12 School
The Twelfth Chapter,
in which you ask yourself again
How do I get out?
Preparation
Required Reading: Jennings, “I Attend, Therefore I Am” (Aeon)
Optional Reading: Nixon, “Attention is not a resource but a way of being alive to the world” (Aeon)
Writing:
- Jennings’ key term is “attention.” How does she define it? Answer with paraphrase, not quotation.
- An argument is a thesis supported by one or more reasons. What is Jennings’ thesis? What reason(s) does she provide in support of his thesis? Paraphrase or quote briefly.
- What is your immediate reaction to Jennings’ argument? Agreement, disagreement, or something else?
- Respond to the following question by writing at least one paragraph: Jennings talks about the idea that “that our truest expressions of ourselves come at moments in which our will is divided.” Try to recall such a moment from your own life. What truth about yourself did you express by the decision you made?
Introduction
There are plenty of normal people who live in the normal world, and then something hits them in the gut — a phone call with bad news, a question they can’t shake, a burning desire for something others don’t care about — and they “walk away.” Maybe that’s you. But there are also people who live in the normal world and have never been normal at all. It’s like they were hit in the gut at birth, and they’ve always been walking away. They’ve always been aware of the bad news, they’ve always had questions they can’t shake, they’ve always wanted different things, had different ideas about what matters and what doesn’t. And it’s made them strange. Like they’re visitors from another planet.
That’s Simone Weil. She’s a strange person. An alien stuck on earth. Totally brilliant: she was reading about Plato’s cave at the age you were reading comic books. (And she was reading it in Greek.) Kind of a mystic (as you’ll see). Totally sincere, totally committed. Remember at the beginning, the poem you read? “You must change your life.” This whole time you’ve been trying to think about philosophy as real life, as something you have to do, an activity that makes a difference to how you live, day by day. Not just “read this story about a cave and tell me what it says about how you should live.” It’s “read this story about a cave and tell me what it says about how you should live and then understand that by doing that kind of thing, by thinking in a different way, you are actually living differently, already.” And then, more than that: you leave the classroom, where by thinking differently you’re living differently, and then you go out in the world — the normal world — and you do abnormal things. You take all this seriously enough to literally, actually, really change your life. Seriously enough to walk away — even when you stay where you are.
Simone Weil stayed where she was, in the normal world, but she was always “walking away.” She was always doing weird things. Like taking a job at a factory (even though she was a fancy philosopher from a middle-class family), because she had certain thoughts about “equality,” and she took her thoughts seriously enough to follow through. Or like refusing to eat any more food than the soldiers in the trenches (this was during a war), even though she was weak and sick and needed more food to stay healthy. For the same reason: she had certain thoughts about equality, and she took those thoughts seriously.
The thing is, none of this does any good. She’s so bad at factory work that they fire her. And she’s so weakened by not eating enough that she dies young. It doesn’t do her any good; but also it doesn’t do anyone else any good. It’s not like she helps the other factory workers; she’s just in their way (they don’t like her much). And it’s not like the soldiers have more to eat because she has less. She lives differently, but she’s not “changing the world,” let alone saving it. She’s not accomplishing anything. She’s not making a political difference. She’s doing philosophy, but she’s not “figuring out the best answer to the trolley problem” (it wasn’t “save myself by eating enough, or save the troops by eating less?”). That’s not what it means for Simone Weil to “do philosophy.” She’s not “walking away” in order to save the child in the basement, or to save the city of Omelas, or anything like that.
What’s she doing, then? Where’s she going — especially since she doesn’t seem to be going anywhere? That’s how we often talk about “accomplishing” things, after all. We say “now we’re getting somewhere.” If doing philosophy doesn’t mean “getting somewhere,” then . . . what does it mean?
Here are some of her thoughts about it.
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies”
The Key to a Christian conception of studies is the realisation that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
It is the highest part of the attention only which makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned towards God.
Of course school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. Nevertheless they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention which will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone.
Although people seem to be unaware of it to-day, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. Most school tasks have a certain intrinsic interest as well, but such an interest is secondary. All tasks which really call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reason and to an almost equal degree.
School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed towards God, is the very substance of prayer.
If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary it is almost an advantage.
It does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.
If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer. Moreover it may very likely be felt besides in some department of the intelligence in no way connected with mathematics. Perhaps he who made the unsuccessful effort will one day be able to grasp the beauty of a line of Racine2 more vividly on account of it. But it is certain that this effort will bear its fruit in prayer. There is no doubt whatever about that.
Certainties of this kind are experimental. But if we do not believe in them before experiencing them, if at least we do not behave as though we believed in them, we shall never have the experience which leads to such certainties. There is a kind of contradiction here. Above a given level this is the case with all useful knowledge concerning spiritual progress. If we do not regulate our conduct by it before having proved it, if we do not hold on to it for a long time only by faith, a faith at first stormy and without light, we shall never transform it into certainty. Faith is the indispensable condition.
The best support for faith is the guarantee that if we ask our Father for bread, he does not give us a stone. Quite apart from explicit religious belief, every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit. An Eskimo story explains the origin of light as follows: “In the eternal darkness, the crow, unable to find any food, longed for light, and the earth was illumined.” If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light which is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure which no power on earth can take away. The useless efforts made by the Curé d’Ars3 , for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvellous discernment which enabled him to see the very soul of his penitents behind their words and even their silences.
Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer. When we set out to do a piece of work, it is necessary to wish to do it correctly, because such a wish is indispensable if there is to be true effort. Underlying this immediate objective, however, our deep purpose should aim solely at increasing the power of attention with a view to prayer; as, when we write, we draw the shape of the letter on paper, not with a view to the shape, but with a view to the idea we want to express. To make this the sole and exclusive purpose of our studies is the first condition to be observed if we are to put them to the right use.
The second condition is to take great pains to examine squarely and to contemplate attentively and slowly each school task in which we have failed, seeing how unpleasing and second-rate it is, without seeking any excuse or overlooking any mistake or any of our tutor’s corrections, trying to get down to the origin of each fault. There is a great temptation to do the opposite, to give a sideways glance at the corrected exercise if it is bad, and to hide it forthwith. Most of us do this nearly always. We have to withstand this temptation. Incidentally, moreover, nothing is more necessary for academic success, because, despite all our efforts, we work without making much progress when we refuse to give our attention to the faults we have made and our tutor’s corrections.
Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is a far more precious treasure than all academic progress. From this point of view it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind of pride sometimes finds a place in it. When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise that we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge is more to be desired. If we can arrive at knowing this truth with all our souls we shall be well established on the right foundation.
If these two conditions are perfectly carried out there is no doubt that school studies are quite as good a road to sanctity as any other.
To carry out the second, it is enough to wish to do so. This is not the case with the first. In order really to pay attention, it is necessary to know how to set about it.
Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.
We often expend this kind of muscular effort on our studies. As it ends by making us tired, we have the impression that we have been working. That is an illusion. Tiredness has nothing to do with work. Work itself is the useful effort, whether it is tiring or not. This kind of muscular effort in work is entirely barren, even if it is made with the best of intentions. Good intentions in such cases are among those that pave the way to hell. Studies conducted in such a way can sometimes succeed academically from the point of view of gaining good marks and passing examinations, but that is in spite of the effort and thanks to natural gifts; moreover such studies are never of any use.
Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence 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. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for spiritual life, for desire directed towards God is the only power capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes down and possesses the soul, but desire alone draws God down. He only comes to those who ask him to come; and he cannot refuse to come to those who implore 4 him long, often and ardently.
Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involve tiredness. When we become tired, attention is scarcely possible any more, unless we have already had a good deal of practice. It is better to stop working altogether, to seek some relaxation, and then a little later to return to the task; we have to press on and loosen up alternately, just as we breathe in and out.
Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application which leads us to say with a sense of duty done: “I have worked well!”
But, in spite of all appearances, it is also far more difficult. There is something in our soul which has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves. If we concentrate with this intention, a quarter of an hour of attention is better than a great many good works.
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.
All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth. The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search. This can be proved every time, for every fault, if we trace it to its root. There is no better exercise than such a tracing down of our faults, for this truth is one those which we can only believe when we have experienced it hundreds and thousands of times. This is the way with all essential truths.
We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity.
The solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but the same law applies to it because it is the image of something precious. Being a little fragment of particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal and living Truth, the very Truth which once in a human voice declared “I am the Truth.”
Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.
In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution, or to the words of a Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.
Our first duty towards school-children and students is to make known this method to 5 them, not only in a general way but in the particular form which bears in each exercise. It is not only the duty of those who teach them, but also of their spiritual guides. Moreover the latter should bring out in a brilliantly clear light the correspondence between the attitude of the intelligence in each one of these exercises and the position of the soul, which, with its lamp well filled with oil, awaits the Bridegrooms’s coming with confidence and desire. May each loving adolescent, as he works at his Latin prose, hope through this prose to come a little nearer to the instant when he will really be the slave – faithfully waiting while the master is absent, watching and listening – ready to open the door to him as soon as he knocks. The master will then make his slave sit down and himself serve him with meat.
Only this waiting, this attention, can move the master to treat his slave with such amazing tenderness. When the slave has worn himself out in the fields, his master says on his return: “Prepare my meal, and wait upon me.” And he considers the servant who only does what he is told to do to be unprofitable. To be sure in the realm of action we have to do all that is demanded of us, no matter what effort, weariness and suffering it may cost, for he who disobeys does not love; but after that we are only unprofitable servants. Such service is a condition of love, but it is not enough. The thing which forces the master to make himself the slave of his slave, and to love him, has nothing to do with all that. Still less is it the result of a search which the servant might have been bold enough to undertake on his own initiative. It is only watching, waiting, attention.
Happy then are those who pass their adolescence and youth in developing this power of attention. No doubt they are no nearer to goodness than their brothers working in fields and factories. They are near in a different way. Peasants and workmen possess a nearness to God of incomparable savour which is found in the depths of poverty, in the absence of social consideration and in the endurance of long drawn-out sufferings. If however we consider the occupation in themselves, studies are nearer to God because of the attention which is their soul. Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure.
Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.
In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous stone vessel which satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound: “What are you going through?” The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
Only he who is capable of attention can do this.
So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.
For an adolescent, capable of grasping this truth and generous enough to desire this fruit above all others, studies could have their fullest spiritual effect, quite apart from any particular religious belief.
Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.
Discussion
Where is Simone Weil at the beginning? She’s in school. Like you. At least that’s where she is in her imagination, while she’s writing. What she’s writing is a letter to a friend. Her friend is a teacher in a school, and she’s been a teacher in a school, too. She’s had the same question he has, and she offers him her answer. What is that question? It’s a question about education — a question about this thing you’re doing, right now, while you read this letter from me, to you. The question is just: what’s the point?
Now, school isn’t just Normal World. School is where Normal World gets built. School is a factory that makes people. You go to school to learn what’s normal. You’re learning how to be normal. You’re being manufactured into the stuff that normal world is made of.
So that’s one answer. The point of education is to keep it all going. It’s to keep the cave in working order, humming along. The prisoners in the cave are students. They’re in school. School is prison. You talk about education like it’s supposed to “free your mind,” but education is what keeps your mind in chains. You sit all day learning how to distinguish one shadow from another and you call this “education,” and it’s just a scam. Your puppetmasters — your teachers! — are laughing at you. They know it’s a joke, that none of it matters, that the point of it all is to keep you plugged into the Matrix. Sure, you’ll graduate and leave school, but then what happens? You go to work, which is just school, again. The only difference is you get paid in money instead of grades. And anyway, school is just preparing you for work, so you just have to ask the Bigger Question. Maybe the point of school is to prepare you for work: but what’s the point of work?
If that’s your answer, then the next question is: what to do about it. After all, you must change your life. You’ve seen through the illusion, there’s no point to school, you’re just energy for the Matrix, playing your games while you’re actually part of someone else’s game, which is the only game that matters, the game of getting the power to do what you want. So change your life: drop out. Or, if you can’t literally drop out, at least you can drop out in your head. Check out; stop pretending it matters. If you ever cared at all, stop. Flunk out on purpose, just to show you don’t care. Or cheat your way to the top — same effect. Unplug yourself. Stop powering the machine.
But that’s not Simone Weil’s answer, is it? What does she say? Something strange, something you’ll have to think hard about. She says the point of school, the point of learning all the normal stuff school teaches you, is actually to learn something else that school doesn’t teach you, something not normal at all. She says the point is just to learn how to pay attention.
What is she talking about?
Think about how school actually works (and how work actually works, too). What is the thing about doing school that feels so totally normal, so obvious — the thing that is most unexamined about school life? It’s grades. Grades, marks, assessments, tests, scores. School works (and work works, and all of life in normal world works) by giving you rewards for doing well (good grades), and punishments for not doing well (bad grades). This just the most basic assumption we have: you do one thing for the sake of another thing. You study hard so you can get a good grade. You get good grades so you can get into a good college. You study hard in the good college so you can get good grades there. You get good grades in your good college so you can get a good job. You get a good job so you can make good money. You make good money so you can buy good stuff. You do all this stuff for the sake of something else, and at the end of it, what? What is the point, at the end of it? You do all this stuff so you can get what you want.
That’s the system. Incentives, rewards and punishments. And the ultimate incentive is that if you play the game well enough, you win, and winning means getting what you want, and that means being happy. That’s what school is. Oh, they tell you that it’s about all this other stuff, that it’s to “free your mind,” get you out of the cave. But if that’s what it’s about then . . . why do you need all those rewards? Isn’t getting out of the cave its own reward? No: school hooks you on the reward system. School keeps you in the cave, where all the prisoners care about is their silly “competition.” So maybe if you really wanted to get out of the cave, you’d drop out of school.
Maybe you need some “unschooling,” like Astra Taylor says. Or “deschooling,” like Ivan Illich says. Don’t be afraid to take this question about “schooling” literally. What should education look like? Do schools actually educate – or do they do something else? (Define your terms!)
But again, that’s not what Simone Weil tells you to do. She’s writing to a teacher, and really she’s writing to the teacher’s students. She’s writing to you, while you’re in school, and she’s not telling you to leave. She’s telling you to do school differently: to do the normal things but in a not-normal way. The normal way to do the normal school-stuff is to do it for the sake of the rewards: the grades, and then eventually the job, the money, etc. The normal way is to study for the sake of something that has nothing to do with what you are studying. The not-normal way, Simone Weil’s way, is to do the normal school stuff for its own sake. But then, if you do it for its own sake, you are actually also doing it for the sake of this other kind of reward, this reward that isn’t grades or money or whatever. Harder to describe.
“For its own sake.” That’s the key concept here. “For its own sake,” as opposed to “for the sake of getting some reward.” That’s what this chapter is adding. But what does it mean — doing something “for its own sake”? And what does it have to do with doing philosophy?
Here’s a little story that might make it clearer:
What happened? In the beginning, the kids played for its own sake. Of course, they were playing a game, and inside the game, they were playing for points, for some kind of reward, playing to win. But they weren’t playing the game to get a reward outside the game (like money). When the old man introduced them to the idea of playing for money, he ruined the game. They stopped playing because they forgot what “playing” really means.
That’s what school does to you. It ruins education. It makes you forget what learning “for its own sake” really means, and makes you believe that the only reason you have for learning is to get a reward that actually has nothing to do with learning — grades, jobs, money, whatever. Now, if you see through that — and maybe you’re seeing through it now, while you’re reading this chapter — you might get cynical. You might start shouting the kinds of things you read a few paragraphs earlier: that school is prison, students are prisoners, it’s all a joke, it’s all a machine designed to keep the cave going for the benefit of the puppetmasters, the grumpy old men who manipulate us with carrots and sticks, like we’re just rats in a maze. And you might drop out, literally or in your head. Flunk, cheat — whatever it takes to show you know what’s really going on.
But if you’re Simone Weil, and you see through this, you take a different path. You stay in: you don’t drop out. But you do walk away from the carrots and sticks. You do the normal things, but you do them with a totally different mental posture. And this mental posture, what does she call it? “Paying attention.”
Doing something for its own sake means paying attention to the thing itself. It means not paying attention to the rewards you might get for doing the thing, or the punishment you might get for not doing the thing. So you’re studying, and you’re paying attention to the material itself. You’re just literally not thinking about the grades or any other kind of reward you might get from getting it right (like praise from the teacher). “Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of that attention . . .”
So here’s a picture of doing philosophy; a picture of getting out of the cave. Philosophy is about being able to do things for their own sake, by giving them your full and undivided attention, without being distracted by fears, desires, or concerns about consequences of any kind. But this is the key thing: the things you’re doing for their own sake, they can be perfectly normal things. Studying. Taking tests. Whatever. It’s not necessarily that you’re doing different things. It’s that you’re doing things differently. You live in normal world; but you’re not normal. You’re not letting normal world make you normal. You’re in school; but you’re not letting it school you. You don’t drop out; you walk away, into a different way of life.
But what is it actually like to do this? What’s it like to “pay attention” the way Simone Weil does, the way a philosopher does?
First, she says paying attention is like praying. (More than that: prayer is attention.) Now, if you don’t pray, this might not tell you much. But if you do, you might be able to understand what she means, at least a little bit. What’s it like to pray? For one thing, it’s out of the ordinary. When you pray you step outside daily life in some way. And you do it first by closing yourself off from all the stuff daily life involves. People shut their eyes, bow their heads, put their bodies into specific postures, all in order to shut out distractions and concentrate their attention completely on one thing, without thinking of the next thing. The one thing is God, for some. But you can understand it even if you don’t believe in God. Buddhists pray, and there’s no God involved. It’s the same kind of mental posture, regardless.
Ok but still, what exactly does the mental posture involve? How do you “concentrate completely on one thing, without thinking of the next thing” — without being distracted by the reward you hope to get for concentrating?
Well, one thing is, you actually do have to want to “get it right.” Remember, all this stuff about prayer is actually about school. You have to work without being distracted by your desire for the good grade, or whatever else. But you do have to want to do your best work. This is tricky, since of course, if you do your best work, you’ll get a good grade, and you’re aware of that. But you can see what she’s saying. You can see that the desire to do good work is distinct from the desire to get a reward for doing good work. A philosopher’s distinction.
Think of what it means to cheat. Cheating means getting the reward for good work without doing good work. You can want the reward, without wanting to do well, and that might lead you to cheat. Now, go further with this idea. Maybe you wouldn’t cheat, because you want to feel like you deserve the reward. But would you do good work, even if you knew you wouldn’t get a reward? If you would, then you’d do your best “for it’s own sake.”
This is philosophy. Philosophers want to get it right for its own sake: not because they want a good grade on their philosophy exam. Philosophy just wants the truth. It doesn’t care about the rewards for knowing the truth. Truth is its own reward. That’s why philosophy is about living differently: because in normal world, the idea of doing something even if you won’t get a reward is hard to fathom. The idea of being good, doing the right thing, if you won’t be rewarded — and furthermore of doing the right thing even if you’ll actually be punished for it — is even harder to fathom. In normal world morality, “cheaters never prosper.” But actually, in normal world cheaters do prosper. When you realize that, you think, “why not cheat, then.” So you take the ring of gyges and take over the kingdom. But the philosopher has a different reason for not cheating. The philosopher doesn’t need normal-world morality, the rules, the rewards and punishments, as a incentive to not cheat. They just . . . don’t want to. Because what they want is not the reward for being good. They want to be good. They want to be good for its own sake.
This is also like philosophy in another way. Remember: philosophers work very hard to get it right, and they stay very relaxed about getting it wrong. You can understand this if you think about “paying attention” in the way that Simone Weil thinks about it. She says first of all that students always confuse attention with “muscular effort.” They think “concentrate” means to furrow your brow, tense up your face. They think that if they feel tired afterward, that means they’ve been doing it right. Weil says the opposite. If you feel tired, you’re doing it wrong. “It ought to be possible to stay relaxed and alert at the same time.” (Aurelius)
You’re studying for a big exam. You have to get an A in order to keep your GPA. While you’re studying, you’re thinking about how you have to get an A. This makes you anxious; you’re distracted by the thought of the reward you want, or the punishment you want to avoid (losing your GPA, losing your scholarship, whatever). You yell at yourself: “pay attention!” You start paying really close attention to how well you’re paying attention. You notice how distracted you are. You get worried about how distracted you are. You get worried about how worried you are. You spiral out. And the whole time you’ve not been paying much attention to the actual thing you’re studying. Studying something thing for the sake of something else makes it harder to study. If you want to really stay alert, you have to stay relaxed. That’s what Weil is talking about. That’s “attention.”
Doing philosophy, living a philosophical life, means paying attention — staying relaxed but alert, concentrating on the main thing instead of the next thing, doing something for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. But then next question is: why is this so, so hard? Especially if the way to do it right is to let it be easy, not to strain yourself? Why is it so hard to relax? Don’t you want to relax? If you want to relax, and relaxing means not trying to hard, and not trying so hard sounds like such a relief from all the stress and anxiety of trying to win the game, get the reward, avoid the punishment — if it’s so great, and so easy, why can’t you do it? Why is it so hard to get out of the cave?
Now, Weil says one of the strangest things in the essay. She says:
We resist paying attention; we resist doing something “for its own sake.” Why – especially since being able to do this, being able to forget about the reward we want, actually makes us more able to get the reward? (And yes, you should definitely be thinking back to Neo and kung fu.) What is this “something in our soul” that resists — this thing in us that she actually calls “evil”? This thing that keeps us inside the cave, that makes us prefer being a prisoner, or a puppetmaster, to being a philosopher?
It’s because of this:
We don’t want to take ourselves out of the equation. We already have our own ideas, and we want reality to prove that we’re right. We don’t want to admit that we might be wrong about anything. Paying attention to something means paying attention to something outside yourself. Trying to see it for what it is, without seeing it through the lens of the ideas that you have of it. We look at the world around us and we don’t see it; we see our ideas about it. We don’t want to give up those ideas. That’s what’s “evil” in us. We don’t want the truth. We want our ideas about the truth. Paying attention means giving up our ideas. It means giving up control. You have to give up control if you’re going to be relaxed. But we’d rather be in control and full of anxiety than “let go.” And so we’re not able to stay alert — not able to see through our own illusions — because we’re not able to stay relaxed — not able to give up those illusions, those shadows on the wall. We don’t want to walk away.
But is “evil” the right word here? Is our ability to pay attention, to live philosophically, really a moral issue? Isn’t this just about how to study for tests? Here is the final point, the crucial thing. Because we don’t just have ideas about things, objects, questions. We have ideas about people. We see others through the lens of the ideas we have about them. (And yes, now you should be thinking back to Hegel.) We put people in boxes; and so we put ourselves in boxes. We sort ourselves into superiors and inferiors, masters and slaves. We get distracted by the boxes, by our own ideas about people, and the reason it’s so hard to give people our undivided attention is because that means letting them out of their boxes, letting them surprise us. We do not want to do that. We want control.
So this is what Simone Weil is about. This is what philosophy can be about. Being in the world, the normal world of people, but not being of the world. Not letting our ideas about the world, about people (ideas that get planted into our brains by what we call “school”) determine how we relate to the world and the people around us. We’re still in the world, still living among the people, but we are “in” it differently because we aren’t “in” our ideas — our illusions — about it (like the illusion of the reward-punishment system). We’re paying such close attention to the world in front of us, to the people around us, that those illusions fall away, and we’re no longer distracted. We get out of the cave, not by leaving normal world, but by seeing normal world in an abnormal way. The philosopher’s way.
The thing is, Simone Weil is a pretty unique person. It’s really hard to stay in the normal world without having normal-world ideas determine how we relate to it. It’s hard to do school without getting schooled. Maybe most of us can’t really do that. Maybe, if the rest of us want to get out of our heads, to get past our distractions, to unearth those assumptions, uproot the ideas that have been planted into our brains, we actually do have to leave. Literally. Maybe most of us do have to “drop out,” at least for a little while.
That’s what the next chapter is about.
Reflection
- Read the following passage from David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature:
But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change: nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind ; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. - Spend a few hours studying or completing assignments for your other classes. Let an hour or two pass, then take your journal and go somewhere else. If you studied in your room, go to the library; if you studied in your library, go to your room; etc. Recollect your study session and record your observations in two separate paragraphs:
Paragraph 1 – Describe the place where you studied in as much detail as possible. Describe the lighting, the objects in your line of sight, the colors and sounds, the temperature, the other people, etc. Focus on your physical sensations. What do you remember seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing, tasting?Paragraph 2 – Describe the thoughts and feelings you experienced while studying. Were you frustrated, interested, bored, determined, distracted? If you were distracted, what were you distracted by? Be specific: what words, memories, sounds, images were in your mind as you studied? If you cannot remember, describe what it is like to try (and fail) to remember. If the memory of what you felt is not present to your mind, what is present to your mind, right now?
- Is the student who studies like Simone Weil says we should study happy? Is the student free? Define your terms. Write at least 250 words.
