Simone Weil and Forgiveness

Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but he didn’t say how to love yourself. He assumed humans love themselves. Maybe that’s a safe assumption to make, but it’s not my experience. Since I was a child, I’ve struggled with self-hatred.

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Somewhere in the aftermath of losing my job in 2020, I developed the unfortunate habit of saying, vocally, to myself, “I hate myself,” on a daily basis. Sometimes I would repeat it over and over, uncontrollably. “I hate myself. I hate myself.” I’ve been caught muttering it multiple times. I said it in a silence while recording a song once, so there’s a literal recording of it in existence.

I tried arguing with it. I tried combating it with affirmations. But I couldn’t keep up. My will to resist it often slackened. Usually, I would say “I hate myself” in response to an intrusive thought, often a disliked memory, something embarrassing or shameful from my past. But sometimes I would say it out of nowhere, for no reason at all.

The only thing that helped, and which has basically eradicated the phrase from my daily usage, has been a spiritual practice of forgiveness. I heard once that there’s an old Jewish practice of saying something out loud three times in order to remember it. So I started saying, vocally, to myself, “I forgive myself. I forgive myself. I forgive myself,” every single time I said, “I hate myself.” And I would say it three times for each occasion, so that if I said, “I hate myself. I hate myself,” I would say, “I forgive myself” six times.

Y’all, it worked! I rarely say that shit now. But I haven’t stopped saying it completely. I still impulsively say something, but I say “I hate it.” Which is different. It’s okay to hate an experience. I get the impulse to respond to an intrusive thought with, “I hate it.” It’s more fitting.

But it’s still an awkward habit. And not a pleasant experience. It’s an experience of discomfort. So I still respond to it. I say, “I forgive.”

“Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.   
To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.   
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”[1]     

“If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe.”[2]     

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

I am learning to love the universe. Which means also learning to love myself. Loving involves forgiving, and forgiving requires acceptance. It is a practice of receiving the world as it is, of letting go of my ideal versions of things—including my ideal version of myself. It is an extension of the “Yes-saying” I wrote about last week. What Nietzsche and Simone Weil have in common is an insistence on embracing things as they are. Loving what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them, reconciling with our fate, saying Yes to life. It is an ethic of radical forgiveness.

Politically, this ethic can be quietistic. That is to say, it can lead us to make peace with oppression, to forego resistance and concede to the powers that be. But for the sake of the soul, there is something necessary in taking this risk. We need to be able to find an inner peace, and that requires at some level accepting the world as it is.

I want an activist repose. I want to be able to forgive the world and forgive myself, even as I work to bring about something better.

Simone Weil modeled this. In her own life, she was a radical political activist, marching with striking workers, helping German communists escape the Third Reich, participating in the Spanish Civil War as an anarchist, and more. But she also developed a profound mysticism that involved what she called “enduring the void.”[3] The void is what is undesirable. It is “the dark night,” a lack of reward.[4] It is gravity, the weight of the world on our shoulders. To accept the void is “to will the void,” to will the world to be as it is.[5] In Nietzschean terms, to will the void means to so love life that we would choose to live it over and over again exactly the same way for eternity.

But for Weil, accepting the void requires grace. It is a supernatural intervention. “Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes,” she wrote.[6] To endure the void is to wait for grace. “Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied.”[7]

Enduring the void does not preclude activism. Rather, it is a composure that can become a foundation for radical action. I compare it to what Nietzsche called “a pessimism of strength.”[8] Sacrificing ideals, it is first disappointed by the world. The world is in need of forgiveness. I am in need of forgiveness. To grant this forgiveness cultivates strength of character. From that strength, action can take shape.

Accepting the world as it is allows us to work with it where it’s at. The alternative is to demand of the world more than it can offer, our hopes continually dashed by an unrelenting status quo. Here, we are again and again thrown back down to a place of weakness, a state of disappointment. Only forgiveness can restore our strength.

And so I say, “I forgive.” I was embarrassed? I forgive. I was humiliated? I forgive. I failed? I forgive. I was disappointed? I forgive. I lost? I was hurt? I was horrified? Oppressed? Overruled? Neglected? Broken? I forgive. I forgive this world. I forgive myself. “Was that life? All right! Let’s do it again!”[9] That is courage, according to Nietzsche. That is strength.

It is better to forgive than to hate. By all means, hate what is hateful, but transcendence is to forgive.

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Notes:
[1] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1997), 54.
[2] Weil, 64.
[3] Weil, 56.
[4] Weil, 56.
[5] Weil, 58.
[6] Weil, 56.
[7] Weil, 58.
[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1999), 4.
[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. and trans. Stanley Applebaum (Mineola: Dover, 2004), 121.