商品简介 A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger
The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.
Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Ayn Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926 and was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the twentieth century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds of millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts that continue to echo today among Silicon Valley’s tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today’s most important liberal ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of Beauvoir’s: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many.
Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy as Wolfram Eilenberger does. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers—indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters—each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war. 由广受好评的《魔术师时代》作者沃尔弗拉姆·艾伦伯格 (Wolfram Eilenberger) 撰写的一部由激进、才华横溢且具有挑衅性的哲学家西蒙娜·德·波伏娃、汉娜·阿伦特、西蒙娜·韦尔和安·兰德主演的精彩的知识叙事魔法师时代< /b>
作者简介 Wolfram Eilenberger is an internationally bestselling author and philosopher. He is the founding editor of Philosophie Magazin and hosts the television program Sternstunde Philosophie on the Swiss public broadcasting network SRF. In 2018, he published Time of the Magicians in Germany. The book instantly became a bestseller there, as well as in Italy and Spain, and won the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It has been translated into thirty languages. Eilenberger has been a prolific contributor of essays and articles to many publications, among them Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and El País. He has taught at the University of Toronto, Indiana University Bloomington, and Berlin University of the Arts, among other schools.
Shaun Whiteside is a prize-winning translator of fiction and nonfiction from German, French, Italian, and Dutch. He also translated Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians.
精彩内容 THE PROJECT
What's the use of starting if you must stop?" Not a bad way to begin. That was precisely the essay's intended subject: the tension between one's own finite existence and the obvious infinity of the world. After all, it took only a moment's contemplation of this abyss for every plan, every design, every self-appointed goal-be it conquering the globe or mere gardening-to be abandoned to absurdity. In the end, it all boiled down to the same thing. Even if no one else did, time itself would ensure that whatever work one had done came to nothing, consigning it to eternal oblivion. Exactly as if it had never existed. A fate as certain as one's own death.
Why then do something rather than nothing? Or, to put it better in the form of a classical trio of questions: "What, then, is the measure of a man? What goals can he set for himself, and what hopes are permitted him?" Yes, that worked. That was it, the structure she was looking for!
From her corner table on the second floor of the Café de Flore, Simone de Beauvoir observed the passersby. There they walked. The others. Each one a private consciousness. All moving about with their own concerns and anxieties, their plans and hopes. Exactly as she did herself. Just one among billions. The thought sent shivers down her spine every time.
Beauvoir had not agreed to this assignment lightly, not least of all because the subject was one that her publisher, Jean Grenier, had commissioned her to write about. For an anthology on the prevailing intellectual discourse of the day, he wanted her to write something about "existentialism." But neither she nor Jean-Paul Sartre had claimed this term for themselves. It had merely been coined by the arts pages of the newspaper, nothing more.
The irony of the assignment was thus hard to overstate, because if there had been a leitmotif defining her and Sartre's journey over the past ten years, it was refusing to be put into boxes preassigned to them by other people. That kind of revolt had been right at the heart of her project-and still was today.
THE PRIME OF LIFE
Let the others call it "existentialism." She would deliberately avoid the term. And instead, as an author, she would simply do what she loved most since the earliest diary entries of youth: devote herself with the greatest possible concentration to her life's most concerning questions-whose answers she did not yet know. Strangely, they were still the same. Above all was the question of the possible meaning of her own existence. As well as the question of the importance of other people for one's own life.
But Beauvoir had never felt as certain and as free in this reflection as she did now, in the spring of 1943. At the climax of another world war, in the middle of her occupied city. In spite of ration cards and food shortages, in spite of chronic withdrawals from coffee and tobacco (by now Sartre was so desperate that he crawled around every morning on the floor of the café collecting the previous evening's stubs), in spite of daily checks and curfews, in spite of the ubiquitous censorship and German soldiers swaggering about with ever greater shamelessness in the cafés, even here in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. As long as she could find enough time and peace to write, everything else was bearable. Her first novel was due to be published by Gallimard in the autumn. A second one lay completed in the drawer. There was also a play in the works. Now the first philosophical essay would follow. Sartre's work Being and Nothingness-over a thousand pages in length-was also at the publisher. Within a month his drama The Flies would premiere at the Théâtre de la Cité. It was his most political play so far.
In fact, all of this was the intellectual harvest of a whole decade during which she and Sartre had created a new style of philosophizing. Just as-because the one was inseparable from the other-they had invented new ways of living their lives: private, professional, literary, erotic.
Even during her philosophy studies at the École Normale Supérieure,when Sartre had invited her to his house to have her explain Leibniz to him, they had concluded a love pact of an original kind: they had promised each other unconditional intellectual fidelity and honesty-with an openness to other attractions. They would be absolutely necessary to each other, but also at times to others. A dynamic dyad in which the whole wide world would be reflected according to their will. Since then this plan had led them to many new beginnings and adventures: from Paris to Berlin and Athens; from Husserl via Heidegger to Hegel; from treatises and novels to plays. From nicotine and mescaline to amphetamines. From the "little Russian girl" and "little Bost" to the "very little Russian girl." From Nizan via Merleau-Ponty to Camus. It still carried her, indeed it carried her more resolutely than ever ("To live a love is to throw oneself through that love towards new goals").
By now they were able to meet their weekly timetable (maximum sixteen hours) as philosophy teachers without any great commitment. Rather than sticking to the coursework, they had their students discuss freely with one another after a brief introduction-always a success. It paid the bills, or at least some of them. After all, they didn't have to pay only for themselves, but also for large parts of their "family." Even after five years in Paris, Olga was finding her feet in her career as an actress. Little Bost was also struggling to make a name for himself as a freelance journalist, and Olga's younger sister, Wanda, was still trying desperately to find something that suited her completely. Only Natalie Sorokin, the youngest of the new generation, was making her own way: at the very beginning of the war she had specialized in bicycle t
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