Simone Weil - Legacy

Legacy

During her lifetime, Weil was only known to relatively narrow circles; even in France her essays were mostly read only by those interested in radical politics. Yet during the first decade after her death, Weil rapidly became famous, attracting attention throughout the West. For the 3rd quarter of the twentieth century, she was widely regarded as the most influential person in the world on new work concerning religious and spiritual matters. Her philosophical, social and political thought also became popular, although not to the same degree as her religious work. As well as influencing fields of study, Weil deeply affected the personal lives of numerous individuals, Pope Paul VI for example said that Weil was one of his three greatest influences. Weil's popularity began to decline in the late sixties and seventies. However more of her work was gradually published, leading to many thousands of new secondary works by Weil scholars; some of whom focussed on achieving a deeper understanding of her religious, philosophical and political work. Others broadened the scope of Weil scholarship to investigate her applicability to fields like classical studies, cultural studies, education and even technical fields like ergonomics. In 2010, Julia Haslett released the film An encounter with Simone Weil ; she noted that Weil had become "a little-known figure, practically forgotten in her native France, and rarely taught in universities or secondary schools." However Weil's work has continued to be the subject of ongoing scholarship, with a metastudy finding that over 2500 new scholarly works had been published about her between 1995 and 2012.

Most commentators who have assessed Weil as a person were highly positive; many described her as a saint, some even as the greatest saint of the twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Coles. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range." In 1951 Albert Camus wrote that she was "the only great spirit of our times."

Weil has however been criticised even by those who otherwise deeply admired her, such as Eliot, for being excessively prone to divide the world into good and evil, and for her sometimes intemperate judgements. Weil was a harsh critic of the influence of Judaism on Western civilisation, and an even harsher critic of the Roman empire, in which she refused to see any value at all. On the other hand, she held up the Cathars as exemplars of goodness, despite there being little concrete evidence on which to base such an assessment, and according to Pétrement she idolised Lawrence of Arabia, considering him to be a Saint. A few critics have taken an overall negative view: several Jewish writers accused her of anti-Semitism, though this was far from a universal shared perspective. A small minority of commentators have judged her to be psychologically unbalanced or sexually obsessed. General de Gaulle, her ultimate boss while she worked for the French Resistance, simply considered her a fool.