A person unable to be classified is an annoyance to collectivists since they disturb the status quo and Simone did that. But look at the results of being classified. Greta has classified me as an evangelist hungering for the Apocalypse. So the secular progressives argue on the basis of shallow perspectives. Simone’s life and ideas invite to do more. It wasn’t intended. She just lived as a little known seeker of truth. Yet something truly human touched the lives of influential people and gradually her essays and private letters were published. Now she is known loved and hated around the world. We may not understand her but many feel compelled to contemplate the depth what we strive to understand. The secular progressives have their labels and scapegoats and the universalists feel the value of the essence of religion which transcends the attraction to pettiness. Consider how the author in this article describes the attraction to Simone Weil. As offensive as being beyond secular classification is to some, it is appreciated by others. I am happy to be one of the others. There is something more valuable than attacking and creating scapegoats. IMO it is opening to and experiencing the reality and significance of the human condition. It is far beyond the limitations of the secular progressive agenda
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 8ecb78c45a
TO GABRIELLA Fiori, Simone Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range." To David McLellan, Weil was a "practitioner of a lucid and active pessimism." She was "peculiar" and "the patron saint of all outsiders."
Then there is Weil on herself: a woman afflicted by "the contagion of my inadequacy and wretchedness. I never read the story of the barren fig tree without trembling. I think that is a portrait of me."
So which is Simone Weil? No answers are guaranteed, not even to readers who go through these newest biographies, both as thick as leafy trees with the ideas and times of a woman who is all but beyond classification. I've read, I think, most of what's in English by Simone Weil, but exactly when it looks as if she is definable she slips away. A pacifist, Weil enlisted in the anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War. Claiming to have a "natural laziness," she thrived on manual labor. She was fervent, believed in God and stated "I love the Catholic liturgy hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies," but she never joined the Catholic Church. She wrote movingly about love and lived uncompanioned.
At her death in 1943 in a sanitorium in Kent, England, Weil was a 34-year-old French Jew who had seen few of her essays published and fewer still of her spiritual or physical sufferings eased. By the late 1940s, her articles and letters were collected in Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace. Posthumous publication continues, from The Need For Roots (1952) and Selected Essays (1962) to The Simone Weil Reader (1977) and Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986).
As all this emerged -- a literary trickling while she lived and a flow that became a torrent after her death -- Weil attracted a following that included Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, T.S. Eliot and Thomas Merton. Camus, who edited Weil's Oppression and Liberation, wrote of it that "Western social and political thought has not produced anything more penetrating and more prophetic since Marx." In the English introduction to The Need For Roots, Eliot said, "This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed in the life of the hustings and the legislative assembly; books the effect of which, we can only hope, will become apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation."…………………………………
You have no idea about my inner life. It's an example of how shamelessly you pull claims out of your arse and try to package them as Nick's Profound Truths. You did not address my point, just rambled on a tangent. Try again.