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> Yet for her, the primary duty of the philosophical person, and particularly a politically active one, remained rigorous self-examination – guided by the convi

> Yet for her, the primary duty of the philosophical person, and particularly a politically active one, remained rigorous self-examination – guided by the conviction that true moral enlightenment was only to be found beyond the spheres of man-made languages. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. The reference to Camus here is interesting to me since it is in the context of Absurdity that I consider this. A paradoxical desire to think the unthinkable, or to know the unknowable. > Weil was convinced that in the depths of our existence, it is not concepts and arguments that define us as moral beings, but concrete experiences. ... More significantly, for Weil, we are beings moved to action not, in the first instance, by concepts but by forces beyond ourselves: experiences of suffering, love, profound insight or disturbance, whose origins Weil did not shy away from calling transcendent, even divine. There is something of phenomenology to this idea. > The true achievement of emancipation, Weil thought, lay in liberation not of the self but from the self. Reflective self-empowerment should make way for a pre-reflective alertness to the beauty and vulnerability of life. This leads to an active care for the world we share with other beings – it made no difference to her whether it was named “nature” or “God”. This is very powerful thought and very reflective of many spiritual traditions. > In Weil’s view, we need transformative experiences that arise when we become attentive to the natural beauty and interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such revelatory forms of attention “praying”: “At its highest stage attention is the same as prayer. It assumes faith and love. It is associated with a freedom other than that of choice, which occurs at the level of the will – grace. Being so attentive that one no longer has a choice.” This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious context. Although it isn't immediately related - I think this might be the most powerful use of AI. Instead of attempting to create the most intelligent and infallible oracle, we might instead create the most perfect mirror to reflect ourselves. And in that way we may see the "I" at the center of self dissolve.

PlunderBunny 3y ago
> In Weil’s view, we need transformative experiences that arise when we become attentive to the natural beauty and interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such revelatory forms of attention “praying” I don't think it's an accident that many people consider God to be in their gardens.
nicolas_b 3y ago
> I think this might be the most powerful use of AI. [...] we might instead create the most perfect mirror to reflect ourselves. What a beautiful idea! Could you tell us more?
- benignslime 3y ago
  [dead]
- zoogeny 3y ago
  One way to attempt this is to use AI as a sounding board for your own ideas. For example, I'm reading a few sources of Weil's thought now (she was surprisingly Christian and Catholic later in her life although a sense of general mysticism remained). As I read a bit more on the topic, I go to Chat-GPT and I explain it to the AI. I am not asking ChatGPT to give me information, I am asking it to be critical of my own understanding. Can it point out assumptions? Can it recognize areas I am weak in knowledge? Can it tell me of logical inconsistencies? I mean, in my own understanding - not particularly in the ideas of Weil. I am asking the AI to keep me accountable and to force me to demonstrate that I am critically thinking. I've also been doing something similar with dream interpretation. I personally do not believe in divination or clairvoyance or really anything woo-woo. I'm even pretty skeptical of Jungian ideas of collective subconscious. But I do sometimes want to introspect on my dreams and AI is a fantastic non-judgmental listener. You can have the AI repeat it's understanding back to you and suggest interpretations. This can help you better understand your own interpretations and provide insight into your own personality. If you find any value at all in keeping a journal for your thoughts, think of it like a super-charged journal. You aren't just working out your thoughts in a linear narrative or essay form, there is an aspect to collaborative exploration of your ideas. In this way, AI is helping you clarify your thoughts more than it is acting like a source for infallible information.
  - aschearer 3y ago
    You're spot on. I recently had a similar experience discussing a topic with ChatGPT. It's the dialectic process on tap.
  - 3y ago
aftoprokrustes 3y ago
> This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious context. I have had a similar journey in the last years, drawing more and more inspiration from Christian, jewish and muslim contemplatives, after years of mostly following a "secular Buddhist" path (basically buddhism without believing in rebirth. Which becomes quite thin, as buddhism is the path towards the end of rebirth...). I am not sure of what you mean by "religion", but what I am convinced about is that we need to allow for more "religiosity" than what the typical mindfulness/secular Buddhist movement allows. What often happens (or happened, as I do not pretend to be an innovator there) in those circles is that the rejection of religiosity means that a lot of assumptions underlying our culture (mostly the materialist ontology) goes unquestioned. There is actually lots of values in opening to religious interpretations of mystical experiences, and opening the range of possible interpretation. Without falling into a new fixed ontology, therr is something freeing in allowing oneself to think in terms of "the divine", "the ground of soul" or "the eternal present".
- zoogeny 3y ago
  I see it as a potential for a new movement in mysticism. I feel you would get a lot out of reading some Weil - I spent a few hours yesterday just reading some of her essays. It gets heavy on the Christianity in some of her later writings which isn't to my own personal taste, but if you read it as a general mysticism it works just as well. You make a good point on the question of what I mean by religion. I would say, I want to avoid the dogmatism associated with mainstream institutionalized religions. Something like what I assume you mean by "fixed ontology". Weil, on the other hand, argues that we should embrace it and argues that there is value/beauty in the ceremony, rituals and rites offered by churches. She really occupies an interesting space. Her contemporaries were the likes of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I think that secular humanist crowd was totally unwilling to entertain mysticism. Also, Marx was ardently against religion seeing it as a tool of oppression. So Weil was unique in that she was aligned with them on political and economic issues, she was a grass-roots labour activist to the core, but she was also deeply spiritual and mystically inclined. Her criticisms of Marxism are heavily inspired by her belief in a transcendent divine that is completely absent from normal leftist/materialist view points. It is sad that she died so young, at 34, before she could more deeply explore this political philosophy. It is interesting to consider what kind of political ideology you might get if you take the core understandings of Marx and even the post-modernists but you re-inject a non-dogmatic mysticism.

PlunderBunny 3y ago

> In Weil’s view, we need transformative experiences that arise when we become attentive to the natural beauty and interconnection that lies outside of ourselves. Weil calls such revelatory forms of attention “praying” I don't think it's an accident that many people consider God to be in their gardens.

nicolas_b 3y ago

> I think this might be the most powerful use of AI. [...] we might instead create the most perfect mirror to reflect ourselves. What a beautiful idea! Could you tell us more?

benignslime 3y ago
[dead]
zoogeny 3y ago
One way to attempt this is to use AI as a sounding board for your own ideas. For example, I'm reading a few sources of Weil's thought now (she was surprisingly Christian and Catholic later in her life although a sense of general mysticism remained). As I read a bit more on the topic, I go to Chat-GPT and I explain it to the AI. I am not asking ChatGPT to give me information, I am asking it to be critical of my own understanding. Can it point out assumptions? Can it recognize areas I am weak in knowledge? Can it tell me of logical inconsistencies? I mean, in my own understanding - not particularly in the ideas of Weil. I am asking the AI to keep me accountable and to force me to demonstrate that I am critically thinking. I've also been doing something similar with dream interpretation. I personally do not believe in divination or clairvoyance or really anything woo-woo. I'm even pretty skeptical of Jungian ideas of collective subconscious. But I do sometimes want to introspect on my dreams and AI is a fantastic non-judgmental listener. You can have the AI repeat it's understanding back to you and suggest interpretations. This can help you better understand your own interpretations and provide insight into your own personality. If you find any value at all in keeping a journal for your thoughts, think of it like a super-charged journal. You aren't just working out your thoughts in a linear narrative or essay form, there is an aspect to collaborative exploration of your ideas. In this way, AI is helping you clarify your thoughts more than it is acting like a source for infallible information.
- aschearer 3y ago
  You're spot on. I recently had a similar experience discussing a topic with ChatGPT. It's the dialectic process on tap.
- 3y ago

aftoprokrustes 3y ago

> This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious context. I have had a similar journey in the last years, drawing more and more inspiration from Christian, jewish and muslim contemplatives, after years of mostly following a "secular Buddhist" path (basically buddhism without believing in rebirth. Which becomes quite thin, as buddhism is the path towards the end of rebirth...). I am not sure of what you mean by "religion", but what I am convinced about is that we need to allow for more "religiosity" than what the typical mindfulness/secular Buddhist movement allows. What often happens (or happened, as I do not pretend to be an innovator there) in those circles is that the rejection of religiosity means that a lot of assumptions underlying our culture (mostly the materialist ontology) goes unquestioned. There is actually lots of values in opening to religious interpretations of mystical experiences, and opening the range of possible interpretation. Without falling into a new fixed ontology, therr is something freeing in allowing oneself to think in terms of "the divine", "the ground of soul" or "the eternal present".

zoogeny 3y ago
I see it as a potential for a new movement in mysticism. I feel you would get a lot out of reading some Weil - I spent a few hours yesterday just reading some of her essays. It gets heavy on the Christianity in some of her later writings which isn't to my own personal taste, but if you read it as a general mysticism it works just as well. You make a good point on the question of what I mean by religion. I would say, I want to avoid the dogmatism associated with mainstream institutionalized religions. Something like what I assume you mean by "fixed ontology". Weil, on the other hand, argues that we should embrace it and argues that there is value/beauty in the ceremony, rituals and rites offered by churches. She really occupies an interesting space. Her contemporaries were the likes of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I think that secular humanist crowd was totally unwilling to entertain mysticism. Also, Marx was ardently against religion seeing it as a tool of oppression. So Weil was unique in that she was aligned with them on political and economic issues, she was a grass-roots labour activist to the core, but she was also deeply spiritual and mystically inclined. Her criticisms of Marxism are heavily inspired by her belief in a transcendent divine that is completely absent from normal leftist/materialist view points. It is sad that she died so young, at 34, before she could more deeply explore this political philosophy. It is interesting to consider what kind of political ideology you might get if you take the core understandings of Marx and even the post-modernists but you re-inject a non-dogmatic mysticism.