May you live in interesting times. The jury is still out on whether that sentiment is a blessing or a curse. There can be no doubt, though, that the heroines of Wolfram Eilenberger’s new book lived in interesting times and then some. Ayn Rand fled the Russian Revolution; Hannah Arendt fled the Nazis; Simone Weil took part in the French general strike of 1933 and fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; Simone de Beauvoir went to bed with Jean-Paul Sartre.
Eilenberger calls his foursome The Visionaries. It’s an odd title, but then so was the one he gave his previous book, The Time of the Magicians. There is no more magic in the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein than there is anything visionary about the thinking of these women. They were all materialists of varying hard-headedness. Though her sex life was a tragedy played out as French farce, Beauvoir was a Marxian feminist. Rand was a rationalist who thought selfishness a virtue. Arendt was so down to earth she considered Descartes’ famous dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’ fantastical. Only Weil, who forsook philosophy for a kind of saintly socialist mysticism, really counts as a visionary. During the second world war, Eilenberger tells us, she fancied feeding the poor by ‘transforming her body and soul into potatoes’ – fine words that, as usual, buttered no parsnips.
A disparate lot, then, and a dispersed one. Though Beauvoir and Weil both studied at the École Normale Supérieure, they met only once. Otherwise, Eilenberger’s heroines had nothing to do with one another; but even had they been best buddies they’d never have agreed on anything. Nothing daunted, he seeks to make a group of them by showing how each ‘experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been’.
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