Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 51

3 February 1909—24 August 1943

War Transforms Us into Things

Philosopher, political radical, classicist, factory worker, mystic, author: Simone Weil is hard, and perhaps impossible, to pin down. In her short lifetime, she journeyed from a youthful commitment to revolutionary Marxism to religious mysticism. But if there’s a unifying theme that runs throughout her activities and her writings, it’s her denunciation of the dehumanizing effects of violence.

Born into a solidly middle-class French family, Weil was a brilliant student who early on lived the double life of an intellectual and an activist. She taught school and wrote learned papers, but she also agitated for workers’ rights and offered free classes to farm, railroad, and factory hands. She helped organize marches and demonstrations aimed at securing higher wages and better working conditions for manual laborers, and even left her teaching job to labor in a factory alongside the men and women whose courage and endurance she so admired. In 1937, she traveled to Spain to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Although she tried hard to be a soldier, she was so inept that she put others at risk and was soon sent home. A Jew, she fled France in 1942, worked for the French Resistance from England, and died from a combination of tuberculosis and ascetic fasting.

Weil left behind dozens of published and unpublished essays. In one of them, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” she offers her most thorough defense of the claim that any form of violence, but especially the kind exemplified in war, dehumanizes. Her selection of the Iliad as the text around which her essay revolves intentionally challenges the widespread belief, exemplified in the ancient poem, that war is a glorious and heroic affair that brings out the best in combatants. On the contrary, Weil insists, glory and heroism are rendered irrelevant by war.

Violence, she argues, is a force “that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense; it makes a corpse out of him.” But even short of killing, martial violence saps humanity. It possesses “the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive.” The person who is attacked becomes so focused on the dread of dying and the animal urge to remain alive that his soul disappears. He becomes an automaton. The aggressor is so focused on killing that his soul likewise disappears. He becomes an automaton as well. Like chess pieces, combatants forget their own and one another’s humanity during the heat of battle. Minutes earlier, they were “thinking, acting, hoping.” But in the clash of arms, they become “simply matter,” stripped of autonomy and propelled hither and yon by the same laws of action/reaction that dictate the motion of any kind of matter.

For Weil, this robbery of humanity takes place wherever humans are forced into situations—the battlefield, the factory, the overly regimented schoolroom—that make them anonymous and dispensable. Before violence kills the body, it kills the soul.