Every era has its defining questions that animate the self and the world, and in the 20th century, such questions of philosophy in the Western world were forged against the backdrop of, and prompted by, war.
Living in a Manhattan apartment in 1943 and reflecting on her situation as a stateless Jewish refugee driven from Nazi Germany a decade before, Hannah Arendt, strident in speech, isolated from her peers and misunderstood by her fellow citizens, writes, “We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions … we left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.”
This passage, from the opening chapter of philosopher and bestselling author Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries, which chronicles the early lives of four female philosophers –Arendt, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand – impresses upon the reader a refrain that continues through the ensuing 300-odd pages and indeed into our present lives. Arendt’s considerations of the loss of one’s language, home, sense of meaning – that is, one’s life should one survive – are not, to borrow from Nietzsche (who has a walk-on role in the book), thoughts out of season: they continue to illuminate the present condition for much of the world.
While The Visionaries opens in 1943, the book formally begins a decade before, in 1933, where the quartet are each by divergent means addressing systematic questions of the self – the self in relation to others, to the world as it is and was, and to oneself. Each is in the embryonic stages of developing theories of consciousness that would, in later years, be refined into definitive and influential works of philosophy and political thought, if not, in certain cases, ideology.
For Arendt, in Germany at the outbreak of war, this was a live material concern. She was alert to history and its consequences, including the rights of an individual within the state and the loss thereof, and, equally, questions of nationhood.
De Beauvoir was critical of her own bourgeois position in Parisian society; a war of negation between one’s subjectivity in relation to another – that is, how to preserve one’s individual freedom and desires while inescapably enmeshed within social relations.
For Rand, who fled Russia for the US and arrived a self-made woman, there was no middle ground. She railed against altruism as “the enemy of freedom”, Eilenberger writes.
Rand strenuously asserted the primacy of the individual against the masses and fiercely loathed the notion of the collective, including religion, which she likened to communism and held in visceral contempt, having found her family’s fate swiftly reversed in the October Revolution.
Captured by the propagandistic potential and universal reach of cinema, Rand worked in Hollywood as a writer with grandiose aspirations. In her writings, Eilenberger detects a “narcissistic personality disorder”. Rand is a theorist who in recent times – notably during Covid-19 amid cries of fascism linked to pandemic restrictions – found footing with political conservatives and libertarians equally contemptuous of the principles and arrangements of collective organisation and its ancillaries.
Weil, born Jewish but profoundly inspired by Christianity and who would become a pre-eminent theologian, is the beating heart of the book. For her, Eilenberger reserves considerable attention and even devotion. In the book’s coda, he entreats the reader to discover what ranks among the most brilliant yet unrecognised thought and expression penned from the human mind.
Weil is uniquely attuned to the suffering of others, particularly the working classes and those deemed invisible or marginalised. In her early writing and assessments of 1930s Europe, she describes with anguish the moral and ethical problems war assumes on not only the world but the human soul.
Her fervent convictions and Marxist allegiance led her to the factory floor and the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War. It was a disastrous and tragicomic attempt at solidarity due to her ill health and weak disposition – a distinct contrast to her penetrating mind that merged, through the dialectical method, material and metaphysical propositions into dazzling analyses, diagnoses, prognoses and insights.
It is too easy to accept the definitive work of a writer – here, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, de Beauvoir’s feminist urtext The Second Sex, Weil’s The Need for Roots and Rand’s The Fountainhead – as fully formed and contained, and to perceive the writer in similar terms. As The Visionaries demonstrates, no one arrives so complete. Eilenberger is adept at positioning each author’s animating questions as a blueprint within the respective conditions of their lives, and so provides a complex psychological portrait of each.
It is fair to say that their adherence or resistance to particular political ideologies and movements was unmistakably defined by their circumstances; no abstract nor hypothetical conditions could produce such rigour of thought. And from each came grave attention to language: each recognised a psychic war of words and their uses; how language is perverted and wielded to dehumanise, disfigure and, finally, to kill. This is, one can argue, a spirit that similarly animates present time.
In methodically assembling and weaving each writer’s diaries, memoirs and published records – replete with endless rejections and frustrations, and their respective marginalisations and exclusions – a relief is revealed of their inner lives, laments, uncertainties and realities against a fomenting war and its world-altering hinge points. The resultant crisis presents upon their ambitions, if not the very question of their existence. Yet if their lives were under threat, their minds remained the single place that was not, and there they found refuge in thought.
These were philosophers, Eilenberger writes, who pursued their theories with “political effectiveness and at the same time fidelity to one’s principles, deep philosophical acuity and transposition into reality”: Weil’s ardent ethical commitments, religious impulse and tortured asceticism; Arendt’s moral clarity and insistence on truth; de Beauvoir’s hedonic appetite for self-definition and determination; Rand’s icy formulas of human motivation and reason.
In 1938, Weil, having travelled her arc toward religious enlightenment and in acceptance of her bodily suffering (she would die five years later, aged 34, from cardiac failure after refusing to eat), testifies that “you could not wish to have been born in a better time than this”. This expresses her embrace of the world as it was and in it her purpose, which she felt she had fulfilled. On her deathbed, after her doctor enquired, she sought to be described as a “philosopher and interested in humanity”.
Arendt and her compatriots Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem “were convinced that what we call the past is not in any way more fixed than the future”, Eilenberger observes toward the book’s close. Both this assertion and Weil’s words offer lasting precepts by which the intention and lasting impression of The Visionaries might be distinguished.
