Reviewing Wolfram Eilenberger's The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times (October 2023)

 

Wolfram Eilenberger's Visionaries, published in 2023, is an historical biography of four highly-regarded European philosophers—Hannah Arendt, Simone Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil—from 1933-1943. The book is a continuation of Eilenberger's 2020 Time of the Magicians in which he examines the lives and views of four other prominent European philosophers—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger—from 1919-1929. For Eilenberger, these two tumultuous decades in Europe birthed some of the most influential European philosophy of the 20th century, and from each he selected four representatives of the era whose philosophical interests very much reflected the times.

 

In The Time of the Magicians (2020), Eilenberger sets the backdrop as the dogma-shattering revolutions in physics and the post-World War I fragmentation of empire and emergent expansion of nationalism and alternative political systems. For Eilenberger, it was the radical changes in the 'real world' and in the physical theories of the 'real world' of 1920s Germany that provided the catalyst for radical changes in the methods and roles of post-Kantian German philosophy in the modern world. In The Visionaries, the principal theme is that of the free individual versus the omnipotent state. The carnage of World War I was still a recent memory, and by the early 1930s there were ominous signs of further wars—according to Eilenberger, the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s was "a laboratory of future cruelty"—some domestic and some foreign. Internally, the scope and reach of the modern state was expanding on both sides of the Atlantic. Stalin's terror was in full swing; Hitler had just been acclaimed by a defeated Germany; and the US was experimenting with socialism as an emergency response to the enduring Great Depression. Externally, the Treaty of Versailles had not put an end to European military conflict. Nations were rearming.

Eilenberger rotates through his selected spokespersons as he moves chronologically from 1933 to 1943. Each thinker is presented and permitted to present herself to the reader in extended quotations that appear throughout. As a brief introduction: Arendt is of fame for her writings on totalitarianism (The Origins of Totalitarianism) and her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. Simone Beauvoir, though recognized in her own right, is introduced and spoken of often in reference to her long-time companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. Ayn Rand, formerly Alisa Rosenbaum of Leningrad, is best known for her libertarian political and economic views, and of course her novels— The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—through which she communicates her views to a broader audience. Simone Weil is perhaps best known for her political activism (in the French Resistance and on the Republican side in Spain) in opposition to the two great totalitarian threats in interwar Europe—Hitler and Stalin.

 

Hannah Arendt was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 for conducting research into antisemitism. This was years before the infamous Krystallnacht, but to those paying attention, the future was becoming clear. She escaped to France, was stripped of her German citizenship making her 'stateless' and was arrested by the Vichy government. Eilenberger refers to the "French mass phenomenon of the 'stateless person.'" Eventually, Arendt made her way to the US. Having been a 'stateless person,' the contradiction in human rights proclamations was obvious: "the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them." It was natural then that Arendt became a champion of what Eilenberger calls "the most fundamental of all rights—the right to have rights at all."

 

Disagreements over fundamental rights set Arendt against the Zionist establishment. Referring to the Zionist program to deny rights to Arabs, Eilenberger writes that

 

she described as absurd the idea that a majority (Arabs) within a democratic Jewish Commonwealth should be granted only minority rights. Equally illusory was the idea of a supposedly sovereign nation-state that had to remain permanently dependent on another protective state [Britain] for its existence and its ability to flourish.

 

Though informed by idealism, Arendt understood realpolitik well enough. According to Eilenberger's reading of Arendt, she believed that

 

the route they had decided on would make peaceful cohabitation with the Palestinian Arabs impossible in the long term and further inflame the growing pan-Arabic anti-Semitism in the immediate neighboring countries.

 

For Arendt, it would be far better to have a federation—having in mind the federal system in her new home in America.

 

National conflicts can only be resolved in such a federation because the insoluble majority-minority problem has ceased to exist. . . . In this union, no individual has dominion over another, and all states together govern the country.”

 

Eilenberger adds that "Arendt imagined just such a federal solution—either part of a notional European federation of states or the British Commonwealth—as the ideal solution for a future Palestine." (Yugoslavia did not exist at the time, but presumably its federal system post-World War II could theoretically have met her standards, and its civil wars since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the federation could have been anticipated.) However, her "form of Jewish patriotism with a cosmopolitan intent made her a lone voice in New York’s concrete desert." Eilenberger ascribes "Kantian global citizenship" to Arendt's mature political philosophy, and that in a world of rising nationalism was unpopular.

 

Being cosmopolitan did not silence Arendt from confronting the Holocaust and the conviction that "since the outbreak of the war and even before, a conspiracy of silence has covered the sufferings and the losses of the Jewish people.” This message she delivered in lectures as early as the spring of 1943, just months after the World Jewish Congress began to report Nazi mass murders. But Arendt was no fatalist. In fact, at one point she advocated for an international army of Jewish people to fight against the Nazis. And, in a letter addressing the mysticism of her friend, the Judaist Gershom Scholem, she writes

 

To speak of the mystical course which, in the great cataclysm now stirring the Jewish people more deeply perhaps than in the entire history of Exile, destiny may still have in store for us—and I for one believe that there is such a course—is the task of prophets, not of professors.... But what we ought not to forget is the fact that in the last instance it is up to man to decide upon his political fate.

 

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Simone Beauvoir was largely unaffected by a world preparing for war and genocide.

 

Beauvoir’s descriptions of their time in Germany [six months in 1933 while Sartre was studying in Berlin] are impressive examples of how uncomplicatedly remarkable philosophical alertness can go hand in hand with almost complete blindness to political realities.

 

Eilenberger notes that "[t]he real-world consequences of Hitler’s accession to power go largely unmentioned in Beauvoir’s records."

 

Indeed, her attention was focused elsewhere. Eilenberger characterizes her as a solipsist with no regard for the Other, unless the Other was Sartre. Eilenberger links Beauvoir to an extreme form of subjectivism discussed by Descartes but ultimately rejected.

 

[I] glance out of the window at people walking along the street. Using the customary expression, I say that I “see” them. But       what do I actually see apart from hats and coats, which could be covering automata.

 

Eilenberger maintains that

 

This is literally the attitude that Beauvoir and Sartre, a couple intellectually very much on the same wavelength, shared in the cafés of Rouen, Le Havre, and Paris. Other people do not really exist for them as people. The two of them are the only beings who truly feel. The rest of humanity serves solely as a backdrop to stimulate their own thought games.

 

To further illustrate Beauvoir's philosophy by contrasting with another's—in this case Simone Weil's—Eilenberger relates the anecdotal story of the first meeting between the two. In her own words, Beauvoir writes

 

[A] great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,” she snapped. Our relations ended right there.

 

But by 1941, Beauvoir had been 'emancipated' from her extreme subjectivism as Eilenberger observes. In her war diary, she writes

 

No man is an island. Instead, the true precondition of my freedom lies in the freedom of the other consciousness—indeed, if the idea is consistently thought through, in the free acknowledgment of all other consciousnesses. Politically, this leads to the demand for a liberation struggle for all under the banner of mutual existential emancipation—each for the sake of their own freedom: freedom and socialism.

 

Having struggled to negotiate something of a synthesis of Hegel's Weltgeist and Heidegger's Dasein, she disavows her prior skepticism with regard to the Other and embraces being active in the world along with others.

 

Metaphysical solidarity that I newly discovered, I, who was a solipsist, I understand what was wanting in our antihumanism. . . . There is no other reality than human reality—all values are founded on it. And that “towards which it transcends itself” is what has always moved us and orients the destiny of each one of us.

 

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Ayn Rand had seen collectivism up close. Her family, relatively wealthy, had been expropriated by the Bolsheviks. While on a tourist visa in the US in 1926, she defected. Unlike the earlier Beauvoir, Rand understood perfectly well "how closely interwoven her own life had always been with the surrounding political and economic conditions." And in Rand's view, "Hitler’s and Stalin’s lust for blood followed a single logic, which was that of a violent state subjugation of each individual human being in the name of an ideally exalted collective." But the collective was not only a threat in the Soviet Union, Germany, the Italian fascist state but also in the US, ushered in by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom she came to loathe as the incarnation of the totalitarian threat on this side of the Atlantic. Rand's nightmare for her new country was "a democratically accepted dictatorship having at its head an individual with a gift for manipulating the masses."

 

Philosophically, Rand found a kinship with the elitism of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Thus Spake Zarathustra and Revolt of the Masses were of particularly intense interest to Rand. But it was Nietzsche who was the greater influence. With Nietzsche's Übermensch, she shared "[a] distinct hatred of religion; undisguised elitism; a rejection of any idea of the necessity of suffering." It wasn't simply that Rand objected to the supreme leadership in Moscow, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Washington. It was just as much the docility and stupidity of the masses. Both the autocrats and the masses conspired towards the subjection of the individual to unfreedom. University educated in the USSR, Rand had to have been familiar with Dostoevky's famous chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, wherein the Grand Inquisitor informs his prisoner, Jesus, that the people don't want his 'freedom' they want the Church's direction. Although Rand was irreligious, the message would have resonated.

 

The following anecdotal account of a conversation Rand had with David O. Selzhick's executive assistant goes a long way towards explaining Rand's contempt for the goals of the masses ... in America.

One day Rand asked her very directly what she considered her actual goal in life. The woman ... didn’t have to think for long: If nobody owned an automobile, she didn’t want one either. If some people owned one automobile and others had none, she wanted one too. If some people owned two automobiles and others only one, she wanted two. She was also keen that people should know she had more than they did.

 

Rand couldn't believe that in a free society people could choose enslavement to the goals and valuations of others. That was the 'docility and stupidity' that she believed she could free others from. Despite, or perhaps because of, her elitism, it was important that she persuade others to accept her view of the world, and so like Zarathustra, she came down from the mountain. Once among the masses, she turned to fiction and film (she had studied cinematography in the USSR) to educate them. And in her optimism that rallied with her success in publishing and film, she comfortably closed The Fountainhead with a jury acquittal of her protagonist, the architect Howard Roark. Message received ... in the world of fiction anyway.

 

It is interesting that Eilenberger included details of two of Rand's cross-country trips, because their juxtaposition discloses that Rand was not immune to her own critique of American status seeking. The first trip mentioned was after Rand's initial failure in Hollywood, when she and her husband drove an old pickup truck to the East. It was on this trip that she "caught a glimpse of another America: that of impoverished towns, the indigent farmers, the deepest, blackest poverty, and, not least, a ramshackle infrastructure." In Virginia, the couple—nearly broke—wrecked their truck and had to continue to New York by Greyhound bus. In the second mentioned trip, on returning to Hollywood with a deal to make a motion picture of her bestselling Fountainhead novel, she and Frank "first took the luxury train to Chicago, with real steak in the restaurant car, at a time of rationing." Eilenberger adds that this was "[s]o very close to the ideal, at least for this one moment."

 

Among the more controversial aspects of Rand's legacy in America is the influence of her libertarian views on in politics and economics. The following extended quote from Eilenberger succinctly connects her concept of freedom with a familiar political and economic agenda—the one critiqued by Quinn Slobodian in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018) and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023).

 

[T]he only thing that makes mutual freedom truly possible and guarantees it is a consistently assumed attitude of “metaphysical independence,” not something like “metaphysical solidarity.” [In contrast to Simone Beauvoir.] The only truly nonviolent way of making contact with the Other and acknowledging them unreservedly as an equally free human being is in a contract—like a good deal. My word is my bond. Take it or leave it. And live with the consequences. But the most socially flexible way of achieving goals of exchange is clearly economic: through monetary transactions. And the only economic way to make a truly nonviolent exchange between individuals in this sense is absolute laissez-faire capitalism. Finally, the only legitimate system of government in this sense is a democracy that is both as direct as possible and as limited in its interventions as possible.

 

 

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Simone Weil was perhaps the most idealistic of the four philosophers, but she was perfectly knowledgeable and wise to the totalitarian nature of the 'communist' regime in the USSR as well as the dictatorship in Germany. She rejected the dictatorship over the proletariat, which made socialism in practice a tyranny instead of a liberation from capitalism. Eilenberger sums up her assessment well.

 

The new total Hitler- and Stalin-style systems tend in their outward economic form to state capitalism, and in their internal construction to a repressive surveillance state, with the help of a primarily self-serving class of functionaries as well as increasingly advanced surveillance technologies.

 

Eilenberger notes that Weil's letters from 1933 indicate that she had a good enough understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union, including the genocidal Holodomor.

 

By 1934 as she was preparing her philosophical testament, "Reflections Concerning the Causes of Freedom and Social Oppression," she was convinced that another world war was looming as was the ascendancy of totalitarian government.

 

It seems fairly clear that contemporary humanity tends pretty well everywhere toward a totalitarian form of social organization—to use the term . . . the national-socialists have made fashionable—that is to say, toward a system in which the State power comes to exercise sovereign sway in all spheres, even, indeed above all, in that of thought. Russia presents us with an almost perfect example of such a system, for the greater misfortune of the Russian people . . . but it seems inevitable that all of them will approach it more or less in the course of the coming years.

 

Like Arendt, she was clear-eyed about the direction in which Europe was headed, but she maintained a strong idealistic streak. Though from a wealthy family, she put herself in situations where she could experience the real history as it was unfolding. She joined the French Resistance and even participated briefly in the Spanish Civil War. Weil even worked in a factory for six months, motivated by her ethical standards but just as much by the desire to

 

experience firsthand the oppression that she sought to remedy as a thinker. Out from the ivory tower of theory, into the everyday suffering of the workers! Neither Marx nor Engels, Trotsky nor Stalin had ever really experienced a factory from inside.

 

Not surprisingly, she was a failure in her factory job, but she had friends who ensured that she was looked after during her 'experiment,' a protective charge which was repeated during her 1937 deployment during the Spanish Civil War, where she also suffered misadventures and had to be sent back to safety for everyone's sake.

 

Back at the writing desk, where she was more impactful on behalf of her cause, she penned an essay—"Let’s Not Start the Trojan War Again”—in which she compares the 10-year massacre of Greeks and Trojans to 1930s Europe.

 

For our contemporaries the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters. If we grasp one of these words, all swollen with blood and tears, and squeeze it, we find it is empty. . . . This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism.

And so for the pacifist Weil, it looked to be another meaningless war not unlike Europe's recent 'Trojan War'—variously called the 'Great War' or 'War to End all Wars.'

 

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Looking back at the book's full title, it seems difficult to understand what 'power' philosophy exercised in Europe during the dark times of the interwar years. Only in hindsight can we appreciate the philosophers' wisdom, but to what avail has this percolated into the Zeitgeist of subsequent generations, including the third decade of the 21st century. Europe has another hot war in progress—not so long after the Balkan wars—and warmongering on both sides of the Pacific threatens to open up a war on the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, autocratic government appears to be a global trend even among countries that have experienced greater or lesser periods of democracy.