ABSTRACT
The difficulties raised by the more metaphysical comments leave the question of how Simone Weil’s thought should be used, and of what sort of use would be most consonant with the ideas themselves. Simone Weil was born in 1909, the second child of a reasonably wealthy Jewish couple, Bernard E. Doering and Selma Weil, both of whom were intelligent and well educated, and neither of whom had much interest in the Jewish religion—Bernard, at least, was an atheist. One of the key problems facing anyone wanting to examine Weil’s thought more closely is its fragmentary nature. One of the most famous passages from Weil’s explicitly religious writing concerns the notion of “affliction.” One of the recurrent themes in Weil’s notebooks is the idea of “imbalance” and “the void”: The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give.
