Postscript: Simone Weil on Moral Impossibility and Moral Dexterity

For Simone Weil, our reading of the world implies what we cannot but do. In times of peace, we read in the humanity and fragility of our neighbour somebody we cannot but respect; in times of civil war, within our frantic group, we read in our neighbour somebody we cannot but try to annihilate. This led Simone Weil to ask what kind of work on ourselves can change our readings. One route towards moral dexterity which she proposed in her essay ‘The Beautiful and the Good’ was contemplating beautiful actions. Beauty, she explains, is not that which aesthetically pleases us but rather that which arrests us; the good is our adherence to what we ourselves choose to follow, not compliance with any externally defined rule. Therefore, ‘beautiful actions’ are not moral precepts, but almost the opposite; they are epic, mythical stories of renunciation in favour of harmony with others, stories that arrest us when we contemplate them, and cultivate in us the potential to arrest, change our reading and step out of the mob.