Simone Weil was a Jewish-born French spiritual philosopher, and was also a political activist with communist and anarchist leanings. She studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and taught philosophy at a secondary school. She took a year off to work as a manual worker at a factory...
On Love

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

On Love

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a Jewish-born French spiritual philosopher, and was also a political activist with communist and anarchist leanings. She studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and taught philosophy at a secondary school. She took a year off to work as a manual worker at a factory   in order to connect with the working class. She later participated in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, until she was burnt in a cooking accident and left Spain. While recuperating in Assisi, Italy, she had spiritual experiences, and became attracted to mysticism and Christianity, although she never converted and continued to value other spiritual traditions. During World War II, while working for the French resistance in England, she did not want to eat more than what French people could eat under German occupation. Weakened, she contracted tuberculosis, and died at the age of 34 from cardiac arrest.

Gravity and Grace (1940-1942) is probably Simone Weil’s most popular book. It is a philosophical-spiritual collection of fragments that emphasize self-negation, purification, suffering, goodness and beauty. The following passages are slightly adapted from the chapter “Love.” In this chapter she explains that pure love does not wish to possess, does not want to get satisfaction, does not demand or influence. It only appreciates the fact that the beloved is there – or, in Weil’s language, it only wants the beloved to exist. Love makes you fully aware of your beloved’s existence. In this sense, loving another person is like loving a work of art.

Loving you means wanting you to exist

Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized.

Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything. This is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. This is why beauty and reality are identical. This is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

[…]

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that, through a bodily appearance, we have beenloving an imaginary person. This is much more terrible than death, because death does not prevent the beloved from having lived.

That is the punishment for feeding love on imagination.

It is an act of cowardice to seek from the people we love or to wish to give to them) a consolation that is different from what art-works give us. Art-works help us just by the fact that they exist. To love and to be loved make this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But this existence should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as the object of our thoughts. If there is any reason for wanting to be understood, it is not for our own sake but for the sake of the other person, in order that our thoughts may exist for him.

Everything in us which is low or second-rate revolts against purity and needs, because it wants to save its own life, to corrupt this purity.

To corrupt is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is what we cannot wish to change. To assume power over something is to corrupt it. To possess is to corrupt.

To love purely is to agree to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and what we love.

[…]

[…] This is the price of chaste love. Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and to the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that somebody would exist, he exists: what more is there to desire? The beloved person is then naked and real, not hidden by an imaginary future. The miser never looks at his treasure without imagining it n times larger. It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness.

Thus, in love there is chastity or the lack of chastity depending on whether the desire is or is not directed towards the future.

In this sense, the love we devote to a dead person is perfectly pure (assuming we don’t turn this love towards a future pseudo-immortality). Because it is a desire for a life which is finished, which can no longer give anything new. We desire that the dead person would have existed, and he had existed.