The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who died of self-starvation and tuberculosis in a Kent sanitorium in 1943 at the age of 34, remains a conundrum. ‘Mais elle est folle!’ had been the spluttering response of Charles de Gaulle the previous year, during her short wartime period analysing reports for the Free French in London. Her simple brief was to précis the ideas coming in from the Resistance movement on how to reconstruct France after liberation. The result – which was posthumously published, as were most of her writings – turned out to be a major work of original philosophy, Enchainement (The Need for Roots), running to hundreds of pages, a testimony to Weil’s lifelong need to go further than anyone could ever have required into what she saw as the truth of things.

Susan Sontag called Weil ‘one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travails of the spirit’.