On Decreation
Weil's attention is almost the opposite of effort. It is a quality of waiting. Of holding the mind open without agenda, without the self rushing in to interpret and possess.
On the morning of June 18, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte did something out of character. He waited.
The ground at Waterloo was soft from the previous night's rain — that was his explanation, then and later. The artillery needed firmer earth to move. Tactically, this was not unreasonable. But his marshals knew something was off. This was the man who had turned speed into a military philosophy, who had won Austerlitz by moving before anyone thought movement was possible. And here he was, watching the morning burn off, while Wellington fortified his ridge and Blücher's Prussians marched steadily closer.
What his generals may have sensed, but could not name, was this: Napoleon was no longer seeing the battlefield. He was seeing himself on a battlefield. The legend had grown so large it had begun to obstruct the view. He could not step aside from what he had been long enough to see what was actually in front of him.
He lost Waterloo in those hours of stillness. The cannonade came too late. The ground, by then, was the least of his problems.
Simone Weil would have recognised this immediately as a failure of attention. And attention, for Weil, was everything.
Born in Paris in 1909, Weil was the kind of thinker who made people uncomfortable. A philosopher, mystic, and political activist, she worked factory floors to understand labour from the inside, refused privileges her intellect could easily have secured, and died at thirty-four, her body depleted by the same radical commitments her mind had reasoned out.
Her concept of decreation is among her most demanding. It appears most fully in her posthumously published Gravity and Grace — a collection of notebook fragments assembled by her friend Gustave Thibon after her death. The word itself is deliberate: not destruction, not self-improvement, not even humility in the conventional sense. Decreation is the undoing of the self as a fixed, defended thing. It is the willingness to stop insisting on your own version of reality long enough for reality to actually reach you.
“We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”
To participate. To create. These are not passive words. Weil was not asking for resignation or self-erasure. She was asking for something harder — the active dismantling of the ego's tendency to colonise everything it touches, including perception itself.
To understand decreation, you first have to understand what Weil meant by gravity.
In her framework, gravity is not a physical force but a psychological one. She’s referring to the natural pull of the self toward itself. We gravitate toward our own desires, our own narratives, our own wounds. We interpret events through the lens of what we need them to mean. We hear what confirms us. We see what flatters us. This is not weakness or vanity in the ordinary sense. It is simply what egos do, left to their own momentum. They fall inward.
Attention is the counterforce. But not attention as we usually mean it — concentration, focus, effort. Weil's attention is almost the opposite of effort. It is a quality of waiting. Of holding the mind open without agenda, without the self rushing in to interpret and possess. She wrote about it first in the context of prayer, then education, then justice — but the principle was always the same: to truly see another person, another situation, another reality, you must suspend the self that wants to make it mean something convenient.
This is why decreation is so difficult. The ego does not experience its own gravity. It experiences itself as simply seeing clearly — as being right, as being wronged, as being the fixed point around which events should orient. The very thing that blocks perception presents itself as perception. Napoleon, watching the morning pass at Waterloo, was not aware of waiting too long. He was aware of being Napoleon, which felt, from the inside, like perfect clarity.
Weil understood this trap intimately. Her solution was not to strengthen the will but to loosen it — to practice a kind of deliberate self-displacement, again and again, until the habit of ego-colonisation could be interrupted. Decreation is not a single act. It is a discipline.
Which brings us back to that quiet morning in Belgium, and a man who had no practice in stepping aside from himself.
Napoleon's tragedy at Waterloo was not, in the end, a failure of intelligence or courage. He had both in abundance. It was a failure of decreation. By 1815, he had spent two decades constructing an identity so total, so mythologised, that it had become a kind of fortress. Inside it, he was safe from doubt. Outside it, reality was doing something his self-image could not accommodate: it was moving on without him. Wellington was not Mack. Blücher was not retreating. The Europe of 1815 was not the Europe that had trembled at Austerlitz. But to see this clearly, Napoleon would have had to step outside the legend — would have had to, in Weil's terms, decreate himself. And that was precisely what he could not do.
The hours passed. The ground dried. The moment closed.
Weil would not have been surprised. Gravity, she understood, is patient. It pulls steadily until the thing that would not bend finally breaks. To see clearly, Weil insists, we must first get out of our own way as an ongoing practice, a continuous loosening of the grip we keep on our own version of things.
Napoleon at Waterloo is an extreme case. But the mechanism is ordinary. Most of us will never command an army or lose an empire. We will in smaller and quieter ways, wait too long, misread the room, insist on a narrative the situation has already abandoned, and wonder, afterward, what we failed to see.
Weil's answer is uncomfortable in its simplicity: we failed to see because we were in the way.
To see clearly, one must step aside.
It is, as it turns out, the work of a lifetime.
