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KATE LARSON
knowledge of self as an object but rather being present to oneself, something
which enables receptivity to the other rather than self-occupancy and self¬
control, transcendence rather than immanence. I will borrow the words of
Aryeh Kosman from his essay on the dialogue to illuminate this notion and
its importance. The quote serves to point back to Hadot’s idea of the status
of dialogue, but it also offers a bridge to Simone Weil and her concepts of
detachment and decreation, a self-abnegation which at the same time offers
true participation in the world. Kosman writes:
Like the empty mindlessness of the fully mindful and enlightened sage, sofrosyne is
a virtue of self without self, a virtue of wisdom and self-mastery in which wisdom,
self, and mastery vanish, and there remains only the quiet, orderly, and effortless
grace of skilled living.®
NAKED AND DEAD ALREADY IN THIS LIFE
Simone Weil was from her early years a profound reader of Plato. Inspired
by her teacher Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier), she avoided the common
conception of Plato as a dualist; she focussed on the moral psychology of
Plato, which convincingly disproves the dualist reading. Weil, however, goes
beyond Alain when she offers her interpretation of Plato: “Plato is an authentic
mystic, and even the father of Western mysticism.”°
In a late, unfinished text entitled “God in Plato,” Weil considers Plato’s
notion of “assimilation to God” flight from the “mixed human world,” in
which good and evil are always co-produced. It is contact with or separation
from God which produces good or evil, or their mixture, according to her,
which make imitating or assimilating experimental concepts rather than
abstract ones. This may appear distant from Plato’s own words, as assimilation
to God in Theaetetus is said to consist of becoming “just and pure” with
the help of reason. But when Weil moves on to a discussion of a passage in
the Gorgias, she is able, without introducing the concept of decreation, to
show the experimental aspect of reason in Plato.
“Plato does not say, but he does imply, that in order to become just, which
requires self-knowledge, that it is necessary to become naked and dead
already in this life.”'° Weil is referring to paragraphs 523-525, in which Plato
suggests that, in judgement, the one judged as well as the judge should shed
Aryeh Kosman, Self-knowledge and Self-control in Plato’s Charmides, Virtues of Thought,
Massachusetts/Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, 245.
° Weil, God in Plato, Late Philosophical Writings, ed. Eric O. Springsted, trans. Eric O.
Springsted & Lawrence E. Schmidt, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, 48.
10 Ibid. 52
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