Simone Weil

Simone Weil: Attention to the Real by Robert Chenavier, translated by Bernard E Doering, 81 pages

For Chenavier, Weil's whole approach can be summarized as an "attention to the real."  This provided the motivation for her lifelong search for a "spirituality of work" that would celebrate the interaction between the freedom of the spirit and material necessity.  Likewise, it drove her quest for a transcendent Truth which reoriented her life around the love of the Good.  This abandonment of self itself presents a higher form of the collision between freedom and necessity.  The higher values do not, however, replace the lower, to the contrary, they illumine and fulfill them.

In her thought as in her life, Weil was a consummate outsider, yet she was also very much a typical twentieth century figure in that her biography and her philosophy are each unintelligible without the other.  In only a few pages, Chenavier demonstrates the significance and coherence of the whole, for her time and for all time.