back
Weil's criminal error
 
 

Early on, she admits to having been wrong about Marxism and Pacifism ("mon erreur criminelle" - my criminal error), saying that she realized her error about the former after a sojourn in Germany and the latter after Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

More egregiously, she was wrong about quantum mechanics and relativity. She refuted the latter by simply dismissing the possibility that the speed of light could be constant as unreasonable. But even when she's wrong she's got something right, and her Classical Greek sensibility touches a nerve when she casts algebra (Descartes' handiwork) as the villain :

Au lieu qu'autrefois l'algèbre constituait le language auxiliaire et les mots le language essentiel, c'est aujourd'hui exactement le contraire (583) While in older times algebra constituted an auxilliary language and words the essential language, today it is exactly the opposite
Weil goes on to predict the end of scientificking in 2 or 3 generations (590)

Nous sommes comme revenus à l’époque de Protagoras et des sophistes, l’époque où l’art de persuader, dont les slogans, la publicité, la propagande par réunions publiques, journal, cinéma, radio, constituent l’équivalent moderne, tenait lieu de pensée, réglait le sort des villes, accomplissait les coups d’Etat. (591)

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion --for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent-- took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups