Gravity and grace | Emptiness and compensation | Accepting the emptiness | Freeing from attachment | Filling imagination | Giving up time | Desiring without an object | Self | De-creation | Disappearance | Necessity and submission | Illusion | Idolatry | Love | Evil | Misfortune | Violence | The cross | Scales and levers | Impossibility | Contradiction | The distance between necessity and goodness | Chance | The one we should love is absent | Purification of atheism | Attention and will | Taming | Intelligence and grace | Reading | The ring of Gyges | The meaning of the universe | The intermediate | Beauty | Algebra | Social stigma | The great beast | Israel | Social harmony | The mysticism of labor

Translator's Note

“We should prefer a real hell to a virtual paradise.”
bound by gravity or blind necessity
A look at human misery

Born in 1909 into a Jewish bourgeois family in Paris, and dying of malnutrition in a British nursing home in 1943, Simone Weil's life trajectory was quite complex, difficult to fit into a single framework.


While working as a high school philosophy teacher, he joined the socialist movement to support workers' struggles, and although he was a radical activist who went to factories and did direct labor, he insisted that communism, like fascism, was a system that oppressed humans, and that the nature of power did not change even if the weak took power. After having a spiritual experience, he devoted himself to religion, but he kept a thorough distance from the secular church, and tried to explain the mystery of faith through Greek tragedy.
He was also extremely hostile to Jewish history and Judaism, despite his participation in the resistance as a French Jew under Nazi rule.


Just as the different aspects of Bayu's life seemed difficult to converge into one, reactions to Bayu were also polarized.
Those who focused on Bayu's political side tended to focus on his writings before he was 'influenced' by religion, interpreting his later preoccupation with religion as a result of pessimism or psychological instability stemming from his wartime experiences. Those who were drawn to Bayu's religious side tended to dismiss his political experiences as a rite of passage and read his texts without any political color.
However, recently, the prevailing interpretation is that these two aspects of Beyu are not mutually exclusive but closely connected.

In particular, 『Gravity and Grace』 was initially read more by readers seeking religious meaning as it was considered a book containing important ideas of Weil's theology, but recently, it has been reinterpreted from a complex perspective centered on the ideas that Weil uniquely redefines, such as gravity, grace, necessity, chance, violence, love, evil, beauty, and de-creation.


Because this text was not completed with publication in mind during Beuy's lifetime, there are many points where it is difficult to determine how much of it is the author's intention and how much is the compiler's intervention.
Adding to this the formal characteristic of listing the chapters, even though it is composed of very concise sentences, there are times when the meaning comes across as ambiguous.
Yet, Bayu's voice resonates through the air like the voice of a prophet, powerfully drawing people in.


How does that moment of freedom from gravity come?
“Grace comes only where there is room to receive it.”

“All natural movements of the soul are governed by laws similar to the laws of gravity in the material world.
Gravity and Grace, which opens with the famous sentence, “Grace is the only exception,” tells of the misfortune of humans bound by gravity or blind necessity and the light of grace that contrasts with it.

Weil says we must reject religion for its solace in trying to explain away suffering or believing in a divine providence that governs all things.
“Explaining the reason for suffering is a consolation for that suffering.
Pain should not have an explanation.
That is the highest value of suffering given to the innocent.” Suffering must be acknowledged as ‘reality’ and accepted as such.
Likewise, he points out that revolutions that promise a world liberated from the belief in progress or blind necessity also hinder a clear view of reality and prevent humanity from confronting its limitations.
According to Weil, “necessity is by its very nature far from imagination.” “We should prefer a real hell to an imaginary paradise.”

Through suffering, Beyou demands that we pay attention to our condition.
Only by realizing that we are limited beings and emptying our ego as subjects can we create an empty space where we can accept something.
“Grace fills.
But grace comes only where there is room to receive it.” Then, a small possibility arises here.
“Man can escape the laws of the world only for a very brief, flash-like moment.
“In the moment of stillness, in the moment of contemplation, in the moment of mental emptiness, in the moment of accepting the moral emptiness, in such moments man can attain the supernatural.”

It would be difficult to accept today Weil's argument, which emphasizes facing the tragic condition of humanity without any comfort or promise of salvation, and denies the power of human agency and the possibility of actively transforming the world.
Her reasoning only makes sense in the context of a time when the rationality and progress that European society had long believed in had crumbled in the midst of an absurd war.


However, the intensity with which Beyu, who devoted all values ​​to the search amidst the collapse of everything, may be even more urgent for us today, who live in the solid fortress of everyday life, held even more strongly by gravity.
Perhaps it is time to use Weil's ideas about the light of grace and the "brief flashes of light" that "can escape the laws of gravity," to think about the possibility of other worlds, "against Weil."


Other stories

1.
Deborah Nelson, in Tough Enough, says that Albert Camus was “a literary practitioner of Weil.”
The appearance of the priest Paneloux in Camus's 'The Plague' and the content of his sermons seem to be significant references to Weil.
In particular, we can find similar passages in Gravity and Grace in relation to the lecture that the arrival of the plague itself is seen as evidence of God's mercy, and the question of how to accept the suffering of children.


2.
Anne Carson titles her book "Decreation," a concept she centrally discusses in Gravity and Grace, and develops her thinking based on this concept.


3.
The novelist Annie Ernaux, who, like Weil, also taught high school, wrote in Time that she was annoyed that students often confused Simone Weil, the "thinker," with Simone Weil, the "politician."
Ernaux confesses that in 1974, after seeing the politician Veil struggle alone in a parliament full of men to pass a bill legalizing abortion, he decided to forgive the students for their misunderstanding.