ABSTRACT
Following the German occupation of Paris in June 1940, Weil and her parents fled to the south of France, finally settling in Marseilles, where they remained until May 1942. As is reflected in the notebooks she kept during the approximately twenty months of her sojourn in Marseilles, she spent this time musing deeply on a wide variety of subjects, among them science, art, folklore, and religion. In the spring of 1941 she devoted considerable thought to science, returning to terrain she had worked in “Science and Perception in Descartes,” but seeing it from a considerably different perspective. In 1929-30 she had criticized modern science for its elitism, its devaluation of ordinary perception and ordinary thinking, its tendency to separate itself from the world and to pursue purely abstract systems of relationships; she had proposed a conception of science that would make it an instrument by means of which all human beings could discover for themselves indubitable knowledge of the world and thereby come to “possess”—master, be able to act on-the material world. By 1941, however, she was no longer satisfied with the conception of the world as mechanical necessity that underlay both the view of science she had criticized and the one she had proposed. “It is true,” she wrote in “Classical Science and After,” a long essay composed in the spring of 1941, “that the matter which constitutes the world is a tissue of blind necessities…; it is true, too, in a sense, that they are absolutely indifferent to spiritual aspirations, indifferent to the good; but also, in another sense, it is not true…. We are ruled by a double law: an obvious indifference and a mysterious complicity, as regards the good, on the part of the matter which composes the world; it is because it reminds us of this double law that the spectacle of beauty pierces the heart.”1
