The blind mans' white stick and reading

 Reading is a kind of interpretation of what is presented to knowers by both their physical sensations and their social conditions;

 therefore, reading—as the reception and attribution of certain meanings in the world—is always mediated.

 In turn, readings are mediated through other readings, since our perception of meaning is undoubtedly involved in and affected by an intersubjective web of interpretations. 

Weil explains this through the metaphor, borrowed from Descartes, of a blind man’s stick. We can read a situation through attention to another in order to expand our awareness and sensitivity, just as the blind man enlarges his sensibility through the use of his stick

. In a revision of Kant’s line that beauty is a finality without finality

In her 1941 “Essay on the Concept of Reading” by Simone Weil

[A]t each instant of our life we are gripped from the outside, as it were, by meanings that we ourselves read in appearances. That is why we can argue endlessly about the reality of the external world, since what we call the world are the meanings that we read; they are not real. But they seize us as if they were external; that is real. Why should we try to resolve this contradiction when the more important task of thought in this world is to define and contemplate insoluble contradictions, which, as Plato said, draw us upwards? 

In attention one renounces one’s ego in order to receive the world without the interference of one’s limited and consumptive perspective. This posture of self-emptying, a stripping away of the “I” (dépouillement)—ultimately for Weil an imitatio Christi in its kenosis—allows for an impersonal but intersubjective ethics.

Weil’s aesthetic commitments are reflected in her style: in her sharp prose she scrutinizes her own thought while tending to exclude her own voice and avoid personal references; thus she performs “the linguistic decreation of the self”