In Memory of Simone Weil

Simone Weil was an extraordinary figure, born a hundred years ago on February 3 1909, into a Jewish family in Paris. She was to become one sharpest stars of her generation, with a mind of great intensity and extraordinary clarity. She came top in the 1928 entrance examinations for the Ecole Normale Superieure, France’s elite school, ahead of Simone de Beauvoir and thirty male candidates, and this just one year after women were admitted.

Although attracted to left-wing causes of all kinds she gradually drifted towards Christian mysticism. She flirted with Catholicism but never quite took that final step because of the nature of her deepest beliefs. So far as she was concerned the best values of Western civilization had originated in ancient Greece, but had been subsequently perverted by the centralizing Roman Empire, which had a similar influence on the emerging Christian Church. She turned away from her own Jewish tradition because she hated what she perceived as the hateful and cruel God of the Old Testament. Although a social radical she saw Communism in the same oppressive terms, a substitution of party oppression for the oppression of capitalism. Her curiosity over religion, moreover, took her beyond Christianity into the mysteries of the Greeks and the Egyptians, and beyond to Hinduism and Buddhism.

Simone never found a final spiritual home, dying in London in August 1943, aged only 34. She had effectively starved herself to death, eating no more than what she believed was allowed in occupied France. Yes, she was great soul.

The Will to Power

I should like to make two things clear: first, that Nietzsche’s The Will to Power is essentially a series of notes, jottings and speculations, written between 1883 and 1888, subsequently collected and arranged in book form by his sister, Elizabeth; second, Elizabeth may eventually have given her support to the Nazi Party, but it is quite wrong to suggest that she 'twisted' her brother's works towards the Nazi cause. Her compilation-and it is her compilation-was, after all, first published in 1901, well before the advent of National Socialism.

Elizabeth's 'fault' was to blur the distinction between her brother's published works and his rough speculations; to present to the world the false impression that The Will to Power was the final and definitive statement of Nietzsche's thought. It was not. That lies in the work published while he was still intellectually active. Having said that, it is still a fascinating and worthwhile collection, an insight into the mind of the thinker in the raw. It would encourage me to think that it is read before judgement is passed

Talking Spencer

Herbert Spencer, I suppose, is another one of those Victorian antiquities, like Karl Mark, whose reputation and influence has declined steadily over the years. Both lived at a time when it was fashionable to produce a great synthetic vision, one that captured life and history in all its bewildering diversity in a convenient explanatory net; historical materialism for Marx, functionalism for Spencer. But whereas Marx looked for 'collective' solutions to the problems of the time Spencer was the apotheosis of an old Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, one which sought to remove all artificial constraints to 'natural progress.' The measure of his importance can be gauged from his entry in the 1912 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography;

Spencer's place in the history of thought must be ranked high. His influence in the latter half of the nineteenth century was immense: indeed it has woven itself into our modern methods of thinking that its driving revolutionary energy is nearly spent; there is little likelihood of its being hereafter renewed. It was the best synthesis of knowledge of his times.

Ah, but who now reads Herbert Spencer? Not many, I think. Does he have an abiding relevance? Perhaps, particularly in concepts of laissez-faire, in his belief that state intervention in social and economic life more often makes matters worse, not better. But what of the grander vision of 'Order and Progress', who now has faith in those?

Sartre in 68

Jean Paul Sartre was in the middle of writing his treatise on Gustav Flaubert at the time, and generally more preoccupied with the events of 1848 than those of 1968! In the words of one of his best biographers "Fully absorbed by Restoration France, the riots of 1831, and the revolutions of 1848, Sartre was at once present and quiet absent from the events of 1968" (Sartre: a Life by Annie Cohen-Solal, 1985, p. 471)

There he was, coming in his most frightening form: the slightly worn-out fellow traveller and, worst of all, an old bourgeois humanist! "As for me, nearly two years after May 1968, he later explained, "I was still trying to work out what had happened. I could not quite work out what they wanted and what role old fogeys like me were expected to play." I can still hear the laughter of the Gods. :-))

Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is a work of considerable analytical power, which penetrates right to the source of all moral concepts. Here are two of my favourite aphorisms-

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.

The latter might best be illustrated by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. In Ibsen's play a doctor takes a principled stand against the collective 'good' of his local community, earning much hatred in the process, but he continues to defend the truth notwithstanding, because '...the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.'

Wittgenstein at Cambridge

There are still stories circulating in Cambridge about Wittgenstein's time. There was a bizarre, almost Monty Python-like quality to his lectures. His students were obliged to bring along deck-chairs, on which they all sat in absolute silence while the professor remained immersed in thought. Every so often this silence would be punctuated as Wittgenstein, in the midst of deep labours, would deliver some idea! He would on occasions turn on one of his students and start a rigorous intellectual interrogation, a process that has been likened to being under examination by the Spanish Inquisition.

He had the capacity, by sheer strength of his intellect, and his relentlessness in pursuit of a point, to reduce his audience to a state of terror. The only person with sufficient courage to stand up to him was Alan Turing. Wittgenstein maintained in one of his lectures that a system-such as logic or mathematics-could remain valid even if it contained a contradiction. Turing rejected this, saying there was no point in building a bridge with mathematics that contained a hidden contradiction, otherwise the structure might collapse. Wittgenstein responded by saying that such empirical considerations had no place in logic, but Turing persisted. How I would love to have been present!

I Think Therefore I Am; or I Think I Think I Am!

I read this in Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy";

Next I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew that I was a substance whose whole nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this I-that is, the soul by which I am what I am-is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is even if the body did not exist.

In the end Descartes 'resolves' the whole problem of the mind-matter interaction by an act, it might be thought, of intellectual bad-faith; by saying that it is a mystery, only understandable to God.

Picture, if you will, the following images. There is a bewigged philosopher in a pensive mood. A bubble appears from his mind with a question mark. “Ah”, says the sage, “I think therefore I am.” The said philosopher continues in his pensive mood. Another bubble appears. This time nothing comes. A look of panic appears on the thinker’s face. The bubble only contains an exclamation mark. And then-POOF!-the thinker vanishes from the scene, wig and all! :))

Time as Experience

Henry Bergson's seminal Time and Free Will distinguishes scientific knowledge of ourselves from our own experience of ourselves. The division here is between time as a spatial concept, a succession of separate and distinct events, and time as a living experience, a flow or a stream, uniting the present with the past and the future. According to Bergson, this flow resists any kind of measurement. The notion of 'time experience' was to be highly influential, used by Marcel Proust, among others, in À la recherché du temps perdu.

In his work on phenomenology, Edmund Husserl deepened Bergson's work by analysing exactly how time appeared in consciousness. Under the influence of both Bergson and Husserl, in 1927 Martin Heidegger advanced the notion that Dasein-subjective existence-has its being in all three temporalities; its past, its present and its possible futures.

God is Dead

I read again the story of the hermit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His life is based upon God's presence. Every action he performs is in praise of the deity. If God is dead then the hermit is dancing in a void, under the illusion that he has an audience. The saint, it might be said, has lost his witness, the only thing that hitherto gave life meaning. But it is far more significant than that; for when God died "...sinners died with him." They died as sinners because their acts no longer conferred any such identity.

Let me put this another way: with the death of God the world has lost its moral centre, the pole from which all meaning was derived. There are no more Saints just as there are no more Sinners. There are only questions, always questions. For Karl Jaspers, taking up Nietzsche's baton, the death of God is a historical situation through which humanity must pass on towards new forms of meaning. Nobody can escape the death of God, atheist or believer. And therein lies the most delicious of ironies!

Sartre and the Lobster

All of the juicy details of Jean Paul Sartre's flirtations with drugs are to be found in Simone de Beauvoir's memoir, The Prime of Life. Sartre's experience reminds me somewhat of that of Thomas de Quincy in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Both men ended being pursued by demons, though Sartre's took a particularly disturbing form. The effects of the mescaline, he told de Beauvoir, were like being trapped in a surrealist text. He was chased through the streets by a giant lobster, and huge devil-fish swarmed over his body; de Beauvoir’s shoes turned into beetles; an umbrella became a vulture. These hallucinations lasted for four months, during which time Sartre was convinced he was going mad-"I'm on the edge of a chronic hallucinatory psychosis."

Ah, well; just fancy: being pursued down the streets of Paris by a lobster! Makes a change, I suppose, from the usual Lotharios! :-))