[excerpted from LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY by Simone Weil based on notes taken by Anne Reynaud-Guérithault when Weil's pupil in a French girls' school 1933-34.
The fetters are the imagination
The shadows of ourselves ar
In the second line Weil talks about the fetters or chains of the imagination. Our society worships imagination. We are not used to thinking of it as our prison. To help you understand what Weil means when she gives a word a different meaning than we are used to, the word is set in red and defined to the left by a key passage from Weil's writings.]
The cave is the world
The fetters are the imagination
The shadows of ourselves are the passive states which we know by introspection.
The learned in the cave are those who possess empirical forms of knowledge (who know how to make predictions, the doctors who know how to cure people by using empirical methods, those who know what is going on, etc.). Their knowledge is nothing but a shadow.
Education, he says, is, according to the generally accepted view of it, nothing but the forcing of thoughts into the minds of children.
For, says Plato, each person has within himself the ability to think. If one does not understand, this is because one is held by the fetters. Whenever the soul is bound by the fetters of suffering, pleasure, etc. it is unable to contemplate through its own intelligence the unchanging patterns of things.
No doubt, there are mathematicians in the cave, but their attention is given to honors, rivalries, competition, etc.
If anyone is not able to understand the unchanging patterns of things, that is not due to a lack of intelligence; it is due to a lack of moral stamina.
In order to direct one's attention to the perfect patterns of things, one has to stop valuing things which are always changing and not eternal.
One can look at the same world, which is before our eyes, either from the point of view of its relation to time, or from that of its relationship to eternity. Education means turning the soul in the direction in which it should look, of delivering the soul from the passions.
Plato's morality is: Do not make the worst possible mistake of deceiving yourself. We know that we are acting correctly when the power of thinking is not hindered by what we are doing. To do only those things which one can think clearly, and not to do those things which force the mind to have unclear thoughts about what one is doing. That is the whole of Plato's morality.
True morality is purely internal.
The man who has left the cave annoys the great beast. (Cf. Stendhal: 'All good reasoning causes offence.')
Intelligence offends by its very nature, thinking annoys the people in the cave.
If one stays in the cave, however easily one will be able to observe all the external rules of virtue, one will never be virtuous. Intellectual life and moral life are one.
What Plato calls the world of what passes away, these are things in so far as one thinks of them in relation to our passions.
One must not say: 'I am incapable of understanding'; one should say: 'I can turn the eyes of the soul in such a way that I will understand.' This equality of minds is a duty, not a matter of fact. (Cf. Descartes.)
The wise have to return to the cave, and act there. One has to reach the stage where power is in the hands of those who refuse it, and not of those whose ambition it is to possess it.
Plato's aim is to find out what forms of knowledge are the right ones to educate those who want to get out of the cave. These are: Arithmetic, Geometry,Astronomy, Music.
Plato's statement about all forms of knowledge:
'They are divine images and reflections of things that are true', so things as they appear to us are appearances of appearances; at least they are this as long as we stay in the cave.
Those who devote themselves to geometry, to the mathematical sciences, grasp what is but as it were in a dream.
So, there is a higher form of knowledge than mathematics which gives an account of the process of thought itself. This is dialectic (Greek word deleted). Unfortunately Plato does not tell us what this higher form of knowledge is. He only states what qualities the dialectician will have: he must be hard-working (physically and mentally), he must hate lying and falsehood.
— excerpted from LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY by Simone Weil based on notes taken by Anne Reynaud-Guérithault when Weil's pupil in a French girls' school 1933-34, translated by Hugh Price, London, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978
French © Lecons de philosphie Librairie Plon, 1959
English © English translation Cambridge University Press, 1978
"Weil came to her philosophical and religious
ideas by a path that included elite university training, factory work, potato digging, harvest in the vineyards, teaching philosophy to adolescent women, partisanship in trade unions, anarchistic Socialism, pacifism, rejection of pacifism, a conversion experience that did not lead her to joining ... a religion, exile in New York City, and employment by De Gaulle's government-in-exile in London.
Weil used her body as a tool as well as a weapon. She threw herself under the wheels of the same issues women are starving for answers to today: issues of hunger, violence, exclusion, betrayl of the the body, inability to be heard, and self-hate. ...
"Weil, our shrewdest political observer since Machiavelli, was never deceived by the glamor of power, and she committed herself to resisting force in whatever guise. More 'prophet' than 'saint,' more 'wise woman' than either, she bore a particular kind of bodily knowledge that the Western tradition cannot absorb. Simone Weil belongs to a world culture, still to be formed, where the voices of multiple classes, castes, races, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions, can be respected. To achieve this culture is an impossible task, but, as Weil would remind us, not on that account to be forsaken.
Today we look to Weil for hope, for meditation, for the bridge a body makes. She knew that the truth had been 'taken captive,' and that we must 'seek at greater depth our own source,' because power destroys the past, the past with its treasures of alternative ideals that stand in judgment on the present."
There Comes
If you do not fight it---if you look, just
look, steadily,
upon it,
there comes
a moment when you cannot do it,
if it is evil;
if good, a moment
when you cannot
not.
She said,
When from the depth
of our being,
we need, we seek a sound
which does mean
something: when we cry out
for an answer
and it is not granted, then,
we touch the silence of God---
Some begin to talk,
to themselves, as do the mad;
some give
their hearts to silence.
Lectures on Philosophy
Simone Weil / Cambridge University Press
New Trade Paper / Philosophy - General
Cave Glossary:
Imagination
"Grace [in terms of Plato's Cave read the true light coming from outside the cave] fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it. We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves."
Introspection"Introspection is a psychological state incompatible with other states.
"1. Thinking about things of the world precludes introspection.
"2. Very strong emotion precludes introspection.
"3. All actions which require attention preclude introspection.
"To sum up, thought, action and emotion exclude examination of oneself.
"[therefore] introspection results in one's taking notice, for the most part, of what is passive in human thought. By the very fact that one keeps a watch on oneself, one changes: and the change is for the worse since we prevent that which is of greatest value in us from playing its part."– Lectures on Philosophy
EducationWeil lamented that education had become no more than "an instrument manipulated by teachers for manufacturing more teachers, who in their turn will manufacture more teachers." rather than a guide to getting out of the cave.
not due to a lack of intelligence"The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
"... All that matters is that he has come to the end of its intelligence, such as it was, and has passed beyond it. A village idiot is as close to truth as a child prodigy. ..."
- Human Personality
excerpts as noted from GRAVITY AND GRACE by Simone Weil, New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1952. edited and arranged by Gustave Tibon, translated by Emma Craufurd
French © Libraire Plon 1947
English © G.P.Putnam's & Sons 1956
All Rights Reserved
"Human Personality" is one of Weil's most challenging and moving essays. It is included in both of these volumes:
UTOPIAN PESSIMIST - The Life and Thought of Simone Weil by David McClellan, Poseidon Press: NY, 1990
Weil, Simone, SIMONE WEIL, AND ANTHOLOGY, edited and Introduced by Sîan Miles, Virago Press, London, 1986
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