On uncompromising ideals - Toril Moi in LRB:

“We don’t admire Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963: ‘I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas.’ What we admire, Sontag thought, is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’, to make herself a person who is ‘rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Sontag underestimates the power of Weil’s ideas, I think, but she is right to say that in the minds of readers, Weil’s thought and life are intrinsically connected. Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.”

(…)

“She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1931, during the brief prewar period when the institution admitted women. (Simone de Beauvoir, a few years ahead of her, didn’t have the opportunity to apply.) Weil had an immense appetite for learning, was a natural teacher and a driven writer. She once said that she felt her mind was crowded by ideas clamouring to be expressed. Yet throughout her life, she insisted on taking on physical tasks for which she lacked the slightest aptitude. In another person this might be seen as selfish. She often became a burden on others. But for most readers, her writing – her intense examination of malheur (‘misery’ or ‘affliction’), the exploitation of workers, of power, violence, war, duties and the need for roots – transfigures all this. Weil writes about her experiences with luminous clarity. Her austere and difficult life lends authority to her thinking in a way other intellectuals can only dream of.
Yet that life depended to an astonishing degree on the support of other people, in particular on the quiet labour of her parents. In 1931, she took up her first posting as a lycée teacher in the small town of Le Puy in the Auvergne. Refusing to live on more than the entry-level salary of an elementary school teacher, Weil sent most of her wages to a fund for striking workers. She would happily have lived in a hovel, but Selma, who virtually commuted from Paris to Le Puy during Weil’s year there, found her a spacious flat with a bathroom, and persuaded one of Weil’s colleagues, Simone Anthériou, to share it.”

(…)

“To help her recover, her parents took her to a sanatorium in Switzerland. As soon as she felt better, she went back to the factory, where she survived another month before she left (or was fired). Next she found work at Carnaud, making gas masks and oilcans; she was laid off after a few weeks. Then Renault hired her. At the end of August, she was fired. The experience of dangerous, physically exhausting and soul-destroying factory work forms the background to La Condition ouvrière, a collection of texts – journal entries, letters, brief essays – dealing with the way capitalism crushes the bodies and souls of workers. When Hannah Arendt read it in the 1950s, she thought it was the best thing ever written on the subject.”

(…)

“This became a recurring pattern. Weil acted on conviction, always with great courage and absolute determination. But in the background, her parents were ready to drop everything to make sure that she survived her attempts at living out her ideals. Gustave Thibon, a farmer and the editor of one of her most popular books, Gravity and Grace, thought that their ‘constant care ... put off the inevitable outcome’. The Weils themselves were perfectly aware of their role. ‘If you ever have a daughter,’ Selma said to Tortel, ‘pray to God she won’t be a saint.’ When people expressed sympathy for her parents, Simone would reply: ‘Another member of the Society for the Protection of my Parents!’”

(…)

“A further disappointment followed when the Free French refused to send her on a mission into occupied territory. None of her superiors in London would entertain the thought. Her bad eyesight and clumsiness were well known. Some also thought her ‘physical type’ made her unsuitable. In other words: she looked too Jewish. The likelihood of her being caught – possibly jeopardising the lives of others – was too high. Although her good friend Maurice Schumann (later foreign secretary under de Gaulle) patiently explained why nobody in their right mind would send her on a secret mission, Weil reproached him. Why would such an intelligent woman fight so tenaciously for such quixotic projects? Maybe the answer is simply that they would oblige her to risk her life.”

(…)

“But saints must often bear the ridicule of others. In her last years, she came to see the ‘extraordinary difficulty’ she had ‘in doing an ordinary action’ as a favour from God, because it kept her from attempting more self-aggrandising heroics. However strangely she did the dishes, Thibon was in awe of her presence, her luminous gaze, her ‘insistence on inner purity and authenticity’.
I am struck by her loneliness. She wanted to merge with the masses, to be anonymous and unobtrusive – a worker, a farmhand, a trade unionist, a soldier – one among many, working and fighting alongside others. Yet she found true solidarity hard to come by. Everywhere she went, she stood out. She was often the only woman; she was always different. Tortel notes that her purity inspired fear. Even her writings are not really about acknowledging the pain of others. They are, rather, about the complete eradication of the self in the service of the afflicted, who, precisely because of their affliction, have already had their own subjectivity obliterated. Weil’s only loving interlocutor is God.”

(…)

“Others have found her thinking repellent. Sontag expresses relief that we can admire Weil without having to agree with her ‘anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilisation and the Jews’. George Steiner goes even further. He considers Weil ‘one of the ugliest cases of blindness and intolerance in the vexed history of Jewish self-hatred’. They have a point. She had an almost visceral loathing for ‘Hebrew’ and Roman culture, matched in intensity only by her deep veneration for ancient Greek culture and Catholicism. More than half of The Need for Roots is taken up with her passionate insistence that French culture and politics went awry as a result of the Romans. In Weil’s account, the Druids, who resisted the Romans, emerge as the unlikely heroes of French history.”

(…)

“The point of studying is not to learn this or that, but to acquire this discipline of the soul. Weil argues that we can train our attention by doing geometry, Greek and Latin translation and by writing, if we are willing to wait for the right word to come. ‘The intelligence,’ Weil writes in a passage I particularly love, ‘can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.’ Weil’s method is hardly a way to get straight As, for if there is no joy, there should be no work. As always, she practised what she preached. She failed the entrance exams to the École Normale the first time she tried, because she disliked her history teacher and so never turned up for his classes.”

(…)

“ To do that, I would, at a bare minimum, have to stop, get out of my car and ask: ‘What are you going through?’ I would also need to listen to the answer. But given that the afflicted can’t say what they are going through, I would also have to take in the whole situation, grasp what affliction is, and what force is, and how this person has come to be in such a horrific state. If I truly did all that, I would feel compelled to act on my understanding. And by the time I had come so far, I would have missed the class I was on my way to teach. If I continued in this vein, I might soon find myself out of a job. No wonder that Weil insists that an act of true attention towards the other is a miracle.”

(…)

“At the same time, The Need for Roots is radical and extremely inspiring. It is rightly famous for its first section, setting out the ‘needs of the soul’. Here Weil rejects all ‘rights talk’. We should not focus on rights, she argues, but on obligations. Obligations (devoirs) precede rights; rights are situational and relative, obligations are metaphysical, absolute and eternal. How do I know what my obligations are? An obligation arises from the very fact of encountering another human being. If I encounter a starving human being, I am not in doubt: I offer food. (Food and eating are the chief metaphors she uses to describe what it means to respond to a need. For me, these metaphors became a reminder that the woman who wrote this was slowly dying from starvation.)”

(…)

“Although Weil’s text is more of a sketch than a fully worked-out account, it offers a rich starting point for anyone who feels that traditional rights talk (which is too often paired with ‘identity talk’) has ceased to deliver the kind of insight necessary in our own times.
Although she thinks a good society needs order and a sense of hierarchy, Weil believed that the French police had lost all credibility with the French people. (She doesn’t explain why, but it must have to do with its role in suppressing strikes before the war, and its collaboration with the Vichy government.) For her, defunding the police would not be radical enough. She proposes dissolving the French police force, and building a new body from scratch.”

(…)

“Zaretsky is surely right to think that if we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart. Following her path would destroy our families, our careers, our wellbeing. But that was her point and she recognised it as a challenge: ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword.’ Faced with communism, fascism, war, invasion and concentration camps, Weil’s extremism – her asceticism, her saintliness, her thought – was a response to extreme times. If she strikes me as more relevant than ever, it may be because we are beginning to realise that we too live in extreme times. What sacrifices and what heroism will the climate crisis demand of us? I am no more capable of living up to Weil’s demands than Zaretsky is. But the solution is not to argue that ideals aren’t worth having. The question is what do we want and need from ideals? Teenagers may read about the lives of saints or the exploits of heroes because they themselves aspire to be saints, or because they hope that one day they too will carry off grand exploits. But most grown-ups harbour no such hopes.”

Read the essay here.

If you ever have a daughter, pray to God she won’t be a saint.

Let’s start there.

Sainthood means be willing to sacrifice yourself.
Jesus, for one, pointed out what was needed to become his follower:

“If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life!” (Luke 14:25-27).

History taught us that people rather sacrifice other people than themselves, understandably.
History also taught us that some people (not too many) sacrificed themselves out of solidarity with the people for whom they felt responsibility. Responsibility can be love.

What do we want from ideals? Preferably not to die of the ideals. But if you are never ready to sacrifice anything for your ideals, they are worthless. If you are not ready to sacrifice your own blood and the blood of your enemies you will be powerless against enemies willing to spoil blood.