Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force

8. Neither Victim nor Executioner

210 C H A P T E R E I G H T Neither Victim nor Executioner The worst possible betrayal always consists in willingly subordinating oneself to the state machinery of the administration, the police, and the military and serving it by trampling on one’s own and others’ human values. Weil, “Reflections on War” Weil’s thinking is occasionally treated as idealistic and out of touch with the reality of human interaction. However, three mid-twentiethcentury moral philosophers of very diverse backgrounds and cultures paid explicit homage to her insights into force and their applicability to contemporary social conditions. In so doing, they also signaled implicit respect for her faith in the existence of a powerful “good” beyond material existence. The American editor Dwight Macdonald and the French author Albert Camus recognized in Weil a kindred spirit who agonized at the thought of others’ suffering. Their mutual friend the Italian humanist Nicola Chiaromonte was instrumental in bringing Macdonald and Camus together in New York in 1946. He had already brought Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” from France and to the attention of Macdonald. In this final chapter, the ways each man fused Weil’s philosophy into his understanding of human nature and subsequently introduced her writings to a wider readership in America and France in the mid–twentieth century serve as examples of her relevance to the twenty-first century. Neither Victim nor Executioner 211 In the framework of World War II, each of the three men wrestled with the same question that preoccupied Weil: How did one keep moral values from disintegrating in the struggle against more powerful brute forces? Although all of them esteemed Weil’s intense assent to supernatural love, they did not share her confidence in supernatural grace. Nevertheless, they did not temper their admiration for her keen observations of human nature and for her unflagging respect for the individual person. They believed profoundly in common values that were accessible to all human beings. Though they were avowed rationalists , their writings imply a hesitant openness to the existence of a nonmaterial positive force for good in the universe. These unique individuals were endowed with strong independent personalities and deep empathy for the suffering of others. In the autonomy of their thinking and the fervor of their dedication, they had risen above what Weil called the collective beast mentality. Her words resonated profoundly with their understanding of human existence. Each had incorporated into his philosophy of life ideas that Weil had brought to the fore, particularly those concepts that underpinned moral consideration for others and revealed the damage that violence does to the human psyche. To the brief encounter in New York, in the first spring after World War II, each man brought indelible impressions of the terrible wartime violence. Their personal observations of human behavior had undermined prior optimistic expectations that humankind would live in greater harmony, and they groped for sources of hope for the future. The international scene was far from promising: the immediate joy in the United States over the declaration of peace had given way to ominous forebodings of a Third World War. Tensions due to the cold war were enabling manipulative political leaders to exploit people’s fears. Even after victory was declared, the governmental restriction of civil liberties persisted, creating a climate of distrust. In their common concern over how to maintain moral values when confronted with immoral abusive force—social, political, or physical—the three thinkers persistently tried to alert their readers to the dangers of submitting to irrational fear and abandoning precious freedoms. But their energies had been sapped by the struggle against the dehumanizing behavior 212 Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force they had recently observed. Camus, in particular, appeared worn out by his Resistance fighting and by disagreements with fellow partisans who thirsted for postwar vengeance. Each man, independently coming upon selections of Weil’s writings long before she gained public recognition as a thinker and writer, had the immediate reaction of discovering a voice that spoke the truth. Despite the recent wartime savagery, her thought inspired in them some hope for the future of humanity. In France, Camus had read a few of her earlier works published in limited-circulation journals but had made little note of them. Dwight Macdonald was impressed by her essay “Reflections on War,” which...