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“Pure good is sent to us from heaven only in imperceptible quantities, either to the individual or society. The black mustard seed is the smallest of seeds. Proserpine ate but a single grain of pomegranate. A pearl buried in the middle of a field is not visible. You cannot see the yeast mixed with the dough.” ¹

Simone Weil

There is a longing for purpose to notice in all of us and for Weil that purpose is a responsibility.

The conditions of purpose are those of attention, of the opportunity to glimpse the essence of a person, be that your own or someone else. That essence is discrete and it is far from personal and even further from the collective.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins in the stream of consciousness of a child whose truth is safely kept with their parents and in the case of Stephen Dedalus, his father. The world is simple and thus the internal construct of it makes it so. Language and form progress to vignettes of significance, whatever caught the attention of young Stephen; these feel like political headlines coming to us through a distraught aunty at the dinner table and the righteousness of an angry father. Seamlessly Stephen’s stream of consciousness changes again, informing the world using references to and quotes from passages in the bible.

The bildungsroman gives the author space to get in touch with an experience that an audience will accept that a child goes through; the building of identity and each decision to act or indecision to react is a naive reflection. The pain of feeling the reliable social structures of our world waver, the first belief dispelled, can be both anticlimactic and a vast dread. Vast still, by the spaces of little definition that children live in anyway. We have to grasp at opportunities to dull our attention to ease this dread because we don’t know any other way, and in the liminal space of not knowing it feels like the alternative is to keep not knowing; it is a perpetual dread. We will recognize this experience had by a child but cannot identify with it and so we allocate it to coming of age and we minimize it; make it an experience of small adjustment.

There is injustice in the veils that build our person, fixed from idols who promise the gift of truth and by doing so hide purpose away from the people that make up their collective, ultimately making truth inaccessible. The thread that binds us is not woven by idols.

Truth and so, true purpose is in and of goodness, this goodness defines Weil’s Impersonalism and counteroffers the person whose understanding of themselves is the essence of them and what it means to be in entirety.

“Science, art, literature, philosophy, which are merely forms of human perfection, are fields in which striking and glorious successes are made by men whose names subsequently live on for thousands of years. But over and above this domain, far above it, separated from it by an abyss, is another sphere in which things of first importance are found. These are essentially anonymous. It is pure chance whether the names of those who have made their way into this domain are remembered or forgotten. Even if they are known they have really entered into anonymity. Their person has disappeared.” ²

Simone Weil

The artist is not the purpose, it is to step away from the personalist “I” and “me” that is meant when using the word person, and not by means of “us” or “we”, that which Personalism strays towards when discussing purpose. It is to experience and nurture what Weil calls the impersonal; a truth that reveals itself as a loving Person.³

“Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, of the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end forever, in time and in eternity, his freedom”. ⁴

James Joyce: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’

The conditions of purpose are that of creative attention; that is the education, silence and warmth that dispels illusions of truth, illusions that lead to and lie in the respite of a collective⁵.

It is both a manifestation of and a pathway to purpose to take responsibility for the truth. The gap between established collective reason and murky honesty is a creative process and a leap of faith, beyond reason, into the unknown and possibly unknowable but what you create from this place is original and substantial and pure good.

“He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”⁶

James Joyce: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’

1. Weil, S ‘Beyond Personalism’, JSTOR, vol. 2, no. 3, 1952, p. 75 ↩︎
2. Weil, S ‘Beyond Personalism’, JSTOR, vol. 2, no. 3, 1952, p. 62 ↩︎
3. Danese, A & Nicola, G, ‘Personal and Impersonal in Simone Weil’, Centro Ricerche Personaliste di Teramo, weblog, 2023, https://www.centropersonalista.it/weil/2020/09/06/personal-and-impersonal-in-simone-weil/#_ftn1 ↩︎
4. Joyce, J (eds), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wordsworth, London, 1992, page 124. ↩︎
5. Weil, S (eds), An Anthology, Penguin, London, 2005. ↩︎
6. Joyce, J (eds), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wordsworth, London, 1992, page 130. ↩︎