Skip to content

«Imiter Dieu». Sul platonismo di Simone Weil

Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, May 21 2024

Speaker: Ariberto Acerbi (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross)

Professor Ariberto Acerbi gave for ROR an in-depth seminar on the reading of Plato by philosopher Simon Weil: «what is philosophy if not a clear expression of the dynamism of the soul?», Weil asks quoting Platos’s Republic.

Weil lived at a time when the return to classical authors, and in particular to Plato, constituted an option of particular interest in view of reconstruction of Europe on the intellectual and moral side. Nevertheless, understanding how Weil interpreted Platonism also appears to be an objective of absolute interest for the development of postmodern civilisation. Her reading of the platonic text speaks very clearly: those who have come to see the good are called upon to spread it by giving their lives; it is necessary to rediscover great ideas such as the concern for the good of the world or the existence of real obligations towards the human being, personal behaviours that would ensure the satisfaction of both material and spiritual needs.

In her time, the ideas of justice (commutative and distributive), developed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, appeared insufficient. Among the most interesting passages taken in consideration by Weil, Acerbi pointed to those about the unjust judge, who does not listen to the mute cry of the wretched wanderer. The underlying questioni is: who is capable of listening to the cry of unfortunate? Only the judge capable of attention in which intelligence is combined with compassion can do so. After all, only the supernatural operation of grace can trasform the soul. Weil wondered how to form judges an politicians educated in truth and justice, and in particular which dispositions of mind needed to be formed. The main point was to distinguish morality based on social consensus, from morality based on objective truth. In Plato’s thought, the highest values that can found a society are the sense of the just, the sacred, the beautiful and the honest.

In contrast, Protagoras, a relativist, held that there are no absolute values, but only those based on common sense. In the great digression of the Theaetetus, Socrates reacts to this view, arguing that only philosophical education can anchor the meaning of the highest values on a truthful, non-common sense foundation. Escape means to make oneself like God according to one’s own possibility by making oneself just and wise with intelligence – this is evidently a paradoxical escape.

Intelligence (phronesis), that is the sense of the good and the true, enables one to really do the good, because it helps to distinguish the true virtues from the socially en vogue ones. In the Phoedon phronesis makes it possible to recognise the good and thereby authenticate virtue: in fact an apparently good moral condition is different from a virtue rooted in a true good. Weil reflects on the fact that wisdom is thus qualified as being associated with the true virtue, radically different from apparent realities. In thus becomes a qualified representative of desiderable knowledge for man.

Unlike moral conduct based on custom, genuine conduct, for Weil, carries within it a reward for the man who pursues it: being the image of God. Finally it is very interesting to understand how Weil interprets assimilation to God. Plato’s ideas are God’s thoughts, God’s attributes. That being said, one may ask how is it possible for a man to imitate God? The answer is in Christ. In The Republic Plato writes that “the righteous” will have the bitter fate of being impaled and killed, but to join the extremes of God and man: there is no other way but that of a “mediator”.

Poster

***

Documents available to participants