Simone Weil on War and Justice

Roger Berkowitz
The Jewish born Christian philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how to respect it, is capable of love and justice.” What war teaches, Weil argues, is the experience of utter misery, the reduction of man to a mere thing, a plaything of fate. Only amidst the fury of war, the savagery of strife, and the lashes of lightning do human beings confront the utter senselessness of our world, the very precondition that calls forth redemption in the guise of the dream of justice. It is the experience of human misery that first allows human beings to raise themselves to a higher plane, to “resort to the aid of illusion,fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their eyes.” As did Plato and Nietzsche  before her, Weil understood that the “man who does not wear the armour of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul.” Only the lie of justice, the dream of a higher plane of human purpose, allows us humans to survive the existential threat war poses. Justice, in other words, is that noble lie that humans invent in order to redeem our warlike and strife-filled lives; justice emerges in response to deprivation of war as an attempt to find meaning in a meaningless world.

I wrote these words over a decade ago and they are published in a volume of essays on Just War in Religion and Politics. You can read the essay here.