Formidable Foursome in a Fearsome Time

 

s:

Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times

(Translated by Shaun Whiteside)(Penguin Press, 2023)

The years from 1933 to 1943, the mid-to-late ‘30s and early ’40s, may not quite be a decade in the usual sense of the term, but they were among the bleakest years in 20^th century 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 this 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 more sent to forced labor camps.  1936-39 were the years of a savage civil war in Spain, in which General Francisco Franco dislodged Spain’s 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, moreover, 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, which since 1941 included the United States and the Soviet Union fighting alongside Britain, with France having fallen to Nazi Germany in 1940.

This grim period, 1933-43, constitutes the chronological framework for Wolfram Eilenberger’s fascinating The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, in which Eilenberger looks at both the personal lives and evolution in thinking of four of the 20^th 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). All were ambitious women, and all are familiar names, yet never have the four been grouped together in the way that Eilenberger does here.

A leading German journalist with a bent toward philosophy, Eilenberger shows how the four women, all relatively young, were in the process of working through serious personal and philosophical issues amidst the tumult of the years 1933-43.  There are numerous common biographical points between two or three of the protagonists, but none that I could discern among all four, other than 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.   The only direct interaction between any seems to have been a single meeting between Beauvoir and Weil, which Beauvoir later described as unsatisfying for both.

Beauvoir and Weil were French.  Beauvoir was brought up in a traditional Catholic family, unlike the other three, all of whom had Jewish backgrounds.  But from an early age, Beauvoir disdained formal religion and most norms of conventional family life.  Throughout the Nazi occupation of France, she lived in relative comfort, her life only barely upended, in stark comparison to both Weil and Arendt. Weil was brought up 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.

Until Hitler came to power in her native Germany, Arendt was almost as indifferent to her Jewish background as Weil.  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.  Rand, born into a Jewish family as Alyssa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, never identified even casually with Judaism.  Nor did Hitler’s ascendancy impact her as it did the other three, but only because she had fled the civil wars in her native Russia in 1920 during the Bolshevik Revolution and had 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, perhaps even household names, in the post-war years.  Rand’s first major novel, The Fountainhead, written during Eilenberger’s period, became a best-seller in the late 1940s and was followed by an even bigger best-seller, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957.  Beauvoir best-known work, The Second Sex, which Eilenberger shows percolating during the 1933-43 period, appeared in 1949.   Arendt, who became an American citizen in 1951, made her mark that year with her seminal work, On the Origins of Totalitarianism and attracted attention in 1963 with her biting analysis of the trial of Holocaust engineer Adolph Eichmann, published as Eichmann in Jerusalem.  Although she died in 1943, Weil gained greater renown posthumously in the post-war decades, thanks especially to Albert Camus’ promotion of her work.

If biographical commonalities among all four women are difficult to glean, Eilenberger finds commonalities of character that link them.  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” (p.69).  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?”– or, in terms easily comprehensible to readers today which none of the four would have used, am I “really driving down the freeway in the wrong direction?”  (p.69).

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; for example, 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, with each segment bearing a catchy title.  This organizational format makes the narrative easier to follow.

Eilenberger’s prose, however, is heavy and often seems overly abstract.  His work has been translated from the original German by Shaun Whiteside, and I don’t doubt that Whiteside remained loyal to the original text while providing a readable English language version.  Throughout the book, however, 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.

The notion of the four women as outsiders leads to a single philosophical thread that Eilenberger utilizes to link 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.

* * *

Arendt, on the move throughout the ten-year period as she fled the Nazis – “stateless,” as she would later put it – 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” (p.37).  True self-discovery for Arendt occurs 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” (p.110).  Although she found work in Zionist organizations while in Paris, she gradually lost her enthusiasm for institutionalized Zionism.

Eilenberger emphasizes how Arendt’s doctoral thesis, “The Concept of Love in Augustine,” written at Heidelberg University in the late 1920s under noted theologian Karl Jaspers, shaped her views as a refugee in the 1930s and early 1940s.  From St. 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” (p.134).  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 married to Stern, Arendt took up in Paris with Heinrich Blücher.  The two married in 1940 after her divorce from Stern and stayed married until his death in 1970.  In the early 1940s, Arendt was afraid of the loss of independence that went with the experience of love of another.  She continued to question 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” (p.143).

In the early part of the period Eilenberger covers, such ruminations would have been all but impossible for Simone de 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,” but with an “openness to other attractions” (p.5).   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 or 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” (p.4).  The result was a “new philosophy of freedom based on mutual existential recognition” (p.263).  Beauvoir now perceived the relationship between “self” and “others” as one that could only be won “solely by each together and at the same level.  No man is an island” (p.263).

As far as we know, there was no man in Simone Weil’s life to prompt ruminations on the Other like those of Arendt or to shield her from such ruminations, as Sartre had done for Beauvoir.   Yet Weil seemed to define herself through, and only through, others.  Always frail, Weil 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 starvation in China – but suffering was also part of her own physical condition, and her thinking seemed to meld the two.

A turning point for Weil was her short stint with the republican side in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a stint which ended almost farcically 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, Eilenberger recounts, to follow a “distinctly Christian understanding of love that sees the neighbor in the suffering Other and requires one to love them as oneself” (p.154).  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” (p.271).

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” (p.298).  Anything less was a form of “altruism,” the “actual enemy of freedom” (p.298).  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” (p.184), Eilenberger suggests, but we can imagine Rand utterly scornful of such a diagnosis.

Rand was most assuredly an “intellect of a unique clarity and, more important, an uncompromising nature” (p.18), 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” (p.22).  But Rand also saw the United States under President Roosevelt’s New Deal as lurching toward collectivism.

During most 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” (p.19), as Eilenberger describes it.   The novel turns around Howard Roark, an architect “happily unaware” (p.147) of any doubts or questions and second only to Jean Paul Sartre as the most prominent male in Eilenberger’s account.  Roark 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 rejects 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.  He was, he told the jury, a man who “does not exist for others . . . [T]he integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor.  Those of you who do not understand this are the men who are destroying the world.”  (p.305).  Implausibly, the jury promptly returns 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” (p.308).

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” (p.308).  It is easy to imagine Arendt, Weil and even Beauvoir coldly informing Rand that much of her life ahead, like that of most everyone else, was in the hands of others.

 

Thomas H. Peebles

Hendaye, France

June 14, 2024