Simone Weil’s Ethic of Resistance: Resisting Not Just Power, but the Race for Power

Humanity has a destructive tendency to treat tools (like money, technology, and power) as end goals. “Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machine.”

So observes the philosopher Simone Weil in a prescient 1934 essay from the collection of her work, Oppression and Liberty.

“The essential evil besetting humanity,” Weil writes, is “the substitution of means for ends”:

At times war occupies the forefront, at other times the search for wealth, at other times production; but the evil remains the same.

Regardless of the precise pursuit, it all comes down to force-accumulation: the race for power.

But while people spend their lives in thrall to the pursuit of power, we must recognize that power too is merely a means. And an incredibly slippery one at that:

Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends.

People seek power, but never get a firm grip on it; they spend their lives in a race to accumulate a resource that cannot be definitively accumulated, desperately hoarding proxies like money, technology, arms, media, and social capital instead.

But all of this is simply gathering means, and never using those means to actually achieve any end. Human inventions should serve humanity, but the race for power reduces humanity to serving its inventions:

It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men—oppressors and oppressed alike—the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.

We might think the problem here lies exclusively with our leaders, as well as the ultra wealthy background figures funding them.

But while those who wield power certainly oppress those beneath them, Weil observes, we must recognize that they are also oppressed by power. Enslaved and intoxicated by accumulation, their humanity drains away, reducing them to mere vessels of power.

For instance, the main character of Homer’s Iliad, Weil claims in a startlingly original reading, is not Achilles, Hector, or Agamemnon; the main character is power or ‘force’ itself:

The real subject of the Iliad is the sway exercised by war over the warriors, and, through them, over humanity in general; none of them knows why each sacrifices himself and all his family to a bloody and aimless war, and that is why, all through the poem, it is the gods who are credited with the mysterious influence which nullifies peace negotiations, continually revives hostilities, and brings together again the contending forces urged by a flash of good sense to abandon the struggle.

In her famous accompanying essay, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, Weil defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”

Weil wrote these words just after France’s fall to Germany in 1940, and the parallels hardly need pointing out. None of those actually fighting in the Trojan war ever had a grip on power, Weil observes. All were subject to forces beyond their control, occasionally gaining the upper hand and surging in power and momentum only to quickly lose it to fear, defeat, or death.

Even the leaders, who viewed themselves as the architects and strategists behind the conflict, were in truth saturated by currents that bypassed their capacity for reason:

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

Those in charge — and the followers who worship them — may feel immune, untouchable; but it is sheer luck of circumstance that grants them power, and circumstance can quickly change:

those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed… But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force.

No upper hand will endure; the fall will always come. Unless we guard against it, the race for power, the attempted accumulation of force, will thus continue endlessly. As Weil puts it in Oppression and Liberty:

For, owing to the fact that there is never power, but only a race for power, and that there is no term, no limit, no proportion set to this race, neither is there any limit or proportion set to the efforts that it exacts; those who give themselves up to it, compelled to do always better than their rivals, who in their turn strive to do better than they, must sacrifice not only the existence of [those they oppress], but their own also and that of their nearest and dearest; so it is that Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter lives again in the capitalists who, to maintain their privileges, acquiesce lightheartedly in wars that may rob them of their sons… Thus the race for power enslaves everybody, strong and weak alike.

Cultivating an ethic of resistance

So, what can be done? How should we deal with the sweeping relentlessness of force? How can we escape not just the injustices of power, but the destructive race for power?

Simply put: through resistance. As Weil puts it:

The struggle of those who obey against those who command, when the mode of commanding entails destroying the human dignity of those underneath, is the most legitimate, most motivated, most genuine action that exists. There has always been this struggle, because those who command always tend, whether they realize it or not, to trample underfoot the human dignity of those below them.

Crucially, however, as well as political resistance to injustice, we also need to develop a kind of ‘psychological’ resistance to the temptations of accumulation and power: we must resist not just those who wield power unjustly; we must resist the race for power entirely.

This forms the basis of Weil’s critique of ‘revolution’. The goal in standing up to an oppressive regime, Weil implores, cannot be to replace it with another one; the goal must be to step beyond earthly power struggles to uphold the dignity of all human beings. And this must include the oppressors, for the oppressors have been mutilated by force just as much as those they’ve oppressed.

We must thus resist not just the dominant group but any hegemony of power. Weil writes:

He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

Weil’s ethic of resistance is thus twofold. Firstly, we must cultivate clear thinking: we must guard against the slogans and social pressures that berate us into looking at things a certain way. ‘They are wrong; we are right!’ voices will tell us. But, as Robert Zaretsky writes in The Subversive Simone Weil:

To resist means never taking opinion for fact, conjecture for analysis, or authority for truth. It is to make the time and place to reason, just as we make the time and place to eat and sleep.

We must resist propaganda and cease viewing the world through the lens of tribal conflict. We must dismiss the rhetoric that places ‘us’ above ‘them’, that renders ‘us’ worthier or more virtuous than ‘them’, that risks chipping away our humanity and reducing us to mere instruments of force.

After all, when a certain group sees itself as the righteous possessor of power, this is when genocides occur. We must instead strive, as difficult and uncomfortable as it may be, to recognize every single human being — including those on ‘the opposing side’ — as a fellow sufferer, subjugated by force, sharing a common human lot, worthy of dignity and deep compassion.

Secondly, to complete the ethic of resistance, this clear and compassionate thinking must be paired with direct action. Though Weil dreamt of a world of dignity and justice, this does not mean she was squeamish about harnessing the brutality of force where necessary. In fact, force may be the only effective response to those in its grip, to those who respect, admire, and even worship power.

Gandhi’s strategy of peaceful protest, for instance, found success because he was appealing to a British government that claimed to be liberal and democratic; employing the same tactics against the Nazis would promote no end to the slaughter. It would thus be naive to dismiss the power of force within certain contexts, Weil writes:

Do not think that we will win because we are less brutal, violent and inhuman than our enemy. Brutality, violence and inhumanity have great stature, one that textbooks hide from students and that adults try not to see, but a standing that we nevertheless acknowledge… Anyone unable to be as brutal, violent and inhuman as someone else, but who also does not practice the opposing virtues, falls short of that person in inner strength and stature, and will not triumph in a confrontation.

How one might practice opposing virtues in the face of the Nazi onslaught led Weil to some unorthodox ideas. As a member of the French Resistance, Weil repeatedly urged one of its leaders, Charles de Gaulle, to parachute nurses, dressed in white, directly onto battlefields, with Weil herself leading the first group. It was ardent proposals like these that led de Gualle to proclaim Weil folle, “a crazy woman”.

But Weil thought resistance was morally necessary even if it seemed that success was hopeless. We must not despair; we must resist until the very end:

It is true that our weakness prevents us from defeating the force that threatens to overwhelm us. But that does not prevent us from understanding it. Nothing in the world can stop us from being lucid.

Embodying resistance

Throughout her short and fascinating life, Weil faithfully lived out her ethic of resistance in all its forms. She was that rare philosopher who utterly embodied her writings, standing up for dignity, humanity, and staying thoughtful and lucid in the face of injustice.

As a child during World War I, she sent her own share of sugar and chocolate rations to deployed French soldiers; at ten years old she joined her first of hundreds of protest marches; following her education, rather than join soft-handed theorists in writing about the plight of labourers, Weil joined labourers and worked, organized, and protested for years in factories, farms, and fisheries.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Weil went to Spain to advance the cause of the Republicans. Her activism continued ceaselessly across Europe, as another World War broke out, all the way to her untimely death in 1943, where she died in a British hospital from complications of tuberculosis — reportedly exacerbated by the scant diet she’d followed in solidarity with soldiers fighting on the front, who had access to only the most meagre of rations.

At the end of her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, Weil declares the Iliad to be the greatest work of art the West had ever produced, because it so unsparingly and with perfect bitterness depicts how force subjugates the human spirit. No Western writer has since come close, Weil concludes:

Perhaps they will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate.

What do you make of Weil’s analysis?

Weil’s body of work is incredibly rich, varied, and always enthralling, and I haven’t at all been able to do justice to it here. If I could encourage you to read just one of her works, it would be The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (this link is to a critical edition including academic commentary, but Weil’s original essay can usually be found for free online). This short essay will give you a sense of the originality of Weil’s perspective and the power of her prose.

Based on my brief commentary of her ethic of resistance above, however, we may reflect on the following questions:

• Do you agree with Weil, that the reversal of means and end (i.e. treating tools like money and technology as end goals), culminating in the race for power, is the “essential evil besetting humanity”?
• What do you make of her ethic of resistance? Is resistance worthwhile even if it seems hopeless? Are oppressors also worthy of our compassion?
• How could the race for power be held in check?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Hannah Arendt: 5 Insights into Totalitarianism
• Catherine of Siena on How Wealth Corrupts Justice​
• Isaiah Berlin On Why the Pursuit of the Ideal is Dangerous
• Hannah Arendt On Standing Up to the Banality of Evil
• Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue: Can International Politics Be Fair?
• ​John Rawls: How a ‘Veil of Ignorance’ Can Help Us Build a Just Society​
• Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning
• ​Political Philosophy: the Best 14 Books to Read

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