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 reci ...