Simone Weil actually lived out the ethics of total self-sacrifice

Evidence

The most extreme was Simone Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor. Some people lacked food, so she stopped eating almost entirely. She wondered in her journal whether one day someone might develop a form of human chlorophyll, so people could live on sunlight alone. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 631

Categorization

• SEED: Could be an essay angle on philosophy literally inhabited — the cost and limits of living one’s ethics to the death.
• FICTION: Weil’s fanciful journal wish about human chlorophyll is a surreal, haunting image usable in fiction.