Simone Weil’s Great Awakening
&gt; Yet for her, the primary duty of the philosophical person, and particularly a politically active one, remained rigorous self-examination – guided by the conviction that true moral enlightenment was only to be found beyond the spheres of man-made languages.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking about this a lot recently. The reference to Camus here is interesting to me since it is in the context of Absurdity that I consider this. A paradoxical desire to think the unthinkable, or to know the unknowable.<p>&gt; Weil was convinced that in the depths of our existence, it is not concepts and arguments that define us as moral beings, but concrete experiences. ... More significantly, for Weil, we are beings moved to action not, in the first instance, by concepts but by forces beyond ourselves: experiences of suffering, love, profound insight or disturbance, whose origins Weil did not shy away from calling transcendent, even divine.<p>There is something of phenomenology to this idea.<p>&gt; The true achievement of emancipation, Weil thought, lay in liberation not of the self but from the self. Reflective self-empowerment should make way for a pre-reflective alertness to the beauty and vulnerability of life. This leads to an active care for the world we share with other beings – it made no difference to her whether it was named “nature” or “God”.<p>This is very powerful thought and very reflective of many spiritual traditions.<p>&gt; In Weil’s view, we need transformative experiences that arise when we become attentive to the natural beauty and interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such revelatory forms of attention “praying”:
“At its highest stage attention is the same as prayer. It assumes faith and love. It is associated with a freedom other than that of choice, which occurs at the level of the will – grace. Being so attentive that one no longer has a choice.”<p>This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean &quot;prayer&quot; divorced from any religious context.<p>Although it isn&#x27;t immediately related - I think this might be the most powerful use of AI. Instead of attempting to create the most intelligent and infallible oracle, we might instead create the most perfect mirror to reflect ourselves. And in that way we may see the &quot;I&quot; at the center of self dissolve.