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"Certainties of this kind are experimental [(expérimentales)]. But if we do not believe in them before experiencing them, if at least we do not behave as though we believed in them, we shall never have the experience which leads to such certainties. There is a kind of contradiction here. Above a given level this is the case with all useful knowledge concerning spiritual progress. If we do not regulate our conduct by it before having proved it, if we do not hold on to it for a long time only by faith, a faith at first stormy and without light, we shall never transform it into certainty. Faith is the indispensable condition.
"The best support for faith is the guarantee that if we ask our Father for bread, he does not give us a stone."
Simone Weil, "Reflections on the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God," in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1951), 52.
Simone Weil, "Attention and will," in Gravity and grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963 [1952]), 110. "human wretchedness is as great in the absolutely sinless man as in the sinner", but also an image of God, "who is what we are not", i.e. infinitely blessed.
"Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period."
Simone Weil, "Attention and will," in Gravity and grace, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1963 [1952]), 106.
"L’attention signifie un acte très élevé de connaissance et
le dénuement le plus complete n face de l’objet."
Paul Ricœur, "L’attention:
étude phénoménologie de l’attention et de ses connexions philosophiques" (Cercle philosophique de l’Ouest, Rennes, 2 March 1939), Studia phænomenologica 13 (2013): 40 (21-50). Immediate context:
an act of the mind can
be adynamic: neither active nor
passive. Or, rather, because to know is
not to suffer, knowing can be experienced in the passive mode (fascination) or
in the active mode (voluntary attention).
There is no contradiction about an act’s being at once receptive and
active; or indeed [(bien)] receptive and passive. Fascination is at once receptivity inasmuch
as it knows, and passivity inasmuch as [it is a] duration endured [(durée subie)];
voluntary attention is at once receptivity by its adherence to the object and
activity by its inherence in the subject and by its liberty of focus
[(orientation)].
. . . knowledge can be experienced in the active mode without
being productive of its object. . . . By attention, I place
myself actively at the disposal of [(me mets activement au compte de)] the
object.
"Mais détruire des cités, soit matériellement, soit moralement, . . . c'est couper tout lien de poésie et d'amour entre des âmes humaines et l'univers."
Simone Weil, "Love of the order of the world," in "Forms of the implicit love of God," in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1951), 115-116, italics mine. Context:
The love of the beauty of the world, while it is universal, involves, as a love which is secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things which bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things [('the pure and authentic achievements of art and science', 'everything which envelops human life with poetry through all the social strata')] are those which form ladders [(échelles)] reaching towards the beauty of the world, openings [(ouvertures)] on to it. He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.
French from Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Le Grand Livre du Mois < Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 744.
Robert "Darnton saw that the Enlightenment, viewed from the ground-level perspective of the S[ociété ]T[ypographique de ]N[euchâtel, 'one of the Enlightenment's most important publishing houses',] looked very different from the version of the subject then popular in universities. In the works of highly regarded scholars like Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, the Enlightenment was in its essence a profound revolution of the mind that liberated critical reason from the shackles of religion and rationalist philosophy. A reader properly began, and sometimes concluded, its study by following Rousseau and Kant, Hume and Montesquieu along the deepest currents of their thought. But this 'Enlightenment' was to a large extent a retrospective invention that took the works out of the social settings in which they originally circulated.
"The STN sold 'philosophical books,' but by 'philosophical' it meant something very different from what we mean today. One of its catalogs indiscriminately included, under this heading, Rousseau's Social Contract, slander-filled attacks against King Louis XV, and explicit pornography. In another early article, Darnton drew from this fact an eloquent conclusion: 'A regime that classified its most advanced philosophy with its most debased pornography was a regime that sapped itself, that dug its own underground and that encouraged philosophy to degenerate into libelle.' Whatever the High Enlightenment may have done to slowly undermine the church and state, the works of slander and pornography savagely scraped away at the reputation and legitimacy of the actual men and women who constituted France's ruling elites."
David A. Bell, "From readers to revolutionaries," The New York review of books 66, no. 11 (June 27, 2019): 66 (66-67).
"Certainties of this kind are experimental [(expérimentales)]. But if we do not believe in them before experiencing them, if at least we do not behave as though we believed in them, we shall never have the experience which leads to such certainties. There is a kind of contradiction here. Above a given level this is the case with all useful knowledge concerning spiritual progress. If we do not regulate our conduct by it before having proved it, if we do not hold on to it for a long time only by faith, a faith at first stormy and without light, we shall never transform it into certainty. Faith is the indispensable condition.
