Belonging Again II.1 (Book 1, Chapter II, Section 2A)

Giving Attention to “The Meta-Crisis” of Affliction

Photo by Susan Wilkinson

Belonging Again (Part I) discussed the topic of Absolute Knowers, Deleuzian Dividuals, and Nietzschean Children, all phrases and terms meant to refer to the same kind of subject who can live according to values which are not socially supported, lack “givens,” and yet still have authority over the subject. They are created by the subject, and thus run the risk of being arbitrary, and yet manage to prove empowering. A question of Belonging Again was if “created givens” could orient the average person, and on this dilemma the question of “character” was explored. Here, we will focus on the life and thinking of Simone Weil and consider Weil’s life in the context of “The Meta-Crisis” to suggest that we should focus on neurodivergence to address it.

I do not know if Simone Weil was neurodivergent, but she “practically” was such in her radical uniqueness and sainthood. Regardless, Lorenzo’s work suggests that we should not be so focused on “evolving our consciousness” to overcome “The Meta-Crisis” and should instead look to make space for the neurodivergent. This means we need to learn how to be “open to the other,” and this means we need to learn how to live like Simone Weil. We need to develop the power of “Attention” she proposed (something Ivan Illich also emphasized), and we need to be deeply part of the world we live in (its “common life,” to allude to Hume). In my view, Simone Weil is far closer to being “The Absolute Knower” and imperceptible “Deleuzian Dividual” we need than say some intellectual genius (the thought of Nietzsche against “Bestow Centrism” also suggests neurodivergence, and I will indeed associate Nietzsche’s Childhood with neurodivergence).

Please note that I don’t mean to say that people today discussing “The Meaning Crisis” or “Meta-Crisis” are supporting a life of intellectualism which is uninvolved in psychology (Dr. Vervaeke, for example, clearly opposes such a life in favor of “serious play” and deep embodiment). However, I’m not sure if emphasizing embodiment is the same as emphasizing neurodivergence, as I’m not sure if emphasizing phenomenology is the same as emphasizing Simone Weil. Though please note I in my work emphasize embodiment and phenomenology, so this is not a critique of others; rather, my point is that reading Simone Weil always feels like a “wake up.” She aligns with the Child in that she certainly made her Christianity her own after a very long road from the religion of her family through Marxism and more: even if she embedded herself in a tradition, it was her tradition. And ultimately the author of The Need for Roots had to embed herself in a tradition and yet she refused to be baptized to formally join the Church. She kept herself outside; she believed but did not let this belief bring her comfort. Belief must stick.

What is needed to address the problems of Belonging Again is for us to try to incorporate more “otherness” and “neurodivergence” (A/B) into ourselves, but at the same time I realize that neurodivergence refers to a group of people who are biologically and neurologically born a certain way, so I am concerned that saying we need to “become more neurodivergent” might sound like appropriation. To avoid this, I am going to refer to “practical neurodivergence” as “mentidivergence” (I also considered “animdivergence,” seeing as “anim” means “spirit” and/or “mind”). For those not genetically neurodivergent, we cannot technically be neurodivergent, but I do think we can implement something like it, which I will call “mentidivergence” (at least here). We can say that mentidivergence seeks to share an image and likeness with neurodivergence, while aware that this cannot be perfectly achieved, and hence the neurodivergent can never be replaced. We will always need to be open to “the other.”

I will touch on Weil’s life to suggest why it is not easy to say she is just “more rational” or possesses an “evolved personality” (even if these describe her somehow), that rather the term “neurodivergent” seems more appropriate, and hence why “Absolute Knowing” might be closer to “neurodivergence” than other descriptions. I do not know if Weil was neurodivergent, so I will refer to her as “mentidivergent” (though please note I might be misrepresenting her). Albert Camus considered Simone Weil ‘[t]he only great spirit of our time,’ while Flannery O’Connor thought ‘Weil’s [was] the most comical life [she had] ever read about, [but also] the most truly tragic and terrible.’²⁵ Many consider Weil a saint, but many also consider her life wasted due to foolish and even prideful ideals (when Simone was suffering from tuberculosis, she refused to eat more food than those suffering during the war, and in 1943 died because of ‘cardiac failure due to the degeneration through starvation and not through pulmonary tuberculosis,’ though this account is sometimes disputed).²⁶ To resist the Germans, she proposed parachuting nurses straight into conflict, which was suicidal, yet she proposed the idea precisely because it was suicidal and the Allies needed “higher ideals” to fight the Nazis; to know what it was like to be a member of the working class, she gave up all academic and teaching posts to work in a factory; and so on — the life and thinking of Simone Weil cannot be readily categorized, and it certainly cannot be encountered without catching our attention. She lived what she believed, and if to a fault, perhaps only because the world misunderstood her.

We cannot discuss Simone Weil without discussing her mystical experiences (which suggests that a profound Alterology, to use language from (Re)constructing “A Is A,” informed her thinking). ‘[H]er role as a mystic was so unintended, one for which she had not in any sense prepared,’ and we might say she also experienced a break between “the true” and “the rational.”²⁷ In this, we see thinking which is free of “autonomous rationality,” as the neurodivergent often are, and further suggests mentidivergence in how her mystical encounters became evidence of a distinction between ‘the visible Church and the invisible congregation of saints [which] are never one.’²⁸

Weil believed that it was ‘easier for a non-Christian to become a Christian, than for a ‘Christian’ to become one,’ which sounds as if she supports an individual lifestyle which avoids socialization and is able to think outside the consensus (like Michael Burry according to Lorenzo).²⁹ She famously refused baptism, and arguably ‘she was [not] even troubled by the question of formally becoming a Christian,’ which seems impossible unless she indeed simply didn’t have a mind like the rest of us (she enjoyed and dwelt in “shadow work”).³⁰ She was concerned by ‘the Church patriotism [which] exist[ed] in Catholic circles,’ and believed that the Church had to be ‘a social structure,’ but that meant ‘it belong[ed] to the Prince of this world.’³¹ She did not believe it was ‘the will of God [for her] to enter the Church at present,’ and she was clearly worried about “the temptation” of the warmth and belonging she would find.³² ‘Undoubtedly there is real intoxication in being a member of the Mystical Body of Christ,’ she wrote, suggesting an awareness of Arendt’s “banality of evil,” and Weil did not see herself as able to resist that intoxication, thus keeping herself outside the Church.³³ And yet she respected and cherished the Church, suggesting a rooted Nietzschean Child:

‘The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. This is the native city to which we owe our love.’³⁴

She sounds like Zarathustra, yes? Amid his animals, loving the earth…‘[I]t is supernatural to die for something weak,’ Weil tells us, which is to say that it is easy to die for a great political movement supported by the masses, but dying for the animals of Zarathustra?³⁵ This requires incredible power. Dying for the irrelevant takes a saint.

Weil believed that ‘the greatest of virtues [was] to uproot oneself for the sake of one’s neighbors and of God,’ and yet she also wrote The Need for Roots — how can we square this?³⁶ It is a paradox, but it suggests Weil found a middle way between Christianity and Deleuze: we need roots and tradition or we wither like a plant (which means we cannot be “autonomous children”), and yet we are to treat that tradition as something which we are outside of and never fully included in. We acknowledge its role and necessity, and yet we also acknowledge our inability to be part of it. We believe in Conservatism (for example), and yet we do not live Conservatively. Is this paradox possible for everyone without Conservatism becoming empty and dead? This is a question Weil wrestled with, and how I’ve come to think about it is by seeing an act of honoring tradition, history, and “roots” precisely in Mystical Experience (which in my work can be associated with “lack,” the Apophatic, Beauty, Alterology, and “The Absolute Choice”). Mysticism can have the role of validating a tradition, and yet it also proves that “The Absolute” is infinitely greater than that very tradition. Something similar might apply to “The Creative Act” engaged in by Nietzsche’s Children — to create suggests that the world here is worth creating in and with. Mainly, the point is that there is something about Mysticism that actually works to validate a tradition which seeks to realize and honor that Mysticism, and thus in Weil aligning herself with Christian Mysticism, she also aligned herself with the Church she never formally joined.

All of these biographical sketches come together to describe someone who seems more mentidivergent (we also know she suffered ‘migraine headaches of an unbearable intensity,’ ones she came to later think of as ‘a special gift,’ which suggests possibilities of a mind which did not function normally, both to her benefit and torment).³⁷ For Lorenzo, the power of neurodivergence rests in its ability to avoid situations that the rest of us, “stuck in rationality,” seem weak to escape. This Game Theory problem brings to mind what Simone Weil calls “Affliction” (the opposite of Attention, which I will capitalize to help make that connection). Weil’s notion of Affliction arose from her time working at a factory, and it is when she also concluded that Marxism and the notion of an “inevitable revolution” were mistaken (long before the Frankfurt School started considering Freud to explain why the Marxist revolution didn’t manifest). Weil came to understand ‘the hidden nature of oppression itself,’ which we could align with “the hidden ways rationality leads to suboptimal results” in Nash Equilibria (which I will associate later with Discourse).³⁸ She experienced and felt how working people were forced into conditions which they could not survive or tolerate unless they turned off their minds: it became rational not to think. But if people didn’t think, they couldn’t escape their situation (through Rhetoric, as we’ll discuss): though it is not Christian language Weil uses, it is as if they were “totally depraved” which is to say they were utterly enclosed in their situation and themselves. ‘Oppression proceeds exclusively from objective conditions,’ Weil wrote, which means our situations influence how we think, and furthermore can influence us not to think, which is to say it becomes rational to shut off our minds.³⁹ An oppressive situation arises to a Nash Equilibrium (arguably for the owners as well, who are spiritually devolved by the condition), and all this is what Weil is referring to when she speaks of Affliction (which is basically a simile for “Rational Impasse,” which is into what Discourse leads us).

Funny enough, as a note inspired by a point Alex Ebert made in “The Net (69),” the feeling of escaping Affliction is what can feel “afflicting’ in the sense that now we have to think and deal with tension, while in Affliction (A/A) we feel secure and like things are “given” (in this way, a “Rational Impasse” can be hard to escape because it feels comfortable). “The feeling of affliction” can hence keep us in Affliction, which is to say that if we start trying to make a “house” become a “home” outside of “shadow work” (as we’ll later discuss), we can start to feel unsure what we should do, like our neighbors think we are strange, like we are in over our heads — all feelings of affliction and tension. For Ebert, a danger with the word “Affliction” is that it might bring with it a moral judgment, and indeed this is a reason why terms like “Discourse” and “Rhetoric” can be better (as we’ll later mostly use), but at the same time we are alluding to Simone Weil and her understanding of the “enclosure” which the working class could fall under. We use the terms in her honor.

‘However tied and bound a primitive man was to routine and blind gropings,’ Weil wrote, ‘he could at least try to think things out, to combine and innovate at his own risk, a liberty which is absolutely denied to a worker engaged in a production line.’⁴¹ Our situations deny us the ability to think (suggesting a connection between “Affliction” and Illich’s “disablement”), just like how a Nash Equilibrium denies us the ability to reason our way out of a suboptimal result. Weil’s work on “force” also connects with her thinking about Affliction, which is most brilliantly highlighted in her considerations of The Iliad. ‘The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force,’ and ‘[t]o define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.’⁴¹ History is a long story of “force” and the objectification of people by others, but people also submit themselves to “force” and can reduce themselves into “things.” Sociological “givens” can hold back “forces,” but they themselves can also cause objectification and dangerous “thoughtlessness,” exactly like what Weil witnessed in factories as a cause of Affliction. There is no easy out.

‘It would seem that man is born a slave, and that servitude is his natural condition,’ Weil wrote (bringing to mind Plato’s Cave), which I would argue is the case because it is natural for humanity to fall into Nash Equilibria (situations in which rationality leads us into Affliction), to create societies which entail “givens” that bring about “thoughtlessness” (as dangerously necessary perhaps in some fashion for the society to work), and the like.⁴² We end up in Affliction for good reason, and that is the problem: “bad reason” leads us into Affliction, but so can “good reason,” all of which suggests how rationality and the neurotypical are “naturally” unequipped to avoid Affliction and Nash Equilibria. To be normal is to be primed for Affliction, which can be described by the following reflection of Weil:

‘If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.’⁴³

To realize that we are in a Nash Equilibria and prone to fall into them is painful, as it is painful to realize that our best efforts to improve the world end up “capturing” us (Deleuze). Bringing Heidegger to mind, Weil lamented how ‘human beings come increasingly through technical progress to dominate nature, [yet] remain incapable of dominating forces of control.’⁴⁴ In fact, there almost seems to be an inverse relationship between “overcoming nature” and “ending up Afflicted.” The more rational we become, the more irrational the world seems. Why? Well, if “rationality” and “irrationality” exists in a dichotomy, perhaps more of one invites more of the other, but it’s also because everything “autonomous” becomes problematic (to lose Hegel’s dialectic is to lose something important).

The Map Is Indestructible discusses how pride, intuition, autonomous rationality, and the like can result in a “self-enclosure” from which there is no easy way to escape, even though it is “locked from the inside” (to allude to C.S. Lewis). I often discuss the trouble of rationality leading to “an internally consistent system,” which is a way of viewing the world which we will never find “reason to leave,” precisely because the variables always align and cohere in a manner that never forces an “essential contradiction.” Ultimately, we all must live and operate according to something like “an internally consistent system,” as we must always live and operate in an ideology, so the presence of “an internally consistent system” does not prove or disprove anything. Rather, the problem of having to ascribe to a worldview that entails coherence even if it doesn’t correspond leads us into a consideration of how we “grip” or “hold” the worldview, which means all of us should hold our worldviews with an “open hand.” We have to believe we might be wrong, and yet the worldview will give us no reason in its coherence for us to conclude such. It seems absurd, and yet is necessary.

The Map Is Indestructible also discusses the problems of “(autonomous) intuition” and “pride as self-enclosure,” which is to say intuition can position itself as right without conceptual meditation, which can lead to a radical certainty of an insight from which a person cannot easily escape, precisely because they see “no reason to escape” (after all, they have intuited the truth). Similarly, when someone is prideful and “self-enclosed” in a system of “self-reference,” they similarly are stuck inside a certainty from which there is no easy escape. In intuition, thinking is almost viewed as a threat, because to not just accept the intuition is almost seen as trying to think and envision God. This is heretical, an act of incredible pride, and in this way intuition can lead to a person practically worshiping an “apophatic God.” In both of these circumstances, uncertainty would be a grace (as Michelle has argued).

What we see in pride and intuition is “a system of relation” which arises with “autonomous nonrationality,” while deconstruction, “Pandora’s Rationality,” and totalitarianism arise with “autonomous rationality.” Considering this, as discussed in The Absolute Choice, we can see why Hegel emphasizes a dialectic between rationality and nonrationality which could keep both perpetually destabilized yet generative, for indeed both poses grave threats to us and can lead us into “a hell locked from the inside.” Where Simone Weil calls for “a spiritual revolution,” I think we can see a call for “a return to Hegel” and embrace of “Absolute Knowing,” which acknowledges an essential limit to thought and hence impossibility of “autonomous rationality,” while at the same time making clear the need for “conceptual meditation” and “dialectically working through negativity,” which corrects the errors of “autonomous nonrationality.” We must think and never be done with thinking.

“The Map Is Indestructible” is a phrase we can associate with what Simone Weil calls Affliction, which is a state that binds the mind to the point where thinking ceases to occur and a person is stuck. Affliction, intuition, pride, “indestructible maps” — all of these lead to a state of “self-enclosure” and “self-reference” that leaves a person in themselves (A/A), and yet there is nothing which necessitates them to stay so stuck. And yet though they are not “technically stuck,” Affliction (A/A-thinking) arranges it so that we are “practically stuck” (and unfortunately the practical is more real than the technical). There is never a “reason” or “thought” (“B”) to leave. In Affliction we would “rationally” never think to step out of Affliction, and yet at any moment we could. This is why it is so insidious: the very ease by which we can leave a “map” makes it all the more indestructible, for it doesn’t seem “indestructible” at all. Its weakness can make us believe we are strong.

Weil’s Affliction (like “maps”) meant that “working class revolution” was impossible; a “spiritual revolution” would be required. Furthermore, it would seem the neurotypical and average person is extremely likely to fall into Affliction and some “indestructible map”; to put this another way, the average person is likely to end up in a “Plato’s Cave” in which nobody ever comes to drag them out (as we have discussed). Neurotypical people are more likely to end up living according to “extrinsic motivations” and unable to leave “Plato’s Cave” on their own, which is to say that the neurotypical are naturally inclined to end up Afflicted. This isn’t to say mentidivergent people cannot end up Afflicted either, and indeed not thinking like the greater social order at all can lead to different problems (as we can see in Deleuze, I believe, when “essential difference” is expressed at the expense of “shared intelligibility”). Ultimately, “a dialectic between the neurotypical and neurodiverse” is needed (A/B), though we as a culture seem hardly ready to even acknowledge the need for neurodiversity — one step at a time.

Anyway, rationality tends toward becoming “autonomous,” as intuition tends to position itself as “all we need,” and to be neurotypical is to naturally follow “external motivators” to align with the social order, and in all of this we see a “gravity” pulling us down into Affliction (A/A and “low order” Discourse). Both Weil and Nietzsche can be seen as thinkers supporting mentidivergence and neurodivergence, for how in the world would anyone even conclude they are in Plato’s Cave unless someone tells them? If we hear the story from a Philosophy Class, we’re likely to conclude that the very act of hearing the story means we’re Philosopher Kings — how do we avoid such “typical” conclusions? Well, we’d have to think differently, but how in the world does someone come to “think differently?” How do we come to actually live according to Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing” versus only think we do so? Indeed, these are profound questions, and we might associate “spreading the conditions for intrinsic motivation” with the question of “spreading mentidivergence,” which is the question of “spreading Childhood,” all of which I associate with spreading certain “material conditions” by which these might be cultivated (which brings to mind “Cone Dynamics” and what we will later call Wordspread) — but more on that later.

Neurodivergence inherently entails an acknowledgment that rationality, once autonomous, becomes its own worst enemy. Unfortunately, Lorenzo warns that it will be “rational” and tempting to use gene-editing technology and gene-selection to reduce neurodivergence in the social order, which is to say we might see a return of eugenics in a subtle fashion. If this were to occur, and if indeed neurodivergence is needed for us to solve “The Meta-Crisis,” we might be our own gravedigger.

“Neurodivergence” seems to me to be what we should emphasize to escape Affliction (“autonomous A/A”), more than “evolving consciousness” or “increasing rationality” — not that these cannot play a role or that people can’t mean something like “mentidivergence” when they discuss “evolving consciousness,” but I myself think there is value in emphasizing diversity and “otherness” versus evolution. There is something Deleuzian about mentidivergence, and though elsewhere I have indeed been critical of Deleuze and the ways his thinking can dissolve “shared intelligibility” and discredit the need for us to “dialectically work through negativity,” I do not want to discount Deleuze entirely, only negate/sublate him into Hegel, for Deleuze offers us a beautiful ontology and metaphysics.

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Notes

²⁵Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: 11 (P.S. Section).

²⁶Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 31.

²⁷Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: viii.

²⁸Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: xii.

²⁹Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: ix.

³⁰Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: xi.

³¹Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: 12.

³²Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: 6.

³³Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: 36.

³⁴Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: 49.

³⁵Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997: xxii.

³⁶Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: x.

³⁷Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York, NY: First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2009: xvi.

³⁸Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 133.

³⁹Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 135.

⁴⁰Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 153.

⁴¹Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 163.

⁴²Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 157.

⁴³Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 69.

⁴⁴Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986: 41.

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