Weil and Wittgenstein in Winch’s “Reading”: Philosophy as a Way of Life

This paper starts with Winch’s study Simone Weil: "the just balance" taking as a precious heuristic method the way in which Simone Weil’s religious, social, political and ethical thought is considered in the context of the rigorous philosophical reflection from which it springs. In particular, the quality of Winch’s analysis is especially valuable because Weil’s philosophical ideas and their context are illuminated through surprising parallels with some of the concepts developed independently by Ludwig Wittgenstein, even in completely different contexts. The subsequent analysis will consider not only the very original results of Winch’s examination of Weil’s philosophy, but since he has shown, with particular originality, some deep “family resemblances” between the philosophical experiences – the “philosophical lives” – of Wittgenstein and Weil, this essay will make use of his methodological approach following Winch’s implicit instructions in order to assert the “Socratic” coincidence between the philosophical experience of Wittgenstein and that of Weil. The attitude of the Socratic way of doing philosophy consists in the intransigence with which thought and life – in their case, just as in the case of Socrates at the beginning of Western thought – interact mutually and are inextricably intertwined, resulting in existences inspired by philosophy, as well as philosophies translated into existences. At first glance, what mainly impresses the reader is that philosophy, for both of them, seems miraculously to turn into everyday experience. It becomes a true “way of living” which in itself gives rise to an ethical-philosophical pragmatics that informs and shapes the most intimate ontological dimensions, in a correspondence to their very existence that gets to the point of encapsulating in their philosophy the meaning of all their life.