Tag: theory

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

When the bonds of affection and necessity between human beings are not supernaturally transformed into friendship, not only is the affection of an impure and low order, but it is also combined with hatred and repulsion…. We hate what we depend upon. We become disgusted with what depends on us. Sometimes affection does not only become mixed with hatred and revulsion; it is entirely changed into it. 

“My value and security may come to depend entirely on my needs and wants being met by a particular kind of human relationship—by a variety of what we usually call human love…. I may manipulate or tyrannize over someone else, deny their right to be themselves or to have interests other than my supposed interests, and so do profound injury to them…. Weil’s claim is that this is endemic in ordinary human relations. If I love someone as a particular individual, this means that their particularity is attractive to me. These features of their reality meet or gratify my expectations, they are pleasing to my standards; my selection of them as objects of love means that I have found reason to ignore or discount other aspects of their reality and to withhold love from other individuals not possessed of the relevant desirable features. Thus my love of the individual as individual is necessarily an attempt to"cannibalize" them, to bring them into my world on my terms”. 

—Rowan Williams, “The Necessary Non-Existence of God,” in Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, ed. R. Bell