Simone Weil on the Beautiful Pain of Others: Beauty, Suffering, and Creation

Simone Weil is often criticised for making suffering something magnificent, of identifying suffering as the foremost method through which one comes to a higher understanding of both self and world. Susan Sontag remarks upon Weil’s ‘tireless courting of affliction’ (Sontag 2003: 51) and Mary Dietz wonders whether Weil comes too close to the fetishisation of suffering (Dietz 1988: 120). Weil herself does little to temper these accusations, pointing out that all the horrors of the world contain ‘an element of beauty’ (Weil 1983: 87–88) The proximity that Weil draws between beauty and suffering is, for many commentators, the most egregious claim of her entire oeuvre; Afterall, do suffering and beauty not preclude one another such that the ground to each is of a fundamentally different kind? Beginning with one of Weil’s most critical interlocutors, Susan Sontag, this essay opens with the provocation in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others that the ugly motivates moral action whereas the beautiful stymies it. Drawing on Weil’s account of affliction ( malheur ), beauty, love, and creation this paper unpacks the ways in which Weil theorises a closeness between suffering and beauty that pushes against Sontag’s claim. Appealing to the form of experience both suffering and beauty involve, this paper argues that it is the presence of love in Weil’s theorisation of the aesthetic that allows her to claim that wherever suffering is truly seen, the experience is always both beautiful and, importantly, creative.