The Weekly Weil #3

Better late than never

Since the Queen Bitch (aka Blake Smith) has already thoroughly read Becca Rothfeld¹ for the “dumb liberalism” on display in her debut book All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, I will limit the scope of my critique to the essay in the collection that I feel best equipped to judge (Having a Cake and Eating it, Too) because it draws heavily on the discussion of beauty in Simone Weil’s essay The Implicit Forms of the Love of God, which I have been contemplating for years.²

In Rothfeld’s estimation, Weil’s searing essay is “for the most part a subdued treatise” but “sometimes light stabs through its reticent prose” like in the following passage (“perhaps the brightest”) which provides the anchor point for Rothfeld’s reflections on “the tragic incompatibility between eating and looking”:

The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. Children feel this trouble already, when they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it. It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating the fruit, the opposite attitude, looking at the fruit without eating it, should be what is required to save it.

Weil’s excess of self-denial could indeed have served as an interesting foil to Rothfeld’s recommended excess of self-indulgence. Unfortunately, Rothfeld, despite her training in analytical philosophy, treats Weil more like a source of poetic inspiration than a philosophical interlocutor. She also evinces little interest in why others are reading Weil at this cultural moment, preferring to dwell on some rather unedifying personal anecdotes contrasting the voracious appetite of an erstwhile male lover with her own reticence to eat anything in front of a man.³

At times, Rothfeld’s idiosyncratic gloss on Weil verges on misrepresentation, such as the claim that “[t]hroughout Waiting for God, Weil rejects hierarchy.” Weil, who talks all the time about genius, about how out of all of Shakespeare’s plays only Lear could be considered art of the first rank, about how she cannot help but consider herself more intellectually honest than her priest-correspondent (whom she nevertheless addresses as Father), rejects hierarchy? Perhaps one can say that Weil believed in the absolute equality of all human beings — not equal in dignity, mind you, but equal in wretchedness. All have the same task: to become nothing so that God can become everything again. To paraphrase Camus, if that is rejecting hierarchy, I prefer my mother.

To put it in Murdochian terms, the problem with the Rothfeld’s essay is that it is the work of an existentialist (with the attendant “unrealistic, over-optimistic, romantic” picture of human nature) trying to commune with the mystics. Although she references plenty of (female) saints, Rothfeld seems content to flirt with the aesthetics and vibes of mysticism without allowing it to penetrate her basic philosophical presuppositions.⁴

I won’t pretend to understand all of Weil’s digestive metaphors and will concede Rothfeld’s point that the erotic quality of Weil’s language challenges a straightforward interpretation of her austere commandments. But this intriguing aspect of Weil’s writing should not distract from the significance of the spiritual teaching which Weil attributes to the Upanishads and which Murdoch explains in more secular terms in her paper On ‘God' and ‘Good’:

It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. The exercise of detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or a sound. Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same quality of detachment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except the things which are seen. Beauty is that which attracts this specific form of unselfish attention. It is obvious here what is the role, for the artist or spectator, of exactness and good vision: unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention.

Perhaps the difference between eating and looking can be viewed as analogous to the distinction that Buber makes between the “primary verbs” I-it and I-Thou. I’ve been wondering whether what Buber is talking about can be conceptualised as a spectrum of different qualities of attention, with the ends of the spectrum being I-it (egotistical, objectifying, seeking power) and I-Thou (relational, intersubjective, seeking love). Or perhaps I-Thou sits somewhere along the middle of the spectrum which ends in not-I (selfless, empty, seeking nothing)⁵. A particularly strong sense of I-Thou consciousness can perhaps approach something like unio mystica, but it seems useful to maintain the distinction.

It is not as straight-forward as I-it bad, I-Thou good. We need I-it consciousness to function in the world. And to speak in erotic terms that Rothfeld may appreciate, only a Perry-style prude would maintain that the objectification of others is never permissible. A good rule of thumb may be to only treat someone as an it if you also respect them as a Thou. Hot sex often involves flitting between I-it and I-Thou consciousness: moments of surrendering to the demands of the flesh alternating with moments of deeper recognition. In the throes of passion, it is not uncommon to become consumed by the desire to devour and to be devoured by the other. It is only after such reciprocal feasting, lying sadly undevoured in the arms of the sadly undevoured other, that one can contemplate the possibility of loving this indigestible otherness.⁶

Believing that “in heaven, where God eats us, we can eat him back” may be a more appealing fantasy for the modern sex positive liberal feminist than a celestial choir singing Gloria in excelsis Deo for all eternity, but neither solves the all too human predicament of eventually growing bored of even the most rarefied of pleasures. What would it mean to be satisfied with eating nothing but God?

1. Confession: After I had already drafted several bitchy remarks about All Things Are Too Small, I received notification, in a rather spooky synchronicity, that Becca Rothfeld now subscribed to The Extremely Difficult Realisation. It must have been the name that drew her, since apart from a reference to that quote in an essay on love, there is little evidence that Rothfeld has read, or understood, much of Murdoch’s work. (It’s a shame as it might have helped her to get a better grasp on Weil.) Nevertheless, I was flattered, of course, by the attention (which after all is a form of love) paid to me by a published author, whose writing I’ve longed admired for its style, if not its substance. Furthermore, since at heart I’m really less of a bitch than a tart, should my sympathies not lie more with Rothfeld than with Smith? Or has Smith already seduced me into accepting his homocentrism (and implicit misogyny)? I tried to be more charitable in my reading of Rothfeld, but this felt somewhat forced and false and I sensed that Weil (who after all was also a woman, albeit an atypical one) would judge me for my lack of intellectual honesty. So I brought back some of the bitchiness, although I hope not to a gratuitous extent. I welcome a response from Rothfeld or any of my other scores of subscribers. Love you guys!

2. I’ve written about my obsession with (and recent ambivalence about) Weil in the first and second instalments of this hopelessly optimistically named series, whose resurrection should give hope and succour to fans of The Iris Murdoch Book Club. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

In another bizarre synchronicity, I drew on the same few pages from Waiting for God that Rothfeld does in my recent argument for a more expansive view of spirituality. Pro-tip: even if you don’t read my posts, always read Pistelli’s comments to my posts. His Kabbalist musings are not unrelated to the issue at hand.

3. Speaking of spiritually inclined women practising what we would nowadays refer to as disordered eating, a certain Church-curious actress and podcaster with the Twitter/X handle dash_eats comes to mind. Surely the reverence for Weil (performative or otherwise) of some in the (erstwhile?) Dimes Square scene is worth contemplating in what I assume is supposed to be a work of cultural criticism? Many of the critiques of Lauren Oyler’s debut essay collection (of which Rothfeld also wrote a largely negative review) fit Rothfeld’s too, notably the lack of curiosity about places and times more than a stone’s throw away from the author’s navel. (And speaking of stones, I am well aware that I am in no position to cast the first.)

4. A stance we may refer to, perhaps too uncharitably, as tie-dyed existentialism.

5. I should note that Rothfeld has a good takedown of the mindless mindfulness craze in the essay Wherever Yo Go, You Could Leave.

6. If you like your sex overanalysed, you’ll love my tell-all memoir sad n horny (apologies in advance to my long-suffering gen z boyfriend), out soon from The Gay Press, an exciting new independent gay publisher that has already published instant gay classics such as Gay Not Queer: Your Sexuality Does Not Define You, Twelve Rules for Grindr: Ancient Wisdom for The Modern Gay and Gagged: The Milo Yiannopoulos Story.