On recognizing the real: Beauty and affliction in Simone Weil

Abstract If the guiding question of ethics is “how should I live?,” then the guiding question of aesthetics might be “what is beauty?” For Simone Weil, these two questions have intertwined answers that turn on a like conceptual apparatus. Focussing on Weil's foremost ethical problem, the plight of the afflicted (malheur), this article offers an account of the philosophical basis to Weil's claim that, when truly recognized, beauty and affliction motivate the same form of experience. I argue that, for Weil, both the aesthetic and moral disposition are grounded in an experience of the real, an experience that both requires and compels the subject to the same attentive state. Finally, I address the charges that might be leveled at Weil for suggesting that our experience of beauty is the same as our experience of affliction, specifically arguing that rather than this experience leading to a form of passive aesthetic arrest, as the experience of beauty has typically been theorized to lead to, Weil understands the experience of beauty and affliction as fundamentally motivational toward the Good.