Simone Weil outscored Simone de Beauvoir on university exams, then walked away from academic safety to work an assembly line at a Renault plant. A lifelong pacifist, she joined an anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War despite being so nearsighted her comrades feared she would fire on their own positions. This episode explores the brief, uncompromising life of the French philosopher, mystic, and activist who lived from 1909 to 1943 and refused to let any line exist between abstract thought and physical consequence.

We follow her from a six-year-old refusing sugar in solidarity with soldiers in the trenches, through her nickname the categorical imperative in skirts, to the factory work that produced her concept of affliction and shattered her Marxist assumptions. We cover her three spiritual encounters in Portugal, Assisi, and while reciting George Herbert’s Love, her refusal of baptism, her theology of decreation and attention, her resistance work, The Need for Roots, and her death in an English sanatorium at 34 after restricting her diet to the rations of occupied France.

• Why Weil told Beauvoir it was obvious she had never gone hungry, and what that reveals about her critique of philosophy
• Affliction, or le malheur: how repetitive labor under fear structurally brands submission onto the soul
• Decreation as the reciprocal act to God’s withdrawal, and attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity
• Her argument that society must be built on obligations rather than rights, and the frontline nurse plan de Gaulle rejected
• The haunting debate over her death: disturbed suicide or the logical limit of her own philosophy