John Berger reads 'Chance' by Simone Weil
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
- The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die. What they think, do and say is limited and is a mixture of good and evil.
I have to know this with all my soul and not love them the less.
I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.
We want everything which has a value to be eternal. Now everything which has a value is the product of a meeting, lasts throughout this meeting and ceases when those things which met are separated. That is the central idea of Buddhism (the thought of Heraclitus). It leads straight to God.
Meditation on chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death.
Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting? Only God. And yet again, my thought of God had its origin in that meeting.
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
Great text from Weil and a pleasure to hear it in Berger's lovely baritone.
Absolutely mind numbing to listen to turtleneck and scarf recite platitudes about determinism, darwinism, quantum physics and so on..
we had to stop half way through but it was all worth it for this comment
Hahaha
I'm new to the works of Simone Weill but my understanding is that chance and finitude and uncaringness is known & experienced, but to whom? That one is ordered, unbounded and loving. That one is yourself. Therefore, you are not the qualities & properties of what is experienced. Yet without you, nothing would be experienced. Therefore, the experienced is nothing but you but you are not the experienced. Thus, a basis of connection between people which is not based on their mutual experience of each other.
Berger gets it; the men who talk don't. Weil's writing remains marvellous.
I am very fond of simone weil and her philosophy! Love these words
It's not a poem. It's a chapter from 'gravity and grace', a compilation of notes from Weil's writings, published after her death by her good friend Thibon. It is basically a compilation of quotes found in her notebooks, structured around a specific theme.
Anything can be a poem.
Especially a brief collection of fragments of notes.
@@coyoterooves True.
Wonderful John Berger
😊🏴☠️🎈
This could be entitled How to Kill a Poem. I cannot get beyond the first three minutes of this massacre by those two guys with dear John Berger. It is not simply that they are men, but that they express what in men is most smothering of all that is good, beautiful, subtle, true, mysterious. My soul went from bliss upon hearing John read Simone, to profound anguish and anger. I will re-visit John and Michael Silverblatt to soothe myself.
You are SO right. The chilling effect here is the HASTE with which they begin interpreting the passage. There is no "Whoa!" No sense that if you get inside what Weil is saying it blows your mind. As such, the video makes you think of how much of our lives is suffocated by people speaking mechanically, with no connection to an experience.
Eloquently articulated by both of you. Not sure who they are & how they came to be in this discussion?? Chiming in only such entry-level ideas such as determinism and free will at their most base. Weil and Berger both deserve company of their own ilk. Disappointing. Nonetheless lovely to hear Berger reflect on Weil-in-writing- I wish there were videos for each chapter of Gravity and Grace, without a doubt my favorite book I've ever read.
I was thinking exactly the same.
Have you read Gyn-Ecology, by Mary Daly? Here I see biophilia (Weil, Berger) vs necrophilia (the two douches).
"Not simply that they are men..," (Does complexity inhere in any form of sexism?) "they express what in men is most smothering of all that is good..?" (As opposed, say, to what in women is most nurturing? Biologize much? How does that intersect with the ideological silver bullet of "culturally-constructed?") Your soul may well have gone from bliss to "profound anguish and anger," but your mind went full bore into sanctimony and vindictive misandry. Those are slurs, not arguments of any kind. Reductionist, casuistic, reactionary. Unfitting for the generous humanity of Berger and Weil. I sincerely wish you luck in your ongoing project of self-soothing. Perhaps one day your spastic acrimony will cease to chafe.
Scarf-guy is, I fear, congenitally incapable of comprehending Weil.
and poor Mr. Turtleneck is incapable of not making everything about Darwin.
Ha! Indeed. I bet if I had more context to who these guys are it would make sense. Like maybe the dude is mildly famous for being the Darwin guy.
scarf-guy forgot the Greeks spoke of that thing called the atom.
HASARD de Simone Weil. Les êtres que j'aime sont des créatures. Ils sont nés du hasard. Ma rencontre avec eux est aussi un hasard. Ils mourront. Ce qu'ils pensent, ce qu'ils sentent et ce qu'ils
font est limité et mélangé de bien et de mal. Savoir cela de toute son âme et ne pas les aimer moins. Imiter Dieu qui aime infiniment les choses finies en tant que cho-ses finies.
Nous voudrions que tout ce qui a une valeur fût éternel. Or tout ce qui a une valeur est le produit d'une rencontre, dure par rencontre et cesse lorsque ce qui s'était rencontré se sépare. C'est la pensée centrale du bouddhisme (pensée héraclitéenne). Elle mène tout droit à Dieu. La méditation sur le hasard qui a fait rencontrer mon père et ma mère est plus salutaire encore que celle de la mort.
Y a-t-il une chose en moi qui n'ait pas son origine dans cette ren-contre ? Dieu seul. Et encore ma pensée de Dieu a son origine dans cette rencontre. Étoiles et arbres fruitiers en fleur. La permanence complète et l'ex-trême fragilité donnent également le
sentiment de l'éternité.
Les théories sur le progrès, sur le «génie qui perce toujours », pro-cèdent de ce qu'il est intolérable de se représenter ce qu'il y a de plus précieux dans le monde livré au
hasard. C'est parce que cela est intolé-rable que cela doit être
contemplé. La création, c'est cela même. Le seul bien qui ne soit pas sujet au hasard est celui qui est hors du monde. La vulnérabilité des choses précieuses est belle parce que la vulné-rabilité est une marque d'existence.
Destruction de Troie. Chute de pétales d'arbres fruitiers en fleur. Savoir que le plus précieux n'est pas enraciné dans l'existence. Cela est beau. Pourquoi ? Projette l'âme hors du temps. La femme qui souhaite un enfant blanc comme la neige, rouge comme le sang, l'obtient, mais elle meurt et l'enfant est livré à une bel-le-mère.
Why is Berger not immortal? So much to be grateful for in his life. Thank you for posting this.
Men speaking on a great woman.. this moment of chance recorded for unlimited consumption..........
"Let me accept these uncaring fools."
Beautiful.
Chance is better meditation than death: OMG ... DEATH is certain, chance is random, chaotic, pure kali energy
Reminds me a little of an Alan Watts talk when he discusses our birth not only beginning before birth, and not only as much part of the Big Bang, but IS actually the evolving Big Bang of which by chance we all belong.
She was a mystic who had a personal encounter with 'God'.
Weil is the biggest philosopher.
A Weil of a philosopher
Where is this from? Is there a full version around? Who are other participants? Thanks!
Has anyone come across anything else by Berger, spoken or written, on Weil? Do share if you would. I would love an essay/book of reflections as such.
It is sweet just to see people interact with different ideas and points of view without disparaging each other. The universities have taken such a dive today, especially with all their perversity, and it is like watching Faust take up with Mephistopheles, as wicked folly places itself as righteous wisdom.
Hello, thanks for the upload. I am citing this in an essay. Could I get some context for this discussion? Location, time, and participants? Its source. Many thanks
She means Chance is Occassion( Malebranche)=Providence=Grace: God's intervention: no chance has no purpose
in this very sense, A. N. Whitehead designates the real things as actual occasions, every occassion is actual, God's Act=divine
Her "attention" in Whitehead in elementary form is ""feeling( prehension)= Leibniz's "minute perception(" petites consciousness?)
The Universe is created, the chance for we spiritual beings to exist is much smaller than 1/googleplex, according to Roger Penrose, yet we have seen beauty, truth and the good and the divine, so the Univesre is a creation or emanation of God's Cosmic Mind, this is the simplest and most logical explanation of Why there is something rather than nothing( Leibniz: this world is the best of all possible worlds).A chance is a possible world.
Darwin is a theorist. Like current events where science is a selection process, data is curated, human aggression for profit and control, offered a subjective pandemic.
I hear these men and wonder about people who are that amazed at what Simone wrote. They’ve apparently held life as something more concrete than I have.
It’s funny a life of violence makes the world look ridiculous early on. Their idea of complexity is self-referred.
A better example of people simply not getting it would be hard to find. If he wanted to talk about chance he may well have just used a set of dice. He is really clueless though. He gets the date of her death wrong. He thinks she is a 'theologian'. In fact she is one of the deepest, hardest, bravest thinkers of the 20th century. Why and how they conceive of this passage as a 'poem' is beyond me. They just go off on their own solipsistic paths, untouched by what is actually said, and it's clear Berger's sonorous posh voice helped to get him taken more seriously than he strictly deserved. Poor Weil is not taken seriously at all.
She died in 1943 at age 34...
BEAUTIFUL ! As when she says, also, that "beauty is the tender smile of Jesus through the material world."
I can't stand this. Weil towers over these smug yahoos (Berger excepted). She may be the one essential thinker of the 20th century. And yes, I realize how extreme that sounds.
His apology for her being a theologian to begin with is a little on the nose
Great reading of the text, but with a disappointing reaction by the listeners. They assumed Simone was only another wishful thinker, which is completely ignorant. Simone was better read in Philosophy at 24 years-old than many Philosophy professors are at the end of their careers. She knew all the arguments revolving around freewill, determinism, the existence of God, etc. These guys are still stuck in a materialistic understanding of reality and a biased view of the past. The one guy stating that the complexity of the universe could be reduced to a few basic scientific rules is absurd. Imagine trying to explain our faculty of Imagination or Memory using a particle physics model. It will never happen.
why is this in black and white? 😂