Reacting to reading of a reading of Simone Weil writing about "reading"

This post follows on from The blur is not just a contradiction (Simone Weil). The notes for these were written at the same time as preparation for the post The need for worlds: Simone Weil and The Need for Roots.

In  The blur is not just a contradiction, the blur is discussed as an intentional way of thinking, with regard to categories or routines of thought and language, in comparison to Simone Weil's use of contradiction as a psychopomp to mystery/faith/god.

This posting looks at her more useful idea of reading, and I’ll be following again the pathway laid out by the text at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/ where it says after contradiction, “reading” (lecture) is the second central epistemological concern of Simone Weil.

I reckon, I react, I read that Weil's “reading” is more important than contradiction-as-a-psychopomp. Afterall such mystery work is a type of reading or attention, a type of mindfulness (see this linkpost Posts on writing, consciousness and altered states for more on these areas of creativity/imagination/writing/improvisation).

Reading is a process, we read, we interpret, we work through. Reading shows our working with others who are doing the same in the world, as in “the reception and the attribution of meanings”, as well as their namings as a “mediation”, and vice-versa. (That is the world). Repute is part of all readings. Reading councils, advises, readys us.

Readings can create the world, but also they can worldbuild (double-downed reading/worlding as “ideology, narrow and simplistic”). Reading are thus “not free from power dynamics”, (see Weil’s “concept of force”).

“We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). (NB 43)"

Weil connects her reading of reading with war and magination. I call that the world, and when done badly it is the worldbuilding that imperialism is drawn to like a moth to the one light of your candle. So yeah, war and imagination: bad worlding = worldbuilding.

“War is a way of imposing another reading of sensations, a pressure upon the imagination of others” (NB 24). In her 1941 “Essay on the Concept of Reading” (LPW 21–27) Weil elaborates, “War, politics, eloquence, art, teaching, all action on others essentially consists in changing what they read” (LPW 26). In the same essay she develops “reading” in relation to the aforementioned epistemological concepts of appearance, the empirical world, and contradiction:
[A]t each instant of our life we are gripped from the outside, as it were, by meanings that we ourselves read in appearances. That is why we can argue endlessly about the reality of the external world, since what we call the world are the meanings that we read; they are not real. But they seize us as if they were external; that is real. Why should we try to resolve this contradiction when the more important task of thought in this world is to define and contemplate insoluble contradictions, which, as Plato said, draw us upwards? (LPW 22)

At this point the worlding urge takes over Weil's position and her mysticism is thrown into this gap above-us that we are "drawn" towards:

An elevated transformation in reading, however, demands an apprenticeship in loving God through the things of this world—a kind of attentiveness that will also entail certain bodily involvements, labors, postures, and experiences. Particular readings result from particular ways of living. Ideally for her, we would read the natural as illuminated by the supernatural. This conceptualization of reading involves recognition on hierarchical levels, as she explains in her notebooks:

To read necessity behind sensation, to read order behind necessity, to read God behind order. We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present. But that is tautological. To love all facts is nothing else than to read God in them. (NB 267)

This is unnecessary. We read the world, here god is a person put forward to cover this non-ego person of the world. Calling that god is lazy and (obedient to the imperial worldbuilding of an Empire's desire to directly order/ control of the mind/souls of believers).

Loving all facts (love your enemies) is sort of nice, but the danger is, again, to double-down rashly, and forgetting the world in the name of god, then make god the enemy of your enemies, which makes love an enemy. This is how theology as statehood evolved, it forgets the polity in the name of god-emperors.

In addition, narcissists also love themselves in their contradictions, so saying this is god/mystery/faith, rather than the world around us makes it doubly dangerous. We empathetic others will see this self-love as self-forgiveness as a hypocrisy,  but is just, to a narcissist's entitlement, part of their universal cosmological principles of grandiosity. Calling the world 'god' is a mistake. A major worldbuilding error.

The urge to should too much, overcomes the best of us, even here when the slavery of the narrow-minded has been recognised by Weil. It is not self-undermining so much as potentially world-undermining. If we make the world, as ourselves, then the love of enemy facts, and the way we are drawn up by that love, in Platonic relationship, then we can lose our way, both of ourselves, and mysteriously, in the world. Plato is the cave, don't you see. This is why he can be right about the cave. But the cave is not the world. God will not lead you out if you are already in the world but refuse to recognise it. (Also, fuck Heidegger).

Crossposted on substack.com

Cited references from  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/ 

Cited Works by Weil from  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/ 

Abbreviations in bold if mentioned in this post.

• [FLN], 1970, First and Last Notebooks, Richard Rees (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• [FW] 1987, Formative Writings: 1929–1941, Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness (eds. and trans.), Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.
• [GG] 1947 [2004], Gravity and Grace, Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (trans), New York: Routledge; La pesanteur et la grâce, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1947.
• [LP] 1959 [1978], Lectures on Philosophy, Hugh Price (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press; Leçons de philosophie, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1959.
• [LPr] 1951 [2002], Letter to a Priest, A. F. Wills (trans.), London: Routledge; Lettre à un religieux, Paris: Gallimard, 1951.
• [LPW] 2015, Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, Eric O. Springsted and Lawrence E. Schmidt (trans.), Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
• [NB] 1956, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Arthur Wills (trans.), 2 vols., New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
• [NR] 1949 [2002], The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, Arthur Wills (trans.), New York: Routledge; L’enracinement. Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949.
• [OL] 1955 [2001], Oppression and Liberty, Arthur Wills and John Petrie (trans.), New York: Routledge; Oppression et liberté, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1955.
• [SE] 1962, Selected Essays: 1934–1943, Richard Rees (trans.), London: Oxford University Press.
• [SL] 1965, Seventy Letters, Richard Rees (trans.), London: Oxford University Press.
• [SWA] 2005, Simone Weil: An Anthology, Siân Miles (ed.), New York: Penguin.
• [WFG] 1966 [2009], Waiting for God, Emma Craufurd (trans.), New York: HarperCollins; Attente de Dieu, Paris: Éditions Fayard, 1966.