Simone Weil

ness of view like Kant's prompts her to complain: If were the human personality in him that was sacred to me, I could easily put out his eyes. As blind man he would be exactly as much human personality as before. I should not have touched the person in him at all. I should have destroyed but his eyes.' By not allowing contingencies to play any role in his definition of the person, Kant gives us no reason for respecting person for the particular being he is. Against this way of looking at it, Simone Weil can say: There something sacred in every man, but not his person; this man, no more and no less.'8 For her, respect closer to compassion than to being in awe of person's rational nature. Where Kant grounds respect for persons in point of view concerned primarily with their capacity to make and give laws freely to themselves, Weil sees respect for person as way of regarding another human being from point of view which (to borrow phrase from Bernard Williams) is concerned primarily with what for him to live that life and to do those actions in that character.'9 Respect for the individual in his or her concrete specificity most likely to be experienced in relationships of love. Respect becomes, on Weil's view, the public expression of this more private affection. Hannah Arendt: What love in its own narrowly circumscribed sphere, respect in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politike, kind of without intimacy and without closeness.2 For Weil, too, equality a kind of friendship, without intimacy and without closeness, only she eager to distinguish her ideas from Aristotle's and especially from what he says about equality and in the Ethics. Thus, where Aristotle says that friendship . . . cannot exist between beings too far removed from one another, that friendship presupposes that they are close to one another and have attained to equality with one another, that it the part of to make an equal use of the equality already existing between men, Weil wants to say friendly regard for others creates the equality between people. It not that equality unconnected with friendship; just that Aristotle gets their relationship backwards. She does not like 17 Weil, Selected Essays, p. 9. i8 Ibid. '9 Bernard Williams, Idea of Equality, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)5 p. 236. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books

Compassion · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy and Literary Analysis · Psychology

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