It has become a ritual among Weil biographers to sum up her life with a series of contradictions. An anarchist who espoused conservative ideals, a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a saint who refused baptism, a mystic who was a labor militant, a French Jew who was buried in the Catholic section of an English cemetery, a teacher who dismissed the importance of solving a problem, the most willful of individuals who advocated the extinction of the self: here are but a few of the paradoxes Weil embodied. It helps to see these instances less as inconsistencies in Weil’s work and life— though, at times, they are precisely this—than as invitations to reflect on both one and the other. In her notebooks, she wrote that the “proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.”
 
By this measure, Weil concluded, “there are few philosophers. And one can hardly even say a few.” Not surprisingly, Weil held an exacting view of the philosopher’s mandate. It is, she declared, “exclusively an affair of action and practice.” This was the reason, she thought, why it was so difficult to write about philosophy—it was, she suggested, like writing a “treatise on tennis or running”—but it is also the reason why contradictions score Weil’s life. They reveal the inevitable tensions in a life that placed so great a premium on aligning ideals and practice, an effort that had to fall short sooner or later. But Weil’s effort to straddle these contradictions, as well as the nature of the ideals that inspired her action, demand our attention. She was, in fact, no less singular in her insistence on accepting the consequences of a given truth than she was in her insistence on matching her ideals with her acts. As her students often heard her declare, Weil could not stand compromise, whether it was with her own self or with others. In turn, we cannot stand for very long in her severe company without feeling deeply discomforted. This is as it should be. To a degree rare in the modern age—or, indeed, any age—Simone Weil fully inhabited her philosophy.
 
To echo the fictitious coroner’s report on the death of the Jesuit priest in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, Weil’s end remains a “questionable case.” For Weil, death was neither the means nor the end to philosophy. Instead, it was a possible consequence of doing philosophy—at least if we understand philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a way of life. As the contemporary philosopher Costica Bradatan has observed, “Philosophizing is not about thinking, speaking or about writing . . . but about something else: putting your body on the line.”
 
As with Socrates and Seneca, Benedict Spinoza and Jan Patocka, Weil obliges us to recall not just the price of the philosophical life, but its purpose. Few of us, I know, can ask this of ourselves. As Stanley Cavell wrote, Weil was exceptional in her refusal to be “deflected” from the reality of life. And yet this inability to be deflected is a gift, or curse, that most of us would gladly refuse. This is how it is—perhaps even as it should be.
 
This book explores five core concepts in Weil’s thought. While I detail several episodes in Weil’s life, I do not treat chronology as consistently as the historian in me would have liked. And so, allow me to trace in the next few pages the arc of her life.
 
Born in Paris in 1909, five years before the outbreak of World War I, Weil was the child of Bernard and Salomea (Selma) Weil. The well-to-do parents were fiercely nonobservant Jews who prized the city’s cultural and literary life. Born in Russia to a prosperous family of merchants, Salomea Reinherz— who shortened her first name to Selma—left for Belgium, then France with her parents following a rash of pogroms in 1882. Her family bristled with poets and musicians, and Selma was herself an accomplished pianist and singer. Bernard Weil was the child of a successful business family from Strasbourg that chose French citizenship when Germany annexed Alsace at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Though his parents were practicing Jews, Bernard gravitated to anarchism and atheism as a young man. Although he never surrendered his atheism, he did put aside his anarchist sympathies upon becoming a successful doctor. One year after the couple’s marriage in 1905, their son André was born; three years later, Simone followed. Shortly after his daughter’s birth, Bernard moved his family into an imposing apartment on the chic Boulevard Saint Michel, where he and Selma provided their children with love and attention, as well as the aspirations and advantages expected of the haute bourgeoisie in Belle Époque France.
 
As a child, Weil both channeled and challenged her parents’ values. She and André participated in discussions about music and literature during family meals, where they would speak in German and English as well as French. Before she had learned to read, she would memorize poems she learned from her mother, then recite them for dinner guests. When she was five, she and her brother were reading and performing passages from Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac. Her melodramatic performance, Madame Weil reported, reduced the family to tears of laughter. The parents found other performances by their children less amusing, however. One day, for example, the siblings went door to door, begging their startled neighbors for food. The reason, they explained, was that their parents had left them to starve.
 
Weil’s rebellious streak came to the fore early and never faded. During the war, she sent her own share of sugar and chocolate to the poilus, the French soldiers fighting at the front. A few years later, the ten-year-old Weil slipped out of her family’s spacious apartment to join striking workers who, chanting The Internationale, were marching along the Boulevard Saint Michel below. Not surprisingly, when she learned of the pittance paid to the workers at the summer resort where she and her family were staying, Weil tried to persuade them to form a union. In grade school, when a classmate denounced her as a communist, the child superbly replied, “Pas du tout! I am a Bolshevik.”
 
While Weil threw herself into the world of politics, her older brother was exploring the world of mathematics. André Weil soon revealed himself as a mathematical prodigy, with his sister comparing him, not unreasonably, to seventeenth-century thinker Blaise Pascal. In a letter she wrote several years later, she confessed that her brother’s genius was a source of both marvel and misery for her. In comparing her prospects to André’s, Weil’s spirit buckled and nearly broke. “At fourteen,” she confessed, “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 and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.”
 
This search for truth was the winch that raised Weil from this sink of despair and, though not without halts and shudders, kept her above it until her death two decades later. It held fast during her years at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, followed by admission into the nation’s most celebrated school of higher learning: the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). Weil’s classmates, who were variously awed or annoyed by her Kantian severity, called her the “Categorical Imperative in skirts.” The school’s director, Célestin Bouglé, no doubt had harsher labels in private for Weil. Driven to distraction by this brilliant student who tried to organize protests against the military draft, and whose drab coat pockets bristled with rolled copies of the anarchist La Révolution prolétarienne and satirical Le Canard enchaîné, Bouglé dubbed her “the red virgin.” Upon graduation, Weil was assigned a teaching position in Le Puy, a small city buried in the distant region of Auvergne. Bouglé perhaps had the hope he would never again hear from or about her. But Weil had the last word. Soon after the school year began, Bouglé received a postcard featuring a photo of the immense bronze statue of the Virgin Mary standing on the cliff that overlooks Le Puy. There was no need for Weil to sign the card: under the photo was the caption: “The Red Virgin of Le Puy.”