Bridging the Infinite Distance Between Us

by | 21 Jan 2025

While Kantian’s are concerned with duties, Aristotelians with human flourishing and consequentialists with aggregating value, Simone Weil’s central concern is the distance that separates us. Naturally, she has much to say about duties and human flourishing, but these matters, for her, are located downstream from greatest philosophical puzzle: how is it possible for two free agents to relate across the infinite gap that exists between them. This is not merely a psychological puzzle, as it originates in the very notion of free agency. In the sections on friendship and love of neighbour in Weil’s essay concerning “Forms of Implicit love of God”[1]she investigates from two complementary perspectives both this distance and the dangers associated with it and, in doing so, presents a challenge to the currently dominant approaches to moral philosophizing. Or at least that is what I will try to argue below.

Weil’s worldview is shaped by the tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The ordinary concerns the normal and unremarkable aspects of our experience both in of the physical world and in one’s inner world. The subjection of matter to the force of gravity is unremarkable, and so is the mobilization of one’s power to back the realization of one’s desires.[2] It is equally necessary that matter subjects itself to gravity and that “the strong will accomplish their will to the extreme limits of possibility”.[3] This is not a mere analogy between the physical and the social. As she puts, this sort of motivational drive from the strong “is a mechanical necessity”.[4]

But why would she think so? After all, there is ample evidence that, at least sometimes, the strong do not behave in that manner. If that is so, the claim that the strong’s drive to accomplish their will is akin to mechanical necessity appears to be false. Weil is acutely aware that there are, after all, good Samaritans out there. In fact, what puzzles her is precisely how this could happen if power does indeed push itself to accomplish the will “to the extreme limits of possibility”. Thus, her claim about what we might call the “logic of power” cannot be an empirical claim. It is rather a conceptual claim about what it means for someone to freely willsomething. As she put it in the essay on love of neighbour, if the powerful did not mobilize all their power to implement their will, “it would be as if they willed and did not will at the same time”.[5]

Thus, the claim that free will drives the person to accomplish her designs is not an empirical claim, but a conceptual one. Here we can see better the philosophical dimension of the problem: if the free will does not do so, it is no longer a free will.

From the perspective of the agent’s free will, thus conceived, other free agents possess no distinctive normative worth or standing. The other is indistinguishable from objects in the world that might sometimes resist one’s will. If the will directs one to walk from A to B, the agent might be frustrated by the fact that there is a boulder blocking her way. She might also be frustrated by the fact that someone is blocking her way. From the point of view of the will, there is no difference between the boulder and the person: it sees either only as an impediment to its realization. Of course, one might be driven to recognize someone else as another free agent, but that is contingent on both having an equal amount of power. In such cases, the only way forward for the will is to accept it has to act in agreement with the other agent. This is what Simone Weil calls “justice”. [6] But if the other is powerless, he is reduced to the condition of an object. They lack agency and, hence, personality: they are a “thing”. [7]

It is around this conception of free will that Simone Weil constructs her picture of the ordinary, unremarkable, way in which the practical world works. This is a picture of both solitude and desolation. Solitude because, in her view, what is taken for granted for the likes of Kant is an impossibility: that a free person, with free will, would see someone not endowed with equal power as another person. Desolation because even in the acknowledgement of the other as a free agent (in situations marked by equipotency between two persons), the other is seen as free only through the lenses of the power the agent believes they can wield. Here, there is no space for the will to recognize the other as valuable in a non-instrumental way. There is no space for seeing the afflicted (more on them later) as free agents and there is no space for friendship.

But against the background of that conception of the ordinary life of practical agents, two extraordinary events might (and sometimes do) occur. First, one might see a powerless thingin front of him, the object that could be easily subjected to the agent’s will, as a person and, in doing so, the agent can be said to love his neighbour. Secondly, two persons might relate in a way that is not reducible to the relationship of justice that is expected when two free wills have no power over one another: they might relate in friendship. As they break the logic of the world, events of these two types point to the existence of another order of being, one that transcends this world. That is why Weil believes these types of connection between people to be forms of implicit love of God.

In each of these two forms of the implicit love of God, the connection between persons is the result of a renunciation by the free agent. It is only by somehow denying herself that the agent manages to establish that connection and bridge the distance between herself and the other. This withdrawal happens in different ways in love of neighbour and in friendship.

Love of neighbour, as mentioned above, can only occur when an agent endowed with free will encounters someone who is in a state of affliction (a poor, but traditional, translation to Weil’s ‘malheur’). In affliction, the individual’s very personality is effaced by some great misfortune, such as dire need or suffering. To love such individual, means refusing to see and treat the afflicted merely as a thing. When love of neighbour is present, the afflicted is not seen and reacted to merely as something to be ignored or, perhaps, used. It is important to bear in mind that such love is not a form of sentimentality (although sentiments are, of course, involved), but an ability to see something that does not exist: the free will of the afflicted. The afflicted’s personality has been destroyed and with it, all traces of free agency. The shackles of dire necessity and suffering make freedom impossible. To be able to see the afflicted as a person is not sufficient to have a sharp perceptive ability, as there is no personality there to be perceived. This kind of “sight” belongs to our ability to see something that is not there (the afflicted’s free will) and is located primarily in the realm of imagination,[8] not in the realm of perception[9].

Moreover, seeing (imagining) the afflicted as an agent like oneself triggers certain responses, both emotional and practical, on the agent: the treatment dispensed to the afflicted is guided by justice. As seen above, for Weil, the “central case” of justice is a free agreement between two equally powerful free agents. But the “secondary analogate” (not her terminology) of justice is the treatment of the afflicted by someone acting with love for their neighbour. This means treating the afflicted with the same dignity that would have been accorded to them, should they be truly free and, presumably, that would mean to treat them in ways that would be agreeable to them, were they not in affliction. Treating the afflicted in this way has also a bootstrapping quality to it: in responding to the afflicted with justice, as if they had in fact free agency, I create the conditions under which the affliction might subside and allow personality to be (re)gained by the other. Imagination and the type of relationship that ensues from it has the ability to alter the reality of the afflicted and produce, ex nihilo, a person where before there was only a thing.

Notice that love of neighbour is not conductive to acts of charity (as something distinct from justice). What is owed to the afflicted is justice. As Weil puts it, we have “invented” the distinction between justice and charity. Separated from charity, this impoverished notion of justice “excuses those who possess [wealth] from giving. If they give all the same, they believe they can be content in themselves”.[10] For Weil, there is no space for supererogation, a theme so loved by deontologists of all stripes, and a staple concept of a liberal political organization: in helping the afflicted I do not go beyond the call of duty; rather, I just fulfil my duty. 

Thus, in love of neighbour the free will refrains from pursuing its freely chosen ends to the “extreme limits of possibility” and, in doing so, bridges distance between her freedom and the afflicted’s unfreedom (her subjection to necessity) and makes it possible for a relationship to exist across that infinite distance. Through imagination an entity without free will is treated with justice (ie as someone endowed with free will should be treated) and, in that exchange, both the afflicted and the agent are transformed. The former (re)gains her personality, the latter, transcends the realm of her own free will (the realm of the ordinary) and enters the realm of the extraordinary (a realm that is also accessible to the formerly afflicted if they were to act with the right form of dignified gratitude).[11]

In friendship, by contrast, the agent’s self-denial is of an entirely different kind (and that appears to be the reason why, for Weil, friendship and love of neighbour are “strictly speaking”[12] different forms of implicit love of God). In a friendship both friends possess free will, not having been reduced by affliction. But, as friends, they also necessitate each other and could be frustrated or even, in the extreme, reduced to affliction by the other’s exercise of their own freedom. Thus, friendship is also paradoxical, at least within the framework of free agency: either I necessitate my friend and, in doing so, lack freedom, or I enslave the other to my will, remaining free, but denying the friend their freedom. As Weil put it: “friendship is the miracle by which human beings consent to view from a distance and without approaching the very being that is as necessary to them as food”.[13] The miracle means that one does not fall into either of the opposite temptations of caving to a desire to please the friend (thus reducing one’s own freedom) or a desire to dominate the friend (thus eliminating their freedom). In the ordinary, unremarkable, ways of free agency, friendship is impossible between humans.

Like in love of neighbour, what makes friendship possible is the relinquishing of control by the free agent, a partial effacement of one’s fee will. In both cases, this is a leap from the ordinary into the extraordinary. Ordinarily, freedom would push against the boundary of necessity and only find its limit on what is impossible for it to accomplish. That a free agent (ie an agent not pressed by necessity) would relinquish control is an event that cannot be explained by the logic of freedom. 

These extraordinary events bridge the infinite distance between (i) the freedom of the agent and the (imagined) freedom of the afflicted and (ii) between the free will of each friend. In both cases, the freedom of the other (imagined in the afflicted, real in the friend) is taken by the agent to be itself a reason for her to refrain from accomplishing all it wishes to accomplish.

It is difficult to overstate how radical a departure from contemporary moral philosophy this is. First, this relational approach to morality offers an alternative to the three currently dominant perspectives in the field, namely, utility-maximizing consequentialism, deontology, and human flourishing virtue-based theories. Secondly, it lays bare important shortcomings in some of these approaches. Thirdly, it suggests ways in which these approaches can be integrated into a wider perspective. There is no space here to develop each of those lines of argument, but an outline of the contrasts between dominant models and Weil’s approach might be instructive. 

Utility-maximizing consequentialism is located in Weil’s domain of the ordinary. In fact, the well-known struggles of this approach to justify why the interests of others should have the same value and moral status as the interests of the agent who is engaged in maximizing her own utility might be an upshot of the fact that, from this perspective, the explanation of moral value is often reduced to what Weil would see as the ordinary interplay of free agents.[14] Weil’s relational approach could account for something like utility-maximization as the domain of mechanical necessity that is the hallmark of the ordinary “movements of the soul” which, as mentioned above, is controlled by laws analogous to the laws of physics. But it also offers an explanation of why this is a partial and unsatisfactory way to account for all movements of the soul. What remains unexplained are the extraordinary movements that allows for love of neighbour and friendship to exist.  

Weil’s approach also contrasts with contemporary deontological perspectives on normativity. Take, for instance, Kantian deontology. Here, moral duties stem from the imperative according to which one should “so act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”[15] In contrast, for Weil, what is puzzling (against the background of freedom) is precisely that others should be treated as ends. There is nothing in the idea of freedom that requires anything like the categorical imperative (in any of its formulations) and, accordingly, it turns out to be just an external and ad hoc limitation on freedom. The puzzle is not so much what duties would be compatible with treating others as ends in themselves, but rather why would a free agent ever treat others as ends in themselves. The solution for this puzzle is not to be found in another order of duty but, as we saw above, in a movement of the imagination that conceives a world that, in the ordinary ways of human action, is impossible: a world in which weak and strong are both free and in which friends do not try to control (or be subjected to) the will of one another. In imagining this world, as mentioned above, we bring it into existence. 

Human flourishing approaches also struggle to account for the bridging of the distance between two free agents, in the way Weil characterizes it. Virtue based approaches often place the normativity of the agent’s relationship with others downstream (as a derivation) of the agent’s own personal growth.[16] But even an explicitly relational version of this human flourishing, such as the one put forward by MacIntyre in Dependent Rational Animals,[17]according to which the independent practical reasoner can only develop by relying on multiple relationships in which it depends on others (and others depend on her), would perhaps, from Weil’s perspective, prove insufficient. Take the argument he puts forward to explain the value of taking care of the those in dire situations (Weil’s “afflicted”): the value of taking care of the afflicted is, at least in part, predicated on the fact that doing so would be helpful for the agent, in trying to become better at independent practical reasoning.[18] and that, in Weil’s terms, could be seen as part of the ordinary logic of the world (I want x and, as taking care of the weak is conductive to x, I have good reason to take care of the weak). 

Thus, by displacing interest, duty and human flourishing from the centre of morality, and replacing them by an account of how it is possible to bridge the  distance between two free wills, Weil offers an alternative to our dominant moral frameworks. Before the furniture of our moral and spiritual world arises, there is an action of self-denial, prompted by imagination, and resulting in a relation. Much like in Christian theology, for her, in the beginning there was a relation.

Claudio Michelon is Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Edinburgh


[1] Simone Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God” from her Awaiting God translated by Brad Jersak and Adit Gamble, Fresh Wind Press, 2012, 47.

[2] As she puts it in the opening line of Gravity and Grace “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of the physical gravity. Grace is the only exception”  (Routledge, 2002), 1.

[3] Simone Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God”, n.1, 50

[4] Ibid, at 51.

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Ibid at 53.

[8] Or “creative attention” as she terms it, at Ibid 55-56

[9] Although it is also true that perhaps a certain type of perception would need to be involved, after all, my imagination must be kept within certain constraints. If I imagine the boulder to be a free agent, my imagination would have gone astray. Perhaps what is perceived is a certain potential to free agency in the afflicted. I thank Maks Del Mar for prompting me to think more carefully about perception in this context (by having objected to the plain dismissal of perception in an earlier draft of this text).

[10] Ibid at 49.

[11] Ibid at 52.

[12] Ibid at 47.

[13] Ibid at 97.

[14] Attempts to build universal value from this perspective often rely on either “invisible hand” explanations or on “general will as incorporating the private will” explanations, both of which lead to a (necessary) convergence of interests between the private and the public.

[15] The well-known second formulation of the categorical imperative in Kant’s Groundwork (the translation above comes from Immanuel Kant Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80 (4:429).

[16] There are many versions of the self-centred objection to Virtue Ethics, of which, one of the best known (and most discussed) is Thomas Nagel The View From Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), 195-197.

[17] MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals Duckworth, 1999.

[18] Id, at 136-140. MacIntyre’s argument is more complex and subtle than this sketch, built from a Weilian perspective, can convey. In other parts of the book’s argument, he draws a clear distinction between relationships justified by the advantages obtained by the agent and relationships that are the result of “sympathy” and “affective engagement”, at 114. But although Weil and MacIntyre would agree that there are such relationships, Weil (but not MacIntyre) is puzzled by their very existence (against the background of free will, as she conceives it). 

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