Abstract
In recent years, Gravity and Grace, Gustave Thibon's popular selection and arrangement from the Notebooks of Simone Weil, has received a bad press. It has been claimed, among other things, that Thibon's decision to isolate passages from the Notebooks from their original context misrepresents their meaning and that his selections give the false impression that Weil's thought was contained in aphorisms. I will argue that these objections are misguided. An illuminating comparison, in this regard, can be made with a comparable book that has, by contrast, received high praise, Culture and Value, G. H. von Wright's selection from the Notebooks of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A close comparison of the two books illustrates both the significance of the different editorial methodologies adopted by Thibon and von Wright and the striking affinities between the thoughts of these seemingly dissimilar philosophers, one, a mystical Christian Platonist, the other, a patron saint of so-called analytic philosophers. Examining the two books side by side shines light on the thoughts of two extraordinary thinkers.