We all have friends who have been called sensitive. Some label themselves this way, wondering why they weep when peers shrug off the hurts. Parents do their offspring no favors when they make comparisons, pointing out the superiority of a sibling’s toughness or her speed at bouncing back. Life waits for the skin to grow thick. With age, delicate souls may harden themselves. It can be a matter of necessity. A second kind of sensitivity involves empathy. The pain originates in the other and is transmitted from her to someone who holds her dear. Though it is absorbed and felt by the empath, it does not disable her. Measuring one’s concern or affliction is a different question, but being empathic does lead to suffering and understanding at a deeper level. Such a person reads the sufferer’s internal state, listens to her, and cares. Anyone who responds with concern takes the role of a witness, carrying another’s wound. Thoughtful parents illustrate this in their identification with their children’s big and small misfortunes. Most people who offer solace bounce back faster than those who sustain the damage directly. Counselors present a special case. They maintain a therapeutic distance from the patient. If they were to duplicate their client’s feelings within themselves, they would (in a sense) become the client, as distraught or debilitated as she is. Any therapist or empathic individual who takes on too much of another’s feelings lacks the separation to soothe their counterpart. All helping professionals are trained to recognize the danger signs of burnout before compromising their ability to aid their clientele. A third level of sensitivity involves emotionality comparable to the person in anguish. Here is an example from my own practice: I received a referral to evaluate a teenager who sobbed when watching TV or listening to radio programs about victims of misfortune. These were strangers, but her heart broke just the same. Tears could not be prevented except by avoiding those media. No evidence of mistreatment, harsh parenting, or abuse was found. The extremity of her response to the world made living close to unbearable.

A fourth type of sensitiveness is similar to the painful reaction in the previous example but does not cause a complete breakdown. The sense of damage done to fellow humans causes her to take action despite her tears. This kind of individual tries to remedy the problem and will put herself at risk to do so. Her first step is to uncover the cause of the emotional or physical harm, which is related to the prevailing conditions within society at large. The life of philosopher, writer, and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) offers an unparalleled demonstration of this kind of virtue. When Simone, then six years old, heard that French soldiers lacked sugar and chocolate during World War I, she sent her sweets to the front. At age 10, she snuck out of her family’s residence to join striking laborers in a rally. In 1934, this young woman took a leave of absence from the school at which she taught to work in a series of blue-collar positions. These included engagement at the Elektro-Firma Alshom factory as a drill-press operator, followed by employment as a packer and then as a machinist for the car manufacturer Renault. Weil sought these jobs to understand the dangerous and mind-dulling conditions under which her fellow employees labored. Simultaneously dealing with the migraine headaches she experienced during her adult life, the first post brought her to the point of exhaustion. Weil sometimes wept, as she was expected to meet a quota that her limited manual dexterity and nearsightedness made impossible. On occasion, she endured burns because of the closeness between her workstation and a furnace. Simone came to believe she and her peers were the equivalents of slaves:

You kill yourself with nothing at all to show for it … that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the depths of your being.

Weil wrote, “Machines do not run to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men so that they may serve the machines.”

Others asked why she persisted in these efforts:

The suffering all over the world obsesses me and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating me. The only way I can release myself from this obsession is to take on a large share of danger and hardship myself. That alone can save me from being wasted by sterile grief.

Indeed, she did her best to influence those with authority during the worldwide economic Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Despite her pacifist beliefs, she also took arms against the fascists in the conflict in Spain. Simone Weil never became hardened or indifferent. She was hospitalized with tuberculosis brought on by malnutrition and exhaustion in 1943. Prior to her collapse, she was employed by the French Government in exile based in London. Defying her doctors, the patient refused to eat as much as she needed. This self-sacrificing woman ate no more than her countrymen had access to in wartime France. To the end of her life at age 34, Weil believed, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness means simply being able to ask him ‘what are you going through?'” Albert Camus, the novelist, and 1957 Nobel Prize-winning writer, called her “the only great spirit of our time.”

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The first image is the Milky Way as photographed by Laura Hedien on October 17, 2023, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website. Next is the George Frederick Watts painting Love and Life, 1884/85. The final two pictures feature Simone Weil. The first was taken during the Spanish Civil War, while the second shows her as a little girl with her family.