Between Wittgenstein and Weil (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy) [1 ed.] 9781032291093, 9781032291109, 9781003300076, 1032291095

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“This volume correlates two figures of the early twentieth-century renowned for their rigour, genius, precocity, and the purity of their quests – betraying a certain saintliness. Intellectual fascination with Weil and Wittgenstein never seems to flag for a reason. In an era with few spiritual beacons, both manifested in their lives and thought the essence of religious authenticity. Bringing the two together helps each to stand forth in uncompromising individuality all the more sharply.” Lissa McCullough, California State University Dominguez Hills, USA

Between Wittgenstein and Weil

This volume explores the relationship between the philosophical thought of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The contributions shed light on how reading Weil can inform our understanding of Wittgenstein, and vice versa. The chapters cover different aspects of Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy, including their religious thought and their views on ethics and metaphilosophy. They address the following questions: How does Wittgenstein’s struggle with religious belief match up with Simone Weil’s own struggle with organised belief? What is the role of the mystical and supernatural in their works? How much impact has various posthumous editorial decisions had on the shaping of Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s thought? Is there any significance to similarities in Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s written and philosophical styles? How do Weil and Wittgenstein conceive of the ‘self’ and its role in philosophical thinking? What role does belief play in Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s respective philosophical works? Between Wittgenstein and Weil will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in twentieth-century philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, and the history of moral philosophy. Jack Manzi completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2023, with a thesis on maieutic philosophical method in Socrates and Wittgenstein. His research specialisms are in Wittgenstein, Socrates, and the maieutic method.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Heidegger’s Ecological Turn Community and Practice for Future Generations Frank Schalow Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary Language and Morality in J.L. Austin’s Philosophy Niklas Forsberg Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being An Analytic Interpretation of the Late Heidegger Filippo Casati Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question An Ethics of Rebellion Pedro Tabensky Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in 1929 Florian Franken Figueiredo Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion God, Freedom, and Duration Matyáš Moravec Kripke and Wittgenstein The Standard Metre, Contingent Apriori and Beyond Edited by Martin Gustafsson, Oskari Kuusela, and Jakub Mácha Between Wittgenstein and Weil Comparisons in Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics Edited by Jack Manzi For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Nineteenth-Century-Philosophy/book-series/SE0508

Between Wittgenstein and Weil Comparisons in Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics Edited by Jack Manzi

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Jack Manzi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jack Manzi to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-29109-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-29110-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-30007-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of contributors List of abbreviations Introduction

ix xi 1

JACK MANZI

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief

14

MARIO VON DER RUHR

2 To Speak of the Divine: Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar

30

JACOB QUICK

3 Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms

56

PHILIP WILSON

4 Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention

83

HANNAH WINTHER

5 Struggling with the Supernatural

106

HUGO STRANDBERG

6 Weil Meets Wittgenstein PALLE YOURGRAU

125

viii Contents 7 Writing (Out) the Self: Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing

151

JACK MANZI

8 Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity

176

C. M. DJORDJEVIC

9 Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good

212

DAVID LEVY

Index233

Contributors

C. M. Djordjevic, Lorraine County Community College, Elyria, United States of America David Levy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, U.K. Jack Manzi, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. Jacob Quick, KU Leuven, Brussels, Belgium Mario von der Ruhr, Swansea University, U.K. Hugo Strandberg, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Philip Wilson, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. Hannah Winther, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Palle Yourgrau, Brandeis University, Massachusetts, United States of America

Abbreviations

The following are abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s published works and other subsidiary materials such as correspondences, lectures, and recollections. They are in alphabetical order. BB Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Generally Known as the Blue and Brown Books BT The Big Typescript: Ts 213 CV Culture and Value F Portraits of Wittgenstein, ed. by Flowers, FA III LE Lecture on Ethics LFM Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939 NB Notebooks 1914–1916 OC On Certainty PI Philosophical Investigations PPO Public and Private Occasions PR Philosophical Remarks RFGB Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus TLP VW The Voices of Wittgenstein, The Vienna Circle, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann Z Zettel The following are abbreviations of Weil’s published works and other subsidiary materials. They are in alphabetical order. APP FLN GG LP N NR

On the Abolition of All Political Parties First and Last Notebooks Gravity and Grace Letter to a Priest The Notebooks of Simone Weil Need for Roots

xii Abbreviations OL Oppression of Liberty RCV Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry’s Claim That Philosophy Is Poetry SE Simone Weil: Selected Essays 1934–43 SL Seventy Letters SNLG On Science, Necessity and the Love of God WG Waiting for God

Introduction Jack Manzi

This book compares the philosophical, religious, and ethical thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil (3 February 1909–24 August 1943) with that of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889–29 April 1951). Motivating this comparison is the surprising number of parallels that exist between them. Both lived and worked during the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of war. Both lived in a tense relationship with religion. Both were, at times, tempted by the teachings of Catholicism.1 Both underwent a profound and transformative mystical turn early into their careers. Both operated against the backdrop of escalating global conflict in the early twentieth century. Both were concerned, amongst other things, with questions of culture, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, science, and necessity. And, perhaps most notably, they both sought to radically embody their ideas and physically ‘live’ their philosophies. Interestingly, despite at times being concerned with similar issues and exploring similar themes, and despite even living in the same city, at the same time, and being involved in similar work (London, 1943), both seemed to be completely unaware of the other. One can only speculate as to what Weil might have made of Wittgenstein and vice versa, or whether the pair of them would have found any common ground. It is not the purpose of this book to try and speculate that. Rather, it is to see whether students of Weil and Wittgenstein, generations later, can find some fruitful common ground in comparing their philosophical thought, given the many similarities that they (at the very least, superficially) seem to share. Despite these similarities, there has been very little work in bringing these two philosophers together, outside of some notable exceptions. Wittgenstein’s student, Rush Rhees, found himself drawn to Weil’s work, finding many similarities between the two. Rhees’ Discussions of Simone Weil approaches some of the major themes of Weil’s work through a Wittgensteinian lens and, in particular, explores compatibilities in both thinkers’ thoughts on religion.2 Similarly, Peter Winch brings Weil and Wittgenstein together in The Just Balance, within which he charts a route through DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-1

2  Jack Manzi Weil’s thoughts on religion and philosophy by exploring rich and fruitful parallels with Wittgenstein.3 But outside of Winch’s and Rhees’ respective treatments, there exists no exhaustive attempt to flesh out the similarities between these two philosophers. This book seeks to address this, by collating nine new essays on the similarities (and dissimilarities) between the philosophical, religious, and ethical thought of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For those readers that are coming from Weil to Wittgenstein, or from Wittgenstein to Weil, it might be useful to first survey the intellectual lives of these two thinkers. Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-born philosopher whose path to philosophy wasn’t straightforward. Wittgenstein was born to one of the wealthiest families in Europe, his father (Karl Wittgenstein) being a magnate in the Austrian steel industry. Wittgenstein had originally pursued a career in engineering – specifically, aeronautics – before becoming fixated on mathematics and concerned with the study of logic and the foundations of mathematics. Wittgenstein sought out Bertrand Russell at the University of Cambridge, who shortly afterwards took him under his wing as his protégé. Consequently, Wittgenstein began to work chiefly on the philosophy of language, mathematics, and the foundations of logic. The only significant work published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was the result of his tutelage under Russell, and attempted to characterise the nature of the relationship between language and reality by the formulation of a perfect logical language, the ‘concept script’.4 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein puts forward the view that philosophical problems are linguistic confusions that chiefly arise from the ambiguity and vagueness of our language. The so-called ‘concept script’ intends to remove all ambiguity from language, so that concepts are rendered clear and philosophical problems are ‘dissolved’. The Tractatus attempts lay out the foundations of such a language via a series of hierarchically numbered propositions, containing no ‘arguments’ as such but instead presenting his findings as a series of declarative statements in an almost austere manner. However, towards the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein takes what has been described as a ‘mystical’ turn by considering the role and status of ineffable concepts (such as ethics and aesthetics) in language. This turn towards ‘mystical’ ways of thinking may have been precipitated by events in Wittgenstein’s life. Whilst writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. During this time, Wittgenstein would come upon Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, in what might be described as a moment of ‘conversion’ for Wittgenstein. Russell reflects:

Introduction  3 He went on duty to the town of Tarnov in Galicia, and happened to come upon a bookshop, which, however, seemed to contain nothing but picture postcards. However, he went inside and found that it contained just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He brought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times… He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.5 Wittgenstein, who was already an avid reader of thinkers like William James and Søren Kierkegaard, had reportedly undergone a transformative experience upon reading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief.6 He became known amongst his fellow soldiery as ‘the man with the gospels’, having committed several passages to memory. He would later describe the Gospel in Brief as ‘saving his life’.7 Arguably, Wittgenstein’s turn towards mysticism had a considerable influence on the Tractatus and its proposed account of language. For the early Wittgenstein, when one tries to make an ethical or religious statement, one is running up against the limits of language and consequently fails to say anything sensical. The reason for this is that the propositions, under the Tractarian account of language, can only faithfully represent true/false statements. For Wittgenstein, religious and ethical propositions cannot be relegated to true/false statements, they are instead statements of absolute value, and thus such propositions merely point (nonsensically) to some kind of ineffable truth. The concluding propositions of the Tractatus outline this view, resulting in the (in)famous final proposition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent” (TLP 7). These final propositions of the Tractatus are arguably the most controversial part of the book. Despite its popularity with the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap is reportedly said to have encouraged people to ignore the final propositions of the Tractatus as ‘confused’. In response, Wittgenstein wrote to Moritz Schlick (another prominent Vienna Circle member), commenting how he “[could not] imagine that Carnap should have so completely misunderstood the last sentences of the book and hence the fundamental conception of the entire book”.8 Indeed, for Wittgenstein, the ‘ethical’ aspect of the Tractatus seems to be the most important part of the work, as evidenced by a letter Wittgenstein sent to his publisher Ludwig von Ficker: My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, by my book.9

4  Jack Manzi Nevertheless, the debate around the role and import of this ‘mystical’ dimension of the Tractatus is one that is still prevalent in the literature. One of the most significant areas of disagreement in contemporary Wittgenstein study is over what Wittgenstein means by the ‘ineffable’ and whether or not it actually exists. Is Wittgenstein saying there is something transcendental, only we can’t talk about it? Or is Wittgenstein saying that the content of such propositions is well and truly nonsense – that there is nothing there to be gestured towards in the first place? More traditional readings of Wittgenstein tend to take the former view, that there really is something that is ‘unsayable’ and that the propositions of the Tractatus point towards it. Other more recent interpretations advance the view that Wittgenstein is actually trying to perform some kind of therapeutic work with his readers, by ridding them of the desire or temptation to point towards ineffable truths in the first place. Those familiar with Simone Weil may find something similar here in Wittgenstein’s discussions on the role and status of religious and ethical statements, and their ‘grammar’. Indeed, this connection has been made by Jacob Quick, who provides a comparative analysis of Weil and Wittgenstein on ‘religious grammar’ in Chapter 2 of this book. The ineffable nature of ethical and religious propositions, or what might be called the ‘supernatural’, is a key concern for both the early Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, forming a key part of both of their practices (importantly, the part of their practices that might be labelled as ‘mystical’). Wittgenstein would (temporarily) give up on philosophy, becoming a school teacher in Austria during the early 1920s. However, he later returned to philosophy, revising much of his thought in the Tractatus, and worked from the 1930s onwards on a new philosophical text that outlined his new approach (the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations). How much continuity there is between the Tractatus and the Investigations is, again, subject to much debate. But both can still be said to take the nature of philosophy and the function and role of philosophical problems as chief areas of concern. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein finds himself concerned with (amongst other things) the role and function of metaphysical statements (where ‘metaphysical’ refers to statements of necessities, essences, and/or exceptionless generalities) and the related ‘problem of dogmatism’ in philosophy. It was also during this time that Wittgenstein began to question what he saw as a fixation with science and scientism in both philosophy and society at large. From here, Wittgenstein would begin to diagnose many of the problems he saw afflicting philosophical practice, which would inform much of his commentary on philosophical method in the Investigations. In particular, he argued that philosophy (and the humanities at large) had

Introduction  5 become enamoured with the scientific method and the development and forwarding of theses and theories. For Wittgenstein, science brought with it a ‘craving for generality’ which inhibits other kinds of understanding aimed at the arts, music, philosophy, literature, and other forms of human understanding.10 Arising from this, Wittgenstein argues, is the view that “scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them-that does not occur to them”. Following on from this diagnosis of the ‘craving for generality’, in the Investigations Wittgenstein came to see philosophy as a tradition of making metaphysical statements about the essential nature of whatever its object of investigation happens to be at the time. Characterised in this way, philosophical accounts aim at describing their objects of investigation in the most general terms, by expressing their essential features. The problem, as Wittgenstein sees it, is that such metaphysical statements commit a kind of injustice to the concept that one is trying to articulate philosophically, by failing to acknowledge the variability and manifoldness of concept use. By making such metaphysical statements, we commit ourselves (dogmatically) to positions that may in the future be untenable or fail to adequately explain conceptual phenomena that fail to meet the ‘criteria’ posited by the philosophical account put forward. Furthermore, Wittgenstein argues that various temptations and biases (for example, the notion that concepts must have a single set of essential defining characteristics) often underlie and motivate our creation of metaphysical philosophical accounts. Wittgenstein came to see the Tractatus as making just such a metaphysical thesis about the nature of language, in attempting to articulate the metaphysical necessities of language. Consequently, the Investigations seeks to put forward a way of doing philosophy ‘without theses’, that is to say, without putting forward these kinds of metaphysical statements. Much of this involves what Wittgenstein describes elsewhere as a “kind of working on oneself…on one’s way of seeing things” (BT 407), and has at times drawn analogies by interpreters with a kind of therapeutic practice. Again, those familiar with Weil may find something of interest here. Wittgenstein’s concern with how it is we approach philosophical problems, how it is that we conceive of our proposed solutions to philosophical problems, and how it is that the shape of said solutions affects our thinking about things bears some similarities to Weil’s pedagogical reflections on how it is that one ought to approach problems and the cultivation of a particular kind of ‘attention’. I make this connection in more detail in Chapter 7 of this book, where I argue that both Wittgenstein and Weil are concerned with how the ‘self’ and its various biases can hinder our philosophical thinking.

6  Jack Manzi Simone Weil Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, teacher, and political activist. She studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, producing a thesis on science and perception in Descartes in 1931, before becoming a school teacher in philosophy. She was also heavily involved in the workers’ rights movement, becoming involved in union struggles, writing political commentaries and essays, and showing solidarity with workers by subjecting herself to the same working conditions as exploited factory workers. She would later become involved in the Spanish civil war through the Colonna Durruti, an international anarchist brigade, and in World War II as an operative for the French government working from London. Unsurprisingly for someone who occupied many different roles over her life, Weil’s philosophical work stretched across many different topics and interests. Her writings span many different areas of concern; she wrote extensively on epistemology, ethics, politics, ancient philosophy, religion, ethics, and mysticism. It would be difficult to categorise these topics into specific periods of her life, as it quite often happens that, during the course of one particular piece of work, she may touch on multiple topics and that thoughts established in the pursuit of, say, pedagogy turn out to have significant import for her thoughts on ethics. However, one may (cautiously) divide Weil’s career into two distinct phases: the ‘pre-mystical’, in which she is predominantly occupied with political, pedagogical, and epistemological work; and the ‘post-mystical’, in which her attention shifted more towards mysticism, religion, and ethics. As previously stated, and similarly to Wittgenstein, Weil spent some time as a school teacher and possessed a distinctive pedagogical approach which I take as being hugely influential in the evolution of her thought. Weil advocated an approach to study that emphasised seeking problems, rather than searching for answers.11 Indeed, Weil would go on to argue that students must Work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention.12 Here we find the seeds of one of Weil’s core philosophical ideas: that of attention. She is advocating for a pedagogical approach that encourages the student away from ‘attention’ as a sort of performative straining of concentration, towards the notion of ‘attention’ as a state wherein one is ready to receive the object of study in an objective and impartial mindset.

Introduction  7 There is an undeniably mystical flavour underlying Weil’s concept of attention. This is unsurprising, given that, like Wittgenstein, Weil too underwent a deep and transformative mystical ‘turn’ that earmarked her thought. In Waiting for God, she outlines three different ‘conversion experiences’ that she underwent which pushed her further towards Christianity and a religious and mystical outlook.13 The first was her visit to Portugal in 1935, where she witnessed the wives of local fishermen singing hymns together whilst walking in a procession. It was here that Weil recognised Christianity as being a ‘religion of the slaves’, beholden by necessity to a divine will. The second such experience happened in 1937, in a Romanesque chapel in Assisi, where St. Francis is said to have prayed. Here, Weil reports that she was compelled to her knees in prayer.14 The final such experience happened in 1938, in the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes. Here, despite suffering from migraines, Weil found a form of peace and joy from listening to the chanting of the monks. From this, Weil began to recognise “the possibility of living divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the passion of Christ entered into [her] being once and for all” (WfG 26). Similarly, whilst reading George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’ at Solesmes, Weil reported that, upon giving her full attention to the poem, she felt as though “Christ himself came down and took possession of [her]” (WFG 27). It is here that we find the marrying of her pedagogical view of ‘attention’ with that of an ethical or supernatural view. Attention, for Weil, becomes a sort of supernatural act, in which one is ‘empty and ready to be penetrated’ by the object of investigation, and a state in which one is ready to truly recognise the suffering of others, engage in compassionate acts, and consequently be closer to God. One of the most distinctive features of Weil’s intellectual life is the extent to which she sought to embody her philosophy, and in particular, her desire to force herself to pay attention to those that suffer. It is documented that, as a child, Weil sent her allocation of chocolate and sugar to soldiers fighting on the front lines in the war. This propensity towards solidarity and living as the ‘other’ extended throughout her life. In 1934, she took a break from teaching to work in the Parisian factories, so that she might experience first-hand the kind of exploitation and worker struggle that she was concerned with in her writing. It was during this time she experienced what she saw as the dehumanising and humiliating effects that factories had on those working in them, and so this became an important theme of some of her political writings.15 It is out of a similar sense of solidarity that, in 1943, Weil is reported to have malnourished herself to the point of death, having starved herself by limiting her food rations to match the food in her estimate available to the French living in occupied territory. The

8  Jack Manzi coroner’s report concluded that Weil had completed suicide, dying from a cardiac arrest brought on by starvation and tuberculosis. Although Weil was a prolific writer throughout her life, her last few years saw her producing an incredible amount of material and some of her most significant pieces of work. Much of this was published in the literary magazine Cahiers de Sud, including her ‘Iliad or Poem of Force’ parts 1 and 2, ‘About the Workers’, ‘The Future of Science’, ‘The Agony of a Civilization Seen through a Poem’. But as well as the work published in the Cahiers du Sud, Weil had also worked on a number of unfinished drafts and other pieces that would become some of her best-known work: the play Venice Saved (1940, although not published until 1955), much of the material for Waiting for God (1942), The Need for Roots (1943), and various essays such as ‘Human Personality’ (1943) and ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’ (1943).16 It was also during this time that Weil left her notebooks with Gustave Thibon, who would later compile the collection Gravity and Grace from them (1942).17 The content matter of these pieces is too broad to summarise here, but they range from socio-political considerations of human beings in society, the human condition, religious and ethical thought, and considerations of the supernatural. There is much in this very short intellectual biography of Simone Weil that those familiar with Wittgenstein will find familiar. Both spent time as schoolteachers and concerned themselves with pedagogy, which arguably had a significant impact on their later philosophy. Both sought to ‘embody’ their philosophy, holding themselves to exacting high standards and seeing philosophy as an activity rather than as a set of doctrines. Both found themselves increasingly concerned with the religious and the mystical, affecting their philosophical style and methodology as it developed. Both were drawn to manual work, seeing the importance of working with one’s hands. Both were sceptical of ‘scientism’ and its impact or impediment on more ‘human’ understandings of the world. And, of course, both were radical philosophers. Between Weil and Wittgenstein It is pleasing to note that the authors that have contributed to this collection are a good mix of ‘Wittgensteinians’ looking to Simone Weil, ‘Weilians’ looking to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and those somewhere in between. Accordingly, this project cannot be viewed as an attempt by one camp to assimilate the other or to force an artificial comparison (as is sometimes the case in philosophical comparative works). Rather, it is evidence that there is meaningful and fruitful dialogue to be had between the two thinkers. Mario von der Ruhr opens the collection with his chapter, entitled ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief’. Von der Ruhr’s

Introduction  9 chapter looks at the similarities and differences between Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s attitudes towards religion, the evolution of their beliefs, and how this intersects with their philosophical outlooks. In particular, von der Ruhr examines how both Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s ‘careers’ as philosophers impacted on their personal beliefs, by exploring how and where ‘philosophy’ can be distinguished from ‘personal confession’, and the distinction between autobiography and philosophy. The second chapter of this collection, ‘To Speak of the Divine: Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar’, is offered by Jacob Quick. In this chapter, Quick explores how both thinkers conceive of the relationship between language and the more ‘profound’ aspects of life, such as ethics, aesthetics, and religion. Quick observes that, for both Weil and Wittgenstein, religious language is not simply a speculation about things that may or may not exist in the world, but rather, offers an alternative framework for interpreting reality, one which is open and receptive to ineffability. Consequently, Quick concludes that for both thinkers, the religious expressions and utterances that make up religious grammar are best understood when situated within the embodied practices from which they are formulated. The third chapter, ‘Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms’ by Philip Wilson, explores the prevalence of mysticism in both Weil and Wittgenstein and argues that by reading Weil through the lens of Wittgenstein we can configure mysticism in new ways. Wilson argues that together they open up the possibility of a pluralist understanding of mysticism and how mysticism itself can be employed in connection with philosophy and scientific study, rather than in confrontation with it. In particular, Wilson argues that Weil and Wittgenstein demonstrate how the ‘human face’ of mysticism can be preserved via investigating how mysticism is rooted in the way we live. The fourth chapter, ‘Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention’ by Hannah Winther, considers Wittgenstein’s claim that the purpose of the Tractatus is an ethical one by exploring its mysticism through the lens of Weil’s philosophy. Following Rush Rhees, this chapter brings together and compares Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach in the Tractatus with Weil’s concept of attention. Winther outlines an ‘ethics of attention’ that proceeds from both thinkers and applies this idea to current debates on attention and the attention economy. Winther examines how both Weil and Wittgenstein can be seen as understanding attention to be a moral rather than an intellectual skill and outlines how this can be useful in addressing some of the issues around the ‘attention economy’ and the grasp that technology seems to have on our attention. The fifth chapter, ‘Struggling with the Supernatural’ by Hugo Strandberg, examines the work done by Peter Winch in bringing together the philosophy of Weil and Wittgenstein. In this chapter, Strandberg looks at what

10  Jack Manzi he takes to be a key source of trouble for Winch, which is the divergence between Weil and Wittgenstein on the notion of the ‘supernatural’. Consequently, this chapter explores a proposed tension between Wittgenstein and Weil on the basis of ‘naturalness’ and ‘supernaturalness’. Strandberg seeks to resolve this tension by casting ‘the supernatural’ as an object of philosophical contemplation, and one that philosophy cannot do without. In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Weil Meets Wittgenstein’, Palle Yourgrau explores the different receptions that the posthumously published collections of writings from both Wittgenstein and Weil have received. In particular, Yourgrau compares Gravity and Grace, which was published by Gustave Thibon and has been criticised by scholars for being a reflection of Thibon’s own Catholic views, with G. H. von Wright’s Culture and Value (which has historically received a much friendlier reception). Yourgrau defends Gravity and Grace from some of these criticisms, arguing that it is a faithful representation of Simone Weil’s thought, before comparing it with Culture and Value in order to demonstrate important resonances (and dissonances) between the two thinkers. In Chapter 7, ‘Writing (Out) The Self: Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing’, I explore the diaristic practices of both thinkers and explore how diaristic writing for both Weil and Wittgenstein was used as a vehicle for philosophical thinking. Although both thinkers had very different styles of diaristic writing, I argue that both Weil and Wittgenstein made use of this style of writing as a means to achieve very similar ends. In particular, I argue that both Weil and Wittgenstein recognise a threat of an ‘overreach of the self’ in philosophical thinking, in that one’s personal biases and prejudices can distort philosophical thinking and impede objective, impartial thought. I argue that Weil’s diaristic writing attempts to achieve this through a ‘negation of the self’, whereas Wittgenstein can be seen to advocate for a ‘confrontation with the self’. I conclude by placing these two different approaches to diaristic writing in the different traditions of hypomnemata and confession (as examples of ‘writing the self’, as understood by Michel Foucault).18 Chapter 8, entitled ‘Affliction: Pain and The Problems of Modernity’, is contributed by C. M. Djordjevic. In this chapter, Djordjevic explores how both Weil and Wittgenstein understand the concept of ‘pain’ and how modern society attempts to make sense of it as part of the human condition. Starting from Elaine Scarry’s modernist account of pain, Djordjevic’s chapter draws on Weil and Wittgenstein’s understanding of the ‘human uses’ of pain in order to highlight the limitations of modernist conceptions. Djordjevic brings together these ‘human uses’ with what he labels as ‘supernatural uses’, in order to establish a radically different account of the role of pain in human forms of life.

Introduction  11 Finally, in Chapter 9, entitled ‘Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good’, David Levy critically examines a claim made repeatedly throughout this collection that Weil and Wittgenstein can be said to have significant similarities with regard to their conception of ethics. In particular, Levy argues that whilst Weil and Wittgenstein can be said to share some superficial similarities in that they are both opposed to the creation of heuristic decision-making devices for the purposes of moral improvement and/ or ‘manufacturing good’ (what Levy labels ‘moral machines’), examining their reasons for the rejection of such devices reveals irreconcilable differences between the two. Levy argues that where Weil might be described as a ‘realist’ with regard to moral improvement (in the sense that Weil advocates an ‘outward orientation to reality’, Wittgenstein might instead be labelled an ‘irrealist’ in his inwards orientation towards one’s own life. The result is that, despite arriving at a similar position in the face of moral machines and ‘manufacturing good’, what underpins this shared ethical position for both Weil and Wittgenstein remains irreconcilably different. Beyond Weil and Wittgenstein As previously stated, the purpose of this collection is to bring the philosophical, religious, and ethical thought of these two contemporaneous philosophers into dialogue with one another. But for what purpose? What is the import of bringing these two philosophers together, outside of noting some interesting similarities and differences? What is the end result, and what are we left with for looking beyond Weil and Wittgenstein? Certainly, part of the value of this collection lies in clarifying what are, at times, frustratingly enigmatic philosophical works, by viewing them through a different (although sympathetic) lens. Where Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein run together is often where they are at their most abstract and difficult to follow: considerations of ethics, the supernatural, what it means to be a human being embedded in lived practices (or ‘forms of life’, as Wittgenstein might call them). But there is also value in realising that both Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophical work is still significant today and that we are as a collective perhaps only now becoming dimly aware of some of the issues they sought to tackle. As Hannah Winther comments in Chapter 4, we are living in an increasingly technological world, which in turn brings ever-increasing demands on our attention and our understanding. Furthermore, and perhaps frighteningly for both Weil and Wittgenstein, ‘scientism’ and the scientific paradigm is now more firmly entrenched in our societal and educational consciousnesses than ever. In universities across the world, humanities are on the decline, in favour of ‘STEM’ subjects and fields of research that operate according

12  Jack Manzi to a scientific paradigm.19 One wonders whether our scientific understanding of the world comes at the cost of more human understanding of the world. Certainly, it would seem that the room for such understanding in our lives is becoming vanishingly small. Reading Weil and Wittgenstein together may yet yield new frameworks and conceptual toolkits for addressing some of these problems. Notes 1 As is noted by Mario von der Ruhr in Chapter 1 of this book, Wittgenstein’s relationship to Catholicism was strained. Perhaps tempted is too strong a word here for Wittgenstein, as despite being baptised as a Catholic and having a Catholic burial service, he spent much of his life actively resisting Catholicism and the teachings of the Catholic church. Similarly, Weil refused a Catholic baptism, although she may have been baptised as she lay dying. For more information, see Chapter 1 of this book, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief’. 2 Rush Rhees, Discussions of Simone Weil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 3 Peter Winch, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: German and English Edition, trans. By C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981). 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letter from Bertrand Russell to Lady Ottoline Morell, December 20, 1919. Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore, ed. by G. H. von Wright (London: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 82. 6 Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief (Guildford: White Crow Books, 2010). 7 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 115–116. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein Letter to Moritz Schlick, August 8, 1932. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, ed. by M. Nedo and M. Ranchetti (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 255. 9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, ­December 6, 1919. Wittgenstein, Sources and Perspectives, ed. by C. Grant Luckhardt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 94. 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper& Row, 1980), p. 17. 11 Robert Zaretsky, The subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (London: University of Chicago Press, 2021), p.  90, see also Anne Reynaud, Simone Weil: Leçons de Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 7. 12 Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. by Price, Simone Weil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 59. 13 Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Routledge, 2021). 14 “[S]omething stronger than I compelled me for the first time to go down on my knees” (WfG 26). 15 For example, Simone Weil, ‘Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression’, in Oppression and Liberty, trans. by John Petrie and ­Arthur Wills (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 36–117 16 Simone Weil, Simone Weil, Venice Saved, ed. and tr. by S. Panizza and P. ­Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

Introduction  13   Note that Venice Saved was out of print for years in France and has been virtually ignored up until the recent translation by Panizza and Wilson.   Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952).   See also Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. by Siân Miles (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), pp. 69–98 & 221–230. 17 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2002). 18 A Greek term that can be translated variously into ‘reminder’, ‘note’, ‘public record’, or ‘commentary’. 19 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Bibliography Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990). Reynaud, Anne, Simone Weil: Leçons de Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Rhees, Rush, Discussions of Simone Weil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Tolstoy, Leo, The Gospel in Brief (Guildford: White Crow Books, 2010). Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952). Weil, Simone, Oppression and Liberty, trans. by John Petrie and Arthur Wills (New York: Routledge, 2001). Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2002). Weil, Simone, Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. by Siân Miles (London: Penguin Classics, 2005). Weil, Simone, Simone Weil, Venice Saved, trans. by Silvia Panizza and Philip Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Weil, Simone, Waiting for God (New York: Routledge, 2021). Winch, Peter, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore, ed. by G. H. von Wright (London: Basil Blackwell, 1974). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Wittgenstein, Sources and Perspectives, ed. by C. Grant Luckhardt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: German and English Edition, trans. by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, ed. by M. Nedo and M. Ranchetti (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Zaretsky, Robert, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (London: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief Mario von der Ruhr

Introduction In his fine book, Simone Weil – The Just Balance,1 Peter Winch has drawn attention to some of the striking affinities – and equally pronounced differences – between Simone Weil’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s treatment of such topics as the proper métier of philosophy, language and concept formation, the notion of the self, the relation between thought and action, and the nature of human beings. His motivation for highlighting these parallels is not to show that the two thinkers hold certain philosophical position in common, however, but the conviction that even though ‘their emphasis and direction of interest are usually rather different, these very differences may often illuminate what each of them is concerned about’.2 This methodological principle also informs the following discussion of Wittgenstein’s and Weil’s attitude towards religious belief. In so far as it combines autobiographical testimony with philosophical reflection, that attitude has a personal as well as an impersonal dimension, and it is precisely the interplay between these that is of special interest. How, for example, do Wittgenstein’s and Weil’s respective philosophical vocations bear on their personal beliefs about God and the world? Must the kind of disinterested analysis typically associated with philosophy be strictly distinguished from personal confession? Are Wittgenstein and Weil committed to this ideal? If so, then where do they draw the line – if, indeed, a clear line can be drawn at all – between philosophy and autobiography? Hopefully, the discussion to follow will shed further light on these questions. Spiritual Journeys – Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Wittgenstein was baptized into the Catholic faith,3 but we know from his biographer Ray Monk that his reaction to the catechism classes he subsequently received at a local Catholic church already betrayed a certain hesitancy or scepticism: ‘He listened carefully to the questions put to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-2

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  15 children by the priest, with the Dean in attendance, and then said suddenly, and very audibly: “Nonsense!”’.4 Over time, Wittgenstein not only came to develop a strong dislike of the Catholic establishment,5 but serious doubts about central articles of the Catholic faith, whether in connection with the Virgin Birth,6 the doctrine of Transubstantiation,7 or beliefs in miraculous occurrences more generally.8 Indeed, when he learnt that some of his friends had converted to Catholicism, he confessed: ‘I could not possibly bring myself to believe all the things that they believe’.9 Consonant with this admission, Wittgenstein did not himself practise the Catholic faith. He was neither a ‘lapsed Catholic’ in the sense of having gradually drifted away from once firmly held convictions, nor did he ever seek a reconciliation with Catholicism.10 On the contrary, he once told his former student Maurice O’Connor Drury, ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view’.11 Whether the point of the remark was to distance himself from any kind of religious affiliation, humbly acknowledge his shortcomings as a human being, or testify to the seriousness with which he engaged in philosophical reflection, it already hints at a certain ambiguity or ambivalence in his attitude towards religion. But even though Wittgenstein may not have been a Catholic, a Christian, or even a religious believer in a broad sense of the term, neither did his Weltanschauung concur with the atheism of an Albert Camus or the agnosticism of a Bertrand Russell. His views on the subject defy easy categorization, but the religious motif – including the difficult question of what it means to believe – certainly occupied Wittgenstein throughout his life and surfaces repeatedly, not only in his personal diaries and private correspondence but in his philosophical work. Nor is his personal attitude towards religion fixed or dogmatic. When he was stationed in Galicia in 1910, for example, he suddenly – and much to the surprise of outside observers – found himself captivated by Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief: It became for him a kind of talisman: he carried it wherever he went, and read it so often that he came to know whole passages of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as ‘the man with the gospels’. For a time he – who before the war had struck Russell as being ‘more terrible with Christians’ than Russell himself – became not only a believer, but an evangelist, recommending Tolstoy’s Gospel to anyone in distress.12 In his 1914–1918 Notebooks, Wittgenstein wonders again what belief in God entails, concluding that the answer involves seeing that life has meaning, that ‘conscience is the voice of God’, that ‘the facts of the world are not the end of the matter’, and that ‘we are in a certain sense dependent’.13 Similar observations inform his work on the manuscript that, in 1922, was published under the title Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus: ‘Philosophy sets

16  Mario von der Ruhr limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science.’ [4.113], ‘We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.’ [6.52], ‘Ethics is transcendental’ [6.421], ‘The solution of the riddle of life… lies outside space and time.’ [6.4312], ‘God does not reveal himself in the world’ [6.432], and ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words…. They are what is mystical’ [6.522].14 Not unlike Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, one of whose self-proclaimed purposes was to set limits to (empirical) knowledge in order to ‘make room for faith [Glaube]’15, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus attempts to draw the boundaries of language and meaning from within, as it were, so as to create a legitimate logical and conceptual space for mysticism, transcendent – i.e. non-reductive – moral and aesthetic value, and religious belief. For both thinkers, the raison d’être of the latter is the result of philosophical – and therefore impersonal – reflection, rather than the product of personal experience hankering after a rationally sanctioned apologia. This, as D. Z. Phillips has rightly argued, is as it should be, since a philosopher’s personal views are always secondary to the elucidatory task at hand: What he must have is respect for the belief he is investigating. He may want to oppose it, proclaim it or simply note it as a serious point of view, but he cannot dismiss it as a product of confusion.16 In other words, proper respect for the object of one’s inquiry demands a certain kind of disinterestedness, one that acknowledges the existential import of critical reflection without, however, prejudging its outcome. That Wittgenstein shows such respect, not only in the context of philosophical analysis but in the concrete circumstances of his professional life, also comes out in his views on the role of religion in school education. On this issue, his ideas differed sharply from those of Josef Putre, the head of school in Otterthal, where Wittgenstein began to teach in September 1924. As Ray Monk reports: While Putre discouraged praying in schools, Wittgenstein prayed with his pupils every day. When Putre once remarked that he was against paying lip-service to the Catholic faith, and considered it meaningless, Wittgenstein replied: ‘People kiss each other; that too is done with the lips.’17 There is no doubt that Wittgenstein’s daily prayers with his students were motivated by a concern for their spiritual well-being and the thought that, independently of their particular religious affiliations, serious prayer was intimately bound up with an examination of conscience and, as an

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  17 acknowledgement of the suppliants’ dependency on something ‘higher’ or transcendent, would also instil in them a proper sense of humility. Josef Putre’s aversion against pretence may have been commendable, but on this occasion, it also prevented him from appreciating the deeper reasons for retaining religious worship as part of the pupils’ school education. Many years later, as he was recovering from a broken hip in Norway, those reasons prompted Wittgenstein to initiate yet another self-examination: Last year with God’s help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then.18 Not long thereafter, on February 15, 1937, he noted in his diary: ‘Like the insect around the light, so I buzz around the New Testament’.19 At the same time, he had to confess: I don’t have a belief in a salvation through the death of Christ; or at least not yet. I also don’t feel that I am on the way to such a belief, but I consider it possible that one day I will understand something here of which I understand nothing now, which means nothing to me now & that I will then have a belief that I don’t have now…. In my soul there is winter (now) like all around me. Everything is snowed in, nothing turns green & blossoms. But I should therefore patiently await whether I am destined to see a spring.20 These illuminating remarks are part of an elaborate credo, summarized in his diaries under the heading ‘What I believe now’21: I believe that I should not fear people and their opinions when I want to do what I consider right. I believe that I should not lie; that I should be good to people; that I should see myself as I really am; that I should sacrifice my comfort when something higher is at stake; that I should be cheerful in a good way when it is granted to me and when not, that I should then endure the gloom with patience & steadfastness.22 On the one hand, Wittgenstein’s personal credo is still far removed from the Apostle’s Creed or similar professions of faith. Unlike his Catholic friends, for example, he does not believe that Jesus Christ was ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit’ and ‘born of the Virgin Mary’, nor yet that ‘he will come to judge the living and the dead’.23 On the other hand, there are

18  Mario von der Ruhr striking parallels between his own ethical orientation and that of a more traditional believer, including a shared commitment to the virtues of courage, truthfulness, charity (love of neighbour), self-renunciation, patience, and gratitude. The existential dimension of Wittgenstein’s conception of religious belief, too, comes surprisingly close to that expressed in, say, J. Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity: Belief … is not demonstrable: it is an about-turn; only he who turns about is receptive to it; and because our inclination does not cease to point us in another direction, it remains a turn that is new every day; only in a lifelong conversion can we become aware of what it means to say ‘I believe’.24 Wittgenstein concurs that belief is not a matter of intellectual assent to a set of abstract propositions, but a spiritual orientation that shows itself in concrete action or praxis and that, moreover, requires constant work on oneself. As Ratzinger puts it: Belief was never simply the attitude automatically corresponding to the whole slant of human life; it has always been a decision calling on the depths of existence, a decision that in every age demanded a turnabout by man that can only be achieved by an effort of will.25 Now, it is worth emphasizing that, apart from Wittgenstein’s observations in the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, his 1938 Lectures on Religion, and various remarks in Culture and Value – a collection of comments spanning the period 1914 to 1951 – his scattered reflections on religious belief do not constitute a clearly defined philosophical position on religion. As Gareth Moore rightly cautions: Very many of the remarks of Wittgenstein which are held to constitute his contribution to the philosophy of religion have in reality little to do with the philosophy of religion; they are rather expressions of a particular religious sensibility, or expressions of a religious point of view.26 Among other things, that religious point of view reveals a deep understanding of the significance of Christ’s resurrection for the hope of personal salvation27 and acknowledges God’s ongoing creativity in relation to the world as a whole.28 It is also one in which God’s name is regularly invoked, as these representative samples from Wittgenstein’s writings illustrate: I would like to say, “This book is written to the glory of God”, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood.29

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  19 God let me be pious but not eccentric!30 Believe that at any moment God can demand everything from you! Be truly aware of this! Then ask that he grant you the gift of life!31 To God alone be praise!32 In these remarks, the meaning of ‘God’ is not reducible to that of ‘the world’, any more than Wittgenstein’s praise of God is to be understood in the sense in which the barkeeper’s serving of a double whiskey might be greeted with ‘Praise the Lord!’ Does this mean that, Wittgenstein’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was ‘a religious man’, after all? The problem is that an affirmative answer would merely prompt the further question, ‘What kind of religious believer was he?’, which in turn could only be answered by reference to the above mosaic of personal experiences, reflections, and remarks. For this reason, it seems to me that the quest for a more user-friendly label of Wittgenstein’s religious convictions had better be abandoned altogether. Instead, we should rest content with Ray Monk’s observation that, regardless of Wittgenstein’s uneasy relationship with institutionalized religion, ‘there seems to be something appropriate in [his] funeral being attended by a religious ceremony’, because ‘in a way that is centrally important but difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious life’.33 For the purposes of the present discussion, it is also worth noting that, in spite of being attracted to certain aspects of Christianity, over time the young Wittgenstein’s reservations about his catechism classes become increasingly more pronounced and self-conscious, especially in his diaries: I believe that I should not be superstitious, that is, that I should not perform magic on myself with words I may be reading, that is, that I should & must not talk myself into a sort of faith, a sort of unreason. I shall not sully reason.34 How does Wittgenstein’s respect for reason relate to his vocation as a philosopher? I shall return to this issue in the final section of this paper, where I compare his conception of philosophy with Simone Weil’s. Spiritual Journeys – Simone Weil (1909–1943) Simone Weil was of Jewish lineage but never embraced the faith of her ancestors. The grandparents on her mother’s side had not practised it, either, nor did it inform the lives of her own parents. Indeed, her father’s attitude towards religion, which dominated the intellectual atmosphere in which she grew up, tended to fluctuate between atheism and agnosticism. Not surprisingly, even the distinction between Jews and Gentiles

20  Mario von der Ruhr remained unknown to the young Simone until she was ten years old.35 However, this ideologically ‘neutral’ upbringing did not prevent her from developing a fine religious sensibility or, even more strikingly, adopting an all-pervasive and distinctly Christian perspective on life. Reflecting on the experiences and insights that engendered it, Weil tells us in her extended ‘Spiritual Autobiography’ that ‘I always adopted the Christian attitude as the only possible one. I might say that I was born, I grew up, and I always remained within the Christian inspiration’.36 The confession was born of the conviction that it was possible to live one’s life in the spirit of Christ’s commands without, however, consciously affirming the dogmas of institutionalized forms of Christian worship. Spanning the previous 18 years of her life, Weil’s spiritual self-assessment37 thus reveals a progressively deepening attitude whose character remains fundamentally unchanged, viz., one marked by the spirit of poverty, love of one’s neighbour, the pursuit of justice, and a certain kind of purity.38 As she recalls: Of course I knew quite well that my conception of life was Christian. That is why it never occurred to me that I could enter the Christian community. I had the idea that I was born inside. But to add dogma to this conception of life, without being forced to do so by disputable evidence, would have seemed to me like a lack of honesty.39 Like the younger Wittgenstein, the adolescent Weil already felt a certain resistance to official Church doctrine; far from being self-evidently true, it seemed to her intellectually suspect. As a result, she admits: Keeping away from dogma in this way, I was prevented by a sort of shame from going into churches, though all the same I like being in them. Nevertheless, I had three contacts with Catholicism that really counted.40 These contacts include a visit to Portugal (1934/1935), during which Weil realized that ‘Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others’;41 a stay in Assisi (1937), where ‘something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees,’42 and a period of prayerful meditation at the Abbey of Solesmes (1938), where she had a mystical experience of Christ’s very presence: Christ himself came down and took possession of me. … I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them.43

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  21 Simone Pétrement rightly describes Weil’s faith in the reality of this manifestation as ‘an astonishing event’44 – astonishing because, even though she was not a believer, she nevertheless embraced the experience with a sense of absolute certainty. As Pétrement perceptively remarks: One has touched something that lies beyond oneself; beyond, though not as one touches palpable objects—beyond but within oneself. Interior intimo meo. One has been in contact with a reality that can only be attained through the inner life, which, however, goes far beyond what one is in oneself. One has touched in one’s self something much greater and more ancient than the self.45 In the light of these encounters and, by way of culmination, the mystical revelation of Christ himself, it is perhaps not surprising that Weil should have come to feel particularly close to the Catholic faith,46 even though she never crossed the threshold to full communion with it. Here, one begins to see a major asymmetry between Wittgenstein and Weil’s relation to Christianity: while the former was baptized into the Catholic faith, subsequently found himself ‘outside’ the Catholic Church, and had no wish to re-enter it, Weil not only identified as Christian but longed to participate in the sacraments, most notably the Eucharist.47 Even so, important similarities remain, such as a commitment to absolute moral standards and a range of distinctively ‘Christian’ values, an almost instinctive suspicion of religious dogma, and a deeply felt antipathy against religious institutions as such. Even Weil was certain that she must remain outside the Church: I am kept outside the Church by philosophical difficulties which I fear are irreducible. They do not concern the mysteries themselves but the accretions of definition with which the Church has seen fit to clothe them in the course of centuries; and above all the use in this connexion of the words anathema sit.48 For Weil, that fateful Latin phrase signifies far more than innocuous disagreement with an opposing viewpoint. In the course of the Church’s chequered history, she thinks, it has come to symbolize outright condemnation, forced evangelization, subjugation, and oppression: It was in any case never said by Christ that those who bring the Gospel should be accompanied, even at a distance, by battleships. Their presence gives the message a different character; and when the blood of the martyrs is avenged by arms it can hardly retain the supernatural efficacy with which tradition endows it. With Caesar as well as the Cross, we hold too many aces in our hand.49

22  Mario von der Ruhr In spite of her righteous indignation over the way in which the Church has dealt with dissenting voices, including spiritual traditions beyond its own ideological purview, Weil senses that her Christian orientation still makes her a member of a Church understood, not as a worldly institution, but as the union of faithfuls or the ‘body’ of Christ: Nevertheless, although I am outside the Church or, more precisely, on the threshold, I cannot resist the feeling that I am really within it. Nothing is closer to me than those who are within it.50 Now, in spite of Weil’s criticism of the Church as an institution – an offshoot of her belief in the oppressive nature of collectivities more generally – she does concede that it plays a vital role in providing its adherents with spiritual guidance: The function of the Church as the collective keeper of dogma is indispensable. She has the right and the duty to punish those who make a clear attack upon her within the specific range of this function, by depriving them of the sacraments.51 Weil has no principled objections, then, to the Church’s safeguarding of the gospel message and the Christian mysteries, or even to reprimanding those who seek to undermine her mission. Nor, for that matter, is her criticism of the institution meant to blur the distinction between the true faith and heretical subversions of it: The speculations which it is legitimate to condemn as heretical are those which diminish the reality of divine things by veiling, under the appearance of reconciling them, the contradictions which are their mystery. For example, making the Son an only half-divine being. Or modifying the divinity and the humanity in Christ so as to reconcile them. Or reducing the bread and wine of the Eucharist to a mere symbol. The mysteries then cease to be an object of contemplation; they are no longer of any use.52 Thus, Weil’s critique of the Church is much more nuanced than it might at first appear, even though these qualifying addenda leave her other reservations – e.g. about the manner of its missionary activities, its eradication of alien spiritualities, etc. – intact and do not persuade her not to remain ‘on the threshold’. On the contrary, her personal credo consists not only of positive professions of faith but of a negative self-assessment in the form of 35 ‘heretical’ theses assembled in correspondence to Fr Couturier

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  23 in New York, in the autumn of 1942, and later published under the title Letter to a Priest.53 The point of this letter was to gain clarity about the extent to which her personal convictions ran counter to canonical Catholic teaching. Fr Couturier’s reaction to Weil’s claim that, for example, ‘we do not know for certain that there have not been incarnations previous to that of Jesus and that Osiris in Egypt, Krishna in India were not of that number’, is easy to fathom.54 And yet, in spite of her doubts and reservations, Weil sums up her religious convictions in the credo, ‘I believe in God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, the Eucharist, the teachings of the Gospel’.55 Recorded towards the end of her life, this resolute affirmation also sheds further light on her understanding of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, which subsequently appeared to her as a mirror in which one could already see early ‘intimations of Christianity’.56 Suddenly, Homer’s Iliad seemed to be ‘bathed in Christian light’,57 and Plato appeared as a mystic58 because he not only ‘recognized the essential truth, namely, that God is the Good’, but ‘by allusions in his works, pointed to the dogmas of the Trinity, Mediation, the Incarnation, the Passion, and to the notions of grace and salvation through love’.59 Weil’s reflections on school education, too, are strongly influenced by her Christian outlook, as her essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’60 illustrates. It was written for her friend, Father Jean-Marie Perrin, who had been in contact with a group of Christian students in Montpellier. While the essay espouses a Christian conception of learning and associates prayer with a certain kind of attention,61 it also argues that the spiritual effects of a properly devised curriculum are quite independent of the students’ religious affiliation.62 Thus, the study of mathematics is valuable precisely because the solution to a mathematical problem cannot be forced – it sets a limit to the student’s will and, by doing so, helps to foster a sense of humility. While Wittgenstein would not go so far as to say that the primary purpose of a school education was to ‘aim solely at increasing the power of attention with a view to prayer,’63 he would no doubt have applauded Weil’s suggestion that, for intellectual as well as spiritual reasons, the study of mathematics should be compulsory for all students. Philosophical Vocation & Religious Belief

Wittgenstein and Weil were both philosophers who took their vocation extremely seriously, not only in the sense that their engagement with philosophical problems was rigorous, tenacious, and nuanced, but because of the personal demands it made on them. ‘Work on philosophy’, Wittgenstein once remarked, ‘is actually closer to working on oneself. On one’s own understanding. On the way one sees things. (And of what one

24  Mario von der Ruhr demands of them.)’64 Similarly for Weil. As she puts it in her Notebooks: ‘Philosophy—search for wisdom—is a virtue. It is a matter of working on oneself. A transformation of being. (Turning the whole soul)’.65 Elsewhere, she insists that I have an extremely severe standard for intellectual honesty, so severe that I never met anyone who did not seem to fall short of it in more than one respect; and I am always afraid of failing in it myself.66 For both thinkers, the required work on oneself goes hand in hand with a certain kind of disinterestedness and detachment. ‘The philosopher’, Wittgenstein famously remarked, ‘is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him into a philosopher’.67 Weil perfectly echoes this observation when she writes: The degree of intellectual honesty that is obligatory for me, by reason of my particular vocation, demands that my thought should be indifferent to all ideas without exception, including for instance materialism and atheism; it must be equally welcoming and equally reserved with regard to everyone of them.68 For Weil as well as for Wittgenstein, philosophy can only be conducted in the Socratic spirit, one that commits the interlocutors to following the argument wherever it may lead, in spite of a strong and countervailing tendency to persuade rather than convince the other of the truth of one’s own position. The principal aim of philosophy is to attain clarity about ‘the way things really are’ and thus to dispel conceptual and other kinds of confusion by showing how these are rooted in hasty generalizations, misleading or false analogies, category mistakes, insufficient attention to linguistic contexts, etc. Intriguingly, the congruence between Wittgenstein and Weil on this point even includes a well-known simile: Wittgenstein: ‘What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’.69 Weil: ‘We are like flies stuck to the bottom of a bottle, attracted by the light and unable to go there’.70 Philosophy may liberate us from a certain kind of entrapment by enabling us to see things from a different point of view. But this, as Wittgenstein acknowledges, is a steep proposition: A philosopher says ‘Look at things like this!’ – but in the first place that doesn’t ensure that people will look at things like that, and in the

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  25 second place his admonition may come altogether too late; it’s possible, moreover, that such an admonition can achieve nothing in any case and that the impetus for such a change in the way things are perceived has to originate somewhere else entirely.71 Mindful of Plato’s allegory of the cave and the philosopher’s role in leading its prisoners from the realm of appearance into the light of reality,72 Weil would no doubt agree with this observation. But there is another question here, viz., what demands can a philosophical vocation make in relation to one’s religious beliefs? Weil’s own response to this existential question could not be more resolute. ‘My vocation’, she says, ‘imposes upon me the necessity of remaining outside the Church… in order that I may serve God and the Christian faith in the realm of the intelligence’.73 On the face of it, Weil’s conclusion sounds odd, for it is one thing to reject the idea of philosophy as ancilla theologiae (handmaiden of theology), but quite another to forego baptism into the Catholic faith, say, or membership of a Christian Church because of the disinterested nature of philosophical inquiry. Unless ‘disinterested’ is taken to be synonymous with ‘indifferent’, a concern for intellectual integrity is surely not incompatible with devotion to a particular form of religious life. In this connection, it is noteworthy that even Weil’s closest Catholic friends could not help wondering whether she might not have joined the Church already if her elevated conception of philosophy had not got in the way. Thus, Father Jean-Marie Perrin laments that ‘in Simone Weil the conflict between the certitude of religious experience and her philosophical mentality went very deep’74 and that ‘she had difficulty on account of a certain rationalism which the great discovery of Christ had not removed’.75 Weil’s friend Gustave Thibon, too, sees in her refusal to be baptized ‘the sign of a deep interior separation’ between her desire for full participation in the sacraments, and ‘an intellectual rigidity’76 which prompted her to question whatever her conscience could not accept. As for Weil’s reservations about the doctrinal dimension of the mysteries, Thibon rightly points out that ‘A great many Catholics … have never thought of asking themselves whether they adhere with all their mind to the articles of the Council of Trent. Often they do not even know them’.77 But if Weil nevertheless refused to cross the threshold to the Church, a doctrinaire conception of the relation between philosophy and religious conviction would hardly be the most plausible explanans. On the contrary, it would seriously downplay the tension between her desire to participate in the sacraments instituted by Christ and her equally strong desire to do justice to Ancient Greek, Egyptian, Pythagorean, Cathar, Hindu, and other valuable forms of spirituality. Instead, Weil’s decision to remain an ‘outsider’ should be seen as a personal decision, rather than as one legislated by the demands of philosophy as an intellectually rigorous discipline. And Wittgenstein? The

26  Mario von der Ruhr above quotations from his personal credo make it clear that his convictions might well change, even though he does not, as a matter of fact, come to believe in a personal salvation through the death of Christ.78 Weil’s attitude was similarly open-minded. ‘In the domain of holy things’, she once said, ‘I affirm nothing categorically,’79 and we can only speculate how her views might have developed if she had lived as long as Wittgenstein. Notes 1 Peter Winch, Simone Weil – The Just Balance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2 Winch, Just Balance, p. 6. 3 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 8. 4 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 196. 5 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 189. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 239. Quoted in Monk, p. 571. 7 ‘He was, it seems, surprised to hear from Anscombe that it really was Catholic belief that in certain circumstances a wafer completely changes its nature.’ cf. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 572. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. by G. H. von Wright (Blackwell, 1980), p. 73. Quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 463–464. 9 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 463. 10 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 580. 11 Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 79. 12 Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 115–116. 13 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 74. 14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. by D. F. Pears, trans. by B. F. McGuinness (New York: Humanities Press, 1961). 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16 D. Z. Phillips, Religion Without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 189. 17 ‘Meine Erinnerungen an den Philosophen Ludwig Wittgenstein,’ 7 May 1953, quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 225. 18 Rhees, Recollections, p. 173. Quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 372. See also pp. 369–370. Among other things, Wittgenstein’s confession concerned acts of physical violence against some of his pupils. 19 Ludwig Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, ed. by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 177. 20 Diary entry of 21 February 1937, in Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, pp. 201–202. 21 Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, p. 201. 22 Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, p. 177. 23 Apostle’s Creed. 24 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 30–31.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  27 25 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 31. 26 Gareth Moore, “Wittgenstein’s English Parson: Some Reflections on the Reception of Wittgenstein in the Philosophy of Religion,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. by D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 220. 27 ‘What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s resurrection? I play as it were with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like every human being. He is dead & decomposed. In that case he is a teacher, like any other & can no longer help; & we are once more orphaned & alone.’ Diary entry for 12.12.1937 in Culture and Value, p. 38. 28 ‘It is strange that one says God created the world & not: God is creating, continually, the world. For why should it be a greater miracle that it began to be, rather than that it continued to be.’ Diary entry dated 24.2.1937, in Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, p. 215. See Klagge and Nordmann. 29 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. by R. Rhees, trans. by R. Hargreaves and R. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 7. 30 Letter dated 31.1.1937, in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Briefwechsel: Innsbrucker Elektronische Ausgabe, ed. by M. Seekircher, B. McGuinness, and A. Unterkircher (Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation, 2004). 31 Letter dated 16.2.1937, in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Briefwechsel. 32 Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, p. 243. 33 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 580. 34 Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, p. 203. 35 Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (London and Oxford: Mowbray, 1976), p. 19. 36 Simone Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 62. 37 Weil gave the manuscript to Fr Jean-Marie Perrin, a Catholic priest whom she first met in Marseille in 1941. 38 Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, p. 65. 39 Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, pp. 65–66. 40 Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, p. 66. 41 Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, p. 67. 42 Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, pp. 67–68. 43 Weil, “Spiritual Autobiography,” in Waiting for God, p. 69. 44 Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, p. 340. 45 Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, p. 341. 46 Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, p. 40. 47 As Pétrement notes: ‘One feels that she regrets not being able to participate in the sacraments. (She had an ardent desire to take communion.),’ in Simone Weil: A Life, p. 452. (She had an ardent desire to take communion.) 48 Letter to Maurice Schumann 1942, in Seventy Letters, ed. and trans. by Richard Rees (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 155. 49 “Thoughts on the Colonial Problem”, in Simone Weil - Selected Essays, ed. and trans. by Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 197. 50 Letter to Maurice Schumann 1942, in Seventy Letters, p. 156. 51 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 80. 52 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 132–133. 53 Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest, trans. by A. F. Wills (London: Routledge, 2002). 54 Weil, Letter to a Priest, p. 8.

28  Mario von der Ruhr 55 Simone Weil, Écrits de New York et de Londres (1942–1943), ed. by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), p. 353. (My translation.) 56 Cf. Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 1988). 57 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 70. 58 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 79. 59 Weil, Letter to a Priest, p. 14. 60 Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, pp. 105–116. 61 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 105. 62 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 115–116. 63 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 108. 64 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 2nd ed., ed. by G. H. von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 24. 65 Simone Weil, Cahiers 1933–1941, ed. by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 175. Translation by Eric Springsted. 66 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 85. 67 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 2nd ed., ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), § 455. 68 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 66. 69 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), § 309. 70 Simone Weil, La Connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 258. (My translation.) 71 Wittgenstein, Zettel, p. 61. 72 Cf. Book VII of Plato’s Republic, 514a–520a. 73 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 85. 74 J.-M. Perrin and G. Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her (London: Routledge, 1953, repr. 2003), p. 41. 75 Perrin and Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, p. 43. 76 Perrin and Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, pp. 146–147. 77 Cf. Perrin and Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, p. 157. 78 ‘I don’t have a belief in a salvation through the death of Christ; or at least not yet … but I consider it possible that one day I will understand something here of which I understand nothing now.’ Diary entry of 21 February 1937, in Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, pp. 201–202. 79 Weil, Letter to a Priest, p. 3.

Bibliography Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ludwig Wittgenstein – Public and Private Occasions, ed. by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990). Moore, Gareth, “Wittgenstein’s English Parson: Some Reflections on the Reception of Wittgenstein in the Philosophy of Religion,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. by D. Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 209–228.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, and Religious Belief  29 Perrin, J.-M., and G. Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her (London: Routledge, 1953, repr. 2003). Pétrement, Simone, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (London and Oxford: Mowbray, 1976). Phillips, D. Z., Religion without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976). Ratzinger, Joseph, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000). Rhees, Rush, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Weil, Simone, La Connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). ———, Selected Essays, in Thoughts on the Colonial Problem, ed. by and trans. by Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 195–210. ———, Seventy Letters, ed. by and trans. by Richard Rees (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). ———, First and Last Notebooks, trans. by Richard Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). ———, Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). ———, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 1988). ———, Cahiers 1933–1941, ed. by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). ———, Letter to a Priest, trans. by A. F. Wills (London: Routledge, 2002). ———, Écrits de New York et de Londres (1942–1943), ed. by Robert Chenavier and André A. Devaux (Paris: Gallimard, 2019). Winch, Peter, Simone Weil – The Just Balance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961a). ———, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (New York: Humanities Press, 1961b). ———, On Certainty, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). ———, Culture and Value, ed. by G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). ———, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981a). ———, Zettel, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981b). ———, Philosophical Remarks, ed. by R. Rhees, trans. by R. Hargreaves and R. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). ———, Culture and Value, 2nd ed., ed. by G. H. von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). ———, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Briefwechsel: Innsbrucker Elektronische Ausgabe, ed. by M. Seekircher, B.McGuinness, and A. Unterkircher (Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation, 2004).

2 To Speak of the Divine Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar Jacob Quick

One of the great paradoxes of human communication is that what is most intimate and important to us is also the most difficult to describe. We generally have no problem describing concrete phenomena like the height of a tree, the color of our clothing, the fastest route to home, and so on. But if we endeavor to describe the most profound moments of our lives, such as why we perceive something as beautiful, or why we love someone so dearly, our speech is characterized by stammers, stops, rephrasing, and a salient sense of inadequacy. It feels impossible to find the right words when we need them the most. Put another way, when tasked with describing the most meaningful features of existence, language seems to malfunction. This supposed inadequacy of language intrigued Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil and inspired them to explore how language relates to profound aspects of life. According to both thinkers, linguistic inadequacy is a fundamental feature of ethical, aesthetic, and religious language. In Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’, Peter Winch claims that both Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein pay close attention to the ‘grammar’ of expressions. Thus, when Weil analyzes important expressions, she explores the way in which our use of these expressions has to be understood not merely in terms of their relation to other linguistic expressions that we use, but in terms of the roles they play in human attitudes and aspirations, activities, lives, and relationships. That is included in what Wittgenstein understood by “grammar” too.1 In this essay, I will also employ this Wittgensteinian understanding of ‘grammar’ to explore a significant area of overlap in the philosophies of Weil and Wittgenstein: religious grammar. Religious grammar includes (but is not limited to) a host of expressions that are found in prayer, sacred texts, rituals, and religious literature. Given Weil’s Christian commitments, she not only makes many religious claims but also carefully analyzes the grammar of these religious expressions. And DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-3

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  31 while Wittgenstein’s relationship to religion is more ambiguous than Weil’s, he also explores the nature of religious grammar throughout his personal writings. By analyzing their work on religious expressions, I will highlight the fundamental points of agreement between Weil and Wittgenstein with regard to religious grammar. I will show that Weil and Wittgenstein both propound a mystical interpretation of religious grammar: one that emphasizes the ineffability of truth, the impossibility of conceptual closure, the necessity of embodied practices for ‘seeing’ the world properly, and the fundamental connection between religious, ethical, and aesthetic claims. The first section of this essay introduces and explores Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar, and the second section analyzes Wittgenstein’s specific analysis of religious grammar. The third section presents Simone Weil’s philosophical framework, and the fourth section showcases Weil’s philosophy of religious grammar. The fifth section analyzes the areas of overlap between these two thinkers regarding the issue of religious grammar. The final section summarizes the conclusions of this comparative research and shows how Weil and Wittgenstein offer an understanding of religious grammar that corrects prevalent misconceptions about religious claims. Wittgenstein on Ethics For Wittgenstein, religious grammar is more about a particular way of seeing the world rather than speculating about the contents of the world. In this way, religious claims operate at a similar grammatical register to ethical and aesthetic utterances: beauty and dignity are not objects in the world (e.g., a mountain or an eagle), but are rather ways of perceiving and responding to the world (e.g., recognizing the beauty of a mountain and the majesty of an eagle). Religious expressions are not so much about empirical or historical claims but denote a particular way of life: a specific practice of interpreting and living within reality. In order to best explore the nature of religious grammar in Wittgenstein’s thought, it is helpful to first turn to his philosophy of ethics. Wittgenstein’s ‘Lecture on Ethics’ is about the grammar of ethical utterances and how these differ from ordinary statements of fact. We can interpret his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ as the development of his brief discussion of ethics in the Tractatus, where he declares that ‘Ethics is transcendental’ (TLP 6.421). He uses the term ‘ethics’ in a broad sense, one that includes aesthetics (TLP 6.421). Ethics concerns what it is to live a meaningful life, a life that is oriented toward goodness. Whenever we talk about ‘the good life’, discuss beauty, dignity, life’s purpose, and other core human ideals and experiences, we are engaging in ethical discourse (LE 43–44).2 In the most profound moments of our lives, we feel compelled to use ethical language but find that the words do not come easily. Ethical utterances

32  Jacob Quick are therefore characterized by awkwardness; by the sense that our words do not capture the reality we are attempting to describe. For example, it is much easier to describe a chair than it is to describe beauty, just as it is easier to explain why we took one route instead of another than it is to explain why we care about our loved ones. Inspired by this difficulty, Wittgenstein explores how ethical language differs from ‘ordinary’ language (LE 44). To highlight this difference, we can look at the following statements: S1: ‘She is a good tennis player.’ S2: ‘She is a good person.’3 Both statements use the term ‘good’, but they do so in different ways. The meaning of ‘good’ in S1 is determined in light of a specified goal, namely, being skilled at tennis. The meaning of ‘good’ in S2, however, is not determined in terms of a relative goal. Wittgenstein clarifies the difference by noting the weight of importance we place on these different uses of ‘good’: Suppose that we were having a friendly match of tennis and I was not playing well. At some point, you tell me that I am not a good tennis player, to which I respond, ‘I know, but I don’t want to be. I just enjoy the exercise and competition. I don’t really care about being good at this sport.’ A natural and acceptable response would be, ‘Oh yes, I see now. That’s fine.’ And the match could continue. But suppose you caught me doing something wrong, like lying, stealing, or ridiculing another. You confront me and say, ‘You’re not being a good person right now.’ To which I explain, ‘I know, but I don’t care about being a good person. In fact, I don’t want to be.’ Your natural response might go along the lines of, ‘But you should care about being a good person.’ We find it acceptable that someone would not strive to be a good tennis player because being a good tennis player is a relative aspiration. But being a good person falls within the realm of ethics, and is therefore not relative, but absolute. You should try to be a good person; that is non-negotiable (LE 44). Wittgenstein introduces two categories of judgment: (1) judgments of relative/trivial value and (2) judgments of absolute/supernatural value.4 S1 is a judgment of relative value, as it is relative to the goal of being a skilled tennis player. S2, however, is a judgment of absolute value because it pertains to ethical ideals that we are accountable to, regardless of our specific goals or desires. A key feature of relative judgments, according to Wittgenstein, is that ‘every judgement of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgement of value’ (LE 44). Thus, the relative statement ‘You should take this road to London’ can translate to ‘This road will get you to London more quickly than all of the other available options’ or ‘This

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  33 road is more scenic than the others’, or whichever attributes you want your London journey to have. Judgments of absolute value, however, cannot drop value-laden terms. For example, we cannot translate ‘You should be a good person’ into such a ‘form that it loses all the appearance of a judgement of value’ (LE 44). At the most, we could rephrase it with ‘You ought to be a good person’, but ‘ought to’ is itself a judgment of value, in addition to being a synonym for ‘should’. When we tell someone that they ‘should’ or ‘ought to’ be a better human, we are not describing empirical, observable facts. Building on this analysis, Wittgenstein maintains ‘that although all judgements of relative value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgement of absolute value’ (LE 45; italics in original). And in the latter half of this quotation, Wittgenstein explains that the incongruity between statements of fact and judgments of absolute value goes in both directions: just as judgments of absolute value cannot be reduced to statements of fact, statements of fact cannot, in themselves, be or imply judgments of absolute value. To illustrate this point, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a book that contains all the facts in the world, including the documentation of every event that has ever transpired. Every scientific truth, every true proposition of the world, is contained within this book’s covers. This book, Wittgenstein argues, would not contain any ethical content. Even if the book recounted a murder, it would only do so by stating when, where, and how the murder took place; it would not provide a value judgment that the murder was wrong. To elaborate on Wittgenstein’s point, we can imagine the factual, dispassionate medical report of a murder: ‘The patient sustained blunt trauma to the head, which caused their brain function to permanently cease three minutes after the strike.’ This presents the facts of the matter, but there is no ethical judgment in the facts themselves. There is no description of the murder as heinous or evil. That is why, if we were to read all the facts in the world, or simply consult a medical report of an autopsy, ‘there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no ethics’ (LE 45). If ethics is not found at the level of facts, then ethical claims cannot add to our knowledge of a subject (LE 51). Learning about the history, geography, and topography of a waterfall adds to our knowledge of it, but perceiving the waterfall as beautiful involves no additional facts. It would be strange to say, ‘I learned that the waterfall was formed by a glacier, is 70 meters high, is 14,000 years old… Oh and I also learned that it is beautiful.’ The final addendum does not fit in with the previous factoids. Likewise with Wittgenstein’s example of a murder: recognizing the murder as wrong or evil does not add to our knowledge of the murder. This is because absolute values (like goodness and beauty) are not facts or objects in the world: they can neither be reduced to nor implied by statements of fact.5

34  Jacob Quick This discussion raises the question: If judgments of absolute value are not found at the level of facts, where can we locate absolute value? According to Wittgenstein, we can locate judgments of absolute value in our perception of the world. Wittgenstein explains that the only way he can illustrate what he means by absolute, ethical, or supernatural value is by referencing certain experiences that he has had, hoping that the audience can resonate with similar experiences of their own. In his words, these ‘absolute’ experiences occur when ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ and when he feels ‘absolutely safe’, no matter what happens (LE 47; italics in original). The first example is not a simple acknowledgment that the world exists (which would be a statement of fact), but a response to the fact that the world exists. We find ethical value in the awestruck perception of existence. Unlike the existence of facts or scientific truths, absolute value cannot be objectively demonstrated or proven. We cannot force another person to perceive the world the way we do or to adopt the same disposition toward our surroundings. Wittgenstein explains that the use of the terms like ‘absolute good’ may appear to have some powers of objective proof, but that is not the case: And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would, necessarily, bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has in itself, what I would like to call, the coercive power of an absolute judge. (LE 46; italics in original) A state of affairs concerns facts, and because facts cannot imply absolute value, they also cannot force someone to acknowledge absolute value. For example, if a friend is skeptical as to whether there’s a waterfall on the other side of the mountain, you could take your friend to the other side of the mountain and, with all of the ‘coercive power’ of facts, prove that the waterfall is there. But if someone were not convinced that the waterfall is beautiful, there is nothing you could do to prove to them that it is. As Rowan Williams explains, ‘That is to say, an ethical judgement (“such and such an action is unequivocally good”) cannot be the outcome of either a series of empirical/deductive steps or a chain of logical reasoning.’6 You could describe your experience of the waterfall’s beauty, invoke poetic language, point out certain striking features, and so on, but there is no guarantee that your friend will share your perception of absolute value. The strange nature of terms like ‘absolute good’ lead Wittgenstein to argue that ethical utterances involve a warranted misuse of language (LE 48).

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  35 Suppose you were to exclaim, ‘How extraordinary that the sun rose today!’ In Wittgenstein’s analysis, you would be misusing the term ‘extraordinary’ as the sunrise is one of the most ordinary events. Indeed, it is one of our primary sources of regularity and predictability. But then again, your misuse of language would not be unwarranted: you are expressing wonder at the existence and beauty of the sunrise, and the word ‘extraordinary’ helps you communicate your sense of wonder. But now suppose that your friend responds: ‘The sun did not rise today, the earth just rotated.’ Their response is inappropriate (I believe the technical term for it is ‘being a smartass’) because it confuses one grammatical register for another. You are making a judgment of absolute value (i.e., expressing wonder at the sunrise), not a judgment of relative value (i.e., a scientific observation about the solar system). Put another way, your friend interpreted your ethical expression scientifically and therefore misinterpreted it altogether. As a result, Wittgenstein claims that judgments of absolute value are ‘nonsense’: words operate at the trivial level of facts, so employing language to talk about absolute value stretches words beyond their ordinary, sensical meaning (LE 50). The terms ‘nonsense’ and ‘misuse’, in Wittgenstein’s usage, are not dismissive pejoratives. Rather, Wittgenstein uses these terms to highlight language’s inability to speak about ethical, aesthetic, and religious subjects. While judgments of absolute value misuse language, Wittgenstein also believes that there is still a logic to this misuse: ‘Now I want to impress on you that a certain misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes’ (LE 48). We can elaborate his claim about similes with the earlier example of describing the sunrise as ‘extraordinary’. Doing so misuses the term ‘extraordinary’, but misusing ‘extraordinary’ in this way still helps communicate the point. There appears to be some overlap of meaning when ‘extraordinary’ is used in the trivial sense and when it is used in the absolute sense. Wittgenstein applies this point to religious expressions as well: ‘Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes, or allegorically’ (LE 48). Religious expressions, like the claim that we are ‘safe in God’s arms’, do not mean that God will literally protect us from all harm, nor do they suggest that God is a being with arms. Rather, this allegorical expression, with its misuse of language, is an attempt to utilize trivial terms to articulate a supernatural claim. One may object that religious expressions should just drop the confusing allegories and similes and ‘just say the facts’, but in response, Wittgenstein reiterates that there are no facts behind the similes (LE 49). Judgments of absolute value, as we have seen, cannot be found at the factual level, so when we want to make an ethical, aesthetic, or religious claim, our only option is to misuse the language that we have at our disposal. This means that we must take our factual, relative language and stretch it beyond its

36  Jacob Quick capacity. It should be clarified here that, even though there are no facts behind judgments of absolute value, this also does not entail that judgments of value are nothing but fiction. On the contrary, judgments of absolute value not only express truths, but they express the truths that are most important and meaningful to us. These truths, however, cannot be reduced to facts. There is ‘more’ to our world than facts, and judgments of absolute value attempt to describe these non-factual features of existence. Wittgenstein also clarifies that the misuse of language that characterizes religious expressions is not a problem that can be fixed over time. It is not the case that, at some point in the future, we might develop language that can adequately express judgments of supernatural value without similes, allegories, or any other misuse of language. Instead, it is the very nature of absolute value to exceed the resources of language, and it is the very nature of language to underperform when it comes to judgments of absolute value. Using language to articulate absolute values is like pouring a gallon of water into a teacup: the teacup will never be up to the task of containing everything, though it can still carry some water (LE 46). Wittgenstein’s position, then, is not that language can capture or describe adequate value, nor is it that judgments of absolute value are meaningless gibberish. We must speak about absolute value, all the while recognizing that our speech will never adequately capture our subject matter. And in order to respect judgments of absolute value, we must take care not to confuse relative/ trivial value with absolute/supernatural value. Religious Language Wittgenstein’s distinction between relative and supernatural value provides an interpretive key to understand what is happening in religious grammar. Wittgenstein already noted the role of similes and allegories in religious language and utilized this linguistic analysis to make sense of the miraculous. Miracles are not events that occur at the level of scientific facts but at the level of absolute value. Wittgenstein illustrates, ‘And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle’ (LE 50). Here again, we find absolute value in the perception of facts, not in the facts themselves.7 Williams articulates this point well when he explains that, when we claim that God exists, ‘We are proposing a comprehensive scheme of perception and of ‘reading’ the facts of the world, not speculating about what the world might or might not contain.’8 This distinction is why it is absurd to claim that science can disprove miracles; such a statement is confused because it uses ‘the word ‘miracle’ in a relative and an absolute sense’ (LE 50). If we treat miracles as challenges to science, or as phenomena that science has yet to explain, then we are confusing relative value with absolute

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  37 value. Wittgenstein’s philosophical religious grammar is motivated by the imperative to respect the difference between absolute and relative sense, as we can see in his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’’. In The Golden Bough, Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer offers an analysis of the rituals of indigenous people that, according to Wittgenstein, is no real analysis at all. Instead, Frazer evaluates the indigenous beliefs and rituals according to the British scientific paradigm of his day. As a result, Wittgenstein finds Frazer’s ‘explanations’ of the unscientific ‘superstitions’ of ‘primitive people’ offensive (RFGB 33).9 Frazer’s work is unsatisfactory because he treats religious beliefs as if they are mistaken theories about the world rather than complex responses to the world. Throughout his documentation, Frazer attempts to provide explanations for rituals. For example, Frazer interprets rain-dance rituals as grounded in the belief that rain-dancing will cause the rain to come (or keep it from falling, depending on the community’s needs).10 In doing so, Frazer depicts these ‘primitive’ practices of rain-dancing as superstitious activities of unenlightened people who have no awareness of basic meteorology. Wittgenstein is not convinced by Frazer’s account, and not only because of its colonial hubris. Frazer’s work is insufficient because it oversimplifies and misunderstands the relationship between beliefs and rituals. According to Wittgenstein, ‘A religious symbol is not grounded in an opinion’ (RFGB 36; italics in original). It is not as if people formulated the belief that rain-dancing causes rain, and then developed a rain-dancing ritual as a result of this belief. This is not the case for at least two reasons: First, beliefs and practices do not follow each other in any straightforward order. It is not as if all practices have their origin in a belief or an opinion, nor is it the case that all beliefs originate from some preceding practice. Even when a practice is associated with a particular belief, Wittgenstein insists that ‘the practice does not spring from the notion; instead, they are simply both present’ (RFGB 32). Thus, there may be an association between certain beliefs and rituals, but that does not mean that there is a straightforward causal relationship or pattern. Winch elaborates the complicated relationship between beliefs and rituals when he proposes an example of tribesmen whose religious rituals center around the mountains they live in. According to Winch: Similarly, I am suggesting that to say of my tribesmen, ‘They look to the mountains in order to show reverence to their gods’, is not to explain why they look to the mountains, but to point to a conceptual connection between what they understand by their gods and their ritualistic practice. (Of course, this does not mean that what they understand by their gods will have no other conceptual connections.)11

38  Jacob Quick Tracing the religious history of a ritual is not like tracing the geographical history of a mountain. With the right evidence, we can develop a scientific explanation for why a particular mountain has its current formation. But religious practices cannot be explained away or accounted for by means of a scientific hypothesis. Second, sometimes our rituals have no identifiable relation to a particular belief. As Wittgenstein observes: Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object that the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction, and does achieve it, too. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied. (RFGB 36; italics in original) A scientific observer might conclude that the ritual of kissing a loved one’s picture originates from the belief that doing so benefits our loved one, but we know that this is not the case. Or, even if some do believe that kissing a loved one’s picture benefits their loved one, this does not entail that the practice is simply the result of that belief. Furthermore, as the quotation demonstrates, we cannot reduce rituals to the effect that they may have. Yes, kissing a loved one’s picture may cause a sense of satisfaction, but it is too reductionistic to claim that this sense of satisfaction is why we engage in the practice. Wittgenstein’s claims are re-enforced when we consider how we respond to our dead.12 Consider a widow who visits the grave of her deceased partner on a regular basis to bring flowers and speak to her late husband. Suppose the widow mentions this practice to a colleague who retorts, ‘Why do you waste your time? You know they’re dead, right?’ This response is not only calloused and insensitive but also, quite frankly, idiotic. The colleague wrongly assumes that the ritual of visiting a loved one’s grave is predicated on the belief that the dead benefit from such a ritual or that the ritual will produce some desired outcome. But the best explanation for visiting graves is that it feels like the most appropriate way to act, considering the circumstances. And once again, even if the widow believed that her deceased partner benefited from these grave visitations, this does not entail that her practice of visiting his grave is dependent upon or caused by such a belief. As Wittgenstein observes, it is impossible to attach a particular belief with a particular practice in any consistent way when we cross-reference different cultures (RFGB 40). All cultures have some ritual of treating the bodies of their dead, and these rituals are associated with all kinds of beliefs (or lack thereof) about the afterlife. And yet, there is no one-to-one

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  39 correspondence between rituals surrounding death and beliefs about death. We can call to mind Herodotus’s account of the Callatiae (a community in ancient India) who are horrified to hear that the Greeks burn the bodies of their dead, whereas the Greeks are horrified to hear that the Callatiae consume the bodies of their dead. Both insist that they perform their respective practices out of respect for their dead.13 We can see this discrepancy in the diverse rituals practiced today: some bury (rather than burn) their dead as a gesture of respect, and others burn (rather than bury) their dead as a gesture of respect. Some burial rituals are associated with beliefs about the afterlife, whereas others are associated with beliefs that there is no afterlife. And, perhaps, sometimes there is no clear connection between a funeral rite and a religious belief, the funeral rite is simply that community’s way of expressing grief and other emotions associated with death. Thus, the relationship between beliefs and rituals (when there is an identifiable relationship) is by no means straightforward. According to Wittgenstein, ‘What we have in the ancient rites is the use of a highly cultivated gestural language’ (RFGB 50).14 This ‘gestural language’, just like any other language, is a complicated terrain of impenetrable oddities. Religious rituals are embodied expressions and responses to the world that develop in conjunction with the natural landscape, historical events, the community’s self-understanding, mythos, and beliefs. Rituals are therefore one facet of religious grammar that features alongside doctrines, ideas, stories, texts, and other forms of religious expression. Wittgenstein’s analysis, then, implies that when we do encounter religious doctrines and beliefs, we cannot isolate them from the overall context of the religious life in which they are developed. There is no straightforward relationship between concepts and rituals, but this does not entail that they can be isolated from one another. Quite the contrary, any feature of a religious expression (whether a practice, belief, text, idea, and so on) must be contextualized within its grammatical framework. It may be the case (and often is) that religious beliefs and practices influence one another to the extent that a change in doctrine will affect one or more rituals, and vice versa. But even though doctrines and rituals impact one another, we still cannot reduce their mutual influence down to a scientific formula. This point is further supported by the fact that religious expressions do not emerge in isolation from one another. To claim that this ritual originates from that opinion is to extricate one opinion and one ritual out from the larger religious grammar and, as a result, overlook the other ways in which said belief and ritual both influence, and are influenced by, other features of the larger religious grammar. The all-encompassing nature of religious grammar leads us to the final point for this section: Religious grammar does not denote abstract theories,

40  Jacob Quick but an embodied way of life. When we think about religious concepts and rituals, we must remember that they are intertwined in an ever-fluctuating web of relations. The ideas, beliefs, or concepts of a religious community cannot be isolated from the embodied practices from which they have their meaning, nor can the rituals of the community simply be ‘explained’ as resulting from their religious beliefs about the world. As Wittgenstein notes: It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. (CV 64e; italics in original) For example, claiming that ‘Jesus is Lord’ or that ‘Mohammad is the prophet of Allah’ is not the same as claiming that ‘water is H2O’. Memorizing the molecular composition of water makes no demands on the life of the knower. To make a religious profession of faith, however, requires that one be a particular kind of person. Religious grammar involves devotion. As a result, the truth value of religious claims is intertwined with the life of the religious community. Comprehending religious grammar, then, cannot be limited to reading theoretical discussions of doctrine. If you want to understand what it means to follow the teachings of Mohammad, for example, you must spend time with people who have devoted their lives to practicing the words of the Quran. Or if you want to truly understand what a vow of poverty means, you must spend time in a community of people who have taken the vow. Of course, we should familiarize ourselves with religious doctrine and theory, as they are an indispensable feature of religious grammar. But as we do so, we must remember that beliefs, doctrines, and theoretical argumentation are one face of the diamond. As Zamuner, Di Lascio, and Levy note, there is an ethical motivation behind his discussion of ethical and religious language.15 In highlighting the limit of linguistic expression and conceptual analysis, Wittgenstein is calling his audience to respond to the ethical demands placed on us, ones that cannot be resolved at the level of conceptual analysis but must be wrestled with in daily life. He is not simply constructing a theory about ethical language. Rather, Wittgenstein is insisting that we cannot, and should not, retreat to the ‘safe’ world of abstract theory. We owe it to ourselves and to others to pay attention to the complexity of grammar and the role it plays in life. It makes sense, then, that many of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer’s work are characterized by a strong sense of moral indignation: Frazer’s dismissive attitude to ‘primitive’ religion is not only inaccurate,

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  41 but unethical. Frazer did not do justice to the nature of religious grammar, nor to the people who live it out. Interestingly, Wittgenstein’s call to ethical action has strong resonances with the life and work of Simone Weil, to whom we will now turn.16 Simone Weil on Attention Weil devoted her life’s work to delineating our ethical obligations and living a life that embodied the principles she advocated. From childhood to her early death, Weil’s life was characterized by a selfless and relentless activism on behalf of the exploited and oppressed.17 In her adult years, her philosophy and activism took on a religious character. Weil grew up in a secular Jewish family, and did not study or practice religion throughout the majority of her short life. But in her late twenties, she had mystical visions of Christ that altered her religious outlook. She became a Christian mystic who sought to unite her passion for justice and her newly found religious devotion within a comprehensive philosophy. In particular, she advocated a form of Christian Platonism: she interpreted Christian doctrine through Platonic metaphysics.18 I mention these brief biographical notes to observe that, while Wittgenstein offers a clear analysis of religious grammar through considerate observation, Weil presents a philosophy of religious grammar ‘from the inside’, as it were. As a devout Christian mystic, Weil approached religious grammar as a practitioner of it; someone who (to use Wittgenstein’s phrasing) ‘passionately seized hold of’ Christianity as her ‘system of reference’. And since Weil worked everything out through her philosophy, her writing offers an indispensable resource on its own, as well as a welcome companion to Wittgenstein’s analysis. The fundamental features of Weil’s notion of religious grammar are best understood by exploring her ethical philosophy. According to Weil, the major problem of humanity is that our vision is obscured by egoistic delusions. Each of us envisions ourselves as the center of the universe, and we act accordingly. This selfish disposition supports various forms of vice: greed, lust, and domination. The ego, or the notion of ‘I’, distorts the world into a warped picture, one that is unnaturally bent toward selfish goals. As Weil explains, ‘Our soul is shut off from all reality by an enclosing skin of egoism, subjectivity, and illusion’ (FLN 288). The more the ego expands its power, the more we become convinced that everyone and everything else is simply a means toward our ends. The ego has a strong gravitational pull, one that we are naturally inclined toward, and it projects itself onto our surroundings, clouding our judgment with narcissistic passions (GG 50–53).

42  Jacob Quick For Weil, then, the problem of the ego is a problem of perception. In order to understand this problem of perception, however, it is important to note that perception is not only an epistemological issue. Weil does not separate metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics from one another. One’s actions in the world are a natural outgrowth of what one sees in the world, and what one sees in the world depends on one’s ability to see what is actually there (GG 6).19 When we are unkind to our neighbors, for instance, it is because we are not seeing them properly. Wrong action is a feature of wrong perception, and the two fuel one another. The more we mistreat others, the more we will see others as deserving mistreatment, and vice versa. Weil maintains that paying attention is the only key to breaking the ego’s spell. Attention, for Weil, involves a selfless orientation toward, and openness to, the world. Attention can only occur when we stop thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe and recognize that the universe is greater than the sum of our own goals, desires, and conceptions. This practice of attention is extremely difficult, as it runs against our natural inclinations to protect and promote our own interests. As Yoon Sook Cha observes, Weil’s attention involves a form of “self-dispossession” that is theoretically and practically daunting.20 But nevertheless, attention is necessary for a virtuous life. Once we pay attention to our neighbor, for example, we will see their dignity, be moved with compassion, and act in their best interest. Weil explains: [The love of one’s neighbor] is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. (WG 64–65) At this point, a close union of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics emerges in Weil’s thought. It is impossible, according to Weil, to pay attention to another and not see them for who and what they truly are. And this proper vision produces proper action. An attentive response is one that includes appropriate action, and the more appropriate action we take, the more our moral vision clarifies. Thus, attention is the mirror opposite of egocentric vision. Neither one can be reduced to a passive acknowledgment of facts but rather denotes a comprehensive orientation to the world. Weil offers a helpful example of attention when she applies it to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a traveler is attacked, robbed, and left to die alone on a road.

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  43 A  priest walks by the dying traveler but passes on the other side of the road. A Levite also walks by and passes on the other side. But a Samaritan sees the man, has pity on him, provides medical attention, and brings him to an inn where he can recover.21 According to Weil, the Samaritan was different from the other two because he paid attention: ‘The actions that follow [from the Samaritan] are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention. The attention is creative’ (WG 90). The Samaritan was not consumed with his own agenda or looking out for his own interests, and therefore he saved the dying traveler’s life. The priest’s and Levite’s visions were obscured because of their egos: they only saw a repulsive victim who posed an inconvenience for them. But the Samaritan saw a fellow sufferer, someone whose dignity demanded a response. Notice that the priest, Levite, and Samaritan were all presented with the same facts. The Samaritan did not have access to any special information that was unavailable to the others. What distinguished the Samaritan, therefore, was not access to information, but rather an accurate interpretation of the situation. Because the Samaritan adopted an attentive posture toward the injured traveler, he was able to perceive what had happened, who had been hurt, and how he needed to respond. Weil’s Christian Platonism enables her to place faith in the act of attention. According to Weil’s framework, the universe is created and sustained by a loving God, and as God’s creation, we are capable of recognizing God’s supernatural presence throughout the universe. Indeed, while the ego darkens our minds with ignorance, we still have a deep desire for God, who is the source of truth, goodness, and beauty. Humans are therefore caught in a tug-of-war between the desires of our soul, which selflessly yearns for God, and the passions of our ego, which pursue destructive, self-centered satisfaction (GG 1–4).22 But the ego is successful only to the extent that it blocks our perception of the divine. Once our souls are exposed to supernatural values like truth, goodness, and beauty, we cannot help but be drawn toward them. Our souls are primed to recognize that which they originate from and that which they long to return to. Just as the flower responds to sunlight, we respond to the divine beauty that grounds our very existence. As a result, paying attention is a reliable solution to humanity’s egocentrism. The supernatural mechanism of selfless love is built into the fabric of reality, and it will take effect within us when we pay attention (GG 48).23 The attentive disposition, therefore, is a steadfast and necessary practice for recognizing love, God, beauty, dignity, and other aspects of what Wittgenstein would call ‘the ethical’. Like Wittgenstein, Weil also insists that beauty and other transcendent realities are not found in concrete objects per se but in the larger reality they participate in. Taking the example of

44  Jacob Quick aesthetics, we can only perceive such beauty when we are already attuned to its existence: ‘The beauty of the world is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relationship of the world to our sensibility, the sensibility that depends upon the structure of our body and our soul’ (WG 103–104). Beauty does not exist in the same way as objects do. As I have previously observed, to say ‘That mountain is beautiful’ and ‘That mountain is rocky’ is to make two different grammatical claims. Beauty is not a concrete feature in the universe (using ‘feature’ in the relative sense) but a transcendent feature of the universe. And our perception of this beauty (our ‘sensibility’) is dependent upon the kind of person we are. The more we cultivate attention, the more we will recognize beauty. Part of Weil’s motivation for locating beauty in our sensibility is to challenge the idea that beauty is controllable. We can control matter and bend it to our means. Thus, we use (and abuse) concrete objects in the world according to our own egoistic agenda. But for beauty to be supernatural, it must transcend the domain of the ego. Weil explains: The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation (…) We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be. (GG 149) The ego seeks to consume and absorb its objects of desire because it does not properly recognize beauty. The impulse to control and consume is antithetical to the beautiful, which can never be instrumentalized. So, Weil’s use of the term ‘renunciation’ describes the selfless appreciation of the soul who wants the beautiful to exist for its own sake, not because the ego has deemed it desirable. Beauty is supernatural, and the supernatural cannot be one object amongst others. As Weil notes, ‘The supernatural is light itself: if we make an object of it we lower it’ (GG 30). There are two important conclusions from Weil’s insistence that the supernatural is not an object: First, if the supernatural is not existent, then perceiving the supernatural does not exclude perceiving the natural. Quite the opposite: we can only properly perceive the world of objects and facts when we are attuned to the supernatural reality that sustains them. When we pay attention to the supernatural, our gaze is not drawn away from earth but toward it. According to Weil, ‘The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world. Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things’ (FLN 147) Thus, according to a Weilian framework, the phrase that someone can be

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  45 ‘so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good’ misunderstands the nature of heaven. The one whose soul is fixed on the eternal and infinite is the one who properly perceives what is temporal and finite. Second, if the supernatural is beyond the world facts and objects, then it is also beyond conceptualization. For example, disciplines like biology, chemistry, and geology (to name a few) scientifically analyze concrete objects or features of the natural world. As scientists study their subjects, they develop language and concepts to describe natural phenomena. But because scientific concepts are developed for natural objects, they cannot be applied to the supernatural. As we saw with Wittgenstein, the supernatural resists conceptualization because it exceeds the boundaries of language. Our linguistic resources are well-suited for the realm of finite objects and sensations, but they are quickly depleted when we turn our discussion toward the supernatural itself. Furthermore, we cannot overlook the ethical aspect of Weil’s insistence that concepts cannot do supernatural justice. Concepts can be helpful for pointing us toward reality, but they can also distract us from it. We can become so consumed with our own conception of the world rather than appreciating the world for its unfathomable wonder. Concepts can be delineated and even manipulated by the ego, and the drive to reduce reality to a fully comprehensible theory is an egoistic delusion. The ego seeks conceptual knowledge which grants a sense of control over the object of study. The more we know about the world, the easier it is to instrumentalize it. But the supernatural cannot be ‘lowered’ to an object of study. Hence, Weil maintains, ‘As long as one can go on conceiving, wishing, longing, the beautiful does not appear’ (GG 150). There is beauty in science, but there can be no science of beauty. The beautiful will only appear when we accept that it will always surpass our understanding. The Contradictions of Religious Language When Weil talks about God or other supernatural subjects, there is a sense of strain in her language. She wants to articulate supernatural truths, but is aware of the fact that her words fall short. As a result, Weil employs paradoxes throughout her religious writing in an attempt to express ineffable truths. Contradictions are an ideal tool because they confound the mind and cause us to confront the limitations of our thought. When Weil discusses contradictions, she is not talking about irrational contradictions like ‘a square circle’.24 Instead, Weil insists that some contradictions are true. These are not contradictions because they defy the laws of logic, but because they express transcendent truths that cannot be linguistically codified or conceptually resolved. For example, Weil maintains that ‘the beauty

46  Jacob Quick of the world proves there to be a God who is personal and impersonal at the same time and is neither the one nor the other separately’ (GG 149). God is personal, but God is not a person, nor is God personal in the way we would use that term to describe anyone else. We can also say that God is impersonal, though the use of ‘impersonal’ here likewise operates at a different grammatical register than its normal, everyday usage.25 According to Weil, contradictions play an important role in refining our ability to pay attention. As we have just seen, Weil claims that concepts can, at worst, be an egoistic distraction when we focus on the concepts themselves rather than the reality that the concepts attempt to describe. But conceptual thinking is powerless against these ‘true’ contradictions. So, Weil recommends the strategy of contemplating contradictions. Weil maintains that ‘a kind of loosening takes place’ when we meditate on a contradiction and that if we continually concentrate on the contradiction, we will ‘attain detachment’ (GG 98). We become detached from our egocentric desires and the concepts we cling to. Once the failure of conceptual thinking is exposed by the contradiction, we acquire renewed vision. Contradictions empower us to break out of our normal habits of thought so that we can encounter the supernatural realities that confound the intellect. Weil’s use of contradictory thinking sets her within the vein of apophatic, or negative theology. Apophatic theology emphasizes our inability to accurately speak about God by using negative claims (e.g., ‘God is not personal’ or ‘God does not exist’). This apophatic method brings linguistic limitations to the forefront of the practice so that the practitioners do not mistake their conceptions of God for the reality of God. If practiced properly, the apophatic method is supposed to bring about a mystical encounter with the God who transcends thought. Though it is important to clarify, as Rowan Williams notes, that apophatic theology is not some intellectual game where we qualify every statement for the sake of theoretical accuracy. Instead, apophatic theology is ‘a more radical business: it is about the ultimate silence of both terms of the model-and-qualifier tension, and the resignation of the mind or subject to sheer attentive receptivity.’26 This apophatic approach of Weil, then, short circuits the mind so that it can be more attentive to the reality that it could not otherwise perceive. The use of contradictory expressions to refine our attentive capacities showcases the promising potential of religious language. In this way, Weil’s philosophy of religious grammar provides an important supplement to Wittgenstein’s analysis. While Wittgenstein explicitly codifies the difference between religious and ‘ordinary’ statements of fact, a distinction that is present though not as developed in Weil’s writing, Weil explicitly clarifies how religious language can be a productive enterprise.27 Yes, language is incapable of representing the supernatural, but it can also direct our gaze toward the supernatural. Speaking of the divine is an indispensable

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  47 practice for charting new ways of perceiving truth, beauty, goodness, and, in Weil’s case, God. Weil would agree with Wittgenstein’s belief that ‘the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk ethics or religion was to run against the boundaries of language’ (LE 51). And she would probably agree, to an extent, with his follow-up claim that ‘This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely, hopeless’ (LE 51). Though in Weil’s philosophy, religious language may be more hopeful than Wittgenstein gives it credit for. Compare Wittgenstein’s assertions about the cage-like nature of language with Weil’s use of a similar metaphor: Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. (GG 145) In this passage, Weil employs contradictory thinking to illuminate the very nature of religious grammar. Human communication is both a wall that separates us from God and what enables us to communicate with God. When used properly, religious grammar orients us toward the supernatural while simultaneously highlighting its inadequacy to express supernatural truths. In so doing, religious grammar regularly alters our patterns of perception to induce heightened awareness.28 And, of course, such an awareness can only take place when one has consistently embodied the ‘gestural language’ (RFGB 50) of the supernatural, as well as practiced the necessary intellectual exercises. We can now bring together the various threads of Weil’s philosophy of religious grammar by exploring her apophatic philosophy of God’s existence: A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion. (GG 114) Here, Weil demonstrates the limitations and potential of religious grammar. She asserts that God exists because of a deep resonance within her very being; a conviction that the subject of her love is not fictional. And yet, the term ‘existence’ is woefully inadequate because God is beyond all

48  Jacob Quick conceivable forms of existence. But while this passage offers theoretical claims and philosophical commentary on the nature of religious claims, it is also more than that. Weil’s meditation on God’s (non-)existence is itself an act of worship. What we witness here is the practice of an apophatic Christian mystic who employs religious grammar to direct her attention toward God and to express her adoration for the inexpressible love that compels her to speak. Mystical Religious Grammar With the background of both thinkers in place, we can now explore the points at which their philosophies of religious grammar converge. My argument in this chapter is that Weil and Wittgenstein both propound a mystical interpretation of religious grammar: one that emphasizes the ineffability of truth, the impossibility of conceptual closure, the necessity of embodied practices for perceiving the world properly, and the fundamental connection between religious, ethical, and aesthetic claims. I will explore each of these features in turn by comparing quotations from both thinkers and exploring these points of convergence. The Ineffability of Religious Truth • Wittgenstein: ‘Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions’ (LE 48). • Weil: ‘God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle’ (WG 141). In these passages, both thinkers describe religious expressions as a ‘misuse’ of language. As we saw in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein argues that language is best suited for the level of facts, which is why it is ‘nonsense’ to use language for ethical and religious expressions (LE 50). In so doing, Wittgenstein explicitly articulates an implicit aspect of Weil’s philosophy of religious grammar. According to Weil, describing God as ‘imperceptible beauty’ is, to use Wittgenstein’s terminology, a nonsensical expression, for it stretches the use of the term ‘beauty’ beyond its ordinary usage. And yet, in the phrase ‘God as beauty’, ‘beauty’ operates like a simile in that some grammatical meaning is still carried over from the trivial to the religious level. Paradoxically, the ‘nonsense’ ‘misuse’ of language found in religious grammar still has some sense to it.

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  49 As I argued in the previous section, Wittgenstein clarifies how and why religious language cannot fully express religious truths, and Weil, in turn, shows the promising potential of religious language. Wittgenstein has the utmost respect for religious grammar, though he does not provide a robust account of the transformative nature of religious grammar. Weil, on the other hand, employs the limitations of religious grammar and in her apophatic approach, finds hope. Ineffability is itself revelatory of God. For Weil, the language that appears to separate us from God also becomes a means through which we can encounter God. But for language to point us in the right direction, it must be recognized as an insufficient resource for doing so. One of the ways of recognizing the deficiency of religious grammar is to remember that there our concepts, like the language used to develop them, are limited. The Impossibility of Conceptual Closure • Wittgenstein: ‘In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person’ (CV 32e; italics in original). • Weil: ‘He who knows the secrets of all hearts alone knows the secret of the different forms of faith’ (WG 120). Religious grammar includes belief, doctrine, opinion, and other forms of assent that involve some degree of conceptualization. But as Weil and Wittgenstein clarify, religious grammar precludes any possibility of conceptual closure. Part of the impossibility of conceptual closure is an implication from the previous point about ineffability: Concepts require language, and if language is incapable of articulating religious values, concepts will face the same shortcomings. But noting the impossibility of conceptual closure is more than an objective epistemological observation. There is an ethical motivation to acknowledging conceptual limitations. Religious thought is not a means of understanding the world in the sense of having absolute knowledge. According to Weil, absolute knowledge is an egoistic delusion; it is an attempt to control the world and reduce it to your understanding (GG 60–61). It is no coincidence that prominent religions consider it an act of idolatry to confine God to any theoretical schema. When we take religious grammar seriously, we see that religious thought (ideally) offers a way of encountering the world and remaining alert to its transcendent beauty and dignity. It does not attempt to reduce reality to a conceptual paradigm, but directs one’s gaze toward a reality that eludes even our best descriptions and theories.

50  Jacob Quick The Embodied Nature of Religious Belief • Wittgenstein: ‘It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation’ (CV 64e; italics in original). • Weil: ‘The beauty of the world is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relationship of the world to our sensibility, the sensibility that depends upon the structure of our body and our soul’ (WG 103–104). If religious claims are not about facts in the world, then religious faith is not simply a matter of intellectual assent. Faith involves the persistent orientation of one’s entire being toward the ‘system of reference’ (CV 64e). Wittgenstein captures this when he notes that religious belief is ‘really a way of living’ (CV 64e). Elsewhere, Wittgenstein claims that faith cannot be reduced to ‘my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind’ (CV 33e; italics in original). This claim does not imply that theories and the ‘abstract mind’ have no role whatsoever to play in religious grammar. Rather, religious belief must be contextualized within the entirety of one’s life and being. Professing religious faith is not equivalent to assenting to an abstract theory. This is why, in his personal writings, Wittgenstein explains that in order to proclaim ‘Jesus is Lord’, he would need to live a completely different life (CV 33e).29 Weil lived the very life that Wittgenstein references. Not only does her philosophy advocate the importance of embodied, ritualistic practices, she devoted her life to embodying them. She developed her attentive demeanor through regular prayer and intensive meditation, as well as the careful study of sacred texts. After her transformative mystical experience, religious grammar became the ‘system of reference’ (CV 64e) for her personal life, philosophical writing, and political activism. Weil adopted a prayerful, attentive posture toward the world so that her ‘body and soul’ would be structured in such a way as to perceive truth, beauty, and goodness (WG 103–104; GG 120). The Connection between the Religious, the Ethical, and the Aesthetic • Weil: ‘The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object’ (GG 120). • Wittgenstein: ‘What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural’ (CV 3e).

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  51 For Weil and Wittgenstein, religious, ethical, and aesthetic claims operate along similar grammatical lines. This does not mean that aesthetic, ethical, and religious expressions are all interchangeable with one another, but that they differ from ordinary speech or, to use Wittgenstein’s terminology, they differ from ‘relative’ or ‘trivial’ expressions. Specifically, they are not ‘statements of fact’ or objective claims that can be measured, tested, or uncovered through scientific analysis. The connection between religion, ethics, and aesthetics, however, is not restricted to theoretical observations about grammar. The works of Weil and Wittgenstein are characterized by the imperative to perceive the good, the true, and the beautiful. Not only do Weil and Wittgenstein present these three categories as related, but also they incorporate all of them within the very motivation and character of their writing. Their discussions of ethics, for example, are motivated by the desire to do justice to ethical obligations. They are responding to the demand to take ethical language seriously, to respect its character, and to encourage others to do the same. Their texts, then, are not simply meditations on the nature of ethical claims but imperatives to refine our ethical sensibilities. In their commentary on Wittgenstein’s ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Di Lascio, Levy, and Zamuner explain: There is no answer to be given in language to the riddle of life, to life’s meaning. Our attention must be focused elsewhere if one is to confront the situation of an ethical subject (…)This is wholly consistent with an overarching motive of warning his audience away from the false hope that explanation and analysis will help in meeting the ethical demand, yet it avoids advocating any ethical disinterest.30 Likewise, with their discussions of religious grammar, their work is permeated by the call to take religious grammar seriously: to respect its claims, its nature, and its practitioners. Religious grammar expresses important, albeit unspeakable, values, and we must attune ourselves to what it is communicating. Conclusion Weil and Wittgenstein offer insightful analyses of religious grammar that provide a foundation for fruitful explorations in religious studies. Philosophical discussions about religion must recognize that theoretical debates and concepts are one small feature of a larger ‘system of reference’ (CV 64e). This does not mean that theoretical discussions about religion are superfluous, but that they must properly contextualize religious assertions in order to understand their semantic content. Framing religious discussion in this way helps us understand not only what is happening with doctrine

52  Jacob Quick but also in the historical claims of religious texts. For example, an atheist and a Christian will likely disagree on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. But while they disagree about a historical claim, the debate does not simply boil down to historical facts. Rather, one must ask not only whether the resurrection happened but what it would mean if it did or did not. Only then can fruitful religious dialogue take place. For both Weil and Wittgenstein, religious grammar is not primarily concerned with speculation about what objects might or might not exist in the world but articulates a framework for interpreting and engaging with reality. Religious grammar, therefore, fosters a humble, reverent, and open posture toward the world and the ineffability of existence. As a result, religious utterances only find their fullest expression within the embodied practices of devotion in which they are formulated, expressed, and enacted. Weil and Wittgenstein encourage us to be attentive to the unique, subtle, and surprising ways that religious grammar operates. Religion is not something that can simply be studied ‘from the outside’, as if it were a stagnant object to be empirically observed. To speak of the most meaningful experiences or realities in life, dignity, worth, and love, is to speak about that which exceeds language, to attempt to articulate the ineffable. Religious grammar, for Weil and Wittgenstein, denotes a way of life that resists all conceptualization and linguistic codification but also prompts us to speak. Thus, to speak of dignity, love, goodness, beauty, and transcendence is to speak about that which eludes language. It is, according to Weil and Wittgenstein, to speak of the divine. Notes 1 Peter Winch, Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’, Modern European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 4. 2 Wittgenstein clarifies that he is not providing a comprehensive, catch-all definition of ethics, as ethics is not something that can be captured or explained in language, despite its familiarity (LE 43–44). Ethics is not a thing that can be ‘pinned down’ in some all-encompassing definition, but a reality that inspires and demands something of us. 3 I am slightly adapting Wittgenstein’s examples from page 44 of his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ here. 4 Wittgenstein uses the terms ‘relative’ and ‘trivial’ interchangeably, and he also uses the terms ‘absolute’ and ‘supernatural’ interchangeably. I will also use these terms interchangeably throughout the essay, unless specified otherwise. 5 This is why, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that there can be no propositions about ethics (TLP 6.42). 6 Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Oxford: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), p. 77. 7 Hence the following statement in the Tractatus: ‘God does not reveal himself in the world’ (TLP 6.432, italics in original). 8 Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, p. 83.

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  53 9 Cf. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), p. 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-34900635-9. 10 Frazer, 83–86. 11 Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense, 1st ed. (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 1987), p. 113, italics in original. 12 For a thorough analysis of our response to the dead and its implications for ethics (particularly animal ethics), see Cora Diamond’s insightful essay, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” Philosophy 53, no. 206 (1978): 465–479. 13 Herodotus, The Histories, ed. by Carolyn Dewald, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Book 3, Chapter 38, pp. 185–186. 14 Religious grammar includes aspects of Wittgenstein calls a ‘form of life’ in PI § 23, § 241. 15 They make this claim in their commentary on Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics, which can be found in ‘Introduction: The Content of a Lecture on Ethics’ (pp.  1–41) in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, ed. by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio, and D. K. Levy (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), pp. 22–23. 16 While Weil held herself to a high ethical standard, she unfortunately fell short when it came to specific religions. For example, while she had great respect for Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, she was uncharitable toward Judaism and Islam. There are places in her writing, then, that fail to pay adequate attention to specific religious traditions (GG 77). Nonetheless, as we will see, she offers an insightful understanding of religious grammar, even if her prejudices prevented her from seeing its valid expression in certain religious texts. 17 Weil’s remarkable and peculiar character, and the relation between her life and philosophy, are detailed by David McLellan in Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon Press, 1990). 18 The precise character of Weil’s Christian Platonism is the subject of much debate and study. It is undeniable that Weil was a Christian Platonist, but what is unclear is the degree to which her philosophy could be described as Platonist and/or Christian. This complication stems from the unsystematic character of much of her writing, as well as her independence of thought. Weil did not fully ascribe to traditional, orthodox Christian theology, and she liberally drew from various philosophical and religious traditions, such as Spinozism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on. A full treatment of Weil’s Christian Platonism falls outside the scope of this chapter, and has been insightfully explored in texts like The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, ed. by Jane E. Doering and Eric O. Springsted,1st ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). For the purposes of this chapter, it will suffice to note that her thought falls within the broad tradition of Christian Platonism. To that end, I will present a few Christian Platonic features of her thought and how they illuminate her understanding of religious grammar. 19 ‘The tendency to spread the suffering beyond ourselves. If through excessive weakness we can neither call forth pity nor do harm to others, we attack what the universe itself represents for us. Then every good or beautiful thing is like an insult’ (Weil, GG 6; italics in original). 20 Yoon Sook Cha, Decreation and the Ethical Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 7–8. 21 The Holy Bible, NRSV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Luke 10:25–37.

54  Jacob Quick 22 Simone Weil developed her philosophy of moral energy and action through the lens of thermodynamics. Ann Pirruccello provides an illuminating analysis of Weil’s application of classical thermodynamics to humanity’s moral capacities in “‘Gravity’ in the Thought of Simone Weil,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 1 (1997): pp. 73–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/2953778. 23 ‘If, in the same way—that is to say motionless and attentive—we contemplate the possibility of doing good, a transubstantiation of energy is brought about in this case also, and thanks to it we accomplish the good we have been considering. The transubstantiation of the energy consists in the fact that, where what is good is concerned, a moment comes when we cannot help doing it’ (GG 48). 24 Weil also cautions against the use of wrong and even dangerous contradictions, such as the irrational and oppressive contradictions of authoritarian propaganda (GG 100–101). Weil’s proposed contradictions are therefore a far cry from the ‘double-think’ of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984, George-Orwell. Org, 2003. https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html. 25 According to Weil, ‘The word good has not the same meaning when it is a term of the correlation good-evil as when it describes the very being of God’ (GG 99). 26 Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2014), p. 174. 27 Regarding the difference between ‘ordinary’ statements of fact and religious claims, Weil observes, ‘The propositions “Jesus Christ is God” or “The consecrated bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ”, enunciated as facts, have strictly no meaning whatever’ (LP 30). Thus, she employs a similar distinction to that of Wittgenstein, even if Wittgenstein provides a more robust analysis and defense of the difference between trivial and supernatural claims. 28 Williams, The Edge of Words, p. 175. 29 ‘[…] I cannot utter the word “Lord” with meaning. Because I do not believe that he will come to judge me; because that says nothing to me. And it could say something to me, only if I lived completely differently’ (CV 33e; italics in original). 30 Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, pp. 22–23.

Bibliography Cha, Yoon Sook, Decreation and the Ethical Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). Diamond, Cora, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” Philosophy (London) 53, no. 206 (1978): 465–479. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100026334. Doering, E. Jane, and Eric O. Springsted, eds., The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, 1st ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00635-9. Herodotus, The Histories, ed. by Carolyn Dewald, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). McLellan, David, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon Press, 1990). Orwell, George, 1984, George-Orwell.Org, 2003. https://www.george-orwell. org/1984/4.html [accessed 21 September 2022].

Weil and Wittgenstein on Religious Grammar  55 Pirruccello, Ann, “‘Gravity’ in the Thought of Simone Weil,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 1 (1997): 73–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2953778. The Holy Bible, NRSV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks, trans. by Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). ———, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, 1st complete English language edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002a). ———, Letter to a Priest, trans. by A. F. Wills (London and New York: Routledge, 2002b). ———, Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd, First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009). Williams, Rowan, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2014). ———, Christ the Heart of Creation (Oxford: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018). Winch, Peter, Trying to Make Sense, 1st ed. (New York: Blackwell Pub, 1987). ———, Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’, Modern European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. by Peter Winch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). ———, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. by David Pears and Brian McGuinness, Routledge Classics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). ———, Philosophische Untersuchungen =: Philosophical investigations, rev. 4th ed., ed. by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). ———, Lecture on Ethics, ed. by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio, and D. K. Levy (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014). ———, “Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough”, trans. by Stephan Palmié, in The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié (Chicago, IL: HAU, 2018), pp. 29–73.

3 Learning to Look On Mysticism and Mysticisms Philip Wilson

Absent Gods Are Everywhere The 1932 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley depicts a hierarchical but peaceful society in which all citizens are happy, because they have been genetically engineered to be happy.1 Although it is a paradise by utilitarian standards, critics usually describe this society as a dystopia. Is it a possibility? Yuval Noah Harari argues that our current ‘unprecedented technological bonanza’ has brought Huxley’s vision closer, because ‘the new technologies are giving politicians the means to create heaven and hell’, even if ‘the philosophers are having trouble conceptualising what the new heaven and hell will look like’.2 Religion is absent in the Brave New World. The monotheistic faiths are no more, their sacred texts unavailable. Henry Ford’s memory is revered but God is never mentioned. People stay happy through secular rituals, promiscuous sex, and drugs. Towards the end of the novel, one of the rulers, Mustapha Mond, speaks with the Savage, who grew up outside this tightly controlled heaven/hell. They discuss God. Mond, who has access to banned works such as the Bible and the writings of Maine de Biran, John Henry Newman, and William James, unexpectedly argues that there probably is a God, who ‘manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all’.3 It is a manifestation that has no effect on how people lead their lives, but for Mond, it is real enough. The tradition of the absent God, the deus absconditus, is ancient (cf. Isaiah 45: 15) and is found within the Abrahamic faiths as a way of understanding God beyond human understanding. There is a paradox here, even a deliberate contradiction. ‘God’ is a term that is frequently used and yet is claimed not to be subject to definition. The anonymous author of the fourteenth-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, for example, admits that he cannot explain God, even though his whole work is about God:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-4

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  57 But now you ask me, ‘How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?’ And to this I can only answer, ‘I do not know’.4 Whereas Mond’s absent God is truly absent, the God of this ‘negative’ or ‘apophatic’ way is a God who is worshipped, followed, and prayed to, but who cannot be conceptualized, because God is totally other. As Clare Carlisle puts it: ‘It is not as if a religiously conceived universe contains one extra item, which distinguishes it from the atheistically conceived universe’.5 Simone Weil writes of the deus absconditus in terms that parallel the Kabbalistic thought of Isaac Luria,6 holding that God has withdrawn from the world after creating it, leaving behind only traces of God’s presence: The true God is the God we think of as almighty, but as not exercising his power everywhere, for he is found only in the heavens or in secret here below. (WG 88) This notion of God seems very close to Mond’s position, or even to atheism as traditionally conceived, but it is better thought of as a strategy, as Lissa McCullough argues: There are two forms of atheism … one of which is simply a denial of God, and the other of which is a purification of the notion of God … Weil hoped that modern incredulity could lead to a purer, more universal and anonymous form of faith.7 Weil’s own ‘incredulity’ means that she cannot see faith as a set of propositions to which assent must be given, as in the Thomist tradition.8 For Weil, the Thomist conception of faith implies totalitarianism ‘as stifling as that of Hitler’ (LP 23). She wishes rather to reconfigure faith as an attitude, as a way of living that transcends confessional boundaries (WG 89). Such a reconfiguration is in her view urgently needed because of her belief that an ‘insufficient spiritual diet’ was leading humanity ‘into the darkest paths’ (SL 131). In this chapter, I suggest ways of approaching mysticism through a Wittgensteinian reading of Weil. I examine aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, in order to show how Weil’s mystical vision can be of value today and can contribute to the re-enchantment of the world demanded by Max Weber.9 I structure the chapter through the use of five mottos associated with the later Wittgenstein, who considered various citations to sum up his work. Mottos are important because they serve as authorial indicators of how to read a text. A recent bestseller on cosmology, Genesis by CERN scientist Guido Tonelli, is prefaced by no fewer than three.10

58  Philip Wilson The first, an anonymous graffito from Palermo, speaks of our need for poetry. The second, by the creative writer Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], asserts that all sorrows can be borne if they are placed within a story. The third is a citation from Weil’s The Need for Roots: To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised of the needs of the human soul. (NR 40) It comes as a surprise to find so prominent a quotation from a philosopher who is usually regarded as addressing non-scientific questions, but it signals Tonelli’s contention that scientific inquiry cannot be divorced from what is human. Weil’s comment about the need for roots helps to set the mood of his work. Even in the world of supersymmetric theories, her thought is of relevance. Wittgenstein considered the following quatrain from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a motto: In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute & unseen part, For the gods are everywhere.

(See CV p. 39)11

The stanza evokes a need to respond purposefully to the sacred nature of a world charged with meaning. The use of the plural ‘gods’ allows it to be read beyond the limits of theism. For Weil, too, the world is sacred, because phenomena such as beauty or friendship can function as implicit forms of the love of the absent God (WG 83ff.), who thus paradoxically becomes a reality. As Marie Cabaud Meaney argues: rather than reducing reality to the empirical data gathered by sense perception, she sees the sacred in the form of the Logos present everywhere.12 So Wittgenstein sees the gods everywhere and Weil sees the Logos [Word] everywhere. More than coincidence is at play here, I argue, because both thinkers stress that what matters is how the individual looks at the world. The project of re-enchantment is urgent. Just as Weil, who died in 1943, speaks of the ‘darkest paths’ (SL 131), so Wittgenstein, writing in the immediate post-war period, refers to the ‘darkness of this time’ (PI p. 4). These descriptions are equally applicable to the world of the early twenty-first

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  59 century, where the dystopia depicted by Huxley is only one of many on offer. How can philosophy show, now that the elder days of art are over, that it is possible to look beyond the dark? One answer lies in what it can tell us about mysticism.13 For Weil, hope was to be sought not with the Thomists but with the mystics, for whom truth was not to be found in the teachings of the Church (LP 23). Mysticism is a highly contested term,14 ‘really something of an academic invention’.15 It serves as a useful way of categorizing attempts to relate to the ineffable.16 All world religions exhibit mysticism,17 so that figures as disparate as the theist Meister Eckhart and the non-theist Zen masters can be and are described as mystics.18 Some canonical philosophers (for example, Martin Heidegger, James, and Edith Stein) have taken mysticism as an object of inquiry, and such inquiry is a growing research field.19 Some canonical philosophers (for example, Augustine, Plato, and Plotinus) are even read as mystics. Wittgenstein can be placed in the first group of enquirers, on account of a number of remarks on the mystical at the end of the 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TL-P 6.44, 6.45, 6.522), but he is not usually regarded as a mystic in his own right.20 Weil, however, can be placed in both groups. As a philosopher of mysticism, Weil addresses mystical phenomena. Here, for example, she asserts their significance in world religions, looking at practice rather than theory: In practice, mystics belonging to nearly all the religious traditions coincide to the extent that they can hardly be distinguished. They represent the truth of each of these traditions. (LP 29) She is, therefore, able to link thinkers and traditions as diverse as Plato, John of the Cross, the Upanishads, and Taoism (ibid.), recognizing how these texts play what Peter Tyler calls the ‘mystical form, strategy or game’ in their efforts to show readers that the gods and the Logos are everywhere.21 Mystics demand what Richard Woods (in reference to Eckhart) calls ‘a conversion of attention’; he argues that both Eckhart and the Zen masters challenge readers to transcend the limitations of attempts to describe the ineffable, by ‘inviting us to live the mystery’ to which they point.22 It is this strategy that Weil discerns at the heart of mystical writings, representing the truth of the respective tradition. As a mystical philosopher, Weil recounts the sort of personal transformational experience that characterizes many texts that are described as mystical. In 1938, she spent Easter at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes,

60  Philip Wilson where she came across the poem ‘Love’ by George Herbert. She learned it by heart and would recite it to herself: without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that … Christ himself came down and took possession of me. (WG 27) As described, this is an encounter that is not tractable to scientific explanation: Weil is quite simply possessed by a supernatural figure in ‘real contact, person to person, here below between a human being and God’ (ibid.). Her account is reminiscent of Paul’s conviction that he lived no longer, because Christ lived in him (Galatians 2: 20), and it matches how James describes the mystical experience as ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive.23 Mystics view their experiences as a mystery, not a problem, to use terms from Gabriel Marcel.24 A problem can always be solved, given sufficient time and resources, whereas a mystery can in principle never be solved conceptually. Weil’s mystical writings from 1938 onwards can be described as an attempt to work out the mystery that had taken over her life, and it is significant that she does this by remaining true to her conception of philosophy. Wittgenstein’s later approach is about seeing things in the right way, about looking rather than thinking (PI § 66). He offers a set of methods rather than a body of teaching (PI § 133). Applying his methods to mysticism allows it to be conceptualized as a pluralistic phenomenon that must be investigated pluralistically, and applying his methods to Weil allows her to be conceptualized as Wittgenstein’s ideal reader (see the Section ‘Teaching differences’). For both philosophers, it is the investigation that matters, rather than coming up with a set of answers. Wittgenstein writes that his aim is to stimulate thoughts in his readers (PI p.  4) and the situation is similar with Weil, as McCullough argues: There is nothing final or definitive in the form of expression–the writing is often tentative and questioning–but a deep deliberation is attested in the dedication to the inquiry itself, the restive seeking embodied in this painstaking record. If we learn from Weil only how to seek in this way, when ultimate matters are at stake, we will have received her gift.25 Together, Wittgenstein and Weil can show that things are rarely as simple as they seem to be, that we ought to look for differences. Teaching Differences Wittgenstein admired James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience for ‘noting the varieties of religious experience within the same religion, not to

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  61 mention the religions of the world’.26 James shows how the term ‘religion’ can easily mislead us into thinking that there is a single entity at stake, whereas there are an immense number of variations.27 The same is true of mystical traditions. As Reiner Schürmann points out in a discussion of Nicholas Cusanus’s notion of ‘learned ignorance’, even if different authors ‘refuse to give a name to the divine, that does not mean that they think the ineffable in the same way’: Eckhart, Plotinus, Augustine, Cusanus and the Zen masters all use the notion of ineffability differently.28 Terms such as ‘mysticism’ indicate family resemblance (PI § 293), and are not designators in any essentialist sense (cf. PI § 65). Weil herself uses the notion of ‘authenticity’ to characterize the mystical writings that she accepts. For her, Plato is an ‘authentic mystic’ (IC 77), and she describes three pre-Christian mystery religions (the Orphic, the Pythagorean, and the Eleusian) as ‘authentic mystical traditions’ (LP 29). Her use of the plural in the second example makes it clear that she is not trying to subsume these mystery religions into a single phenomenon. Such religions differed radically from each other, so that the adherent had to pledge allegiance to one divinity or set of divinities rather than to another, but each of the three can for Weil be held to be playing a positive role in the life of the adherent, and authentic in that sense. Wittgenstein considered using a saying by Kent from William Shakespeare’s King Lear as a motto for the Investigations: I’ll teach you the differences.29 It would have been a fitting preface to a text that attempts to make its reader aware of the various uses to which any term can be put. Wittgenstein’s account of a shopping trip for five red apples, for example, shows that what appears to be a single, simple transaction actually involves three different linguistic operations: working out what sort of fruit is needed; deciding on the correct colour of fruit; and counting out the apples (PI § 1). To view an activity such as shopping through a single theory will fail to map the plurality of phenomena involved. Analogously, adopting Wittgenstein’s approach can work against any tendency to see ‘mysticism’ as a unified phenomenon. In his reflections on the anthropology of James Frazer, Wittgenstein asks if Augustine was ‘in error’ when he calls on God upon every page of his Confessions (RF 119). He then wonders whether it is possible to make a religious mistake: But one might say–if he was not in error, surely the Buddhist holy man was–or anyone else–whose religion gives expression to completely different views. (Ibid.) It would seem to be a matter of elementary logic that the rightness of Augustine’s beliefs implies the wrongness of the Buddhist’s beliefs, along with

62  Philip Wilson the wrongness of the beliefs of anybody else who does not call upon Augustine’s God. That is, however, to regard religious faith as a zero-sum game, which also implies that if the Buddhist is right, then Augustine is wrong: somebody must be making an error, though we may never know who, and it may well be both of them (if, say, the methodological naturalist is right). Wittgenstein reconfigures the inquiry, by giving an answer that is not bound by the terms of the question. He states that ‘none of them was in error, except when he set forth a theory’ (RF 119). Agreement for Wittgenstein is found not in opinions but in forms of life (PI § 241). Even if practices differ, lives can be lived authentically, to use Weil’s term. Given his beliefs, Augustine is not wrong to call upon God in the Confessions, but nor is the Buddhist holy man wrong to follow his own religious practices. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land similarly juxtaposes the voices of Augustine and the Buddha himself at the end of the Section ‘Phenomena as Theory’,30 with Eliot writing in a note that the ‘collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western ascetism … is not an accident’.31 Neither the Christian nor the Buddhist voice has precedence for Wittgenstein or Eliot. We have a radical pluralism. Mikel Burley understands ‘radical pluralism’ in two ways: first, as utilizing a plurality of methods; second, as recognizing the plurality of religious phenomena in the world without trying to judge them by a single standard.32 He sees a way forward in Wittgenstein’s stress on description (cf. PI § 109), which allows philosophers to investigate non-dogmatically the language-games that are played in different religious forms of life.33 Wittgenstein, after all, held that all ‘genuine expressions of religion are wonderful’,34 and criticized Frazer for applying a single standard to religious phenomena, namely the rational scientific paradigm of his own day, which led him to look down on many practices, finding them wanting from his analytic standpoint. Wittgenstein remarks, for instance, that Frazer is incapable of conceiving of a priest ‘who is not basically a present-day English parson with the same stupidity and dullness’ (RF 125). By applying a single theory, Frazer misses the point. What is needed is a thickened description.35 Wittgenstein’s methods offer support for Weil’s own take on mysticism. Despite being attracted to Catholicism, she attends to a plurality of mystical forms of life. While her work is deeply and directly influenced by Plato, who is seen as part of a tradition that includes the ‘mysteries and the initiatory sects of Egypt, Thrace, Greece, and Persia’ as well as the ‘Gnostics, Manichaeans and Cathars’ (SL 130), she is also willing to look outside this tradition to, say, the Bhagavad Gita (cf. RCV 110). She refuses, however, to allow any form of violence to enter the picture, which is why she rejects the physical violence of the God of the Hebrew scriptures (LP 41) and the intellectual violence of Thomism (see the Section ‘Absent Gods Are Everywhere’).

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  63 Just as Wittgenstein argues that Augustine and the Buddhist holy man would be in error if they were to put forward a theory (RF 119), so Weil holds that dogmas ‘lose their value as soon as they are affirmed’ (LP 30). She was unable to enter the Catholic Church through baptism, because she felt that too much mystical truth lay outside it.36 It is tempting to argue that Weil is, therefore, a universalist, but universalism tends towards homogenization,37 that is, asserting that differences do not matter. Her thinking rather exhibits a ‘religious pragmatism’ that permits her ‘to accept any faith as divinely inspired that advances justice’.38 Weil’s thought can be seen as pluralistic because it teaches us differences in three ways. First, it allows truth to be acknowledged in more than one religious system: at the very end of her life, she was reading both the Gospels in Hellenistic Greek and the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. Second, her mysticism is itself the result of influences from different traditions: her notion of detachment, for example, is derived from Plato, Augustine, Marguerite Porete, Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Blaise Pascal.39 Third, she is able to maintain apparent contradictions in her religious philosophy without seeking to resolve them: Christ for her was identical to Dionysus, Krishna, Noah, Odin, Osiris, and Prometheus, because they can all function as saviour figures, even if such a position is anathema to the Catholic Church, which insists on the uniqueness of Christ. Weil’s pluralism and embrace of contradiction are illustrated by an image that she cites from the Upanishads: two birds are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it … These two birds are the two parts of our soul. (WG 166) Western philosophy is traditionally a discipline of the excluded middle: propositions are either true or false. Weil, however, sees the ability to hold to a contradiction in mind as a sign of the true philosopher, arguing that as soon as we have thought on a certain matter, then we must discover ‘in what sense the contrary is true’ (GG 102). For her, truth can be blurred. Analogously, Wittgenstein warns against dividing people into buyers and sellers, because people both sell and buy (CV p.  26), and shows in the Investigations how concepts can be blurred, as in his discussion of games (PI § 71). Commentators have applied a wide range of labels to Weil in efforts to try to categorize her philosophical stance. She is described as an Augustinian, a Cathar, a Cartesian, a Gnostic, a Jansenist, a Kantian, a Lurianic Kabbalist, a crypto-Lutheran, a Neo-Platonist, a Platonist, a Quietist, a Spinozist, a Stoic. It makes more sense, however, to see her thought as sui generis. It has affinities with these traditions and doubtless with others that

64  Philip Wilson are not included in the list. There are some cases of direct influence (such as her debt to Plato), and some cases of explicit self-identification (such as her Stoicism), but there are also cases where any affinity seems to be accidental (such as the similarity of her thought to that of Luria). Weil has a pluralistic vision, and to acknowledge this pluralism is to see how her approach can teach differences and can show why differences matter. Her attitude to mysticism is based on looking at practice rather than theory and it involves the blurring and even abandonment of conflicting categories: Mysticism means passing beyond the sphere where good and evil are in opposition, and this is achieved by the union of the soul with the absolute good. (SE 214) Her strategy is similar to that of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who advocates asserting God’s existence, then denying it, then denying both the assertion and the denial in order to realize that God is ‘beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion’.40 Contradictions are maintained. As Karen Armstrong comments, his is a dialectical method that ‘leads to an intellectual rapture that takes us beyond everyday perceptions and introduces us into another mode of seeing’.41 Weil can thus advocate the ‘road toward faith by way of atheism’ (N 469). Wittgenstein imagines being asked this question: Should it be said that I’m using a word whose meaning I don’t know, and so am talking nonsense? (PI § 79)

His answer illustrates the general strategy of the text:

Say what you please, so long as it does not prevent you seeing how things are. (And when you see that, there will be some things that you won’t say.) (Ibid.) Weil exemplifies his approach. She is his ideal reader. She looks at forms of mysticism and is willing to grant them authenticity even if they do not correspond to the Catholic dogma to which she was personally drawn. She attempts to see how things are. The refusal to support any form of life tainted by violence or dogma means that Platonic and Egyptian mysticism are judged as authentic, but not the barbaric deity of the Books of Kings or the God of the philosophers. There are some things that she will not say. She avoids theory and looks at phenomena.

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  65 Phenomena as Theory In a chapter that addresses pluralism, it is important to recall the differences between Wittgenstein and Weil. Weil’s use of Plato, for example, is in sharp contrast to the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which has been read by some scholars as attacking the Platonic paradigm of meaning (cf. Kerr 1988).42 This present chapter is itself pluralistic because it advocates using both Weil and Wittgenstein, who are not in any sense equivalent. (I do not wish to add ‘Wittgensteinian’ to the list of labels in the Section ‘Teaching differences’.) Carlisle, discussing Spinoza alongside Christian philosophers, argues that the point of juxtaposing views is to ‘open up a shared conceptual space’ that can bring into view ‘the distinctive philosophical task’.43 What conceptual space is at stake when Wittgenstein and Weil are read together in order to address mysticism? Both philosophers offer ways of walking on the ground, to borrow a metaphor that Wittgenstein employed when writing to a friend who was becoming a Christian; for Wittgenstein, religious commitment was like deciding to move forward by walking on a tightrope, which he refused to do. He was thus unable to commit to the Catholicism into which he was baptized as a child, just as Weil would not seek baptism, in order to keep his feet on the ground. (Like Weil, he was given a Catholic burial, but in both cases, the ceremony seems inappropriate, given that neither was a practising member of the Church.) Walking on the ground – the Investigations proclaims itself to be a move to the ‘rough ground’ (PI § 107) – enables mysticism to be seen (and constructed) as a human practice, in line with Iris Murdoch’s call for a ‘natural way of mysticism’.44 Murdoch’s own work can be read as an attempt to formulate one such way,45 as can Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Tractatus (see the Section ‘Absent Gods Are Everywhere’). John Gray finds natural ways of mysticism in George Santayana, who ‘valued contemplation because it enabled a lucid vision of the only way that exists’,46 and in the ‘mystical atheism’ of Arthur Schopenhauer.47 The list could be extended, and examples will surely continue to appear. A third motto that Wittgenstein considered was from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena: they themselves are the theory. (In RPP I 889) Meaning, for Wittgenstein, is to be found on the surface because nothing of interest is hidden (PI §126). Such attention to phenomena, as opposed to imposing theory on phenomena, can be linked to current debates about

66  Philip Wilson whether mysticism can be explained naturalistically or by appeal to hidden essences. Nobody can deny that mystical texts exist, or that people do have the sort of transformative experience described by Weil at Solesmes. Yet the mystery/problem dichotomy mentioned above in the Section ‘Absent Gods Are Everywhere’ returns. For Weil, what happened could only be interpreted in terms of supernatural intervention, as a mystery. For the methodological naturalist, it is a problem that is explicable in terms of psychology and/or physiology. Michael Pollan, for example, offers the following explanation for mystical experience: just what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network. This can be achieved any number of ways: through psychedelics and meditation … breathing exercises (like holotropic breathing), sensory deprivation, fasting, prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences.48 There is clearly a strong case here. Huxley’s mystical experiences, for example, were deliberately induced by taking mescalin.49 As philosophy of mind becomes increasingly influenced by theories from neuroscience and computation, the possibility grows of explaining away the mystical, of dismissing it as an irrelevance, or worse, in a world that desperately needs philosophy to be relevant. The philosophical perspectives explored in this chapter suggest that we do not need to dismiss mysticism in this way, because a cognitive approach can stand alongside a philosophical one, just as buyers can also be sellers, and just as one bird on a branch can look at the fruit while another eats it. The reductive attitude to mysticism fails to satisfy on a human level. Wittgenstein, writing in his Notebooks during the First World War, in danger of death from enemy fire, noted that the ‘urge towards the mystical comes of the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science’ (NB 51).50 Naturalistic explanation fails to address the anthropological side of mysticism, that is, the rootedness of our lives. Tonelli (above) signals that he will not fall into this trap when he cites Weil on rootedness as a motto. A strictly physicalist account of either the universe or of mysticism fails to address forms of life and therefore fails to speak to the philosopher on the front line. James argues that while ‘medical materialism’ can categorize Paul as an ‘epileptic’, Teresa of Avila as a ‘hysteric’, and Francis of Assisi as a ‘hereditary degenerate’, nothing is ultimately explained by these categorizations: ‘how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?’.51 Wittgenstein comments on how hard it is to find the correct philosophical starting point: ‘it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back’ (OC 471). When discussing mysticism as a human practice, it is

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  67 going too back far to explain it away in terms of brain states. Researchers can point to ‘God spots’ in the brain that light up when people meditate, but nothing is learned by doing so about the forms of life involved and their spiritual significance, or about spiritual significance itself. Should Wittgenstein’s opposition to theory (cf. PI § 109) be used to dismiss any attempt to theorize mysticism by cognitive science? It seems to me that science is one place where theory is at home and any use of theory is something that needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Wittgenstein is right to attack Frazer for using theory where it is inappropriate, but I do not wish to argue that naturalistic explanation is a waste of time, rather that different approaches are in play from science and from philosophy. These approaches are complementary and can inform each other. Plato argues that there is not a dilemma here but an opportunity: we should distinguish two kinds of cause, the necessary and the divine, and should search in everything for the divine cause, if we are to attain as blessed a life as our nature permits. But our concern with divine causes should lead us not to ignore necessary causes either … (Timaeus 69a) The cosmology of the Timaeus accounts for everything from the creation of the world to the formation of fingernails but always insists that the philosopher will pursue a separate line of inquiry. An example from cognitive theory of mind can illustrate such a pluralistic approach. Andrea Hollingsworth theorizes Christian apophatic mysticism in four stages: resonance, rupture, reappraisal, and repair. She sets her theory alongside a description of the mystic’s ‘relational processes’, showing how the mystical practices under investigation are based on the notion of the absent God, because the negative way involves a breakdown of resonant relationality … the apophatic contemplator realises that because divinity can be neither conceptualized nor named, God cannot be ‘encountered’–at least in any normal sense. In Weil’s poignant phrase: ‘He whom we must love is absent’. [WG 109]52 Weil’s vision is used as an instantiation of the apophatic mystical approach, which is based on loving the absent God. We cannot just look at what is going on in the brain but have to see the mystic in context, to look for ‘points of possible connection between the ideational and experiential’.53 Hollingsworth argues that Weil’s Notebooks contain ‘affinitive meditations on the aporetic abysses of Christ’s crucifixion’; they offer an ‘empathetic identification with an exemplar’ that triggers neural effects.54

68  Philip Wilson No doubt Weil’s brain could have been scanned to show which areas were active during her empathetic meditations on Christ, but the nature of this inquiry is different. The point is to look at all phenomena, not just brainscans, and some phenomena need to be investigated philosophically. Philosophers must not go back too far, only to the beginning, where we find the Deed. In the Beginning Wittgenstein was drawn toward an expression from Goethe’s Faust as a motto for his later work when the eponymous hero sets about translating the New Testament from Hellenistic Greek into German and renders the opening of John’s Gospel as: In the beginning was the Deed.

(See OC 402)55

For Wittgenstein, the meaning of words can be understood by looking at how they are used (PI § 43). Words are therefore deeds (PI § 546). Thus, the word ‘mysticism’ is used differently by different people in different places and times, but always to do something. Tyler, in his Wittgensteinian investigation into mysticism, argues that it is an error in our speech that makes us see mysticism as an ‘occult entity’; mysticism is ‘more a manner of speaking and writing than an entity … as much a verb as noun’.56 To assume that there must be a mysterious entity lurking behind mystical texts is to take a step too far, if, as Wittgenstein maintains, everything in language is open to investigation (PI § 126). As he commented to Paul Engelmann, the mystical is not a ‘bluish haze surrounding things’ that gives them an ‘interesting appearance’.57 It is found in phenomena. Such an approach is methodologically agnostic because it does not depend on a faith position. It is philosophical, rather than theological. My reading of Weil is similarly agnostic. Even though she often uses the language of theism, her readers do not need to do so. The world exhibits a variety of forms of mysticism, from the Christian Augustine to the Zen masters to atheist mystics such as Barbara Ehrenreich.58 There are many orders, not one order (cf. PI § 132), and it is therefore important not to start out with closed definitions. (One reading of PI § 109 is that we should not begin with theory.) Robin Dunbar, who assigns mysticism an important role in the evolution of religion, defines it as ‘a feeling of divine transcendence that comes over an individual from time to time’.59 This definition works very well for the context of early human development, but would not work for investigation into contemporary non-theist

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  69 mysticisms such as Zen practice, or the experiences of Ehrenreich. Louise Nelstrop remarks that when teaching mysticism to undergraduates, she refuses to give an initial definition and adopts a ‘wait and see’ strategy.60 To return to the citation from Goethe discussed above, the phenomena themselves are the theory. Richard Jones’s and Jerome Gellman’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia takes a suitably inclusive step by seeing mysticism as a cluster concept: it is ‘best thought of as a constellation of distinctive practices, discourses, texts, institutions, traditions, and experiences aimed at human transformation, variously defined’.61 It is tempting to read mystical texts as if they are about imparting information, whereas they are more about triggering effects in the reader, more akin to lyric poetry than to philosophical papers. The opening line of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins illustrates the approach of many mystical texts: Hark, hearer, hear what I do …62 We should normally expect a verb of speaking to follow the subject here, but the narrator makes it clear that something is being done. The poem is performative and actively engages with its reader. Poetry, as Wittgenstein remarks, may be written in the language of information but it is not about imparting information (Z 160). It is a mistake to read the poems of Hopkins in order to become informed about Victorian Catholicism, even if any reader will necessarily pick up a lot of details about Victorian Catholicism, and even if some knowledge of Hopkins’s religious background is necessary in order to make sense of his writing. (Better sources are available.) It is more important to pay attention to what Hopkins is doing. Mystical texts similarly need to be read as performances, as texts that make the receptive reader pay attention by constructing new languagegames. As Tyler argues: Wittgenstein’s analysis releases the fly of mystical analysis from the mystical fly-bottle [cf. PI § 309]. We are no longer concerned with finding ghostly … ‘entities’ or categories that lie ‘behind’ mystical discourse … Mystical discourse possesses meaning qua mystical discourse; its language-games are embedded in a practice or ‘way of life’ that enables reference to occur.63 As Wittgenstein stresses, the reader needs to look rather than think (PI § 61). The Investigations is about learning to look, an approach that is paralleled by Weil’s notion of attention. Weil goes so far as to assert that

70  Philip Wilson looking ‘is what saves us’ (WG 136) – which may suggest a preference for the bird who looks as opposed to the bird who eats – and defines ‘attention’ as follows: Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. (WG 111) Attention is an ancient and much-discussed philosophical practice.64 It is also central to many approaches to spirituality, such as that of Ignatius Loyola. Weil’s originality lies in reconfiguring attention as passive, contradictory as that sounds. Just as a translation solution may suddenly reveal itself to the translator who pays attention to a text (WG 128), so attention to the world may reveal new aspects, and even what must be done. Weil uses the image of the farmer who can sow seed, but who cannot guarantee that the weather will be propitious (SNLG 151).65 Examples from her literary work can show how this ‘passive attention’ can work. In Weil’s tragedy Venice Saved, the protagonist Jaffier is leading a Spanish conspiracy to subjugate Venice but betrays his comrades to the Venetians because he has paid attention to the beauty of the city and wishes to save it (VS). The play has a lot to say about what will happen to the citizens of Venice if the conspiracy succeeds. There are graphic descriptions by the Spanish mercenaries of their plans for slaughter, enslavement, and rape. Jaffier, however, does not act to prevent such human suffering. Nor, despite the play’s Catholic setting and Weil’s own interest in Catholicism, is his action religiously motivated. Attention for Weil, as poeticized in Jaffier, is a this-worldly activity: The object of my search is not the supernatural, but this world. The supernatural is the light. We must not presume to make an object of it or else we degrade it. (N 173) Such attention can also be discerned in Weil’s later poems as a disposition, an attitude to the world. For all her affection for Herbert’s theocentric poem ‘Love’, Weil herself uses no overt religious imagery or invocation of God but rather maintains sustained attention towards natural phenomena (see MO). In the 1941–1942 poem ‘The Gate’, for example, she describes waiting at a mysterious portal: Open the gate for us, and we shall see the orchards. We shall drink cold water where the moon has left its trace.

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  71 The long road is burning and hostile to the strangers. We err without knowing and we never find our place.

(MO 129)

The narrator realizes that they will never go through the gate. Attentive waiting is what matters. It is not even clear in front of which gate we should wait, even if (we can infer) there will be some gates in front of which we should not wait. Similarly, another poem written shortly before her death, ‘The Stars’, begins with a contemplation of the stars and ends with their ‘divine fires’ entering the heart of the one who contemplates. It exemplifies her definition of attention given above. Literature is a domain where mystics can express grammatically their experiences and their world-views: the haiku of Bashō; Ehrenreich’s memoir Living with a Wild God; the poetry of John of the Cross; the autobiography of Margery Kempe; Nuns and Soldiers by Murdoch; the poetry of Rumi; Franny and Zoey by J. D. Salinger; the prose fictions of W. G. Sebald; The Song of Songs; the stories of Leo Tolstoy; the poetry of Wang Wei; the poetry of Weil; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s courtly Grail romance Parzival. The list can be greatly extended, and already encompasses texts from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and non-religious traditions written over a wide timescale. What is difficult to speak about can be shown by the literary. Willis Barnstone, for example, argues that mystical poems can bring readers ‘closer to the experience of that light than conceptual explanations’.66 Both Weil and Wittgenstein read widely in world literature, and Wittgenstein maintained that writers such as Tolstoy could show what could not be said. In the story ‘Father Sergy’, for example, Tolstoy tells of a Russian noble who becomes first a monk and then a hermit after he realizes that his fiancée has been a lover of the Tsar. When his chastity is threatened by a scheming noblewoman, he cuts off a finger in order to be delivered from temptation (following the example of a Desert Father) and acquires a reputation for sanctity and healing. His hermitage becomes a place of pilgrimage. He then falls from chastity by sleeping with a young woman who had been brought to him to heal. Ashamed, he flees his hermitage and considers suicide, but at last becomes a wanderer in the Russian tradition. Tolstoy writes: And little by little God began to reveal himself within him.67 The revelation does not come when Sergy is a holy monk, or when he is a holy hermit. The story shows how hollow such holiness is, because he is aware of it and gains pleasure from it. His religious way of life within the Orthodox Church is shown as another product of the ambition that

72  Philip Wilson had driven him when he was in the military. At last, he is exiled to Siberia, where he leads a life of humble service. How do we know which path to follow, however? After all, Sergey appears three times to have found his true way – as a soldier, a monk, and a hermit – only to be disillusioned. One answer is found in attention, ‘the mystic’s principle tool but also the method of the philosopher’, as Kotva puts it.68 Sergy’s ultimate vocation is forced on him by life but only because he attends to the world, and is penetrated by it. There are many possibilities, however, and Sergey’s is only one of many stories that Tolstoy wrote. The point is that attention will lead to action, just as Jaffier feels himself compelled to betray the conspiracy. Wittgenstein stresses that, rather than a continuation of his work by others, he would prefer a ‘change in the way people live which would make all these questions superfluous’ (CV p. 61), and Weil argues that the faith of a judge is seen in his behaviour on the bench, not in church (FLN 146). The path is opened to natural ways of mysticism if we follow McCullough: Weil’s conception of creation as withdrawal of God provides the theoretical grounds for what can be called her ‘religious atheism’, or even her atheistic mysticism … an experience of intense negative mysticism and negative sacramentalism … It is in this vein that Weil can write in a tone of mystical rapture of God’s ‘everlasting absence’.69 This reading returns us to where we began, with the absent God, but the God who is now known to be absent. The question of whether Weil was directly in touch with God at Solesmes in 1938 can be left open. She herself, when describing how she came across Herbert’s poem, recorded that ‘I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence’ (WG 26). Attention allows mysticism to be reconfigured as an attention that leads to a radical pluralism of natural ways. That seems like progress. Progress, however, may not always be as great as it looks. The Trouble with Progress Wittgenstein also considered as a motto the title of an Irving Berlin song, ‘You’d be surprised’.70 In the end, however, he turned to the Viennese dramatic satirist Johann Nestroy to preface the Investigations: The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is. (PI p. 2) I take Wittgenstein’s use of Nestroy to be a hint to his readers that they should not expect too much from philosophy in terms of supplying

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  73 dogmatic answers. Many of the central questions of Western philosophy – such as the meaning of life, how to live virtuously, the existence of God, or the best form of government – are not discussed in the work, which instead offers a set of methods for investigating language and changing the way that readers see the world, leaving it up to them to do the real work (PI p. 4). Similarly, there is no discussion of mysticism in the Investigations, a disappointment for any readers of the Tractatus who were hoping for further elucidation on the topic. Wittgenstein’s tools can, however, be applied to mysticism, as in the work of Tyler, who argues that there are mystical language-games and forms of life, rather than a mystical essence that can be discovered philosophically.71 A radical pluralism is encountered, in which both Augustine and the Buddhist holy man can be right. Applying Wittgenstein to Weil supports a reading of her as a mystical pluralist, who indicates a number of possibilities and who will ultimately disappoint any reader who looks for dogmatic solutions. Christ may be followed, but also Krishna, or other gods, or no god/God. Murdoch’s debt to Weil is huge, for example, but she does not take on Weil’s engagement with Christianity.72 The point is to wait at the gate. Which gate? A number of ontological possibilities are open, even if some (such as violence) are simultaneously closed down. My own preferred reading of Weil is that of the ‘atheistic mysticism’ put forward by McCullough (see the Section ‘In the Beginning’), but other readings are possible, and there are in any case many forms of atheistic mysticism. One point of this chapter is to open up debate on this issue. If we are to avoid a Brave New World, perhaps one even worse than the imaginings of Huxley, then mysticism is worth pursuing, especially because it can be considered and practised in isolation from organized religion, following Weil’s own example. Organized religion remains one of the biggest threats to the stability of the world, as any glance at the news will show. Dunbar makes the following points: 1 Religion is beneficial at an individual level; but when large numbers of believers are involved, conflict is likely to result because of the crowd effects of mass psychology.73 2 The history of attempts to create humanistic religions is ‘not encouraging’.74 3 Religion is a ‘deeply human trait’ that will be with us for some time.75 Mysticism remains an individualistic practice that can avoid the collective conflict that Dunbar discerns as endemic to religion. Weil herself condemned collectivities, even advocating the abolition of political parties (APP). A philosophically informed mysticism can avoid trying to mimic religious rituals and can offer a way for philosophy itself to remain relevant as a way of living, as in Ancient Greece, when rival schools such as Stoicism and Epicureanism offered vocations rather than career

74  Philip Wilson opportunities.76 Piety, according to Carlisle’s reading of Spinoza, is about ‘how’ rather than ‘what’: a ‘matter of how one thinks and behaves, not a matter of what one knows and believes’.77 For Weil, mysticism similarly cannot be divorced from morality (OL 151). Kotva thus is able to make a convincing case for the relevance of Weil, ‘a late, and in many ways unusual representative of mysticism’, to the current ecological crisis, given that in the twentieth century, the idea of attention became ‘significant to ecological thinking’.78 She cites the following thinkers who advocate attention (and resulting action) to the environment: Jane Bennett, Félix Guattari, Catherine Keller, Sallie McFague, Thomas Merton, and Isabelle Stengers. The picture is again pluralistic. Merton and Stengers have very different views of the world, for example, with Merton drawing on Catholicism, and Stengers drawing on Quakerism and Wicca. Kotva’s point is that Weil can be read alongside these thinkers. The demand is that ‘our environmental emergency should be studied in the context of the ongoing influence of ‘spirituality’.79 There is clearly a long way to go from formulating mystical views of the world to saving the whale, the seas, and the rainforest. Here again, progress in philosophy has a tendency to look greater than it actually is. Philosophical inquiry into mysticism is at a key point in its development, because of the growth of cognitive research into mystical phenomena. Wittgenstein’s warnings against ‘the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language’ remain apposite (PI § 109). In the Second World War, when working for a medical research unit, he warned against making an initial diagnosis of ‘shock’ when treating injured servicemen, and recommended beginning with a clear description of symptoms. It was important not to go back too far. Reading Wittgenstein and Weil together opens up new possibilities of interdisciplinary inquiry. Rather than explaining mysticism away, philosophy can both inform and be informed by cognitive science, as long as it is recalled that these are enquiries in different domains. The work of Shahar Arzy and Moshe Idel on the ecstatic Kabbalah is an example of how mysticism and neurology can be mutually enlightening.80 Can it be shown that absent gods are everywhere, that our world can be re-enchanted (cf. Weber 1946)?81 Or shall we settle for the peaceful society of Huxley, which also features an absent God, but where citizens are programmed and drugged and cannot even begin to conceive of the God who is absent? I commented in the Section ‘Absent Gods Are Everywhere’ that Brave New World is usually read as a dystopia, even though many of its programmed activities are now common in our world. The reason that many readers are repelled by Huxley’s novel may be because the pursuit of wisdom is lacking. Citizens do not reflect on the value of their lives,

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  75 apart from a few misfits, whose genetic design has gone wrong, and the Savage, who grew up elsewhere. Wisdom texts, such as the Bible or James, are kept locked in the safe, while the works of Ford fill the shelves. The Socratic contention that the unexamined life is not worth living haunts any attentive reading of Huxley’s text, something supported by the logic of the story: the misfits are banished, and the Savage kills himself out of guilt at having participated in an orgy. It has always been the curse of religion that it has brought conflict. Rather than looking for the absent gods and realizing that dogma is dangerous, believers have fought over idols.82 In contrast, Wittgenstein’s insistence that neither Augustine nor the Buddhist holy man is wrong offers no reason for them to fight each other, so long as neither of them puts forward a theory. In the anonymous eleventh-century Old French epic La Chanson de Roland [Song of Roland], the Christians are declared to be right and the Muslims to be wrong, which leads to immense bloodshed.83 Similarly, Weil’s notion of attention crosses confessional boundaries, as I argued in the Section ‘Absent Gods Are Everywhere’, and avoids conflict if it eschews dogma. Wittgenstein and Weil read together, therefore open up a conceptual space for a pluralistic reconsideration of mysticism that both supports and extends Murdoch’s call for a ‘natural way of mysticism’,84 and is supported by recent moves that see philosophy as a way of life.85 To borrow a simile that Wittgenstein used about philosophy, mysticism is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing; only when everything is in place does the door open.86 There may be more than one successful combination, even many safes. The real task may only start once the safe is opened. After all, the safe is where the Brave New World keeps wisdom. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Jack Manzi for bringing this whole project to life. And to Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Gareth Jones for commenting on a draft of my chapter. The following have offered invaluable support and advice: Jean Boase-Beier, Hasok Chang, David Cockburn, Tom Greaves, Davide Rizza, and Richard Woods. Any errors are of course my own. For Weil’s biography, I have relied on work by Gabriella Fiori,87 Simone Pétrement,88 and Stephen Plant.89 For Wittgenstein’s biography, on work by Ray Monk,90 M. O’C. Drury,91 and Jonathan Rée.92

76  Philip Wilson Permission

The translation of Simone Weil’s poem ‘The Gate’ by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson was first published in Modern Poetry in Translation (No. 1 2021), and appears in Weil’s Mirror of Obedience (Bloomsbury). Many thanks to Khairani Barokka (MPIT) and to Bloomsbury for permission to use the cited extract. Notes 1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2022). 2 Yuval Noah Harari, “Introduction,” in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (London: Vintage, 2022), pp. vii–xi (p. ix). 3 Huxley, p. 206. 4 The Cloud of Unknowing (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 2. 5 Clare Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 12. 6 Lissa McCullough, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 87. 7 McCullough, p. 235. 8 Cf. Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 2. 9 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129–156. 10 Guido Tonelli, Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began, trans. by S. Carnell and E. Segre (London: Profile Books, 2022), p.vii. 11 Wittgenstein misquotes Longfellow’s final line, which reads ‘For the Gods see everywhere’. I am working, however, with what he thought to be the case. 12 Marie Cabaud Meaney, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 18. 13 M. A. McIntosh, The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p.vii. 14 See Philip Wilson, “Demanding the Impossible,” in Untranslatablity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Duncan Large, Motoko Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska, and Emily Rose (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 99–113 (p. 99). 15 M. A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998), p. 11. 16 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 380. 17 Robin Dunbar, How Religion Evolved (London: Pelican, 2022), pp. 26ff. 18 See Rainer Schürmann, ed. and trans., Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher: Translations with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 19 Cf. Louise Nelstrop, Kevin Magill, and Bradley B. Onishi, Christian Mysticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 20 This chapter does not investigate Wittgenstein’s remarks. See James R. Atkinson, The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings (London: Routledge, 2009); Peter Tyler, The Return to the Mystical (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 193ff. 21 Tyler, p. 25.

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  77 22 Richard Woods, Eckhart’s Way (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), p. 210. 23 James, pp. 380–381. 24 Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having [No translator credited] (London: Fontana, 1970), p. 127. 25 McCullough, p. 12. 26 D. Z. Phillips, “Philosophy’s Radical Pluralism in the House of Intellect–A Reply to Henk Vroom,” in D.Z. Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion: Questions and Response, ed. by A. F. Sanders (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 179–211 (p. 200). 27 James is usually seen as adopting a perennial position on mysticism. See Tyler, pp. 10–16. This debate is beyond the remit of this chapter. 28 Schürmann, p. 225. 29 In Maurice O. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein/Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 76–171 (p. 157). 30 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Liveright, 2013), ll.307–311. 31 Eliot, p. 80n. 32 Mikel Burley, A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), p. 2. 33 Burley, p. 44. 34 In Drury, p. 93. 35 Burley, p. 45. 36 It is possible that Weil was baptized on her deathbed. 37 Cf. Burley, pp. 17–21. 38 McCullough, p. 226. 39 McCullough, p. 243n8. 40 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987), p. 136. 41 Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 126. 42 Cf. Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 43 Carlisle, p. 15. 44 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 301. 45 Cf. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970); see Kotva, pp. 171–172. 46 John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (London: Allen Lane, 2018), p. 130. 47 Gray, pp. 142–147. 48 Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (London: Allen Lane, 2018), p. 306. 49 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Vintage, 2004). 50 Cf. Gray, p. 12. 51 James, pp. 13–14. 52 Andrea Hollingsworth, “The Architecture of Apophasis: Exploring Options for a Cognitive Scientific Interpretation of the via negativa,” Religion, Brain and Behavior 6 (2016): 290–306 (p. 306). 53 Hollingsworth, p. 295. 54 Ibid.

78  Philip Wilson 55 ‘In the beginning was the Word’ would be the more conventional translation. Faust’s radical translation choice of Tat [Deed] to render the Greek ‘Logos’ implies that we can interpret Weil’s discernment of the Logos everywhere (see Section 1 above) as a discernment of the Deed everywhere. 56 Tyler, p. 231. 57 Paul Engelmann, Letters from Wittgenstein, trans. by L. Furtmüller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 98. 58 Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God (London: Granta, 2015). 59 Dunbar, p. 50. 60 In Nelstrop et al., p. 1. 61 Richard Jones and Jerome Gellman, “Mysticism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2022 Edition). https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/ [accessed 25 May 2022]. 62 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 85. 63 Tyler, p. 52. 64 See Simone Kotva, Effort and Grace (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 65 Cf. Kotva, p. 163. 66 Willis Barnstone, “Introduction,” in The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, by John of the Cross, trans. by Willis Barnstone (New York: New Directions, 1972), pp. 9–36 (p. 27). 67 Leo Tolstoy, “Father Sergy,” in The Devil and Other Stories, trans. by Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. by Richard F. Gustavson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 237–79 (p. 278). 68 Kotva, p. 139. 69 McCullough, p. 93. 70 In Drury, p. 157. 71 Tyler, op. cit. 72 See Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil (New York: Routledge, 2022). 73 Dunbar, p. 265. 74 Dunbar, p. 267. 75 Dunbar, p. 268. 76 Cf. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. by Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 77 Carlisle, p. 177. 78 Kotva, p. 174. 79 Kotva, p. 177. 80 Sharhar Arzy and Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences (London: Yale University Press, 2015). 81 Cf. Weber, op. cit. 82 Cf. Mark Johnston, Saving God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 83 La Chanson de Roland (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990), LXXII l.1015. 84 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 301. 85 Cf. Hadot, op. cit.; Kotva, op. cit. 86 In Drury, p. 81. 87 Gabriela Fiori, Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by J. R. Berrigan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 88 Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Mowbrays, 1976). 89 Stephen Plant, The SPCK Introduction to Simone Weil (London: SPCK, 2007).

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  79 90 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990). 91 Drury, op. cit. 92 Jonathan Rée, Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English (London: ­Penguin, 2020).

Bibliography Armstrong, Karen, The Case for God (London: Vintage, 2010). Arzy, Sharhar, and Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences (London: Yale University Press, 2015). Atkinson, James R., The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings (London: Routledge, 2009). Barnstone, Willis, “Introduction,” in The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, by John of the Cross, tr. by Willis Barnstone (New York: New Directions, 1972), pp. 9–36. Burley, Mikel, A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Caprioglio Panizza, Silvia, The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil (New York: Routledge, 2022). Carlisle, Clare, Spinoza’s Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). La Chanson de Roland (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990). The Cloud of Unknowing (London: Penguin, 2001). Drury, M. O., “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein/Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 76–171. Dunbar, Robin, How Religion Evolved (London: Pelican, 2022). Ehrenreich, Barbara, Living with a Wild God (London: Granta, 2015). Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Liveright, 2013). Engelmann, Paul, Letters from Wittgenstein, trans. by L. Furtmüller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). Fiori, Gabriela, Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by J. R. Berrigan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). Gray, John, Seven Types of Atheism (London: Allen Lane, 2018). Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. by Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Harari, Yuval Noah, “Introduction,” in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (London: Vintage, 2022), pp. vii–xi. Hollingsworth, Andrea, “The Architecture of Apophasis: Exploring Options for a Cognitive Scientific Interpretation of the via negativa,” Religion, Brain and Behavior 6 (2016): 290–306. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 1985). Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Vintage, 2004). ———, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2022). James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin, 1985).

80  Philip Wilson Johnston, Mark, Saving God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Jones, Richard, and Jerome Gellman, “Mysticism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2022 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/ [Accessed 25 May 2022]. Kerr, Fergus, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Kotva, Simone, Effort, and Grace (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Marcel, Gabriel, Being and Having [No translator credited] (London: Fontana, 1970). McCabe, Herbert, Faith within Reason (London: Continuum, 2007). McCullough, Lissa, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). McIntosh, M. A., Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998). ———, The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Meaney, Marie Cabaud, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990). Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970). ———, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992). Nelstrop, Louise, Kevin Magill, and Bradley B. Onishi, Christian Mysticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Pétrement, Simone, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Mowbrays, 1976). Phillips, D. Z., “Philosophy’s Radical Pluralism in the House of Intellect–A Reply to Henk Vroom,” in D.Z. Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion: Questions and Response, ed. by A. F. Sanders (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 179–211. Plant, Stephen, The SPCK Introduction to Simone Weil (London: SPCK, 2007). Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Pollan, Michael, How to Change Your Mind (London: Allen Lane, 2018). Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987). Rée, Jonathan, Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English (London: Penguin, 2020). Rhees, Rush, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Schürmann, Rainer, ed. and trans., Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher: Translations with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). Sebald, W. G., “In a Completely Unknown Region: On Gerhard Roth’s Novel Landläufiger Tod,” trans. by Markus Zisselsberger, Modern Austrian Literature 40, no. 4 (2007): 29–39. Tolstoy, Leo, “Father Sergy,” in The Devil and Other Stories, trans. by Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. by Richard F. Gustafson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 237–279.

Learning to Look: On Mysticism and Mysticisms  81 Tonelli, Guido, Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began, trans. by S. Carnell and E. Segre (London: Profile Books, 2022). Tyler, Peter, The Return to the Mystical (London: Continuum, 2011). Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation,” in Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129–156. Weil, Simone, The Notebooks of Simone Weil [2 volumes], trans. by Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1956). ———, Seventy Letters, trans. by Rush Rhees (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). ———, On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, trans. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). ———, First and Last Notebooks, trans. by Rush Rhees (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). ———, Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (Glasgow: Collins/Fontana, 1978). ———, Oppression and Liberty, trans. by Arthur Wills and J. Petrie (London: Routledge, 2001). ———, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawfurd and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002a). ———, Letter to a Priest, trans. by Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002b). ———, The Need for Roots, trans. by Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2002c). ———, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans. by Simon Leys (New York: NYRB Classics, 2014a). ———, “Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry’s Claim That Philosophy Is Poetry,” trans. by Eric O. Springsted, Philosophical Investigations 37, no. 2 (2014b): 105–112. ———, Venice Saved, ed. and trans. by Silvia Panizza and Philip Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). ———, Mirror of Obedience, ed. and trans. by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). Wilson, Philip, “Demanding the Impossible,” in Untranslatablity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Duncan Large, Motoko Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska, and Emily Rose (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 99–113. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Notebooks 1914–1918, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961). ———, On Certainty, trans. by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). ———, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology [2 volumes], trans. by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980a). ———, Culture and Value, trans. by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980b). ———, Zettel, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). ———, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C. K. Ogden [and Frank Ramsey] (London: Routledge, 1990).

82  Philip Wilson ———, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Philosophical Occasions, trans. by John Beversluis, ed. by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (London: Hackett, 1993), pp. 118–155. ———, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Woods, Richard, Eckhart’s Way (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986).

4 Will the Void Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention Hannah Winther

The Limits of Sense and the Ineffable Though they were contemporaries, it is not known whether Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Simone Weil (1909–1943) were familiar with each other’s works. It is likely that they weren’t—one of the many similarities in their life trajectories is the fact that the majority of their work was published after their death. The texts they did publish during their lifetimes, moreover, would doubtfully have crossed the other’s path. Weil was largely untranslated and yet to rise to the prominence she later would. In France, on the other hand, Wittgenstein was more or less unread until the 1960s and considered a “curiosité intellectuelle sans intérêt.”1 The many parallels between their lives and philosophical preoccupations are striking, however. Among other affinities, this comes to the fore in the way they conceive of and approach philosophical questions, as Peter Winch has observed.2 Both have been described as outsiders,3 and part of what validates this description is their resistance to conform to conventional standard and style in philosophical writing. Aphorisms and imagery pervade their texts, and they write with an earnestness that demands the reader to take the subject as seriously as they do. They both reject philosophy as system-building, preferring instead a fragmentary style of writing. More than a matter of style, this is a question of philosophical attitude. The urgency and relentlessness with which they write make it clear that the philosophical problems they are addressing are also deeply personal problems, and they never seem able to approach them with the distance and sobriety that characterize much academic philosophy. For both, it can be claimed that philosophy is not merely an abstract intellectual endeavour to understand the world we live in, but rather a personal quest to understand how we should live. In line with this, both conceive of philosophy as an activity and argue against the attempt to give ethics a propositional content. For both, these stylistic choices are also informed by an attempt to challenge and go beyond the parameters set by reigning cultural, logical, DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-5

84  Hannah Winther and philosophical paradigms. Their writing expresses an attempt to run up against the limits of language, to borrow a turn of phrase from Wittgenstein,4 in an attempt to both establish and defy them. Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence” is Weil’s “Language isn’t made to express philosophical reflection.”5 This chapter is concerned with this attempt to run up against the limits of language and with Weil and Wittgenstein’s mutual concern with that which we cannot express through language. In the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Wittgenstein famously draws a limit between what can be said and what can only be shown and writes that that which shows itself is the mystical.6 Notably, ethics is one of the mystical things we can say nothing about, and yet Wittgenstein also claimed that the book has an ethical purpose.7 How we should understand what Wittgenstein means by this has been a topic of contention. I attempt to shed light on this question by drawing on Weil’s concept of attention and exploring similarities in Wittgenstein and Weil’s conceptions of philosophy. This juxtaposition is motivated by some reflections by Rush Rhees. As a contemporary of both—a student and friend of Wittgenstein, and an early ambassador for Weil in Anglo-American philosophy (although they never met)—Rhees was perhaps uniquely positioned to see affinities.8 He saw, more specifically, a likeness between the way in which Wittgenstein approaches philosophy and Weil’s concept of attention.9 What Rhees has to say about this likeness is brief, but I believe that it contains useful insight and attempt to substantiate it here. The chapter is structured as follows: I start by laying out the initial problem, namely how Wittgenstein can claim that the Tracatus has an ethical goal when ethics fall under the domain of things we can say nothing about. In an attempt to shed light on this question, I proceed by discussing Rhees’ comparison of Wittgenstein and Weil, arguing that they share a rejection of system-building in philosophy and an understanding of philosophy as an activity that consists in the examination of our assumptions and preconceptions in order to perceive the world more accurately. Spelling out the ethical implications of this, I argue that though Wittgenstein writes little about the concept of attention explicitly, it still plays a significant role in his thinking and is, similarly to Weil, a morally consequential notion insofar as it determines how we perceive reality and which actions we consider possible. Finally, I argue that both Wittgenstein and Weil offer useful perspectives for current debates on the attention economy. After Throwing Away the Ladder Towards the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein makes a puzzling remark: The propositions the book consists of are

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  85 nonsensical, and if we understand him, we will recognize this.10 He also makes a statement the whole book is remembered for (a repetition from the introduction, where it also appears) and which has entered the history of philosophy with a certain notoriety: “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.”11 This description of his own text as nonsense might strike the reader as putting in question the consistency and credibility of the entire work. One reader who was certainly so struck was Rudolf Carnap: In the first place [Wittgenstein] seems to me to be inconsistent in what he does. He tells us that one cannot state philosophical propositions and that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent; and then instead of keeping silent, he writes a whole philosophical book.12 Why has Wittgenstein put us through over 500 complex and difficult statements, which demands significant effort from the reader who wishes to understand them, if they have no meaning? Why should we take seriously the claim that we should keep silent about the things we cannot speak of if it that too is a nonsensical claim? And if we should keep quiet about these and other philosophical propositions, where does that leave philosophy? In order to answer these questions, we must consider what Wittgenstein himself took the purpose of his work to be. Wittgenstein provides us with some instructions for how to approach the Tractatus in a letter to Paul Engelmann. There, he points us to the preface and the conclusion, which “contain the most direct expression of the point of the book.”13 These parts of the Tractatus are sometimes referred to as its “framing.”14 In the preface, right after having stated that we must pass over in silence the things which we cannot speak of, Wittgenstein goes on to say the following: Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).15 Wittgenstein’s remarks here form the basis for the infamous distinction between showing and saying. According to Wittgenstein, some things are not describable in language, and the aim of the Tracatus is to draw a line between these things and what can meaningfully be said. Towards the end of the text, Wittgenstein phrases this ambition thus: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”16 Among the things that cannot be said and are mystical, Wittgenstein includes propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. In fact, the only propositions we

86  Hannah Winther can say on his account are propositions of natural science. Wittgenstein’s dismissal of the propositions of his own text as nonsense seems to suggest that they too cannot be said. But this brings us back to Carnap’s question: Why write the book? Some indication of an answer is found if we turn to the other part of the frame, the conclusion, where Wittgenstein states the following: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.17 In other words, Wittgenstein’s nonsense is clearly nonsense with a purpose, where this purpose is to “see the world aright.” But how can we take Wittgenstein seriously here—surely this is also a nonsensical proposition? Furthermore, the suggestion that we will “see the world aright” if we succeed in understanding him could suggest an ethical motivation, but as we remember, he claims that ethics is just as nonsensical as anything else the book has to offer. And yet, Wittgenstein suggests elsewhere that it is precisely ethics that is at stake. In a letter to the publisher Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein makes two striking claims. First, he writes that “[t]he book’s point is an ethical one.”18 In fact, the Tractatus consists of two parts: In addition to the actual part that was published, there is unwritten part. Moreover, “it is precisely this second part that is the important one.”19 He goes on: My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.20 We can consider this letter as the unwritten frame of the Tractatus, and in the literature, much effort has been devoted to understanding the direction it gives for reading it and how something which is not contained in the book can still be said to be part of it.21 Wittgenstein aims at saying something about ethics by remaining silent about it, but unless epiphanies have struck you on top of the ladder and you have happily thrown it away and ascended to some level in which you would presumably not need it to come back down, chances are that the

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  87 message feels unconvincing. This, then, is the problem the Tractatus leaves us with: How can a book consisting of nonsense have an ethical point? In other words: What can we learn from the Tractatus about Wittgenstein’s views on ethics? Difficulties of Philosophy as Moral Difficulties The question about Wittgenstein’s views on ethics needs to be seen in connection with his broader conception of philosophy. Here, I propose to do this by turning to Rhees, who relates Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy to Weil’s concept of attention. The context for this comparison is Rhees’ essay “The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy,” which was edited from his Nachlass and published posthumously. The topic which preoccupies Rhees in this essay is the relationship between questions of philosophy and one’s outlook on other things. “To do philosophy,” Rhees states, “a man must be able not only to see questions where those not given to philosophy see none, but also to look on these questions in a particular way.”22 He elaborates: Not wanting to dismiss the questions, nor to ‘get rid of them’ through any sort of answer, or to show that they are a sort of needless worry to be put out of mind. (Wittgenstein sometimes spoke about this in a way that was misleading and contrary to his own practice.) Trying rather to understand these questions—and from this angle or in this sense to understand how they arise in, and in one sense belong to, our thinking about other questions that we ask and answer. This goes with contemplation of the ways in which people think and inquire—e.g. in trying to solve problems of physics, or in connection with moral problems. And this is difficult. Perhaps especially so in a culture which has become as technological as ours—as much preoccupied with getting things done, with how to do things, with results.23 Rhees’ final comment about the challenges of contemplation in the age of technology has only become more pressing in recent years, and I will return to this point later. The main relevance of this quote for the current purposes is that Rhees connects the above description of how he believes philosophy should be approached, which is a method he relates to Wittgenstein, with Weil’s concept of attention. He writes: I have been trying to paraphrase certain of Wittgenstein’s ideas. Simone Weil often spoke in ways that were analogous, although she and Wittgenstein often diverged also. In analogy with what I have just been trying

88  Hannah Winther to say about contemplation, compare what she says about ‘attention’, for instance, in her ‘Réflexions sur le bon usage des études scolaires’, Attente de Dieu, p. 76: ‘Twenty minutes of attention, without tiring, is worth infinitely more than three hours of forced effort… But in spite of how it appears, it is much more difficult. There is something in our soul which draws back from genuine attention much more violently than the flesh recoils from fatigue. This something is much closer to evil than is the flesh.’24 “Attention” is a key concept in Weil’s thought. In everyday speech, this notion is typically understood as a kind of cognitive spotlight—our moment-to-moment zooming in and out on our surroundings—or we talk about attentiveness and paying attention as our ability to concentrate or focus on things for longer periods of time. We should be careful to distinguish Weil’s use of the term from this understanding, as she explicitly contrasts her understanding of attention to this kind of “muscular effort.”25 For her, attention is both a spiritual and a moral capacity; it is a passive, open waiting. It serves a dual function: It is both that which brings us closer to God and that which makes us acknowledge reality and do what is right. In the essay quoted by Rhees above, Weil writes that being attentive is a matter of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object, it means holding in our minds, within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.26 In other words, attention consists in living our minds open and detached: We should not be affected by any particular thoughts or motives and be receptive to what opens itself to us. Weil’s description of being attentive as a state of waiting is made clearer in the original text: In French, the word for waiting is attente, underlining the connection between this state and attention. As Silvia Panizza phrases it, “the attentive mind is receptive but not seeking, […]not trying to understand, but to make itself available for understanding to occur.”27 “Waiting” and “making oneself available” are not just a matter of sitting around, however. Weil describes attention as a “negative effort.”28 For Weil, being attentive involves a deliberate refusal or renunciation of one’s own desires, thoughts, and distractions in order to focus on the object of attention. Instead of thinking about attention as

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  89 something we add on to our mental state, it is better thought of as a subtraction or removal of whatever might distract us from what we are trying to focus on. In other words, we have to resist the pull of our wandering thoughts and desires. The fact that such distractions can come in the way of attention is likely a familiar experience for anyone who has ever owned a smartphone. Attention is difficult not only because it requires effort and focus over time but also because reality can be difficult to take in.29 This is what Cora Diamond has in mind when she writes about “the difficulty of reality,” which she describes as “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking about it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability.”30 The examples Diamond writes about concern our comprehension of death, or treatment of animals, and instances of goodness and beauty. When we are confronted with such difficulties, we are pushed beyond what we are able to think—“to attempt to think it is to feel one’s thinking become unhinged.”31 Our conflicting relationship to animals is a weighty moral issue of our thinking becoming unhinged, but, as Panizza comments, anything can present such a difficulty if we look at it long enough.32 When our thinking “becomes unhinged,” our usual patterns of thinking meet a resistance that can make us question them, and this questioning carries moral weight. This perspective resonates with Rhees, who writes that “the difficulties of philosophy have in a certain way the character of moral difficulties.”33 This, he notes, is what Wittgenstein has in mind when he writes that philosophy involves a constant struggle against a resistance in oneself, a resistance of will: “One is unwilling to let certain ways of thinking go. It was in such connections also that Wittgenstein said that whoever does philosophy will have to suffer.”34 An example of the kind of statement Rhees is referring to here can be found in The Big Typescript, where Wittgenstein states that the “difficulty of philosophy is not the difficulty of the sciences, but the difficulty of a change of attitude. Resistance of the will must be overcome.”35 Our patterns of thinking can have a strong hold on us, and doing philosophy involves questioning some of these fundamental assumptions and beliefs about the world and ourselves. The task, then, consists in leaving our preconceptions and regular patterns of thinking behind and considering reality attentively. But how do we achieve this? From Deflection to Attention A common response to a difficulty of reality, Diamond writes, is deflection. Deflection consists in a failure to appreciate a difficulty of reality and focus instead on a moral problem in the vicinity which we are able to say

90  Hannah Winther something about.36 Take Diamond’s example about animals: Here, as mentioned above, the difficulty lies in reconciling our understanding of animals as living beings and companions in life with the fact of animal suffering. According to Diamond, we fail to appreciate the true difficulty of this situation if we address this moral challenge by trying to settle how they ought to be treated on the basis of which morally relevant capacities they have, as is argued in an influential approach to animal ethics defended by Peter Singer.37 Establishing capacities and settling which of them are morally relevant may give us one answer about how we ought to treat animals, but it is an answer which, by taking the original problem and articulating it in these more manageable terms, sidesteps the original difficulty.38 What Diamond tries to show is how deflection can misguide us and that attention to a difficulty of reality, even when it doesn’t lead to a resolution, can be a rewarding philosophical endeavour. Doing so, however, is challenging. “Can there be such a thing as philosophy that is not deflected from such realities?” Diamond asks and gives Weil as an example of a philosopher who attempts to maintain her awareness of difficulties rather than fall into deflection.39 The story of Weil’s life could be told as an effort to appreciate difficulties like the ones described above, from her refusal to eat sugar at the age of 6 upon learning that the soldiers at the front could have none,40 her taking on factory work in an attempt to better understand the workers’ conditions,41 to her joining the Spanish Civil War.42 “Human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality of affliction,” Weil writes in a paragraph quoted by Diamond.43 Truly understanding and taking in the reality of affliction would involve recognizing the frailty of our own existence, which we have no control over. Acknowledging affliction means understanding that it is something that might befall us, and this is extremely difficult to do. We can imagine that we get hit by a car or that we experience famine, and we know that we will ultimately die, but these imaginings are characterized by an unreality—we cannot truly understand them as experiences we could be the subject of. Understanding the reality of affliction means accepting our own temporality and mortality, and this is an understanding we prefer to keep at bay with diversions—“the thought of death calls for a counterweight, and this counterweight—apart from grace—cannot be anything but a lie”, Weil states.44 She writes about an interior void, which is constitutive of our nature, and how it is filled up by the imagination in an attempt to avoid affliction. In order not to deflect from this difficulty, we need to “empty ourselves of the world” and to “reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time—that is to say, to nothing.”45 This extinction of desire or detachment, as Weil calls it, means that we open ourselves to the void, which can then be filled by God and his grace. It is in this solitude we possess the truth of the world. Our task,

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  91 therefore, is to “fix our will on the void—to will the void.”46 This involves a kind of self-forgetting and letting go of the ego—something which Iris Murdoch, who repeatedly acknowledges her debt to Weil, would later call “unselfing.”47 It means that we transcend the limitations of the self, which for Weil is necessary to develop empathy and compassion for others. As Weil puts it, “the ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me.”48 Although this effort might never fully succeed, there is still a value in striving for it. The value of contemplation without necessarily reaching an answer is demonstrated in Weil’s ideas about teaching. For Weil, when we consider a geometrical problem, it matters little that we never manage to solve it. Zaretsky writes about Anne Reynard, one of Weil’s students in Roanne, who recalled that Weil would conduct outdoor classes where she would encourage her students to “seek problems in geometry.”49 The point of these classes was to learn that merely looking for problems, and ponder and wrestle with them, is a worthwhile pursuit in itself. A genuine effort of attention is never wasted, as Weil puts it.50 Similarly, she writes that: The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.51 Weil writes that few philosophers meet this standard, but it might be objected that this is because it has not really been considered a standard for doing philosophy. What she is doing, though, is challenging a common conception of what we should expect when we ask questions in philosophy and what we can hope to achieve by trying to answer them. Diamond has offered an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s effort in the Tractatus that is in line with Weil’s challenge to traditional conceptions of philosophy. Her main argument is that the point of the Tractatus is not that it gives us ethical statements we can use in our own lives— Wittgenstein makes this clear when he states in the introduction that this is not a textbook—but rather that it enables us to see the world in a certain way. It achieves this through Wittgenstein’s account of senseful language: the propositions of the Tractatus serve a specific purpose in that they draw our attention to what senseful language is, thereby making us realize that certain things cannot be adequately expressed in it. Diamond explains this point with a helpful analogy. The propositions of the Tractatus, she writes, Have a role that can be compared with that of auxiliary construction lines in a geometrical proof. What we have at the end of the geometrical

92  Hannah Winther proof is the construction itself, the lines that form part of it. The auxiliary lines helped us get there, but they are not part of what we are left with at the end.52 The aim of drawing our attention to senseful language is to transform our understanding of both the questions we wanted to ask and the answers we expect to them. Diamond writes that just like we can find our perspective transformed by a work of art, such a transformation can also occur by philosophical writings. As an example she gives is Wittgenstein’s engagement with Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, which has ethical significance despite the fact that it contains no guidelines or statements in it about how we ought to live: Just as that story is ethically significant in part through keeping silent about ethics, so the Tracatus can be ethically significant through keeping silent about ethics. It can treat ethics through presenting nothing ethical; it can treat ethics (this is what I want to suggest) through presenting the general form of a senseful proposition.53 On this account, what is involved in throwing away the ladder is an altered understanding of what is involved in asking and answering a question in philosophy. On Diamond’s interpretation, when Wittgenstein writes about the limits of language, he does not mean that what lies on the other side is beyond reach and that we have to resign to the fact that saying something about it would be futile. Rather, talking about the limits of language means that there is nothing we can say in language which will give us an answer to the question we sought to answer. 54 In other words, “[t]he idea […] is not that the thing one is trying to say […] lies beyond the limits of what can be said, but that nothing that can be said would be what one is seeking, or takes oneself to be seeking.”55 Like Weil’s reflections above, then, this suggests that though we might not find the kind of answer we thought we were looking for when we asked a certain kind of question, the fact that we asked it and struggled with it might still get us somewhere. The propositions of the Tractatus are not failed attempts to say something we ultimately are unable to say but rather intended to re-direct our attention.56 The sense in which the Tractatus is ethical, then, is that it can enable us to “see the world the right way.”57 This reading is echoed by Lars Hertzberg, who writes that philosophical bewilderment, on Wittgenstein’s view, “is to be overcome by the redirecting of our attention, by our being reminded of things we know but fail to bring to bear on the issues that confront us.”58 To give some examples: When Wittgenstein states that “Not how the world is the mystical, but that it is,” what he means is that if we answer

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  93 the question “Why is there anything?” with scientific propositions and reference to natural laws, then we will not be left with the answer we’re looking for. Similarly, Wittgenstein states that even if we had answered all possible scientific questions, the problems of life would remain completely untouched.59 In Lecture on Ethics, he invites us to image a book written by an omniscient person, containing the whole description of the world. This book, Wittgenstein writes, “would contain nothing we could call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment.”60 Therefore, “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.”61 In other words, Wittgenstein wants to examine what it could mean to ask questions about the problems of life, and challenges our conception of what such an answer could look like. Rather than throwing in the towel, this is a call to “see differently ourselves and our askings, and the relation of our askings to the world.”62 To summarize so far, both Wittgenstein and Weil encourage us to give up a certain standard of what it means to ask and answer questions in philosophy. Weil writes that “philosophy does not consist in accumulating knowledge, as science does, but in changing the whole soul.”63 In a similar vein, Wittgenstein also dismisses the idea of a scientific accumulation of ethical propositions: “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science”64 and states doing philosophy involves working on oneself.65 What they offer instead is an understanding of philosophy as a practical and engaged activity that requires us to critically examine our assumptions and language use in order to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In the following, I will give an outline of what this kind of practice involves by sketching out some possible implications of Wittgenstein and Weil’s insights for current debates on the attention economy. Wittgenstein, Weil, and the Attention Economy The concept of attention has gained a lot of traction in recent years. This can be explained by the fact that it increasingly seems to have become a commodity due to the demands on it made by the internet, various smart gadgets, and ever more advanced algorithms, to mention just a few examples. Hence, James Williams has stated that “[t]he liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.”66 “The attention economy” has become an established term, and there is a plethora of how-to books about how the war against distraction can be fought.

94  Hannah Winther A few selected titles give a telling image: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (2020), and Attention Hijacked: Using Mindfulness to Reclaim Your Brain from Tech (2022). If you do a Google search for “digital detox retreat,” you will find plenty of offers promising the impossible: an escape from our digital lives, the opportunity to “disconnect to reconnect,” if only temporarily. Case in point: As I am writing this, I am relying on a program that blocks my access to specific websites and apps in an attempt to stop procrastinating and focus on the task at hand.67 In some respects, there is nothing new about this struggle; already Weil noted, as we remember from above, how difficult it is to sustain attentiveness for longer periods of time. But with new technologies, this challenge is gaining new dimensions as concerns are being raised about how it impacts our ability for attention. Among the ongoing discussions in the wake of this development are questions like how distractions by technological devices and the internet impact productiveness, how they affect our school systems and education, and how they impact our general well-being. An equally salient question, however, is whether and how our capacity for moral attention is affected. What is at stake, in terms Weil would perhaps use, is our capacity to recognize morally salient features in a situation, which is necessary to know how to act. Think, for example, about how technological devices and information architecture shape what we pay attention to: Algorithms tailor news feeds based on interests and engagement, which may lead to the formation of filter bubbles and cause you to have a very different conception of politics and world events from your neighbour or co-worker. This challenge is increasing all the more with the speedy development of fake news and the ability of fake news outlets to produce attention-grabbing and viral content. So-called microtargeting, that is, highly personalized advertisements directed at users based on personal behavioural characteristics, may to a large degree shape what kind of messages and information we are exposed to. A European Commission Report states that “The microtargeting of political messages has considerable potential to undermine democratic discourse.”68 Such practices have led former US president Barack Obama to state that the internet is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”69 These mechanisms and technologies steer and control what we pay attention to, how we understand it, and what importance we grant it. In other words, there is an urgent need to understand how the massive demands that are made on us by digital technologies impact our ability to respond to situations that confront us. While neither Wittgenstein nor Weil can offer an antidote to the grasp technology has on our attention, what they can offer is a vocabulary for addressing the dangers inherent in failing to be attentive and for understanding

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  95 attention as a moral rather than an intellectual skill. Central in both philosophers’ thinking is the emphasis on how our attention can be blocked or distorted, for example, by our own prejudices and predeterminations, familiar patterns of thinking, or distractions that impose on our thinking. For Weil, being attentive involves a certain level of detachment from one’s own desires and preoccupations and a sustained awareness, which requires discipline and effort. The concept of attention is at the core of what the ultimate aim of philosophy is for her, namely to help us transcend our limited perspectives and open ourselves to God. For Wittgenstein, philosophy is an activity that consists in the clarification of thought with the aim of helping us see the world in the right way,70 and both in his earlier and later work, philosophy can be understood as a battle with prejudice and specific ways of thinking, which comes from language and our shared forms of life.71 Both place emphasis on the question of how attention regulates our interaction with the world, and both see it as involving a striving towards a truthful vision of it. Our ways of viewing things are deeply entrenched in our daily practices of life. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests that we are held captive by “pictures” which make us see the world a certain way,72 and doing philosophy involves questioning, freeing ourselves from, and constructing new pictures. It is easy to be blind to these pictures, since they constitute our framework for experience.73 This is connected with Wittgenstein’s understanding of concepts as context-based: “[The word] ‘beautiful’ is connected with a specific game. And this is also the case in ethics: The meaning of the word “good” is determined by the action that qualifies it.”74 Ethical concepts, in other words, only make sense in the context of our praxis of using them in and on the background of our moral lives. Further elaborating on this understanding of concepts as determined by context, Wittgenstein uses the example of the duck-rabbit and writes about how an aspect of this figure can “light up” so that we can see the drawing as either a duck or a rabbit.75 This aspect theory has moral implications: If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.76 Compare Wittgenstein’s statement that we cannot alter the world, only its limits, with Weil and her discussion of the good Samaritan. Those who merely pass by the robbed man on the Jericho road see “only a little piece

96  Hannah Winther of flesh, naked, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch; he is nameless; no one knows anything about him.”77 For the good Samaritan who stops and turns his attention towards him, the situation appears differently: He sees a fellow human being in need of aid. For him, there is no moment of reflection or weighing of different alternatives—his actions are simply what follows from this moment of attention. As Weil puts it, “To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.”78 Similar perspectives can be found in Weil’s reflections in “Essay on the notion of reading.” In this essay, Weil defends a perspectivism in that she shows that different kinds of views, or “readings,” are possible. When we read, we do so through the prism of meaning. How we take in and understand the text will depend on who we are and what kind of background we approach it with. For Weil, the idea of different readings does not just apply to text, but also to human beings and different situations. Similarly to Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, she writes about how we occasionally can confuse what we see for something else. As an example, she described walking along a deserted road at night and seeing a man standing on the side of the road, waiting to ambush her. When she comes nearer, however, she realizes that the man is in fact a tree: “A human presence has penetrated my soul through my eyes, and now, just as suddenly, the presence of a tree.”79 The point is that it is not the world itself that changes, but rather our “reading” of it. Of course, in this case, one reading was simply wrong, but nonetheless, meanings can fix what we believe and how we act.80 Meanings can take possession over us in such a way, she writes, that “my soul is no longer my own.”81 Zaretsky offers another example of how we read the world differently in different situations: In war, we often see the opposing party as our enemy, and it can become impossible to distinguish between the person and our hatred for them. In times of peace, however, we see fellow human beings worthy of respect and consideration.82 In Wittgenstein’s terms, we could talk about this as a shift in aspects: we are exposed to the same object, but depending on our preconceptions and prejudice, have the experience of seeing it as the specific thing we are seeing it as. The notions of “seeing” and “viewing,” in fact, frequently appear when Wittgenstein discusses ethics in the Tractatus.83 For Wittgenstein, as Fairhurst has argued, a good ethical life demands a certain view of the world.84 In 6.45, for example, he talks about “viewing the world,” when writing about the solution to the problem of life and when examining the mystical, he refers to a “visual field.”85 In his later writings, the idea of a picture or an image is also frequently invoked. In the introduction to Philosophical Investigations, for example, he compares the book to an album consisting of different images that taken together may offer the reader a view of

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  97 the landscape.86 The point is that different descriptions and considerations can be taken into account and come to make us see things differently. Consider in this context Wittgenstein’s claim that “ethics and aesthetics are one.”87 When reasons are given in aesthetics, Wittgenstein argues, they have the nature of “further descriptions”: they can “draw your attention to a thing” or “place things side by side.”88 Further emphasizing the importance of attention in these contexts, in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Wittgenstein states that “‘[d]escribing’ includes ‘attending’.”89 Using Wittgenstein’s own example from Lecture on Ethics, if you are a fan of Brahms and want to make your friend see what’s so great about him, you can show him different pieces by Brahms, replay things and point to different patterns, or compare him with a contemporary author. This is not giving an argument for why Brahms is an excellent composer who should be admired; we cannot point to any one thing which makes it so, but what you can try to do is make our friend see what you see. If these attempts fail, however, and your friend still finds Brahms unappealing and boring, that will usually be the end of the discussion—what more can be said? For Wittgenstein, reasons work in much of the same sense in ethics.90 Just like aesthetic judgments are not a matter of clearing up circumstances before a judge who will pass a sentence, so we cannot bring forth reasons in ethics that will give us a definitive understanding of good and bad. The point is rather to show someone a certain way of looking at something, and ask them to consider and maybe accept this picture: What do I mean when I say “the pupil’s ability to learn may come to an end here”? Do I report this from my own experience? Of course not. (Even if I have had such experience.) Then what am I doing with that remark? After all, I’d like you to say: “Yes, it’s true, one could imagine that too, that might happen too!” But was I trying to draw someone’s attention to the fact that he is able to imagine that?—–I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things. (Indian mathematicians: “Look at this!”)91 As Hertzberg notes, when we are telling someone that they overlooked or failed to notice something, we are saying that the information was accessible; they merely didn’t notice it.92 Similarly, when I have a discussion with someone and find myself convinced by a perspective that has been brought forth, I can say something along the lines of “I hadn’t looked at it like that, but now I see what you mean.” When Wittgenstein invites about how we can draw someone’s attention to something and ask them

98  Hannah Winther to accept a certain picture, he is pointing to something similar to what Weil has in mind when she writes about how our reading of the world can change: We see and hear the same things, but they gain new meanings. The reason why our field of vision has moral dimensions is that it constitutes the area for our possible actions. This concretizes the alternative that can be found in their thinking to the system-building in philosophy they both reject: Morality here does not consist in the construction of abstract principles to be applied to reality; instead, morality is something that “spurs from attentive focus,” as Elisa Aaltola has phrased it.93 When we pay attention to the reality of others, we also come to recognize its value.94 For both Wittgenstein and Weil, then, how our attention is steered and what we choose to pay attention to establish the basis on which we understand which choices and actions are open to us. Attention is the guide to our moral perception of the world and what makes us transcend our limited self and take in the reality of others. This means that the way in which algorithms, technologies, and social media platforms usurp and shape our attention also shapes our moral understanding of the world. In Wittgenstein’s vocabulary, it can be understood as a continuous stream of picture-making, pointing to and constructing different perspectives and world views and inviting us to accept them. While the ability of these platforms to expose us to realities and perspectives we might otherwise never have encountered might expand our attentive perception of other realities, it might also distort it. What Wittgenstein and Weil can offer in this context is a vocabulary for describing how attention shapes our perception and understanding of the world, where attention is understood as a fundamental moral capacity. In other words, when our attention is treated like a resource which can be monetized and commodified in the attention economy, this has implications for how we function as moral agents. This suggests a need for a broader conversation about the structure of the markets that arguably exploit our attentional capacities and for the consequences this has for both the individual and society. Finally, while most of this chapter has been concerned with the individual’s attentive practice, it has also, via Weil, pointed to a possible systematic response to the challenges raised in this section, namely to education and school systems. On Weil’s view, the underlying aim of education is precisely to develop our attentive faculties. Weil’s observations of the difficulty of attention and the importance of education in cultivating attention are especially relevant in light of current debates on screen use in schools and their impact on children’s learning abilities. In the era of instant availability, her and Wittgenstein’s reflections on the value of engaging with the difficult and the complex and on how this is a matter of working on oneself and one’s own understanding, though it may not yield concrete answers, may offer a useful corrective.

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  99 Conclusion This chapter has been concerned with establishing an affinity between Wittgenstein and Weil by using Weil’s concept of attention to discuss Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. This comparison was motivated by some remarks by Rhees, who observed a likeness between them in this regard but who never developed these reflections further. One way of interpreting Rhees’ statement has been offered in the discussion above: Both thinkers reject philosophy as system-building, arguing instead that philosophy is an activity that consists in striving towards a truthful vision, which is simultaneously a work of understanding the world and working on oneself. I have also suggested that though the concept of attention is not operationalized in Wittgenstein’s thinking in the same way as it is in Weil’s, it does in fact play a significant role in his thinking and can shed light on both his conception of philosophy and his conception of ethics in both his earlier and later philosophy. Finally, I have argued that since attention is increasingly becoming a commodity as new technologies and ever more complex algorithms make demands on it, the question of how it is shaped and what role it plays warrants further research. Here, the perspectives of Wittgenstein and Weil have much to offer. Notes 1 “An uninteresting intellectual curiosity.” (My translation). James Helgeson, “What Cannot Be Said: Notes on Early French Wittgenstein Reception,” Paragraph 34, no. 3 (2011): 339. https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2011.0029. 2 Peter Winch, Simone Weil: The Just Balance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 4; Peter Winch, “Introduction,” in Simone Weil. Lectures on Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Price. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3 Andre Gidé described her as “the patron saint of all outsiders” (A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Benjamin P. Davis, “Simone Weil,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022)), and in her introduction to Waiting for God, Leslie Fiedler describes Weil’s outsidedness as “the very essence of her position” (Leslie Fiedler, “Introduction,” in Waiting for God (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), p. 7). Wittgenstein was similarly an outsider among the Viennese bourgeoise, in Cambridge and in his locations of exile in Trattenbach and Skjolden. Their outsideness was not merely observed by others, but also self-prescribed: Weil wrote that is was necessary for her to be alone, “an outsider and alienated from every human context whatsoever” and wrote the following reminder in her journal: “Preserve your solitude!” (Fiedler, p. 7). Wittgenstein similarly sought solitude. About his stays in Norway, he wrote “I thank God that I came to Norway in solitude!” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Ms-183,” in Interactive Dynamic Presentation (IDP) of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Nachlass, Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB), p. 187). (My translation.) 4 Fredrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Conversations Recorded by Fredrich Waismann, ed. by Brian McGuiness (Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 68.

100  Hannah Winther 5 Simone Weil, “Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry’s Claim That Philosophy Is Poetry,” Philosophical Investigations 37, no. 2 (2014): 110. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Werkausgabe Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), p. 6.522. 7 Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), p. 143. 8 See Rush Rhees, Discussions of Simone Weil, ed. by D. Z. Phillips (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 9 Rush Rhees, “The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy,” Philosophical Investigations 17, no. 4 (1994): 579. 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 6.54. 11 Wittgenstein, Tracatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 7. 12 Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London: Kegan Paul, 1935). 13 Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 144. 14 Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. by Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 149. 15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge Classics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 3. 16 TLP 6.522. The German original here says: “Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.” D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness translates this as “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” My translation above has opted for “inexpressible” instead of “cannot be put into words” and “show itself” instead of “make themselves manifest”. 17 TLP 6.54. 18 Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 143. 19 Engelmann, p. 143. 20 Engelmann, p. 143. 21 For example, thinkers such as Cora Diamond (discussed below) and James Conant have used it as an interpretative tool for what has been termed their “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein (see, for example James Conant, “Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder,” Yale Review 79, no. 3 (1991): 328–364; Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”; Cora Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 170–204. Others have argued against this reading and the role it attributes to the frame (for example Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, “The Good Sense of Nonsense: A Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as NonselfRepudiating,” Philosophy 82, no. 319 (2007): 147–177. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0031819107319062; P. M. S. Hacker, “Was He Trying to Whistle It?,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. by Alice Crary and Rupert Read (Routledge, 2000), pp. 353–388). 22 Rhees, “The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy,” 578. 23 Rhees, 578–589. 24 Rhees, 579. Weil is quoted in the original French by Rhees, and the quote is translated in a footnote by Timothy Tessin, the essay’s editor. 25 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, Waiting on God (Routledge, 2009), p. 34. 26 Weil, p. 35.

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  101 27 Silvia Panizza, “A Secular Mysticism? Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and the Idea of Attention,” in Filosofía, Arte y Mística, ed. by M. del Carmen Paredes (Salamanca University Press, 2017). 28 Weil, Waiting on God: 349–358. 29 Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention (New York and London: Routledge, 2022), p. 6. 30 Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy & Animal Life (New York, Chichester and West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 45–46. 31 Diamond, p. 58. 32 Panizza, The Ethics of Attention, p. 6. 33 Rhees, “The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy,” 577. 34 Rhees, 577. 35 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. by Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian Aue (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 86. 36 Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” p. 57. 37 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975). 38 Talia Morag, “Comparison or Seeing-as? The Holocaust and Factory Farming,” in Morality in a Realistic Spirit. Essays for Cora Diamond, ed. by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), p. 195. 39 Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” pp. 74–75. 40 Mark Freeman, “Beholding and Being Beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention,” Humanistic Psychologist 43, no. 2 (2015): 162. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873267.2014.990458. 41 Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil. A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), p. 7. 42 Zaretsky, 8. 43 Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” p. 74. 44 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 16. 45 Weil, 16. 46 Weil, 40. 47 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 82. Though I do not develop the connection further here, Murdoch arguably bridges the philosophical perspectives of Weil and Wittgenstein. Like Rhees, she is one of few contemporaries who were familiar with the thinking of both philosophers. Murdoch met Wittgenstein once through Anscombe (Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch. A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 403), who gave her access to unpublished manuscripts by Wittgenstein and also served as a teacher of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Murdoch described herself as a Wittgensteinian in sharing with him a way of looking at philosophical problems (Michael O. Bellamy and Iris Murdoch, “An Interview with Iris Murdoch” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 2 (1977): 137), and is also inspired by his emphasis on ordinary language and everyday experiences, and his understanding of philosophy as work on one’s own understanding (Nora Hämäläinen, “What Is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist? -Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor,” Philosophical Papers 43, no. 2 (2014): 191–225. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/05568641.2014.932957.) Murdoch was also one of few philosophers in England at her time who was well immersed in the philosophical debates in France, and throughout her writings, Murdoch repeatedly acknowledges her

102  Hannah Winther debt to Weil, particularly with regards to the concept of attention (Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good). For a comprehensive treatment of the role of attention in the thinking of Murdoch and Weil, see Panizza, The Ethics of Attention. 48 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 118. 49 Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil. A Life in Five Ideas, p. 43. 50 Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu (Albin Michel, Paris, 2016), p. 96. 51 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 335. 52 Cora Diamond, “The Tractatus and the Limits of Sense,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. by Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 255. 53 Diamond, p. 259. 54 Diamond, pp. 243–244. 55 Diamond, p. 244. 56 Diamond, p. 16. 57 Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” p. 168. 58 Lars Hertzberg, “Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Attention,” based on talk delivered at conference In Wittgenstein’s Footsteps, Reykjavík, 15.09.2012, accessible at http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/filosofi/Staff/lhertzbe/Text/Attention.pdf, 1. 59 TLP 6.52. 60 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, ed. by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio, and D. K. Levy (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), p. 128. 61 Wittgenstein, p. 51. 62 Diamond, “The Tractatus and the Limits of Sense,” p. 244. 63 Weil, “Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry’s Claim That Philosophy Is Poetry,” 109. 64 Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, p. 121. 65 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998), p. 23. 66 James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. xxi. 67 I warmly recommend it: It is, somewhat ironically, called Freedom. 68 European Commission, “JRC Science for Policy Report. Technology and Democray. Understanding the Influence of Online Technologies on Political Behavior an Decision-Making,” 2020, 5. https://doi.org/10.2760/709177. 69 Peter Kafka, “Obama: The Internet Is ‘the Single Biggest Threat to Our Democracy,’” Vox, November 16, 2020. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/ obama-internet-threat-democracy-facebook-fox-atlantic. 70 Sandra Laugier, “Ethik Als Achten Auf Das Besondere,” in Wittgenstein Philosophie Als “Arbeit an Einem Selbst”, ed. by Fabian Goppelsröder, Jörg Volbers, and Gunter Gebauer (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), p. 97. https:// doi.org/10.30965/9783846747643. 71 Bela Szabados, “Autobiography and Philosophy: Variations on a Theme of Wittgenstein,” Metaphilosophy 26, no. 1–2 (1995): 68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679973.1995.tb00556.x. 72 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 114. 73 Roy Brand, “Philosophical Therapy: Wittgenstein and Freud,” International Studies in Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2000): 1. 74 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vorlesungen 1930–1935 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 191.

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  103 75 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 118. 76 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.43. 77 Simone Weil, Love in the Void (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2018), p. 26. 78 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 119. 79 Simone Weil, Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), p. 23. 80 Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil. A Life in Five Ideas, p. 41. 81 Weil, Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, p. 25. 82 Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil. A Life in Five Ideas, p. 41. 83 Jordi Fairhurst, “The Early Wittgenstein on Living a Good Ethical Life,” Philosophia, July 2021 (2022): 1753. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00485-0. 84 Fairhurst, “The Early Wittgenstein on Living a Good Ethical Life.” 85 Fairhurst, 1753. 86 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 3–4. 87 TLP 6.421. 88 G. E. Moore, “Wittgenstein’s Lectures i 1930–33,” Mind 64, no. 253 (1955): 19. 89 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 725. 90 Moore, “Wittgenstein’s Lectures i 1930–33,” 19. 91 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 144. 92 Hertzberg, “Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Attention,” 2. 93 Elisa Aaltola, “Love and Animals: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Attention as Love,” in The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, ed. by Adrienne M. Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), p. 201. 94 Aaltola, p. 201.

Bibliography Aaltola, Elisa, “Love and Animals: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Attention as Love,” in The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, ed. by Adrienne M. Martin (Routledge, 2018), pp. 193–204. Bellamy, Michael O., and Iris Murdoch, “An Interview with Iris Murdoch”, Contemporary Literature 18, no. 2 (1977): 129–140. Brand, Roy, “Philosophical Therapy: Wittgenstein and Freud,” International Studies in Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2000): 1–22. Carnap, Rudolf, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London: Kegan Paul, 1935). Conant, James, “Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder,” Yale Review 79, no. 3 (1991): 328–364. Conradi, Peter, Iris Murdoch. A Life (New YorK: HarperCollins, 2010). Diamond, Cora, “Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 170–204. ———, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. by Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 149–173. ———, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy & Animal Life (New York, Chichester and West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 43–89.

104  Hannah Winther ———, “The Tractatus and the Limits of Sense,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. by Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 241–275. Engelmann, Paul, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: Horizon Press, 1967). European Commission, “JRC Science for Policy Report. Technology and Democray. Understanding the Influence of Online Technologies on Political Behavior an Decision-Making,” 2020. https://doi.org/10.2760/709177. Fairhurst, Jordi, “The Early Wittgenstein on Living a Good Ethical Life,” Philosophia, July 2021 (2022): 1745–1767. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00485-0. Fiedler, Leslie, “Introduction,” in Waiting for God (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), pp. 3–39. Freeman, Mark, “Beholding and Being Beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention,” Humanistic Psychologist 43, no. 2 (2015): 160–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873267.2014.990458. Hacker, P. M. S., “Was He Trying to Whistle It?,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. by Alice Crary and Rupert Read (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 353–388. Hämäläinen, Nora, “What Is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist? – Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor,” Philosophical Papers 43, no. 2 (2014): 191–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/05568641.2014.932957. Helgeson, James, “What Cannot Be Said: Notes on Early French Wittgenstein Reception,” Paragraph 34, no. 3 (2011): 338–357. https://doi.org/10.3366/para. 2011.0029. Hertzberg, Lars, “Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Attention,” in In Wittgenstein’s Footsteps, 2012. http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/filosofi/Staff/lhertzbe/Text/Attention.pdf. Kafka, Peter, “Obama: The Internet Is ‘the Single Biggest Threat to Our Democracy,’” Vox, November 16, 2020. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/16/21570072/ obama-internet-threat-democracy-facebook-fox-atlantic. Laugier, Sandra, “Ethik Als Achten Auf Das Besondere,” in Wittgenstein - Philosophie Als “Arbeit an Einem Selbst” (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), pp.  83–102. https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846747643. Moore, G. E., “Wittgenstein’s Lectures i 1930–33,” Mind 64, no. 253 (1955): 1–27. Morag, Talia, “Comparison Or Seeing-as? The Holocaust and Factory Farming,” in Morality in a Realistic Spirit. Essays for Cora Diamond, ed. by Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 194–214. Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle, “The Good Sense of Nonsense: A Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as Nonself-Repudiating,” Philosophy 82, no. 319 (2007): 147–177. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819107319062. Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). Panizza, Silvia, “A Secular Mysticism? Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and the Idea of Attention,” in Filosofía, Arte y Mística, ed. by M. del Carmen Paredes (Salamanca: Salamanca University Press, 2017). Panizza, Silvia Caprioglio, The Ethics of Attention (New York and London: Routledge, 2022).

Will the Void: Wittgenstein and Weil on the Ethics of Attention  105 Rhees, Rush, Discussions of Simone Weil, ed. by D. Z. Phillips (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). ———, “The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy,” Philosophical Investigations 17, no. 4 (1994): 573–586. Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca, and Benjamin P. Davis, “Simone Weil,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/. Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975). Szabados, Bela, “Autobiography and Philosophy: Variations on a Theme of Wittgenstein,” Metaphilosophy 26, no. 1–2 (1995): 63–80. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.1995.tb00556.x. Waismann, Fredrich, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Conversations Recorded by Fredrich Waismann, ed. by Brian McGuiness (Basil Blackwell, 1979). Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). ———, Gravity and Grace (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). ———, Waiting on God. Waiting on God (New York and London: Routledge, 2009). ———, “Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry’s Claim That Philosophy Is Poetry,” Philosophical Investigations 37, no. 2 (2014): 105–112. ———, Attente de Dieu (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016). ———, Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). ———, Love in the Void (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2018). Williams, James, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Winch, Peter, “Introduction,” in Simone Weil. Lectures on Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Price. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1–23. ———, Simone Weil: The Just Balance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). ———, Vorlesungen 1930–1935 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). ———, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge Classics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). ———, The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. by Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian Aue (Blackwell Publishing, 2005). ———, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Werkausgabe Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). ———, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). ———, Lecture on Ethics, ed. by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio, and D. K. Levy (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). ———, Culture and Value, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998). ———, “Ms-183,” in Interactive Dynamic Presentation (IDP) of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Nachlass, ed. by Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB), n.d.-b. Zaretsky, Robert, The Subversive Simone Weil. A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021).

5 Struggling with the Supernatural Hugo Strandberg1

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the works of Simone Weil knows that religious concerns are central to them and that terms such as “the supernatural” are not seldom employed. How is the relation of Weil and Wittgenstein to be understood in the light of this? Such a question can certainly not be given an exhaustive answer, neither will it be possible to discuss in an exhaustive manner all the topics that will come up in the course of my discussion. Instead, my task in this chapter is mainly negative: taking issue with what may lead one to see a conflict or tension between Weil and Wittgenstein as far as the supernatural is concerned. For isn’t Weil a philosopher of the supernatural and Wittgenstein a philosopher of the natural? One question thus concerns to what extent such designations are to the point, another one how the relation of these terms should be understood. I will approach this task by way of Peter Winch’s Simone Weil: “The Just Balance.”2 In the introduction to the book, Winch writes: There are […] great affinities between the way they [Weil and Wittgenstein] conceived and approached philosophical questions, as well as equally striking divergences. […] I have frequently exploited both the affinities and the divergences in the interest of trying to clarify the nature of, and the difficulties confronting, Simone Weil’s philosophical positions.3 One of these divergences, and one that is a source of trouble for Winch throughout the book, is precisely the concept of the supernatural. His struggles are not idiosyncratic but telling, I believe, especially for someone trying to approach Weil from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Taking a closer look at them might therefore be rewarding: taking issue with Winch’s understanding of the relation of Weil and Wittgenstein might help us to a better understanding of the relation of the supernatural to philosophy. DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-6

Struggling with the Supernatural  107 Tensions Winch’s Simone Weil opens with him giving voice to the troubles I just referred to. He writes: The purpose of this book is to explore some of the most important philosophical issues underlying Simone Weil’s thinking. She did not herself discuss the distinction between questions that are philosophical and those that have some other character. I do not wish to suggest that she should have done this. […] while there is no point in trying to legislate in a comprehensive way about what is philosophy and what is not, it does seem to me that sometimes one needs to raise a question of that form. One needs to be clear where a particular discussion belongs in order to determine how precisely it is to be understood […] And according to the tradition within which I work, these are types of questions it is peculiarly the responsibility of a philosopher to press. […] Difficulties of this kind do arise, sometimes acutely, for someone trying to assess the significance of Simone Weil’s work. At least they have done so for me. This is particularly true in relation to the writings springing from the later part of her life, when considerations of a religious nature came to be more and more important.4 There are obvious tensions here, and since this is the way the book starts, one expects that these tensions will mark the book as a whole. On the one hand, Winch insists on the need of drawing some kind of distinction between philosophy and religion, even though Weil herself did not, a need that is motivated both by Winch’s aspiration for understanding and by his philosophical belonging. On the other hand, Winch says that the distinction he is drawing is not one he thinks that Weil herself should have drawn and that the problems of understanding are personal ones. The degree of generality of his opening claims is hence unclear. Furthermore, there seems to be some confusion going on: if the distinction between philosophy and religion is not one that Weil should have drawn, doesn’t this mean that she, in contrast to Winch, did understand how her discussion is to be understood, and if this is so, how can Winch know, beforehand, that drawing such a distinction is the way to go to reach such an understanding? Could one not just as well suspect that the felt need for such a distinction is part of the problem? The tensions are consequently not there only on the surface but give rise to philosophical difficulties. Winch continues the discussion in the introduction to the book by writing: My own procedure in dealing with this [the increasing, or at least increasingly explicit, religious strain in Weil’s thinking] has been to try for as long as possible to display these late thoughts in “secular”

108  Hugo Strandberg philosophical terms. This is not because I regard such terms as in any way more acceptable than the religious language which she increasingly speaks. It is in part, I expect, because I feel much more at home operating with such terms. […] My hope is that, by doing this, I have been able to exhibit something of the conflict between secular philosophy and religion which anyone who wants to understand Simone Weil has to come to terms with.5 The same tensions manifest themselves also in these sentences. On the one hand, Winch emphasizes the personal nature of the difficulties. On the other hand, he emphasizes the general nature of them, by using words such as “anyone.” However, Winch explicitly expresses his own uncertainty on this point: by using the phrase “in part, I expect” he makes it clear that he himself does not really know why he has chosen to display Weil’s thought in the way he has. What is clear is only that Winch wants to avoid giving the impression that secularizing Weil’s thought by removing its religious dimension—to naturalize the supernatural, as it were—would be a selfevident improvement. This could be seen as a central Wittgensteinian suggestion and insight: trying to make sense of what you meet with is just as much working on your own preconceptions, for the philosophical problem might just as well be a result of your insufficient imagination as of the alleged senselessness of the matter at hand.6 The same tensions become visible at regular intervals throughout the book. I will not comment upon these instances individually, even though many of them are both strange and interesting.7 Because of these tensions, it is most of the time unclear exactly what differences Winch has in mind when contrasting Weil and Wittgenstein. Therefore, I will begin my discussion with one of the few instances where Winch is able to make this clear, where he, in other words, gives some substance to the above tensions, which in the rest of the book are often vague.8 A Guide and a Geographer Here, Winch contrasts Weil and Wittgenstein by contrasting two quotations. First, Winch approvingly quotes Gustave Thibon, friend of Weil’s and editor of Gravity and Grace: Between Simone Weil and a purely speculative philosopher there is the same difference as there is between a guide and a geographer. The geographer studies a region objectively: he describes its structures, assesses its resources, etc. The guide on the other hand leads one by the shortest

Struggling with the Supernatural  109 route to a given destination. From his point of view everything which is conducive to this end is good, everything which hinders it is bad. Now Simone Weil is before all else a guide to the road between the soul and God, and many of her dicta gain from being interpreted, not as a description of the countryside through which we are passing, but as pieces of advice to travellers.9 As a contrast, and as an example of what Winch sees as the role of the philosopher,10 Winch quotes Wittgenstein: I think that if I could make myself quite clear, then Turing would give up saying that in mathematics we make experiments. If I could arrange in their proper order certain well-known facts, then it would become clear that Turing and I are not using the word “experiment” differently. […] I would say, “I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone out of this paradise [of Cantor’s].” I would try to do something quite different: I would try to show you that it is not a paradise – so that you’ll leave of your own accord.11 However, this comparison is in many ways misleading. The quotation from Wittgenstein is taken from lectures, a special context in which the good teacher will engage with the thoughts of those present, among them Turing. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes, by contrast: “What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”12 Wittgenstein is thus not here writing for everyone but for “travellers,” for those who feel trapped and want to get out, and does in this respect work as a “guide.”13 (Or, to put it differently, as a “therapist,” that is, not as “a purely speculative philosopher”; if the meaning of characterizing Wittgenstein as a therapist is not uncontroversial, that he is not a speculative philosopher should be evident to anyone.) Conversely, Weil writes: when projecting the light of attention equally on the one and the other [good and evil], the good seizes it through an automatic phenomenon. […] There is not a choice to make in its favour, it suffices not to refuse to recognize that it exists.14 In other words, the good does not need the help of a guide. Precisely because the good is not experienced as an object of choice but in the form of necessitation, according to Weil,15 the one writing on good and evil need only see to it that her and her readers’ attention are projected equally on both. Doesn’t this sound similar to the task of the “geographer”?

110  Hugo Strandberg Beyond Subjectivity and Objectivity When reading the above quotation, it is however important to bear in mind that it is taken from Weil’s Cahiers. The readers I referred to are thus only Weil herself. The fact that she is her own intended reader, or, differently put, that there is strictly speaking no intended reader, does not mean that her Cahiers are subjective. That there are people, distinct from her, who find them, say, enlightening, shows this. But this does not mean that reading them in a spirit of objectivity (in a geographical spirit, so to speak) is necessarily the best way to understand the topics she is reflecting upon. That the distinction of the subjective and the objective puts many things out of sight is already clear in the two Wittgenstein quotations above: the good teacher relates to the questions of his students but is not trying to deal with any imaginable question any imaginable student might ask, and the one who tries to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle is not deterred by the fact that some flies seem to have found their home in the bottle.16 Reading in a spirit of objectivity, reading, say, Weil’s texts, those that were intended for publication and those that were not, in such a spirit, means constantly asking whether everyone would agree with her. But such a question is not innocent, and may lead to the topic reflected upon being lost. What if the intended audience of a text that reflects on the supernatural cannot be anyone, but only me and you? As an example of what I am after, see this quotation from Winch: “Why not just point to the examples – examples like that of Jesus, Homer, Thucydides and leave it at that? Why not just say: […] here are examples; do what you will with these examples?”17 Winch is here referring to examples discussed by Weil, discussions in which she uses the term “the supernatural.” In contrast to Weil, Winch is however suggesting a more “geographical” approach to these examples. As Thibon writes above: “The geographer studies a region objectively: he describes its structures, assesses its resources, etc.” For the geographer, what others will do with these resources are not his business, so he might say: “do what you will with them.” But in the case of the examples of Jesus, Homer, and Thucydides, such an approach is far from neutral. The answer to Winch’s two questions is thus obvious: if I have been struck by an example such as these, I will not be able to do what I will with it. As long as someone is able to do what he will with these examples, he has not seen anything supernatural in them; if he has seen something supernatural in them, he is not able to do what he will with these examples. Knowing that there are people who are able to do what they will with them will only in special cases change this reader’s understanding of the examples. If this is the sense of the term, the intended audience of a text that reflects upon the supernatural can thus not be anyone, but only me and you.

Struggling with the Supernatural  111 Let me try to be a bit more specific here. The reason Winch mentions Jesus, Homer, and Thucydides is their importance for Weil,18 specifically for one of the main ways in which she understands the concept of the supernatural, the way Winch mostly concentrates his discussion on. Very simply expressed, the natural is to command wherever one has the power to do so, the supernatural to seek consent (also, or especially) where there is no power of refusal.19 What is Weil’s own take on these examples? Referring to Jesus and Thucydides, she writes: The Christian doctrine contains the notion of a second abdication. “… Being in the state of God, He did not regard equality with God as a prize. He emptied himself. He assumed the state of slavery … He humbled himself to the point of being made obedient even unto death … Even though He was the Son, what He suffered taught Him obedience.” These words could have been an answer to the Athenian murderers of Melos. They would have really made them laugh. And rightly so. They are absurd. They are mad.20 In other words, people will in fact often do what they will with the examples, and as Weil indicates at the end of this quotation, she does not think that there is anything that can be added in terms of rational persuasion in order to bring about a different take on them. Nonetheless, there is such a thing as being struck by the examples, that is, being struck by madness, or, as Weil says a few lines later, by love.21 Then one will no longer be able to do what one will with them, just as little as a poor, starving man can avoid seeing the restaurants and grocery stores all around him, to use Weil’s own simile.22 However, the word “objective” is ambiguous. This far, I have been using it with reference to an extreme point arrived at by extrapolating from the line subjective–intersubjective. In other words, speaking objectively is to speak to no one in particular. Literally, however, the word “objective” refers to what pertains to the object in contrast to what pertains to the subject. These two different ways of using the word coincide in many cases: to the extent I am able to abstract from what I bring with me, the object in focus will not have a special relation to me or someone else and hence be there in the same way for anyone. When it comes to the moral, existential, spiritual, or religious sphere, however,23 these two ways of using the word “objective” do not coincide: ascesis, as a way of purifying me from what I bring with me, is supposed to open me to the address of the supernatural. Unselfing will bring into focus the special relation this “object” has to me, not abstract from it. In other words, the supernatural would be misrepresented if described in objectivist language (in the first sense of the word, referring to what is there for no one in particular), in which case I would

112  Hugo Strandberg not be called on by it, as well as in subjectivist language, in which case there would be nothing to (fail to) respond to and no sense in sharing it with someone else. The same point could be expressed in terms of love: to love is not to deem something or someone worthy of love, but to be struck by it, him, or her, being called on to respond in love. In other words, by approaching love from the perspective of anyone, the very topic will be bypassed; the topic is only there for me and you. This is, I believe, key to understanding what Weil is after in this context. The supernatural requires selflessness, but requires it of me and you, not of no one in particular.24 When rejecting the objectivist spirit, this is what I have in mind. What Sort of Concept? Questions such as “does one have to see anything supernatural in Weil’s examples (Jesus, Homer, Thucydides)?” or “do they have to be seen in this way?” are thus misleading. But this does not mean that nothing could be said about the sense of the term “the supernatural.” Winch opens the last chapter, titled “‘A supernatural virtue’?”, of his book on Weil by asking: “What sort of concept is that of the supernatural?”25 The rest of my discussion, as far as Winch goes, will focus on his discussion of this question in this chapter of the book, because here the tensions I have referred to above become especially evident. In this context, Winch writes: I think it must be clear that no argument is going to prove that certain forms of behaviour must be seen as supernatural. There is no “must” about it. What we need, in order to understand how the expression is being used, is some exhibition of its use; we need to be shown it in action and to ask ourselves whether or not certain things become clearer if thought of in terms of that use.26 Winch says this in criticism of Weil, but as we have seen, this is misleading. If the “must” is an objectivist “must,” Weil not only agrees but thinks it an important insight as regards things done in the light of the supernatural that “[t]here is no ‘must’ about” them. She writes: in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason.27 In fact, what Weil is doing can be described as, if not exhibiting the use of the expression “the supernatural” (since this would be observing it from the outside), putting it into practice and so displaying its use. (It sounds

Struggling with the Supernatural  113 almost as if Winch has failed to see that displaying its use is what Weil has been doing all along.) But in another sense, there is definitely a “must” there for Weil: the experience of moral necessitation. Could such an experience be shown to be generally mistaken? At any rate, Winch would not think possible an argument allegedly showing this, as I understand him. Asking whether anything becomes clearer if thought of in these terms might then be a good question to ask, but only as long as one notes two things. First, one should note that criteria of clarity are not in general more fundamental than what they are applied to. Starting to see things in the light of the supernatural might therefore change one’s conception of what clarity involves. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes, calling attention to the fact that experience can change one’s understanding of a concept and its point: Life can educate you to “believing in God”. And experiences too are what do this but not visions, or other sense experiences, which show us the “existence of this being”, but e.g. sufferings of various sorts. And they do not show us God as a sense experience does an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us.28 Second, one should note that in a discussion about whether anything becomes clearer if thought of in terms of, say, the supernatural, it is not to be taken for granted that this can be determined by reference to anything like rules, that is, in one sense of the word, objectively. In a different context, Wittgenstein points to the possibility of showing someone something by means of “tips” (Winke): Is there such a thing as ‘expert judgement’ about the genuineness of expressions of feeling? – Here too, there are those with ‘better’ and those with ‘worse’ judgement. […] Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can learn it. Not, however, by taking a course of study in it, but through ‘experience’. – Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. — This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here.29 The form of these tips has to be cut according to the one to whom they are given. Strange, startling, paradoxical, and disconcerting forms of expression might in certain contexts be exactly right. Taking these two quotations into account means that questions such as “[w]hat sort of concept is that of the supernatural?” and “whether or not certain things become clearer if thought of in terms of the use of that expression” need not be possible to give straightforward answers to.

114  Hugo Strandberg The objectivist spirit is not the only way or necessarily the best way of reaching understanding, as the understanding Wittgenstein is talking about in the first of the two quotations above is primarily there for me and you, sharing our lives with each other, a sharing which need not be possible in any more direct way than in the giving of “tips” (in this context, “intimations” would be a better translation of “Winke”).30 Specifically, Wittgenstein points to the importance of experience in both of the above quotations, experiences that need not in principle be beyond reach for anyone but which may take years to acquire, and bringing about such experiences calculatedly need not be possible. What I am taking issue with here is a common picture of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (a picture that is however rarely found in this blunt form in writing), according to which central to it is a theory stating that language is a public phenomenon based in social practices. That such a picture does not capture Wittgenstein’s thought is already obvious from the fact that he says that “we may not advance any kind of theory”31 and exhorts us to “don’t think, but look!”32 More specifically, it is important to notice that just because language is not private, it is not public or social: there are more possibilities, and there are more distinctions to be made within those very broad categories.33 This picture of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy may be a result of the fact that for most readers, the first, say, three hundred paragraphs of the Philosophical Investigations are much more well known than the rest of the book, in the light of which the discussions in the opening parts will be seen as potentially misleading. Furthermore, I think it must be clear from the form itself of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that he does not think that philosophy must be possible to pursue in any more direct way than by giving “tips.” Is not giving such “tips” (but without invoking anything like “expert judgement”) precisely what Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is all about?34 The Natural and the Supernatural Having these two things in mind, that criteria of clarity are not in general more fundamental than what they are applied to and that whether anything becomes clearer if thought of in terms of the supernatural cannot necessarily be determined by reference to anything like rules, what is the use of terms such as “the supernatural” as Winch reads Weil? He writes: One general characterization of what is involved in describing human life in ‘supernatural’ terms can perhaps be risked. It is to give a description which rules out explanations in natural, or naturalistic, terms. But the difficulty here is of course to understand that italicized phrase correctly.35

Struggling with the Supernatural  115 However, if the term “supernatural” is unclear, its contrast, the term “natural,” will also be unclear, so referring to the latter will not help us going further into the matter. (For naturalism to make any sense, the naturalist must be able to give some account, and not just a caricature, of what she is rejecting, that is, must be open to the possibility of the thing rejected.) Of course, the contrast to “the natural” is often other things than “the supernatural,” and in such contexts, the term has a more or less clear meaning, for example when it is contrasted to “cultural” or “unusual,”36 but this does not help us in this context. On this point, Winch seems to be somewhat confused. On some occasions in his book on Weil,37 he approvingly refers to Wittgenstein saying that “[w]hat we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings,”38 but fails to notice that this is only a relevant remark in this context if Wittgenstein, in saying this, is contrasting what he is doing to something like a “supernatural history of human beings.”39 (The contrast Wittgenstein is after is rather to various forms of intellectualism, as I understand him.40) This is not just a detail, for Winch ends the book by writing, in this way specifically answering the question of the last chapter, “what sort of concept is that of the supernatural?”, and giving a last, summarizing account of the affinities and divergences between the ways Weil and Wittgenstein conceived and approached philosophical questions, one of the central questions of the book: I believe the point of this sort of language [using “supernatural” terms] is to provide a way of expressing the connections between various attitudes, interests, strivings, aspirations, which are all part of our “natural history.” It is only because they are part of our natural history that we have any chance of making sense of the notion of the “supernatural.”41 In other words, Winch portrays Wittgenstein as a philosopher of the natural, Weil as one of the supernatural; the divergences between them remain, but if the supernatural is in some way grounded in the natural, the divergences need not be seen as conflicting. As I have indicated, however, I do not think this is the way to go if one would like to understand what Weil means when she is talking about the supernatural. Let us return to a quotation by Winch above, but now with other words italicized: “I think it must be clear that no argument is going to prove that certain forms of behaviour must be seen as supernatural.”42 For Weil, by contrast, the supernatural is closely related to obedience.43 This term primarily enters in the context of deliberation, broadly understood, as a way in which deliberation is cut off, and therefore also characterizes a possible spirit in which I am doing (or not doing) something; it is only because this is the case that this term can also be used to describe a form of behaviour, mine or someone else’s. In other words, what should be

116  Hugo Strandberg in focus if we are to understand what Weil is talking about is not “certain forms of behaviour,” but my understanding of what I am doing or of what the good would be in the context I find myself in. Here a comparison with Wittgenstein might be helpful. Friedrich Waismann records Wittgenstein as saying: Schlick says that in theological ethics there used to be two conceptions of the essence of the good: according to the shallower interpretation, the good is good because it is what God wants; according to the profounder interpretation God wants the good because it is good. I think that the first interpretation is the profounder one: what God commands, that is good. For it cuts off the way to any explanation ‘why’ it is good, while the second interpretation is the shallow, rationalistic one, which proceeds ‘as if’ you could give reasons for what is good.44 In this context, referring to “the natural” would not be a matter of explaining someone’s behaviour, but an attempt at explaining why something is (or is not) good, with reference to our biological nature or to social norms, understood in terms of “second nature.” Referring to “the supernatural,” in this case to God, is by contrast Wittgenstein’s way of “put[ting] an end to all the claptrap about ethics,” something he regards as “definitely important” to do.45 To the good one responds with obedience, as Weil would put it; everything else would be evasion. As I said earlier in this text, the good is not experienced as an object of choice but in the form of necessitation, according to Weil46; moral necessity is thus one context in which the sense of the term “the supernatural” could be sought for.47 The necessity here is not the necessity of physical force or anything like it.48 As Weil writes: “[t]he madness of God consists in needing man’s free consent.”49 The slightly paradoxical-sounding phrase “consenting obedience”50 points to this character of the experience of, say, coming to a moral insight, or, in the context of temptation, of the experience of coming to see self-deception for what it is. The more important and immense the change is, the more point there will be in describing it as a gift, as something I am thankful for,51 that is, I am “consenting,” to use Weil’s word, to something that is not done by me but to me.52 The experience is not the experience of being pushed by a blind force, but an experience of being attracted by something the authority of which the attraction is the recognition of. Obedience is therefore just as well longing, desire.53 One point at which Winch overlooking all this becomes especially evident is when he writes, referring to Weil’s discussion of Thucydides: To say that the good lies outside the world is to agree with the Athenians that there is nothing in the world which justifies the conviction [that

Struggling with the Supernatural  117 it is better not to command wherever one has the power]. But to say that there is nothing in the world which justifies it is to say that there is nothing which justifies it. Of course that is not the same as saying it is unjustified; and that perhaps is what the Athenians cannot see.54 Why does Winch claim that “to say that there is nothing in the world which justifies it is to say that there is nothing which justifies it”? Of course, if the emphasis is on justification, understood as the possibility of showing someone the correctness of a conviction by means of something like a conclusive argument, this will be true almost by definition. But if this really is a conviction, that is, if the one who shares it would find it terrible to lose it or to fail to live up to it, saying that there is nothing which justifies it does not capture her experience of what holding it means.55 If one wants to understand what using a term like “the supernatural” could mean, this experience needs to be reflected upon. Winch, it seems to me, sees only two possibilities: either “the supernatural” is a theoretical concept, underpinning our moral responses and arrived at by arguments independent of these responses, an idea he is rightly critical of, or it is a concept which is essentially optional, “provid[ing] a way of expressing [certain] connections” between those responses. Another possibility is pointed out by R.F. Holland, when he writes, in a slightly different context: “it is more a matter of registering an experience or marking an encounter than passing a judgement.”56 In other words, Winch overlooks the possibility Wittgenstein is referring to when he writes that “[e]xperiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us.”57 (The reference to thoughts is especially intriguing.) A Light from Above In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes: Is what I am doing in any way worth the effort? Well only, if it receives a light from above. And if that happens, – why should I take care, not to be robbed of the fruits of my labours? If what I write really has value, how were anyone to steal the value from me? If the light from above is lacking, I can in any case be no more than clever.58 In similarity to Weil,59 Wittgenstein seems here to refer to the impersonal nature of truth, but in the context of my closing reflection, I would like to focus on a more specific topic: the light from above, on the one hand, cleverness, on the other hand.60 According to Weil, concepts such as rights, person, and democracy “are in themselves entirely foreign to the supernatural and are, however, a bit above brute force.”61 This is so, because “the supernatural operation of

118  Hugo Strandberg grace” can impose itself on them; however, “[w]hen they are not continually renewed by this operation, when they are only its survivors, they find themselves by necessity subject to the caprices of the beast,” that is, to the brute force of the collective.62 The context is a very different one than Wittgenstein’s, but their points are related. The things we rely on, be it cleverness or democracy, are better than their opposites but can be used as well for bad as for good.63 Specifically, cleverness might be used to further one’s academic career and feed one’s intellectual vanity, democracy to obtain political power, and further one’s own ends. But does it make any sense to say that what contrasts to this—truth and justice, to use words frequently employed by Weil—is a light from above, a form of grace? One does not escape what contrasts to these words just by using them.64 Something else is needed, a spirit infusing one’s work. This spirit will not be there just because one wants it to be there, and this is thus one background against which it makes sense to refer to a light from above, a form of grace. Specifically, the word “want” is here misleading, since what the issue concerns is the way in which judgment upon one’s strivings is passed.65 What one is doing is of importance, if it is, Wittgenstein and Weil both seem to be saying, not because of the effort, not because of the possibility of success, but because of that to which what one is doing is a response.66 If this is so, “the supernatural” is not so much one possible object of philosophical reflection, but something philosophy cannot do without.67 (Of course, nothing hangs on this word; another one, or no one, could be used.) For this reason, however, it is also something that philosophy will have a hard time dealing with. Notes 1 This publication was partly supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value,” registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/ 15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the research seminar in philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, Finland; thanks to those who participated in the discussion. 2 Peter Winch, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 4. 4 Winch, Simone Weil, pp. 1–2. 5 Winch, Simone Weil, pp. 3–4. 6 See e.g. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P.  M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), § 103; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. ed., trans. by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 24.

Struggling with the Supernatural  119 7 For example, Winch characterizes his procedure—of abstracting from the religious dimension in Weil’s thought—by using terms such as “absurdity” and “perversity” (Winch, Simone Weil, pp. 164, 188). 8 For a discussion of the tensions in Winch’s philosophy of religion, see Olli Lagerspetz, “The Resurrection and the Philosophical ‘We’,” Sats 10, no. 2 (2009): 85–105. 9 Winch, Simone Weil, p.  123, translating J.-M. Perrin and Gustave Thibon, Simone Weil telle que nous l’avons connue (Paris: Fayard, 1967), p. 177. 10 Compare also Winch’s claim 20 years earlier (1968), using the same terminology as Thibon: “philosophy can no more show a man what he should attach importance to than geometry can show a man where he should stand.” (Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 191.)   One problem in Winch’s discussion in his Simone Weil is that he never makes it clear why and how the role of the philosopher is restricted. He just writes things such as “The difficulty of course is to avoid it [making supernatural things trivial and commonplace] without giving up one’s philosophical responsibilities.” (Winch, Simone Weil, p. 198) But the problem of course is that this “of course” takes for granted that it is clear what “philosophical responsibilities” involve. 11 Winch, Simone Weil, p.  221, quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 103. 12 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 309. (One could claim that the same idea is there in the passage Winch quotes as well: Cantor’s “paradise” corresponds to the sugar that tempts the flies to enter the fly-bottle.) 13 Cf. Lars Hertzberg, Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language (London: Anthem, 2022), pp. 37–38. 14 Simone Weil, Cahiers 2: Septembre 1941 – février 1942, ed. by Alyette Degrâces, Marie-Annette Fourneyron, Florence de Lussy and Michel Narcy, Œuvres complètes 6:2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 426. (My translation.) 15 See e.g. Weil, Cahiers 2, pp.  194, 200–201; Simone Weil, Cahiers 3: Février 1942 – juin 1942, ed. by Alyette Degrâces, Marie-Annette Fourneyron, Florence de Lussy and Michel Narcy, Œuvres complètes 6:3 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp.  122–123, 137; Simone Weil, “L’amour de Dieu et le malheur,” in Écrits de Marseille: Philosophie, science, religion, questions politiques et sociales, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Œuvres complètes 4:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 355. 16 As Wittgenstein puts it: “It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 4.) 17 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 195. 18 See e.g. Simone Weil, “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” in Écrits historiques et politiques: Vers la guerre, ed. by Simone Fraisse, Œuvres complètes 2:3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 227–253; Simone Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” in Écrits de Marseille: Philosophie, science, religion, questions politiques et sociales, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Œuvres complètes 4:1 (Paris: ­Gallimard, 2008), p. 288; Simone Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” in Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses, ed. by Robert C ­ henavier, Jean Riaud and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), pp. 240–249.

120  Hugo Strandberg 19 See e.g. Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” pp.  289–290; Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” pp. 240–242. 20 Simone Weil, “Are We Struggling for Justice?,” trans. by Marina Barabas, Philosophical Investigations 10 (1987): 3; Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” p. 242. Weil quotes Phil 2.6–8 and Heb 5.8. 21 Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” p. 243. 22 Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” p. 243. 23 In fact, Weil would not accept the suggestion that there are different spheres, one in which the object in focus will not have a special relation to me, one in which it will. Instead, she would make a related point to the one above by distinguishing between two spiritual orientations (or between a spiritual orientation and the lack of one), one focused on knowledge, one on truth (see Simone Weil, “L’Enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain,” in Écrits de New York et de Londres, ed. by Robert Chenavier and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), p. 319). The latter spiritual orientation—intimately related to love—is just as much at home in, say, natural science as anywhere else, especially since Weil also writes: “there is not any department of human life which is purely natural. The supernatural is secretly present throughout. Under a thousand different forms, grace and mortal sin are everywhere.” (Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), p. 112; Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” p. 310.) 24 Cf. Simone Weil, “La personne et le sacré: Collectivité – Personne – Impersonnel – Droit – Justice,” in Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Jean Riaud and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), pp. 212–213. 25 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 191. 26 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 205. Later in the same chapter, Winch asks the question at the end of this quotation in more detailed terms, whether this use “prepares the way for the possibility of saying further things, of making further constructions, from the point of view of which we may articulate certain things more clearly, and perhaps raise questions which would otherwise hardly be possible.” (Winch, Simone Weil, p. 208.) 27 Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” p. 137; Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” p.  333. See also Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” pp. 290–291; Weil, Cahiers 2, p. 432; Weil, “L’Enracinement,” p. 240; Simone Weil, “Lettre à un religieux (Lettre au père Couturier),” in Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Jean Riaud and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), pp. 183–184. 28 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 97. Cf. Simone Weil, “Autobiographie spirituelle,” in Attente de Dieu (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2016), pp. 54–55. 29 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § II:355. (When reading this quotation soon after the former one, it is easy to interpret it as also a description of what spiritual guidance involves.) 30 For this reason (and for reasons that follow in this paragraph), I think that only the second half, not the first one, of a point made by Iris Murdoch is correct: “the movement of understanding is onward into increasing privacy, in the direction of the ideal limit, and not back towards a genesis in the rulings of an impersonal public language.” (Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings of Philosophy and Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 322.)

Struggling with the Supernatural  121

31 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 109. 32 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 66. 33 Compare Weil’s distinction between collective language and individual language, between the language spoken at the market square and the language spoken between two or three people (Weil, “Autobiographie spirituelle,” pp. 65–66). 34 For this section, see also Hugo Strandberg, Love of a God of Love: Towards a Transformation of the Philosophy of Religion (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 57–61; Hugo Strandberg, “On the Difficulty of Speaking,” in Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, ed. by Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen (Cham: Springer, 2022), pp. 84–87. 35 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 206. 36 The term “supernatural” is not at all synonymous to “unusual” for Weil, but she still sometimes seems to see supernatural goodness as in fact very unusual, at the points where her thought verges on cynicism (see e.g. Weil, Cahiers 2, pp. 140, 195). Criticizing Weil in this regard would however be a very different criticism than Winch’s, because it would open for using terms such as “the supernatural” more often than Weil herself does. 37 See Winch, Simone Weil, pp. 190, 211. 38 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 415. 39 For a discussion of the meaning of the term “natural history,” see Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), pp. 29–30. 40 Cf. Hertzberg, Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language, ch. 7. 41 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 211. 42 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 205. 43 See e.g. Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” p. 323. 44 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, trans. by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 115. 45 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, pp. 68–69. 46 See e.g. Weil, Cahiers 2, pp. 194, 200–201; Weil, Cahiers 3, pp. 122–123, 137; Weil, “L’amour de Dieu et le malheur,” p. 355. 47 For a discussion, with reference to Winch, see Lars Hertzberg, “On Moral Necessity,” in Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, ed. by Raimond Gaita (London: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 106–107. 48 Cf. Weil, Cahiers 2, p. 200. 49 Weil, “Are We Struggling for Justice?,” p. 4; Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” p. 243. 50 Weil, “Are We Struggling for Justice?,” p. 7; Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” p. 247. 51 Cf. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 222–225. 52 Cf. Weil, Cahiers 2, pp. 192, 252; Weil, Cahiers 3, p. 86. Sometimes it sounds as if Winch claims that such a description is mistaken, as if my behaviour would necessarily show that I always had it in me: “[…] if they [responses of goodness] do exist in human behaviour, they are just as much a feature of human nature, and therefore just as natural, as all the rest. […] What does that have to do with the supernatural?” (Winch, Simone Weil, p. 190). Emphasizing the word “response,” however, would get us out of this impasse: a response is neither independent of the one whose response it is, nor of what (or whom) it is a response to. In other words, a response is an encounter.

122  Hugo Strandberg 3 See Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” p. 324. 5   The questions I discuss here with regard to Winch are related to those discussed in the wake of his “Who is My Neighbour?” paper (Peter Winch, ­Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), ch. 11; see e.g. D. Z. ­Phillips, Interventions in Ethics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), ch. 17; Lars Hertzberg, “On Being Neighbourly,” in The Possibility of Sense, ed. by John H.  Whittaker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp.  24–38; Howard Mounce, “Winch and Anscombe on Ethics and Religion,” Philosophical Investigations 34 (2011): 241–248; Martin Gustafsson, “Perception, Perspectives and Moral Necessity: Wittgenstein, Winch and the Good Samaritan,” in Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, ed. by Reshef Agam-Segal and Edmund Dain (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 201–221), but to explain exactly how would require a paper of its own, because I do not think that my points here support any one side in the debate. 54 Winch, Simone Weil, p. 198. 55 For reasons Winch expresses very clearly in another context (Ethics and Action, p. 186), this experience should not be dismissed as merely psychological. 56 R. F. Holland, Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p.  2. Holland’s paper “Is Goodness a Mystery?” (Against Empiricism, ch. 7) is of general importance for what I have said in this paper, although I have not referred to it. 57 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 97. 58 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 66. 59 Weil, “La personne et le sacré,” p. 217. 60 Cf. Weil, Cahiers 3, pp. 142, 312. 61 Simone Weil, “What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?,” in Late Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), p. 113; Weil, “La personne et le sacré,” p. 221. 62 Weil, “What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?,” p. 113; Weil, “La personne et le sacré,” p. 222. 63 Cf. Weil, “La personne et le sacré,” pp. 226–227. 64 Cf. Weil, “La personne et le sacré,” p. 235. 65 Cf. Gaita, Good and Evil, ch. 17. 66 For this very reason, Weil writes (Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” pp. 126–127; Weil, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” p. 323): That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way, it does not even disturb its comfort—not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed. 67 Cf. Weil, Cahiers 2, p. 245.

Bibliography Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004). Gustafsson, Martin, “Perception, Perspectives and Moral Necessity: Wittgenstein, Winch and the Good Samaritan,” in Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, ed. by Reshef Agam-Segal and Edmund Dain (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 201–221.

Struggling with the Supernatural  123 Hertzberg, Lars, “On Moral Necessity,” in Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, ed. by Raimond Gaita (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 102–117. _____, “On Being Neighbourly,” in The Possibility of Sense, ed. by John H. Whittaker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 24–38. _____, Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language (London: Anthem, 2022). Holland, R. F., Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Joas, Hans, Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019). Lagerspetz, Olli, “The Resurrection and the Philosophical ‘We’,” Sats 10, no. 2 (2009): 85–105. Mounce, Howard, “Winch and Anscombe on Ethics and Religion,” Philosophical Investigations 34 (2011): 241–248. Murdoch, Iris, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings of Philosophy and Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997). Perrin, J.-M., and Gustave Thibon, Simone Weil telle que nous l’avons connue (Paris: Fayard, 1967). Phillips, D. Z., Interventions in Ethics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). Strandberg, Hugo, Love of a God of Love: Towards a Transformation of the Philosophy of Religion (London: Continuum, 2011). _____, “On the Difficulty of Speaking,” in Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein, ed. by Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondřej Beran, and Nora Hämäläinen (Cham: Springer, 2022), pp. 77–90. Weil, Simone, “Are We Struggling for Justice?,” trans. by Marina Barabas, Philosophical Investigations 10 (1987): 1–10. _____, “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” in Écrits historiques et politiques: Vers la guerre, ed. by Simone Fraisse, Œuvres complètes 2:3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 227–253. _____, Cahiers 2: Septembre 1941 – février 1942, ed. by Alyette Degrâces, MarieAnnette Fourneyron, Florence de Lussy and Michel Narcy, Œuvres complètes 6:2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). _____, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), pp. 83–142. _____, Cahiers 3: Février 1942 – juin 1942, ed. by Alyette Degrâces, Marie-Annette Fourneyron, Florence de Lussy and Michel Narcy, Œuvres complètes 6:3 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). _____, “Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,” in Écrits de Marseille: Philosophie, science, religion, questions politiques et sociales, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Œuvres complètes 4:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008a), pp. 285–336. _____, “L’amour de Dieu et le malheur,” in Écrits de Marseille: Philosophie, science, religion, questions politiques et sociales, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Œuvres complètes 4:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008b), pp. 347–374. _____, “L’Enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain,” in Écrits de New York et de Londres, ed. by Robert Chenavier and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), pp. 111–365. _____, “What Is Sacred in Every Human Being?” in Late Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), pp. 103–129.

124  Hugo Strandberg _____, “Autobiographie spirituelle,” in Attente de Dieu (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2016), pp. 46–70. _____, “La personne et le sacré: Collectivité – Personne – Impersonnel – Droit – Justice,” in Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Jean Riaud and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2019a), pp. 212–236. _____, “Lettre à un religieux (Lettre au père Couturier),” in Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Jean Riaud and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2019b), pp. 159–197. _____, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?,” in Écrits de New York et de Londres: Questions politiques et religieuses, ed. by Robert Chenavier, Jean Riaud and Patrice Rolland, Œuvres complètes 5:1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2019c), pp. 240–249. Winch, Peter, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). _____, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance.” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). _____, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). _____, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, trans. by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). _____, Culture and Value, rev. ed., trans. by Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). _____, Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

6 Weil Meets Wittgenstein Palle Yourgrau

Two Books in Search of an Author In the selection from the Notebooks of Simone Weil that Gustave Thibon published under the title Gravity and Grace,1 he slapped a label on contextless snippets consisting of striking but manipulable bon mots, less complex, less original, and more orthodox than the real Simone Weil, who is not for readers wanting easy or ready-made solutions. Gravity and Grace, selected and organized in ways Weil herself never approved, was presented by Thibon as a book by Weil, though it is actually one of Thibon’s books. His topical pigeonholing results in a grab bag of marginally related ideas that reflect his own ideas as a committed Catholic. These are some of the criticisms that have recently, and not so recently, been directed at Gravity and Grace (henceforth, GG) by a distinguished collection of scholars of Weil, stitched together, here, into a single critique of one of the, if not the, most popular, most influential books to which the legendary mystical Christian–Platonist French philosopher Simone Weil’s name has been attached. Lest I be painted with the same brush that has been applied to Thibon, I have footnoted the original contexts from which my selection of quotations has been taken.2 Interestingly, Culture and Value (henceforth, CV), to which Ludwig Wittgenstein’s name has been attached, though also not actually composed as a book by Ludwig Wittgenstein but assembled by G. H. von Wright from Wittgenstein’s notes, has been accorded a far friendlier reception, as the following quotations from the back cover attest.3 [F]or someone who wants to understand what the “Wittgenstein commotion” is about, who wants to experience the intellectual thrill of thinking in a new and illuminating way, and who is willing to tolerate an occasional obscurity, this book is highly recommended, wrote Robert L. Arrington in the Sewanee Review. ‘The work is a masterpiece by a mastermind’, wrote Leonard Linsky (University of Chicago). DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-7

126  Palle Yourgrau ‘I think it will count as a permanent contribution to our Western literature, accessible to any educated reader who can enjoy fine writing’. I believe a comparison of GG with CV reveals striking consonances between the minds of two of the deepest and most spiritual thinkers of the twentieth century. Weil, of course, never actually met Wittgenstein, but GG and CV nevertheless reveal—or so I will argue—a kind of meeting of the minds. Given the different receptions accorded the two books, however, there is an urgent need to demonstrate that GG deserves to be taken as a legitimate representation of Simone Weil’s thought. (Nothing similar is demanded for Wittgenstein and CV.) I begin, therefore, with a defense of GG against the forceful criticisms that have been advanced against it by some of the leading scholars of Simone Weil. After that, I place side by side a number of striking passages from the two books (as well as some other books by Weil and Wittgenstein), from which, I believe, important conclusions can be drawn about the relationships among the ideas of the two thinkers. I argue next, however, that on some crucial issues, Weil and Wittgenstein followed different paths. I conclude with some final remarks about what unites and at the same time divides these two great philosophers whose thoughts are illuminated by the light each casts on the other. Defending Gravity and Grace The detailed story of how GG came to be is told by Thibon in his Introduction to GG and in his contribution to Simone Weil as We Knew Her, published a few years later, in 1952, in French. On leaving Marseilles, where she and her family had fled from Paris to escape the Nazis, Weil handed over some of her extensive notebooks (‘a dozen thick exercise books’, according to Thibon) to her good friend, saying to him that they were now his to do with as he pleased.4 As she wrote to him soon after, ‘so now they belong to you’. She added, ‘I hope that having been transmuted within you they will one day come out in one of your books’. Naturally, he declined that invitation, choosing instead to edit a selection of them in order to introduce her ideas to the world.5 Peculiarly, later on in that same letter, Weil added that if Thibon hadn’t heard from her in three of four years, he would have ‘complete ownership’ of her Notebooks—an odd addendum, since she had already stated that ‘now they belong to you’. Ronald Collins, however, takes Weil’s peculiar comment as decisive and makes a puzzling statement of his own, that ‘[g]iven her unexpected passing, ownership of the notebooks may well have vested with her parents’.6 Surely, however, the fact that Weil had died made it decisive that Thibon would not hear from her over the next few years! In any case, Thibon stated outright in his Introduction to Simone Weil as We Knew Her that ‘[t]here is nothing to suggest that in the secret of her soul [Weil] ever revoked this choice [to

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  127 hand over her notebooks to Fr. Perrin and himself] […] This is a fact, and we state it as such, without vainglory or false modesty’ (p.  6 (brackets added)). Collins is also concerned that although GG is not, strictly speaking, a work that Weil herself composed as a book, the work was presented as a book by Weil. In a 1991 postscript to Gravity and Grace, Thibon described his role as simply “presenting Simone Weil’s first book to the public”. […] In a real sense, then, Gravity and Grace was actually that, one of Thibon’s books. (‘The Famous Book She Never Wrote’) Strangely, Collins neglects to mention the fact that in his Introduction to the book, Thibon makes it absolutely clear that what he has done is to assemble and edit, on his own, selections from Weil’s Notebooks. Indeed, Collins himself entitled his essay, ‘The Famous Book She Never Wrote: The story of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace’. Why isn’t the title of his essay, ‘The Story of Thibon’s Gravity and Grace’? Compare. There’s a popular collection of orchestral highlights from Wagner recorded by George Szell. Wagner, of course, had nothing to do with the idea of the selections, nor of the selections themselves. Should we characterize the music on that record as composed by Szell? Moreover, in the case of GG, in Simone Weil as We Knew Her, also a widely read book, Thibon once again made perfectly clear how GG came to be written. Thibon, in sum, was not trying to put something over on an unsuspecting public about the book having been written as a book by Simone Weil. Interestingly, similar issues arise about what should count as a work by Wittgenstein. See, for example, Joachim Schulte, ‘What Is a Work by Wittgenstein?’.7 Even more to the point, note what Marjorie Perloff writes in her Afterword to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Private Notebooks, 1914–1916, which she edited and translated: ‘Culture and Value […] is at this writing one of Wittgenstein’s most popular books even though it is, strictly speaking, not a book ‘by’ Wittgenstein at all’ (p. 200). More substantively, one hears the objection that GG was ‘selected and organized in ways Weil herself never approved’, that Thibon was ‘identifying [Weil’s ideas] with themes of his choosing, not Weil’s’, and that Thibon was engaging in ‘topical pigeon holing’, resulting in ‘a grab bag of marginally related (if that) ideas’. Note first that given the size of the notebooks Weil had entrusted to Thibon (‘a dozen thick exercise books’), simply publishing them as a whole was not an option. Indeed, even if it were an option, publishing the entire, massive, collection would surely have had little impact on the public and would have failed to introduce Weil’s thoughts to the world. Iris Murdoch’s comment, that ‘the complete

128  Palle Yourgrau text of the Notebooks is immensely more interesting than the previously published selection [GG]’,8 is no doubt, in a sense, quite correct, but it fails as a criticism of Thibon. Of course, now that we have GG, there is interest in studying the original documents, in full detail. It’s equally true, however, that reading all the books that go by Weil’s name, in addition to reading all the Notebooks, would be an even more rewarding experience. And let’s not neglect all the secondary literature on Weil. Reading that as well would be a still more rewarding experience. And so on. A selection by Thibon from the Notebooks Weil had handed to him was necessary. He cannot, therefore, be faulted for making a selection of which Weil herself had not approved. But how to select? Thibon himself—like G. H. von Wright, in his Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value— explained that he had a choice whether to edit the selections or leave them unordered: ‘I hesitated between two ways of presentation: either to give the thoughts of Simone Weil one after the other in the order of their composition, or to classify them. The second method seemed to me preferable’ (GG, p. xxxvii). (By contrast, von Wright chose not to classify Wittgenstein’s thoughts. We will see shortly what the result was.) The alternative, ‘to give the thoughts of Simone Weil one after the other in the order of their composition’, would not have been more faithful to Weil’s intentions, since Weil never had any intention of publishing her Notebooks, or selections thereof, as a book. But was Thibon the right person for the job? In the short time during which they had come to know each other, working on and then near his farm outside Marseilles, Weil and Thibon had established a close relationship.  As to whether he was a person of sufficient intellectual caliber to attempt such a task, consider what Jacques Cabaud has said about the research that led to the writing of his classic biography of Weil: While I had contacted a hundred or more people for my research, two people stuck out in my mind: Camus and Thibon. They had the keenest minds and were the greatest and most learned people I met. They both impressed me; their intellectual acuity astonished me.9 Still, there’s the suggestion J. P. Little made that, after all, ‘Thibon was a committed Catholic […] and it was inevitable that his selection of passages from the Notebooks should reflect his own beliefs’ (Collins and Little, ‘Weil’s Single–Minded Commitment to Truth: A Q & A Interview with J. P. Little’). Thibon himself anticipated this concern. In Simone Weil as We Knew Her, he writes: ‘At this point a very serious objection comes up. “Both of you [himself and Perrin] are convinced Catholics”, we are told. “Is there not a risk that your faithfulness to your Church will weigh more heavily in your judgments than faithfulness in Simone Weil’s memory?” Our reply is clear as day. Simone Weil knew what we were […] Yet, not only did she entrust

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  129 us with the task of publishing many of her writings, but she invited us to use them as we chose and to incorporate them in our own work […] In declining this offer, which was as generous from her point of view as it was impossible to accept, we are convinced that we have not gone as far as she would have allowed us’ (pp. 8–9). In the end, I see no signs in GG of any such Catholic reflection or prejudice or agenda on the part of Thibon. Indeed, in GG, Weil says, ‘The Eucharist should not then be an object of belief for the part of me that apprehends facts. That is where Protestantism is true’ (p. 117). She then adds that ‘[o]nly with that part of us which is made for the supernatural should we adhere to these mysteries’ and concludes that ‘[t]here the Catholics are right’. Again, ‘Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things’ (p. 50). To my ears, that’s the sound of a just balance, not of proselytizing. Indeed, far from attempting to use Weil to promote a Catholic agenda, Thibon in his Introduction noted that: Even the Catholic church, which moreover she admired in many of its aspects, did not escape her criticism as a social body […] [I]ts connection with temporal things, its organization and hierarchy, its councils, certain formulae such as ‘no salvation outside the Church’ or anathema sit and some of its historical records such as the Inquisition, etc., appeared to her to be forms (of a higher order, but nevertheless to be infinitely feared) of social idolatry (GG, pp. xxviii–xxxix). In Simone Weil as We Knew Her, he went even further: How many times did she not tell me that Catholic totalitarianism was, in a sense, infinitely worse than that of men like Hitler or Stalin, since it condemned all refractory spirits to eternal torture whereas the tyranny of the dictators did at least cease upon death! (Thibon and Perrin, p. 148) The most substantial criticism, however, of GG has not yet been addressed, the charge that Thibon ‘slapped a label on contextless snippets consisting of striking but manipulable bon mots, less complex, less original, and more orthodox than the real Simone Weil, who is not for readers wanting easy or ready-made solutions’. Much has been said about the fact—or so it is claimed—that contrary to the impression created by GG, Weil was not an aphorist, like Pascal. Recall, however, the example of Szell’s popular recording of orchestral highlights from Wagner. Should Szell be accused of giving the false impression that Wagner was an orchestral, as opposed to an opera, composer? In any case, ‘[i]n the notebooks of Simone Weil’, notes Florence de Lussy, co-editor of Simone Weil: Oeuvres Complètes, ‘brilliant formulations abound; they are often the result of a sudden tightening of thought’.10 As Wittgenstein put it: ‘There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man — but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point’ (CV, p. 35e). An example not from her Notebooks but from a book she actually wrote: in The Iliad

130  Palle Yourgrau or The Poem of Force, having argued that for the Greeks, ‘retribution […] has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force’, Weil comes up with a line that stops one in one’s tracks: ‘We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue’ (p. 16). The plain fact is that Weil belongs to a select group of thinkers like Augustine, Pascal, and Wittgenstein11 of whom a single phrase can change one’s life. At the same time, it’s true, as the critics allege, that frequently in GG the aphorisms are contextless. Often, however, to include the context would serve only to diminish their effect. Consider an example from Wittgenstein. As indicated earlier, unlike Thibon, von Wright said he chose not to edit Wittgenstein’s remarks in CV. Consider then, this passage: Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake; and someone who is in a position to give us a bag full of raisins still can’t bake a cake with them, let alone do something better. I am thinking of Kraus and his aphorisms, but also of myself too and my philosophical remarks. A cake—that isn’t as it were: thinned-out raisins (CV, p. 67e). Wittgenstein is referring to Karl Kraus, journalist and aphorist, an Austrian contemporary of his, whose journal, Die Fackel, was enormously influential. The context of Wittgenstein’s remark, then—‘Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake. […] A cake — that isn’t as it were: thinned-out raisins’—is a reference to Kraus’ aphoristic style as well as Wittgenstein’s. This is of historical and biographical interest, but its significance is much greater. There is a tendency to want to reduce the greatness of an object of value to what, in some sense, is its finest part. The Mona Lisa, for example, is famous for its enigmatic smile. But the smile is not greater than the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is not, as it were, a thinned-out smile. The surrounding context provided by von Wright, thus, serves only to diminish the force of the aphorism. Yet isn’t Wittgenstein, in this passage, arguing against me? No. His point is that if a part is essentially part of a whole, albeit the best part, it can’t stand alone. By contrast, in the cases I’m considering, the aphorism, unlike the smile of the Mona Lisa, can stand on its own. Not only isn’t the reference to Kraus’ and Wittgenstein’s writings required, the reference domesticates the aphorism, reducing it to a clever observation about two literary styles. Von Wright’s decision not to edit Wittgenstein’s notes, was a mistake, a mistake Thibon did not make with GG (which is not to say that Thibon’s editing was faultless). There, for example, we find the following passage from Weil: ‘To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. […] Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise; what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without [gravity]?’

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  131 (p. 3 (brackets added)). To my mind, this captures, at one stroke, the essence of Christianity. There is nothing else like it, to my knowledge, in the (‘actual’) books attributed to Weil. As for the original context of these lines in the Notebooks, we are fortunate that the philosopher Martin Andic hunted down many of the original contexts Thibon left out. Here, then, is the context in Weil’s Notebook of the lines I’ve just quoted: Incarnation in Plato. God, and the gods, and the blessed souls, in their feast partaken of on the other side of the sky, consume reality, nourish themselves with knowledge, and devour justice itself, reason itself, science itself and the other manifest realities. // It is clear that the justice referred to here is justice as an attribute of God. // Republic V: The manner of conceiving justice itself. Even the most just men are but close to Justice, they are not in every respect that which justice is. But one must also conceive what the perfectly just man would be like, should he happen to be born, without going into the question of whether such a thing is possible or not. Now, this man would be in every respect the same things as justice, in every respect like unto justice; therefore, in spite of the fact that he was on earth, he would belong to those realities which lie on the other side of the sky. // Plato always looks upon the perfect as more real than the imperfect, and for a man there is no other reality but that of earthly existence. Man ought to have come down not from the sky where reside the gods, but from the world which lies on the other side of the sky, to come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. […] Gravity makes things come down wings make them rise; what wings raised to the second power can make things come without weight [gravity]?12 What we learn from this is that Weil was meditating deeply on passages from Plato. The question remains, however, whether what we learn is necessary for us to appreciate the force of Weil’s aphorism. From related passages in GG (of which more, soon), and from our general knowledge of Weil, we know that for Weil ‘the perfectly just man’ is an intimation of Christ. In Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks she quotes Socrates in Theaetetus 176a: [O]ne should strive to flee this world as swiftly as one can. This flight is, as far as possible, an assimilation in God. This assimilation consists in becoming just and holy by the help of reason […] God is never in any way unrighteous […] and nothing resembles him more than that man among us who is the most righteous (Intimations of Christianity, pp. 77–78). Even more explicitly, she asks: ‘What is this justice? How can the imitation of God by a man be possible? We have an answer. That answer is the Christ’ (Intimations of Christianity, p. 79). Weil, after all, is a Christian– Platonist. She has a Christian reading of Plato, just as she has a Platonic reading of Christianity. In Christianity, for Weil, there is a ‘double descent’: God descends from Heaven to earth in the person of Christ, and on earth,

132  Palle Yourgrau Christ’s ministry proceeds not by acting like a king, but by ‘descending’, by humbling himself, washing the feet of a disciple, coming to Jerusalem on an ass. Wings defy gravity and ‘make things rise’, an image of ascent to Heaven, as in Plato’s Symposium 202e–203a (a passage described in detail in Intimations of Christianity), where Diotima tells Socrates that Eros shuttles (how else but on wings?) between earth and Heaven, an angelic ‘mediator’ between the two realms. In Christianity, paradoxically, Weil is saying in GG, wings bring things down without gravity. These are ‘wings raised to the second power’ that make us rise by falling. Why wings? We know, of course, that it is by wings that birds climb the air, appearing to defy gravity. Yet wings are, after all, merely physical. Nevertheless, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, ‘[b]y their nature wings have the power to lift up heavy things and raise them aloft where the gods all dwell, and so, more than anything [else] that pertains to the body, they are akin to the divine’ (246e (brackets added)). Indeed, Weil has written elsewhere that, mysteriously, sometimes, what is material, what pertains to the body, is ‘akin to the divine’. In ‘Classical Science and After’, she writes: [I]f there has ever been real sanctity in the world, even if only in one man and only for a single day, then in a sense sanctity is something of which matter is capable […] [A] saint’s body is nothing else but matter and is a piece of the world. […] We are ruled by a double law: an obvious indifference and a mysterious complicity, as regards the good, on the part of the matter which composes the world; it is because it reminds us of this double law that the spectacle of beauty pierces the heart (p. 12). As it were, beauty dematerializes matter, as do wings ‘raised to the second power’. Note the subtitle of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great sonnet, ‘The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord’. The poem begins by saluting ‘dapple dawn drawn falcon’, adding, ‘my heart stirred for a bird’ — the sky climbing falcon, ‘kingdom of daylight’s dauphin’. Midway through the poem, however, things reverse: Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! The (‘contextless’) passage that Thibon plucked from the Notebooks, then — ‘To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part. […] Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise; what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without [gravity]?’ — does not consist of ‘striking but manipulable bon mots’ that are ‘less

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  133 complex, less original, more orthodox than the real Simone Weil’. Indeed, compare the ‘real’ Simone Weil: In one of Grimm’s stories there is a competition between a giant and a little tailor to see which is the stronger. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before it comes down again. The little tailor lets a bird fly and it does not come down at all. Anything without wings always comes down again in the end [i.e., comes down by the force of gravity] (‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, p. 127). Need I say it? The passage from GG was not designed by Thibon ‘for readers who want easy or ready-made solutions’. On the contrary, it resonates with Plato and Hopkins, not to mention the real Simone Weil. If anything, one could complain that the passage is too demanding of the reader. And I have heard just this complaint made of GG. Which is it, then: is GG too simple-minded, or, rather, too challenging? One can’t have it both ways. Ironically, the same Martin Andic who has done so much to provide the missing contexts that Thibon omitted from GG for which Thibon’s critics have held him to account, wrote to me in 2002 that ‘[Weil’s] Intimations was a life changing work for me, and so was Gravity and Grace, which took me years even to begin to understand, with the help of her Notebooks’. So much for GG being too simple-minded, a mere mélange of ‘striking but manipulable bon mots’. But then the opposite question arises: if it took even Andic, a highly esteemed scholar of Weil, years to begin to understand GG, could the uninitiated reader be expected to grasp it? Well, why shouldn’t the reader be challenged? Moreover, there are a number of passages in GG that help illuminate Weil’s image of wings raised to the second power, of rising by falling, without gravity, and Thibon would have done well to collect these together.13 He would also have done well to collect together what Weil has to say in GG about death.14 Note that these passages do not misrepresent Weil’s thought as presented in other writings, such as Intimations of Christianity. When one goes on to read Weil’s other books and essays, one does not feel that one is finally getting to the ‘real’ Simone Weil. Indeed, not only is the following passage from GG particularly striking, it also resonates with an idea with which Weil was deeply preoccupied: The source of man’s energy is outside him, like that of his physical energy (food, air, etc.) […] [I]n the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible. There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light (GG, p. 2). What is that ‘chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light’ if not God? As Weil says, ‘[m]an’s great affliction […] is that looking and eating are two different operations’ (GG, p. 90). Lacking a divine chlorophyll, we can’t live by looking; we can’t eat light. We have to eat food, that is to kill,

134  Palle Yourgrau in order to live.15 Indeed, even to love. The corpses in the Iliad, Weil writes, are ‘dearer to the vultures than to their wives’.16 The passage, then, in GG, deep in itself, is deeply connected to Weil’s mature thought, as represented in a variety of contexts. It is as far as possible from being a mere youthful dialectical exercise. The idea of chlorophyll, moreover, is for Weil more than a mere simile, more than a symbol, as demonstrated in detail by de Lussy in ‘L’Image Chlorophyllienne de la Grâce Chez Simone Weil’. De Lussy reveals the extent to which Weil immersed herself in an intense study of the biology of photosynthesis. Weil said to herself, ‘Find someone who can tell me if the second law of thermodynamics is regarded as valid in biology’ (‘The Chlorophyllic Image of Grace in the Works of Simone Weil’, a translation of de Lussy by Andrea Fineman, p. 2).17 She studied Max Planck’s Lessons on Thermodynamics carefully, annotating her copy of the book. ‘What intuition’, writes de Lussy, guided Simone Weil in so stubbornly studying to try to find and understand the complex mechanism of photosynthesis? This intuition throughout her oeuvre, […] is the analogy that she made between the phenomena of the tangible world and the divine truths. (‘Chlorophyllic Image’, p. 3) (An analogy seen at work with Weil in our earlier discussions.) ‘The mechanism of photosynthesis especially appealed to her’, writes de Lussy, ‘because she saw in it a translation of how actions of grace appear in the spiritual realm, but are demonstrated in the physical realm. […]“Grace is our chlorophyll”, she said’ (‘Chlorophyllic Image’, p. 3). In particular, Simone Weil saw, in the complex mechanism of photosynthesis, the only thing that constitutes an antagonistic force against gravity […] Weil didn’t cease to demonstrate the opposition of the two forces in her writings — and did this right up until the end. (‘Chlorophyllic Image’, p. 3) Of course, precisely, this central idea of Weil’s, gravity vs. grace, was what induced Thibon to use this as the title of GG, a decision that his critics complained was simply his own device, that lacked Weil’s blessing. De Lussy, however, is not one of those critics: Thus, Simone Weil powerfully defined the two big principles that, for her, rule the ethical and religious domain—that is to say, gravity and grace. Gustave Thibon was right in giving this title to the thoughts and adages that he extracted from the Cahiers that Simone Weil gave him in confidence at the moment that she departed for the US (‘Chlorophyllic Image’, p. 4).

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  135 Gravity and Grace Meets Culture and Value Far from misrepresenting Weil’s thought, then, Thibon in GG in his very title captured the essence of Weil’s thought. Reflecting on such passages as the ones I’ve highlighted about wings raised to the second power and a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light, can one still say with a straight face that in GG, Thibon had merely ‘slapped a label on contextless snippets consisting of striking but manipulable bon mots, less complex, less original, and more orthodox than the real Simone Weil, who is not for readers wanting easy or ready-made solutions’? On the contrary, we owe Thibon a debt of gratitude, not only for the value of the book on its own, but for its value as a window onto the relationship between the thoughts of Simone Weil and those of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Interestingly, a bridge between the two can be discerned from the personal perspective provided by two poignant remarks by Wittgenstein’s friend M. O’C. Drury. ‘After Wittgenstein’s death’, he wrote, ‘I became acquainted with the writings of Simone Weil. These have had as profound an influence on my subsequent thought as Wittgenstein had on my earlier life’.18 That was no exaggeration. Drury recorded a conversation he once had with Wittgenstein. ‘Your religious ideas’, Wittgenstein said, ‘have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic’.19 ‘Yes’, Drury replied, ‘I do feel that, when, say, Plato talks about the gods, it lacks the sense of awe which you feel throughout the Bible’. In a footnote to that passage, Drury added, ‘Now that Simone Weil has taught me how to understand Plato, I would bite my tongue out rather than make such a remark’.20 Indeed, in light of the discussions above, it’s no mystery why, after reading Weil, Drury changed his mind about the relationship between Plato and the Gospels. It’s a pity we don’t know whether reading Weil would have had the same effect on Wittgenstein. We do know that Drury recorded the following conversation about the fourth Gospel, John’s Gospel, which is known as the most Greek, the most Platonic of the four Gospels: WITTGENSTEIN: Drury, what is your favorite Gospel? DRURY: I don’t think I ever asked myself that question. WITTGENSTEIN: M  ine is St. Matthew’s. Matthew seems to me to contain everything. Now, I can’t understand the Fourth Gospel.21 In fact, we can learn a great deal by comparing Gravity and Grace with Culture and Value. As mentioned earlier, both books were assembled by a later editor from notes written by the two philosophers. Thibon and von Wright, however, adopted opposite methodologies, the former

136  Palle Yourgrau choosing to select and rearrange excerpts, the latter deciding to simply record the notes as he found them. Von Wright, I believe, made a mistake. I’ll repeat what I did with respect to GG and make a suggestion on how to arrange some passages from Wittgenstein, an arrangement that suggests a natural, and striking, comparison with Weil. I would entitle one section ‘The Transcendence of the Good’ and arrange the passages as follows. Below each excerpt from CV, I append a corresponding excerpt from GG. Below that, sometimes, an excerpt from elsewhere in Weil. (No commentary on the parallels, I believe, is necessary. They speak for themselves.) The good is outside the space of facts […] What is good is also divine. Queer as that sounds, that sums up my ethics (CV, p. 3e). Goodness is transcendent. God is Goodness (GG, p. 40).22 Christ’s attitude on this subject, as far as I understand it, was that he ought to be recognized as holy because he was perpetually and exclusively performing good23 (Weil, Letter to a Priest, p. 50). The propositions ‘Jesus Christ Is God’ or ‘The consecrated bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ’, enunciated as facts, have strictly no meaning whatever (Letter to a Priest, pp. 48–49). If Christianity is the truth, then all the philosophy that is written about it is false (CV, p. 83e). Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things (GG, p. 50). Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural (CV, p. 3e). The Eucharist should not […] be an object of belief for the part of me which apprehends facts. […] Only with that part of us which is made for the supernatural should we adhere to these mysteries (GG, p. 117). Similarly, I would assemble another collection of passages from Wittgenstein and Weil under the title, ‘The Dangerous Myth of Science and Progress’. If one examines CV and GG in the right way, then, one sees clear parallels, consonances that would be more apparent were the two books edited in a way that I believe would render the thoughts of the two philosophers more perspicuous, such as collecting together, under a single heading, ideas that in themselves belong together. There are also a number of striking parallels from other venues that don’t fit together easily under a single heading but which demonstrate further that there is a real kinship here. Consider the following: The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell (Weil, ‘Human Personality’, p. 69). [I]n one of our actual exchanges he had […] thrown out a distinction between intelligence and character. […] [H]e said: ‘Intelligence — you can

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  137 pick it up in the street’ (F. R. Leavis, ‘Memories of Wittgenstein’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rhees, p. 64). There are some words in Isaiah which are terrible for me: They that love God ‘shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint’. This makes it physically impossible for me to forget, even for a moment, that I am not of their number (Weil, Seventy Letters, p. 170). I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth (CV, p. 72e). In spite of telescopes and microscopes, we cannot step outside our scale. All that we see, by definition, is at our scale (Weil, ms., p. 78).24 [E]ven the hugest telescope has to have an eye–piece no larger than the human eye (CV, p. 17e). [Thomas Hertog, in The Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, employs this as the epigraph for Chapter. 1] A Parting of the Ways One can’t fail to be struck by the close relationships among these passages. At the same time, there are passages that reveal a contrasting sensibility between the two thinkers. Consider, for example, what Vivienne Blackburn has written: [Weil] was […] shocked by the curse of Elisha on the children who mocked him (II Kings 2), and the implication of God’s approval of the children’s destruction. Pétrement writes that Weil understood that horrifying events occurred in primitive times, but not the respect with which accounts of them were treated as sacred texts. It was this initial revulsion which led to Weil’s attempt to understand Christ’s revelation in terms of Greek philosophy rather than that of the Hebrews.25 Weil is not alone in being shocked by that passage. See Evan Fales, for example, in his contribution to Divine Evil.26 By contrast, Drury records a conversation he once had with Wittgenstein: DRURY: There are some passages in the Old Testament that I find very offensive. For instance, the story where some children mock Elisha for his baldness: ‘Go up, thou bald head’. And God sends bears out of the forest to eat them. WITTGENSTEIN: [very sternly] You mustn’t pick and choose just what you want in that way. DRURY: But I have never been able to do anything else. WITTGENSTEIN: Just remember what the Old Testament meant to a man like Kierkegaard. After all, children have been killed by bears.

138  Palle Yourgrau DRURY: Yes, but we ought to think that such a tragedy is a direct punishment from God for a particular act of wickedness. In the New Testament we are told precisely the opposite. WITTGENSTEIN:  That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. You don’t understand, you are quite out of your depth (‘Conversations’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rhees, pp. 169–170). Perhaps Wittgenstein would have held that Weil, who, like Drury, found the story of the bear attack very offensive, was also quite out of her depth. Perhaps he would have reminded her, too, that ‘after all, children have been killed by bears’. Perhaps, however, Weil, in turn, would have responded that she understood that horrifying events occurred in primitive times, but not the respect with which accounts of them were treated as sacred texts. In any case, Wittgenstein himself, surely, was being inconsistent when he admonished Drury: ‘You mustn’t pick and choose just what you want in that way’. After all, as mentioned earlier, Wittgenstein was quite taken with Tolstoy’s The Gospels in Brief, which consists entirely of Tolstoy’s rewriting of the Gospels to conform to his own conception of ‘what really happened’ during Christ’s ministry. For example, Tolstoy writes in his Preface that, ‘to this day, nobody has attempted to separate the teaching of Christ from that artificial and completely unjustified reconciliation with the Old Testament’ (p. xxviii). Ironically, as noted above, Weil did actually attempt ‘to separate the teaching of Christ from [what she took to be] that artificial and completely unjustified reconciliation with the Old Testament’. It’s a nice question what Weil would have made of Tolstoy’s book. She certainly had no reluctance to ‘picking and choosing just what she wanted’ from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels. The plot thickens when it comes to their different responses to the Jewish question. Neither had a Jewish upbringing; both had Jewish ancestors. Wittgenstein (at times) identified himself as a Jew. Weil did not. Wittgenstein had negative things to say about Jews (much less so about Judaism). Weil had negative things to say about Judaism (much less so about Jews).27 Wittgenstein, unlike Weil, struggled with his Jewish identity. A well-known example of this is his ‘confession’ to an embarrassed Fania Pascal that he had allowed people to be misled about his Jewish ancestry (Pascal, ‘Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rhees, pp. 35–36). More disconcerting are Wittgenstein’s reflections in CV on what he took (at least at that time) to be the limitations (as well as strengths) of ‘the Jewish mind’, including his own. It is unimaginable that Weil could have written

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  139 such lines, could have conceived the very idea of ‘the Jewish mind’ and its supposed limits. Her primary concern was rather, as we’ve seen, with the ideas or doctrines she believed are contained in the Hebrew Bible, in particular the massacres (holocausts, she called them) ordered or inspired by Yahweh (see Divine Evil, for details)28 and the idea that the Jewish people (or race) are Yahweh’s own people, ‘the chosen ones’. The idea of chosenness, exclusiveness or separation, offended Weil, including what she took to be Catholic exclusiveness or separation.29 (She famously resisted being baptized.) Personal considerations about her own background rarely came into play, unlike the case of Wittgenstein, though she did once say, ‘I am paralyzed by the sentiment that I am accused of descending from a people who couldn’t find anything better to give to humanity than Jehovah’.30 This was a thoughtless comment on her part, since she herself wrote that: [C]ertain parts of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Book of Job, Isaiah, the Book of Wisdom, contain incomparable expression of the beauty of the world […] [whereas] the beauty of the world is almost absent from Christian tradition (‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, pp. 83, 101 (brackets added)). Weil also, like Wittgenstein, was at times not immune to giving in to stereotypical thinking, as in the offensive chapter, ‘Israel’, in a later edition of Gravity and Grace (that was mysteriously omitted in earlier English editions).31 Thibon was right, I believe, to bring out Weil’s animus toward ancient Israel and its historical influence (which reflects her later thought as well), but wrong to bury one of her great ‘aphorisms’ in the extended passage he chose to select for GG. Weil discusses the story in the Hebrew Bible of Jacob wrestling an angel. In the original French, she says: ‘“Il lutta contra un ange et fu vainqueur, et celuici pleura et demanda grâce…” N’est–ce pas le grand malheur, quand on lutte contre Dieu, de n’être pas vaincu?’.32 In English: ‘”He fought against an angel and was victorious and the angel wept and asked for mercy”. Is it not a great misfortune when one fights against God, not to be defeated?’ (Strangely, the beginning of this passage is mistranslated in GG 2002, so that its meaning is reversed: ‘He fought against an angel and was vanquished and here he cries and asks for mercy’ (p. 161).33) To be sure, one could argue that Weil here (as so often) neglects the meaning a given passage actually has in the context of the Hebrew Bible, but at the same time, one should not let this blind us to the fact that Weil’s ‘aphorism’ stands on its own. Are there not fights one ought to lose? Should Jesus have defeated the Romans who came to arrest him and made them beg for mercy? Yet what about the Crusades? That was, Weil would insist, ‘Romanized Christianity’, which, she would also insist, remains, sadly, with us.

140  Palle Yourgrau The Reality of the Transcendent More significant, I believe, than what separates Weil from Wittgenstein in their attitude toward the Bible or toward Jews and Judaism is their response to the more general question of the reality of the transcendent, the supernatural. Wittgenstein did say in CV, ‘Only the supernatural can express the supernatural’ (p. 3). Indeed, ‘there is a sense’, he said to Drury, ‘in which you and I are both Christians’.34 But there he was speaking of living a certain kind of life, not of holding certain beliefs. ‘I am not a religious man’, he said to Drury, ‘but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’.35 As his friend Normal Malcolm wrote: I do not wish to give the impression that Wittgenstein accepted any religious faith […] [b]ut I think there was in him […] the possibility of religion. I believe he looked on religion as a ‘form of life’ in which he did not participate, but with which he was sympathetic (Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 72). By contrast, Thibon once said of Weil: ‘Never have I felt the word supernatural to be more charged with reality than when in contact with her’ (GG, p. viii). Could one have said the same thing about Wittgenstein? Is it conceivable that Wittgenstein, especially in his later period, would have uttered these words from Weil: ‘Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others’ (‘Human Personality’, p. 73). On the contrary, deeply suspicious of the misuse of ‘such beautiful words’ by philosophers, he wrote that [our language] keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. As long as […] we still have the adjectives “identical”, “true”, “false”, “possible” […] people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties […] And what’s more, this satisfies a longing for the transcendent. (CV, p. 15e (emphasis added)) Further, ‘the use of such words as “beautiful”’, he said, ‘is even more apt to be misunderstood if you look at the linguistic form of sentences in which it occurs than most other words’ (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, p. 1).36 To be sure, with respect to religious rituals, Wittgenstein said, ‘All genuine expressions of religion are wonderful, even those of the most savage people’ (Drury, ‘Some Notes’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rhees, p. 93). Wonderful, yes; but are those expressions of religion of even ‘the most savage people’ right? As we know from his critical ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, the question would be otiose for Wittgenstein, otiose as well with respect to more ‘civilized’ religions: ‘The religious

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  141 actions […] of the priest–king are no different in kind from any genuinely religious action of today, for example, a confession of sins’ (‘Remarks’, p. 123). Weil, too, was critical of Frazer,37 and she was in agreement with Wittgenstein that today’s religions are no different in kind, but, strikingly, she draws the opposite conclusion: [T]he feelings of the so-called pagans for their statues were very probably the same as those inspired nowadays by the crucifix and the statues of the Virgin. […] Even if they [‘the so-called pagans’] did happen to believe the divinity to be totally present in some stone or wood, it maybe they were sometimes right. Do we not believe God is present in some bread and wine? Perhaps God was actually present in statues fashioned and consecrated according to certain rites (Letter to a Priest, p. 16 (emphasis and brackets added)). A ‘Language Game’ about God In the end, did Wittgenstein acknowledge the reality of the transcendent, the supernatural, the divine, or not? G. E. M. Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s favorite student, was, from early in her life, a devout Catholic. Did she, as Malcolm suggested, like Wittgenstein, see religion as a ‘form of life’ in which Wittgenstein simply did not participate, a language-game he did not play, but with which he was sympathetic?38 Malcolm was also a believer. In a famous paper defending the ontological argument, he affirmed that the idea of the necessary existence of God is essential to the Jewish and Christian religions: In those complex systems of thought, those ‘language–games’, God has the status of a necessary being. Who can doubt that? Here we must say with Wittgenstein, ‘This language–game is played!’ I believe we may rightly take the existence of those religious systems of thought in which God figures as a necessary being to be a disproof of the dogma, affirmed by Hume and others, that no existential proposition can be necessary.39 Would Malcolm, however, hold that since ‘the language game’ of ancient Greek mythology involving Pegasus was played, that disproves the contemporary dogma that there are no winged horses? What’s going on here? Rudolph Carnap, the most prominent of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, in a well-known essay, ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, that reminds one of Malcolm’s article, distinguished between what he called internal and external questions with respect to a given system of thought. An internal question takes place within a system and obeys its rules and procedures. Such a question, if well-posed, will have a definite answer. Thus, from within the system of arithmetic, the question of whether there exists a number between 2 and 4 has a definite answer. But if we pose the

142  Palle Yourgrau external question about the system of numbers itself as to whether there ‘really’ exists such a thing as the number 3, there is no answer, since the question is ill-formed or ‘metaphysical’. Malcolm’s move appears, then, to be that if we ask from within the religious system or ‘language–game’ of Judaism or Christianity whether God necessarily exists, the answer is yes. If we ask, however, from outside these religions whether God ‘really’ necessarily exists, the question is ill-formed and has no answer, since the question of the existence of God is after all a religious question, and a religious question demands a religious answer, just as a mathematical question demands a mathematical (not a metaphysical) answer. Could this move enable Wittgenstein to preserve both his religious sensibility and his (late) Wittgensteinianism? Here, we’re going beyond the scope of this essay. I can say, however, that there’s clearly something right about Carnap’s approach, but at the same time, something wrong. For one thing, the question of whether Carnap was right to distinguish between internal and external questions seems itself to be an external question. Are there ‘really’ different systems of thought and a substantive distinction between internal vs. external questions, with external questions being ill-formed, or is that question only answerable from inside a new system or language-game, a meta-system, or system-of-systems, or language-game-of-language-games?40 And what about the relationships among different systems or languagegames, relationships which are discovered rather than postulated? Consider, for example, ‘the Langlands Program, thought by many to be the Grand Unified Theory of Mathematics’, relating ‘mathematical fields that at first glance seem to be light years apart: algebra, geometry, number theory, analysis and quantum physics’—a program to which André Weil, Simone’s brother, is ‘particularly relevant’.41 With regard to religion, itself, it would surely be unsatisfactory if a Catholic fearing he or she were losing their faith were to ask their priest whether he was certain that God exists, and the priest were to reply that of course, speaking as a religious Catholic—speaking from an internal perspective—he could not but be certain that God exists. The question that was being asked, however, was an external one and far from not being a genuinely religious question, I would insist that, on the contrary, it is a paradigmatically religious question. In On the Abolition of All Political Parties, Weil condemned the practice of speaking as… (fill in the blank as you please): [P]eople are not ashamed to say, ‘As a Frenchman, I think that…’ or ‘As a Catholic, I think that…’ […] [W]hen a man joins a party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as ‘As a monarchist, or as a Socialist, I think that…’ It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think (pp. 17–18, 27).42

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  143 Philosophies and Philosophers Unsurprisingly, the question of the ultimate relationship between Weil’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophies, which, so to speak, spring from a common source, turns on profound issues related to the idea of absolute truth and the ‘limitations’ of what can be said, and, as a consequence, on the notion of the reality of the transcendent, in particular, the good—the question that was at the heart of Socrates’ and Plato’s philosophies and at the center of Wittgenstein’s critique of those philosophies. I have tried to take some steps toward showing that a good way to grapple with the thought of these two thinkers is by studying Gravity and Grace alongside Culture and Value, even though neither book is, strictly speaking, something either of them composed as a book. However one resolves the question of the relationship between the two philosophies, it is indisputable that there is a deep kinship between these two seemingly different philosophers, one a Platonist, the other (at least on the surface) a severe critic of Plato. The following quotations from each are illustrative, I believe, of what both unites and divides the two thinkers. “The moon,” wrote Weil, “is the image, the reflection of the sun. The sun being the good, it is natural to suppose that the moon is the beautiful.” (Weil 1987, 146) “If I had planned it,” Wittgenstein said to Oets Bouwsma, “I should never have made the sun at all. … The sun is too bright and too hot. … And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing.” (Bouwsma 1986, 12). Their kinship can be discerned, in particular in their relationship to Plato. Bouwama, recalling a conversation with Wittgenstein in 1950 (near his death in 1951), said, ‘Wittgenstein reads Plato — the only philosopher he reads. But he likes the allegories, the myths’.43 Compare Weil: ‘[T]he only philosopher she was still reading at that time [after 1940, near her death in 1943], besides those whose fragments were collected in Diels’s anthology, which she also examined, was Plato’.44 Moreover, Weil said in an early essay for Alain, her teacher at the Lycee, that ‘[a]mong Plato’s finest thoughts are those which came to him by meditating on the myths’.45 As should be clear from all of the above, however, and especially from Intimations of Christianity, for Weil, as opposed to Wittgenstein, Plato’s meditations on the myths resulted in his uncovering profound truths. ‘[W] eil writes: “The Foundation of mythology is that the universe is a metaphor of the divine truths.” Mythology thus conveys truths’.46 The mystical Christian Platonist and the patron saint of analytic philosophy shared a moral seriousness, a religious point of view, if not a shared religion, a fact that emerges clearly from the collections of thoughts contained in the two books that have been the subject of this essay. Of course, there is a great deal more to their philosophies than can be gleaned from these two books. Nevertheless, Gravity and Grace and Culture and Value provide windows onto the thoughts of each philosopher that reveal aspects

144  Palle Yourgrau of their philosophies that are otherwise less visible. To bring the two thinkers into dialogue with each other sharpens our focus on the meaning and significance of their writings. Imaginary dialogues, as Plato demonstrated, can be much more than mere poor relations of the real thing. Notes 1 Gravity and Grace, ed. by Gustave Thibon, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Except where otherwise noted, all references to Gravity and Grace (GG) will be to this edition. 2 Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 136–137; Eric Springsted, Simone Weil for the Twenty–First Century, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), p. 5; Ronald Collins and J. P. Little, “Weil’s Single–Minded Commitment to Truth: A Q & A Interview with J. P. Little”, Attention (16 August 2021), https://attentionsw.org/weilssinglemindedcommitmenttotruthaqainterviewwithjplittle [accessed 1 May 2022]; Ronald Collins, “The Famous Book She Never Wrote: The Story of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace”, Washington Independent Review of Books (16 April 2020). https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/features/thefamousbooksheneverwrote [accessed 1 March 2022]; Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 157. 3 All references to Culture and Value (CV) will be to the edition ed. by G. H. von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). There is also a revised edition ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. by Peter Winch, rev. by Alois Pichler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 Thibon, “Introduction to Gravity and Grace”, pp. xii–xiii. 5 See his comment about this in Thibon and Perrin, Simone Weil as We Knew Her (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2003), pp. 8–9. 6 Collins, “The Famous Book She Never Wrote”. 7 Schulte, in Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works, ed. by Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelä (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 397–404. 8 Existentialists and Mystics, p. 157. 9 In Ronald Collins and Jacques Cabaud, “A Q & A Interview with Jacques Cabaud, One of Simone Weil’s First Biographers”, Attention (April 2022). https://attentionsw.org/aqainterviewwithjacquescabaudsimoneweilsfirstbiographer [accessed 1 June 2022]. 10 de Lussy, “To On: A Nameless Something over Which the Mind Stumbles,” in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, ed. by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 115–132, p. 126. 11 As will be seen when we come to discuss CV. 12 I am indebted to Ronald Collins who, in a spirited correspondence with me about GG, reproduced some of the contexts Andic uncovered. [I have emphasized the lines Thibon chose to include in GG but have otherwise cited the text as given by Collins.] 13 To take just one example: ‘The cross as a balance, as a lever. A going down a condition of rising up. Heaven coming down to earth lifts earth to heaven’ (GG, p. 84). 14 A striking example: ‘The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real; henceforward, it is his way of appearing’ (GG, p. 21). One

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  145 is reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous discussion in Being and Nothingness , trans. by H. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), of noticing the reality of Pierre’s absence from the café, except that, to my mind, Weil’s aphorism is deeper and more beautiful than Sartre’s belabored discussion invoking ‘nothingness’. 15 See Palle Yourgrau, Simone Weil, (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), Chapter 7, “Fêtes de la Faim”. 16 “The Iliad Or the Poem of Force,” in War and the Iliad, trans. by Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), pp. 3–37, p. 3. 17 I am grateful to Andrea Fineman for providing me with an English translation of de Lussy’s text. 18 Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984a), pp. 97–171, p. 98. 19 A peculiar comment by Wittgenstein, since it’s well known that while a soldier in WWI, he became transfixed by Tolstoy’s The Gospels in Brief: The Life of Jesus, trans. by Dustin Condren (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011). Carrying it always in his rucksack, he became known among his comrades as ‘the man with the Gospels’, a curious epithet for a man who described himself to Drury as ‘one hundred per cent Hebraic’. 20 Drury, “Conversations,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984a), pp. 97–171, p. 161. 2 1 Ibid., p. 164. 22 For more on Weil and Wittgenstein on this theme, see Palle Yourgrau, “Against History: A Lesson from Simone Weil”, IAI News (18 July 2017). https://iai. tv/articles/againsthistoryemmanuelmacronslessonsfromsimoneweilauid844 [accessed 24 September 2022]. 23 That is, not because he performed miracles or was resurrected from the dead. (Contra St. Paul: ‘And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:17).) 24 Cited by de Lussy in “To On,” in Christian Platonism, ed. by Doering and Springsted, p. 123. 2 5 Virginia Blackburn, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil, A Study in Christian Responsiveness (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 111–112. I thank Ronald Collins for finding this reference for me. In this passage, Blackburn is citing Simone Pétrement, La Vie de Simone Weil, (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997), vol. II, pp. 217–218. See also p. 346 in the English translation of Pétrement’s biography, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). 26 Fales, “Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ,” in Divine Evil: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. by Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murry, and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 91–108, p. 96, n. 13. 27 These contrasts are, of course, oversimplifications. For more nuanced discussion, see Brian McGuinness, “Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewishness,” in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. by James Klagge, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 221–236; David Stern, “Was Wittgenstein a Jew?,” in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. by James Klagge, pp. 237–272; Palle Yourgrau, “Was Simone Weil a Jew?”, Partisan Review 68 (2001): 631–641; and Eric Springsted, “Was Simone Weil an Anti–semite?”, Attention (January 2022). https://attentionsw.org/wassimoneweilanantisemite/ [accessed 1 March 2022].

146  Palle Yourgrau 28 Divine Evil: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. by Bergmann, Murry, and Rea. 29 See my essay, ‘Was Simone Weil a Jew?’. I go into the matter in greater depth in my book, Simone Weil, in Chapter 8, ‘On the Jewish Question’. Perhaps in too great a depth. A. Rebecca Rozelle–Stone and Lucian Stone, in Simone Weil and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).   (p. 196, footnote 5), state that, ‘[t]here exists a cottage industry of biographers and commentators who obsess over Weil’s Jewishness, or more generally attempt to psychologize her as a means of ‘understanding’ her thought. […] [M]any go so far as to insist that Weil’s relationship with her Jewish identity is the central question in coming to know her thought. See, for example, Palle Yourgrau, Simone Weil, esp. Chapter 8: “On the Jewish Question”.’ Since the approach to Weil taken in my book is the exact opposite of how it is characterized in that footnote, I can only conclude that the authors of that footnote have not actually read my book. 30 Quoted in Jeffrey Mehlman, Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944, (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 89. 31 This later English edition will hereinafter be referred to as GG 2002. In 1998, I wrote to Routledge about this omission from GG (1992), sending them my translation of the missing chapter, but I was told there were copyright issues with Librairie Plon, and nothing came of it. 32 Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, ed. by Gustave Thibon (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988). p. 190. 33 In 2003, I wrote to Routledge pointing out this mistake. 34 Drury, “Conversations,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rhees, p. 114. 35 Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rhees, p. 79. See also Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 36 Though Weil was not a so-called ordinary language philosopher, she, too, was not insensitive to our ‘ordinary’ use of words: ‘God is pure beauty’, she wrote. ‘That is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle.’ (“Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” in Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Crauford [New York: Harper and Row, 2001, pp. 83–142], p. 141.) 37 See Marie Cabaud Meaney, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Ancient Greek Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 18–19. 38 In fact, Anscombe’s reaction to Wittgenstein on religion was much harsher. Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb writes that ‘she [Anscombe] had never accepted his [Wittgenstein’s] views on religion (she would later remark to a student that “[on] religion, Wittgenstein is sheer poison.”)’ (Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 140). 39 Malcolm, “Malcolm’s Statements of Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” in The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers, ed. by Alvin Plantinga (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1965), pp. 136–159), p. 153. 40 Perhaps the distinction between internal and external questions is meant to be merely pragmatic, i.e., useful. But then the question arises: useful for what?

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  147 41 Edward Frenkel, Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (New York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. 3–4, 95 (brackets added). 42 For further discussion of Weil’s essay, see Palle Yourgrau, “‘An Argumentative Jew’: Leon Wieseltier contra Simone Weil”, Attention (November 2022). https://attentionsw.org/anargumentativejewleonwieseltiercontrasimoneweil/ [accessed 8 November 2022]. 43 O. K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1986), p. 61 (brackets added). 44 Michel Narcy, ‘The Limits and Significance of Simone Weil’s Platonism,” in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, ed. by Doering and Springsted, p. 36 (brackets added). 45 Ibid., p. 30. 46 Meaney, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature, p. 19 (emphasis added). For my part, it would be a mistake to focus primarily on Plato’s myths, as important and beautiful as they are. The logical argument in the Euthyphro, for example, is not a myth. Employing the resources of modern logic, Richard Sharvy has demonstrated just how impressive is the logic of that argument. (See Sharvy, “Euthyphro 9d–11b: Analysis and Definition in Plato and Others,” Nous 6, no. 2 (1972): 119–137.   In my book, Simone Weil, pp.  94–96, 143, I indicate how important that argument from the Euthyphro is for Weil’s own philosophy. By contrast, Wittgenstein appears to have rejected the argument. (See Friedrich Waismann, “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Review 74 (January 1965): 12–16, p. 15.)

References Bergmann, Michael, Michael J. Murry and Michael C. Rea, eds., Divine Evil: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Blackburn, Virginia, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil: A Study in Christian Responsiveness (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2004). Bouwsma, O. K., Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949–1951 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1986). Carnap, Rudolf, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings, ed. by Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 241–257. Collins, Ronald K. L., “The Famous Book She Never Wrote: The Story of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace,” Washington Independent Review of Books (16 April 2020). https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/features/thefamousbooksheneverwrote [accessed 1 March 2022]. ——— and J. P. Little, “Weil’s Single–Minded Commitment to Truth: A Q & A Interview with J. P. Little,” Attention (16 August 2021). https://attentionsw.org/weilssinglemindedcommitmenttotruthaqainterviewwithjplittle [accessed 1 May 2022]. ——— and Jacques Cabaud, “A Q & A Interview with Jacques Cabaud, One of Simone Weil’s First Biographers,” Attention (April 2022). https://attentionsw. org/aqainterviewwithjacquescabaudsimoneweilsfirstbiographer [accessed 1 June 2022]. Drury, M. O., “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984a), pp. 97–171.

148  Palle Yourgrau ———, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984b), pp. 76–96. Fales, Evan, “Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ,” in Divine Evil: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. by Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murry, and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 91–108. Frenkel, Edward, Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (New York: Basic Books, 2013). Hertog, Thomas, The Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory (New York: Bantam, 2023). Leavis, F. R., “Memories of Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 50–67. Lipscomb, Benjamin J. B., The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). de Lussy, Florence, “To On: A Nameless Something over Which the Mind Stumbles,” in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, ed. by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 115–132. ———, “L’Image Chlorophyllienne de la Grâce Chez Simone Weil,” SpazioFilosofico, no. 17 (2016), pp.  337–349. https://www.spaziofilosofico.it/en/ numero17/6257/limagechlorophylliennedelagracechezsimoneweil/ [accessed 20 March 2022]. Malcolm, Norman, “Malcolm’s Statements of Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” in The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers, ed. by Alvin Plantinga (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1965), pp. 136–159. ———, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). ———, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). McGuinness, Brian, “Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewishness,” in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. by J. Klagge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 221–236. Meaney, Marie Cabaud, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Ancient Greek Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mehlman, Jeffrey, Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Murdoch, Iris, Existentialists and Mystics (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). Narcy, Michel, “The Limits and Significance of Simone Weil’s Platonism,” in The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, ed. by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), pp. 23–41. Pascal, Fania, “Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 12–49.

Weil Meets Wittgenstein  149 Pétrement, Simone, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). ———, La Vie de Simone Weil (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997). Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1989). ———, Republic, trans. by G. M. A. Grube, rev. by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1992a). ———, Theaetetus, trans. by M. J. Levett, rev. by Myles Burnyeat (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1992b). ———, Symposium, trans. by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1995). ———, “Euthyphro,” in Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. by G. M. A. Grube, rev. by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002). Rhees, Rush, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). ———, Discussions of Simone Weil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Rozelle Stone, A. Rebecca, and Lucian Stone, Simone Weil and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984). Schulte, Joachim, “What Is a Work by Wittgenstein?,” in Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works, ed. by Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelä (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 397–404. Sharvy, Richard, “Euthyphro 9d–11b: Analysis and Definition in Plato and Others,” Nous 6, no. 2 (1972): 119–137. Springsted, Eric O., Simone Weil for the Twenty–First Century (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). ———, “Was Simone Weil an Anti–Semite?,” Attention (January 2022). https:// attentionsw.org/wassimoneweilanantisemite/ [accessed 1 March 2022]. ———, “Robert Zaretsky: The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas,” The Review of Politics 84 (Spring 2022): pp. 294–296. Stern, David, “Was Wittgenstein a Jew?,” in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. by James Klagge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 237–272. Thibon, Gustave, and Joseph-Marie Perrin, Simone Weil as We Knew Her (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2003). Tolstoy, Leo, The Gospels in Brief: The Life of Jesus, trans. by Dustin Condren (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011). Waismann, Friedrich, “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Review 74 (January 1965): 12–16. Weil, Simone, Letter to a Priest, trans. by Arthur Wills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). ———, Seventy Letters, trans. and arr. by Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

150  Palle Yourgrau ———, “Classical Science and After,” in On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, ed. and trans. by Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 3–43. ———, “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. by Sian Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 49–78. ———, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1987). ———, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, ed. by Gustave Thibon (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988). ———, Gravity and Grace, ed. by Gustave Thibon, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). ———, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” in Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Crauford (New York: Harper and Row, 2001), pp. 83–142. ———, Gravity and Grace, ed. by Gustave Thibon, trans. by Emma Craufurd and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). ———, “The Iliad, Or the Poem of Force,” in War and the Iliad, trans. by Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), pp. 3–37. ———, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans. by Simone Leys (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. by Cyril Barret (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). ———, Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus, trans. by David R. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). ———, Culture and Value, ed. by G. H. von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). ———, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1993), pp. 119–155. ———, Culture and Value, ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. by Peter Winch, rev. by Alois Pichler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). ———, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Private Notebooks, 1914–1916, ed. and trans. by Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2022). Yourgrau, Palle, “Was Simone Weil a Jew?,” Partisan Review 68 (2001): 631–641. ———, Simone Weil (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). ———, “Against History: A Lesson from Simone Weil,” IAI News (18 July 2017). https://iai.tv/articles/againsthistoryemmanuelmacronslessonsfromsimoneweilauid844 [accessed 24 September 2022]. ———, Death and Nonexistence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). ———, “‘An Argumentative Jew’: Leon Wieseltier contra Simone Weil,” Attention (November 2022). https://attentionsw.org/anargumentativejewleonwieseltiercontrasimoneweil/ [accessed 8 November 2022]. Zaretsky, Robert, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

7 Writing (Out) the Self Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing Jack Manzi

Introduction As well as sharing many other interesting and significant parallels, Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both prolific diarists. Given the popularity of the practice, particularly in times as tumultuous as the early twentieth century, this is perhaps unsurprising. However, what is noteworthy about both Weil and Wittgenstein’s diaristic writing is how intertwined their personal writings are with their philosophical and religious writings. Indeed, the two are often inseparable – anyone undertaking serious academic work on either thinker must eventually plumb the depths of their notebooks, diaries, and personal memoirs in order to glean insights into the philosophical thought of each thinker. In the case of Weil (and to a lesser extent, Wittgenstein), her ‘core works’ and her personal writings are virtually indistinguishable, with many of the primary sources of her writings being collated from her diaries and personal correspondences. It is no surprise then that, in the literature surrounding both thinkers, there is a steady stream of academics publishing more and more collections of previously unseen and/or untranslated material from both thinkers, with the hopes of excavating some original and hitherto unseen perspective on their philosophical thought.1 Evidently, part of the reason why these attempts are so well received by the academic community (evidenced by the continuing trend of publishing unseen or untranslated works) is that there is something to be found there. That, within their personal writings, serious philosophical work takes place – not just reflection and evaluation of work undertaken elsewhere, in more formal channels, but direct and novel attempts at grappling with philosophical subjects. In this respect, both Wittgenstein and Weil seem to view diaristic writing as an appropriate and effective vehicle for serious philosophical work. What I am proposing in this chapter then is that, when we examine how Wittgenstein and Weil’s diaristic writing intersects and dovetails with philosophical work, we’ll find that it does so for a reason. DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-8

152  Jack Manzi I  propose then that diaristic writing fulfils some kind of philosophical purpose for both thinkers, and specifically, that diaristic writing is an effective tool for negating the overreach of the ‘self’ in philosophical thinking. What is meant by this will become more apparent throughout the chapter. Diaristic Writing as a Philosophical Tool I’d first like to make a general observation. I want to highlight what makes ‘diaristic’ writing different from other forms of writing, including formal academic writing. Quite simply, ‘diaristic writing’ refers to a practice of writing about one’s personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, reflections, and so on and so forth. This, I hope, is not controversial: after all, the root of the term ‘diaristic’ is ‘diary’, which is widely understood to be a personal reflective log or journal of some sort. It is not writing for a general audience, rather, it is writing about oneself (primarily) to one’s self. Consequently, I take it that this idea of ‘self’ in some way or another is central to the aims of diaristic writing. The idea that diaristic writing relates to the idea of the ‘self’ in some way may come across as painfully obvious and hardly worth mentioning, but I highlight it here as I believe it provides an appropriate focus for examining how both Weil and Wittgenstein made use of diaristic writing as a philosophical tool, in suggesting that the desired aim of such philosophical works somehow relates to their respective notions of ‘self’. It is in the quasi-Wittgensteinian spirit of bringing to mind something that is so obvious that it might elude our attention that I then place this reminder of the obvious here. The additional benefit to drawing our attention to something that may seem obvious is that it also provides a means by which we can focus on our attention to particular texts and passages from both thinkers. Despite both having a relatively light list of works published in their lifetime, Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both prolific writers, and so deciding which of their respective works to use for comparison becomes difficult without some kind of means of homing in on the relevant passages. Consequently, the works I will be focussing on within this chapter are those that I take to be written ‘about oneself for one’s self’, and include (but aren’t necessarily limited to) those writings by both philosophers that are primarily personal, having not been written for general consumption by the public (academic or otherwise). The difficulty in doing this, however, is that many of these writings have since been collated into collections by various editors and executors, with the view of making them palatable to these kinds of publics. Whilst these works have excelled in broadening the reach and appreciation of these works, there is the issue that these collections have been arranged and edited with particular purposes in mind – that is to say, they may not be entirely faithful representations, and may

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  153 even be arranged with particular editorial or academic biases in mind. It is not the function of this chapter to deal with this thorny issue, so I merely note the difficulty before pressing on. Confronting the Self: Wittgenstein’s Diaristic Writing My argument is that, for Wittgenstein, the process of diaristic writing amounted to a confrontation with the self and its overreach in philosophical thinking. As we shall see throughout this chapter, Wittgenstein engages in this kind of writing in such a way that he is constantly seeking to identify and expose ‘himself’ in his philosophical work, both to himself and to others. This culminates in what has come to be known as the ‘confessional’ aspect of his philosophical style, an aspect that involves acknowledging one’s various pitfalls and failures with regard to the work at hand and in light of ‘the other’. The relationship between Wittgenstein’s ‘personal’ writings and his ‘philosophical work’ is complex, and, in many cases, the two are entwined. On the one hand, there are the numerous private notebooks and diaries that are a part of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, from which various academic texts have been posthumously collated and published.2 On the other hand, even those texts that Wittgenstein actively worked on as ‘philosophical’ texts (chiefly, the Philosophical Investigations) are replete with introspective passages, personal reflections, and asides that almost stand out as being non sequitur with the otherwise technical discussions of philosophical problems, as James Conant comments.3 Consequently, when discussing how Wittgenstein’s diaristic writing both relates and overlaps with his philosophical thinking, one must take into consideration both his more ‘private’ writings (that is, those collections of writings that weren’t necessarily set aside for publication, such as Culture and Value), and those personal remarks that accentuate his more ‘formal’ philosophical works (such as the Investigations) – indeed, and as we shall see, it is those private remarks that make their way into his philosophical works that are perhaps the most revealing of the relationship between the two.4 That the two overlap is not a novel suggestion. Academics working on Wittgenstein have long made use of his personal notebooks in order to make sense of Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought, or else, to find new and original insights into Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking. Often, they turn to the posthumously collated collections of remarks drawn from his notebooks and diaries in order to achieve this. One of the most influential of these collections is G. H. von Wright et al.’s Culture and Value, a collection that draws heavily from Wittgenstein’s personal notebooks during the 1930s when Wittgenstein was revising the thought from his earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and started working on material

154  Jack Manzi that would eventually be a part of the Philosophical Investigations. Many of the most significant of these notes would be written during the various periods of time Wittgenstein spent in self-exile, in a small hut in Skjolden, Norway. What is interesting about Wittgenstein’s writings during the 1930s, and the philosophical work produced during this time, is that Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing style undergoes a significant change. His previous work, the Tractatus, is a work that consists primarily of numbered propositions that leaves little room for personal reflection. By contrast, the Philosophical Investigations and Wittgenstein’s later work makes frequent references to the state of the author and the author’s own difficulties whilst working through whichever philosophical problem is the current focus of the text. My contention, which I shall argue for throughout this section, is that this change is a result of the long periods of intense selfreflection and introspection Wittgenstein underwent during the 1930s in Skjolden Norway, during which Wittgenstein’s struggles with various philosophical problems coincided with the various personal struggles that he documented.5 During this time, Wittgenstein’s thoughts became focussed on the idea of ‘confession’. Throughout the writings that make up Culture and Value, Wittgenstein explicitly highlights the importance of confession by stating that ‘A confession has to be part of your new life’ (CV 18e). Generally speaking, the act of confession, much like the process of self-writing, involves the creation of a narrative in which one’s self is made visible both to the self and others, in order to confront, purify or otherwise prepare the self in some way. As is evidenced by Augustine’s Confessions (which Wittgenstein was familiar with), sincere confession requires that one be truthful about oneself, the conditions of one’s life, and the state of one’s soul – or else, how can the confession hope to be effective? Whatever kind of ‘confession’ Wittgenstein has in mind, if it is to be effective then it will require truth and honesty, if it is to bring about Wittgenstein’s desired effects. Based on remarks Wittgenstein makes throughout Culture and Value, it is certain that Wittgenstein placed an enormous importance on truth and honesty, and furthermore, that he understood there to be a direct correlation between his own pursuit of truth and honesty and the quality of his philosophical work. Wittgenstein makes frequent references to this pursuit: You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are (CV 33). It is… difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives…thinking about these things is… often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important (WC: 370).

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  155 Working in philosophy, like work in architecture in many respects, is really more like working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them) (CV 16). In these remarks (and others besides), Wittgenstein simultaneously expresses the difficulty and necessity of being truthful with and about oneself, for the purposes of truthful and honest thinking in his philosophical work. From these remarks, it is clear that for Wittgenstein there is a clear and direct relationship between thinking (philosophically) and truth/honesty. Importantly, this conviction extends beyond his perception of his own work and can also be found in his perception (and critique) of others’ works. As has been noted numerous times in the literature, Wittgenstein’s estimation of thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Arthur Schopenhauer seemed also to hinge on his perception of their self-honesty and ability to acknowledge their own faults and mistakes.6 In particular, James Conant observes that one of Wittgenstein’s dissatisfactions with Russell can be traced to what Wittgenstein seems to perceive as a tendency from Russell to seek a way around philosophical problems rather than a way through them.7 According to Conant, Russell’s repeated attempts to side-line the so-called ‘problem of the unity of propositions’ by leaving it unresolved for ‘logicians with the…indication of a difficulty’ frustrated Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s attempts via private correspondence to convince Russell to pay attention to and engage with the problem would leave Russell fretting that Wittgenstein thought him a ‘dishonest scoundrel’, and would later lead to him admitting that there had been a ‘failure of honesty in [his] work’.8 Similarly, Wittgenstein would express similar dissatisfactions with Schopenhauer’s inability to ‘take stock of himself’, despite Schopenhauer seeming to acknowledge that one of the chief barriers in philosophical thinking is the thinker’s inability to admit that they are wrong. He consequently labels Schopenhauer a ‘crude mind’ (CV 41). In both instances, Wittgenstein’s main concern seems to be the thinker in question’s ability to be honest with themselves, and how this reflects in their philosophical thought. Consequently, it is evident that an important part of ‘writing the self’ for Wittgenstein is then openly acknowledging the difficulties that one encounters, both personally and with regard to the work that one conducts. Based on his own criticisms of Russell and Schopenhauer, one would expect Wittgenstein then to be open-handed about any problems or difficulties he encounters during his own philosophical work. And, as we shall come to see further down in this section of the chapter, we can indeed see evidence of Wittgenstein holding himself to the same exacting standards that he holds the other philosophers that are otherwise high in his estimation,

156  Jack Manzi by bringing his ‘self’ into contact with the work that he is conducting and acknowledging such difficulties as and when they arise. For Wittgenstein, the importance of honesty and the notion of confession isn’t something that is limited to his writing. Perhaps the most critical piece of evidence for Wittgenstein perceiving such a necessary relationship between self-honesty, honesty towards others, and the quality of one’s philosophical work can be found in the ‘live’ confessions that he conducted to close friends and family in 1936. Following yet another brief spell of isolation in Skjolden, Norway, Wittgenstein felt it necessary to gather those closest to him to confess what he felt to be his greatest sins.9 The confessions themselves were split across two separate occasions: one to a group of close friends and family in Vienna, and another to a group of his colleagues in Cambridge. Amongst other ‘sins’ that Wittgenstein reportedly confessed (a complete account of which has been lost to history), Wittgenstein admitted to lying about his Jewish ancestry, and to striking a student whilst he was teaching in Otterthal. Judging by Wittgenstein’s remarks after this event, it is clear that he felt this had some significant impact on both his own well-being and his work. He writes: Last year with God’s help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness.10 As has been observed by Gabriel Citron, ‘Seriousness’ for Wittgenstein should be treated as a buzzword for Wittgenstein talking about the quality of his philosophical thinking.11 Citron argues that, for Wittgenstein, ‘seriousness’ is one of several so-called ‘philosophical virtues’ necessary for philosophical thinking. To evidence this, he points to a number of instances where Wittgenstein either expresses concern over the ‘seriousness’ of his philosophical work or otherwise highlights its importance: My work (my philosophical work) is… lacking in seriousness & love of truth (PPO: 153). And the following instance, in which Wittgenstein defines a ‘serious thinker’ to O. K. Bouwsma as: A man who endured conflict and struggle, who came back again and again to these matters. He wrestles (F: IV: 116). With these remarks in mind, it is clear that when Wittgenstein describes his confessions as bringing him to ‘a greater seriousness’, he understands at least part of this to be in relation to his work and philosophical thinking. Consequently, we can see that the very act of ‘confession’ for Wittgenstein is one that is conducive to good philosophical work – a means of ‘writing the self’ that, for Wittgenstein, appears to be a necessary process if one is to bring honesty into their thinking.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  157 The importance that Wittgenstein places on honesty in this period isn’t just evident in remarks made in his more personal writings. They also begin to manifest themselves in some of his more overtly ‘philosophical’ works, including some of the material that would eventually become the Philosophical Investigations. Interestingly, Wittgenstein produced this material (arguably some of the philosophical work he was most content with, given its relative stability during his otherwise frantic drafting process) after his live ‘confessions’, further supporting the idea that this process of confession was instrumental in his philosophical work. Remarks made throughout the Investigations follow the convention established in this chapter that a key part of ‘writing the self’, for Wittgenstein, involves acknowledging the difficulties that one encounters during the process of philosophical thinking (which aligns with his criticisms of Russell and Schopenhauer). Throughout the Investigations, Wittgenstein frequently takes a step back from whatever philosophical investigation he is currently working through to comment on the various ways in which his ‘self’ is affected by the problem at hand. He will, for instance, comment on the difficulty of the problem, or the various ways in which he is tempted to respond to a philosophical problem (even if the tempting response is ultimately an incorrect or unviable one).12 Of critical interest to us though is how this recognition of the importance of honesty and acknowledging one’s own difficulties and biases intersects with Wittgenstein’s revaluation of the nature of philosophising and philosophical problems in the Investigations. The Investigations sees Wittgenstein arguably move away from the Tractarian conception of philosophical problems (that there is one fundamental problem underpinning philosophy, which is resolved through the establishment of a logically ‘perfect’ language or ‘concept script’) towards the view that there are a multitude of kinds of problem that require a variety of different kinds of methods to resolve (which Wittgenstein compares to different kinds of therapies).13 However, one of the core problems that Wittgenstein comes to identify as underpinning philosophical thinking (and arguably one of his key concerns throughout the Investigations) is what he labels dogmatism. Wittgenstein introduces the problem of dogmatism in PI §131 as a problem pertaining to ‘ineptness’ and ‘vacuity’ in our philosophical statements, avoided only by ‘presenting the model as what it is, an object of comparison…a measuring rod, not as a preconceived idea to which reality must respond’. Here, Wittgenstein identifies a root cause of the problems of dogmatism in philosophical thinking, in the presentation of philosophical statements as statements of (metaphysical) necessity. In asserting that things must be a certain way, we lay ourselves open to the problem of dogmatism in our thinking, whatever that may turn out to be, and with it the two problems of ‘ineptness’ and ‘vacuity’.

158  Jack Manzi Exploring what is meant by ‘vacuity’ would take us too far off course and is not relevant for our purposes. Instead, let us turn our attention to what Wittgenstein means by ‘ineptness’. As is observed by Oskari Kuusela, examining how Wittgenstein frames this problem in earlier drafts of the manuscripts that would come to form this section of the Investigations is particularly enlightening in understanding what Wittgenstein meant by ‘ineptness’.14 An earlier form of the remark has Wittgenstein frame it thus: For we can avoid the injustice or emptiness of our statements only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison – as, so to speak, a measuring rod – and not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (I am thinking of Spengler’s mode of examination.) In this earlier draft, Wittgenstein uses the term ‘injustice’ in place of ineptness. As Kuusela goes on to argue, ‘injustice’ in this instance can be understood as referring to an ‘injustice’ committed to the concepts that one is trying to clarify in making a philosophical statement, by misrepresenting whatever it is that is the subject of the metaphysical philosophical statement. Wittgenstein advises that one uses their philosophical statements as ‘objects of comparison’, devices with which reality is compared against and both similarities and dissimilarities are noted, rather than superimposing said philosophical statement on top of reality, and asserting that this is what reality must be like.15 The concern here is that a philosophical statement of the metaphysical necessities of a concept under investigation risk over-simplifying or otherwise misrepresenting the concept by putting forward an account of said concept that is meant to hold true, irrespective of any prior or future experience of that concept. The metaphysical philosophical statement is then unable to properly account for the wide variety of particular cases that fall under the scope of the concept it is trying to clarify. It is either then ‘inept’, ‘unjust’, or quite possibly both. To clarify this with an example, let us take the opening sections of the Investigations (PI § 1-X). Here, Wittgenstein examines a philosophical statement that he imagines Augustine to make about the nature of language – that words name objects, and sentences are combinations of such names. The picture is alluring, because it seems to explain how it is that we come to learn language (by having a teacher point to an object and repeat the name, so that we learn to associate the name with the object). But the ‘naming thesis’ that Augustine puts forward is actually making a metaphysical claim about language – that this is the way that language must operate, in essentials. The problem, as Wittgenstein exposes, is that this ‘naming thesis’, despite being put forward as a statement of the essential nature of language, fails to capture the manifoldness of language and the different ways in which words are used. For example, and amongst other kinds of words, Wittgenstein observes that the ‘naming thesis’ fails

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  159 to accommodate words such as ‘this’ and ‘there’ which do not designate anything in particular, and consequently cannot be taught or understood by learning to associate them with what they are designating. Rather, and as Wittgenstein points out, understanding these words seems to rely on understanding the function or use that these words have in language. Insisting on the naming thesis then amounts to an act of ‘conceptual injustice’, by misrepresenting the phenomena that one is seeking to explain. Important for our purposes is the motivation behind making these kinds of statements (and exposing ourselves to the risk of philosophical dogmatism), and how one can combat this. Wittgenstein provides one such remedy in the above remark, in underlying the importance of using our philosophical statements as objects of comparison. Wittgenstein discerns that part of the problem behind making these kinds of statements lay in the unconscious biases and prejudices one has, which skews a person towards making these kinds of statements in the first place. Again, he frequently refers to the ‘temptation’ to respond in a particular way, or the ‘prejudice’ behind a particular philosophical position.16 Part of the philosophical struggle, for Wittgenstein, involves dealing with one’s temptations, biases, and underlying desires to see things in a particular light. Again, we can look at Wittgenstein’s estimation of Schopenhauer for evidence of Wittgenstein’s view on the importance of acknowledging one’s biases and dogmas. Despite accusing Schopenhauer of ‘never taking stock of himself’ (CV 41), it is clear that Wittgenstein nevertheless respected Schopenhauer and was greatly influenced by his work. One passage in particular that Wittgenstein quoted from Schopenhauer frequently was the following, in which Schopenhauer outlines the various ways in which one’s biases and the factors of one’s life can influence one’s philosophical thinking: Nothing is more tiresome and annoying than when we argue with a person with reasons and explanations … under the impression that we have to deal only with his understanding, and then finally discover that he will not understand; that we, therefore, had to deal with his will, which pays no heed to the truth, but brings into action wilful misunderstandings, chicaneries, and sophisms, entrenching itself behind its understanding and its supposed want of insight … Acknowledgement of the most important truths… will be expected in vain from those who have an interest in not allowing them to be accepted.17 As is observed by Citron, Wittgenstein was clearly taken with this passage, and a similar sentiment is expressed in certain remarks made by Wittgenstein to Drury about W. E. Johnson being too habituated to his long-term positions to change his mind about things at such a late stage in his career. Citron also points to remarks made to Rhees about

160  Jack Manzi the difficulty in adopting new ways of thinking ‘not because it’s hard to understand, but because you don’t want to give up the way you’ve always gone’ (WCPR:61).18 From the above, it is clear that Wittgenstein perceived part of the difficulty of facing philosophical problems and overcoming the problem of dogmatism underpinning them is the difficulty of facing the will. This is perhaps best exemplified in Wittgenstein’s original title in the Big Typescript (an earlier draft of the Philosophical Investigations) for what became the so-called ‘philosophy’ chapter of the Philosophical Investigations: ‘Difficulty Of Philosophy Not The Intellectual Difficulty of the Sciences, But the Difficulty of a Change of Attitude. Resistances of the Will Must Be Overcome’ (BT:86). Tellingly, production of the Big Typescript began in 1933, during the period when we see the lines between Wittgenstein’s personal writings and his philosophical work begin to blur. Clearly, Wittgenstein began to understand that his personal writing//writing of the self, within which his concern was demonstrably about self-truth and honesty with one’s self and others, was conducive to philosophical thinking and overcoming the ‘resistances of the will’. We are now in a position to begin to summarise Wittgenstein’s process of ‘writing the self’ and his use of diaristic writing as a philosophical tool. As we’ve seen, in the transitional period of his career, Wittgenstein began to see that a difficulty of philosophical problems pertains to one’s own underlying convictions and biases, and how they negatively skew one towards maintaining philosophical positions. It’s not just enough to understand that one’s philosophical thinking can be skewed in such a way; one must also work through these convictions and biases, through a process of self-examination that Wittgenstein saw as being difficult, perhaps even painful, but ultimately necessary. One must acknowledge these underlying temptations and truths about oneself and ‘expose’ them to the light by commenting on them as and when they arise in one’s philosophical thinking and making them ‘public’ if one is to negate their effects. This isn’t just for one’s own benefit. As we can see by Wittgenstein’s estimation of other philosophers, these reminders do not just serve the purpose of making oneself mindful of the various biases and desires; they also serve to help make us more accountable to those engaging with our ideas and to prompt our readers to do the same kind of inward reflection. In short, diaristic writing for Wittgenstein is a vehicle by which one can confront these temptations and, in effect, confront the overreach of the self and the resistance of the will in philosophical thinking. By engaging in diaristic writing, Wittgenstein is able to directly acknowledge those underlying temptations and desires that distort his way of thinking and lead him towards philosophical dogmatism.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  161 Negating the Self: Weil’s Diaristic Writing Like Wittgenstein, Weil produced copious amounts of personal notebooks throughout her life from which interpreters and academics have extracted the various philosophical, ethical, and religious thought attributed to her. However, unlike Wittgenstein, Weil’s notebooks are (as Robert Zaretsky observes) almost completely barren of anecdotes or references to private and personal feelings.19 Where Wittgenstein’s notebooks are replete with personal observations, cultural references, personal thoughts, feelings, and desires, Weil’s notebooks are empty of such things and are instead almost exclusively turned towards whatever problem she was grappling with at the time of writing. Yet these were indeed her personal notebooks, not intended for publication and written (primarily) for herself. Although these do not resemble diaristic writings as we commonly understand them, it is nevertheless clear by the fact that Weil dutifully kept up with writing these ‘private’ notebooks throughout her life that they are a personal record of her thoughts, and thus fulfil a similar function. Understanding how Weil uses this kind of impersonal diaristic writing for philosophical purposes requires examining several of her key notions underpinning her work and conception of philosophy as a practice. Of particular significance to us is the Weilian notion of ‘attention’. Although the notion of ‘attention’ in Weil’s writings is most often taken to be one of the core concepts of her ethical work, its influence can be seen across Weil’s oeuvre, informing her epistemological, pedagogical, and even metaphilosophical thought. Ultimately, ‘attention’ is fundamentally a moral concept for Weil, playing a fundamental role in her ethics and the recognition of human suffering in others. To put it simply, human beings are averse to really acknowledging the suffering of others – yet truly acknowledging the suffering of others and giving one’s attention over to the suffering of the other is crucial for compassion, insofar as a detachment from ourselves is required to really acknowledge and understand what is happening to the sufferer as a fellow human being, rather than a projection of ourselves. It is, however, supremely difficult. She writes: ‘the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it’ (WG 64).20 There are significant pedagogical roots that underpin Weil’s ethical notion of ‘attention’. In her essay Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God, Weil offers some observations on how school exercises could, with a proper focus, be useful in cultivating faculties that are conducive to the elusive kind of ‘attention’ that Weil sees as being central to compassion and prayer. In this essay, Weil draws

162  Jack Manzi a contrast between ‘ordinary attention’, understood as a kind of directing of the will or focussing of the attention towards a particular object or task, and what I shall from here on label the moral ‘Weilian Attention’. She describes her understanding of attention as a ‘negative effort’ in contrast to the ‘muscular effort’ of regular ‘attention’, a negative effort that is characterised as leaving the person paying ‘attention’ (in the Weilian sense) ‘detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object’ (WG 61–62). This emptiness for Weil can be understood as the place where understanding happens – if we actively seek answers through muscular attention, we risk filling that empty space with false understanding, or other things that distort our thinking and distract us from being open and ready for further understanding. Or, as Weil writes: All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style, and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. (WG 112) Weil’s own pedagogic practice as a teacher evidences her commitment to this notion. Anecdotes from students that she taught in 1933 recall that she would characterise a task in class as ‘Seek[ing] problems in geometry’, as opposed to searching for answers to the problems.21 In fact, finding the solution to a problem is, for Weil, secondary to the task of engaging with the problem in the first place, although she does observe that it is nevertheless important to try very hard to find the solution (WG 106). However, it doesn’t matter if we find the solution, for a ‘genuine effort of attention’ is, for Weil, never wasted. Yet, and as Zaretsky observes, it is not as simple as saying that, for Weil, the journey is more important than the destination.22 Although we might fail at finding the solution to the problem at hand, we nevertheless catch a glimpse into a ‘more mysterious’ moral dimension by practising this kind of attention. This moral dimension pertains to the deeper mystery of the lives of our fellow human beings (or what we might label as ‘the other’). Furthermore, although we fail to actually grasp truth through our efforts, Weil maintains that we nevertheless develop a greater capacity for grasping truth in future endeavours, even if we fail to find the solution we are looking for (WG 107). So, although the kind of attention that Weil sees as being critically important to recognising the suffering of others is supremely difficult, we can nevertheless develop our faculties towards attaining such attention through an adjustment of our epistemic attitudes and the search for knowledge.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  163 However, and perhaps in contrast to Wittgenstein, this isn’t to be understood as a development of a kind of willpower. Weil explicitly states that willpower, although useful to those enduring suffering and manual work, is of no use in guiding our intellect in developing the faculties of Weilian attention. Weil writes that ‘the intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in work’ (WG 110). What is crucial in developing our faculties is the desire towards truth, which Weil sees as being engendered by taking pleasure and finding joy in engaging in work (in this case, the work of engaging with and searching for problems of various kinds). Principally, however, it is clear that the primary aim of these kinds of exercises for Weil is the development of a particular kind of attitude or orientation, which allows us to look away from ourselves and towards the other (so that we may properly recognise the other’s suffering and feel compassion towards the other). What is involved in this, for Weil, is seemingly a rejection of the self, or perhaps more precisely, the illusion of a self. In her New York Notebook, she outlines her view that God created her as a ‘non-being’ with the appearance of being, so that she may ‘through love…renounce this apparent existence and be annihilated by the plenitude of being’ (FLN 97).23 Further ahead in the same passage, Weil repeats this refrain with an observation that she is created as a non-being with the appearance of being so that, through love, she is able to renounce what appears to be existence and so emerge from non-being. This notion of the renunciation of the self towards love, and how this ties in with the views surveyed earlier in this section of the chapter surrounding how Weilian attention allows us to pierce into a ‘mysterious’ moral dimension, is elucidated further on in this notebook, where Weil writes the following: I am not, and I consent not to be; because I am not the good and I desire that only the good should be… … God desires to be, not because he is himself but because he is the good. Through love, the Father causes the Son to be, because the Son is the Good. Through love, the Son desires not to be, because only the Father is the Good. (FLN 102) Here, I argue, Weil points towards the nature of this ‘mysterious’ moral dimension that underpins her idea of the renunciation of the self, highlighting that we pierce into it when we pay proper Weilian attention to others. Renouncing the self for Weil seems to involve a recognition that only ‘the good’ exists. Yet, as she writes, this cannot be a matter of just knowing

164  Jack Manzi that the ‘I’ does not exist (or rather, belongs to non-being as she puts it). As she observes, if she just simply knew it, then there would be no renunciation (FLN 97). Rather, it appears to be a matter of practice – that is to say, its importance derives from the practice of renouncing the self, rather than simply possessing the knowledge that the self belongs to non-being. But how does this tie in with her philosophical practice, and more pertinently to this chapter, her diaristic writing? In the First and Last Notebooks, Weil outlines a view of the method of philosophy which bears a striking resemblance to her approach to pedagogy surrounding approaching problems in one’s education: [The] proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting. (FLN 335) This approach to philosophical problems appears consistent with Weil’s prescribed approach to problems like those in geometry, where she advocates the search for and contemplation of the problem itself over and above forced attempts to solve the problem for the sake of solving it. For Weil, philosophical problems ought to be approached in the same way the school student ought to approach their problems – contemplatively, patiently, led by the desire to understand them over the will to solve them. In this way, approaching philosophical problems can be seen as yet another opportunity to develop the kind of faculties required for Weilian attention. Furthermore, we can also see what Weil saw as the risks of not approaching philosophical problems in this way by looking at the remarks that she made surrounding the missteps one might take in applying the wrong kind of attention to problem-solving more generally. Recall that, for Weil, misunderstanding arises when the mind seizes a thought too hastily and thus prematurely blocks itself from the truth (WfG 112). If for Weil philosophical problems ought to be approached in the same contemplative manner, then it stands to reason that misunderstanding and ‘clumsiness of style’ in philosophy also arise from one prematurely coming to a solution to a problem and blinkering themselves from alternative possibilities. There is a potential here for drawing an illuminating comparison with Wittgenstein. Recalling the discussion from the Section ‘Diaristic Writing as a Philosophical Tool’ of this chapter, Wittgenstein held that one of the principal problems in philosophy is the problem of dogmatism, wherein one runs the risk of committing an ‘injustice’ by unfairly representing concepts. This unfair representation comes in the form of insisting that

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  165 a particular philosophical model or account is the correct one, at the exclusion of all others. As we saw, for Wittgenstein this is a chief cause of problematic thinking in philosophy, and for Weil, something similar appears to be the same. The premature seizing of an answer can be likened to Wittgenstein’s idea of dogmatically insisting on a particular account: in both instances, one blinkers themselves from alternative possibilities by insisting on a particular picture or thought that has seized one’s attention. Weil believed in an approach to problem-solving that cultivated one’s mental faculties toward being ready for ‘attention’ and the renunciation of the self in recognition of the good. This approach places an emphasis on searching for problems, not solving them, and in eliminating egoism from our attempts to solve problems. The aim, for Weil, is to create a ‘negative space’, within which one ‘cancels their desires’ and turns away from the ‘blind and bulimic self’, waiting for insights rather than going in search of them (WG 62). Weil’s inquiries certainly reflect these attributes. As has been noted, Weil’s diaristic style is largely devoid of private feelings, personal anecdotes, and other matters relating to the self. Similarly, the inquiries themselves reflect the kind of problem-searching (as opposed to problem-solving) that she sees as being integral to developing the faculties necessary for attention. By undertaking a form of diaristic writing that is devoid of the kind of personal introspection and reflection that is typically characteristic of the practice, Weil can be seen to be creating a ‘negative space’ in which proper attention to the philosophical problem at hand can be practised, without interference from the desires and temptations of the self. It is not that Weil takes the problems that she lays out in her personal writings seriously – after all, her discussions of them can hardly be said to resemble unguided daydreaming and philosophical navel-gazing. Rather, Weil’s writing can be seen as a contemplation on the problems themselves, and in focussing on the problems over herself. Weil’s attention is drawn away from herself and towards the ‘other’. This notion of negating the self finds expression in her notion of decreation. For Weil, decreation describes a process of renouncing the self in a manner that is comparable with God’s withdrawal from His own divinity so that creation can be realised.24 In renouncing the self, Weil maintains that one can also participate in creation. She describes how In the same way every time that we raise the ego (the social ego, the psychological ego etc.) as high as we raise it, we degrade ourselves to an infinite degree by confining ourselves to being no more than that. When the ego is abased (unless energy tends to raise it by desire), we know that we are not that. (GG 33)

166  Jack Manzi For Weil, renouncing the self is as much a spiritual act as it is a pedagogical one, cultivating a kind of emptiness that brings us closer to God. Getting into the theological aspect of Weil’s philosophical practice will take us too far off course, however, and so I merely flag the overlap between Weil’s concepts of ‘attention’ and ‘decreation’ here for completeness, before resuming the analysis. Borrowing again from Wittgenstein, one might understand the emptiness desired from Weilian attention as a negative space in which one is separated from the various dogmas that lead us into the kinds of traps that we are prone to whilst philosophising. In this reading, Weilian attention becomes a kind of preventative measure for Wittgensteinian dogma (where Wittgensteinian introspection might be seen to be a corrective one). Following Weil, one avoids the problem of dogmatism by philosophising in a ‘negative space’, where the various biases and temptations in one’s thinking are (theoretically) unable to infect one’s contemplation of a philosophical problem and one can approach problems free from the influence of the ‘muscular attention’ of the will. Philosophical thinking may proceed from such a state, without risk of the ‘self’ imposing dogmas on one’s thinking. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, corrects the problem of dogmatism by holding the self to account, through a process of rigorous self-examination. Or, to put it another way, where Weil uses her diaristic writing as a means of negating the self, Wittgenstein uses his to bring about a dramatic confrontation with the self. Both, however, can be said to be motivated by a conception of the self’s role and overreach in philosophical thinking. If I am correct in my assessment that the diaristic writing styles of these two thinkers were motivated by broadly similar concerns with the overreach of the self in philosophical thinking, then a question arises as to how and why Weil and Wittgenstein came to such drastically different methods of self-writing. To help answer this question, I believe it would be useful to place their respective methods of diaristic writing within a larger narrative of the historical and philosophical development of the notion of ‘writing the self’, as is expounded by Michel Foucault. It is to this task that I now turn to. Writing the Self: Hypomnemata vs. Confession Broadly speaking, Michel Foucault’s work on ‘writing the self’ is an outline of the evolution of the practice, starting from the ancients and their practice of hypomnemata (a Greek word roughly translating to some kind of personal record, note, or reminder) and arriving at the Christian-influenced notion of ‘confession’.25 For Foucault, this development of the practice of writing the self seems to run parallel with a general shift in a conception of ethics as being a ‘taking care of others’ (or techne tou biou) towards a

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  167 taking care (or techne) of the self. In the former, one feels obliged to take care of themselves for the sake of society, whereas, in the latter, one takes care of themselves for the sake of themselves.26 Foucault saw the former as being the ‘general Greek problem’, highlighted in texts such as Plato’s Alcibiades where the care of the self is discussed in relation to one’s duty to rule a city, and observes that this eventually gives way to the notion of taking care of the self for the self’s sake with the Epicureans.27 Why does Foucault chart the evolution of ‘writing the self’ with an evolution of the notion of techne tou biou? As Foucault himself observes: No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; nor can one learn the art of living, the techne tou biou, without an askesis [practice] that must be understood as a training of the self by the self. This was one of the traditional principles to which the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, and the Cynics had long attached great importance. Indeed, it seems that among all the forms that this training took… writing – the fact of writing for oneself and for others – came to play a considerable role rather late.28 For Foucault, ‘writing the self’ is one of a number of exercises that are vitally important in practising ‘the art of living’, forming a part of the ‘training of the self by the self’. That is to say, the art of writing the self for Foucault is a form of askesis, a means by which one may train oneself in the art of living, cultivating a techne of the self. In Writing the Self, Foucault points at the various differing ways in which thinkers have written the self over the course of history, not only as examples of exercises in askesis but also as a sort of timeline in which one can see the progression from an ethic of taking care of others to taking care of the self. Foucault’s analysis starts with hypomnemata. Understood broadly, hypomnemata more generally speaking are taken to be instances of some kind of memorandum, devices for the purposes of recording memories and events. They contained ‘quotations, fragments of works, examples, and actions of which one had been the witness or had read the narrative, reflections or arguments that one had heard or occurred to one’.29 Although they weren’t treatises by themselves, they were the primary material from which treatises on various topics may be formed and were themselves the focus of meditations and exercises in reflection. One may think of Marcus Aurelius’ own Meditations, within which Aurelius sets out a series of ‘spiritual exercises’ (as Pierre Hadot puts it) which were the focus of meditation.30 Similarly, as was the case with Weil’s private notebooks, Aurelius’ Meditations were never intended to be read by an audience, but were instead private memorandum directed at himself.

168  Jack Manzi Foucault observes that these hupomnemata were not simply aids to one’s memory. Rather, they were to be ‘deeply implanted in the soul’ by means of contemplation, through reading (and rereading) them, meditating on them, conversing about them (with oneself and others), and so on.31 The idea, according to Foucault, was that the content of these hupomnemata would be available at the point of need for the person recalling them, not (merely) as a physical collection of notes but as something that is deeply embedded within one’s ‘soul’. Again, one may draw a further comparison with Aurelius’ Meditations, in particular, his observation that one’s soul is dyed by the colour of one’s thoughts, and his injunction to ‘dye one’s mind’ with philosophical ideas. They are not ‘intimate diaries’, neither do they themselves constitute ‘an account of the self’. As such, they are not to be confused with similar devices in later Christian literature and are not aimed at unearthing things about oneself or bringing previously unsaid things about oneself to light for the purposes of purification or confession. Rather, their aim is the opposite: to constitute the self via the gathering and reassembling of things that one has already heard or already said. For Foucault, the writer establishes an identity by recollecting the things they have heard. They become a part of the writer, through something that Foucault (taking a cue from Seneca) likens to a kind of ‘digestion’ – they are assimilated, not just into one’s memory but into one’s faculties of thinking.32 The progression from hypomnemata to the kind of self-writing that takes its cue from later Christian literature and the practice of confession seems to come by way of the emergence of another kind of writing the self, correspondence.33 It’s important to note at this point that Foucault is not suggesting that one practice was picked up as another one was dropped – for there is no doubt correspondence and hypomnemata overlap – rather, Foucault seems to be suggesting that correspondence as an alternative and distinctive method of writing the self from hypomnemata has characteristics that eventually feed into the later vehicle of confessional writing which has come to typify more contemporary practices of writing the self. As Foucault observes, correspondence is not just an extension of hypomnemata, rather, it represents the expression of oneself to the other. As Foucault notes, to write is to ‘“show oneself,” make oneself seen, make one’s face appear before the other’.34 For Foucault, just as one focuses on one’s addressee through the act of correspondence, so too does one ‘give oneself over’ to the gaze of the other, through their descriptions of themselves and their thoughts. Foucault starts with an examination of Athanasius’s hagiography Vita Antonii [The Life of Anthony].35 Foucault’s consideration of Athanasius’ Vita Antonii highlights the transition from self-writing as an example of hypomnemata towards more confessional modes of self-writing, which is

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  169 influenced by this idea of giving oneself over to the other. Foucault begins his paper with a passage quoted from the Vita Antonii within which Athanasius describes the importance of ‘[taking] note and [writing] down the actions and movements of our souls’ in ensuring that ‘one does not sin’.36 Foucault observes that the role of self-writing here is to expose the self to an ‘other’, off-setting what he sees as the ‘dangers of solitude’ in what seems to equate to a lack of accountability. For Foucault, the self-writing in the Vita Antonii appears very close to the Christian tradition of confession, observing that both seem concerned with recording the ‘interior movements of the soul’. He observes that, like confession, self-writing as it appears in the Vita Antonii looks to be a form of spiritual discipline, safeguarding oneself against various forms of selfdeception, by forcing the writer to keep a material record that acts as a ‘touchstone’ with which one can check the facts of a particular experience. In doing so, one resists the natural temptations to retroactively skew one’s experiences through the lens of whatever biases one may be under. Or, as is the case in the Vita Antonii, it serves as a test through which one can circumvent the Devil’s attempts to deceive us by making us deceive ourselves. The important difference between this kind of writing the self and hypomnemata is that, where hypomnemata is a constitution of the self through an assemblage of things that have already been said and heard, the confessional mode requires that one exposes aspects of oneself so as to be free of their influence. This brief summary of Foucault’s thoughts on the relationships between the various kinds of writing of the self that have existed throughout history provides an interesting lens through which one may examine the diaristic practices of Weil and Wittgenstein. One can already see the broad camps that one might place Weil and Wittgenstein in. Wittgenstein’s practice can quite comfortably be placed in the ‘confessional’ mode of writing the self, in that he is concerned with exposing these ‘interior movements of the self’ to the other, in an attempt to off-set the danger of deceiving himself. This is no surprise, given Wittgenstein’s influences, among which are Augustine, Soren Kierkegaard, and Leo Tolstoy. Wittgenstein was indisputably influenced by Christian thinkers, who were themselves concerned with the notion of ‘confession’, its role in maintaining spiritual and moral well-being, and in safeguarding against self-deception. Clearly, Weil does not belong to this category. As we have seen, Weil does not leave much room for the kind of introspection that Wittgenstein engages in, and her writings cannot be said to chart the ‘interior movements of her soul’ in the way that the confessional mode of writing the self-demands. Weil does not place herself before the ‘other’ in the way that Foucault describes – there is no exposition of Weil’s personal thoughts,

170  Jack Manzi feelings, hopes, or fears. One might, then, more readily identify Weil’s selfwriting as an example of hupomnemata, in that it seems to resemble more a collection of recorded thoughts, things that Weil had read and thought important to reflect and meditate on. Again, looking at Weil’s background and her influences may help. We know that Weil was an avid reader of the ancients, and her notebooks often contain discussions on passages from various ancient thinkers, ranging from Plato to Homer, and many of her philosophical concepts (such as her notion of ‘force’) were directly influenced by her exposure to ancient thought and philosophy. Whilst it would be purely speculative to suggest that Weil’s diaristic practices are as a direct result of the exposure she had to ancient thought and writing (an exposure that was considerably greater than Wittgenstein’s) it is nevertheless striking that Wittgenstein and Weil’s diaristic practices take after the style of some of their most significant respective influences. However, although Weil’s diaristic writing may share a closer resemblance with hypomnemata than confessional modes of writing, there are some distinct differences. Most notably, the notion of constituting a self from the assemblage of various recollections, conversations, and recordings of things heard and seen seems to stand at odds with the idea put forward in this chapter that Weil’s writing style is intended to create a ‘negative’ space that is free from the privations of the self. As I have argued throughout this chapter, Weil’s diaristic writing practices seem to align with integral aspects of her wider philosophical and ethical thought, most notably her notion of attention. The idea that Weil engages in a practice that is aimed at negating the role of the self does not seem to lend itself neatly to Foucault’s description of hypomnemata as being a (positive) constitution of the self. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this chapter to seriously entertain this line of inquiry, there are several avenues open should anyone be willing to undertake this work in the future. One such avenue would be to explore the different senses of the concept of ‘self’ that one could talk about. So far in this chapter, we have talked about the ‘self’ loosely in terms of ‘the interior movements’ of one’s soul; one’s personal desires and innermost thoughts. Although Weil engages in a practice of negating her ‘self’ (in the sense outlined throughout this chapter), I believe that Weil is nevertheless engaged in a project of constructing a philosophical identity or ‘self’, in the sense that her comments and writings are reminders and meditations on living in accordance with a set of philosophical ideals. For Weil, philosophy ‘is exclusively an affair of action and practice’ – that is to say, it is something that is practical, embodied in the way in which one conducts oneself and lives one’s life. This notion of an embodied,

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  171 practical philosophy is perhaps unsurprising for anyone familiar with the events of Weil’s life and her death. Her drive to live in accordance with her ideals was often detrimental to her health and well-being, so fervently did she seek to inhabit her philosophical positions and put them into practice. Recall that for Foucault, the purpose of hypomnemata was to instil a set of philosophical values deeply within one’s soul so that they were available to one at the moment of need. Whilst the reader does not find the kind of tracking of the ‘interior movements of the soul’ that one would expect from more confessional modes of writing the self in Weil’s writings, there are nevertheless the kind of meditations, reflections, and recollections that are typical of hypomnemata. One can argue that, in a sense, a philosophical ‘self’ is constituted in this way by Weil, through the assemblage of thoughts she presents in her writings, bringing Weil’s diaristic writing more in line with the vision of hypomnemata put forward by Foucault. Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to present a comparative analysis of the diaristic writing styles of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the practice of diaristic writing being linked to the notion of ‘writing the self’. What has emerged is a picture of two philosophers who both demonstrably see philosophical value in diaristic practices and ‘writing the self’, but with significant differences in the execution. Where Wittgenstein engages in a practice that actively seeks to write (and consequently expose) the self to the other, Weil engages in a practice that can almost be described as a ‘writing out of the self’, where the ‘self’ refers broadly to one’s personal desires and interior thoughts. In comparison to Wittgenstein, whose writings often include ‘confessions’ of his thoughts, Weil’s writings are notably – and significantly, I have argued – devoid of any such confessions. However, whilst their diaristic writing styles may differ in their execution, I have argued that what underpins both Weil and Wittgenstein’s practices is a shared concern with the overreach of the self in philosophical thinking. In Wittgenstein’s work, this was expressed as a concern with philosophical dogmatism, and the battle against one’s personal biases, and the struggle to make explicit the distorting influences that may lay dormant in one’s thinking. For Weil, this was accomplished through a ‘writing out of the self’, via the negation of the self in favour of abstract contemplation of philosophical issues. I believe this analysis has several useful applications for clarifying the philosophical thought and style of these two thinkers. Firstly, understanding the role of the confessional mode of writing the self in Wittgenstein’s writings places his philosophical writing style in a different light. We are

172  Jack Manzi able to see how the unusual style of the Investigations and his other later writings play an important role in the practice of his philosophy. Secondly, I believe understanding Weil’s writing style as a negation of the self will provide a basis for further clarificatory work on her concept of decreation, and how Weil manifests decreation in her own writing. Notes 1 For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks: 1914–1916, ed. by Marjorie Perloff (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2022).   Arthur Gibson and Niamh O’Mahony, eds., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dictating Philosophy to Francis Skinner: The Wittgenstein-Skinner Manuscripts (Berlin: Springer, 2020).   Simone Weil, Simone Weil, Venice Saved, trans. by Silvia Panizza and Philip Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 2 Wittgenstein’s Nachlass is the collection of some 20,000 pages of Wittgenstein’s philosophical notebooks, manuscripts, and dictations, ranging from 1913 to 1951. It is the well from which most (if not all) of Wittgenstein’s posthumously published works are drawn.   See Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition, ed. by The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: German and English Edition, trans. by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981).   James Conant, “On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy,” in The Possibilities of Sense, ed. by John H. Whittake (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 85–129. 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. ed., ed. by G. H. von Wright, H. Nyman, and A. Pichler, trans. by P. Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 5 See for example Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, which heavily features material written by Wittgenstein during this time.   Bibliographic information taken from Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990). 6 For example, see Conant, “On Going,” pp. 95–98 and Gabriel Citron, “Honesty, Humility, Courage, & Strength: Later Wittgenstein on the Difficulties of Philosophy and the Philosophical Virtues,” Philosophers’ Imprint 19 (2019): 1–24, 5. 7 Conant, “On Going,” pp. 98–108. 8 Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 1916 (exact date unknown), quoted in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. N. Griffin, vol. I, p. 459.   See also Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 June 1913; The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. by N. Griffin, vol. I, p. 462. 9 Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein: Hermine Wittgenstein–Fania Pascal–F.R. Leavis–John King–M. O’c. Drury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 37–38. 10 Rhees, Recollections, p. 173. 11 Citron, “Honesty, Humility,” pp. 13. 12 See PI §§ 39, 143, 159, 182, 254, 277, 334, 402, 588 for examples.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  173

13 See PI § 133. 14 Oskari Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 12. 15 See Kuusela, The Struggle for a comprehensive analysis of Wittgenstein’s notion of dogmatism and a compelling argument as to why his concern with dogmatism and his use of ‘objects of comparison’ is one of the fundamental features of his later philosophical method. 16 Again, see PI §§ 39, 143, 159, 182, 254, 277, 334, 402, 588. See also PI §§ 20, 24, 27, 73, 217 for examples of where Wittgenstein observes the ‘inclination’ to think in a particular way. 17 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, trans. by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), chap. XIX, sec. 7. 18 Citron, “Honesty, Humility,” pp. 4–5. 19 Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 103. 20 Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Routledge, 2021). 21 Anne Reynaud, Simone Weil: Leçons de Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 7, quoted from Zaretsky (2021, p. 90). 22 Zaretsky, Subversive, p. 94. 23 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 24 See Gravity and Grace 32–33: “Renunciation. Imitation of God’s renunciation in creation. In a sense, God renounces being everything. We should renounce being something. That is our only good.” 25 Michel Foucault, “Writing the Self,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Ira Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 235–247. 26 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 235. 27 Plato, Charmides. Alcibiades I and II. Hipparchus. The Lovers. Theages. Minos. Epinomis, trans. by W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 28 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 235. See also Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 253–280, p. 273. 29 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 236. 30 Pierre Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises” in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. by Arnold I. Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 8–126. 31 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 237. 32 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 237.   See also Letter 84 in Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters on Ethics, trans. by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 285. 33 This is to say, correspondence as a vehicle for philosophising and as a genre of writing the self. Correspondence and letter writing are obviously ancient practices, and neither I nor Foucault is suggesting that they only came about as practices out of hypomnemata. 34 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 243. 35 Athanasius, Vie et conduite de notre Pere Saint Antoine, in Antoine Le Grand: Pere des moines, trans. by Benoit Lavaud (Paris: Eds. Du Cerf, 1943), pp. 69–70 for the translation that Foucault uses and quotes from. 36 Foucault, “Writing,” p. 234.

174  Jack Manzi Bibliography Athanasius, Vie et conduite de notre Pere Saint Antoine, in Antoine Le Grand: Pere des moines, trans. by Benoit Lavaud (Paris: Eds. Du Cerf, 1943). Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations: The Annotated Edition, trans. by Robin Waterfield (New York: Basic Books, 2021). Citron, Gabriel, “Honesty, Humility, Courage, & Strength: Later Wittgenstein on the Difficulties of Philosophy and the Philosophical Virtues,” Philosophers’ Imprint 19 (2019): 1–24, 5. Conant, James, “On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy,” in The Possibilities of Sense, ed. by John H. Whittake (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 85–129. Foucault, Michel, “Writing the Self,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. by Arnold Ira Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). ———, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 253–280. Gibson, Arthur, and Niamh O’Mahony, eds., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dictating Philosophy to Francis Skinner: The Wittgenstein-Skinner Manuscripts (Berlin: Springer, 2020). Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. by Arnold I. Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Kuusela, Oskari, The Struggle against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990). Plato, Charmides. Alcibiades I and II. Hipparchus. The Lovers. Theages. Minos. Epinomis, trans. by W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Reynaud, Anne, Simone Weil: Leçons de Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Rhees, Rush, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein: Hermine Wittgenstein--Fania Pascal--F.R. Leavis--John King--M. O’c. Drury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 37–38. Russell, Bertrand, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. by N. Griffin, vol. I (London: Routledge, 2002). Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Letters on Ethics, trans. by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, trans. by E. F. J. Payne, vol. II (New York: Dover Publications, 1958). Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). ———, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2002). ———, Simone Weil, Venice Saved, trans. by Silvia Panizza and Philip Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). ———, Waiting for God (New York: Routledge, 2021). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: German and English Edition, trans. by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1981). ———, Culture and Value, rev. ed., ed. by G. H. von Wright, H. Nyman, and A. Pichler, trans. by P. Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Wittgenstein and Weil on Diaristic Writing  175 ———, Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition, ed. The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ———, Philosophical Investigations, rev. 4th ed., trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). ———, Private Notebooks: 1914–1916, ed. by Marjorie Perloff (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2022). Zaretsky, Robert, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021).

8 Affliction Pain and the Problems of Modernity C. M. Djordjevic

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil share the contention that the modern age is beset by illusions that often stem from our inability to accept certain aspects of the human condition.1 Indeed, for both, mythical tales of progress, the ideal of radical autonomy, etc., spring from a denial or avoidance of certain constitutive features of our forms of life. This paper elaborates on one central feature of the human condition that both see as necessary for our forms of life and antithetical to such modernist conceits. Specifically, I examine the role of pain in human life. I argue that, for each, pain helps dispel certain anti-human ideals embedded in our modern conception of subjectivity. I then discuss how both Weil and Wittgenstein view pain as one possible constitutive precondition for being a person. The Section “The Subject and the Threat of Pain” sets the stage. I reconstruct Elaine Scarry’s groundbreaking work on how moderns make sense of pain in the human condition. The Section “Pain and Persons” argues that Weil’s understanding of pain foregrounds the limitations of Scarry’s account and transvalues the role of pain by giving it a supernatural use. The Section “Pain and Subjects” utilizes Wittgenstein’s private language discussion (PLD) to demolish the modernist account of pain, thereby setting the stage for investigations into the purely human uses of pain. Finally, the Section “Persons Begotten in Charity” discusses how aspects of Weil’s transvaluation can illuminate Wittgenstein’s elaboration of pain in human forms of life. Should this prove persuasive, I will have foregrounded a different understanding of pain. The Subject and the Threat of Pain It is a truism in modernity that pain is antithetical to human beings and an affront to their dignity.2 However, this truism is underwritten by a very particular history that understands the human being in a unique way.3 Let us call this particular conception of being human “the subject,” because it DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-9

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  177 emphasizes sovereign autonomy and understands all sociability in terms of contractual arrangements that individuals freely entered into.4 To make sense of why the subject is incompatible with pain, I turn to Scarry’s critical work on pain in the human condition.5 Scarry’s work is pivotal for many reasons. For us, chief among them is that Scarry proffers an extremely articulate and consistent account of why pain is a problem for subjects and how to solve it. To begin, Scarry presents the human condition as a spectrum bookended by two crucial and inversely related aspects. Specifically, the human condition is a fusion of intentional states without objects and intentional objects without states.6 The former’s purest form is pain, which is associated with sentience, bodies, and unmaking the world.7 The latter’s purest form is imagination, correlated with self-extension, voice, and making the world.8 Let us examine how Scarry understands the subject in terms of imagination. Then, let us discuss why pain is such a threat to this view and how to overcome it. Scarry contends that the imagination is a unique capacity in that it is “the only [intentional] state that is wholly its object. There is in imagining no activity, no ‘state,’ no experienceable condition or felt-occurrence separating it from the object.”9 Scarry further stresses that imagination is the “extraordinary ground of objects beyond their naturally occurring ground [in sensation]; it actively ‘intends’ ‘authors’ or ‘sponsors’ objects that are not passively available as an already existing ‘given.’”10 In other words, imagination is a purely active and wholly productive capacity that a subject has. For example, when I imagine that a unicorn is white, I eo ipso create a white unicorn, even though there are no unicorns in the world. Scarry further contends that “other forms of consciousness can be understood to entail more moderate and modest acts of authoring, selfalteration, and self-artifact routinely and dramatically at work in imagining.”11 This suggests that imagination is not just a liminal capacity that subjects have but one that saturates all other modes of consciousness as well. Indeed, imagination defines the subject partly because it is constitutive of how subjects experience the world. For example, if a woman (call her Sally), experiences the intense feelings across the skin of her body [while making love] not as her own body but as the intensely feelable presence of her beloved [call this person Pat], she… experiences the sensation of ‘touch’ not as a bodily sensation but as a self-displacing self-transforming objectification… if they [these experiences] are named as bodily occurrences at all, they will be called ‘pleasure,’ a word reserved either for moments of overt disembodiment or, as here, moments when the acute bodily sensations are experienced as something other than one’s own body.12

178  C. M. Djordjevic Scarry further stresses that pleasure is “a condition associated with living beyond the physical body, or experiencing bodily sensation in terms of objectified content.”13 Hence, even for seemingly direct bodily stimulation like touch, Scarry maintains that imagination is a precondition for how the subject experiences it. This is because, unlike brute stimulation, experience is always about something other than the subject’s body, and this “about” is secured precisely via imagination. As it were, Pat’s touching Sally is not reducible to some mechanical operation to arouse Sally but is, e.g., a confirmation of their relationship, an indication of Pat’s desire to please Sally, etc. Hence, for Scarry, a subject is defined by its capacity to imagine exactly because this capacity constitutes all the subject’s experiences by ensuring that experiences are about something other than stimuli per se. Scarry then understands imagination in terms of a subject’s ability to objectify or substantiate.14 In other words, for my experience to be about something, I must objectify the something, which requires the productive role of the imagination. However, Scarry’s account of how precisely this works is left somewhat implicit. Ergo, let me reconstruct how objectification might work. Then, let me examine how such objectification makes sense of the subject’s relation to her body and the world. An intuitive place to look for objectification is at the level of syntax. Thus consider the sentence “Sally feels that Pat is touching Sally.”15 Notice that the verb “to feel” and other such intentional verbs (“to believe,” “to desire,” etc.) are transitive. Given this, they require a grammatical object to function. And “that Pat is touching Sally” is a nominal expression that works as the requisite grammatical object. In turn, one can reasonably claim that the that-clause objectifies the sentence “Pat is touching Sally” as the nominal form functions as a singular grammatical object. Granting this, syntactic objectification may also be mirrored at the semantic level. Specifically, since experience is always about something, it is plausible to read the nominal expression as designating this something that experience concerns.16 Hence, “that Pat is touching Sally” designates the content of Sally’s experience, i.e., what she is experiencing. From here, some logical implications come into view. Consider 1 2 3

Sally feels that Pat is touching Sally I can infer from this Sally feels something, namely, that Pat is touching Sally In turn, this can be formalized as ∃x (x = that Pat is touching Sally & Sally feels x) (read: There exists an x such that x is that Pat is touching Sally, and Sally feels x)

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  179 Notice that this aligns the syntactic and semantic levels of analysis. Moreover, it clarifies something critical about intentional verbs. To wit, they are relations between a subject and content. In effect, “to feel” is a relation between a subject and what she is feeling. Notice also, on this relational view, that what she feels, the content of her experience, is independent of her body. Logically, this is because the existential quantifier does not depend on the subject or her body per se. More intuitively, if the experience is always about something other than stimulation, then what it is about cannot be reduced to or understood in terms of brute stimulation per se.17 This makes sense of Scarry’s counterintuitive proposal, viz. Sally being touched by her lover. Precisely, the point of the touching is not, e.g., bodily stimulation. Instead, the touching allows Sally to gain access to some content. Indeed, the experience is “disembodied” because Sally focuses not on her body but on using her body to grasp the content in question. Given this, two further interrelated implications loom into view. First, the content in question requires specific truth-conditions to determine if it is instanced. Otherwise, it is unclear if this or another content has been instanced. Intuitively, differentiating between “Sally feels something, namely, that Pat is touching Sally” and “Sally feels something, namely, that a pet is touching Sally” requires that Sally know under which conditions either content is instanced. This implies that the nominal expression designates a proposition defined precisely by its truth-conditions. Second, relatedly, language is cast as a device for swapping these propositions. The meaning of “that Pat is touching Sally” are the conditions under which the sentence is true, and understanding the sentence is knowing what these conditions are. A critically important corollary of this view is that all content is sharable as grasping truth-conditions does not depend on a subject’s stimulation per se. In turn, this propositional account of experience drastically reconfigures how a subject relates to both her body and the world. For the body, Scarry draws on her interpretation of Marx and claims the made world is the human being’s body and that, having projected that body into the made world, men and women are themselves disembodied, spiritualized. A made thing remade not to have a body, the person is himself an artifact. For Marx, material culture incorporates into itself the frailties of sentence… and thus continues in its colossal and collective form the ‘passover’ activity of scriptural artifacts. Through this generous design the imagination performs her ongoing work of rescue and because of that design Marx never disavows or discredits the western impulse towards material self-expression.18

180  C. M. Djordjevic In other words, the body becomes instrumentalized in that it now functions as a tool, one among many, that allows the subject to access content. This flows naturally from the above. Since experience is always about something, and since this “about” is supplied precisely by the imagination, the real work is done by imagination, and the body is a means, one of many, to grasp the content. Moreover, Scarry furthers this by stressing that the body is constantly modified, refined, and recreated to ensure access to specific content.19 Intuitively, for Sally to access the content that Pat is touching her requires Sally to place her body in a specific relationship with Pat and possibly modify her body (e.g., wearing lipstick, getting breast augmentations, etc.) to secure this relationship. Relatedly, since the body is just another material thing in the world, the subject’s relationship with the world is understood similarly.20 Indeed, the subject’s relationship with the world is best construed in terms of action – i.e., the subject works on the world.21 In turn, action-as-work “entails two distinct phases – making-up (mental imagining) and making-real (endowing the mental object with a material or verbal form).”22 Again, this springs from Scarry’s contention that imagination is constitutive of experiences. Since the imagination constitutes experiences by objectifying content, and since the imagination is not bound by what currently exists in the world, a subject can have experiences of content not presently existent in the world. This is what Scarry means by making-up. For example, I might have an experience of missing a friend, even though (clearly) my friend’s absence is not part of sensory stimuli.23 From here, making-real occurs when the subject sets out to change the world against the background of the content. I might, e.g., use physics to build telephones so that I can call my friend.24 For Scarry, all actions and interactions subjects have with the world have this structure of making-up and making-real. Hence, a subject is best construed as a maker or creator precisely because everything she does aims to change the world so that it realizes content she has objectified via imagination. Notice that this account of imagination and objectification presupposes a disjunction between how the world is and how the subject wants it to be. Indeed, the entire point of work is aligning the content I have accessed with material reality. Moreover, Scarry pushes the subject’s making-up and making-real structure to its extreme. Thus, part of the work of creating [is] to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate–of, in other words, its privilege of being irresponsible to the sentient inhabitants on the basis that it is itself nonsentient. To say that the “inanimateness” of the external world is diminished is almost to say (but is not to say) that the external world is made animate.25

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  181 In other words, the entire point of the subject’s work, all her actions and interactions with the world, and even the structure of her experience via imagination aim at abolishing the ontological independence of the world – i.e., the fact that the world is indifferent to how I imagine it to be. This casts the world as inherently defective, a storehouse of raw materials for the subject’s creative activities at best. And the world is intrinsically flawed exactly because entities in it may instance properties that are indifferent to or antithetical to subjects. Relatedly, the goal of work is remaking these entities (including the body) so that entities instance only properties that support a subject’s goals, plans, desires, etc. Hence, the real goal of all work is to replace the ontologically independent world with one of an artifactual world that perfectly reflect imaginings.26 In summary, for Scarry, a subject is a maker of the world. In turn, the ability to make stems from the subject’s imagination. Precisely, a subject’s experiences are always about some content. Since this content is not bound by what happens to be the case (making-up), the subject’s actions can be uniformly explained as interventions to realize the content (making-real). Hence, the subject is godlike, and her metabolic relationship with the world aims to remake the world according to her imaginings.27 And this frees the subject “of the pressures and limitations of embodiment”28 precisely because these features limit her godlike status as a creator. With this in view, let us examine why pain is a problem for subjects. Then, let us consider how to overcome it. To begin, pain is a threat to the subject because pain “unlike any other of consciousness – has no referential content. It is not of or for anything.”29 In other words, whereas all other intentional mentation betokens a relation between a subject and a proposition, pain does not. This can be seen at several levels. First, to feel pain is eo ipso to be in pain. In other words, for Sally to feel that she is in pain is for Sally to be in pain, as the existence of pain depends precisely on her feeling it.30 This is in marked contrast to the above account of touching. Relatedly, second, Sally has first-personal certainty of her pain because she cannot be wrong about feeling it.31 Conversely, third, it also means that third-personally I can never be sure of Sally’s pain. This is because, per assumption, pain depends on Sally’s feeling it. And since I do not have first-personal access to her experience, I cannot know if Sally is in pain.32 Finally, these points suggest that pain is not about any content. Intuitively, a headache is not about pain but is pain. Granting this, devastating implications loom into view. Pain is ‘private’ or unsharable. This is for two reasons. First, since pain is not a relation between a subject and a proposition, another subject cannot entertain the proposition. In effect, the truth conditions of “Sally feel that Sally is in pain” are so inexorably tied up with her feeling pain that grasping them third-personally is not viable. Second, since another person cannot

182  C. M. Djordjevic access Sally’s pain, they can never really know if Sally has pain. Since this is so, pain entails the “shattering of language.”33 This is because paintalk does not express propositions, so others cannot grasp the content (?) of such talk. In turn, this inability to share pain – i.e., to use pain-talk to express propositions – means that the subject’s godlike status is vitiated. This is because pain “obliterates the content of contents of consciousness.”34 And pain achieves this feat exactly by resisting objectification.35 Since I cannot formulate pain as a content, I am unable to stabilize it so that I can have beliefs about it, hopes concerning its alleviation, etc. Moreover, this inability to stabilize pain into propositional content also means that it cannot guide my work in the world.36 Indeed, since I cannot make-up pain, I cannot make-real its alleviation via work. Notice also that this casts pain as purely passive, as something that subjects suffer rather than choose. Indeed, it is a sign of a subject’s inherent vulnerability, stemming ultimately from the subject’s facticity.37 By “facticity,” I mean that certain states, conditions, bodily features, etc., of the subject are not a product of her making activities. In turn, this facticity further disrupts the godlike creative subject by severing “the visible world from the privacy of the human interior… [And the related] freestanding object [that] is a projection of the live body that itself reciprocates the live body.”38 In other words, pain shows that the subject cannot self-constitute itself through its work. It cannot choose and become something else via making-up and making-real exactly because pain is not susceptible to this treatment. Granting this, for Scarry, pain is a threat to the subject precisely because pain unmakes the world.39 Effectively, pain forces the subject to contend with something that she cannot objectify and so cannot alter via work. Moreover, pain demonstrates the ontological independence of the world to the subject. Indeed, the body, that tool par excellence, itself becomes strangely independent of the subject. Hence, “the person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony.”40 Since this is so, Scarry rails against all pain and its uses as it is uniformly unmaking. Pain destroys godlike subjects and their artifice of a created world. Scarry then turns to how subjects might overcome pain. And one means they have at their disposal is pain-talk, which Scarry reads univocally. Expressly, the point of (trying) to talk about pain is that this talk can haltingly objectify it. For example, Scarry claims that a physician’s work depends on “the acuity with which he or she can hear the fragmentary language of pain, coax it into clarity, and interpret it.”41 In other words, doctors and nurses can provide patients with a vocabulary to describe their pain. Indeed, Scarry has nearly unreserved praise for, e.g., pain scales, lists

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  183 of adjectives, etc.42 This vocabulary becomes a resource for patients as it allows them to transmute their pain into language. And once the pain is expressed in language, it has a content that can be grasped, believed, etc. Effectively, pain-talk allows persons to describe their pain, thereby enabling them to imagine it. And once they have made-up their pain, they (or others) can work on making-real its amelioration.43 However, this uniform view of pain as always condemnable and the related univocal understanding of pain-talk as always providing resources to subjects leaves Scarry with a problem. Specifically, evidence suggests that people’s relationship to pain is far more complex than this. For example, many contemporary ‘Western’ women refuse analgesic medication during labor because they seem to view the pain as critical to giving birth.44 In another key, historical evidence shows that Christian monks took pain as a precondition for forming a specific sort of self and fostering a special relationship with God.45 Finally, cross-cultural ethnographic evidence suggests that many bands use pain during initiation rites to recognize a person as an adult in their community.46 Moreover, the role of language in each case seems to shift markedly. To presage a bit, a mystic’s way of talking about pain is not exhaustively explained as resources for description (see the Section “Pain and Persons”). Scarry’s reply to such examples is that such uses of pain are symbolic substitute for death in the initiation rites of many tribes is surely attributable to an intuitive human recognition that pain is the equivalent in felt-experience to what is unfeelable in death. Each only happens because of the body. In each, the contents of consciousness are destroyed. The two are the most intense forms of negation, the purest expression of the anti-human… though one through absence and the other a felt presence, one occurring in the cessation of sentience, the other expressing itself in grotesque overload. Regardless, then, of the context… physical pain always mimes death.47 In other words, and despite the seeming medley, pain is always bad and always mimes death. Unsurprisingly, death also becomes antithetical to the subject’s godlike status as a maker. Relatedly, we also see that embodiment itself is inherently problematic for the godlike subject as it makes this subject inherently vulnerable. Finally, it is clear that all pain, be it a mystic’s closeness to the divine, a woman’s way of giving birth, or a person coming of age, are all token-identical and anti-human. That said, it seems to me that this reply strains credulity, both empirically and conceptually. Empirically, it is difficult to maintain that all uses of pain are identically anti-human. For instance, the claim that a lover

184  C. M. Djordjevic electrocuting a woman’s nipples during their lovemaking and a torturer electrocuting her nipples during an interrogation are identically antihuman elides some critical difference(s). And, conceptually, things become even more intractable. Scarry’s denunciation of pain leads her to condemn the finite status of human beings, their embodiment, and vulnerability itself. However, these condemnations make it challenging to understand how subjects and human forms of life relate. And this is because many aspects of our forms of life depend precisely on these (seeming) limitations.48 Hence, we see where a certain trajectory in modern thought ultimately leads. In the name of the subject, that godlike maker who creates the world, Scarry condemns the human, that sadly dependent being thrown into an indifferent world, doomed to die in it, and suffering pain because of it.49 Pain and Persons In the Section “The Subject and the Threat of Pain”, I argued that a specific view of the human person as a subject readily lends itself to the project of abolishing the world and removing all pain. In this section, I examine a transvaluation of this contention by considering one form of pain, affliction. Specifically, I draw from Weil’s account of affliction and her use of it to reconceptualize persons beyond projects and dignity without self-deification.50 However, before I begin, I stress that reconstructing Weil’s thought in standard philosophical prose presents a medley of difficulties. One is that the preconditions for correctly understanding her may not be in place. This is because what “is necessary is not that the initiated should learn something, but that a transformation come about in them which makes them capable of receiving the teaching.”51 In other words, one difficulty Weil has in communicating is not due to the paucity of language but the fact that she wishes to bring into view another aspect, present and yet unseen.52 Given this, the reconstructions I offer are, at best pale shadows of her thought and, at worst, an avoidance of the supremely severe demands she discovers at the heart of human subjectivity. One, sadly, does what one can when wrestling with a saint. In any case, Weil begins by stressing that affliction is not in itself good, nor less does it necessitate spiritual progress. Indeed, she emphasizes that we “must eliminate affliction as much as we can from social life… There will always be enough affliction for the elect.”53 Moreover, Weil stresses that when she is “in contact with the affliction of other people… The contact causes me such atrocious pain… that as a result the love of God becomes almost impossible for me for a while.”54 In other words, and pace a fatuous ‘spiritualism’ that explains (away) affliction by giving it a role in

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  185 the grand theodicy of the world, Weil’s felt horror at it causes her to struggle to love G-d, despite her experience of Her real presence and boundless love.55 Nevertheless, Weil also insists that affliction can play a critically important role in our lives.56 First, I clarify what affliction is for Weil. Then, I compare her account with Scarry’s. Finally, with this in view, I turn to Weil’s contention that, despite its utterly baleful power, affliction can have a supernatural use for us, by the grace of G-d and provided that we have learned to die.57 Weil distinguishes affliction from physical pain, psychological distress, and suffering broadly. Specifically, she notes that “affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by… physical pain.”58 This resonates with Scarry’s connection between pain and death. However, Weil adds that for the pain to count as an affliction, the “social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or the fear of it.”59 In other words, for Weil, pain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for affliction. For her, affliction requires a social dimension as well. Expressly, an afflicted person’s pain is denied or remains unrecognized by her peers.60 Usually, we recognize certain basic expressions of pain like cries, screams, etc. In turn, recognizing these expressions entails that I understand enough of the other’s suffering to respond to it meaningfully. During affliction, these links are severed, and the person’s pain is made private. In turn, this insistence on a social dimension to affliction presages and fundamentally reconfigures several aspects of Scarry’s account. Let us examine these shifts. First off, Weil anticipates Scarry in that Weil too emphasizes affliction carries a horrible form of privacy, a deracination from one’s fellows and community.61 However, Weil insists that this privacy is not an epistemic limit but an ethical failure.62 Hence, Weil stresses that afflicted people have no words to express what is happening to them. Among the people they [afflicted people] meet, those who have never had contact with affliction in its true sense can have no idea of what it is… Affliction is something specific and impossible to describe in any other terms, as sounds are to anyone who is deaf and dumb.63 In other words, for Weil, the problem of privacy is not an inherent epistemic feature of affliction but stems from ethical deafness. And, in marked contrast to Scarry, imagination is what allows us to deny another’s pain.64 Let us drill into this. Weil notes that imagination “does away with the third dimension, for only real objects have three dimensions. It does away with multiple

186  C. M. Djordjevic relationships.”65 In other words, Weil agrees with Scarry that imagination objectifies experience. However, for Weil, objectification falsifies the richness of experience, the nature of the world, and subverts the vital role that attention plays in ameliorating affliction. Let us examine each in turn. For experience, recall that Scarry’s account renders its content propositional. In other words, all experiences are understood solely in terms of what they are about. And this “about” is supplied by the imagination. To this, Weil points out that such a view abolishes our experience of beauty. Following Kant, she notes that in beauty, we experience finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn towards it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers us its existence.66 In other words, one of the most striking features of beauty is that we are confronted with an experience that is not about anything per se. Indeed, this is partly seen in the range of applications of the concept of beauty itself. In my mind, beauty is true of Cantor’s proof of trans-finite numbers, Milosz’s poems, Katie Perry’s music, etc. And to ask what a poem, a proof, pop music, etc., share so that they are all about beauty is to misunderstand something fundamental about these experiences. In each case, the sheer existence of the experience disrupts our ability to objectify the content into some tractable that-clause summary. Moreover, Scarry’s discussion of lovers touching each other seems jarring because it ignores this point. Sally’s feeling that Pat is touching Sally is not exhausted by Sally imagining that Pat is affirming their relationship. Indeed, such a view elides the overwhelming excess and pure gratitude that (at its best) constitutes such moments. The experience of beauty is simply too rich to be reduced to singular about-clauses and person-independent propositions. For Weil, imagination threatens to falsify such moments precisely by objectifying them into faux-univocal contents.67 In turn, the experience of beauty, this interruption of my imagination, discloses something essential about the world, something that imagination occludes as it “tends to fill the entire space which is given to it.”68 Specifically, Weil stresses that such moments show us what is absolutely independent of us; it includes all the accomplished facts in the whole universe at the moment… In this domain, everything comes about in accordance with the will of God… Here, we must love absolutely everything.69 Weil nuances this by stressing that it “is God who in loves withdraws from us so that we can love him.”70 She adds, “there exists a deifugal force.

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  187 Otherwise all would be God.”71 This thought can be reconstructed, inadequately, in standard metaphysics. Consider a statement like “there exists a rock.” This is logically unpacked as ∃x (R(x)). Following Frege, this translation presupposes the concept of rock and then claims that some x instances this concept.72 However, three related points are worth stressing. First, the logical translation does not indicate why or how it is that a rock exists.73 Hence, the concept of rock does not entail that a rock exists, and the existential quantifier gives us no insight into why they do.74 Second, following this, the fact that rocks exist is, for Weil, a miracle.75 This is because the existence of a rock is contingent. So, a rock does not need to exist, and it seems like a rock’s contingency means it depends on ‘something’ else. Yet what this ‘something’ actually amounts to is utterly unclear. As it were, the Being of being is not itself a being.76 Or, what amounts to the same thing, etiological, causal, etc., explanations of the interactions between things cannot explain the existence of things because accounts of their interactions presuppose their existence.77 Hence, we always reason from existence in the empirical world, never to it.78 Third, Weil claims that “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.”79 In other words, the only way for such contingency to be a notable feature of a world is for G-d to withdraw Herself from it. As Weil emphasizes, G-d’s creation of a contingent world is a form of self-abnegation. Hence, for Weil, the world’s beauty manifests its double independence – both from G-d and from me. And for Weil, attempts to replace this contingent world via imagination with artifacts do not affect the metaphysical contingency and are ultimately delusional. Simply put, such attempts are in vain since they cannot alter metaphysical contingency. Finally, this realization of radical ontological contingency leads Weil to stress the importance not of imagination but of attention when confronting another’s affliction. At base, this attention expresses the wish for the existence of this free consent in another, deprived of it by affliction, is to transport oneself into him… It is to deny oneself. In denying oneself one becomes capable under God of establishing someone else by creative affirmation.80 Thus, attention is born from the twin realization that this wounded being before me does not need to exist and my related refusal to absorb them into my metabolic activities. Instead, I affirm them both as independent from my projects, goals, etc., and affirm that their independence is good. Indeed, the ethical failure that makes affliction private partly springs from imagination and correcting it requires attention. Hence, only creative attention can “respect for the dignity of affliction in the afflicted – a respect

188  C. M. Djordjevic felt by the sufferer himself and others.”81 And such creative attention manifests in pain-talk because the core function of language is affirmation, i.e., “to express the relationship between things.”82 Thus, let us examine paintalk further. To begin, Weil contends that the modern understanding of language and pain often furthers the person’s affliction. Indeed, and pace Scarry, offering an afflicted person a prefabricated list of adjectives, asking them to rate their pain on a scale of zero to ten, etc., may avoid the very creative attention and affirmation they desperately need.83 For example, consider a woman who has been beaten by her lover. The woman arrives at the hospital in physical pain and feels degraded, alone, and utterly worthless. And to respond to her affliction with a list of adjectives like “hot?,” “sharp?,” pain-scales, etc. seems anti-human.84 Partly this is because they ignore the woman’s three-dimensionality, imagining that giving her words is enough to return to her a sense of her humanity. Instead of scales and prefabricated lists, Weil stresses a radically different use of language for the afflicted. However, this use turns not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation… God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself. By this creative act, he denied himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves… He who, being reduced by affliction to the state of an inert and passive thing, returns, at least for a time, to the state of a human being through the generosity of others… a soul begotten exclusively in charity.85 Hence, what is needed is self-restraint and attention that show the person that they exist and that this is good. Indeed, such a gesture births a soul in charity by creating a space for the afflicted person in our shared world. Less metaphorically, an afflicted person has lost their sense of agency, control, and self-worth. By refraining from acting on them and responding to any action they perform lovingly, we help renew their sense of being a person.86 Critically, notice that such creative affirmations may well occur silently, as when a nurse sits with a beaten woman and gently holds her hand. Such silence is not a failure of language, and the nurse’s filling the void with “sharp?,” “four out of ten?,” etc., is not ‘progress’ toward solving the problem of pain. Instead, such silence acts to acknowledge the affliction and, more importantly, the person who suffers from it. Critically, such creative attention works best when we actively resist our imagination. Indeed, we must refuse to think that this woman’s affliction can be solved by giving her linguistic resources or encouraging her to ‘simply’ leave the abuser. Finally, with this comparison between Scarry and Weil in view, we can begin to make sense of how affliction, that bane of the human condition that has the “power to chain down our thoughts,”87can be given a

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  189 supernatural use, by the literal grace of G-d. To remind, for Weil, such a supernatural use does not make affliction somehow ‘good.’ Nevertheless, Weil thinks affliction can reveal something critical about ourselves. Specifically, it can force finite creatures to acknowledge the “infinite distancing separating God from creatures… [And yet the afflicted] through all the horror… can continue to want to love.”88 Let me articulate aspects of this supernatural use as best as I can. To begin, for Weil, human beings “cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made of desire.”89 Relatedly, Weil stresses that “we have to die in order to liberate tied up energy, in order to possess energy which is free and capable of understanding the true relationship between things.”90 In other words, for Weil, a human being is constituted by and through its desire. And this desire is akin to energy in that it fuels our actions in the world. Crudely, my desire that p is inherently motivational and gives me the energy I need to perform actions so that p comes about. However, according to Weil, desire can become the source of illusions vis-à-vis attachment. Indeed, attachment “is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.”91 Partly, Weil’s thought can be understood as follows. A human being is constituted by desire. However, desire seems to require an intentional object to function. However, “the [intentional] object… is unreal.”92 In other words, to have a desire for an object requires that this object is not currently available to me. As it were, I cannot want what I already have. And, for Weil, the function of the imagination is fabricating unreal objects (making-up) so that they can guide desire towards a preset end (making-real). In turn, this attachment of desire to unreal objects is the proton pseudos from which a medley of illusions arises. First, it structures time teleologically. In effect, we understand the present in terms of lack, the future as fulfillment, and action as progress toward the end.93 Second, the form of temporality recasts the world in terms of imagination. Specifically, we attend to aspects of things only insofar as these things conform to or confute projects we have to reach some desire. Rocks are no longer taken as miraculous entities but as raw materials.94 Relatedly, third, we conceive ourselves as godlike creators who can make-up unreal objects and then make them real.95 That said, fourth, this seeming apotheosis of persons, so central to modernism, actually reduces the richness of ourselves and flattens the world.96 For humans, this view reduces human dignity to the capacity to independently choose and achieve projects. However, this goes deeply wrong for a host of reasons. One of them is that such will-to-power fails to make sense of vitally important relationships like friendship.97 For the world, the hubris involved is tragicomic. Again, whatever humans do, however much progress they make, etc., they cannot alter metaphysical contingency. Thus, their artifactual world always remains a fantasy.

190  C. M. Djordjevic In turn, these illusions spring from incoherence buried in this conception of desire at the base. Simply, “everything which I appropriate becomes valueless immediately [when] I do so.”98 In other words, since desire requires an unreal object to function, and since once this unreal object is made-real, it can no longer serve as a target for desire, there is no real achievement, satisfaction, or even self. Effectively, desire always requires unreality, and the process of making-real objects can never sate it. With this in view, we can understand the supernatural use of affliction. Weil’s account shows us the utter impossibility of the human condition.99 Indeed, we are both constituted by desire, yet nothing can sate desire here below. And for Weil, affliction is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite create the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center… [An afflicted person] struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through his horror he can continue to want to love.100 In other words, affliction can generate a second-order desire, the want to love, love being the most primordial desire of all.101 And affliction does this by painfully severing the link between desire and unreal objects. Through agonizing pain and humiliation, affliction teaches us that our capacity to desire, to love, remains even after all unreal objects have been evacuated from it.102 Such a sundering decreates both the illusory world and the self. The self is decreated as I realize that I am nothing, i.e., my being-in-love does not depend on my projects, commitments, etc.103 And I decreate the illusory world in that its radical independence is revealed to me. Moreover, such a radical break liberates the energy of desire from the shackles of unreal objects.104 And this freed energy, this love, can “participate in the creation of the world by decreating the self.”105 In other words, now that I can see the world clearly, I can use my liberated energy to help it flourish. And for Weil, Job’s unjust anguish and Christ’s cry on the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?,” both testify to this as both reveal how to continue to love without unreal objects and even beyond reason. Indeed, Christ’s cry is both radically atheistic and the most pious sentence ever uttered. It refuses to make-up G-d as an object of desire, and yet the scream shows that Christ still loves G-d, although She does not exist.106 Hence, in the most radical sense imaginable, Christ’s cry and death affirmed that G-d refuses to negate the world’s contingency, and its goodness, unto even His own death.107 However, such lessons, such dreadful agony, such an entry of pure nihilism into our very bones, can crush just as easily as decreate. And, perhaps, only saints can live in this void.

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  191 Pain and Subjects In the Section “Pain and Persons”, I adumbrated Weil’s account of pain and humanity, arguing that it contains a powerful corrective to certain antihuman tendencies. However, the supernatural use of pain and its transvaluation is not something a person can accomplish under their own power.108 Indeed, as noted, affliction can crush just as easily as it can decreate. Nevertheless, as we shall see in the next section, several of Weil’s insights can help make sense of wholly human uses of pain. However, demonstrating this harmony between supernatural and human uses of pain requires getting clear on the human uses of pain. Crucially, bringing such human uses of pain into view depends partly on showing why the modernist account of subjects in pain is ultimately incoherent. And the most trenchant criticism of this view seems to me to be found in Wittgenstein’s famed private language discussion (PLD).109 It is to this we now turn. To begin, like Weil, Wittgenstein contends that the idea of epistemic privacy inherent in pain leads to intractable problems. His reasons for this are myriad and complex. For our purposes, one leitmotif in his symphony stands out. To wit, Wittgenstein argues that the attempt to make sense of “pain” epistemically is untenable. To make sense of this, I reconstruct an epistemic theme in Wittgenstein’s symphony. In turn, this sets the stage for intersubjectivity and an (admittedly) halting analogy between human and supernatural uses of pain.110 To begin, the modern understanding of pain seeks to align two theses. These are: pain is subjectively certain in that having a pain entails knowing I have a pain; and that pain is private in that the only person who can have my pain is me. For Wittgenstein, these theses are ultimately inconsistent. Wittgenstein begins by asking, “[i]n what sense are my sensations private? – Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it.”111 So far, this simply restates the theses above. However, Wittgenstein then notes that in one way this is false, and in another nonsense. If we are using ‘know’ as it is normally used… then other people very often know if I’m in pain – Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can’t be said of me at all…that I know I’m in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain.112 Notice that Wittgenstein detects a problem in the claim to knowledge in this context. Specifically, Wittgenstein contends that if I claim to know I have pain in the same way I claim to know that two is prime, then the claim is false. Conversely, if I try to ground the knowledge claim differently, then the entire framework for sensations in language becomes incoherent. Let us examine each option in turn.

192  C. M. Djordjevic Consider ‘When I say ‘I am in pain’, I am at any rate justified before myself.’ – What does that mean? Does it mean: ‘If someone else could know what I am calling ‘pain’, he would admit that I was using the word correctly’? To use a word without a justification does not mean to use it wrongly.113 First off, it seems that Wittgenstein’s second remark about using a word correctly but without a justification partly reflects his contention that knowledge claims ultimately rest on techniques and activities that are not propositions per se.114 However, it seems equally clear that Wittgenstein’s interlocutor does not share his understanding of knowledge. Indeed, various voices in PLD before this have attacked the connections between pain, “pain,” and human actions/reactions.115 Pursuant to this, the interlocutor finds it necessary to justify that her application of “I am in pain” is correct for this sensation. Finally, if she can adduce a justification for her claim, then she knows “I am in pain” is correct of her sensation, and so she knows she is in pain. Though there are many aspects of this reply that Wittgenstein finds problematic, two are noteworthy for us. First, it is utterly unclear why the interlocutor thinks that if, per impossible, someone had her sensation, he would grant that she applied “pain” correctly to it. Indeed, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a ‘beetle.’ No one can ever look into any else’s box and… he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here, it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing… The thing in the box does not belong to the language game at all… one can ‘divide’ through the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.116 In other words, the attempt to justify the use of “pain” by sharing a sensation cannot work. And it cannot work precisely because of the thesis of epistemic privacy. Since only I experience my pain, I have no ground, reason, evidence, etc., to assume that another’s experience is at all akin to my own. Indeed, “[i]f I say of myself that it is only from my case that I know what the word ‘pain’ means… how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibility.”117 Hence, such an attempted justification begs the entire question. Second, relatedly but worse, Wittgenstein argues that in point of fact, I cannot justify the claim that I know I am in pain. And this stems from the nature of justification itself. Specifically, to justify a claim requires both

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  193 that the justification be independent of the claim (otherwise, it is circular) and that the justification be assessable independently of the claim (otherwise, it cannot provide support for the claim). However, for Wittgenstein, we cannot offer such a justification for our application of “I am in pain” to a sensation and so do not know we are in pain. To clarify this, Wittgenstein has a voice ask us to “[i]magine a person who could not remember what the word ‘pain’ meant – so that he constantly called different things by that name.”118 Given the beetle example, this seems eminently possible. Moreover, since my memory of what makes the application of “I am in pain” to a sensation correct cannot be independently assessed, it cannot justify my current claim that I know I am in pain.119 Worse, since I am unable to currently adduce independently assessable reasons, evidence, etc., of my claim that I know that I am in pain, it follows that I am not justified in the claim now. And, by contrapositive of the knowledge thesis, I do not know I am in pain. Hence, Wittgenstein’s argument results in a stunning dialectical twist wherein the claim that I know I have pain entails that I do not have pain. Let me re-present this more tractably: P1: Pain is private in that only I have my sensation of pain P2: If pain is private, then my application of “pain” to my sensation of pain depends solely on my sensation P3: If I have pain, then I know I have pain P4: If I know I have pain, then I have a justification for applying “pain” to my sensation P5: If I have a justification for applying “pain” to my sensation, then something independent confirms that my application of “pain” to my sensation is correct P6: If something independent confirms that my application of “pain” to my sensation is correct, then it is not the case that my application of “pain” to my sensation depends solely on my sensation Granting these premises: 1 My application of “pain” to my sensation depends solely on my sensation (modus ponens, P1 & P2) 2 It is not the case that something independent confirms my application of “pain” to my sensation is correct (modus tollens [MT], 1 & P6) 3 It is not the case that I have a justification for applying “pain” to my sensation (MT, 2 & P5) 4 It is not the case that I know I have a pain (MT, 3 & P4) And, the coup de gras,

194  C. M. Djordjevic It is not the case that I have pain (MT, 4 & P3). Or, following through with the negation: I do not have pain. This is a reductio ad absurdum. And one way out is to reject premise 3, the knowledge thesis. However, perhaps we can understand the knowledge claim differently. Indeed, it seems like what the voices of several objectors in the PLD, Scarry, and the modern tradition are trying to get at is that pain is certain. Effectively, what they seem to want is the thought that my having pain implies that I cannot doubt it. And one plausible way to cash this out is via something like knowledge by acquaintance.120 Under this view, when I seem to see a tree, I know I seem to see a tree because there is a direct relationship between myself and this experience. And it is this direct relationship that warrants the shift from “I seem to see a tree” to “I know that I seem to see a tree.” For Wittgenstein, this acquaintance view is incoherent and leads not to the deconstruction of language but its nullification.121 To bring this into view, Wittgenstein begins by asking us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign ‘S’ and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation – I want first to observe that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated… But all the same, I can give one to myself as a kind of ostensive definition! – How?… I concentrate my attention on the sensation – and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.122 This seems to be a fair gloss on how knowledge by acquaintance might work. Moreover, it seems to connect the sensation, the certainty of it, and the meaning of “S.” Effectively, I have a pain, I am directly acquainted with this pain and so am certain of it, and the meaning of “S” derives solely from this direct connection. However, Wittgenstein detects something devastating lurking here. Prima facie, the point of writing “S” on the calendar is to track the sensation diachronically. However, crucially, the occurrent psychological state I turn my attention to is synchronic in that I only have direct acquaintance with this sensation now. And my direct acquaintance with this sensation now does not contain any connection with past or future states. Since this is so, the claim that this sensation now and a sensation at another time are the same requires identity criteria that coordinate between them. However, these criteria are not something I am directly acquainted with. Intuitively, to compare two sensations requires holding both ‘in my mind’ at once. However, I am directly acquainted with only one at a time, so the comparison transcends the acquaintance with the occurrent psychological state. And it follows that “S” transcends acquaintance or becomes diachronically arbitrary.

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  195 Wittgenstein then focuses on a single occurrent psychological state that I am acquainted with and that supposedly gives “S” its meaning. Wittgenstein asks [w]hat reason have we for calling ‘S’ the sign for a sensation? For ‘sensation’ is a word of our common language… And it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes ‘S’ he has Something…. But ‘has’ and ‘something’ also belong to our common language.123 Though complex, several threads are relevant. To begin, it is unclear how “S” and whatever is going on with me relate. If I invoke words like “sensation,” then “S” no longer gains its meaning solely from my acquaintance. This is because “sensation,” an English and public word, generalizes across many possible states. Thus, I cannot derive its meaning from this occurrent state. Alternatively, I might try to construe “S” as an indexical-ish term. In this view, “S” functions similarly to “this” in that the meaning of the term depends on what it picks out. This view abandons any attempt at continuity with other states. “This” can pick out a color, a book, an idea, etc., and so too can “S.”124 However, such a strategy goes awry because “S” or “this” needs a context to function.125 For example, when I point and utter “this,” I might be referring to a book, a color, etc. And the only way to know what “this” refers to is by incorporating context and mutandis mutatis for “S.” However, since the occurrent psychological state does not determine the context, “S” strangely hangs there.126 And, again, Wittgenstein’s argument ends with a stunning twist. Since “S” has not been given meaning by an acquaintance, and since, per hypothesis, the meaning of “S” is to derive solely from my acquaintance, it follows that “S” is meaningless. However, if “S” is meaningless, our ways of understanding and responding to pain-talk fall apart. “S” (crying, uttering “I am in pain,” etc.) are seen through and shown to be meaningless. So, the idea that they have any more significance for us than, e.g., causally produced sounds an old engine makes is absurd. Perhaps we might be interested in the causal process for whatever reason. But causal processes are not meanings. And this viewpoint ends with a disturbing question. To wit, “[w]hat gives us so much as the idea that beings, things, can feel?”127 Thus, Wittgenstein’s arguments show that the attempt to view pain epistemically goes badly wrong, in either case. At base, Wittgenstein’s analysis shows that the modern account of pain rests on a devastating equivocation. For instance, Scarry wants “pain” to retain enough meaning to have ethico-political relevancy, yet she wants it to be so epistemically private that it is effectively meaningless. And one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too.

196  C. M. Djordjevic In this key, Wittgenstein concludes by stressing that this “paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts.”128 This break ramifies rapidly as the entire modern conception of subjects who make-up and make-real projects turns on a view of language as describing a ‘rich inner world.’ For Wittgenstein, there is no such ‘inner world’ that our intentional-verbs describes. In turn, this implies that the valorized categories of modernity – autonomy, self-expression, willto-power, etc. – all fail badly, if read in this way. For example, expressing oneself turns on the idea that there is an ‘inner’ stable self (making-up) that ‘externalizes’ its ‘hidden’ nature via utterances, actions, etc. (making-real). And Wittgenstein’s argument suggests that even for something as seemingly basic as the experience of pain, it and the term “pain” come apart in such a way that the semantics of “pain” does not and cannot depend on a subject’s arbitrary assignment of it to express some ‘inner’ state. Effectively, all “‘inner process[es]’ stand in need of outward criteria.”129 And, granting this, Scarry’s (and the modernist) idea of untrammeled making-real as a correlate of making-up is not workable. The making-up relies on a world replete with meanings that a subject did not create and cannot control. Bluntly, the semantics of “pain” presupposes that English exists and the existence of English is not some fiat that a person happens to invent for herself, anew at each second. And here our first bridge between Weil and Wittgenstein comes into view. For both, a pernicious illusion of modernism is the incoherent dream that people invent themselves, their world, and their language(s) via an act of sheer will-to-make and the magic of genius, an illusion that sorely tempted both a younger Weil and Wittgenstein.130 And, for both, this temptation terminates in the thought that language itself is a constraint, a restriction of the godlike freedom of the subject. Indeed, language may well be the original sin that precipitated the fall from grace.131 The problem, however, is that this temptation undermines imagination itself. This is because the shift from sentences (e.g., “Pat is touching Sally”) to nominals (e.g., “Sally feels that Pat is touching Sally”) via objectification introduces truth conditions that are not up to the subject. And this problematizes the entire modernist project. However, this radical nonsense making of pain talk (and all other intention talk) raises a profound worry. Indeed, a voice in the PLD objects that “but there is a Something there all the same, which accompanies my cry of pain!”132 This claim seems to me to be an ethical objection to PLD. Effectively, the voice demands that Wittgenstein recognizes that she has a pain, that she feels it, that it hurts her. And the tone I imagine this voice has is one of deep rage. Even if she cannot defend herself against PLD, nevertheless she feels her pain. And Wittgenstein’s seeming attempt to make this vanish in a poof of logic or, worse, to deprive her of language, of her ability

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  197 to tell others that she is wounded and needs help, sympathy, love, is deeply offensive to her. And this is not because she has delusions of godhood but because she knows she needs others and she thinks PLD takes from her of the most human way to ask for help.133 Hence, if language becomes this unhinged, PLD threatens not merely phantasmagoric subjects but real persons who use their words to beg for help, to express their pain, to try to find their ways with one another. And it is in answering this worry, in exploring purely human uses for pain, we find a halting but powerful analogy between Wittgenstein and Weil, one that understands persons in decidedly non-modernist terms. It is to this that we now turn. Persons Begotten in Charity PLD seems to me to be a devastating assault on various myths of modernity. It shows that language cannot be a simple tool of self-expression, as a way for pre-existing ‘inner worlds’ to display themselves in ‘outer reality.’ However, PLD can easily be (mis)read as going further than this. Such a reading takes PLD as a radical rejection of the very idea of persons at all, since the entire inward soul vanishes. And interestingly enough, read in this way, PLD harmonizes with certain trajectories embedded in some post-structuralist thought like, e.g., that the author is dead and discourse speaks individuals.134 We return to this possible postmodern evacuation of personhood and the ethical worries it raises later. In any case, Wittgenstein is adamant that he has not rejected the idea of persons but “only reject the grammar [e.g., of the modernist conception of the meaning of “pain”] which tends to force itself on us here.”135 This statement suggests another way to make sense of “pain” and the human condition, which retains the concept of a person without invoking that of subject. Here, Weil’s discussion of supernatural uses of pain cast a spiritual light on Wittgenstein’s attempt to make sense of human uses of pain. Wittgenstein begins by asking us to reflect on how we learn to use “I am in pain,” “Ouchy!,” etc. He notes Here is one possibility: words are connected with primitive, natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior. ‘So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ means crying?’ – On the contrary; the verbal expression of pain replaces the crying, it does not describe it.136 Let us explore this understanding of pain talk further. To begin, the primary function of pain talk is expressing my pain. When I cry, say “I am in pain,” etc., I do not inform someone of how things stand

198  C. M. Djordjevic in my ‘inner’ realm. Instead, I, e.g., beseech them to help me. Indeed, part of why Scarry’s account of torture is so harrowing and so accurate is that there is privacy involved. However, again, it is an ethical one, a refusal to respond to these cries humanely. Indeed, this aligns perfectly with Weil’s insistence that affliction is unrecognized pain, pain made private by the callous indifference of our fellows.137 However, Wittgenstein’s note that we teach the child pain talk to express pain raises the question of why. What is it about pain talk that makes it better suited to human forms of life than screaming into the void? To answer this, Wittgenstein notes I tell someone I’m in pain. His attitude to me will then be that of belief, disbelief, suspicion, and so on. Let’s suppose he says’ It’s not so bad’. – Doesn’t that prove that he believes in something behind my utterance of pain? – His attitude is proof of his attitude. Imagine not only the words ‘I am in pain’, but also the reply ‘it’s not so bad’, replaced by instinctive noises and gestures.138 Notice that what such instinctive reactions would lose is precisely a new way of comforting, a unique pattern of responses to the pain. My utterance “I am in pain” requests, not grunts, but that another person enters into a very particular relationship with me. Here, another bridge between Weil’s reflections on pain and Wittgenstein’s human uses of it opens. For Wittgenstein, our responses to pain reflect an attitude. However, though this attitude may be one of belief, disbelief, etc., what is vital is that the attitude is directed to me. Indeed, Wittgenstein stresses that “[o]ur attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same… this is the case of the transition ‘from quantity to quality’.”139 He adds later that our “attitude towards him [a person in pain who says ‘I am in pain’] is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.”140 In other words, when someone utters “I am in pain,” I do not concern myself with their godlike autonomy or try to make sense of what is going on in their ‘inner realm.’ Indeed, “if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so… and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his eyes.”141 Thus, I attend to them in their full three-dimensionality, exactly as Weil noted. This point about attention becomes more evident when we return to Wittgenstein’s example of teaching a child pain talk. I am confronted with a young infant screaming into the void. I respond to them, in a soft voice, in a language they do not understand, with “it’s not so bad.” And this utterance is interwoven with my holding them, looking for anything that might upset them, etc. Effectively, I treat this tiny being who does not

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  199 speak English and may well lack any conception of themselves, as a person. My attitude reflects my faith that this little being is the sort of entity for whom “it’s not so bad,” coupled with a loving smile, can comfort humanly. My attention to them, my self-limiting focus on their cries, my disregard for my projects, my need for sleep at 3:37 AM, etc., all exhibit a particular pattern of normative responses from me. These responses center not on my fantasies of what this little being should become but on what they really might need. Granting this, Weil’s discussion of supernatural uses of pain elevates Wittgenstein’s account. Specifically, she contends that these normative responses, and my self-limiting so that this tiny being can become human, betokens justice in the most profound sense of the term. Weil stresses that the “supernatural virtue of justice consists in behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is stronger in an unequal relationship.”142 She adds that such justice “makes them [the weak] a gift of the quality of human beings.”143 She further emphasizes that such justice is identical to love.144 Taken together, this deepens our understanding of this particular situation and blossoms into a radically different understanding of the human condition and communities. For this particular situation, this tiny being who is incapable of using language, let alone caring for itself, is one that I have the deepest love for imaginable, one I treat as humanely as I possibly can. However, as Weil rightly notes, this treatment is, on one level, absurd. This little creature is not (yet) a person, she is not in a position to respond to reasons, and her screams may well be neuro-causal correlates of dysregulations in her immature and rapidly changing nervous system. Indeed, one might push this further and point out that my ascription to her of the desire that pain stops and her belief that crying will help her achieve this goal is absurd as she does not have the cognitive resources necessary to distinguish between a true and a false belief.145 Nevertheless, I treat her as if she is a person, as if a gentle voice uttering soothing words and certain forms of behavior can comfort her, as if her tears are meaningful. Indeed, part of my normative responses is desperately trying to determine the reason for her screaming so I can set it right. Critically, the cash value of these ‘as if’ clauses is seen in my discarding both empirical evidence (e.g., this being’s brain is too underdeveloped to cry for anything like a reason) and philosophical arguments (e.g., teleological explanations and interpretations require a full-blown cognitive system to make sense) in the name of her humanity. I treat her as a person, equal to me and capable of responding to my actions in human ways. Indeed, I attend to her tears not as signs of neurological dysregulation but as symptoms that express the presence of pain for her. Thus, my love for this

200  C. M. Djordjevic tiny being, bereft of reasons, language, and even basic self-understandings, leads me to treat her justly, as an equal, as a fellow person whose cries express pain. Weil’s insight that such normative responses are at once the highest form of justice and the truest expression of love deepens Wittgenstein’s point. For human communities, this account of justice as love rapidly expands to redefine our understanding of them. Expressly, Weil and Wittgenstein together point out that human communities should not be understood as the result of, e.g., autonomous game-theoretic agents negotiating contracts with one another.146 Indeed, this understanding presupposes wholly formed selves in full possession of language that babies do not have. Worse, it readily lends itself to thinking of justice as fairness based on respect for autonomy. For Weil, such a conception of justice goes badly wrong as it connects dignity and autonomy together in an inherently problematic way.147 Indeed, in this key, Scarry’s attempt to secure human dignity by linking it to a subject’s capacity to making-real fails to make sense of why I treat this little one, incapable of making-real (or even making-up) as anything more than a resource to metabolize in my godlike projects. Suffice it to say, treating my child as a mere means to, e.g., show what a great parent I am seems to me to be abhorrently unjust. Furthermore, for Wittgenstein, the idea that human communities that share a language rest on some prior negotiation fails to make sense.148 Contracts presuppose language, so contracts cannot be used to make sense of the bonds within linguistic communities. Hence, for both, human communities are not the result of subjects freely agreeing to live together for mutual benefit or whatever. Instead, human communities may be preconditions for becoming and being persons at all. At this stage, an important corollary follows from this new understanding of human communities. It has become increasingly fashionable to cast all communities as intersectional power matrixes and think about human beings not as subjects but as mere nodes in them. As noted, there is a way to read PLD that harmonizes with such a post-structuralist view. However, Weil reminds us that, though asymmetric power relations are abysmally common and analyzing and contesting them is vital to fostering a just world, power cannot be the end of the story.149 Indeed, if power is all that constitutes communities, it becomes utterly unclear how or why we should contest it in the first place. Instead, for Weil, such power is wrong because it deforms what human communities should be based on, i.e., loving justice. And, within this context, Wittgenstein’s request to “try–in a real case–to doubt someone else’s fear or pain!”150 is vital. A child has hurt herself, and she cries. Now, we can violently reimagine her tears as a power-play designed to further white supremacy or whatever.151 However, such a highly theoretical view disables our pre-philosophical attitude towards her as an

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  201 ensouled person.152 And, it seems to me that allowing theory to run roughshot over our attitudes sets the stage for mass murder, as the first move is often to use a theory to deny another’s humanity.153 Indeed, to be quite brutal about it, the problem with Stalinism, Maoism, National Socialism, etc., is not that they lacked a theory that ‘justified’ the murder of millions. Instead, the problem is that they had rather sophisticated ones.154 The ‘justification’ (and even ‘justice’) of such grave horrors stems partly from thinking of all human social intercourse as a set of zero-sum powerladen games of domination, a possibility already built into trying to think about human communities as game-theoretic solutions to coordination problems. And one way out of this (perhaps the only way) is to return to our pre-theoretical attitudes and lovingly attend to the child as a person, not analyze her tears as, e.g., yet another token of white supremacy. In any case, returning to our infant, who has turned pink screaming into the void, my normative response patterns, my attempts to care for this little creature by responding to her consistently with loving attention also affect her. Indeed, my loving attention, my just treatment of her as a person, actually cocreate a person. As it were, my responses to her calls, call her as a person into being. Less poetically, she begins to formulate a sense of herself as a person precisely by attending to how I attend to her, i.e., the fact that I treat her cries as more than mere random gestures thrown into the cold night but as meaningful requests issued by an ensouled being.155 To see how this might work, let me sketch a brief myth that seems to resonate with what empirical research is teaching us about babies becoming people.156 To begin, our little one has hurt herself, and she cries. I intervene by ascribing to her reasons for discomfort and then trying to understand and ameliorate these. Again, I treat her tears not as signs of neurological dysregulation but as symptoms of pain. In turn, she attends to these normative responses from me. She sees my actions and interactions with her as neither rote mechanical operations nor random behaviors. Instead, she sees them as my attempts to address her, to attend to her as an ensouled being. Indeed, here we have a form of metacognition. She attends to how she is attended to. And, by doing so, she learns that her sounds have concrete and predictable effects and elicits patterned ways others engage with her. She then cottons on to these normative response patterns, this loving justice, this attention, and uses it to begin to bootstrap. She makes sense of itches and urgers, screams and gestures, sensations and things, by watching how they affect those who affect her. In turn, this sets off a dynamic, iterative process. This becomes even clearer when one considers not only screams but other sounds as well. At first, by random groping, that babbling that babies do, she stumbles on a few sounds that elicit particular normative responses from her mother and me. She accidentally slams together “da” and “da” and finds the response

202  C. M. Djordjevic it generates wonderful, as these giant beings who are somehow always present for her nearly weep with joy the moment she produces this sequence. In turn, such a robust response encourages her to repeat the sound, perhaps smiling as she knowingly awaits the celebration that it engenders. Hence, she comes to see that her ability to produce such sounds, be they “dada” or her now purposeful screaming, makes her an agent, a being who can affect the world just as well as be affected by it.157 From here, the process again iterates. Once she understands that “dada” does things, and has some sort of use(s), she begins projecting it into a myriad of situations as a request in one instant (hold me!), a gesture of excitement at another (look at that!), a demand at third (I want to go, now!), etc.158 However, and pace Augustine and the modernism that never entirely escaped his long shadow, this projection of her sounds is not her assigning noises to prefabricated made-up unreal intentional objects that lurk somewhere in her gray matter.159 Instead, her projections actually teach her what the desire to be held is, what leaving a situation she dislikes means, etc. Effectively, if meaning is in some vital sense related to use, her projections, and her discovery of new uses for her sounds, allow her to find new meanings for herself, her behaviors, and her worlds.160 And all of this rests on the willingness of her parents to lovingly attend to her, to try to make sense of why she suddenly utters “dada!?” when this large yellow beasty with four legs and a wet tongue runs up to her and licks her. Again, the precondition for this process is loving justice, which cashes out, partly, in the assumption that this now not-so-small being is engaging with the world in something that is (or can become) a human form of life. Then, the iterations become more rapid, heading towards a crescendo where she sees herself as a person, an ensouled being with an inward dimension. She learns her numerals when her kindly teacher guides her hand across the page.161 She comes to read by learning how to focus her mind and allow it to be guided by an external reality.162 Maybe one day, she will study first-order predicate calculus and begin reading Frege (one can dream, after all!). And she also learns points of resistance, comes to acts of rebellion, and objects to the uncouth nature of her elderly parents. Sadly, she will also learn the meaning of “loneliness” by being misunderstood and feeling like no one lovingly attends to her. Throughout this process, she develops an “I,” not as another name for herself.163 Instead, she extends the semantic-like categories she uses to make sense of others and utterances inward, formulating a sense of herself as a being with (possibly unexpressed) thoughts, (possibly unstated) commitments, etc.164 In other words, she is not born a self (nor less a subject), but she becomes one with the right sort of loving care. Her inward subjectivity is an achievement, not a default.165

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  203 Finally, after this self has been created, after she has taken on commitments, preferences, etc., perhaps, one day, she herself learns the meaning of “love” and decreation too.166 Perhaps she finds herself with a tiny little one, screaming unrelentingly into the void at 3:37 AM. One prays, she projects “love,” and her parents’ admittedly flawed attempts to treat her justly in this new situation. She learns how to self-limit so this small creature can thrive. Indeed, she comes to see the sacrifice of her grant proposal, the paper she is currently composing on her father’s misreading of Frege, the keynote lecture she should be preparing, etc., as joyful moments in her new life. Here, in an admittedly attenuated and all-too-human way, she comes to see that the highest moment of human life is her ability to cocreate others by decreating herself and letting grace open the way for a new neurologically unstable and infinitely fragile tiny being to take his place in the human forms of life. Perhaps, she even comes to understand better her own parents’ halting attempts to reflect this grace for her. Provided that this myth is somewhat accurate, one vital point follows. Pace Scarry and modernism, the process of becoming human and achieving subjectivity does not begin with desire, making-up, and making-real. Indeed, it seems incredibly likely that infants lack the cognitive resources necessary to objectify sensation via imagination. Instead, the process begins with pain and the call-and-response pattern it generates. Played in this key, our call, our blindly screaming into the void, reflects our felt need for each other, and the (just) response to such a need is an act of creative attention.167 Crucially, imagination may not be a precondition for such music but may hinder it. At best, imagination (in Scarry’s sense) might convince me that I already understand what the other needs, as I have already objectified her experiences. This readily lends itself to the thought that ‘solving’ the problem of pain is best done via prefabricated lists of adjectives and rating scales. This easily degenerates into a form of intellectual hubris. At worse, imagination can elide the other person entirely. A child has hurt herself, and she cries. And the thought that I should only respond to this when I can metabolize the tears into, e.g., a protest against injustice, seems to me to be profoundly anti-human. In either case, it seems that the imagination misses the mark as it ignores the person in front of me and focuses instead on subjects and their godlike capacities. The above account is antithetical to modernism. Indeed, it suggests that humans are not born autonomous subjects, driven by their godlike desire to make-up and make-real and for whom the community is predicated on optional ‘alliances’ they choose to make. Instead, humans are created as persons by an attitude of attention, or just love, and for whom communities are constitutive preconditions.168 Such a fundamental dependency of ourselves on others is anathema for moderns. Nevertheless, if the above account is at all persuasive, such dependency may well be the ground of personhood.

204  C. M. Djordjevic In closing, notice that Weil’s enrichment of Wittgenstein’s human uses of pain shows us something crucial. To wit, pain is not inimical to becoming a person but is likely a linchpin for it. A child has hurt himself, and he cries. This is simply what infants do, an instinctual response. However, by attending to the cry, uttering “it’s not so bad,” and teaching the child both languages and the normative response patterns that underwrite them, we help create them. As it were, we fill their screams with meaning and have faith that the infant will eventually understand what these meanings are. At base, all this turns on our willingness to stop making-up the other in our heads and to do our best to attend to and respond to each other as we need. Indeed, persons are not made-real constructs from the raw materials of fleshy bags of carbon. Persons are ensouled beings we ethically relate to, one way or the other. This seemingly simple point cuts to the very heart of modernism. It reminds us all that our fellows are not raw materials to manipulate as we (whoever Scarry’s ‘we’ is) see fit. Indeed, though technological prowess easily deludes us into thinking that we can nullify metaphysical contingency when this delusion is extended to persons, it becomes quite literally anti-human.169 After all, what is the history of twentieth-century totalitarianism than a horrific track record of the contention that the human beings, too, are mere raw materials for Leviathan to make-up after its own image and to make-real by acts of terror and brutality?170 And, for both Weil and Wittgenstein, the only out here is to recover the dogma that persons are radically independent, features of reality that ‘we’ do not make-up and make-real, though by the grace of G-d we may help open a space for them to be(come) human, with just love. As I hope the above has made clear, such a recovery requires a repudiation of an entire chain of metaphysicalcum-political arguments about the nature of the world, each other, and ourselves. Conclusion For Weil and Wittgenstein, the contention that we are godlike creators for whom pain is an affront to dignity rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition. People are not born autonomous beings who fabricate worlds. Instead, people are beautifully (or tragically) dependent social beings, begotten through loving attention. And pain is often a critical way that such attention is elicited from others. Thus, far from pain being antithetical to being human, it may be a precondition for becoming human in the first place. In any case, for both, a refusal to accept our inherent vulnerability, and our real need for creative affirmation, is tantamount to making war on the human condition itself. Finally, both Weil

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  205 and Wittgenstein hope that in this twilight of modernity, where the idols of ‘freedom,’ ‘self-expression,’ etc., all lay shattered at our feet, and when our war against metaphysical independence has finally turned on human forms of life themselves, we can finally begin again to do philosophy, i.e., come to know ourselves once more.171 Notes 1 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge Press, 1999), e.g., pp.  16–18 or 51–61. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980), pp.  6–7 or Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2009), preface p. 4 or §§ 109–134. 2 Cf. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 67–99. 3 E.g., Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp.  211–304 or Alister MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), pp. 36–78. 4 Cf. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 6 Scarry, The Body in Pain, e.g., p. 162. 7 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 243–277. 8 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 243–277. 9 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 162. 10 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 167. 11 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 167. 12 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 166 – emphasis mine. 13 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 335 footnote 6. 14 Scarry, The Body in Pain, e.g., p. 5, p. 13, p. 16, etc. 15 This is admittedly clunky. However, I phrase it this way to avoid indexicals (e.g., “she,”) and the issues they generate. 16 Jeffery King, ‘Designating propositions,’ Philosophical Review 111, no. 3 (2002): 341–371. 17 Gottlob Frege, The Frege Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 1997), e.g., pp. 325–345; Edmond Husserl, The Shorter Logical Investigations (London: Routledge Press, 2001), pp. 30–84. 18 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 244 – emphasis mine. 19 Scarry, The Body in Pain, e.g., pp. 254–244. 20 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 247–248. 21 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 19–23. 22 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 21. 23 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 163. 24 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 163–164. 25 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 285 – emphasis in original. 26 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 278–364.

206  C. M. Djordjevic Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 278–326. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 251. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 5 – emphasis in original. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 8. 31 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 4. 32 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 4–5. 33 Scarry, The Body in Pain, e.g., p. 5. 34 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 54. 35 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 3–7. 36 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 38–45. 37 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 164. 38 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 280. 39 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 38–51. 40 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 77. 41 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 6. 42 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 6. 43 Scarry, The Body in Pain, e.g., p. 8. 44 Yvonne Hauck, Jennifer Fenwich, Jill Downie, and Janice Butt, “The Influence of Childbirth Expectations on Western Australian Women’s Perceptions of Their Birth Experience,” Midwifery 23, no. 3 (2007): 235–247. 45 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 97–124. 46 E.g., Suzette Heald, Initiation Rites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Available at: https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/encyclopedias-almanacstranscripts-and-maps/initiation-rites. 47 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 31 – emphasis mine. Scarry attempts to nuance these claims (Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 34–35). However, her attempt valorizes choice in a way I find hard to understand. Prima facie, it seems odd to claim that an essentially active subject can chose passivity. 48 Cf. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 365–391. 49 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), pp. 219–224 & pp. 279–311. 50 Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 80. 51 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 83. 52 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II xi, § 355. 53 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 158. 54 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 45 – emphasis mine. 55 E.g., Weil, Waiting for God, p. 27. Note that I write “G-d” and vary pronouns arbitrarily to try to keep in view that treating the term as a proper name is a gross category mistake. As we shall see, this point is critical for Weil as well. 56 E.g., Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 79–84. 57 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 20. 58 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 68. 59 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 68. 60 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 84–99. 61 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 68. 62 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p.  5. See also, e.g., Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledgement,” in Must We Say What we Mean? A Book of Essays, ed. by S. Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27 28 29 30

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  207 63 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 69 – emphasis mine. 64 Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 16–18. 65 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 17. 66 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 105. 67 Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 99–117. 68 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 10. 69 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 3. 70 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 33. 71 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 33. 72 Frege, The Frege Reader, pp. 181–193. 73 However, on a broadly Frege-ian view, it clarifies that existence is a secondorder property and disabuses us of various mistakes. 74 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge Press, 1974), point 6.44. 75 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 131. 76 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 26. 77 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, point 6.44. 78 Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 40. 79 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 38. 80 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 91. 81 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 85. 82 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 3. 83 Cf. Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 6–9. 84 Cassell highlights this anti-human tendency in contemporary biomedicine. See, e.g., Eric Cassell, ‘Suffering and Human Dignity,’ in Suffering and Bioethics, ed. by R. Green and N. Palpant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp.15–30. 85 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 89–90. 86 Cf. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (London: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 38–58, for a beautiful account of this process. 87 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 68. 88 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 81. 89 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 144. 90 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 35. 91 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 2. 92 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 22. 93 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 20. 94 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 65. 95 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 30. 96 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 33. 97 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 131–137. 98 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 31. 99 Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 95–97. 100 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 81 – emphasis mine. 101 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 66. 102 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 115. 103 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 38. 104 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 22. 105 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 33. 106 The idea that G-d is not a being and so does not exist has a long and venerable tradition in Christianity (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works

208  C. M. Djordjevic of Pseudo-Dionysius (New York: Paulist Press, 1989 [lived ca. sixth century ACE]). In any case, the issue strikes me as fundamentally aesthetic, not metaphysical. Does one see in a world red in and tooth and claw, indifferent to justice, and with no discernable necessities a gift or does one see in it a horror? This question is untouched by fatuous debates about a superhero named “God” who flies about saving the just and damning the wicked. 107 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 72–74. 108 Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 33–39. 109 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §§ 243–315. 110 Cf. Peter Hacker, An Analytic Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Volume 3: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Press, 1990), pp. 187–200; Stephan Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), §§ 243–315. 111 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, §246. 112 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 246 – emphasis in original. 113 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 289. 114 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, e.g., § 150, § 202, § 241, etc. 115 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 253, § 257, § 263, § 281. 116 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 293 – emphasis in original. 117 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 293. 118 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 271. 119 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 265. 120 Cf. E.g., Bertrand Russell, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and knowledge by Description,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910): 108–128. 121 Charles Djordjevic, “Politics in/of Pain,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 47, no. 3 (2020): 262–288. 122 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 258. 123 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 261. 124 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 260. 125 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 35, §§ 46–53. 126 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 260. 127 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 283 – emphasis in original. 128 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 304. 129 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 580. 130 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 22–23; Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, point 5.63. 131 Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Language Which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation,” in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, ed. by J. Moran & A. Gode (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 5–74. 132 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 296. 133 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 108. 134 Michael Foucault, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986), e.g., pp. 101–120. 135 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 304. 136 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 244. 137 E.g., Weil, Waiting for God, p. 68. 138 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 310. 139 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 284. 140 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, II iv, § 22 – emphasis in original.

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  209

141 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 286 – emphasis in original. 142 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 87. 143 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 88. 144 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 85. 145 Donald Davidson, ‘Thought and Talk,’ in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation ed. by D. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 155–170. 146 Cf. E.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), pp. 102–168. 147 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge Press, 1952), pp. 3–10. 148 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, e.g., § 6. 149 Weil, The Need for Roots, passim. 150 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, § 303. 151 For a push in this direction, see, e.g., Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why Its So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (New York: Beacon Press, 2018), pp. 131–139. 152 This point was made very clearly to me by Dr. Amber Bowen. I thank her for it. 153 E.g., Das, Life and Words, pp. 108–134; Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), e.g., pp. 59–62. 154 Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism (New York: Mariner Press, 1976), pp. 460–479. 155 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 25–30; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II iv, §§ 19–25. 156 Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 157 Cf. E.g., David Graember, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster Press, 2018), pp. 83–84. 158 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 168–190. 159 Cf. Augustine, The Confessions (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1997), pp. 11–12. 160 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 43, §§ 67–77. 161 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 143. 162 Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 57–65. 163 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 410. 164 Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 90–117. 165 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 189–215. 166 Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 26. 167 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 108; Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 116–117. 168 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II iv, § 22; Weil, Waiting for God, p. 92. 169 Hillary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), pp. 68–99. 170 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Mariner Press, 1976), passim. 171 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, preface, p.  4; Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 177.

210  C. M. Djordjevic Bibliography Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Mariner Press, 1974). Asad, T., Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). ———, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Cassell, E., “Suffering and Human Dignity,” in Suffering and Bioethics, ed. by R. Green and N. Palpant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 15–30. Cavell, S., The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). ———, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, ed. by S. Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002a), pp. 220–245. ———, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, ed. by S. Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002b), pp. 246–315. Das, V., Life and Words: Violence and He Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Davidson, D. “Thought and Talk,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation ed. by D. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 155–170. Djordjevic, C., “The Politics in/of Pain,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 47, no. 3 (2020): 262–388. Frege, G., The Frege Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997). Hacker, P., An Analytic Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Volume 3, Wittgenstein: Meaning and mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Press, 1990). Heidegger, M., Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962). Hirschman, A., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Husserl, E., The Shorter Logical Investigation (London: Routledge, 2001). Kierkegaard, S., Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). King, J., “Designating Propositions,” Philosophical Review 111, no. 3 (2002): 341–371. MacIntyre, A., After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007). Mulhall, S., Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations §§ 243–315. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Nussbaum, M., Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). Rousseau, J. “Essay on the Origin of Languages which treats of melody and musical imitation” in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, ed. by J. Moran & A. Gode (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), pp. 5–74. Russell, B., “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910): 108–128.

Affliction: Pain and the Problems of Modernity  211 Scarry, E., The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Taylor, C., Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Tomasello, M., Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge Press, 1974). ———, Culture and Value (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980). ———, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2009).

9 Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good David Levy

0. Many philosophers have observed commonalities in the thought of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein, often in relation to their ethical thought.1 There are indeed some similarities, particularly when their views are compared with mainstream Anglo-American ethical theorising, where each seems singularly at odds with the mainstream. I shall argue that Weil and Wittgenstein arrived at a strikingly similar interim position on ethics. Specifically, they set themselves against the idea of a machine that can manufacture moral improvement or progress. Both founded their opposition on the common thought that the good is not constituted, latent or even supervenient on material facts or states of affairs; and, second, that it is false and misconceived to suppose there is a technique or human technology that can be used to bring about the good. However, notwithstanding their similar interim position on ethics, their underlying or ultimate positions on ethics are different and incompatible. In other words, I shall argue that while there is a surface-level agreement in their ethical thoughts, in fact the ethical thinking of each is distinct and irreconcilable with the other. Weil is best described as a realist, for whom an outward orientation to reality is the route to moral improvement. Wittgenstein, in contrast, could be called a non-realist or irrealist, for whom an inward orientation towards one’s own life is the locus of moral selfimprovement in life. Whether my claims for what Weil and Wittgenstein’s positions were are convincing or not, setting out the difference in the positions that underlie the similar interim position is, I suggest, illuminating. Specifically, the interim position they share does not seem to commit one to a realist or non-realist underpinning for that position. The underpinning must still be given. Indeed, anyone who thinks the ethical or the good transcend the contingent and factual will face a similar need for an underpinning comparable to that Weil and Wittgenstein had to give.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003300076-10

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  213 I begin by setting out the interim position they share regarding “machines” for manufacturing good and the two foundational claims on which the position depends. By “machines” are meant impersonal mechanisms or techniques that could be used to improve the goodness of the world or a person. Wittgenstein’s grounds for the two foundational claims are then elaborated at some length. I complement this discussion with the parallels in Weil’s thinking that support these two foundational claims. With their interim position vindicated, I will elaborate the divergence in their thinking as each responds to the import of the interim position. It is worth noting at the outset that we should not be surprised that their philosophical and ethical thinking should diverge. They were quite different. They were born a generation apart, with Wittgenstein the elder by 20 years. Though both European, Wittgenstein’s formative milieu was middle European fin de siecle Austro-Hungary, while Weil was a Parisienne formed in the aftermath for France of World War I. Wittgenstein was born into the extraordinary wealth created by his self-made industrialist father, which afforded access to the highest echelons of Viennese society. Weil by contrast was comfortably middle-class, the daughter of a doctor. Noting this difference does not make the distance between them sufficiently stark. Weil identified early with factory workers and the trade unions that advanced their grievances, while Wittgenstein’s family owned factories in heavy industries and he was uncomfortable around the working class.2 So while Weil was animated throughout her life by the cause of justice and its realisation in the world, nothing parallel occupied Wittgenstein. Weil was a precocious linguist and exceptional student and was given almost the best education France had to offer, including a thorough grounding in the works of previous philosophers. Wittgenstein’s education was undistinguished, and though he was supervised and tutored at Cambridge for a time, his knowledge of philosophy and its past outside his interest in analytic philosophy, logic and language was scant. They were both deracinated Jews, but having this in common is to say very little, nor should it imply they were likely to think alike. Similarly, some observe that each was austere and severe in how they lived. However, apart from the fact that each was an unusually serious, sometimes stern, person, a detailed consideration reveals that the similarities in their lives and how they lived are very few. Less often remarked is that both worked for a time as teachers or that Wittgenstein enjoyed more than twice as many years in his adult life as Weil did. Indeed, when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 to re-invent his philosophy, he was already six years older than Weil when she died. Neither should we forget she was a woman and he a man.

214  David Levy 1. The central idea of the interim position Weil and Wittgenstein share is opposition to a kind of moral machine. Consider first this passage from Weil: That is the unavoidable absurdity of every materialism. If the materialist could dismiss all concern for the good, he would be perfectly coherent. But he cannot. The very being of man is nothing other than a perpetual straining towards an unknown good. And the materialist is a man. This is why he cannot help but end up regarding matter as a machine for fabricating good. (OC V:1, 309, “Is there a Marxist doctrine?”)3 Then this extract from a letter Wittgenstein sent to his friend Engelmann: It is plain, isn’t it, that when a man wants, as it were, to invent a machine for becoming decent, such a man has no faith. But what am I to do? I am clear about one thing: I am far too bad to be able to theorise about myself; in fact, I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve, and that’s that! (Engelmann 1967, p. 11) Each uses the image of a machine producing moral improvement or good as a target for categorically faulty understanding of the moral. The image of a machine, I propose, is meant to suggest a device or technology which is automatic in two senses. First, the machine does something without our having to do it. Second, its operation is in accord with its own internal structure or logic. It is unlike a hand tool, such as a saw, which is not automatic in these senses. This is already a contrast we mark. Woodworking with hand tools and without machines has merit because it implies the skill of the woodworker in using the tools. However, while it is only a bad craftsman who blames his tools, there is no vice in excusing one’s bad workmanship or results by noting that a machine was not working well. The machine’s functioning is (basically) independent of the operator. Moreover, the way it functions is independent of the operator. While someone can choose which machine to operate, to a significant extent one cannot choose how a machine functions. For example, one might choose the tempo and the tune on a player piano, but not the mechanical interactions by which the cylinder encoding the tune causes the notes to be struck in the piano. After all, the machine does not really play piano at all. Notes are struck owing to a causal relation between the structure of a coded cylinder and a series of mechanical linkages. Likewise, a machine that plates silver onto a base metal will do so through a chemical process which did not originate in any human artifice, but solely the physical laws of chemistry.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  215 For this very reason, a machine to plate silver on base metals was created before the chemistry was understood, because the process could be discovered without understanding it. This example shows that machines can be made and operated with little or no understanding of how they work. Some immaterial, human technologies can also be conceived of as machines in a similar manner. An algorithm, a heuristic and a decision-procedure are, I suggest, examples of this. In computers, these technologies, ultimately, function electro-mechanically, like the player piano. These technologies can also function in human minds as well, such as when I use a fast algorithm for calculation or a heuristic that picks out leap years. No doubt when this is the case, there is a question about the extent to which operator and function—mind and algorithm—are really independent. (Wittgenstein’s own rule-following considerations apply to this question.)4 But those considerations are not decisive here, because what is in question is the image of a machine and therefore the independence required can be supposed. Moreover, the independence from one’s mind of logic, language, algorithm et al. is such that it permits speaking of the necessity of a conclusion within a symbolic system like algebra or game theory, e.g. “To win the Prisoner’s Dilemma you must adopt the tit-for-tat strategy.” This talk of necessity makes the machine an appealing image just because it seems as if the conclusion might be forced on us of itself, automatically. This is tantamount to admitting that, as it were, one can be told the correct answer through a calculation or an analysis, by a generalised line of reasoning, by a kind of logical machine. This machine-image shows its persistent appeal in the ambition for a machine that produces moral progress. Contemporary ethical theory is awash with it in various guises. The demand for theories that are action-guiding is one example, where the further demand for an algorithmic decision-procedure is often explicit. Wherever moral progress is understood as making the world better by transforming worse states of affairs into better ones, the image of the machine is operative. It is similarly latent in any system of analysis in which the logical form of moral judgements yields truth conditions on the basis of which the judgements might be proved true, or the judgements could provide a template state of affairs to realise. Something similar lies in the hope that a correct theory of reasons will under analysis provide specific determinations of what is right, obligatory or some other deontic predicate. The same hope animates the advocates of formal decision theory, game theory and the rest of the theories that classify human beings as Homo economicus. In the passage cited above, Weil is critical of a materialist—by which she means a familiar modern position where matter is taken as exhaustive of reality—though she took the mistaken appeal to a machine for manufacturing good as central to utilitarianism, economic liberalism and even Hitlerism.5

216  David Levy Thus to the extent that machines for manufacturing good are a categorical misunderstanding of good for Weil and Wittgenstein, if much contemporary ethical theory models an aspiration to moral machines, then it is plain that the interim position Weil and Wittgenstein share is sharply at odds with the mainstream. The appeal of a moral machine would seem to be precisely that it works automatically. It separates the operator of the machine from the moral progress produced. Just as with a non-moral machine, malfunction in the moral machine can be disclaimed by the operator, which operator can in any case operate the machine without understanding how it functions. It demands nothing of the operator, even if it is the operator who is morally improved when it functions. Not only is the functioning of the machine independent of what is improved by the machine, but the machine functions to produce its result without any necessary connection to the operator’s ways of thinking, acting, doing, etc. This is the very idea of the machine: it manufactures. There is a parallel here with the commonly used turn-by-turn, step-by-step, GPS-based guidance we get from hand-held computing devices today. Few have any idea how they work, nor is any such idea necessary for using them. Could one not imagine something similar for utilitarianism or effective altruism? The stated goal—maximising utility—is not in principle any more complex than an accessible route to a destination. Provided we came to view the utilitarianism machine’s guidance as reliable, why disregard its advice only because we do not know how it functions to produce it? Indeed, supposing the utilitarian machine had a prosthetic agency via robotic automata, is there a principled reason not to allow it to improve a low-utility state of affairs into a better one autonomously? A well-known difficulty for consequentialism is, in general, its indifference to the aetiology of states of affairs. There are certainly philosophical reasons for objecting to the idea of moral machines sketched above. The absence of a defining role for the moral subject is an obvious one, though many other familiar objections might be adduced, e.g. that moral decisions cannot be delegated, that there is no criterion for establishing the reliability of the machine, etc. However, Weil and Wittgenstein both rely on two unusual claims to ground their objection to moral machines. The first claim is that states of affairs in themselves have no value; more specifically, no fact is valuable in itself. Call this the valuelessness claim. Machines function by some mechanism to transform one material entity into another or, more abstractly, they take one state of affairs as input and produce another as output. But if a state of affairs is valueless, then the input state can be no better than the output state in terms of value. Input and output are both without value. So if the valuelessness claim holds, then a moral machine operating materially is impossible. Roughly, you cannot get gold from pyrite or fool’s gold.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  217 Where the machine is not mechanical in a physically material sense but in the mentally material sense of being realised in someone’s mind, then the valuelessness claim can be avoided if one also denies any identification of the mental with the physical. In this case, the second claim will do the dialectical work required to make moral machines impossible. The second claim is that the will is powerless, specifically that there is no logical connection between what is willed and what happens. Call this the powerlessness claim. In a moral machine that is mentally realised, the will can no more cause an inference—a movement in a mental machine—than it can bring about any other state of affairs, material or otherwise, if the powerlessness claim holds.6 So mental moral machines are likewise impossible. Even if the will could effect an inference, any resulting attempt to realise the results of a train of thought in material terms, i.e. act to bring about a state of affairs, would again be denied by the powerlessness claim. This would make moral machines not impossible but useless. The interim position I have suggested Weil and Wittgenstein share is opposition to a moral machine. However, Weil and Wittgenstein also had a similar foundation for their opposition to moral machines, namely the valuelessness and powerlessness claims. In the next section, I will elaborate the claims and their basis as well as vindicate attributing the claims to Weil and Wittgenstein. 2. Wittgenstein’s views on ethics are a tiny part of his Nachlass, those collected writings Wittgenstein left unfinished after his death. Combined, his writings on ethics might amount to 50 pages, more than half consisting of short remarks in diaries and notebooks. His only sustained treatment of ethics was his lecture on ethics which he gave in 1929. Insofar as he set out theoretical remarks on ethics, these are set out in his WWI notebooks. Some of these notes were included in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.7 Moreover, none of his later writings on ethics contradicts the earlier work, even as his later philosophical accounts of language contradict earlier views.8 Therefore, I shall use the earlier work as foundational and set out Wittgenstein’s view based on it. There are four themes in the WWI notebooks, three of them principal.9 I focus on the two themes that articulate the valuelessness and powerlessness claims respectively. The valuelessness of facts is stated plainly in the Tractatus: “All propositions are of equal value” (6.4). This is unpacked as follows: 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

218  David Levy What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world. Wittgenstein’s idea is that what occurs in the world is necessarily contingent. Every fact can obtain or not. If, per impossibile, a putative fact were necessarily true, then it would not be a fact.10 Wittgenstein’s hidden premise is that value is not contingent. If something is valuable, then it must be so without regard to contingencies. Value is not a hostage to chance. That is a premise. If it is granted, then the inference follows directly. Facts are contingent; value is not; therefore, value cannot be a fact. Wittgenstein makes clear that the sense of value he intends is ethical when he continues: “Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher” (6.42). If we take ethics to concern value, and if the content of a putative ethical proposition is a description of some value, then there is an obstacle to the existence of ethical propositions, because Wittgenstein’s view of propositions limits them to describing facts and, as noted immediately above, value cannot be a fact. This is the compressed point of 6.42: There can be no propositions describing value, i.e. there can be no ethical propositions. The further consequence of this chain of reasoning is that there can be no talk of ethics, nor ethical judgements expressible in language. This does not imply that there is no such thing as value, only that it does not inhere in the factual. Language concerns solely the factual. So language cannot express value or ethics. Addressing the valuelessness of facts, Wittgenstein is comprehensive in emphasising that the world is not a locus of value. Everything in the world, as constituents of facts, is on the same level. “A stone, the body of an animal, the body of a human being, my body, all stand on the same level” (12.10.16).11 For Wittgenstein, worldly events are transitions among states of affairs and their factual constituents. As facts, they are on one and the same level. Wittgenstein’s conclusion is the denial of facts as valuable or morally charged, “The world in itself is neither good nor evil” (2.8.16). Wittgenstein thought that ethics could not be in the world, but must be of the world—like logic. Ethics is a condition of the world, meaning that ethics is absolute in that it is independent of how the world happens to be at any moment. As a condition of the world, it requires only “that the world is.” The difficulty remains that facts—and the world which they constitute— are neither good nor evil nor any ethical form in between. Wittgenstein is not a sceptic or amoralist. There is good and evil. So where is it? Ethics is conditional on a subject, because the subject is the one capable of ethical response, whose engagement with the world can realise good.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  219 Good and evil is born in and borne by the subject. The subject’s role in the world’s ethical form is total for Wittgenstein, “Good and evil only enter through the subject. […] good and evil […] are not properties of the world” (2.8.16). The subject originates good and evil. The dependence is clear on Wittgenstein’s view, but how does the subject do it? 3. The second theme does little to explain the subject’s role since it asserts the powerlessness of the will. The crux of the powerlessness claim is also set out directly. 6.37 A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity. 6.373 The world is independent of my will. 6.374 Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will. Proposition 6.37 asserts that there are no causal necessities on Wittgenstein’s view. If that is so, then even if the will had a place in the material world (something Wittgenstein doubts) and were causally efficient, the relation between willing and the realisation of what is willed cannot be a necessary one, only contingent, for there are no causal necessities. This would not show the powerlessness of the will, for the will may be causally effective, albeit contingently so. However, when combined with the preceding themes, the will proves irrelevant for ethics: (1) Assuming that value is not contingent; and (2) given that the relation between willing and the realisation of what is willed is contingent; then (3) then the relation between willing and the realisation of what is willed cannot be of value. The same conclusion can be reached by noting that the effects of a causally efficient will are solely states of affairs, themselves combinations of facts. But the valuelessness claim established that facts have no value. So the effects of a causally efficient will have no value. The conclusion, to be clear, is that, ethically speaking, the will is powerless. The subject can neither make nor control the world, but his responses seem dependent on its happenings, for “we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will” (8.7.16). The idea is familiar from and analogous to the mythology of fate. “In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world—which is independent of our will” (8.7.16). This is an important point, because fate—curiously—requires a willing engagement that is also idle. Someone subject to fate seems to act in making his future and in some sense does so. But the events consequent on his actions are pre-determined. One’s willing seems paradoxically both redundant and necessary. Yet the

220  David Levy paradoxical situation is neither personally excluding nor exculpating: Oedipus takes no solace in what he has done even when he knows that he was fated to do so. It is on grounds incontestable for him—those of logic—that Wittgenstein resigns himself to concede that what one wills does not determine, even partially, happenings in the world, “For it is a fact of logic that wanting does not stand in any logical connexion with its own fulfilment” (29.7.16). Logically, wanting states of affairs in no way necessitates their obtaining. Wittgenstein is forced to a tentative conclusion in which he accepts the comprehensive powerlessness of the will, viz. “The will is an attitude of the subject to the world” (4.11.16). 4. Anyone familiar with Weil’s work and thinking will probably see a direct parallel with the elaboration of the valuelessness and powerlessness claims in Wittgenstein’s writings. Indeed, both are tacitly present in the following passage where Weil is describing the idea of an ethical or moral order: The idea is the following; it is indispensable to any sound doctrine; it is central. Beneath all phenomena on the level of the mental [morale], whether collective or individual, there is something analogous to matter proper. Something analogous, not matter itself. […] When we think of matter, we think of a mechanical system of forces subject to a blind and strict necessity. But even before having got this far, it is already extremely useful to know that this distinctive necessity exists. This helps to avoid two mistakes into which one falls over and over, indeed as soon as one gets out of the first one falls into the other. The first is to believe that mental [morale] phenomena are modelled on material phenomena; for example, that mental [morale] well-being arises automatically and exclusively out of physical well-being. The other is to believe that mental [morale] phenomena are arbitrary and that they can be occasioned by autosuggestion or external suggestion, or even by an act of will. (OC V:1, 314, “Is there a Marxist doctrine?”) The first frequent mistake Weil identifies is that of thinking that moral phenomena are constituted by or supervenient on facts or states of affairs. This I take as a preliminary equivalent to the valuelessness claim. The second frequent mistake is to suppose that moral phenomena can be produced by entertaining a thought or by an act of will. Likewise, I take this as a preliminary equivalent to the powerlessness claim. (There is a complexity in the translation of the quotation, because the French morale can have as much a mental connotation as a moral one. The apparent ambiguity can be

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  221 set aside because, in the larger context of her essay, moral phenomena such as holding certain moral values were constituted by the mental phenomena associated with the commitment to those values. So what is said regarding mental phenomena will apply always to the moral too.) Sometimes Weil is more direct in making the valuelessness claim, for example in this passage where she is explaining that a direct love of the good is not possible if the objects of that love are in the material world, which she often calls ‘here below’ (ici-bas), only an indirect love is possible: These indirect loves are simply the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul oriented towards the good. They do not themselves have a good as their object. There is no good here below. (OC IV:1, 333, “Forms of the implicit love of God,” my emphasis) More often Weil clothes the valuelessness claim in the assertion that ultimate finality or purposiveness (finalité) is not present in the material world determined by necessity. Everything is an intermediate in this existence, everything is a means, purpose finds no purchase anywhere in it. The manufactured thing is a means; it will be sold. Who can set his good on it? The material, the tool, the labourer’s body, and his soul itself are means for manufacturing. Necessity is everywhere, good nowhere. (OC IV:1, 420) Through no ploy, no technique, no reform, and no upheaval can purposiveness gain entry into the universe in which the labourers are placed by their very condition. (OC IV:1, 422, “Precondition of non-servile labour”) The world where human beings labour offers only intermediate purposes, not an ultimate purpose or good. Thus, states of affairs or matter certainly have no intrinsic value. As with Wittgenstein, when conjoined with the powerlessness claim, it would seem they cannot have extrinsic value either as direct means to the achievement or creation of good. And Weil is as comprehensive in her ejection of value from the material world as Wittgenstein is, although she makes the point in a different idiom. This whole universe is devoid of purposiveness. The soul which, because it is torn apart by affliction, cries out continually for this purposiveness, touches this void. (O IV:2, 291, “Concerning the Pythagorean Doctrine”)

222  David Levy The why of the afflicted admits no answer, because we live within necessity and not within purposiveness. If there were purposiveness in this world, the place of the good would not be in the other world. Every time we ask the world for purposiveness, it denies it to us. (O IV:1, 372–3, “God’s love and affliction”). I take it the passages above vindicate my describing Weil and Wittgenstein as having parallel views on the valuelessness of facts. For Weil, as for Wittgenstein, the good is not made real in material or factual states of affairs.12 5. Vindicating Weil’s commitment to the powerlessness claim seems more straightforward as Weil is already well known for an account of moral subjects as distinctively possessed of a negative agency, so-called because it is not a power to pursue ends nor realise states of affairs. By contrast, it finds expression principally in capacities for consent, attention and love.13 Indeed, a great part of her later philosophy elaborates the variety of ways in which we cannot directly pursue the good but must wait for it to arise and grow. I cannot readily condense this account of negative agency here. Powerlessness is also a natural concomitant of Weil’s emphasis on the overweening place of necessity in the material world. Sometimes this claim is unvarnished, e.g. “We, however, are nailed in place, free only in our gaze, subject to necessity.”14 That remark and its ilk would be sufficient to secure the powerlessness claim since the reasoning is similar to Wittgenstein’s. If everything is determined by material necessity, it is solely “a favour of fate” that what we will or want should come to be in any material state of affairs. Our willing does not make it so since our bodies and minds are no less determined by necessity. However, Weil makes an attenuated point in a more down to earth and practical setting when she describes the conditions in which workers will be happy in relation to their work: For example, bosses can conceive only two ways to make their workers happy; either raising their wages, or telling them they are happy and chasing off the wicked communists who assure them of the contrary. They cannot understand that, on the one hand, the happiness of a worker consists above all in a certain state of mind in relation to his work; and, on the other, that this state of mind appears only if certain objective conditions are realised […]. This double truth, suitably transposed, is the key to all practical problems of human life. (OC V:1, 315, “Is there a Marxist doctrine?”) The most important point in this passage is Weil’s claim that there are objective conditions that must be met before a state of mind can, as she

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  223 puts it passively, appear. It is not enough for the subject to, as it were, decide subjectively that the conditions in which he works are right and satisfy himself of this, e.g. by checking his pay packet or comparing his lot to someone else’s. Weil is making the stronger claim that the state of mind that lifts the disheartening burdens of labour—itself a form of direct engagement with material necessity—is not in the gift of the worker to conjure. False consciousness, for example, would be unable to bring about this state of mind. These objective conditions might be that certain needs of the soul be met, whether or not a worker is aware of these needs or can articulate what would satisfy them. Or, perhaps, the objective condition might be in relation to the phenomenal experience of time in the workplace, e.g. a working cadence that affords those moments in which one is aware of what one is doing, rather than operating like an automaton. The general point of her essay on non-servile labour is that labourers must be equipped to recognise in the work they do and the tools they use that they recapitulate in microcosmic ways the order of the universe—and at the limit the beauty in what they do.15 That kind of recognition is not a belief per se and is better described as a state of mind or an understanding. Such an understanding might be aroused in various ways, but it is not something upon which someone can simply decide himself. The point she makes in that essay I take to be a general one in relation to the objective conditions in which someone will find those states of mind that are related to the good. For comparison, a parallel point might be made for the objective conditions for love as a state of mind, rather than a feeling. To sum up, Weil is committed to the powerlessness claim because of the central role she gives to necessity. In addition, she advances a more modest view that the good is not an object one can pursue directly, in action, belief or decision-making. This more modest view is a second basis for attributing to Weil a commitment to the powerlessness claim. This section and the preceding three aimed to elaborate the valuelessness and powerlessness claims in Weil and Wittgenstein’s using their own words, thus simultaneously supporting the attribution of both claims to both authors. The two claims are the shared foundation of their shared interim position against the idea of moral machines. 6. Whatever else might warrant a commitment to the valuelessness and powerlessness claims, I suggest that Weil and Wittgenstein were each satisfied that claims along these lines made moral improvement machines impossible. If they are impossible, the idea of moral machines might be thought harmless. On the contrary, Wittgenstein and Weil each thought that the enduring hope and appeal of a moral machine was harmful. For it has the effect of directing people away from what is really important, what is really good, and from the true locus of good. The theoretical effort

224  David Levy toward realising moral machines was at best wasted effort and at worst pernicious. Moral good is not to be found in the material world where machines are possible, so whatever good there can be must be sought elsewhere. Isolating ethics from the realm of fact is something I have argued elsewhere is the principal purpose of Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics.16 In the manuscript draft for the lecture he wrote: […] the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would, necessarily, bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. (MS 139b, 9–10)17 Similarly, when it is suggested that “we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions,” he replies: […] when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by ‘absolute value’, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. (MS 139b, 18) This is not an argument, it is a warning that he urges on his audience at his lecture on ethics, whom he told he would address as “a human being who tries to tell other human beings something useful,” emphasising, “I say useful, not interesting.”18 Instead, Wittgenstein wants them to give up any hope of finding a machine to make them morally decent, and direct themselves beyond the world to that which is higher, to that which ethical language tries but fails to express, toward the absolute. That is where the ethical will be found. Weil too is similarly clear that the mainstream has gone wrong in its efforts to alter the material conditions of life so as to produce progress. For several centuries, we had lived on the idea of progress. […] It was thought to be linked to the scientific conception of the world, even though science is contrary to it as is authentic philosophy. The latter teaches, with Plato, that the imperfect cannot produce the perfect nor the less good the better. The idea of progress is the idea of a birth in stages, over the course of time, of the better from the less good. Science shows that an increase in energy can only come from an external source

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  225 of energy; that a transition from low energy to high energy can only occur as the counterpart of an at least equivalent transition from high energy to low energy. Always, downward movement is the condition of upward movement. An analogous law regulates spiritual matters. We cannot be made better, except through the influence upon us of what is better than we are. (“What does the Occitanian inspiration consist in,” OC IV:2, 415, with allusion to Republic 504e) The analogy with energy begins from the scientific claim that in the material world, total energy is fixed—or ‘conserved’ in scientific idiom. The total can be redistributed, but not increased from within. Thus no matter the distribution, the total remains constant. The idea of progress, by contrast, posits that the total can be increased over time through some imagined transformation of the (raw) materials of the world. This being impossible, any increase would have to draw energy from outside the closed system, that is from outside the material world. A focus on the material world is futile, efforts must instead be directed beyond the material world. In Weil’s analogy, we too are limited and are incapable of transforming ourselves to be better than the limit of what we are presently capable of being. Only a good beyond our present capability can make us better. Thus, Wittgenstein and Weil inveigh against the idea of the moral machines because they misdirect our efforts. The sooner we reject the idea, the hope and the appeal of moral machines, the sooner we can direct our efforts toward what may in actuality be morally improving. 7. Thus far, Weil and Wittgenstein are agreed that the effort of moral improvement must go beyond the material to what is higher, as they put it. The locus of the higher is where they diverge. The divergence I shall argue is irreconcilable because in Weil the orientation toward the higher is outward toward reality, while with Wittgenstein it is inward toward the subject. For Weil, moral improvement will come from attending to reality, only not material reality, but the higher aspects of reality. For Wittgenstein, moral improvement will come from attending to what is problematic in life from a perspective beyond material reality, bounded only by the subject whose life it is. Indeed, a third facet of their divergence is that Weil’s movement toward the higher is away from the personal toward the impersonal, necessary and real; while Wittgenstein’s movement toward the higher is away from the reality of contingent happenings and being-so toward the personal. The world was always the intense focus of Weil’s concern. In one way or another, her whole life—intellectual and practical—was dedicated to supernatural justice, the intermediary of the good on earth. Supernatural justice, for Weil, is not something material, nor is it a state of affairs, and

226  David Levy for that reason a moral machine is impossible. Indeed, Weil allows that an administrative state could produce natural justice, that state of affairs in which people’s needs are met. Natural justice is no intermediary of the good because natural justice can have any aetiology, e.g. the result of an efficient yet indifferent bureaucracy in pursuit of higher GDP. Supernatural justice by contrast occurs when people are moved to meet the needs of others by a charitable feeling toward their fellows which, at its limit, is akin to love of one’s neighbour. The inspiration for supernatural justice is something higher, something expressed in love of one’s neighbour. In Weil’s religious idiom, the love of one’s neighbour is the worldly expression of God’s love, which love is the basis for creation, and God’s own essence.19 In Weil’s Ancient Greek idiom, the love of one’s neighbour is the worldly expression of the Pythagorean principle of cosmic harmony which lends order to reality.20 Therefore, in seeking what is higher than the natural valuelessness of facts, Weil looks to the supernatural in the world. Her focus remains with the world. Weil is a realist in the sense that she believes that what is higher is real. There are, on her view, levels of the real, something she understands in a broadly Platonic way. Likewise for another aspect of the real, there are different levels of necessity. Causal necessity is on the lower, material level of necessity compared to the higher necessity of geometry, which is itself on a lower level than the necessities of being, potentiality and actuality. An individual can make contact with what is real and higher. Weil writes: Plato called dialectic the movement of the soul which, at each stage, in order to ascend to the higher domain, relies on the irreducible contradictions of the domain in which it finds itself. At the end of this ascent, it is in contact with the absolute good. (OC V:1, “Is there a Marxist doctrine?,” 325) This ascent occurs—i.e. the movement towards contact with the good occurs—when objective conditions are met, for example the state of mind achieved through contradiction; or through attention, consent and love; or through beauty and supernatural joy; or again in the experience of affliction that does not extinguish the desire to love what is good. The objective conditions might be many and difficult to determine or describe, but for Weil, the movement of the soul is real and the transformation effected is also real. She wrote that it is as if to the natural psycho-physical mechanism of a human there was added an additional, supernatural part which will alter the operation of the mechanism in some way.21 This will show itself in how one is moved to act. The route to the contact with the good attunes the aspirant to the inspiration of the good that finds worldly realisation in supernatural justice.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  227 What is important with Weil’s realism is that the subject who might be morally improved by attending to what is higher must still attend to what is real, to reality, i.e. one must be turned outward away from oneself. In Weil’s terms, the movement upward is a movement away from the personal to the impersonal.22 One image of this movement Weil adopts is that of the Greek Stoics’ love of the world, the love of our cosmic home, the love of the order of the world.23 This Stoic love is attention to what is higher in reality. That it is love that is urged is of the first importance, because pure love does not seek anything from the beloved, love is not a means to an end. Love can thrive in conditions of powerlessness. Weil is known for her development of an account of love, consent and attention as active non-action, so-called because none is directed to bringing about a state of affairs. Each is by contrast a way of opening oneself to the fullness of reality. Thus, we get a simple model of moral improvement. Rather than seeking to do good or be better, the aspiration is to recognise a moral failure such as envy and do no more than turn away from it. It is not necessary to act in an opposite manner, it is enough to refuse it. Rather than becoming diminished by the loss of envy from of one’s personality, on Weil’s view simply to refuse envy is progress in opening to the inspiration of what is higher in reality. Weil offers a model in which moral improvement comes from bypassing worldly contingencies for one’s person through the worldly exercise of human capacities such as consent. When this is undertaken without any purpose, one is filled by the higher purposiveness of reality itself. Wittgenstein’s conception of what is higher is much more elusive than Weil’s, not least because he wrote less about it. But there is a clue in a difference between the two quotes that were used as emblematic of the interim position. Weil wrote of a “machine for fabricating good” and Wittgenstein of a “machine for becoming decent.” Wittgenstein’s focus is on becoming decent, which translates the German ‘anständig’ meaning ‘proper’ or ‘upstanding’ or ‘decent.’ The subject’s focus is on himself, on his becoming, on what he has or will become, perhaps how he might be purified of what is indecent. The focus is resolutely inward and personal. Wittgenstein, unlike Weil, does not seek the higher in the world, nor look to it for inspiration, nor a fortiori could it be for Wittgenstein an object of love. Whatever the higher is, separating the subject from the possibility of a moral machine leaves a subject alone with solely his own resources with which to face the moral demands of life. This is an intensely personal demand, because the subject cannot respond by obedience to coercion or authority. As it were, he must depend solely on his heart and soul, because to do anything else would be to evade the challenge. In other words, in Wittgenstein’s ethical outlook, an ethical subject’s response must be wholly and solely personal.

228  David Levy Second, for Wittgenstein, the moral demand was principally to live a decent life. It was a recurring preoccupation of his.24 ‘Decent’ or anständig was the word Wittgenstein used when describing what made a life worthy rather than wasted, especially in his notebooks after 1929, e.g. 2.5.30, 2.10.30 and 12.3.37, though Wittgenstein had first wondered at the purpose of life in his wartime notebooks, 8.5.16.25 As noted in §3 above, the ethical challenge of living a decent life concerned the subject’s attitude to the world. And he endorses the view in 1916 and 1930 that the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This too is a key element in Wittgenstein’s thoughts of what is higher and how one can attend to it. To attend to it is an attitude that is taken from a timeless perspective, wherein one could regard one’s life as a whole, like an object extended in spacetime. With that perspective in mind, which attitudes towards one’s life are possible? In answering this, there is textual support for taking Wittgenstein’s position in two, distinct directions. Each is at odds with Weil’s realism because neither augments the world with something that is real and higher. One direction, call it irrealist, is that the attitude one takes to one’s life during one’s life determines whether one’s life is a waste or of worth, i.e. anständig.26 Some attitudes, perhaps the low ones, make life a waste, while other attitudes give it worth. The difficulty is that it is not clear what foundation to give to the predicates ‘waste’ or ‘worth’. On what basis do they apply to a life, such that they can be correct or incorrect, or even provide guidance toward a life of worth. The danger is that talk of a worthy or a wasted life could seem like little more than talk of a higher state of affairs. If that were so, Wittgenstein would need an account of how these higher facts were not valueless. It is one thing to suppose that the subject occupies a transcendental perspective or that the subject is itself in a higher realm, but if this higher realm is one with contingent facts about worthy and wasted lives, then all the problems against which Wittgenstein inveighed in the worldly case would seem to recur.27 Instead, Wittgenstein simply uses the predicates as if they must be the categories that will apply when thinking in the higher realm in which one confronts the world in life but outside time. In his diaries, this is most often how he seems to think of the matter, but it sits uncomfortably with his views on categories and the language by which we express them. So on this view, the ethical challenge we face once we have abandoned the hope of aid from a machine is the challenge of living life, seen as a whole, so as not to waste it, fighting and trying to be decent. There is nothing more and what is higher would seem simply to be the difference between these two categories, waste and worth, whose predication is unclear. A different view, call it non-realist, that is suggested by Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics is to adopt the attitude that is available to us and proper

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  229 for  directing ourselves towards what is really important, toward what is  higher. This is the attitude of treating the world as a miracle, which Wittgenstein glosses in the lecture on ethics as meaning something that we do not try to explain, that we do not think awaits explanation, which is taken as not for explanation.28 Taking something as a miracle is taking it as an object of wonder, something that is absolute in the sense of not being comparable to anything else. It would be in a relevant sense to treat it as outside time, to take it as a complete whole extended in time. The personal, moral challenge on this view is simply to adopt within one’s life the attitude of the world as a miracle, for that is how it appears from the higher, timeless perspective. Adopting this attitude can only be done by disregarding the world of facts and happenings and the idea of moral machines, both of which tether one to the worldly perspective. Once again, adopting this attitude is something that one fights and tries to do. Thus, adopting it is something personal, a challenge that is inward, that must be met, pursued and achieved. Rather than being powerless, it is the one power whose exercise is morally decisive, viz. the adoption of the attitude toward the world and one’s life as a miracle. If one succeeds, the world is unchanged and one learns nothing new from the attention to the higher realm. It is only one’s attitude that is changed, which attitude is inexpressible. So failing to be decent is simply failure to live from within an attitude in which the world is a miracle. It is as it were to be held down. Wittgenstein’s ultimate view is not wholly satisfactory, but then there is no reason to conclude that he had arrived at a satisfactory view. His negative account of the idea of moral machines may not have yielded a positive account of the higher. Nonetheless, whether Wittgenstein’s view is satisfactory or not, it should be evident that Wittgenstein and Weil have different views on the nature of the higher. There seems little prospect for reconciling them, given the gulf between her impersonal concern with the world and his irrealist or nonrealist focus on the personal. Whatever the commonalities in the interim position they seem to share which might urge thinking of them as similar, at a more fundamental level Weil and Wittgenstein seem very far apart. Notes 1 See for example, Dilman (1999), Kroesbergen (2021), Kronqvist (2009), Recchia Luciani (2020), Springsted (2020), von der Ruhr (2011), and Winch (1989); also E. Springsted, F. R. Recchia Luciani; P. Winch; H. Kroesbergen; I. Dilman; C. Kronqvist; M. Von der Ruhr who spoke of their “spiritual kinship”; Sekino (2016); and Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, has made the comparison in private conversation. 2 His coded wartime diaries testify to this last point. See Wittgenstein (2022). 3 See also, 327, “How then to serve justice, if one does not know what it is? The only way, according to Marx, is to hasten the operation of that mechanism,

230  David Levy inscribed in the very structure of social matter, that will automatically bring justice to men.” References to Weil’s writings are to the volume, sub-volume, and page in the Oeuvres complètes. All translations of Weil’s writings are mine in conjunction with Marina Barabas, and are forthcoming in Simone Weil: Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2023). 4 See Wittgenstein (2001), roughly §§138–242. 5 See L’Enracinement, OC V:2, 307–308. 6 This point touches on the general problem of explaining why inferences occur or why a thought makes use of a sign to think of what the sign symbolises. In her 1931 dissertation, Weil recapitulates the Cartesian Cogito as a powerless parade of images before a mind whose sole power is to accept or refuse an image. “Science et Perception en Descartes,” OC I, 161f. 7 Wittgenstein (1922). All references to the Tractatus will be by section number. 8 See part III of my introduction to Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics, Wittgenstein (2014). 9 These themes are discussed at greater length in my “Wittgenstein’s Early Writings on Ethics,” in Wittgenstein (2007). 10 A necessarily true proposition lacks an articulated logical form and thus pictures no specific fact; see 4.4463. 11 See Wittgenstein (1979). All references to Wittgenstein’s notebooks will be by date of the entry. 12 We might have to allow that there are states of affairs that are better than others. Weil allows that natural justice obtains when people do not want for what they need. But that is compatible with those states coming to be without any inspiration from the good, outside, as it were, of the light of supernatural justice. 13 See for example, “Reflections on the good use of school studies with a view to the love of God,” OC IV:1, or “Theory of Sacraments,” OC V:1. 14 “God’s love and affliction,” OC IV:1, 352. 15 See “Precondition of non-servile labour,” OC IV:1. 16 See my introduction to Wittgenstein (2014). 17 References to Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics are to the manuscript designated by von Wright’s scheme and presented in Wittgenstein (2014). 18 MS 139a, II. 19 This is developed most fully in “Forms of the implicit love of God,” OC IV:1. 20 This is developed most fully in “Concerning the Pythagorean Doctrine,” OC IV:2. 21 See “Letter to a Priest,” OC V:1, 181 and more generally all of §25 therein. 22 Indeed, when Weil uses religious language, she expresses the ultimate endpoint of the move upward toward the impersonal as when someone becomes no less and no more than the medium of God’s love for God, a kind of perfect unity. See “God’s love and affliction,” OC IV:1, 358. 23 See, e.g., “Concerning the Pythagorean Doctrine,” OC IV:2, 270. 24 See Wittgenstein (1981), 212ff. 25 Notebook entries from 1929 onward are published in Wittgenstein et al. (2003) and referenced by date. 26 He puts it this way in 18.2.37, 19.2.37, 20.2.37. 27 This is of a piece with Wittgenstein’s remark in TLP where he notes that immortality would not solve the problem of life, 6.4312. 28 MS 139b17ff.

Wittgenstein and Weil on Manufacturing Good  231 References Dilman, İlham, Free Will: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999). Engelmann, Paul, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (1967). Kroesbergen, Hermen, Faith Envy: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Weil on Desirable Faith (Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2021). Kronqvist, Camilla, “Our Struggles with Reality,” in Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives, eds. Y. Gustafsson, C. Kronqvist, and M. McEachrane (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 202–20. Levy, D., and M. Barabas, eds., Simone Weil: Basic Texts (London: Routledge, 2023). Recchia Luciani, Francesca R., “Weil and Wittgenstein in Winch’s “Reading”: Philosophy as a Way of Life,” in Nordic Wittgenstein Studies: Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch, eds. Michael Campbell and L. Reid (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), pp. 149–166. Rhees, Rush, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Sekino, Tetsuya, “Peut-on parler de Dieu aujourd’hui? De Wittgenstein à Simone Weil,” dissertation, University of Lyon, 2016. Springsted, Eric O., “Having an Inner Life,” Philosophical Investigations 43 (2020): 142–157. Von der Ruhr, Mario, “Christianity and the Errors of Our Time: Simone Weil on Atheism and Idolatry,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 68 (2011): 203–226. Winch, Peter, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1922). ———, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). ———, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, With a Revised English Translation (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001). ———, Lecture on Ethics (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2007). ———, Lecture on Ethics (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014). ———, Private Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. and trans. Marjorie Perloff (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022). ———, Alfred Nordmann, and James Klagge, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

Index

affliction 42, 90, 133, 189–205 apophatic 46–49, 57, 67 attention (Weil) 7, 9, 23–24, 41–46, 51, 70–75, 87–99, 161–166, 186–188, 204 attention economy 9, 93–98 Augustine 59–63, 73–75, 154, 158, 202

hypomnemata 166–171

Carnap, Rudolf 3, 85 confession 9, 10, 14, 17, 20, 57, 61, 62, 138, 141, 153, 154, 156, 157, 166, 168–171 Culture and Value 10, 18, 113, 117, 125–128, 135, 143, 153–154

Lecture on Ethics 31, 48, 51, 93, 97, 217, 224, 228–229 Letter to a Priest 136, 141

decreation 165 dogmatism 4, 157, 160, 164, 171 Drury, M. O. 15, 75, 135, 137, 138, 140, 159 environmental crisis 72 ethics 11, 16, 31, 31–36, 47, 50–52, 83–90, 93–99, 116, 161, 166, 212, 217–219, 224, 228–229 forms of life 11, 62, 66–67, 73, 176, 184, 198, 203, 205 Foucault, Michel 166–171 Frazer, James George 37, 40–41, 61– 62, 67, 140–141 Goethe 65, 68, 69 grammar 4, 9, 30–31, 36–37, 39–41, 46–52, 197 Gravity and Grace 8, 10, 108–109, 125–127, 126–137, 139

Iliad 8, 23, 129–130, 134 James, William 56, 59–61, 66 Kant, Immanuel 16, 63, 168 Kraus, Karl 130

materialism 24, 66, 214 Murdoch, Iris 65, 73, 75, 91, 127–128 mysticism 3, 6, 9, 16, 59, 61–69, 72–75 Nachlass 87, 153, 217 Petrement, Simone 21, 137 Philosophical Investigations 4, 96, 109, 114, 153, 154, 157, 160 Plato 23, 25, 59, 61–65, 67, 131–133, 135, 143, 144, 167, 224, 226 private language 176 radical pluralism 62, 72–73 realism 227–228 religious belief 14–25, 39–40, 50 religious language 9, 30, 36–41, 45– 48, 49, 108 Rhees, Rush 1, 9, 84 Russell, Bertrand 2, 15, 155 Scarry, E. 176–188, 194–198, 203–205 Schopenhauer, Arthur 155, 157, 159

234 Index Seventy Letters 137 supernatural 4, 32–36, 43–50, 66, 70, 106–118, 136, 140–141, 185, 189–191, 199, 225–226 The Need for Roots 8, 58 theology 25, 46, 116 Thibon, Gustave 8, 10, 25, 108, 125, 134

Tolstoy, Leo 2–3, 15, 71–72, 92, 138, 169 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2–5, 9, 15–18, 31, 59, 65, 73, 84–87, 91–92, 96, 153–154, 217 transcendent 16–17, 31, 43–45, 49, 140–141, 143, 228 Winch, Peter 1–2, 9–10, 14, 30, 37, 83, 107–118