THE MYSTICISM OF WORK

Below is a short passage from Weil’s “Gravity and Grace” (about a 5-minute read). Just a quick preface: Simone Weil’s life was a fierce integration of thought and deed. For her, there was an indissoluble unity between idea and action. Weil realized her ideas while working in the factory and dwelling among coal miners. Currents of thought and experience converged for her. Much of what she has to say orbits around the subject of work and labor, and it’s important to distinguish between the two. Weil believed that the liberation of the worker must be accomplished in the work itself, “and that the work, in order to become that of a free man, must be pervaded by thought, invention, and judgment” (Pétrement, A Life). In the following passage, however, she delves into the mystic nature of work. I find it to be astonishing. There are some parts that might make the reader tilt their head sideways. For example, her comment “We have to turn all our disgust into a disgust for ourselves” needs to be understood within the larger context of her work. That said, her thoughts touch on something profound and are capable of fostering great conversation about what we’re experiencing when we find ourselves at work.

THE MYSTICISM OF WORK

The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature, which infinitely exceed him when in inaction; there is only equilibrium in action by which man recreates his own life through work.

Man’s greatness is always to recreate his life, to recreate what is given to him, to fashion that very thing which he undergoes. Through work he produces his own natural existence. Through science he recreates the universe by means of symbols. Through art he recreates the alliance between his body and his soul (cf. the speech of Eupalinos). It is to be noticed that each of these three things is something poor, empty and vain taken by itself and not in relation to the two others. Union of the three: a working people’s culture (that will not be just yet) ...

Plato himself is only a forerunner. The Greeks knew about art and sport, but not about work. The master is the slave of the slave in the sense that the slave makes the master.

Two tasks: To individualize machinery. To individualize science (popularization, a people’s university on the Socratic model for the study of the elements of the various trades).

Manual work. Why has there never been a mystic, workman or peasant, to write on the use to be made of disgust for work. Our souls fly from this disgust which is so often there, ever threatening, and try to hide it from themselves by reacting vegetatively. There is mortal danger in admitting it to ourselves. This is the source of the falsehood peculiar to the working classes. (There is a falsehood peculiar to each level.)

This disgust is the burdensomeness of time. To acknowledge it to ourselves without giving way under it makes us mount upwards.

Disgust in all its forms is one of the most precious trials sent to man as a ladder by which to rise. I have a very large share of this favour.

We have to turn all our disgust into a disgust for ourselves.

Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity—the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.

The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious.

The spirituality of work. Work makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work.

If we regard one of the two as an end, or the one and the  other taken separately, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth.

A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere—extreme misery and extreme grandeur.

It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

The great hardship in manual work is that we are compelled to expend our efforts for such long hours simply in order to exist.

The slave is he to whom no good is proposed as the object of his labour except mere existence.

Accordingly he must either be detached or fall to the vegetative level.

No terrestrial finality separates the workers from God. They alone are so situated. All other conditions imply special aims which form a screen between man and pure good. But for them no such screen exists. They have nothing superfluous of which they have to strip themselves. To strive from necessity and not for some good—driven not drawn—in order to maintain our existence just as it is—that is always slavery.

In this sense the slavery of manual workers is irreducible. Effort without finality. It is terrible—or the most beautiful thing of all—if it is finality without an end. The beautiful alone enables us to be satisfied by that which is. Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity.

Religion alone can be the source of such poetry. It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

Deprivation of this poetry explains all forms of demoralization.

Slavery is work without any light from eternity, without poetry, without religion. May the eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary.

Failing that, the only incentives are fear and gain—fear, which implies the oppression of the people; gain, which implies the corruption of the people.

Manual labour. Time entering into the body. Through work man turns himself into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist. Work is like a death. We have to pass through death. We have to be killed—to endure the weight of the world. When the universe is weighing upon the back of a human creature, what is there to be surprised at if it hurts him?

Work is like a death if it is without an incentive. We have to act, renouncing the fruits of action.

To work—if we are worn out it means that we are becoming submissive to time as matter is. Thought is forced to pass from one instant to the next without laying hold of the past or the future. That is what it means to obey.

Joys parallel to fatigue: tangible joys, eating, resting, the pleasures of Sunday... but not money. No poetry concerning the people is authentic if fatigue does not figure in it, and the hunger and thirst which come from fatigue.

Weil, Simone. Gravity And Grace (pp. 180-183). Kindle Edition.