August 28, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    This is the beginning of a new school year, and so I think it appropriate that I offer you an essay by a seventeen-year-old college student in France. The assigned topic in a philosophy class is "The Beautiful and the Good." The essay is rather long, and what I am able to present here is a mere capsule.

    In the essay, the student maintains that the moral act is not an act that conforms to this or that rule but is a free, unpredictable act, a creation like a work of art. [Tell that to the religious fanatics--the plague of the world today!] The student then says that this act is simply an act of purity and fidelity to oneself, and develops the idea, not only abstractly in some detail, but also through a meditation on the story of Alexander the Great. Alexander crosses the desert and suffers from thirst like his soldiers. Some one brought him water in a cask from a great distance away. Alexander pours out the water on the ground so as not to be more favored than his soldiers. "Nobody," writes the student, "much less Alexander, would have dared predict this astonishing deed; but once the deed is accomplished, there is nobody who does not have a feeling that it had to be like this." The story illustrates that good and duty are created by the free will; they are not imposed on it. The student then observes that ostensibly Alexander's act is not useful to anyone; it only safeguards Alexander's purity and humanity; but it is not in this way that it is useful to everyone. "His wellbeing, if he had drunk, would have separated him from his soldiers... Everything takes place in Alexander's soul, and for him it is simply a matter of taking the stance of a man... So it suffices to be just and pure to save the world, which is an idea expressed by the myth of the Man-God [the Christian myth] who redeemed the sins of men by justice alone, without any political action. It is necessary to save oneself, save the Spirit in oneself, of which external humanity is the myth." The student then discusses sacrifice, which entails "the acceptance of pain, the refusal to obey the animal in oneself, and the will to redeem suffering men through voluntary suffering. Every saint has poured out the water; every saint has rejected all well-being that would separate him from the suffering of men." And so on.

    The student is Simone Weil. Her grade is t.b., for "Tres bien" and "Tres belle." Now, you probably don't agree at all with what she says. Nevertheless, if you are at all just, you have to admit that it is a very remarkable effort of independent thought by a teenager. After this essay, Simone Weil lived another seventeen years: she died at age thirty-four. Her entire life illustrates Alexander's act--a creative moral act that, as Simone says, Alexander couldn't have predicted. Wouldn't it have been more practical to have drunk the water and so be in a better state of alertness to command his troops? That is the sort of practical reasoning that would have made you, dear reader, a great general, or, if you like, a chaired professor, but not Alexander the Great and not Simone Weil. (Simone Petrement, Simone Weil: A Life, Pantheon, 1976, p. 34).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu