“The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.”
Simone Weil1
I have wanted to believe that there is nothing in me. There is a nagging to tend to that which is indiscriminate; take it in and give it a home in me and then allow it to be a home for me. To identify with it so that there is something that I understand to be me and I can go out into the world and there will be a world for me to go out into. Until then, I thought, it is easier to believe that there is nothing else. This is an experience of the Personal.
“She felt the need to be silent; to be alone. All the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others” … “and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experiences seemed limitless.”
Virginia Woolf – ‘To the Lighthouse’2
A “wedge shaped core of darkness” speaks to this nothing.
For Weil this core is an impersonal essence that lies in each of us; a pure truth, under which is “beauty, virtue and every kind of goodness.”3
Why is it then that I had wanted to believe that there is nothing in the place of the inherent goodness inside of me and instead live facing away from it? It isn’t wholly clear, but I believe the answer lies in fear; I didn’t believe that I could physically survive living by truth, however, by not, I suffered a kind of death that I hope can be prevented in others.
Weil explains that there is something sacred in every man; it is not his person but the whole of him.
He is not sacred in so much as he has arms or eyes or a certain inflection in his voice, nor as a fisherman or politician or laborer if that is what he is. However,
“the knowledge that if someone were to put out his eyes, his soul would be lacerated by the thought that harm was being done to him” … “At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is above all that is sacred in every human being.”
Simone Weil4
The person can be grasped as a state of being; objectified as a means to manufacture an understandable and visible vision of ‘me’, while that which is impersonal cannot be held fixed, it cannot be targeted; there cannot not be a search for it, only a process of observing whatever is revealed in us as what is.
I reflect on having been so afraid of truth that I pretended that I had executed it; condemned it to a state of nothing and I imagine now what it would mean for my life, my thoughts and my actions and how I interact with the world, if I regard truth instead as the whole point.
“There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.”
Simone Weil5
- quotefancy.com. (n.d.). Simone Weil Quote: ‘The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.’ [online] Available at: https://quotefancy.com/quote/1462384/Simone-Weil-The-full-expression-of-personality-depends-upon-its-being-inflated-by-social [Accessed 12 Nov. 2023]. ↩︎
- Woolf, V. (1998). To the lighthouse. New York: Columbia University Press.
↩︎ - Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin.
↩︎ - Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin.
↩︎ - Weil, S. and Miles, S. (2005). Simone Weil : an anthology. London: Penguin. ↩︎
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