Simone Weil's Conversation With The: Bhagavad Gita

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Simone Weil's Conversation with the


Bhagavad Gita
LINDA WOODHEAD

According to Simone Weil and the Bhagavad Gua, there exists a law-
they call it the 'aberration of opposites'-which states that any error is
indissolubly linked with another which is its opposite extreme.
Therefore, in fleeing from one error one necessarily falls into an
opposed and equally false one-unless one transcends both.
The studies of We il's work which have appeared since her death in
1943 have too often exemplified the working of this law of the
'aberration of opposites', falling with regularity into one of two
opposed errors. The first is, as she herself puts it, that of 'parcelling' her
work into 'little pieces', 1 pieces selected and interpreted according to
interests alien to their own, which attain a false significance
independent of the 'dense mass' from which they are drawn. The
second error is the opposite one of over-generalizing about Weil's
work in the attempt to present it as a more comprehensive and
complete system than it actually is.
This article aims to transcend these opposed errors by treating
Weil's work as significantly 'conversational'. It does so in faithfulness
to her own characterization of herself as a practitioner of 'dialectic' or
'the Platonic method', a method which, she says, 'consists, when [one]
encounters an idea, an affirmation in one's mind, not in asking
whether it is true or false, but what it rneans'i'' In this search for
meaning both Weil and Plato make use ofconversational forms which
are far more than mere stylistic devices. For it is the seeking rather
than the sought, the discussion rather than the conclusion which forms
the stuff of their philosophy. While Plato's conversations take place
between living persons, Weil's usually take place between herself and
the recorded thought of another person or people. Hers are still
conversational in an important sense, for both parties are active in the
encounter, both interact with one another, and both are changed in
the process.
This article will deal specifically with just one of Weil's
conversations, that which she held with a sacred and anonymous BeE
Indian text, the Bhagavad Gua. This particular conversation is chosen
because of the importance it assumed for Wei I in her own eyes, because
of its unique value for the interpretation of the Gila, and because of its
significance as an example of interfaith dialogue which, lacking the
self-consciousness implied in that formula, succeeds where such
dialogue too often fails. Moreover, if the claim that Weil's work is
dialectical is true, the study in some depth of just one of her
conversations should serve to illuminate her work as a whole. For it
follows from the nature of dialectic that one can learn more about

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Simone Weil on the Gita 25
a dialetician's thought by studying a small part of it well than by
studying it all badly. As Weil comments, 'Its truth lights up the soul in
proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity'i' The quality
of exposition in this article should thus serve as some proof-or
otherwise-of the methodological claim on which it rests.

SIMONE WElL, PACIFISM AND THE BHAGAVAD GlTA

From an early age Weil regarded herself as a pacifist. She believed


that participation in warfare could never be justified, and that
abstention from violence was a moral imperative binding on all men
and women. This extreme pacifism was grounded in what Wei I
termed her 'materialist' critique of war, a critique which assessed the
propriety of war in terms of the means it actually employs rather than
the ends it claims to pursue. Such an analysis, Weil believed, showed
war to be oppressive in a fully Marxian sense." It showed it to be
characterized by the subordination of soldiers to the instruments of
war, instruments controlled by those who do not fight and whose
power of constraint lies in their right to execute without trial. As a
French citizen, therefore, Wei I firmly opposed French intervention in
the Spanish Civil War,and even in the face of increasing belligerence
from the Nazis, called for a generalized non-intervention policy which
would preclude French involvement in German affairs as much as in
Spanish."
At the same time, however, Weil began to say and do things which
suggested her growing dissatisfaction with the extreme pacifism she
continued to espouse. In 1938 she proposed the establishment of a
national defence army and outlined the guerilla tactics it should
employ, and two years earlier she had travelled to Spain to fight with
the Anarchist C.N.T. brigade in the Civil War. Her dissatisfaction
seems to have become acute by early 1940, the time when she first read
the Bhagavad Gua: As her major biographer, Simone Petrernent,
records,
[Weil] managed to read the Guaatjust the moment when the poem
answered precisely all the questions she was thinking about ... She
told me that this poem had a burning pertinence to what was
happening just because it dealt with the question of knowing
whether a man who has pity for others, and whom war fills with
horror, Arjuna, must nonetheless fight ... Arjuna's problem was
hers."
Weil thus engaged in an intense and sustained conversation with the
Gua on the issue of pacifism. Its fruit was the position she developed
and maintained from then on.
The Bhagavad Gua opens as Arjuna, standing on the battlefield of
Kuruksetra on the eve of the war he must wage against .his own
family, voices his reluctance to fight to his charioteer, the God
Krishna. His reluctance seems to stem chiefly from a deep revulsion at

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26 Linda Woodhead
the thought of wilfully injuring and killing other human beings. But
Krishna counters this objection with a sharp rebuke,
You have mourned for those who should not be mourned ...
The truly wise do not mourn
The dead or the living [II, II].
They do not mourn, he explains, because they are secure in the
knowledge that,
The unreal never is.
The Real never is not ...
No-one can cause
Destruction of this imperishable [II, 16, 22].
It seems clear that Weil felt the sting of this rebuke herself. Despite
her earlier protestations that her extreme pacifism was not generated
by any 'superstitious respect for human life", it is clear that her
materialist critique of war is based on the belief that the extortion of
human life is the ultimate act of oppression, and other of her remarks
suggest that she once considered loss of life a price not worth paying
even for the alleviation of injustice. Krishna's teaching on the
indestructibility of the Real (Weil preferred to call it 'the Good') led
her to reassess this position. She interpreted his teaching not as a
doctrine of immortality where this is understood as a belief in the
continued existence of individuals as distinct persons after their deaths
(this she thought a shallow 'consolation'), but as a denial of the
ultimate reality of the person in order to stress the reality of that which
transcends it. Her acceptance of this doctrine is shown by a remark
which occurs in one of the notebooks she wrote soon after reading the
Bhagaoad Gzfa where she asks the question, 'What is it evil to destroy?'
and no longer answers 'a human life', but,
Not that which is base, for that does not matter.
Not that which is high, for, even should we want to,
We cannot touch that.f
Weil did, however, come to believe that there was something which
it was both possible and wrong to destroy: a 'metaxu' or 'bridge'. A
metaxu is something which, though not unqualifiedly good in itself,
enables men and women to reach the unqualifiedly Good, to pass from
the realm of 'gravity' to that of 'grace'. Many vital metaxu-such as
order, security, cultural traditions, objects and people one loves-are
easily destroyed by war, and it is this destructive potential of war that
Weil now responds to as the basis of her pacifism.
This insight is echoed in the Bhagaoad Guo, where Arjuna puts
forward very similar considerations in favour of abstaining from
violence. But although Krishna admits to him, 'You speak words of
wisdom', he is not persuaded that the reason counts in Arjuna's case.
Indeed, he treats it as a mere excuse, and accuses Arjuna of cowardice
(II, I). Arjuna is called a coward, believes Weil, because he shrinks

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Simone Weil on the cus 27
from following the course he has voluntarily embarked upon, whether
consciously or by default. Moreover, his desire not to fight is utterly
unreal since it can no longer impinge upon reality in the form of
action. It is a mere distraction. Wei I comments: 'Arjuna's moment of
pity-it belongs to the order of dreams. At agiven moment one is not free
to do anything whatever. And one must accept this internal necessity;
accept what one is, at a given moment, as a fact, even one's shame.'?
Wei I devoted much energy to the interpretation of this section of
Krishna's teaching, and made it clear that she felt herself guilty of a
shrinking from necessity with respect to the Second World War as
culpable as Arjuna's with respect to the battle of Kuruksetra, As a
result of her meditations on the theme she coined her famous maxim,
'Nothing Ineffective is of any Value.'10 She now believed that non-violence
was only good ifit was effective, as it was for such men as Gandhi and
St Francis, but could not be for Wei I in 1940 or Arjuna at Kuruksetra.
And while it is a duty to strive to attain the stature which enables one
to be non-violent, if one is not of such stature, and cannot alter a
situation by remaining non-violent, one's duty may be to take up
arms. Reversing her stress on the irrelevance of a war's end, however,
Weil now claimed that the only wars men and women may have a
duty to participate in are those whose sole aim is to create in the enemy
the disposition for peace when its creation by non-violent means has
become impossible. Weil had not abandoned her pacifism, but had
come to believe that it was possible to remain a pacifist even when
wielding sword or gun. The (lu{is main theme-the nature and
possibility of detached and non-defiling action-had also become the
main theme of Weil's conversation with that sacred text.
SIMONE WElL, DETACHMENT AND THE BHAGAVAD GfTA
Even before reading the Bhagavad (;zta, Wei I had become convinced of
the centrality of detachment in human life. I~ her student days the
most influential of her teachers, Alain (Emile Chartier), had
impressed upon her his belief that doubt or detachment is found in all
true thought and is the sign of reason. Weil developed this insight in
some of her earliest writings, arguing that detachment only occurs
when an obstacle is encountered. If, for example, instead of pushing
against a rock that blocks one's path, one turns away to look for a
lever, one has momentarily renounced one's desire and become
detached.
All reflection and all methodical action are thus, according to Weil,
the fruits of detachment. It is detachment which generates the crucial
notion of 'necessity' which occurs when the mind, attempting to
understand something or overcome some obstacle, turns away from it
and reconstructs it in thought. As Wei I puts it, 'It is insofar as man
controls nature, whether he does this really, or whether he does it by
the use of signs [mathematical, geometrical, linguistic, for example]
that he has the notion of necessity. '11 As long as a child does not realize
that a circle is produced by the rotation ofa straight line about a point,

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28 Linda Woodhead
he or she may have a general idea of what a circle is, but can have no
notion of its necessity. A thought without necessity can only be a
prejudice. Actions without necessity are equally indefensible. Weil
comments, 'It is only those actions and thoughts which have a necessity
about them that are truly human ... One must avoid those actions and
thoughts which have no necessity about them.T' Such thoughts and
actions will be unjust. The ethical and the theoretical are not separate
here; detachment lies at the heart of both.
Important as these ideas about detachment were to Weil, however,
they were unable to furnish her with a means of escape from a
dilemma with which she had struggled for some time, and which came
into sharpest focus in 1939 and 1940 as she tried to decide whether or
not to participate in war. The dilemma was that of knowing whether
to live a life of activity or inactivity. Since Wei! believed that activity
necessarily implicated one in the evils of the world and involved one in
compromise, and that inactivity, 'creeping out of concrete life', was a
despicable and cowardly course, she was constantly tortured.P In the
Bhagavad Guo, however, she found that Krishna finally persuaded
Arjuna to fight by convincing him that actions performed with
detachment implicate one neither in evil nor in cowardice. This was a
solution to her dilemma which Weil both could and did accept, and
which she soon came to see as an implication of her own thoughts on
detachment. Her most fascinating exchange of ideas with the GUll
concerns this subject.
In the third chapter of the Bhagavad Guo, where Krishna expounds
his great theme of detachment, he begins by insisting on the
impossibility of a life of inactivity as it is normally conceived. Even the
bare maintenance of the body necessitates activity. The only real
choice facing Arjuna at Kuruksetra is not that between acting or
abstaining from action, but that between acting purely or impurely.
For, as Krishna says,
Not by the non-performance of works
Does one reach worklessness;
And not by renunciation alone
Does one attain to perfection [III, 4].
Purity and true inactivity are to be attained not through the
renunciation of action, but through the 'renunciation of the fruits of
action'. Only thus, insists Krishna, can one rise above one's actions and
avoid being defiled by them, attaining inactivity within activity,
spiritual stillness in the midst of bodily engagement. As he says,
Whoever acts abandoning attachment
Evil does not stain
As water [does not stain] a lotus-leaf [V, 10].
Weil forged a particularly powerful image by which to illustrate
and understand these ideas-the image of the 'void'. She suggested
that human energy, the energy which normally enables men and

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Simone Weil on the cas 29
women to act, is lost when an action results in a loss of the actor's
prestige-such as would result, for example, from association with the
poor and despised. If this loss is not balanced by a compensatory input
of energy, energy supplied by regaining prestige (as would occur, for
example, if it was believed that association with the poor and despised
brought future reward), a disequilibrium, a void, results. Human
nature abhors this void as much as physical nature abhors a vacuum.
To act while renouncing the fruits of one's actions as the Bhagavad (;zta
prescribes is precisely to accept the void and act within it. It is to act
without thought of the benefit or harm an action may bring one; to act
selflessly.
Wei1does not hide the danger involved in passing through the void.
It is a 'dark night' in which everything-including God-is lost for a
time. She speaks of it as a 'terrible risk' ; it may cause an individual to
fall as well as to rise. Both Christ and Arjuna were subjected to this
risk, the former enduring the void because he was the victim of force,
the latter because he wielded it. Weil explains, 'Christ himself was for
a moment deprived of God. Contact with force, from whichever end
the contact is made (sword handle or sword point) deprives one for a
moment of God. Whence the Bhagavad (;ua. The Bhagavad (;zta and the
Gospels complete each other.'!" In the end neither Christ nor Arjuna
fell, because they both accepted the void and resisted the temptation to
fill it with human energy. As a result it was filled instead by an influx
of spiritual energy, of grace, and they were saved.
Weil realized that the idea of performing actions within the void,
actions whose fruits have been renounced, paralleled her earlier belief
that only necessary actions should be performed. By renouncing the
fruits of actions it is possible to act in obedience to necessity-'en
hypomene', as she liked to put it-rather than according to personal
predilections. She found this parallel further developed in the (;zt(is
teaching on the 'Gunas', The Gunas are described in the (;zta as the
constituent elements of the world and of the creatures within it. Most
importantly, they are said to underlie all human action. As Krishna
explains to Arjuna,
The Gunas of Prakrti (nature/matter)
Perform all actions;
He whose understanding is deluded by egoism
Thinks, 'I am the agent' [III, 27].
Weil took this to mean that all true actions can be reduced to a play of
necessary causes without leaving any residue representing the share
taken by the '1'.15 She found support for this in her observation that
both good and bad acts appear to happen automatically, independ-
ently of their authors. Bad acts seem to have a momentum of their
own which volition is unable to alter. As St Paul said, 'I do not do what
I want, but I do the very thing I hate' (Rom. 7. I 5). Good acts too
appear to happen without the person behind them appearing, when
the actor's attitude is, as Wei I says, 'not, "I would do it again if I had

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30 Linda Woodhead
to", but, "I cannot do otherwise" ... The "I" is absent.v" Good and bad
acts are not therefore to be differentiated on the basis of volition, but of
understanding. In a good act, the actor understands the necessity of a
situation and the action it calls forth, and acts in obedience to it. In a
bad act no such understanding is achieved and the actor believes
himself or herself a free agent. WeB now believed that she had been
subject to this enslaving delusion of freedom in her espousal of pacifism
in the pre-war years,just as Arjuna had in his refusal to fight on the eve
of battle. Neither of them,
Knowing that the GU1)as merely act on GU1)as
[Had] not become attached [III, 28].
Prior to her reading of the Bhagavad Guo, Wei I had made little use of
religious categories in her exploration of the notion of detachment. In
the Bhagavad Guo, however, she found that both theistic and monistic,
personalist and impersonalist, religious traditions were treated as
valuable expressions of the ideal of detachment. An individual who
has renounced the fruits of action is thus spoken of as,
Devoted to the Atman [self],
Satisfied with the Atman
Content in the Atman alone [III, 17],
as 'having become one with Brahman', and as having 'abandoned' his
or her actions to the God Krishna.
Weil explored each of these expressions in turn in her conversation
with the Guo', finding new insights in each. The theistic she considered
worthy and beautiful, so long as it was not interpreted to mean:
'Perform actions for Krishna.' Actions, she thought, should be
performed because impelled by God, and not for his sake. God should
not be put into the dative. As Weil comments with reference to the Guo'
and the legend ofJoan of Arc, 'A fundamental difference: [Arjuna]
makes war although inspired by God, Uoan] makes war because
inspired by God.'17 The monistic expression Wei I also found uniquely
valuable. She believed that it showed perfectly the way in which, in
becoming detached, one renounces the concerns of one's own body
t!.nd takes instead the whole universe as a body. As she says, 'The
Atman ... let the soul of a man take the whole universe for its body ...
The soul transports itself outside the actual body into something else.
Let it therefore transport itself into the whole universe.'18
Weil was no less impressed by the Bhagavad Gilas constant stress on
the importance of meditation, which it alternately calls, Yoga
(discipline), Samadhi (concentration), Sthitaprajiiata (steady wisdom)
and EkOgrata (one-pointedness). As it explains,
When [the wise man] withdraws
His senses from their objects,
As a tortoise draws in its limbs on all sides,
Then his wisdom (prajiia) becomes steady [II, 68].

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Simone Weil on the efta 31
Weil's stress on the importance of ,attention' echoes the Gzt{is emphasis
on meditation. She characterizes attention as distinct from will, being
a 'negative' effort rather than a positive and muscular one. It consists
in suspending thought, in leaving it detached and empty, ready to
receive in its truth the object which is to penetrate it. Only by paying
attention can one grasp the necessity of a situation. It was just this,
maintains Weil, that Arjuna, on the eve of battle, was unable to do.
Hence the need for Krishna to instruct him in the ways of
concentration, meditation, attention. Only by paying attention could
he rise above his involvement in evil. He could not do so in the sphere
of outward manifestation, by fighting or refusing to fight. All that he
could do was, as Weil puts. it, 'While remaining through and beyond
his action in a state of contemplation, doubting its validity, standing
outside it and straining towards the better and non-represented, to
prepare himself to become later on capable of doing better.'!"

This article's consideration of some of the most important aspects of


Weil's conversation with the Bhagavad Gua has shown repeatedly how
in the period she was reading the Gzta a change, if not in direction at
least in emphasis, took place in themes central to her thought. Wei I
describes the Gztas role in this process in a passage from her Spiritual
Autobiography:
In the spring of 1940 I read the Bhagavad Gzta. Strange to say it was
in reading those marvellous words, words with such a Christian
sound, put into the mouth of an incarnation of God, that I came to
feel strongly that we owe an allegiance to religious truth which is
quite different from the admiration we accord a beautiful poem, it
is something far more categorical. 20
The Gila, in other words, led Wei I to an appreciation of the irreducible
nature of religious affirmation and commitment and, her words
imply, to the making of such. Prior to this she had approached
religious beliefs with the formula, 'Perhaps all this is untrue'. Now,
without ceasing to repeat this formula, she added to it the contrary
one, 'Perhaps all this is true'.21 The openness involved in this
movement between affirmation and denial now seemed to her the
attitude most appropriate to religious truth.
Weil's new sensitivity to religious belief is marked in her work by an
increased stress on the reality of the other-rather than the this-worldly,
the unknown rather than the known. With the (;zla, she came to regard
the renunciation that opens up the creature to the unknown and
prevents clinging to the known, as constitutive of all true religion, and
to conceive of God as above all an unknown God. The dark night of
God's absence was for Wei I itself the soul's contact with God, and the
god who could be known a mere idol. Weil did not reject the material
in favour of the spiritual, but came to believe that the adoption of a
correct attitude to the world must depend on rather than precede the
adoption of a correct attitude to what is above the world. She herself

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32 Linda Woodhead
remained so much in the world that she refused baptism for fear of
deserting it; but she was at the same time so little of the world that she
took this decision solely in obedience to the unknown God on whom
her attention was focused. The (;ua had taught her that it was only by
looking at the supernatural with attention that one could rise in the
sphere of the natural. Arjuna had done just this in listening to the God
Krishna rather than to his own inclinations. At the end of the Bhagavad
Gita he speaks these words:
Destroyed is my delusion [0 Krishna]
And I have gained my memory through your grace.
I am firm, my doubts have gone.
I will do your word [XVIII, 73].
Arjuna had been involved in the only revolution Weil could now
believe worthy of the name.

Linda Woodhead is a research student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A


version of this article was first read at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne's
Conference on 'The Sanskrit Tradition in the Modern World'.

Notes
I Ecrits de Londres (Paris 1957), p. 250.
2 Quoted by S. Petrernent in Simone Weil: A Life (Oxford 1977), p. 404.
3 The Need for Roots (London 1952), p. 63·
4 See 'Reflections Sur la Guerre' in Ecrits Historiques et Politiques (Gallimard 196o),
pp. 229-39·
5 See 'Non-Intervention Generalisee', ibid., p. 364.
6 Petrernent, op. cit., p. 364.
7 Ecrits Historiques et Politiques, p. 234.
8 The Notebooks ofSimone Weil, vol. I (London 1956), p. 48.
9 ibid., p. 56.
10 ibid., p. 97.
I I Lectures on Philosophy, tr. H. Price (Cambridge 1978), p. 88.
12 ibid., p. 89.
13 See Weil's letter to D. Garnett, reprinted in Durham UniversityJournal (Dec. 1976),
p.60.
14 Notebooks, vol. I, p. 25.
15 ibid., p. 53·
16 ibid., pp. 29-30.
17 ibid., p. 25.
18 ibid., p. 19.
19 ibid., p. 294·
20 Waiting on God (London 1951), p. 22.
2I ibid., p. 25.

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