Beckett. Camus, Joyce, Simone Weil the patron saints of outisiders.

 Becket. Camus, Joyce,  Simone Weil the patron saints of outsiders.

Simone Weil, the arch patron saints of outsiders in aa practice of epistemic humility She was critical of any sensation that universalizes one’s reading of the world, and she saw the imagination as thus extending the self, because it could not help but think through its own categories, wishes, and desires, thereby reading the world on its own terms

 This was not, however, a type of Hegelian synthesis that can be intellectually apprehended. Instead, the contemplation of contradictions can lead the knower to a higher contemplation of truth-as-mystery. Thus, in her late epistemology Weil presents this concept of “mystery” as a certain kind of contradiction in which incommensurables appear linked in an incomprehensible unity.

Mystery, as a conceptualization of contradiction, carries theological, or at least supernatural, implications. For instance, if contradiction is understood through formal logic, then the existence of affliction would seemingly prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent, wholly benevolent God; however, contradiction, understood as mystery, can itself serve as a mediation, allowing for the coexistence of affliction and God, seen most prominently on the Cross