In an aphorism of "The Great Beast," Weil begins the transition from analyzing society to discovering a solution or antidote. Here her thoughts hearken to anthropological thinking circulating in the early twentieth century, which maintained that society is a project of individual relationships, a projection given life and meaning separate from those relationships, a projection to which power and thought and authority is renounced. This is not a renunciation to the fictional cooperative called "society" but to individuals as authorities, who then contrive the symbols, ploys, and coercive social structures. Anthropology called these "totems"--Weil does not use the term--which define God, religion, and the norms of society via the power of institutions to interpret and sanction.
According to Weil, the person's accession to society, the individual's renunciation of values to the collective as defined by a small group, is based on ignorance and fear, fear that without society (which is to say the state), people will collapse into crime and evil. The social and collective is seen as transcending individuals, as a supernatural entity from which nationalism and war is as normal as science, progress, and consumption. All of these evils are taking place simultaneously in a social context. The individual has probably never reflected on these issues at all, never acknowledged his or her degree of complicity in this system. But, say the apologist for the Great Beast, the individual need have no direct responsibility,
The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice, gold is the social order. In the case of ambition, power is the social order.
Thus society itself is the Great Beast, not some particular product of society, not even the state, the mode of production, the capitalist class, or any other social product. The weight of humanity is a heavy and ponderous gravity, a force but a contrived force to which the individual remains oblivious.
As long as one accepts the "totem," and subordinates all values to the collective, the contrived dichotomy of good and evil will trap individuals in fear. But the solution to the dilemma Weil depicts is not Nietzsche's transcendence of morality but a simple perception of the nature of society, of the nature of the "Great Beast."
It is the social which throws the color of the absolute over the relative. The remedy is in the idea of relationship. Relationship breaks its way out of the social. It is the monopoly of the individual. Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.
Alluding to the allegory of the cave in Plato's
Republic, where reality is seen second-hand as shadows on the wall rather than directly in the light of reality, Weil points to the compelling truth that everything people do or believe is based on a second-hand source: society. As long as individuals substitute society's view of reality for their own discoveries of reality -- so that the relationship to self, others, nature, and the universe is direct, immediate, intuitive, and accountable -- the individual will remain oppressed.
Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imagination) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments.
The most difficult of detachments , yet it can begin, not with action but with reflection.
Meditation on the social mechanism is in this respect a purification of the first importance. To contemplate the social is as good a way of detachment as to retire from the world. That is why I have not been wrong to rub shoulders with politics or society.
Weil was modest in this passage. Her activism was thorough-going. In 1930's France and Spain, she took breaks from teaching to work in factories, on farms, with labor unions, and to visit the front in the Spanish Civil War to learn first-hand the nature of society, power, and politics. She worked among the republican forces in Barcelona, and witnessed the atrocities against civilians. Later, she wrote to the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, who witnessed the atrocities of the nationalists against civilians. Though Bernanos was a social conservative he and Weil came to share a similar revulsion to war and ideology. She wrote to him:
My own feeling was that when once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whole life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men that murder. ... For the purpose [of the whole struggle] can only be defined in terms of the public good, of the welfare of men -- and men have become valueless. ... One sets out as a volunteer with the idea of sacrifice, and finds oneself in a war which resembles a war of mercenaries, only with much more cruelty and with less human respect for the enemy.
Of course, Weil's experience can be extrapolated to any modern war, with its contrived pretexts and goals. In this regard, her reflections in the thirties are prophetic. She added to Bernanos that she knew of no one else who had understood the ramifications of war on human morality. Such was the "rubbing of shoulders" she so modestly mentioned.
In the 1940's, Simone Weil returned to activism as a resistance member in England after exiling with her family from Vichy France through Casablanca to New York City. She was no armchair philosopher or writer but combined deep reflection with direct experience of the complexities of the world she analyzed. Weil witnessed evil on all sides and summarized it all as "the service of the false God, of the social Beast under whatever form it may be."
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