The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy

The portrail of these four philosophers of this period and the juxtaposition of their perspectives is fascinating! I'll read it again for sure!

This is an interesting multiple biography, but I did not enjoy the author's method. Some references seemed lost in the storyline.

Very chronological in structure with plenty of interesting facts and details. Each philosopher has the same time in the spotlight as do their ideas. Well worth a read.

Eilenberger has written a superb follow on to his previous work on early 20th century male philosophers. In the book, Visionaries, he presents a brilliant set of vignettes of four eminent women, from 1933 to 1943. He examines Beauvoir, Arendt, Rand and Weil. I am quite familiar with the first three but limited in Weil.The author’s approach is to examine each of the four on a year by year basis during the decade of 1933 to 1943. They are maturing while the world is collapsing. Each is at a different pole in terms of thought. Beauvoir goes from a follower of Sartre to a state of her own independence. Arendt moves from Germany to the United States in a rather perilous manner. Rand, having left Russia, evolves from a screen writer to a powerful force on her own. Weil is to me the most challenging, a somewhat intense mystic of sorts, falling into the world as a suffering participant. Her life is at times a Greek tragedy, her work reflective of her mystic life.The author reflects on the writings of each as the years progress and as the world explodes. Ending in 1943, with the exception of Weil, each of the remaining three are on the precipice of their most impactful contributions. Beauvoir is coming into her own yet is still reflective of the complex relationship with Sartre. Arendt is becoming Americanized, despite her deep roots as a German intellectual and student of Heidegger. Rand has set forth her first Magnum Opus and is preparing to forcefully espouse her philosophy of individualism, unlike the individualism of 19th century de Tocqueville’s America.The book is exceptionally well written and its structure helps the reader see each in contrast. It is very well worth the read.These are not the only early 20th century women thinkers. Three more come to mind, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, and Dorothy Day. That trio, albeit distinct, spread societal ideas in a similar manner. Goldman the Communist, deported but I believe leaving behind a legacy of 20th century communist allegiance, Luxemburg, assassinated, left a contrast to what would become the Stalinist view but laid out a counter to nationalism in the 20th century, and Day, a rather strange bird to use the phrase, a self-proclaimed social savior of the lower class, soon one surmises to be declared a Saint by the Catholic Church, but whose early life was filled with abortions and profligate displays. It would be interesting to see how all of these influenced mush of what we see as dramatic change in the 20th century leading to the changes we are seeing in the 21st.Reading this work is an excellent step towards that.

The Visionaries, subtitled Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, describes the intellectual progress of four notable women writers of the 20th century. Although Wolfram Eilenburger’s account underscores actionable intellect as redemptive, his premise puts forward their thinking as valid but incomplete understanding. The examples he chooses are social philosophers, natively intelligent and highly educated individuals who happen to be notable Russian and European women, ethnically Jewish, who lived during a time of intense social upheaval. Nazi and fascist aggression foments World War Two. Their freedom is compromised, but not their understanding. In pursuit of meaning and purpose, they seek survival first, and then a means to create for themselves a way of thinking and being through intellect and reason. What they achieved did not find broad emotional applicability in the real world, nor stability nor perhaps the happiness they sought for themselves and, by extension, the human condition. The author tells their stories as a series of ongoing vignettes.Simone Weil wrote: “It seems fairly clear that contemporary humanity tends pretty well everywhere toward a totalitarian form of social organization… Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never has man been so incapable…of thinking.” Her aim was toward establishing a free society of self-determined individuals. Inability of individuals to think was an issue.Ayn Rand’s fictional characters were influenced by Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, but her proclamations on the page could not be sustained in real human interactions. Messy aspects of human nature interfered. Jealousy, competition, envy, pettiness and a host of unworthy impulses and human response clouded the intellectual purity of her concepts and affected her life negatively. For Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, “The only necessary relationship [with Sartre was] characterized by a life of polymorphous bisexuality [as validating] a radically different way of living.” However, it resulted in “dominance that is free of both enjoyment and empathy: venial little games for the satisfaction of her own ego – without a deeper concern for the consequences of her own actions in the consciousness of others.”Hannah Arendt retreated to New York City and wrote Origins of Totalitarianism, a copious analysis of social components of Nazism and fascism, and later, Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she identified what she called “the banality of evil.” These texts remain authoritative analyses.The reasoned philosophical outlook of Ayn Rand and Simone Beauvoir falls to conflicting emotions of sex and intimacy; Simone Weil succumbs to self-destructive mental decline and dies during the war; Hannah Arendt’s sharp analysis uncovers more questions than answers. While brilliantly expressing their separate conclusions, each fasces reality’s unrelenting resistance. All of these thinkers are intellectually stranded in a Nietzschean context which makes arguments from the outside in. They pointedly (and wrongly) ignore Freudian understanding, which makes its argument from the inside out.As Beauvoir articulated in The Second Sex, women were (and still are) living within a power deficit in society. As the author imputes, Ayn Rand’s ego, Simone Weil’s religious hallucinations, and Hannah Arendt’s insights into prejudice and evil drove their fertile intellects, but what they might have missed was a comprehensive psychological understanding of human response.Harry Stack Sullivan was a Freudian analyst whose work sought to expand psychoanalytic understanding into a broader social coherence. Instead of forcing behavior into concepts, he reverse-engineered insights from observing powerful behavioral factors. He wrote: “What I am, at any given moment in my process of becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those I love or refuse to love…We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.”If Atlas shrugged under the weight of Ayn Rand’s adult response to unhinged paradigms of power, the Beatles seemed to sum up a different conclusion as children of that war: “The love you take is equal to the love you make,” a notion that seems truer to universal understanding, and less fraught.Tom Casey