[HN Gopher] Simone Weil's Great Awakening
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Simone Weil's Great Awakening
Author : enskied
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-07-12 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| https://archive.vn/SuXsZ
| zoso wrote:
| I didnt expect to see Simone Weil on the frontpage of hacker
| news!
| jbotz wrote:
| Curious... the article starts out by saying: "And the task of
| disseminating her canon and her influence is still, almost
| unbelievably, only just beginning" and then never mentiones the
| question of the copyright on her works. Simone Weil died 80 years
| ago, so her work should be out of copyright by now, but I can't
| find any of it on-line.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/weil_simone/pesanteur_e...
|
| This seems to be the French text of "Gravity and Grace". The
| English translation dates from 1997; her other works are even
| less known and less likely to have sufficiently old
| translations.
|
| Copyright really does screw over lesser-known philosophers.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Simone_Weil
|
| The translators having their own copyright is likely the issue.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/weil-a...
| thebooktocome wrote:
| This text is definitely not in the public domain.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Weil's work on attention made me look at religion with entirely
| new eyes. Now I think I have truly only began the work I need to
| do to maintain clarity of thought while practicing attention.
|
| For all those like me that don't have the necessary expertise to
| assimilate the original philosophical texts, I would recommend
| the excellent work done by Stephen West in his podcast
| Philosophize This. You might need to consume the work from David
| Hume onwards up until Simone Weil to get a good understanding, if
| like me you had no previous formal instruction in philosophy, but
| it's totally worth the effort.
| norir wrote:
| I think an interested reader can get a lot of Gravity & Grace
| (which I recently completed) without much background in
| philosophy so long as one accepts that they won't understand
| _everything_ she writes. Given the mystical nature of some of
| her work, complete understanding is likely impossible anyway,
| but that doesn't take away from the rewards of studying the
| work. That being said, the Iliad and Bhagavad Gita seem as
| important to her work as more recent philosophers like Hume.
| philips wrote:
| Is there a translation or edition you recommend?
| obliteratus wrote:
| [dead]
| hprotagonist wrote:
| may i recommend dorothy day as the shot/chaser combo thinker to
| Weil?
|
| doxis needs praxis, and vice versa.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Neat, thanks!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Simone Weil for Americans_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26977605 - April 2021 (5
| comments)
|
| _Simone Weil and the Need for Roots_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26908295 - April 2021 (70
| comments)
|
| _The Mathematician and the Mystic: Andre and Simone Weil_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494566 - June 2020 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Logic of the Rebel: On Simone Weil and Albert Camus_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22564898 - March 2020 (3
| comments)
|
| _Simone Weil is the patron saint of anomalous persons_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188334 - June 2019 (13
| comments)
| zoogeny wrote:
| > Yet for her, the primary duty of the philosophical person, and
| particularly a politically active one, remained rigorous self-
| examination - guided by the conviction that true moral
| enlightenment was only to be found beyond the spheres of man-made
| languages.
|
| I've been thinking about this a lot recently. The reference to
| Camus here is interesting to me since it is in the context of
| Absurdity that I consider this. A paradoxical desire to think the
| unthinkable, or to know the unknowable.
|
| > Weil was convinced that in the depths of our existence, it is
| not concepts and arguments that define us as moral beings, but
| concrete experiences. ... More significantly, for Weil, we are
| beings moved to action not, in the first instance, by concepts
| but by forces beyond ourselves: experiences of suffering, love,
| profound insight or disturbance, whose origins Weil did not shy
| away from calling transcendent, even divine.
|
| There is something of phenomenology to this idea.
|
| > The true achievement of emancipation, Weil thought, lay in
| liberation not of the self but from the self. Reflective self-
| empowerment should make way for a pre-reflective alertness to the
| beauty and vulnerability of life. This leads to an active care
| for the world we share with other beings - it made no difference
| to her whether it was named "nature" or "God".
|
| This is very powerful thought and very reflective of many
| spiritual traditions.
|
| > In Weil's view, we need transformative experiences that arise
| when we become attentive to the natural beauty and
| interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such
| revelatory forms of attention "praying": "At its highest stage
| attention is the same as prayer. It assumes faith and love. It is
| associated with a freedom other than that of choice, which occurs
| at the level of the will - grace. Being so attentive that one no
| longer has a choice."
|
| This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in
| exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to
| reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception
| of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious
| context.
|
| Although it isn't immediately related - I think this might be the
| most powerful use of AI. Instead of attempting to create the most
| intelligent and infallible oracle, we might instead create the
| most perfect mirror to reflect ourselves. And in that way we may
| see the "I" at the center of self dissolve.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| > In Weil's view, we need transformative experiences that arise
| when we become attentive to the natural beauty and
| interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such
| revelatory forms of attention "praying"
|
| I don't think it's an accident that many people consider God to
| be in their gardens.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Meta comment, but man the patterns are so annoying now .. I open
| the link, see a giant cookie preference dialog opening up on top
| of the content, have to click into it to customize cookies,
| figure out how this particular site decided to implement the
| options, ensure everything except necessary cookies is disabled,
| and OK the dialog away. Now I'm actually let into the article - I
| read the first sentence, then scroll down to read more and find
| out I only get three lines of the article, and have to either
| register or pay to get more. No, no I don't think I will, and
| I'll never be back.
| Panoramix wrote:
| That's nothing, most sites nowadays have all the above plus
| some advertisement banner plus some video on autoplay and when
| you get past all that, in the remaining 5% of your screen that
| is still dedicated for its intended purpose, you realize that
| the content is 80% SEO and 20% advertisement. Yesterday I was
| searching for a recipe and instead I contracted digital herpes.
|
| The internet is broken.
| aarpmcgee wrote:
| Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article on Simone Weil
| [1]. I haven't read it yet, but now I plan to.
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| A little off topic, but after we talked about Simone Weil here on
| HN a couple of years ago I bought a book about her. HN sends me
| off in interesting directions!
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