Eilenberger, W., & Whiteside, S. (2023). The Visionaries (First U.S. hardcover edition). Penguin Press.
Review
A biographical and intellectual account of four philosophers—Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil—that charts their developments in parallel over the “dark” decade of 1933-1943. Fascinating how the same “irrational” historical conditions led them to four drastically different directions of inquiry: Arendt’s humanism, Beauvoir’s existentialism, Rand’s egoism/objectivism, and Weil’s mystic altruism.
Quote
The philosophizing person seems to be essentially a pariah of deviant insights, the prophet of a life lived rightly, whose traces can be found and deciphered even in the deepest falsity. … [Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, and Weil] simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been. And deep inside they remained certain of who or what the problem needing treatment was: not themselves, but the Others.
I think some familiarity with each of these philosophers’ works makes reading this book more worthwhile. For me, this was true for Rand (by virtue of living in the U.S., birthplace of libertarianism) and Weil. Unfortunately, because of how the parallel narrative was enforced, Rand and Weil were the only ones who produced their most well-known works within this book’s time scope; Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Arendt’s The Human Condition were published in 1949 and 1958, respectively. As Eilenberger notes in the epilogue, the positions they are known for—Beauvoir as a founder of modern feminism, Arendt as an influential theorist of politics and totalitarianism—were assumed much later. Their sections felt relatively scattered and glossed together for me.
Altogether, I think framing the four’s ideas this way was a very effective way of distinguishing each, but the book was too constrained by its year-by-year chapter structure. I was also honestly hoping for more exegesis, but for that I should probably read their actual writing and not a biography.
Selected concepts and passages
- The actual impulse of astonishment at the beginning of all philosophizing is not the surprise that there is “something and not nothing,” but rather, honest bafflement that other people live as they do. In other words, the decoupling of philosophical thought from its original impulse is not ontological or epistemological, but social. It affects not the relationship of the self with the mute world, but the self with speaking Others. (69)
- Putting the cause and protection of the Jews in the hands of powerful patrons, however thoughtful and benevolent, was to [Arendt’s] mind a hopeless and possibly even a counterproductive strategy. In the end it was part of the nature of political questions that they did not have private solutions. (112)
- The discussions on the subject [of Roark’s trial] among Beauvoir, Arendt, and Weil would have taken several days, possibly even years (or centuries), without ever converging on a unanimous judgment. … Only fools or ideologues see consensus as a goal of thought. (307)
Notes
Quote
”My only excuse for my long silence is that of a person who has just emerged from Hell. The year which as passed has been so terrible, with the constant disappointments, the indefinite waiting and the struggle, that I did not want to let anyone hear from me, for all I could say have been complaints. I had to reach some success before I could feel like a human being again…” — Ayn Rand
- (185) Rand believes only a person like her protagonist Roark, who is completely self-empowered on the basis of his ego, is capable of true friendship.
- “Because he is able to look at people in them selves, unselfishly—because he is too selfish, because they are not a part of him in any way.”
- Only this kind of person doesn’t feel the need to use others for their own benefit, like self-worthiness or social status; everyone is an “end in themselves.”