The Aesthetic and the Spiritual Attitude in Learning: Lessons from Simone Weil

The beautiful is something on which we can fix our attention…. The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful.

—Simone Weil

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Introduction

At the end of the Phaedrus, Socrates suggests to his friend Phaedrus that they should offer a prayer to the gods before they returned to the city from the country, where they had gone to discuss the notion of love.¹ To which suggestion Phaedrus replies: "By all means." Socrates then proceeds to offer a prayer of inner beauty and of inner wholeness, asking: "Beloved Pan … give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one…. Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me."² In the prayer, Socrates can turn his "gaze intensely on [God] … receiving from him character and disposition, so far as man can participate in God."³

The words "prayer" and "gaze," which are scattered throughout the Phaedrus, are sufficient indication that Socrates regards them as important in his philosophy of education. Education, for Socrates, demands a listening space—"some quiet spot"⁴—where the self hears itself and is drawn on a journey of ascent "to things higher still,"⁵ where it comes to "live in light always,"⁶ and where it comes to cultivate quiet prayer or contemplation: "And then we [behold] the beatific vision and [are] initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed."⁷ But this beatific vision is the privilege of those who have embraced the mystery "of true love."⁸ This is the love that renders us as good and as wise as God, who "is what He is."⁹

A twentieth-century philosopher who, like Socrates, attaches the greatest importance to prayer, the gaze, and love is Simone Weil (1909–1943). Possessed of a broad knowledge of Greek, Christian, Renaissance, and modern thought, as well as of the Old and the New Testaments, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tao, Buddhism, and the social thought of Marx and Durkheim, among others, Weil sought to reconcile these various currents into a vision of existence that is both Christian and non-Christian. Throughout her works, Weil speaks of the spiritual as one who is outside the Christian faith, and she speaks of dogma as one who is outside the Church. "I cannot help still wondering," Weil writes to Father Perrin on January 19, 1942, "whether in these days when so large a proportion of humanity is submerged in materialism, God does not want there to be some men and women … outside the Church."¹⁰ It is as an "outsider" that Weil makes her major contribution to both Catholic Christianity and to education.¹¹ In particular, Weil brings to education the same practice of attention and of solitude that form the very core of her spiritual experience. For Weil, learning comes more often in that which we merely look at and in that which we merely leave unsaid than in that which we actively pursue and say. Learning, Weil writes, is an "exercise of the intelligence, which consists of looking" (GG, 109);¹² and looking, she goes on to say, is the same as prayer (GG, 106):¹³

The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest…. Prayer being only attention in its pure form and studies being a form of gymnastics of the attention, each school exercise should be a refraction of spiritual life. There must be method in it. A certain way of doing a Latin prose, a certain way of tackling a problem in geometry (and not just any way) make up a system of gymnastics of the attention...