Four women seers in a time of strife

Tista Austin

“WHAT WOULD YOUR GOOD do if evil did not exist?” asks the Devil in Mikhail Bulgakov’ Faustian satire The Master and Margarita. For Wolfram Eilenberger, the light of intellect shines against the presence of evil in his genre-defying book The Visionaries. Neither biography, history nor fiction, Eilenberger’s work interweaves into a “constellation” the fates of four questing female figures (three of them Jewish): Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil in the decade after Hitler’s rise to power. Founder of a popular philosophy magazine and television programme in Germany, Eilenberger is on a kind of Lucretian mission to interpret philosophy for the multitude; his previous volume Time of the Magicians (on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer and Benjamin) was an acclaimed bestseller. Its sequel The Visionaries, entitled Fire…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2024

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