to be more PRESENT and they’ll READ THE WORDS of the WISE ZEN MASTERS. What is it to be present? Well it’s SIMPLE when I walk, I walk. When I eat, I eat. And when I sleep, I sleep. 

They’ll READ this stuff and say hey, I think I got it! I shouldn’t think about the past. I shouldn’t WORRY about the future. I gotta just BE RIGHT HERE in the present. So whatever I’m DOING…I just gotta focus on THAT ACTIVITY…and NOTHING ELSE. That’s what it MEANS to be in the PRESENT MOMENT. 

Now is that technically MOVING in the right direction when it comes to presence? Sure, you could SAY that…you’re certainly MORE present than if your mind was just COMPLETELY wandering in all directions with no effort being made at all…but on the OTHER hand…there is obviously a VERY SEVERE divide between the experience of THAT person…and the experience of PRESENCE that someone is going for when they’re living in a buddhist monastery on the top of a mountain. Is it better than nothing? Probably. But Simone Weil might say just be sure to remember there are LEVELS to this and that the SAME thing applies to the skill of attention. 

Remember she would say that society INCENTIVIZES people to FALL BACK into these OLD habits of PROJECTING their AGENDA onto things, INCLUDING the process of cultivating attention. If you’re LOOKING for a solution or if you’re LOOKING for a destination where you’ve PRACTICED being open and receptive ENOUGH and now you’re a moral sage…then you’re NO DOUBT going to FIND that destination.   

Cultivating attention then…HAS to go HAND IN HAND with a healthy level, of self-awareness. WE HAVE to keep ourselves in check, nobody else is going to FOR us. WE have to remain humble…and the ONLY WAY you can ever HOPE to DO that REALLY…is if you develop your ability to THINK as clearly as possible. Remember, she thought that LUCIDITY…was the ONLY path to the virtues of moderation and courage. Two virtues she says without which life is nothing but a disgraceful FRENZY. 

But the VALUE of moderation and courage extend FAR BEYOND our own PERSONAL development, we ultimately NEED these things to be able to effectively resist ANYTHING in the world politically, without becoming OURSELVES a disgraceful FRENZY in the process.  

And THIS is where the mathematician’s situation from last episode becomes a bit more complicated. Because let’s say you can GET to the point where you are ACTUALLY seeking the truth. And let’s say you follow her solution of REFUSING to join one of these collective ways of thinking and you take the road less traveled and work on this skill of attention. 

By the end of her life it was CLEAR to her that there are certain situations that the world can throw your way… where JUST REFUSING to JOIN a collective way of thinking, was not, the APPROPRIATE level of protest if you were going to BE a morally consistent person. 

She actually lived through one of these situations… when Hitler invaded Poland. And then Denmark, and then Norway and Belgium and as he went…there CAME to be a time to Simone Weil where just BEING a pacifist, and REFUSING to participate, that sort of resistance started to seem to her to be, pointless. 

I mean, by ALL means, she would say…if the situation DOESN’T REQUIRE violence…non-violent, civil disobedience is GREAT…but she says when you’re FACING someone like an Adolph Hitler. At a certain point, in a CERTAIN kind of social conflict… you have to fight FIRE with fire. She says you can’t just sit back passively, taking personal PRIDE in KNOWING that you’re morally superior to the nazis, oh, HISTORY will look back on me and say I was in the right…no THAT’S NOT ENOUGH sometimes when people out there are being colonized and murdered. 

Simone Weil thought there were situations…where it’s GOING to be necessary for a person seeking the truth to make the choice to align themselves with a collective… and MOST of the time, that’s gonna be something that THAT person sees as a LESSER EVIL in the moment that they’re supporting. And while we can NEVER VIEW the philosophy of Simone Weil as by ANY means a completed work just given how early in life she died…I think she’d want to say to this THINKING person that HAS to resist the way things are by temporarily aligning with a collective…that WHEN you CHOOSE a lesser evil…NEVER allow yourself to forget that you ultimately CHOSE evil there. 

Courage and moderation. Maybe the two virtues that most CLOSELY resemble moral obligation…and thinking clearly. Two things I don’t know if I’ve EVER seen another philosopher more committed to than Simone Weil. 

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.