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AUTHENTIC PRESENCE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF INITIATION
all attributes in which they are dressed to be truly seen and able to see."
Weil understands these attributes as attachments, and knowledge of self is
understood here as presence to self, enduring its void.
She is connecting this image, this linking of death and nakedness (a true
mystical thought, she writes) with the passage in the Phaedo in which Socrates
speaks of philosophy as nothing other than training for death.” This passage
is close in its implications to the one in Theaetetus about the philosopher
“escaping” this life, and thus it is seen by Annas as an example of the spiritual
(non-ethical) side of Plato and in common reception as the unworldly strand
of his thought.
In another late, also unfinished essay entitled “Some Reflections on
the Concept of Value,” Weil discusses her understanding of death in relation
to philosophy, which shows that there are threads between the ethical and
spiritual side of Plato, and that they are not severed.
In this text she argues that value is at the centre of philosophy. It is,
she contends, the true object of reflection, as it cannot be an object of
experience, being our ground. The mind, always and essentially, she says,
strives towards value. You cannot step outside the order of values to reflect
on them objectively, so how is philosophical reflection even possible? It is
a form of detachment, she concludes, and so has to posit detachment itself as
a superior value. As value connects not only to knowledge but to sensibility
and action as well, all philosophical reflection aims at and affects the whole
soul, the way of living. Weil writes, “Detachment is a renunciation of all
possible ends without exception, a renunciation that puts void in the place
of the future just as the imminent approach of death does.” Therefore,
she continues, “The initiation into wisdom has been regarded as a passage
towards death.”
Still, detached thought has as its object, as all philosophical reflection,
a way of living, a better life, not somewhere else but here on earth and
immediately. In this way, philosophy is oriented towards life through death.
Translated into Weil’s terminology, the decreative process, which reaches
into the nothing, the no-thing, of God, transforms life “here and now.” It is
not a turning away, but a deepening of our presence. This better life may seem
indifferent to what we usually look upon as human attachments, yet it creates
new ways of solidarity.
1 Plato, Gorgias, 523-525, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Complete Works, 865-67.
2 Plato, Phaedo, 64a, 67e, trans. G.M.A Grube, Complete Works, 55, 59.
Weil, Some Reflections on the Concept of Value, Late Philosophical Thinking, 33.
4° Ibid.
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