Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion

Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion. By Richard H. Bell. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. 224p. $58.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

One day in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil had their first and last conversation. A great famine had recently devoured China, and Simone Weil declared that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution that would feed all the starving people of the earth. Beauvoir responded that the problem was not to make people happy but to find the reason for their existence. Weil gave Beauvoir a withering stare and retorted: "It's easy to see you've never gone hungry." "Our relationship did not go any further," the chastened Beauvoir duly noted; but she added: "I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world" (Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958).

Those who find Weil's thought so irritating usually castigate her for a lack of rigor and coherence, made all the more infuriating (as Beauvoir found out) by her seemingly implacable certitude about everything and her assertory mien. A commentator can go in one of two directions in dealing with this intractable thinker: either accept what Maurice Blanchot perceptively termed "an irregularity that is not easy to grasp" across her writings, or attempt to wrestle some sort of continuity (if not systematicity) out of Weil's disparate oeuvre. Richard H. Bell goes the latter route, finding in Weil's thinking the persistent attitude that Beauvoir admired: a deep sensitivity to all forms of human suffering and for those human beings "who hunger and are in need of assistance" (p. 86).

Under Bell's interpretation, however, the continuity in Weil's thinking is not limited to an attitude; it also entails a uniformity of theoretical direction. Hence, Weil's writings assume the steady and determined character of a definitive if not wholly systematic (p. 208) moral philosophy which embodies nothing less than "a new discourse" (p. 167) that results in "a very radical formulation of what justice is" (p. 62). Bell further solidifies Weil's work by inviting us to understand her "compassion-based moral philosophy" (p. 86) and its "new virtue of justice" (p. 62) as diametrically opposed to the "rights-based moralities" that he claims have...