The Philosopher at the Gate of the Word: A Study of Simone Weil’s Transformative Literature

Abstract

Can literature help us in a time of crisis? Yes, in many and unexpected ways, as Simone Weil’s literary work shows. Reading Weil’s unfinished tragedy Venice Saved in the context of her poetry, philosophy and politics, we argue that it is an example of literary work that can engender transformation, for three reasons: its presentation and encouragement of attention to beauty; its tragic tension, forcing a deeper vision of the world; and its use of the poetic word. These elements, we conclude, make literature a prime tool for inner and outer transformation, especially when everything seems to be lost.

Literature in a Time of Crisis

In a time of crisis, literature may be thought to be a luxury that the world cannot afford. W.H. Auden famously wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, yet the contemporary world is one in which we desperately need things to happen. In a recent editorial on climate change and the arts the poet and playwright Clare Pollard argues that poetry can support activism because poetry is “a technology for paying attention” that can change the language of politics and the way that we deal with crisis.¹ In this paper we show how the literary work of the mystic, philosopher, poet and playwright Simone Weil (1909–43) encapsulates her thought in all those areas in order to express and embody the transformative power of attention and the resulting greater insight into reality and the need for action.

It is trivially true that attention is necessary for moral judgement. To study reports of melting ice caps may occasion desire for change in the way that air travel is managed, for example. For Weil, however, the activity of attention goes far deeper. Rather than only making certain facts available, or allowing us to understand something or someone, attention is radical, all-encompassing and deeply transformative, providing both new vision and motivation to act. It requires detachment and discloses the deeper order of the world.²

Critical reception of Weil tends to present her as writing in two unconnected fields: politics and mysticism. We follow Deborah Nelson, however, who argues that the tendency to see a split in Weil between the radical and the mystic is caused by “publishing history and academic taste” rather than by any split in the writing.³ Both Weil’s later work and her biography reveal a mystic and a thinker committed to action in the world, something confirmed by her literary output, especially her unfinished tragedy Venice Saved,⁴ in which the protagonist’s attention to the beauty of the city results in action to save that beauty from a Spanish conspiracy.

Weil is read and studied as a philosopher, but she was also committed to the writing of literature. Venice Saved is exemplary of Nelson’s definition of Weil’s late work as “an aesthetic rooted in tragedy” (Nelson, p. 25). Transformation – understood philosophically, rather than theologically – can be attained through and in literary activity. Weil’s literary work provides a deeper link between aesthetics and tragedy than may be thought at first. Reading Venice Saved, with the help of some of her poems and in the context of her philosophical and political thinking, we are going to show that Weil’s tragedy is a transformative work, affecting not only the inner life but practice and action, for three reasons: it both displays and encourages attention to the objects within the play, above all Venice’s beauty as a special dimension of reality; in its tragic tension, it forces a choice between a superficial and deeper vision of the world; and in its use of the poetic word, it seeks a more immediate rendition of the reality it presents.

Through Weil’s drama and in the light of her philosophy, we conclude that it is possible to appreciate how literature can play an active role in times of crisis, even be a form of activism, by disclosing a reality which Weil saw, Platonically, as mostly hidden and inherently motivating. At the same time, despite Weil’s religious metaphysics, we take it to be possible to understand and experience this process without appeal to the supernatural, but rather as a deeper appreciation of this world.

The Literary Weil

Literary creation was important to Weil. In a 1937 letter, she lamented not having “n existences,” so that she could devote one of them to the theatre.⁵ She produced 10 poems as well as Venice Saved: scarcely a substantial legacy, but it must be recalled that she died young and was unable to bring many projects to completion.⁶ Her literary output has been largely overlooked by readers and commentators, a neglect that can be explained by the difficulty of obtaining the source texts, the lack of published translations and a tendency in analytic philosophy to overlook literature as a way of telling the truth.⁷ There is scholarly evidence, however, that Weil’s literary work does repay philosophical attention,⁸ and Weil herself considered it to be important. Her poems were written over a relatively long period (1922–42) and she was constantly revising them with a view to publication. She was working on Venice Saved until her death, making changes and sketching out new ideas. (Although the play is work in progress, Weil did complete the ending and left detailed notes for missing scenes, so that it is possible to read and perform it as a unity.)

Weil started work on her play in 1940, the year when France fell to German invasion. Gabriella Fiori argues that more than coincidence is at play: “The scene of Venice in 1618 is the scene of Europe in 1940. … The motivations of the mercenaries are the motivations of the Nazis. … Venice, “the city” which represents the roots, “the contact with nature, the past, and tradition,” is Europe. Over both there looms the menace of moral decomposition.”⁹ How can literature combat such a menace? Weil gives a clue in a 1942 letter to Joseph-Marie Perrin: “Our obligation for the next two or three years … is to show the public the possibility of a truly incarnated Christianity. In all the history now known there has never been a period in which souls have been in such peril as they are to-day in every part of the globe.”¹⁰ Her words bring to mind the creative writing dictum that literature should show, not tell. Her tragedy is one attempt at such a showing: “Something is communicated by an action. / This can be seen in Venice Saved” (VS, p. 51).

The play, although written in the time of radical dramatists like Jean Anouilh, Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, is highly conventional, looking more like the work of Jean Racine. It is mostly composed in formal verse and can be described as a closet drama, given that little happens on the stage. Based on a 1674 historical fiction by the Abbé de Saint-Réal (César Vichard), it depicts the 1618 attempt by Spanish mercenaries to bring down the city state of Venice and to impose Spanish rule. The conspiracy, which would have unleashed an orgy of violence on Venice and its inhabitants in its imposition of foreign hegemony, is defeated when Jaffier, one of the conspiracy’s leaders, betrays the plot because he cannot bear to contemplate the destruction of the city’s beauty. He receives an assurance from the Venetian authorities that his co-conspirators – including his beloved best friend Pierre – will be spared, but the promise is broken. The men are put to death with great brutality, leaving Jaffier alone, a man who has saved the city but has lost both friends and honour. He finally sacrifices himself fighting as Venice prepares to commemorate her marriage with the Adriatic.

Beauty, or How Attention Saved the City

It becomes clear that Jaffier will not lead the conspiracy to capture Venice, after contemplating the city and its planned demise. Weil comments: “reality enters into him, because he has paid attention” (VS, p. 53). Venice Saved does more than provide an example of attention, no matter how helpful that might be. As Cora Diamond argues, great authors allow their readers to see the world in new ways, construct new possibilities and take part in different sensibilities; in other words, she suggests, they offer “paradigms of a sort of attention.”¹¹ Weil’s work is paradigmatic in this sense.

Weil’s play concludes with Violetta, daughter of the Secretary of the Venetian Council of Ten, greeting Venice’s Marriage, blissfully unaware of the events that have gone on during the night when the conspirators were arrested and butchered (VS, p. 113):

Daylight comes across the sea slowly.

Soon the feast will fulfil every desire.

The calm sea waits. How lovely on this sea

are the rays of day!

Violetta personifies the city. Just as Venice has been saved from conquest, so she has been saved from the violence that the conspirators describe with glee throughout the first two acts. She heralds the survival of Venice as a manifestation of other-worldly beauty in another new dawn. It is to this beauty that Jaffier has responded out of pity. As he laments (VS, p. 99):

I had promised nothing to Venice, and yet I saved it,

renouncing out of pity so much power and glory.

Pity here is the emotional response arising from attention to beauty. Not just pity for the inhabitants, but for Venice. This motivation is one of Weil’s key innovations with regards to her material. In earlier renditions of the story, i.e. Saint-Réal’s source text and Thomas Otway’s 1682 dramatisation of Saint-Réal, Venice Preserv’d, the motivation was respectively cowardice, and political and sexual interest (Fiori, p. 187). Crucially, Jaffier’s move towards pity occurs when talking (and flirting) with Violetta, who maintains that beauty is Venice’s best defence; during this conversation, his tone turns “from badinage to love for Venice”: “No man could ever make something as beautiful as Venice. Only God. The greatest thing a man can do, the thing that brings him closest to God, is to preserve the marvels that exist, given that he cannot create them” (VS, p. 82). He is thus able to look beyond military triumph to see what such triumph would do to Venice (VS, p. 87):

Empty eyes will look around in vain

for palaces, houses or churches.

Their songs will never again be heard.

They will have no voice for their lament.

This sea for them will be always mute.

By his action, Jaffier stops this vision becoming reality. Violetta’s song is explicitly heard at the end of the play and for her the sea is not mute.

How can beauty have such power? Jaffier’s response to the city’s beauty can be linked to Weil’s Platonism. Beauty is one way that we perceive reality,¹² inducing us to come out of the cave into the light (Plato Republic 514 ff.).¹³ As Weil writes in her poem “A un jour” [To a Day] (MO, forthcoming):

Let dawn’s angelic song summon

the heart, which becomes mute and clear

at the sweetness of the message

that quivers in the scattered air.

The Platonic imagery is clear. It is possible to move from the dark to the light, under the summons of beauty, the celestial harmony that reaches the heart. Beauty for Weil is one of the forms of the “implicit love of God,” along with love of our neighbour and love of religious practices (WG, pp. 137–215). She stresses that beauty is special among these forms, insofar as it is easier for us to access the good when it is visible (following the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium), but also because it is impossible for us to dominate or possess beauty, although we desire it. The desire aroused by the beautiful is different from that aroused, for instance, by erotic interests, because the beautiful does not stimulate possessiveness, nor the aim to control and change its object. It defeats any such desire, because the only way to encounter the beautiful is through contemplation, just as Jaffier contemplates the city.

Venice Saved shows how, in a context of extreme crisis, it is possible to be transformed through an experience of the beauty of the world. No matter how terrible Jaffier’s end, grace is depicted and even offered. The audience is enabled by the play’s poetics to share in Jaffier’s experience, to participate emotionally in his change of vision: Weil tells herself to make the conspirators “as sympathetic as possible” so that the audience will initially want the enterprise to succeed (VS, p. 50); she accordingly has the conspirators speak at length about their vision of a united Christian Europe and she introduces the Courtesan, who tells how she has been abused by Venice, a story that matches the Venetian ruthlessness described by the conspirators, a ruthlessness confirmed at the end when Pierre and the others are led away to torture and death. Yet Weil insists that the audience’s view should change by means of a speech by Renaud (the French lord behind the conspiracy), “which should have the same effect on the spectator as it has on Jaffier” (VS, p. 50). Renaud addresses the conspirators as follows (VS, p. 61):

You are going to make history. You will destroy a power that is tyrannical, full of intrigue, hated by its own citizens and which opposes the unity of Europe. Thanks to you, the whole of Europe will be united under the Habsburg dynasty, and the ships of this united Europe will cross the seas to conquer the entire globe …

Attention to what is truly at stake will make the audience resist Renaud’s vision. On the one hand, if the conspiracy succeeds, then the tyranny of Venice will vanish from the world and a Christian Europe will be formed. On the other hand, Spanish success will bring about the devastation of beauty that the conspirators describe in detail, with their planned destruction of art and architecture and the murder and mass rape of citizens. If paying attention to beauty, as Weil writes, is incompatible with its possession, then the realisation – complete, in every part of one’s being, as attention demands – of Venice’s beauty is the turning point in both perception and volition. If the audience does resist Renaud’s vision, then a double transformation becomes possible, as they not only live through Jaffier’s situation but are presented with a poetic work of beauty that can be taken into their own lives. If (and only if) you have perceived the beauty of Venice, then you will listen to Renaud’s words to Jaffier and reject them (VS, p. 72):

See this city and all those who dwell in it as a toy that can be thrown about, even broken. You must have realized that this is the feeling of your mercenaries, even of your officers. We, of course, are above that; we are making history.

Jaffier, and by implication the spectator, cannot allow beauty to become a toy. Act Three begins after he has betrayed the conspiracy, and the tragedy of grace is then worked out.

Beauty, far from being an ornament, is thus an instrument of deep transformation. However, it is possible to ignore the beautiful or to mistake it for yet another object to possess. That is exactly what the Spanish do when they plot to conquer Venice, as seen in Renaud’s reference to it as “a toy” above. Beauty alone does not force transformation but only enables contact with reality. Contemplation of beauty, as we saw above, evokes desire, at which point we can look away, try to consume what is not made for consumption, or we sustain that desire and transform it into a desire for the object to be what it is, which is what Jaffier does. His love can be described as detached because it is on behalf of the city as a whole – as shown by Violetta’s final appearance – rather than out of friendship or care for the Venetians; in fact, friendship itself, in the character of Pierre, succumbs to this impersonal love. Jaffier’s action lies outside personal relationships, for it involves emptying desire of what ordinarily makes it so, i.e. the self: “If one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish [beauty] inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention. Beauty achieves its transformative aim only insofar as it is contemplated with attention, which means with a love that is detached.”¹⁴

Tragedy: Affliction and Contradiction

Jaffier is captured by the city’s beauty, which forces a recognition of reality upon him, hence making it impossible for him to act against reality by possessing it. Attention, for Weil, reveals the reality outside the self insofar as the attentive self becomes nothing. This is the final step for Jaffier to take. He loses everything: his status, his best friend, and eventually his life. He may be described as a tragic character.¹⁵ But the drama’s poetics depict him as more than tragic: he is afflicted. After his friends have been sent to the torturers, he describes himself four times as an “afflicted man” who has lost his way (VS, p. 101).

The concept of “affliction,” translating the French malheur, is used by Weil in her philosophy to signify something deeper than suffering: the total destruction of the self in its physical, social and psychological manifestations (WG, p. 119). In that emptiness, a person can easily be lost. Or she can find the extraordinary strength to pay attention, allowing reality to shine through her, occupying the space left by the self. Jaffier’s attention is doubly bound in this way: by beauty, and by affliction. Significantly, affliction is also an important concept in Weil’s political philosophy. She identifies the workers’ condition, their oppression and alienation, with the complete emptiness characteristic of affliction.¹⁶ In that characterization, however, is also a seed of hope. (See Section 6 below.)

Affliction is experienced by Jesus on the cross when abandoned by God (Matthew 27: 46) and by the Titan Prometheus in Weil’s 1937 poem “Prométhée” [Prometheus], who brings fire to humankind but is then punished by the gods by being chained to a rock, with an eagle arriving daily to feast on his liver (MO, forthcoming):

His body twists in vain, under constraint;

and his screams are heard only by the wind;

affliction takes his flesh: alone, with no name.

The lexis of the twisting and constrained body is reminiscent of Jesus’s crucifixion and Weil goes out of her way in the final line to point out that Prometheus is a victim of affliction that takes his flesh. Similarly, Jaffier has no hope left, he has lost his way (VS, p. 101). He could have ruled over Venice but instead he is forced to contemplate the death of his comrades at the hands of experts in torture, while he is granted both liberty and financial reward (VS, p. 96):

I renounced everything, through pity, to keep these men safe,

and you are telling me – words that I still cannot believe –

you dare to inform me that my companions will be killed?

My friend is going to die, my one friend, all that I love?

Through such anguished speeches in the third act after Jaffier has betrayed the plot, Weil stages affliction, as J.P. Little observes: “Redemptive suffering for Simone Weil thus involves something more terrible than death: it involves affliction, which destroys all that gives life a meaning for man, but leaves life itself. It is a kind of living death … Tragedy needs the sort of complete abandonment in affliction which Simone Weil has given Jaffier.”¹⁷

Weil takes an innovative approach to the tragic genre as a whole, an approach that proceeds from her philosophy. She structures the moral universe by taking the polarity of gravity and grace from the physical sciences. She writes: “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.”¹⁸ Weil accordingly describes William Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which the protagonist is destroyed by the machinations of others and by his own internal flaws, as a “tragedy of gravity” (GG, p. 2). Venice Saved, we argue, is by contrast a tragedy of grace. Jaffier could have been a ruler of a city at the heart of a united Christian Europe, alongside his beloved Pierre. He is then transformed by attention, but the transformation costs him everything, even though he has oriented himself to the good. The new orientation has led him to act in a way that, even as it succeeds, makes him an “afflicted man” like Jesus on the cross or Prometheus on the rock. Yet Jaffier, Jesus and Prometheus move into affliction of their own free will rather than through what others do or through weakness, and that saves them. (Whereas Othello, to use another example from Shakespeare, is brought down both by Iago’s cunning and by his trust for this untrustworthy man.)

Venice Saved is a tragedy of attention, grace and affliction. Like all tragedy, it hinges on an irreparable conflict. But the nature of the conflict, for Weil, is not between two opposite values, or systems of values. As in her reading of Sophocles’s Antigone, Weil rejects the idea that the tragedy stems from an opposition of natural and positive law, just as Venice Saved is not about the opposition between desire for conquest and moral scruple. True tragedy for Weil shows rather the discrepancy between two different orders, a natural and a transcendent one.¹⁹ The two are irreconcilable, but also not strictly speaking in conflict, because they are incommensurable. Weil writes in The Need for Roots, on which she was working at the same time as Venice Saved, that there is an incompatibility between kinds of obligations (p. 10): Antigone obeys a higher, absolute law by insisting on burying her brother rather than following the civic law which forbids it. Jaffier acts out of pity, having become aware of the deep order of the world, which is invisible without the kind of attention that removes the self entirely, but which becomes visible to Jaffier through Violetta.

Talking about two orders can easily lead to a supernaturalist interpretation of Weil’s idea of tragedy,²⁰ and Weil does talk about a “supernatural order.” But what we read, in Venice Saved as well as in Weil’s poems, is a far more ambiguous contrast. What attention shows to Jaffier is the city’s reality. A reality that is rich, resistant to possession, and beautiful, but also “here.” Weil’s final poem, “La porte” [The Gate / The Door] (MO, forthcoming), written 1941–2, offers imagery that describes the processes of attention staged in Venice Saved, as well as in philosophical reflection generally, opening with the evocation of an Eden beyond our perception, hidden by a gate:

Open the gate for us, and we shall see the orchards.

We shall drink cold water where the moon has left its trace.

The long road is burning and hostile to the strangers.

We err without knowing and we never find our place.

Florence de Lussy argues that the gate represents the passage to the transcendent; people have the feeling that they are immortal but simultaneously perceive this world as a prison; the text becomes a gate in its own right.²¹ The scenario is reminiscent of the parable told by the priest to Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, in which the man from the country tries to gain admittance to the law but is denied by a door-keeper and eventually dies, only at the very end seeing a radiance coming from behind the uncrossed threshold.²² More recently, inspired by Kafka, J.M. Coetzee ironically represents this longing for a beyond in “At the Gate,” the penultimate chapter of Elizabeth Costello.²³ There, the protagonist also finds herself waiting in a surreal town to be allowed on the other side of the gate, but in order to move forward, she must produce a “statement of belief.” Costello at first refuses. When she realises she will not be allowed through without a statement, she chooses to tell the judges a story about the frogs which emerged from a muddy river in her childhood, singing throughout the summer. Her reason for believing in the frogs is simply that “they are real” and that “they are indifferent to my belief” (Coetzee, p. 396). In Costello we see the statement of an artist whose only resource is a belief in the hard, resistant reality of the world, a world that is both indifferent to her own beliefs and desires, and that becomes visible precisely when no such belief and desire is present. The reality of the frogs is the order of the world becoming manifest, which needs no further justification, and no understanding, only turning around and paying attention.

Weil describes the existential drama of the one who waits before the gate. By the end of the poem, as in Kafka, the gate has not opened. We are still “crushed by time’s gravity” (a symbol of the metaphysical gravity of the world):

We must languish and wait and we must keep watch in vain.

We look upon the gate; it is closed and too heavy.

We fix our eyes on it; we weep under the torment.

We keep it in our view; we’re crushed by time’s gravity.

In Kafka, Coetzee and Weil we have the image of a transcendent reality that we seek but never attain, like the withdrawn God of the Kabbalah, who inspires Weil’s metaphysics. The gate did open once, Weil writes in the poem, but what came out was “so much silence.” For all the mysticism in Weil’s philosophy, there is no overt supernaturalism in the play or the poems. The mind at the gate is not given access into the lost Eden.

Prometheus remains afflicted on his rock. In Venice Saved, the city’s Catholic culture plays no salvific role, Jaffier finds no Christian consolation for his acts and no deus ex machina (still less any Deus ex machina) arrives to offer hope for him at the end. The beauty of Venice remains, but that will be for Violetta, not for Jaffier, as he realises (VS, p. 112):

To eyes that will soon go dark, how lovely is the city!

I must leave the land of the living, never to return.

There will be no dawn where I shall go, nor any city.

Weil’s poetics are Platonic rather than Catholic. Her literary work is a mysticism that is realised. We can read it without sharing her belief in the “incarnated Christianity” that she mentions as the basis for writing in the letter to Perrin cited above (WG, p. 76). Many of Weil’s readers come from outside Christianity, and her own refusal to be baptised has been inspirational. Perhaps there is an analogy with how J.R.R. Tolkien’s work can be linked theoretically to his Christianity but does not show obvious religious features. (His hobbits are far more interested in a good breakfast than in developing a belief system.)

“La porte” functions as an artefact that makes the attentive reader experience more than the transmission of a point of view. The poem can be compared to a kōan, one of the paradoxical stories from the Zen tradition (such as the sound of one hand clapping) that aim to change the very way that the listener thinks. Not only does it say something, it also does something. The same is true of Venice Saved, where the tragic form allows the human condition to be reformulated. Nothing changes in the landscape before Jaffier’s eyes, but everything is changed. That is what literature can do, and philosophy too. The connection between philosophy and literature, in terms of their special power to transform and capture something invisible to most, is the subject of Simone Weil’s imaginary conversation with Paul Valéry, to which we now turn. Putting the two authors side by side will allow us to explore further the meaning of another level of reality that is “here,” while also bringing out the third way in which Weil’s literary work is transformative: the use of the poetic word.

The Poetic Word and Philosophy

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) is one of the poets who inspired Weil, and she had a brief correspondence with him about her own poem “Prométhée.” He is mentioned in her notes to the play: “And as with music (Valéry) a poem emerges from silence, returns to silence” (VS, p. 57) and Thomas R. Nevin argues that Weil as poet walks in Valéry’s “semantic ambit,” following “his pursuit, with a concession to final impossibility, of what may be pure and absolute within the flood of ordinary impressions and discourse” (Nevin, p. 158).

In a series of lectures at Oxford University (1954) – delivered 2 years after the 1937 inaugural lectures at the Collège de France to which Weil obtained the notes and responded with an essay of her own²⁴ – Valéry discusses the role of abstract thought in poetry, establishing a close connection between poetry and philosophy.²⁵ At the opposite end from didactic art, a true poet’s philosophical ideas, he argues, show themselves in their execution (pp. 229–30), and that is the purest and most effective way of thinking. Appealing to the familiar distinction between form and content, which he calls “voice” and “depth” respectively (p. 225), Valéry presents a case for the philosophical force of poetry, not only claiming that ideas must be embodied, but that they obtain their real force through a means of expression that can make them “happen” in the poet and the reader alike. For Valéry, while in every other use of language we use words to achieve an aim, communicate something, and, once that is communicated, allow the words to fall out of sight, two distinctive things happen with poetry: first, the words retain their salience and are not mere instruments by which speakers reach something beyond them; second, they achieve a rare – he calls it “marvellous” – unity, with the meaning or “depth” of their emotions, images, objects, ideas. This union, Valéry claims, is able to transport the reader into a different state, the poetic state or state of inspiration, where words and world have a meaning they never have in our ordinary state, composed of action, of the pursuit of goals, and of the direction of the will. Through poetry we are insensibly transformed and inclined to live, breathe, and think according to a system and under laws which are no longer practical; that is, nothing which happens in that state will be resolved, finished, or abolished by a well-determined act. We then enter the poetic universe (p. 219). Literature can be an irreplaceable vehicle for insight and transformation, as well as an instance of beauty in itself. It discloses the beauty of the world while being an expression of it. Valéry’s theory of poetry allows us to describe key aspects of both Weil’s play and her philosophy: the transformation of the individual’s spiritual energy, occasioned by the contemplation of a reality that reveals itself as meaningful but is impossible to possess, evoking and defeating desire at the same time. The poetic word is like the attentive state: it exists when possessive and instrumental desire has been extinguished. Again, this occurs at two levels in Weil’s play: through the poetic word, and through Jaffier’s contemplation. The experience of reality, desired but ungraspable, is for Weil also the experience of beauty: “Everything beautiful is the object of desire but one desires that it be not otherwise, that it be unchanged, that it be exactly what it is. One looks with desire at a clear starry night and one desires exactly the sight before one’s eyes” (SWA, p. 268).

Jaffier’s conversion occurs when he attends to the city’s beauty. His ability to contemplate it without possession allows for a radical change in him, which manifests itself in the impossibility of destroying that which is beautiful – and is finally recognised as such. But his story is not complete until he becomes afflicted. In this state of total destruction, it is natural for the afflicted to seek consolation, but this would be to distort and deny reality. Instead, the afflicted is in the perfect position to practice detachment, by confronting this condition of nothingness and loving it, loving the order of the world that contains it. The task is almost impossible, for it goes against the natural human tendency towards gravity, yet Jaffier, having been transformed by the moment of attention to beauty, completes it.

The detachment that we see in Venice Saved, and that Weil may have hoped to encourage in its audience through the experience of both suffering and beauty, is also a more general requirement of Weil’s ethics. The goal is the same, but it takes different forms in tragedy and philosophical reflection. This fundamental unity of art and philosophy is what Weil addresses in her essay inspired by Valéry. There, Weil addresses true philosophical reflection, which she claims is extremely rare and requires something nearly impossible. The starting point in her argument is that philosophy attempts to comprehend the mind, and the chief object of the mind is value, so all reflection is reflection about value. She follows the Platonic idea that in whatever we do we are moving towards something we consider to be good, rightly or wrongly, and that the energy behind our actions (our eros) is derived from that sense of value. So the object of reflection is to identify a hierarchy of values. However, knowledge of value is impossible. That is because, as Weil puts it: “Knowledge is conditional, values are unconditional; therefore values are unknowable. But one cannot give up on knowing them, for giving up would mean giving up on believing in them, which is impossible because human life always has a direction. Thus at the centre of human life is a contradiction” (“RCV”, p. 107).

In our lives, the operations of the intellect follow chains of cause and effect, of if-then, and instrumental values depend on ends. Value, however, is a final end, and as such neither conditional and determined by our desires, nor knowable. Like Valéry’s poetic word, value is an end in itself, which keeps offering insight to the attentive mind and cannot be exchanged for another goal. As such, it is absolute and not contingent. In relation to the soul, value is an “orientation.” When we recognise something as value, we are “turned” toward it, so previous perceived values become of lesser importance and no longer move us. Venice Saved represents this conversion to the value of beauty, while its tragic form displays the contrast between the absolute and the contingent.

At the heart of Weil’s conception of tragedy is incommensurability. Jaffier begins to follow the order of the world by becoming alive to the existence of Venice. The vision of beauty is at the same time an awareness of the existence of the beautiful object. Such awareness is itself an intimation of a limit to his will, to himself. Weil writes in her notes to the play: “As soon as Jaffier realises that Venice exists…” (VS, p. 53). This awareness of the existence of the world is, for Weil, itself an awareness of the absolute order, and at the same time of our own nothingness. Jaffier’s new state of being is on a different level from the world in which he had lived and acted before, and as such, it is incomprehensible to all around him. He has ceased to operate according to contingent and hypothetical values and oriented himself to absolute value.

Such unnatural detachment is what Weil’s tragedy requires of Jaffier, through the experience of beauty, and such detachment is what literature may encourage in us. Most philosophy, Weil argues, attempts to ignore this tension by constructing systems that smooth out all that is incompatible. That is why, for her, most philosophy is not true philosophy: “At the centre of human life is a contradiction” (“RCV”, p. 107). True philosophical reflection, like tragedy, must be able to confront this contradiction.

If the human condition is one of blindness and illusion, of obedience to the laws of gravity that encourage self-expansion, de-realisation, and the use of force in the pursuit of contingent knowledge and instrumental goods, something needs to happen to remove us from that state and cast us into the domain of the absolute. Articulating this need is the main aim of Weil’s thought. Tragic characters and the afflicted in our world are alike in being in the condition that is both in most danger of total annihilation and for same reason closest to the reach of truth and joy. Yet, as Nelson asserts, “the afflicted need language to make their oppression visible and knowable” (p. 30). Tragedy offers this language.

At the same time, as Weil stresses, attention, or the ability to love the order of the world, particularly during times of affliction, is against nature. Detachment goes against the natural tendencies for self-expansion and consolation. This is true in the practice of philosophy as well: following mystical thinkers such as Meister Eckhart and Spinoza, Weil believed that the error of the intellect is to trust its own limitation, thus confusing the contingent with the real. That is another way of understanding why so few are, for her, true philosophers.

Literature, and tragedy in particular, are analogous to philosophy in this respect. If the object is the absolute, intellect will not take us very far at all. But anything that stimulates detachment, whether it is the impossible desire for beauty, or the poetic word or the crisis of the perceived impossibility of holding at the same time in the mind the contingent and the absolute order, can initiate the transformation. Such transformation can neither be forced upon us, nor chosen by us. It needs to be an encounter between the desperately loving, attentive soul (Jaffier) and the order of the world. As Weil writes (WG, p. 163):

The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps, is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out… he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything… but this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger which threatens him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.

Both philosophy and art, and tragedy in particular, can bring us close to the entrance.

Conclusion: Literature in Action

It may seem contradictory for a Platonist to turn to literature, given how Socrates is notoriously hostile to literature, seeing a divide between conceptual content, which is essential, and literary form, which is merely ornamental and thus a distraction to the seeker for the truth (Plato Republic 393d). Yet Plato’s own works show literary genius, and Seamus Heaney argues that Plato has been read by writers not as imposing a blanket ban on poetry but as “the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is wrong in the prevailing circumstances.”²⁶ Heaney uses Weil’s notions of gravity and grace to argue that poetry can offer a “redressing effect” in the world, because it can function as a “glimpsed alternative” (p. 4). It can offer the grace to offset the problems of gravity: “If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale” (Weil in Heaney, p. 4).

It is in this light that we can understand why Weil brought literature into her political activism. As we saw, in 1936, when she had the opportunity to write an article for a workers’ periodical (Entre Nous), she decided to write about Antigone.²⁷ Her aspiration was to show oppressed workers that they could take Antigone as role model: that their afflicted condition could only be overcome by an inner change, requiring courage and faith (or love, which for Weil is the same thing) to attend to reality without consolation, but with inner freedom (Cabaud Meaney, p. 82), and not bow their head to a system of injustice.

Elsewhere she writes: “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem” (SWA, p. 180). This thought is elaborated in “Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour,” quoted above (SWA, pp. 268–9). It is not the religion of rituals, but the religion of the inner orientation towards the order of the world, that Weil is talking about. Such orientation is extremely, almost impossibly, difficult, but it is more easily available – and at the same time more necessary – for people in the afflicted condition, like the factory workers that Weil encountered, like Jaffier, and like the countless afflicted individuals nowadays. Their lives, repetitive and hetero-directed, lack joy and purpose. Seeking purpose in any specific object in the world, according to Weil, is futile and misleading. There is only one true purpose, and that is loving the necessity of the universe. Workers without any contingent purpose or consolation need to turn to poetry as the “very substance of daily life.” (SWA, p. 268).

Reversing the traditional assumption, Weil claims that poetry is a luxury for everyone but the workers, and the afflicted in general. It is for them, who have no “screens” or consolation in their lives – for those plunged in crises they cannot evade – that life can become poetry through an inner change. Just as Valéry writes about poetry as art, where “word and depth” become one, the separation between sign and signified is removed, and poet and reader are transported into the poetic dimension; so the afflicted who can see the poetry in daily life can thoroughly transform her perception of everything around her into a sign of the transcendent.

Weil’s bringing together of creation and the divine, like Valéry’s union of word and world, also shows why it is possible to accept her thoughts on beauty and crisis without a belief in an “elsewhere;” why, in fact, such focus could lead us astray. The poetic word transforms us, even momentarily, and places us in the “poetic universe,” according to Valéry (p. 219). That is not a different universe, but a different state, in which we look at the same world with different eyes. The poetic word is a gate, but one which leads into this world, from which the non-poetic word is separated. Likewise, Weil’s idea of beauty is not a harbinger of something beyond, but in fact a manifestation of an order which is here, but which we fail to see because we are not, in our ordinary active, self-affirming perceptions, capable of contemplating: “Beauty is the order of the world that is loved” (WG, p. 170). The order is manifested in beauty, not through it. What is required is a transformation of perception through detachment, which real reflection, true poetry and beauty afford to the most courageous of souls. We began this paper by citing Pollard’s insistence on how poetry can engage with the language of resistance because it is a “technology for paying attention” (p. 1). We conclude, following Diamond, that Weil is a paradigm of such engaged writing because her play and her poems manifest and demand the sort of deep attention that leads to resistance and because her theoretical work shows how this is possible.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that a philosopher who does not take part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring. Weil believed that literature and philosophy can bring grace to the world and she as philosopher went into the literary ring in order to prove this point. It is part of her personal affliction that her work was never brought to completion, that her words were not heard in the time of crisis that they addressed. They can inspire people today, however, in another time of crisis. As Pollard argues, new voices are now needed (p. 1) and Weil can paradoxically be one such voice. A consideration of the literary Weil, the philosopher at the gate of the word, shows how activism and mysticism can unite within the tragedy of grace. It also explains why she is the philosopher to whom Heaney turns in order to evoke the redress that poetry, in spite of everything, can still offer.