Tingens lydnad och människans väntan : Nödvändighet, nåd, handling och tänkande i Simone Weils filosofi

Sammanfattning: This bachelor thesis engages in a quest to understand the concepts of necessity and grace in Simone Weils thinking. The question in play, in which many more questions lie hidden, reads as follows: How does Weil understand the operations of grace in relation to the ”blind necessity” of the natural world, and what are the philosophical implications of this concept of grace? What are, for instance, given her understanding of the world as God’s creation, the metaphysical grounds for a basic human activitiy such as thinking or reflexion? A reading of Simone Weils works on necessity, grace, affliction and attention is contrasted with her thoughts on science, method and truth. The concept of necessity is compared to the one of Spinoza, especially on the subject of how the good or the just relates to the true and the necessary: it shows there are interesting similarities and illuminating differences between the two philosophers’ lines of thought. Here, the concept of attention becomes central to the image: the idea of a cultivated mode of reception of the world and of the Other. Attention is analogously understood as a method of prayer and a cultivated ethical attitude towards other human beings – and an ideal scientific state of mind. In the final chapter of the analytic part of the composition, Weils concept of grace is investigated in regard to concepts of thinking and understanding. Here, Leibniz idea of the divine world and the divine mind plays a concise but important role on the matter of a tentative metaphysical grounding of thinking as such – how this can be thought and how it reflects and deepens Simone Weils metaphysics, especially her understanding of the highest states of insight into the nature of the world as partly a work of divine grace. In the last chapter Walter Benjamins vision of the coming philosophy as a consolidation between Immanuel Kants transcendental philosophy and religious experience – and religious thought – show the way for further investigation into the field, a field that the thesis has outlined at the same time as it has attempted to answer some specific questions that seems to be the most urgent ones.