Forward thinkers

An absorbing chronicle of four singular female philosophers whose ideas, shaped by war, continue to resonate today.

- ANNA RANKIN

Every era has its defining questions that animate the self and the world, and in the 20th century, such questions of philosophy in the Western world were forged against the backdrop of, and prompted by, war. 

Living in a Manhattan apartment in 1943 and reflecting on her situation as a stateless Jewish refugee driven from Nazi Germany a decade before, Hannah Arendt, strident in speech, isolated from her peers and misunderstood by her fellow citizens, writes, "We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions... we left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded."

This passage, from the opening chapter of philosopher and bestselling author Wolfram Eilenberger's The Visionaries, which chronicles the early lives of four female philosophers Arendt, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand - impresses upon the reader a refrain that continues through the ensuing 300-odd pages and indeed into our present lives. Arendt's considerations of the loss of one's language, home, sense of meaning - that is, one's life should one survive - are not, to borrow from Nietzsche (who has a walk-on role in the book), thoughts out of season: they continue to illuminate the present condition for much of the world.