The Visionaries

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 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," 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.

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."

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."

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 you only had 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 hand. As 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."

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."

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. 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.