The Enigma of Simone Weil

In August 1943, the French philosopher Simone Weil died from a cardiac arrest at age 34. The coroner’s report claimed that, after suffering complications from tuberculosis, she had killed herself by refusing to eat, ‘the balance of her mind [...] disturbed’. While the exact reason for Weil’s hunger strike remains unclear, many believe it to have been an act of solidarity with German families living under the Nazi regime. One of her biographers, David McLellan, wrote that her self-inflicted starvation followed her study of Arthur Schopenhauer and his writings on Christian saintly asceticism and salvation. In Simone Weil: A Sketch for a Portrait, Weil’s first biographer in English, Richard Rees, offers a speculative but compassionate outlook on her passing. ‘As for her death,’ Rees writes, ‘whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.’