Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Simone Weil: The Woman Who Wouldn’t Look Away

She was thin even by the standards of saints.

In her final months, Simone Weil weighed about seventy pounds. “Tubercular,” said the doctors. “Starvation,” said others. Maybe both. She died in exile in Kent, England, in 1943, having refused to eat more than the average French citizen under German occupation. This wasn’t a hunger strike. This was solidarity. Her stomach, like the rest of her, didn’t believe in exceptions.

But let’s rewind. The body isn’t the beginning of Simone’s story — it’s the unavoidable end. The real story is in the jagged arc between thought and flesh, idea and action. Most philosophers keep to the first half. Simone Weil was the rare mind who dared the second.

She was born in 1909 into a Jewish bourgeois family in Paris — bookish, skeptical, secular. Her parents adored her. Her older brother, André Weil, would go on to become one of the century’s greatest mathematicians. Simone, for her part, claimed to have stopped eating sugar at age six “in protest of the soldiers suffering in the trenches.” No one asked her to. She just decided: if the world is suffering, she would not indulge. That was her logic, and it never changed.

Even as a child, she was unbearable in the best way. She read Pythagoras for fun and asked questions no adult could answer. At the Lycée Henri-IV, she out-argued her teachers and led student strikes. At the École Normale Supérieure — the intellectual forge of France — she studied philosophy under Alain (Émile Chartier) and graduated first in her class, just ahead of Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir would later recall Weil as “a genius,” then added, “Weil was one of the only people who ever made me feel I was not intelligent.”

Unlike Beauvoir, Simone had no use for glamour. She wore shapeless clothes, never combed her hair, chain-smoked cigarettes she sometimes rolled with one hand while grading papers. Her students called her “the nun.” She called herself “a soldier in the war against injustice.” She meant it literally.

In the early 1930s, Simone gave up her post as a philosophy teacher and took a job on the factory floor at Alsthom, grinding metal, standing twelve hours a day beside roaring machinery. She wanted to understand the worker’s life — not from theory, but from the ache in her back, the burn of oil on her skin. Her diaries from this time read like dispatches from a moral battlefield: “The machines brutalize the soul.” “I understand now what it means to be a thing.” Her fellow workers were confused. Why would a teacher choose this?

That was Simone’s maddening beauty — she did the things no one else believed possible.

Her experience in the factories nearly broke her. She collapsed. She never fully recovered. But she emerged with a clarity that would haunt the rest of her life: intellectual knowledge was a pale ghost beside lived suffering. Real compassion meant exposure. Not sympathy from a distance, but a radical proximity to pain.

In the years that followed, Simone drifted like a prophet through the political fault lines of Europe. She supported striking miners. Taught in rural schools. Traveled to Germany under Hitler — “to see with my own eyes,” she said. She marched to Spain during the Civil War to fight Franco’s fascists, but her commanders quickly removed her from the front after she nearly shot a fellow soldier by accident. Her clumsiness saved her life.

She returned to France sick, idealistic, disillusioned. She’d seen too many ideologies make monsters of men. Her politics grew more complex, more tragic. She flirted with anarchism, then Christianity, but refused to convert — “I cannot belong to any Church that would accept me.” She read the Gita, loved Laozi, quoted Homer like scripture. She rejected Zionism but loved the Hebrew prophets. She had no tribe, only a trembling fidelity to justice — wherever it hurt most.

And then, the mystical turn.

In 1938, in the tiny chapel at Solesmes Abbey, Simone had what she called a "real contact with Christ." She wept during the reading of a George Herbert poem. “Love bade me welcome,” it begins. It was the first time, she said, someone had offered to feed her without asking her to earn it. Grace undid her. She began writing spiritual notebooks that pulse with raw fire — metaphysical longing married to social realism. God, for Weil, wasn’t comfort. God was the abyss, the void that opens up when you pay attention long enough to someone else's suffering.

Her concept of attention — radical, muscular, relentless — became her signature. To truly attend to the world, she argued, was the purest form of prayer. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same as prayer,” she wrote. “It presupposes faith and love.” It’s easy to quote. Harder to practice. She believed attention could redeem the soul of the world.

But war was coming. Europe was cracking open. Simone’s Jewishness made her a target. She fled to the south of France, then to New York, then to London. In London, she joined the Free French resistance and wrote feverishly — treatises, letters, plans for the postwar world. She proposed training nurses to parachute behind enemy lines — “Red Cross commandos.” The resistance said no. She grew increasingly ill, and increasingly unwilling to eat.

Some say she was suicidal. But to say that is to miss the deeper, stranger truth. Simone didn’t want to die. She just didn’t want to be exempt from the suffering of others. She believed anything else was hypocrisy. She didn’t believe in safe havens, only shared burdens.

There’s a moment, recounted by a friend, when Weil, too weak to walk, was lying in bed and still asking about the food rations in occupied France. “If they are hungry, I cannot eat.” She wasn’t performing. She meant it.

Simone Weil died on August 24, 1943, at the age of thirty-four. The British coroner listed the cause of death as “cardiac failure due to inanition.” A clinical phrase for a woman who simply refused to make peace with a world of cruelty.

She left behind a stack of notebooks, essays, and fragments that would become, posthumously, some of the most celebrated philosophical writings of the twentieth century. Gravity and Grace. The Need for Roots. Waiting for God. Simone de Beauvoir called her “a soul in torment.” Camus called her “the only great spirit of our time.”

Today, Simone Weil is claimed by everyone — Christians, leftists, pacifists, mystics, feminists — and owned by no one. You can find her name in Google searches for "female philosophers who changed the world," or "radical women mystics," or “ethical lives in wartime.” But she doesn’t fit tidy categories. She defies brand. She’s the philosopher who got her hands dirty, the mystic who stood in breadlines, the intellectual who washed dishes and wrote like an angel possessed.

What remains is a haunting. A question. Not “What would Simone do?” — that’s too literal. But rather: What, in this moment, would attention demand of me? What does it mean to see — truly — the other’s pain, and not look away?

Because Simone Weil never did.