Outsiders in an Age of Turmoil: Eilenberger on Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil

Review: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside (translator), The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times (Penguin Press)

 

The years from 1933 to 1943 constitute among the bleakest periods in European history.  Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist party came to power in Germany in 1933 amidst a worldwide economic depression and quickly dismantled what remained of the experiment in democracy known as the Weimar Republic.  Within the same period, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin systematically starved to death nearly four million of his fellow citizens living in Ukraine and then cleaned the Soviet Union of “hostile elements” within the Communist party in the Great Terror of 1936-37, with about 750,000 people executed and more than a million sent to forced labor camps. In Spain, a savage civil war raged from 1936 to 1929, in which General Francisco Franco dislodged the republican government, with Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini supporting Franco while Stalin’s Soviet Union supplied arms and munitions to the republican side.Just two decades after the carnage of World War I ended, World War II began in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and Great Britain and France declared war upon Nazi Germany.  

For much of this period, the basic principles of liberal democracy, such as the dignity of the individual and the right to express oneself freely, seemed to be in retreat across the globe, under assault in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union by governments that have come to be called totalitarian.  But by 1943, history’s most devastating war appeared to be turning against Nazi Germany and in favor of the Allied powers.

This turbulent period, 1933-43, although not quite a decade in the usual sense of the term, constitutes the chronological framework for Wolfram Eilenberger’s fascinating The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times., In this work,  Eilenberger looks at both the personal lives and evolution in thinking of four of the 20th century’s most formidable intellectuals, each born in the century’s first decade: Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Ayn Rand (1905-1982), and Simone Weil (1909-1943).  The Visionaries proceeds chronologically, with each of its eight chapters confined to a delineated portion of the 1933-1943 period, and each beginning with a snappy summary of what the four protagonists were doing during that portion. Chapter 2, entitled “Exiles: 1933-1934” is summarized as a time when “Arendt leaves her country, Weil her Party, Beauvoir her skepticism, and Rand her script.”  Chapter 5, “Events: 1938-39,” is billed as the years when “Weil finds God, Rand the solution, Arendt her tribe, and Beauvoir her voice.”  Each chapter is then broken down into several short segments concentrated on one of the four individuals, making the narrative easier to follow.

Eilenberger is a leading German journalist with a bent toward philosophy.  His prose, however, at least when translated into English, is sometimes heavy and often seems overly abstract.  Shaun Whiteside translated the work from the original German, and I don’t doubt that he remained loyal to the original text while providing a readable English language version.  Yet, throughout the book, I returned to a question I’ve asked myself frequently in the past, whether passages, particularly on philosophical conceptions, that might be clear, precise, and relatively easy to understand in the original German are likely to be more ponderous when translated into English.

Although The Visionaries’ four protagonists are all are familiar names, never have they been grouped together as Eilenberger does here.  In many ways, it is a curious grouping.  Aside from a single meeting between Beauvoir and Weil, which Beauvoir later described as unsatisfying for both, there does not appear to have been any interaction between any of the four.  None of the four seems to have been influenced by or even aware of the work of the other three.  Yet, each felt the call of philosophy during her formative years, at a time when totalitarianism in one way or another hovered over all of them.  And as women, all had to chart their course in male-dominated hierarchies of various sorts, a point that Eilenberger does not fully explore. 

There are also biographical commonalities between some of his protagonists.  Beauvoir and Weil were both French, whereas Arendt was born in Germany and Rand in Russia.  Beauvoir was brought up in a traditional Catholic family, while Arendt, Weil and Rand had Jewish backgrounds (Rand was born as Alyssa Rosenbaum).   The lives of Arendt, Beauvoir and Weil were upended by the Nazi rise to power, unlike Rand, who fled Russia in 1920 during the civil wars after the Bolshevik Revolution and lived in the United States from that time onward.  Weil died in 1943 in Britain, whereas the other three women lived several decades into the post-World War II era.  Rand, Arendt and Beauvoir all became better known writers, perhaps even household names, in the post-war years (although Weil also gained greater renown posthumously in the post-war decades, thanks especially to Albert Camus’ promotion of her work).

Beyond these biographical commonalities among some of the women, Eilenberger finds them all linked by commonalities of character and temperament.  All were outsiders in what passed for mainstream society in those disrupted years, he contends. All sensed that they were pariahs of “deviant insights,” who “simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been.” Each was “tormented from an early age” by the same questions: “what makes me so different; why can I not understand and experience like others?”  

The status of the four women as outsiders leads Eilenberger to a single philosophical thread linking them during these crucial years: how each attempted to define the individual generally — and herself particularly — and the relationship of the individual to “the Other.”  But even here, each came to an idiosyncratic definition, quite unlike those of her three contemporaries.

 

Until Hitler came to power in her native Germany, Arendt was generally indifferent to her Jewish background.   She fled Germany in 1933, spending key years in Paris, where she mostly worked on Jewish migration issues before immigrating to New York in 1941.  Perhaps because she was on the move throughout the ten-year period as she fled the Nazis – “stateless,” as she would later put it – Arendt came to see the individual as an inextricable product of his or her community, culture and even nation state, precisely what she lacked.  For Arendt, the “definition of who she was did not lie in her hands alone.” True self-discovery for Arendt occurred only through other people.  During her time in Paris as a political refugee with an ill-defined status, Arendt turned to her Jewish identity and the Jewish community because she had been effectively expelled from what she considered her primary community, the “tradition of German-language writing and thought.”  Although she found work in Zionist organizations while in Paris, she gradually lost her enthusiasm for institutionalized Zionism.

In shaping Arendt’s views as a refugee in the 1930s and early 1940s, Eilenberger emphasizes the importance of her doctoral thesis, “The Concept of Love in Augustine,” written at Heidelberg University in the late 1920s under noted theologian Karl Jaspers.  From Augustine, Arendt extracted the notion that those who love are “not alone in the world.  And they no longer experience the meaning of the world and themselves from their isolation.”  This notion figured prominently in Arendt’s personal life.  While an undergraduate, she had a now widely-recognized romantic relationship with renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger, briefly a Nazi party member and subsequently discredited as a Nazi sympathizer.

But before fleeing Germany, Arendt married Günther Stern, a marriage that fell apart when both found themselves in Paris as refugees.  While still technically wedded to Stern, Arendt took up in Paris with Heinrich Blücher.  The two married in 1940 after her divorce from Stern and stayed together until his death in 1970.  In the early 1940s, Arendt confronted her fear of the loss of independence that went with the experience of love of another, questioning how she could become part of a loving union without abandoning her own identity.  As she put it in one letter to Blücher which Eilenberger quotes, she wondered how she could have both the “love of my life and a oneness with myself.” 

 

Although brought up in a traditional Catholic family, from her earliest years Simone de Beauvoir disdained formal religion and most norms of conventional family life.  In the early part of the period Eilenberger covers, ruminations on the Other such as those of Arendt would have been all but impossible for Beauvoir, whose life was defined by her unconventional relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.  Eilenberger delicately describes that relationship as one of “unconditional intellectual fidelity and honesty,” coupled with an “openness to other attractions.”  Beauvoir had no real sense of “the Other” — apart from Sartre, everyone else was the Other.

Beauvoir comes off as the most hedonistic of the four.  While Arendt, Weil and Beauvoir all found themselves in Paris during parts of the period covered, Beauvoir’s career, unlike those of Arendt and Weil, was only barely interrupted by Hitler’s rise and the German occupation of France.  She continued her writing in the same Paris cafés, and the occupation years marked her most productive time within the ten-year period.   But during the German occupation, Beauvoir came to view the Other in a more empathetic light and freedom as something more than simply doing what she wanted to do.

In the early 1940s, Eilenberger contends, Beauvoir developed an acute sense of solidarity with her fellow human beings.  The “question of the possible meaning of her own existence” became inextricable from the “question of the importance of other people for one’s own life.”  The result was a “new philosophy of freedom based on mutual existential recognition.”  Beauvoir now perceived the relationship between “self” and “others” as one that could be won “solely by each together and at the same level.  No man is an island.” 

 

Simone Weil grew up in Paris in a secular Jewish family but began to absorb Christian theology during the period Eilenberger covers.  Despite her lack of any identification with the Jewish faith, she and her family were targeted for deportation from France and fled to the United States.  Weil returned from America to Great Britain to enlist in Charles de Gaulle’s government-in-exile and work for the liberation of France.  As far as we know, there was no romantic partner in Weil’s life to prompt ruminations on the Other like those of Arendt or to shield her from them, as Sartre did for Beauvoir.   

Yet Weil seemed to define herself through, and only through, others.  Always frail, she lived with crippling migraine headaches for much of the period, along with other health issues which together took an ever-greater toil on her physically.  Weil was remarkable for her identification with the suffering of others – Beauvoir recounted how in their one meeting she cried when speaking of the starving people of China – but suffering was also part of her own physical condition, and her thinking melded the two.

A turning point for Weil was her short stint with the republican side in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which ended abruptly when she stepped into a boiling can of oil and burned herself badly, after which she returned to her parents in Paris.  From roughly that point onward, Weil’s answer to questions of the Other became increasingly inseparable from her embrace of Christian theology.  She began to follow a “distinctly Christian understanding of love that sees the neighbor in the suffering Other and requires one to love them as oneself.”  Weil spent her last years seeking clarity about what she saw as life’s crucial questions: the “value and origin of the self, and its relationship with the Other, with God, with society, and with the historical situation.” 

 

Unlike Weil, Arendt, and the latter Beauvoir, Ayn Rand rejected categorically defining oneself in terms of others.  Freedom for Rand depended upon one’s distance from the Other.   One must deny any “involvement of the Other in one’s own pursuit of the will.”  Anything less was a form of “altruism,” the “actual enemy of freedom.” Rand’s view of herself and, by extension, the individuals she valued (more to be found in her fiction than in the real world) could be dismissed as an indication of “severe mental distortion, if not actual narcissistic personality distortion,” Eilenberger suggests, but we can imagine Rand utterly scornful of such a diagnosis.

Rand was an “intellect of a unique clarity and, more important, an uncompromising nature,” Eilenberger writes with some understatement, well-known for her espousal of laissez-faire capitalism as the only ethically justifiable economic and governmental system.  The invariable alternative to capitalism was what she termed “collectivism,” obviously the systems in place in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which pursued “violent state subjugation of each human being in the name of an ideally exalted collective.” But Rand also saw the United States under President Roosevelt’s New Deal as lurching dangerously in the direction of collectivism.

During much of the 1933-1943 period, Rand worked prodigiously on her first major novel, The Fountainhead, where she set out her distinctive world vision — a “philosophical treatise masquerading as a novel,” as Eilenberger describes it.

The novel’s hero, Howard Roark, an architect “happily unaware” of any doubts or questions and second only to Jean Paul Sartre as the most prominent male in Eilenberger’s account, was commissioned to design a public housing project.  But just before the project was completed, he blew up the building to protest planning changes that a committee of bureaucrats had imposed during the final phase, without his permission.  At his trial, Roark rejected representation by a lawyer, using the proceeding as an occasion to justify to the jury his destructive act as the only permissible outcome of his and Rand’s philosophy of unbridled individualism.  Implausibly, the jury promptly returned a verdict of not guilty. 

Rand handed the script to her publisher on the last day of 1942, with “months of social isolation and uninterrupted creative ecstasy behind her.” From that point on, Eilenberger writes with what might be unintended irony, further decisions on the fate of her novel were “in the hands of others.”

 

Readers who have worked their way through Eilenberger’s analytic volume can easily imagine Arendt, Weil and even Beauvoir coldly admonishing Rand that much of her life ahead, like that of most everyone else, was in the hands of others.  Among four outliers, Rand was the outlier on the issue of “the Other.”  But if the threads linking the four protagonists are thin throughout this volume, Eilenberger ably captures how the turbulence of the time impacted the philosophical and personal journey of each.

 

Image credit: The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times [Cover] (Penguin Press), Fair Use.