Simone Weil and the Illusoriness of Worldly Goods

A correspondent, responding to Weil's Wager, has this to say:

[. . .] What worries me when I turn to Weil’s argument is that she seems to be trying to replace Pascal’s serviceable scale of goods with a dichotomy of illusory and absolute goods. I have no idea what it means to say ”health and fitness are illusory goods” or “only God is absolutely good.” The former seems to me just some metaphysically tricked-out term of abuse. I have no idea at all how to unpack “God is the absolute good” (despite your remarks in Part IV ). Pascal at least talks about salvation and an eternal afterlife. Is that what is supposed to be absolutely good for me? And so God as the provider is somehow also valuable or “absolutely good” for me? All of this dark and murky to me in Weil’s argument, while I think I understand what Pascal is proposing.

I agree that the whether-or-not version of (7) is incompatible with (1), but otherwise I remain lost at sea in her attempt to argue that I must pursue the only thing that is “absolutely good” whether or not it really exists. [. . .]

Central to Weil's thought is the notion that the goods of this life are unreal: "Things of the senses are real if they are considered as perceptible things, but unreal if considered as goods." (Gravity and Grace, p. 45) To understand this one must see it in the light of Plato, Weil's beloved master. It has been said with some justice that every philosopher is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and there is no doubt that Weil is a Platonist and was hostile to Aristotle. My correspondent, however, is an Aristotelian (to force him into our little schema) and so it comes as no surprise to me that he is at a loss to understand what it could mean to say that such things as health and fitness, food and drink, property and progeny, are illusory goods.

Now I won't try to convince my friend of the illusoriness of worldly goods. In general, I do not try to convince anybody of anything; I am satisfied if I can get my 'opponents' to appreciate the merit of the positions they oppose. (For example, I would not try to make a theist out of an atheist; I would simply try to get him to stop saying stupid Russellian things like, 'God is as incredible as a celestial teapot.') For I hold that in any adopting of a position there is an ineluctable element of de-cision, etymologically a cutting off of reflection and an engaging of the will: at the end of the day, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. You will never find some argument, or set of arguments, that definitely establishes your desired conclusion, or justifies your way of life, and if you think you have found that argument or set of arguments, then you have decided in favor of that argument or set of arguments without realizing that you have done so. If nothing else, you have decided to leave off investigating the matter.

So I won't try to prove to my friend that it is true that worldly goods are illusory; I will content myself with explaining what this means and how one might think it to be true.

First of all, it does not mean that such goods have no reality whatsoever; the point is rather that they lack plenary reality, which amounts to saying that they cannot satisfy us ultimately. I can approach this via the notion of idolatry. What I am about to say I believe myself and I think is also close to what Weil believed.

The essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions — say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

Ultimately, all desire is desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this fact about itself. But our de-luded desire thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry. The Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of fleshpot A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for fleshpot B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.

So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire as such is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date, before clicking on the YouTube link):

You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.

There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.

Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not it exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.

I'm sure my friend does not share my Platonic-Buddhist intuition that desire is infinite and not finally satisfiable by anything finite and perishable. But although he does not feel this to be so, he should be able to understand how someone might feel and think it to be so.

But although I share with Weil the Platonic intuition that the goods of this life lack plenary reality, I don't believe that this intuition can be true unless there exists an absolute good in which we are capable of participating — as I explain in Weil's Wager.