The Weekly Weil #5
faute de mieux
Chers amis,
I’m writing this from the Greek coastline, where my gen z boyfriend and I have been fortunate enough to be living our best Nietzschean lives (#blessed). So I pray for your indulgence if this post is even more disjointed than usual.
Chaleureusement,
m.j.e.
Friend of the blog John Pistelli graciously mentioned the The Weekly Weil in discussing his ongoing project of marrying Christ and Nietzsche (or Heaven and Hell, in the Blakean terms I prefer)1. He neatly summarised Weil’s main historical sympathies and antipathies (something I’ve neglected to do so far):
[L]ike Nietzsche, she reserved her highest acclaim for the Greeks, though for her they were not the original singers of strength but rather the devisers of just the kind of absolute sympathy Wilde attributes to Christ. Weil meanwhile scorned Romans and Jews alike as deficient in this universalism: the first mere imperialists and the second mere nationalists.2
He also mentions that Harold Bloom “curtly dismissed Weil as a pathological case whose vaunted ethics were little better than a bathetically introjected anti-Semitism.” This literary titbit triggered a bout of self-analysis, despite my intention of kicking the habit: could my erstwhile (?!) obsession with Weil be explained as the self-hating Jew in her appealing to the self-hating homosexual in me?3
In my previous post, I quoted Murdoch’s reflections on the limits of self-knowledge from her essay On ‘God’ and ‘Good’. The relevant passage continues:
A chief enemy to such clarity of vision, whether in art or morals, is the system to which the technical name of sado-masochism has been given. It is the peculiar subtlety of this system that, while constantly leading attention and energy back into the self, it can produce, almost all the way as it were to the summit, plausible imitations of what is good. Refined sado-mascohism can ruin art which is too good to be ruined by the cruder vulgarities of self-indulgence. One’s self is interesting, so one’s motives are interesting, and the unworthiness of one’s motives is interesting.
Whether or not it is fair to call Weil a masochist depends on one’s metaphysical positions. The eroticisation of pain is a means of denying its horror. In contrast, Weil believed in the supernatural use of affliction (malheur): staring unflinchingly at the horror and accepting it anyway, thereby liberating a piece of the self to be rescued by God4. But if this belief is ultimately just a more elaborate consoling fantasy, is it really that much better than the cheap tricks we use to distract ourselves from painful truths?
Over time I’ve come to realise that much of what I found so new and radical in Weil was already there in Plato — it’s just that nobody had bothered to tell me about it. In Murdoch’s play Art and Eros, an entertaining dramatisation of some of her central philosophical ideas on art and ethics, the uncompromisingly severe character of the 20-year-old Plato certainly reminds me of Weil. After explicating his famous myth of the cave of illusion, Plato disparages art as a distraction from man’s true purpose:
Good art can be a kind of image or imitation of goodness. That’s how it deceives enlightened people and stops them from trying to become better. It’s a kind of sacrilege. If you believe in the gods, whatever they may be, you know that they make some absolute pure demand — the highest thing of all — it’s like when an athlete in the Games is strained almost beyond endurance, almost to dying. Art softens the demand of the gods. It puts an attractive veil over the final awful demand, that final transformation into goodness, the almost impossible last step which is what human life is really all about.
The 60-year-old Socrates responds with good humour, admonishing Plato for his perfectionism (a charge that could perhaps be laid against some of Murdoch’s own philosophical writings, although not against her fiction):
You say art consoles us and prevents us from taking the final step. You say art is a last exist or a a second best. It may be that humans can only achieve a second best, that second best is our best. (Plato is shaking his head). Perhaps not only art but all our highest speculations, the highest achievements of our spirits, are second best. Homer is imperfect. Science is imperfect. Any high thinking of which we are capable is faulty. Not everything connects, my dear Plato. We are not gods. What you call the whole truth is only for them. So our truth must include, must embrace the idea of the second best, that all our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted by selfishness. This doesn’t mean there is no difference between the good and the bad in what we achieve. And it doesn’t mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest truthful spirit. This is our truth.
In this vein, I’ll finally respond to SkinShallow’s comment on The Weekly Weil #3. While I agree that we often disguise selfish motives under the label of love, I find the idea that “need obliterates the possibility of love” too Buddhist, which is to say too Platonic, which is to say too idealistic. Even the greatest human love is likely to be riddled with impurity. We should try to love anyway.
I still find it hard to imagine what a truly equitable marriage between Nietzsche and Christ would look like. I can imagine a tempered Nietzschism that acknowledges the existence and legitimacy of other wills. And I can imagine a follower of Christ accepting Nietzschean tactics to counter anti-Christian forces. But can one ultimately serve two masters?
John’s example of Wildes’s De Profundis is a good one, but as with other belated come-to-Jesus moments, I can’t help but hear the voice of Lady Macbeth in my head: Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? / And wakes it now to look so green and pale / At what it did so freely?
It is a bit of an understatement to say that Weil scorned the Romans as mere internationalists (C’était vraiment un people athée et idolâtre, non pas de statues faits en pierre ou en bronze, mais idolâtre de lui-même) and the Jews as mere nationalists (Les Hébreux étaient des esclaves évadés, et ils ont exterminés ou réduit en servitude toutes les populations de Palestine.) She was of course talking about the ancient Israelites rather than modern Israelis, but recent events have prompted me to reflect on my own Jewish heritage: not the one-eighth of my genes that Science has identified as being Ashkenazi in origin, but the foundations of my mental world that were formed by the texts that I was taught to call the Old and New Testaments. Amid growing concerns about a post-literate culture, the indispensable Alan Jacobs observes a possible exception to this trend among students at Christian colleges:
And what I find is that my students are, to a degree that’s strongly countercultural these days, people of the book. When they were young they were read to, and read to all the time—the Bible, yes, but not just the Bible and maybe not even primarily the Bible. Their parents read them the Narnia books and The Hobbit and Madeleine L’Engle’s novels, and when they got a little older they started reading for themselves more challenging books by the same (and similar) authors. Many of them read the Harry Potter books, not as contrasting those more straightforwardly Christian texts, but as being complementary to them. To a degree not readily found elsewhere in our society, reading was an integral part of the culture of the families and communities within which they were raised.
Scrolling through Substack Notes, however, it seems that the book-as-fetish-object is likely to survive the demise of the Abrahamic faiths (the grimoire is after all also a kind of book). I would normally applaud this, but sun-dazed on an Aegean beach, I can’t help but wonder whether Plato isn’t at least partly to blame for the predicaments of modernity since he insisted on writing down the drunken speculations of a bunch of fruity pederasts, allowing ideas cultivated in this paradise-on-earth to be transplanted to the dark and humid soil of the temperate North. Perhaps the greatest sin of the intellect is that of abstraction.
Astute Jungians would have noticed a glaring omission in the plotting of aspects of my Self on the meta-political compass I proposed in my previous post, especially considering my choice to write under a transsexual pseudonym. This may be because my anima is a contested space — although I’m not sure how to best describe the contestants. Perhaps it is a competition between Mary and Martha, or between the two Simones (Nina and Weil).
Funnily enough, the other Simone has never really appealed to me as a means of splitting the baby. After all, did la grande dame of second-wave feminism not allow herself to be cucked by JPS? (If we are to judge her by male standards, which I’m sure she would have wanted). Granted my serious engagement with De Beauvoir is limited to listening to 152 minutes of the audiobook of La Femme indépendante : Extraits du Deuxième Sexe pour practiquer mon français. Freddie de Boer has claimed to be “in love with Simone de Beauvoir’s mind”, so the fault probably lies with me.
Reading Henry Oliver’s fascinating post on Flaubert made me wonder, not for the first time, whether my anima might be Emma Bovary (unfortunately, unlike Flaubert, I don’t have the moral luck of artistic genius). Speaking in parapsychological terms, I might have been drawn to Weil as a grounding energy to counteract my romanticising tendencies. Or maybe it was simply the revenge of what my gen z boyfriend likes to call my inner tannie (or Karen in Internet-speak).
Literally, tannie derives from tante, the Dutch word for aunt: a product of the endearing/annoying Afrikaans penchant for diminutives. As it happens, tante is also the word used by Jean Genet, another of my problematic Gallic faves, to refer to femmes/bottoms in his novel Notre-Dame des Fleurs, written in prison in Nazi-occupied France and published anonymously in 1943, the year of Weil’s death and the title of a book by Alan Jacobs on the Christian humanist alternatives to secular modernity put forth by Weil, Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden. Sartre was so enamoured with the homosexual criminal as an embodiment of his existential philosophy that he wrote a 700-page book entitled Saint Genet. Camp icon Susan Sontag, whose reflections on Weil I’ve previously quoted, likened Genet’s prose (which he insisted was written in la langue de l’ennemi) to a cathedral. Small world, innit?
Reading Weil lately often makes me want to exclaim: “Good God, can someone get this girl some morphine!” (I don’t know anything about Weil’s actual pain management regime: I’m really more of a Weil stan than a Weil scholar, if you’ve been too kind to notice). The spiritual potential of suffering is of course an ancient Christian idea. The post-Christian conception of suffering as unredeemable comes with its own costs: on a personal level, attempts to escape the hell of pain can easily land one in a different kind of hell; on a philosophical level, one can start seeing nothing but hell and believe like David Benatar that it would have been better if none of us had ever been born.