Latest / Polymath World Channel / Polymath World # Episode 34 - Roundtable: Philosophy - Simone Weil
Transcript
- Polymath World (00:01.462) Hello and welcome to the Polymath World channel and today we're digging into philosophy and I've got two amazing guests with me who are experts on this incredible and underappreciated philosopher Simone Wey, not Simon Weill as I've occasionally heard described, but Simone Wey, I think perhaps the most underappreciated figure in modern philosophy. I'm delighted to be joined by two friends and colleagues, people I've had the pleasure of working with, Alex Carter at Cambridge University Christopher Thomas at Manchester Metropolitan. How you both doing today gentlemen? Christopher Thomas (00:36.728) Yeah, very well. Thank you for having us. Alex Carter (00:36.962) Good. Thanks, Sam. Polymath World (00:40.204) Let's just immediately start biographically. Chris, could you tell us a little bit about who she was and her brief but brilliant life? Christopher Thomas (00:51.362) Yeah, yeah. Well, first things to say, I suppose that Smon Vey is many different things to many different people. So whenever you're trying to say who she was, it's always a very difficult task. a brief sort of biography might be helpful. Vey was born to an upper middle class family in Paris in the 1930s. She was born into a secular Jewish household. Her father was a doctor and this is significant because she was born into sort of an academic family from the beginning as it were. She was born three years after her brother Andre Vey and in some ways Andre Vey is more famous than Simon Vey because his mathematical theorems that he developed, he was a mathematician, still used in schools, universities, know, across the world at the minute. He was in some ways the kind of real polymath and in lots of ways the early Ve, the young Ve, felt a deep kind of inferiority to her brother. So she had this kind of strange relationship to what she called his genius. But of course, this was unwarranted because Ve was a multilingual child. She would continually recite Greek poetry. She was politically active from the age of 10. She was once in her family home. and she heard striking workers marching in the boulevard below chanting the international and she went out to join them at the age of 10 and no one knew where she was. So you know from very early on she was politically active. So all of these things really leave no doubt about her own abilities and yet Vey was always tormented in some sense by not being good enough as it were and I have this quote from the letter here which I really think sums up a lot of a lot of Faye's kind of young life, and you can see a lot of it later on as well. At the age of 14, she wrote this in a letter and I quote, I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence. And I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access. Christopher Thomas (03:18.422) and wherein truth abides. I prefer to die rather than live without the truth." And I think this kind of like absolute radical position on either death or truth sets up Ve quite nicely because that's what dominates her very short life. They died at the age of 34 from a mixture of perhaps self-starvation and tuberculosis after also a very heavy amount of work. But between those two periods, between early Vey and late Vey, she is many things, she becomes many things. She's a teacher, she works in a cult, she writes various political treaties early on in her life. She goes through three mystical experiences at different points which turns the accent of her thinking from simply political to more religious. She's exiled from Europe during the war, first to New York and then to London. And within all this time, she's continually engaging with several key ideas and topics or thought or problems, as it were, that she takes as being central to her life and which kind of dominate her thinking, suffering, truth. beauty, goodness, justice, things like this. So I think that's perhaps, I've spoken already quite a bit, that's a very general from the early way through to her death and some of the things that happen in between. There's of course more to say because she has this kind fascinating biography. Polymath World (05:00.128) Yeah, thank you for setting the table really well for us there, Christopher. She's, when you read her biography, firstly, you're just this magnificent mind on this really brilliant, sort of tragic shooting star of a young thinker whose time came far too soon. But also, she very much is a polymath. She's capable of a great deal. And I was very struck and inspired by just how driven she is. And I think you described that really well. Alex, let me hand it over to you here. Can you just tell us a little bit more about her incredible mind and how she's able to apply herself in so many different places and give some examples? Alex Carter (05:50.07) I think Chris has said so much of it. Certain things that I wanted to sort of elevate and focus on, things like her relationship with her brother is very indicative because this idea that she's cut off from this transcendent realm connects with her relationship with religion, but it also connects with her fierce attachment to the truth through a kind of Platonism, which is where she would see her brother, the mathematician, as having this kind of absolute intellectual purity. and around her is all this compromise and imagine introducing that mathematical certainty into politics or into religion. And indeed that's where I think some of the fascination with Simone Bay comes from is this idea that she is a mix of contradictions or at least that makes it sound like she would be wrong. Of course, the whole point is that she is almost always right. Not my opinion, I think that what I mean is she has an argument that stands up by its own merits and the fierce attachment to the truth is how she derives that. And I think one of the things that's so interesting about her relevance today is that she has this relevance to a political world where we aren't that attached to the truth and we are quite divisive and relativistic about what things are true. For instance, the reaction that the audience might have just had to me saying she was almost always right would be, ooh, no, you can't say that about anyone. Well, with her, I feel like I can. For instance, when it comes to religion, one of the things that she's most averse to is this idea of daydreaming, what she calls daydreaming, says, the root of all evil, this idea of wanting the world to be other than it actually is. So confronting the world in its absolute. is what she's all about. So this is this notion of attention that she has and that, you know, attending to the world is kind of strict epistemology, as we would call it in philosophy, this idea of just like really attending to the truth and to what matters. And so many people who would say, well, how can you be religious in that mode? How can you take that approach to religion? Because isn't it about wishing the world to be a certain way against prevailing evidence? so no, no, it's absolutely not. It's establishing Alex Carter (08:08.555) cornerstones of absolute certainty, things like the desire for gold is not itself gold, but the desire for good is itself good. And so it's a kind of self-fulfilling desire. That's a unique aspect of the desire for good. And so when she confronts people like Albert Camus, an existentialist, humanist and not religious, he can't find anything in her religious philosophy to attack. So he says, everything I've been against in religion, I'm not against this. I'm not against what you're presenting me with. So this is why I strongly encourage as many people as possible to read some of it because you get this really refreshing, very different perspective on quite old and trite problems. It's what first attracted me to my favorite philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein takes a very kind of middle view of things. So if there's an atheist and a theist arguing, he'll just say, you're both wasting your time because you're both talking about the existence of God. And why would you talk about existence in this context? It's irrelevant. We don't talk about the existence of honor or the existence of the number eight. These things still have conceptual weight. They have meaning, they have significance, and it's that meaning and significance that gives them value. And Simone Veil is very much attached to this idea, rather than trying to get worldly power. Right? This is why Trotsky would come to her house and talk politics with her and find it so unpleasant that he has to leave, which is an event that actually happened because She doesn't bow to this sort of worldly desires or these worldly compromises. She has this fierce attachment to truth that cuts through disagreements that are basically based on what we want, what we desire, what we have, specific trivial things that we want. So she cuts through all of that. I think that's why she has this kind of resonance through time and why actually I would argue she has more relevance today than she had before. Polymath World (10:06.102) We're already showing, mentioning Camus and Trotsky and there's plenty more we'll get into that this incredibly bright young woman who still, when she's a student and just after that, is going toe to toe and rubbing shoulders with so many of the big thinkers and players at the time who recognized her brilliance. Chris, I want to come to you as we dig into some of these themes. We've mentioned religion a few times already and she's written this incredible book, Waiting for God, but I found sort of a tension in Vay that she is trying to reconcile this sort of pure religious love with the fact that she's so dismayed at the failures of the Catholic Church and the wrongs done in the name of religion. Could you sort of open up her more complex wrestling with philosophy of religion for us? Christopher Thomas (10:57.996) Yeah, I guess the first thing to say is when people call her a Christian thinker or something, it's a really qualified Christian thinker. And she's a deeply heterodox Christian if there was any other kind, any other proper kind. Famously, refused baptism. So she, you know, there are all these kind of biographical issues about whether she kind of formally enters the Catholic Church or whatever. But I guess to take it back to some of the basics, Faye's thought is often split into an early and late period. The early period is dominated by lot of this political work and certain political treaties she writes. And the late work comes after these three mystical experiences that she has, one of which she's reciting John Herbert's poem, Love, and has this kind of feeling. Another one where she goes to Portugal and sees a procession of fisherman's wives singing, I can't remember whether singing some sort of hymn, and she has a feeling that she is a slave amongst other slaves and that is what Christianity comes to mean to her. And so she has these experiences and then suddenly her language slightly shifts. She's much more inclined to talk or rather write in the context of transcendence and in the context of really being more direct in setting up a kind of a world up here and a world up here. But as Alex said, the world down here is always the guide about how we understand the relationship between the two. And I suppose this comes from her dual Platonic and Christian kind of methodology, as it were. She's a Platonist, but she's a Christian. She reads Plato as a mystic. And so her way of thinking about religion is deeply heterodox in that respect. She's also very pluralistic. So she is reading the gospels and the scriptures, et cetera, but she's also reading the Tibetan and the Hindu sacred texts and drawing a huge amount from them. I mean, you know, masses of them out. In fact, there's a new book coming out soon with Bloomsbury called Dharma and Detachment, a play on gravity and grace, which is a collection of Vey's engagements in her notebooks with the Bhagavad Gita and also other. Christopher Thomas (13:22.796) other sacred texts in the Hindu and Tibetan tradition and the Indo-Chinese tradition as well. So that's just coming out. are just starting to look at that. But there's a very deeply pluralistic relationship to religion where, yes, she's kind of a Catholic and a Christian or whatever, but ultimately she believes in this kind of pluralistic conception where other people have come to those same insights from different religious traditions. And that's really important because going back to what Alex was saying when he was talking about Vey's epistemology, I have this brilliant quote which I've just been reflecting on because I'm writing something at the minute and I think it gets to the crux of Vey's thinking, not only on religion but also on truth. And this is what she says, she says, the degree of intellectual honesty which is obligatory for me. by reason of my particular vocation, demands that my thought should be indifferent to all ideas without exception. Water is indifferent in this way to the objects which fall into it. It doesn't weigh them. It is they which weigh themselves after a certain time of oscillation. So, Véy saw herself as this vessel of water in which objects qua thoughts or ideas would fall, and they would oscillate and bounce around in her kind of her weight of water and they would weigh themselves. She wouldn't weigh them, she wouldn't judge them. This is what attention is. Attention is not a judgment as Alex was saying, it's something different. It's a way of allowing ideas to weigh themselves and even though Ve is most famously a Catholic and a Christian thinker, she's taking all these other religious ideas and she's allowing them to weigh themselves like objects do in water and I think that's probably the most important thing to understand in terms of her religious thinking and the way in which Yes, her dominant framework is theological in the kind of Abrahamic sense or the New Testament. We perhaps shouldn't get into Vaze reading the Old Testament or her thoughts on Judaism because that's very difficult and problematic. But nevertheless, she's still taking all these ideas and allowing them to kind of work themselves out in herself, as it were. Polymath World (15:39.756) Yeah, brilliantly put. She reminds me a little of Descartes in that she's searching frantically for pure thought, like pure thinking rightly on this issue. And she is colourful. She's got this Jewish background. She can't be divorced from her context. And she has these mystical experiences. And I was struck by this. It comes through in her writing, this frantic searching. She's frantically, desperately clawing and scrambling for the transcendent. Alex, how do you think her mystical experiences changed her life and impacted her? And can you elaborate on some of the of the searching that she does? Alex Carter (16:28.438) Yeah, so I just very quickly pick up one important difference that you're right to say there is a kind of Cartesian element to this and I think you often see this in a lot of actually of French philosophy. There is a kind of scientific inquiry going on, but one key important difference is that Simonve is often about the nullification of self in a way that Descartes was much more obsessed about the thinking subject, about the self. So for instance, the analogy with water that Chris was just looking about, she brings this into a discussion of religion where she says, and of beauty, where she says that the sea is the expression of beauty because it takes, irrespective of desire, it will save some, it will take others. It does this out of necessity. It doesn't do this because it has a whim. If it chose to save one person and not save another, it would be monstrous. But it's beautiful precisely because of its indifference, because of its... lack of a kind of subjective desire and this nullification of self about when you're attending to something, because I often found this quite a difficult aspect of a philosophy to get, to accept, to be willing to endorse, perhaps because I'm egotistical myself, is to sort of take an object and she says just ask what is it and keep attending to what is it, what is it. And there's this kind of removal of self. And this does come into her religious thoughts a lot and to her mystical experiences, because so much of what she's experiencing in this religious experience is a removal of self. for instance, one good example of this is she appeals to the Holy Grail narrative of, you know, the Holy Grail is given to the person who asked the king holding it. What are you going through? Not in any self-interested way of, want to look nice or I'm interested in hearing what they have to say. but in just an outpouring of self, a nullification of self to allow someone else to fully occupy your experience. And interestingly, there is a commonality between her epistemology, therefore, and another contemporary of hers, Henry Bergson, also a lapsed view, who would also say that the way to understand the world as a scientist, and again, this is how difficult this is to understand as an idea, is the methodology of sympathy. Alex Carter (18:45.036) having sympathy for your object, just as we have sympathy for a person, to give oneself over to someone. And this comes into her religious thought insofar as she says most people live with this kind of scale of bad things happen, I want compensation, good things happen, I want to be thanked for them. And so we're constantly trying to get back to this equilibrium, as she calls it. She says being a Christian is throwing that away. just getting rid of it. And again, this speaks to that kind of slave idea. It speaks to this idea of non-attachment to things and to, know, Chris said that she was political from 10. I would say it goes even back even younger because when she was very, very young, I mean, three or four or something like that, she was given a ring that she inherited from her grandmother. She said, I'm not interested in material possessions and handed it back. You know, this is, this was innate in her. This is, yeah, so she holds our feet to the fire. on this stuff, because when we look at her philosophy, it is like a mirror that is reflecting back at us our own unwillingness to give up this equilibrium, even though it's the very thing that sort of gives our life such tension and such strain is trying to get compensation for good things and trying to recompense for bad things. So much of our life is spent like that. We don't think to just give it up. And that's where a lot of the Yeaston thinking I think comes in as well, this nullification of self, this removal of desire and will. Polymath World (20:06.422) Yes. Alex Carter (20:08.568) So her mystical experiences were, one way in which she put it was she had a tour around Paris led by Jesus Christ himself and she said that Christ took possession of me. And so there's again this idea that when we are attending to this, so she had a personal experience, a private experience, whether or not you believe that she had that experience is actually irrelevant. And many people have put it down and said, oh, she had terrible headaches through her life, maybe she was mentally ill again. irrelevant. The point is the truth of the experience, not how the experience came about. And this, again, holds our feet to the fire because we want to try and explain, we want to try and understand. So what she says is, for instance, if you haven't had that experience, if you haven't had direct personal experience of God, maybe you should be an atheist, because at least you aren't holding up a false image of the divine that's going to get in the way of you experiencing God. So that's why we have to wait on God, not passively. just sort of sitting around like we wait for the bus, but attentively looking for, but not expecting to see a certain thing. And again, that's that giving over of self to allow something else to sort of present itself to you, including God, the world, whatever it might be. So it's a weirdly unifying thing of science and religion all coming together through an epistemology, which is just basically allowing other things to be. Christopher Thomas (21:29.678) Just to come in very briefly, that giving over of the self to allow the other to be, they also then goes on to develop her own creation theology whereby she conceives of God's creation as an abdication of being. So, you know, if typically God was seen to create and then the creature sort of sits ontologically distinct from him, in Vey's theory, God abdicates his being in order to give being to Polymath World (21:30.1) Yeah. Christopher Thomas (21:59.064) creatures. Therefore the creatures greatest goods becomes in giving that being back to God in kind of relinquishing what has been given to us as a gift. She says being not having, know, only having belongs to us. We have being but we need to give it back through this abdication of self, which then is a mirror of the abdication of God's creative act. So, you know, the ethical, what we are asked to do at the kind of human material level is a mirror of what God has done at the kind of transcendent level in creation. So that then kind of links her theology to her ethics very clearly. Polymath World (22:39.146) Yes, go for it. No, go ahead. Alex Carter (22:39.448) And just to accent that, I teach creativity theory and I talk about the fact that creation myths often sit behind theories of how human beings create. So for instance, the act of will that brings the world into existence is this idea that I create my ideas, but don't ideas strike us, not the other way around. But they have to strike us, they have to strike me, not someone else. The philosopher Beatrice Hampyle has a lovely term for this which comes from ancient Greek language where she calls it the Mediopassive. So it has to happen through us but it has to happen to us. A good example of this is marriage and indeed Simonve was essentially married to God at that point with this idea that so when we're married it's something I'm doing hopefully, something that's being done to me as well. So it's this It's all bound up together. So it's not just simply I have to sit back and passively accept what's happening in the world. It's not resignation. It is and it's a fierce attention to the world that doesn't constantly just turn into materialism and to possession and to ownership of things and to say that's my idea as opposed to this is an idea that came to me. Polymath World (23:57.416) There's so much there we could pull out that I'd love to ask you both. I was struck by how incredibly authentic she is. She is so impressively consistent. And whatever people might think about her mystical experiences, as you've rightly pointed out, it clearly transforms her. And I don't think anyone could ever accuse her of being out of her mind because of her consistency and authenticity. But you've mentioned materialism, we've mentioned Camus. Again, her context here. She is, this is the 30s and the 40s and beyond. Logical positivism has come up, the Vienna Circle. There is this resurgence of humanism and materialism. And yet she is standing very much against that, looking to sort synthesize something else. You've mentioned her sort of falling in love with Jesus. It reminds me a bit of Albert Einstein who didn't like religion very much, but said in an interview in the late 30s that he was enthralled by the figure of the Nazarene. Or Gandhi, who really said, I do not like Christianity, but I really like your Christ. She's searching for something and yet she won't be wed to traditional Orthodox religion. Chris, could you sort of elaborate on the tension? She kind of wants the spiritual and the transcendent, but not religion. And how does that come out in her writing? Christopher Thomas (25:33.546) Yeah, it's very true. would happily take Christ over Christianity in the same way that she will always look to the crucifixion rather than the resurrection as the defining point of Christianity as well, another kind of heterodox, unusual point. Alex has already touched on this, but Ve is very keen on this idea of atheism in a sense. She sees much religious activity as a form of idolatry and she sees a certain form of atheism as what she calls a form of purification of the idea of God. So you know we have to deny or not believe in the God that has been given to us or the God in which we're led to believe exists in order to then come to this better more true understanding of transcendence of God or as Rupert Murdoch then Rupert Murdoch my god Iris Murdoch I don't think a reef of Murdoch is where they... The world would be a better place if you had. Iris Murdoch then comes along and says, know, she places God with the good. But she has this very kind of heterodox picture of God. Problematic in some ways, you know, because she emphasizes the place of suffering in religious experience, which can lead to... Polymath World (26:31.764) You Alex Carter (26:34.039) you Christopher Thomas (27:00.056) to certain negative ideas. she's very much on the side of, the majority of what is given to us as religion is a form of idolatry. It gets in the way of true faith. And it blinds us to the actual work of being an imitator of Christ, as it were, and all that comes with that. So yes, you're absolutely right. She is the same as a lot of those thinkers. who would happily take Christ without religion or even someone like Einstein who wasn't very taken with religion but he did say that he believed in Spinoza's and in lots of ways she read her Spinoza and she's very close to Spinoza in some ways. So she does fall into that kind of history of philosophers who want God but who don't want the kind of institutionalized religion that they see as being fundamentally corrupted, not just in modernity, but also going all the way back in time as well. Polymath World (28:06.474) Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned suffering. Obviously, she's very intimately acquainted with that, particularly in the later part of her life when she is writing a lot of her philosophy of religion and she has a lot of physical infirmity. Alex, could you elaborate on that? But also tell me what you think her greatest contribution to philosophy of religion might be. Alex Carter (28:31.192) That's two very big topics. So let me try and unify them because I think there's this beautiful intersection between the significance she attaches to the crucifixion, which as Chris says is special in her theology because she links creation with the crucifixion. The idea of renunciation, as we've already been talking about, God, like Christ, has to run out to the world in order to allow the world to be and so on. And Christ's, Father, why have you forsaken me? is this expression of this, what we experience as the presence of God, which is His absence. We experience God through the absence and there's this lovely analogy she uses, very sad, but the poignant of two prisoners in neighbouring cells and it's the wall between them that separates them, but by tapping on the wall they can communicate. it's what so the bonds of separation. we might call it. So we're separate but bonded because of that separation. But then she says, the Christ's crucifixion is no more significant than a pine needle falling. He died like a beggar, only slightly more ridiculous, because he has this crown of thorns on his head next to two people who were thieves. Essentially, he's just dying like any other person, but less significant because of that great role he has to play. She also described herself and towards the end of her life as invisible as dead leaves as well. So this idea of pine needles and leaves, this kind of detritus that gets swept away in the wind. There's this sense of that. And this is where she's coming from with this kind of acceptance of what we are. And the way in which this comes out quite beautifully is this letter she wrote to Joie Busquet, who was a soldier in the First World War who had trapnel in his spine and he was experiencing constant agony. And amazingly, this letter still exists because when I tell you what was in it, you're going to think, how on earth did he not just tear this into shreds the minute he read it? But she wrote a letter to him saying how lucky he was. Lucky because he's had all of these pretensions, right? This this equilibrium thing and all this desire for the world to be other than it is stripped away and just the world laid bare. Alex Carter (30:45.248) And between him, she says, this uses a very religious image, she even calls it out as religious as this eggshell between him and the world. They take the tiniest tap from him. This is what attention is. It's just a slight reorientation, very much like the notion of orientation that we find in Plato, orienting ourselves away from shadows and darkness towards light and moving upwards and always outwards and all this kind of stuff. This is what she's talking about, this attunement to a certain way of experiencing the world. And he... is gifted this precisely, not because he has some profound mystical experience, but because he is constantly reminded of his physical material nature and the fact that the world just is this indifferent sea, this necessity, right, that just takes and gives and that's it. You know, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. So this notion that we just have to strip ourselves of these pretensions and get back to a kind of humble experience. is the story of Christ, it's also the story of the soldier, and it's everyone's story. But we get caught up in this, to borrow a phrase, this spectacle where we can't escape this notion, right? So liking and disliking, you know, I'll probably be looking at the comments to this podcast, so please put nice ones everyone, but going through, no, they said that I was wrong about this, and I probably did get something wrong. Why do I care? Because again, the honesty is in the moment, it's in the experience, it's in the kind of, you so... What can we tease out of this engagement with the world? And so similar basis, essentially affliction, pain, suffering, not so much suffering, more affliction. It's an important distinction to draw and I've just opened up a can of worms, but the idea of suffering is that you suffer for something, there's meaning to it, whereas affliction is precisely that recognition of one's meaninglessness in a world of indifference, which is a weird thing for a religious person to express. But again, is this with the way to get to that profound bond of separation. So what's profound about Simone Bay and her real contribution to the theology is it returns it to itself a little bit, it returns to this notion, it connects how our experience now can be connected with Christ's experience and so on, but not in an anecdotal, I believe those events happened, right? It doesn't matter. Alex Carter (33:07.256) Again, she says, faith is not based on a historical anecdote. But then she goes on to say, but if those events didn't happen, then it is all for nothing. So that's a really difficult thing to get your head around, but it's not a contradiction. It's not a logical contradiction. Again, like I said, she's still right. Polymath World (33:24.574) Yeah. Chris, what do you make of the writing that comes out of Simone Weil later in her life when she is wrestling with ill health and starvation? Christopher Thomas (33:37.582) Yeah, mean, Faye's writing, I'm always asked, or at least asked by some people who want to get into Faye, where do you start with Faye? And it's this strange thing because your first encounter with Faye is often troubling. Her writings don't so much as draw you in as crash into you. And so if you don't already have a certain epistemic robustness, they're deeply problematic and challenging. You have this huge, you have these huge collections of notes that she that she writes, which scholars draw on, you know, book this thick of her notes. They're very random. There are pages on, you know, Greek translations and there are pages on creation theology, pages on mathematics, theories of suffering, particular readings of the Timaeus in Plato, whatever it might be. And so you have this kind of huge huge set of work there, which is very interesting and which is, and which, which then came to be edited by a friend of hers who she left her notebooks with called Gustav Tibon, a conservative priest effectively. He edited this, this, this collection of notes as it were, and put them under different headings, the self, the void, detachment, decreation, love, beauty, et cetera. This is a really strange book. because it's completely false in the way in which it presents these ideas. But on the other hand, it really is compelling and draws you in because you're like, what the hell is this I'm reading? I'm really interested in this. So gravity and grace is, from an academic point of view, a terrible resource because it doesn't give you a proper idea of vase thought, but it draws you in in the way that poetry draws you in. And so I always say to people, against pretty much every other vase scholar out there, start with gravity and grace because it's compelling like poetry is compelling. and then go on and read some of these other works. And these other works which you're talking about from that last period are based on all these notes that she writes in Marseilles and then in New York and then in London. And from those notes come these essays and these books that become the totems of they's later life. A series of very important essays, human personality, a book. Christopher Thomas (35:58.574) final book that she wrote for the Free French. she, they went, when she was in New York, she wanted to be closer to the action basically in Europe. And so she went to go back and she went to work for the Free French in London. And they thought, she thought that they were going to send her undercover and to go into, you know, as part of a resistance movement into France. But unfortunately she was given this desk job and she was tasked with creating a pamphlet for the rebuilding of Europe after the war. This pamphlet that they were tasked with writing came out at about 250 pages. It's called The Need for Roots and it sets out the rebuilding of Europe according to the needs of the soul, how one becomes rootless and how one builds roots after they've become rootless. This is a really significant work of political theology and political theory. And it's also one of the most, I'd say almost difficult works of Ve to read as well. So you have that really significant book, a series of really important essays, and also this vast collection of notes that she writes. And trying to make sense of all of these is or can be quite difficult because as Alex has pointed to, sometimes there can be perceived tensions in what Ve is saying, perceived contradictions. sometimes not even perceived, sometimes outright contradictions. But for Ve, this isn't really a problem because contradiction becomes for her or rather holding competing ideas in your head becomes for her an important methodological principle. It's how you think sitting in between two ideas, X and Y, that kind of seem to contradict one another is important way of thinking what's true in between them as it were. So all of these works are really important. Do they form a consistent whole? Does Faye's work form a consistent theology or a consistent philosophy in the same way that other people do? Perhaps not. Perhaps there are key things that guide Faye's thinking. Is she always consistent on how she thinks about those things? No, but she also recognizes that her thought is Christopher Thomas (38:23.042) both fallible and historical and therefore the changing of the way she thinks about these things is fine and perfect and good as well. So all those later works are really interesting for all those reasons. But they're challenging precisely because they have this kind of strange methodology. And that goes back to what I said at the start about the way in which you need to read Vayen is the way in which she approached ideas. You're the water and ideas weigh themselves in you. You don't weigh them. you don't judge them, you suspend judgment in as far as that's possible. And that's, think, how we need to approach these final texts. Polymath World (39:04.048) She's very challenging. She died young and she's surrounded by a lot of other philosophers at the time who are more popular, particularly male ones, which is the reasons why she goes underappreciated so much. She's not easy to engage with and she will challenge you. But I want to give the rest of our time to her other branches of philosophy because when I read a lot of critics and supporters that there seems to be particularly from the more feminist ones, this sort of this mourning or this grieving that she converted to Christianity later on. She was like, she was on a great path. She was so interesting. And then she got all religious. If only she had finished what she started or something like that. So Alex, could you tell us a bit more about the other philosophies that they contributed so well to and the earlier they and open that up for us? Alex Carter (40:04.344) Well, I kind of want to pick up a little bit also on what Chris was saying. I think this might speak to that same point and it's being all things to all people. That's a very trite way of putting it. I don't want to quite put it that way, but the way she approached education, for instance, by any educational metric today, she was an appalling teacher because her students failed exams, they didn't do very well, etc. but what they were is inspired. And so for instance, know, the Camus when he writes the plague can have the priest character not die, but rather on his medical sheet just have doubtful case written on it. It's partly because someone very challenged him and challenged his understanding of what religion could be. And again, so much of what she's doing is just challenging and provoking us. So is a provocation the philosophy? Possibly not. It's a little bit like how would we see Socrates' philosophy, right? So how would we understand a Socratic philosophy? What was Socrates' view? Well, it wasn't Plato's view. In fact, Plato was quite clearly the worst pupil who ever existed. Why? Because the one thing Socrates was terrified of was writing. Why? Because he didn't want his ideas to be separated from him. So what did Plato do? He turned him literally into a mouthpiece for Plato's own philosophy. That's the worst thing you could have done to Socrates. Yes, it's the greatest crime Socrates can imagine. So Socrates was inspirational, people would diverge. the thing is, Simone Weil can equally inspire philosophies that diverge away from where she is. I mean, it's interesting, for instance, and I don't know if this is particularly in answer to that question about philosophies, the fact that she, her and Simone de Beauvoir, the two Simons, were the first women to be admitted into the Econ and El Superior. Where did they come? First and second in a class of 36 with 34 men behind them. Simone Vey was top of the class and Simone de Beauvoir was second again. Sorry, Simone. I have to do that joke every time I tell that story because Simone de Beauvoir wrote the second sex. So anyway, so she was second again. the point being that Simone de Beauvoir became much more famous. It wasn't necessarily about gender. Christopher Thomas (42:16.184) you. Alex Carter (42:23.744) I don't think, not necessarily about gender. I mean, I don't doubt that played an important role, not least because when de Gaulle read this pamphlet that became The Need for Roots, that was the end of it, because there was no way he was going to incorporate these ideas into the rebuilding of France after the war. There was just no way he was going to conceive of what she was conceiving. But we can today. So again, I'm less attentive to how she influenced philosophers of her time. Sorry, Sam. And I'm more interested in how she would influence our philosophy today. And I think it's increasingly important. one episode in her life, which wasn't a mystical experience, but a very practical one, is she wanted to understand why the working class didn't rise up against the managers, the middle class, right? They massively outnumbered them. Why were they not overthrowing them in a new French revolution to get freedom? So she went to work in a factory, despite having terrible headaches and despite suffering from a physical frailty. She went to work in these factories and must have had a terrible experience, not least because of the sharpness of her mind and yet the drudgery of the work that she was doing. And she found she got her answer. The answer was you can't mount a revolution on apathy and on drudgery. Once you've been crushed by a system, you can't build from that. And this fits into this idea because what she was experiencing very early on was this kind of move towards a kind of globalized, universalized worldview, which is industrialize things, forget the individual. And we're seeing more and more of this, though, just AI is a good example, AI is just a replacement of individual thinking with a kind of uniform, it's good enough, it's okay, which is a kind of a factory for ideas. So we now can just switch off our minds. The irony, of course, is by the way, the factory she was working was making lights, making light bulbs or ideas, right? And now we are literally taking that kind of like that factor and we've done it for thought. And she would see this as one of the worst things that you could possibly imagine because now what we're doing is we've kind of globalized and universalized individuals. So the need for roots is all about this kind of concentric circles moving outwards, not inwards. So we start typically from the global and then move to the national, then to the regional, then to the local, then to the family, then to the individual. It should be the other way around and we should be building outwards from a sense of rootedness and purpose about where we are now. Alex Carter (44:51.64) And we're losing this more and more and more. So her sort of alternative trajectory that she wanted to put us on would leave us in a much, I would argue, better place than we are in today, where we have this kind of universalized globalized view, which ironically comes from a political left, which she was so far left off that she would have been kind of like off the spectrum. So what she's challenging all sides of a political divide. not to build walls around nation states and then kind of build this kind of nationalistic viewpoint, not to build a kind of globalized worldview either, but to challenge that entirely and to try and find a personal mission, despite the points we've made about the rejection of subject, etc. Because partly what she's trying to reflect is the fact that you can treat the subject as an object as well. You can... nullify the self by thinking, well, you again, I need to have the kinds of desires that I want to see as desires that can be theologically, politically appealing. And instead, we're getting a nullification of all of those kinds of desires to fulfill the desires of a few. And why are we not rising up? Because we're crushed by that same system. So can anything turn this back? I don't know. But I think enough people reading The Need for Roots might be a good way to go. I don't know. Polymath World (46:18.026) and Christopher Thomas (46:18.83) I mean, just to come in on some of those things, it's really important because Faye kind of gives up on the idea of revolution basically at the end. And that often comes from her reading of, or rather her experience in the factories. She says at the end of the day, after working all this time and being browbeaten by the foreman, cetera, the idea of revolution never occurs to anyone. And she says, even after sort of three or four weeks working in these factories, she said for a year, Not every day she goes to sit quite often, but she's in these different factories for a year. And she's, you know, after like a month or two, said, I even forgot the reason I went in there. She forgot the reasons for her motivations. Why am I going in here in the first place? And then when she forgets these reasons, suddenly she becomes motivated by the end point, which is the pay packet, as it were. And that happens, you you get... stuck in that repetitive cycle, she sees the work get stuck in that repetitive cycle where they're only acting for the end of the week or the end of the month and so the reasons for the motivations and any other form of action just is completely lost to them and that picks up on her kind of philosophy of labour which is another incredibly important point in her philosophy. think Hannah Arendt said that she was the only one to treat it with the kind of sympathy it needs. And I'll just say one thing about that, know, labor for VE is good, it's central. Work is central and good for the human being. We can't imagine a world without labor and without work. And we should never try to liberate the human being from work. That's really important. And but she says how that work is carried out, how it's organized is the thing which changes its meaning. So she she gives this brilliant example of a young new mother. sewing some sort of piece of clothing for their baby and someone in a very industrialized factory that's sewing things, exactly the same thing. Their actions are identical and yet their relations to those actions are completely different. One is entirely alienated from the end point of their action and their work and the other is so deeply invested with what they're doing. Christopher Thomas (48:40.578) that they almost can get at what she would call a spirituality of work. So again, labour work is central to they. It's a way of achieving an understanding of necessity, an understanding of necessity, which as Alex has already said, is central in that kind of living the good life as it were. And so she wants to centralise that in any future organisation of society where work is central, labour is central. but it's organised in a completely different way. Polymath World (49:12.108) I found her end very puzzling. It seemed very self-destructive, almost. She seemed to be careering off a path leading to her death in a way that seemed unnecessary. Can you gentlemen help me make sense of why they die at age 34? Alex Carter (49:37.528) Okay, well, I mentioned Socrates. You could say a similar thing about Socrates, right? I've never actually thought about the close parallels between Socrates and Simone de'Avon. Maybe Chris may have done so before. This is just occurring to me. yeah, I actually wrote my undergraduate dissertation on whether or not Socrates committed suicide. My answer was no, because he didn't want to die. He just didn't care if he did. And so... the very many opportunities he had to escape the fate of drinking hemlock in prison weren't interesting to him. They would have meant sacrificing something much more important, maybe the truth, and think Simone Vague was in a similar bind. Insofar as she had tuberculosis, she was never going to recognise that as a particular reason to change her principles around whether she should be eating more than the people in France were eating. on their rations, etc. So she instantiated that principle that I am no different from them, I should not be treated any better than them just because I happened to have escaped into exile. And that led to her then being listed as a suicide. But I think it's a view that we would probably not accept today that someone has a principle. You mentioned Gandhi earlier, who fasted many, many, many times and was begged to stop fasting because he was about to die. But again, the principle overrode the physical needs that she had. Again, she did often lament physical ineptitude. These were her words, I'm just not physically up for the challenge of doing these things. So again, I think she would have been very happy if she could have survived it. She just didn't care if she didn't. And again, if that's something you want to say is suicide, I would dispute that definition of suicide myself and say instead, perhaps it was... recklessness or something like that possibly from a medical point of view but from a philosophical point of view it's as we were saying earlier intellectual honesty it's an intellectual honesty that overwrites all other things. Polymath World (51:46.282) What do you make of it? Christopher Thomas (51:46.798) I think, yeah, I mean, the parallels with Soxie is really interesting because, you know, I don't often draw those, but recently I did in something that I'm writing and I sort of compare Ve to the, you know, the gadfly, the image of a, you know, what if Ve wishes the gadfly and the man that Soxie is is the gadfly in the Apology. She's an ideological troublemaker in lots of ways. She's, you know, she's doing all of that. But her end is that kind of troubling, very difficult thing to think about. I'd always thought about it in really abstract terms until recently. I share an office with a 20th century European historian and they were teaching this class on France under occupation basically and he'd brought in these bags of rice, of pasta, of whatever it was and I looked at them and I made a joke about it. was like, your lunch? And he said, well, these are the rations for a month in under occupation in France. I looked at them and suddenly I was like, well, of course she was never going to survive that. It was unbelievable. Her constitution with these rations plus her work rate, her work rate in the final. think I have a, just bear with me one second. have a, I have a list of the works that she produced in the final, I think 10 months of her life. and I'll just. read it out to you if I can. Hang on one second, because didn't. Because I think it explains the level of exhaustion that they would have... in the PowerPoint that I had up recently. Christopher Thomas (53:31.854) And it really sort of speaks to the level of exhaustion that she must have been facing as well as not eating what she should have been eating as well as having tuberculosis. So hang on. Christopher Thomas (53:51.528) it's not going to find it now. Anyway, it was it was a relentless, relentless level of work that she was doing. And as much as it might be written down, it was, you know, exhaustion and self starvation. So tuberculosis and self-starvation. I think that they was just exhausted. I think it was just a giving up of a body eventually. And that's the kind of an ideological exhaustion as well as a physical exhaustion, because they had lived this this life, the intensity of which I don't think we can even imagine. And we would never really describe that as suicide. We'd almost hold it up as something to be, as a virtue almost. So I think that that's the way I think about it, as a level of intensity that just couldn't continue. But there was certainly no intent on her part to kill herself or to die. She wouldn't have wanted to, like Alex said. It just happened because of the way that she lived her life and the way in which the historical circumstances didn't allow for that intensity to continue. Polymath World (54:54.164) Yeah, I said it earlier, she's one of the most driven people I've ever read of, certainly. Someone full of vision who lived their life with great passion and purpose. We're almost out of time, so for the new student, for someone who's never heard of VE and now wants to get into this and explore her and explore her work, we addressed this earlier, where should they begin? Where should they go? Is there a good introductory book you'd recommend? Polymath World (55:30.793) Either of you. Alex Carter (55:31.096) For myself, I think for me the best place to start would be with a problem. I'm not, I think Chris gave the perfect answer earlier about which texts to pick up, but in terms of where to start with, as I say, as we've been talking about, there's so much that you can explore and delve into, each of these, she made this comment that those who hunger for bread are not given stones and you know truth by its taste, because it's like bread, because it sustains you, etc. Now her point is, if you hunger for bread, it doesn't mean you get given bread. It just means that if you're hungering for the truth, you're not going to get lies. And so all I would say is, if you come to any aspect of Bayes' work, trying to find a solution to a particular problem. So for instance, Chris was saying about the value of labor. Well, look at what AI is doing to the value of labor. It's making us say, actually, if an AI can do it, then why would I do it? Well, maybe because it would give your life meaning. And we are in a quote unquote meaning crisis. So there is this sense in which this is where we're hungry for bread and we're being given stones, but neither are we being given bread. So my point is start with what's driving you. problems seem important to you and then go looking for things that you might find in Ve. Who knows, maybe even use AI to help you find the text. Just don't rely on AI to summarize the text, help it to guide you, use it to guide you or use Google or whatever, or drop us an email. try and find your path through Sima Ve's work, but what's driving you is probably where you're going to find any value in her work. And another good place to start would be possibly Spinoza. well because as we were saying there is something I think Spinoza is problematic just because the price tag of his philosophy he offers a similar kind of thing to Simon Weber his price tag if you thought hers was high his is way higher you've got to give up everything you value forget equilibrium it's just everything that you might see valuable in the world give it up now before and it's not really selling Spinoza is it but what I mean it's a philosophy that is so rigorously true Christopher Thomas (57:40.706) This is Alex Carter (57:47.384) it kind of cuts through any pretensions you might have and leaves you kind of with nothing but the truth of the necessity of what Spinoza is talking about. This is why even Nietzsche, who hated everyone, could say of Spinoza, he's my enemy brother, which was probably the nicest thing Spinoza, Nietzsche ever said about anyone. But the Spinoza might be a good way into this kind of philosophy and secondary texts as well. The Visionaries is a lovely book that talks about Simone de Beauvoir, talks about Simone Bay, talks about Hannah Arendt, and looks at how they were predicting the future. And I think that for me is particularly interesting about Simone Bay's work, is that we've continued down the path that she saw as a not a good path to go down. And she offered an alternative a long, long time ago, and we haven't really paid any attention. It might be 100 years after her death before we actually go, we probably should have done that. We're 100 years late coming to Simon Bay, so I would say possibly, yeah, jump with both feet. Polymath World (58:51.276) Christopher, anything else you'd like to add? Christopher Thomas (58:51.31) Yeah, I'd agree with all of that. think it's a really valuable point to say start with the problem that you're interested in. There aren't really many problems in philosophy. I always say it's probably about half a dozen problems and everyone has always a million concepts to talk about these problems. think Deleuze originally said that. So start with the problem you're interested in and it will be in the way and you'll find an interesting way into it. But on more practical note, we are in a bit of a very Renaissance at the minute. she is becoming canonised, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be seen. And what that means is that there's recently been published one of those Oxford very short introductions to VEI. 2023 or 2024 it was published, it took that long to get a very short introduction. A lot of my students find, you know, reading really difficult at the minute, so those short introductions are incredibly valuable. They give you a really good insight into the fundamentals and the principles, and we should never be too proud to... Polymath World (59:43.094) Yes. Christopher Thomas (59:49.784) to go and read a very short introduction. So I think it's better to do that than go on Wikipedia. So I would suggest to do that. Polymath World (59:57.228) Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, guys. Alex Carter (59:57.954) And there's, because we're, sorry Sam, because we're talking to podcasts, I'm just thinking as well, my favorite radio series that is now sort of on a website, you can go to David Cayley's website and get the series called Enlightened by Love. It's a five episode series. The sections of Simone Bay's text are read by David Cayley's daughter. She reads them so beautifully. It's a really lovely program to just listen to. So if you want to engage with the kind of overview of her thoughts. That's a really, really lovely series of podcasts as well, as well as this one, Polymath World (01:00:31.148) I'll just add I had the pleasure of reviewing this book, The Literary Afterlives of Simone Vey by Cynthia Wallace, which I thought was a really, fantastic collection of contributions and perspectives on Simone Vey. I got to review it for the journal Reading Religion and really enjoyed it. So that's also a good place to look at a bit more advanced, but it does include a short biography as well for people who want to look at different perspectives and attitudes on Simone Vey. Christopher, where can people find more about you or your research if they want to know more about your work? Christopher Thomas (01:01:07.182) Well, you can find my research on the Manchester Metropolitan website, Dr. Christopher Thomas, VEI articles. We are in the, well I say we, myself and my co-editor are in the middle of, well not in the middle. We have 38 of 39 chapters of The Routledge Companion to Simone VEI. I'm writing the introduction as we speak. And we have a deadline to the editor of November, so that probably means mid-2026 for potential publication. So that's probably the next big thing that I've got coming out and that's got, like I say, 39 chapters. Omwe's work split into biography, religious thinking, political thinking, how she relates to current day stuff, all that sort of thing. So yeah, that'll be the next thing I'd say look out for from me and my co-editor, Deborah Casewell. Polymath World (01:01:58.316) Fantastic. That's very exciting. Alex, where can people find you? Alex Carter (01:02:05.216) So I am teaching academics. So I teach in professional and continuing education at the University of Cambridge. So if you take University of Cambridge Pace, Alex Carter, you can find courses that I'm teaching. My very first course that I ever proposed was a course on Simon Veil, which didn't run because it didn't get enough interest, which was falling at the time and made me realize that maybe it's just how you sell it. So one thing that the one course that is very popular is the course that we run on creativity theory. And in that course, obviously, we talk a lot about the things that we talked about earlier around creation and Simon-Veil's very interesting approach to theories of creation. yeah, so you can find various courses on there. Simon-Veil invariably pops up in my discussions. In fact, she's over my shoulder now. She's in a set of Russian dolls. She is this one here on my shelf that my wife made for me, which is lovely. But so, yeah, so. Polymath World (01:02:55.946) Ha Alex Carter (01:03:01.432) She invariably comes up in my conversations in any course, but we don't have any specific courses on Simon Bay, but she will come up again and again and again in our courses. And you can do courses in philosophy at the University of Cambridge without any qualifications needed. And you can walk away with a qualification from the University of Cambridge that many people really, really, really value. And I love teaching those students because they often come with no expectations about what they're going to get. And you've got students from 18 to 87 and everything in between. lots of diversity, lots of really interesting viewpoints expressed and lots of application. So we really focus on how do you take the ideas of someone and actually apply them in your lives or in work or in the world. So yeah, please do look me up. Polymath World (01:03:43.596) I'm stunned that in my undergraduate and master's degree in theology I never came across Simone Wey, but I'm very, very fortunate, I think, that these two institutions I've been a part of, Cambridge and Manchester Metropolitan, she is something of a deity. Gentlemen, thank you so much. That's really, really brilliant and I hope students are really encouraged to look up this amazing and underappreciated philosopher. Thanks for joining me today. Christopher Thomas (01:04:09.4) Thanks, Sam. Alex Carter (01:04:09.708) Listen.