Simone Weil

[tbieter]

This morning I finished Weil's short essay on the abolition of all political parties. It is really on the nature of all political parties. I highly recommend it to you.

I've been thinking about party discipline recently, I expected my senator, a Democrat and a lawyer, to vote for Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. She didn't and her statement in justification was really lame. She toed the party line.

She now has lost my support.
https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Politi ... imone+weil

[HexHammer]

Dear tbieter please don't recommend any of your charlatan books, you have ZERO critical sense to see it's all bloated nonsense and babble, just like all the other books we've discussed and I showed how blatant stupid those books were!

[davidm]

This morning I finished Weil's short essay on the abolition of all political parties. It is really on the nature of all political parties. I highly recommend it to you.

I've been thinking about party discipline recently, I expected my senator, a Democrat and a lawyer, to vote for Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. She didn't and her statement in justification was really lame. She toed the party line.

She now has lost my support.
https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Politi ... imone+weil

Why would anyone except a right-wing knuckle-dragger vote for such a terrible person?

[Nick_A]

This morning I finished Weil's short essay on the abolition of all political parties. It is really on the nature of all political parties. I highly recommend it to you.

I've been thinking about party discipline recently, I expected my senator, a Democrat and a lawyer, to vote for Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. She didn't and her statement in justification was really lame. She toed the party line.

She now has lost my support.
https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Politi ... imone+weil

You're in for it. Saying something favorable about Simone may get you boiled in oil. Here is a classic quote from the essay

"When a man joins a political party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, ‘As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that …’ It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think." Simone Weil

As usual she hits the nail on the head as you've discovered. These political hacks don't think

If you are intrigued by her thoughts on political parties, you'll probably appreciate this article in the New Republic. He understood so will probably end up being boiled in oil.

https://newrepublic.com/article/119305/ ... rb-edition

The Metaphysical Case for Abolishing Political Parties

Do political parties corrupt the souls of their members?

[Greta]

Criticising politicians is so easy a child could do it. It's much harder to recommend realistic and workable policies and systems. Most proposed societal systems would probably work tremendously well if not for human beings.

[PauloL]

Thanks for the link anyway, but can you expose the main ideas on abolition of parties for discussion here?

That's an interesting issue. In US they only have 2 parties, but in Europe you have hundreds and counting.

[Sir-Sister-of-Suck]

I believe it's the exact opposite - and I'm not a democrat - the democrats have been far too passive with some of trumps cabinet choices. Some of them blatantly and flat-out go against the democratic principles, so they don't even make consistent sense. But others like Jeff Session and Tom Price I hope we would have a bipartisan consensus on, and they absolutely should not have been voted in.

[tbieter]

This morning I finished Weil's short essay on the abolition of all political parties. It is really on the nature of all political parties. I highly recommend it to you.

I've been thinking about party discipline recently, I expected my senator, a Democrat and a lawyer, to vote for Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. She didn't and her statement in justification was really lame. She toed the party line.

She now has lost my support.
https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Politi ... imone+weil

You're in for it. Saying something favorable about Simone may get you boiled in oil. Here is a classic quote from the essay

"When a man joins a political party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, ‘As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that …’ It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think." Simone Weil

As usual she hits the nail on the head as you've discovered. These political hacks don't think

If you are intrigued by her thoughts on political parties, you'll probably appreciate this article in the New Republic. He understood so will probably end up being boiled in oil.

https://newrepublic.com/article/119305/ ... rb-edition

The Metaphysical Case for Abolishing Political Parties

Do political parties corrupt the souls of their members?

Thanks for the article. The only criticism I have is that the author does not appreciate the significance that the notion of goodness has in Weil's thought, so I add the following from the text:
______________________

Weil begins the subject of goodness in the text as follows:

“The only legitimate reason for preserving anything is its goodness. The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?

It would be far more relevant, however, to ask: do they do the slightest bit of good? Are they not pure, or nearly pure, evil? If they are evil, it is clear that, in fact and in practice, they can only generate further evil. This is an article of faith: ‘A good tree can never bear bad fruit, nor a rotten tree beautiful fruit.’

First, we must ascertain what is the criterion of goodness.

It can only be truth and justice; and, then, the public interest.” p. 4 (Emphasis added)

[Nick_A]

This morning I finished Weil's short essay on the abolition of all political parties. It is really on the nature of all political parties. I highly recommend it to you.

I've been thinking about party discipline recently, I expected my senator, a Democrat and a lawyer, to vote for Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. She didn't and her statement in justification was really lame. She toed the party line.

She now has lost my support.
https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Politi ... imone+weil

You're in for it. Saying something favorable about Simone may get you boiled in oil. Here is a classic quote from the essay

"When a man joins a political party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, ‘As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that …’ It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think." Simone Weil

As usual she hits the nail on the head as you've discovered. These political hacks don't think

If you are intrigued by her thoughts on political parties, you'll probably appreciate this article in the New Republic. He understood so will probably end up being boiled in oil.

https://newrepublic.com/article/119305/ ... rb-edition

The Metaphysical Case for Abolishing Political Parties

Do political parties corrupt the souls of their members?

Thanks for the article. The only criticism I have is that the author does not appreciate the significance that the notion of goodness has in Weil's thought.

I see you appreciate Simone Weil. I agree that "goodness" is an important part of Simone's thought. Maybe you can help me on this. The American Weil Society has a colloquy once a year and I like to submit something as a min stretch since Simone requires real impartial out of the box thought. The 2018 colloquy has the topic "Beyond Ideology"

http://www.americanweilsociety.org/annual_colloquy

The American Weil Society includes many gifted people and a few nuts like me. I like to contribute not to be accepted but as a way of helping my understanding. Anyhow, knowing Simone as you do, what kind of ideology could express the depth of her concept of goodness or is ideology by definition intellectual so would lose the "heart" of goodness? How do we reconcile the intellect of ideology with the heart of goodness so they become complimentary if it is possible?

[Harbal]

The American Weil Society includes many gifted people and a few nuts like me.

Don't run yourself down, Nick, I'm sure that most of them are just as nuts as you.

[thedoc]

Criticising politicians is so easy a child could do it. It's much harder to recommend realistic and workable policies and systems. Most proposed societal systems would probably work tremendously well if not for human beings.

"I love humanity, it's people I can't stand." - Linus.

[tbieter]

A documentary about Simone Weil http://linestreet.net/ Here is the trailer.

[EchoesOfTheHorizon]

Why is everyone so bitterly opposed to her here? I just looked over her wiki page, seems a hippy, as well as one could be in her era. I don't see anything that leaps out as worthwhile to investigate, but at the same time she seems immensely forgettable, being neither a object of inspiration or disgust.

Is this just another case of Brits being numbskulls attacking anything resembling faith or religion, due to insecurities with their own society and sense of self? I know many are fragile here, but it isn't a reason to attack and hate on everyone else. If you only give some time to honest self reflection, you'll find something worthwhile in yourselves to build a national philosophy out of, you don't have to disparage everyone else to make it look like you are strong or have something deep going on. Everyone can see through this charade.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lB6a-iD6ZOY

[Nick_A]

Why is everyone so bitterly opposed to her here? I just looked over her wiki page, seems a hippy, as well as one could be in her era. I don't see anything that leaps out as worthwhile to investigate, but at the same time she seems immensely forgettable, being neither a object of inspiration or disgust.

Is this just another case of Brits being numbskulls attacking anything resembling faith or religion, due to insecurities with their own society and sense of self? I know many are fragile here, but it isn't a reason to attack and hate on everyone else. If you only give some time to honest self reflection, you'll find something worthwhile in yourselves to build a national philosophy out of, you don't have to disparage everyone else to make it look like you are strong or have something deep going on. Everyone can see through this charade.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lB6a-iD6ZOY

Simone Weil must be hated by secular intolerants and religious fundamentalists because she cannot be classified. Nothing is more offensive then an influential person who is beyond classification. it is insulting and cannot be tolerated. Any person who was a celebrated Marxist admired by Leon Trotsky and die a Christian mystic and intellectual influence on Pope Paul Vi has to be hated. How can Albert Camus call Simone "The only great mind of the times?" such contradictions cannot be tolerated. Socrates was hated for corrupting the youth of Athens. Simone is hated for disturbing a person's conditioning. It is human nature.

She is easy to hate but not that easy to forget.

http://www.cesnur.org/2002/slc/bauer.htm

[EchoesOfTheHorizon]

I notice she liked studying other religions but refused the syncretism, we have a lot of people like that. Christians like Seraphim Rose and Thomas Merton didn't shy away from studying other faiths and philosophies, and incorporated compatible aspects (look into the debates between the pagan Neo-Platonists and the Christians in Gaza, we have a long history of doing this).

I don't mind. Many Christian Taoists running around in China right now, I'm a Stoic Catholic. Buddhism has a few schools of thought deeply indebted to Greek thought, and our western skepticism seems directly imported from Buddhist schools. I don't run around scared shitless of Sextus Empericus.

I don't much like the current iconoclastic mode of political atheism..... when atheism absolutely must be a state religion prior to all others, and everyone else persecuted. It is idiotic, and most societies start to veer away from this rather sharply after a few generations, you only gotta look to the eastern block, especially Russia, or China. It plays out differently in each, but play it does. I'm a lot more respectful of the more intellectual atheism of earlier eras, when it was based on a program of principled approaches to reason and valid belief, skepticism and searching. Darwin's balance of Unitarian and CofE thinking for example, never a full atheist or committed to any creed, but rather careful watching and pondering, looking to the long term, studying the dynamic of how men approached things seems rather more enlightened. Think he represents the high tide of English intellectualism, has gone done hill ever since. Really wasn't someone possessed like many now are.