“But she is mad!” said General de Gaulle. It was the autumn of 1942 and the leader of the Free French movement in London had just received a proposal from a fearfully weak and emaciated woman, practically blind without her glasses, to head a special mission of French nurses to provide first aid at the front. Simone Weil hoped to become, as Wolfram Eilenberger puts it, “a kind of female anti-SS in the spirit of the Maid of Orléans”.
The 33-year-old Jewish philosopher wrote: “The challenge would be all the more conspicuous because the services would be performed by women and with a maternal solicitude … It would illustrate with supreme clarity the two roads between which humanity is faced today.”
She was prepared to die for her ideals, but feared De Gaulle wouldn’t let her. He thought she was a liability, and had a point: during the Spanish civil war she had badly injured her foot by stepping into a pot of boiling oil left by her comrades, who earlier voted unanimously not to allow her to carry a rifle, still less load it.
But De Gaulle also didn’t grasp the mad, perhaps even saintly, sanity of the woman who scintillates on every page of Eilenberger’s group biography in which she appears. In 1939, as 5 million troops faced one another in western Europe, she wrote the profoundly timely essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, arguing war petrifies souls into a blindness to the consequences of one’s own actions – a truth she took to be the key lesson of Homer’s epic.
“To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as to its victims: the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.” Rather, it possesses us. Eilenberger glosses Weil’s essay: “war as a shared institution effectively ‘enslaves’ everyone”. Putin, perhaps, is as much force’s plaything as his Ukrainian victims.
Not that force can be removed from the world so that humanity can bask in some perpetual peace of the kind imagined by Immanuel Kant. Rather, as Weil put it, “only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows not to respect it, is capable of love and justice”. By putting her body on the line, she intended to disrespect and disempower the spirit of the age.
To say such mad truths as De Gaulle and the rest of the allies geared up to fight Nazism may have seemed, to put it mildly, untimely.
Eilenberger’s group biography focuses its action between 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession, and 1943, the year, thanks to Stalingrad, that the Third Reich’s demise became likely – a decade when the shadow of force hung over Europe and under which these four exceptional women (Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand) developed their distinctive philosophies.
Other recent group biographies of female philosophers – notably Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, about Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, GEM Anscombe and Mary Midgley – deal with women who shared flats, lovers and ideas. The Visionaries is about four contemporaries working independently of one another. They had little in common but the fact that they were women and were writing and thinking as what Auden called the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s gave way to the horrors of the second world war – each finding very different ways of responding in their writings to a world turned upside down by the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, only met the other Simone once, but it was a decisive business. Already De Beauvoir had heard of this seeming secular saint, struck by the image of her crying over the news of a great famine in China. “I envied her,” wrote De Beauvoir, “having a heart that could beat right across the world.”
De Beauvoir’s heart didn’t beat that way; it was trapped in a less saintly body. When the two met, inevitably they clashed. Weil announced the only thing that mattered in the world was a revolution to feed the world’s starving. “I retorted 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.”
And yet the story that Eilenberger threads through the book is of De Beauvoir emerging from the influence of her lover and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre to find, not just her own polymorphous sexuality, but a philosophy not trapped in the intellectual prison of the solitary ego, as his was.
Certainly one effect of this book, half of whose protagonists were Jews rendered stateless by Nazi laws and French connivance with them, is the extent to which it makes the most celebrated philosophy of the 1940s, Sartre’s existentialism, seem utterly unfit for purpose. He published Being and Nothingness in 1943 while Paris was still under Nazi occupation. It reads now as self-obsessed and asocial, fit for the self-regarding, ostensibly rebellious turtlenecks of postwar Parisian cafes no doubt, rather than the millions murdered or turned into refugees by Hitler.
The example of Hannah Arendt, on the run throughout this decade from fascist murderers first to Paris then Lisbon and eventually New York, is particularly salutary in this context: from early on her writing was profoundly engaged with geopolitical realities in a manner as yet beyond Sartre. Her developing thinking, Eilenberger relates, led Arendt to doubt universal declarations of human rights. There’s nothing that would make one more sceptical about France’s human rights tradition than seeing fellow Jews delivered by gendarmes to Nazi killers.
Her experience of becoming a refugee also made her sceptical about Zionism. When in New York among fellow Jewish exiles dreaming of a homeland, Arendt was nauseated by their plans. If Israel was to mean anything, she thought, it would have to mean more than an ethnically conceived state modelled on the European ones that had subjected Jews to exclusions, pogroms and Auschwitz.
A few streets away in New York, a Russian exile called Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, who had reinvented herself Stateside as Ayn Rand, was developing philosophy very different from Arendt’s generous humanism. Personally, I find it ridiculous that Eilenberger gives this sophomoric pseudo-Nietzschean space in a book devoted mostly to much more subtle women. Her endless blethering in the imperative mood like Jordan Peterson on a bad day, about will, selfishness, the worthlessness of altruism and the moral foundation of capitalism, is very hard to take. And yet, I suppose, it is important to realise that Rand, though the feeblest of the thinkers here, was the most successful: as of 2020 her terrible novels had sold 37m copies, and her thoughts have underpinned the barbarous project of neoliberalism, inspiring former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, the Republican Tea party and, arguably, Trump’s low-tax and anti-regulation policies. Former British cabinet minister Sajid Javid, he of the “Tory power stance”, is a fan.
The Visionaries is much better than Eilenberger’s previous group biography, Time of the Magicians, which took four male philosophers, Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, suggesting tendentiously they had between 1919 and 1929 “invented modern thought”. Like Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Cafe, several of whose anecdotes Eilenberger repeats, this new book does something better: illuminates the times through which these philosophers developed their ideas – and vice versa – often drawing poignant parallels and discontinuities between the women.
But his evident and understandable fondness for Weil skews the book. Which is fair enough, because Eilenberger wants to make her work better known. “Even today, Weil’s thought is generally ignored by academic philosophy,” he writes. Most likely because she was a woman. That said, other women, not just De Beauvoir, have found her inspiring. In her essay Against Dryness (itself a rebuke to barren male philosophising), Iris Murdoch championed the Frenchwoman: “Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will.” Murdoch agreed, thinking we need to break free from the prison house of the ego: “We need a new vocabulary of attention.” We still do.
There is a book about American actor Gloria Grahame’s last days called Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Similarly, philosophers aren’t supposed to die in Ashford, but Weil did. Taken ill in the Kent town with tuberculosis, she refused to eat much, and in her mad sanity asked nurses to send the milk they offered her to her starving compatriots in France. Weil may have had an undiagnosed eating disorder, but she had something else: an existential disorder, out of joint with the brute forces all around her. “I am finished, broken beyond mending,” she wrote in one of her last letters before she died on 24 August 1943. She was 34.
• The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
