Éric Weil (; ; 4 June 1904 – 1 February 1977) was a French-German philosopher noted for the development of a theory that places the effort to understand violence at the center of philosophy.
Calling himself a post-Hegelian Kantian, Weil was a key figure in the 20th-century reception of Hegel in France, as well as the renewed interest in Kant in that country. The author of major original works, critical studies, and numerous essays in French his adopted language, as well as German and English, Weil was both an active academic as well as public intellectual. Involved in various fecund moments of French intellectual life, Weil was, for example, a participant in the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and would go on to play an instrumental role at the journal Critique during its start and then serve as one of its editors for a number of years.Patron, Sylvie, Georges Bataille, Éric Weil: À en-tête de "Critique", Correspondances 1946-1951, Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2014. An influential teacher, his students, such as Bourdieu, have noted Weil's formative role in their intellectual development.Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words, Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. p. 3-4. This influence was also at the origin of the creation of the Institut Éric Weil, a foundation and research library created by a group of his former students after his death.
A systematic thinker, Weil's works follow Kant's divide between practical and theoretical philosophy, a complete statement of his thought is developed in his Logique de la philosophie (1950), Philosophie politique (1956), and Philosophie morale (1961). These books show how the effort to understand violence by subsuming it under a discursive form is the basis of philosophical reflection. Because there are always novel forms of violence that grow out of older already understood and subsumed forms of violence, Weil insists on the role of history in philosophical discourse.Roth, Michael S., Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. The role of history is seen in Weil's political thought, for instance, where he rejects the contractualist notion of an original position and instead underlines the historic, context specific, and often violent, origin of political formations, usual by territory-grabbing military leaders.Weil, Éric, Philosophie politique, Paris: Vrin, 1956. This historical origin is used to explain how cultural and political traditions are often inhabited by antique forms of violence that can resurge at any moment or can have perverting effects on the formation of political identity.
Early life and education
Weil was born June 8, 1904, in the town of Parchim in the German Empire, to Louis and Ida (née Löwenstein) Weil. The Weils were a well-to-do Jewish family. He spent his entire childhood in Parchim where he was first a student at the Parchim Vorschule and then at the Friedrich-Franz-Gymnasium. He finished his studies at the Gymnasium in the spring of 1922 and left Parchim to go to Medical School in Hamburg. Just after Weil matriculated into university, his father died. Louis Weil's death led the family into material difficulties that would persist all throughout Éric Weil's student years.
During Weil's medical studies his interest in philosophy was already evident: his university registration from 1922 includes one of Ernst Cassirer's courses on Philosophy of Language. The following year Weil would move to Berlin while still continuing his studies in medicine. Over the next decade, Weil, now studying philosophy full-time, would move back and forth between Hamburg and Berlin numerous times. Between Hamburg and Berlin, Weil started his doctoral studies and eventually wrote his dissertation "Des Pietro Pomponazzi Lehre von dem Menschen und der Welt" under Cassirer. It is during this period that he started to publish reviews and articles, as well as work as a private tutor. It was also during this period that he started an association with the circle around Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library. Moving again back to Berlin from Hamburg in 1930, Weil became the personal secretary to the philosopher Max Dessoir, and became involved in the publication of his journal Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. In 1932 Weil published his doctoral dissertation. During this tumultuous period Weil read Mein Kampf and understanding the political implications on him as a Jew, he started looking towards his options abroad. He notably applied for a position at the University of Puerto Rico, which he did not receive.
Flight from Germany
In April 1933, Weil moved to Paris. It was during this period that he started to see Anne Mendelsohn, the childhood best friend of Hannah Arendt and herself a German immigrant of Jewish extraction. Weil's early years in France were tumultuous; he moved frequently and was often short of money. But despite this, it was during this period that he and Anne married, first in a civil ceremony in Paris on the 16th of October 1934 and then in a religious ceremony in Luxembourg a week later. Luxembourg was to be the point of interaction between Weil and his relatives, because after leaving Germany in 1933 he refused to return for many years. During this period, despite the instability, Weil started to integrate into French intellectual life in Paris. He naturalized as a French citizen and continued to pursue his work on Renaissance humanism. He produced his study "Ficin et Plotin" around the Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino and his attempts, through the work of Plotinus, to fuse Platonism and Christianity.Weil, Éric, Ficin et Plotin, edited by Alain Deligne, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007. This work would remain unpublished until 2007. Around this time, he started the work that would culminate in the Logique de la philosophie as a reflection around the role that philosophical categories and discursive rationality play in history. His association with Alexandre Koyré, to whom the Logique de la philosophie was dedicated, also started during this period, collaborating with him on the journal Recherches Philosophiques from 1934 to 1938. He participated in Koyré's seminar on the Phenemonology of Spirit, continuing when it was taken over by Alexandre Kojève. Koyré was also to be the director of the work that he defended at the École pratique des hautes études "La critique de l'astrologie chez Pic de la Mirandole" which extended his work on the Renaissance, in order to have an equivalence degree in France. The events at the end 1930's uprooted the lives of those around Weil. His mother was forced to sell the family home in Parchim. The home of his sister Ruth and his brother-in-law Dr. Siegfried Cohn was ransacked and Siegfried was arrested. The following year, in 1939, the Cohns sent their daughters to the Netherlands to be hidden. Only Siegfried and the girls would survive the war, organizing transport to Australia.
War years
The Second World War was to have, like for so many of his generation, a profound effect on Weil. This was not only because he was a German Jew, and so felt more deeply than gentile Europe the initial, and final, pressures of the Nazi regime, but also because this war provides and clear picture of Weil's philosophical, political, and human commitments. A shift had already happened in his thinking before the war. This fecund period in Paris marks the beginning of the reflection that was to become the Logique de la philosophie. Weil started to work out his theory about how fundamental philosophical concepts come to organize and structure the world. In this work Weil sets up a fundamental antinomy between liberty and violence, and shows how discursive rationality is the result of the interplay between these two forces. This is because, for Weil, discursive rationality is the product of the overcoming of violence by the interpretation of it under the logical form of contradiction.Canivez, Patrice, Éric Weil ou la question du sens, Paris: Ellipses, 1998 In a way, Weil's whole project can be understood as trying to understand attribution of meaningful content, whether it be to actions, propositions, or feelings, and how that meaning can be used as a resource to help individuals overcome violence. This however was not merely a theoretical engagement. At the start of the war Weil took a fake name, Henri Dubois, and enlisted in the French army and go to the front to combat the Nazi regime. In June 1939, 6 months after his enlistment Weil, as Henri Dubois, was taken prisoner and interned at Fallingsbostel. There he became an organizer of the prison resistance and wrote for its clandestine newspaper. He was to spend the rest of the war interned as a German prisoner. It was not until 1945, when the camp was liberated that Weil was able to return to Paris.
Academic career
Returning to Paris, Weil almost immediately secured a post as a researcher at CNRS, and within the year he was able to finish writing the Logique de la philosophie. It was also during this period that Weil reformed his relationship with Georges Bataille, who he had met years before in the Hegel seminars. This relationship continued after the formation Critique, and led to Weil's involvement with the journal. During this period he defended a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne using the Logique de la philosophie as well as the slender Hegel and the State as the texts. His jury consisted of Jean Wahl, Henri Gouhier, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edmond Vermeil.
Over the next several years Weil would be active in Parisian philosophical and intellectual circles, organizing numerous conferences, participating in seminars, writing articles. It was also during this period that Weil started teaching, notably as an instructor at the École pratique des hautes études. He was able to secure entrance into French higher education as a Maître de Conférences (Junior Professor) and found his first permanent post at the University of Lille. At 52, Weil finally had the security of a regular position. Over the next several decades, Weil would publish the two other major books completing his system, Philosophie politique, and Philosophie morale. In addition he would publish a book dealing with Kant, Problèmes Kantiens, and at the urging of his students two collections of his articles and shorter works, Essais et Conférences I (1970) and II (1971).
During this time his position as a recognized public intellectual grew, as he published in international journals, gave numerous international conferences, and was a visiting professor in the United States. In 1968, after 12 years in Lille, Weil took a position at the University of Nice and he and his wife moved to the south of France.
Weil was to be active up until his death, giving a final conference on Hegel just months before his death on February 1, 1977, at his home in Nice.
Recognition