Simone Weil’s life illustrates the capacity to give up the things we feel we’re owed – such as a carbon-intensive consumer-driven lifestyle
Justine Toh
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The saying takes on new meaning after the hottest July ever, devastating wildfires in Greece and Canada, and the declaration by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, that we’ve left behind “global warming” for “global boiling”. But this time our Neros – AKA governments – aren’t the only ones shirking their responsibilities. What are the rest of us doing while the world burns?
Simone Weil’s philosophy demanded she put everything on the line. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy
Feel helpless yet? Me too. The climate crisis calls for a radical rethink of our cushy, carbon-heavy lives and our collective willingness to make sacrifices for future generations. But raised in a world of comfort and convenience, I get annoyed when there’s no wifi. I don’t do sacrifice. I need someone to show me how.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher, political activist and not-quite-Catholic mystic, died 80 years ago. Although known for her work on attention and affliction (very basically: extreme, dehumanising suffering), Weil wasn’t one for abstract theorising. Hers was a lived philosophy demanding she put everything on the line – and with a zeal that qualified her for “secular sainthood”, as one recent biography puts it.
If anyone can offer us an earthly education in sacrifice, it’s Weil. Even if she’s a hard act to follow. Albert Camus called her “the only great spirit of our time”. She intimidated Simone de Beauvoir, her classmate at the Sorbonne (“I envied her for having a heart that could beat across the world,” De Beauvoir wrote of Weil’s distress for famine victims). I mean, as a six-year-old, Weil gave up sugar in solidarity with French soldiers during the first world war. Clearly, she was no ordinary kid….
After the truth-shower 