The Simone Weil reader

Format:

Book

Title:

The Simone Weil reader

Uniform Title:

Works. Selections. English. 1977

Author:

Weil, Simone, 1909-1943, author.

ISBN:

9780679506560

9780679506737

9780918825018

9780880290029

Publication:

New York : McKay, [1977]

Physical Description:

xlii, 529 pages ; 23 cm

Contents:

Part I : A new saintliness -- Spiritual autobiography -- Sketch of contemporary social life -- Reflections on the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God -- Factory work -- Letter to Georges Bernanos -- What is a Jew? a letter to a Minister of Education -- Letter to Déodat Roché -- Letter to Joë Bousquet -- Letter to Maurice Schumann -- Last thoughts -- Part II : Prelude to politics -- Analysis of oppression -- The Iliad, poem of might -- Uprootedness and nationhood -- Part III : Language and thought -- The power of words -- The responsibility of writers -- Morality and literature -- Scientism -- a review -- Freedom of opinion -- Human personality -- Part IV : Criteria of wisdom -- Decreation -- Love -- Metaxu -- Friendship -- Equality -- Beauty -- Evil -- The great beast -- Part V : Paths of meditation -- Two poems: the threshold -- The stars -- Come with me -- Contemplation of the divine -- The things of the world -- The father's silence -- The love of God and affliction -- Forms of the implicit love of God -- Concerning the Our Father.

Summary:

The immediate and guiding aim of this book is to introduce the contemporary reader to the work and thought of Simone Weil.

Subject(s):

Philosophy.

Added Author:

Panichas, George A., 1930-2010,

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Monmouth Public Library	194 Weil, S. 1977	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Author Notes

Born in Paris, Weil came from a highly intellectual family. After a brilliant academic career at school and university, she taught philosophy interspersed with periods of hard manual labor on farms and in factories. Throughout her life she combined sophisticated and scholarly interests with an extreme moral intensity and identification with the poor and oppressed. A twentieth-century Pascal (see Vol. 4), this ardently spiritual woman was a social thinker, sensitive to the crises of modern humanity. Jewish by birth, Christian by vocation, and Greek by aesthetic choice, Weil has influenced religious thinking profoundly in the years since her death. "Humility is the root of love," she said as she questioned traditional theologians and held that the apostles had badly interpreted Christ's teaching. Christianity was, she thought, to blame for the heresy of progress. During World War II, Weil starved herself to death, refusing to eat while victims of the war still suffered. (Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A purely human courage is required to renounce the whole of the temporal to gain the eternal,"" wrote Kierkegaard. He could have been describing Simone Weft who, in this extensive collection of her writings (drawn from her major works, her letters, and occasional papers), is revealed as a consciousness aspiring through a perpetual calvary to mystical ascent. ""Faith,"" Weft writes, ""is the indispensable condition."" But Well's faith--like her prose--searing in its power, its integrity, its humility, even, perhaps oddly, in its final simplicity, is the foundation of a spiritual quest shaped in paradoxical complexity and burned in anguish. Born a Jew of well-to-do parents, she identified with and consecrated her life to Christianity and the disenfranchised. Her social writing displays shrewdness and encompassing erudition of such magnitude that Camus considered ""Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression"" unequalled after Marx. But her writing--now aphoristic, now lyrical, and nearly always incandescent in brilliance--increasingly reflects her obsession with spiritual perfection, attempting to reconcile divine perfection and the eternal with human misery and the temporal. But this is far too simple. Well's complexity is better suggested by an admiring friend, Gustav Thibon, who wrote: ""Simone Well oscillates between a pessimism which reduces man to nothingness and an optimism which raises him prematurely to divinity."" The recent Petrement biography lends interest and currency to this discerning compilation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.