The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times

Also by Wolfram Eilenberger

Time of the Magicians

PENGUIN PRESS

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Copyright © 2020 by Klett-Cotta—J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH

Translation copyright © 2023 by Shaun Whiteside

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Originally published in German as Feuer der Freiheit by Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart

This page and this page constitute an extension of the copyright page.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Eilenberger, Wolfram, 1972– author. | Whiteside, Shaun, translator.

Title: The visionaries : Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the power of philosophy in dark times / Wolfram Eilenberger ; translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Other titles: Feuer der Freiheit. English

Description: First U.S. hardcover edition. | New York : Penguin Press, 2023. | Originally published: Feuer der Freiheit. Stuttgart : Klett-Cotta, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022049207 (print) | LCCN 2022049208 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593297452 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593297469 (ebook)

Classification: LCC B105.W6 E3513 2023 (print) | LCC B105.W6 (ebook) | DDC 190—dc23/eng/20230123

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049207

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049208

Cover design: Stephanie Ross

Cover images: (clockwise from top, left) Hannah Arendt, dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo; Simone de Beauvoir, Uber Bilder / Alamy Stock Photo; Simone Weil, The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo; Ayn Rand, Everett Collection / Alamy Stock Photo; painting texture, Qweek / Getty Images Plus

Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

pid_prh_6.1_148814534_c0_r0

For Venla and Kaisa

Women on the way

Did you imagine

I would hate life,

And flee to the desert?

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Prometheus (1789)

Fool me once, fool me twice

Are you death or paradise?

—Billie Eilish, No Time to Die (2020)

Contents

I

Sparks: 1943

The Project · The Prime of Life · The Situation · Deadly Sins · Morality · The Mission · Inspired · In a Trance · Moronic · Outrageous · Ready for Battle · Only Logical · The Foreigner · No Banisters · The Split · Being Present

II

Exiles: 1933–1934

Grid · The Case of Rahel · Enlightened · Polyphonic · Being German · Back Door · Furious · Revolutionary · Cause for Concern · Third Ways · Salvation Army · Testament · Threatened · The Other · Isolated · Magic Potion · Walls · A Writing Engine · Airtight · Ideals · Nietzsche and I · Socratic Tension

III

Experiments: 1934–1935

Accused · Facing Justice · Selfish · Second Hand · Straight out of the Movies · Provincial Manners · The Olga Principle · Sorcerers · Role-Play · Flowers of Spirituality · Right at the Bottom · On the Conveyor Belt · Knowledge and Interest · Limits of Growth · World Turned Upside Down · Modern Times · Extinction · Before the Law · Places of Origin · Contradictions · Question in Human Form · Virgin Territory · Exclusions

IV

Nearest and Dearest: 1936–1937

We the Living · Reconquest of I · Howard Roark · Sensory Egocentrism · Together and Apart · Frontal · Dark Processes · Tribes · Love Thy Neighbor · Arendt Changes Direction · Paris Is for Lovers · A Shaky Pact · Free Love · Elective Affinities · Melancholia · Headaches · Moral Hinterland · Spirals of Dehumanization · Empty Words of Power · False Oppositions · Prophetic

V

Events: 1938–1939

In the Cul-de-Sac · Notes of Mercy · God’s Kingdom · Not Responsible for Her Actions · The Blind Light · Back to the Sources · Blocked · Hymn · Working on the Myth · Skyscrapers · A Compelling Idea · Ecce Homo · The Poison of Recognition · Brand-New Dawn · One-Way Street · The Most Basic Lies · Salvaged Assets · Tribal Ethics · Abnormal Dependency · No Future · Prepared for Battle · Equals · War of the Worlds · The New Situation · In the Face of Fear

VI

Violence: 1939–1940

A Relentless Spectacle · Know Thyself! · Geometry of Chance · Death and Time · Unique Sensitivity · Parachutists · Exodus · Borderline Situation · Nothing But Freedom · On the March · Homecoming · Project Hegel · Firmly Resolved · Scum of the Earth · Living Corpses · Transit · Angel of History · Mishaps · The Toohey Principle · False Equality · Manhattan Transfer · Rand’s Constitutional Patriotism · I Want You!

VII

Freedom: 1941–1942

As If Liberated · Emancipated at Last · Positively Charged · Thanksgiving · Tense Expectation · Selfless · Without We · Without Opium · Ethics of Acceptance · Superior Indifference · Crossing · This Means You! · New Horror · False Unity · Cosmopolitan Intentions · Small Crisis · Nietzsche’s Curse · American Demolitionists · Social Distancing · Roark’s Defense · The Verdict

VIII

Fire: 1943

On Strike · Not a Fiction · Deal! · New Train · Creative Transgression · Open Future · Message in a Bottle · On the Brink of the Abyss · Elements and Origins · No Fate · Foolish Fruits · Insoluble · Release · Grounding

Coda

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Works

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

_148814534_

I

Sparks: 1943

Beauvoir is in the mood, Weil in a trance, Rand in a fury, and Arendt in a nightmare.

THE PROJECT

What’s the use of starting if you must stop?"[1] 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.[2] 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?[3] 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. [4] 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.[5] A second one lay completed in the drawer.[6] There was also a play in the works.[7] 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[8]).

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 theft, and since then she had operated a well-organized black-market trade—obviously tolerated by the Nazis—in an increasingly wide assortment of goods.

THE SITUATION

The experiences of war and occupation had brought them closer together once again. Over the past few months, their life together had really sorted itself out, it seemed to Beauvoir, who was in practice the head of the family. They each enjoyed their role, without being reduced to it. They each knew their claims and rights, without insisting on them too rigidly. They were each happy in their own way, but without being bored when they were together.

Beauvoir was not worried about the impending judgment for her own sake alone. For over a year, investigators of the Vichy authorities had been making inquiries. Entirely by accident, Sorokin’s mother had found an intimate correspondence between her daughter and her former philosophy teacher in a drawer. She had started investigations of her own and had finally gone to the authorities with the material. The method, she charged, was obviously always the same: first Beauvoir privately befriended the students or former students who looked up to her, then she seduced them sexually, and after a time she even passed them on to her partner of many years, the philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. This put her at risk of being charged with the crime of incitement to debauchery,[9] which would have involved consequences for Beauvoir, the least serious of them the permanent withdrawal of her teaching permit. So far, the only thing certain was that Sorokin, Bost, and Sartre had held their tongues when summonsed. Apart from the aforementioned letters to Sorokin, which were not in themselves finally incriminating, there was no direct evidence. On the other hand, Pétain’s regime would have no shortage of evidence as to which side of the political spectrum Beauvoir occupied—and what she stood for with the whole of her existence.

For years Beauvoir and Sartre had lived together, not in apartments, but in hotels on the Left Bank. It was there that they danced and laughed, cooked and drank, argued and slept together. Without any external compulsion, without any hard-and-fast rules, and above all—as far as possible—without making false promises and renunciations. Might a mere glance, a casual touch, a nuit blanche not be the spark to light the flame of a life renewed once more? They tried to believe as much. In fact, for Beauvoir and Sartre, human beings were really at one with themselves only as beginners.

One never arrives anywhere. There are only points of departure. With each man humanity makes a fresh start. And that’s why the young man who seeks his place in the world does not initially find it . . . and feels forsaken.[10]

That was also a way of explaining why she had brought Olga, Wanda, Little Bost, and Sorokin to Paris, taken them under her wing, and supported, sponsored, and financed them in the city. It was to guide these young people out of their obvious abandonment and into freedom; to encourage them to make their own place in the world rather than simply occupying one already prepared for them. This was done as an act of love, not of subjection, of living Eros, blind debauchery. An act in which humanity was preserved. Because: Man is only by choosing himself; if he refuses to choose, he annihilates himself.[11]

DEADLY SINS

Insofar as there was anything in her new philosophy that could take the place of sin, left free after the death of God, it was the voluntary refusal of that very freedom. That deliberate self-destruction was to be avoided at any price, both for oneself and for others, both privately and politically. And in the here and now, in the name of life itself, and as a celebration of it. And not as the supposed existentialist Martin Heidegger seemed to be teaching from the depths of the German provinces, in the name of a being-for-death. "The human being exists in the form of projects that are not projects toward death, but toward singular ends. . . . Thus one is not for death."[12]

Accordingly, the only being that counted was the being of this world. The only guiding values were worldly values. Their only true origin was the will of a free subject to grasp his freedom. That was what it meant to exist as a human being.

Hitler and his kind had had precisely this form of existence in their sights; they sought its annihilation and extinction. That had been their exact goal when they had invaded Beauvoir’s country three years before—so that, after their final victory over the whole world, they could dictate to the last people on earth how they were to write their essays, or even only to tend their front gardens, right down to the smallest detail. No, she really had better things to do than worry about the judgment of that petit-bourgeois fascist. Let them take her teaching permit away! She would reassemble herself, piece by piece! At this very moment so many doors seemed to be opening at the same time.

MORALITY

Beauvoir was excited about the debates. In the evening there was going to be a general rehearsal of Sartre’s latest play. After that, as ever, they would be out on the town. Even Camus had said he was coming. If her thoughts so far had been correct, they opened the possibility of a new definition of man as an acting creature. And one that was neither empty of content, as in Sartre’s latest work, nor bound to remain absurd, as in Camus’s writings. With her essay she would reveal an alternative. A third way of her own.

As far as she could see, this meant that the measure of genuinely human action was limited from within by two extremes: on the one hand, the extreme of totalitarian intrusion by external forces, and, on the other hand, the extreme of total asocial self-determination. In concrete terms, then, it existed between the inevitably lonely goal of conquering the whole world and the equally lonely endeavor of cultivating one’s own front garden. In the end, and one had only to look out of the window, there were other people apart from oneself. Therefore the goals of moral engagement also had to be kept between two extremes: a self-emptied and necessarily undirected sympathy with all other suffering human beings, on the one hand, and exclusive attention to purely private concerns, on the other. Like a scene from real life: A young woman gets irritated because she has leaky shoes that take in water. . . . However, another woman may cry about the horror of the Chinese famine.[13]

Beauvoir had once even personally experienced this situation herself. She (or rather an earlier version of her) had been the young woman with the leaky shoes. But the other, weeping woman was her then fellow fighter Simone Weil. Never again since then had she met a person who could burst spontaneously into tears because somewhere far away a disaster was happening that seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with one’s own life. That other Simone in her life was still a mystery to her.

Beauvoir paused and looked at her watch. It was time. Tomorrow morning, she would go back to the Café de Flore and think again about this mystery.

THE MISSION

Like Simone de Beauvoir, early in 1943, Simone Weil resolved to embark on radically new paths. The seriousness of the situation left her no choice. That spring, the thirty-four-year-old Frenchwoman was more certain than ever that she was facing an enemy who justified the greatest possible sacrifice. For a person like Weil, fully imbued as she was with religious belief, that sacrifice lay not in giving up her own life, but in taking another.

If I am prepared to kill Germans in case of military necessity, she recorded in her diary that spring, it is not because I have suffered from their acts. It is not because they hate God and Christ. But because they are the enemies of every country in the world, including my own, and because sadly, to my acute pain, it is impossible to prevent them from doing harm without killing a certain number of them.[14]

In October 1942, she left New York, where she had fled into exile with her parents, on a freighter bound for Liverpool, to join the forces of Free France led by General Charles de Gaulle.[15] Nothing caused Weil greater pain during those crucial weeks and months of the war than the thought of finding herself far from her home and far from her people. Immediately after her arrival at the organization’s headquarters in London, she informed the leading members there of her burning desire to be given a mission on French soil and, if necessary, to die a martyr’s death for the fatherland. She would be happy to go as a parachutist—she had studied the handbooks on the subject in detail. Or else act as a liaison with the comrades on the ground, some of whom she knew personally, having worked years before in Marseille for the Catholic Resistance group around the journal Témoignage chrétien. But ideally, she would be at the head of a special mission that she had dreamed up herself, and that she was firmly convinced would be crucial to the war. Weil’s plan was to set up a special unit of French nurses at the front who would be deployed only in the most dangerous places, to provide first aid in the middle of battle. She had acquired the requisite medical knowledge through courses with the Red Cross in New York. At the front line, this special unit would be able to save many valuable lives, Weil explained, and in support of her proposal she presented the members of the executive committee with a list of selected surgical specialist publications.

But the actual value of the unit would lie in its symbolic power, its spiritual value. Like all wars, she continued animatedly, this one was primarily a war of mental attitudes—and hence one of propagandistic skill. Yet in this sphere the enemy had so far proved to be greatly superior, to evil ends. One need only think of Hitler’s SS and the reputation that now sped ahead of it throughout the whole of Europe.

The SS are a perfect expression of the Hitlerian inspiration. If one may believe neutral reports, they exhibit at the front the heroism of brutality, and carry it to the extreme possible limits of courage. . . . We can and ought to demonstrate that our courage is quantitively different, is courage of a more difficult and rare kind. Theirs is a debased and brutal courage, it springs from the will to power and destruction. Just as our aims are different from theirs, so our courage too springs from a wholly different inspiration. There could be no better symbol of our inspiration than the corps of women suggested here. The mere persistence of a few services in the very center of the battle, the climax of inhumanity, would be signal defiance of the inhumanity which the enemy has chosen for himself and which he compels us also to practice. The challenge would be all the more conspicuous because the services would be performed by women and with a maternal solicitude. These women would in fact be only a handful and the number of soldiers they could help would be proportionately small; but the effect of a moral symbol is independent of statistics. It would illustrate with supreme clarity the two roads between which humanity today is forced to choose.[16]

Once more in her country’s history, Weil explained, the important thing was to counter the spirit of idolatry with a salutary and authentic form of faith. In short, what she had in mind was a kind of female anti-SS in the spirit of the Maid of Orléans: the plan had already been set out in writing. When Simone Weil delivered it to Maurice Schumann in person, he promised his former fellow combatant that he would present it to de Gaulle in person. And he personally accompanied her to her accommodation in the barracks.

As Schumann had predicted, it took de Gaulle less than three seconds to dismiss the Nursing Unit—But she is mad![17]—which was why any other kind of deployment on French soil, they agreed, was out of the question in Weil’s case. Far too dangerous. You only had to look at her. Emaciated and practically blind without her glasses. Purely physically, she wouldn’t be able to cope with the demands required, let alone the mental ones.

For all the eccentricity of her appearance, Schumann pointed out, Weil was a person of the highest integrity, and above all of unique intellect: she had graduated in philosophy from the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, she was fluent in several languages, a gifted mathematician, with years of experience in journalism and work with trade unions. These abilities could be very useful.

Rather than sending her to the front to die for her ideals, Weil’s superiors entrusted her with a different special mission: for the phase after the victory over Hitler, and the subsequent assumption of power by the government in exile, she was to draw up plans and scenarios for the political reconstruction of France.

Deeply disappointed, but without any open contradiction, she accepted the task, holed up in a hotel room at 19 Hill Street in Mayfair, repurposed as a study—and set about her intellectual work.

INSPIRED

In the history of humanity, there can have been few individuals more productive than was the philosophical Resistance fighter Simone Weil during only four months in that London winter of 1943: she wrote treatises on constitutional and revolutionary theory and on a political new order for Europe, and one investigation of the epistemological roots of Marxism, and another of the function of political parties in a democracy. She translated parts of the Upanishads from Sanskrit into French, and wrote essays on the religious history of Greece and India, and on the theory of the sacraments and the sacredness of the individual in Christianity and, under the title The Need for Roots, a 300-page redesign of the cultural existence of humanity in the modern age.[18]

As her plan for an association of front-line nurses suggests, Weil represented the actual needs of the moment in the realm of ideals and inspiration. As the continent that gave rise to two world wars within only two decades, her analysis suggested, Europe had already been suffering from a devastating hollowing of its guiding values and ideals, both culturally and politically. In fact, she told the military chiefs of staff of the French Resistance in February, in an essay of the same name, this war was A War of Religions.[19]

Europe remains at the center of the drama. From the fire scattered over the world by Christ—the same fire, perhaps, that Prometheus brought—there were still a few live embers in England. It was enough to prevent the worst. But it was only a respite. We are still lost unless those embers and the flickering sparks on the Continent can be fanned into a flame to kindle the whole of Europe. If we are only saved by American money and machines we shall fall back, one way or another, into a new servitude like the one which we now suffer. It must be remembered that Europe was not subjugated by invading hordes from another continent, or from Mars, who have only to be driven out again. She is wasted by an internal malady. She needs to be cured. . . . The conquered peoples can only oppose the conqueror with a religion.[20]

To bring this healing process under way, first militarily, and then politically and culturally, the continent must therefore be filled with a new inspiration[21]—according to Weil notably from the writings of Plato as well as the New Testament. Because in the darkest of times anyone who wanted true healing should draw on sources that were not only from this world.

This applied most specifically to her homeland, France, which, as the source of liberté in 1789, had fallen further than any other among the warring nations. In the summer of 1940, subjugated almost without a fight by Hitler’s troops in only a few weeks, it now relied on outside help for its liberation, and had as a nation lost any guiding faith in itself. In other words, it was deeply shaken in terms of the most profound and important of all human spiritual needs: that of roots.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part. . . . Uprootedness occurs whenever there is a military conquest. . . . But when the conqueror remains a stranger in the land of which he has taken possession, uprootedness becomes an almost mortal disease among the subdued population. It reaches its most acute stage when there are mass deportations, as in German-occupied Europe.[22]

This was Simone Weil’s assessment of the situation, as philosophical mastermind appointed specially by the shadow cabinet of General de Gaulle in the spring of 1943. Weil was born Jewish, but for years she was deeply inspired by Christianity; this analysis of a spiritual deficit at the foundation of the murderous events of the time serves as a source of her almost superhuman-seeming philosophical production.

IN A TRANCE

As if in a trance, she allowed the whole range of her unique mind to flow onto the page. Hour after hour, day after day. Without getting enough sleep. And above all, as in previous years, without eating enough. In her London notebook she writes: In view of the general and permanent condition of humanity it may be that to eat one’s fill is always a kind of theft. (I have been guilty of many kinds.)[23]

On April 25, 1943, this trance came abruptly to an end. Weil collapsed in her room and lost consciousness. She was discovered by a colleague several hours later. Having regained consciousness, Weil categorically forbade the colleague to call a doctor. She had still not entirely abandoned the idea of her combat unit. Instead she called Schumann directly, and he replied that no final decision had been made on the question of deployment in France—in principle, anything was possible, particularly if she received prompt treatment. Only then did Weil agree to be taken to the hospital.

MORONIC

If the New York author and philosopher Ayn Rand had wanted to find the epitome of all the values that, in her view, were responsible for the disaster of the World War, she could have found no more suitable candidate than the very real Simone Weil in London. In that spring of 1943, nothing seemed more devastating to Rand than the willingness to sacrifice her own life in the name of a nation. Nothing could be more morally fatal than the will to stand by others first and foremost. Philosophically, nothing could be more absurd than blind faith in God. Metaphysically, nothing more confused than the attempt to anchor one’s guiding values in a realm of unworldly transcendence. Existentially, nothing more insane than personal asceticism for the salvation of the world.

This attitude and the ethics behind it are the actual enemy. They must be overcome and unconditionally opposed wherever they appear. This irrationalism must not be granted so much as an inch. Certainly not in terms of one’s own survival.

As Rand had painfully learned in ten years as a freelance writer, in the United States these were ultimately business-related questions. Which was why, in a letter of May 6, 1943, to her editor Archibald Ogden, she had fumed more than ever before. Regarding his mention of faith, she writes, I don’t know what that word means. If you mean ‘faith’ in a religious sense—in the sense of blind acceptance—I don’t have any faith in anything or anybody, I never have had and never will have. I go by facts and reason, thus setting out the actual foundations of her approach toward the world. And she even deploys them against Ogden in defense of her own interests: "What evidence has the firm of Bobbs-Merrill given me of its competence to handle the business side of a book’s publication? Whom is