Simone Weil (review)

It is tempting to reduce a great mind to one's own limited categories, to show that geniuses have feet of clay, to use the ever-ready categories of psychology to make sense of what eludes us. Palle Yourgrau has resisted these temptations: he has rendered Simone Weil less opaque while respecting the mystery at the heart of every person. His goal was not to write yet another biography, adding minor details to an already well-researched life, but to let the reader encounter Weil's thinking. This he has achieved. He debunks three stereotypes typically applied to Weil: of an anorexic, a self-hating Jew, and a sexually repressed woman. Yourgrau's analysis of Weil's relationship to Judaism is probably his greatest and most controversial contribution. Is Weil anti-Semitic, since she refused to be categorized as a Jew? Yet what defines her as Jewish if she rejects the Jewish religion? Her ancestry? A connection to Ancient Israel can hardly be traced. To perceive her traits and manner of thinking as Jewish is a stereotypically racist approach, which Yourgrau rejects. That Weil should have accepted her Judaism because of Hitler's persecution — like Hannah Arendt — means giving Hitler the power to determine her racial identity. But should she not have sided with the Jews out of solidarity, at the very least? She did to some extent, although this is little known. It is not Weil's critique of the disturbing passages in the Hebrew Bible that Yourgrau challenges, but her dismissal of the Jewish religion and culture as a whole. She, who believed that a religion could only be known from the inside, could not claim such knowledge for herself. Her niece, Sylvie, to whose family biography Yourgrau refers extensively (one may wonder if Sylvie's memoirs deserve such prominence, since she did not know her aunt and her resentment cannot but skew her vision), returned to her ancestors' faith. In a world engulfed by neotribalism, neocollectivism, and an obsession with race, it is not surprising to Yourgrau that Weil homes in on certain passages of the Bible where a Chosen People proves its racial destiny with the power of arms. What God is asking of them — to massacre people — her contemporaries were doing in the name of History. Yet, as Yourgrau rightly states, Weil fails to see that God may well choose a nation whose mission is holy, although it may itself be found wanting. Christianity's position that Christ, as the fullness of revelation, sheds light on the Old Testament is not Yourgrau's, although he is sympathetic to Christianity. Christian Platonism, Yourgrau believes, is at the heart of Weil's thought. For Plato, the just man must exist for there to be relatively just men. He must suffer greatly for his justice to manifest itself. Christ, foreshadowed by Job, fits those criteria. However, although he may be God's incarnation, so could Krishna. Hence Yourgrau is sympathetic to Weil's hypothesis of multiple incarnations, thereby joining her in her more eccentric, heterodox musings.