Simone Weil was a French philosopher who died at 34 from tuberculosis complicated by refusing to eat more than the rations of French soldiers during WWII. She was a philosopher, a factory worker, a mystic, and a revolutionary. She managed to be all of these without being a hypocrite (which is so rare it is almost suspicious).
attention. Weil said the highest human faculty is not reason or emotion. It is attention. The ability to truly see another person, to listen to them without agenda, to be fully present. This is the foundation of ethics. You cannot love what you do not see. You cannot help what you do not understand (try this on your phone-addicted ass the next time someone talks to you).
She worked in a factory in the 1930s to understand the working class. She hated every minute of it (shocking). She wrote about how factory work destroys the soul by depriving workers of meaning and attention. She became a mystic later in life and wrote about the experience of God as a form of radical attention.
She also refused to join the Catholic Church because she would not abandon those outside it. She was a Christian who would not be baptized because she believed God wanted her to stay with the non-believers (this level of intellectual honesty is exhausting to even read about, and she did it while starving herself for French soldiers).
Starter book: Gravity and Grace (1947, posthumous). A collection of her notebooks. Aphoristic, dense, and unforgettable. Read one page at a time. then continue to ponder.
